Youngblood (7 page)

“
Fasil!
” he said, citrus on his breath and a large lip sore on his mouth. “
Fasil!
”

I looked at him with confusion and shook my arm free. He stared back with the hard, unblinking eye of poverty.

I took a step back. I'm no great Satan, I thought. He reached for my forearm again. I took another step back. He kept repeating the same word, so I turned to the soldiers and asked if anyone knew what he wanted.

“
Fasil
,” Snoop called out. He and Sipe were dealing with other enraged locals farther down the roadside. “Blood moneys America owes their family. To make things good.”

I pulled out my notepad and a pen, wrote down the outpost's phone number, and handed it to the man. Then I pantomimed calling a telephone. He nodded slow, as if trapped in a fever dream.

The crowd gradually dispersed. Alphabet ran up to say that the commander wanted us at Camp Independence, “Time now.” The checkpoint was going to be crawling with field-grade officers soon. I patted Doc Cork on the shoulder as he packed up his medical kit and walked over to my platoon sergeant and terp.

“The driver was addicted to khat, according to one of his neighbors,” Sipe said, lighting a cigarette. “Might explain why he kept driving.”

“Khat is nothing,” Snoop said. “Children chew it. He just made a stupid mistake. Arabs, yo.”

I felt the distant pangs of a headache bearing down with the heat. The inside of my mouth was dry. I licked my chapped lips, shrugged, and began walking back to our vehicles.

“Another thing,” Sipe said. I turned around. “Your man, Haitham. He was here, in the minibus. Got hit with shrapnel in the neck from a ricochet. He bounced, though, before we got on scene. Something spooked him. Other than the dead guys, it's all the Iraqis wanted to talk about.”

I didn't know what to make of that, so I said nothing.

As we drove by the still-smoking white car, soldiers from first platoon were trying to pack the driver into a nylon body bag. Nearby, his two angry friends and the old man held the mother, still thumping her chest and wailing for answers. The soldiers zipped up the bag and carried it over to her.

So, I thought. That's what a dead civilian means.

W
e had a few hours free at Camp Independence while the maintenance team checked the Strykers. The platoon scattered, most of the joes heading to the chow hall to gawk at female support soldiers. Chambers said he was off “to dip my pen in company ink,” which I presumed to be a reference to Sergeant Griffin.

I stopped at the shower trailer first. In a narrow fiberglass stall, behind a blue curtain covered with penguins, I washed away two weeks' worth of grime. The other stalls were occupied, too, so the hot water faded quickly as I popped the blisters on my feet. The forever glare of the dead driver had lingered, but I shook free of it, along with paranoid thoughts of the soldiers in Karbala who were electrocuted to death in a KBR shower trailer like this one. Then I shampooed my hair. It didn't take long, since Hog had given the entire platoon a buzz cut that morning. A few loose dark brown strands whirled around the shower's drain before disappearing into the underbelly of the trailer. So long and farewell, I thought. Thank you for your service.

After toweling off, I brushed my teeth and shaved. The body in the mirror looked strange. Dark circles ringed his eyes like a raccoon's. I called him Hotspur Six, and he called me the same. He looked younger than I remembered—something about the way his face collapsed in at the cheekbones and the way his chest concaved where finely tuned gym muscle used to be. I'd always thought experience was supposed to age people. He smiled toothily when I told him to, but I didn't think he meant it.

I changed back into my uniform and walked to the cybercafé, a sandblasted bungalow covered in satellite dishes. I took a seat at one of the desks, woke up the computer, and googled “Staff Sergeant Rios U.S. Army Ashuriyah Iraq.”

Why did I care? Because getting rid of Chambers mattered. In only a couple of weeks, his presence was transforming my platoon. My brother was right: men like him were time bombs. Also, I was bored with paying off sheiks and teaching
jundi
s rifle discipline over and over again. I was intrigued by the idea of war, a real war, occurring in the same streets and mud huts I now called my own.

The death pitch in the Iraqi mother's cries probably had something to do with it, too.

The search led to an entry on iCasualties: “Staff Sergeant Elijah Rios—KIA, nonhostile event, near Baghdad, Iraq, April 4, 2006.” An obituary from a small-town newspaper in Texas said that Rios had dropped out of community college after 9/11 and enlisted in the army, and was survived by a mother, Ninel, and a sister, Sarah. A variety of links led back to the same 2009 Associated Press story that outlined his family's struggle with the military bureaucracy to recover his full remains—“a small amount of tissue found on army equipment was positively identified through DNA testing as belonging to Rios, enough to classify him as Killed in Action,” the story read.

It went on to quote Rios' mother: “My son is partially in the ground here, one or two inches maybe. But most of him is still over there. Just 'cause the Pentagon lists him as ‘accounted for' doesn't make it true.”

When I returned to the bay, the maintenance team had a message: the Big Man wanted to see me. “How wonderful,” I said. The warrants just grunted and went back to the engines. They'd seen plenty of sarcastic lieutenants come and go. I turned around and walked up the long asphalt snake that led to battalion headquarters.

The walk was flat and drab. I poured canteen water onto the pavement, and it hissed in reply through the fierce triple-digit heat. I picked up some discarded flyers calling for participants in the Camp Independence softball league and stuffed them in my cargo pocket. Hog would appreciate this latest artifact of fobbit life.

Proof of the might of the military-industrial complex lay everywhere. Trailers lined the road with pickups in front of them, most marked
with Halliburton decals. Other trailers advertised deals for new cars or cash advances for deployed soldiers. Beige tents and warehouses dotted the horizon like mole hills, every single one a KBR structure. The chow hall gleamed in the distance on the northern fringe of the camp, a sprawling ivory planet unto itself, ringed by Burger King, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut stands. I wondered if I had time for a Whopper with cheese, but decided I didn't. Each step the other way deepened the craving, and soon all I wanted was a patty of cooked cow stuck between sloppy, gooey pieces of cheese and bun, but I was a military man, and military men put duty first and stomach second.

I walked by a group of soldiers roasting in the sun as they filled sandbags for a bunker. They were part of the base's work detail, a receptacle for malcontents and PTSD head cases. I asked some of them about their work. We were at least a mile away from the living quarters.

“For the contractors,” they said. “In case of a mortar attack.” They forgot to salute me, but I didn't care enough to correct them.

The air-conditioning in the operations center roared, and it took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the dim green glare of laptops. I smelled warm cheeseburger coming from one of the workstations. My belly growled in resentment. An admin soldier grabbed my rifle, placed it in the weapons stand, and hurried me into the Big Man's waiting room. I knocked twice and entered.

The Big Man sat in a metal folding chair parallel to, rather than behind, his desk. The battalion flag hung over him limply, and the room smelled like burnt matches. Ever the linebacker, he motioned with his fist to sit across from him.

“I understand your platoon was the first to reach Checkpoint Thirty-Eight this morning.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, pulling up a chair. “Quite a scene.”

“That's what happens when small-unit leaders lose focus,” he said. The Big Man exhaled slowly through his nostrils, his lips pursed as if choking off an inner rage. My mom had grown up an admiral's daughter and said that senior officers functioned so that no truth could betray
the myths, of either the past or the mind. It came with the rank, she believed, and it wasn't something they were able to leave at work. I wondered if some of that was going on with the Big Man now. How could more focus have slowed that white car or made the machine gun a precision weapon?

He directed a fist my way. “I'll be relieving both the platoon leader and the platoon sergeant, and that gunner—well, I'm not sure yet.”

I sat up straight, clearing my throat. “From what I understand, sir, he followed the rules of engagement.”

A pulsing neck artery and deep scowl suggested the Big Man felt otherwise.

“I understand you've been having some issues explaining the nuances of our mission to your platoon,” he said.

“I have?”

“Sir.”

“I have, sir?”

“Lieutenant, counterinsurgency is a complicated task. A thinking man's war. Requires care, restraint. An appreciation for the gray.”

“Sir, I'm all about the gray,” I said, grasping for a foothold on which to hoist myself back into his good graces.

The Big Man wasn't having it. His eyebrows rose like crucifixes until I stopped talking.

“We're the army, Lieutenant. We like blowing things up. For years, we've been trained that we're the hammer and every problem is a nail. That's not going to do it here. This is a guerrilla war. Where were you during the Invasion? I was in-country. You know what we learned?”

Another “Clear-Hold-Build” speech was coming. I'd memorized it long ago: Clear an area of insurgents. Hold that area to keep it clear, so the bad guys can't move back in. Build up the area with civil affairs projects and money and shit. So while the Big Man went on about battles I'd never heard of and soldiers I didn't know, I stared at a speck of dirt on his pink, bald head and thought about how unfair it was that Will, of all people, was free and blithe while I was stuck in this hellhole.
He'd been so awkward in high school—all honors classes, cross-country races, and student newspapers. He actually came home his prom night, like an idiot. I'd been twelve at the time and stayed up playing
The Legend of Zelda
, telling our mom to lay off the cigarettes and go to bed. After he closed the front door quietly at midnight like a good boy, I met him in the kitchen and asked if he'd finally done it. When he told me to shut up because he didn't want to talk about it, I promised myself I'd never be like him.

The crimson flush in the Big Man's cheeks brought me back.

“You hearing me? We're replacing your platoon sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. I mean . . . wait, what, sir?”

“I'm a patient man, son, but you're testing it. I've received reports that your platoon needs a jolt. To refocus on the fight. I talked with Captain Vrettos, and in addition to replacing first platoon's leadership, we decided Sergeant First Class Sipe is burned out. He's been reassigned to operations staff. Which means you get a chance to start over with a new battle buddy and prove yourself more capable of the responsibility with which you've been charged.”

“Who's my new platoon sergeant?”

“Staff Sergeant Chambers.”

An anchor dropped through me.

“Sir, Staff Sergeant Chambers is not—”

“This isn't a democracy, Lieutenant Porter.” He smiled and came over to my side, patting me on the back. “You'll learn a lot from him. He's a perfect match for you, and for Ashuriyah. Been over here before, you know. Very same place. The green machine loves itself some irony. Isn't irony something your generation appreciates?”

I stood up and mumbled a “Yes, sir.”

“Surf's up, Lieutenant Porter.”

I saluted and left the room to retrieve my rifle. Already at headquarters, I made a quick detour to the civil affairs office. The cavernous trailer stunk of stale potato chips and freshly ripped ass. A dumpy, haggard-looking major was alone there, playing
StarCraft
online. It
took five minutes to sign out twenty-five thousand dollars in stacks of hundreds, our company's Sahwa payment for the next month. I held my breath as I waited. The money fit into a black canvas backpack that the major had me sign out.

“We're responsible for those,” he said. “Return it next time you're here, and I'll give back your hand receipt.”

I thought about the Big Man's words, and the major's, too. In college, I'd learned about tragic irony and dramatic irony. But on the long walk back to the maintenance bay, I couldn't remember the difference.

T
he Big Man had asked where I'd been during the Invasion, though he hadn't waited for a response. I was glad for that. I'd been protesting it.

It was the month of my seventeenth birthday. Marissa and I weren't dating yet, but I'd asked her to prom ten weeks in advance to make sure no one beat me to it. After two years of riding the junior varsity bench, I hadn't made varsity basketball, so I went to games with friends and made fun of the guys who had. I was smart, but not as smart as I thought, and lazy, but not as lazy as I pretended to be.

I tried not to deal with the Global War on Terror, but it couldn't be helped, both at my mom's house and my dad's. Will had completed his officer training and joined his unit. He was going either to a war in the mountains or to a war in the desert, and neither parent could stop talking about how “real” it suddenly felt. Try as I might, I never felt the same.

My mom had always insisted we eat dinner at the table, but now angry television debates about weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake filled that time. I had to remind her to eat her whole meal, usually after she talked about how another pasty, overweight middle-aged man from the office had told her how much he respected her eldest son.