He noticed me watching, and I looked away so as not to embarrass him.
“Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account.” Louder each time. Then this woman in America, whoever she was, went on the offensive. The guardsman reeled back in his chair and attempted to stifle her onslaught with a crisp “Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”
I looked over again, and the guardsman had the phone held away from his ear as she screamed. He closed his eyes, peaceful for a moment, then gave up. He slammed the handset down on the receiver, grabbed his rifle, and shuffled past me. No one in the tent seemed to notice or care.
I went to the empty desk, sat down, and pulled a calling card from my breast pocket. This gift from my sister, one thousand minutes, was sent with a demand that I call my parents at least once a week. I never managed that, but I made the effort on my birthday, at least.
I dialed and checked my watch while the line rang. I could never remember the time difference, Iraq to Alabama.
My mother answered before I finished the math, “Donovan residence.”
“Hi, Mom. It’s Pete.
“Oh—Pete!”
“I’m sorry, forgot to check. What time is it there?”
“Oh, it’s about nine in the morning. A lovely one, too. So glad to hear from you! Happy birthday! Are you having a happy birthday?”
“I am. Thank you.”
“Would you like to speak to your father, just right quick?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Lemme run fetch him, then.”
I heard her go out on the back porch and call his name. The screen door slammed, and I made a mental picture of the white trim and the black mesh. A green world beyond it. A cool breeze, birds, and insects buzzing in the pine trees. The screen door creaked open, a bootheel hit the kitchen floor, and I heard my mother say, “It’s Pete. It’s his birthday.”
He picked up the phone. “Son?”
“Hello, Dad.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You do anything to celebrate, over there? A cake, or something like?”
“No, sir. Just another day, really.” Marceau’s memorial service had been the day before. I didn’t tell him. “What are you doing today?”
“Oh, not much. Working out in the yard. Trying to keep the kudzu vines from gobbling up the pine trees.”
“How’s that going?”
“Well, it’s not exactly a fair fight, if you know what I mean. That kudzu just keeps coming.” He sighed. “So, how are you? Doing good?”
“Yes, sir. Doing fine”
“Doing a good job? Working hard?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well that’s the most important thing. That’s a happy birthday, right there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Take care of yourself. Got to go work. Here’s your mother.” He handed the phone to her and I heard him cough on his way out the back door. Into the green. Into the breeze.
My mother didn’t speak until the screen door bounced shut. “Do you need anything? Can we send you something?”
“No, ma’am. I’m about fine. On my way to grab dinner, actually. People waiting in line for the phone, too. So I should go.”
“All right, then. Happy birthday, darling.” She added in a soft voice, “Your father is worried sick, most days, you know.”
“I know.”
“And he can’t wait for you to come home.”
“I know.”
“Love you. Be safe.”
“Love you, too.”
I hung up the phone, stood, and returned the index card at the counter as I pushed my way through the tent flap. The wind pelted my face with sand. Hot as a hair dryer, even at night. I walked across the tarmac, through rows of tents and plywood huts. I passed the gym and the store. I walked over to the mailbox and dropped in two letters. One to Marceau’s father, the other one to his mother. Different addresses in different states.
“Your fiduciary responsibility,” Major Leighton had called it. “You are required by law and custom to send his parents a letter. Anything else is at your discretion.”
I walked across the unlit patch of hard dirt between the old tarmac and the chow hall while, on the flight line, the casualty-evacuation alarm wailed. In the few minutes it took me to reach the chow hall, two helicopters had made it airborne. They banked hard in the direction of Ramadi, low and fast. I tried to remember the tasking order for the night, and if the company had any convoys out near Ramadi.
I cleared my pistol at the entrance to the chow hall by pointing it into the clearing barrel and pulling the slide back to make sure it didn’t have a round in the chamber. Every weapon was cleared before it entered the chow hall. I cleared my pistol twice while two national guardsmen watched. I put the weapon back on safe and holstered.
I moved through the chow line with my tray, and a guest worker from Bangladesh piled my plate high with mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak. Cobb and the other lieutenants sat at their usual table on the far side of the tent. I counted them. All there. No one from our company out near Ramadi, everyone safe.
A lieutenant I didn’t recognize sat with them. A tall guy with broad shoulders and a carbine draped over his back—an infantry officer, from the look of him, and not working out of Taqaddum. The lieutenants at Taqaddum never carried rifles around the base. We locked our rifles in the operations center when we came in from the road and walked around with pistols, only.
I scanned the chow hall for another place to sit, an empty table where I could eat alone without looking like I’d meant to. Doc Pleasant and Dodge sat together, away from the rest of the platoon. Pleasant’s dinner sat untouched in front of him, and I noticed for the first time how he’d lost weight, how his uniform hung loose on his shoulders. Dodge pointed at Doc’s plate with a fork and began to take from it, perhaps thinking a foreign fork might encourage Doc to eat something. It worked. Doc brushed Dodge away with feigned aggravation and grudgingly took a bite.
I spotted Zahn and Gomez sequestered in a far corner, staring at their trays and attacking their dinners. They spoke in short bursts, nodding while they arranged the chow on their plates for maximum efficiency of consumption. It seemed like they were building the scene together, with purpose and shared understanding. It reinforced an image, for the junior Marines in the platoon, of a sergeant and her senior corporal, too busy, too focused on the work of war, to taste their food.
Under the table, I noticed their feet. She tapped the toe of his boot with her own and slowly pulled her foot away. He returned the gesture, all while they stared at their trays. I pretended not to notice and took the long way around to the lieutenants’ table.
I sat down across from the new guy, the infantry lieutenant with the carbine, as the table burst into laughter.
Cobb held court. “I’m serious! They had the thing in a box under one of the cots.”
“No fucking way, man.” Wong, the Bulk Fuel Platoon commander, shook his head and tore open a dinner roll. “Hey. What’s up, Donovan. You gotta hear this. Cobb—start again, man.”
Cobb nodded to me. “Hey, Pete. Real quick, this is Brian Jagrschein.” Cobb pointed to the infantry officer. “A buddy of mine from Quantico. Brian’s with Charlie Three-Nine out in Ramadi.”
I reached across the table, shook his hand, and said, “Pete Donovan. Nice to meet you. What brings you out this way?”
“Prisoner transfer. All wrapped up. Just letting my guys get some good chow before we head back.” He made eye contact as he spoke, and I liked him immediately.
A female helicopter pilot sat on his right. I recognized her, and the call sign Moonbeam embossed on her flight-suit patch. She flew casualty-evacuation missions. She had a good reputation. A professional.
“Anyways, where was I?” Cobb recovered his thought. “Oh, right. So my platoon finds this scorpion down by the lake and they put it in an ammo can. They
sneak it back into the company area and put it in a cardboard box. They throw some dirt in there, a few bits of shrub, and decide to keep it. It sort of becomes the platoon mascot . . .”
Just then, Moonbeam’s radio, sitting on the table next to her tray, squawked to life. A garbled voice said something about clearing the landing zone at the hospital. Three casualties, urgent surgical, two minutes out and prepped for rapid transfer. She put a finger in her ear to block out Cobb’s story as he pressed on.
“Then they go out and catch a bunch of camel spiders to fight the scorpion. Oh, and they name him, Fred. Right? Fred, the Egyptian death stalker. World’s deadliest scorpion. I’m not kidding.”
“Who is it?” Jagrschein whispered to Moonbeam as she strained to hear the radio traffic. “Which unit?”
She put the radio back on the table and turned the volume way down. She shook her head, not to say that she didn’t know, but that it wasn’t the time to ask.
“What those dumb-asses didn’t know? Camel spiders are the natural prey of the Egyptian death stalker scorpion. So, I mean, it’s not much of a fight, is it? More like a feeding. They drop in these big camel spiders and Fred the Scorpion just kills them in about five seconds and eats them whole. So, they’re feeding this fucker, right? Constantly. And he’s getting bigger. A lot bigger.”
Jagrschein noticed me looking at my mashed potatoes, doing my best to ignore Cobb’s story, and decided to chat me up. Maybe he wanted to keep his mind off the helicopter on its way to the hospital with those Marines. Maybe his Marines.
“So, Pete, you do outpost construction like Cobb over there?”
“No. I have the road-repair platoon. We fill potholes. Craters and stuff.”
“Ever filled a crater in Ramadi?”
“Not yet. Fallujah, mostly. Habbaniyah and points north.”
On the other side of the table, Wong stepped into Cobb’s scorpion story. “Yeah, but tell them how you found it,” he said eagerly. “Tell them how you walked in on them while they were feeding it.”
Cobb smiled over at Wong. “Right! Thanks for reminding me. So, I go into the platoon’s barracks to see if the corporals have their guys ready to roll in the morning, and I find the whole gang huddled around that cardboard box, cheering . . .”
Moonbeam’s radio squawked again and she got up from the table, left her tray, and walked out in a hurry.
“. . . and I’m like, ‘The fuck is this? Do you know how deadly that scorpion is? Ever heard of neurotoxins?’ Seriously, one sting and you’re doing the funky chicken, foaming at the mouth. And here’s the kicker: the nearest antivenom stocks are in fucking Germany . . .”
Jagrschein’s eyes tracked Moonbeam as she left the chow hall, and he seemed to be debating whether to leave, too.
“So, Brian,” I said, trying to distract him, “you operate out of Hurricane Point?”
He brought his eyes back to me. “That’s right.”
“Security patrols? Quick-reaction force?”
“Yeah. Well, sort of. I mean, we have our own mission, my platoon. Special tasking.”
“Dude, did you lose your shit when you caught them?” Wong laughed hard.
Cobb shrugged. “No, I kept my cool. They stopped cheering when they saw me, though. That’s for goddamn sure. I didn’t say a word. I just walked out and went to see Gunny . . .”
“What kind of special tasking?” I asked Jagrschein. “Checkpoints? High-value targets?”
“Nah, nothing like that. We take the governor of Anbar Province to work every morning. Pick him up at his house, fight him into Government Center in the morning, and fight him home in the afternoon.”
“Fight?”
“Yeah. It’s a running gunfight. Every morning. Every afternoon.”
“. . . and I tell Gunny, ‘Get that fucking scorpion out of this barracks. Kill it, release it, I don’t care . . .’”
“Then why do it?” I asked. “Why not just tell him to bed down at Government Center?”
Jagrschein shrugged. “To keep up appearances, I guess. We do it at the same time every day. We change up the route a little bit, but otherwise it’s a toe-to-toe fight. Whole city knows when he’s coming and going. Brave guy, I’ll give him that. He’s the tenth governor in two years. The other nine were all assassinated.”
“. . . but Gunny tells me, ‘Sir, we can’t do that. They’re attached to Fred the Scorpion. He’s like a pet. We kill him, it’ll crush morale . . .’”
“Whose choice is that?” I asked. “Going home every night? His choice? The regimental commander’s?”
“His, I think. If someone was just telling him to do it, I’m sure he would’ve refused a long time ago. The Government Center offices? They’re up high, so the bad guys have direct line of sight on the building from anywhere in the neighborhood. We put a flak and Kevlar on him, right over his coat and tie, and we drag him up the steps as fast as we can. Under fire, every time. It’s a real bitch. All the spent brass on the steps? We’re always slipping on the fuckers, trying to return fire.”
“. . . so we reach a compromise. I tell Gunny, ‘Look, drown the little fucker in diesel to preserve his body, and we’ll pack the corpse in epoxy. All right? Make a paperweight out of him, or something . . .’”
“We do foot patrols around Government Center during the day, just to keep the bad guys on their heels a little bit. Push them back enough so we can get out the gate in the afternoon without getting pounded by RPGs. Try to keep them from lining all the routes with IEDs. And those foot patrols, man? It’s the real deal. We do the whole patrol route at a dead sprint. Fire coming from everywhere.”
“. . . then, after three days floating around in the diesel, the Marines reach in with pliers and pick him up by his tail. They’re about to drop him in the epoxy, and the fucker comes back to life! He wiggles out of the pliers and hits the ground running. Fred, the indestructible petro-scorpion! So, you know, somewhere on this base is the biggest scorpion in the whole world, and he’s impervious to our weapons.”
“That whole city. Ramadi,” Jagrschein said, “it’s ready to explode.”
“. . . Anyway, that’s my scorpion story.” Cobb looked up from his Salisbury steak, finding his table had drifted. Half the lieutenants were now listening to Jagrschein.
But Wong held true. “That’s fucking hilarious, Cobb. You should write that down.”
“Sorry for holding you up,” I said to Jagrschein. “You probably want to go check on that dust-off bird.”
“Yeah, I should do that.”
He stood to leave. So did I.
“Nice talking to you, Pete,” he said. “Look for me at Hurricane Point, if you make it out that way.”
He turned for the door. I still had food on my plate, but I didn’t care to sit back down and listen to Cobb and Wong. I didn’t want to follow Jagrschein out either and have him thinking he had to keep talking to me. So I walked over to the dessert table with my tray and hunted around the slices of cake until I saw Jagrschein leave. Then I left, too.
I took a shortcut back to the company area, deciding to climb the berm and spend some time looking down at the river. I scrambled my way to the top and sat just as the full moon cleared the buildings behind me. The light painted the river and the flooded fields and shimmered in the exhaust of every generator in Habbaniyah.
I had a strange notion that I shouldn’t let my birthday pass without at least a token commemoration. Not because I thought I’d earned it. It was more to do with the envelopes I’d dropped in the mailbox earlier. The pointless, empty words to Marceau’s parents. I thought about the first leadership principle: Know yourself and seek improvement. Real OCS idiocy.
Then, as I searched for a place to start knowing myself, the barracks door creaked open below me, and someone muttered as he climbed the berm. I sat still as the climber slipped, planted a knee in the dirt, and cursed, “Fuck.”
I recognized the voice—Dodge—but stayed quiet until he made it to the top and installed
himself a few meters away from me with a book in his hands.
“Dodge?”
He flinched. “Mulasim? Fuck. You frightened me.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.”
“How long have you been sitting here, Mulasim?”
“Not long. A few minutes? You know you’re not supposed to come up here, right?”
“Yes, I do know this.” He smiled. “Are you aware of this?”
I smiled back. “Special occasion.”
“Indeed?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Well, then, happy birthday, Mulasim.” He put the book under his leg, mimed applause.
“How do you say ‘happy birthday’ in Arabic?”
“Eid meelad sa’eed.”
“I like that,” I lied worthlessly. “I’ll try to remember.” We sat quietly for a moment and I sensed him wishing I’d leave. Suddenly not wanting to be alone, I forced him to keep talking to me. “What’s with that book, anyway? Always meaning to ask you.”
“This?” He pulled the book out from under his leg. “It is just something I study. Something I like.”
“Can I see it?”
He hesitated. Then shrugged and extended the book my way. “Certainly.”
I held the tattered title page up to the moonlight and read the faded words. “Huck Finn? Really?”
“Of course.” Dodge kept his hand out, wanting the book back.
I flipped through the pages, thick with handwritten notes in both Arabic and English. “You really read this? I mean, this is hard for a lot of Americans.”
“Of course. As I have said, I study it.” He closed his hand a few times, growing more insistent, so I returned the book to him.
“Where did you learn to speak English? Been meaning to ask you that, too.”
“School.”
“College?”
He cringed. “I am told not to discuss that.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry.” We sat quietly again until I found something else to talk about, some other reason to keep him there. “You and Doc Pleasant seem to get on well. I’m happy to see it.”
Fives and Twenty-Fives Page 20