Easton was convinced the locals knew more than they were telling about who’d taken his three soldiers. They were still officially listed as missing, not POWs, but it wasn’t looking good. On his orders we went street to street, knocked on doors and kicked them down if they weren’t opened fast enough to suit us. We tore through their shitty little houses, tossing closets, wardrobes, stepping over screaming babies, dumping stacks of blankets onto the floor. It seemed like each Iraqi family owned a ridiculous number of blankets, way more than you’d ever need. I still can’t figure why they had so many and it’s not important at all but the detail sticks in my head, searching through stacks of them so big, you could definitely hide a body in there. McGinnis, Crump, and Wigheard. By then, we knew all about them. We’d memorized their names to call for them on the streets.
Next afternoon we were still on the hunt. Our platoon had moved out from Triangletown to a spot on the highway where we set up a traffic-control point, looking for late-model Toyota trucks. The soldiers who’d survived the traffic circle reported that was what the guys who’d attacked were driving. Higher told us to keep an eye out for Toyotas but to search every car that passed. Sometime late on the first day we stopped a gold-colored Mercedes E-Class with two occupants. The driver looked nervous, too smiley. He wore a red-and-white head scarf.
“Red is the Palestinian color,” Fitzpatrick said. “It’s what the fighters like. Most Iraqis wear black.”
“That right?” Blornsbaum said.
“Haven’t you noticed?”
“I ain’t been paying that close attention to their headgear.”
“Car looks fancy enough to be from outta town, though,” Galvan said. “These hajjis around here would just as soon be rocking a donkey cart.”
“True.”
Blornsbaum pounded on the trunk and motioned for the driver to open it. The driver clapped his hands together like he was dusting them off.
“Meestuh, is nothing. Meestuh, is dee-nuh.”
“Freaking open it,” Blornsbaum said. “Now.” He pointed his rifle at the driver and tapped the muzzle on the trunk, chipping the paint. The driver winced but quickly smiled again, no problem, and turned his key in the lock and opened the trunk like he was expecting something or someone to jump out. When I saw how he did that, the hairs on my forearms stood on end and I raised my rifle, finger crooked on the trigger. The trunk swung all the way open and I leaned back, expecting to see wires and propane tanks and plastic explosives, or the bodies of three U.S. soldiers, bound and gagged, but it was nothing like that. The driver had taken care with the trunk because, while there was a creature tied up in there, it wasn’t a person but a sheep, legs hobbled. It saw daylight and raised its head, bleating pathetically. The driver punched it in the neck and it groaned and lay back down on the spare tire.
“Dee-nuh,” he said, patting his belly.
Shit continued to get weird. That afternoon there was an unexpected visitor at the traffic-control point. Frago came ambling down the road. He’d tracked us more than five klicks from the Row. Blew my mind. You hear stories of dogs following their masters across crazy distances but I’d always thought those stories were hype.
“You ever know a dog that loyal?” I knelt to scratch him behind the ears.
“He’s just looking for a free lunch,” Fitzpatrick said. “Besides, I’m not even sure it’s the same dog. Most of them around here look like that.”
“It’s him,” I said. “Hundred percent.”
He gulped down the bean-and-rice burrito I tossed into the shade of our turret, where he spent the rest of the afternoon lying around, watching without much interest as we stopped dozens of cars and searched each one, finding nothing as interesting as the sheep. There was more drama around dark when a Volkswagen painted orange and white, the Iraqi markings for a taxi, approached our checkpoint without slowing down, so Galvan fired a shot into the front tire. The bullet ricocheted off the wheel into the passenger compartment, hitting the driver in the foot, severing his middle toe. Medic Marko cursed Galvan as he treated the wounded Iraqi who reeked of whiskey and sobbed like a crazy person. Frago went over and sniffed at him, and the drunk toeless cabbie wailed even louder.
“Stop being such a baby,” Blornsbaum said. “He ain’t a biter.”
“It’s a cultural thing, Sergeant,” Fitzpatrick said. “I heard the CIA uses dogs at Gitmo for interrogations and shit. Arabs are scared to death of them.”
“Really. Dumb mutt might be useful after all.”
Marko stopped the bleeding with QuikClot, bandaged the foot, and handed the man the dime-sized piece of his toe wrapped in gauze, sealed inside a plastic bag. We’d found the toe on the floorboard. We sent him on his way with a warning to get off the road as soon as possible. He was so drunk, he could barely stand.
That night we were ordered to collapse our roadblock and set an observation post on a stretch of dirt road that ran along a canal north of the village. The road wasn’t used much, and we took turns sleeping and pulling watch in the tank. With the engine running, the inside of the turret was too loud for us to talk without using noise-canceling headphones wired into our helmets. We had an MP3 player jury-rigged into the commo system so we could listen to music, each other, and the military radios all at the same time. Galvan liked gangsta rap and was blasting Eminem. Not my first choice, but he was the tank commander.
I slouched in the gunner station watching the road through the thermals. Sipping on coffee to stay awake, I felt so tired from the adrenaline dump and no real sleep in almost forty-eight hours, I got annoyed, starting to forget we’d caused this whole mess. If we’d been at camp, like we were supposed to be, instead of trying to crack those safes, we wouldn’t have held up our platoon when the QRF call went out. Our tanks would’ve gotten to the traffic circle a good ten minutes earlier, and what happened there might’ve ended differently. It was hard to say for sure, but we might’ve been the one thing that tipped the scales. The thought would pop into my head from time to time but I couldn’t make it stick. Zoned out, listening to the angry music, I was nodding off when Galvan said, “You see that?”
“No. What?”
“There.” He hit a button on his joystick and the hydraulics in the turret whirred as the gun snapped to the point he’d been looking at through the thermals.
“You think that could be a Toyota?”
“I dunno. Maybe, yeah.”
The truck was in a field about a klick away, off-roading slowly in the general direction of the canal.
“Looks like they’re creepin’,” Galvan said. “Get ready.”
He called in a report and then told Fitzpatrick, down in the driver’s hull, to fire up the engine. The turbine kicked on. The radio beeped.
“Blue Two, this is Crusader Six. I copy your traffic about the possible Toyota. Detain and search that vic. Over.”
“Shit,” Galvan said to himself. “Roger that, sir,” he said to Colonel Easton.
The truck had almost reached the canal. It turned onto the road, heading slowly for us, driving with no lights, and that was a huge red flag. We were also blacked out, not moving, and they were far enough away, there was no chance they could see us yet unless they had night vision, too.
“What’s the distance?” Galvan said.
I hit a button and painted the truck with a laser. “Five hundred fifty meters,” I said.
“Wait till they’re at one fifty and then turn on the white lights.”
“Roger.”
“Now?”
“Two hundred.”
“Okay. Tell him when.”
“Rooster, hit it.”
Fitzpatrick threw the switch for the brights, and seeing our tank suddenly lit up on the road ahead, the truck stopped. Just sat there for a second like the driver wasn’t sure what to do next, before the front end dipped as he threw it in reverse, backed up in a hurry and did a three-point turn, taking off.
“Get that motherfucker,” Galvan said, and Fitzpatrick
dropped the transmission into drive, opening the throttle. The sound of the tank speeding up was like a fistful of pennies dumped in a blender.
“Crusader Six, this is Blue Two. Vic is refusing to stop. In pursuit, time now.”
“Two, do not let that goddamn truck get away from you.”
“Roger, sir.”
Some people might think it’d be easy to chase down a truck with a tank, but it’s not. An M1 Abrams drives like an old Cadillac, one of those big boats from the seventies. Smooth-handling and fast on the open highway, but not a lot of get-up-and-go, and there’re some things it just can’t do, like crossing the wrong kind of ditch. The tank is so long, it’ll pitch down the slope if the sides are steep enough and get stuck in the bottom like a lawn dart.
The canal road was a long bumpy straightaway, and the driver of the truck must’ve seen us gaining and gotten desperate. He hit the brakes and tried the one thing that could’ve saved him. Headed across the canal. The water wasn’t so high there and he slid down the bank and gunned it through. At first it looked like he might get swept away, but his wheels caught and he made it up the other side.
“Want me to try it?” Fitzpatrick said.
“Negative,” Galvan said. “We’ll never make that.” He keyed the net: “Crusader Six, Blue Two. Vic crossed the canal, vicinity Checkpoint Three One. I’m stuck on the far side. Request guidance. Over.”
“Two, Six. Is it definitely matching the BOLO?”
“Affirmative.”
“Can you shoot to disable? Over.”
“Negative, sir. It’s too far away and still rolling.”
There was radio silence while the colonel thought about it. A second or two to decide life or death. That’s all you ever get, if that.
“Two, Six. Engage, over.”
“Roger, engaging time now. Gunner, coax, truck!”
I flicked off the safety but didn’t fire. Something in me already knew what we’d find later.
“Sergeant, they haven’t really done anything. And what if the POWs are in there? We sure about this?”
“Fuck, Sleed. You heard what the colonel said.”
“I know but—”
“Fire!”
I’d never physically hurt anyone in my life except for a fight in school when I was in the eighth grade and bloodied the nose of this bully who’d been picking on me because of my acne. Still, I was supposed to be a stone-cold killer, had trained for this moment for years, but when it came down to it, it was hard to pull the trigger, especially when no one was shooting at us. I just couldn’t. Galvan had to. The truck was getting away, six hundred meters now. He took over the gunnery controls from his station. The coax bucked in the mount, the smell of cordite filled the turret, and I watched in my sights as the tracers sailed through the air and landed all around the Toyota, shredding it like a beer can blasted with a shotgun, the tires bursting, truck bouncing across the field before it rolled on its rims to a stop.
Galvan ceased fire. The rear passenger door opened and stuck halfway like the hinges were damaged and someone inside had to kick it free. Galvan was about to shoot another burst but when the door opened the rest of the way, it was a woman who stumbled out. She moved like a puppet whose strings were being cut. Wobbled away from the truck, back toward it, and leaned into the backseat. Dragged something out. Even from that far off, but with the sights set on max power, I could tell right away we’d screwed up big.
“Oh my god,” I said. “It’s a kid.”
We drove farther up the road to where there was a bridge over the canal. We crossed to the other side and circled back around to the truck smoking in the field. By then everyone in it was dead. The woman we’d seen. The little girl she’d been carrying, who looked too skinny, like she’d been about to die of starvation before we killed her. The man driving, still buckled into the front seat. A boy in the back. Something was wrong with one of his arms. Like it’d been whittled down to a nub in place of a hand.
“This is so bad,” Galvan said.
I was starting to get light-headed, but this time I refused to let myself faint. Instead I walked up to Galvan and hit him as hard as I could. Sucker punched my tank commander. Laid him out and got on top and started to choke him. We fought, going hard, basically trying to kill each other—why not add one more fucking corpse to the mix—and even Fitzpatrick, big as he was, couldn’t separate us. It wasn’t until Blornsbaum drove up in his tank and dismounted and got involved that they broke up the fight.
They dragged me off to one side. Galvan the other. I sat with my head in my hands, nose snotty and bloody, and all that mixing with the tears.
“I can’t believe this!” I shouted. “We shouldn’t even be here.”
“Tell me about it,” Blornsbaum said.
“Those people are wasted because we’re looking for the MIA, and the only reason we’re doing that is we didn’t get to them fast enough.”
“Yeah. You’re gonna have to live with that.”
“You wanna know why we missed the QRF call, Sergeant?”
“Shut the fuck up, Sleed,” Galvan yelled from across the way.
“I don’t know if I do,” Blornsbaum said carefully.
“Well, I’m telling, regardless. We missed it because we were too busy trying to bust into some safes in the water palace. I can’t fucking take this anymore.”
Blornsbaum stared at me like he wanted to wring my neck, and he spat on the ground and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You kids,” he said. “Man, you kids.” He didn’t sound mad or even disappointed. Just real tired. “Sleed,” he said, “I want you to listen close. Never say what you just said to me, ever again, to nobody. You put that mess in a box. Lock it, bury it deep, and throw away the key. Word of this gets out, and some people, including you, are going to jail. Not for just a minute, either. I’m talking about your life is over. And the people who are lucky enough not to go to jail, their careers will be over. You three are a disgrace. I hope you get yours, but you better believe I’m not letting you take me down with you. What’s done is done. The only thing left now is to stop the bleeding.”
The day after the shooting, Triangletown was in an uproar. Dozens of Iraqis moved on our company’s makeshift outpost, spools of razor wire strung around tanks and APCs circled defensively like a wagon train in a western. The Iraqis were chanting something that could’ve been Death to America, we didn’t know. They were led by this old sheikh, who, unlike everyone else, acted calm, hands clasped behind his back like a professor, skin the color of a walnut, and just as creased.
We were quickly becoming surrounded. The crowd surged forward, pushed from the rear by newcomers. Frago ran back and forth along the wire, barking at the Iraqis. Someone in the crowd threw a stone at him and missed. Somebody else threw another one that hit him in the haunches and made him yelp, tuck his tail over his balls, and scurry under our tank to hide.
I yelled, brandished my rifle and stepped to the crowd. The night before, I’d been destroyed by regret, but now it turned inside out, to anger, like when you do something wrong and get called on it.
“You shit birds wanna throw rocks? Throw one at me, and let’s see what happens.”
Just then I jumped in my boots at the sound of a command. “At ease that goddamn noise, troop!” It was Colonel Easton, small man with a big voice. He was bandy legged, built like a jockey but a few inches taller, and always acting unnaturally crass, probably thinking that the way he cursed all the time made it easier for us common folk to relate. Like a lot of officers who’d drunk the Kool-Aid and slogged away long enough to gain command of a battalion, he was a weird mix of motivational speaker and prison warden.
“What’s the fucking big idea here?” he said, looking right at me.
“They were throwing rocks, sir.”
“Who’d they throw rocks at?”
“My dog, sir.”
“Your fucking dog?” He scrunched his face like he’d just bit into something nasty. “You know we’ve got
three MIA out there right now, don’t you? Not to mention this mob scene on our hands. And you mean to tell me you’re busting balls over a dog? You aren’t even authorized to keep a dog, Specialist… Sleed,” he said, squinting to read my name tape. “We tracking?”
“Sorry, sir. I shouldn’t’ve pointed my gun at them.”
“A rifle is a weapon. The only guns in the army are the big guns. You make my head hurt, Sleed. What platoon you in?”
“Third, sir.”
“Oh. You’re the assholes. What’ve you got to say for yourself?”
I could feel Blornsbaum staring a hole through me.
“We, uh, we tried, sir.”
“You tried. Look what that gets you. Goddammit, Sleed. I’m going to personally do violence upon you if you don’t get out of my sight in the next three seconds.”
“Yes, sir.”
I moved off, and he turned to Moe, his interpreter. “Which one is he?” the colonel said, scanning the crowd. “Yeah? Ask him what he wants.”
Moe was on loan from the State Department, an Iraqi American by way of Detroit. Rumor was, his dad had run afoul of Saddam’s secret police during the war with Iran, and as a little kid, Moe had fled with the rest of his family to America. He was wearing desert camo, same as everyone, but had on metallic-colored sneakers in place of combat boots, and a pair of sunglasses with wide frames that none of us regular soldiers could’ve gotten away with.
He went up to the razor wire and talked with the sheikh in Arabic. The crowd quieted, listening in.
“So?” Easton said at a break in the conversation.
“He’s come for the bodies of his family,” Moe said. “His daughter, granddaughter, grandson, son-in-law. He claims your men shot them last night.”
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