“I’ll have the dog food and supplies that flew in with you stowed in the mess hall,” he said just before we stepped inside. “There’s no room in here.”
The building was dark and overheated by a stove at the far end. Rows of narrow wooden racks — Marine Corps elf talk for beds — lined the walls with an aisle between, so narrow that you could reach your arm out and touch the guy sleeping across from you. There were boots and sneakers all over the floor, and some of the racks had photos and pictures torn from magazines stuck to the walls around them. A few empty cans of energy drink littered the floor. It looked almost like my little brother’s room at home.
If it weren’t for the weapons.
Rifles and machine guns were propped against the beds or shoved into corners. Every spare inch of floor was covered in ammunition cans. Belts of ammunition hung from nails on the walls and on the bed frames. Grenades hung from the ceiling beams.
About half of the racks were full, lumps under blankets rising and falling with every breath. A few of the guys were actually sleeping curled up with their guns.
The place looked like the messy playroom of maniac children, but it smelled like the gym locker room at the end of the school year, a mixture of old socks and sweat and a whole stew of mysterious men-at-war stenches.
Staff Sergeant Luken pointed at an empty rack right next to the door, the coldest spot in the barracks. I worried that guys would be walking in and out past me all night as they traded shifts or went to the bathroom. There wasn’t much room, and I didn’t want anyone to step on Loki.
But I didn’t say anything. Talking had gotten me in enough trouble. I’d make do with the situation as it was. That was the Marine Corps way.
The staff sergeant saw me toss my stuff down, grunted once, and left. I heard some guys snoring. A few shifted in their racks.
Loki cocked his head to the side and listened. His nostrils twitched, taking in all the smells and sounds. Someone farted, and Loki’s ears perked up. For a dog, the barracks must have smelled amazing. For a human, they were barely tolerable.
I took off my body armor and helmet and sat down on the edge of my rack.
“Welcome home,” I whispered to Loki and scratched behind his ears. He immediately jumped up onto the bed, spun in a circle, and lay down in the middle of it. He stretched all four paws and almost pushed me off.
“No way, pal,” I said, scooping him in my arms, hefting all seventy pounds of him up and setting him on the floor. “Humans get the beds.”
He looked up at me, his eyebrows cocked sideways in what I knew was his cutest begging look.
“Don’t pull rank on me,” I told him. “The cute act is unbecoming of a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps.”
He hung his head.
He’d had a hard day of travel, and he’d been a pretty good boy the whole time. I couldn’t totally resist that look of his. Tired as I was, I figured I could take the time for a little bit of fun.
I rummaged in my bag and found a brush, bent down, and ran it through his fur. Grooming, Jeff had told us, helps form a bond between a handler and his dog. And the dogs loved it.
So I groomed. I checked his paws to make sure the paw pads and claws were in good shape. I rubbed his belly and gave him a rawhide bone I’d been carrying, which he happily gnawed at on the floor while I brushed him.
I told myself I was doing it for him, but really, grooming him relaxed me. I wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, and while I was taking care of Loki, I could almost forget that I was the odd man out in an experienced infantry company on top of a mountain in Afghanistan. I could almost forget that my dog had more friends here than I did. I could almost forget that I’d be going on my first combat mission in the morning.
“So, I heard you’re going on your first combat mission in the morning,” Chang whispered as he came into the barracks and sat on the edge of my bed. “First platoon. We’re the best there is.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, watching Chang as he started rubbing Loki’s belly without even asking my permission. Loki’s tongue lolled out of his mouth, hanging all the way to the floor. He rolled over onto his back, loving the attention.
“New guy’s always on point, you know,” Chang told me, meaning I’d be the one walking at the front of the platoon, the most dangerous position.
“Uh-huh,” I said again. I had figured I’d be on point before Chang told me, since I was the one with the bomb-sniffing dog. I didn’t need him telling me my job.
“Name’s Chang,” he told me. “They call me Lucky Chang ’cause I stepped on a land mine once and it didn’t go off.”
I nodded.
“You don’t say much,” he said.
I nodded again.
“I heard you talking to the dog,” he said. “More a dog person than a people person, eh?”
“I guess so,” I told him.
“That’s cool. I got a dog at home, back in Brooklyn. Little Chihuahua. It was my girlfriend’s. She dumped me for some club promoter but left the dog. My mom’s looking after it. I miss that girl.” He sighed. “I mean the dog, not the girlfriend.”
He waited for me to laugh. I gave him a smile, which was the best I could do at the moment. I wasn’t in a joking mood.
“Why so serious …?” Chang croaked at me. He raised his eyebrows when I didn’t respond. “The Joker? From The Dark Knight? It’s not my best impression, but come on. Throw me a bone here. You can’t be that gung ho, can you?”
“I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be,” I said, doing my own Batman impression.
Chang didn’t respond. I guess impressions weren’t my thing. He slipped off my rack, kneeling to give Loki one last pat on the belly. “Tell your master to lighten up,” he told Loki. “Life’s too short … especially up here.” He looked up at me. “See you in the morning, Batman.” He chuckled and wandered back to his own rack.
I lay on my back and stared up at the low metal ceiling of the barracks building, thinking about how I’d do on my first combat patrol, thinking about how Loki would do. He was a goofball, but he was good enough at his job that they’d sent him back here with me, noob that I was. I just hoped I could control him and hoped that I wouldn’t let my new platoon down. Mistakes could be deadly out here. I had to prove that I could handle it, that I could be useful and that I deserved to be here. They’d named the outpost after the guy I was replacing. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice. How could I ever live up to that?
I heard Loki snoring on the floor, about as loud as some of the other marines.
I wondered if Loki understood what had happened to Eliopulos. I wondered if TJ and Baxter knew where I’d gone. I wondered if dogs could grieve.
It was still dark when we set out on foot from the outpost.
I was in front, with Loki walking by my side on a leash attached to my belt. My M16 hung by its strap in front of my chest. I had on my body armor, my Kevlar helmet, a full CamelBak of water on my back, extra ammo magazines on my chest, and Loki’s toy tucked away in a front pocket.
“Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.” Chang whistled in my ear as we started off under our heavy loads of gear.
He was just off my left shoulder, his gun raised, watching out for me so I could focus on Loki. If Loki’s behavior changed, if he picked up a scent or heard something unusual, it could be our only warning before a bomb went off or the enemy attacked. My heart was pounding so hard in my chest, I couldn’t believe my gun wasn’t bouncing with every heartbeat.
I scanned the rocky terrain in front of me, my eyes darting to Loki and back to the surrounding boulders with every step.
Douglass walked about ten feet behind me and Chang, carrying the big M240 across his shoulders. The M240 was a massive belt-fed machine gun that must have weighed twenty-five pounds. I couldn’t believe he could haul it all over these mountains in addition to the rest of his gear. We each had about fifty pounds strapped to our bodies between our packs and ammo and body armor and water, but the w
ay Douglass moved, you would have thought he wasn’t carrying a thing.
Lieutenant Schu was a few feet behind Douglass, fourth in the line, so he could keep his eye on me on my first combat patrol, but also so he could communicate with the rest of the platoon staggered out in a line behind him.
The platoon sergeant, a foul-mouthed Texan named Gaffley, checked in with each of us as we made our way through the maze of sandbags, past the razor wire, and down the rocky slope to a footpath along the ridge. Every other word he said was a curse, but he had a reassuring nod for every marine as he passed him, before he fell into the rear of the line.
With all the different sergeants and noncommissioned officers and the lieutenant, I felt like I had about a million different bosses. It was like a chart at the beginning of one of Zach’s fantasy books, with all the elf kings and dukes and counts and princes listed, where you kept having to flip back to figure out who was who and how they were connected and which elf was really in charge.
In Afghanistan, I didn’t have a chart like that. I just had to figure that everyone but me was in charge. Even Loki. I wasn’t the lowest ranked, technically — that’d be the privates — but I was the least experienced. In the kingdom of elves, that made me a gnome, I guess. In Afghanistan, it just made me grateful to have the other marines watching my back.
The plan that first morning was to take the footpath along the spine of the mountains, down to the river valley, and check in with the elders in the nearest village. The lieutenant wanted to ask them what they knew about enemy fighters passing through the area, hiding weapons and planting bombs. He wanted Loki and me to search a few houses to see if we couldn’t turn up some of those weapons.
Of course, we had to make it to the village first, and the footpath was a great place for the enemy to ambush us. There were boulders and scrubby trees at the edge of the path, crumbling stone walls were scattered here and there, and trenches for water runoff stretched alongside the route. Every few feet I’d think about where I’d take cover if we were attacked. There were a lot of good places to duck, and I comforted myself by picking out new ones as I walked.
Loki snuffled at the ground, his ears cocked, his eyes wide. He strained against the leash, eager to get to work.
“Over the river and through the woods,” Chang sang quietly.
“Chang!” Douglass whisper-shouted from behind. “This ain’t karaoke night at the Starlight Lounge. Quiet.”
“Roger that,” he answered and winked at me. “I just love driving Douglass crazy,” he whispered.
“He’s not the only one,” I muttered back.
“Ooh, you got some fight in you yet,” Chang chuckled. “I just might try to keep you from getting killed today after all.”
“Thanks,” I grumbled, and we walked on in silence. The air around us was cool, but starting to warm as the sun came up. That was the cruelty of where they’d built Outpost Eliopulos. At night it dipped below freezing. During the day, the area fried. It didn’t seem like a place fit for people to live, but people had been living there for thousands of years. Some of the crumbling walls along the footpath looked like they might actually be thousands of years old. This was an old country, and it had been at war for a very long time. Even Alexander the Great couldn’t conquer it. I wondered if his soldiers had walked along this same path.
It was amazing how my brain worked. I was terrified; I was on high alert for any sign of the enemy or for any change of behavior in Loki, but still, random thoughts kept coming to me. I remembered seeing Afghanistan on the colorful world map in my elementary school. It was just a pink blob in South Asia. At the time, I never could have imagined I’d be walking along its footpaths, a gun at my chest, a dog at my side, and a platoon of marines strung out behind me on the downward slope of a mountain littered with ancient ruins.
There were also more modern ruins along the footpath.
As we rounded a bend, we came upon the rusty shell of a burned-out Russian helicopter that had been shot down over twenty years ago. Loki sniffed at it, and, not caring about the history of the Russian invasion of this country, lifted his leg and peed on the wreck, marking his territory: Loki was here.
He sniffed at the road from side to side, his nose working overtime on all the smells. We walked that way for hours, no one talking. Lieutenant Schumacher would occasionally stop the line and we’d crouch, pointing our guns all around, listening. I’d pull Loki in to heel whenever that happened. It was so quiet, I wondered if everyone else could hear my heart beating as loud as thunder.
“Screeeeech!” A high-pitched whine cut the silence.
“Incoming!” Chang yelled, and all the marines dove to the side, pressing their faces into the dirt to take cover from what sounded like a heavy mortar shell streaking in. Mortars were like giant bullets that got launched high into the air and then arced down to the ground, exploding on impact. They could tear through walls and ceilings, and when they blew up, shards of hot metal flew out in all directions.
I felt totally exposed, fragile, even in my body armor with an M16 cradled against my chest. I dove into the trench along the side of the footpath, dragging Loki with me. Without thinking, running on instinct and training, I covered him with my body.
The whistle stopped and started again. Everyone waited. No explosion came. Chang stuck his head up, looking around.
“Do we have contact?” Lieutenant Schumacher asked.
Contact. That’s elf talk for a gunfight. It made it sound more like dancing than like two groups of people trying to kill each other.
Chang was still looking around, scanning the trees around us, looking off to the mountains in the distance.
Another screech cut the air. Chang ducked again.
“Chang! Are we taking indirect fire or not?” Lieutenant Schumacher demanded. Indirect fire was elf speak for things like mortar attacks, where the enemy didn’t have to be able to see us to hurt us. They could simply shoot mortar shells into the air and hope they’d drop on us from the sky.
“I don’t know, sir!” Chang called back. We all flinched at another screech in the air. “It sure sounds like it.”
But there were no explosions.
That’s when Loki started barking and squirming underneath me.
“It’s okay, boy.” I tried to calm him. I worried he was freaking out. Combat stress. I thought about what Gunny had told me about losing control of my dog downrange. It could be a disaster, especially on my first patrol. “Calm down. Shhh. Calm down, boy.”
But he didn’t calm down. He barked like mad and wriggled out from under me, his nose pointing to the trees. This wasn’t like him. This wasn’t normal. Was he trying to tell me something? I followed his gaze to the tree and saw a small gray monkey perched on a branch, watching us.
“Screeech!” the monkey called.
“Screeech!” another monkey answered.
“It’s monkeys!” I called. “Up there!” I pointed.
Everyone stood.
“Nice call, Chang,” Lieutenant Schumacher said sarcastically. He gave the signal to keep moving.
“Every single time,” Chang muttered as we started walking again, Loki keeping his eyes on the monkeys in the tree as we passed under it. “They always get me. I swear, the monkeys know it, man. They know they sound just like incoming mortars. They do it to mess with me.”
“This has happened before?” I asked.
“I mean, why do they pick on me? I think they don’t like Koreans. Racist monkeys. Messing with my head.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted.
I felt strangely disappointed. I’d still never been in a firefight, and I didn’t know how I’d do in one. The anticipation was worse than fear. It was the unknown that bothered me, and I was no closer to knowing than I’d been an hour ago. We kept marching.
“One of these days, I’m going monkey hunting,” Chang grumbled as we walked. “I’m gonna make a hat out of those furry tree monsters. And a blanket. Maybe a toy for Loki.”
/> I guess Chang really hated monkeys.
We hiked for another two hours. The sun had come up and was beating down on us. We’d crossed the mountain and gone down to the flat land at the edge of a dried-up river. A few irrigation ditches ran with meltwater from the snow of the mountains, and the mud around the ditches was a rich, dark brown. Everywhere else I looked was a reddish-yellow dusty color, even the low stone buildings of the village that were carved directly into the mountainside. They were built on top of each other up the slope, so that one family’s roof was another’s front yard.
As we approached the village, a young boy with a small herd of goats watched us carefully. He wore a long gray tunic and gray pants that looked like pajamas. He had on a little pillbox hat, and his hands clutched a thin stick that he used to whack the goats.
Loki immediately charged at the herd, and I pulled his leash short. The boy jumped backward, but when he saw me holding the dog back, he broke out into a smile. Loki lifted his front paw and cocked his head sideways at the boy. The boy imitated him, cocking his head to the side in the same way, and laughed.
I gave him a thumbs-up.
He smiled and gave me a thumbs-up right back. He made a motion, bringing his hand to his mouth and rubbing his stomach.
“What’s he want?” I asked Chang.
“Candy,” said Chang. “You give ’em candy once, and they never let you forget it.” Chang dug in his pocket and tossed the boy a stick of gum. The boy caught it and gave Chang a thumbs-up.
Loki growled, and the boy’s smile vanished. He turned and ran, the goats ambling after him. I noticed Chang had his finger on the trigger of his gun as the boy left.
“Seriously?” I said.
The boy had looked about the same age as my brother, Zach.
Chang shrugged. “Maybe I don’t trust goats. In league with the monkeys.”
As we walked into town, women covered in veils from head to toe scattered, vanishing behind closed doors. Old men with their beards dyed rusty orange watched us through hazy eyes. Little boys ran up and down along the sides of the path, calling to one another and pointing at Loki. It seemed strange that everyone was either an old man or a young boy. Where was everybody else?
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