“OK. Night after night, Walsh lies awake, he replays the scene. The kid appears in the hall, he points at the door, he speaks to Walsh. Everything is clear—too clear—everything except when the kid opens his mouth, what comes out? Fucking gibberish. So Walsh, what does he do? He starts hanging with the terps. He starts taking lessons. He starts trying to learn the fucking lingo. Now he’s got to know, right? It’s like this kid’s words, whatever the fuck they were, are the key to the whole shitty mess. Like if Walsh can’t understand them, he won’t ever understand anything. He figures, Walsh does, if he can learn some of the lingo, maybe then the words will come.
“Well, what do you think? We’re getting contact almost every day, losing guys, and our star NCO, our main dude, is spending all his downtime with the terps? Nope. By the end of the deployment, nobody wanted anything to do with fucking Sergeant Walsh.”
Murray turned back to the monitor and began fiddling with the joystick.
“That’s the end of the story?” I said.
He shrugged. “I got out after that tour and started working for Raytheon.”
“Jesus, Murray,” I said. “You’re telling me you don’t know what happened? You don’t know if Walsh ever figured out what the kid said?”
Murray looked at me and grinned. What he was saying without saying was: “You dumb son of a bitch, of course he never figured it out.”
—
The drones had spotted more comings and goings, and we had orders to return to the compound by the river. It was daytime. Sanchez was working the detector. He was midway across a wide, dry creek bed when he got a hit. I pulled the squad back onto the bank, and then farther back, into a small grove where a spring fed moss and trees. While we waited for Bruce to join us with the robot there came the scream of a shell and its breathtaking thunderclap near enough to wash debris across our backs as we pressed into the earth wishing she would open up. Almost immediately a second shell impacted on the opposite side of the grove, and the panic, the awareness that the mortar team was adjusting in, arrived at the same time as a barrage of small arms from our six, the bullets so close we could hear them whining shrilly, vibrating the air.
We spread out, returning fire every which way, bracing for the next mortar round to land. Sergeant McPherson yelled at the men to identify targets, locate muzzle flashes, movement, kill holes in the compound walls. I took a quick inventory and noticed, among the frazzled grunts, one soldier lying comfortably in the prone, rifle propped on a log. He was scanning a distant stand of pines while squeezing off precise, methodical bursts. The unhurried way the soldier was shooting and reloading—the way, at one point, he expertly cleared a jam without removing his eyes from those pines—stood in stark contrast to the existential alarm taking hold of the men around him.
McPherson saw it too, low-crawled over, and shouted, “What do you got?”
To which Specialist Feldman, ejecting an expended magazine and inserting a fresh one, responded, “Two o’clock. Tree line.”
Today, no matter how hard I try to transport myself back to that grove, I can’t say for how long Feldman’s little moment lasted. Half a minute? Half an hour? I suppose it doesn’t matter. For a short while, anyway, the old man was doing what he’d come there to do. He was showing them.
I was so distracted that I didn’t notice Private Dupree until he hollered in my ear.
“He’s here, sir.”
“Who?”
Dupree pointed at a patch of chaparral midway between our position and the pines. I raised my rifle. The kid was squatting in the bushes, eyes clinched, covering his ears. Clearly, he didn’t want to be there. The little bastard must have been following us, I realized, ever since we’d left the base.
Before I had a chance to consider what it might mean, or to alert McPherson, the kid did a jerky half spin, as if an invisible assailant had whipped him around from behind. I saw, through the scope, the spray. He landed face-flat in the dirt.
I looked up. The only soldier aiming that way was Feldman. He had no scope—I hadn’t issued him one yet—and he was squinting down the iron sights, trying to see his man.
The first thought that occurred to me was what a remarkable shot he was.
—
It took us until sundown, availing ourselves of close air support, to exfil home. There was no hope of recovering the kid, who in any case had been a goner before he’d hit the ground. As soon as we got back inside the wire, Private Dupree jumped Feldman. He got in several vicious punches before anyone tried to pull him off. I sent Feldman to the aid station, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. Later, I brought him some food. He was sitting on the floor, holding a cold pack to his swollen brow. After muttering some bromides about collateral damage, the nature of combat, I said, “Don’t worry about the report.”
For a moment I thought Feldman was going to object; to insist on suffering some consequences for his actions; to say, “I killed that child, and I need to pay.” I could see the noble temptation flickering like a loose bulb behind his eyes.
Then it went out.
—
I didn’t really talk to Feldman for several weeks after that. None of us did. If before he’d been a minor nuisance, unfortunate but innocuous enough, now the old man was a bona fide pariah. McPherson no longer put forth the effort to find excuses to rebuke or punish him, and the rest of the platoon, understanding this to be a still harsher form of rebuke and punishment, followed suit. Feldman was considerate. He made avoiding him as easy as he could.
A month or so after the ambush at the creek, I received word that the chaplain was making the rounds and would be at the patrol base in the morning. That night I waited until Murray hit the shower, and I called Feldman into the box.
His appearance disturbed me. What little hair he had was way too long—far exceeding regulation. It made him look even older, more incongruous in that place, and less like a soldier. I could only imagine what McPherson, in the past, would have done to him. Now, it seemed, no one had noticed.
I said, “I was thinking it might be a good idea for you to talk to someone, Feldman.”
There was evident relief in his eyes. Evident gratitude. “I appreciate that, sir,” he said.
“Good. So you agree.”
Feldman vigorously nodded. “If you want to know the truth, sir, the truth is that if it weren’t for my kids, I might just go ahead and…” He laughed. “But then, I can’t even think about my kids without thinking about…”
I cleared my throat. “What I was going to say is the chaplain will be here tomorrow, and he’d probably be a good person to talk to.”
Feldman blinked.
“Better than me, probably,” I added.
He had the same stupid, befuddled look on his face as when he’d thought that McPherson really wanted to hear about the book he was reading.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“They’re trained in this stuff,” I said. I picked up a stack of papers from the table and began flipping through them, stopping occasionally to set one facedown on a different stack.
“Should I go now?” Feldman asked.
I glanced up as if surprised to find him still standing there. “Sure, Feldman,” I said. “And do me a favor, will you? Cut your fucking hair.”
The next morning Corporal Sanchez was the only soldier at mass, and Feldman steered clear of the chaplain for the rest of the day. It was only much later that I learned that Feldman was a Jewish name—although, by then, I knew that no priest, rabbi, or other person could have helped him anyway.
—
Ours was a war that offered few opportunities, aside from getting killed or wounded, to distinguish yourself. There were no hills to charge, peninsulas to hold, bridges to seize. There was only the patrol: a year’s worth of mine-littered walks ending where they started. Maybe this is why it was with a kind of horny impatience that we kept waiting for the big one, some mad battle in retribution for Feldman’s crime.
As usual
, when it came it was a letdown.
We were finally returning to the compound by the river, which we’d postponed doing since the ambush. We’d made it past the grove and the creek bed, the chaparral where the kid had died. We were almost there, about a dozen meters from the property, when a slot in the metal gate slid open, a muzzle poked out, and someone from inside opened fire.
It lasted maybe five seconds. Neither of the two shots came anywhere near us. The gate was flimsy tin, and before the gunman could get off a third round we’d riddled it with holes. We fanned out and readied for the others. Incredibly, there were none.
“The hell?” McPherson said.
Bruce and Sanchez opened the gate. As they swung it wide, we all braced in anticipation, weapons raised. What they revealed was a shot-up corpse slumped in a wheelchair. The man had taken several bullets in the face; it was difficult to judge his age. Both of his feet were missing. Not his legs—just his feet. A Kalashnikov lay across his lap.
Sanchez patted him down. He shrugged.
“The hell?” McPherson said.
Once again, we found nothing suspicious in the compound. There were only a few mud rooms, cell-like, each with a narrow entrance obstructed by a tacked-up sheet. The sheets were floral-patterned.
I peeked into each of the rooms after they’d been cleared. All but one held farm equipment, engine parts, hay, and chickens. The sole space dedicated to human living was crammed with bedding and pillows. Colorful tapestries hung from the walls. A wooden chest stood in a corner. The soldiers had yanked out all the drawers: clothes lay in messy piles atop the cushions and blankets. I noticed that some were the clothes of a child. I sifted through them with my boot. Did I know what I was looking for? Was I surprised when I found the brown prayer cap, the kameez with the familiar pattern stitched across its chest in white and gold?
Sanchez was calling me on the radio: “You better come and see this, sir.”
I joined him behind the compound, where we’d neglected to search during the night-op, under the shade of a pomegranate tree. He stood at the lip of a yawning hole in the ground. The hole looked like the mouth of a small volcano, sloping gently, and then vertically, into a pit of uncertain depth. It was a karez: part of a labyrinth of subterranean passageways built millennia ago to transport water from desert aquifers. The system had long since dried up, leaving beneath the village a complex network of tunnels, some big enough to drive a truck through. These tunnels obsessed the CO, who was convinced that the enemy used them to travel from village to village, stash matériel, and convene shuras undetected by the drones. He’d once confided in me that he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a whole “Taliban city” down there, complete with power and roads. Of course, the implied image was the CO descending with a flamethrower, hordes of screaming gooks running out on fire. Like I say, though, ours was a lackluster war: rarely did it yield such lurid satisfactions. We’d searched dozens of these caverns, and not once had we ever found anything.
Sanchez turned on his flashlight.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
What we discovered, after Bruce rappelled to the bottom, was a burlap sack containing almost two hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate, some blasting caps, and a couple dozen carbon rods. No Taliban city, exactly, but a haul.
—
I found Specialist Feldman pulling security near the gate, brought him to the wheelchair, and made him look.
I explained how this fucking hajji—who’d attacked us, who’d been hiding enough shit to blow up half the village, who’d lost his own feet during some mishap in the workshop, and who, for all we knew, had been responsible for Kahananui and the others—this fucking hajji was the father of the kid. “Or grandfather,” I said. “Or brother. Point is, the kid lived here. They lived here together.”
Before I’d even finished I regretted it. Feldman gazed down at that brutalized corpse, and I could see him working it out. He was smart, after all, in his way. Too smart for the infantry, anyhow—although, fatally, not smart enough to have seen that in the first place. Just as I’d told Feldman one story, another was telling itself. I mean the story in which the kid was exactly who we’d wanted him to be; the story in which he’d tried to help us with the bombs because it had been a bomb that maimed his father, grandfather, brother, or whoever; the story in which the kid had followed us not just that day of the ambush at the creek but every day, ever since we’d arrived in the village and erected the patrol base; the story in which he saw for himself what happened to Kahananui, and he pitied us; the story in which this footless, faceless person had volunteered the use of his karez and launched his pathetic little kamikaze raid only after we had killed the kid; and the story in which Specialist Feldman, far from forestalling a catastrophe, as I’d suggested, was in a sense responsible for two deaths now, not one.
This story was as plausible as mine, mine as plausible as this one, and who could say how many other variations there might be, or which of them Feldman was contemplating then.
It didn’t matter. He had the rest of his shitty life to attend to all of them. The rest of his shitty life: and still he’d get no closer to knowing. No closer than Sergeant Walsh will get to knowing whether that boy in Baghdad set him up or warned him. No closer than I will get to knowing whether the weight of that radio was the weight that killed Kahananui.
—
One day, toward the end of our deployment, Murray told me he had something he wanted to show me. He reached into the gym bag he kept under the monitor and brought out an unopened can of Dr Pepper. It was the first Dr Pepper I’d seen since my leave, nine months ago. He’d been squirrelling it all this time.
“It’s going in my first machine,” Murray said. Then he went on to explain how he intended to use the money he’d earned in Afghanistan to invest in the “pop-vending racket.” “There’s only one word you need to know to make your fortune,” said Murray, “and I’m about to tell you what it is.” He tossed me the Dr Pepper can, and I held it in my palm, feeling its heft, its promise. “Location,” Murray said.
Back at Knox, I pinned the new ribbons on my dress blues, spoke at the memorials, completed my contract, and took the discharge. I saw the old platoon once more, about six months later, at a bar in Louisville. McPherson had organized a party to celebrate Sanchez getting his citizenship. When I arrived, Sanchez was parading around in a cardboard Uncle Sam hat. I’d been apprehensive about seeing McPherson, but as soon as I walked in, he threw his arm on me, yelled for everyone’s attention, and proposed a toast. He called me the best lieutenant he’d ever had the privilege to serve under, and all of the men duly agreed.
I sat in a booth with Rob Dupree. He was a corporal now, a budding McPherson. You could see the sergeant’s influence on him. He told me they’d already been put on alert again, and he seemed pleased. A little later, he said, “Look who it is.”
I turned to find Feldman stepping through the door. He wore a plaid shirt tucked into pleated slacks. He still looked like a math teacher.
“How’s he been doing?” I said.
Dupree shrugged. Then he told me something strange. He told me that Feldman had re-upped, extending his contract for another four years.
“He’s not so bad,” said Dupree.
I watched Feldman navigate the crowd. I could see that things had improved for him. No one turned his back or snubbed him; no one called him “Sorry.” Still, after a few polite greetings, silent nods, Feldman was at the bar, on a stool, by himself.
Eventually, I headed that way. Just before I reached him, I glimpsed Feldman’s face in the mirror above the taps. It stopped me cold. I was standing there, a foot or two behind Feldman, when someone yelled “Sir!” and I seized the chance to turn around, away from him, into the middle of a war story. It was a familiar one, a story we’d all heard and told a dozen times but that we still laughed and shook our heads at, even though it wasn’t true.
The sun is low on the headlands and the whole empty bay alive with sl
ippery light. On my way down the ramp I stop to admire the fleet. Not even a dozen bow-pickers remain. They are all listing and jury-rigged: plastic duct-taped over broken windows, rotten plywood bolted to aluminum. What with the salvaged tires hanging from the rails, the Styrofoam coolers bungee-corded to the cabin roofs, the impression you have is of a rogue armada of waterborne jalopies. On the deck of the Captain Smilie, Bud Jr. attends to a mini camping grill with a set of tongs. When I pass him on the dock, he eyeballs the flare gun in my hand.
“Fixing to sink?” he asks.
Before I can explain, Bud Sr. emerges from the cabin carrying a Tupperware container full of brown sauce.
“Make way,” he tells Bud Jr.
“Let me turn ’em,” Bud Jr. says.
“Give ’em a minute,” says Bud Sr.
“In a minute they’ll be burnt.”
“Hear that?” Bud Sr. asks me.
“Like yours burnt?” Bud Jr. asks me.
“I work for Sal,” I say, meaning barbecue particulars are not often my concern.
Bud Sr. removes his gimme cap and itches his bald head with the edge of its bill. “I don’t know how you do it,” he says.
“Do what?”
“Stand that ornery dago.”
When I reach the Lady Barbara, I find that Sal is out again, slumped on a bucket turned into a stool. Across his lap, the damaged net; in his fists, the shuttle and twine. A monument to dotage, complete with bird turds. All around him, gulls flock and shit.
I climb aboard. Inside the cabin, while stowing the gun, I hear a sputter from below. I roll back the carpet, open the hatch, wiggle down. The pump is clogged: foul, dark water stands in the bilge. I disassemble the housing—there, jammed in the filter, is Sal’s lucky handkerchief. At first I delight in the prospect of how I will gloat. Then I realize: he’s been down here tinkering again. Someday, I swear, I will find that geezer wrapped on the propeller shaft.
These Heroic, Happy Dead Page 11
