The Brave (17 page)

''IT WAS a Thursday night," Danny said.

"Things had been kind of quiet for a few days. There'd been a couple of mortar attacks on the base but nothing serious, nobody hurt. It was one of the guys' birthday and his buddy in the kitchen had made this killer chocolate cake shaped like a Humvee. By the time we had to go out on patrol we were all feeling stuffed and happy."

He paused for a moment, staring out at the ocean. The waves were bigger now. A hot wind had risen and was shifting what was left of the haze and filling the air with a salty tang. Tom and Danny were sitting on the sand in the shade of some tilting palms, their shoes, father's and son's, drying side by side before them in the sun. Danny had rolled the wet bottoms of his pants up to his knees and was idly brushing the sand from his legs. Tom waited for him to go on.

At first he'd found the way Danny talked difficult to understand. He used so much military slang and jargon, so many wry euphemisms and acronyms, that it was sometimes like listening to a foreign language. Tom knew his NCOs from his RPGs but had to interrupt to ask about IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and NVGs (night-vision goggles), QRFs (quick-reaction forces) and SAWs (squad automatic weapons—M249 light machine guns). Danny had laughed when Tom asked what WTF meant (what the fuck) and again when he asked how many had been in the Hummer.

"What's so funny?"

"We call them Humvees, Dad. Hummer means blow job."

That was when Tom decided to stop butting in and just listen to the boy's story.

Danny's company had been based some forty miles north of Baghdad in a derelict food-processing plant that had been converted into a fortress. It was infested with rats and roaches and smelled evil which was probably why its first occupants had nicknamed it Mordor. The land around was mostly farmland, vineyards and orchards, crisscrossed with irrigation canals and unmapped roads and scattered with sprawling little towns and villages.

As in most other parts of the country, the local people had originally welcomed their liberating invaders with open arms, Danny said. But now they expressed their feelings with nightly mortar and rocket attacks on the base and ever-more-inventive roadside bombs. These were usually made from 155 mm artillery shells buried in the dirt shoulder or a hidden culvert but sometimes they were packed into the carcass of a dead dog or goat and triggered remotely by cell phone.

"The one that got us that night was stuffed into a dead donkey," Danny said. "Can you imagine doing that? Jeez. If we'd just used our noses we could probably have smelled the damn thing a hundred yards away."

They were a QRF of three Humvees. Danny was in the third. Those in the lead vehicle should have seen the bomb and probably would have seen it had there not been a near to full moon that night. It had risen late and huge, Danny said, casting stark shadows. And in one of these shadows, beneath a tree at the edge of a scrawny orchard, lay the donkey. In the moonlit green world of their night-vision goggles it looked like nothing more than another shaded undulation of the earth.

"I just happened to be looking ahead when the bomb went off. There was this incredible white flash and the lead Humvee bucked into the air like a rodeo bull or something. The blast knocked me off my seat. For a moment I thought we'd been hit too, but we hadn't. And when the smoke and all the debris cleared we saw the hit vehicle was nose down in the gully on the other side of the road. Rear wheels spinning in the air. The whole lower part of its right side had been ripped open. The steel all peeled back like the petals of some weird kind of flower."

Danny shook his head and stopped talking for a few moments.

"Then there was, like, nothing. Just this spooky stillness. You know, everybody just stunned, thinking, shit, has this really happened? Am I still here? And then, as if somebody's pressed the play button again, slowly everybody comes to life. People hollering and swearing, shouting out each other's names. And then all the radio babble, everybody asking what's happened, giving positions, calling in support."

Danny turned and looked at Tom earnestly, as if he really wanted him to understand.

"It's not panic. It's like a kind of controlled frenzy, you know? Everybody knows what to do. You're trained for it. But you're just so shocked and pumped with adrenaline and your head's still all blurred and ringing from the blast that it takes a while to claw your way through and remember. And that's the really dangerous moment, because while you're still stunned and trying to piece it all together, the motherfuckers who've planted the bomb and watched all the fun will usually start to shoot the hell out of you."

And that was exactly what happened next, Danny said. As they scrambled out of the other two Humvees (though scramble, Danny said, wasn't quite the word when you were each hauling a hundred pounds of gear, weaponry and Kevlar body armor), they heard the crackle and ricochet whine of incoming fire. Then the mortars started.

Luckily, Danny said, the insurgents rarely seemed to know how to aim mortars with any consistent accuracy. It was hard to tell how many were out there firing at them. They seemed to be laid up somewhere in a thick wall of reeds that ran along a canal about two hundred yards away across the orchard. Though not for long because the turret gunners of the two functioning Humvees swung around and opened up with their .50 cals and everybody on the ground did the same with their M16s, laying down a wall of suppressive fire and decorating the night with tracers.

"Like, within a minute the reeds were shredded and the trees in the orchard shot to hell. All ragged and splintered. And the bastards were either dead or shitting themselves and saving their asses, because the incoming completely stopped."

The driver of the bombed Humvee was dead and probably never knew much about it. Both of his legs were missing. Two other guys were badly wounded and one of these turned out to be Danny's best friend, Ricky Peters. He was from Pasadena and had just turned twenty. He was one of the funniest people on earth, Danny said, adored by everyone who knew him.

By the time Danny was able to scuttle across the road and down into the cover of the wrecked Humvee, someone already had an IV rigged up and a needle into Ricky's arm and he was drifting off on a cloud of morphine. A jagged slice of steel had been driven up into his groin and his legs were bloody, like butchered meat.

"He had this weird little smile on his face," Danny said quietly. "He kept trying to say something and I couldn't make it out. It was some kind of sick wisecrack about his balls. All I could do was hold him and stroke his forehead."

Danny swallowed and stared at the sand for a while. This is my son, Tom thought, my little boy. That he should have seen such horrors was almost impossible to imagine. Tom put a hand on his shoulder. And Danny composed himself and went on.

The medevac Black Hawk touched down within minutes. They all scoured the ground and found one of the driver's missing legs but couldn't find the other. For the sake of the bereaved, Danny explained, corpses were always sent home as complete as they could be. The medevac guys were supposed to take only the wounded, not the dead, but this time they did and once they were loaded up, the Black Hawk hoisted itself into the air and veered away across the moon.

Danny's squad regrouped. The job now was to find the motherfuckers who'd done this. Roadside bombs were often triggered by cell phone, but this one had been detonated with wires. One of the QRF squad leaders, a sergeant called Marty Delgado, told Danny to come with him and the two of them followed the wires in the green moonlight across the orchard while an Apache helicopter crossed and recrossed ahead of them, panning the reeds and canals with its searchlight.

Danny and Delgado didn't get along. At least, not anymore. All Marines by definition were hard-core, but Delgado took it to a whole new level, Danny said. He was titanium-grade hard-core and never missed an opportunity to let the world know.

"All rippling muscle and tough-guy tattoos," Danny said. "Always checking himself out in the mirror. And he carries all this extra gear in his pack, in case he suddenly has to climb Everest or something or go scuba diving."

Anyhow, Danny went on, a couple of weeks earlier, at the base, after Delgado had been banging on about how many superhero bench presses he could do, Danny and Ricky had been in the latrines and they were joking about it, imitating him. Not in any mean kind of way, just having a laugh, the two of them. Or so they thought.

Danny happened to mention the size of the Delgado dick (which, he added, for the record, was uncommonly small), when who should walk around the corner but its owner. Danny felt sick to his stomach, prayed the guy hadn't heard. But it soon became clear that he had because from that moment on, Delgado was on his case, finding fault with everything Danny did. Calling him clumsy and putting him down in front of everyone in the platoon.

What really sucked, Danny said, was that on this particular night, the night of the donkey bomb, the mean bastard had good cause. After they'd found the place where the bomber had laid up (he'd made himself a cozy nest in the reeds and left the wires still attached to a twelve-volt car battery), Danny tripped and found himself slithering on his back down the side of an irrigation canal. The cement was smooth and covered in slime and there was nothing to grab hold of. He ended up chest deep in the foul-smelling water.

"I tried to climb out but, what with the slime and the weight of the body armor, there was no way. I just kept sliding back. All I could do was stand there looking dumb. Delgado stared down at me and didn't say a word, just shook his head like I was some kind of imbecile. Then he took a rope from his pack and threw me one end and hauled me out."

Danny had been furious with himself and muttered something vivid and profane about what he was going to do to that little hajji fuck of a bomber when they found him. Delgado told him sharply to get ahold of himself.

There was a path through the reeds that had no doubt been used for the getaway and as they were following it—Danny dripping like a fruit strainer, stinking to high hell, boots squelching all the way—they heard over the radio that a man in a camouflage jacket and white pants (which sounded a pretty weird combination, Danny said, kind of see me, don't see me) had been sighted running toward some farm buildings just a few hundred yards ahead of them. Delgado replied that they were after him.

There was a narrow wooden bridge over the canal and they ran across and at the edge of the reeds got their first glimpse of the farm, a cluster of ramshackle sheds and block-built barns, roofed with rusted iron sheets and beyond them the taller white walls of the main building. A dog came rushing out at them, barking loudly, and Delgado shot it stone dead with a single round from his M16.

They headed toward the buildings and were about fifty yards short when someone opened up at them with an AK. The terrain was scrubby and scattered with derelict pieces of farm machinery, so there was cover enough. They returned fire and made a series of runs to the shelter of the first barn and, just as they got there, saw the man in the cammie jacket, carrying an AK, dashing from behind a shed then disappearing around a corner of the farmhouse. It was all in an instant. They fired but he was gone.

Of course, Danny said, there was no sign of him when they came around the corner themselves. What they found instead was a group of maybe a dozen women and children and a few men, mostly old guys, standing there all huddled together in this shitty little whitewashed courtyard, dogs barking and chickens skittering and squawking around them. All terrified out of their minds.

"Two of the women were holding babies. And all of them were screaming and hollering and holding up their hands. It was weird, but my goggles made them look scary. Their eyes were all white. Like they were ghosts or something. Like a gang of wailing zombies."

A moment later, four other guys from the QRF burst in through the other entrance to the courtyard and then the Apache suddenly slid in over the rooftop and hung overhead, shining its searchlight directly down on them all, which immediately ratcheted up the screaming and hollering from frantic to full-blown hysterical. Where the hell the guy with the AK had vanished to was anyone's guess.

Danny paused and swallowed again. He was sitting with his knees bunched up in front of him and he lowered his head onto them for a moment, as if summoning the strength to go on. Tom put his hand on his shoulder again and waited. A young woman was standing at the water's edge flinging a stick into the surf for a big black dog. The wind had grown stronger and shifted onshore and the waves were big now and, again and again, the dog got tumbled like laundry in the foam but always came back with the stick to ask for more.

When Danny resumed, his voice was quieter and Tom had to lean in close to hear. He said maybe it was hard for Tom to understand how hyped they'd all been that night. He said he couldn't get the image of his blood-soaked friend out of his head. Of Ricky, lying there smiling, trying to crack some dark joke about his balls being blown off. And the women wailing and screaming just made it worse. Danny was so churning with hate and fear and God knew what else that he felt as if his head were going to explode.

Then Delgado ordered him and a young private called Eldon Harker to stand guard over the crowd in the courtyard while he and the other three Marines searched the house. Danny challenged this because he'd seen the guy who'd shot at them and it seemed only sensible that he should take part in the search. But Delgado told him to shut the fuck up and do as he was told. Harker was from Cleveland and had only just arrived on his first tour of duty. Danny barely knew him. The poor guy looked scared out of his mind.