Youngblood (30 page)

It was his goddamn idea to go up there, I thought. And he didn't want his kids to grow up fatherless? This was the same guy who'd bragged about not knowing where two of his offspring had moved with their mother.

Then I thought about how I wasn't really the person I presented to the soldiers, either. There were parts I hid, parts I exaggerated. Maybe Chambers was the same.

Maybe.

I hung up the phone knowing there was no way I'd get back to sleep.

“Where's the last place you'd expect to find a lieutenant?” I asked the night shift. “Like, right now.”

They told me.

•  •  •

Through night vision binos, Ashuriyah was a phosphorous green pillow. The joe in the north guard station of the roof wasn't asleep, but he wasn't
quite awake, either. His body jerked when I came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Go sleep, youngblood,” I said. Among other things, I'd surrendered to the term. The private knew officers didn't pull roof duty, but was too drowsy to articulate it. He stumbled off with an “LT, thanks, LT,” and I was alone.

That private, I thought. He'd shown up with Chambers, all those lost months ago. He couldn't have been more than twenty. He was from North Dakota? New Hampshire? South Carolina? He talked a lot about how smart his Doberman was. He also claimed to have only three chest hairs, and had named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, something the rest of the platoon found hilarious. It was sort of funny, now that I thought about it.

I rotated the machine gun and scanned, the mechanized velvet of the turret rolling smooth. A hunter's moon gored the sky. Below, beyond the blast walls and mazes of razor wire, lights were scattered like lost candles.

We'd been here almost a year and couldn't even keep the goddamn power on. I thought about that while my index finger stroked the trigger well and I kept scanning, slowly. Nothing but quiet September black. An autumn chill nipped at my cheeks and at the slits of skin where sleeve met glove. We weren't supposed to smoke up here. It gave away our position. Revolutions were nocturnal beasts, though, and I figured the large camo nets and an occupation nearing a decade had also given away our position. I lit up a cigarette, cupping the cherry with a palm just in case.

My brother's message hadn't been the only one in my in-box. My old ROTC pal Chiu had finally e-mailed back. He was home in Irvine, armed with a medical marijuana prescription, trying to figure out where to go back to school. For what, he didn't know yet, but he knew school would at least get him away from his parents, who told him every day that having one leg was no excuse for being a derelict.
REMEMBER,
he wrote,
ALL REAL VETS DIE BITTER AND ALCOHOLIC! (LOL).

He'd be okay. The world needed people like Chiu.

A gunshot echoed through Ashuriyah, a tongue popping off the roof of a mouth. When only dogs answered, I grabbed the walkie-talkie and reported in.

“One round fired to the north, approximately three thousand meters away.”

“Roger that, logged,” came the response.

One round could mean anything. Kids messing around. A negligent discharge at a Sahwa checkpoint. An execution in a barn. A sniper's tidy shot through a car window. Just another prayer bead on the death string of tribal warfare, no different from any other.

It wasn't that I hadn't known their names. The people in the mosque. I'd already gotten over that. I didn't even know what they looked like, though. They were complete ciphers, anyone and everyone all at once. “Locals,” I'd call them in my war stories someday, to sympathize with the faceless people I'd unintentionally helped kill. “Iraqi citizens who wanted peace.”

I finished my cigarette, stomping it out with the heel of my boot.

Some time passed. I thought about the mosque some more, then about what was left of it. Some more time passed. The metal door that led downstairs popped open, loosing a sliver of light. I gripped the stock and asked who was there, flipping up my night vision binos and squinting.

“Why you here?” It was Chambers, his voice flexing, always flexing, but strained, too. I couldn't see his face, but pictured it drawn and ashen.

“You look how I feel,” I said, waiting for him to laugh. He didn't. “Still no patrols?”

“On standby.” He grunted. “Spec ops are on a raid somewhere nearby. Might need to clean up their mess.”

“Seems to be a lot of that recently.” I chewed on my bottom lip and waited. I really needed to learn his trick of making people nervous by not responding. “Battalion says al-Qaeda is coming after us soon.”

He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. Then he started balling his hands into fists, flexing his forearms. He stopped when he saw me staring.

“Why do you do that?” My question came out more strident than intended.

He did it again, just once, as if to prove something. “My dad was an addict. Habit I started in high school, to remind myself to not be like him. Guess it stuck.”

“Huh.” That seemed plausible, and made more sense than the bogeyman reasons I'd ascribed it. Still, I thought. Weird. We seemed so far from the time he'd joined the platoon and called me Jackie, so far from the weeks I'd spent trying to get rid of him because everything had changed with his arrival. Another gunshot echoed through the night, this one from the other side of town. More dogs barked. My report was logged.

Chambers leaned against the sandbags, stepping under the dim moonlight. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wad of dip, sticking it in his mouth. I wanted him to leave so I could be alone again, but we needed to talk, and not just because his intel girlfriend was worried.

“Been smoking, Lieutenant?” He was looking at the butt on the ground. It was a bad example for the men, we both knew. It also didn't need to be said. I leaned down and stuck the butt into a cargo pocket.

“You okay, Sergeant?” I asked. “Yesterday was—well. Fucked-up, you know?”

He answered quickly, as if he'd been rehearsing.

“All good. I mean it. Yesterday was the result of a half-assed strategy set by old men in suits who don't have a fucking clue. They hear ‘counterinsurgency' and think it's War Lite—a smarter, cleaner way. But it's not. War is always dirty. War is always about force. Yesterday's on a lot of people. But not us. We just happened to be the grunts sent there to do what no one else would. What no one else could.”

I wanted to agree with him. I wanted us to absolve ourselves of
blame, deflect the accountability elsewhere. I wanted to chalk up the ruin we'd wrought to something unknowable, like providence, or chance, or bureaucracy. But something inside implored me not to. That's too easy, it said. Be stubborn. Fight for understanding.

It had my grandma's voice.

“It wasn't anyone, though,” I said. “It was us.”

Chambers laughed, spitting out a wad of dip, the spartan creases in his face glinting. He pushed aside the droopy camo netting and looked over the roof wall at the pool of elephant grass below. A breeze stirred through the meadow, playing thistles, banging flowerheads.

“ ‘God, grant us men to see in a small thing principles which are common things, both small and great.' ” He turned his hard gray eyes my way. I must've looked perplexed. “Still haven't read Augustine,” he said.

“Oh.” His quote had gone over my head. “Not yet.”

“Doing right by soldiers can get messy,” he continued. The smell of hot tobacco in his mouth filled my ears. “We have less than three months left. Three months until they're home with their wives, their parents. Fucking kids. Just get them home. Nothing else matters. Didn't always feel that way, but I do now.”

“Yeah.” Some other things mattered, I knew, or at least some other people, but I couldn't control any of that. Still, though—I'd decided that I wanted to leave Iraq having done one good thing. One good thing free of complication and ambiguity, one good thing that proved I wasn't the type of man who used drop weapons or destroyed mosques or couldn't remember his dead soldiers' faces. A good thing rather than a lucky thing, like being told where a man's bones were. I wanted to tell Chambers all this, even though he'd probably scoff. Before I could, he spat out another wad of dip and cleared his throat.

“Soldiers been talking, Lieutenant. What happens during the day? They say you got a slam piece out there. Not that I care, but be careful. A woman got Elijah killed. You already know that, I think.”

I looked out at the dark and counted slowly in my mind. “Shit,” I
said, forcing a laugh too late. “I wish. Just a bored housewife with good intel.” I almost said it was Rana, as if I needed his permission, but held back.

“Good.” He whistled, low and without melody. “Keep lying so I have plausible deniability. Gives new meaning to ‘Be the scorpion,' I guess.”

I laughed again, but was bothered he didn't believe me, and even more bothered that he'd called Rana a “slam piece.” She was many things, but not that. Never that. Something else lingered, too.

“What happens during the day is boring,” I said. There was an edge to my voice I tried to dull but couldn't. I pointed out to the town, to the scattered lights. “What happens at night? On your patrols. Soldiers been talking about that, too. Like, where would you guys be right now if you didn't have to be here?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Combat is a hard place for hard decisions. For hard men,” he said, opening his eyes again. My question had disappointed him. “Leave the moralizing for the bystanders. You want to be one of us—be the type of officer soldiers will follow—you need to kill that part of you. Easy solutions don't exist. Not out here in Indian country. You should know that by now.”

Maybe I agreed with him, maybe I didn't. I hadn't really been listening, because he'd been tapping his right forearm, where the five skull tattoos were, each one a moment, a memory, a life taken in the desert by a gun. His gun.

“What?” he asked. He'd found my eyes.

My mouth was dry, so I ran my tongue through it before asking my question. “You gonna get another skull when we get home?”

The night air pushed between us like waves. I tried to keep my breathing steady and fought off an itch in my armpit. I wished I could take back my question, but it was too late. He spat out the last of his dip over the ledge and into the meadow.

“Never ask me that again,” he whispered, rubbing snuff bits from his teeth, unslinging his rifle so he held it from its vertical grip in front of
him, barrel pointed straight down. “Sir.” Then he was gone, away from the guard station and into the blackness. I didn't breathe until I heard the roof door close.

I was angry as I looked back out at Ashuriyah. Angry at Chambers. Angry at Iraq. Angry at myself. He's a goddamn mess of contradictions, I thought, and fuck it, so am I. But I understood myself, even when my thoughts or actions didn't make sense. Why couldn't I understand him? I wanted to, I really did, even though I'd been on only one tour and he'd been on four. He'd saved my life, and I'd found his friend. We were fucking even.

And Rana and Rios had been in love, I reminded myself. She was no one's slam piece.

I bowed my head over the machine gun and prayed for a long time, about a lot of different things.

The light patter of feet from behind broke my solitude and broke it too late. I tried to swing around the machine gun, but the tripod and sandbags held in place. I went to the ground on one knee, and my left hand dove for my pistol.

“Easy, sir. Just your guard relief.”

“Hog.” I took a deep breath and tried to push back the pulses threatening to puncture my skin. “Sorry about that.”

“It's cool. Gets creepy up here.”

Holstering the pistol, I looked down at the two chevrons on his chest he'd worked so hard to earn. Some months before, before Rana and before Chambers, before a lot of things, I'd taught him that “terp” wasn't short for “interpolator.” In turn, he'd taught me that I wouldn't want to hunt birds with a military-style assault rifle.

I thought he was going to bring up Haitham again, but he didn't. He replaced me behind the machine gun, and I stayed up there with him during his shift, talking about home. Later he asked if Ramadan was over yet. I told him almost. We shared his bag of sour gummy worms. When neither of us could think of anything to say, we listened to the wind in the meadow.

After a particularly long silence, Hog asked if I'd learned about Adam and Eve in Sunday school.

“Of course,” I said. “The first story for everything. Took place right around here, I think. To the south a bit.” I chewed through a mouthful of gummy worms. “Been thinking those holy thoughts, my man?”

“Yep.” Hog shook his head. “God's gonna have a lot to answer for when I die, that's for sure. He better have some answers ready.”

I couldn't help but laugh at that, smiling into the void of night.

T
he next morning found my half of the platoon prepping the Strykers for a quick mission to Camp Independence. There was some state-of-the-art satellite dish that battalion needed us to put on our roof, because brigade said so, because division said so, because the Pentagon said so, because the satellite dish was a defense contracting job from 2005 that'd finally been completed.

I finished the brief by telling the soldiers we didn't have time for showers and food runs this time. Captain Vrettos wanted us back in Ashuriyah ASAP, due to the report of al-Qaeda's pending attack.

“Any questions?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Washington said. “What's this dish do?”

“Need-to-know basis,” I said. I figured the dish had something to do with surveillance drones, but it was just a guess. “And we don't need to know.”

The soldiers groaned and walked to the armored vehicles. As I went to follow, Snoop jogged out of the outpost. His eyes were wide, and he held his cell away from him like a stinky piece of fruit. I grabbed it from him, but the line was dead.