Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  I seethed. Escaping Chambers was impossible, like his shadow had been stapled to my heels. “I don’t care what Sergeant Chambers told you,” I eventually said. “I’m the platoon leader. Not him.”

  Another forty minutes passed in slow drips of sun. We killed time with great precision, skipping rocks and telling stories of home. Stories of girls, stories of late nights and foggy mornings, stories exaggerated and stories seared into outright lies. The desert heat bleached everything, including the minds and memories of its occupiers. Alphabet once drank a fifth of whiskey in an hour. Dominguez lost his virginity to a friend’s aunt. Hog had cliff-dived into the Arkansas River from fifty feet up. Snoop knew a girl in Baghdad’s Little Sudan neighborhood who said he had the biggest dick in all of Mesopotamia, and who was he to question her?

  “Got any good stories, sir?” Hog asked.

  “Hmm.” I stroked my bare chin and considered. The frat boy in me wanted to participate. But the officer in me demanded I tread carefully. “Didn’t party much in high school,” I said. “But in college, I went to class in a SpongeBob bathrobe for a semester.”

  I patted my slung rifle for effect. The soldiers laughed. The younger guys liked hearing stories about college. It gave them something to look forward to after this, even the ones who knew they would never use their GI Bill funds.

  The soldiers started talking about the platoon roast slated for that evening, before our night patrol—a rare scheduling blip, with no one on guard duty or out of the wire. One of the cooks had traded with a local storekeeper for a goat. I reminded them that I’d been invited, so any General Order No. 1 violations would have to be furtive. I laughed to let them know they could, too.

  The sound of a car motor droned through the still, coming closer and echoing off the blast walls. My chest seized up, and my muscles went taut. I wasn’t the only one: like figures in a diorama, we took our places, poised and alert.

  We were what we pretended to be.

  As the ranking enlisted man, Dominguez took the lead, walking through a maze of razor wire set across the dirt to impede car bombs. Hog followed, moving with more self-consciousness but less care. Alphabet rotated his turret from side to side, like a swivel, to remind the approaching car he was up there and so was the machine gun. I assumed my place behind the last strand of wire, shoulders cocked, back straight, head rigid, visualizing how the imperial officers of the past had stood when they bought peace for their country in strange lands far from home.

  The car pulled up to the checkpoint, its driver idling the engine. Dominguez instructed both the driver and the passenger to get out. It was a blue sedan, similar in make to the one shot up by first platoon. The Iraqi brothers stood to the side, where Hog patted them down and then searched in and under the car. After the driver opened the trunk, Dominguez shouted a strident “All clear!” The soldiers and Iraqis began walking around the wire strands, and I went to the back of the Humvee for a black canvas backpack filled with stacks of hundred-dollar American bills, twenty-five hundred in total.

  We called it condolence funds. They called it fasil. Blood money seemed most apt, though Captain Vrettos had freaked when I’d called it that the previous night. “That’s cynical,” he’d said. “We can’t afford to be cynical right now.” I’d wanted to argue that the army’s distortion of language was far more cynical—“military-age male,” for example, militarized any Iraqi with a penis between the ages twelve and sixty, whether a harmless shepherd or a zombie Zarqawi—but one look at the commander had suggested he wasn’t interested in philosophical debate. For such a slender man, he could be quite intimidating; there was something feral about his unkempt hair and ever-thinning eyebrows. So I’d just said “Yes, sir” and left it alone.

  We converged in front of the Humvee. I’d expected the brothers to arrive in traditional man-dresses because of the funeral, but both wore the uniform of the urban young man on the prowl: tight dress shirts open at the collar, pressed slacks, narrow pointed leather shoes that shined like sunspots. Both wore long, tidy mustaches and smelled of ginger; the one I presumed to be older had rolled up his sleeves to display a heavy gold watch, while the younger one kept thumbing prayer beads in the palm of his hand.

  “Salaam Aleichem,” I said, raising my right hand to my heart and cupping it.

  The older Iraqi stared at me with hard, angry eyes, two black stones rolling across a flat berm of a face. Snoop chewed his lip while Dominguez waved the soldiers back to their positions at the gate. I looked past the brothers and up at the sun and reminded myself that I was the one with the gun.

  It was the younger Iraqi who ended the standoff. “Salaam,” he said, curtly.

  I turned to him and spoke. “Snoop, tell these guys the money is all here. They can count it out on the hood of the Humvee. One will need to sign a contract stating receipt.” Snoop nodded and started translating before I interrupted him. “They can’t keep the backpack. Battalion needs it.”

  Snoop nodded again, pursing his lips and tapping his foot in the manner of a professional athlete feigning deference to a referee. I waited out their conversation, watching a large roach the color of sand shimmy across the ground. Then I remembered that Iraq didn’t have roaches, and even if it did, they didn’t have two claws and a raised trident for a tail. I took a step back while Snoop tried to smash the scorpion with his boot. It escaped under the tire of the Humvee.

  “Fuck,” Snoop said. “A shaytan.”

  I shivered in the heat. Getting blown into gut soup by a roadside bomb? I’d reconciled myself to that possibility. An unseen sniper’s bullet eating my little eternity like a goat eats a can? I’d never know the difference. But the chance of a silent assassin in hard-shelled bug form lying in wait under my pillow or in one of my boots had proven a recurring panic. The things didn’t even bleed. I looked back up at the Iraqis. The older brother was glowering, all flat-topped aggression, while the younger brother fiddled with a dead tooth in his mouth, eyes still hunting for the scorpion. Then the older one grabbed the contract from Snoop and signed it on his brother’s back. While he did this, I noticed his signing hand had the pinky nail grown out. It gleamed in the light. He shoved the sheet of paper at me and barked at Snoop.

  “He say . . . well, I not tell you. But their cousin was no ali baba, he say. He worked the date groves by the canal.”

  “And the part you didn’t translate?”

  Snoop sighed. “ ‘To the eyes of Hell.’ An Iraqi slur.”

  I nodded and stuck my hands in my pockets. My feet ached. So did my right collarbone, that old bane of a wound. An exoskeleton of sweat had formed under my body armor and uniform. No amount of water would end the drought in my throat. My men had already been out here for too many hours and wouldn’t be relieved until this was over. In theory, I wanted to empathize with these men who’d lost a loved one to an ignorant, violent occupation they called the Collapse. In theory, I found the exchange of blood money by any name, in any culture, to be abhorrent. In theory, my memories of their dead cousin’s sundered intestines and his wailing mother meant something more than just still-shot photographs soaked in gore. In theory, in an air-conditioned classroom I’d once sat in with great clarity and wrath, I would grasp and grapple for a solution that bridged this vast divide, because it was the right thing to do, because right things to do were worth grasping and grappling for, and not just in air-conditioned classrooms.

  In practice, though, things were different. They just were.

  “Insha’Allah,” I said, back straight, shoulders cocked. I folded up the contract and stuck it into a cargo pocket. Then I walked to the outpost, leaving any regrets at the gate, discarded waste for strangers to take away in the dead of night.

  At the entrance, I cleared my rifle and stuck my muzzle into the tin barrel, jerking the trigger with a quick squeeze. Click. No negligent discharge for me. The heat stayed at the door, a loyal ghoul that would await my return.

  The foyer was cool and bracing. The air was tint
ed orange and filled with dust—no door could keep out the desert sand. Trudging up the stairs to the living quarters, I looked up at the fresco covering the wall. I blew a kiss at the Mother Hajj and told Pedo bin Laden to leave the children alone. Both stared back, unsmiling.

  •  •  •

  I needed to nap before our night patrol. The soldiers wanted to raid a house, but battalion intel had no houses to raid. Instead we were to escort the engineers as they filled potholes along the highway to the east. The field-grade officers referred to counterinsurgency as “a thinking man’s war,” which appealed to the left coast elitist in me, but deep down, I wondered how thoughtful using money as a weapon really was. It could get complicated, certainly, and messy, like downstairs at the gate. But thoughtful?

  At a metal rack upstairs, in the hallway, I stripped away the apparatuses of war and hung them on hooks one at a time. There was a ritual to donning armor, deliberate and purposeful, like the warriors of old dressing for battle, but taking it off always seemed an exercise in frenzy. The helmet came off first, my scalp gasping for air; then the slung rifle; the knee pads that were really extra-large elbow pads because my matchstick legs couldn’t hold real knee pads; the elbow pads that were in fact elbow pads; then the vest that held our extra rifle magazines and Jolly Ranchers. I ripped apart a set of Velcro straps at my sternum and lifted the body armor up and over my shoulders, a turtle escaping its shell, and set it on the tile floor. I’d shed sixty pounds of gear in ten or so seconds. Once I bent over and loosened the laces of my boots, I felt human again.

  Our boxy, windowless room smelled of dirty mop water. Along the near wall, at the foot of the bunk I’d once shared with our old platoon sergeant, our new platoon sergeant was rifling through a cardboard box of books.

  “The hell, Sergeant Chambers,” I said. “Those are my things.”

  There was no response, so I repeated myself.

  This time he looked over with slate-gray eyes and smiled. Bits of dark brown snuff covered his teeth. His tan, sweat-stained undershirt was tucked in, and flip-flops peeked out from the bottom of his uniform pants. He usually napped through the late afternoon.

  “Lawrence of Arabia, sir?” he said, lifting a faded, dog-eared copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I’d ordered online months earlier. “Self-aggrandizing bullshit. You should’ve gotten the abridged version. Saved yourself some time.”

  We were alone. He always managed to fill a room with his presence, each slight movement a little tremor of possibility. I’d never noticed it before, but his hands, large and ragged, shot out of his forearms rather than tapering in from them, like he didn’t have wrists. I walked over to the box and pulled out another book, squaring my shoulders. Built like a piano, he had more than a few pounds on me, but I held a sizable height and reach advantage, if things came to that.

  A puncher’s chance, my brother would’ve said. A fool’s hope, my mom would’ve replied.

  “What about Che?” I asked, holding up a copy of Guerrilla Warfare. Its thinness flapped in the fan’s wind. “Viva la Revolución?”

  He snorted. “We offed that fuckstick in the Bolivian jungle. La Revolución no viva,” he said.

  These books were the only possessions in Iraq that I cared about. I wanted to tell him to stop challenging my authority all the damn time, not to mention stay out of my personal effects. But the moment necessitated restraint. He was the new platoon sergeant. I needed to work with him, at least until I could figure out a way to link him to the alleged kill team. A thinking man’s war, indeed. I exhaled through gritted teeth, slow and sure, and smiled.

  “It wasn’t technically ‘us,’ ” I said. “But true enough.”

  He set down the Lawrence book and walked across to his own bunk, six hollow-eyed skulls on the underside of his right arm swaying like voodoo on a string. After putting a large wad of dip into his mouth, he kneeled on the ground and pulled an olive-green trunk out from under his bed. After unlocking it, he reached in and grabbed a thick paperback.

  “Want to read about insurgencies?” he said, tossing it to me. “Don’t read their own mythologies. It’s all propaganda. Read that,” he said, pointing to the book I’d caught. “That’s how an empire deals with the barbarians.”

  “Huh.” It was Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul. “Didn’t know you were such a reader. But Caesar didn’t write propaganda? ’Course he did.”

  He snorted again and slurred through the dip nestled in his cheeks. “Try this one, too,” he said, throwing The Confessions of Saint Augustine in my direction. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”

  He locked the trunk and slammed it back underneath his bunk. I pretended to study the back cover of his second book recommendation. I’d read it before. Parts of it, anyhow.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant.” I put down the book to find Chambers a foot away from me, looking up with those damn gray eyes. His chest rose and fell in slow breaths like hills, and he smelled of wet tobacco. “What do you think we’re doing here?”

  I studied a crack in the Sheetrock of the rear wall. “Making a fucked-up situation less fucked-up, I guess,” I said. “You were over here when civil war seemed inevitable. The Surge pushed everyone back from the brink. We need to maintain that.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head tilting, wanting more—of what, I didn’t know. “What about you?”

  He forced a choked laugh. Then he blinked, finally. “I’m a simple cog in the machine. Just a door kicker lucky to have his high school diploma. Don’t get paid to think.”

  “Well.”

  He started walking back to his bunk, but then turned around. “One more thing. We got to change the platoon name. Hotspur? That shit is amateur hour. We need something hard.”

  “I like Hotspur,” I said. “It’s got panache.”

  “Panache.”

  “Yep.” I realized I’d been leaning back into my bunk’s frame, arms crossed, copping the posture of a street hustler. I decided to be firm. “The name stays as long as I’m the platoon leader.”

  Chambers shrugged. “No worries. I’ll be here for years after you leave. For three, four platoon leaders. It’s all about the endgame. Don’t they teach that at officer school?”

  I grunted and told him I’d see him at the roast later. Unable to find sanctuary in my own room, I spent the next hour in a part of the outpost I was rather unfamiliar with: the small gym across from the terps’ room. Dumbbells didn’t provide answers, but they did provide purpose.

  •  •  •

  I walked outside to the back patio. Night was near, the mating call of beetles just shrill enough to rise above the nearby generators that powered the outpost. Four wood picnic tables sat on a concrete slab, each squad assigned a table, forty men in sweat-starched uniforms ready to eat. I saw Chambers at one of the far tables, so I took a seat at the nearest one, next to Doc Cork.

  “Welcome to family dinner, sir,” Hog said, across from us. “Smell that meat? I heard it’s ’cause one of the cooks is old friends with Sergeant Chambers. Celebrating his promotion.”

  I turned to watch the goat rotate over the burn pit. It was plump, moving in slow revolutions, like a clock without a minute hand. Two joes stood at each end of the goat, turning it with a steel rod held up by stakes. Burn pits were used for all sorts of refuse, from classified documents to used batteries, but it seemed suitable for roasting local cuisine, too. Cotton candy smoke billowed from the pit, drifting west.

  After waiting for the soldiers to cycle through the food line, I grabbed a plastic tray and heaped mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and deviled eggs onto it, skipping the salad bowl. One of the cooks put chunks of tender, pink goat meat on my plate. It smelled of heavy pepper. In theory, I detested the military-industrial complex that made things like fresh deviled eggs in the desert possible. It was wasteful. It was excessive. It further separated us from the townspeople we’d been charged with protecting. That was all true. In practice, though, indulgence filled stomachs, and incl
uded ice cream for dessert.

  The goat proved too chewy. Most of the soldiers around me ate with abandon, though, like some unseen, angry parent would emerge to punish them if they didn’t clean their plates. I ate slower, stopping when I got full, pushing around what remained on the plate so it looked like I’d eaten more than I had. My stomach had always been a bit of a princess. I washed the meal down with a cold can of Rip It, flat fruit punch with a special jolt that’d keep me awake for the night patrol.

  As I ate, I listened to the soldiers argue about whom they’d rather have sex with, Jessica Alba circa 2006 or Shakira circa 2008. I declared myself team Alba. Doc Cork said both of them were too skinny, he needed a woman with some meat on her, a thick ass, too, which sent the table into hysterics. Each of the tables hummed with similar banter; we rarely got together as an entire platoon anymore, and never at the outpost. Once dinner ended, I stood up on the bench and clapped my hands.

  “Hotspur!” I said. “Settle down. Want to say it’s great to be together in the same place since . . . well, Kuwait. Two more things: third and fourth squad, we still have that engineer escort tonight. Also, join me in recognizing our new platoon sergeant. Congratulations, Staff Sergeant Chambers. We’re all looking forward to working with you in your new position.”

  After the applause faded out, the men began chanting, “Speech! Speech!” Chambers grinned, tucking his overbite behind his lower teeth, and waited them out. A dim sky now hung over us, with only red lens flashlights and the blaze from the pit illuminating the area. Someone tended to the fire with lighter fluid, swelling the flames wide and red. Chambers moved in front of the pit to speak. Because of the slight incline of the hill, and the way the flames danced shadows up and down his silhouette, he seemed a pastor delivering a dark sermon. The pealing cadence in his voice reinforced it. Wayward souls, these soldiers were, but not beyond his redemption. Not yet.

  “I want to tell you all a story. A war story,” he said. “Listen to it. Learn from it. The best soldier—the best man—I ever knew was a noncom named Elijah Rios. We deployed here together, a couple years ago. He was bona fide, a real warrior. I owe everything to him. He saved my life.”