Youngblood (43 page)

Q: Where did you take them?

Detainee 2496: Depends. Syria, usually. Jordan, sometimes. Lebanon.

Q: And you did?

Detainee 2496: Of course. It was a business. I'm a businessman.

Q: Who would you do this for?

Detainee 2496: Whoever paid. Rich, poor, Sunni, Shi'a. Police, imams. Even worked with an American once.

Q: An American?

Detainee 2496: Yes. An officer.

Q: Why would an American officer work with you?

Detainee 2496: Business.

Remarkably, the interrogator didn't follow up, steering the questioning back to weapons smuggling along the Syrian border. The whole transcript carried an air of disbelief—someone had scrawled “Broke too easy, probs not believable” on the top of page 48. I didn't care about any of that, though, even the part about me. I read Yousef's “Of course. It was a business. I'm a businessman” response a hundred times, trying to glean meaning from it.

There's nothing here, I finally thought. No secret, no veil, no encryption. Which meant they'd made it. Or at least maybe they'd made it, which was something. And having something instead of nothing felt like everything.

W
e alter the past for the sake of the future, memories bending like light.

I came to Beirut fleeing and seeking. Fleeing home, where I'd started drinking too much and had crashed my dad's car into a neighborhood birch tree. I left the army under a cloud of scrutiny for the missing Sahwa money, though they never could figure out where it went. I chalked that up as a victory for personal initiative over bureaucracy, took a piss one night on the commanding general's lawn, and left Hawaii eager to sleep in and grow my hair out, honorable discharge in hand.

After six months of falling into all the normal veteran traps—not just the booze but also believing my own bullshit stories, believing in my own invincibility—a fresh start seemed necessary. So when a Middle Eastern studies scholarship to the American University of Beirut presented itself, I didn't hesitate. The desert awaited, again.

Snoop moved here soon after I arrived, though I don't call him that anymore. He's Qasim. He got across the Syrian border just as the last American Stryker moved into Kuwait. He doesn't say how, and I don't ask. We share a flat above a tattoo parlor on Hamra Street. The GI Bill pays for most of our rent, and the money he earns from selling pirated DVDs covers the rest.

We both like smoking hookah with pretty young women, so it's working out. I wish he'd do the dishes more, and he leaves sunflower seed shells everywhere. I remember him being more responsive during the war. If I've gotten soft, he's gotten lazy.

My mom and Will visited for a couple of weeks in the winter. I took her antiques shopping, and to lunch with one of my professors. I think she wanted proof that I was attending classes. She liked Beirut, though;
said it had dignity. Will couldn't stand being back over here, though. Creeped him out. He wouldn't eat at any of the local spots, and kept ordering takeout from an Italian restaurant. When I made fun of him, he accused me of going native. He's proud, though, I can tell.

We don't spend all our time looking for Rana and her boys, not anymore. This is a big city. More than two million. They're here, somewhere. Sometimes I walk the refugee ghettoes and ask around. Qasim tells me not to go alone, but I've led men in combat—I'm not afraid of the slums. Though fingering a cube of hard green metal in my pocket is a far cry from carrying an assault rifle.

I just want an answer for why. That's all.

Last month on TV, we watched al-Qaeda plant black flags on top of government buildings in Ramadi. Only thirty miles southwest of Ashuriyah; I looked it up. It wasn't quite the Fall of Saigon, but it felt close enough.

Every day brings more refugees, more from Syria now than Iraq. I was worried it'd make the searching more difficult, but the Iraqis and Syrians keep clear of each other. “Like scorpions and camel spiders,” Qasim likes to say. I hate that joke.

I thought I'd found her last week. I was walking the ghettoes and spotted a young woman wearing a gray cotton dress. I pushed past people, then took off after her at a trot. She wore no face cover and her hair fell across her back in black waves. She turned a corner, and for a moment I saw a coffee stain of a birthmark and an arrow nose piercing out.

I ran around the corner shouting her name. But there was nothing there, just the faint echo of my own steps.

My gratitude to:

Parents Deborah and Dennis, brother Luke, and the Gallagher, Boisselle, Scott, and Steinle families;

Friends and colleagues Ted Janis and Phil Klay;

Friends and readers Elliot Ackerman, Nick Allen, Lea Carpenter, Eric Fair, Will Gehlen, Brian Hagen, Fahad Khan, Sanaë Lemoine, and Nick McDonell;

Friends and chiefs Brandon Willitts and Words After War and Paul Rieckhoff and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America;

Educators Loni Byloff and Mary Chrystal at Brookfield; Shelly Brewster and Hardy McNew at Bishop Manogue; Simone Caron and John McNally at Wake Forest; and David Ebershoff, Richard Ford, Lauren Grodstein, and Victor LaValle at Columbia;

The soldiers and interpreters of 2-14 Cavalry and 1-27 Infantry who served in Iraq from 2007–9;

Agent extraordinaire Amelia “Molly” Atlas and ICM Partners;

Atria editors Daniella Wexler and Peter Borland and Atria publisher Judith Curr, who believed in this book;

And, of course, fierce and lovely Anne.

To those I mentioned, and to the many others I didn't—
Sláinte
.

ALSO BY MATT GALLAGHER

Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War
(Editor)

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Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Gallagher

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 Gallagher, Matt.

  Youngblood : a novel / Matt Gallagher.—First Atria Books hardcover edition.

   pages cm

  1. Soldiers—Fiction. 2. Americans Fiction—Iraq. 3. Iraq War, 2003–2011— Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.A4154415Y68 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015014772

ISBN 978-1-5011-0574-6

ISBN 978-1-5011-0576-0 (ebook)