You Know When the Men Are Gone (6 page)

His parents called him David. His friends from Stuyvesant High School, NYU, and Wells Fargo called him David. His girlfriend of four years, Marissa, called him David or a singsong
Dav-vy
when she was angry with him. But everyone in the army called him Moge. And in the couple of years since basic training, “Moge” had become his identity in a way that unnerved him. Suddenly the name “David” felt too refined and prissy in comparison. Too weak. He wanted out of the army before he became this Moge character forever.

He started looking up grad schools from the communal computer room of Camp Liberty, his forward operating base outside of Baghdad. He had seven months, three weeks, and six days of his commitment left—once he got back to Fort Hood, he’d out-process and be back in New York in no time, a civilian again, a student, free.

Then they promoted him to sergeant, even though he had resisted the pressure to reenlist for another year with its twenty-thousand-dollar tax-free reenlistment bonus. A week later his squad leader, Sergeant Raines, was shot through the face, a miracle, missing his eye and nose and somehow even his brain, the bullet emerging through the planes of his face in such a way that Raines kept giving orders during the firefight, had just assumed he’d been fragged in the cheek by wayward shrapnel, until the blood leaking from the back of his neck wouldn’t stop and the medic stuck his finger inside and realized it was an exit wound. So Raines was sent to the hospital in Germany and Sergeant Moge, by default, became the acting squad leader. The guys he bunked with, shared
Playboy
magazines with, stayed up all night playing
Call of Duty
with, were suddenly “his men” rather than his buddies. It was the first bit of power the army handed over and it made the Moge in him blossom. While others dragged their feet when they were sent out beyond the wire, Moge’s men were ready and yodeling as they climbed into their Humvees, and Moge, though raised in the East Village, began to speak in an inexplicable Queens accent, his use of the word
fuck
explosively poetic.

Just when Moge had become everything the army needed him to be, his favorite interpreter, Khaled, quit. Khaled was getting married and his wife’s family thought his job a much too dangerous profession. They did not approve of his having to move to a different relative’s house every few days, leaving at dawn and taking many different buses, always a different route to the base in order to avoid being followed. Khaled apologized profusely, taking Moge’s palm in his, staring at him intently and holding his hand much too long in a way that a straight man would never hold another straight man’s hand in the U.S.

“She is my first wife,” Khaled said. “I am a fool for love.”

Moge tried not to smile, but he did manage to turn the hand-squeeze into a handshake, and then carefully remove his fingers from Khaled’s grip, patting the man on the shoulder. Khaled’s colloquial idiosyncrasies made him the company’s most requested terp, not because of his English accuracy but because he had them laughing as they rolled out.

“Congratulations,” Moge said, giving Khaled a box with a lopsided bow. He had had Marissa send him a serving platter as a wedding gift. He didn’t know if Khaled or his new wife would ever use it, the bottom was stamped with
Made in America
and therefore might be a liability in their home, but Moge had wanted to give him something.

Khaled bowed his head. “Thank you, my cherished friend.” He reached for Moge’s hand again and Moge did not pull it away.

The army gave him a new terp. A woman terp. Moge was not happy when the first sergeant informed him.

“I thought this was an infantry company, First Sergeant,” he said. “And there’s a reason we don’t have women in the infantry.”

First Sergeant looked up from his desk and Moge saw himself through the eyes of the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the company—his hair touching his ears, his wrinkled uniform, his lowly rank. Moge waited for the lecture.

“You are here to help this country, isn’t that right, Moge?”

Moge bit the inside of his cheek and just barely nodded his head.

“You’re not helping anyone if you are cowboying around without an interpreter. Now you have an interpreter. Enough said.”

Moge rolled back and forth in his boots, knowing he was dismissed but unable to leave. “What if she ... I don’t know, gets hurt, First Sergeant? The guys are going to worry about a woman in the heat of it. It’ll interfere with our mission.”

First Sergeant arranged the papers on his desk. “She chose this job. She knows the danger better than any of us.”

Just as Moge was about to step out of the office, the first sergeant called him back. “Sergeant, you’ve really squared away your squad in the last few weeks.”

Moge nodded. He remembered how, a couple of months before, one of the privates was late for company PT, so the entire squad was tasked with building a pathway to the filthy porta-shitters that were cleaned once a month. Six highly trained United States Army soldiers, among them an investment banker, a high school history teacher, and a cop, laying down gravel and scrap wood across a stench-filled morass of sucking mud. Since Moge had taken over, no one had ever been late for PT—hell, their PT scores were the highest in the battalion.

The first sergeant was watching Moge as if he could read his thoughts through his forehead. “Your platoon sergeant says you’re thinking of getting out,” he said. “Can’t imagine why a fast-tracking soldier such as yourself would do that when the civilian job market is headed the wrong way down a one-way.” Moge shrugged ever so slightly, enough to voice his disagreement without being outright disrespectful. “Moge, how else you gonna have an opportunity to be a goddamned hero?”

Moge said nothing. When the first sergeant looked back down at his paperwork, disgusted, he turned and walked out.

The new interpreter’s name was Raneen. She showed up at formation the following morning wearing camouflage, U.S. Army issue, but the decade-older version, the version used in Desert Storm, not the ACUs everyone was wearing now. She was small, five feet two inches or so, and seemed even smaller in her loose uniform, the sleeves rolled up a few times at her wrists. Her dark hair was uncovered and pulled back severely into an intricate bun at the nape of her neck. She didn’t wear any makeup and her fingernails were unpolished but clean and filed straight across. Moge’s men were silent; they had been in Iraq for more than five months and had seen very few women’s faces, just shadowy
abayaas
floating like dark, nunnish ghosts down the streets of Baghdad, the occasional American female reporter in a bulky Kevlar vest and surrounded by security, sometimes an older Iraqi woman with a colorful
hijab
scarf over her head in the Green Zone.

Their first mission with Raneen was an easy one: there was a new girls’ school on the outskirts of Dora. The headmistress had written a halting letter to the base’s battalion commander asking for school supplies and a generator. Moge and his men had a few boxes of pencils and crayons, spiral notebooks and soccer balls, a case of water bottles, six cans of peanut butter, saltine crackers, and apples stolen from the mess hall—if a school was overtly asking for aid from the Americans, it had to be in desperate need.

It was quiet in Moge’s Humvee, none of Khaled’s incessant questions about why Americans prefer college football to soccer, why Britney Spears was viewed as more beautiful than the resplendent Catherine Zeta-Jones, why Americans look so fat on television but the soldiers were so skinny.

“Hey, sister!” one of the men shouted from the back of the truck. Moge looked down the line, catching Specialist Brodis Dupont elbow Crawford.

“Welcome to the Boom Boom Room,” Dupont continued. Trapped laughter hissed from behind the hands of the soldiers next to him.

“That’s ‘Boom Boom’ Dupont,” Moge said to Raneen. “He’s survived three IEDs, two of them in this same Humvee.” Moge tapped the soft wall for emphasis. “He’s first platoon’s very own living, breathing lucky charm.”

The soldiers high-fived and then Dupont, never one to let the attention of a woman pass him by, called out again, “Lady, maybe you can settle something we’ve been debating since we got to this upstanding country.” He hesitated theatrically. “Do you all eat pork?”

“Cut it out,” Moge said. Dupont was a good soldier and a bright kid, had been a third-string tight end at LSU until he ran out of money, blasted gangsta rap through his headphones but smeared sunblock on his cherrywood-dark skin every morning, and called his momma in Baton Rouge once a week. Moge suspected he also had some serious PTSD, that he was the kind of guy who would have a difficult time staying out of trouble back at home when there wasn’t a sergeant looking over his shoulder all the time.

“What, Sar’nt? I’m just trying to broaden our ‘Moos-lim’ cultural awareness. Everybody wants to know if a Muslim can eat hot dogs but nobody asks. Has she ever had the distinct pleasure of biting into a plump, dirty-water dog on a hot summer day? Or maybe a spicy, thick hunk of good ol’ Louisiana
andouille
sausage? This is something we are very eager to know.” All the soldiers were laughing by now, heads lowered into the stiff padding of their Kevlar vests, their rifles knocking into their helmets, leaning into one another and shaking their heads.

Raneen had been looking out a window but now she slowly turned and directed her gaze at Dupont. She didn’t say anything, just stared, the laughter drying up, the men glancing away, until even Dupont lost his grin, finally shrugged, and bent over to tie the already perfectly tied lace of his boot.

Moge rubbed his chin against his shoulder to hide a smile. So this chick might be okay, he thought. Raneen went back to looking out the dust-spattered window, her face emotionless.

Two of the Humvees pulled security around the school, guns out, creating a half-moon of camouflage against the dilapidated building. It had been hit by a mortar to the left of the entrance, the concrete still crumbled and loose, but someone had stuck fake flowers into the rubble and it almost looked cheerful. A tall woman in a headscarf stood in the doorway wringing her hands, glancing around at the Humvees and soldiers with their guns, looking at the blank windows of the buildings surrounding the school.