War of the Encyclopaedists (18 page)

He saw his life as a mediocre movie. There had been some funny moments, a few tragic ones, plenty of boring ones, some in which the acting was painful, and were he to stay in the theater, there might be some more touching or hilarious scenes, but there'd also be hours of utter banality, of poorly edited and poorly written dialogue, of plots that went nowhere, of flimsy two-dimensional characters. Why not just walk out of the theater? He could be a thing that existed and then a thing that didn't.

The credits were rolling on
The Last Samurai,
and Corderoy muted the TV. He thought about getting a knife from the kitchen. He thought about rifling through the medicine cabinet looking for pills, he thought about sticking his head in the oven, he even thought about taking a bath and throwing the toaster in the water. But he continued to lie on the couch, his thumb tracing slow circles over the springy rubber buttons of the remote.

BAGHDAD

19

The Black Hawk whipped low over the dun suburbs of Anbar Province. Second Lieutenant Mickey Montauk had a window seat, his boot dangling above clusters of brown houses with driveways and clotheslines. On the roof of a larger three-story, some teenagers sat in lawn chairs. Montauk was touched by a momentary envy. In Seattle, rooftops were angled and shingled, due to the rain. One of the roof kids jumped up and waved, his loose blue shirt flapping in the rotor wash. Montauk waved back. His cultural proficiency guidebook had warned about showing Iraqis the soles of your shoes—a sign of disrespect in the Arab world. No way the Arab foot-beef extended to people flying in helicopters, but he tucked his feet in anyway.

He had volunteered to be on the advance party, arriving by helo. Olaf was supervising the convoy from Arifjan in Kuwait. Montauk felt guilty leaving his platoon to make the long drive without him, getting their first taste of anxiety about the ever present threat of roadside bombs. But as the city began appearing on the horizon through the thick haze, Montauk's guilt gave way to amazement. Baghdad from the air was a land of fantasy, ripped right out of some cartoonish video game. Gigantic pastel mushrooms and blue eggs dotted the landscape. There were the Ba'athist pleasure domes, surrounded by greenery and kidney-shaped pools. The summer palaces on slopes where sheiks relaxed on their terraces while silken girls served sherbet.

Many of the larger buildings hugged the Tigris, which curved in a
lazy bend around the center of the capital. There was a large zoo with a Ferris wheel and a hippopotamus pond. Close by was an enormous white disc-shaped structure—the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, built in the wake of the Iran/Iraq war. And beyond that, the capstone of it all: the Swords of Qādisīyah, their massive blades gripped in hands rising out of the earth. Saddam was a cheesy son of a bitch, yes. But there was something awesome about commissioning an official government sculpture of your own hands holding 140-foot sabers, to be placed in the middle of the city.

Montauk daydreamed his own self-aggrandizing public art pieces. Perhaps a bronze equestrian monument, with himself in late-­eighteenth-century costume—but did the world really need another of those? Then the vision came to him: looming over acres of tombstones in Arlington Cemetery, a hundred-foot-high statue of himself, shirtless, pointing a big-ass Rambo M-60 to the sky, Corderoy's mom clinging to his side in a tattered dress, her romance-novel melons barely concealed, and Corderoy at his feet, hunched like Gollum with clawed fingers and giant yellow eyes. Montauk laughed to himself as the Black Hawk banked west over the Tigris.

The Texans of 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division had installed themselves in the presidential palace on the river, with its turquoise dome and copses of palm trees out front, now browning and dying because the Cav didn't give a good goddamn about Saddam's landscaping. There was a nice fat hole in the side of the dome where some Tomahawk missile had slammed into it. Montauk wished he'd been around to see that. Those air strikes had happened just over a year ago; he might have been nerding out over transcendental poetry with Cor­deroy in Rome on the night this part of Baghdad had its face rearranged by the Air Force. He'd joined the National Guard back before the Twin Towers fell, a blink in the eye of history but a long time ago for Montauk. Even after the Iraq invasion, a combat deployment seemed an unlikely future to your average reservist. Foreign wars were for the regular Army. And yet here they were.

The Black Hawk touched down on the dirt, and Montauk and his team grabbed their rucks and headed toward the main entrance, a fancy raised-up marble and brass deal with a valet parking–type turnaround.

They entered and climbed the marble staircase to the rotunda, which was hung with a large Old Glory and an even larger Texan flag. It must have been forty feet long. No need for all those stars and stripes, just one stripe each of red and white and one big-ass star.
Protected by niggas with big dicks, AKs, and 187 skills,
Montauk recalled Snoop Dogg saying, apropos of something or other.

“You like that, LT?” said a man coming down the staircase. He looked like a black Mr. Clean. An oversize horse-head Cav patch on the shoulder, captain's bars on one lapel, and on the other what looked like . . . yes, cavalry sabers. He was Montauk's liaison.

“It's huge, sir,” Montauk said, looking back to the flag.

“Got it donated from the DAR in Fort Worth. I spoke with Captain Byrd. He's gonna talk to your colonel to get us a Washington flag to hang up there, since y'all are getting attached to Third Brigade.” He looked Montauk in the eye. “You got a big one?”

“Probably not that big.”

• • •

They were shuttled in a Humvee to the Convention Center, a couple of klicks away at the other edge of the Green Zone. They passed traffic circles with memorial statues, palm trees, rows of small houses, some still occupied (by their original inhabitants, foreign contractors, journalists?), some damaged and vacant. They passed roadside food carts, convenience stands, more palm trees. The Humvee approached an entrance checkpoint manned by two soldiers with a tire ripper that they rolled out of the way when the driver flashed his ID. They took a right and rolled down a central boulevard divided by an L.A.-style median whose palms had been reduced to stumps by security-­conscious landscapers. Across the median and through a small parking lot stood the Al Rasheed Hotel, Saddam's Ritz, which was for a while the most sought-after address in occupied Baghdad. Until the mortars and rockets started flying about six months after the invasion. Large concrete walls were erected around the Green Zone, and the occupation slowly hunkered down in the bunker that would become its prison.

Montauk's liaison dropped him off in front of two machine-gun
towers and a long walkway that served as a pedestrian checkpoint; fifteen or twenty soldiers were spread along it, checking identification, searching, and swabbing for explosive residue. A steady trickle of Baghdadis in light, loose clothing or long, black abayas emerged from the gauntlet of the checkpoint and walked through the heat toward the Convention Center. For what? To apply for jobs, to get some kind of handout or reparations payment from the occupation, to report relatives missing or killed? Montauk looped his front sling over his head and arm so that Molly Millions hung straight down over his vest. A soldier from the 3rd Infantry Division stood at the Convention Center's front door, checking to see that weapons were unloaded. He'd probably shot his way in here with the invasion force and was still cooling his heels. Montauk yanked the bolt back to show Molly's empty innards and was about to walk through when the soldier stopped him. “Pistol, too, sir.”

“Right. Sorry,” Montauk said. He did the same for his pistol, feeling like the new kid in school. You didn't belong until someone newer than you came along.

The main hall was wrapped in a mosaic depicting the history of the Babylonians, from Hammurabi's conquests to the recent “victories” over Iran and the US, represented here as a dragon with a red, white, and blue tail. Soldiers and flak-vested American-looking civilians crossed the tile floor, along with Iraqis in loose blue uniforms who looked to be custodial staff. Montauk asked around and was pointed toward a door off to the side of the main hall. He opened it and guessed he had found his future home.

It was some sort of office corridor, though the desks and cubicle partitions had been replaced by bunks and stacks of equipment. Camouflage ponchos hung on green 550 cord to make little living-space partitions. It looked like a couple hundred troops were living here.

Montauk asked around for the CO and was pointed to the Tactical Operations Center, a hemispherical office room with a satellite map of the Green Zone on its fuzzy wall, a couple of desktop computers, and some olive-green steel tactical radios. The two guys sitting in front of the computers looked up at him.

“Can we help you, LT?” one of them said.

“I'm the advance party for Bravo Company, 161. Washington National Guard.”

They both raised their eyebrows and looked at each other. “Are you our relief?”

It hit Montauk that yes, he was the new kid in school, but his arrival meant graduation for all these troops. Charlie Company had been here since the invasion and was one of the last companies of the 3rd Infantry to be sent home. The 1st Cav had been here a month, but the transition was slow. Now that Montauk was arriving with Bravo Company, these weary boys could return to their wives and girlfriends, or ex-wives and ex-girlfriends, depending.

“Looks like it,” Montauk said.

One of the radio guys hailed his commander on the phone while the other looked at Montauk like a fifth-grader who had just won a pizza party.

20

“Faggot,” Mohammed Faisal muttered in English after the shop door jingled shut behind him. He made his way down Karada Dahil, his plastic flip-flops slapping against the sidewalk as he shifted the case of Mr. Brown iced coffee from one shoulder to another. When a gap in traffic appeared, he dashed to the median. A blue Bongo pickup carrying goats wafted its goat-smell over him as it passed along the parkway, and the boy made a face of exaggerated disgust. He shifted the box off his shoulder and onto his chest and ran the rest of the way across. He was a week short of his eleventh birthday.

The line of cars started a full block and a half from the checkpoint. The drivers milled around, close enough to keep an eye on their vehicles but far enough to maybe survive the blast if one of the cars should for any reason explode. A pile of trash bloomed in a vacant lot, threatening to engulf the sidewalk and obliging Mohammed to sidestep the rank evaporate of what had been fetid pools. His hair clung damply to his forehead as he trudged down the line of cars toward the gun towers in the near distance. An Iraqi soldier sitting in a plastic chair looked up as he passed. “Hey, kid,” he said, cigarette smoke snorting out his nostrils.

Mohammed stopped, surprised. The Iraqi soldiers at the checkpoint were mostly from out of town and rarely spoke to him. They never bought anything because they didn't want to pay his delivery markup. This one was young and clean-shaven. The palm hanging over his head shaded the Kalashnikov in his lap.

“The new Americans just got here,” the soldier said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He smirked. “Hope they don't kick you off the checkpoint.”

Mohammed smiled defiantly, then hopped and slung the case up to his head and continued on, balancing the coffee on his skull like a ­Babylonian serving girl. His too-short F. C. Iraqiya jersey rode up, exposing a sliver of belly to the dusty air.

“Faggot,” he muttered in English. He walked up the entrance lane and passed three soldiers, two of whom he didn't recognize. He slowed down and twisted his head to take a look at them. The patches on their shoulders were different. Also, their helmets were smaller and had black metal squares on the front.

The checkpoint seemed to be flooded with new Americans. Mohammed made his usual way past the gun towers in the center of the traffic circle and just north of it to the command post, which was made up of three tall concrete barriers with camouflage netting strung between them to make an area of dappled shade. There were five Americans standing under the netting. One of them pointed at him and they all turned. Mohammed hesitated.

“Come on in!” yelled Lieutenant Watts. “Put the coffee on the table.” He turned to Captain Byrd and Lieutenant Montauk, his replacement. “That's Monkey,” he said. “He's one of the checkpoint kids. Gets you coffees and shawarmas and shit.”

Mohammed stared at the group as he walked into the command post. Satellite photos were taped up on the concrete walls. A large steel desk sat at the rear with green metal radios on top of it. Mohammed hefted the case onto the desk, and Lieutenant Watts tore it open. “Iced coffee?”

“Is it cold?” Montauk asked.

“Room temperature.”

“So, like, a hundred and fifteen degrees?”

“Yeah.” Lieutenant Watts smiled, then dumped the cans of coffee into an ice-filled garbage bin.

“That's going to be the new checkpoint LT,” Watts said to Monkey.

Montauk held his hand out for a fist bump. “What's up, stud? Lieutenant Montauk.”

The kid curled his hand into a fist and bumped Montauk's.

“Now beat it,” Watts said, handing him a couple bills.

Mohammed scurried off and started back down toward Karada Dahil, his plastic flip-flops sending small scraping noises through the thick, windless air.

“Faggot,” he said once he was out of earshot.

• • •

Watts stood over the dusty, laminated satellite map of Baghdad. Montauk and Byrd crowded behind him. The Green Zone was outlined in marker; its eastern and southern borders followed the contour of the Tigris River.

“Here's Brigade,” Watts said, pointing to an
X
on the western edge of the Green Zone—the large domed palace where Montauk first reported. “And here's the FOB.” He indicated the Iraqi Convention Center, Montauk's new Forward Operating Base, marked by another
X
to the northeast. “And here we are at Checkpoint Eleven.” He pointed at a small traffic circle outside the Green Zone on the south side of 14 July Bridge.

“We're running three ingress routes to the Green Zone. Military Lane runs north on Route Steelers and into the checkpoint past the east bunker and east gun tower. That's for Coalition military vehicles and US government vehicles. The east-west road that intersects with Steelers is Karada Dahil. It's the main thoroughfare that runs the length of the dick.”

“The dick being Karada Peninsula?” Montauk asked.

“Right, the Tigris bends around it a few klicks to the west. Baghdad University's over there. It's out of our AO, but I've rolled through there a few times. Relatively peaceful, though apparently some student group has been terrorizing people and making all the women wear burkas and shit. Anyway, Routine Search traffic comes in westbound on Karada Dahil. Drivers only, though. Passengers have to get out, go through the Ped Search bunker, and rejoin their vehicles on the bridge. That's how we do it, anyway. Just made it up as we went along, so you'll probably figure out what works for you. It got more complex after the city started getting explody. So, Priority Search is on River Road, a
block to the north. That's for the top two tiers of Iraqi government workers and contractors. No gun towers over it, but BOB provides overwatch.”

Montauk wiped the sweat off his brow. He should have been taking notes. He was, after all, going to be living and breathing the operations of Checkpoint 11. But it was hard to concentrate on procedural minutiae while he was consumed with curiosity and anxiety about attacks on the checkpoint. There was a crater just outside the command post, a gouge in the pavement about the size and shape of a bed frame. He'd been wanting to ask about it since he walked in. “Who's Bob?” he asked instead.

“The Bradley On the Bridge. BOB. It's parked in the middle, where it can be a backstop for any vehicle that somehow manages to bum-rush through the entire checkpoint. We park it so that it can also cover River Road to the east with optics and the twenty-five.”

Montauk pictured one of the old-model BMWs he'd seen on Karada Dahil getting shredded by 25 mm chain-gun fire. “Has it ever come to that?” he asked.

“Not yet, fingers crossed. But we did get a VBIED a few weeks ago.”

“We heard about that,” Captain Byrd said.

The LT treated Montauk and Byrd to the rundown on the bombing: a silver Kia had driven slowly up to the command post, where two soldiers stopped it to check the driver's ID and search for contraband or weapons. As one of the soldiers approached, a stack of artillery shells wired together in the trunk detonated, cratering the ground and blowing him right into the wall of the CP.

“Jesus,” Montauk said.

“Yeah,” said Watts. “PFC Klay. It was one of those concussion deaths where all your blood vessels burst and you bleed out internally. Klay was kind of prim, so I guess we used to pick on him a lot. Everyone felt bad.”

Watts fell silent for a moment, and neither Byrd nor Montauk attempted a response. “One of our tower guys thought he heard the driver do the
Allahu Akhbar
thing before blowing up,” Watts said. “Anyway, we got five men on each entrance lane now. One who checks the driver's ID, then if he waves it in, two to search the trunk, passen
ger compartment, and undercarriage while two more provide overwatch with a machine gun from the bunker.”

One-Six, Routine Search.

“It's working so far,” Watts said, reaching for his radio.

Routine Search, One-Six, what's up?

One-Six, Routine Search, we got a lady over here freaking out about her ID.

Roger, en route.

“Sir, you wanna come down and check it out?” Watts asked Captain Byrd.

“That's what we're here for,” said Byrd. He and the rest of the platoon had arrived that morning, a few days after Montauk.

They walked down the lane toward Routine Search, their path corralled by long, curving lines of six-foot-high concrete T-walls.

“Did you guys put these barriers up?” Montauk asked.

“Yeah, the idea is, if you wall off the lanes and stretch them out, and you put only two or three troops at any given point, they know there's no way they're getting into the Green Zone with a bomb and that they can only take one or two of us, max, if they decide to go see Allah. So it's not worth it to hit us when they can go to the local police station and kill like twenty or thirty guys.”

They walked past a middle-aged man getting a pat-down from Ant, with a Charlie soldier supervising. Montauk gave him a nod of approval.

“And the assumption is that suicide bombers are going to make a rational decision like that?” Captain Byrd said.

“Yes, sir. I mean, they've only got so many suicide bombers, so they got to make them count, right?”

Up ahead, an Iraqi about Montauk's age was talking with two of Watts's squad leaders. Near them, seated at the foot of a T-wall, was a late-middle-aged woman in a black hijab clutching a purse. The Iraqi waved to them.

“That's Aladdin,” said Watts. “He's maybe our best translator, or at least I like him best. I worry about him sometimes, though. It's getting more dangerous for these guys.”

Aladdin was dressed nicer than the Average Alis in line to enter
the checkpoint; they seemed to prefer loose trousers and sandals. He looked more like the young Roman guys Montauk and Corderoy had met in Trastevere: cheapo stonewashed “designer” jeans with a fitted polo, slip-on shoes, and Gucci-type shades.

“Hey, Aladdin, I want you to meet some people. This is my replacement, Lieutenant Montauk. He's the platoon leader. That's his boss, Captain Byrd.”

“Okay, nice to meet you, sih!”

“How's it going?” Montauk said. Aladdin shook his hand in the exact sort of low slap-shake Corderoy would use. Montauk liked him immediately.

They approached the squad leaders and Watts asked about the situation.

“Sir, she says she lives in the Green Zone,” his sergeant said.

“But she's got no ID. Like, none at all,” said the other Charlie soldier.

“What does she say about it?” Watts asked.

They looked to Aladdin.

“She say she left it at her home, sih,” Aladdin said, giving a half-smile and holding his hands out expansively.

“Yeah, you guys believe her?”

Aladdin shrugged.

“What would you do, Montauk?” Byrd asked.

“I don't know, sir. I guess let her in?”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Sir, I'd give her a good search, maybe take her picture so she knows we're serious, and then let her in. I mean, what are we worried about?”

“No ID at all, you'd let her in?”

“Hooah, sir, that would be my call.” Montauk had already changed his mind, but that
hooah,
Army slang for anything and everything except
no,
had the stamp of finality. Being indecisive was Original Sin in the officer corps, for good reason. Whether Byrd actually disagreed or was just testing his mettle, Montauk couldn't back down now.

Captain Byrd looked to Watts. “What do you say, LT?”

“Yeah, I think it could go either way, sir. They're supposed to have IDs, but there's a lot of gaps, and the IDs are such crap. I'm inclined to let her in.”

Everyone looked at Captain Byrd, who'd been at the checkpoint for all of ten minutes but who outranked everyone there. “Hooah,” Byrd said.

“Okay, Sergeant,” said Watts. “Tell Pedestrian Search to take her picture and let her in.”

The sergeant nodded at Aladdin, who began translating.

“I've got to get back,” Byrd said to Montauk. “Be prepared to brief me tomorrow on your checkpoint SOP.”

“Hooah, sir.” Byrd walked back up the lane, and Montauk keyed his hand mike and arranged for two of his guys to take the commander back to the FOB. Aladdin walked up to Montauk as Watts talked to his sergeants. Montauk was packing a tin of Kodiak.

“Oh, you dip, sih?”

“Yeah,” Montauk said. “Want some?”

“Oh, thank you, sih.”

He handed the tin to Aladdin, who took a pinch and stuck it under his lip like a person who'd been doing it only a few weeks. Passing for a grunt, just like Montauk himself was doing. Montauk smiled, threw in a plug of the pungent dip, and popped the tin back into his compass pouch.

“I think that was a good thing, sih.”

“What, the woman?”

“Yeah.” Aladdin put his finger to his lip to push the dip farther in. “I don't think she is mujahideen, you know. And it is not safe for her out here.”

“Tell me about it. It's like
Mad Max
out here.”

“Mel Gibson,” Aladdin said.

“You like Mel Gibson?”

“No, sih. I like Bruce Willis.
Die Hard
.
Five Element
.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You look like young Bruce Willis,” Aladdin said. “When your hair falls out, then you look just like him.”

“I'll take that as a compliment,” Montauk said.

“No one can tell the difference then. And you will take me to fancy Hollywood parties. Lots of girls.” Aladdin elbowed Montauk in the ribs.

Montauk laughed. “Hey, man, if I can get in, you'll be the first on my guest list.”

• • •

Watts found them and took another half hour showing Montauk the ropes, then they hopped into a flatbed Humvee that had its doors torn off and a makeshift gun turret welded on. One of Watts's soldiers got in the driver's seat, and the other jumped behind the gun. The sun was low in the sky, and the Humvee's headlights revealed a small cloud of dust that dispersed as the truck started forward and headed back across 14 July Bridge to the FOB. Chow time. Finally.