by Douglas Lain
A few minutes later Tyrant announced, “The angel has found her.” He marked the position on Reid’s map. Three kilometers east-northeast. Reid switched to gen-com. “Hold up.”
A new window opened in her display, a feed from the angel that showed Sakai rigged in her dead sister, with her MCL1a in hand. Sakai surely presented a danger, yet without her helmet and her skullcap she looked fragile, her bare scalp like a gray eggshell in the sideways light of the westering moon.
“You got her, LT?” Juarez asked.
Reid sent him the feed and the location.
The map updated.
“Shit,” Juarez breathed. “She’s not alone.”
Scanning the ground with its infrared camera, the angel had found three figures less than a hundred-thirty meters from Sakai—a distance rapidly closing as she advanced.
Half-hidden beneath the spreading branches of a thorn tree, they appeared at first as flashes and chips of bright heat. Then they emerged draped in infrared-blocking fabric that did not hide them completely but gave them the vagueness of ghosts as they passed through tall grass, moving in a line toward Sakai. The angel identified them from profiles compiled during the firefight: they were the three insurgents who had escaped alive.
They probably couldn’t see Sakai past the vegetation, but they would be able to hear her. She was using her dead sister to trot at a careless pace, rustling grass and snapping twigs, with no way to know what lay in wait for her. They would gun her down before she knew anyone was there.
And wasn’t that what she’d gone looking for?
Reid wondered if she’d fight back; wanted her to; resolved to force her to, if she could. Reid would not let death take Sakai by surprise. She would make her face it, and facing it, maybe Sakai would choose life instead.
Fuck the insurance.
Speaking over gen-com, Reid said, “Faraci, you’ve only used one grenade. Fire another, maximum range. In Sakai’s direction.”
“LT?” Faraci sounded perplexed. “Sakai’s way out of range.”
“Shit, Faraci, I don’t want you to kill her. I just want you to put her on alert. Now, if that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The grenade shot above the tree tops, hurtling northeast, to burst above the brush. The boom rolled past while through the angel’s eyes, Reid watched Sakai drop flat, her training taking over despite the guilt and despair that had sent her north.
The insurgents took cover inside a thicket, no doubt trying to guess what the distant explosion meant for them. Caution should have made them retreat, but they wanted Sakai’s weapon and dead sister.
“Let’s go!” Reid barked. “Now, while they’re confused. Fast as we fucking can. Go, go, go!”
Tyrant posted a path. Reid jumped on it, running flat out. The joints of her dead sister multiplied the power of every stride. She crunched through grass, slid sideways in mud, bounded over deadfalls and, carrying her tactical rifle one-handed, she used the struts on her other arm as a hammer to batter aside branches.
“Sakai’s taken cover in the brush,” Tyrant said.
It was hard to look death in the face.
Tyrant spoke again. “The insurgents are moving. They’re closing on Sakai’s position.”
“Good.”
Sakai would see them, she would know what death looked like, and she would fight back. She had to.
With two kilometers behind her, Reid heard the slow tap, tap, tap of small arms fire. “Tyrant?”
“They’re trying to flush her from cover.”
Reid ducked under a tree and then battered her way along a cattle trail between two thickets. The terrain was so monotonous she felt like she was getting nowhere.
A larger-caliber weapon spoke. Reid well knew the sound of an MCL1a.
“She got one,” Tyrant reported. “Damn good shot by moonlight alone.”
Half a kilometer to go.
“The survivors are retreating.”
Too soon.
Reid heard the worried bleat of a goat just ahead of her, the sound so unexpected she almost threw herself down and started shooting.
The goats were just as frightened. They must have been sleeping in a thicket. Startled at her approach, they fled straight toward Sakai.
“Reid, get down!” Tyrant shouted. “Get down! She’s got her weapon turned on you!”
Never before had Reid heard that level of emotion in Tyrant’s voice. It scared her but she kept running, because the goats were a distraction that she could use. They were cover. Sakai wouldn’t hear her coming past the noise of their stampede.
The goat herd funneled together as they raced between two tall thickets. Then they spilled into a grove of seven or eight trees with only bare ground beneath them. Branches filtered the moonlight into shards and polygons that painted the mud and flashed over the hides of the fleeing animals.
Hidden in shadow, unseen by the frantic goats but clear to Reid in night vision, was Sakai. Reid saw her in profile, crouched and trembling with her back to a tree trunk, weapon held close to her chest, shoulders heaving, her hairless head tipped back, and amazement on her exhausted face as she watched the goats dart past.
With no night vision to aid her, she didn’t see Reid.
Briefly, Reid considered a negotiation, verbal persuasion, but she didn’t want to have a conversation while Sakai held onto her MCL1a and her stock of grenades.
So Reid tackled her. Shoulder to shoulder: their arm struts clanged as they both went down. Reid got a hand on Sakai’s rifle, got it loose, heaved it away—but that was only step one in disarming her. She still had a full complement of grenades in her vest, and her dead sister was a lethal weapon in hand-to-hand combat—though Reid had no intention of letting it come to that.
Scrambling free, she came up on her knees in a patch of fractured moonlight, her MCL1a braced at her shoulder. “Don’t move!”
Sakai wasn’t there anymore. She wasn’t wearing her pack, and without it she was more agile than Reid expected. She had rolled away, rolled onto her feet. She stood looking down at Reid with a shocked expression.
What did she see with her unaided eyes? Gray bones and the negative space of Reid’s black visor? Maybe nothing more than that, blind in the night.
No.
This close, there would be a glimmer of light from the MCL1a’s targeting mechanism.
Reid corrected her aim. “Very slowly,” she said, “crouch, and release the cinches on your dead sister, starting at the ankles.”
Sakai frowned. She turned her head, perusing the shadows, wondering maybe if they were alone. “Come on, LT,” she said in a low voice as she looked back at Reid. “Do it now. No one’s watching.”
“Someone’s always watching. You know that. I’m not your ticket out.”
The goats had fled. The night had gone quiet. Reid had no idea where the insurgents were, but she trusted Tyrant to warn her if it looked like they would interfere.
“Do you have it with you?” Sakai asked. “My skullcap?”
“Do you want it?”
“No! No. I don’t want it.” As if trying to convince herself. “I don’t want to die with that thing on my head.”
“You mean that when you wear it, you don’t want to die at all … right?”
Sakai shook her head. “You know what I think? I think we all start off as light and shadow, but the light seeps away when we wear the skullcap. It moves out of us and into the wires, so when we take it off, there’s only darkness left in our heads.” Titanium struts gleamed in night vision as she brought her gloved hand up to tap the center of her forehead. “Punch it, LT. Or I’m going to take you out.”
Reid waited, and when Sakai sprang she squeezed the trigger. The round caught Sakai in the shoulder, pancaking in her armor. It didn’t penetrate, but the impact spun her around so that she landed face down, a rag doll mounted on a metal rack.
Juarez stepped out of the shadows with Phan behind him.
“Ge
t her unstrapped,” Reid growled.
Sakai had tried to turn her into an executioner. Now, in the aftermath, fury kicked in.
Maybe I should have complied.
But Reid’s skullcap responded, modulating her outrage, defusing her brittle frustration, bringing her back to a logical center. Because that’s what it did, she decided. It didn’t control what she thought or who she was. It didn’t make her a different person. It kept her tied to who she really was. It was a shield against anger and guilt; against the emotional scar tissue that could consume a mind.
Juarez and Phan turned Sakai over; they popped her cinches while Reid checked the squad map, confirming Faraci on their flank, ready, if the two surviving insurgents made the poor choice to return.
Sakai’s chest spasmed. She sucked in a whistling breath and tried to sit up, but Juarez pushed her back down again while Phan finished removing the ordnance from her vest.
“Cuff her,” Reid said, handing Juarez a set of plastic restraints.
He got Sakai into a sitting position. She offered no resistance as he bound her wrists behind her back.
Sakai had always been a problem child, but she’d been a good soldier. The army should have protected her. Command should have required her to wear her skullcap. No soldier had the option of going naked into battle—and battles didn’t always end when the weapons were racked.
Reid crouched in front of Sakai. In night vision her face was stark; her features dragged down as if by the gravity of despair. At first she didn’t acknowledge Reid, but after a few seconds she looked up, fixing an unflinching gaze on the featureless void of Reid’s black visor.
“Is that you, LT?”
Shadow, unblended with light.
“It’s me.” She reached into her pocket and got out Sakai’s skullcap, holding it so that a triangle of moonlight glinted against its silky surface. “I want you to wear this.”
“No.”
“You’ll feel better.”
“You think I want to feel better?”
“So you lost your temper with a kid! You want to kill yourself over that?”
“I didn’t just lose my temper. Sixteen days without the skullcap and I was fucking out of control. If Kevin hadn’t been there, I might have killed that sweet baby. And that’s not who I am … or it’s not who I was.”
“It wasn’t the skullcap that made you do it.”
“Shit yes, it was! When I was wearing it, it hid all the crap I couldn’t live with. Made me feel okay. Didn’t even know I was falling apart inside until it was too late.”
Is that what the skullcap did? Hide the rot?
Did it matter? They had a job to do.
Reid jammed Sakai’s skullcap back into a pocket, and then she stood up. “Tyrant, we need to evacuate Sakai.”
“Chopper on the way,” he said. “ETA thirteen minutes.”
“Rest while you can,” Reid advised the squad.
They still had two insurgents to hunt and the second half of their patrol to finish—a long night ahead of them, followed by a few hours of sleep and then another patrol where their lives would be at risk every moment until they were back inside the fort. Thinking about it, Reid felt a looming abyss of emotional exhaustion, there and then gone, washed away by the ministrations of the skullcap.
mission accomplished
On May 1, 2003 George W. Bush arrived at the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier via an arrested landing in the 3B Viking “Navy One.” He, along with a pilot who looked like Tom Cruise only taller, strutted across the flight deck to a podium set underneath a banner that depicted the words “Mission Accomplished” in the background and an extreme close-up of an American flag in the foreground. Standing there the president looked, in the words of Wall Street Journal writer Lisa Schiffren, “really hot.”
“In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” Bush said.
Later on there was some debate about the banner. Especially as a guerilla war erupted in occupied Iraq, and the White House tried to deflect criticism by claiming first that the banner had been put there by the crew of the aircraft carrier and that it referred to the aircraft carrier’s mission, the Abraham Lincoln was returning home after a ten-month deployment. When it turned out that the banner had in fact been produced and hung at the behast of the president’s PR team, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan insisted that the banner was, in any case, really cool looking.
The PR mistake had a real consequence as it underlined a key problem for both the Bush administration and the war effort, namely that nobody knew exactly why we were in Iraq to begin with and nobody was sure how we’d get out. What would it really look like when the mission was accomplished? Just what was the mission anyhow?
It would be three years before another photo-op would replace the banner. This time the conclusion of the war, a sense of success and finality, would be conveyed via viral video. The former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30 in 2006.
The video taken with a primitive cellphone camera depicted a grubby scaffold at the top of what appeared to be a stairwell in a parking lot, but really must have been a chamber designed for executions. The executioners wore ski masks and debated with dictator.
“Do you consider this bravery?” one of his executioners asked him after Saddam had shouted his final call for victory against the invaders. “Go to hell!”
“The hell that is Iraq?” Saddam asked back.
This conclusion was even worse than the bungled speech on the aircraft carrier, as the insurgency continued. Attacks against the Iraqi police in the American controlled regions of Iraq continued and, despite the death of Saddam, more troops were deployed. Rather than the mission being over, the US had to devise a “New Way Forward” with twenty thousand more troops and developed a strategy known as “The Surge.” The success or failure of the surge is still subject to debate, but in April 2013 a new threat emerged from the hell Iraq had become. This group is known as ISIS.
The photo-op that really did signal an end to the Iraq invasion took place on December 14, 2008. It took place in Iraq in the palace of then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It was there that George Bush announced a timeline for US withdrawal from Iraq and it was there that an Iraqi journalist threw both of his shoes at the President’s head.
“The war is not yet over,” Bush said,“but with the conclusion of these agreements and the courage of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi troops and American troops and civilian personnel, it is decisively on its way to being won.”
And that’s when Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes.
“This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” al-Zaidi yelled, and then he threw his first shoe. “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!” Then he threw his second shoe.
Reporters in the West explained that, in the Arab world, throwing a shoe at somebody is considered a special sort of insult because shoes are considered unclean. It was necessary to explain because some viewers apparently thought throwing a shoe was a way to invite Bush out for a beer.
Bush did set December 31, 2011 as the deadline for a complete withdrawal of US armed forces in Iraq. Three years seemed like a long time in 2008 but by the time the date did roll around and Obama honored the original agreement, the White House framed the decision to leave and honor Bush’s deadline as a fulfillment of Obama’s campaign promise during the 2008 election. Many people had forgotten about the original agreement, and indeed, Obama’s political opponents used the honoring of this agreement as an opportunity to lay Iraq’s instabilities and the emergence of ISIS at the feet of Obama administration.
If there is something to learn from all this, it’s that a war of occupation is much more difficult to win than a defensive war, and that it is difficult to determine what winning means. Even today, nearly a decade after the execution of Saddam Hussein, the condition of Iraq is precarious as the number of murders committed by ISIS and the number of US air str
ikes both escalate. The possibility of another ground war in Iraq is, apparently, back on the table.
The stories you’re about to read reflect the interminable quality of the mission in Iraq.
Rob McCleary is mostly a television writer having worked on Jacob Two-Two, Pecola, and Moville Mysteries among other Canadian children’s programs, but in the world of literature he has one major claim to fame. McCleary is the author of “Nixon in Space,” a short story published in the now-defunct, semi-pro magazine called Crank! back in 1993. The story has endured for more than twenty years. The author Jonathan Lethem republished the story on Electric Literature’s Recommend Reading page in 2013 and noted that “if you wrote ‘Nixon in Space’ or its equivalent fifty times you’d be George Saunders or Donald Barthelme. Do it just once and you’re Rob McCleary.” McCleary’s strange non-sequel to “Nixon in Space” is entitled Too Fat to Go to the Moon and is due out from Zero Books in 2016.
Rob McCleary’s “Winnebago Brave” is original to this anthology.
“winnebago brave”
ROB McCLEARY
the Saddams appeared one dawn in Albany in the becalmed pause following the initial shock and awe of Iraq 2.0, before the transition to the never-ending hand job of an unwinnable, ever-ballooning Middle East war. Our failure to capture the real Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s collapse denied us our blockbuster ending, not to mention the specter of a Snidely Whiplash Saddam roaming the country fomenting a counter insurgency. A situation further clusterfucked by the discovery of an entire conscripted cadre of Assassination Body Double Decoys, all of whom the pressures of staying in character 24/7 as one of history’s most brutal dictators had symptomized itself into a seeming Chuck Palahniuk–inspired all-you-can-eat buffet of sexual dérivé. Unable to decide which was more terrifying, an anti-American uprising led by the real Saddam or one crystalizing around one of his Piss Play doubles, all ten were airlifted en masse to Fort McKlusky in upstate New York. From where they quickly escaped to Albany, with day trips into New York City, where they loitered sullenly in the hipster bars around the Astor Place subway stop, the diplomatic immunity granted them as part of their extradition agreement protecting them against all forms of legal repercussion short of rape and murder, freeing them up for exhausting bouts of marathon public masturbation, usually in Washington Square Park, NYU students being their preferred audience, gender seeming largely a matter of indifference. And it wasn’t until Super Bowl XL, the B2 flyover and national anthem brought to a dead halt by the Marine Color Guard in their Dress Blues–Adult Baby mashup uniforms, complete with Cleveland Steamer Merit Badge that America realized it was defeated in Iraq. The hardened combat Marines of the flag bearing detail, sick to the teeth of IEDs and Stop-Loss, decided to take matters into their own hands on an “Improvise, Adapt, Overcome” model, and did more in their soiled bed sheet diapers in that one moment than all the NO BLOOD FOR OIL bumper stickers in America combined.