These Heroic, Happy Dead

by Luke Mogelson

  “Is that?”

  “Ain’t no lunch pail,” Murray said. He chuckled to himself, and I could tell it was going to become a thing with him. Next time we heard gunfire on the ridge—“Ain’t no lunch pail.” Next time a scorpion skittered across the tent—“Ain’t no lunch pail.” Next time someone pulled a six-inch hair from his instant eggs or the helicopters strafed or a mortar or a ZPU round whistled overhead—

  “Fuck’s that?” Sergeant Parker said.

  I preempted Murray. “Looks like someone brought a present for you, Bruce.” Like the mustaches, using their first names was something the bomb techs did to remind everybody else that they were special. I went along. They were special. “Dupree says a kid just set it down and walked away,” I said.

  “And waved,” said Murray.

  “And waved,” I said.

  Bruce Parker scowled at the monitor.

  “Empty, I bet.”

  But after he’d suited up, ventured out to Kansas, packed some C-4 around the jerrican, and uncoiled a detonation cord back to the ECP, Bruce had his game face on.

  “Not empty,” he said.

  —

  At first, when we arrived in the village and erected the patrol base, we traveled everywhere by vic. They were magnificent machines, a locomotive’s worth of steel on wheels, the awesome apogee of our desperate, decade-old pursuit of superhuman invincibility. And yet: if you sparked enough potassium chlorate under one of them, the effect was comparable to wrapping a stick of dynamite in tinfoil. Within a month, I had the platoon moving exclusively on foot. An engineer with a metal detector would walk point while the rest of the squad followed in a line, stepping in one another’s boot prints or tight-roping down a trail of baby powder. Tactically, single-file has to be the least desirable formation into which infantrymen can organize themselves. But we were getting blown up, not bushwhacked, so fuck tactical, was my thinking.

  It didn’t matter. Soon they learned to employ components with a low enough metallic signature not to register on our equipment—clothespins and rubber bands, entire trigger devices whittled out of wood—while daisy-chaining them together with lamp cord and speaker wire. Early days, before we gave up going into town, we traveled via rooftop, humping ladders to lay across the alleys like a bridge. That worked until it didn’t—until they started mining ceilings.

  We’d lost three men, all to bombs, before this business with the kid.

  Corporal Kahananui had been killed just two weeks prior. Kahananui had signed up under the relaxed enlistment standards of the late-aughts, between surges, when the army was desperate for bodies and taking any man or woman who could fog a mirror. What I mean to say is he was fat. It wasn’t his fault. He hailed from fat people—fat was in his blood. His broad skeleton, good humor, and squat neck all seemed specially designed to accommodate the inheritance. How he’d made it through basic was the subject of much chow-hall speculation. No way could he have qualified in the push-up, let alone the sit-up, let alone the run. Rather, some drill with a quota must have fudged his score a point or ten. That drill, turned out, did us a favor: Kahananui was the greatest, most casualty-producingest machine gunner I’d ever commanded. He’d fallen for the SAW the first time he felt it chugging in his arms, spraying metal down the range at Benning. Call it an affinity, like the fat kid who chooses tuba. During a tiff, he could fix a jam, reload a belt, or jury-rig a broken drum with hardly a hiccup in his surgically directed devastation. He had achieved that intuitive communion with his weapon that every rifleman aspires to. It was humbling—it was truly a delicious treat—to watch him work.

  Still, though: fat. And so, between patrols, I ran him ragged. Suicide drills with a MOPP suit and gas mask; calisthenics in a rock-filled rucksack; mountain climbers, bear crawls, cherry pickers, duck walks. Kahananui welcomed the abuse—he genuinely wanted to lose. At some point he started calling me “Coach,” an impropriety I allowed. You made allowances for Kahananui.

  Then one day I caught him skulking out of the supply trailer, his cargo pocket stuffed with Pop-Tarts. I marched him straight to the NCO tent, where we found McPherson, my platoon sergeant, reclining on his cot with a laptop balanced on his tattooed torso.

  “Now on, Kahananui gets the radio,” I said.

  McPherson tugged off his ear buds (which, from his pillow, continued to emit small sounds of screwing), that scar on his face like a continuation of his frown.

  “He’s got the SAW.”

  I shrugged. “Tough titty.”

  The SAW, with a full ammo drum and all the extra rounds Kahananui liked to carry, weighed a good thirty pounds—the radio, with spare batteries and antennae, at least twenty. On top of his flak jacket, hydration system, I-FAK, and Kevlar, it was a load. But Kahananui, in true Kahananui fashion, accepted his punishment without complaint, laughing with everyone else each time he geared up, piling that massive kit onto himself, heave-hoeing, and lurching like a warhorse out the gate.

  According to McPherson, that’s what killed him: weight. The device had been buried under the doorway of a compound they were searching. Although three men had entered the compound ahead of Kahananui—the third man having been Private Dupree—it was set too deep for any of them to compress its plates, close the circuit, and ignite the charge. Only Kahananui was heavy enough. Later, while debriefing me, Sergeant McPherson said, “With the radio and everything…”

  He didn’t finish. Didn’t need to. By the time the kid pulled his stunt in Kansas, I was sure I could sense it: a suppressed hostility disguised as the strict adherence to enlisted-officer etiquette, a respect that was the opposite of respect—no one calling me “Coach,” anymore, that’s for sure. I’d begun interpreting any friction, any hesitation or hint of dissent, as having to do with Kahananui. I imagined knowing looks behind my back, privates whispering in the tents, a growing camaraderie, among the NCOs, built on shared contempt for me. They were all in this together, was the gist—all lumbering through the same goddamn minefield every day, struggling to survive the whims of the same goddamn lieutenant.

  I felt betrayed. Didn’t they realize, big as he was, Kahananui might have triggered that mother walking buck-naked, hungry, through the door?

  —

  A few days after Dupree first spotted him, the kid appeared again, again put down a bomb in Kansas, waved, and disappeared into the trees. Bruce set the binos on the sandbags, pressed his finger against his right nostril, and ejected something from his left. “Why do I feel like there’s a spring-loaded bar behind that piece of cheese?” he said.

  “Sometimes,” I offered, “maybe a piece of cheese is just a piece of cheese.”

  Bruce looked at me. By then, I was adept at hearing what people were saying without saying. What Bruce was saying without saying was: “Then why don’t you go blow it up, asshole?”

  —

  Kahananui’s replacement, a Specialist Feldman, arrived with the next resupply. McPherson brought him to the box, said, “New guy,” and turned to leave.

  “McPherson,” I said.

  He stopped. I thought I saw him sigh.

  “That’ll be all.”

  After McPherson was gone, I glanced from Feldman to Murray, who seemed as puzzled as I was. We were both trying to figure Feldman out. The shadow of a fully receded hairline encircled his pale scalp, and his face looked like something thrown against a wall, sliding down. He appeared to have had the wind permanently knocked out of him, an unsoldierly absence of any pectoral definition whatsoever. His nose was honeycombed with capillaries; impressed lines from spectacle frames linked his temples to his ears. I’d seen generals who looked sprightlier.

  “How long have you been in the army, Feldman?” I asked.

  “Six months, sir.”

  Murray let out a kind of disbelieving whoop, turned it into a cough. Feldman, who evidently was already used to having to explain himself, said, “I was a teacher, sir. High school mathematics, eleven years. If you want to know the truth, sir, the truth is I
hated every second of it. Then my wife left me, took the kids. I’d always wanted to serve. It’s always been a dream of mine. I thought I’d missed my chance—but when they raised the age limit…”

  “Right,” I said. “What’s it now?”

  “Forty-two, sir.”

  “Forty-two,” I said.

  “Good God,” said Murray.

  “I’m not that old, sir.”

  “No, no,” I said, even though he could’ve been, even though forty-two would not have surprised me in the least.

  “Anyway, here I am,” Feldman said. He seemed as surprised as Murray and me.

  “Here you are,” I said.

  —

  In the dark, even with the goggles, you couldn’t see the baby powder. Night-ops, what we’d do was we’d break open light sticks and pour the viscous fluid over cotton swabs. The swabs, in the green world of the goggles, would smolder brightly, like radioactive mice. Not long after Feldman joined us, we followed one of the engineers, Corporal Sanchez, as he led us into the green, one hand working the detector and the other, like a wizard’s, sprinkling a trail of emerald luminescence for the rest of us to walk on.

  Sanchez had come to America on giant tractor tires lashed together with rope and cable. Once, at Fort Knox, while we were waiting in the bleachers for our turn at the range, he’d told us how, after four days drifting at sea, as his raft approached the beaches of Florida, a Coast Guard skiff attempted to intercept him. Sanchez and his raft mates dove into the water. Sanchez could see the sand, the resort guests outstretched under colorful umbrellas—then he heard the high gunning of an outboard and looked up at a silver hull, a man in a life vest reaching to grab him. At this point in the story, in the bleachers at Knox, Sanchez held out his own hand, fingers splayed, and, after a brief pause, closed it in a tight fist. Just as the Coastie was about to seize him, Sanchez said, shaking his fist, a wave peaked between them, pushing the skiff back to sea and lifting Sanchez aloft, conveying him as if on wing to shore.

  That wave had left Sanchez with a pretty fatalistic worldview, which was why he remained unbothered by the fact that after two combat tours he still had not been naturalized, and why he didn’t mind walking point at night.

  We worked our way through the woods, down the valley, and to the river, where a large compound, identified by surveillance drones as the site of frequent comings and goings, was suspected of caching ordnance. We were just about to breach when the new guy, the old man, Specialist Feldman, dropped his rifle. The clatter roused a pack of dogs, whose barking roused the cats, whose caterwauling roused the jackals—none of which was as jarring as what Feldman did next. What he did was whisper, loud enough for all to hear, “I’m sorry.”

  Back at the base, after we found nothing and no one in the compound, Sergeant McPherson took Feldman aside and spoke to him. Light was breaking. On my way to the box, I saw Feldman standing beside the entrance to one of the tents. He held his carbine high above his head, as if fording a river. To every soldier who ducked through the flaps, Feldman said, “I’m sorry.” Around noon, I stepped out for chow. Feldman was behind the serving table, holding up the carbine. As the platoon filed by, heaping food onto their trays, he again told each of them, “I’m sorry.” Feldman’s arms were shaking violently; his face was an alarming shade of purple. A couple of privates ahead of me were laughing. They must have been twenty years younger than Feldman, at least.

  “I’m sorry,” Feldman told them. “I’m sorry…I’m sorry…I’m sorry…”

  Eight hours later, he was back out there for dinner. It was an unfortunate way to have to introduce yourself.

  —

  In the week following the night-op, the kid returned twice more. The second time, I saw him for myself. Private Dupree was on duty again. He radioed me as soon as he spied him scaling the logs. I sprinted for the tower. The kid was smaller than I’d expected. He had to sort of hug the jerrican rather than hold it by the handle. After he set it down, he wiped his nose with his sleeve. I focused the binos. His kameez featured an intricate pattern stitched across its chest in white and gold. He wore a brown prayer cap. He waved.

  According to Bruce Parker, the outsides of the cans had all been marked with soil. This would have seemed to indicate that the kid was digging them up. Bruce went on to argue, however, that it would be easy enough for a person to rub on some dirt precisely for the purpose of giving that impression.

  “Mousetrap,” Bruce declared.

  I admit I was inclined to disagree. The kid, after all, was the only good thing that had happened to us since we’d arrived in that fucking village. Within the platoon, he’d come to be viewed as a kind of a win. Moreover, since Dupree had been the first one to spot him, and the only one who’d seen him twice, a degree of the kid’s juju extended to the private. In our minds, Dupree was connected to the kid, and this connection was in turn connected to Dupree also having been the last person to walk through the last door Kahananui walked through. Via Dupree, in other words, the kid was connected to Kahananui.

  It was partly for this reason that I asked Bruce to keep his theories to himself. Another reason, I confess, was that ever since the kid I’d sensed less resentment from the men.

  Specialist Feldman might also have had something to do with that. It was as if, with so much enmity focused on the math teacher, none remained for me. Every day his difficulties seemed to increase. For starters, after the night-op, nobody called him Feldman; he was known by everyone as “Sorry.” McPherson’s relentless hard-on for the specialist further estranged him from the platoon. Once, during chow, I heard McPherson say, “Who let this fucktard into my army?” and watched him march across the yard to where Feldman sat alone with a book.

  “What is that?” McPherson demanded.

  Feldman pushed his glasses up his nose and smiled. Somehow under the impression that the sergeant’s interest was genuine, he began talking with enthusiasm about the book, a history of Afghanistan, saying things like, “It’s actually quite interesting…” and “Says here the mistake the British made when they installed the shah was…”

  A few hours later, when McPherson had finished with him, I summoned Feldman to the box. He was sweating so heavily that the salt stained his uniform in thick white bands. I tossed him a water bottle, and he turned it upside down, bobbing his Adam’s apple until it was empty.

  “I guess it’s not for everyone,” I said.

  “Sir?” Feldman said.

  I waved in a general way. “Why didn’t you go officer? You have the degree. Army needs officers. How is it your recruiter let you enlist?”

  “I insisted, sir.”

  Over at the monitor, Murray shook his head. I tossed Feldman another water. “You were expecting something a little different?”

  Feldman shrugged. He was reluctant to acknowledge how poorly things were developing for him. When I suggested that McPherson would back off in time, it was nothing personal, he laughed and said, “Beats teaching!” He gulped at the bottle, wheezing through his nose. “Beats my empty condo! Beats having to see Brad Drexler every day. Drexler in the break room, Drexler in the halls, Drexler in the—”

  “Brad Drexler?”

  Again Feldman laughed. “Nobody, sir. A social studies teacher. My wife…”

  He was smiling in an ugly, crooked way, lips curled against his teeth, eyes wrenched wide. It took me a minute to realize he was trying not to cry. When I did I understood why Feldman so disgusted McPherson. Quickly, to avoid saying something cruel, I pointed at his rifle. “Just show them you know how to use that thing. That’s all that matters.”

  Feldman’s mouth remained twisted in its mocking rictus. When he replied, “Yes, sir, I’ll show them,” it was plain that we were talking about different people, he and I.

  —

  A few days later, while we were alone in the box, Murray said, “When I was in Iraq there was this squad leader. Sergeant Walsh. Not my squad leader. Not even my platoon. But everybody in the unit
knew him. Walsh was the darling. High speed, Ranger-qualified, born for the uniform. Imagine Kahananui not fat. That was Walsh. So one day Walsh and his squad are kicking down doors. They’re in this building where every time we pass it somebody fucks us from the roof. They come around a corner—standing in the hall, minding his business, there’s this kid. Young kid, like yours.”

  “Mine?” I said.

  “Only no man jammies. No week’s worth of moon dust on his face. This is Baghdad. Oh, and he’s not carrying an improvised explosive device; he’s got that going for him.

  “So Walsh halts the squad. The kid, he points at one of the apartment doors. He points at the door, says something to Walsh, and then he runs away. Interesting. Thing is, we’re talking early days—Walsh doesn’t have no terp with him. But he thinks, Walsh does, There must be some baddies in there. Sure. Why else point it out? Why else run away?

  “You know what happens next. It happens the instant they hit the door. Blast nearly brings the building down. Dude from the QRF told me a flying TV almost killed some bitch five blocks away. Walsh’s guys? Our guys? Two of them are dead.

  “Two guys in the first month of our deployment. Meaning guess what? That platoon had an entire year to get theirs. I mean these yahoos were notorious. Sure, maybe the lieutenant was a fucking psychopath. But still: it all started with that kid. Kid’s what set it all in motion.”

  Murray raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re saying you’re with Bruce on this,” I said.

  “Hold on,” Murray said. “The story’s not about the kid. It’s about Walsh. Walsh had a problem. His problem was: he thought about things. That way, he was kind of like you.”

  That way, I thought. Not the born-for-the-uniform way. Not the darling-of-the-unit way.

  “One thing Walsh thought about,” Murray went on, “one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about, was what if the kid hadn’t set them up? What if what the kid had done was warn them?

  “Good question. A few days after the attack, Walsh visits the terps. He finds their hooch, knocks on the door, is like, ‘How do you say, “Don’t go in there”? How do you say, “Go in there”?’ He says every line he can think of, every possible thing the kid might have said to either set them up or warn them. But of course none of it is ringing any bells. It all sounds the same. It all sounds like fucking gibberish.