Youngblood (17 page)

“Fucker just tried to stab me,” he said. His voice was hard and flexing. He tossed away the dagger and straightened his back, moving his boot to the Barbie Kid's chest. He pushed down with his foot, evoking a sharp cry from his captive.

“Easy now,” I said, walking next to the pair. “Talk me through this. Who was firing?”

“Hog,” he said. He kept his face down, lensed eyes staring through the ground. “Shot out a window.”

I looked across the street. Glass shards decorated the ground below an empty window frame.

“Negligent discharge,” Washington said. “No good.”

I looked at Hog, who shook his head and gripped his rifle tight. “I—I don't know what happened, sir. I heard shouting and I turned around, thinking it was Dead Tooth, and it just—it just happened.”

“No one was hurt,” I said. “Let's be thankful for that.”

Underneath Chambers' boot, the Barbie Kid's unibrow bent up and down, his good eye darting wildly. His arms shook like twigs on a branch, and he gasped for air, still recovering from the boot stomp.

“How the hell did he get so close?” I asked.

“Ran up from behind,” Chambers said. “I heard his steps and tossed him to the ground before he could take a swipe.”

“Must still be mad about his goat,” Washington offered.

While we pulled the Barbie Kid to his feet and zip-cuffed him, Chambers straightened his arms and balled his hands into fists over and over again. I looked up at the floaty orange dust. Back when I'd longed for excitement, sulky teenagers with self-designated nicknames and confusion over gender identity hadn't been what I'd imagined. Our grandfathers had pushed back the onslaught of fascism. Just what the fuck were we doing?

From: William Porter

To: Jack Porter

Re: Intel?

July 1 9:05 PM

Jack—

Grant is dead. Killed himself a couple years back. He tried to testify at Winter Soldier a few days before, but the organizers deemed him too unreliable. Who blows their brains out in their childhood home for their parents to find? Jesus.

A few of my classmates knew him from Fort Hood, said he was a good dude who never pulled it together post-deployment. Happens to a lot of guys, unfortunately. (We'll talk about that when you get back—being a leader doesn't end when the bullets stop flying.)

Enough preaching from me.

Found Tisdale—we have some mutual Facebook friends, but none are close enough for me to inquire about him. Got his email if you want to write him or something—[email protected].

Any luck finding a local to write a statement? I'm telling you, that's your ace in the hole.

Nothing really new here. In San Fran for that summer internship. So many hot women in this city, it's ridiculous. And my apartment is above a gourmet barbecue joint. I don't even know what that means, but it smells delicious.

Be safe, Jack. And be strong. Only a couple months left.

Will

P.S. CALL MOM AND DAD

P.P.S. Grant was born and raised in Twain country. Hannibal, Missouri. Thought you'd appreciate.

I stared at the screen in a trance. Grant was dead. By his own hand. I hadn't known the guy beyond a name on some papers, but still.

Maybe it was because his mud huts were now my mud huts. Maybe it was because he'd once been a junior officer overwhelmed by the ambiguities of the desert and I was now a junior officer overwhelmed by the ambiguities of the desert. Maybe it was the shared relationship with Chambers, or the vision of him trying to right his wrongs at Winter Soldier, seeking absolution.

Maybe it was just the day, the moment, the headache.

I promised myself I'd track down his family when I got home, the same way I would Alphabet's and Ortiz's. New Concord, Ohio. Hannibal, Missouri. Tucson, Arizona. I'd make a road trip of it.

We had internet at the outpost now, in a third-floor guest room formerly for embedded reporters. Journalists didn't come to Ashuriyah anymore. First Sergeant said they were all in Afghanistan. A green fly buzzed around my head. I waved it away, and it landed on the computer. Walls of plywood formed small cubbies, each soldier tucked into a station like a lunch box.

My watch said I was late. I refreshed my e-mail one last time, hoping for a note from Marissa. Still nothing, despite my last e-mail to her being titled
S.O.S.! (JUST KIDDING).
I'd wanted to know if she'd come visit Hawaii again when we redeployed. I resisted the urge to rip the bracelet from my wrist, and logged off. To calm down, I thought about partying with my brother in a city saturated with young women. It helped, a little bit.

The hallways were filled with the dissonant sounds of men at war. From the ancient, guttural cadence of bullshitting to the iron poetry of machine gun bolts slamming into place, I breathed it in and told myself to value it, to cherish it, that someday it would be moments like this I'd miss, even if the moment itself wasn't worth missing.

On the second floor, pockets of huddled soldiers mumbled greetings as I passed. I smiled back, cracking jokes and slapping backs, presenting the image of the blithe lieutenant because I thought they needed that. Free until the next morning, most of my sergeants were playing poker in our room. I'd been invited, but said I couldn't make it. I didn't like gambling with my men much anymore. It wasn't how I felt when I lost, either. It was how I felt when I won.

I turned down the stairwell and found Captain Vrettos coming up it, a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders and head.

“Jack!” he said, grabbing my forearm with both his hands. “Was looking for you. About to start a movie. The new Civil War one.”

His eyes were cracked and bloodshot. My eyes had been red like that before, back in high school when I'd smoked too much and needed Visine before I went home to face my mom's inquisition. Captain Vrettos looked like he could use some weed.

“Sir? You need to sleep. The runners will wake you if anything pops.”

He shook his head, telling me he was fine, he could sleep when he was dead. After explaining that I had a meeting with Saif scheduled, I pressed once more, asking what the point of delegation was if not for sleep. He straightened the hunch in his back and said to remember my rank. I nodded and said I'd left Caesar's memoirs on his desk like he'd asked, in case he got bored with the movie. The Mother Hajj and Pedo bin Laden escorted me down the stairs. She was looking more despondent than I remembered; he, more manic.

The foyer was warm, and the evening air was wet. As I moved into the Iraqi Army quarters, I stroked my slung rifle. I had three full magazines in my cargo pockets. There had been a rash of green-on-blue attacks in the past month, all out of our sector, sudden moments when
jundi
s
or Iraqi policemen turned their weapons on their Coalition allies. I wondered if I should have brought Tool or Dominguez with me, but figured it was too late.

A wine-red curtain spread across the entry of the first room in the hallway. I heard hip-hop blaring, so I knocked on the open door and poked my head inside.

“
Molazim
Saif?”

Four
jundi
s were watching MTV Middle East on the couch. I smelled dirty laundry and sour body odor. On the screen, an Egyptian clone of Notorious B.I.G. rapped in hoarse Arabic, pointing at the gold chains around his neck and to the luxury sedans behind him. The room was dingy, splashed with bright colors from the television. None of the Iraqis turned around, but one pointed silently to the room across the hall.

“
Shukran
,” I said, and removed myself.

Saif was in the next room, a narrow nook he occupied alone. He wore a dull black undershirt shoved into cargo pants. Under the yellow ceiling light, the folds in his forehead were more pronounced, the clipped hair on the sides of his head highlighting the baldness on top. Built like a pear, he was somewhere between stocky and fat—Hog would've called him “country strong.” His skin, darker than that of most of the local Iraqis, was the color of an old penny.

His quarters were sparse, the Sheetrock walls bare. Three pressed uniforms hung in his dresser, the Iraqi flag shoulder patches facing out, green Arabic scrawl darting and cold. Taped to the side of the dresser was a picture of his daughter, a bucktoothed girl with a sunflower in her ponytail. Below that was a hand-colored engraving of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A plastic trunk sat in a corner, locked, a rifle-cleaning kit on top of it. A pullout couch was in the adjacent corner. I accepted his invitation to sit across from him on the floor, my back against the near wall and legs out, his legs tucked under him and his back straight.

He began by chiding me for my tardiness. I told him I didn't think
Arabs cared about time. He laughed, shaking his head. I complimented his digs and asked if he ever got lonely.

“We are different, Loo-tenant Porter.” I asked him how so. “We keep separate from the soldiers. Better for discipline.” I waited for more. He pointed to my rifle. “A soldier's weapon, not an officer's weapon.” He patted the semiautomatic pistol in its holster on his leg, the Glock's metal rattling.

“My M-Nine is upstairs.” I didn't carry my pistol much, but felt it necessary to point out that I had one. “But yeah, we're big on equality. All for one, one for all sort of thing. Goes back to George Washington, I think.”

“George Washington?” Saif raised an eyebrow. “One of your slave-owner presidents, yes?”

He stood to go brew the tea in his makeshift kitchen, a wooden counter mounted between his couch and dresser. He seemed embarrassed to be using an electric kettle, and spoke of how seriously his father took chai.

“Begin with springwater,” he said, twisting the cap off a plastic water bottle. “Not tap, never distilled. The more oxygen your water has, the better the chai.” He poured the contents of the bottle into the kettle and pressed a green button. The kettle rumbled to life as he sat down again.

We discussed how we'd become army officers. He'd originally become an Iraqi policeman to escape his family's rice farm south of Baghdad, near the banks of the Euphrates. He'd been at the police academy when the Invasion occurred.

Saif wanted to know about my childhood in California, refusing to believe I didn't surf. He scoffed when I suggested the suburban dream was decaying, telling me that American-style villages were all the rage in the affluent parts of northern Iraq. When I said I'd spent a college semester in Ireland, he asked how the Irish had dealt with their diaspora.

“We have the same problem now,” he said. “All the minds have fled—the doctors, the politicians, the businessmen.”

The kettle beeped to indicate the water had boiled. The
jundi
platoon
leader kept talking as he rose to his feet again nimbly, a physics problem in action. He scooped Earl Grey tea leaves into a small teapot and cracked open two cardamom pods into the pot.

Though he'd been raised Shi'a, his grandfather on his mother's side was a Sunni, something that proved useful during the Surge, when the Iraqi government, desperate for diversity in the Shi'a-heavy army, offered bonuses and promotions to souls brave and stupid enough to make the jump.

“The ministries didn't actually want us to switch,” he said, pouring the boiled water into the pot, shielding my view of the procedure as if it were some secret recipe. “They were under pressure from the American generals. The Shi'as controlled the national government for the first time, and wanted to keep control of the army and police. The Sunnis countered by creating the Sahwa gangs. So I used my grandfather's name as my own, and was sent to officer school and got more pay. My trainers didn't run me off, once they realized I was Shi'a like them.”

“Higher didn't catch on?”

He loosed a cavalier smile. “I blamed the paperwork. It was one of my family names, so it wasn't hard.”

Setting the teapot on top of the kettle, Saif resumed his seat across from me. “The leaves soak for ten minutes,” he said. “Proper chai must be dark, with lots of sugar. Nothing like the Iranians make. That's not tea. It's water.”

Pretending to understand what this brewing preference signified about Persian culture, I thought about how the only food or drink I could make was an orange cappuccino for my mom. I couldn't even cook, unless instant ramen counted. This seemed like hard evidence for our earlier discussion about the decay of suburbia, but I wasn't about to embarrass myself like that in front of a colleague.

“You've been quiet, Loo-tenant Porter.” His head tilted in consideration.

I sighed. For weeks—months, really—I'd needed nothing more than a sounding board to salvage my sanity. Will could do only so much
from across the sea, and Marissa was still unresponsive. But I barely knew Saif. I wanted to trust him. I really did.

“Tough day. My platoon sergeant almost got stabbed over a dead goat? I don't know. Maybe the heat's getting to me. And I just found out that a friend killed himself back in the States.”

“Was he a soldier?”

“An officer. A young officer. Like us.”

Saif leaned over and put his hands on my shoulders. “I mourn with you. The martyrs who fall after are still warriors. You will see him again.”

I didn't know how to explain that I'd never met Grant, so I just said thank you.

We swapped information on Dead Tooth. He hadn't known about the shooting death of Azhar's cousin, but said it didn't surprise him. Excuses for stupidity were an insurgent's calling card, he said. He seemed skeptical of Fat Mukhtar's claim that Dead Tooth wasn't welcome on the Sunni Strip, saying that one of their sources had seen him there the night before. He called the Sahwa leaders ali babas, arguing that they were just armed thugs who'd filled the power vacuum created after the Invasion. That may be true, I said, but they're still our allies.