* * *
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 dishdashas 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 be
cause 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.
“Fasil!” he said, citrus on his breath and a large lip sore on his mouth. “Fasil!”
I looked at him with confusion and shook my arm free. He stared back with the hard, unblinking eye of poverty.
I took a step back. I’m no great Satan, I thought. He reached for my forearm again. I took another step back. He kept repeating the same word, so I turned to the soldiers and asked if anyone knew what he wanted.
“Fasil,” Snoop called out. He and Sipe were dealing with other enraged locals farther down the roadside. “Blood moneys America owes their family. To make things good.”
I pulled out my notepad and a pen, wrote down the outpost’s phone number, and handed it to the man. Then I pantomimed calling a telephone. He nodded slow, as if trapped in a fever dream.
The crowd gradually dispersed. Alphabet ran up to say that the commander wanted us at Camp Independence, “Time now.” The checkpoint was going to be crawling with field-grade officers soon. I patted Doc Cork on the shoulder as he packed up his medical kit and walked over to my platoon sergeant and terp.
“The driver was addicted to khat, according to one of his neighbors,” Sipe said, lighting a cigarette. “Might explain why he kept driving.”
“Khat is nothing,” Snoop said. “Children chew it. He just made a stupid mistake. Arabs, yo.”
I felt the distant pangs of a headache bearing down with the heat. The inside of my mouth was dry. I licked my chapped lips, shrugged, and began walking back to our vehicles.
“Another thing,” Sipe said. I turned around. “Your man, Haitham. He was here, in the minibus. Got hit with shrapnel in the neck from a ricochet. He bounced, though, before we got on scene. Something spooked him. Other than the dead guys, it’s all the Iraqis wanted to talk about.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, so I said nothing.
As we drove by the still-smoking white car, soldiers from first platoon were trying to pack the driver into a nylon body bag. Nearby, his two angry friends and the old man held the mother, still thumping her chest and wailing for answers. The soldiers zipped up the bag and carried it over to her.
So, I thought. That’s what a dead civilian means.
9
* * *
We had a few hours free at Camp Independence while the maintenance team checked the Strykers. The platoon scattered, most of the joes heading to the chow hall to gawk at female support soldiers. Chambers said he was off “to dip my pen in company ink,” which I presumed to be a reference to Sergeant Griffin.
I stopped at the shower trailer first. In a narrow fiberglass stall, behind a blue curtain covered with penguins, I washed away two weeks’ worth of grime. The other stalls were occupied, too, so the hot water faded quickly as I popped the blisters on my feet. The forever glare of the dead driver had lingered, but I shook free of it, along with paranoid thoughts of the soldiers in Karbala who were electrocuted to death in a KBR shower trailer like this one. Then I shampooed my hair. It didn’t take long, since Hog had given the entire platoon a buzz cut that morning. A few loose dark brown strands whirled around the shower’s drain before disappearing into the underbelly of the trailer. So long and farewell, I thought. Thank you for your service.
After toweling off, I brushed my teeth and shaved. The body in the mirror looked strange. Dark circles ringed his eyes like a raccoon’s. I called him Hotspur Six, and he called me the same. He looked younger than I remembered—something about the way his face collapsed in at the cheekbones and the way his chest concaved where finely tuned gym muscle used to be. I’d always thought experience was supposed to age people. He smiled toothily when I told him to, but I didn’t think he meant it.
I changed back into my uniform and walked to the cybercafé, a sandblasted bungalow covered in satellite dishes. I took a seat at one of the desks, woke up the computer, and googled “Staff Sergeant Rios U.S. Army Ashuriyah Iraq.”
Why did I care? Because getting rid of Chambers mattered. In only a couple of weeks, his presence was transforming my platoon. My brother was right: men like him were time bombs. Also, I was bored with paying off sheiks and teaching jundis rifle discipline over and over again. I was intrigued by the idea of war, a real war, occurring in the same streets and mud huts I now called my own.
The death pitch in the Iraqi mother’s cries probably had something to do with it, too.
The search led to an entry on iCasualties: “Staff Sergeant Elijah Rios—KIA, nonhostile event, near Baghdad, Iraq, April 4, 2006.” An obituary from a small-town newspaper in Texas said that Rios had dropped out of community college after 9/11 and enlisted in the army, and was survived by a mother, Ninel, and a sister, Sarah. A variety of links led back to the same 2009 Associated Press story that outlined his family’s struggle with the military bureaucracy to recover his full remains—“a small amount of tissue found on army equipment was positively identified through DNA testing as belonging to Rios, enough to classify him as Killed in Action,” the story read.
It went on to quote Rios’ mother: “My son is partially in the ground here, one or two inches maybe. But most of him is still over there. Just ’cause the Pentagon lists him as ‘accounted for’ doesn’t make it true.”
When I returned to the bay, the maintenance team had a message: the Big Man wanted to see me. “How wonderful,” I said. The warrants just grunted and went back to the engines. They’d seen plenty of sarcastic lieutenants come and go. I turned around and walked up the long asphalt snake that led to battalion headquarters.
The walk was flat and drab. I poured canteen water onto the pavement, and it hissed in reply through the fierce triple-digit heat. I picked up some discarded flyers calling for participants in the Camp Independence softball league and stuffed them in my cargo pocket. Hog would appreciate this latest artifact of fobbit life.
Proof of the might of the military-industrial complex lay everywhere. Trailers lined the road with pickups in front of them, most marked with Halliburton decals. Other trailers advertised deals for new cars or cash advances for deployed soldiers. Beige tents and warehouses dotted the horizon like mole hills, every single one a KBR structure. The chow hall gleamed in the distance on the northern fringe of the camp, a sprawling
ivory planet unto itself, ringed by Burger King, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut stands. I wondered if I had time for a Whopper with cheese, but decided I didn’t. Each step the other way deepened the craving, and soon all I wanted was a patty of cooked cow stuck between sloppy, gooey pieces of cheese and bun, but I was a military man, and military men put duty first and stomach second.
I walked by a group of soldiers roasting in the sun as they filled sandbags for a bunker. They were part of the base’s work detail, a receptacle for malcontents and PTSD head cases. I asked some of them about their work. We were at least a mile away from the living quarters.
“For the contractors,” they said. “In case of a mortar attack.” They forgot to salute me, but I didn’t care enough to correct them.
The air-conditioning in the operations center roared, and it took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the dim green glare of laptops. I smelled warm cheeseburger coming from one of the workstations. My belly growled in resentment. An admin soldier grabbed my rifle, placed it in the weapons stand, and hurried me into the Big Man’s waiting room. I knocked twice and entered.
The Big Man sat in a metal folding chair parallel to, rather than behind, his desk. The battalion flag hung over him limply, and the room smelled like burnt matches. Ever the linebacker, he motioned with his fist to sit across from him.
“I understand your platoon was the first to reach Checkpoint Thirty-Eight this morning.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, pulling up a chair. “Quite a scene.”
“That’s what happens when small-unit leaders lose focus,” he said. The Big Man exhaled slowly through his nostrils, his lips pursed as if choking off an inner rage. My mom had grown up an admiral’s daughter and said that senior officers functioned so that no truth could betray the myths, of either the past or the mind. It came with the rank, she believed, and it wasn’t something they were able to leave at work. I wondered if some of that was going on with the Big Man now. How could more focus have slowed that white car or made the machine gun a precision weapon?
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