Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  They’re probably dead, I realized. A mother and her boys. And it was all my fault, because I’d tried to help.

  I was lost in those lonely stirs of nothingness when Chambers found me.

  “You almost got us killed.”

  Serenity cloaked his words, his movements neat and trim. He still had his body armor on, rifle at the ready. I couldn’t see his skulls but felt them through the black, pulsing. I took one last drag and tossed the butt to the ground.

  “You’re toxic,” I said. He stood perpendicular to my line of vision, and I refused to turn, instead watching his piano frame out of the corner of my eye. “You won’t infect my platoon any longer. You’re going home, tomorrow. For our sake and yours.”

  “Me?” His voice crashed through the night. “You’re the one chasing ghosts. You’re the one who’s turned patrols into fuck dates.” He was so angry he was stammering. “You’re the one who—that was fucking insane. I gave the order to shoot.”

  “And I gave the order not to.” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t do it again, but it worked.”

  Another fire had been stoked. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You, though—you got a lot to answer for with that empty backpack in the arms room. I think you gave it to the hajj bitch. That’s what I think.”

  “Prove it.” I forced a yawn, silently thanking the soldiers for staying true to Iceberg Slim. “Junior officers don’t get fired for negligence. Not ones with war heroes for brothers.” I didn’t believe any of that, but convincing him was what mattered. “You, though, drop weapons galore. Anyone who’d defend you is already dead.”

  “Prove it.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing this whole fucking time?” I wanted to push him past the controlled anger, past the fury, to find what lay on the other side. “People like you win battles. People like me win wars. Get over your bitch boy Elijah and you’ll see that.”

  It wasn’t the threats that did it, but the “bitch boy.” A sound beyond rage burst from Chambers, a niagara of mania and broken nobility. The shadows blurred and then softened into a hard shape. His fist landed under my left eye, and I heard something pop. My head went astral and snapped back, but I managed to hold on to the top of his collar as I fell back onto the picnic table. Long seconds passed into blankness as I fought for consciousness.

  I blinked and blinked until I could focus on the moon above. The world seemed fuzzy, especially at the edges. Something hot and wet ran down the side of my face and into my cracked lips. I’d held on, though. By clutching his collar with my right hand, I’d managed to sneak the M9 pistol I’d been hiding up under his chin, where his helmet couldn’t protect him. Sour breath blew down on me, and for the first time I recognized that the pouches on his face were too heavy for a grown man, like a baby’s cheeks were. Chambers had baby cheeks.

  “You tricky fuck” was all he could offer.

  “You know, Sergeant,” I said, concentrating on the thin vine of muscle wrapped around the pistol trigger, keeping my breaths shallow. “Punching an officer used to be a death sentence.” I smiled like a clown. “Firing squad, usually.”

  His eyes were like gray flares, and his nose folded into the bottom of his forehead. Then he managed a hollow laugh.

  “Quite the Mexican standoff.” His breathing was slowing, and the killer shine in his eyes was fading. I counted to thirty in my mind. The hand holding the pistol became damp, but I held it fast. He closed his eyes and tucked his overbite behind his lower teeth. For the second time in one night, the possibility of rampage collapsed.

  He opened his eyes. “What happened to nothing else mattering but the youngbloods?” he asked.

  I considered his question, then his pet phrase. “Means different things to us, I think.”

  “He really was my friend.” He wasn’t speaking to me so much, not anymore. “He really was the best man I ever knew. That’s not bullshit. Every year, though, it’s like . . . sometimes I can’t even remember what he looked like.”

  The first trace of sun touched the horizon. He asked if he could remove his helmet. I asked why.

  “To show you a picture. It’s in the crown, under the padding. He’s been with us the whole time.”

  I said I didn’t want to see it. Sliding off the far side of the table, I kept the pistol leveled at him. Runny blood fell off my face; I felt my cheekbone with my free hand and figured he’d broken it.

  He sat down on a bench and took off his helmet anyhow. He looked into it like it was a kaleidoscope, acne scar pockets marking his temples, his high-and-tight cut a strip of order in the midst of chaos. It’s not that he lacks a conscience, I decided. It’s that the one he has is broken in the center, because that’s what going to war over and over again does to people. I walked around the patio backward, lowering my pistol. I’d already opened the door and propped it open with a foot when I remembered something.

  “You need three for a Mexican standoff,” I said.

  “I know.” He patted the top of his helmet. “That’s why I said it.”

  I thought about that for a few seconds. “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I never would’ve pulled the trigger.” He didn’t say anything. “Why didn’t you shoot? Last night, I mean. You just gave the order. They would’ve shot if you had. You know that.”

  “Still figuring that one out,” he said. His voice was so low, I could barely hear him. “Let you know when I land on something.” He looked up, so tired and so old.

  “Let’s get them home,” he said.

  “Let’s.”

  “I’m sorry I punched you.”

  “Sorry I pulled my pistol on you.”

  “We good?”

  “Yeah.” I was still going to get rid of him. “We are.”

  As the metal door rang behind me like a cymbal, I cleared my pistol with shaking hands. The inside of the outpost felt very cold. I didn’t think I had much in my stomach, but the urge to defecate was sudden and strong. Climbing the stairs, using the banister to keep my balance, I noticed someone had smeared a crude veil over the Mother Hajj’s face, an eclipse of paint. Probably a jundi, I reasoned, or maybe someone from the town council. A soldier wouldn’t have put in the effort.

  My legs had turned to juice, so I took a seat halfway up the stairs. The foyer was empty, and yellow light was spilling into it. I took in a breath of mop water and floaty, orange air and listened to a finch call from outside. I stayed there for a while. Then I walked to the command post.

  The night shift sat around the radios in a semicircle of lawn chairs, all morning breath and jaded stares. I asked where the commander was.

  “Camp Independence,” a sergeant said. “Helping plan for an expedited withdrawal. Sounds like we’re going home early. Sounds like everyone is.”

  “Just marking time, aren’t we?” I said.

  “Haven’t we always been?” A beat later, the sergeant said, “Sir, you know your face is bleeding?”

  I said I’d fallen down the stairs and that it hurt like a motherfucker, because it did. Then I radioed battalion and told them to relay to Captain Vrettos that I needed to speak with him, as soon as possible. One way or another, I needed Chambers out of the platoon.

  “Roger that,” came the reply, distant and sleepy. “He left word to conduct a show-of-force mission. Exact location is up to you.”

  “Show-of-force?” I asked. It was a term from the pre-counterinsurgency era that roughly translated to Show the Iraqis who’s boss.

  “Yes.”

  Options, I thought, too many options. I was standing in the hallway, alone, when Snoop came by, walking off sleep in his loose basketball shorts and do-rag.

  “Yo, LT,” he said. “You look— Bad night?”

  I laughed, massaging my broken face. “Patrol leaves in an hour,” I said before walking across the outpost to wash my face and wake the guys.

  The brief took place in the foyer. No jundis showed up, and none of us bothered to go find any. All the soldiers wanted to talk abo
ut was the riot. Other than Doc Cork, none had been there, but that didn’t stop the stories.

  “I heard it was like a thousand Iraqis.”

  “Not that many. But their leaders were carrying machine guns, like Rambo.”

  “Yo, sir, it true you said you’d kill everyone if they didn’t go home?”

  I shook my head and exchanged a knowing glance with Doc Cork. I looked out at the twenty gaunt faces in the open, sunny octagon of a room, and saw them in all their boyish grace, all their earnest bravery. I hated myself for the times I’d been reckless with them, for the times I’d been less than worthy of them. Maybe getting them home wasn’t the only thing that mattered, but it still mattered, and mattered a lot.

  “Hotspur!” they yelled, the last syllable reverberating through the outpost.

  “Hotspur,” I repeated, more to myself than to them, noticing that they still wore the scorpion patch on their uniforms, though it meant something different to them now. At least I’d done something right.

  •  •  •

  We drove directly to the Sunni Strip, then walked to the small mud house with red bars on the windows on the crooked hill. Alia stood outside her open door, waiting, holding a long lead pipe like a club. She spoke menacingly as we neared.

  “She say we can’t take her family again,” Snoop said.

  We finished the climb, and I looked past Alia into her house. Her niece stood in the small kitchen, putting on her shoes and backpack for school. She wore a purple head scarf and had black gemstones for eyes and a gaping red void for a nose, burns covering much of her upper body. I flinched, remembering the young girl from Yousef’s some months before delivering falafels and asking for a tip. Snoop remembered, too, pointing. Another jigsaw piece snapped into place.

  “It’s not what you think,” Alia began, but I interrupted her.

  “I don’t care about that,” I said. “The mukhtar’s dead. Where’s Rana?”

  Alia swore she didn’t know. She was waving the lead pipe around so much that Snoop asked her to set it down so she wouldn’t accidentally strike one of us.

  “If she wanted to run away, she may have gone to her father’s old house,” she said. “Where she grew up.”

  She gave us directions to the abandoned estate, then asked us to leave.

  “But we want to help,” I said. “Your family needs help. What can we do?”

  “Leave now,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I have neighbors.”

  Perhaps for the first time, I listened to Alia clearly, and took our patrol away.

  We pushed east and then south, to the far edge of Ashuriyah—not so far from Haitham’s final hiding spot, I realized, or the Sunni graveyard. “You’ll know it from the big moon gates,” Alia had said, and she’d been right.

  We gently rammed the gate with a bumper to get in. It was a thin ribbon of a building, shaped like an upside-down T, much smaller than I’d imagined. Weeds of brown overgrowth covered the house’s roof and sandstone walls, and a small marble fountain lay in the center of the circular driveway, dry as a salt flat. There’d once been a statue in the core of the fountain, but scavengers had long ago broken off the eagle’s head and body. All that remained were the base and a pair of long, wide talons.

  I went in alone. Dominguez insisted I bring a portable radio.

  The house smelled of dust and hot air. There were no doors or windows anymore, just frames. Anything of worth had long ago been looted, though I found a rotted-out cabinet in one of the bedrooms. I opened it, and the door fell off its hinge.

  I moved to the back of the house and into the courtyard. It was a wide rectangle and, save for a hunched brown cypress in the rear, there was only chapped yellow earth.

  The great sheik’s courtyard, I thought. Not so great.

  “I don’t know where you are,” I said, to her, to myself, to the barren land in front of me. “But I hope you’re safe. I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for.” I paused, swallowing to wet my throat. “I hope you’re not in a ditch somewhere.”

  The portable radio on my hip buzzed. “Hotspur Six,” it said. “You’re needed at Camp Independence ASAP. Commander’s orders.”

  I smirked. It was reckoning time. I kissed my fingers and placed them on the sandstone wall of the house. It seemed the thing to do. Then I left.

  We drove straight to Camp Independence, and I tried to appreciate the baked air and dust slapping at our faces in the breeze. Battalion had been trying to get ahold of our patrol all morning. They refused to say why I was needed, so I prepared myself for the worst. At least I’d gotten to say good-bye.

  I met them in the Big Man’s office. The battalion flag hung over the room like a big baggy clock, its infantry blue and crossed rifles symbols from a forgotten life. The Big Man looked up from his desk, all bald gravity. In front of the desk sat Captain Vrettos, hunched over. Between them was the intelligence officer, teeming with short-man energy. The Big Man motioned with his fist for me to enter. I took a deep breath and walked in, posting to the position of attention.

  “Lieutenant Porter,” the Big Man began, “we are aware that a fatwa has been placed on you by insurgents and have reason to believe you’ve known this for some time.” I opened my mouth. “Don’t answer. I don’t want you to implicate yourself. I admire your dedication to the mission.” The intel officer sneered but kept quiet. “The Rangers brought this to our intel team, and we confirmed it this morning.”

  My confusion betrayed me. “Sergeant Chambers,” Captain Vrettos said. “Talked to him an hour ago on the phone. He spoke very highly of your loyalty to the platoon. But that riot last night, Jack—that was all staged to get you, the Rangers say.”

  “Anything can be a fatwa,” I said. “They’re not just death sentences. And I’m pretty sure you have to be Muslim to get a fatwa. And really, no one in Ashuriyah takes them seriously. It’s coming from a crazy person.”

  “I take them seriously.” The inflexion in the Big Man’s words suggested he’d already issued his own fatwa on the matter. “Your war’s over, Lieutenant. You’ll spend our remaining month here as part of my staff. We can’t risk you being out of the wire anymore. You’ve served your country honorably. You’ve cleared. You’ve held. And you’ve built. Be proud.”

  It surprised me how quickly I was willing to drop the world. I wanted to avoid getting into trouble. I wanted to go home. I wanted to live.

  I thought of my men. “What about . . . Hotspur?”

  “It’s one month. Sergeant Chambers can get them home.”

  I nodded meekly, knowing that, despite everything else, he could do that, and that he would.

  “Your war’s over,” the Big Man repeated. This time, I couldn’t help but relent.

  50

  * * *

  I waited on the patio of Pizza Hut, stirring my soda water with a straw and poking at an untouched slice. A raw December wind pushed through the gulch, spraying sand pebbles into the faces of passing soldiers and contractors. A few hats blew off heads and onto the ground. No one was bothered. We’d all be in America in a week’s time. I readjusted my fleece cap and went back to playing with my food, right leg twitching and twitching.

  Where is Ibrahim? I thought. He’s fucking late.

  I’d become a witness to my own war. Since higher wouldn’t let me go on patrols anymore, I’d embraced my inner fobbit. Hot showers. Steady meals. Steadier sleep. Sure, I made PowerPoint slides and charts. But mostly I counted off calendar days, killing time.

  There’d been guilt, of course, a little about the missing Sahwa money, mostly about other things. But I’d learned something about myself during the blanched, neutral weeks at Camp Independence: I was no martyr. The truth mattered less to me than survival did. If that made me a coward, then at least I was a coward who’d been shot at.

  Then they’d found the empty backpack.

  Fingers were pointed and words were yelled, and through it all I stayed silent as a m
onk. “This isn’t going to show up in your bank account, right? That’s the first place they’ll look,” my JAG lawyer kept repeating. He claimed that a defense of negligence, even the gross negligence of losing twenty-five thousand dollars, would keep me out of jail. “I wouldn’t count on get getting promoted, though.” I’d just shrug, say I was planning on leaving the army anyhow, and repeat the half truth that I’d dropped off a backpack in the arms room.

  My leg was twitching so furiously that it bumped the underside of the table, loosing a ricochet of sound into the late afternoon. A few nearby soldiers turned to look. Needing something to do to get away from their eyes, I stood to throw out my drink and pizza. When I sat down again the watchers had gone back to their meals, and it was my turn to observe as a familiar face strode the length of the gulch to the base exchange.

  Sergeant Griffin walked through the automatic doors of the exchange. She’s going home to take her son to first grade, I thought. And that matters. It matters a lot. Then I pushed away images of Rana doing the same with Ahmed and Karim. I tried not to think about them anymore, though that hadn’t stopped the nightmares. Nightmare, really, since it was always the same one. Three heads in a ditch, lined up like nesting dolls, their jaws hanging open in everlong shock, smelling of smoke and maggots.

  A hand slapped my shoulder from behind.

  “Easy, sir.” It was Ibrahim. He took a seat and pushed his plastic-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. The table creaked under his weight. “Got the thing.”

  As he pulled a file thick as a fossil from his bag, it took great restraint not to snatch it from him. He set it on the table. I touched it with a thumb just to make sure it was real.

  “Awesome, man,” I said. “Know this wasn’t easy.”

  “All good,” he said. “My buddy’s an interrogator. Once he heard this was the guy who put the fatwa on us, he was happy to help. Muslim brotherhood, you know?”

  “Thank him for me,” I said, finding the folder label with the name YOUSEF AL-NASIR on it. The falafel man’s interrogation transcripts, weeks’ worth, ever since the Rangers found him hiding under a pile of blankets on a roof. “No one else will see it, of course.”