In my stead, my brother visited Chiu at the hospital. A general had already come by and awarded Chiu his Purple Heart, something he’d taken to using as a bookmark for his robot romance novels. He seemed in good spirits, given the circumstances, and Will asked about old college stories to keep the mood light. One of the first tales my brother heard was Chiu’s Charge.
“I never figured out what the right answer to that situation was,” Chiu said after finishing the story, shaking his head. “Guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
20
* * *
The joint part of the joint security station arrived the morning after Ortiz’s service: twenty jundis, all wearing the baked chocolate chip uniform of the Iraqi Army. The change had to be done to maintain a permanent armed presence in Ashuriyah, something the town council had requested from Captain Vrettos, who had to clear it with the Big Man, who had to clear it with the brigade commander, who had to clear it with the division commander, who had to clear it with the Multi-National Force–Iraq commander, who had said yes.
They moved into the stale, dusty rooms of the first floor, to the fury of nearly everyone.
“Everyone in my fireteam is sleeping with one eye fucking open,” Dominguez said.
“I’m gonna smell like camel jockey now,” Batule said.
“I can’t believe they’re making us live with sand niggers,” Snoop said.
“My men are as bothered as yours,” Saif, their platoon leader, said. “As officers, we must lead by example.”
I patted Dominguez on the back and told Batule to keep his mouth shut and had some of the black soldiers explain to Snoop the irony of his slur, but I hadn’t known how to respond to the Iraqi platoon leader. During previous interactions, Saif hadn’t revealed any hint of his fluency in English, the result of twelve years of tutoring with an uncle who’d once lived in Toronto.
“Before, I watched and learned,” he said. He was nearly as tall as me and twice as wide. Though he was only in his late twenties, the stresses of war, combat helmets, and a young daughter had left his hair a black horseshoe. He maintained a trim mustache and couldn’t understand why American infantry officers weren’t supposed to grow one, since every culture but ours knew that mustaches and masculinity were intrinsically linked. “I’ve seen many Americans come and go. Your units all work differently from each other.”
I asked what else he’d learned.
“For one, there is a difference between allies and partners. Allies do their own thing. Partners work together. For two, Americans have good hearts, but get impatient when they don’t sleep enough.” An eddy of cigarette smoke and yellow molars whirled up at me. “Especially young molazims far from home for the first time.”
I laughed and accepted his invitation for a planning session over chai the following evening.
The two people whom I’d believed would be most distressed by the jundis in the outpost didn’t react the way I thought they would. Alia refused to answer Snoop’s questions about how it affected her side business. And Chambers stressed to our soldiers that it meant progress in the greater mission.
“Appreciate you pretending for the guys,” I said, after walking into his lecture in the joes’ room. “Them bitching about it isn’t going to change anything.”
“I meant it, Lieutenant,” he said. “Every word. I don’t plan on coming back here. Anything that brings that closer to reality is fucking worth it.”
Just because he said he meant it didn’t mean I believed him. We donned our body armor together in silence, me groaning as the armor pressed down on my shoulder blades, him grunting as he velcroed his torso straps. He caught me staring at his strange, wristless hands, though he probably thought I’d been looking at the skull tattoos.
Downstairs, we passed Alia mopping the red-and-white tiles of the foyer. She kept her head bowed, serene as a church bell.
• • •
The June heat was grave. First and second squad stood near the clearing barrels, as did three of Saif’s men. Snoop played Game Boy to the side, a black ski mask pulled over his face and bunched under his helmet. The brigade had mandated that terps weren’t allowed to wear masks on patrols, but Captain Vrettos had turned a blind eye to it, leaving it up to the translators themselves. Since the sniper attack, Snoop hadn’t gone outside without the mask. He said Jaish al-Mahdi was hunting him, in both Ashuriyah and the Sudanese neighborhood in Baghdad where his family lived. Without Captain Vrettos’ relaxed policy, he swore he would already have quit.
I studied the crater-eyed faces in American uniforms. A few wore unauthorized patches of a dark scorpion where the Twenty-Fifth’s lightning bolt should’ve been. Everyone called us the scorpion platoon now, even the commander, though I’d insisted on keeping the Hotspur call sign. Many of the soldiers were familiar, but some were not, a result of Chambers’ platoon trades.
We had . . . six new soldiers? I wondered. Maybe seven. I needed to ask for an updated platoon roster. I thought of Ortiz and Alphabet and tried to form their faces out of the scattered shards of memory but could put together only parts of their portraits, which were different and wrong somehow.
“Gather ’round, killers. Snoop, turn off the game and translate for the jundis.”
“Okay, LT.”
“Today we’re collecting info on Azhar, better known as Dead Tooth.” I looked for a familiar face and found Washington, fresh from explaining sand niggers to Snoop. “Corporal W, what can you tell us about Dead Tooth?”
“He’s got a dead tooth,” Washington said, earning a few laughs. Satisfied, he continued. “Youngblood punk using his daddy’s rifle.”
Chambers’ pet phrase coming out of my soldier’s mouth irritated me, but I kept it to myself. I asked who Dead Tooth was aligned with.
“Al-Qaeda,” Washington said. “At least he says that. Probably just a pretender.”
As soon as battalion had sent a photograph of the new insurgent leader, I’d recognized the younger cousin who’d picked up his family’s fasil payment in the spring. Same long face, same thin mustache, same brown, crooked teeth filling his mouth. Captain Vrettos had sighed deeply when I’d mentioned the history, then charged our platoon with capturing him because of my “superb diplomatic skills.”
“Reports say he’s been hiding around the Sunni Strip, in the northwest. Write this down, guys.” I stopped for a beat before continuing. “That’s where we’re going. The mosque blocks.”
“Fobbits got nothing else?” Chambers asked from the back. His voice had acid in it. “Why have an intel shop if they’re only gonna tell us what we already know?”
“Above my pay grade,” I said. “Let’s focus on what we can control.” I finished the patrol brief, reminding them that Dead Tooth was wanted in connection with the increase in IED attacks. After asking if there were any questions, I paused. I hated this part of the combat ritual. “Hotspur, you know the deal. Be the scorpion,” I said.
“Be the scorpion!” they echoed.
We locked and loaded and filed to the front gate, Dominguez walking point yet again, zip cuffs dangling from his vest like a necklace of plastic ears. Another platoon’s soldiers occupied the Humvee and sentry shack, a wigwam of ammo crates and sandbags. Some of the guys had wanted to name the shack after Alphabet, but it hadn’t taken.
American soldiers pushed into the unknown once more. We moved with edge, adrenaline juicing our blood, a hyperconsciousness the civilized world could never replicate. If hajj was going to get any of us, he’d have to earn it. There would be no more shots in the dark on the unsuspecting. Over the past few weeks I’d grown proud of what we’d once considered routine. A platoon of infantrymen, young, silly, fierce men from the country and the ghettos, marching into the outposts of hell because no one else would. And I went with them. They’d proven themselves now that things mattered. More than anything, I needed to prove myself worthy of being their lieutenant. Their LT.
A storm brewed as we pushed west. The tr
ash-strewn streets were empty save for dust cyclones spinning at corners like little orange pinwheels. Most Iraqis stayed in the shade during the cruel afternoons, but the storekeepers and porch denizens usually remained firm. Even they had fled the elements today. As we walked, Ashuriyah turned into a biblical van Gogh, the wind painting everything it touched in dizzy strokes of churning earth.
“Simoom season,” Snoop said.
“What’s that?” I asked, wiping dirt from my lenses.
“The poison wind.”
As difficult a time as I was having staying vertical, our interpreter found it impossible. He had one of those angular, bony bodies that only looked natural leaning on something. Wobbling around with his crooked mask and a plastic rifle tucked under an elbow, he resembled a hungover bank robber. Batule, now the radioman, shook his head at our terp and laughed. I smiled and tapped Snoop lightly on the helmet.
We shifted north into the mosque blocks. A small high school building made of granite lay at the intersection. Closed for the summer, chains wrapped around its gate like a metal python, rust gnawing away at the padlock. Big blocks of spray paint covered the gate and parallel walls.
“Jaish al-Mahdi graffiti,” Snoop said. “Telling young Shi’as to defend their homes and families.”
We crossed through a long thistle meadow. The houses to the east were dilapidated clay mounds, but the ones to our west, nearer to the great mosque, were made of sun-dried brick and sported tall, spiked gates. Dark bullet scars marked the walls of both neighborhoods.
Halfway through the meadow, I stepped into a puddle of mud hidden by weeds, turning my tan boots the color of ground coffee.
“Watch your step,” I told the soldier behind me. It was Ibrahim, one of the new guys Chambers had traded for. He had a reputation as a kiss-ass, but he’d been quiet and dependable with us, if not entirely self-motivated.
“How are things?” I asked. “Must be weird switching.”
“Good, sir.” He pushed a pair of army-issued glasses up the bridge of his nose, the type of chunky, plastic-rimmed lenses worn by hipsters in Brooklyn. “I’m enjoying the new start.”
He walked tall but with the type of shiftlessness large men had when they’d never gotten used to their size. He seemed soft but considerate, and asked about my feet. I said they didn’t blister anymore, they’d finally hardened, though I left out my daily moleskin and baby powder treatment. I remembered a conversation from months before, in a leadership meeting, and asked if he’d had trouble with his old platoon because of his religion.
“Kind of. But it wasn’t because I’m Muslim. Some of the guys were always trying to get me to translate, but I don’t speak Arabic. I mean, I’m from Buffalo.”
There went my next question. It would’ve been nice to have another fluent speaker to practice with. I asked how he felt about Hotspur. He said things were fine. His team leader was Dominguez, so I trusted they were. Then he said he was thankful Staff Sergeant Chambers had intervened on his behalf. I wasn’t so sure about that part. I told him to come see me if anything came up, and pushed forward in the formation.
We emerged from the meadow onto a yellow wedged avenue known as the Sunni Strip, running east–west and connecting two larger roads. Even the Iraqis didn’t know how a pocket of Sunnis had come to settle in this part of Ashuriyah, so near the Shi’a mosque, so far from their larger enclaves in the south of town and the villages out west. During the sectarian wars, the area had been ground zero for local terror, complete with kidnappings, gang rapes, and a torture house where a medieval rack was recovered. Somehow, some way, the Sunni Strip had held. To the northwest, a mile away, the minaret tower loomed through the orange haze, spirals of stone crested by an Ottoman dome older than the flag on my shoulder. To the northeast, I could just make out the stone arch that served as both entry and exit to Ashuriyah.
Cypress trees scattered around the courtyards swayed to nature’s will. All three dozen adobe homes on the Sunni Strip were new, a gift from the powerful Tamimi tribe and supposedly subsidized by the Iraqi parliament. Sahwa checkpoints marked both sides of the Strip, and I walked to the nearer one, where a black Land Rover with tinted windows was parked. My soldiers and the jundis found security positions, taking knees next to cars and lying down in small depressions. Batule loped behind me, a radio strapped to his back like a green bullseye. Before I reached the checkpoint, a rear door of the Land Rover opened and there was Fat Mukhtar, arms wide, hands formed into plump peace signs.
“Habibi! Surf’s up!”
Pressed against the Iraqi’s mass in a hug, I felt his man boobs pushed against my chest plate. He pecked both cheeks, and I air-mouthed reciprocation. He wore a loud powder-blue tracksuit instead of a man-dress, and his thatch of curls was stuffed under a checkered headdress of red and white. Aviator sunglasses and white sneakers completed the outfit.
“The hell?” I whispered to Snoop, who was getting the same treatment. “We’re habibis now?”
“He’s showing off, yo,” Snoop said, now released from the tribal leader’s embrace. “Wants people to know he’s close with an American officer.”
“Wasta.” I winked.
“Wasta.”
Fat Mukhtar then tried to shadowbox with me, but stopped when I stood there and rubbed my helmet rather than play along. He was checking on his men, he said, as the Sunni leaders rotated responsibility for posting Sahwa on the Strip. What luck it was to bump into each other like this!
It was the first time we’d seen each other since the deaths of Alphabet and Ortiz. He expressed his condolences and assured me that his men were looking for the sniper. In a dark tone, he whispered something to Snoop, who asked him to repeat it with an air of disbelief.
“He say the sniper is a new terror man called ‘the Cleric.’ ”
“Huh? The guy from the arch?”
“Not him. That cleric has been dead many years. The mukhtar is not sure if the Cleric is a real holy man, but that’s the name he goes by.”
The topic of conversation reminded me I should move around while in the open; between the trailing radioman and lengthy discussion, I was prime sniper bait. Now pacing, I thanked the mukhtar for the information and, in broken Arabic, explained that we wanted to know about Dead Tooth. He answered so furiously I was unable to understand, turning to Snoop for help.
It was true, he told us, Dead Tooth had been hanging around the Sunni Strip. But his own family had chased him away because he refused to recognize the authority of the fasil.
“Law is everything,” Fat Mukhtar said. “And fasil is the ground of our law.”
He advised us to look for Dead Tooth in the south of Ashuriyah, where the poorer Sunnis lived. “Or among the Rejectionists,” he said. “Shi’as will hide anyone for moneys.”
“Speaking of,” Snoop said, “he asks about the next Sahwa payment.”
Two teenage Sahwa guards in khaki on the far side of the vehicle began chanting “Fuluus! Fuluus!” until Fat Mukhtar yelled at them to turn back around. It was rather terrible theater, though I appreciated the effort.
“We’ll call soon,” I said. “Only a couple weeks more.”
Fat Mukhtar tucked his neck into his chest, jowl pushing out, a sinkhole of excess skin. An odd way to express displeasure, I thought. He knew that Sahwa paydays were scheduled by the commander, at least until the Iraqi government took them over.
Something occurred to me. “You still want to be paid first, right?” I asked him. I let Snoop translate but didn’t wait for an answer. “Azhar’s family lives on the Strip? Take us there.”
We walked a quarter of a mile to a two-story house with white trim and a balcony. Fat Mukhtar banged on the courtyard door while I waved over a fireteam. The storm had weakened, though the wind still proved too much for Snoop, who was now using his plastic rifle as a cane. A Sahwa guard who’d followed us pointed to the plastic rifle and laughed. Snoop barked back in Arabic. The guard pounded his chest twice before returning to the checkpoint. S
noop mumbled to himself and spat on the ground where the guard had stood.
Chambers emerged from the cloud of orange dust with Dominguez, Hog, and Ibrahim in tow. Though I wanted nothing more than to be rid of our platoon sergeant, I’d learned that including him in decisions minimized blowback. Chambers took in the balcony and sneered. “Comes from money. Interesting.”
“Think we’ll find anything?” Ibrahim asked.
“Nope,” Chambers said. “But he’s been here. Hard for rich kids to get away from Momma’s tit.”
We all laughed, even Dominguez.
“Almost forgot.” I pointed to the jundis, who’d huddled together under a nearby cypress tree. “Bring them, too.”
Without a word, Dominguez walked over to the Iraqi soldiers, shaking the nearest one by the collar, and gestured for them to follow him. They did, though the one whose collar had been violated spoke with ire to Dominguez’s back.
While Dominguez took the soldiers and jundis into the house to search cabinets and upturn mattresses, Chambers, Snoop, and I met with the family and Fat Mukhtar in the courtyard. It made for a crowded space, and I kept having to push a fern out of my face to make eye contact with anyone. A man with cracked skin and a gray worm for a mustache glared at me while his wife, covered in an abaya, yelled at Snoop and wagged a finger in his face. Chambers stepped to the side to play with two girls and their Barbies, which were Arab in appearance and had various face veils as accessories. Then the woman turned her finger toward me. Even though the top of her head barely cleared my sternum, I took a step back and used the fern as a shield.
“We’re being gentle!” I told Snoop, rifle slung, hands raised. A sniper on the Strip was hypothetical. This lady was not. I took off my lenses, helmet, and gloves and tried to look as boyish as possible. “Tell her that.”
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