Princes of War

by Claude Schmid

  “What’s that other ball there?” Wynn asked, tilting his head in that direction to point it out.

  “That ain’t no ball, Sir. It’s an egg.”

  “An egg?” Wynn asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, Sir. An empty egg shell. Keeping it as a souvenir.”

  Wynn looked perplexed.

  “From those Iraqi Egg Ladies. The ones we got the chickens for,” Cooke explained.

  Wynn smiled. A few months ago the Wolfhounds had helped two middle-aged Iraqi sisters, both widows, obtain six chickens and a rooster. One sister’s only son had been killed serving in the new Iraqi Army. The idea was to help them turn the chickens into a business. It worked. Now these ladies had an egg stall in the marketplace. Somebody heard they were up to about 20 birds.

  “That an intact egg shell?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “How did you get the egg to bleed out?”

  “There’s a secret to that, young man.” Cooke beamed widely, as if he’d pocketed the last piece of candy in the store.

  “I think I remember something about water and heat, but I’m not sure.”

  “Attention to detail, Sir. That’s the only way.”

  Wynn leaned forward and twisted his back left and right. Sixty pounds of body armor each day did not go unnoticed, even for a young man.

  “I know Kale has family,” Wynn said. “He’s got a gal and a little boy. He’s not their dad, though. Not sure if she was married previously. I wonder if they’re sensing anything about him.”

  “He ain’t married now, Sir. Didn’t marry her yet. But they might as well be. They living together. Two years now. I know he says he’s got a biiiggg love for her.”

  “OK,” Wynn continued. “Let’s keep our eyes on Kale.”

  “I’m definitely watching him. I watch them all. We got help too, Sir. Moose been watching him. Thinks he’s the sensitive type but says he’s doing OK. And the Chaplain. I know Kale’s been to the Chaplain several times. Just to talk. A lot of them need it, Sir. Need to know they’re being listened to. It ain’t no good keeping it bottled up inside. Gotta let them talk.”

  Wynn was pleased with that answer. Handling a man walking the edge wasn’t easy. Too much care could backfire, strip a man’s self-confidence. But withholding care when needed was like withholding a rope from a drowning man.

  DAY TWO

  6

  Kale stirred violently, still asleep. Pale people with dark eyes surrounded him, and bright orange light enveloped the horizon. Something unbearably heavy restrained him. He breathed deeply, desperately. He could move nothing but his eyes, which darted, searching, burning with indistinct images. He felt as if he was tied tightly down on a ledge, his physical life stolen. Why? Was he being punished? The pale people pointed at him accusingly, hostile; shouting with so much anger, all shouting the same thing, with an edge of sadness and pain. He strained to listen but could not understand their words. Everything was in slow motion. He watched their mouths annunciate in unison, the pronunciation of words grotesquely magnified. He again struggled to understand, lost and confused and guilty. Yes—their fierce eyes proclaimed him guilty. Guilty of what? Was he in hell, and they the custodians?

  He struggled to focus his eyes on the moving mouth of one of the pale people. Follow the mouth. Listen! Kale now felt his own mouth start moving. He tried to say what they were screaming. Was he becoming one of them so he could understand?

  Three words. Was that all? Only three words.

  Then he recognized the words, and understood. He repeated them. Kale was crying now.

  “Ramirez”

  “Is”

  “Dead!”

  Then again:

  “Ramirez”

  “Is”

  “Dead!”

  Why tell him this? Why shout at him?

  Suddenly one of them leaned forward and touched Kale’s forehead with a long gnarled finger of death. Kale’s dream turned into memory, vivid and immediate, rushing back, taking him to where the past eats the present, where he had first seen violent death. His body was now free, soaring back to the surface. His memory came alive.

  They had been on a humanitarian mission, less than two months after the Wolfhounds’ arrival in country. The platoon was led to a family home so they could pay damages to a family for their shop that Americans had destroyed. The shop, destroyed when EOD initiated a controlled detonation of an adjacent vehicle laden with bombs, had been nothing more than a roadside stand selling pirated DVDs and CDs. Financial compensation for damages such as this was available to Iraqis thanks to the American taxpayer. It had taken about three weeks to get the money, $1,000 in this case. The Wolfhounds, assigned to provide security for the Army Civil Affairs team, accompanied them to dispense the money. Headquarters had gotten word to the Iraqi family by phone that the next day the Americans would come to make payment. That call had been a bad mistake.

  The family lived in the W13 sector, near an inoperable water fountain. The plan was simple. A family guide would meet the platoon at the fountain at 1400 and guide them to the residence. As the Wolfhounds waited at the fountain, a man drove up on a scooter promptly at 1400, and identified himself as a member of the family. After the link-up, the convoy drove maybe 300 meters, through a couple of intersections, and stopped near the home. Once the house was identified, Wynn deployed the platoon’s vehicles tactically, and established security at both ends of the street. The plan called for the Wolfhounds to provide two extra shooters for the dismounted Civil Affairs team entering the house. Kale was designated one of these men. Specialist Raul Ramirez was the other.

  A staff sergeant named Sanders led the Civil Affairs team. Brown and Callicut were his two men. Ramirez entered the home with the Civil Affairs soldiers. Kale remained outside. Sanders’ team had been inside the home for less than two minutes, when he came out into the courtyard and signaled Kale to come inside.

  Just as Kale took several steps into the courtyard, everything went crazy. He first thought something had crashed into the building, knocking everyone down. He recalled the sensation of flying sideways. Everything was smashed. He landed on his right side, his arm and shoulder taking most of the impact. As he hit the ground, Kale felt his body trembling from shock waves. Everything he was—his mind, his bones and sinews, his whole life-force—was on the verge of breaking into a million pieces.

  Yet, slowly, he regained his senses. He could see through the house. Weirdly spacious now, but smoky. He saw a man on the ground. He thought it was SSG Sanders, sitting upright, frozen against what remained of the outer wall. The man focused downward, fixed on something lying between his outstretched legs. His arms hung by his side. Was he hurt? Dead? Kale couldn’t tell.

  The explosion utterly destroyed the house. Scattered debris—tatters and chunks of furnishings and masonry, bits of broken ceiling—covered everything. For a moment everything in Kale’s mind had stayed still, as if the explosion had somehow frozen time. Then things started to move. Bright sunlight glittered off tiny moving particles in the air, and the glistening dust made it seem as if a grand entrance was imminent. He heard a sound like distant rain. Heavy at first, then tapering away. It was the slow collapse of the blast, the settling of millions of particles blown up in the air by the explosion, everything coming back down to rest, unrecognizable, dead. For some reason, his concussion perhaps, Kale thought he was in a slow-motion playback, all going in the wrong direction. Then time caught up with him, and he tried to concentrate. Yes, that was an explosion. The house had blown up. But he was alive.

  Kale heard the noise of people frantically talking. At first, all sound except for the rain of debris had been cut off. The blast dulled his hearing, and he struggled to make out what they said.

  “Shit! You OK?” someone shouted, exasperated.

  Kale didn’t think he’d moved. His eyes still worked, and he saw Sanders ahead of him. Kale remained flat on the ground, face turned to the sid
e. Sanders wasn’t sitting up, but was lying on his side. Kale’s own orientation had confused the view. His eyes started failing him. He forced himself to blink faster, wanting clarity. The sharp light now shining in the room further disoriented him. It shouldn’t be light like this inside. More shouting. He moved his left leg. The shouting reconnected him to reality. Slowly, he turned himself chest down on the floor and flattened both hands on the floor, as if he had been arrested. He raised himself unsteadily. His physical senses, now on maximum intensity, raced back, recovering the precious seconds he’d lost between the blast and the present. He felt grit embed in his palms as he pushed up. The extra weight of everything he wore—body armor, bullets, water, his rifle, his helmet—kept him down. He felt no pain, just dizziness. Amazingly, he wasn’t hurt badly. He felt wetness on the back of his legs. Blood? No, he didn’t have time to feel fear right now.

  What about the other men? Who had said, ‘You OK?’ Who were they talking to? With difficulty, he brought his knees up under him. Then, still with his hands open and on the floor, he saw the tan sole of a boot directly in front of him, no more than six to eight feet away. Only a foot. A severed foot. No leg attached to the boot. Light reflected off the dogtag laced in the foot’s boot. Kale threw up, the bile landing on his hand. He whipped his hand in the debris.

  Then he saw another boot, on the other side of the still-intact interior wall that separated the two rooms. The front wall—the one facing the road—and a portion of the ceiling on that front side, had disintegrated because of the explosion. Kale crept forward on his hands and knees. Stay down. Stay down. Bile burned his mouth. Whose foot was that? He kept pushing ahead, instinctively more than deliberately. Someone started screaming for him to stay down, to let others do it. An inner voice urged him to let others do it. But he kept moving forward toward the boot and maybe to the man that must have owned it. More loud talk, yelling, most of it unintelligible.

  This other boot he saw was toes up, heel down, suggesting the attached owner was knocked down flat on his back. Rubble encircled it. Kale could see the leg attached to it. Something thin brown and flat lay there too. Then he saw it was nothing, just pieces of paper torn in the explosion. He felt a sharp pain in his left hand. He lifted it. A metal shard stuck in the lower center of his hand. He brushed it away, more annoyed than angry. A dry smoky burning odor overwhelmed his sense of smell.

  Kale struggled to focus his eyes on what remained of the house’s interior, and where the body lay. Part of him wanted to help the person, but another part of him resisted. No involvement meant no blame. Could he avoid being accused of poor performance if he stayed down, stayed out of it? But he wanted to do right, wanted to be the hero. He kept moving but stayed down. He sought to avoid shame more than he wanted to be a hero. He crawled, trying to keep the rest of his body low to the ground.

  His eyes glued on the body he thought was Sanders. The man’s uniform, or whatever that was, had turned grey from dust and debris, hardly recognizable. Kale reached out with his hands, tentatively exploring with touch and smell. He felt a gritty wetness. Then he saw. A pile of broken masonry chunks mixed with fetid ooze lay on the ruin of what had been a man. A new realization struck him. It wasn’t Sanders. It was Ramirez.

  “Medic!” Kale screamed, but did not hear his own voice. Did the others hear it? He screamed again. “Medic!!” It was the first time he’d tried to speak.

  He remembered a strange raw smell, like a freshly opened can of fish soup. He choked on the smell, and again spit out thin bile. What was below him was an extinguished life, finished, incomprehensible, and it lay beside him. He resisted looking at what remained of Ramirez. He remembered feeling confusion—not revulsion, not panic, more amazement, mystified at the horror of it all. He had never seen anything like this before.

  “Anybody hurt?”

  Somebody standing above him shouted.

  “Shit!” the speaker answered his own question. It was Lee, a Wolfhound medic. Kale saw Lee move around the room looking for bodies.

  “Here!” Kale heard himself say.

  Lee came to him. “What is it?” Lee asked cautiously, the tone of his voice signaling he’d rather avoid the answer.

  “There,” Kale answered, cocking his head towards Ramirez.

  “Callicut and the other man are dead,” Lee told Kale. Lee’s eyes spilled tears.

  “They’re in the back, back there.” Lee said, as if he never wanted to go back, and cocked his head in that direction. “Very little left of them,” he added softly, as if whispering a secret.

  “Ramirez,” Kale heard Lee say in a whisper as he looked down at the body Kale lay beside.

  Lee went to his knees and brushed away debris that covered Ramirez’s body. Lee stopped, exhaled audibly, staggered by what he saw. “Shit,” he said, “shit!” like he didn’t know where to start. “Shit,” he said, again and again. Ramirez’s mangled upper body hardly resembled anything human. What could he do? Lee sat back for a second, very still. Then he leaned forward, plucked a small piece of something white, the size of a grape, and tossed it aside. He sat back on his haunches. He grabbed for another piece of debris and tossed it away too. He leaned over, and using the edge of his palm in a flurry of small movements brushed something else off the body, as if he was still trying to find Ramirez underneath the ruble.

  Kale, still dazed, watched all this quietly, not moving, fascinated and stupefied, unsure what to do. There was no doubt Ramirez was dead.

  Then both noticed Ramirez’s open eye. Debris obscured most of his face, but an open eye stared back like a camera lens encircled by a mess of dirty wet pink flesh. The orb, still round and bright, floated in a small pool of sparkling fluid, looking weirdly perfect, alive with the past, framed by hell. Kale—still now—hated the image. It made him shudder. The exposed parts of Ramirez’s face had reminded him of bacon, human bacon. Pieces of torn flesh hung in strips from his face. Kale didn’t even look at the lower body, between the upper thighs and the stomach. Lee’s hands, slippery and wet with blood and various particles stuck on his fingers, looked as if he’d stuck them in red paint. Lee dropped back on his haunches again, exhaling grimly. Kale watched all this, still motionless, stunned, unable to help in any way, and knowing it.

  “What do I do?” Lee, frustrated, asked. He sounded like a confused child pleading with a teacher. But Kale had no help to offer.

  Kale tried to put himself inside Lee’s head. Lee had just turned 20 the previous month, four years younger than Kale. This was the first time either man had seen a severely injured person. As a medic, Lee’s job was to save lives and to treat injuries until doctors could take over. His life-saving skill was intended to bridge the ugliness of the battlefield and the hospital. Medics had done incredible things, deserving much credit for saving lives. And Kale knew Lee had always done well in training, had earned the combat medics badge, finishing near the top of his class.

  Before him was a man who moments before had been a breathing thinking living person. The whole situation was simultaneously ridiculous and evil. A look of futility rose up in Lee’s face. He could do nothing. Suddenly anger seized him. He balled his hands up to his face, as if trying to shield himself from the scene. Maybe he was crying. Kale watched, but didn’t cry. Numbness had sealed his emotions.

  Then Kale heard noises. Deep sharp piercing noises, increasing in volume.

  He woke. The noises were sharp knocks at his trailer door. He shot up and opened the door. Bright orange daylight blazed outside. Cooke stood there looking like a man born to deliver bad news.

  “I heard somebody in here thought we had transformed this place into a resort. Well, we haven’t,” Cooke barked. “Move your ass!”

  Kale’s dream reliving Ramirez’ death was over.

  The Wolfhounds found out after the bombing had been investigated that a bomb had been placed under a couch. The insurgents knew the Americans were coming to pay the family. The whole thing had been planned pr
ecisely. The family had been pressured to cooperate with the insurgents, on threat of execution, and had given up their home, $1,000, and the lives of three American soldiers. Just after the explosion, a few men were seen running away. The Wolfhounds chased, but to no avail. They found nothing. They never saw the young guide again.

  Cooke walked purposefully towards the motor pool. The platoon would be there, getting ready to go. After the short conversation he just had with Kale, Cooke wanted to find SSG Pauls, Kale’s truck commander, and reestablish a meeting of the minds. He wanted no daylight between how they viewed the situation. Kale needed to buckle-up. If he didn’t, he might go flying out of this war, as a psyche case, a casualty, or a dead man. Pauls was first on the hook to make sure that didn’t happen.

  Pauls, who had recently been promoted, was a mild-mannered, competent NCO. He looked wistful, as if he couldn’t be truly happy until he was a retiree spending mornings in McDonald’s with coffee and friends.

  Cooke had seen all kinds of soldiers in his 14 years of military service. They came tall and short, rich and poor, smart and stupid, but everyone one of them had a story; some of those stories ended up being a labyrinth of troubles. War was not the place to untangle old troubles. Soldiers ranged from hard asses to candy asses, and about a thousand flavors in between. Men could be like puppy dogs. Too soft and unusable. He believed that self-reliance—his mama simply called it tying your own shoes—was an essential attribute of all successful men; yet men, like dogs, performed best in packs. Knock a dog on the head or separate it from the pack and most dogs go submissive, become puppy dogs again. Keep the dog in a well-managed pack and it stays happy and productive. Men were about the same. In a pack, they could be at their best: manly, strong, unbeatable. Running lose, anything could happen. He wanted to keep his men in the pack.