“Corporal Gus Dempsey?” A private stepped into the kennel, a piece of paper clutched in his hand.
“That’s me.”
“Colonel Levithan wants to see you.”
“Now?”
The young marine rolled his eyes at me. “No, next week. The colonel loves waiting around for enlisted grunts.”
“Chill, bro,” Diaz told the guy. “Dempsey’s got brain damage.”
“I’m, uh, sorry, I …” the marine stumbled, not sure what to say.
“Don’t sweat it,” Diaz laughed. “It’s actually made him a lot more likable.”
I laughed. It wasn’t all that funny, but it felt good to laugh. And the look on the private’s face was priceless.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’ve been looking for Dempsey all day.”
“All day?” I said. “I’ve only been out of bed for half an hour.”
“What’s the colonel want with Dempsey, anyway?” Diaz asked, suddenly protective of me. I guess we had “history” too.
“Do I look like someone Colonel Levithan confides in?” The guy was annoyed now. “Let’s go.”
I turned back to my dog. “Don’t worry, Loki. We’ll get you back home soon.”
“Home?” It was Diaz’s turn to raise his eyebrows at me.
“Nothing says home like a cold rack and pit latrines,” I laughed, but I was really surprised myself. Why had I called that dusty, dirty, dangerous outpost home?
“I guess there’s no place like it,” Diaz shook his head. Then he looked me up and down with a smile. “Dempsey-Wempsey, summoned by the colonel.” He gave me a fist bump. I returned it, but the sideways smirk on his face made me think of Chang.
“Later, Mama Bear,” I called back, and followed the private outside.
Loki didn’t take his eyes off me as I left. I heard a whine from his cage.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, and I hoped he understood. And I hoped it was true. We’d failed to protect Chang, failed to detect the other bomb. Maybe this was it. Maybe I was going to be sent home, a failure.
I hopped into the private’s jeep for a quick ride over to the headquarters, suddenly worried this would be the end of me and Loki as a team. If they sent me packing, would they even give me time to say good-bye to my dog? The Marine Corps wasn’t a sentimental bunch.
Colonel Levithan stood when I entered the room. “Corporal.” He offered me a seat.
“Sir.” I saluted and sat down. I was grateful. I felt a little woozy on my feet.
“I read your lieutenant’s report on the incident,” he said. “You and your dog are doing fine work. It could have been a lot worse without you there.”
It couldn’t have been worse for Chang, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. I guess I wasn’t getting in trouble after all.
“The Corps takes brain injuries very seriously, son,” he said. “So I’ll put this to you pretty plain. We’ve got a battalion-wide op coming up in your company’s battle space.”
I had to translate in my head from military elf into human speak. He meant an entire battalion — about a thousand marines — were going to conduct some sort of operation around the area of Outpost Eliopulos.
“We’re going to flush them out of the valley and cut off their escape routes across the border. It works kind of like hunting with dogs, driving birds from the bush. In this case, the dogs are a few rifle companies and they are going into the villages in the valley to route out enemy fighters. When those fighters come running to escape through the mountains, another rifle company — Echo Company — will be waiting to engage them.”
I couldn’t figure out why he was telling me all this. He was so far above my rank he might as well have been the president. Why did I need to know this stuff?
“You want to get back to your company, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Given your injuries, we cannot order you back. Not in time to participate in this op,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“But if you request to return …” His voice trailed off. “Those mountain passes are filled with places to hide IEDs. Our guys would be a lot safer with an experienced dog team on the ground. I want you to think about it for a day or two, Corporal.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t order you,” he repeated.
“I understand, sir.”
“That is all,” he said.
I stood and saluted. He dismissed me, and I made my way back to the kennel.
I wanted to take Loki for a walk. I had some serious thinking to do, and I guess I wanted to do it with my partner at my side. If I volunteered to go back and take part in this operation, it wouldn’t just be my life I was putting in danger. It would be Loki’s life too.
Back home, before the Corps, whenever I had a problem I needed to work out or something was bothering me, I’d take Baxter and TJ for a walk.
It’s a simple thing, walking a dog. It wasn’t like taking them outside to go to the bathroom, and it definitely wasn’t like going hunting. There was no point to it but the walk. The walk was the point. As my dogs trotted around me, sniffing at whatever caught their interest, I could relax a little, not worry about what anyone thought of me, or how I was doing on the football team or in school. Or if I was living up to the idea of myself I had in my head. I could just be a guy walking his dogs. And I found it easier to talk to them than to talk to most people.
Loki trotted beside me now as we made our way through the desert dust of Leatherneck. He peed on the side of a metal storage unit that had been turned into an officer’s quarters. I hoped no one was watching him.
He stuck close to me. It was our first walk since the patrol. I knew it had been a week because that’s what they told me, but I’d fallen out of time. Camp Leatherneck felt like a dream. Airplanes shaking the walls as they took off and landed day and night, air conditioning and showers, a gym and a hospital. There was even a makeshift plywood pool hall. Laughter shook its walls day and night.
“So what do you think, O.G. Loki?” I asked.
Chang’s face popped into my head again, his sideways smile tilting into the sun like a ramp. I figured this was how it would be now. Chang would go on my walks too. There were worse ghosts to be haunted by than your friends, I guessed.
Loki stopped and curled around to lick his back leg.
“Here’s the situation,” I told him. He looked up at me. He knew I was talking to him. Even if he couldn’t understand the words, he knew they were meant for him. “They need us at OPE, you know that? We have a big job to do. Dangerous.”
Loki cocked his head, as if to say, Is that it?
I guess that wasn’t it.
“We don’t have to go back yet,” I said. “It’s up to us.”
It wasn’t all about the marines. Mom and Zach needed me too. Zach was worried — or else he wouldn’t have bothered writing from school. And Zach would only worry if he saw Mom worrying. The Twinkies were just her way of showing it.
But her worries weren’t only that I’d get hurt. She was worried I’d become a different person, someone moody and angry and distant, like my father had. She was worried that even if I came back, I would leave a part of myself over here. Should I be volunteering for danger, knowing how she felt?
And if I didn’t, what kind of person would I become then? What kind of man would I come back as, knowing I’d let down my friends?
The guys up at OPE did need us, but after all that had happened, I needed them too. Everything at the outpost was important. Everything we said or did, we did with the knowledge that it could be life or death. Everything mattered. How could I go back to taking out the trash at home, when I’d walked point on a patrol and searched strangers’ homes for explosives? When I’d sat next to my friend on the head, listening to him rap, looking across the valley at the mountains, and hoping that an attack didn’t come in before I got off the toilet?
I couldn’t. Not without kn
owing I’d given it my all. It wasn’t anything like home, but it wasn’t like anywhere else either.
Kind of like Loki’s sleeping bag. The place was filled with familiar smells, gross as they were.
“What do you think we should do, Loki?” I asked him. “We can stay safe down here for a while. Miss the big, dangerous op. Another team will go. You think that’s what Mom would want us to do?”
Loki looked up at me when I talked to him, and figuring that meant playtime, I guess, he whacked me with his paw, right in the pocket.
“Okay, okay,” I told him. I pulled out the toy. He sat and licked his lips. I moved it from side to side, watching his eyes track it. Then I tossed the toy as hard as I could in a great, soaring arc. Loki raced after it, a black streak across the desert.
In a flash, he was back. He dropped the toy at my feet and looked up at me, doing a little dance with his front paws, ready to give chase again. I picked up the toy and threw. He charged, leaping over ruts in the dirt, front and back legs working in unison, zigzagging across the sand. He looked like he was flying.
Watching him run, I felt a pang of doubt.
He didn’t sign up for this. As much I liked to think that he knew he was a marine with important work to do, he didn’t really know the difference between this game of fetch and the work we did on patrol. He was born to train as an IDD dog, and with each test he passed and each round of training, he was bustled forward into a life he hadn’t chosen. And now, he was with me because he’d been assigned to me, just like he’d been assigned his last handler.
But was my life so different? I’d been trained, I’d been assigned to Outpost Eliopulos. The only reason Chang and I knew each other was an accident of fate. I just as easily could have known some other guys at some other base or gotten sent home after a crash like Hulk. I just as easily could have stepped on that bomb instead of Chang. It was all random.
But it still mattered. The people around us, even if we didn’t choose them, mattered. The things that happened, even if they happened without any rhyme or reason we could see, mattered. We couldn’t choose everything that would happen to us, but we could choose how we handled it as it happened.
Loki brought the toy back. I picked it up to throw again.
“You want this? You want it?” He barked and spun. He jumped to grab it from my hand, and I had to yank it away at the last second. He hit the ground, and I threw it in the opposite direction.
“Go! Go!” I yelled, and he was off again. Nothing else mattered to him at that moment but getting that toy and bringing it back.
I remembered what Chang said to me that first night, quoting the Batman movie. It was the same thing Loki said with every bark and every wag of his tail: Why so serious?
Loki didn’t know we were in a war or doing important work. He just knew he felt a bond with his marines, and especially with me. That was all he needed. He didn’t know what came next, and it didn’t matter. The connection was all that mattered. That was why he whined when I left him alone, why he felt safe in his old handler’s sleeping bag, why he wanted to play as much as possible.
He hadn’t chosen me or chosen this job, but he was doing it with joy, doing his best and wagging his tail through it all. He was afraid when there were things to be afraid of, and he was playful when there were things to play with, and he was a goof when I needed a goof, even if I didn’t know that’s what I needed. He just loved the humans around him while he could, as much as he could, and brought his best every day.
Toughness wasn’t about being the strongest or the biggest or the baddest, it was about seeing the job through, even when it was hard, sticking by your friends. My mother would understand why I chose to stay. Loyalty was toughness. Semper Fi. Always faithful. Loki didn’t need that explained to him. He lived that way.
So would I.
Real men stay.
Loki and I played fetch all afternoon, until the sun set and Loki began to vanish into the shadows each time I threw the toy. He always came back out of the darkness to drop the toy at my feet and beg me to throw it again.
Once it was dark, I went over to one of the big bunkers the military set up for us to get online. A few marines sat at other terminals, writing e-mails or checking Facebook or video chatting with their families back in America. Loki lay down on the dirty floor at my feet and gnawed on his toy.
I logged in to my e-mail and found the picture I was looking for. Douglass had sent it sometime during the week I’d been unconscious.
The picture showed me standing in the hazy background during our demonstration for the colonel. In sharp focus at the center of the picture, Loki was wrestling Chang down to the ground, his black fur bristling, red dust rising in the air around his feet. Chang had his arm raised with Loki pulling on the end of it, his teeth buried deep in the bite sleeve. Chang’s white teeth shone with laughter, frozen forever in that picture’s pose.
I smiled looking at it, then typed a new message.
Hey, Zebro. Here’s that pic you wanted. That’s me in the background, and in front, that’s two of the toughest marines in the world. They’re both heroes. I’m still learning to be. Semper Fi, bro. — Gus
I hit send and stood up.
“Well, Loki,” I said, picking up his toy and leading him out into the cool desert night at Camp Leatherneck. Generators rumbled loudly as we walked back toward the kennels. “You ready to go back into the mountains?”
His tail wagged, and I knew he understood. He was going back to his friends, wherever they needed him to be.
And so was I.
“Something don’t smell right.” Douglass stood in the doorway to the narrow bunker, sniffing the air. “Is that … shampoo that I smell? Did some marine just get back from a spa?”
“Good to see you too, Douglass,” I said, standing up to greet him.
“Bad guys gonna smell you from across the valley and know just where to aim. You the only clean thing in a hundred miles.”
I was definitely the cleanest guy on base. Even Loki was cleaner than any of the marines up on the outpost.
“Now that you’re back, we gotta get you an OPE shower,” he added.
“What’s that?”
“Cleaning the latrines,” he said.
I laughed, and Douglass looked at me like I was an alien.
“What?” I said. “It was funny.”
“The Dempsey I know don’t laugh.”
“Maybe I got brain damage.”
“You must have, to come back up here.”
“Loki insisted. I think he had a date with Vasquez.”
“I knew the two of them had something special.”
We joked like that for a few more minutes. The jokes kept us going without having to talk about Chang, at least not directly. But we were also kind of talking about him the whole time. If his death had made us stop messing with each other, he would have taken it as a great insult to his memory.
I went out to take a walk around the base. It was pitch-black outside, but Loki could lead me. I liked the late nights up at OPE. Lieutenant Schu and Staff Sergeant Luken were asleep. Vasquez was up, sorting bandages. He welcomed us back by tackling Loki and wrestling with him in the dirt. So much for a clean dog.
“Will you shut up?” someone grunted from inside the barracks. “Some of us are trying to sleep through the war!”
Vasquez dusted himself off and stood up. “Welcome back, brother,” he said to me. “Word is you volunteered to come back sooner than you had to. What was the problem? You didn’t like the heated towels at Leatherneck?”
I laughed.
“Seriously, though, Dempsey,” he said. “We’re glad to have you and your O.G. back here. Everybody feels a lot better with Loki looking out for us.”
I glanced over at the medical supplies he had laid out, bandages and needles, packets of fluids and pain killer pills. Like he was expecting a lot of casualties.
“Lieutenant Schu’s briefing us in the morning about Hunting Dog,” he
said.
“Hunting Dog?”
“That’s the name of the operation,” Vasquez answered. “I think the colonel took a liking to Loki, named it in his honor.”
Loki, hearing his name, rolled onto his back, demanding Vasquez rub his belly. Vasquez obeyed, and Loki’s tongue rolled happily out of his mouth.
Then we heard the screech of an incoming attack. The quiet of the nighttime was torn open. Men shouted as they scrambled from their bunks and rushed to fighting positions. I grabbed Loki and pulled him close as Vasquez and I jumped into a sandbag bunker. Loki panted happily in my arms. Even with the deafening explosions of the bombs and the roar of the machine guns, his tail wagged.
The attack was over almost as soon as it had started. We climbed out of the bunker. Douglass was taking apart his gun, even though it was still smoking hot.
“Gun jammed,” he said. Hot brass shell casings littered the ground at his feet.
“Or you melted the barrel,” Vasquez suggested.
“Doesn’t matter much,” Douglass shrugged. “They didn’t have much fight in them tonight. Probably just saw the helicopter come in and wanted to welcome our dog team back to us. Give you a proper fireworks display.”
I picked up a piece of hot, twisted metal from the dirt, a vicious bit of shrapnel that easily could have killed one of us.
“Some welcome,” I grunted.
Loki sniffed at the metal in my hand and wagged his tail. To him, it must have smelled just like everything else I asked him to find. He jumped up and leaned on me with his front paws to get a really good sniff at it. Then he nudged my pocket with his snout.
Time to play, Boss, he seemed to say. That smell means it’s time to play.
I pulled out his toy and let him tug on it for a while.
“O.G. Loki,” Vasquez laughed. “He comes out of a firefight and wants to play. Now, that’s a marine.”
He barked, which I guess was his way of saying oo-rah.
“Glad you guys are back.” Douglass patted me on the shoulder and gave me a long look. Finally, he smirked. “Because I wasn’t kidding about that OPE shower. Those latrines are nasty. You best get them cleaned up and get yourself dirty by morning. We’ve got some hunting to do.”
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