Princes of War

by Claude Schmid

  “Fucked-up about that sniper shooting,” Tyson said. “Ain’t no place safe. I think I knew that guy. That makes nine KIAs so far in the battalion since we been here, don’t it?”

  “Think so,” Moose answered, without thinking about it.

  Shortly after getting back to Apache, everyone learned the identity of the KIA. That kind of bad news passed through the FOB like an arctic wind.

  “Hey, what’s up with Kale?” Tyson inquired, changing the subject. “The guys are talking about him. He’s—I don’t know—out there, or something.”

  “He doesn’t talk much, that’s for sure,” Moose replied, after thinking about it for a second.

  “It’s like he’s lost in his own world or something. The dude is dreamy. No jokes. No more smiles.” Tyson added, curious about what Moose thought.

  “I don’t know, buddy. I do remember him being more alive, more with it, back stateside,” Moose said.

  “Yeah. Think so too. Remember how that dude could run? He used to run all the time. Never see him doing PT now.”

  “Combat duty ain’t for everybody, Ty,” Moose commented, making an evaluation rarely voiced, but obvious to anyone who thought about it. “Does something to you, they say. Trouble is you don’t have a way of finding out ‘what’ until you’re in it.”

  Everything in war was everyone’s business. No place to hide. Men stripped each other psychologically. If a man’s bowels were loose, people joked about it. If a lady back home was messing with you, it wouldn’t stay secret long. If a man was a risk to the platoon, people would know. They might not talk right away. But they would know.

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s right, Moose. War damn sure ain’t for everyone. Since Ramirez, Kale hasn’t been the same,” Tyson said. Ramirez was the first—and only so far—Wolfhound soldier killed.

  Tyson hesitated, wanting to get the words right.

  “Certain things you won’t know until you’re right there in it. No trial run here. Here the race is always on, man! Fuck, you know that, Moose.”

  “Who talks to him most?” Moose asked.

  “Who what?”

  “Who talks to him most?” Moose asked again.

  “Probably you, don’t ya?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “He seems to be lugging around a pack of disappointments.”

  Moose saw the problem, and remembered checking Kale out on the rooftop earlier. Kale was his friend, ever since Army basic training. Something in his head wasn’t right anymore. Moose said nothing. Tyson dropped it.

  They arrived at the living trailers.

  “Meet you in about twenty minutes after showers, and we’ll go eat.” Moose said.

  “I’ll knock on your hooch.”

  “That works. Make sure you use soap!” Moose retaliated for the earlier abuse.

  “Fucker. You know it.”

  Kale sat in his hooch, alone. Earlier, after Cooke released the men from the day’s patrol, the platoon sergeant had walked over and commended Kale on his professionalism during the day’s missions. He hadn’t expected it. Thinking about Cooke’s comments now, Kale flushed with pride—but he also felt ashamed. All of his life, pride had both motivated and consumed him. Sometimes, when he felt on top of the world, a tiny voice inside him whispered that the air in high places was thin and the footing treacherous.

  Kale stood up abruptly and looked at himself in a small wall mirror. His face resembled one of those you saw in paintings of American Indians: a large upright chin, wide prominent cheekbones, watchful green eyes, square shoulders and a narrow waist, and reddish-brown hair that looked as if its ends were burning when he stood in the sun. Fitness came easily to him. He had the metabolism of a furnace and never gained weight. Naturally reticent, he was the type of guy who talked less than others thought he should.

  “Textbook stuff, dude. You’re a damn fine soldier,” Cooke had said, slapping Kale on the helmet.

  That was two hours ago, and Kale’s spirits still soared. He loved compliments the way a dog loves attention.

  All his life Kale had felt as if he needed to prove something.

  Was Moose hungry for praise the same way? Something about Moose made him appear permanently satisfied, as if he didn’t seek praise from other men. Kale wanted that kind of independence.

  He thought again about what Cooke said, and how he’d said it. Maybe Kale did well today, but others had too. He certainly wasn’t one of the top soldiers. Guys like Moose were much better, Kale knew. Something calculating was in Cooke’s look. Was he giving genuine compliments, or was it something else?

  A feeling of being scrutinized flooded over Kale again. He understood why.

  4

  Specialist Juan Cuebas, one of the Wolfhound’s Soldiers, relaxed in the company orderly room staring gargoyle-like at nothing and everything. He was deciding whether to call home. His aunt would be anxious to hear from him. Even before Iraq, she had spent many an anxious hour worrying about him. As a little boy, he’d hide from her, once for a whole day, making her search everywhere, sometimes bringing her to tears. Cuebas had a distinctly primitive look—a mottled alligator-skin face and dull wet gray eyes, like raw oysters. His tight mouth and thin narrow lips intimated confidentiality and prudence, the look of a man holding secrets. Another side of him was pure jokester. He liked that side best.

  Cuebas was Puerto Rican. His remaining family still lived on the island. Both his parents had died before he started school, his father of cancer and his mother in a car accident two years later. His aunt had raised him while caring for her own three children. She became his surrogate mother and father. Her husband had died before Cuebas moved in. Life skills came from living; that’s what his aunt always said. Several of his relatives were combat veterans. His grandfather got wounded in the Korean War. Two uncles had served in Vietnam. One got a Purple Heart.

  Cuebas fondled the brass memory chain on his wrist, which was a gift from his aunt. His uncles’ names were stenciled on it.

  He joined the Army three years ago, immediately after graduating from high school. He left for basic training promising his aunt he’d write regularly. He never did. But he did call when he could. Since arriving in Iraq he’d developed the routine of calling her once a week. The calls were mostly one-way conversations; she did most of the talking. They lived in different worlds now. She asked him little. Her job was conveying to him the news of the island, keeping him connected to his home, and this she did meticulously, pausing to ask repetitive questions about his well-being but nothing more. It wasn’t her nature to be inquisitive.

  Cengo came into the room.

  “Ayeee. Hey Cengo,” Cuebas started most of his statements with “Ayeee,” a sound a man might make when he’s sipped scalding coffee.

  Cengo nodded, friendly but silent.

  Cuebas watched Cengo ready himself to leave the FOB. He got extra time off today, like the Americans. Cengo shed his American uniform and stowed it away, along with his helmet, boots, and body armor, in a footlocker inside the dayroom. Every day, like most of the other terps, Cengo arrived at the FOB and reported to work before the American patrols departed. At day’s end he would leave, unless an extended mission required staying on the FOB. The Wolfhounds controlled Cengo’s schedule.

  After work, the only American-supplied thing Cengo regularly took home was his sunglasses.

  He sat on the footlocker and put his sandals on. As an Iraqi Kurd, Cengo was—even before the war—a rebel inside his own country. The Kurds, about 15 percent of the Iraqi population, had fought the powers in Baghdad for centuries. More Kurds lived in the surrounding nations. Kurds were one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a state to call their own.

  Cuebas knew Cengo had a large family, but his mother’s family had been killed in one of Saddam’s chemical attacks on the Kurds. Second to Kurdistan, a country that did not yet officially exist, Cengo’s favorite country was America.

&n
bsp; Cengo wanted to leave Iraq. Cuebas understood why. Cengo’s family didn’t have money. Now, as an interpreter he made $600 a month, royal wages in the local area. If he had a flaw, it was his hostility to the Arabs. The Arabs wouldn’t trust him. His accent made it impossible to hide his Kurdish origins. On the other hand, Cengo knew the area, knew who the important families were, and better detected dishonesty in conversations than the other terps. Two of those were older Americans, immigrants from other Middle Eastern countries. Two others were Iraqis, but their education level was low and their English barely passable. So the platoon felt blessed to have Cengo as their full-time terp.

  “Wanna take some soft drinks with you?” Cuebas asked. “Put in your backpack?”

  “No can do. Terrorists no like coke.”

  “Ha. Ha. You don’t have to share them.”

  “They no ask. If they want, they—take.”

  “OK. Then we make a special coke for them. One that goes BOOM. Like what they do.”

  “No. I go quick and be invisible.”

  Be invisible was Cengo’s usual parting declaration. Cuebas hoped it would be true.

  He walked over to Cuebas to say goodbye. As they shook hands, Cengo’s face turned serious.

  “Sorry about Soldier killed today,” he said.

  An hour later Cuebas was finishing dinner in the DFAC when he heard a familiar voice mention the Twin Towers. Curious, he looked over. A few seats away, Halliburton, a lanky Texan with a reputation for having the biggest and dirtiest mouth in the platoon, was talking to Moog, a knotty dark-skinned Asian-Hispanic from New Mexico whom the Wolfhounds called, “Mongrel Moog,” or just “Mongrel,” and Randell, a New Yorker with three lifetimes worth of acne and habit of making his finger knuckles pop like an Orchestra’s percussion practice.

  Halliburton said, “When those two towers went down in flames, I knew what I had to do. I made up my mind that fucking day.” He bent forward over his plate and spooned up a mouthful of creamed corn. Mongrel Moog, tearing open a plastic packet of salad dressing, looked as if he wanted to respond, but thought better of it.

  Everyone knew why everyone else had joined the Army. Or at least their claimed reasons. For most of the youngest guys, it was 9/11. Everybody defended their reasons 24/7. Pretending not to believe each other was a kind of game.

  Mongrel, after scratching his crotch, spoke up. “I’d already made up my mind by then, but after 9/11, I didn’t have to worry no more about persuading my Mom. It was a done deal, dude. She never said another word.”

  “Those Fuckers,” Halliburton continued, referring to the 9/11 attackers, shaking his head with disgust as he spooned up more corn. “Ain’t nobody in this man’s Army going to rest until we bury those bastards.”

  “Sure better not,” Cuebas answered.

  Mongrel and Halliburton, two of the youngest guys in the platoon, looked at Cuebas. Neither had noticed him until this point. Mongrel reached over and acknowledged him with a fist bump.

  “You brothers are still wet behind the ears. Surprised the boys in recruiting took you in,” Cuebas jabbed.

  “Shit,” Randell said.

  “I was born a killer,” Halliburton protested. “They saw killer in my eyes when I walked in. Now I’m here. We need to get down to business in this place.” He hunched back over his food, leaning so low he looked worried someone would steal it.

  “We, the few and the brave,” Mongrel offered, not sure if he had the line right.

  “Shitttt,” Halliburton grunted, “that’s the Marines you thinking about. The few and the proud.”

  “You’re thinking ‘home of the brave,’ Mongrel,” Cuebas said.

  “Tell you one thing, I’d give my left nut to be the guy that puts a bullet in Bin Laden’s head.” Mongrel smirked and looked around, seeking praise.

  Cuebas whistled to get their undivided attention, seeing a perfect opportunity to spring a trap.

  To Mongrel, he said, “I’d give your left nut to blow away that bastard, too.”

  All laughed. Cuebas picked up his tray and got up to leave.

  “Eat me,” Mongrel replied.

  Cuebas looked back. “What? Your boy, Halliburton, not making you happy anymore?”

  Mongrel, flustered by Cuebas’ retort, dribbled bits of food out of his mouth.

  Cuebas walked away, chuckling. Another score by an insult artist. He claimed victory if he left them sputtering.

  After 9/11, Cuebas felt vindicated. He’d joined the Army just over a year before the attack. In the early days, he watched his fellow citizens’ surge of patriotism with a combination of amusement and a where-you-been-all-this-time bravado. Nonetheless, he didn’t begrudge those joining because of 9/11. It was an excellent reason. Yet in his way of thinking, they’d needed an extra push, a push that he didn’t require.

  He of course wouldn’t deny he too got caught up in the post-attack patriotism. Everyone did. Even his aunt, and he’d never heard her say an angry word. She’d called Bin Laden El Cabrona. Son-of-a-Bitch. And the letters! Cuebas had received dozens of “thank you for your service” emails and letters, including from folks he didn’t remember. His aunt had distributed his address. One letter had come from his high school English teacher. He’d had a crush on her in school. She wrote to him as if he were a rock star or something, even calling him “hot stuff.” Once, four or five months after 9/11 while back in Puerto Rico on leave, he’d thought of looking her up with ideas of her thanking him in another way. He’d decided against that. The mass support made everyone feel proud to be a soldier.

  But this was Iraq, not Afghanistan. Few thought they would be putting a bullet in Bin Laden’s head here. So why were they here? Cuebas didn’t need explanations. He wasn’t sure it mattered. The thing was, some Islamic bastards here were fighting us—just like those 9/11 terrorists did. Better here than back home. It made sense to him.

  5

  Wynn walked over to a new wooden picnic table under a grey tarpaulin near the FOB's mini shoppette. The outside heat sizzled. Even the bugs sought shade. He sat down, hoping for a bit of privacy. The rug and jewelry shop trailers were to his right. The barber shop further up, and beyond that the Burger King and Pizza Hut stands, arranged in trailers like vendors at a county fair. He had just gotten a haircut, and now planned to finish his weekly report for CPT Baumann. Wynn looked around. The FOB used massive quantities of wood. Where did it come from? Someone said that America shipped it in. As far as he knew, Iraq had no forests. New guard towers with four massive telephone pole corner supports. Bus stops. Outdoor furniture. Indoor shelving and partitions and desks. Army engineers were hard at construction, erecting new American-style things on top of the war-damaged Iraqi stuff. It made you think. But those were unimportant thoughts.

  What was important for him was understanding this part of the world. Everybody asked the same questions: Do Iraqis want what we want? Can we win this thing?

  At Temple University, he’d taken a course on psychology on his way to a political science major. He remembered a discussion on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the theory that basic physiological needs came first: food, water, shelter, basic survival, things like that. Then came safety. Sophisticated political considerations came much later, if at all. Was there a message in that for a counterinsurgency? Societies developed step by step and what you had at any given time was a Sudoku puzzle, with thousands of big and small imprecise evolving pieces. The ruler, whoever was on top, dealt for better or worse with what he had. In most times and places, retaining power was all-important. Sometimes rulers fiddled benevolently with the pieces. Sometimes they smashed them. Sometimes they didn’t care.

  Two young soldiers walked over to the Pizza Hut stand, carrying their rifles and wearing their helmets. The security rules required that soldiers stay in this uniform in most places on the FOB. Wynn didn’t recognize the men. They had combat patches on their right shoulders, so they’d been in country at least a month. Th
e pizza man slid open the stand’s window and Wynn smelled the rich spicy aroma.

  Eighteen or nineteen years old maybe. Nations sent their young men to fight wars. Few of them had studied psychology or sociology or Middle East history or anything else like that. Few understood the puzzle pieces: the Sunni and Shia, the Arab and Persian rivalries, the history of confrontation between the Islamic and Western Worlds. Who in America really did? Academics, maybe. But even within that academic community differences were intense. Some political leaders, maybe. But they weren’t here. He and these young men, and other men and women like them, were here. They manned the front lines of America’s foreign policy, to work and fight—and possibly die—for political ideas. It was ironic, even cruel, that these ideas were imperfectly understood. Could that be enough to motivate men? There had to be something more.

  Wynn had five or six years on the soldiers ordering pizza. A few years more of school. Maybe nature had given him better cognitive abilities and a better memory. Probably no difference in drive. Or in ambition. The two soldiers walked to the other side of the break area, holding their pizza slices and their guns.

  The talk with Amir today had, again, confirmed the incredible complexity of the whole enterprise. Wynn wanted to think he’d made some progress—despite the great distances between them and us, language obstacles, huge cultural differences. And culture clearly mattered. Basic to everything was information. Information was available all around him, information about the area, the people, about the tactical situation on the ground. The question was how to absorb it and use it.

  A sparkle of color on the ground caught Wynn’s eye. Curious, he got up from the bench, took a step, and bent down to take a closer look at the colored object. On the ground lay a thin inch-long strip of bright green-and-red plastic foil attached to a broken stick of black plastic the size of a toothpick. A piece of waste blown here by wind perhaps. He picked it up. It looked vaguely like a part of one of his grandfather’s old fishing flies.