Authors: Amber Green
I reached down casually and gave my scrotum enough of a pinch to drop the dick.
Oscar completed his shower in the time I took to rinse off. Neither of us shaved. No razors had been laid out. I had heavy five-o'clock shadow. He had none.
When I came out to the dressing room, towel draped about my hips, Oscar followed. No modesty there—he carried the towel in one hand. He went past me, straight to a bin of clothes, hung his towel on a hook, and commenced dressing.
I turned away. Drooling over the man-candy wasn't going to get me anywhere I wanted to go.
The other bench was set like a shop's table with an array of camo in tidy stacks, all the pieces comfortably worn, each neatly labeled with a size tag. A line of new boots had been laid out on the floor before the bench. Small wads of dark cloth lay between each stack.
I picked up one of the wads. A...jockstrap? I checked two more. Jockstraps. What the fuck?
"Pick a tight one,” Oscar advised.
My face heated. “I do not wear such things."
I dreamed of them. Has more exciting underwear ever been devised? But I didn't wear them.
The blond stuck his head in. “Major's here. Hurry it up."
I threw a jock at him. “I won't wear this!"
He grinned, snagging it out of the air and tossing it back. “Then you better find some other way to keep your balls from slapping the saddle with every stride, or by sunset you'll be waddling in circles, going
meep...meep
. Won't he, Oscar?"
"Shut up, Echo."
Echo blinked at that quiet order, and yes—that was an order. Oscar had rank as well as years on this boy Echo.
I eyed the jocks. For hard riding, my father had used a long strip of cloth, wrapped to hold his scrotum high and forward. In the US, I'd worn very tight jeans for support. Now...it wasn't a salacious garment. It was a very practical garment.
I hesitantly stepped into the nearest jock. It felt okay, I guess, like it wasn't there. When I bounced on my toes, though, my balls bounced more than the rest of me. No-go. This was supposed to be for support.
The next stack of jocks felt like silk, which is unworthy of an honest man. The fourth had more give than the first. The last looked like it had been worn before, but it was certainly clean. And it fit right, cupping my balls like a hand.
"Have a spare.” Oscar offered me another, black and clean but used. “Same style."
I realized the two of them were his and pocketed the spare he offered. We dressed in silence, my mind lumbering like a tired bear from the amazing fact I'd been kidnapped to the question of why I'd been kidnapped to that fine brown ass of Oscar's. And his underwear, cupping my balls like a hand.
The painful place was sealed away. Mourning my brother was something I'd have to do in my own way, in my own time.
The major, a big man in a uniform completely sanitized of rank insignia, but with a pistol at his belt, ate heartily. Mike and Oscar ate with their rifles slung at their backs, no small trick for men sitting on the floor. Echo wore a shorter, blockier SAW, the squad automatic weapon. I felt distinctly unarmed among them.
Echo and the major sat on their left hands. After a look around, Echo rearranged his feet to hide his soles. He was trying to get the basics of courtesy, then. Mike and Oscar ate with just their right hands, their soles comfortably tucked out of sight. They'd been here a while.
The major took a gulp of tea. “Your records say you don't speak Pashto, Farsi, or Arabic. Why did you lie?"
Such a blunt insult had to be deliberate. So I banked the coals of anger before answering. “I was asked
once
if I spoke Pashto. I'd never heard it called that before, and I wasn't really sure, sir, what it was. Nobody asked if I spoke Pakhto or Pukhtu. After that, they asked if I spoke any Towel-head; I don't believe I am required to answer that. I do speak a little Dari, but that isn't Farsi any more than Italian is Spanish. And I only know the Arabic we use to pray."
Mike poured the major another cupful of green tea. Mike's fingertips were square, very tidy.
The major's fingertips were spatulate, like Oscar's, but much paler and with long nails. “Do you know how much extra pay you've missed out on?"
Mike renewed my cup too. I nodded politely to thank him. “Three hundred to a thousand bucks a month."
"So you paid that much attention. Yet you didn't think it was your duty to come forward. Do the words
critical need
mean nothing to you?"
I hid behind my cup, bitter and grassy tasting as it was. “Critical need for what? You want me to pray with the prisoners, or with some suspects somewhere? I can do that. My accent sucks, though. And I warn you, it's not a Muslim thing to be overcome by the power of the Word and start spouting confessions."
The major leaned forward, knotting his red-blond eyebrows. “
Why
, Momand?"
I studied my cup. Didn't he realize he'd said the answer? “I read the newspaper. I've seen the Abu Ghraib photos. I won't be part of an interrogation. I'd serve time before I'd do that."
He settled back, carefully tucking his feet to hide the soles of his boots. “Serving time is certainly an option, given the need for accurate translation. But aside from custodial interrogation, where do you stand? Would you agree to translate for soldiers in the field?"
I sipped slowly. We were getting closer to the point here. Closer to the reason I was sitting on the floor here—possibly AWOL—more than a thousand miles from my ship, wearing some other man's jockstrap under a uniform as sanitized as the major's.
But one reason might not be all the reasons. An acceptable mission might lead to wholly unacceptable ones. Interrogation, spying. If they thought I would agree to head out undercover, to spy on my own people, they had another think coming.
My own people. I'd decided more than fifteen years ago what that meant. Why now did the question arise again?
Because the times had changed, and I had.
I accepted a third cup resignedly. “If I agree to translate for soldiers in the field, y'all will document that I'm agreeing to translate, right? So then when someone can't crack a prisoner, and they decide to blame the translator and send for another, the other one might be me. So your answer, sir, is no. With all respect, no."
His pale lashes lowered. “How about for one mission? One crucial mission. You get a letter of commendation out of it. Plus a...less official attaboy."
He dangled that carrot, let me sniff it and think about it. He was all but promising me a promotion. I'd never heard of a chief petty officer being forced to translate. Of being forced to do anything he didn't want to do. Chiefs are administrators, mostly.
But I didn't know the legal or the actual limits of what they could be required to do. And the major wasn't willing to put his support in writing. So the bait wasn't worth the risk.
Before I could say no again, he added, nonchalantly, “And you'll take all that back to your nice, safe ship."
My face tightened. He thought me a coward. Or did he instead think he could push the Coward button on a Pakhtun to get a predictable response? I took another sip and forced my aching brain to consider the matter. What he thought of my character didn't matter, but what he said could matter. What was the worst possible outcome, aside from being forced to assist the interrogators?
Being sent to the brig at Miramar for a couple of years would suck. They'd probably take my pension, too.
He could dump me here, let me try to get back to my ship without assistance, let me deal with the fallout of having left it without orders being cut. That would pretty well gut my career. I'd never see chief, but the pension would be there as backup income while I transitioned to civilian life.
I looked at Oscar's carefully blank face, then at Mike's blandly courteous one, then at Echo's squinted blue eyes and tilted head. If I'd been looking at Echo when the major dropped that insult into my tea, what would I have seen in that open, boyish face?
The major looked past me toward Mike, giving me a chance to study his face. A major is high enough in rank to have ordered someone to find a translator for him. This was different. He wanted me for something specific.
And that, I discovered, intrigued me.
I took another bitter sip. “Could you list me as medic instead of translator on the reports for that one mission?"
He relaxed, his whole body shape changing, settling to a rounder form as he shed his tension. “Roger that."
I finished my tea deliberately. They drank silently with me, as if awaiting my decision. A very Pakhtun courtesy, since we all knew I'd just agreed to join their venture, whatever it was.
They'd known I would accept it, or I wouldn't be wearing a jockstrap now. “What is the nature of the mission?"
The major again looked past me. The other men stepped away from the table to the three doorways. Each turned on a boom box. One broadcast the babble of a mess hall. The others blasted a newscast and a sermon—both with voices and accents very like the major's.
The major leaned in, dropping his voice. “A deserter has taken refuge with a Momand family. Your people. We need you to pry him out of their compound before he can make his way into one of the enemy base camps over the line."
I looked into my empty mug. The major was being very circumspect.
The Base
in Arabic is
al-Quaeda
. The line would be the Durand Line, dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan.
When the Brits had drawn that line, they'd cut Pakhtun turf in half. The Pakhtun had not been consulted. Especially not the Momand families who now lived on both sides, who remembered when they could rove seasonally over the border.
In podcasts of Pekhawar demonstrations, men would often be chanting, “Are we not Afghani? Why are we separated from our brothers?” Yet the subtitles read “We support our brothers! We reject the Satanic West!” or some crap like that. Nobody in power wanted the world to know how the Pakhtun were divided or how they resented being divided.
Oscar left his boom box to refill my cup. I thanked him, “
Dera manana
."
The major smiled faintly, and I realized I'd spoken in Pakhto.
I studied my cup.
Nanawatai
was—or used to be—an inviolable tenet of Pakhtunwali. “If your target has been extended the hospitality of a Pakhtun family, much less claimed sanctuary, the Pakhtun Way will make such a mission fruitless. You'd have to beat down every man in the hujra, including the eight-year-olds and the ninety-eight-year-olds, to drag him out. If the media find out you did that, consider the embarrassment."
Not to mention an international incident, if the Pakistani government found out.
"This man knows too much. He cannot be allowed to take that information to the enemy's leadership. On top of that, he has set my men up for punishment and shame they do not deserve. I want him brought to justice. I want you to find a way to do it."
He needed me to translate justice? “Whose justice?"
"I want him tried. I want him to shoulder the blame so my boys don't have to."
I swallowed my tea. Too much was going unsaid here. Had one of the major's “boys” talked to this man when he shouldn't have? Let him see something he shouldn't have? “Do your ‘boys’ deserve blame, sir?"
"My boys on duty there were insufficiently observant, insufficiently suspicious. New in country. Not one of them older than twenty. They let it happen on their watch, but they were not knowing accessories to what this man did. I'd stake my life on that fact."
"Boys.” I'd enlisted at seventeen, after Mom died, to send money to my brothers while they finished high school then went on to college. Only to see them enlist, one after another, in my wake. No doubt if Ben lived, he'd be quivering with eagerness to take this mission. “I will do what I can, sir."
I wouldn't be able to do much, but I'd go through the motions.
The boom boxes cut off:
click click click.
I looked sideways at Oscar. “I take it the hour is just about up?"
He nodded.
Taking Oscar's boom box to stack atop his own, Echo grinned. “Roger that."
One summer morning, just before I turned ten, the Soviets—the Shuravi—massacred a third of our
khel's
men.
Two days later, while I was still numb with the horror of washing my brother Hamid's mutilated body for burial, my mother quietly gathered her remaining sons and our three best milk goats, donned a pleated blue burqa, and rode with us over the mountains into Pakistan.
We ranged for weeks, living on milk and stolen grain and whatever I could earn with a day's work. We rode east and south from one abandoned railway station to the next. Most of them were cement ruins, stripped of every burnable scrap of wood and every sellable scrap of metal. Some were whole but empty. The echoing chambers made me think of mosques where no one dared worship.
An old woman lived in one. She drank of our milk and told us stories of the
paryan
, the
jinni
, while gunfire cracked in the night like breaking bones.
When daylight came, we moved on. Away from the gunfire.
Wild dog packs took down our goats, one after another. The hungrier dogs also lunged, foaming and snarling, at my youngest brothers. Mom would grab up the baby and defend him with the long-bladed
yataghan
, while I threw stones and swung my walking stick to protect little Mohammed. Omar, halfway between my age and Mohammed's, usually fell in behind me, holding the little one so he wouldn't climb my back, ducking with him as I swung.
Apart from throwing rocks and yelling, we mostly left the goats to defend themselves. Once, I fought off the dogs quickly enough to retrieve most of a goat's carcass. We ate heartily for a few days. Then we starved for a few days more.
At last we found gleaming tracks and followed them to a bustling station. My mother had me sell the gaunt shadows of my father's proud horses for tickets to the eastern border.
What I remember best of that trip was the sweet, sticky rice they fed us. Omar later told me we passed through a gloriously green valley, studded with flowers like masses of jewels.