Movie Night: Baghdad, April 2005

Brock Michael Jones
Horizontal close up of a black tv sitting on the ground.
Photo by Daniel von Appen

K-Mart announces that he’s putting a movie on and we pull camp chairs and cots to the center of the tent, around the TV, and Rich asks what we’re watching and K-Mart says Team America: World Police, which has to be hilarious, he says, since it was made by the same guys who make South Park, though the only thing the rest of us know about it is that all the actors are puppets but K-Mart convinces us to give it a chance and he slips it in the player and turns out most of us laugh pretty good here and there, but none as hard as Markose, especially when the drunk marionette pukes and pukes outside the bar, he can’t stop laughing and keeps saying Look at that shit! and he rewinds the DVD to replay the scene at least three times, laughing harder and harder, and his laughing makes the rest of us laugh and by the third time we’re all wiping tears from our eyes, and then a few of the guys say let the movie play on and he does, and when the movie’s over Markose, who will have a violent fight with his wife when this tour is over and get drunk and take a handful of Wellbutrin and never wake up, rewinds the DVD, his smile glowing in the faint light of the TV. We gotta see that shit again

Brock Michael Jones graduated in 2013 from the University of Wyoming’s Creative Writing MFA program. He served three tours of duty in Iraq.

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