Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

“This—this is me,” I said. “This is Hotspur Six.”

  “Hotspur Six!” It was Captain Vrettos, his words like hot silver to my ear. “Did you copy? Are all friendly forces clear of the top?”

  “Yes.” I panted through the words. “I mean, yes. All clear.”

  Almost instantly a deep rumble swallowed the sky. Then came crashing rock and glass above us, an upside-down earthquake bearing down. We grabbed Saif again and kept moving, an angry god’s breath on our heels.

  As we turned the last rounded corner of the path, a group of medics met us, relieving us of our burden and placing Saif on a stretcher. Doc Cork tied a tourniquet onto one of the stumps and began twisting. Saif screamed out with chants that sounded like prayers, every revolution of the baton bringing more. Slobber covered his chin and mustache. He grabbed my arm, pulling me to his face, close enough to see black quills of hair in his nose.

  I bowed my head and closed my eyes, grabbing his clasped hands with one of my own. In a frail whisper he asked, “My legs. Like fire. How is—how is legs?”

  I opened my eyes and told him as calmly as I could that they were fine, he’d be walking before he knew it, he’d be playing with his daughter soon.

  His mouth fell open, and he pressed his pistol into my palms. Then he was gone, carried off on a stretcher to the awaiting medevac. I remained by myself for some minutes, tugging at my ears, staring up at the minaret that had tried to kill us, now just a dark splinter. It was evening by the time I walked down the remainder of the tower path, finding my platoon waiting. Everyone else had already gone home.

  I don’t even know his daughter’s name, I thought.

  The rumble we’d heard had been a main gun round shot from a 105-millimeter cannon on an outfitted Stryker. It caused much of the top of the tower to collapse in on itself, killing everyone in the rooms and on the walkway, including Dead Tooth, two other military-age males, an old man presumed to be the mullah, two unidentified women, and a child the official report described as “likely younger than ten years old.” The dome had shattered into a thousand ceramic dishes. Iraqis contracted for disaster cleanups spent days sorting through the ruins, and a State Department official later estimated it’d cost the American taxpayer a cool million dollars to repair the mosque. “If the Iraqi parliament determines it worthy,” he then clarified. “No guarantee. This is the middle of nowhere.”

  Both Batule and Saif were sent to Baghdad for emergency surgeries—Batule for a lost eye and a ruptured eardrum, Saif for his lost legs. Their war was over.

  I spent the rest of the night smoking cigarettes and watching movies on my laptop, away from our room, where Chambers was. Something he’d said wouldn’t go away. We’d been on the tower path, the medics working to stabilize Saif. “Mission accomplished,” he’d said. Then he’d laughed.

  38

  * * *

  We didn’t go on patrol the day after the mosque got blown up. No one did. “A tactical pause,” Captain Vrettos called it. For him, that meant explaining to higher what had happened. For the soldiers, it meant gym workouts and video games. For me, it meant going through my e-mail. There was a note from my brother, an apology. I didn’t know how to respond, and even though I tried to write back, I didn’t know what to say. He’d been right about moral courage mattering more than physical courage. I deleted the message.

  I spent the day on the smoking patio, watching the walls of camo nets sway with the wind, breathing in wet cigarette. A light rain spat on the ground outside, steady through the afternoon. It would have been cold but for an electric space heater. I sat there reading a magazine article about the commanding general in Afghanistan getting fired for insubordination. It seemed like a stupid thing to get fired for, but things were going to hell everywhere.

  Snoop found me there, alone.

  “Yo,” he said.

  “Yo,” I said.

  “Crazy shit yesterday.” He shook his head. “Fucking Arabs.”

  “Fucking Americans,” I said. “Stupid. All of it.”

  He took a seat in the lawn chair next to me, his long legs sticking out like fishing rods. “Batule? Molazim Saif? They okay?”

  “They’ll live.” I stared ahead.

  Snoop pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He was a dark shadow in the pale light. We were close, maybe even friends, and I knew barely anything about him. I was about to try to rectify that when he said he needed some advice.

  “I’ll help if I can,” I offered. It was such a first-world thing to say.

  Snoop’s special visa to America had been delayed, along with hundreds of others. The embassy hadn’t given a reason or a time line. But he couldn’t go home to Little Sudan anymore. Jaish al-Mahdi wanted his head on a spike. He was spending his occasional weekend passes at Camp Independence, an option that wouldn’t be there once we left.

  “What about the letter I wrote? I thought there was a big push to get terps stateside.”

  “Too slow. And only goes to terps who give moneys. I gave them a whole file of letters from American officers I’ve worked for. It didn’t matter.” He paused to spit out a few shells. His words were boring deep into my conscience, and I thought of Rana, the way she looked at her boys when she sent them out to play with soldiers.

  “The right way doesn’t work,” he continued. “I want to go to America, but getting out of Iraq is first. The war won’t end when your army leaves next year. You know this.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Anywhere.”

  I said I’d help, somehow, reminding him we still had a couple of months to figure something out. “Maybe my brother knows someone in Homeland Security,” I said, though he probably didn’t.

  “Thanks, LT,” Snoop said, standing. He seemed embarrassed and started moving to the doorway before turning around. “We never talked about Haitham.”

  Excuses darted through my mind like manic bats, but I didn’t need them. “What you did was right,” Snoop continued. “He was the Cleric, yes? It was the only thing a good lieutenant could do.”

  He was wrong, of course, but I still appreciated his saying it.

  •  •  •

  I found a few hours of rest sitting up on my mattress and against the wall, poncho liner draped over my head. I didn’t bother to loosen my boots, like I was trying to trick myself into sleep. An arm shaking my own woke me at midnight.

  My eyes felt like stomped grapes. I smacked my lips and concentrated on the foggy shape in front of me. It was the runner for the night shift. He could tell I was considering going back to sleep, so he shook me again.

  “Battalion intel’s on the line. And—well, we don’t want to get the commander.”

  I smacked my lips again and cracked my neck. “He in the sack?”

  “Yes, sir. And. You know how it is. He needs to stay down, while he can.”

  I slapped my face lightly and hopped off the bunk. “Glad you got me.” The runner thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t, not totally.

  I picked up the phone expecting the intel captain from Duke, but instead heard the voice of Sergeant Griffin. She sounded tired but solemn.

  “Lieutenant Porter? I need to speak to Captain Vrettos. It’s urgent.”

  “I’m the ranking officer on duty. What’s up?”

  “Just heard from a green-level source.” She was annoyed to be talking with me, I could tell. “Al-Qaeda’s planning payback for what happened to the mosque. Something big and soon. Supposedly in the next day.”

  I had no idea what “green-level” meant, but figured it meant “good” and “believable.” I pantomimed punching myself in the face, which made the night shift laugh.

  “You’ll let your commander know ASAP?” Sergeant Griffin continued. “Green-level. This is real.”

  “No doubt,” I said. I didn’t question her intent, but I’d been through too many false alarms to take seriously vague threats. Something big? Something soon? Welcome to our everyday, I thought. I was setting the phone do
wn when I heard Sergeant Griffin say, “One more thing,” through the receiver.

  I waited.

  “Talk to Dan today?” she asked. She meant Chambers, though I’d never thought of him having a first name.

  “Haven’t really seen him,” I said.

  She said they’d talked earlier, online. He’d told her what had happened at the mosque, how it bothered him. That he wasn’t a young fire breather anymore. That on this, his fourth combat tour, he’d finally had his fill. That he’d survived a lot of close calls, but that yesterday had been the most searing, the bridge too far. That he had his kids to get back to. That maybe he’d take up a friend’s offer and work construction in Dallas. Or switch over to an admin job so he could reach retirement from behind a desk. That he had better things to be doing than running up ancient mosques to kill teenagers who’d had nothing to do with 9/11.

  “Just venting, I think,” Sergeant Griffin said. “But I’d never heard him like that. Maybe you can talk with him. Since you were up that tower, too.”

  It was his goddamn idea to go up there, I thought. And he didn’t want his kids to grow up fatherless? This was the same guy who’d bragged about not knowing where two of his offspring had moved with their mother.

  Then I thought about how I wasn’t really the person I presented to the soldiers, either. There were parts I hid, parts I exaggerated. Maybe Chambers was the same.

  Maybe.

  I hung up the phone knowing there was no way I’d get back to sleep.

  “Where’s the last place you’d expect to find a lieutenant?” I asked the night shift. “Like, right now.”

  They told me.

  •  •  •

  Through night vision binos, Ashuriyah was a phosphorous green pillow. The joe in the north guard station of the roof wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake, either. His body jerked when I came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Go sleep, youngblood,” I said. Among other things, I’d surrendered to the term. The private knew officers didn’t pull roof duty, but was too drowsy to articulate it. He stumbled off with an “LT, thanks, LT,” and I was alone.

  That private, I thought. He’d shown up with Chambers, all those lost months ago. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was from North Dakota? New Hampshire? South Carolina? He talked a lot about how smart his Doberman was. He also claimed to have only three chest hairs, and had named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, something the rest of the platoon found hilarious. It was sort of funny, now that I thought about it.

  I rotated the machine gun and scanned, the mechanized velvet of the turret rolling smooth. A hunter’s moon gored the sky. Below, beyond the blast walls and mazes of razor wire, lights were scattered like lost candles.

  We’d been here almost a year and couldn’t even keep the goddamn power on. I thought about that while my index finger stroked the trigger well and I kept scanning, slowly. Nothing but quiet September black. An autumn chill nipped at my cheeks and at the slits of skin where sleeve met glove. We weren’t supposed to smoke up here. It gave away our position. Revolutions were nocturnal beasts, though, and I figured the large camo nets and an occupation nearing a decade had also given away our position. I lit up a cigarette, cupping the cherry with a palm just in case.

  My brother’s message hadn’t been the only one in my in-box. My old ROTC pal Chiu had finally e-mailed back. He was home in Irvine, armed with a medical marijuana prescription, trying to figure out where to go back to school. For what, he didn’t know yet, but he knew school would at least get him away from his parents, who told him every day that having one leg was no excuse for being a derelict. REMEMBER, he wrote, ALL REAL VETS DIE BITTER AND ALCOHOLIC! (LOL).

  He’d be okay. The world needed people like Chiu.

  A gunshot echoed through Ashuriyah, a tongue popping off the roof of a mouth. When only dogs answered, I grabbed the walkie-talkie and reported in.

  “One round fired to the north, approximately three thousand meters away.”

  “Roger that, logged,” came the response.

  One round could mean anything. Kids messing around. A negligent discharge at a Sahwa checkpoint. An execution in a barn. A sniper’s tidy shot through a car window. Just another prayer bead on the death string of tribal warfare, no different from any other.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t known their names. The people in the mosque. I’d already gotten over that. I didn’t even know what they looked like, though. They were complete ciphers, anyone and everyone all at once. “Locals,” I’d call them in my war stories someday, to sympathize with the faceless people I’d unintentionally helped kill. “Iraqi citizens who wanted peace.”

  I finished my cigarette, stomping it out with the heel of my boot.

  Some time passed. I thought about the mosque some more, then about what was left of it. Some more time passed. The metal door that led downstairs popped open, loosing a sliver of light. I gripped the stock and asked who was there, flipping up my night vision binos and squinting.

  “Why you here?” It was Chambers, his voice flexing, always flexing, but strained, too. I couldn’t see his face, but pictured it drawn and ashen.

  “You look how I feel,” I said, waiting for him to laugh. He didn’t. “Still no patrols?”

  “On standby.” He grunted. “Spec ops are on a raid somewhere nearby. Might need to clean up their mess.”

  “Seems to be a lot of that recently.” I chewed on my bottom lip and waited. I really needed to learn his trick of making people nervous by not responding. “Battalion says al-Qaeda is coming after us soon.”

  He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. Then he started balling his hands into fists, flexing his forearms. He stopped when he saw me staring.

  “Why do you do that?” My question came out more strident than intended.

  He did it again, just once, as if to prove something. “My dad was an addict. Habit I started in high school, to remind myself to not be like him. Guess it stuck.”

  “Huh.” That seemed plausible, and made more sense than the bogeyman reasons I’d ascribed it. Still, I thought. Weird. We seemed so far from the time he’d joined the platoon and called me Jackie, so far from the weeks I’d spent trying to get rid of him because everything had changed with his arrival. Another gunshot echoed through the night, this one from the other side of town. More dogs barked. My report was logged.

  Chambers leaned against the sandbags, stepping under the dim moonlight. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wad of dip, sticking it in his mouth. I wanted him to leave so I could be alone again, but we needed to talk, and not just because his intel girlfriend was worried.

  “Been smoking, Lieutenant?” He was looking at the butt on the ground. It was a bad example for the men, we both knew. It also didn’t need to be said. I leaned down and stuck the butt into a cargo pocket.

  “You okay, Sergeant?” I asked. “Yesterday was—well. Fucked-up, you know?”

  He answered quickly, as if he’d been rehearsing.

  “All good. I mean it. Yesterday was the result of a half-assed strategy set by old men in suits who don’t have a fucking clue. They hear ‘counterinsurgency’ and think it’s War Lite—a smarter, cleaner way. But it’s not. War is always dirty. War is always about force. Yesterday’s on a lot of people. But not us. We just happened to be the grunts sent there to do what no one else would. What no one else could.”

  I wanted to agree with him. I wanted us to absolve ourselves of blame, deflect the accountability elsewhere. I wanted to chalk up the ruin we’d wrought to something unknowable, like providence, or chance, or bureaucracy. But something inside implored me not to. That’s too easy, it said. Be stubborn. Fight for understanding.

  It had my grandma’s voice.

  “It wasn’t anyone, though,” I said. “It was us.”

  Chambers laughed, spitting out a wad of dip, the spartan creases in his face glinting. He pushed aside the droopy camo netting and looked over the roof wa
ll at the pool of elephant grass below. A breeze stirred through the meadow, playing thistles, banging flowerheads.

  “ ‘God, grant us men to see in a small thing principles which are common things, both small and great.’ ” He turned his hard gray eyes my way. I must’ve looked perplexed. “Still haven’t read Augustine,” he said.

  “Oh.” His quote had gone over my head. “Not yet.”

  “Doing right by soldiers can get messy,” he continued. The smell of hot tobacco in his mouth filled my ears. “We have less than three months left. Three months until they’re home with their wives, their parents. Fucking kids. Just get them home. Nothing else matters. Didn’t always feel that way, but I do now.”

  “Yeah.” Some other things mattered, I knew, or at least some other people, but I couldn’t control any of that. Still, though—I’d decided that I wanted to leave Iraq having done one good thing. One good thing free of complication and ambiguity, one good thing that proved I wasn’t the type of man who used drop weapons or destroyed mosques or couldn’t remember his dead soldiers’ faces. A good thing rather than a lucky thing, like being told where a man’s bones were. I wanted to tell Chambers all this, even though he’d probably scoff. Before I could, he spat out another wad of dip and cleared his throat.

  “Soldiers been talking, Lieutenant. What happens during the day? They say you got a slam piece out there. Not that I care, but be careful. A woman got Elijah killed. You already know that, I think.”

  I looked out at the dark and counted slowly in my mind. “Shit,” I said, forcing a laugh too late. “I wish. Just a bored housewife with good intel.” I almost said it was Rana, as if I needed his permission, but held back.

  “Good.” He whistled, low and without melody. “Keep lying so I have plausible deniability. Gives new meaning to ‘Be the scorpion,’ I guess.”

  I laughed again, but was bothered he didn’t believe me, and even more bothered that he’d called Rana a “slam piece.” She was many things, but not that. Never that. Something else lingered, too.

  “What happens during the day is boring,” I said. There was an edge to my voice I tried to dull but couldn’t. I pointed out to the town, to the scattered lights. “What happens at night? On your patrols. Soldiers been talking about that, too. Like, where would you guys be right now if you didn’t have to be here?”