The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  “Sir, I need some time to translate,” Sharif said. Everything he said was too soft. I don’t think he was getting my point across.

  “Sharif, I’m not done,” I said. “I’ve got something else.” I was still seething.

  “Okay, sir, okay, yes,” Sharif said.

  “Sir, we’re going to walk out of this village,” I said. “We’re not going to pay you. No one is going to pay you. We’re leaving. I ask you to leave us alone.” They exchanged words again.

  “He says that, unless we give money, these men’s families must have revenge,” Sharif said. “They will not rest until they have revenge.” I could appreciate that sentiment.

  “Sharif, listen to me, buddy,” I said. “You need to tell him this word for word. I need you to concentrate.” Sharif nodded silently.

  “Can you fucking concentrate?” I snapped at him. He replied with a meek “yes, sir.” I returned to the old man.

  “Sir, I can’t offer you any money, but I can offer you a promise,” I said, slowly this time, for the benefit of the translation. “I promise you that, if you try to seek revenge, my men and I will kill everybody in this village. We’ll kill your men. Your women. Your children. Your animals. We’ll burn all the bodies. We’ll burn down all your houses. None of you will be buried. You’ll be left out for the dogs to eat. And no one will ever care. Do you understand me?”

  “Sir, I cannot say that to him,” Sharif said. “You cannot say that to Afghan people. It is too much, sir.”

  “Sharif, buddy,” I said, “you either tell it to him right now, or I’m just gonna start killing them. Your choice.” I didn’t care how they felt. I truly meant what I said.

  Sharif swallowed hard as he spoke these words. No reply from the man, but his eyes widened as Sharif continued the speech. I could tell that this disturbed him in an unbearable way.

  “Sharif, ask him if he understands,” I said. Sharif asked it twice—poh sheway dee?—and there was no response. The man ignored him. He thought we were beneath his contempt. He still had his pride.

  “Poh sheway dee?” I asked with a pleading smile, hamming it up, knowing that I’d piss him off. The man gave me a hard look and, finally, spit at my feet with a look of hatred and defiance. He might as well have said, “Fuck you,” because what he lacked in English vocabulary, he communicated with his eyes, green like dusty jade, with an expression that told me he wished only for my death, and soon.

  And that was it. I snapped. Everything I hated about this country, its people, the war, the Army, the idiotic and insane mission, it all unleashed a fury in me that I had never entertained. I know I scared my soldiers. I certainly scared myself.

  I grabbed the old man by his shoulders, tripped him with my leg and hurled him to the ground. He landed with a pathetic, hacking cough. I still had my helmet in my hand. I brought it down on his face and it thumped like an empty coconut. I shouted at the top of my lungs, “POH SHEWAY DEE?” I kicked him in his side. I could feel his body crunch as my foot connected. It was such a relief to hurt someone in a way that wasn’t abstract or distant. My soldiers raised their weapons. I could see variations of terror and delight in their faces. “POH SHEWAY DEE?” I kicked him again. Bones broke, and it delighted me. The funeral crowd now stared down the barrels of thirty assault rifles and machine guns. Finally, I dropped the helmet to the ground, pulled out my Beretta, charged the slide and pointed it at him. I shouted one more time, “POH SHEWAY DEE?”

  “Wo, wo, wo, ze poh sheway yem, ze poh sheway yem!” He shrieked at me, clutching his face. “Ma wulah, ma wulah!”

  “He’s saying, ‘I understand, I understand, don’t shoot,’ sir,” Sharif shouted at me.

  “Good,” I said, breathing heavily. “I’m glad we understand each other.”

  I flipped the safety on my Beretta. It caused the hammer to strike forward without firing a shot. The man jolted in terror at the click. He shouted in hoarse, wheezing Pashto. His broken glasses hung on his nose. He squirmed on the ground, trying and failing to get up. I had broken at least one of his ribs. There was a contusion on his forehead where my helmet struck. Ribbons of blood streaked down his face.

  “What’s he saying, Sharif?” I asked.

  “He’s saying you’re a cruel man, sir,” Sharif said. “He said, ‘God, punish him. He is so cruel and angry. He is like an animal.’”

  “You’re goddamn right, I am,” I said. “And he’d better remember that.”

  Once we returned to FOB Ghormah, we got word that they’d found Ellis’s body in Wor Mamay district. Battalion stood us down, and Sharif quit out of disgust and contempt. For me. My company commander got word of what I’d done, but he just told me to be more careful. Afghans are sensitive, he said. The battalion commander was the kind of guy who might have chastised me for it, maybe even relieved me, but he never spent enough time in Khusamond to hear the legend. Crazy L-T Longo, the soldiers in my company called me. The only guy who’d stopped being nice to those people, who’d tell it for what it was. The only guy who’d go to a shura and beat the elders to death. They said it with admiration.

  But, I didn’t kill the old man. I told my guys to turn around and push out. Once clear of the village, we reached some high ground that kept us decently separated from them. The helicopters arrived early the next morning, and we left. The villagers could have attacked us in the night if they’d wanted to, fired a few more rounds our way, but I didn’t think they’d risk it. There wasn’t any need. We had already established more than enough mutual trust and respect.

  3 x 5

  by Thomas Gibbons-Neff

  They almost got their mail last week. The helicopter had come in low and slow; its forty-minute flight from one of the larger bases briefly interrupted by a herd of camels the pilot wanted to harass with the thwap thwap thwap of the rotors.

  It was five feet off the ground when the airframe shuddered and snapped in half, spilling flat rate boxes and envelopes into a dying propeller wash. The crew (who were all fine) would later joke that it was the price they paid for flying a bird that once participated in the Saigon airlift.

  So, nestled in between a row of sand dunes and a dying river, the outpost waited for their mail. From the air it was an oversized sandbox punctuated with a few bunkers and a cluster of radio antennae that scraped the sky like oblong blades of grass when the winds picked up or when the resupply helicopters managed to land without breaking into two. Yet, to those who lived in the dusty loam of her confines, the outpost was the same on the ground as from the sky: a barren rhombus filled with cots, a platoon of Marines, and a stray goat that a sergeant insisted on keeping even though it wouldn’t stop eating people’s gloves.

  On one of those cots lived Alex Franklin, and today the mail had come.

  He had just come back from patrol and while his eyes were drawn to the single envelope silhouetted against the olive drab fabric of his bed, he couldn’t help but let out a string of expletives when he noticed that someone had moved his bottle of Texas Pete’s Hot Sauce from beneath it.

  Drawn to the sound of distress, a Marine on one of the posts leaned over a clump of sandbags and looked curiously down at Alex.

  “No one cares that you don’t like it when people touch your stuff, Franklin,” he said, banging a pack of cigarettes against the stock of the machine gun his right elbow was draped over. “Besides, the mail came today so just shut up.”

  Alex was handsome with brown hair and proportional arms and a proportional chest and it didn’t take long after he had inspected his hot sauce and opened the lone envelope to realize he had just been dumped (the date read a month prior, but that kind of time meant nothing to the outpost).

  Now Alex had been dumped a fair number of times during his twenty-two years of existence, but today this was different.

  Notably there was Samantha in eighth grade who did it over AOL instant messenger, and that was par for the times, but it was in an away message wedged between Blink-182 lyrics.

  Oh,
and Rebecca, his junior year. This was in person but she was drunk and it was after he had caught her making out with his younger brother (he was thirteen) at a prom party in his own basement. Afterward, even his dad had clapped him on the shoulder and exclaimed that she had been good first wife material.

  Today though, today there was Sarah, and she had just dumped him with four lines on an index card.

  He gagged thinking about how excited he was when he first held it fifteen seconds earlier.

  Everything about the index card was upsetting, even the way it felt when he shook it against the air. It was as if the ballpoint pen she had pressed to the material had inundated the off-white surface with the weight that he felt in his stomach as he read those four lines over and over again.

  It was thick, probably hemmed together from bastardized scraps of construction paper in some mill in West Virginia before being sent to Walmart or her sister’s desk drawer or wherever she found it before dooming him to a life of misery.

  She “had found someone else,” someone who worked the dinner shift with her at Texas Roadhouse, some douche who understood what she had to deal with, and who danced with her in the middle of the dining room when that song Franklin could never remember the name of came on at the top of the hour.

  And just as it dawned on him that he had been dumped by a Texas Roadhouse waitress, he subsequently recalled that people in prisoner of war camps used to write manuscripts on pieces of toilet paper and all he got was four lines on an off-brand index card.

  He let out a laugh, the hollowness of which unsettled the goat.

  Checkers, as the goat had come to be known, was meandering around the outpost when Alex’s laugh reached his twitching goat ears. He bleated softly and stared at Alex, moving his molars rhythmically over a lost pair of mechanic gloves as he trailed off into exasperated pants.

  “She’s probably been fucking him this whole time,” Paciello said, his dip-stained breath just inches from Franklin’s ear. He didn’t have to turn around to know Paciello was grinning.

  “How long you been back there?”

  “Since you opened it.”

  Paciello walked back to his cot and sat, smiling as he leaned over to take off his boots.

  “Can you blame her, man?” Paciello said, lying down now, the cot’s frame huffing and hawing under the pressure of his 220-pound Italian-American frame. “She’s nineteen, trying to figure out what shoes to wear six times a day, and you’re out here trying to keep your legs attached to your body.”

  Paciello was a lanky motherfucker and had worked on roofs in Connecticut most of his life. His face was pitted from the New England winters and a bad case of acne in the eleventh grade, yet for being a thirty-year-old who “actually listened to Kurt Cobain when he was alive,” Paciello complained belligerently about how much he wanted to watch Seinfeld reruns on his couch. “A real couch,” he would say.

  Franklin would often wonder why Paciello always stressed that it was a real couch (as opposed to a fake one?) in his diatribes, but this place makes you stress on weird things and so he left it at that.

  He knew Paciello was right, though—it was a terrible idea coming here with a nineteen-year-old girlfriend, and one index card later he knew what one of his sergeants had meant when he told him, “I don’t care who the hell she is, you do not date teenagers when you’re deployed.”

  Whoops.

  In the distance a lone donkey whimpered and Franklin could hear the guy on watch keying and unkeying his radio. The short bursts of static mixed with the moan of the outpost’s lone generator was the same white noise Franklin had fallen asleep to for the last hundred days, but tonight he pressed play on his iPod and let the Cranberries take over.

  It’s the same old theme since nineteen-sixteen.

  In your head, in your head they’re still fighting

  Zombie.

  The stars were out and judging by where the moon hung in the sky, Franklin knew Chase would be jabbing a red lens flashlight in his eye in less than two hours muttering the same thing he did every night: “Franklin, bitch, you got watch.”

  Watch. Franklin tossed the word in his head and then looked at his own. He was right, less than two hours until Chase was tormenting him. Watch. Six hours of staring into the Papa Zulu sector through his night vision goggles, the dull green slowly burning his corneas, forcing him to blink constantly to stave off the headache that would come with dawn.

  Watch. Six hours of thinking about Sarah and the guy from her shift at Texas Roadhouse. The guy who was a world away running his hands through her hair, kissing the matching freckles on her palms and putting up with her juvenile bullshit that Franklin thought he had put up with so well.

  He sighed.

  The battery on his iPod read less than 10 percent but he didn’t care. It would take a day and a half to find the asshole from third platoon who had the portable charger for it, but he had just gotten dumped and he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to fall asleep listening to music.

  “Fuck you, Sarah,” Franklin said, pulling the blanket over his face, the light of the iPod casting his cocoon in a pale glow.

  As Alex slept, eyes moved in the dark. Eyes that were tired of the two-month-old People magazine that had blown to tatters, and eyes that were sick of reading their own business. Paciello had talked about it when he shuffled past him at the piss tubes and the eyes wanted to see it for themselves.

  An index card? What kind of girl dumps a guy on an index card?

  The eyes could see Alex sleeping and the iPod glowing and as they got closer and closer the eyes grew hands that quietly plucked the index card off the end of the cot.

  “Franklin, bitch, you got watch,” Chase said, the flashlight inches from Franklin’s eye.

  Franklin had been asleep for less than two hours, but already his eyelids had crusted over from the dust in the air.

  “Time?”

  “Zero-one-hundred,” Chase said, dragging out the last syllables of “hundred” in his Florida accent. “Same time it always is.”

  Franklin let out a low fuck and picked up his boots, shaking each in case a scorpion had decided to crawl into the warm enclave of the toe box.

  “I never do that, man,” Chase said. “Life’s more exciting when you put your shoes on without looking.”

  Chase was a year older than Franklin and made it into the military after a sideways childhood in a town just outside of Tampa. Chase called it “Itty-Bitty-Plant-City” and from what Franklin could discern, Plant City had good fishing and even better strip clubs.

  Chase was short with shoulders that kept his ruck high on his back during the long patrols and the sun turned his unnaturally dark face even darker and his blonde hair even blonder, leaving only two vertical scars over his lip their naturally pinkish tone. Girls loved Chase because of his blue eyes and Franklin loved Chase because he was the best machine gunner in the company.

  “Sorry about your girl,” Chase said.

  Franklin stopped putting on his gear and turned around.

  “Who told you about that?”

  Chase moved his hand to his right cargo pocket and began to tug. Alex squinted but he didn’t have to, he could hear the index card grinding against the fabric of Chase’s pants. He could see those eyes in the dark too, Chase’s big blue eyes that were sick of reading rag mags and letters from his dad.

  The eyes glowed and Alex felt the tin of violation in his gut.

  As he had slept, Chase had gone to the guy on radio watch and the four posts that covered the cardinal directions with crew-served weapons and Marines who had nothing better to do than read four lines on an index card.

  “The whole platoon knows?” Franklin coughed.

  “The whole platoon knows,” Chase said.

  After he was done with the Marines doing their jobs, Chase had found the ones who weren’t. He woke up the majority of second squad and had them huddle around him as he held the index card up like the Gettysburg address or Luther’s 95 th
eses.

  “And the guys asleep?”

  “Woke them up.”

  Franklin stared at Chase, whose teeth, even in the darkness, showed a triumphant grin.

  He stared at big Paciello who had rolled onto his side, silently awake and grinning a knowing grin.

  He stared at the moon that was up and the rifle that was down in his hands and the dirt in his fingernails and then he remembered the last of the index card’s four lines.

  I’m sure you don’t get it, Alex, but maybe someone else will.

  LITTLE

  by Teresa Fazio

  I wormed it out of Al when he joined me for cribbage, a habit since log school. I’d hung a bug zapper in my plywood-walled room, and he dealt hands punctuated by the electrocution of flies. He said the battalion XO—the Major—had put them all up to it, ordered everyone to rotate visits to my bunker to give me some human contact, some friendship or something. To cheer me up. You have the hardest job in the battalion, he said. I probably do. I’m the mortuary affairs officer, and not ten miles away, grunts are dying.

  “What is this, some sort of check-on-the-little-lady, make sure the job isn’t breaking her?” I asked, sipping my third Coke Light of the evening.

  “C’mon, you know he’d say that for the rest of us too. It’s a shit detail.”

  “Just because I have a pussy—”

  “I know, I know,” Al broke in. “Doesn’t mean you are one.” He moved his peg on the cribbage board.

  There are perks to my billet. Two plasma-screen TVs, for instance, wangled by the major so my Marines can decompress. But I’m tired of field grades parading in for the dog-and-pony show, of stretchers, nitrile gloves, face masks that don’t hide the stench. Tired of putting up a front that I’m fine while bloody scrubs swish in the washer. Once in a while I feign a deluge of paperwork and lock myself behind this plywood door, just to get an afternoon’s break. I can’t be friends with everyone.