Princes of War

by Claude Schmid

  Damn fucking country. Crazy fucking country.

  His bed was wedged tightly between the walls. He kicked the wall hard one time, lashing out at the brutal craziness poisoning the world.

  He looked again at the light through closed eyes, the acetylene torch burning behind a thin screen. Can’t burn it off. Never can.

  DAY FOUR

  12

  At 0430, the earth herself still asleep, all Wynn could hear was his feet hitting the gravel of the running trail around the perimeter of the FOB and his steady deep breathing. He hadn’t run for several weeks. He’d decided to run this morning to help purge the craziness of yesterday. After a day like yesterday, night sunk the whole earth into a suffocating silent pit, and he wondered how ordinary life could ever return. Nonetheless, every 24 hours—an immense achievement—the world turned back from the black, muted, and lethargic night into a living, breathing, buzzing spectacle. He pushed the air out of his lungs. Of course everything wasn’t asleep. Bad things happened in the night; things that could hurt his men—people like whoever shot that boy. Wynn’s chest heaved and expanded as he ran, sounding like a hospital breathing machine. He’d rounded the back of the FOB a second time. His body-burn felt good, as if every cell was rejuvenating. He couldn’t change what was happening around him. Part of him maybe didn’t want to. To count when it mattered most was what mattered most.

  What does matter and what doesn’t? Perhaps there are a few true things, a few large and stable rocks in a cold stream that you could use while crossing, while moving through your life. Life was inevitably a precarious crossing; sometimes the stepping stones were wet and slippery. You had to keep going. That was the main thing.

  Some didn’t keep going. He had lost one: Ramirez. Wynn hoped, prayed, he would not lose another. Long after the Wolfhounds returned stateside and the war was old history, after the country had moved on to new crises and his men had married beauties and fathered children, and gotten new jobs, and lost jobs, and gotten new jobs again, and gotten divorced, and started again, and kissed grandkids, after they had built a thousand new memories—the one thing they would never forget is that not everyone came home.

  After breakfast, Cooke huddled with Sergeants Pauls, Turnbeck, and Singleton. Dawn cracked like a smoldering fire along the horizon. The night’s darkness resisted banishment, and bright light from a pole-mounted fixture shined down on them, the four men’s bodies casting long lean shadows, like dark fingers pointing impenitent at the day to come.

  “We got to shake that mess yesterday off the men,” Cooke said. “No man can see kids killed without being affected. Watch your guys. Keep telling them things will be all right. Keep each other safe, that’s the main thing.” He worried that the men would hold on to that image of the dead boy and thereby degrade their performances in the days to come. He kicked at the ground, grinding the toe of his boot into dirt, trying to squash any such possibility.

  “We lost him,” Pauls said, his voice sodden with residual frustration.

  “Lost what?” Cooke asked.

  “The damn shooter. That’ll eat the guys.”

  “True. It’s fucked up. But it ain’t over. Keep talking to your guys. What’s important right now is the men need to be reminded that a man, especially a fighting man, wins some and loses some. Being able to handle both is the definition of maturity.”

  “We gotta get something to make up for it, kill something, fuck them up. We find the bastards that did this, the guys will put it behind them,” Turnbeck said.

  “We watch out for each other,” Cooke said. “We want to bring everybody home. I don’t want to lose anybody else.” He thought about Ramirez. He’d lost one of the Wolfhounds already; it couldn’t happen again. “You remind your guys about that. Remind each other. If anybody lets me down, I’m gonna deliver a really hard time.”

  “We got it, Sarge,” Pauls answered.

  “The LT and I’ve been talking,” Cooke continued. “We’ll find these bad guys. We all work hard, and we’ll find them. Keep your eyes wide open. Keep your crews alert. We’ll dig until we find some clues. Something will break our way.”

  After talking for a few more minutes, the group broke up. Cooke watched the others walk away. Then he stuck his left hand in his pants pocket and fingered a thin strip of fabric. He touched the familiar embroidered letters on the fabric. The letters spelled a name: Ramirez. After Ramirez had been killed, the platoon had packed up all his personal effects to give to casualty affairs. On a table in the FOB trailer where Ramirez had lived had been a small packet of spare uniform items, including three name tapes for his desert cammies. Cooke, seeing these, had softly run his finger over Ramirez’s name and taken one. Ever since then he’d carried Ramirez’s name tape in his pants pocket. Inside Cooke’s kevlar vest cover was another Ramirez memento, a printed picture of Ramirez that Mongrel had taken during the flight from America. The photograph caught Ramirez in the aisle of the aircraft, horsing around, his mouth twisted insolently, his hands extended like two six-shooters aimed at Mongrel. With the photograph inside Cooke’s vest, the dead man remained part of the pack. Whenever the Wolfhounds left the wire, Ramirez still ran with them.

  Moose arrived early in the motor pool. Other men, other early arrivals, clambered about their trucks, some with a casual distractedness, privately at work, taking care of business, their minds elsewhere. Their activity suggested purposefulness. Few talked. They were busy, busy in the way of serious men who know their jobs. Each was preparing, checking, rechecking, readying for the day—each alone, yet fulfilling a necessary task for the whole. Moose saw Lee installing a repaired radio. Gung did maintenance checks under the hood of D21. Cuebas crawled inside the back of his truck, rearranging equipment.

  Ulricht stood like a centurion on top of his truck, adjusting the gun turret. In addition to his uniform, Ulricht wore an assortment of the combat soldier’s discretionary gear and black gloves. A Leatherman multi-tool hung off his belt. His quick decisive movements—leaning over one second, manipulating the turret the next—made him look vigorous and strong and important. He was all about getting things done. Moose watched him. Ulricht was silhouetted against the sky, his lean body contrasted with the immense blue sky backdrop, as if, in its oddly fragile human form, youth and freshness nevertheless stood up defiantly against the physical world. Maybe his silhouette symbolized how important they each were as individuals. The platoon was a small part of a big Army, yet each man was something big too.

  What was Ulricht thinking about yesterday’s events? He was probably still wondering whether it was right to fire, and whether he had hit anything. Everyone was frustrated at their inability to find whoever had shot at them, and each felt bad about what had happened to the boy.

  Moose contemplated the day ahead. It wasn’t about helping the Iraqis. He cared only about helping other Wolfhounds. How could they stay safe? Their training had focused primarily on that. They had spent weeks making sure they understood and could work their equipment. They had repeatedly shot their weapons. They studied military techniques again and again. They’d spent dozens of hours on counter-IED training, trying to master taking care of themselves in combat. Sure, they went out to look for bad guys. Sure, they engaged with the local population. But at least 75 percent of it, especially the outside the wire part, was about protecting themselves. After yesterday, the focus on self-protection would increase.

  Wynn looked across the hood of his truck at his men. He would give it to them straight. They knew the cost of war, and the difficulty of operations in Iraq. The death of the Iraqi boy yesterday was a cost of war. With all the fat boiled off, the Wolfhounds’ mission was to keep the violence levels in their battlespace as low as possible. After yesterday, his soldiers would be asking whether they had failed. They hadn’t failed. They’d been out in it, doing their part, trying to bring a little better life to the Iraq’s citizens by helping with a new school. Had the Wolfhounds stayed away, progress, such as the
construction of new schools, wouldn’t be possible. Whoever attacked them yesterday was attacking Iraq. That attack didn’t negate what the Coalition Forces were trying to do. Wynn wanted his men—today and every day—confident that they were trying to do the right thing.

  He studied the faces of war-chiseled men, tested men, tired men, men who had seen things that should not be seen, who had by now spent enough time around death to know it from the inside. He detected their resolute acceptance, a kind of readiness to attempt the task at hand. It wasn’t so much that they believed fully in the mission but that they ought to try. They were all can-do men focused on getting the mission accomplished.

  Wynn laid his notes on the hood of the truck. He had spent time last night before falling asleep—and again this morning on his run—thinking about what to say to the platoon about the sniper attack yesterday and what needed reinforcing. Each night he forced his mind to take perspective of where they had been, look forward, and decide how to articulate his thoughts.

  He covered his points in a tight, business-like fashion. Speaking about the sniper shooting yesterday, he chose his words carefully, appreciating the gravity of the event. He concluded: “It was very ugly. Can’t hide that. But it shows how ugly our enemy is. There is no blame on us. What we were trying to do is good. Our mission is right. And if it takes a trip to hell to find that sniper, that’s where we’re going.”

  Then he paused longer than usual, looked around the group, locking for a second or two on the eyes of several men as if that connection might fix a special confirmation, cement an intimacy. He wanted to see singularity of purpose. They looked back, expectant, receptive.

  He told the platoon that orders from higher headquarters required that they continue the census that morning for a few hours. After that, they would go back to Bawa Sah, once again looking for anyone that would give them any information about what had happened.

  Wynn saw Cooke ready to speak.

  “Listen! You have to toughen yourself. There’s no other way. You have to harden your soul so completely that your concentration, no matter what happens, is not distracted and your actions are automatic. One of two things will happen if you don’t. One, you’ll be paralyzed into inaction, where you can’t do anything because your system is shocked silly, and you won’t be worth a fuck. Two, you’ll be killed, because the bad guy is meaner than you. Dead, or not worth a damn. Two bad options. That’s the way it is. Harden the heart. If we don’t, we ain’t gonna win.” Cooke said all these things like he was born to say them.

  13

  The convoy exited FOB Apache.

  “Clear!”

  “Roger.”

  “Loaded .50. Dukes on. Run.”

  “LNs ahead,” Turnbeck reported.

  “Kid in a ditch on the right.”

  Kale remembered the bloody, dead boy. And he remembered Wilson.

  “Don’t know what he’s doing. Fishing or something,” Turnbeck added.

  “Passing LNs on left.”

  “Lady with a bunch of sticks.”

  Kale saw the woman. She was dressed from head to toe in a brown burka and carrying a bushel of sticks on her head as she walked. She looked as if she’d been carrying the load a long way.

  The convoy continued their routine.

  Minutes later, Turnbeck was on the radio. “Donkey cart with green foliage in the back.”

  A boy pulled the donkey by a rope. The foliage was stacked so high that it nearly fell off the sides of the cart, and Kale didn’t see the boy until he passed.

  “Approaching car,” Turnbeck reported. The car, with three occupants, passed them going in the other direction.

  “Were they waving or flipping us off?”

  “Flipping us off? Makes me want to go home.”

  The convoy continued moving, but soon the traffic slowed. The first Iraqi check-point consisted of a small office made out of a metal shipping container. The road side of the container was covered with a layer of sandbags. Two IP manned the checkpoint. One of them slowed the civilian traffic by waving the cars down with his hand, and the other man walked up to the car window and checked the driver and his identification. As the first Humvee neared, one of the IP removed two orange street cones and a welded triangle of steel that blocked the road.

  The policeman, wearing a black ski mask over his face to hide his identity, waved the platoon through. If his identity were known, he and his family—even his extended family—might be threatened or even killed. War had forced the man to hide in his own country.

  Passing through the checkpoint, each vehicle sounded off on the radio.

  “Two’s out.”

  “Three’s out.”

  “Four’s out.”

  Out on the open road, they picked up speed again, maintaining intervals of about 50 meters.

  Moments later they arrived at the location Wynn had chosen.

  By the time the census teams had finished a dozen houses, a burning, orange sun stood stark and indomitable in the sky. Though it was still early, heat already swathed the land and the men in what felt like hot, sticky syrup. The soldiers continued from house to house, slogging through the heavy air, uncomfortable in the clamminess of wet, salty, sweat-filled uniforms, the itch of soil, sand and debris coating all exposed skin, burdened by the relentless stress of the tedious work.

  A two-man security team of Kale and Tyson was on a rooftop, overwatching the census area. A three-foot-high wall bordered the edge of the roof.

  Kale looked south at the people in a small makeshift market below. Shoppers walked the street, mingling with vendors at small stalls. Just below his position, a tall man sold fish and vegetables and flat bread. Other vendors sold electronics. Some offered assorted beverages. Many of the vendor stalls were nothing more than a cart or oversized wheelbarrow. Few had overhead cover. Kale watched people’s behavior. Most shoppers were women. Some had small children in tow. Most vendors were males—a few were kids, not much older than the boys yesterday, or Wilson. People moved about purposefully, taking care of their daily tasks. For a moment he imagined himself down in the market, moving through it, mingling with Iraqis. He would be lost in their world. He knew nothing about their lives. What made them happy? What were their worries? No, he didn’t fit. The past is a selfish thing, and nothing in his past prepared him to be one of them.

  In their pre-deployment briefings this phenomenon was called culture. To understand the place they had to understand something of Iraqi culture. The Army called this cultural awareness. Why did it matter? Did culture really have something to do with killing that boy yesterday?

  He tried to remember those culture briefings. How did you get a culture? Where did it come from? They’d been told it had to do with long-established characteristics of a society. Things like language, customs, history, and beliefs—a blend of tangible and intangible stuff like that. You didn’t get the option of buying in or rejecting it. Life’s inevitable baggage. You got born into it—almost like genetics, but not quite. A lot of culture was psychological. To change it took years. The textbooks said that culture was intertwined in everything, that you could not separate it out. Just as you couldn’t build a house without a frame, you couldn’t have a society without a culture.

  Kale heard Tyson mutter something and glanced over at him.

  “Cleric,” Tyson repeated, and pointed. A tall man with a black turban talked animatedly to a vendor. A small crowd had gathered. Kale had no idea what the conversation was about. Might be everyday talk. Clerics wearing black turbans claimed to be descendants of the prophet Mohammed. Clerics wearing white turbans did not. Was it a scolding for improper behavior?

  The man getting the talking-to had a round placid face. If he was receiving a lecture, he absorbed it with suitable humility.

  Several other men with cloaks and turbans surrounded the cleric, probably his escort. Some might be bodyguards.

  On the far side of the roof, Kale saw flat and
sunburnt ground in the distance. They were near the edge of the city—a few more streets of houses separated them from open fields. Further off, several miles away, he saw the tall smoke stacks of the idle brick factory, jabbing up into the sky like angry fingers from the underworld. The platoon had not been out there. He doubted if any units had. Too much space to worry about and too few men. The factory was out of action anyway. It had surely been stripped of anything valuable. Whatever jobs and income it had provided was gone.

  Wynn, partly to get his mind off the dead boy and the boy’s killer, decided to watch Turnbeck’s team conduct a census. Minutes earlier, Turnbeck had reported entering a residence behind a lone eucalyptus tree. Wynn walked the 20 meters to the house.

  Moose, now on Wynn’s security detail, moved ahead of him and knocked on the door. In less than a minute, a chubby Iraqi boy of nine or ten opened the door. The little fucker would probably grow up to be a terrorist.

  The boy’s eyes flickered uncertainly and Wynn assumed he was still intimidated by the other soldiers who had entered his home a few minutes earlier. Wynn and Cengo went inside, passing the boy as he stepped out of the way. Wynn didn’t wait for an adult escort, since Turnbeck’s team was already inside. The hallway was narrow and poorly lit. Wynn smelt bitter Iraqi coffee. Sunlight cascaded brightly through a hall window into the room ahead. He could see people sitting in that room.

  Moving forward, he recognized Turnbeck’s leg and boot through the doorway ahead, one of two men in the platoon with a red dog tag laced to his boot. Turnbeck was allergic to penicillin. Across from this boot was a giant sandal-clad foot, perhaps twelve inches long. Must be a big man. The worn-out sandal had seen better days. Sometimes little things told the most. A $75 high-top Army boot of tan suede leather, composite parts, custom-designed soles, and nylon laces, confronted a cheap, thin plastic sandal. What must an Iraqi think when a heavily armed and armored man arrives wearing a kit of equipment worth probably more than the contents of his house, sits down across from him and starts speaking to him in a strange foreign language?