Youngblood (34 page)

She moved to my side like wind wrapped in black, touching my arm. I turned to look at her through the veil. “They will have his mind. They will have his kindness, his caring for other people. They will not have his anger.” She folded her arms and looked down at the remains of her family. “So they must learn about him.”

Rana let go of my arm and moved to the floor, tucking her legs under her and facing the pit, telling Ahmed and Karim to do the same. Snoop followed suit. I turned around and shrugged at Washington, who shrugged back. We joined the others in Muslim prayer, something Karim found humorous, as he kept sneaking furtive smiles at Snoop. His brother ended that with a quick smack of the head.

Rana muttered in impenetrable Arabic for a full minute, Snoop and Ahmed joining her for bits and pieces. She bowed quickly, producing a small bottle of rosewater from an unseen pocket and sprinkling it down upon the ground beneath us. Once the bottle was empty, she returned to her knees.

“How do the Irish bury their dead?” she asked me.

“It's similar,” I said. Closing my eyes, I probed my mind until I found something suitably nondenominational. “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God, may Allah, hold you in the hollow of His hand.”

When I opened my eyes, they again fell upon the graves of the legendary sheik and his defiant son, two smeared moons of cinder in the dirt. I thought of Shaba's burned carcass and grinning skull. I've found you all, I thought. Now what?

I joined the others on my feet.

A solemn quiet filled the crypt, a draft of wind whistling through the room from the window. Karim started puckering his lips. Ahmed told his brother to stop, which only made him do it more. Ahmed then put him in a headlock and punched him in the ribs. Rana was still staring into the pit. She asked her boys to go play outside. Washington and Snoop followed of their own volition.

“Elijah was supposed to come here,” she said, once we were alone. “But al-Qaeda would not give us his body.”

“Why not?” I asked, even though I knew why.

She sighed, the swamp blossom scent of her perfume coming with it. “Life was impossible back then. First came the Collapse. Then the Shi'a death squads and the civil war. It didn't matter to them that Elijah had become Muslim. It didn't matter that this was his home. It didn't matter that we were to be married.” Her voice turned to chrome. “Only the war mattered.”

I waited for tears that didn't come. She patted my hand with her left one, sending quivers like light up my arm. “Wish I'd met him,” I said. “Like his tattoo about liberating the oppressed.”

She let go of my hand. “He only had one tattoo. It didn't say that.”

“
De Oppresso Liber
?” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Latin. On his chest.”

Even through the veil, I could see her eyes turning to splinters. “He had a tattoo on his chest. It said”—she knocked her forehead as she searched for the pronunciation—“ ‘In-fi-del.' He said it was a joke for Americans.”

“Oh.” Fucking Chambers, I thought. What a goddamn fraud. “I see.”

“He was a man, like any other.” She sighed again. “And I loved him very much.”

We looked into the pit for another minute or so. Then we left.

The noon sky had grayed out, hinting at rain. Snoop and Washington sat nearby, leaning against a pile of rocks they had to know was a grave. Rana asked where her children were.

“That way,” Washington said, pointing over a ridge that led deeper into the graveyard. “Was playing tag.”

I wanted to chew them out for letting the boys wander, but Rana didn't seem bothered. She walked up the ridgeline, calling their names. After a few moments, Karim's head poked up from the other side of the ridge.

“What?” Rana's voice flexed in worry. “Where's your brother?”

She began running before the words were even out of her youngest's mouth.

We followed, moving up and through rolling knolls, dodging headstones and crevices of dirt, unable to catch her. By the time I got to the knoll she'd stopped at, gasping for breath, she had sat Ahmed up against a dark boulder shaped like a dinosaur egg. The young boy's face was as faint as the land, and he seemed disoriented.

Rana grabbed his arms, running her hands down them like a tailor. “No,” she said. “No.”

A pair of matching bite marks glowed like juice stains on Ahmed's wrist. His mother began slapping his cheeks, which caused him to smile vaguely.

The others ran up, Karim pointing to a small batch of camelthorn and shouting. Snoop pulled out a long Bowie knife I'd never seen before and started hacking into the brush. The brush rasped in anger, causing Snoop to push Karim back and stomp into it between hacks. Washington directed his rifle at the camelthorn, but Snoop shook him off, reaching into the bush and pulling out a thick beige rope two feet long with a bloody anvil for a head.

“Viper,” Snoop said, throwing it down, then following it to the ground. He began to saw off the snake's mashed-in head with his knife. “These have powerful poison.”

Rana lifted her son's hand to her mouth and began trying to suck the poison out, then spitting, then sucking from the bite again. “I don't think that actually helps,” Washington offered, but his words were ignored.

I walked over to the camelthorn and watched Snoop work. The viper had two horns that crested a broad, flat head, and a set of scales that alternated among yellow, brown, and gray rectangles. Snoop held up the snake head when he was done.

“Doctors will want this,” he said.

“Washington, radio the vehicles and tell them we're en route,” I said. “They need to be ready to move.”

Rana had tipped Ahmed's head back against the boulder, slowly pouring the contents of another rosewater bottle into his throat. Karim stood nearby, tugging at his black bangs, his eyes filling with long tears. Still conscious, Ahmed kept spitting up the water and saying something about bad smells. He started running his fingers over the pink scar on his neck until his mother said to stop.

I looked down at the now shaking boy. His wrist was beginning to swell. Too scared to scowl now, he suddenly looked like his father had in the
mukhtar
's photo, plain-faced and grim. He's Shaba's blood, I thought. He's Shaba's son. And it's up to us to save him.

I put my hand on Rana's shoulder as she forced water down her son. “We're taking him to the hospital,” I said. “Now.”

I tried to scoop Ahmed into my arms. Rana wouldn't let me. “I'm carrying him,” she said. “I'm his mother.” Washington and Snoop jogged ahead to let the patrol know we were following. Her face veil removed, with her son draped across her arms and the hem of her dress bunched together in one hand, Rana moved through the hills like a hero of old. She shook off my attempts to share the burden and told Karim he needed to keep up. I didn't know what else to do, so I had the younger boy hop onto my back. He was heavier than expected. The air tasted hot and angry, and sweat ran all over my face and into my eyes.

Doc Cork met us at the entrance with a fleece blanket and medical kit. He stuck an IV in Ahmed's arm and checked his vitals, telling the boy to keep his arm below his heart. Ahmed nodded feebly, raising his hand to touch the scar on his neck again before remembering not to. The boy's wrist had continued to swell like a balloon, and the skin around the bite marks had morphed to a dark yellow.

I looked around at the coolers and folding tables spread between the vehicles. The men had been playing cards.

Snoop pulled out the viper's head and showed it to Doc Cork, jiggling it like it was a voodoo skull. Doc Cork stared at it, transfixed.

“I don't know what the fuck that is,” the medic said. “This is way beyond my training. We need to get him to a hospital that has antivenoms. I don't . . .”
he trailed off, but I pressed him. “We'd have to go to Baghdad to get what he needs. That's too far, though. His heartbeat is through the roof.”

“What about Independence?” I asked.

Doc Cork's shoulders slumped. “We're not allowed to bring locals to base for medical treatment, not anymore. Not even for emergencies.”

“That's insane.”

“I know—but remember the car accident? On Route Madison? First platoon wanted to do the same thing. Battalion told them it's a no-go. They're supposed to use their own hospitals.”

“Please.” Rana grabbed my shoulders and pulled me close. Swamp blossoms and hard breath filled my nostrils. “We must go to your base. It's the only way.”

I kept my eyes on Rana as I spoke. “Don't doctors have a code of ethics? Like, they have to treat a patient if one's brought to them?”

“I—I think so,” Doc Cork said.

“So we'll bring him straight to the aid station.”

“Okay.” Doc Cork tugged on my sleeve to get me to face him. “But, Lieutenant.” I turned to him. He was whispering now. “We'll get crushed for this. You especially.”

Doc Cork kept turning from me to Ahmed to the ground, from me to Ahmed to the ground. My mind was thrashing. It'd been trained to equivocate, molded from birth for clever escapes and third options. It kept grasping for something beyond the either-or, anything but the either-or, except there was nothing, nothing but the either-or.

For the first time all deployment, maybe the first time all war, there was only one decision to make. Clarity imbued my chest, then my words.

“Hotspur,” I said. “Mount up. Camp Independence, time fucking now.”

September 30

Jack—

I'm sorry we argued like that on the phone. Not sure if you've read my emails apologizing—doesn't matter. I'll say it again and I'll say it better: I'm incredibly proud of you. Always have been, but especially now. I've no idea what you're dealing with, because I don't stop and consider people the way you do. I just bulldoze through life, and that's not right. Your empathy makes you a good leader and a better man. Like the accidental shooting you talked about—caring like that makes you special. Don't let this war take that from you, no matter what.

You should know that I'm not the hard-ass I probably try to come across as. During every one of my deployments, I was scared out of my mind. Every time I said good-bye to you and Mom and Dad, I thought for sure I'd never see you all again. And over there—over there, as you know, it's worse. It gets so bad you stop caring. At least I did, especially the last time.

You should know why I got out. It wasn't just business school. That last deployment to Baqubah, man . . . it was bad. And I mean that in the most non-melodramatic, non-bullshit war story way possible. Before then, it'd kind of been a game. But command broke me, it really did. It's taken me a while to realize that.

The battle wasn't like the articles or books. It was . . . I don't know. I don't even trust my memory of it. We were tasked with seizing twin bridges and setting up a blocking position. We did that. Then came the IEDs, then the ambush, then it was night and it was all over. Everything in between is a total blur.

I'm not sure if you ever saw it, but when I received my Silver Star, I got interviewed by the news. The quote they used was terrible, made me sound like a sociopath. Something like, “I was just spraying guys and they kept falling. They would just drop—no blood, no nothing.” Crazy thing, I don't even remember saying that, but there's the footage, for all the world to watch.

My kids are going to watch that someday.

The things the award citation and the articles don't say: that I didn't get the third guy out of the Humvee before it blew up. That my planning fucked up the blocking position, leaving a ridgeline open, which is why we had no idea about the ambush. That the reason some of us survived that clusterfuck was because of 20-year-old joes who received no award, did zero interviews, and now might be lucky enough to work as Walmart greeters.

What does any of that mean for you? I don't know. Wish I did. Obviously, I'm still sorting through things myself, and I've been back awhile. We're always learning the wrong lessons from history, I know that much. And I know that compartmentalizing things like I said to do isn't always best. It got me home, but maybe it made things worse in the long run. So if that doesn't work for you . . . it doesn't work. That's okay. I just want you to get home. Just get back here, damn it.

I got drunk with Dad after my last deployment and told him everything. Something he quoted has stuck ever since: “He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

It's from a Yeats poem about the Irish revolution, which I'm sure you already know. (I'll admit to having to look that up. No poetry classes in B-school.) But—those words. Those fucking words. This isn't very profound or anything, but they've helped me. Maybe they'll help you too.

I fear I'm lecturing again. Or rambling. Both are nasty habits. Maybe finding a local willing to write a sworn statement is the solution. Maybe reporting everything you know is. Maybe doing nothing is. Point is, you'll figure out what to do, as a leader, as a man. Pray.
Think. And act. Just do what you feel is right. Everything else will fall into place.

Since most of this letter has been all about kissing your scrawny ass, I'll point out that you were wrong about one thing. “Be safe and be strong” is not bullshit. It's all I have to offer from over here, but that doesn't make it disingenuous. So. Be safe. Be strong. And get the fuck home, you crazy goon. We need you.