Authors: Matt Gallagher
A bronze fog hung over the town of Ashuriyah. It obscured our vision, though the occasional minaret crown emerged above the haze. I took off my clear lenses and wiped away the dust before deciding to hell with it and slipped them into a cargo pocket. While the fog shielded us from the sun's worst and kept the air relatively cool, I'd already sweated through my clothes by the time we reached the market blocks. My body ached in all the normal places from the medieval bulk of the armor: the blister spots on my heels, the knotted center of my back, the right collarbone that'd been turned sideways years before during intramurals. I pushed these bitchy suburban grievances away, tugged at my junk, and thanked Hog again for teaching me the importance of freeballing.
“No problem,” he said. “But what do they teach at officer school if they don't teach that?”
We stopped short of the market and turned onto a dusty back street, walking by a lonely cypress tree. Small sandstone houses resembling honeycomb cells lined the sides of the road. A donkey cart filled with concrete blocks ambled by, the animal and boy driving it sunk in discomfort. On their heels came a rush of children clamoring for our attention and clawing at our pockets.
“Mistah, gimme chocolata!” they said. “Gimme football! Gimme, gimme!”
“You gimme chocolata!” Hog said, picking up one of the kids, twirling him around.
“Punks should be in school,” Doc Cork said, reaching for a cigarette. For some reason, the other soldiers took great pride in the fact that our medic smoked. The only son of Filipino immigrants, he was a peddler of light, and pills, in a bleak world.
I turned to a child with doubting eyes, ruffled his hair, and pointed to him. “Ali baba,” I said. The group of kids around him laughed and chanted, “Ali baba! Ali baba!” while the victim of my slander protested. No one liked being called a villain. I put my hands out and let the kids play with the hard plastic that cased the knuckles of my gloves.
Some of the guys were debating whether to provide the kids dipping tobacco and telling them it was chocolate, so I gave Dominguez the hand signal to keep the patrol moving.
“This is good, yo,” Snoop said, waving around his dummy rifle like a flag. “Kids keep snipers away. They won't shoot with kids here, unless they are fuckups. People get angry about dead kids.”
Near the hajji bodega, a group of teens were playing foosball in a plot of muddy weeds and poppies. The Barbie Kid was there, too, wheeling around a cooler and selling Boom Booms and cigarettes to occupiers and occupied alike. A gust of wind carried the faint scent of shit so pervasive in Ashuriyah. Sewer ditches and cesspools were still far more prevalent than indoor plumbing in this part of the Cradle of Civilization.
Snoop pointed to the table and asked if I wanted to play.
“Sure,” I said. “Anyone got someplace to be?”
Most of the soldiers laughed, though I spotted the new staff sergeant, Chambers, glaring my way. He leaned against a telephone pole with wires hanging from it like spaghetti, his helmet tilted forward to cover his face in a deep shadow.
“Too nice to these little fuckers,” he said, exposing a tobacco-stained overbite. There was a hard edge to his voice. This wasn't a jokeâit was criticism.
Half the patrol started studying packed dirt, while the others turned to me. I needed to say something. I was the platoon leader. He was an interloper, a fucking new guy who wasn't supposed to be doing anything but watching and learning. So I shrugged and said, “It's not 2007 anymore. Things have changed. We're withdrawing soon.”
“Right.” He didn't sound convinced. “While you and the English-speaking hajj handle business, I'm going to show the guys how to pull security.”
I nodded slightly and considered my options. Some noncoms couldn't help but test their leadership, and it seemed I now had one of those. My brother would say I needed to regulate. All in good time, I reasoned. There was no reason to crush a guy for having baggage from his last tour. I watched a pair of stray dogs along a ridgeline to the east. They were teasing a spotted goat with big pink balls that wanted nothing to do with them. I felt bad for the thing, but we hadn't been sent to Iraq to save goats.
Snoop tugged my sleeve to bring my attention back to foosball. Two teenagers built like cord had lined up across the table. The bar of our goalie proved sticky, but one of their strikers had been sawed in half somehow, so it evened out.
“They ask how old you are,” Snoop translated. “They say you look too young to be a
molazim
.”
It wasn't the first time I'd heard that. “Twenty-four,” I said, trying to keep my voice flat. “Old enough.”
Sweat rolled down my face and onto the table, dripping like dirty rain. It was too hot to be wearing anything other than a tee shirt. The teens suggested Snoop and I take off our gear. They thought American soldiers were crazy for wearing body armor outside. I grunted and took off my gloves to better grip the handles.
During the game, I listened to soldiers pelt Chambers with questions about firefights on his previous deployments, his Ranger tab, and what he meant by “exposed silhouettes.” Hog's voice especially carried from across the dirt road, which bothered me.
“Sergeant?” he asked. “I heard, uh, you got tattoos for every enemy you've killed?”
Chambers pulled up the sleeve on his right arm, though I couldn't see what he was showing. The soldiers, now spread out in pairs and kneeling behind cars or peeking around building corners, all turned his way.
“Don't look at me, oxygen thieves,” Chambers said, his voice stinging with authority. “Eyes out.”
“Fuck this,” I said, after giving up another goal that I blamed on the stuck goalie. I'd been to Ranger School, too. I had my tab. Why didn't they ever ask me about it? Because infantry officers have guaranteed slots, I thought. We don't have to fight to get in like the enlisted. “Snoop, call over the Barbie Kid. Let's get some work done.”
I could tell the terp was annoyed by the way the game had ended, but he did as instructed. The Barbie Kid, all ninety pounds of him, moved to us with bare feet covered in dust, rolling a cooler of goods behind him. A dark unibrow raced across his forehead, and he stank like a polecat, wearing his usual pink sweats. The Barbie doll's face on the sweatshirt was smudged with mud and crust, forever spoiling her smile.
“Any ali babas around?” I asked.
The Barbie Kid looked up at me with his good eye, the lazy one staying fixed to the ground. “None the Americans would care about,” he said through Snoop, his voice cracking but tart.
Fucking teenagers, I thought. They're all terrible. Even here.
I reached down and lifted the Barbie Kid's sweatshirt to reveal the handle of a long, dull
sai
dagger tucked into his waistband.
“Still carrying that around,” I said. “You're going to hurt yourself.”
The young Iraqi frowned, then argued. “He is a businessman and must protect his business,” Snoop translated. “He asks why you care? There are boys younger than him who work for the Sahwa militias. They carry AK-47s.”
“Good point,” I said.
“Want any Boom Booms, LT? He offers a special deal, because Hotspur is his favorite platoon.”
“I'm sure he tells that to all the girls. How much?”
“Two for five dollars.”
As I rummaged through my pockets for money, a sound like wood planks slapping together broke the peace. Then again. My heart jumped up and my feet jumped back, unprepared for fired rounds. Chambers stood in the center of the road, back straight, rifle wedged tight into his shoulder. The bronzed dirt in the air had parted around him, giving off a strange, glassy sheen. A wisp of smoke curled out the end of his barrel and the goat with big pink balls lay collapsed on the far side of the street, near a pair of soldiers in a wadi. I exchanged a confused look with Snoop. Then the Barbie Kid unleashed the most primal sound I'd ever heard, a scream both high and low, as abrupt as it was lasting. He ran to the goat's body, and we followed, slowly.
“Goddamn it. What did I just say about keeping the enemy out of our perimeter?” Chambers yelled, lowering his rifle. “If that thing had been a suicide bomber, you'd be explaining to Saint Peter why the fuck you're so stupid.”
The Barbie Kid fell to the ground next to the dead animal, cradling its body and petting it. He wept uncontrollably. The goat was lean to the point of emaciation, and its coat was splotched and stringy, like shredded paper. Its balls were even bigger and pinker up close. It'd been shot through the brain at the bridge of its nose, giving the look of a third eye. Fat, gray insects were hopping off its coat into the Barbie Kid's hair, so I kept my distance.
“Sergeant Chambers,” I said. “We're not supposed to shoot animals. Higher's pretty strict about that.”
“They're a menace,” he said. “But okay.”
I looked around the platoon. Most peered in at the scene, a strained quiet gripping them. There were no jokes, no sounds of spat tobacco, no jingling of gear. Dominguez shook his head and turned back out, instructing the joes nearby to do the same.
I pointed to the goat. “Pretty close to some of the men.”
Chambers pounded his chest twice and hooted. “A perfect kill. Never a danger.”
Snoop was on the ground with the Barbie Kid, placing a hand on his back. “LT Jack? This was his pet, his only
habibi
. He say his parents didn't let it in their house, but he fed it and played with it for many months. He's very sad.”
“I can see that.” I chewed on my lip. “For fuck's sake.” I reached into my pockets and pulled out all the bills and change I could find: seventeen dollars and fifty cents, and eight hundred dinars.
“Tell him to take this,” I told Snoop. “Condolence funds. And Sergeant? Throw some money in there.”
Chambers sneered, but did as ordered, tossing a twenty-dollar bill to the ground.
The Barbie Kid wouldn't take the money, nor would he abandon the dead goat. Putting the bills and change into his cooler, we left him hugging and petting and snotting over the carcass.
The electricity recon took ten hours. I met with a half dozen Iraqi families over chai and flatbread, discussing the neighborhoods and the Sahwa militias and the problems with electricity and clean water. They had many questions, and I had few answers. Chambers ran security for the rest of the mission, staying out in the bronze fog the entire time. Throughout the day, both the Barbie Kid's scream and Chambers' hoot twisted in my mind like screws. Not even Doc Cork's headache pills could make them go away.
Y
o, LT Jack. Source called.”
I looked up from the poker table. Snoop stood in the doorway, a swirl of dark skin and shadows. I could tell by his voice that the matter was urgent, but there was three hundred dollars in the pot. I'd spent a good hour sandbagging hands. Maybe some of the platoon originals saw what I was doing, but Chambers hadn't. He'd no clue, thinking I was just another dumb lieutenant who didn't know how to play cards.
“Duty calls.” Dominguez's chipmunk cheeks widened into a grin as he rubbed his shaved head. He'd clean up quickly with me gone. “Insha'Allah. As God wills it.”
“Something like that,” I said. I stood and put on my uniform top, an amalgam of digital camo, tan and green and gray and ugly as puke. “I'll cash out when I get back.” I followed Snoop out of the windowless room, the poker game resuming behind us.
In the two days since the goat incident, everyone had stayed silent about it. There wasn't much to say. I'd wondered how my brother would've handled things, since he was the perfect leader of men or something, but hadn't been able to land on anything specific. I could always call and ask, I thought, before rejecting the idea. He'd just lecture me for letting it happen in the first place.
On the other side of the outpost, Snoop and I angled by the command post, where Captain Vrettos hunched over the radio like a broken stork, updating battalion headquarters. He had a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders and head as a shawl.
“Yes, sir, I understand the tenets of counterinsurgency,” he was saying. His voice was brittle; he sometimes slept in there during the days, on a folding chair, so he could stay up and track our company's night
operations. He must've been speaking with someone from battalion. “Clear and hold. Then build.”
In a whisper, Snoop asked if I wanted to stop and check in with the commander. I shook my head wildly. When battalion got going on the tenets of counterinsurgency, there was no stopping them.
The interpreters' room lay on the far reaches of the hallway, across from a small gym. We walked into dank must. The other terps were playing a soccer video game in the dark. I flipped on the light switch and a ceiling panel flickered to life.
“Lieutenant,” one of them said. “Surf's up.”
“For the millionth time, I'm not from that part of California. I grew up in the foothills. By a lake.”
The terps' faces remained blank. There was only one California on this side of the world, and nothing I could say would ever change that.
“Haitham called,” Snoop said.
Haitham was the town drunk, a toy of a man with flitting eyes and rotting yellow teeth. He was also the Barbie Kid's estranged uncle. For being a Muslim on the bottle, we figured. We paid him twenty thousand dinars a month, and he still claimed he couldn't afford toothpaste.
“He drinks too much.” Snoop liked him more than I did. “But he's no liar.”
“True,” I said.
“He say he watched us the other day. When the new sergeant shot the goat.”
“He did? Why?”
“He remembers the new sergeant, from before. He say the new sergeant helped murder Iraqis during the al-Qaeda wars, when the Horse soldiers were here. Called him a white
shaytan
.”