Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  Fat Mukhtar had owned two villas before he became a Sahwa militia leader, and built two more since. In the daylight, we would’ve seen buildings painted eggshell white with gold trim, staggered in pairs, forming a square. Now we saw them as dim gray outlines, winding and weaving formlessly like dotted lines on a map.

  “Always reminds me of a drug palace. Like Scarface,” Hog said.

  “Shut up,” Dominguez responded.

  “I’ll shut up when I finally get out of this hole. I pin on corporal next month and get my own fireteam. Your wetback ass is gonna miss me!”

  “You are my favorite redneck.”

  I’d considered confiding in these two about my struggles with, and plans for, Chambers, but decided against it. They were too junior. I’d use them as sensors, like Will had suggested. We parked at the end of a flagstone driveway, behind a herd of black Land Rovers and Mercedeses with tinted windows.

  Fat Mukhtar waited at the foot of the Stryker’s lowered ramp, his white dishdasha not long or loose enough to hide his stomach rolls. His goatee was freshly trimmed, and a thatch of black curls topped his head. I kicked Snoop awake and hopped to the ground. Alphabet followed.

  “Salaam Aleichem,” I said, raising my right hand to my heart and cupping it.

  “Hah-loo.” Fat Mukhtar raised two fingers into a peace sign and peered into the dark bowels of the Stryker. “Vrettos?”

  “No,” I said. “Just me. Just a molazim.” The Iraqis always wanted the commander to show up to meetings, even the ones that didn’t deserve his time or attention.

  “Surf’s up,” the mukhtar said. I sighed.

  A fireteam followed us to the main house, while Hog, Dominguez, and the other crews stayed with the vehicles. We walked into the front room and took off our helmets. Mauve curtains swathed the long shoebox of a room in an effort to cover the cement walls. Watercolors of rivers and forests from the old American Midwest hung from the far wall. We sat down on a garish red rug, some knockoff from Beirut, and the servants brought out chai and flatbread. Both tasted like warm sweat.

  After a few minutes of hollow pleasantries, Fat Mukhtar brought up business. “My Sahwa need payment,” he said through Snoop. “My men get nervous without payment. Brave, yes, loyal, yes, but they aren’t warriors. They are farmers with guns. And farmers with guns make mistakes.”

  “What did Captain Vrettos say about the payment plan?” I asked.

  “He say next month. But it’s always next month.”

  I was glad he remembered what the commander had said, because I hadn’t.

  “Then it’s next month. But—if you’re interested, I could get your group to the head of the line on payday.”

  The mukhtar’s eyeballs lit up like an illum round, and he stroked his goatee. All the tribal leaders viewed getting paid first as a signifier of clout.

  “Who is Shaba?” I asked.

  The mukhtar cleared his throat and grinned faintly. “Shaba was an American soldier,” Snoop relayed. “He say, ‘You didn’t know him? You’re an American soldier, too, right?’ ”

  Fat Mukhtar laughed once Snoop finished translating, his jowl wobbling, which caused the terp to join him. I stared through both men until Fat Mukhtar raised his fingers into peace signs. Then he continued, his Arabic slushy in the damp room.

  “He say Shaba was famous here, with the Horse soldiers,” Snoop said. “A man with much wasta.”

  “Wasta?”

  “Like power, but with people. Very important to Arabs.”

  “What made him famous?”

  “He was the moneyman; that was the big thing. Gave out moneys to sheiks and to businesses. He was also very good at finding the terror men. He talked Arabic, but would pretend not to, and listen to the people. Iraqis talk about things in front of Americans, believing they don’t understand. Shaba could. And—wait, I must tell Fat Mukhtar to slow down.”

  I waited.

  “The mukhtar say Shaba could change faces when he wanted to? He say it’s a special American army trick only the greatest soldiers can do. I don’t know, LT Jack. Crazy Arab talk.”

  “Ask what Shaba’s real name was.”

  “That was some time ago. The mukhtar doesn’t remember. He wants to know how you learned of Shaba?”

  “A source. Can’t say more than that.”

  Fat Mukhtar erupted at Snoop’s words. “A source? That’s what you call Haitham? The little man is the only one who would still speak of Shaba.” Snoop translated while Fat Mukhtar wheezed with delight. “I didn’t know he was back in town. Do Americans really have enough drink for him? He is where whiskey goes to die!”

  My face turned red, and I tried to hide my shame in a large bite of flatbread.

  Fat Mukhtar stopped laughing, eventually, then spoke again. “He asks if you would like to see a photograph of Shaba,” Snoop translated.

  “Please.”

  Fat Mukhtar clapped his hands and yelled to his servants. A scrawny teenage guard soon stumbled into the room holding a toucan on one arm and a photo album in his other.

  Fat Mukhtar reached for the bird first, placing his forearm out so it could perch there. The bird hopped down with a croak, its yellow-and-green bill nipping at the Iraqi’s open, empty palm. Electric yellow splashed across its face, its body and tail deep black. Fat Mukhtar had often spoken of his preference for his exotic birds over his children.

  “This one is Sinbad,” he said.

  “Sounds like a pig.” Snoop looked disturbed. “Maybe a donkey.”

  Fat Mukhtar reached into the folds of his dishdasha and produced pellets shaped like berries that the toucan went at with zeal, the Iraqi laughing as it ate, stroking its tail with his free hand. The bird’s blue eyes were surrounded by a ringlet of green, a pair of bright monocles that never left the corners of the room.

  I pointed to the photo album still in the guard’s arm. “May I?”

  The teenage guard didn’t say anything, but I grabbed the album anyhow.

  It was like a flipbook of the entire fucking war, a dust storm of long-departed tanks, uniforms, and faces. I recognized the coffee stain camo pattern of the Invasion-era army and the doorless Humvees of pre-insurgency Iraq. Then came the sectarian wars and the Surge, signified by the louder digital camouflage and the larger up-armored vehicles. The soldiers and marines looked familiar and alien at the same time, like they were from a yearbook of a school I dreamed about, ebbing and flowing in a grim light. Fat and skinny, tall and short, smiling and sneering, their eyes were all the same. Where are these men now? I wondered. How do they remember this place? Do they think about it anymore? Do they hate it the way we hate it, or is their hate more profound and authentic, free of boredom but soaked in blood and memories? About halfway through, a large thumb pressed down on a photograph.

  “Shaba,” Fat Mukhtar said. The guard now held the toucan.

  The photo had been taken in the same room we were sitting in. Same cement walls, same curtains, even the same red rug. A noticeably younger, less round Fat Mukhtar stood in the middle of the picture in a dishdasha, arms around a pair of stout black Americans. All smiled. In the foreground, off to the side, a slight, brown-skinned man crouched, plain-faced. Sporting sharp black hair and sideburns that defied regulation length, he wore a staff sergeant’s rank on a plate carrier, and his uniform didn’t fit quite right. He gaped at the camera rather than smiling at it, revealing a chipped bottom tooth.

  “Looks Arab,” Snoop said. “The mukhtar say many believed he was Iraqi, because he was brown and small.”

  “He does,” I said. “I see it.”

  “Some even thought he was a son of a rich family who bought their way out to escape Saddam’s secret police. But the mukhtar, he doesn’t believe that. Thinks it was a story put out by the Americans. For wasta.”

  I zeroed in on Shaba’s nametape. Though the shot was blurry, a couple of seconds of study produced an answer: Rios. I quietly verified it with Alphabet.

  “Ever hear of this guy be
fore?” I asked Snoop.

  He shook his head. “I’ll keep my ears open.”

  Sinbad began croaking again, loud and distressed, as if it were alerting the flock to a predator. It flapped its wings, clipped in the center, and the smell of bird shit filled the room. The teenage guard looked at his arm and groaned, then left with speed. Fat Mukhtar laughed and laughed, jowl wobbling, offering a peace sign to his departing guard.

  Shaking my head, I tried to regain control of the meeting, snapping to get Snoop’s attention. Then I pointed back to the photograph.

  “What happened? To Rios, I mean.”

  A beat passed, then another. Someone’s stomach grumbled. Fat Mukhtar spoke in a monotone, allowing Snoop to translate his words sentence by sentence.

  “Molazim. For that? For that, you’ll need a lot more payments. That was Ashuriyah’s problem. Not ours.” Then he leaned against the wall and called for his hookah.

  7

  * * *

  I took off my boots and crawled up the side of the black metal frame and into the top bunk. Wrapping myself in a poncho liner that still smelled of tropical Hawaii, I pushed my temples together, but they pulsed back against my palms like a metronome. I wished our room had windows so that it didn’t always reek of balls and heat and sand. Closing my eyes to hide from the dull, pounding light I’d forgotten to turn off, I thought about other, better smells, like perfume and sex.

  We’d spent most of the late morning and afternoon rehearsing dismounted battle drills with the jundis in the gravel courtyard behind the outpost. It hadn’t gone well. It’d been hot. And confusing. And really fucking hot.

  Their platoon leader was on leave, so I’d been stuck explaining officer tasks to jundi sergeants, which wouldn’t have been so bad had their noncoms understood that they were more than glorified privates. The concept of empowered and professional enlisted leaders was new to the Iraqis, something that became plain when they talked during instruction and asked questions about lunch. It wasn’t until I took out my M9 that some of them decided to feign caring.

  “They hate pistols,” Snoop said at the time, telling me nothing I didn’t already know. “The weapon of Saddam’s secret police. For executions!”

  I smelled my own stink. It wasn’t pleasant. So I thought of someone who was. I thought of Marissa. I thought of how she always smelled like mango, even after a long run through Granite Bay. I thought of the slight crook in her smile and the small gap between her front teeth. I thought of the way she would sleepily scold me for not cuddling enough, for never cuddling enough. I thought of how she’d read on her front porch for entire summer afternoons, gossip mags, thick historical biographies, old newspapers, anything she could find, legs tucked under her into cushions, eyes slapping across the pages like sneakers on pavement. She’d look up every forty minutes or so, just to make sure I was still there, and wink in mock seduction. I loved her most in those hours, before the suburban sun became suburban stars, when our plans became communal property with friends who didn’t matter the ways we mattered. When we were all our own.

  The jundis were all their own, too. They were okay at entering and clearing buildings—they’d had plenty of practice with that. But here we were, still trying to convey the concept of reacting to contact by splitting into support and maneuver elements. On the fifth attempt to answer the question “Why?” I’d snapped and said, “Because we win wars and you don’t, that’s why.”

  Snoop had said he didn’t want to translate that, and Dominguez intervened and asked if he could try. He did a better job even though he was a sergeant and I was a lieutenant.

  The headache came like fire the third hour of the battle drills. I hadn’t been drinking enough water. We had the rest of the afternoon off, and I’d wanted to spend it calling my parents and maybe even Marissa, but now I couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t.

  I thumbed the thin bracelet on my wrist. Sometimes I told people it was a good-luck charm. Maybe it was. The beads were red, green, and yellow, the colors of Hawaiian sovereignty. Marissa and I had bought matching ones from a shrimp truck on the north shore as a joke, two mainland haoles as representative of the Hawaiian occupation as the Union Jack on the state flag.

  “I’m no imperial pawn!” she’d laughed at my accusation, long, delicate arms dancing through the wind of the ocean drive, crystal blue to our front, green, jagged cliffs at our backs. “I’m going to be an environmental lawyer. I’m going to change things.”

  “I’m going to change things, too,” I’d said. “Just in a different way.” Then I’d held up my braceleted wrist and pointed to hers and asked if we were making a mistake.

  “Oh, Jack,” she’d said. “Just appreciate the moment. Things are already too complex.”

  I didn’t want to think about complex anymore, so I thought about something else.

  The first time Marissa and I had slept together, we’d been on the slide of a neighborhood park, underneath a row of cedars and a black well of sky. We’d called it a midnight brunch, a bottle of cheap red wine and grilled cheese sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil. I’d collected together a few blades of grass, two dandelions and a three-leaf clover, and handed her the bouquet with ironic flourish. Not bad for a high school senior. “Mister Romance,” she’d said, pulling me down with resolve, her soft lips filling my mouth.

  She hadn’t responded to my e-mails in a few weeks. Maybe I’d come across as too needy. Facebook said she was “In a relationship.” Or maybe not needy enough. Back when I had civilian hair, shaggy brown like a Beatle, she’d made me use coconut-scented shampoo because she said it smelled nice. As long as she wasn’t back together with that lurp she dated before me, I was cool with it. He was a real estate agent now, for Christ’s sake.

  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.

  8