Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  She goes to the rear of the Humvee and opens the hatchback. Unlucky enough to be issued a thirsty truck, they’ve got two full cases of oil stowed on top of all their other gear: five gallon jugs of water, spare barrels for the fifty, weapons-cleaning kits, MREs, duffel bags for their uniforms and personal effects, a POW-handling kit, and ammo cans packed with linked and belted rounds.

  She returns to the front of the truck carrying a quart of oil and hands it brusquely to him, not bothering to do him the favor of using her multi-tool to notch a spout.

  “What’s got your goat?” he says, fishing in his pockets for his own multi-tool.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Wigheard.”

  “You don’t need to be seeing that? Like I’m some delicate flower.”

  “That’s it? We’re not here for goddamn tourism, Wigheard. The fuck. I need you here with me, doing precombat checks in the little time we got left before we move out again. I do not need your ass off gaping at the goddamn dead. ”

  “Roger, Sarn’t,” she sighs, knowing he’s right about not taking frivolous side trips away from the truck, but not quite believing him about why. Can’t help the way he was raised, she thinks. A Southern boy, best and worst of the army, his daddy supposedly some hotshot time-share developer in Florida, and McGinnis the blue-collar-by-choice black sheep who enlisted instead of enrolling in an MBA program. At least, that was the word in the platoon. McGinnis kept pretty quiet about his own origins.

  He looks at her expectantly, conveying an unspoken request for something, for the funnel she has forgotten to bring. She grimaces and goes back to the rear of the truck to get it.

  “Appreciated,” he says when she returns to the sliver of shade created by the Humvee’s propped-open hood. The oil glugs down the funnel, into the warm ticking engine. He looks across his shoulder and regards her in the reluctant way she has come to associate with him disembarking the laconic territory in which he’s most at home. “Whatever responsibility I have for you has got everything to do with my rank and nothing to do with the fact that I’m a man and you’re a woman. You’re my soldier. I’m your superior. That’s the bottom line. My main job in this thing is to bring us home safe. Everything I do, every decision I make, that’s it.”

  “Shouldn’t you worry more about winning the war than keeping us safe?” she asks sarcastically.

  “No way,” he says, shaking his head steadily. “Winning and losing is on Higher. Our game is a lot simpler.”

  “Let me guess. Life or death.”

  “Correct.”

  “I don’t know,” she says mock chidingly. “Sounds kind of weak to me. Maybe we should play to win. What do you think about that, Sarn’t?”

  He stops fiddling around with the engine and gives her his full and undivided attention, a quizzical glare that asks why she’s acting so annoyingly difficult and whether he’s done anything to deserve it. He snorts and scowls and resumes his work, removing the funnel and flinging out the last drops of oil. He screws on the engine cap and tosses the empty can into the desert, where it rolls across the sand. No room in their load plan to pack trash, the whole brigade will be littering all the way to Baghdad.

  He walks a careful oval around the Humvee, inspecting the tires, checking the lug nuts, assessing the cracked rubber on the hood latches, and, kneeling to lie flat, crawls beneath the truck, peers at the undercarriage, the brake lines, attuned to every key mechanical detail. He’s tall and lanky, a half generation older, with fast-moving eyes.

  She waits for him to offer an opinion, but he doesn’t. “You think they’ll ever catch that guy, the rapist?” she finally asks.

  “Maybe,” he says, judiciously wiping grease off his hands with the rag. “They might get a hit in the all-services DNA database. Sample he gave at MEPS will be what nails him. If—and this is a big if—those jokers back at New York didn’t fuck up handling the evidence. I’ve seen some ate-up police in my day, but those jokers were something else. They’ve been in the sandbox way too long.”

  Cassandra hears him, but not really, eyes glazed over from exhaustion, locked on the faraway ridge, scorched metal and flesh; squinting, noticing something nonhuman moving around up there, some kind of animal, a wild dog, she guesses, shuddering to imagine what it’s feeding on.

  “It could be any of these guys…” She trails off, her gaze moving closer, to the soldiers up and down the column, who are themselves busy doing the same things she and McGinnis are, pouring oil and fuel into their machines to be burned.

  “It’s a big army,” he says. “Takes all comers. Some are rotten.”

  One of the brigade’s fuelers pulls alongside, and she gasses up the Humvee and returns the hose to the soldier manning the vehicle the size of an eighteen-wheeler, laden with thousands of sloshing gallons of diesel: it rumbles away in a cloud of greasy exhaust, one of several fuelers driving down the line, topping everyone off. They just took on twenty gallons, and that is nothing compared to the capacity of the Abrams tanks, each capable of burning through five times as much in an hour. Nearly a hundred tanks in this column alone. She does the math. Think about so much oil. Got to burn it to get it.

  The radio mounted inside their truck blares with a staticky warning from the commander. “All stations, Crusader Six. Prepare to move out in fifteen mikes.”

  There is a flurry of activity up and down the line.

  “Wake up Sleeping Beauty there,” McGinnis tells her, indicating Crump, in the driver’s seat. “And let’s slap a fresh coat of CLP on the fifty before we get rolling, shall we?”

  She climbs in the gunner’s hatch and nudges Crump awake with her boot before attending to her weapon. She holds her tongue but wants to tell McGinnis that applying more lubricant to the fifty will do more harm than good at this point. The gun needs to be stripped down and detailed. Another coat of oil will do little but attract the dust that gums the action and never seems to stop falling over everything all the time.

  4

  SLEED: TROPHIES

  32 Days Before

  IRAQ (HIGHWAY 1; PALACE ROW)

  I’ll never be able to forget. The desert that day was so empty of any living thing, it looked like the sandblasted side of a dead planet. We were halted on a rest-and-refuel, killing time messing around on some destroyed Iraqi armor not far from the highway. That’s when it started, if you had to pick a point. Back when we thought memories would not be enough.

  Galvan and Fitzpatrick, and yeah, me too, wanted souvenirs for the grandkids yet to be born. A helmet or bayonet to take home and prove we were in the shit. Trouble was, everything good on those tanks had burned or melted. Crews, too. Galvan had already gotten a few pictures with the digital camera he’d been carrying around everywhere since he’d bought it at New York, probably for this exact reason. He took some more of this one guy and went in for a close-up. The man’s teeth were coal black, his hands like two claws planted into the sand that had gotten so hot in the fire, it crunched like thin ice when you walked on it. That was the first time in my life I’d ever seen anything like that, and the war felt really fucking real all of a sudden. I got this complicated feeling that has bothered me ever since. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like knowing every decision, even something dumb like what to eat for breakfast or what route to drive to the store, might be the thing that kills you or saves you or gets somebody else killed, and there’s no way to know. Like everything matters so much, it’s pointless to worry about anything.

  Photographing dead troops fell under a gray area of the law of war. Whether or not it was legal depended on why you were doing it. Like, a combat correspondent would be allowed to take a picture, it would even be part of his job, but for ordinary joes, that same picture could get you busted down. You could safely kill them but not take pictures of what you’d killed. Made sense to me. Once you start in with trophies, even photographs, the nastier shit is bound to follow.

  I hoped Fitzpatrick would stop Galvan with the pictures, but no.
He and Galvan were thick as thieves. On their own they could have been okay, but they fed off each other, and that made for bad news. Galvan was our tank commander. Fitzpatrick, the driver, was this big arrogant bastard we called Rooster for how cocky he was. Not for no reason. Dude was smart, seemed like he basically got what the world was like, how to make his ugly piece of it better, but the truth about war is, some people are good at it, and people tend to enjoy showing off their talents.

  Me, I couldn’t stand the army, felt like an idiot for ever believing left-right-left would solve my problems. Grinding pills to snort in my parents’ basement, working nights in a video store. I thought enlisting would give me a higher purpose, something to fight for, but as it turned out I was the same person anywhere. A watcher. Usually the wrong-place-wrong-time kind. To my credit, though, I did get tired enough of Galvan and his pictures to speak up. Said, “You ain’t worried about those Geneva Conventions or nothing, huh, Sergeant?”

  Galvan just laughed.

  “You heard me, though, Sarge?”

  He acted like he didn’t, took another picture just to rub it in, and then rose to his full height, which wasn’t much. This scrawny Puerto Rican dude, but not scrawny in a weak way, he had that wiry workingman’s strength. Held the camera close to his mouth and blew the dust from the lens.

  “Geneva Conventions? That’s good, Sleed. Real smart. Don’t you know this whole fucking war is illegal?”

  He shook his head like I was too much of a fool to bother with, looking at the screen on the camera, scrolling through what he’d gotten.

  “Well, I just wanna go on record,” I said. “All respect, I think this is some sick-ass bullshit.”

  “Noted. Now fuck off.”

  We hung around till we spotted Sergeant First Class Blornsbaum, our platoon’s head honcho, making his way up the ridgeline from the road where our own tanks were parked. Seeing him put the fear back in us. Galvan stopped with the camera and slipped it in his chem-suit thigh pocket, playing it cool, but Blornsbaum had not just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, as he always said about himself.

  He was a lifer. Veteran of Gulf War I, Kosovo, and peacetime posts all over the world. Skin the color of a toad’s belly that refused to tan and would only burn in the desert, so he was always slathering sunscreen on himself, real diligent about shit like that, personal hygiene. He stood there trying to look tough, but it came out painfully confused, like someone had just smacked him on the back of the head, his eyes passing over Fitzpatrick, me, Galvan, the dead bodies, the burned-out tanks, and finally back to Galvan and his pocket, where the camera was stowed. He knew we knew he knew.

  “Lemme guess,” he said. “You been playing war reporter.” He unscrewed his face and spat on the sand. Shook his head and chuckled, the one reaction I’d not expected. The sound of his growly laughter made me feel light-headed, and I could practically hear the vein in my forehead throbbing. He’d thrown me. Thought for sure he would take Galvan’s camera and make him delete the pictures or even report him for violating the regs. Instead, he snapped his fingers at him.

  “Hey, Ernie Pyle. Get one of me.”

  He stood by the destroyed T-72 with a big shit-eating grin and flashed the peace sign. Galvan took his picture and then started a series of shots that would make a panorama if he stitched them together. He took one of our tanks in the distance, one of Fitzpatrick holding his rifle, like something out of a recruiting commercial, and finally came around to me. That lucky bastard managed to catch the exact moment I started to drop. I felt myself stumbling and swaying, my vision fading all white and hairy, and one of my knees buckled out from under me, my head so light, it was like my body was stretching into gas. It sort of felt nice. Because I thought that if a bullet did happen to hit me right then, it would pass clean on through without doing any harm. Just like I was a ghost.

  I revived, laid out on the desert floor. Gritty sand pressed on my cheek and nose, and there was something wet scraping across the other side of my face, into my ear.

  Blornsbaum was shouting like he was enjoying himself. “Get that dang thing off him!”

  I sat up and saw it was a dog licking me that had snapped me out of it. Spit all around my mouth, disgusting. I shoved it away. Its rusty-yellow fur felt greasy. A desert pariah dog, kind of a mongrel cur like an oversized coyote, it wasn’t trying to bite, just licking crazily like it had already loved me for years.

  It ran circles around us, yipping and rolling its eyes. Blornsbaum managed to snag its neck and hold it in one place between his legs so it had nowhere to go and nothing to do but whip its tail over the sand.

  “What the hell,” I said.

  “Dude, you just dropped like a fucking rock,” Fitzpatrick said. He handed over his canteen and I washed out my mouth, then took a swallow, the water tasting like dust and plastic. He went on, “For a second we thought you’d been shot or something. So we’re all taking cover, wondering where the fuck is the sniper, and then that dog comes trotting down the wadi.”

  “Sleed, Sleed,” Blornsbaum said. “Sleed the Gentle. Sleed the Meek. Wild animals flock to the poor son of a bitch like he’s Saint Francis wrapped in Kevlar. We have absolutely got to get this fainting business checked out, Sleed.”

  He let the dog loose. It rushed me again, bowing and scraping in the sand.

  “You’re a good boy,” I said, running my fingers like a comb through his fur to work out some of the mats. I found myself already growing fond of the damn thing. It’d been so long since I had touched any living creature in a gentle way.

  Galvan took a knee and petted the dog. Even he couldn’t resist some canine affection. “Well, Frago,” he said, scratching him behind the ears and naming him at the same time, “considering your only food source out here is these barbecued motherfuckers, you might wanna roll with us awhile. Today’s your lucky day.”

  “Is that cool, Sergeant?” I said to Blornsbaum. “Can he ride in our tank?”

  “Galvan wants that dirty mutt in his turret, it’s his problem. Never did care for dogs myself.”

  The battalion was leaving soon, and we made our way down the steep side of the high ground where the sand was loosest and deepest. We took sideways steps, and the dune gave way and rolled in little avalanches. Frago followed, zigzagging a switchback. It already felt like he belonged. Funny how in five minutes you can get so fearsomely in love with a dog. He was our first trophy, a mascot for the hard times ahead. A scavenger, a mutt, a survivor of uncertain pedigree.

  Correction. He was our second trophy, counting Galvan’s photos.

  Couple klicks outside Baghdad, we took Palace Row without a fight. The bulk of our brigade headed on into the city, while Higher ordered our company to hold at the Row, “to secure the area and search it for possible high-value targets,” in their words. When done with that, we were supposed to stick around and serve as a quick reaction force. QRF. Kind of like an ace in the hole, backup in case our guys in the city got overrun and needed the armored cavalry to come charging to the rescue.

  On QRF we got a lot of free time, compared to before. We spent it sleeping, and when we’d had our fill of that, we poked around the Row. Place was like nothing I’d ever seen. A battalion staffer found Saddam’s solid-gold toilet in our headquarters palace. The news spread, and a long line of soldiers formed up to see it. They said it weighed eight hundred pounds. Said it was worth five mil, at least. The line stretched through the palace all the way to the front gates, which looked like they were also made of gold but really were gilded brass. Outside was a checkered marble porch that looked over a man-made lake no more than a couple feet deep. A fake lake, like at a golf course. The palace with the gold toilet was just one of many near it. The most unusual one was built out over the lake on a concrete pier supported by tall pilings. We called it the water palace. Our battalion translator, whose name was Mohammed but who went by Moe, said its actual name was Victory over America Palace. It’d been built by Saddam to celebrate the end of Gulf
War I and was destroyed in the first days of part two. Victory, my ass. Thing looked like a ruined temple. Cruise missiles had pounded the walls and the pier, and the section connecting it to the shore had fallen. There was no way to get inside without wading into the lake and using grappling hooks or something to climb up. Higher had absolutely forbidden us from doing that. So you know we were thinking about it.

  On our second day at the Row, our battalion took a casualty. Fluke type of thing. It happened in the headquarters palace, the one with the gold toilet. A kid named Private Simmons pulled a life-sized painting of Saddam from the wall, triggering a booby-trapped grenade lodged in a carved-out hole. Whoever had chipped away the plaster and placed that grenade behind the painting had been pretty smart. He knew we would take it down first thing. The orders had come straight from Lieutenant Colonel Easton. “Remove and consolidate for demolition all artwork bearing regime imagery.” There was a ton of the stuff. We had a pile going in the main lobby.

  Upstairs, before the explosion, Galvan had found something good. A trophy room filled with mounts. Antelope, giraffe, an elephant-foot ashtray. A full-grown African lion, stuffed and posed on a boulder. I went to see it. Frago came with. The big cat startled him and he barked at the lion until I went over and knocked on its skull with the muzzle of my rifle to show him it was just old skin.

  “Ho,” Galvan said. “Jackpot.”

  Against the wall was a display cabinet filled with ancient artifacts. He took out a dagger a foot long, sheathed in a brass scabbard. I could see why it’d caught his eye, the scabbard all studded with gemstones.

  “Those have got to be fake,” Fitzpatrick said.

  “They look real enough to me,” Galvan said.

  It was like something an Arab prince might have carried tucked in his belt. Galvan unsheathed it and used the tip of the blade to pry at an emerald on the scabbard. Fitzpatrick reached into the display case and picked up a small clay statue of a woman whose breasts drooped over a pregnant-looking belly. She was headless. Her hands and feet had also broken off sometime long ago. He held up the statue and eyed it like he was some kind of art expert.