I wished I’d put on his special dog body armor. I had worried about Loki overheating or tiring out too soon on his first patrol in months. Now I worried about a bullet tearing him apart because I hadn’t put his armor on him. I had my armor on, though, and I decided to stay above Loki, covering him with my body … just like Corporal Eliopulos had.
I popped over the top of the ditch, pointing my gun at the sloping mountain in front of us.
I didn’t even know where to aim. The air was thick with black smoke from the explosion of the IED that had started the firefight. I guess it went off too early to get any of us. Maybe the bad guys got nervous seeing Loki and didn’t want him to find it before they could blow it. Maybe they just got clumsy and pressed the button too soon. Whatever happened, I was glad to be alive, my heart pounding, my focus intense, and adrenaline racing through my body. I wasn’t afraid. Things were happening too fast to feel afraid. Fear came before, and maybe it would come after. But right at that moment, I just felt like doing something.
They were trying to kill Chang with his quick comebacks and Douglass and foul-mouthed Sergeant Gaffley and Lieutenant Schumacher, and all those guys whose names I hadn’t even had a chance to learn yet. I couldn’t let that happen.
I pointed my weapon where everyone else seemed to be shooting and I squeezed the trigger.
I’d never shot a weapon at another human being before. The gun bucked a little in my hands and the bullets flew out and the shells ejected and my shots crackled against the hillside. I knew I hadn’t hit anything other than dirt, and I surprised myself by cursing. At that moment, I wanted to hurt the people who were trying to hurt us. I wanted to hit something other than dirt. At the same time, I was relieved I hadn’t.
Two totally opposite emotions, churning inside me.
I ducked back down to comfort Loki, who was shaking now. “Good boy,” I said to him. “You’re okay, good boy. It’s all okay.”
I wondered if Eliopulos had told him the same thing when they came under fire together the last time. I wonder if Loki believed it. Dogs know when something is wrong. They can smell it.
“This is Echo-One Actual,” Lieutenant Schumacher was calling into the radio. “I’ve got a TIC at position Homer.”
TIC meant troops in contact, and position Homer was the code name for the place where the path back to the outpost met the flatland on the way to the village. Its code name changed all the time, in case the enemy was listening. Today it was named for a character from the Simpsons. Tomorrow it might be a sports team.
He pulled out a map, studying it quickly, and shouted some coordinates to the artillery team at one of the bases across the valley. The mountains were dotted with bases and outposts like ours so that they could support one another. If one came under an attack it couldn’t repel, another could aim its big guns that way and clean up the mess.
We all waited a moment and then heard the shriek of heavy artillery rounds fly over us, pounding into the side of the mountain. The ground rumbled. The dirty water in the irrigation ditch shook. The shriek of the artillery and the explosions on impact were like the biggest, baddest fireworks show I’d ever seen — more like a wizard’s festival from one of Zach’s fantasy books than an average Fourth of July. I couldn’t believe it, but I felt a smile burst onto my face in the middle of it all. I hadn’t thought war was supposed to be fun.
When the dust and smoke cleared, the air smelled heavily of gunpowder, but it was quiet.
Second squad, led by Sergeant Gaffley in front, moved forward to investigate while we covered them from below. Once they gave us the all clear, we finally crawled out of the ditch.
“Another job well done, dog team,” Lieutenant Schumacher told me as we started up again. “A few more steps forward and I would have been writing some letters home to grieving parents.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Loki okay to take point again?”
I looked down at Loki, who was panting and sniffing around happily, the firefight already a distant memory, the disgusting wastewater smells all over the marines’ pants legs much more interesting now.
“Good to go, sir,” I told him.
“Roger that. Let’s move.”
Chang, Loki, and I moved ahead to catch up with the second squad.
“Thanks for pulling me down back there,” I told Chang.
“I had to,” he said. “I’ve got a bet with Douglass. You can’t get killed until you laugh at one of my jokes.”
“Then I’m gonna live a long life,” I told him.
We got quiet when we reached the second squad. They were standing around the burned landscape, which was pocked with bullet holes. Where once there had been a stand of trees and a low stone wall, there was nothing but smoking heaps of ash. It was like the surface of the moon.
One of the second-squad marines — De La Peña, his name patch said — nodded and hitched his thumb at one smoking heap. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. Then I saw the burned-up pillbox hat, a streak of gray in the pajamas. And the shining silver foil of a stick of gum.
The shepherd boy.
There were two men nearby, both on the ground face down, their clothes and hair burned, their bodies torn apart, weapons melted and mangled in the dirt beside them.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off the boy.
The platoon corpsman — a navy medic who served with the marines — was bent over the charred pile of flesh that had been a boy just a few hours ago. He was checking for vital signs, a heartbeat, breath, anything … but he stood up, shaking his head.
“Just a kid,” he sighed, scratching the back of his neck. “Vasquez,” he introduced himself to me. Loki wagged his tail. “Glad you brought Loki back to us.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said, feeling strange about making small talk on the edge of this scorched hillside, surrounded by bodies.
“Looks like the rest of them scampered off,” De La Peña said. “Probably hightailed it up over the back of the ridge when the big guns opened up on them.”
“Do we pursue?” I asked, thinking about Loki’s powerful nose. “They can’t have gone far.”
“Go after them?” Sergeant Gaffley shook his head. “Hajji’s got caves all over the place. They ditch their weapons and pretend to be shepherds. We’d never find them.”
“But Loki …” I started. He wasn’t really trained to track people, just bombs and guns, but still, he was a Labrador retriever. Tracking was in his blood.
I wanted to go after the bad guys. I was angry. Not only did they try to kill us, but they’d used that boy, that boy the same age as my brother. They’d poisoned his brain and given him a gun and put him right in our way.
They had to know what would happen.
His blood was on their hands.
Not mine.
But I’d fired. I’d fired into the hills just like everyone else.
But I’d missed.
But I hadn’t wanted to miss.
“Come on, John Wayne,” Chang nudged me forward. “We’ll go hunting fugitives another day.”
As we stepped out ahead of second squad to lead the way back to OPE, I looked back at the burned body of the shepherd boy.
No choice at all, I thought.
Loki walked ahead, sniffing the road from side to side, and I followed him up the mountain, the line of marines falling in behind us.
I kept my eyes on my dog and didn’t look back.
Poop.
There’s no way to avoid it.
Life as a dog handler at a military outpost in a combat zone means a lot of poop.
The outpost was a collection of tight spaces where guys walked around barefoot and there were weapons everywhere and sometimes we had to scramble if it looked like an attack was coming in. No one wanted to step in dog poop, so I spent a lot of time wandering around, making sure Loki didn’t leave behind any surprises.
At Combat Outpost Eliopulos, the marines didn’t have anyone to clean up after us. We did our ow
n cleaning, with water that was brought in by locals from the rivers in the mountains. We washed our own clothes when we had to. (Like right after the firefight in the drainage ditch. The other two platoons made us clean up before we stank up the whole outpost … at least, worse than it already stank.) We also had to gather up all our garbage and burn it every few days.
That included Loki’s poop.
But not just Loki’s poop.
We didn’t have any running water at the outpost. When we needed to use the head — marine elf speak for toilet — we had four open stalls, each with a wooden seat positioned above a metal bucket. The stalls had no doors, but a nice view of the mountains. There were no women around, and we all lived so closely that there wasn’t much need for privacy. Anyway, the Marine Corps didn’t really do privacy. We got to know each other whether we wanted to or not. For example, I quickly learned that Chang liked to rap while he sat on the head.
Lucky Chang’s the name, how can I deny it?
I got more rhymes than LA’s got diets.
I bust my caps up at OPE,
Shoot up the ’Stan with my M16.
Break it down for me, O.G. Low-Key!
That’s usually when Loki would bark. I don’t know how Chang trained him to do it, or why Corporal Eliopulos let him, but it made going to the bathroom entertaining.
The steel buckets under the seats collected our business, and every other day, we’d gather it all, pour some fuel onto it, and burn it so it didn’t stink up the place. The burning job rotated among the enlisted men of Echo Company, and no one ever wanted it, which meant I got to do it for my first three weeks.
I was the new guy.
Those were the rules.
“It’s the law of fecal gravity,” Douglass explained.
I didn’t know what he meant.
“You know … fecal. Feces?” He shook his head. “Like, what’s in the buckets? And gravity. It means that stuff rolls downhill. You’re the new guy, the noob, so the dirtiest job rolls down to you.”
The other guys all agreed. I had to obey the rule of fecal gravity.
When I wasn’t cleaning up or burning buckets of poop or taking up a post and watching the valley from a bunker with Loki sleeping at my feet, he and I were training.
I’d hide samples of bomb-making stuff around the outpost and show Loki his toy, and he’d go off and find what I’d hidden. The other guys loved to watch, to see what he could do. They all offered to help by hiding the samples for me, usually in one another’s stuff.
Especially in Chang’s stuff.
He’d come back from a shift on watch or from working out or cleaning up or rapping on the toilet, excited to lay down and sleep for a few hours, and he’d find that a dog had torn his rack apart, unpacked his bag, and drooled all over his one clean shirt. Loki loved rolling around on anything clean. He liked to get rid of the clean smells as quickly as possible, I guess, make everything smell like him, like it should. Luckily for him, clean smells were rare up at OPE.
Loki had memorized the smells of all the other marines in Echo Company, and he was very protective. Whenever locals would come with the water, he’d growl and watch them suspiciously. Whenever someone would come from the village to tell us news or speak to the lieutenant about a problem, Loki sniffed them first to make sure they didn’t have any hidden explosives strapped to their bodies, and then he usually growled anyway.
He knew he was a marine and he didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t.
The days went by. Most of the time things were pretty dull. We’d go for patrols, hearts pounding, nerves tingling, and we’d all feel a bit let down when nothing happened. And we’d all feel a bit relieved too. Always the opposite feelings at the same time. That’s how war worked.
On one patrol, Loki found an old Russian mortar shell. On another, he went crazy when he found a kitchen timer buried by a burned tree stump.
“Why’d he smell this?” I asked Chang.
“They hook these kitchen timers up to a mortar cannon and then run away. The cannon fires when the timer goes off, and the bad guys are long gone by then. We can’t return fire. There’s no one to hit. This one must have gotten some of that smell on it. Must have been used.”
“So we’re at war with kitchen timers?”
“Roger that,” Chang laughed. “Cell phones, kitchen timers. Even our own self-heating MREs.”
“The meals ready to eat?” I couldn’t imagine how those could be turned into weapons. The military already made us eat the disgusting things.
“They can be turned into booby traps,” Chang explained. “The heating packet can be rigged to explode and snap your ankles. Probably hurt Loki pretty bad because he’s closer to the ground.”
I looked at Loki lifting his leg to mark the stump, his soft underbelly exposed. He could be killed by an enemy we’d never even see: a buried bomb hooked up to a cell phone, a rocket set off by a kitchen timer.
I shut those thoughts out. We had a job to do. I kept the kitchen timer to use in training. He’d have to learn what they smelled like too.
One morning, I was sitting outside in the shade of the netting, leaning on some sandbags and brushing Loki. Douglass and Doc Vasquez came over in the middle of a conversation.
“I am telling you, Doc,” Douglass said, loud enough to make sure I heard it. “Dempsey does not let anybody play with his dog. I mean, he doesn’t even play with his dog except for training. He’s too gung ho for all that.”
“Nobody is that gung ho,” Doc Vasquez said and glanced at me.
It sounded like they’d rehearsed their little “chat” and were performing it now for my benefit — and overacting too.
I thought about explaining how training was playing, but Loki had sniffed them coming over and was looking up at them, panting and wagging his tail. He turned to me, his dark eyes begging.
I was about to tell the guys that I had to finish grooming him, and then we could do some training together if they wanted. But now they were all three staring at me with big puppy dog eyes. Vasquez had even taken off his sunglasses to make sure I got the point.
“Pretty please?” Vasquez said.
Loki let out one low whimper and shifted his weight from paw to paw. He was doing his cute act.
Bad habits, I thought. But I let go of his collar and nodded. It was enough of a cue for Loki. He twisted around and dove right onto Vasquez, licking his face like an ice cream cone. Vasquez rolled him, and Loki dove out of his grip — he wasn’t about to let another human put him on his back. In one quick move he snatched Vasquez’s sunglasses out of his hand, gripping them loosely in his mouth and slobbering all over them.
Vasquez reached to grab them back, and Loki leaped just out of reach. Vasquez scrambled toward him, and Loki leaped in the other direction.
“Come on, Loki, give me those!” he pleaded. Loki snorted, Vasquez lunged, and Loki bolted in the other direction, Vasquez laughing in pursuit, racing through the maze of the base, up the slopes, through the twisting rows of HESCOs and bunkers.
“You believe he wants to be a doctor?” Douglass muttered, watching them run off. “Man can’t even keep his glasses from a dog.”
Watching them run, it struck me that I didn’t know much about Vasquez, except that he was from somewhere in Wyoming, listened to the worst heavy metal I had ever heard, and that the MRE spaghetti and meatballs didn’t agree with his stomach.
After the incident with the shepherd boy, we had stood next to each other to wash our pants. Mine were covered in muck and filth from the drainage ditch. His were streaked with blood from the boy. We didn’t talk, and at the time I appreciated it. I was still buzzing from my first combat. I hadn’t even wondered about what was in his head, the medic with the gun, the wannabe doctor covered in the blood of a shepherd boy we’d killed.
I could hear him uphill, calling Loki’s name, pleading for his sunglasses back. I knew how hard Loki could be to catch when he didn’t want to be caught.
I thoug
ht back to training and to Gunny. I thought about the baby talk with the ammo cans, and Harry Potter, and the zerbert he gave me. Gunny had been in the war and seen young guys just like me injured and dying, and he knew our whole training class would be going to war soon too.
Maybe he and Loki understood the same thing: You can’t be tough all the time.
Sometimes you need to read a book about wizards. Sometimes you need to act like a goofball. Sometimes you just need to play.
“Listen up!” Staff Sergeant Luken came strutting down from the headquarters building.
He looked at me and Douglass, ran his eyes over the surrounding mess of empty energy drink cans and open MRE packets, the rifles lying around, the spent ammo littering the dirt, and he shook his head. “We need to get this place squared away. We’ve got Colonel Levithan coming in on a bird at thirteen hundred to give this place a once-over. I do not want him to see us living in our own —”
“I got him!” Doc Vasquez strutted back down the hill, interrupting the Staff Sergeant’s rant. He held his sunglasses high, dripping with drool. Loki was at his heels, running in circles around him and leaping to try and snatch the glasses back. Vasquez kept having to turn and block Loki with his body. “O.G. Loki ain’t so hardcore!”
“Vasquez! What the hell are you doing?” Luken shouted. “Can it! And Dempsey, get control of your dog! We’re not running a doggy day care here.”
My face flushed. The one time I let Loki cut loose, and I get yelled at.
“I want this place in shipshape,” the staff sergeant yelled. “Vasquez, get those heads cleaned.”
“But Dempsey’s the new guy!” Vasquez objected. “He’s on doodie duty.”
Staff Sergeant Luken gave Vasquez a look that made it crystal clear to all of us it was now Vasquez’s turn to clean the heads.
He shook his head. “Colonel’s coming, so now I gotta scramble to clean toilets. It ain’t right.”
“Fecal gravity,” nodded Douglass.
“Dempsey!” The staff sergeant turned to me. “You get Loki ready. When the Colonel gets here, Lieutenant Schu wants to do a demonstration for him of what our dog team can do.”
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