The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “Maybe this McKutcheon’s the first reasonable dude we met,” Beale said.

  “Oh, shit! Yes! That’s right!” Fowler shouted. Though it seemed as if Beale was directly contradicting her, she took a surprising pleasure in this. “I’m sorry, Pulowski, I am completely wrong about this thing. We are fucked. We are undeniably fucked. We got no chance. We’re losing. All the dead people are dead now for no reason at all and every fucking lick of work we’ve done in this place is total crap. Let’s all be McKutcheon. Let’s all sit on our ass and complain about how shit is broken. Life sucks, war is bad—what a genius concept! What an incredible insight!”

  It was, maybe, possibly the closest thing he’d ever heard from her in the way of a semi-decent speech, a rallying cry—surprising only in that it was delivered in the negative, a mockery of what not to be, rather than a statement of belief. Even so, as he listened to Fowler’s voice, he felt a burbling in his throat, a buzzing clot of emotion that stuck there uncomfortably. “What about the Iraqi you took down?” Pulowski said, trying to resist this. “In the war-is-bad category?”

  Fowler checked her mirror in silence. This too was different.

  “You know what the colonel did to the Muthanna intersection after it got hit?” Fowler said, pivoting around again in her seat. “Nothing. Totally abandoned. Go on, Beale, take us through Muthanna. Let’s go in the front door like we own the place.”

  He’d seen the bombed Muthanna intersection twice: once on a flat-screen television beside the Camp Tolerance chow line, which normally showed poker tournaments, and once back in Tennessee sitting in his mother’s living room on leave—the grainy column of black smoke, the evacuated soldiers, half dressed, some down to their underwear. But it had mutated over time—after the details about the deaths of the two soldiers had come out—into something more organic. The bombing at Muthanna was the thing that skittered and scratched inside his brain when a warm gust of breeze touched his cheek, or he picked the paper up off his mom’s lawn, or he drove past his high school—anytime that he relaxed back into the ease that was normal life, there it would be, even if what had happened to those soldiers had nothing to do with him. Even if the only thing more ridiculous than getting killed at a traffic control point, at a completely unimportant intersection, was Fowler’s pigheaded insistence that this kind of ridiculousness needed to be stamped out or solved in some way. He’d said as much to Fowler—hell, he’d dumped her for that, basically—and, despite her compliments, he worried that she had brought him here to shame him, so he made an effort to keep a hard expression on his face and especially not to show fear. “I mean, okay, so the barracks don’t look too good,” he said, peering out the window at the crumpled slabs of concrete where the soldiers had stayed. “But it’s not … well, it’s not completely insane. I mean, look, what’s that?” He craned his head so that he could see through the windshield. “There’s people out, lots of traffic. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

  The worst part had been the feeling he’d had before he’d separated from Fowler, the premonition that he was going to do something cowardly and that he was powerless to stop it or make it change. And this was it. Forgetting his resolution, believing that maybe, in Fowler, there was something very, very serious he’d missed. “So tell me, where are the bad guys?” he asked. “What is it I don’t see?”

  “Same thing we don’t see,” Fowler said. He noticed that her tone had turned grave, respectful—though not frightened—and that she and Beale were upright in their seats, scanning both sides of the street that they’d now entered, while patting the … what was it? a broken shackle?… that Beale had welded to the roof, one, two, three, some ritualized version of a handshake between themselves and the Humvee.

  “Touch it,” Fowler said.

  “Touch what?”

  “Touch me, touch Beale, give us a little love, Pulowski.”

  He reached up, awkwardly, not wanting to undo his shoulder belt, and brushed the backs of their hands with his fingertips.

  “That’s good,” Fowler said. “That’s for Fredrickson and Arthur, who fucking bit it right fucking here. And now, in their honor, we’re going to fix this place.”

  “Hooah,” Beale said.

  * * *

  The traffic was a problem. Fowler could handle the bomb crater, the pile of slag left from the building that had collapsed, but what she hadn’t accounted for were the cabs, mini Nissan pickups loaded with melons, overladen buses, hatchbacks with angry-looking men that zoomed around her platoon’s vehicles as they pulled into the intersection outside Muthanna. So she pretended that she had. She called the battalion and requested four additional Humvees. She established a security perimeter, her Humvee’s .50-cal warning traffic away, then she ordered her platoon to fill the blast hole with gravel and tow away the chassis of the truck that had blown up Fredrickson and Arthur. And what did Pulowski do during these two hours of steady work? Nothing. He slouched around her truck. He unpacked his cameras, fiddled with some wires, and generally acted terrified—which, you know, fine, but so was everybody. It had always been her one weakness, trying to take care of a man who couldn’t take care of himself. You told yourself you were going to change things, then you just kept making the same dumb mistake over and over again. It wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined when the ROTC recruiting officer, Captain Granger, had shown up at her high school wearing dress greens that had been cut so tight that everyone—including, Fowler had noticed, Miss Simmons, her homeroom teacher—could clearly see his biceps through the fabric. That was the kind of officer she’d expected to teach her about life in the Army—energetic, confident, and hard as fucking nails. Instead, she’d gone for the complicated option, the sensitive model, the one that had seemed more interesting, which was how you ended up in a tactical situation that was far more fucked-up than anyone had realized it would be.

  More than anything, she resented the way Pulowski had accused her of being responsible for this mission the night before. The whole lecture on how she had the free will to say no, as if the connection between them had never existed. Which was a lie. But then again, so were the arguments she’d used to keep her platoon together, functioning, and in the field. It didn’t help that she got a call from the TOC, informing her that the reinforcements she’d requested had been diverted to provide security for a tour that Colonel Seacourt was giving that day. Or that, hearing this news, her platoon sergeant, Carl Beale, became increasingly nervous, pacing back and forth, scanning the windows of the nearby buildings incessantly. “Why don’t you give me a couple guys, LT,” he said finally, “and let me walk this west perimeter, go in these storefronts? I don’t like them.”

  Beale had freckles so thick that in places they blended to solid patterns on his cheeks, and a body that resembled, in its doughiness and the flat-footed way his boots creased at the instep, an old-fashioned power hitter gone to seed. They were standing at the fender of Fowler’s Humvee, which she’d parked in the center of their work site. Pulowski had stopped for a water break a few meters away. “Stick with the plan, Beale,” she said. “We secure this area, we get the T-walls for the new checkpoint up, then we wait for the extra manpower to go in the buildings and get those cameras installed.”

  “You knew you were bringing the cameras out. So why didn’t you bring the extra trucks in the first place?”

  She knew Beale knew the answer to that. The answer was that neither Pulowski nor McKutcheon had given them an accurate report on how congested and unruly the intersection was going to be. “It’s an unforeseen circumstance, Beale. Okay? But I’m not going to abandon protocol just because you’re nervous, okay?”

  “Yeah, well, imagine how you’d feel if you lost somebody just because Pulowski was too much of a pussy to go do his job.”

  “It’s not about Pulowski,” she said. “I don’t want to send you in either. Or Waldorf. Or Crawford. Or anybody.”

  “You deserve better than that.”

  “What?”

&n
bsp; Beale was an awkward soldier; he’d never touched her except out in the bean field, when she’d saved him from a fight. But now he grabbed the collar of her body armor and pulled her down into a squat, holding tight. “You laid out for me with Seacourt, didn’t you? Huh? You lay out for me, I lay out for you. How would you feel if we got hit because you spent two hours waiting for backup, just because you wanted to protect Pulowski? He doesn’t have your back, ma’am. Not like we do, anyway.”

  She should have let it pass—ignored Beale, made the proper call. Instead what she saw, like the tiny picture she used to get when she turned her father’s binoculars around and looked through them the wrong way, was the image of herself sitting in the recruiter’s car, out front of her father’s house in Junction City, Kansas, signing the papers. All she could see was that image and, along with it, a tight, high pressure in her chest, as if someone were stabbing her in the center of her breastbone with a piece of glass. It had been there ever since they’d left the gate that morning and it frightened her because she almost never felt this way outside the wire. She also had this feeling associated with it that felt like guilt, as if she had committed some grave sin—which was impossible, since she’d been waiting for eight months for her platoon sergeant to speak to her in this way. Maybe she felt guilty because the eighteen-year-old Fowler would’ve agreed with Beale. That Fowler had sat in that recruiter’s car and signed those papers as a declaration of freedom from Harris, her life, that house. She had never intended to allow anybody to make her as vulnerable as she’d been then.

  “You got a specific plan in mind, Sergeant?” she said, standing up and addressing him in a more formal voice, so the soldiers nearby could hear. “I got guys posting security, we need people setting the T-walls up—so if you want to do a sweep, you’re gonna need people who aren’t already doing something.”

  “I’m not busy,” Beale said. He had a sly look on his face.

  “Yeah, but you need a team. Can’t go in solo.”

  “What about camera boy here?” Beale said. “It’s his shit, his equipment, his fucking project. We’re good with these T-walls, ma’am. The only thing we’re waiting on is for Pulowski to get off his ass and do something.”

  She glanced up at Pulowski. If it had been anyone other than Pulowski, she would have shut Beale down immediately, played it safe. But then again, if it had been anybody other than Pulowski, she wouldn’t have been put in the position of being humiliated in front of her entire team. All she wanted from Pulowski was a little backup: nothing fancy, no apology, no sympathy, just a decisive opinion, a suggestion, some admission that they were together in the mission, that they shared responsibility. It was no excuse, of course—if you were a good lieutenant, you weren’t supposed to care about these things. But today she did.

  Instead, Pulowski punched his hands down in his pockets and bit his upper lip, grinning at her and Beale as if they were the biggest idiots he’d ever seen. “Well, it seems like you guys ought to make the best tactical decision you can, don’t you think?”

  It wasn’t even something he actually believed.

  She pushed between the two of them, grabbed a water bottle off the Humvee’s seat. It was a bad idea to make decisions out of anger, but now she did. “Beale’s right,” she said. “Pack up your gear and get moving, Pulowski. I got a fucking platoon to take care of. You should’ve manned up an hour ago. Stop making us wait.”

  “Roger,” Beale said.

  “Grab Crawford to go with you,” she said. “But don’t go inside. You can look, but we’re not rushing any buildings with anything short of a full team, and I can’t spare that many men. You got it? You understand me? That’s a direct order.”

  “Oh, yeah—I copy,” said Beale. He jerked his Kevlar down tight over his ears, fastening his chin strap. “That’s a direct order. Nobody gets to hurt Pulowski. Come on, camera boy, let’s beat it, please.”

  * * *

  The first shots were muffled and therefore hard to locate. They could have been far away. She dove in through her Humvee’s door and scrambled for the portable radio that she kept under her seat. Once she got it and looked up, her platoon had begun firing at the market on the right-hand side of the intersection. It was empty, the bare metal pipes that defined the abandoned stalls knitting and unknitting like lace. And yet, once a single soldier aimed there, the entire platoon “unleashed” and these shadowy frames skidded and upended under the steady hose of rounds, sparks flaring and receding like lit match heads, a constant gloriole of sound and motion that was just confusing enough to be satisfying to shoot at. Just enough to give the illusion that a target was there.

  Fowler saw all of this. But what she also saw was that every single one of her sentries—the Humvee crews that she’d posted at all four corners of the compass—had abandoned their appointed sectors and faced the firing. She tried to correct this, but when she flipped the portable radio on, the channel was overloaded, emitting only blips and burps, Wrrock, SCREEJAARGH, Go! Go! And then Enemy at three o’clock, and then Fucking something moving, down in that market right there, see that hut, and then the fucker dropped into the canal, somebody shoot his ass … until the feed dissolved into a high-pitched whine.

  Okay, you’ve got to move. Where’s the danger? she thought, and slid out in a crouch from her Humvee with her sidearm in her hand. Who’s hit? Is anybody hit? She didn’t think so. She was already in a hurry then, telling herself to slow down and think, and fighting against that hurry. The medical building was up ahead and to the left—the opposite side of the street from the market. They’d set up T-walls across the road, so she could only see its upper story and the roof. Nice thinking, Beale. Good place for shooters, Beale.

  “The roof!” she shouted to her own gunner, McWilliams, whose .50-cal machine gun, pumping out rounds above her head, made it almost impossible to think.

  “What?” McWilliams said.

  Fowler stepped up onto the door frame of the Humvee, grabbed him by the shoulder, and pointed at the roof of the medical building. Then she dropped down onto the dirt and began running hard, tucking her chin, that way.

  “All right, all right,” she was saying a few seconds later, as she crouched behind a newly installed T-wall, halfway to the medical building. The intersection was quiet. McWilliams had silenced the shooter on the roof and the horseshoe of Humvees circled around the intersection had quit firing at the marketplace. That was progress, at least. She peeked up over the T-wall and checked the roofline again: nothing. Okay, what next?

  “Okay, I need my perimeter security to do their jobs. Just stick to your own quadrants. Keep your eyes open. I’m going to call out sectors. South is toward the highway. Okay? South.”

  “Clear,” Waldorf said.

  “West.”

  “Clear,” Dykstra said.

  “North,” Fowler said. This was Jimenez, whose Humvee was on the other side of the T-wall, nearest to the alley where Beale and Pulowski had gone in.

  “Are you clear?”

  “Almost, Lieutenant,” Jimenez replied.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She tried to keep her voice steady during this, trying hard not to ask directly about Pulowski. She was supposed to be the platoon leader for all these people, not just him. But still, she felt a wave of relief when, after some rustling of the microphone, Pulowski’s voice came on the air.

  “Crawford and I are here. We were in this alley, and the team leader”—this meant Beale—“said we were under fire and he, uh, we got separated from him.” There was muffled whispering here, a mic covered with a hand.

  “You say you last saw Beale in the alley.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  How the fuck did three guys get separated in an alley? Here’s how three guys get separated in an alley: their lieutenant gets pissed off and sends them in.

  She pushed out from behind the T-wall and ran hard to the medical building, got herself under the second floor walkway, pressed her back against the louver
ed steel door that covered the front window. She peeked around the corner. No Beale. A car with its windshield shot out. A big steel box that looked like a dumpster someone had made from scratch. Okay, what would be the most dangerous place for Beale to be? The answer was inside. By then a cancerous black tentacle of fear began to curl itself, glistening, around Fowler’s wrist, sneaking up the cool wincing skin of her inner bicep, nesting inside her armpit: Beale had a headset radio with him too. Why wouldn’t he be answering?

  “All right, Eggleston,” she said. “Button up the Hercules and drive it right over to me. Punch a hole in this wall, then back up and head down the alley. They’re not going to be able to hurt you, okay?”

  It was a risk. Risky to send an armored vehicle into such a restricted space. But only if the alley had been mined, and she doubted that. Everybody knew that alleys were places where U.S. forces didn’t drive. The AKs wouldn’t touch the Hercules. An RPG might, but fuck it, if they had RPGs, they would’ve shot them already. By then the big vehicle had already crossed the open street, its treads clanking, chewing up the asphalt, Eggleston dropping the boom that he’d been using to lift the T-walls on the fly. “Do it soft,” she said. “Do it soft or you’ll take the building down.” And Eggleston slowed and put the nose of the Hercules against the louvered steel door and she heard the diesel engine gun and the frame of the whole vehicle began to shake and the anchor for the metal screen tore away from the concrete overhead, and the whole sheet bowed, and there was an opening just big enough along one side that she put a boot up on the Hercules’ fender and dove in.

  It was dark inside. Glass on the ground. Shelves. A counter, the space behind it empty but in disarray, papers spilled out on the floor. Cardboard boxes of Band-Aids. Cotton balls. Q-tips. Amber glass bottles of medicine. Other supplies that she recognized by the colors of their brand, though the name itself had been transcribed into Arabic: the brown and gold of Bayer aspirin. Less stuff than you would’ve seen in an American store, the shelves flimsy and in places empty. The shooting had started only after Beale and Pulowski had gone off to inspect this same building. First the guy up on the roof, taking aim at her platoon—and maybe even someone firing from the empty market on the other side of the street. Then, after that had ended, a final, muffled series of shots. Something she heard without maybe even recognizing that she heard it. Probably from inside the building. What did that mean? It meant there had been people waiting for them in here. Not a random shooting. An organized attack. And the muffled shots at the end probably meant that, despite her orders, Beale had gone in.