“Nam. Shi’a,” he pointed at himself.
“Bush good, no Saddam?”
“Saddam no good.”
“Bush no good,” I said. “Bush Ali Baba.”
“No!” the older one said, aghast.
“Saddam, Bush, same-same,” I said. “Ali Baba, Ali Baba.”
“No, Boosh good,” the young one said.
I shrugged. “Ali Baba.”
The older one pointed at me. “You Christ-ian?”
“La. No god.”
He looked cross: “Yes, God.”
“La.”
He shook his head. “No good.”
I shrugged.
There was a bang at the door. I pointed at the young one and pointed at the door, then got up and grabbed my rifle and followed him to it. “F’tal bob,” I said, and he unlatched the gate and put his shoulder to and slid it open.
A middle-aged hajji stood outside in a dishdasha. A couple more stood back behind him.
“Salaam a-leykum,” I said.
“Leykum-a-salaam,” he said back, bowing slightly.
“What’s up?”
He started talking Arabic, but then he said, “Bomb, bomb, koom-ballah. Ali baba.” He gestured back for one of his friends to come up.
“We have information,” the guy said. “Bomb and bad yes.”
“Okay, hold on.” I turned back to Reading. “Fucker,” I shouted. He looked up.
“What?”
“Get on the radio and see if you can get a translator.”
“For what?”
“This guy says he has information.”
“About what?”
“About your mom. Fucking call somebody.”
Reading picked up the walkie-talkie and called SSG Reynolds. They talked back and forth for a minute, then Reading shouted, “Sergeant Reynolds gonna go see if he can get one.”
“Call up Red Steel Main and see what they say.”
“What I tell ’em?”
“Tell them we have an Iraqi here who says he has information on a bomb.”
“He got a bomb?”
“He has information on a bomb.”
“Information.”
“Yeah.”
“So what?”
“So call Red Steel Main.”
He picked up the other walkie-talkie and called Red Steel Main. He talked to them for a few minutes, then shouted at me, “They said he gotta go to Foxtrot Gate.”
“That’s the one on the south side, right?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Then SSG Reynolds called Reading back, so I waited, and when they were done Reading shouted, “He said he can’t find a translator, and I told him Red Steel Main said send him to Foxtrot Gate and he said that’s fine.”
I shrugged and turned back to the hajjis.
“You go around, go to Foxtrot gate,” I gestured around, pointing toward the south edge of the FOB.
“We have in-formation,” the one said again.
“Yeah, I know. You have to go around.”
“Go round?”
“Yeah, go to Foxtrot gate. The other bob.”
“You help us? Ali Baba?”
“No, go around. You gotta go to the other gate.”
“We have in-formation. Koom-ballah.”
“Yeah, I understand. Look, you gotta go around. Salaam,” I said, grabbing the gate and yanking on it. “Sit’l bob,” I shouted at the ICDC.
The hajjis started shouting in Arabic, but I closed the gate and latched it and we went back and sat down.
* * *
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That noise. Like grunting.”
I listened. It sounded like it was coming from the tower.
“What the fuck?”
“They fucking up there?”
“Dude, I hope one’s female.”
“Turn the hose on ’em.”
“Shine the flashlight.”
I shined my flashlight up at the guard tower. We couldn’t see anything. The grunting continued and I turned off the light. A few minutes later the grunting stopped, and then about twenty minutes after that a soldier came down and used the Porta John. Under the Kevlar and armor and shapeless DCUs, you could almost tell she was female.
“I’m gonna say something,” Reading said.
“What you gonna say?”
“I don’t know. Lemme think.”
“Ask her how it feels to be on the tip of the spear.”
“That’s fucked up.”
“See if she cleaned her weapon.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Ask if she did a proper PMCS.”
The soldier came out of the Porta John.
“How’s it going?” Reading said.
She ignored him and headed back to the tower.
“Let us know if you need anything,” he called after.
“Fuck off,” she shouted, not looking back.
* * *
We got off shift. Daytime, nighttime. I slept about five hours. When I got up, I worked out, then cleaned my rifle and watched Malcolm in the Middle. Reading slept.
We lost track of the other guys, the daily patrols, what the fuck was happening. We started talking all the time in pidgin English. The big news was that one patrol got attacked by a retarded kid throwing rocks. He threw a rock and hit Jasper in the face, knocking out one of his teeth. The patrol stopped and Lieutenant Perez y Luca and Roberts covered the kid.
The kid picked up another rock.
“Put the rock down,” Roberts shouted, but the kid lifted it up like he was going to throw, so Roberts shot him in the chest.
Healds was with them, so he patched the kid up and they drove him to the hospital in the Green Zone.
A week or so later they got me and Reading up in the middle of the day, when we were trying to sleep, and made us go down to formation. They had a little ceremony and awarded Roberts a Bronze Star for valor. Captain Yarrow talked about what a great job he’d done defending the patrol.
“The only thing Roberts did wrong was forget his training,” he said. “We trained and trained, two rounds center mass! Maybe next time you’ll get it right!”
We all chuckled. Roberts stared straight ahead.
* * *
A couple days later I ran into him outside.
“Chaku maku,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“For what it’s worth,” he said.
I shrugged. “You did what you had to.”
“Sure.”
“Look, I’m sure you did the right thing. Least you got some action.”
He shook his head. “Yeah. Whatever.”
“Any word on when we’re leaving?” I asked.
“Man, they don’t even pretend to tell us dates anymore.”
* * *
Reading sat watching Friends. I read Chomsky’s For Reasons of State. Headlights flashed at us from down the road and I shouted at Reading to put his DVD player away. I put on my Kevlar and stood and grabbed my rifle. A big black SUV rolled up and a Sergeant got out.
“At ease,” he said. “You on guard here?”
“Roger.”
“Look there’s a suspected VBIED attack tonight. We’ve got jammers in here, but you’ve gotta shut your radios off while they work.”
“Uh, alright. Let me call up higher and let them know.”
I called up Red Steel and SSG Barton and let them know we were gonna be out of radio contact. Red Steel verified that the jammers had priority. Then I shut the radios off and the Sergeant said thanks and climbed back in his truck.
Reading went back to Friends. I went back to my book. They stayed there for about two hours, then the Sergeant opened his window and told us we could turn our radios back on. After that they left.
Ali Dudeki came by and asked us to bring him ficky ficky magazine. I offered him the Michael Jackson Vanity Fair but he didn’t want it.
“You bring ne ficky ficky tomorrow, any o’clock?�
�� he asked. “Tomorrow and tomorrow?”
“No ficky,” I told him. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
CONTRIBUTORS
David Abrams is the author of Fobbit (Grove/Atlantic). His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, and other literary quarterlies. Abrams retired in 2008 after a twenty-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist. In 2005, he deployed to Baghdad with the 3rd Infantry Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Colby Buzzell served as an Army infantryman in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. Assigned to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Buzzell blogged from the front lines of Iraq as a replacement for his habitual journaling back in the states. He is the author of My War: Killing Time in Iraq and Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey.
Siobhan Fallon is an army spouse whose debut collection of stories, You Know When the Men Are Gone, was listed as a Best Book of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and Janet Maslin of the New York Times. Fallon’s stories and essays have appeared in Salamander, Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters, Publishers’ Weekly, among others, and she writes a fiction series for Military Spouse Magazine. She earned her MFA at the New School in New York City and lives in Falls Church, Virginia, where her husband is still active duty. More can be found at her website www.siobhanfallon.com.
Matt Gallagher is Senior Fellow at the nonprofit Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and the author of the war memoir Kaboom, published in 2010 by Da Capo Press. A former Army captain who served fifteen months in Iraq, he is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.
Ted Janis graduated from Wake Forest University and was commissioned as an infantry officer in the United States Army. He served in the 101st Airborne Division and 75th Ranger Regiment, deploying twice to both Iraq and Afghanistan. “Raid” is his publishing debut. He currently lives in New York City and studies international affairs at Columbia University.
Mariette Kalinowski served in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq twice, in 2005 and 2008, and discharging as a sergeant. Her experience as a heavy machine gunner on convoys led her to focus on women’s perspectives of combat and war, since women’s involvement in the wars is too often dismissed. She is an advocate for women veterans and participated in the documentary Service: The Film. She currently studies in the Hunter College Master of Fine Arts program and is working on her first novel.
Phil Klay is a Marine Corps veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a graduate of the MFA program at Hunter College. He has been published by the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and Granta, and is completing a short story collection to be published by Penguin Press.
Gavin Ford Kovite was an infantry platoon leader in Baghdad from 2004 to 2005. After his deployment, he attended NYU School of Law and has since returned to active duty as an Army lawyer. His work has been published in Flatman Crooked and in Nine Lines, the journal of the NYU Veterans Writing Workshop.
Perry O’Brien is an Army veteran of Afghanistan and a conscientious objector. He is currently a labor organizer and an MFA student at New York University. His work has appeared in New Letters and New Labor Forum, and he is the co-author of After Gandhi: 100 Years of Nonviolent Resistance.
Roy Scranton’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, LIT, New Letters, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He earned an MA from the New School for Social Research and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Princeton University. He was an artilleryman in the US Army from 2002 to 2006, and served in Iraq from 2003 to 2004 (1st AD). “Red Steel India” is from his novel War Porn.
Jacob Siegel is an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is from Brooklyn. Mr. Siegel’s work has been published in New York Press, New Partisan, and The Arch. Currently he is writing a book that he describes as a pulp detective novel set inside an epic detective novel. He would rather not say anything more about it but if agents or wealthy patrons are interested the working title is Lucifer’s Nightgown.
Roman Skaskiw’s work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Stanford Magazine, Front Porch Journal, on GoNomad.com, the Mises Institute website, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His six years in the US Army included completion of Ranger School and Jumpmaster School, two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, and one with the Kunar Province Provincial Reconstruction Team.
Andrew Slater served in the US Army as an infantry and Special Forces officer from 2000 to 2010. He deployed to Afghanistan (2002–2003) and Iraq (2004) as an infantry platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne Division, followed by two deployments to Iraq (2006–2007) and one to Afghanistan (2009) with 5th Special Forces Group. He received a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Columbia University and currently teaches high-school English in Erbil, Iraq.
Brian Turner (author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) served as an infantry sergeant in Iraq (2nd Infantry Division) and in Bosnia (3rd Mountain Division). He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. His work has appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others.
Brian Van Reet was born in Houston, Texas. In November 2001, he dropped out of the University of Virginia and enlisted in the Army. He served as a tank gunner with the 1st Cavalry Division and was awarded a Bronze Star with “V” Device for combat actions in Baghdad. His fiction has received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, won the Gulf Coast Prize, and has appeared in journals including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Brooklyn Review, and Evergreen Review. He lives in Austin where he holds a James A. Michener Fellowship.
CREDITS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
“Roll Call” by David Abrams © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Play the Game” by Colby Buzzell © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Tips for a Smooth Transition” by Siobhan Fallon © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Bugs Don’t Bleed” by Matt Gallagher © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Raid” by Ted Janis © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Train” by Mariette Kalinowski © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Redeployment” by Phil Klay © 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“When Engaging Targets, Remember” by Gavin Kovite © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Poughkeepsie” by Perry O’Brien © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Red Steel India” by Roy Scranton © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Smile, There Are IEDs Everywhere” by Jacob Siegel © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Television” by Roman Skaskiw © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“New Me” by Andrew Slater © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Wave That Takes Us Over” by Brian Turner © 2013. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Big Two-Hearted Hunting Creek” by Brian Van Reet © 2009. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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