Nothing there.
I looked at the box where we kept some of the training materials, the explosive samples and the timers and detonators. It was locked, and Loki wasn’t around.
“Back here,” said Chang. “I figured. He’s here.”
I ran to the back of the room and saw Loki tucked away in the shadows, looking up at me wide-eyed, his back quivering, afraid. He was curled up in a tight ball on top of a bundle of camouflage cloth. When I reached down for him, I saw that it was a patrol sleeping bag, the kind issued to every marine as part of his gear.
I tried to pull him off it, but he planted his legs, tucked in his tail, and pulled against me with all his strength. He didn’t want to step off the bag.
“Hold on,” said Chang. He bent down and peeked inside the bag. He nodded and showed me the name stenciled inside: Eliopulos, N. “Left here when they packed his things up. I thought that’s what Loki might be after.”
“You thought that?”
“I’m sentimental,” said Chang. “Figured Loki might be too.”
I let go of Loki’s collar and he immediately curled back into a ball, burying his nose deep into the fabric of the bag.
Dogs have memories. That’s how they can learn how to sit and stay and heel, how they can be trained to find bombs, and that’s how they became man’s best friend. They remember us by our smells. But memory can hurt too.
I remember the day my father left. I was on the couch playing a video game, something with soldiers fighting aliens. Mom and Dad were yelling at each other in their bedroom with the door wide open. She was holding Zach, who was just a baby. He didn’t cry. He didn’t make a sound.
“You don’t understand a single thing!” my dad yelled.
“Oh I understand perfectly, Martin!” she yelled right back at him. “You think you’re so tough. You’ve gotta fight everyone you see. That’s not tough! That’s weak. You’re the weakest man I’ve ever met.”
“Weak? You calling me weak?” He laughed in her face, a cruel, humorless laugh. “Let’s see how you do without me, then. See if you can carry the weight of this family without me!”
He stormed out, slammed the front door. Didn’t even pack a bag, just left.
“You think you’re such a tough man!” she yelled after him, then yelled at the closed door where he had been. “Real men stay.” She rested her forehead on it, her voice falling to a whisper. “Real men don’t leave.” She murmured to herself, but I could still hear her loud and clear. “Real men stay,” she said again.
Dad didn’t come back. Mom packed up his stuff, all of it, into a box and shoved it into the attic. She didn’t throw anything away, but she erased every trace of him from the house. I remembered, though. I remembered him by the empty spaces, by the box in the attic, by the Marine Corps dress uniform wrapped in plastic inside it that he never came back to get.
Loki remembered his handler. He was just like me when Dad left. He couldn’t understand what had happened to Corporal Eliopulos or why, but he knew that he’d had a handler that he trusted and slept beside and played with, and that that guy was gone. All that was left was this stinky old sleeping bag, abandoned in the back of the supply bunker.
I sat down next to Loki and ran my hand along his back.
“It’s okay, pal,” I told him. “I get it.”
Chang watched us for a while without saying a word. When the outpost was quiet again, he peeked outside. “Looks like it’s over for now,” he said.
I urged Loki up and took the sleeping bag with us back to the barracks. The medical tent was empty, which meant we hadn’t taken any casualties. Everyone who didn’t have to be on watch was back in their racks trying to sleep. The middle-of-the-night attack was just the enemy’s way of keeping us on our toes and keeping us tired. Some guys were already snoring. They weren’t about to let the enemy claim a victory over their shut-eye.
I set the old sleeping bag down beside my bed and scratched Loki behind the ears.
“There you go, buddy,” I told him. “You get some sleep now.”
He curled up on the bag, burrowing into it as he let out a long, slow sigh. It might have meant nothing, just his way of exhaling after a stressful night. But I liked to think that it was his way of saying thank you.
I fell asleep with my hand hanging off the rack, resting on his head. He let my hand lie there all night, and he was still there when I woke up.
That morning I got to check my e-mail on the satellite linkup.
Zach had written me.
Hi Gus.
I’m writing from school. Can you send a picture of you and Loki in your uniforms? No one believes me that my brother has a dog that outranks him. Do you feed him at the table too? Mom wants to know if you need anything sent in a care package? More bullets? Haha. School’s good. I got an A in everything but math. Mom’s good. She misses you. She told me not to ask you this, but did you kill any dragons yet? I don’t know what else to write. Come home soon. I’m tired of taking the trash out myself. And walking Baxter and TJ. They say hi too.
You know, in a dog way. — Zach
I stared at the screen for a while, picturing Zach on the other side of the world, taking care of Mom and the dogs and the house all by himself. Not that Mom needed taking care of. She was the toughest woman I’d ever met. She’d done so much for us on her own. I wanted to make her proud over here. I wanted to be tough for her. I knew she was scared that I’d get hurt or killed, or that war would break me like it broke my father. But I knew I took after her.
Like me, she didn’t say much. She just wanted to know about what to send in a care package … I guess toughness comes in all different forms.
“Who’s down with OPE?” I heard Chang rapping on the head down the hill. “All the lay-dees!”
I smirked and typed a quick reply to my brother:
Zebro — Will write more later. Heading out on a dragon hunt. Tell Mom to send Twinkies. — Gus.
As soon as we’d eaten breakfast, Lieutenant Schumacher called first platoon together for a briefing. Sergeant Gaffley and Staff Sergeant Luken stood next to him, writing notes in little green books they’d pulled from their pockets.
“We’re going to check out some firing positions from last night’s attack,” the lieutenant told us. “They cannot fire on my outpost with impunity.”
“Impunity?” Chang whispered to me. “He loves those SAT words.”
“If it means building a patrol base on every damn ridge in this valley,” Lieutenant Schu continued, “so help me, we will do it. The enemy won’t be able to turn his head without running into Echo Company.”
“Oo-rah!” we answered him in unison, before we rolled out of the base.
As usual, Chang, Loki, and I were walking point, out ahead of the platoon. We passed burned-out tree stumps and scorched patches of earth. We came to an abandoned compound with its door gaping open and its dirt walls crumbling. My squad was sent inside to search the courtyard.
Loki sniffed around every wall and under every rock, but all he came up with was an empty plastic water bottle and a chicken bone that he crunched on until I told him to drop it. I was worried that the insurgents might leave things around that were tempting to dogs, to try to poison him.
We walked all morning without seeing any people. No shepherds or farmers or suspicious young men watching us warily in the distance. Nothing at all. It was creepy.
The fear of hidden IEDs was nothing like the fear of being in a firefight. With guns blazing all around and tracer fire streaking into the sky, a firefight is scary, but it’s also exciting. Every move has a purpose, every moment comes into sharp focus. Time slows down and speeds up simultaneously, and it’s kind of weird to admit it, but it’s fun. The guns roar and spit fire, the noise shakes your bones, and you are fighting alongside your brothers. You don’t have time to think about anything else, or worry about anything else. It’s freeing.
But walking on a patrol, searching for explosives, knowing that you c
ould set off a hidden bomb with every step … that just wears you out. It’s all anticipation. It’s all worry that your next footfall could be the one that kills you and everyone around you.
Everyone felt a little safer knowing that Loki’s nose was on the job.
My eyes were fixed on him, about ten yards ahead, checking out another burned tree stump that looked like all the other burned tree stumps. But he kept pacing back and forth in front of it. I held my hand up in the air and the patrol stopped behind us.
Loki didn’t sit down this time, but his behavior had changed enough that it was worth checking out. Chang and I stepped forward. I bent down to look at the ground and saw some wires sticking out.
“We’ve got something!” I called, whistling for Loki to come back with me to a safe distance so that Sergeant Gaffley could bring in the bomb disposal unit. He ran right beside me and nudged my pocket with his nose. I pulled out the toy and told him he was a good boy.
“I gotta teach Pixie to do something useful when I get back to Brooklyn,” Chang said. “You think you could train a dog to get girls’ phone numbers?” He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to laugh. “Or to find Twinkies?”
I just shook my head, and Chang stepped over to my left, which is exactly what the bad guys thought he’d do.
They hadn’t planted only one bomb.
They’d been watching me and Loki work for a few weeks now, and they’d figured us out. They planted one bomb for Loki to find, and they planted another one nearby, deeper, so the scent wouldn’t be as strong.
That’s the one Chang stepped on. We heard a click when his foot went down, and there was just enough time for eye contact. I saw Chang’s face — a strange embarrassed look flashed across it, like he’d just run out of the house without pants on. It was too brief a moment to do anything.
The blast knocked me and Loki sideways. When I came to in a cloud of dirt, my ears ringing, Loki was already standing above me, panting anxiously.
I reached up, running my hands over him, checking his paws and his eyes, just like I’d learned in the first week of IDD training.
He was okay. I felt a moment of relief until my head cleared and I remembered Chang.
I heard shouts all around. The air was thick with smoke and my mouth was filled with a tangy, metallic taste.
Lieutenant Schumacher was on the radio calling for a medevac chopper.
“We’ve got one casualty and one KIA,” he said.
It took my rattled brain a second to translate KIA into normal human talk. Killed in action. Dead. Someone was dead.
I pictured Chang’s face again. That oops moment. He stepped in the wrong place.
Oops.
How long ago was it? A week? Ten seconds? Time had lost its meaning, events were unstitched. I heard my mother’s voice in my head. “They’ll chew you up and spit you out.”
I felt sick to my stomach.
Vasquez rushed over, running his hands along my sides, shining a small flashlight into my eyes, checking me out like I’d just checked out Loki.
“Chang?” my voice creaked.
Vasquez shook his head. “You just chill out, all right? You took some shrapnel. You’ll be fine, but we gotta get you on the chopper. Can you walk?”
I nodded and pushed myself off the ground. My legs hurt, but I could walk with Vasquez giving me support. Loki was at my side, staying right on my heel as we moved down the slope, past the other marines of first platoon who were pulling security for the incoming chopper. I looked behind me. Douglass and Norris were carrying Chang down behind us.
What was left of him, anyway.
I stopped and nearly tripped Vasquez as I bent down to throw up in the dirt.
“It’s okay, Dempsey,” he said. “Don’t look, man. Just don’t look.”
Norris and Douglass kept moving past us, grimly determined to get Chang to the landing zone.
“I never laughed,” I said.
Vasquez looked puzzled.
“I never laughed at one of Chang’s jokes,” I said. “He had a bet with Douglass that I would. I never did.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Vasquez said. “Come on.”
They piled me onto the chopper as it touched down. Loki jumped on with me. He started licking my face. It stung, but I didn’t push him away. I held on to him.
The crew chief yelled something about Loki being onboard, but Staff Sergeant Luken came rushing over.
“The dog goes with his handler!” he shouted over the chopper’s engines. Even if the crew chief couldn’t hear him, he saw the staff sergeant insignia on his arm patches and the no-argument expression on his face and he nodded.
As we took off, Loki sniffed at the bag they’d loaded Chang’s body into. It was right next to us. I squeezed Loki against me and held him tight, burying my face in his fur. That warm fur and dirty dog smell was the only thing that kept me from screaming.
I woke to the shriek of incoming fire. I scrambled from bed looking for my helmet and for Loki. It took me a second to realize where I was and that Loki wouldn’t be on the floor next to me. There was no incoming fire. That was the sound of a plane landing.
I was recovering at Camp Leatherneck, the sprawling military base in southern Afghanistan. Just about every marine in-country passes through here at one time or another during their deployment. It’s 1,600 acres of concrete barriers, portable housing units, headquarters and staff buildings, hot meals, hot showers, and a runway with supply planes screeching in and out, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
“Jumpy much, Dempsey?” someone in another bed chuckled at me. “Why you so scared of an airplane?”
Fobbit, I thought. That’s military elf talk actually taken right from one of the fantasy series I’d read to Zach.
Hobbits are fantastical little half-men in the Lord of the Rings books, lazy and comfortable, rarely leaving the comforts of their village.
Fobbits are military people who never leave the FOB — forward operating base. They take hot showers and eat hot food every day, and they don’t understand why we infantry grunts are dirty and rude or why we flinch when we hear the shriek of an airplane. (It sounds just like an incoming rocket propelled grenade, that’s why.)
I didn’t know how long I’d been there. The doctors said I had a concussion. They wanted to check me out for a few days to make sure I hadn’t suffered TBI — that stands for traumatic brain injury. The military elf talk got worse and worse the longer you spent in combat.
There was a box of Twinkies there for me, sent by my mother, so I’d either been unconscious for a while, or she’d used express shipping. Probably both.
I let the other guys recovering in the medical unit eat the bright yellow treats. They were never meant for me anyway. I’d wanted them for Chang.
The thing about Camp Leatherneck was that it wasn’t just a big military base for people. It was also for dogs. It held the dog kennels that supported all the K-9 teams within a thousand miles.
As soon as I was up and dressed, I left the fobbit in the next bed — I didn’t even ask his name — and went to find the kennels to check on my dog.
Loki jumped and barked and panted as soon as he saw me step into the building. The air conditioning hummed steadily, keeping the dogs at a comfortable temperature.
“Hey,” I said, squatting down in front of his cage. “How’s my original gangsta?”
He shoved his face up against the wire and started licking me through it, his tail pounding against the ground. He didn’t have his sleeping bag. I worried he’d miss it. I wondered what was happening up at the outpost. “How’s my good boy?” I cooed at him.
“He’s made some powerful friends,” a voice behind me said. I turned around to see Diaz — Mama Bear — strolling in with his dog, Joker, by his side. He led Joker into the cage next to Loki’s, put in a bowl of fresh water, and tossed him a treat. Joker scarfed it down and then went to sniff at Loki through the wire between their cages. “Colonel Levithan himself came
to see Loki yesterday.” He shook his head. “Told me they had ‘history.’ Whatever that means.”
I shrugged. “How long you been in the ’Stan?”
“Just a week, man,” he said. “I haven’t even had to take a cold shower yet. It’s like a beach resort here — minus the beach. I can’t go home and tell my friends I spent the whole deployment on a base bigger than the town I grew up in. I wanna get outside the wire, get on a patrol.”
“Appreciate the hot showers while you have them.”
“I didn’t sign up for the Corps to take hot showers. I mean — we learned to embrace the suck, right? It doesn’t suck at all here.”
“It’ll suck soon enough,” I told him. “Don’t you worry about it. Pretty soon you’ll smell like your dog.” I smirked at him. “And it’ll be an improvement.”
He smiled back at me. “Loki must be getting to you,” he said. “You’re actually being friendly.”
I looked down at Loki in his cage. He was rolling around on his back, throwing his legs from side to side, and then popping up on all fours again, over and over, just for the fun of it.
“Can’t spend so much time with a dog and not be a little more human, I guess.”
“Dude,” Diaz gaped at me. “When did you turn into a warrior poet?”
“Same time you turned into a dimwit,” I smirked at him again.
“No,” Diaz laughed. “I was born this way. You hear about Hulk?”
“No,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. I didn’t like his tone of voice. There was no laughter in it.
He shook his head. “First day here, flying out from Leatherneck to some patrol base farther south, had mechanical problems and the chopper crashed. No one was killed, but he shattered his foot, broke his wrist, and lost an eye. Discharged. His dog too — wouldn’t go near a helicopter after that. I think Hulk’s gonna adopt him. Shortest deployment I ever heard of.”
I nodded. I pictured Chang again, just before he stepped on the bomb. I shuddered.
“Could have been worse,” I told Diaz.
He didn’t push me to explain. He knew.
Semper Fido (9780545539241) Page 10