Youngblood (42 page)

The portable radio on my hip buzzed. “Hotspur Six,” it said. “You're needed at Camp Independence ASAP. Commander's orders.”

I smirked. It was reckoning time. I kissed my fingers and placed them on the sandstone wall of the house. It seemed the thing to do. Then I left.

We drove straight to Camp Independence, and I tried to appreciate the baked air and dust slapping at our faces in the breeze. Battalion had been trying to get ahold of our patrol all morning. They refused to say why I was needed, so I prepared myself for the worst. At least I'd gotten to say good-bye.

I met them in the Big Man's office. The battalion flag hung over the room like a big baggy clock, its infantry blue and crossed rifles symbols from a forgotten life. The Big Man looked up from his desk, all bald gravity. In front of the desk sat Captain Vrettos, hunched over. Between them was the intelligence officer, teeming with short-man energy. The Big Man motioned with his fist for me to enter. I took a deep breath and walked in, posting to the position of attention.

“Lieutenant Porter,” the Big Man began, “we are aware that a fatwa has been placed on you by insurgents and have reason to believe you've known this for some time.” I opened my mouth. “Don't answer. I don't want you to implicate yourself. I admire your dedication to the mission.” The intel officer sneered but kept quiet. “The Rangers brought this to our intel team, and we confirmed it this morning.”

My confusion betrayed me. “Sergeant Chambers,” Captain Vrettos said. “Talked to him an hour ago on the phone. He spoke very highly of your loyalty to the platoon. But that riot last night, Jack—that was all staged to get you, the Rangers say.”

“Anything can be a fatwa,” I said. “They're not just death sentences. And I'm pretty sure you have to be Muslim to get a fatwa. And really, no one in Ashuriyah takes them seriously. It's coming from a crazy person.”

“I take them seriously.” The inflexion in the Big Man's words suggested he'd already issued his own fatwa on the matter. “Your war's over, Lieutenant. You'll spend our remaining month here as part of my staff. We can't risk you being out of the wire anymore. You've served your country honorably. You've cleared. You've held. And you've built. Be proud.”

It surprised me how quickly I was willing to drop the world. I wanted to avoid getting into trouble. I wanted to go home. I wanted to live.

I thought of my men. “What about . . . Hotspur?”

“It's one month. Sergeant Chambers can get them home.”

I nodded meekly, knowing that, despite everything else, he could do that, and that he would.

“Your war's over,” the Big Man repeated. This time, I couldn't help but relent.

I
waited on the patio of Pizza Hut, stirring my soda water with a straw and poking at an untouched slice. A raw December wind pushed through the gulch, spraying sand pebbles into the faces of passing soldiers and contractors. A few hats blew off heads and onto the ground. No one was bothered. We'd all be in America in a week's time. I readjusted my fleece cap and went back to playing with my food, right leg twitching and twitching.

Where is Ibrahim? I thought. He's fucking late.

I'd become a witness to my own war. Since higher wouldn't let me go on patrols anymore, I'd embraced my inner fobbit. Hot showers. Steady meals. Steadier sleep. Sure, I made PowerPoint slides and charts. But mostly I counted off calendar days, killing time.

There'd been guilt, of course, a little about the missing Sahwa money, mostly about other things. But I'd learned something about myself during the blanched, neutral weeks at Camp Independence: I was no martyr. The truth mattered less to me than survival did. If that made me a coward, then at least I was a coward who'd been shot at.

Then they'd found the empty backpack.

Fingers were pointed and words were yelled, and through it all I stayed silent as a monk. “This isn't going to show up in your bank account, right? That's the first place they'll look,” my JAG lawyer kept repeating. He claimed that a defense of negligence, even the gross negligence of losing twenty-five thousand dollars, would keep me out of jail. “I wouldn't count on get getting promoted, though.” I'd just shrug, say I was planning on leaving the army anyhow, and repeat the half truth that I'd dropped off a backpack in the arms room.

My leg was twitching so furiously that it bumped the underside of
the table, loosing a ricochet of sound into the late afternoon. A few nearby soldiers turned to look. Needing something to do to get away from their eyes, I stood to throw out my drink and pizza. When I sat down again the watchers had gone back to their meals, and it was my turn to observe as a familiar face strode the length of the gulch to the base exchange.

Sergeant Griffin walked through the automatic doors of the exchange. She's going home to take her son to first grade, I thought. And that matters. It matters a lot. Then I pushed away images of Rana doing the same with Ahmed and Karim. I tried not to think about them anymore, though that hadn't stopped the nightmares. Nightmare, really, since it was always the same one. Three heads in a ditch, lined up like nesting dolls, their jaws hanging open in everlong shock, smelling of smoke and maggots.

A hand slapped my shoulder from behind.

“Easy, sir.” It was Ibrahim. He took a seat and pushed his plastic-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. The table creaked under his weight. “Got the thing.”

As he pulled a file thick as a fossil from his bag, it took great restraint not to snatch it from him. He set it on the table. I touched it with a thumb just to make sure it was real.

“Awesome, man,” I said. “Know this wasn't easy.”

“All good,” he said. “My buddy's an interrogator. Once he heard this was the guy who put the fatwa on us, he was happy to help. Muslim brotherhood, you know?”

“Thank him for me,” I said, finding the folder label with the name
YOUSEF AL-NASIR
on it. The falafel man's interrogation transcripts, weeks' worth, ever since the Rangers found him hiding under a pile of blankets on a roof. “No one else will see it, of course.”

We sat together for a few minutes, listening to the cadence of empire. Cargo planes rumbled through the winter sky while helos sliced at it. Soldiers made jokes about small dicks and big dicks. With the sun falling into the west, someone in the gulch trilled the Zulu chant from the beginning of
The Lion King
.

I smiled in spite of myself.

Ibrahim seemed to be doing well. Less depressed, at least.

“Lot better,” he said. “Almost went crazy out there. Now it all just seems like a bad dream, you know?”

We shook hands, and he saluted. I watched the large man walk into the sludge of dusk.

“Be the scorpion!” he called over his back. I didn't answer.

I placed the transcripts in my own pack. I wanted to read them more than anything, but knew if I started I wouldn't be able to stop. I'd save them for my housing trailer later, where no one could see me.

First, though, I had to go back to battalion. There was a graph about local business grants I needed to finish. The major had been quite clear about that.

Even though I was late, I took the long way there, walking up the gulch toward the tank graveyard. The yard was a laser show, dozens of Iraqi contractors wearing fireproof suits and wielding blowtorches. According to base gossip, it took ten hours to destroy one Stryker, cutting each vehicle into pieces small enough to feed industrial metal shredders.

General Dynamics had no need for their war machines, and neither did the U.S. Army—Strykers didn't work well in Afghanistan, the terrain was too rocky. Turning them over to the Iraqi military seemed out of the question, since every vehicle was filled with state-of-the-art technology. So there was only this, hiring locals to destroy them, shredding Strykers by the thousands.

I walked to the fence of the yard, sticking my fingers through the chain links. The heat from the blowtorches blew across my face.

A shadow approached the fence through the near night. “Twenty dollars.”

It was one of the Iraqi contractors, his fireproof suit dark yellow and covered in soot and burn marks. I asked what for. He held up a tiny green cube. The remnants of one Stryker, ground into a square to sell locally. I pulled out my wallet and handed over a twenty for the armored cube. It felt smooth and flat in my palm, like glass.

“Thanks,” I said to the contractor.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.”

I walked up the asphalt road that led to headquarters and crossed the yellow-grassed quad. I opened the door into the operations center slowly, hoping to get to my workstation unnoticed. It wasn't dim laptop green illuminating the room, though, but the bright yellow of electric lights. Soldiers weren't sitting and typing, quietly going about the business of war bureaucracy. They were standing around, prattling. They spoke at once, as if they'd rehearsed it, so I couldn't associate the message with anyone particular.

“Sergeant Chambers,” they said. “Sergeant Chambers is no longer with us.”

Bodies reached for me, drawing me to their circle of grief. Ostensibly they wanted to console, but they really wanted something else, something they could break from me and take home for themselves. I wouldn't let them, though. I stood there casual as a stone, arms down and body rigid, until they let go.

“It hasn't hit him yet,” I heard them say, and I let them think that, because it meant being left alone.

Later I'd learn that he found a scorpion in his boot that morning. That was what some soldiers said, at least. Others said that was bullshit, just a stupid story. After all, the cynics argued, who ever found a scorpion in their boot in Ashuriyah?

They all agreed on how it happened, though. It was the Day of Ashura, a Shi'a festival. They'd gone on a foot patrol through the market blocks and found a large crowd watching a young man whip himself with chains. The soldiers said that while some Iraqi kids were laughing at the man whipping himself, none of the adults were.

“He was bleeding a lot,” Doc Cork said.

“So much,” Snoop said.

“Like a stuck pig,” Hog said.

Some of them remembered the Barbie Kid being there, across the street in a ditch, just watching the festival like everyone else. Others
swore he materialized out of nowhere, that they would've remembered him walking across the street, dragging his cooler like a gypsy wagon.

We're soldiers, they said. We were trained to notice things like that.

No one would admit to remembering what came next, not clearly at least. No one would talk about it, either. No one but Hog.

“He started looking through his cooler,” he said. “I thought he was looking for porn mags to sell us, or maybe Boom Booms. I was walking over to Snoop to ask about the whipping guy, when I heard two shots real quick—like BANG BANG. Then a different shot, which was Sergeant Dominguez shooting the Barbie Kid.

“Doc Cork ran to them both right away. But he'd shot Chambers straight through the brain. And Sergeant Dominguez had shot the Barbie Kid in the chest. They were already dead. It all happened so fast.”

“The shots were different?” I asked.

“Different sounds,” Hog said. “The first two were pistol pops. Glock, I think. The last one was a whistle, Sergeant Dominguez's rifle.”

I thought about the strings I'd pulled to get the Barbie Kid out of jail. It had seemed the right thing to do then.

Then I wondered where the Barbie Kid had found a Glock. No way, I thought. No way.

I asked how Dominguez was. “He killed a kid. That's not something you just get over.”

I didn't know any of that in the operations center, though. I just knew an Iraqi kid had shot Sergeant Chambers, and I was supposed to be surprised about it but I wasn't, not at all. The major said I didn't have to finish my PowerPoint graph. So I left.

•  •  •

Roaming the gravel paths of Camp Independence, I ended up alongside the eastern gate, as far from Ashuriyah as I could get. To the south lay the dulled lights of the airfield, the mire of Halliburton trailers, the club I'd never made it to. Through the muddy night to the north was
the aid station we'd taken little Ahmed to. And to the west were softball fields, the bank, the detention center housing Yousef.

I checked my pack to make sure the file was still there.

I retraced my steps, passing the tank graveyard again. The contractors had set down their blowtorches for the night. The housing trailers rose into sight. I again thought of Chambers.

I'd never know why he'd kept quiet about the Sahwa money. If anyone could've sealed my fate, it'd been him. But he'd spared me, for reasons I'd always wonder about. Maybe he thought he'd won. Maybe he thought I'd gotten what I deserved.

In my trailer, I poured myself a glass of Rip It over ice. Two packed duffel bags stood in the corner, ready to leave at a moment's notice. The pressed, pure uniform of a fobbit hung in the closet, ready to fly home and greet my family at the welcome-home ceremony. I sat down and opened the file. One hundred forty pages of interrogation transcripts awaited.

Most of the pages had to do with Yousef's weapons smuggling and al-Qaeda contacts. His denials and nonresponses became names and connections around page 39, after loud Metallica songs became part of his daily regimen. What a weird thing to break someone, I thought. It wasn't until page 92, though, and a second glass of Rip It that I found what I sought.

Q: You said earlier that you smuggled things other than weapons.

Detainee 2496: Yes.

Q: What?

Detainee 2496: Not what. Who.

Q: People.

Detainee 2496: People who wanted to get out of the country.