Youngblood (6 page)

Or that orangutan of a dental student. He had bad gums.

Or that tennis player with spiky hair. He smiled too much. What a fucking clown. Anyone but that guy.

I tried thinking about some of the others, like the Danish tourist I'd met in Honolulu the year before, who'd called me Mark the next morning. Sometimes she was the answer, but not this time. I kept my eyes closed and breathed in a cloud of mango and Marissa's body went up and down that slide and up and down and my pants went up and my hand went down and—

“Sir?”

I poked my head out from under the poncho liner and opened my eyes, finding a burly, confused Slav.

“Alphabet?”

“Doc Cork gave me these. To give to you.”

I grabbed the pair of white pills from his palm with the grace of a startled dog. “Thanks, man.” There was a long pause. “Sleeping pills.” There was another long pause. “Things better at home?”

“Yes, sir, sure are.” The skin on his face so used to frowning flipped upright. “Thanks for checking on me so much. Meant a lot.”

I sat up and leaned against the wall, arms draped over my knees. I'd always been all angles and elbows, there wasn't a joke about it I hadn't heard. Sitting like that also hid the proud little grunt standing at attention in my lap.

“Course,” I said. “What are lieutenants for?”

“Yeah.”

“We're halfway done. Remember that. Like a run to Kolekole Pass—we're on the downslope, back at the barracks before you know it. Just need to keep moving.”

“Good call, sir.” He pursed his thick lips, blood draining from his face. “It's okay for people to make mistakes, right?”

I chewed my bottom lip. He and his fiancée couldn't be more than twenty. Young love meant young heartache, something I knew all about. He had an unmolded roundness about him, the type of Rust Belt clay that had been switching out high school football jerseys for the uniform of a soldier for generations.

Then I remembered that Alphabet hadn't played high school football. He'd been on the debate team.

“Sure is, Alphabet,” I lied. “All relationships go through rough patches. What matters more than anything is honesty. All that other stuff? Just static.”

“Roger that. Want some water to wash those down?”

“Gracias.”

I popped the pills and drank the entirety of Alphabet's canteen because he said it was okay. It tasted lukewarm like bathwater and had sand bits in it that slid down my throat and into my stomach. I was waiting for Alphabet to leave the room, but he lingered at the bunk. I wasn't sure if he wanted to talk more about his fiancée.

“Something else on your mind?”

“Was just wondering,” he said. “Why'd you join the army?”

“Huh.” It was a strange question from a soldier. Civilians back home asked it all the time, and I'd learned the stock set of responses to keep them and their fixed notions at bay. College money. Participate in history. Because someone had to. All were true, but none answered the actual question. “Lots of reasons, I guess. What about you?”

“To be part of something.” Alphabet looked ready for the front of a cereal box, he seemed so damn serious. While I was touched by my soldier's earnestness, alarms began ringing in my head. Purists broken by the realities of life were capable of crazy things—especially ones with access to guns and bullets and fucking grenades. When he grinned to himself and shook his head, betraying some perspective, I praised God and then the other two parts of the Trinity for good measure.

“Kid stuff, you know?” he continued.

“That's good,” I said, “You should be proud you were like that. Most people go through life never serving anything but themselves.”

“Yeah.”

I didn't know what else to say, so I said “Yeah” too. We'd had our moment and it'd passed. Alphabet left the room with his canteen, and I lay back down. I realized I'd never answered him about joining up, but that could wait. So could the calls home, and Marissa, and the goddamn war. It could all wait.

I
visited other tribal leaders, but none would talk about Shaba or acknowledge they knew of him. I asked if any of their sons had been killed in the war, but they all said no. Haitham wouldn't pick up his phone, and we found his hut abandoned and empty. And the tension between Chambers and me simmered like a mortar round left in the sun too long. He resisted counterinsurgency-related missions and instructions, spending free time planning raids and training the joes accordingly. I responded by relaying orders through Sipe or the other squad leaders.

The morning of May Day, we passed under the stone arch and the image of the cleric. The sky was blue and clear. In the lead, my vehicle kicked up drapes of sand until we reached Route Madison and its pavement, paid for by the American taxpayer through a contract awarded to the local power tribe, the al-Badris. At least they finished this one, I thought. The water filtration project was still nothing but a collection of pipes and cement blocks on the banks of the canal. Local gossip claimed the Tamimi tribe was to be awarded that job, until they withdrew their offer after last-minute negotiations with the al-Badris.

Corruption, I thought, warm desert wind enveloping my face. Bribery. Gross waste of government funds. Perhaps Iraq understands democracy after all.

My heels ached after a week of foot patrols, two blisters filled with rich, cloudy pus. I'd pop them with a knife at Camp Independence, where twenty-four hours of hot showers, uninterrupted sleep, and non–Porta John shitting awaited.

We passed small groups of Iraqis walking the other way on the roadsides, toward Ashuriyah. Most seemed to be older men and women,
though there were some children and teenagers in their ranks. The men all wore black
dishdasha
s and the women black burqas, while the kids dressed in an array of Western-style clothing, glowing bright like sequins against the pious robes of their elders.

I thought they were pilgrims going to the large Shi'a mosque in the north of town. It was Friday, the Muslim holy day.

“Not quite, sir,” Hog said from the driver's hole. “The terps said it's to celebrate a battle Ali won back in the day. Shi'as love that dude.”

“Yeah?” Dominguez's voice dripped with amusement. “Who'd he defeat?”

“Glad you asked,” Hog said. I didn't need to see the wide smile on his face to know it was there. “She was important.” He went on to tell us about Aisha, the Prophet's widow, and how her forces fought Ali at the Battle of the Camel, because of course it'd be called the Battle of the Camel.

“A woman went crazy after her man died, and started a war over it,” Dominguez said. “She wasn't a chicana?”

A female voice filled our ears. “Emergency,” it said, the words soft as fog but demanding. “Exit the vehicle immediately, exit the vehicle immediately.”

Everyone laughed. Hog had pressed the emergency button on the control panel. Many of the joes swore that they'd track down the body that belonged to the voice, to marry her, no matter what she looked like, no matter how old. I wondered how much money and research had gone into determining that young soldiers responded to feminine persuasion.

A short, staccato cough of machine gun fire ripped across the desert. I felt my stomach clench up.

“That's straight ahead,” I said.

“Roger,” Dominguez said. “First platoon's at Checkpoint Thirty-Eight.”

The radio raged hot. Officers as far north as the canal and as far east as the highway demanded to know what sort of battle had interrupted
the war, and why. I turned off the radio and ordered the platoon to stop at the checkpoint.

We arrived two minutes later. The ramp dropped. A white car down the road lay like a squashed slug, strangely two-dimensional under the sun. Doc Cork and others jogged ahead to where a crowd of locals was gathering, but I stayed put to look at the car straight. A thin plume of smoke floated up from its engine. The car was between two orange cones used as checkpoint markers. Four other cars and a minibus had pulled off to the side of the road behind it, none having pushed past the first orange cone. Windshield shards glinted under the sunlight like daggers.

I walked past the other platoon's vehicles to the white car. At the driver's door, I leaned in through the open window and smelled iron. A heavyset man in a
dishdasha
sat back in his seat with a frozen glare. I'd seen the look before, on my mom, when we'd almost hit a deer on a mountain drive. Both his feet seemed to still be searching for the brake. Machine gun rounds had chewed through his body, leaving slabs of ill-cut flesh and human sludge. As I peered closer, I saw that the right side of his chest had been separated from the rest of him, held together by licorice sticks of entrails.

I wanted to think he hadn't suffered, but that wasn't really possible. I figured him to be about Chambers' age, in his early thirties, which wasn't old but probably older in Iraq than it was in America. On the other side of the car, sprawled across the passenger seat and the center console, was a smaller man of similar age and dress. He had jug ears and a furry soul patch, and a cluster of large, red polka dots perforated the right side of his body. He must've turned to his side at the last second in an effort to shield himself.

A group of first platoon soldiers arrived, pulling out the passenger's body by the core. A stream of blood began pouring out over the center console. The soldiers groaned. I left them to their task, walking back down the road.

The gunner of the lead Stryker was still in the turret, shoulders
slumped, hands tucked into his ballistic vest. I called up at him, but he either couldn't hear me or didn't care to. I couldn't make out his face. Rather than continue to bother him—for what? I thought—I walked to the back of the vehicle, where I found their platoon leader standing on the downed ramp, finishing a radio call.

“Porter,” he said. He took off his helmet with shaking hands. Small pockmarks covered his temples and cheeks. He took a swig of bottled water. “We are so fucked.”

“
Shaku maku
, bro,” I said, hoping the native greeting would both relax and ground him. “What happened?”

He told me they'd been at the checkpoint for seven hours, since before dawn. There hadn't been much traffic all morning, either foot or vehicle, just the steady drip to which we'd all been subjected. They'd been set to rotate back to the outpost an hour earlier, until higher had ordered them to stay indefinitely because battalion intelligence had determined that “military-age males might use the religious pilgrimage as cover to run guns into Ashuriyah in a white sedan.”

“I asked if one of the targets was named Mohammed,” he said. “They said to stop being a smartass and report back when we found something.”

His platoon's dismount team had been finishing the search of another car when the white one appeared, moving quickly and traveling west. It hadn't slowed at the first orange cone.

“We're well into this,” he said, his voice turning barbed. “They know the rules.”

He'd been in the stone guard shack when he heard the gunner and the dismounts yelling for the car to stop. It'd all happened so fast. When the car neared the second orange cone, the gunner opened up with the machine gun, aiming for the engine. Those were the rules of engagement. The gunner had followed the rules of engagement. The platoon leader pulled out a laminated index card from his breast pocket to reinforce this point; all soldiers were supposed to carry one, as it came printed with the updated rules for when it was okay to shoot and when it wasn't,
albeit in nebulous lawyer jargon that confused more than clarified. I patted my own breast pocket and found it empty. I must've left my card in the laundry again.

Except now it didn't matter that those had been the rules of engagement. It didn't matter that the car matched the description given to them by battalion intelligence. It only mattered that there hadn't been any guns or IED-making materials or even a switchblade in the car. It only mattered that there were now two dead hajji civilians and three injured hajji civilians and the company commander was furious because the battalion commander was furious because the brigade commander was furious and he was so fucked, they were all so fucked. One of the dead men's mothers was on the side of the road, and he couldn't bring himself to go over there.

He sat down on the ramp and bowed his head against balled fists.

“Sayonara Station,” I muttered. “He was right.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Don't worry about the crowd, man, I'll handle that. And don't worry about higher. I mean, these things happen. It'll be okay.”

The void in his white, watery eyes told me he didn't believe me. As I walked toward the gathering crowd, I realized that I didn't believe myself, either.

About twenty Iraqis stood on the gravel, some of them pilgrims, others bystanders. Facing them was a group of first platoon soldiers tending to the wounded or the grieving. My men were helping. Doc Cork had his medical kit out; he was dressing the head wound of a gored Iraqi woman, telling her through Snoop to go to the hospital and yelling at Alphabet to find her bottled water. A
jundi
consoled a frightened boy squatting in the dirt. Chambers held back a pair of angry young men, skinny as thatch, who wanted to get to the white car on the road. Chambers told them to wait, and when they kept pressing forward, he squared his rifle like a pugil stick and pushed them back.

The mother was there, too, dressed in a cotton striped dress and
a red head scarf, surrounded by consolers. She wailed in hot Arabic, thumping her chest and lifting her head skyward, as if wresting fault from above. She was short with wide shoulders, what my college friends would've called a Soviet plow, not that any of us had ever worked a farm. Trench-deep cracks in her face rose and fell through her skin. I got as close to her as the protective circle would allow—five feet or so—when an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard grabbed my forearm.