Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  I smiled goofily. “You a regs man, then? Regulations are important.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw uncertainty cross my soldiers’ faces. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.” So certain. So smug. “That’s why I stopped him.”

  “Then why the fuck aren’t you at attention when addressing a commissioned officer of the United States Army?”

  It was like I’d backhanded him. He snapped to attention, unleashing a sarcastic salute and yelling, “Sir, yes, sir!” Every eyeball in the chow line was now on us. I had two options: escalate the spectacle or end it.

  “Your service to country tonight is noted, Chief.” I leaned down into the man’s face, our noses touching, his stunted seafood breath tickling my chin. “You’re dismissed.”

  “Lieutenant.” He spoke low now so only I could hear him. “Do that again, you’ll spend the rest of your life drinking through a straw.” I was going to call his bluff, but he continued. “You think you know me? You know shit. Just ’cause I don’t wear it, don’t mean I don’t have it—I’ve been blown up more times than years you’ve been alive. Your boys are out of control. So are you. Rein it in. Be a leader. Respect the uniform. Respect yourself.” With a salute, he was gone into the dirty night, just another shape drifting through the camouflage sea.

  “Show’s over!” I shouted to the line, where heads ogled and voices jeered. The madness had passed. Now I was just embarrassed. “Enjoy your meal, vote Republican.”

  “Holy shit, sir.” I turned to the soldiers. It was Doc Cork. “That was awesome.”

  “Thanks, LT,” Washington said as we exchanged knuckles. “Owe you one.”

  The three soldiers moved away while I got in line. Then something gloomy pricked at me and I called them back. I asked Washington and Batule to remove their scorpions until we returned to the outpost. They balked.

  “That guy was a racist,” Washington said. “Why you taking his side?”

  “I don’t doubt that. But he’s right about the patches. Tell the same to anyone rocking the scorpion at Salsa Night. We’ll be back soon.”

  “But, sir—”

  “Did I stutter? Move out.”

  Whatever goodwill I’d earned was lost. They walked off grumbling about power-tripping officers, but replacing one another’s patches. I envied them for their solidarity.

  “Lonely,” I sang to myself, not ironically, not cheerfully, watching the three soldiers fade away. “I’m Mister Lonely. I have nobody . . . for my own.”

  They served surf and turf for the holiday. The cooks wished me a happy Fourth, and a thickset female with a dreary smile told me she’d been up twenty hours preparing food, and I felt bad for every mean, nasty thought I’d ever had about fobbits, because the truth was we needed them more than they needed us.

  I ate in a back corner. On a nearby television, I watched Cleveland sports fans burn the jersey of some basketball player, a self-proclaimed messiah who’d left because winning was hard there and it’d be easier in Florida. After a tenth jersey burned, the howling of proletarian pride and pain broadcast across the globe, I went outside and bummed a cigarette from a contractor. We tried small talk, but his English proved rudimentary and my Korean nonexistent, so we smoked next to each other in quiet, observing the night.

  Watching soldiers come and go through shadows, I longed for the other side of the wire. It didn’t always make sense out there, but sometimes it did. And it offered purpose. I forced myself to contemplate the sniper shot that’d almost turned me to pink mist, and I fantasized about what that would’ve done to Marissa. A sick pleasure took hold; I saw her weep and regret. Her life would’ve never been the same. It would’ve destroyed her. Then I saw what it would’ve done to my parents, to Will, and I remembered it would’ve destroyed me, too, in the most literal of ways. Chambers, I thought. Chambers saved me. He’d said to embrace the beast within, and now I knew he’d been right. He’d been right about everything.

  I’d see Haitham and Azhar dead before we left, I promised myself, not because I hated them, but because that was what I was supposed to do. That was why we were here. I walked to Salsa Night, my patrol cap tilted up only slightly.

  An empty warehouse on the southern rim of the base, the club lay at the end of a gravel path, next to the airfield, in a deep mire of Halliburton trailers. The generals intermittently tried to shut down the club, but like an obstinate weed, it kept returning. Higher had relented in order to maintain the perception of control. Officers weren’t supposed to go, but we weren’t banned from it, either.

  I just needed something to do.

  The walk was dark and quiet. At the airfield, I watched a group unload a cargo jet with neon ChemLights, little dancing birds of hallucinogen. The crates alongside the fence line were filled with machine gun ammunition and milk shake powder mix. There was no other activity on the tarmac. Cresting a small ridge, I heard the club rumbling well before I saw it, a shining boom box of a building. Blue and yellow lights flashed through partially boarded windows, and I asked myself if watching bored joes grind up on each other was really how I wanted to spend my evening.

  A slobbering whistle filled the darkness, followed by the sounds of exploding air. I looked up for fireworks but instead saw mortars running down the cheeks of night. To the north, the noise of earth being punched from above echoed. The base alarm system shot to life. I ran forward for a bunker without knowing where one was.

  At the intersection of the gravel path and a back gate of the airfield, I found a sandbag mound. I jumped into it headfirst, landing with my rifle under me. I groaned, having knocked the wind out of myself, failing to notice the large shape on the other end of the bunker.

  “You okay, sir?” it asked.

  “Sure,” I took a deep breath and spoke through gasps. “Forgot to tuck and roll.” I peered through the tunnel and rose to my knees, the brim of my cap brushing the ceiling of the bunker. “Ibrahim?”

  “Yeah.” My eyes adjusted to the dim. He looked like a sad panda at the zoo, gnawing on a jerky stick like bamboo. His plastic-rimmed glasses kept slipping down the bridge of his nose as he chewed. “What’s going on?”

  “Mortar attack. Shouldn’t last long.”

  “Oh.”

  I sighed and asked what was wrong. He said nothing. I said that was an obvious lie, and since we were going to be spending the foreseeable future together stuck in a bunker, he might as well tell the truth.

  It wasn’t just one thing, he explained. It was everything. He’d Skyped his parents earlier, only to learn his sister was talking about dropping out of college. Even though Dominguez had said he was a good soldier and getting better every day, he didn’t think that was true. And ever since we’d made the other joes stop teasing him, they just ignored him, which was worse. That’d been what happened at the club that night. He’d heard them and some fobbit females laughing at his back as he left, minutes before the mortar strike, and he’d taken refuge in here to be alone.

  “Good times,” he said, forcing a smile. “But how are you, sir? Enjoy your day off?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Was swell.”

  The attack passed and, soon after, the strident “All clear” sound rang out. I told Ibrahim to get a good night’s rest and then tried to follow my own advice. I left him in the bunker with his jerky wrappers, knowing I should talk to him some more, but unable to summon the energy. We all had our personal tragedies to bitch about.

  We left for Ashuriyah at dawn. I snapped my bracelet and dropped broken beads onto the desert road one at a time, like breadcrumbs. What had once led home now led nowhere.

  25

  * * *

  The mortar attack’s origin point came from eastern Ashuriyah, leaving Burger King a pile of ash, with two Bengali contractors and one soldier dead. We needed to end the war, and end it immediately. During a meeting in his room, Captain Vrettos asked for ideas.

  “Split the platoons,” Chambers said. “Platoon leaders take half the guys for
the day, platoon sergeants take the rest at night. Doubles our patrols. They focus on counterinsurgency, we focus on the killers.”

  “We’d be stretched real thin,” First Sergeant said.

  “Done,” Captain Vrettos said. “I’ll try anything at this point.”

  I didn’t have any better ideas, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Afterward, Captain Vrettos found me in the hallway. Hollow-eyed, he asked me to cover for him that afternoon at the wake of a Sunni tribal leader. He hadn’t slept since the firefight three days before. I said of course. I couldn’t tell if it was exhaustion or gratitude that caused his eyes to water.

  Outside, the sun was a hammer. Midday, high July, we piled into our Strykers once again. The soldiers napped on one another’s shoulders, rifles between their legs. I stood out of the hatch and watched sandstone buildings drift by, then hills. Even though we drove south and then east, away from the stone arch, I could still feel the wire-rim glasses of the Cleric on us, watching.

  Billowing chimney smoke marked the house of the dead sheik, a black funeral flag draped from a balcony. A lone cypress stood idle at the edge of the yard. The hand-me-down Humvees of the Iraqi Army and the black Mercedeses of the tribal leaders lined the side of the dirt road.

  “We late, sir?” Hog asked, parking behind the other vehicles.

  “Thought we’d be early,” I said. “So of course.”

  I’d never met Abu Mohammed. He’d been ill since our arrival. But he’d long been a patriarch in the al-Badri tribe, and his sons claimed he was an early supporter of the Sahwa movement. He’d been buried the day before, at a Sunni graveyard, today marking the beginning of the three-day mourning ceremony.

  A large cylindrical tarp had been erected in front of the house, under which twenty or so visitors had gathered. Leaving my helmet and rifle, I told Batule and Snoop to join me. I asked Snoop to leave his plastic rifle. I considered telling him to do the same with his ski mask, but didn’t, thinking about what Saif said about the difference between allies and partners.

  Rolls of green Astroturf had been spread across the yard. One of Abu Mohammed’s sons welcomed me as I stepped from dirt to turf, and I handed him a bouquet of desert poppies I’d picked that morning in the meadow behind the outpost. In dense Arabic, he asked where Captain Vrettos was.

  “Emergency at Camp Independence,” I managed. “He sends his condolences.”

  Under the tarp, I greeted groups of Iraqi men, most of whom I didn’t recognize, raising my right hand to my heart and cupping it. The old men returned the gesture, but most of the younger men insisted on shaking hands. A carload of women in burqas arrived, and I watched them enter the house, taking off their shoes at the entrance. I asked Snoop where they were going.

  “Women and men can’t mourn together,” he said. “They go into the house to drink coffee and tell stories of the dead sheik. And make the food, yo.”

  The atmosphere was solemn, and I quickly ran out of ways to say, “He was a good man.” As servants brought out the first platters of food, Saif found me and explained that fried eggplant served cold on pita bread was a traditional dish. It was a wild garden of dough and oils, and we ate with our hands, sharing the platters. Following Saif’s lead, I dipped the bread into a side of hummus. We washed the food down with spiced chai, which somehow cooled me in the heat.

  “Did you hear?” Saif asked through mouthfuls. “The police released Ismail this morning. Saw him leave his cell. Sullen young man. Didn’t look too beaten, likely because you intervened. That was a good thing you did.”

  I was surprised they’d released the Barbie Kid already, but the brigade JAG officer had determined an attempted sai poking didn’t qualify as a murder attempt. I decided to let Chambers hear about the teen’s release from someone else; he’d just rage about how much the army and Iraq had changed for the worse.

  The second group of platters consisted of dried apricots and some sort of chopped salad I had no interest in. Fat Mukhtar arrived, too, his three wives and many children hustling inside with bowed heads, armed guards and the toucan Sinbad staying outside with us. One of the guards held the bird on his forearm, though it nibbled from Fat Mukhtar’s hand with its keel bill as he fed it bread from the communal platter. Saif grunted at the scene, but said nothing. Neither did anyone else.

  “There’s a strange feeling in the air now,” Snoop whispered in my ear.

  The bird regurgitated into his feeder’s hand, a yellow and deficient slop. Fat Mukhtar rolled his eyes and wiped his hand clean on his guard’s black muscle shirt. He shouted something in Arabic, which brought laughs from throughout the tarp.

  “He say the Reconciliation means he must square with Shi’as,” Snoop translated. “But he doesn’t have to square with toucans.”

  I smiled at the mukhtar. His greeting under the tarp proved far more tepid than the hug I’d received on the Sunni Strip, just a limp peace sign under glazed eyes. Around the collection of frail old men, he seemed even larger than usual. His goatee was freshly trimmed, as usual, but his thatch of curls had been slicked back with grease for the occasion. As we made our way through the third course, a mix of goat meat and brown rice, he walked to our side of the circle, speaking low to Snoop.

  “He say it is wrong to talk business today, but wishes to know if you’ve learned Haitham is the Cleric. This true, LT? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Yeah.” Through his mask, I could sense Snoop’s skepticism. “Battalion told me yesterday. Crazy, but true.”

  “Surf’s up,” Fat Mukhtar said.

  Then he asked for us to turn off the machine in the Strykers that made cell phones stop working, as the sheik’s sons were expecting calls from loved ones.

  “No idea what you’re talking about. We don’t have that kind of technology,” I said, plain-faced. “Excuse me, I have a completely unrelated matter to attend to.”

  I walked past the cypress tree to our vehicles and gave Dominguez the “kill the jammer” hand-and-arm signal; remote-detonated IEDs weren’t a concern at the moment. Returning to the tarp, I noticed something odd on the shoulder of one of Fat Mukhtar’s guards, standing off by himself and holding a silver AK-47. I called over Snoop.

  “The fuck?” I pointed to the Ranger scroll he’d sewn onto his khaki Sahwa top. “Where’d you get that?”

  From a Ranger, of course. It was a gift. They’d worked together on a recent mission he couldn’t tell us about; it was “top secret.” I thought about how battalion had learned of the Cleric’s identity—the still-alive one—and looked past the guard to the waddling mukhtar. He held his toucan in front of a sad, wizened old man, laughing while the bird croaked.

  So many secrets here, I thought, trapped in a glint of the afternoon sun. So many veils, too.

  After I rejoined the mourners, a group of old women in black abayas were exiting the house, moving with slow steps to the tarp. They chanted dirges, low and ominous. The old men passed around a collection plate, which Saif quietly explained was for the women, professional mourners hired to sing of the dead’s accomplishments and the world’s loss. They’d go for hours, if necessary, and would return each afternoon of the three-day ceremony. I tossed in a ten-dollar bill.

  I hadn’t seen Snoop sneak away, but as the lamenters performed, he waved me to the back of the tarp. He held his phone tight in his hand.

  “Haitham,” he said. “He asked if we were at the wake for Abu Mohammed.”

  “Shit.”

  “I didn’t tell him. But he say if we were here, we should dig near the cypress tree. He say—he say we will find the body of Shaba there. Then he hung up.”

  I turned around to look out into the desert. Nothing but yellow badlands until Baghdad, I thought. Who knew how many bodies lay in the barren earth beneath us.

  “I am just a terp, but we should dig at that tree,” Snoop said. “I believe him.”

  I strode to the cypress, all gnarled branches and leaves like asparagus. The dirt around its trunk was
cracked and sun-scorched. None of it looked disturbed. Then I looked up and saw the Iraqis looking over their shoulders at me, pretending to listen to the dirge.

  “Get Saif over here,” I said to Snoop. “We need to be delicate about this.”

  The Iraqi lieutenant’s eyes flashed like pinwheels when we told him, and he stroked his pistol holster. I argued we should wait to dig until after the mourning ceremony, but Saif pointed out they knew that we knew now. Unless we wanted to post guards for three days, we needed to dig right away.

  “It’ll be better if my men do it,” Saif said. “And your Muslim soldier.”

  I sent Snoop to the sons to explain that we weren’t trying to be disrespectful, just following a tip. The laments ended as Ibrahim and the jundis put shovels into dirt. Two and three at a time, the mourners fell away to their cars and homes, Fat Mukhtar leaving with his guards in a Mercedes. Only the dead sheik’s family remained for the excavation.

  It took ten minutes for one of the jundis to find a piece of plastic. It stuck out of the ground like a candlewick, crusted in dirt and barely discernible. Thirty minutes after that, we stood around a shallow hole with a bag of human remains in it. The body had been stripped and burned, giving the carcass a smoky, charcoal shine. Maggots had long ago chewed through the clear plastic to feast on the insides. The skull wasn’t attached to the body but had remained intact, falling to the bottom of the bag. I stepped into the hole to look it in the eye. A chipped bottom tooth was fixed prominently in its mouth, death reckoning life with the stupidest of grins.

  “Not right,” Saif said, looking up at the branches of the rigid cypress. “Even to an enemy. Such things are against Allah’s will.”

  I heard the joes whispering from above, around the tree. “Think it still has the Green Beret tat on it?” one asked. The others told him to stop being stupid.

  “Who is it, sir?” Ibrahim asked, his face and words drained of color. “Or was it, I mean.”