Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  We sat together for a few minutes, listening to the cadence of empire. Cargo planes rumbled through the winter sky while helos sliced at it. Soldiers made jokes about small dicks and big dicks. With the sun falling into the west, someone in the gulch trilled the Zulu chant from the beginning of The Lion King.

  I smiled in spite of myself.

  Ibrahim seemed to be doing well. Less depressed, at least.

  “Lot better,” he said. “Almost went crazy out there. Now it all just seems like a bad dream, you know?”

  We shook hands, and he saluted. I watched the large man walk into the sludge of dusk.

  “Be the scorpion!” he called over his back. I didn’t answer.

  I placed the transcripts in my own pack. I wanted to read them more than anything, but knew if I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. I’d save them for my housing trailer later, where no one could see me.

  First, though, I had to go back to battalion. There was a graph about local business grants I needed to finish. The major had been quite clear about that.

  Even though I was late, I took the long way there, walking up the gulch toward the tank graveyard. The yard was a laser show, dozens of Iraqi contractors wearing fireproof suits and wielding blowtorches. According to base gossip, it took ten hours to destroy one Stryker, cutting each vehicle into pieces small enough to feed industrial metal shredders.

  General Dynamics had no need for their war machines, and neither did the U.S. Army—Strykers didn’t work well in Afghanistan, the terrain was too rocky. Turning them over to the Iraqi military seemed out of the question, since every vehicle was filled with state-of-the-art technology. So there was only this, hiring locals to destroy them, shredding Strykers by the thousands.

  I walked to the fence of the yard, sticking my fingers through the chain links. The heat from the blowtorches blew across my face.

  A shadow approached the fence through the near night. “Twenty dollars.”

  It was one of the Iraqi contractors, his fireproof suit dark yellow and covered in soot and burn marks. I asked what for. He held up a tiny green cube. The remnants of one Stryker, ground into a square to sell locally. I pulled out my wallet and handed over a twenty for the armored cube. It felt smooth and flat in my palm, like glass.

  “Thanks,” I said to the contractor.

  “No,” he said. “Thank you.”

  I walked up the asphalt road that led to headquarters and crossed the yellow-grassed quad. I opened the door into the operations center slowly, hoping to get to my workstation unnoticed. It wasn’t dim laptop green illuminating the room, though, but the bright yellow of electric lights. Soldiers weren’t sitting and typing, quietly going about the business of war bureaucracy. They were standing around, prattling. They spoke at once, as if they’d rehearsed it, so I couldn’t associate the message with anyone particular.

  “Sergeant Chambers,” they said. “Sergeant Chambers is no longer with us.”

  Bodies reached for me, drawing me to their circle of grief. Ostensibly they wanted to console, but they really wanted something else, something they could break from me and take home for themselves. I wouldn’t let them, though. I stood there casual as a stone, arms down and body rigid, until they let go.

  “It hasn’t hit him yet,” I heard them say, and I let them think that, because it meant being left alone.

  Later I’d learn that he found a scorpion in his boot that morning. That was what some soldiers said, at least. Others said that was bullshit, just a stupid story. After all, the cynics argued, who ever found a scorpion in their boot in Ashuriyah?

  They all agreed on how it happened, though. It was the Day of Ashura, a Shi’a festival. They’d gone on a foot patrol through the market blocks and found a large crowd watching a young man whip himself with chains. The soldiers said that while some Iraqi kids were laughing at the man whipping himself, none of the adults were.

  “He was bleeding a lot,” Doc Cork said.

  “So much,” Snoop said.

  “Like a stuck pig,” Hog said.

  Some of them remembered the Barbie Kid being there, across the street in a ditch, just watching the festival like everyone else. Others swore he materialized out of nowhere, that they would’ve remembered him walking across the street, dragging his cooler like a gypsy wagon.

  We’re soldiers, they said. We were trained to notice things like that.

  No one would admit to remembering what came next, not clearly at least. No one would talk about it, either. No one but Hog.

  “He started looking through his cooler,” he said. “I thought he was looking for porn mags to sell us, or maybe Boom Booms. I was walking over to Snoop to ask about the whipping guy, when I heard two shots real quick—like BANG BANG. Then a different shot, which was Sergeant Dominguez shooting the Barbie Kid.

  “Doc Cork ran to them both right away. But he’d shot Chambers straight through the brain. And Sergeant Dominguez had shot the Barbie Kid in the chest. They were already dead. It all happened so fast.”

  “The shots were different?” I asked.

  “Different sounds,” Hog said. “The first two were pistol pops. Glock, I think. The last one was a whistle, Sergeant Dominguez’s rifle.”

  I thought about the strings I’d pulled to get the Barbie Kid out of jail. It had seemed the right thing to do then.

  Then I wondered where the Barbie Kid had found a Glock. No way, I thought. No way.

  I asked how Dominguez was. “He killed a kid. That’s not something you just get over.”

  I didn’t know any of that in the operations center, though. I just knew an Iraqi kid had shot Sergeant Chambers, and I was supposed to be surprised about it but I wasn’t, not at all. The major said I didn’t have to finish my PowerPoint graph. So I left.

  •  •  •

  Roaming the gravel paths of Camp Independence, I ended up alongside the eastern gate, as far from Ashuriyah as I could get. To the south lay the dulled lights of the airfield, the mire of Halliburton trailers, the club I’d never made it to. Through the muddy night to the north was the aid station we’d taken little Ahmed to. And to the west were softball fields, the bank, the detention center housing Yousef.

  I checked my pack to make sure the file was still there.

  I retraced my steps, passing the tank graveyard again. The contractors had set down their blowtorches for the night. The housing trailers rose into sight. I again thought of Chambers.

  I’d never know why he’d kept quiet about the Sahwa money. If anyone could’ve sealed my fate, it’d been him. But he’d spared me, for reasons I’d always wonder about. Maybe he thought he’d won. Maybe he thought I’d gotten what I deserved.

  In my trailer, I poured myself a glass of Rip It over ice. Two packed duffel bags stood in the corner, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The pressed, pure uniform of a fobbit hung in the closet, ready to fly home and greet my family at the welcome-home ceremony. I sat down and opened the file. One hundred forty pages of interrogation transcripts awaited.

  Most of the pages had to do with Yousef’s weapons smuggling and al-Qaeda contacts. His denials and nonresponses became names and connections around page 39, after loud Metallica songs became part of his daily regimen. What a weird thing to break someone, I thought. It wasn’t until page 92, though, and a second glass of Rip It that I found what I sought.

  Q: You said earlier that you smuggled things other than weapons.

  Detainee 2496: Yes.

  Q: What?

  Detainee 2496: Not what. Who.

  Q: People.

  Detainee 2496: People who wanted to get out of the country.

  Q: Where did you take them?

  Detainee 2496: Depends. Syria, usually. Jordan, sometimes. Lebanon.

  Q: And you did?

  Detainee 2496: Of course. It was a business. I’m a businessman.

  Q: Who would you do this for?

  Detainee 2496: Whoever paid. Rich, poor, Sunni, Shi’a.
Police, imams. Even worked with an American once.

  Q: An American?

  Detainee 2496: Yes. An officer.

  Q: Why would an American officer work with you?

  Detainee 2496: Business.

  Remarkably, the interrogator didn’t follow up, steering the questioning back to weapons smuggling along the Syrian border. The whole transcript carried an air of disbelief—someone had scrawled “Broke too easy, probs not believable” on the top of page 48. I didn’t care about any of that, though, even the part about me. I read Yousef’s “Of course. It was a business. I’m a businessman” response a hundred times, trying to glean meaning from it.

  There’s nothing here, I finally thought. No secret, no veil, no encryption. Which meant they’d made it. Or at least maybe they’d made it, which was something. And having something instead of nothing felt like everything.

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  We alter the past for the sake of the future, memories bending like light.

  I came to Beirut fleeing and seeking. Fleeing home, where I’d started drinking too much and had crashed my dad’s car into a neighborhood birch tree. I left the army under a cloud of scrutiny for the missing Sahwa money, though they never could figure out where it went. I chalked that up as a victory for personal initiative over bureaucracy, took a piss one night on the commanding general’s lawn, and left Hawaii eager to sleep in and grow my hair out, honorable discharge in hand.

  After six months of falling into all the normal veteran traps—not just the booze but also believing my own bullshit stories, believing in my own invincibility—a fresh start seemed necessary. So when a Middle Eastern studies scholarship to the American University of Beirut presented itself, I didn’t hesitate. The desert awaited, again.

  Snoop moved here soon after I arrived, though I don’t call him that anymore. He’s Qasim. He got across the Syrian border just as the last American Stryker moved into Kuwait. He doesn’t say how, and I don’t ask. We share a flat above a tattoo parlor on Hamra Street. The GI Bill pays for most of our rent, and the money he earns from selling pirated DVDs covers the rest.

  We both like smoking hookah with pretty young women, so it’s working out. I wish he’d do the dishes more, and he leaves sunflower seed shells everywhere. I remember him being more responsive during the war. If I’ve gotten soft, he’s gotten lazy.

  My mom and Will visited for a couple of weeks in the winter. I took her antiques shopping, and to lunch with one of my professors. I think she wanted proof that I was attending classes. She liked Beirut, though; said it had dignity. Will couldn’t stand being back over here, though. Creeped him out. He wouldn’t eat at any of the local spots, and kept ordering takeout from an Italian restaurant. When I made fun of him, he accused me of going native. He’s proud, though, I can tell.

  We don’t spend all our time looking for Rana and her boys, not anymore. This is a big city. More than two million. They’re here, somewhere. Sometimes I walk the refugee ghettoes and ask around. Qasim tells me not to go alone, but I’ve led men in combat—I’m not afraid of the slums. Though fingering a cube of hard green metal in my pocket is a far cry from carrying an assault rifle.

  I just want an answer for why. That’s all.

  Last month on TV, we watched al-Qaeda plant black flags on top of government buildings in Ramadi. Only thirty miles southwest of Ashuriyah; I looked it up. It wasn’t quite the Fall of Saigon, but it felt close enough.

  Every day brings more refugees, more from Syria now than Iraq. I was worried it’d make the searching more difficult, but the Iraqis and Syrians keep clear of each other. “Like scorpions and camel spiders,” Qasim likes to say. I hate that joke.

  I thought I’d found her last week. I was walking the ghettoes and spotted a young woman wearing a gray cotton dress. I pushed past people, then took off after her at a trot. She wore no face cover and her hair fell across her back in black waves. She turned a corner, and for a moment I saw a coffee stain of a birthmark and an arrow nose piercing out.

  I ran around the corner shouting her name. But there was nothing there, just the faint echo of my own steps.

  Acknowledgments

  My gratitude to:

  Parents Deborah and Dennis, brother Luke, and the Gallagher, Boisselle, Scott, and Steinle families;

  Friends and colleagues Ted Janis and Phil Klay;

  Friends and readers Elliot Ackerman, Nick Allen, Lea Carpenter, Eric Fair, Will Gehlen, Brian Hagen, Fahad Khan, Sanaë Lemoine, and Nick McDonell;

  Friends and chiefs Brandon Willitts and Words After War and Paul Rieckhoff and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America;

  Educators Loni Byloff and Mary Chrystal at Brookfield; Shelly Brewster and Hardy McNew at Bishop Manogue; Simone Caron and John McNally at Wake Forest; and David Ebershoff, Richard Ford, Lauren Grodstein, and Victor LaValle at Columbia;

  The soldiers and interpreters of 2-14 Cavalry and 1-27 Infantry who served in Iraq from 2007–9;

  Agent extraordinaire Amelia “Molly” Atlas and ICM Partners;

  Atria editors Daniella Wexler and Peter Borland and Atria publisher Judith Curr, who believed in this book;

  And, of course, fierce and lovely Anne.

  To those I mentioned, and to the many others I didn’t—Sláinte.

  MATT GALLAGHER is a former US Army captain and the author of the acclaimed Iraq War memoir Kaboom, based on the popular and controversial blog he kept while he was deployed. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and Playboy, among others. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.

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  ALSO BY MATT GALLAGHER

  * * *

  Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

  Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Editor)

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Gallagher

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Atria Books hardcover edition February 2016

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  Interior design by Paul Dippolito

  Jacket Design by Ella Laytham

  Jacket Photograph © Wesley Bocxe/Getty Images

  Author Photograph by Brad Jamieson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

   Gallagher, Matt.

    Youngblood : a novel / Matt Gallagher.—First Atria Books hardcover edition.


     pages cm

    1. Soldiers—Fiction. 2. Americans Fiction—Iraq. 3. Iraq War, 2003–2011— Fiction. I. Title.

    PS3607.A4154415Y68 2016

    813'.6—dc23

    2015014772

  ISBN 978-1-5011-0574-6

  ISBN 978-1-5011-0576-0 (ebook)