Youngblood (33 page)

T
he outpost was a zoo the next morning. Another platoon was driving out the front gate to deliver the
fasil
payments as the logisticians arrived with a delivery—the last shipment of foam mattresses from a contractor leaving Kuwait. First Sergeant said we didn't need them, but could hand them out to locals. They also had the infamous satellite dish. Meanwhile, a group of Rangers arrived unannounced, a captain built like a viking needing to talk to someone about “high-value targets.” The rest of the Rangers remained in their Humvees, eyeballing our soldiers with carefully cultivated disdain.

On the outpost stairs, Captain Vrettos admired the pistol holstered on my chest plate—Saif's olive Glock—and asked what I had planned for the day.

“I could meet with the Rangers if you want,” I said. “But I have a meeting slated with that source from out west. Going to take us to a graveyard in town. Something about the real Cleric.”

“No, I'll handle the Rangers.” The commander's mind seemed elsewhere, perhaps at Camp Independence, where the Big Man had said he had no second chances left—it was peace or bust. “Stick with your patrol. Just get some good intel, please. We've got to figure this out.”

If I felt any guilt about misleading my commander, the thought of spending time with Rana quickly displaced it. I'd called the previous night to thank her for saving lives—our lives. She again refused the offer of cash, but said there was another way I could repay her.

“Anything,” I said.

“My family is buried together, in south Ashuriyah,” she said. “I haven't visited them in years. Perhaps you could take us.”

“Of course,” I said. “But this is a small thing. We're still not even.”

I didn't let her hang up until she agreed with that.

A daisy chain of sweaty, grunting soldiers led down to the foyer, with a variety of items being passed up the stairs from large cargo trucks outside, crates of Rip It and jugs of bleach and Memory Foam pillows that'd come with the mattresses. In a corner of the first floor stood Alia, mopping the red-and-white tiles with indifference. She wore a gray
abaya
and leopard-pattern head scarf, and her attention was focused across the octagonal foyer. She was watching Chambers, still in his body armor, yelling at soldiers to daisy-chain faster. I watched her watch him while the same section of tiles got mopped again and again. Then, as if her Spidey sense had tingled, she turned with her mop into the corner.

I walked over to Chambers and placed a hand on his shoulder. We hadn't spoken since the roof.

He looked up with a jerk. “Lieutenant,” he said. “What's the patrol today?”

I tried to visualize him the way Rana remembered him from 2006: eager, brash, more peacock-like than Machiavellian. It didn't quite fit what I saw in front of me.

“Source meeting out west, again. About the real Cleric. Think we're getting closer.”

“Really.” He crossed his arms and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, as if he were testing a new angle to see me for what I really was. “Think I'll come along. Be good to get out in the day again.”

No way, I thought. You'll ruin everything.

“Be great to have you,” I said. “For any patrol. But honestly, man, this is the source that saved us the other day. You're the hammer. These people remember you.”

“ ‘The hammer'?” I thought he'd be pleased at being described this way, but it seemed to bother him. “Hajjis call me that?”

“Yeah. You do your thing, we do ours. Seems to be working.” I swallowed. “Seems like it'll get the guys home. Nothing else matters.”

“Nothing else.”

His eyes crinkled with doubt, but when he unbuckled his helmet
strap, I knew I was safe—that
we
were safe. I turned to walk outside to the Strykers, but Chambers called me back.

“Lieutenant,” he said. “You still a believer?”

I'd tried to read the opening of
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
but found it tedious. “I don't always get God, but, yeah, I guess I am.”

Cloudy green met pale slate again. I stood up a bit straighter and stood out a bit wider, mentally counting to ten in Arabic.

“Not that,” he said, pushing past and smelling of ugly sweat. He walked upstairs, not bothering to glance at the mural above. Pedo bin Laden and the smiling children looked surprised at this for some reason. The Mother Hajj didn't.

On the patrol to Rana's, I considered what Chambers had meant. I wasn't sure. Then I considered the rumors about Rana and me. Today wouldn't help, I knew. But she'd earned it.

She's a good source, I told myself. She saved us. I'm not overvaluing her info because I like her. Though I do. As a person, I like her. She's interesting. The ramp dropped just then, and I saw Rana and her boys in the daylight.

They'd dressed for the occasion. Ahmed and Karim wore matching white collar shirts tucked into navy trousers. The eldest wore a brown belt and his ubiquitous scowl, while Karim stared at the declining Stryker ramp with mouth agape, his bug eyes wider than usual. Both boys had slicked down their hair with water so it clung to their scalps like hay. Their mother wore a black burqa made of silk with a translucent veil that didn't entirely conceal the greenness of her eyes.

I took off my headset and smiled.

“You're the best, Jack,” she said. “This means so much.”

“No problem,” I said with a too-casual shrug. “Rana.”

She asked if we would take a picture of them dressed up. Snoop hopped out and played photographer, using her cell phone. None of the Iraqis smiled for it. Then they took a seat on the cushioned bench in the rear of the vehicle, Rana in the middle, holding her boys' hands.
Karim nuzzled into his mother while Ahmed whispered into her ear. Across from them, Snoop laughed.

“They think they're in a robot,” he said. He leaned forward and spoke to the boys, offering them sunflower seeds. Ahmed didn't respond, but Karim gave the terp a shy smile and accepted a handful. The ramp closed slowly, like a drawbridge, the ochre glow of electronics filling the space between. It
is
kind of like a robot, I thought.

The crunching of tires on silt turned to the quiet of smooth pavement. As we pushed east back to Ashuriyah, Ahmed asked Snoop where his mask was. Snoop groaned and said something about losing it. Since the Big Man's edict, he'd also given up carrying around his plastic rifle, becoming more remote and moody in the process. I needed to talk to him again about his plans for after the withdrawal. As soon as I had the chance, I would.

I switched the Stryker's internal screen from the digital map to the camera of the driver's view, so the boys could watch the passing landscape. Even Ahmed's face brightened with interest, and he tugged at his mother's sleeve to make sure she was watching, too.

“How long?” I asked Rana. “Since you've been to the cemetery.”

“We came for my father's burial.” She patted Karim on the head, ruffling his hair. “This one had just been born.”

Compared to Snoop, the Iraqis looked like baby birds on their bench. Rana's legs barely reached the floorboard. As we swung south into Ashuriyah and under the Cleric's arch, Ahmed fell back into the legs of the joe standing out of the rear hatch. If the soldier even noticed, he didn't show it, remaining upright and rigid. In the meantime, Snoop helped the boy back to his seat, and I put on my headset to yell at the drivers to slow down.

“Are you eating?” Rana asked as I removed the headset again. She tilted her head toward me. “Your face looks thin.”

“Back to three meals a day,” I said. My appetite hadn't returned with the end of Ramadan, though I ate enough to keep functional. I flexed a bicep. “Can't you tell?”

“I don't like being lied to,” she said, her dimple flashing in amusement. “I already have two boys. I don't need a third.”

I smiled back, though it felt like the corners of my mouth were glowing warm from embarrassment. I changed the subject.

The four Strykers halted at the graveyard's entrance. Over the radio, I told Washington to join us on the ground as security and everyone else to remain with the vehicles. Valium addict or no, the two children loved him.

I stepped into the late morning. The graveyard lay at the end of a road of packed dirt on the outskirts of town. There was nothing south of it, only dusty badlands cleaved by the occasional ravine, but a convenience store sat across the road in a cement bunker. A wrought-iron fence the color of milk enclosed the graveyard itself, a swing gate the entrance. A small bronze plaque hung from the gate, pink and green graffiti covering the engraved Arabic script.

“Message from Jaish al-Mahdi,” Snoop said. “It say, ‘Home for Sunni donkeys.' ”

“What up, Scowls!” Washington joined us at the entrance, greeting Ahmed with an exaggerated hand slap. A learned smirk and jutted chin I recognized as my soldier's own crossed Ahmed's face. Karim, still holding his mother's hand, tugged her down and said something in a soft voice, pointing at Washington and Snoop, and then at me. The terp laughed heartily.

“He wishes to know,” Rana said, “why some Americans are painted and some are not. I've tried before.” She turned my way. “Perhaps you have an answer?”

I racked my brain for a simple way of explaining to a child the racial history of humanity. I pointed to the gray sky and then to the skin on my arm. “The sun,” I said. “My ancestors lived far to the north, where there's less sun. Your ancestors lived here, where there's more sun. Their ancestors lived in the south, where there's even more sun. We're all the same underneath. It's just the skin that changed, depending on where people lived.” I turned to Snoop. “Think you can translate that?”

“Nice work, LT,” Washington said. “Not even that racist.”

Karim nodded, rubbing the back of his head, which produced a spiky cowlick. His mother thanked me. I blushed again.

Rana opened a black umbrella to keep the sun off, and we followed her through the entrance, one at a time, Washington conducting a radio check with the Strykers in a brittle cotton drawl. We walked in pairs: Rana; Karim at her heels, holding on to her dress; me and Snoop; and then Ahmed and Washington in the rear.

The dirt path soon turned to disordered mounds of earth and sandstone markers, graves upon graves jumbled together. There was no grid, no discernible system whatsoever, just sun-blasted rocks and calcified yellow dirt. As we eased down a knoll, the graves became more spread out and distinctive: some had stucco tombstones; others were marked by small religious flags hung over them. A group of tabbies with fur like sunbursts had gathered between two tombs for shade. Most watched us pass indolently, though a tomcat draped in dead flowers hissed.

Umbrella in front of her like a pike, Rana pointed to a crypt made of sun-dried brick with a porcelain-green dome, but my eyes drifted left, down the hill. In a depression lay lines and lines of markers, uniform and ordered. Plastic flowers rested next to the markers, the nearest adorned with portraits of young men holding rifles and wearing bandoliers of ammo across their chests.

“For Sunni insurgents,” Snoop said. “The sign calls it the ‘Garden of Martyrs.' ”

A pair of gravediggers were planting shovels into the ground on the far end of the depression. I waved at them. One waved back. I squinted my eyes hard until the markers fell out of focus and I tried to see the soft green hills and marble heads of the garden of martyrs back home.

It didn't work.

As we neared the al-Badri crypt, the mounds thinned into a pathway. A square of brown grass surrounded the crypt. Rana leaned down and pulled a few blades from the ground, shaking her head in frustration. A splintered wood door about my height led into the crypt itself. Rana produced a key and pushed it open. I instructed Snoop and
Washington to stay back, pushing Ahmed forward to join his mother and brother, but Rana waved us to the fore.

“My father thought well of Americans.”

The crypt smelled of sour earth and incense. Removing my helmet and gloves, I ducked down into it, finding a wide, circular room that could've fit twice our number. A shuttered window at the top of the circle allowed for gashes of air. The floor of mosaic tiles fell into a pit in the center of the room, round cinder tombstones marking the graves. I looked up at the underside of the dome. It'd been painted with the golden-black eagle of Iraq, wings tucked, talons clutching a scroll.

Rana asked Snoop something in Arabic.

“Gene-a-ration,” he said to her, sounding out the syllables. “Gene-a-ration.”

“No,” I corrected. It's gen-a-ration.”

“Yeah, that's what I say.”

Rana's voice slipped back into rutted English. “My father's grandfather is buried here, too. Three gen-a-rations of al-Badri sheiks rest beneath us. Or gene-a-rations.”

Walking along the pit's edge, she indicated which marker belonged to each dead sheik. Then, grabbing both her boys' shoulders, she leaned down and told them of the powerful, wise men whose blood flowed in their veins. Karim looked into the pit with the clean smile of a child, feeling the gaps between his teeth with his fingers, but his older brother nodded darkly, as if he'd felt the ghosts guiding him through the world all along. Now he knew their names.

Leaving Snoop and Washington in the back of the crypt, I walked to the far right of the pit, where Rana had indicated her father had been buried. I did my best to make the moment feel surreal. Here lay Sheik Ahmed. I fought off a seditious yawn and asked about the marker next to Sheik Ahmed's.

“For my brother,” Rana said. “He wanted to be buried in the garden outside, with the others, but our father wouldn't allow it.”

“Oh.” I stared at the small rise in the ground and wondered how it fit a prince of al-Qaeda. “I shouldn't have asked in front of your children.”