Redeployment

A military vehicle is hit by a grenade, and the narrator—named Ozzie—climbs out of the wreckage. He sees two men from his unit, Corporal Garza and Timhead. Someone opens fire on them from a nearby building, and they shoot back. When the shooting stops, a woman is screaming from the building. When they reach the building, they see that Timhead has shot and killed a 13-year-old boy. The boy’s mother is the screaming woman.

Timhead tells Garza that it wasn’t him, so Garza assumes that Ozzie shot the boy. Timhead comes to Ozzie and says that he’s worried that everyone back at the base is going to ask him what it was like to be the first of them to kill someone. Since Garza already thinks that Ozzie shot the kid, he asks if they can stick to that story. Ozzie agrees, and when they get back, everyone in the unit shakes his hand and congratulates him on doing his job. The next day, he gets asked to tell the story many times. Each time, he adds details and realizes that his version of the story is starting to feel as if it really happened.

A week later, a man named MacClelland is killed when a convoy is attacked.