Youngblood (10 page)

After waiting for the soldiers to cycle through the food line, I grabbed a plastic tray and heaped mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and deviled eggs onto it, skipping the salad bowl. One of the
cooks put chunks of tender, pink goat meat on my plate. It smelled of heavy pepper. In theory, I detested the military-industrial complex that made things like fresh deviled eggs in the desert possible. It was wasteful. It was excessive. It further separated us from the townspeople we'd been charged with protecting. That was all true. In practice, though, indulgence filled stomachs, and included ice cream for dessert.

The goat proved too chewy. Most of the soldiers around me ate with abandon, though, like some unseen, angry parent would emerge to punish them if they didn't clean their plates. I ate slower, stopping when I got full, pushing around what remained on the plate so it looked like I'd eaten more than I had. My stomach had always been a bit of a princess. I washed the meal down with a cold can of Rip It, flat fruit punch with a special jolt that'd keep me awake for the night patrol.

As I ate, I listened to the soldiers argue about whom they'd rather have sex with, Jessica Alba circa 2006 or Shakira circa 2008. I declared myself team Alba. Doc Cork said both of them were too skinny, he needed a woman with some meat on her, a thick ass, too, which sent the table into hysterics. Each of the tables hummed with similar banter; we rarely got together as an entire platoon anymore, and never at the outpost. Once dinner ended, I stood up on the bench and clapped my hands.

“Hotspur!” I said. “Settle down. Want to say it's great to be together in the same place since . . . well, Kuwait. Two more things: third and fourth squad, we still have that engineer escort tonight. Also, join me in recognizing our new platoon sergeant. Congratulations, Staff Sergeant Chambers. We're all looking forward to working with you in your new position.”

After the applause faded out, the men began chanting, “Speech! Speech!” Chambers grinned, tucking his overbite behind his lower teeth, and waited them out. A dim sky now hung over us, with only red lens flashlights and the blaze from the pit illuminating the area. Someone tended to the fire with lighter fluid, swelling the flames wide and red. Chambers moved in front of the pit to speak. Because of the
slight incline of the hill, and the way the flames danced shadows up and down his silhouette, he seemed a pastor delivering a dark sermon. The pealing cadence in his voice reinforced it. Wayward souls, these soldiers were, but not beyond his redemption. Not yet.

“I want to tell you all a story. A war story,” he said. “Listen to it. Learn from it. The best soldier—the best man—I ever knew was a noncom named Elijah Rios. We deployed here together, a couple years ago. He was bona fide, a real warrior. I owe everything to him. He saved my life.”

His eyes moved from man to man in slow consideration.

“Before we left, we thought we were steel. But even those of us who'd deployed before didn't know what hard was. Not yet. Our platoon sergeant, he had an idea. Kept saying it wouldn't be like the Invasion, or Afghanistan. That the war had changed, evolved. Kept calling us youngbloods, to try and get us focused. We thought it was a big joke. Ha fucking ha.

“He was right, though. Things were raw. Got hit every day. Daisy-chain IEDs. Snipers. Even a female suicide bomber once. This was before the generals bought off the insurgency. Before the sheiks turned on al-Qaeda. It was everyone against everyone, and everyone against us.

“Got intel one night that an al-Qaeda group had moved into a Shi'a neighborhood, going around and executing people. Trying to get everyone to vacate so Sunnis could move in. Didn't think much of it, was happening all over Iraq, on both sides. Just another mission, we thought.

“Didn't know the exact house they were in, just the block. So we sent the whole company. Set an inner cordon, outer cordon, whole nine yards. But anyone worth a fuck wanted to be kicking down doors, going house to house. That's where I was. That's where Elijah was.

“First eight or nine houses were all dry holes. Tenth house, everything went to shit. First room, we found a guy loading an RPG behind a couch. We shot him in the face, but then all his buddies knew we were there.

“That fatal funnel in doorways you hear about when you learn how to clear rooms? No fucking joke. Took three squads for that one house. Eight enemy spread across five rooms. Eight.

“Killed them all.

“Three wounded, one dead on our side.

“Should've just blown the house up with a tank round, but higher wouldn't clear it. Collateral damage, they said. So it was up to us. The grunts. The trigger pullers. The goddamn infantrymen. That's why we're here, gentlemen. To do what no one else can. What no one else will.

“Somehow, some way, we pushed our way upstairs. Couldn't make sense of anything, everything was too dark or too bright in the night vision. A grenade went off, couldn't hear, neither.

“Three of us stacked outside one of the last rooms and reloaded. There was no door, and we could hear a voice on the other side, fucking with us. Say what you will about al-Qaeda, but they weren't cowards. Not the real ones.

“I went in first and saw a flash of light, of movement, in a corner. So I turned that way. I shot twice, and glass exploded everywhere, falling to the ground. Shots came from behind at the same time. All I could think was, Fuck. I'd been had.

“The bastard had set up a mirror so I'd go that way, chasing his reflection. He had a clean shot at the back of my skull. If the guy behind me hadn't recognized that, I'd be dead. If the guy behind me hadn't pulled his trigger faster than hajj pulled his, I'd be dead.

“That guy was Elijah.

“I didn't know what to say. I think I sputtered out thanks or some shit. He just looked at me and nodded. ‘I got you, youngblood,' he said. ‘I got you.' ”

I no longer heard the beetles or the generators, and neither did anyone else. My right leg twitched and twitched and I swallowed loud, looking around to see if anyone had heard me. Chambers continued.

“Elijah had a philosophy he lived by.
De Oppresso Liber
. Anyone hear that before?”

Even if someone had, no one spoke.

“Means ‘Liberate the Oppressed.' It's the motto of the Green Berets. Elijah planned on joining them after our tour. He didn't just say it, either. Had it tattooed on his chest. He fucking meant it. He fucking lived it.”

Someone in the shadows shouted, “Preach,” which was echoed a few times. Chambers pressed on.

“Some of the squad leaders and team leaders here know what I'm talking about. They saw it, too. Humvees swallowed in fire, bodies liquefied by metal and heat, all because of a wrong turn or a gunner not spotting a wire fast enough.”

The sound of helicopters, attack birds, moving from Camp Independence sliced through the night. Rather than let them interrupt his benediction, Chambers raised his hands, palms up, and absorbed them into it, the rotors his very own monk chants. It all seemed quite natural, somehow. It really did.

“Hear that?” he shouted over the WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH of the blades. “Savage. That's what this is all about. Staying alert. Staying ready. Staying vigilant. They're gonna get some before they get got.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as the birds flew south, toward Baghdad. His head drooped down. Seconds passed in a shrouded hush. Then one of the joes up front quietly asked what'd happened to Rios.

Chambers opened his eyes and smiled. His voice lowered, and I couldn't tell if he was betraying the quiet sort of rage that lingers within men after something vital, something matchless, breaks inside, or just faking the same.

“Dead,” Chambers said. “Because he didn't stay vigilant. Even he—I'm telling this story to show it can happen to anyone if you let down your guard, even for a moment. Don't think that because the war seems over that it is. Right now, out there, men are plotting to kill you. To kill your friends. And like those birds, the only way we make sure that don't happen is to get some before they do. You hear me, Hotspur?”

“Hooah!” the platoon grunted in unison.

“I said, ‘You fucking hear me?' ”

“Hooah!” They were louder this time. Fiercer, too. I wasn't sure if he was done. Part of me hoped so.

Part of me didn't.

Something blossomed out of the dark near the pit. It crawled under the firelight, then down the hill, capturing Chambers' attention. He raised his boot and then thought otherwise.

“Get a cup,” he said. “One of the large ones.”

It was a camel spider. I'd seen them before—at a distance, though, not like this. Yellow with brown fur, it was thick like a cigarette pack. It kept poking its front pincers and gaping angry jaws at us as we passed around the cup. Some sort of insect blood, probably beetle, was splattered across its mouth like a child's art project.

“Men,” Chambers said from the other side of the fire. “Heard some of you caught a scorpion at the front gate. True?”

I was about to answer that we'd just missed it when a voice beside me spoke. “Roger, Sergeant. Mean little fucker.” It was Alphabet.

“He upstairs?”

Alphabet nodded.

“Bring him down,” Chambers continued. “What better way to end the night than a prizefight?”

As Alphabet went inside, I sought out the gate guards from earlier. I found Hog first. He explained that after I'd left, the scorpion had reappeared from under the Humvee.

“One of the Iraqi brothers grabbed it,” Hog said. “By the tail. Then we put it in a jar.”

They set up a ring next to the bonfire, a cardboard box with its bottom pushed open. They dumped the camel spider in first, and it poked the walls of its new prison, all four corners and two square feet of it. Testosterone bogged the air, and red flashlights flitted over the ring like police sirens. I looked around and didn't see jaded boredom anymore but something else.

I wondered if I should stop the fight. I decided not to. I wondered if I should leave the fight. I didn't.

“No need to be queasy.” Chambers spoke to me from across the ring. A red light shined up from a wristless fist onto his face. “Your man Lawrence did this. It's a proud tradition.”

“All good.” I grinned. “Who you got?”

“Scorpion,” he said. He must've smelled the stink of easy money on me. “You thinking spider?”

“Everyone knows the scorpion always wins. I'm not that green.”

He winked. “Guess not. How long you think the spider will last, then? I'm in a betting mood.”

The soldiers crowded around us, shouting suggestions, picking sides. I studied the two combatants. The camel spider was at least twice as big as the scorpion. Besides, I reasoned, it'd take time for the scorpion's venom to seep into the spider's bloodstream, or whatever circulatory system spiders have.

“Two minutes,” I said.

“I'll take the under,” Chambers replied. “How's a hundred bones sound?”

I nodded. I had faith in the big ugly.

Most of the soldiers did not. I looked around and, intentional or not, nearly all of them had slid over to Chambers' side of the ring—and the scorpion's. Through the firelight, I spotted a friendly face.

“
Et tu
, medicine man?” I said.

“Sorry,” Doc Cork said. “Like you said. Everyone knows the scorpion wins.”

I nodded again and felt a hand on my shoulder. “We're with you, sir.” I turned around and found Alphabet standing behind me, heavy Slavic gaze holding steady, with Hog next to him. “What's two minutes?”

Then he burped loud and proud, reeking of digested goat. I'd never loved another man more.

Dropped from its jar, the scorpion landed on its feet, and the camel spider went straight at it, jaws wide, fangs bared. Under a spotlight of red incandescence, the camel spider trying to pierce the scorpion's exoskeleton with its pincers, the scorpion bobbing and weaving to keep clear of the spider's
bloody furnace of a mouth. The smaller creature was soon boxed into a corner, maintaining leverage due to a jagged pebble. I needed the spider to stop being so aggressive, but asking an arachnid to go guerrilla and outlast its opponent rather than murder it as soon as possible seemed pointless, so I just shook my fist and howled. Similar sounds emanated from around the ring. The camel spider sank its front pincers into the top of the scorpion's shell and began pulling it into its jaws, a long, slow death march. I howled again, something resembling the word “yes” rising from the wilds of my chest. The camel spider began gnawing on the scorpion's head. The arthropod held off ingestion by ramming its claws against the bulk of the spider and shoving, a sort of dark arts horizontal push-up. Then it raised its trident. My eyes snapped wide as the tail moved back and forth, to and fro. The spider stopped chewing, hypnotized. Like a black lightning bolt, the scorpion plunged its stinger down into the camel spider, straight through a bulbous eye. A horrifying rattle followed, something like a leaking balloon, and the camel spider collapsed on its belly, pincers out.

“Time?” someone asked.

“Eighty seconds,” Doc Cork said, reading from the digital green of his wristwatch. “Team Scorpion wins.”

I bellowed bitterly as Chambers and most of the platoon cheered and crowed.

“See, men,” Chambers said. “That's what happens when you hesitate. A motherfucking stinger comes for your brain. Don't be that camel spider. Be the scorpion.”

The scorpion freed itself from the dead spider's jaws and took a victory lap around the dirt ring, claws raised. I accepted Alphabet's offer of a cigarette, even though I didn't smoke. Chambers asked if I could pay him next time we made a run to Camp Independence, and I said yes. Then he used two cups to collect the scorpion and started walking to the perimeter gate. The soldiers protested, saying they wanted their prizefighter for future bouts.