Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Combat is a hard place for hard decisions. For hard men,” he said, opening his eyes again. My question had disappointed him. “Leave the moralizing for the bystanders. You want to be one of us—be the type of officer soldiers will follow—you need to kill that part of you. Easy solutions don’t exist. Not out here in Indian country. You should know that by now.”

  Maybe I agreed with him, maybe I didn’t. I hadn’t really been listening, because he’d been tapping his right forearm, where the five skull tattoos were, each one a moment, a memory, a life taken in the desert by a gun. His gun.

  “What?” he asked. He’d found my eyes.

  My mouth was dry, so I ran my tongue through it before asking my question. “You gonna get another skull when we get home?”

  The night air pushed between us like waves. I tried to keep my breathing steady and fought off an itch in my armpit. I wished I could take back my question, but it was too late. He spat out the last of his dip over the ledge and into the meadow.

  “Never ask me that again,” he whispered, rubbing snuff bits from his teeth, unslinging his rifle so he held it from its vertical grip in front of him, barrel pointed straight down. “Sir.” Then he was gone, away from the guard station and into the blackness. I didn’t breathe until I heard the roof door close.

  I was angry as I looked back out at Ashuriyah. Angry at Chambers. Angry at Iraq. Angry at myself. He’s a goddamn mess of contradictions, I thought, and fuck it, so am I. But I understood myself, even when my thoughts or actions didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t I understand him? I wanted to, I really did, even though I’d been on only one tour and he’d been on four. He’d saved my life, and I’d found his friend. We were fucking even.

  And Rana and Rios had been in love, I reminded myself. She was no one’s slam piece.

  I bowed my head over the machine gun and prayed for a long time, about a lot of different things.

  The light patter of feet from behind broke my solitude and broke it too late. I tried to swing around the machine gun, but the tripod and sandbags held in place. I went to the ground on one knee, and my left hand dove for my pistol.

  “Easy, sir. Just your guard relief.”

  “Hog.” I took a deep breath and tried to push back the pulses threatening to puncture my skin. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s cool. Gets creepy up here.”

  Holstering the pistol, I looked down at the two chevrons on his chest he’d worked so hard to earn. Some months before, before Rana and before Chambers, before a lot of things, I’d taught him that “terp” wasn’t short for “interpolator.” In turn, he’d taught me that I wouldn’t want to hunt birds with a military-style assault rifle.

  I thought he was going to bring up Haitham again, but he didn’t. He replaced me behind the machine gun, and I stayed up there with him during his shift, talking about home. Later he asked if Ramadan was over yet. I told him almost. We shared his bag of sour gummy worms. When neither of us could think of anything to say, we listened to the wind in the meadow.

  After a particularly long silence, Hog asked if I’d learned about Adam and Eve in Sunday school.

  “Of course,” I said. “The first story for everything. Took place right around here, I think. To the south a bit.” I chewed through a mouthful of gummy worms. “Been thinking those holy thoughts, my man?”

  “Yep.” Hog shook his head. “God’s gonna have a lot to answer for when I die, that’s for sure. He better have some answers ready.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh at that, smiling into the void of night.

  39

  * * *

  The next morning found my half of the platoon prepping the Strykers for a quick mission to Camp Independence. There was some state-of-the-art satellite dish that battalion needed us to put on our roof, because brigade said so, because division said so, because the Pentagon said so, because the satellite dish was a defense contracting job from 2005 that’d finally been completed.

  I finished the brief by telling the soldiers we didn’t have time for showers and food runs this time. Captain Vrettos wanted us back in Ashuriyah ASAP, due to the report of al-Qaeda’s pending attack.

  “Any questions?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Washington said. “What’s this dish do?”

  “Need-to-know basis,” I said. I figured the dish had something to do with surveillance drones, but it was just a guess. “And we don’t need to know.”

  The soldiers groaned and walked to the armored vehicles. As I went to follow, Snoop jogged out of the outpost. His eyes were wide, and he held his cell away from him like a stinky piece of fruit. I grabbed it from him, but the line was dead.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” he said. “Surf’s up, maybe.”

  Rana had just called. She was worried about us. A coworker of her husband’s had said to avoid the paved road by the big American base for the next couple of days. Malek hadn’t needed to ask why; he knew this coworker had family in the Sunni insurgency. Her husband had called in sick and was planning on doing so until he knew the road was clear again.

  “She risked a lot calling,” Snoop said. “Her husband would be angry if he knew.”

  “Right.” It didn’t take much to connect this with what Sergeant Griffin had called with the night before. I told the patrol to stand by. Historically, IEDs were a retaliatory tactic for local al-Qaeda. It made sense.

  I radioed battalion and asked when the engineers had last cleared Route Madison.

  “One week” was the reply.

  “Roger. Got intel that”—this would need to be phrased delicately—“an attack is forthcoming along Route Madison. Recommend the road is shut down until cleared.”

  Battalion wasn’t happy—they really wanted us to get that damn satellite dish—but after explaining to two majors and the Big Man that our source was credible, they agreed. Our patrol dropped the Strykers’ ramps and hung out under low gray clouds, playing cards and talking about the best clubs in Hawaii to meet slutty tourists.

  I was only half listening when Dominguez asked how my girlfriend was doing.

  “Who?” I asked. He had a strange look on his face. I wasn’t sure if he meant Marissa, or if this was his way of asking about the local “slam piece” rumors. Denial would get me nowhere, I knew. But neither would the truth. “Oh. Her,” I said, turning it into a joke. “Honestly, I’m not sure.”

  He seemed to consider what that meant before turning back to the debate over clubs.

  I walked away from the group to the back of my Stryker. It was open and empty. I lay across a cushioned bench and tucked my helmet under my head so it served as a hard, round pillow. I didn’t know when it’d happened exactly, but I’d become the type of person who preferred resting in the day to resting at night. I was somewhere between sleep and consciousness when the explosion happened.

  The soldiers thought a jet had crashed, because of the noise and because of the black fireball to the east. We thought we’d be sent out the gate immediately, but Captain Vrettos radioed and told us to remain on standby until higher figured out what’d happened.

  We already knew, though. Two of us did, at least.

  “That was the bomb in the road,” Snoop said, crawling into the back of the Stryker to sit next to me. “That was meant for us.”

  “Maybe.” I grabbed an orange from a food bin and started peeling the skin into small jagged pieces. When that was done, I split the orange into lumpy slices and swished one around in my mouth. Snoop just watched.

  “She saved us,” he finally said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  It was true. She had. Information about what had happened drifted down to us, slowly at first, like ticker tape, then faster and faster. The tip had spooked the engineers, too, so they’d sent their best mine-resistant vehicles to patrol Route Madison. They crept along the road at five miles per hour, scanning for piled trash and potholes.

  Al
ong the western edge of Checkpoint 38—Sayonara Station—a bomb exploded under the lead vehicle’s front right tire. Forensics later estimated that the IED contained two hundred fifty pounds of homemade explosive, primarily fertilizer and acetone, designed to trigger under the pressure of an armored vehicle. The insurgents had taken advantage of our absence the day prior and had dug, dropped, and repaved without anyone noticing, or caring to.

  The twenty-ton vehicle rolled forward like a shot elephant, its outer hull spraying the roadside with large metal chunks. All but one of the ballistic glass windows shattered upon impact. Inside, all five soldiers were hurt, two of them knocked unconscious. The final tally counted four concussions, six broken bones, and a fire extinguisher–induced gash along a neck.

  Strykers weren’t built to withstand massive IED attacks. Had it been us on that patrol, like we could have been—like we should have been—it would have been a matter of body parts and pink mist, not casts and splints.

  “She saved us,” Snoop kept saying to me, long after he left me alone to tear apart more oranges. “She saved us, she saved us, she saved us.”

  40

  * * *

  The room smelled of rot. I couldn’t determine the source, couldn’t parse it from the other odors—the rain outside, the bouquet of wildflowers in the corner, the foul stink of angry men in sweat-starched uniforms and man-dresses. Still, after another breath, there was no mistaking it. There was rot somewhere.

  Twelve of us had gathered in Fat Mukhtar’s sliver of a meeting room. The attendance of the Big Man, Captain Vrettos, and an Iraqi Army major meant I didn’t have to speak; the presence of the mukhtar and a host of other tribal leaders meant I still needed to listen.

  “The sheiks demand fasil for all the dead but Azhar,” Snoop said. His voice cracked with angst. “They will not budge from this. They say all the others in the mosque were innocents.”

  There’d been drama even before we’d arrived. At the outpost, the Big Man took one look at Snoop’s ski mask and plastic rifle and said our entire company lacked discipline. Captain Vrettos had tried to explain the complexities involved, to no avail. Snoop had saved his job by taking off the mask and setting down the plastic rifle. Time would tell if he’d traded it for his life.

  Pallid Arabic brought me back to the meeting. Fat Mukhtar rose from the rug like a false idol, joints cracking, knees popping, the cement wall behind him bracing his back. Once he finished unfurling, he pointed to the far wall. The watercolors of American rivers and forests still hung there, but the mukhtar’s index finger wagged above them, at three portraits. His finger moved from frame to frame, tracing invisible lines.

  “He wants the American officers to look,” Snoop translated. “Those are the men who ruled here before. The one on the left was his great-grandfather, who worked with the Ottomans.” The size of a paperback cover, the hot wax painting displayed a young man with a long, broad nose and a little chin. Soft curls bounced across his head, and his eyes were like two brown suns. “The man in the middle, with the beard? He was the mukhtar’s grandfather. He worked with the British to overthrow the Ottomans.” This man was middle-aged, the black-and-white photograph capturing an august face and rigid body, clenched fists dangling from arms tucked neatly into a dishdasha. Had he met T. E. Lawrence, I wondered, perhaps on the famous march to Damascus? “The third man? His father, who worked to bring down the last king of Iraq.” Larger than the others, and slightly crooked, this color photograph presented a man more like the heir, round and mustached, dressed in olive fatigues and holding a large-caliber revolver. He possessed a physical poetry his son lacked, a sort of grace fixed in the photograph.

  Have those always been there? I thought. Or did Fat Mukhtar bring them out for today? That felt likely, though I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed them before.

  “The mukhtar says he works with Americans now,” Snoop continued. “Americans who will leave, as the Ottomans and British left.”

  Captain Vrettos loosed a soft whistle. The Big Man made a feeble attempt to explain why we were different. He mentioned clearing, holding, and building. My eyes moved from dead face to dead face to dead face. I tended to think that those who came before were worthier, more distinguished. At first glance, the same held true for these Iraqi tribal leaders. But Fat Mukhtar’s great-grandfather, he of the biblical eyes, also had pouty lips. And his grandfather’s mouth hung open, like a fool’s. And his father—he must’ve posed with the gun for show, as tightly as he gripped it. I remembered Lawrence had been stationed in the outpost of Cairo only because his superiors had deemed him a goof and a nuisance. I belong here as much as anyone, I thought. Because at least I have the goddamn dignity to question being here to begin with.

  “Lieutenant Porter.” It was the Big Man. “Update us on your Muslim soldier.”

  The fatwas were old news, so none of the Iraqis acted surprised. The Big Man seemed to want them to be. Every time I bumped into Ibrahim at Camp Independence he looked more despondent than the last, but he never whined or complained. He just said “One day closer” over and over again, until I left him alone.

  “We have nothing to do with that,” Fat Mukhtar said, slumping against the wall and sliding down it, resuming his seat. “That’s the Cleric.”

  “Not possible,” the Big Man said, his fingers stubby rocks aimed at the mukhtar’s head. “Lieutenant Porter’s platoon got him last month. What was his name again?”

  “Haitham,” I said, staring at a triangle of light from the window’s reflection that’d gathered between my legs. His black-and-white mug shot was wedged into my Lawrence book along with every other document I didn’t know what to do with. “His name was Haitham.”

  “And it was you who led us to him.” Captain Vrettos spoke now, his voice charged with a voltage I didn’t recognize. Recent events had amplified the pressure on him from higher, though the Big Man had supposedly refused to fire him when pushed to by the generals. I looked at Captain Vrettos and clucked my tongue to try to calm him, but his red-faced exhaustion had eyes only for the mukhtar. “You fed the Rangers that information. So, with Haitham dead, just who the hell is dictating the fatwas?” The volts surged. “Someone here knows the fucking answer to that.”

  The room turned helter-skelter. Tribal leaders shouted at one another and at us, fingers wagging, fists shaking; the Big Man yelled at Captain Vrettos, who yelled right back, saying he was sick of ignoring the obvious. I pulled my knees tight to my chest and watched the triangle of light dance between my legs. I wondered what Rana was doing. Probably hanging laundry to dry, or demanding Karim lie down for his afternoon nap. She’d said her husband would be home all week. She’d have called otherwise.

  I looked up at the portraits of the dead men and sighed. We said we wanted peace. What we really wanted was calm, something else altogether. They said they wanted peace, too. What they really wanted was power, which maybe wasn’t something else altogether. After we’d destroyed their mosque, it was tough to argue otherwise.

  One of the tribal leaders, a younger guy I’d met at Abu Mohammed’s wake, started shouting, “Nina leven, fasil! Nina leven, fasil! Boosh! Boosh! Boosh!” I winced. Captain Vrettos flipped him off with both hands, which made the Iraqi yell louder.

  Through all the noise, I smelled decay again. I watched a man with a large lip sore and a salt-and-pepper beard emerge from the corner to shush the other Iraqis. The stench seemed to be coming from his sandaled feet, his toenails little gnarled knives poking out at the world. Wearing a gray dishdasha and a red-and-white checkered turban, thick wrinkles splayed across his forehead, sagging in the middle. Yousef’s eyes studied the spaces between the men in the room, one a deep hazel, the other the cloudy brown of cataracts. I realized where I’d seen him before, even before the patrol through the sandstorm. He’d been the man demanding fasil at the car accident in the spring. I wanted to ask why a falafel man had been invited to this meeting, but stayed quiet.

  “This isn’t the t
ime for blame.” Snoop translated for Yousef with taut exactitude, as if he were afraid to neglect even a syllable. “We’ve all lost friends, American and Iraqi. While it seems wise to keep the American Muslim away, we must remember the death sentence was also placed on brave Iraqi soldiers.” The IA major nodded vigorously. “And we must remember the neighborhoods of Ashuriyah are being covered with lists of targets stuck to telephone poles. Sunni and Shi’a. Not all are just threats.”

  While Yousef continued, I watched the faces of the other men in the room. Wasta isn’t a thing to pursue, I thought, or even possess. It’s not just power. Yousef knows this, and that’s why he has it. Despite the Sahwa contract, despite the luxury sedans, despite all the bombast and circumstance, the mukhtar didn’t. One glance his way showed he knew it, too.

  Yousef was still speaking when Fat Mukhtar interrupted. At first the older man tried to speak over him, but when the mukhtar continued, he stopped and turned his head toward the ceiling, exasperated. Fat Mukhtar then stood up again to shout down his opponent. An argument ensued, one voice restrained and firm, the other wild as a roller coaster. The rest of us sat in awkward silence, watching while pretending not to.

  “They argue about who’s in charge,” Snoop said slowly. “Fat Mukhtar say this is his house. The falafel man tells him to calm down, this is not the time.”

  Fat Mukhtar spat on the ground toward Yousef’s feet and wiped his palms together like he was cleaning his hands. He said something to all the room with his arms spread wide and turned to Snoop and me, jerking his head to the door. Then he stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

  Snoop’s voice returned to a robotic pitch. “The mukhtar say he’s the only one who can stop the terror men,” he said. “Then he tell LT Jack and me to go outside with him, since everyone else here just wastes time.”