The Good Lieutenant

by Whitney Terrell

  “I got something.” She could hear Beale banging around excitedly inside the RG. “There’s somebody down along the canal, north,” he said.

  Canals were bad places for people to be, generally. Canals, especially dry ones, were where people hid to detonate IEDs. “How far away is he?”

  “Hundred meters—he’s coming our direction, Lieutenant.”

  Fowler was trying to imagine why an Iraqi would walk toward a patrol of U.S. soldiers down an empty canal, not hidden enough for an ambush, but not in the open enough to show he came in peace. It did not fit into any known categories of behavior. Or at least no category she’d been introduced to yet.

  “Want me to take him?” Beale said.

  “No, I want this motherfucker alive,” she said.

  “He’s gonna be here soon,” Beale said after some delay.

  “Don’t shoot,” Fowler hissed, climbing up on the roof of the truck.

  There was something wrong with the whole setup. From the height of the RG’s roof, she could see the guy down in the ditch. A male, maybe twenty-five. He wore gray dress slacks with an elastic waistband and he was thin and his tan leather shoes were delicately pointed. She got her binoculars out and scanned the far side of the canal. There was a tree line about a hundred meters out. A house behind it.

  “Everybody down in the canal,” she said. She got the glasses up. This time she saw movement, a filtering sensation behind the trees. She called to Beale through the opening in the RG’s roof, where the gunner would’ve stood. “Get around the bend,” she said. “All of you, go down the canal and get around the bend.”

  Beale swung out the door and dropped, running.

  The first shot was an RPG. Fowler saw a white puff of smoke, and then heard the bad sizzling sound, and she ducked her head behind the turret flanging. It hit the bank beside the RG. Dirt rained over her head. She sat up, got the binoculars out again.

  “Three guys,” she said. “One’s in a blue shirt, two of them are in dishdashas.”

  A second puff of smoke. This RPG flared high and right, way off course, into the bean field behind them. She didn’t even duck for that weak shit.

  “All right, that’s it for the fucking rockets,” she said. “They’re gonna run, they’re gonna fucking run. Shoot ’em, Wally. You can engage. Use the canal for cover.”

  The RG was slowly tilting underneath her. She had to keep leaning to the right to keep the glasses straight. Beale was yelling at her but she deleted this. “I got a pickup,” she shouted. “They’re in a white pickup, heading south, call that in. Right now, call that in.” And she dropped the glasses and the canal came back and the roof of the RG was tilting, the thing was rolling over, and she thought, This is fucking easy, and she ran up the sloping roof in a crouch and jumped off the back. Or it would have been easy except for the big antenna that she bumped going off, and it rotated her a little in the air and slowed her down just enough that she hit the edge of the canal, left shoulder first. “Whoof,” she said, as she rolled down the dirt incline. “Okay, that fucking hurt.”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” She heard Beale shouting around the bend. “Don’t move! Don’t move. Shit! LT, you okay?”

  The RG’s cab had impacted only a few yards away. She tried to sit up, but her left arm was pinned, so she rolled over and pushed up with her right and said, “I’m fine, Beale. I’ll be right there,” and checked her sidearm, and patted herself all over, and then tested out the shoulder where she’d hit. It wasn’t dislocated, and seemed at first okay. But when she lifted the arm above her waist, it felt like two electric wires had sparked and she dropped the arm quickly and said, “Oh, yeah, definitely kicking ass,” and started running.

  When she got around the bend in the canal, Beale, Waldorf, and Dykstra were all waiting for her there. Beale had his weapon aimed at the Iraqi’s chest.

  “He was a fucking decoy, is what I say,” Beale said. “Supposed to get our attention while those other dudes slipped up for a shot through the trees.”

  “Is that right?” Fowler said.

  The Iraqi made a noise that was something between a laugh and a reaction to being hit in the balls. She raveled up the collar of his shirt tight against his neck and turned just for a moment, checking for her zip cuffs, and that was when Beale drove the butt of his M4 into the center of his face.

  * * *

  The Iraqi was a mess. Beale’s rifle butt had squashed his nose and levered a cut above his eye, his collar lined with blood. Fowler checked his airway and his pupils, then wiped the blood on her pants. He wasn’t dead. As a recovery platoon, it was their responsibility to tow the RG back to their base, so she had brought the heaviest equipment that she had, the Hercules and a flatbed, and ordered their crews to start hitching towlines to the RG and left Crawford with the Iraqi and ordered Waldorf to assemble the platoon on the far side of her Humvee. Then she walked back to the ditch.

  It was quiet there. A few yards away in the weeds, she could see a scatter of brass where someone had fired on the pickup. No weapon on the Iraqi.

  When she turned, Beale blocked her way.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m asking a favor here.”

  She stiff-armed him. The back of her hand was rusty and dark against Beale’s armor, as if she’d been playing in clay.

  “I think I might know a way to fix this.” Beale sidled in close and spoke in a whisper, as if they were old buddies. “Why don’t we take this guy out to my friends at the patrol base? I’m just thinking maybe they’d give us a hand with the Iraqi.”

  “Masterson’s platoon? You mean the guys who ripped off our gear and then spent three days smoking you? Those friends? Why the hell would he give us a hand?”

  A long silence. Beale’s face looked like a hot water bottle from an old cartoon, swollen, red, and steaming. “I fucked up, ma’am,” he said finally. “Okay? You happy with that? You want to bail on me, that’s fine. But at least give me a fucking chance, huh? I didn’t kill this guy. I broke his nose. Take me out to Masterson. He can cover for me.”

  “We’re in recovery,” Fowler said. “That’s what we do. And it’s our job to recover this vehicle and take it back to camp. If we violate the rules of engagement, we report it. The minute I put you outside the rules, that’s when I bail on you.”

  “Masterson,” Beale said, “will let us off on this.”

  “Us? What the fuck did we do here, Beale?”

  “Is there a problem, ma’am?” Dykstra said.

  “No, we’re fine,” Fowler said.

  “Good,” Dykstra said. He grabbed Beale’s wrist. “Come on, let’s go over here, Sergeant. Let’s be fine in a different place.”

  “No, no, no, man,” Jimenez said. He untied a sweat-soaked bandanna from around his neck and held it out. “Don’t do that. The sergeant is a sensitive guy. You gotta talk nice. Here, sir, you need a hankie?”

  “Fuck you both,” Beale said.

  “Let’s go sit down first,” Dykstra said.

  “I am not sitting down, Dykstra, you fucking moron. You were fucking there. She hit that guy first. So I don’t want to get busted down a rank just because you and Jimenez are all up in the LT’s ass—”

  “Hankie time.” Jimenez came forward, dandling the bandanna at arm’s length, as if he were going to wipe the tears from Beale’s face. “Come on, let it out, buddy.”

  “Shut up!” Beale said. And he swung at Jimenez, a flailing, awkward punch, impeded by his weapon, but enough to knock Jimenez sideways into Dykstra, who in turn dropped to a knee and then came up, growling and burly, and went after Beale. It was inevitable. She’d been pushing Beale further and further outside the circle, criticizing him, isolating him, doing exactly what Masterson had suggested, until it had been natural for Dykstra and Jimenez to go after him, to come to her defense. She dropped down and wedged her way into the scrum with her elbow, prying and worming her way in, then pushing them apart with her outstretched hands.

  “All right,” she said when
she got them separated. The wires had touched again, but she kept her bad arm up anyway. “All right? Gonna be okay?”

  “I’m good,” Dykstra said, wiping dust away.

  The pain from her shoulder was a furious force moving inside Fowler’s head, like a wheel that kept spinning faster and faster. Beale was right. The position he was in now, beaten, humiliated, isolated from the rest of the platoon, was on her as much as anybody. “You? Are good?” she said to Dykstra, getting very close to his face. “Well, I’m not good. The detainee is my responsibility. That’s on me. So if you and Jimenez want to fuck with somebody, fuck with me. Is that clear? As for you, Beale, no matter how much of a shithead you are, you still ought to be smart enough to know I wouldn’t send you down for this. So … so—” She scanned their faces, trying to figure out what to say next, something to replace the silence that had overtaken her at Muthanna. “So we’re all fucked, okay? Beale”—she grabbed the sergeant by his body armor and dragged him into the group—“is fucked because nobody likes him. Dykstra is fucked because he’s forty pounds overweight. Jimenez is fucked with his hankie. Fredrickson and Arthur are more fucked than anybody. But I’ll promise you one thing, okay? It’s not going to feel any better if we start fucking each other, too. In fact, the only thing that might make it feel slightly better is actually doing our job right despite getting fucked. Okay?”

  It was a bad speech, she could see that, but maybe its badness helped; she could see Jimenez cover a smile with his bandanna. “Are we clear?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jimenez said. “We all equal in the fuck.”

  She crossed the field. The detainee was conscious, cuffed, and moaning a little bit. He had thick black unwashed hair and a long, delicate nose, and a mole high up on his cheekbone, like a beauty mark. “He have any papers?” Crawford handed her a heavily worn wallet. She opened it and thumbed through the cards in the plastic sheaths—an identity card. Other printed cards on stock paper. All in Arabic. In his jacket pocket, a folded piece of paper with a pencil drawing of a U in the center, nothing else there … “So this wouldn’t give me any information on why you were out there during an attack on my men?”

  The man averted his gaze. “This is stupid,” he said.

  “Okay, that’s progress,” Fowler said. Then, tucked inside an interior flap of the wallet, a plastic military ID card—Faisal Amar was the man’s name—a worker number, and an interpreter pass signed by Bert Masterson of Delta Company.

  “Jesus Christ, Beale,” she said. “Why not get lucky, for a change?”

  * * *

  Beale’s and Pulowski’s voices argued inside her head as she sat at her desk, staring numbly at the sworn statement form, on which she was supposed to describe what had happened during the attack on the RG, the commands she’d given, the order of events. What were the choices? It was one thing to tell her platoon that the detainee was her responsibility, it was another to write it down in a sworn statement whose facts could be checked. The right thing was to tell the truth. The other right thing was to accept responsibility. But when she tried to put the two together, the report seemed more doormat than brave: As Dogpound Platoon leader, the injury of the detained Iraqi was my responsibility. I did not have zip cuffs with me and thus was unable to secure the detainee quickly enough in the immediate aftermath of the attack. If I had done this properly, Sergeant Beale would never have struck the Iraqi … She stopped there, unable to close the sentence. Maybe the mistake was sitting around whining to herself about wrong and right at all. Whining never helped—it made as much sense as telling someone that you were so concerned about their safety that you couldn’t be around them anymore. And then disappearing to fucking Tennessee.

  And yet, if there was one thing that Pulowski had taught her, it was how to formulate a thesis and then back it up objectively. That, and facts were naïve.

  She erased the last line and wrote, I caused the injuries to the Iraqi’s head and face. And then she pulled out a second piece of paper and added this:

  On April 9, 20–, two specialists from the 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry’s Delta Company were killed by a truck bomb at the intersection outside Muthanna, she wrote. At the subsequent battalion briefing, Lieutenant Colonel Seacourt said that two soldiers had died in the explosion, in large part because they had been occupying an un-reinforced checkpoint. And yet, I had been installing concrete T-walls inside Camp Tolerance for three months prior to the bombing at the Muthanna intersection. I had also frequently volunteered to use my platoon’s equipment to haul a load of T-walls out to the entrance of Muthanna and build a reinforced checkpoint. Colonel Seacourt did not follow through on the idea. Instead, he insisted that the Muthanna intersection was “the one place in Iraq that I’d take my grandmother.”

  She filed the report by slipping it into the wire basket that had been nailed to the trailer wall beside Hartz’s office, openly in view of her desk. Its disappearance that afternoon was followed by a period of silence that her imagination feverishly tried to make permanent, imagining that her comments on the T-walls might not even be noticed. They had no business being in the report anyway, since the intersection bombing happened four weeks in the past. That evening Captain Hartz informed her—emphasizing that this was only a “bureaucratic requirement”—that she was now officially “relieved of duty” pending an investigation into her conduct. In addition, she was under orders to avoid contact with her platoon, and so, for the next two days, she lived primarily in the fifty yards between her trailer and the head. It was awful. Pulowski’s absence, his lack of emails, and her own stubborn refusal to ask for a response had been bad enough when she was at work. Now Crawford silently delivered her meals in Styrofoam boxes from the DFAC, their tops dusty from his quarter-mile walk along the ravines and footbridges that stood in for sidewalks along their battalion’s main street. She no longer attended morning briefings at the battalion headquarters, but she was cc’d on the email that Colonel Seacourt sent to every member of Echo Company, assuring them that “every soldier in the division” was currently engaged in looking for bombers at the intersection, and that he would know more when the official investigation of the incident was complete. Finally, on the morning of her third day of isolation, Captain Hartz knocked on her trailer and invited her for a ride in his Humvee.

  “You understand that they’re going to come after you, don’t you?” Hartz said as they left the parking area, Hartz and his driver in front, Fowler in back.

  She glanced up. Hartz was a fireplug of a man, five foot four, a solid 175. Despite his florid sunburned face and rocklike gut, his small tapered hands were curiously delicate, uniformly clean: the kind of guy you might imagine coaching women’s basketball at Junction City High, decent, fair, soft-spoken, and, as Pulowski had phrased it, “aggressively naïve.” “What difference does it make?” she asked. “Fredrickson and Arthur are gone anyway.”

  “No, no, no. We are finding whoever did this. You’ve got to believe that, if there’s any chance of it coming true at all. Now take my hand and we’ll say it together.”

  “I don’t pray,” Fowler said. She’d respected, and even courted, Hartz’s advice back at Fort Riley, his nostrums about teams and taking it one day at a time being a comfortable kind of truth. Familiar. Not exactly groundbreaking. But spoken in good faith. Today it all seemed aggressively naïve.

  “Look, I’m just saying—what’s wrong with a positive thought?”

  “Positive thought? What positives are there? You saw my statement. It’s the truth. I screwed up. I should’ve had the zip cuffs on me. I should’ve checked the detainee’s ID immediately. I should’ve been more skeptical of the intel. If I’m going to get my ass in a sling for fucking up an Iraqi, the least I can do—”

  “Zip,” Captain Hartz said, holding a finger to his lips.

  “—is do something to improve the situation,” Fowler said.

  “I said stop.” Hartz lunged over the backseat to grab her shoulder, but the shoulder st
rap of his seat belt caught the bridge of his nose, giving him the appearance of a man mysteriously caught and held motionless by a finish-line tape. “You’ve got to stop overthinking,” he said as he finally, in anger, unclipped the seat belt and threw it to the side. “The way you’re acting, this worrying about stuff, this questioning everything—let me ask you this, do you like it?”

  “I don’t have questions,” Fowler said. “I have bad facts.”

  “If I was in a situation where I had my own and other people’s careers at stake, I might start asking some questions,” Hartz said.

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “Like, ‘Should I piss and moan about where colonels put their T-walls? Which I can’t control. Or—’”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, jeez, I don’t know, sir. I thought we were talking about what happened to that Iraqi out by the RG. I thought we were talking about me.”

  “The second thing I’d do is ask myself, ‘How do I help my team?’ All of us, every single soldier on this entire base, practically, is sick to death about what happened at the intersection. We’re all trying to fix it, and I think you need to consider whether this report of yours is contributing to that. Have you done that?” Fowler shook her head. Mostly she felt a strange, rising excitement at the thought of having sunk so low that she didn’t have to care about these kinds of things.