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On Piss and the Smell of War
...by Benjamin Leslie

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All that day Aziz felt drowned under the warm stream of anxiety. In fact he knew well now, and was reminded by the smell that it had been cat urine. It had begun as the feeling of so much warm water dripping from the soft shower in his father’s bathroom in Baghdad. He dreamed himself at home and not hiding from a war in the southern desert; he dreamed himself in the shower with thin rivulets of water running down his cheeks, and blowing the water quietly with his breath through pursed lips. The guffaws of the other men hiding in that shell of a house woke him. Then came the bleary realization of the cat standing on his chest, still urinating gently. Aziz shook his head so the cat spooked, digging the claws on its rear paws into his cheeks before it bounded violently from him. The cat paused momentarily on the ground, looked to either side, then hurried under some rubble and out of sight. The men were still laughing most of the day and refused Aziz water to clean the urine from his eyes. There was not enough water they said, laughing. Aziz had to ask why: Why did this cat choose to pee on me today? Today of all days? This could mean only bad things. Today was of course March 20th. On the paper flier that had fallen from the sky the day before - and which Aziz now used to wipe the mixture of urine and blood from the stinging claw wounds on his cheeks - it was written: the great Satan would come soon. Through his own blood and the piss of the cat, Aziz read again: TAKE AN OFFENSIVE POSTURE AND YOU WILL BE DESTROYED. DO NOT RISK YOUR LIFE AND THE LIVES OF YOUR COMRADES. LEAVE NOW, GO HOME, WATCH YOUR CHILDREN GROW AND PROSPER. COALITION FORCES DO NOT WISH TO HARM THE NOBLE PEOPLE OF IRAQ. Under the writing there was a drawing of a dead Iraqi soldier with liberated Iraqi children standing, smiling around him. This was covered now with Aziz’z blood and the urine. This could mean only bad things.

“Oooy. I feel like a great bloody cat took a piss in me mouth last night, mate,” Ralph Robson whined through the cracking gray crust that lined the inside of his mouth most mornings, even when he wasn’t in the desert. He lay on his cot in his camouflaged tent where his drinking mates had deposited him the night before and now he groped for the air conditioning tube he hoped might diminish the pain throbbing from deep in his brain. “What piss was I into last night?”

“Tequila,” an exhausted American reporter glared back at him.

“I shoulda known. Gotta get some pictures today!”

“Oh there’ll be pictures today. No worries, my friend, Uncle Sam’s gonna give you some pictures today,” said the reporter, trying to sound ominous to the Aussie who just grinned before moving his mouth over the air conditioning tube to consume the frigid air.

The US Army Rangers have a creed: they never leave a man behind. But when that man is an Australian photographer and he is dangling out the side of their helicopter trying to get a shot of the Iraqi soldiers scurrying for cover in the desert not fifteen feet below and those Iraqis are blindly firing their AK-47s skyward so that the pilot spooks and suddenly banks hard left and loses that boozy Aussie photographer into the sand with a thud that no one ever hears over the whir of the rotors, then the US Army Rangers leave that man behind.

Ralph recognized the sound of bones breaking when he landed and so he lay in the sand under the cover of the dark night, waiting, hoping that the pain would come, that he was not paralyzed. Soon he began to shake and pissed himself as the trauma of the fall and the realization that he was alone in Iraq dawned. And with the shaking and the feeling of warm piss on his thigh, he celebrated momentarily that he had been spared his wasteful life once again before realizing that his crotch smelled now slightly less of stale tequila than of fresh cowardice.

He rolled over on his belly in the sand to look around him and there it was: one mostly smashed cat. He had landed on a goddamned cat. He hadn’t time to contemplate this thing before men were dragging him through the sand into the shell of an old house littered with rubble. As Ralph lay on the sandy floor and gained his vision in the darkness, an Iraqi soldier appeared in the doorway with the limp carcass of the cat in his arms. The man was grinning inexplicably and laughing vigorously so his face crinkled, tearing the scabs of the scratch wounds on his cheeks to send drops of blood down his face and bring tears to his bloodshot and swollen eyes. Ralph pulled a small camera from his vest and just as he snapped his shot a great red light filled the sky, silhouetting the wounded soldier cradling the cat. It would be a wonderful shot. The war had begun.

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