Rankin looks over and raises an eyebrow. “You look bored, D. Maybe you should take up a hobby.”
“Like what?”
“Well,” he says, putting on his thoughtful face, “like speed cigarette-rolling. Stateside, it’s really catching fire. I hear ESPN2 even has a show. You could time yourself and see how fast you finish a sack. Here, give it a try.” He digs into the front pocket of his fatigues and throws his pouch of tobacco into my lap. “But D?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Careful you don’t get it too close to your pants.”
“I was waiting for this shit to start.”
“You got to mind your hygiene out here, D,” Rankin tells me with a straight face.
I shake my head and start to twist one up. I’m glad to have something to distract me from my stomach cramps. They’ve gotten worse. Each time we hit a bump in the pavement, I think I’m going to spray the Humvee with half-digested chili.
As I’m lighting the cigarette for him, the Humvee in front of us rolls to a stop.
“Goddammit, Greer, what is it now?” the radio squawks.
“Uh.” Greer whispers a quick question to someone in his vehicle before talking into the radio again. “A nobby, sir.”
This is our base’s radio code for a flat tire. Since we use these crappy toy-store walkie-talkies for foot patrols and the radios in our Humvees operate on a standard civilian band, the lieutenant worries that the insurgents are capable of monitoring our radio transmissions. Most of us are of the opinion that these new codes do more to confuse us than the enemy.
“Goddammit,” the radio says. I imagine the lieutenant spraying the dash with spittle. His voice is painfully loud.
Rankin reaches over and turns the volume down a notch, and I thank him. I hand him the cigarette and lean back in my seat. This stop might last a while. I take shallow breaths and hold my belly with both hands. Every few seconds, the muscles in my stomach clench up and pointy little fingers of pain jab at my insides. A vulture glides down into the rubble-filled yard of the factory. Then another. I wonder what has crawled in there and died. Lopez and Nevada and two others hop out of the first Humvee to set up a defensive perimeter. Hazel mans the second vehicle’s .50-caliber and scans the factory’s rooftop with binoculars. He looks as bored as I feel. Doc Greer gets out too and opens up the back door so they can get the jack. I catch a quick glimpse of the older hajji huddled back there. Doc Greer slaps his foot to get him to move it. He’s none too gentle. Their lips move, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Nevada points to the tire and lights a cigarette. Lopez pulls a face, but he kneels and starts cranking up the jack.
Rankin laughs. “Fucking Lopez.”
My stomach squeezes itself into a ball and stays that way. Little BBs of greasy sweat pop up on my forehead and my throat constricts. I close my eyes and try again to think of something else. It’s no good. I’m going to puke. I have to get out of this Humvee. Rankin glances over at me but doesn’t say anything. Sweat drips down my cheeks and beads on the tip of my nose. I lean out the window to spit.
“Rankin,” I say through my teeth, “I’m going to yurp.”
Rankin frowns.
“I’ve got to move, man. You know I hate to have people watch and—”
He turns and looks me full on. “This ain’t the time or place for this kinda shit. There could be a sniper up there. Pull yourself together, D. Just lean out the window. I’ll close my fucking eyes.”
“No, really. You know I can’t do it out there in front of—”
Rankin rolls down his window and looks around. “Jesus Christ, D.”
“I got to go. Radio ahead, if you want. I won’t go far. I just have to—” A bit of vomit comes up into my mouth and I’m forced to swallow it down. I close my eyes and unsnap my seat belt. My head spins. For a moment, I’m not sure which way is up and which way is down.
“Shit.” Rankin chews at his lower lip and gives me the stink-eye. “You’re going to get us both in trouble.” All the same, he flicks his fingers at me like he’s shooing a fly out of the car. “It’s your ass.”
I open the door and jump down. As I run around the rear of the Humvee, I can hear Rankin complaining. “You owe me for this, man. I expect five hundred smokes.”
I am recognized as the best roller of cigarettes on base. I make them plump, tight, and even. Nevada is a distant second, but Rankin and Nevada don’t get along. Rankin would smoke a hundred loose, crumbly cigarettes before he’d ask Nevada to roll him one. Nevada grew up wild in New Orleans in a project near the number two St. Louis Cemetery, and Rankin was raised in a middle-class black family in south Georgia who sent him to community college in Savannah. They might as well be from different countries. A week back, the two of them almost came to blows over a rap Nevada made up about Rankin trying to lighten his face with Clorox and Q-tips. Then Rankin reminded Nevada who it was that joined the Army because a judge gave him a choice between Basic or three to five up at Angola State Prison. It took five guys to pull them apart. Rankin and Nevada exchanged hard looks for a few days, but then it blew over. They still won’t play video football together.
I lock my gun and run across the road. Puke rises in my throat and some of it dribbles out of the corner of my mouth as I go. Doc Greer shouts something I can’t quite make sense of. I keep running. Up to the gate and in. Feeling my way around with the tip of my rifle. Just after I turn the corner, I let it all out. Gallons of it. The sound of liquid hitting the ground makes me retch twice as hard. I dry heave until bitter strings of bile drip onto the dirt. Behind me on the road, someone shouts my name over and over again. My throat stings and my eyes fill with tears, but I feel better almost immediately. I spit several times and slump back against the wall, trying to catch my breath.
When I straighten up to wipe my face on the sleeve of my uniform, I see a brief flash of movement on the far side of the main building. The factory yard is filled with all manner of construction waste and general debris: piles of broken masonry, tangles of rusty wire, chunks of rebar-studded cement, and waist-high patches of dry weeds full of wind-blown cans and wisps of weathered paper. My eyes are bleary and I might have been mistaken. It feels like a fuse burned out somewhere deep in my head and, in the sudden dark, my brain stopped working right. Still and all, I’ll be damned if something didn’t move over there.
I make sure my M4 is locked, load a round into the chamber, and start backing out of the factory yard, scanning the windows and mounds of trash for movement as I go. I’m used to the heavier M16, so I find myself constantly checking to see if I’ve forgotten to load my clip. A squadron of flies has already discovered my puke. The buzzing of their wings seems unnaturally loud and grating. And then I see it again. Something purple flits between two piles of broken brick. I blink and look hard, but whatever it was, it’s gone now. Maybe a jackal. I’ve heard they get pretty big. I take a step back. Pebbles rattle behind a nearby heap of gravel. Then the little purple creature zips one mound closer to the factory’s main door, one mound closer to me. It looks like a small woman or a boy. A long rope of tangled black hair bounces on this miniature person’s back as it runs. Immediately, I think of it as a her. Not even teenage boys in this country let their hair grow past their shoulders. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to have a rifle, but she could be packing a small handgun or a grenade. I consider firing a warning shot, but that would bring the entire squad over here. They’d pound every inch of this place with lead before I had a chance to explain, and then my ass would really be toast. Back on the road, someone shouts. It’s unintelligible. My ears still ring from the IED blast, but it isn’t really noticeable until I try to make sense of people’s speech.
It’s time to move. The lieutenant’s probably pitching a fit back there. I take a quick glance over my shoulder to measure the distance I’ll have to run until I have decent cover. A good dozen yards or more. Just as I’m bracing myself for the dash, I spot her again. Without a sound, she appears, perched like a p
urple sparrow on a stack of broken brick. I freeze. We stare at each other for a very long moment. I’m no longer positive it’s a female. Angular, dirt-smeared features and waist-length hair that even from twenty yards away looks matted and ratty and infested. Hunger has made the child’s eyes huge and its body UNICEF-thin. It’s very hard to tell ages here, but this one can’t be older than thirteen or fourteen. The kid’s dressed in what looks like a collection of knotted purple rags. Maybe it is a girl. The sex of young children is often impossible to figure out in this country, a fact that fucks with the head of many a soldier when he first arrives.
“Hey,” I say, letting my rifle strap slide so the barrel points toward the ground. I hold up my hands.
The kid hisses. Her eyes narrow. And then she bolts away like a feral cat, leaping over the puddles of broken glass and the rusting clumps of rebar. I want to give chase, but out on the highway, Lieutenant Blankenship shouts something in a tone of voice I can’t ignore. I heft my rifle and jog back to the convoy. A fifty-yard dash. My heart rate increases when I see they’ve already finished changing the tire and loaded up the jack. Nevada smokes a cigarette and points his rifle at the factory. He grins at me as I jog across the highway and then points to his ass.
Before word one, I knock off a crisp salute. I’ve found that making my salutes as straight-backed and formal as possible sometimes has a soothing effect on the lieutenant. In this case, it doesn’t help.
“What in the fuck all was that?” Lieutenant Blankenship shouts through the window of the lead vehicle. His face is gray and strained, and I immediately wish I’d listened to Rankin. “If you’ve got to take a shit, you know the appropriate defecation formation. Two armed men as escort and no more than ten yards from the convoy. You could have—”
For a moment, I think of lying, but I’m caught off balance by what just happened. Seeing the girl has got me feeling something I wasn’t prepared for, something I can’t quite name. “I’m sorry, sir,” I stutter. “I had to be sick, and then I saw a child and—”
“A child?” he asks, incredulous.
Behind him, Lopez glares at me as he gets into the Humvee. I want to flick him off, but I’m in enough trouble as it is. Lopez is soon to become a sergeant and officially outranks me, something he never lets me forget. He and the lieutenant are chess buddies. They like to quiz each other on regulation minutiae and regimental nicknames.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “A little girl, I think.”
He rewards me with a thoughtful frown before turning to look at the other men in the Humvee. “Did any of you see a child back there?”
“No, sir,” they sing.
“What the hell would a child be doing out here, Durrant? Use your fucking head. If there was one here, and I’m very far from believing such a thing, she’d be out to set us up. Get your ass back in your vehicle. We’ve got wounded men. If someone so much as fires a BB gun at us, I’m blaming you. This is a perfect place for an ambush, you stupid—”
“Yes, sir.”
I turn and run before he can finish. My face is hot. He’s right. I had no business running off like that. Gerling looked pretty bad, and I know Kellen got hit in the leg with shrapnel.
“Man, he’s pretty fucking P.O.’d. You should of heard what he was yelling on the set,” Rankin says, tapping the radio with the thumb of his cigarette hand and knocking a worm of ash onto the dashboard. “He’ll have you stirring shit for weeks.”
I groan. Stirring shit is what we call burning the waste from our homemade field latrines. It is possibly the worst detail there is. The ashes are greasy and leave marks on your uniform, and the smell of burnt shit sticks to your clothes and hair. Since we don’t have enough water to wash our uniforms more than once every few weeks, it means you reek like that for quite a while. Oddly, it smells like burning meat. Haul a hotplate out to a Porta-John and fry some beef jerky until it burns and you’ll get some idea of the smell. Usually we pay one of the local hajjis to do it.
Rankin puts the Humvee into gear and we lurch forward. “At least you blew off some of the stink while you were out there running around.”
“But be honest. You saw her too, didn’t you?”
In the rear window of the Humvee in front of us, Hazel holds up his hand as though to wave at me. Then he pretends to crank down his fingers with his other hand until only the middle one is left, all the while grinning his lopsided grin and shaking his head. With his other hand, he holds up a twisted piece of metal, probably shrapnel from the artillery shell they used to make the IED. Hazel loves to collect the bits of metal left over after the enemy tries to blow us up. If he doesn’t find some after an attack, he tends to freak out. Hazel has this desert voodoo notion that his collection will protect him from mortar attacks while he’s sleeping.
“Huh?” Rankin says, giving me a sidelong glance.
“That little girl.” As I say it, I crane my neck and look out the rear window to see if I can spot her again. I know I didn’t imagine her. I was almost close enough to smell her. I saw a girl. Or a child. You don’t hallucinate something like that. I wish she would come out again for a second, just long enough for somebody else to see her.
“I didn’t see nothing.” He squints at me again, concern crinkling up the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Just a broke-down old factory and a seriously pissed-off officer.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Rankin. Please. I’m serious.”
He gives me a long, slow shake of the head. “You really got thumped back there, didn’t you? We best get you checked out when we get back to the Cob.”
5
The Cob. The old Corn Cob. Or, as it’s known on paper, Forward Operating Base Cornucopia. A 300-year-old fortress constructed of mud bricks and undressed stone blocks. At sunset it resembles a huge golden-brown corn cob laid on its side. It was originally built by the Khalifa Omar Rahman to defend himself against attacks by his younger brother Mohammed Rahman. For a time at the end of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, it served as a prison. Then, in the nineteen eighties, some enterprising government official converted the compound into a cement factory. Now we have it.
The actual fort stands in the center of this enormous, empty space about the size of eight football fields, which in turn is surrounded by a thick brick wall. We only use eight or so of the stone rooms at the front of the fort, but behind this there are dozens and dozens of smaller rooms and crumbling corridors. We call this unused space the old fort. Underneath it is a dungeon, which I’ve heard stretches out beneath the entire base. We reinforced the original fort with cinderblocks and it became the motor pool, armory, and supply facility. Directly across from the fort is a cement factory, which was built around a flimsy steel frame and covered with corrugated fiberglass sheets, half of which have blown off. The only thing we use it for now is to house one of our latrines. The Army put up the rest of the base pretty quickly, which is to say shittily.
To the west of the fort, several rows of enlisted men’s tents stretch out in the dirty yellow sand; to the east, there are the two common tents for recreation and the mess tent and kitchen. To the east of the cement factory are the command and communications trailers and the officers’ Conexes, big steel prefab boxes about the size of railroad shipping containers with two-man living quarters built inside. All of these buildings combined occupy less than an eighth of the space inside the Cob. It feels like a small settlement on a large plain.
Whenever I pass in through the Cob’s front gates, I always feel a little of my anxiety lift away. The perimeter walls are nearly fifteen feet thick. Although the bricks are crumbling and rotten in places, it would still take a pretty mean artillery attack to breach the walls. The base is self-contained and has a rough sort of comfort. Although I never forget I’m in a war zone, once I get on base it’s nice to know the bad guys are locked outside. On hard nights when I feel rattled, I try to imagine we’re as secure as jewels in a strong safe. Every once in a while this actually works
.
When I first arrived here, we had almost three times as many soldiers and twice as many tents and trailers on base. Once the Army decided this area was pacified and secure, they trucked or airlifted all the decent buildings off to Inmar, including the Porta-Johns. Now all we have left are a smattering of two-man tents pitched above wooden pallets, a few office trailers and Conex units, a random assortment of canvas-covered structures, and forty-two active-duty soldiers. During a sandstorm the month before I arrived, the mess tent literally blew away during breakfast. The roof broke free of its stakes, flapped around in the wind for a while, and then fell in on itself. One soldier broke his arm and another one almost suffocated before they dug him out. After that, we stabilized everything with sandbags and two-by-fours. The office trailers look like tiny Gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses made of PVC piping and guy wires.
One of the worst aspects of base life is the latrines. They promised to bring us new Porta-Johns when they trucked off our old ones. You’ll see them in a week, HQ said. They lied. We built a few groups of two-man latrines the next morning out of scrap plywood and two-by-fours set above old fuel drums. At first there was only a back wall to lean up against when struggling with the infamous MRE constipation. Every passing Joe got a view of your knobby knees and red straining face. For pissing, we have white PVC tubes that drain directly into the sand (regulations state you can’t mix Number One and Number Two; the Army even likes to control your bodily functions). After a week of this sorry situation, somebody, probably Hazel, strung up pieces of oil-stained canvas around the latrines, shower curtain–style. My theory is he wanted a little privacy for his stroke mags.
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