Inside the bus, she does the same thing: prays to nobody. She prays looking out the window while the bus chugs and creaks through the streets. Prays staring down at her hands, which are still shaking. Prays when a young guy with short hair and an angry face gets on. Prays that she can keep herself together, not lose where she is, not piss her pants. Not hurt anybody.
The bus rattles through the back streets of Albany. Red-brick blocks and half-empty strip malls, dollar stores and gated liquor-shop windows. Overflowing garbage cans. Fat people struggling in and out of cars.
Finally, the bus moves into the suburbs. It’s better here, peaceful. She leans her forehead on the window and looks out with relief, letting the fall colors wash over her. Red sugar maples. Yellow bushes. Heaps of orange leaves in the gutters. It looks so good after the brown desert and relentless white of the hospital that it makes her eyes sting.
The bus stops on a corner and two passengers climb on: a teenage girl in skintight jeans and a baggy gold sweater, and a middle-aged woman wearing a short black skirt and high-heeled white boots. The soldier has no idea if what they’re wearing is cool or slutty, fashionable or cheap. She’s been in a time warp and come back to the future.
The teenager flings herself into the seat in front of the soldier, sticks wires in her ears and starts nodding her head to the tinny music seeping out from her earphones. Her long ponytail, brown and wavy, dangles over the seat back, swinging from side to side as she nods. The soldier stares at it, mesmerized. Back and forth, back and forth. She feels a powerful urge to take out the penknife in her pack and cut the fucking thing off.
She sits on her hands to stop herself, shuts her eyes and starts praying again. Please don’t let me do something dumb. Please don’t let me screw up. But most of all she prays this will work out. Because if it doesn’t, she has no idea what she’ll do.
[ PART THREE ]
CONVOY
[ KATE ]
“YOU CLEANED UP your rifle real good last night, I hope?” Yvette says the day of our new mission. We’re standing outside our tent in the morning twilight, shivering with sleep deprivation and nerves. “It better work smooth girl, ’cause out on that convoy it’s all you’re gonna have between you and Hajji.”
“Don’t worry, I got it.” I pat myself over to make sure I’m complete: Kevlar, night-vision goggles, dog tags, flak jacket, utility vest, canteen, knife, ammo clips, grenades, M-16 cleaning kit, gas mask, gloves, JSLIST (compressed suit to protect me from being melted alive by a chemical attack), casualty card, medevac card, rules of engagement card, code of conduct card, rifle… and most important of all, a packet of Skittles I can suck on so I won’t have to drink or piss.
Yvette watches me a moment, then pulls the crucifix I gave her over her head and hands it to me. “Here, take this back. It’ll do you more good than all that shit.”
“No, I want you to keep it,” I say, still shivering like a cornered mouse. “It’s yours now.”
“But this is your first time outside the wire, babe. You need all the Jesus you can get.”
I push it firmly back into her hand. “No, you deserve it more than I do. You shouldn’t even be doing this mission. It’s all my fault.”
Yvette clucks her tongue, hangs the crucifix back around her neck and straps her Kevlar over her bony little head. “Nothing’s your fault, Freckles. Come on, let’s go.” She flings her arms around me, gives me a squeeze, then scoots off to the motor pool quick as a sparrow, as if the eighty pounds of gear strapped to her body weigh nothing at all. I lumber after her, my neck and back already throbbing.
The way it turns out is this: Yvette gets put in the Humvee that guards the head of the convoy, right in the line of fucking fire, while I’m put in the one that brings up the rear—the convoy’s asshole. Between us are twenty tractor-trailers and a middle gun truck, but nobody’s in as much danger as Yvette. Please, I pray to Mom’s crucifix, please look after my friend.
Our mission, as turdface Henley explained, is to escort those trucks, most of which are driven by untrained, underfed, non-English-speaking civilians, nearly three hundred miles up the Highway of Death to Baquba, a city just north of Baghdad. There, we’re supposed to unload whatever the hell is inside them, spend the night at a base called Camp Warhorse, then drive back again. That’s how most of us so-called soldiers spend our time in this war: as a frigging delivery service.
When I reach my assigned Humvee, I climb into the front seat, still jumpy as hell. This is a whole different kettle of crap than what I’ve been used to. The jerk-offs and scorpion-tossing detainees are nothing compared to what’s out there beyond the wire: Mortar shells filled with shrapnel designed to tear a human to shreds. Rocket-propelled grenades capable of blowing off your hand in a blink. Homemade bombs strong enough to blast a Humvee and all the suckers inside it into itty-bitty pieces. People with AK-47s who hate me. And the only armor I can see is the Vietnam-era flak jacket I’m wearing myself, which is useless against those same AK-47s or anything else Hajji might send my way.
My driver turns out to be this gigantic sergeant called Nielsen, with a huge slab of a face the color of salami. His eyes are pink with moondust irritation and he saw the backside of forty a long time ago, but at least his body looks strong. He grunts in surprise when I climb in. “What the fuck did they send me a girl for?”
“’Morning to you, too, Sergeant.” I pull the condom off the end of my M-16 (condom courtesy of Jimmy, back when we were still talking) and drape it over the rearview mirror, just for the hell of it.
Nielsen chuckles. “Better than a rabbit’s foot, huh, Specialist?” he says. Then he snatches the condom and kisses it.
Wonderful. Another frickin’ nutball.
I settle in and try to get comfortable. Not that comfortable is something anybody can be in a Humvee. Whoever designed those things couldn’t possibly have had a human body in mind. For one, the shocks are so bad that driving in the desert feels like being dragged over rocks on a cafeteria tray. For another, like I said, the Humvees are always stuffed with so much crap you have to sit with your knees folded up around your ears like a frigging grasshopper.
Just as I’ve found myself a half-bearable position, the convoy shakes awake with a roar of engines and begins to rumble slowly out of the motor pool in a long, snaking line. The sun rises as we approach the camp entrance, turning up the heat like an oven dial, and through the dust I can see a clump of thirty or so civilians standing outside the wire, same as when I worked there. I look for Naema—Third Eye told me she’s still turning up every day—but I can’t see her. Again I feel her dad’s head under my foot, see the blood clotting on his smashed face, hear him struggling to breathe…
No point thinking about that now. No point in thinking about anything, for that matter.
Once we’re out on the highway, the noise is ear-numbing, all those sand-clogged engines and broken shock absorbers grinding and clanking and shrieking. The stink is powerful too, the trucks farting their fumes right into my face, and being in the rear, I have the pleasure of breathing it all in. I pull my scarf over my nose but I can still smell and even taste the oil and diesel and soot. Within minutes I’m covered in a greasy black crust, like an overcooked pizza.
I stick my weapon out the side window, tell my zinging nerves to shut the fuck up and hunker down to my job.
For a long time the dust is so thick I can’t see anything at all. I know it’s better than being in the front like Yvette, jumping at the sight of every damn plastic bag or dead dog on the road, but this blindness is its own kind of scary. I’m supposed to be looking out for those wacko suicide car bombers we’ve just begun hearing about, and for insurgents who might zoom out of nowhere and throw a grenade or shoot at us. But all I can see are those daytime ghosts, human-shaped dust swirls that loom up in front of me then fall into nothing, leaving my heart hammering, my rifle on lock and load and my head buzzing like a swarm of panicked bees.
“I feel like I’m friggin’ bl
indfolded,” I shout to Nielsen over the racket. “Can’t see a fucking thing.”
“Maybe you should climb in the back and keep watch out the rear,” he yells in reply.
I glance over my shoulder at him. Is he serious? There’s nothing back there, not even a shield.
“Yeah,” he goes on, like he’s talking to himself. “Good idea. Get in the back.”
So I have to. He is a sergeant, after all.
This is what I should have to do my job right: A tank, or at least an up-armored gun truck. A real bulletproof vest. A long-range scope. A belt-fed machine gun. And a gun turret.
This is what I actually have: A soft-top Humvee with an open back and canvas doors. A useless flak jacket. And a rifle rapidly clogging up with sand. I might as well be riding into war in a go-cart, wearing a bikini and waving a parasol.
The drive goes on so long it turns hypnotic. The rumble and clank of our Humvee bumping along the tarmac. The deafening roar of all those engines in front of us. The wind whistling and whooshing.
I stare over my rifle through the dust. The desert stretches out in a haze on either side of us, littered with garbage and tire shreds and blocks of squat yellow houses, same color as the sand. Pieces of abandoned military equipment are poking out of the desert, too: shards of rusting metal, shells of old tanks and bombs, bits of airplane left over from the last war.
We pass a dead goat lying on its side, so bloated with rot its legs stick out like toothpicks in a sausage.
We pass the husk of a charred car, the people inside it contorted black skeletons.
We pass a body run over so often it’s flat as a puddle.
We pass a vulture pulling at what looks like a pile of clothes but turns out to be a little boy.
After that I stop looking.
More hours crawl by. Rumble, stink, rumble. Don’t look. Don’t see. Back aching. Head aching. Arms burning from holding up the rifle.
Apaches fly past, giant black hornets against the sun— whomp, whomp, whomp—the air batting around my ears. Sand and more sand. Rumble, stink, rumble.
What’s Jimmy doing? Has he come looking for me? Does he know where I am? Is he worried? Will he ever know how much I love him?
Is Yvette okay? Is Third Eye okay? Are Naema and her dad okay?
I need water. I need a piss. I need Jimmy. I need, I need…
BOOM!
The blast is so loud it’s like a kick to my chest. The Humvee slams to a halt and I’m flying onto my back. Black smoke blinding me, choking me, radio shrieking—eye-eedee, eye-ee-dee—but I don’t know what it means or where my breath’s gone or if I’m hurt or if I’m even alive.
Then I hear: “Fuck!”
I lie there helpless and winded, trying to make my lungs work and running my mind over my body: No pain, no wounds, no missing limbs that I can tell. I struggle to breathe a moment longer, then soon as I can, heave myself upright and turn around. Nielsen’s face is running with blood.
“Shit! You hurt?” I scramble into the front.
“Gimme something,” he groans. I pull off my scarf and hand it to him, grease and all. He wipes his face, smearing blood. “Damn. I’m always getting these frig gin’ nosebleeds.”
I stare.
“What the fuck’s your problem?” He thrusts my blood-and-snot-covered scarf back at me. “Radio says a truck up front got hit by an IED. Now we got to sit tight as a nun’s cunt till ordnance gives the all clear.”
“Sit? Why can’t we pull out? Aren’t we supposed to keep moving no matter what?” Then I remember Yvette. I throw open the door to jump out.
Nielsen clutches my utility vest and hauls me back in. “Where the hell are you going?”
“My friend’s up front! I’ve got to find her!” I try again to leave but Nielsen won’t let go of me.
“You ain’t going nowhere. I know it’s rough, kid, but you gotta sit here, you know that. Now shut that door quick.”
“I can’t! I have to find out if she’s okay, I have to!”
“What you have to do is stay here. Shut the door!”
I do. But when I turn back to him, I’m surprised to see his meaty face looking sympathetic. “Pray, that’s all we can do right now,” he says gently. “Come on, let’s join hands and pray to the Lord to help us.” He reaches out, but I pull back. The last fucking thing I want to do at this moment is pray, and the second last thing is hold his sweaty paw.
“Thanks, but I’m returning to guard position,” I say firmly and clamber into the rear again, rifle in my hands.
We sit and sit. I don’t hear Nielsen doing any more praying than I am. He’s just staring at the radio like it holds the secret of the frickin’ universe. But the radio isn’t talking, and nor, for a while, are we.
We sit for another ten minutes or so, while I worry about Yvette. Please let her be alive, I chant in my head over and over, so I guess I am praying after all.
“Brady?” Nielsen calls back to me after a while. “That is your name, right?”
“Yup.”
“You ever think we might die any moment?”
What a mulchbrain. “Sar’nt, all I’m thinking about right now is my friend.”
“I know, I know.” His voice shakes a little. “But you ever think how sad it would be to die without, you know, having experienced the whole of life?”
I don’t answer. Just keep my mind on Yvette. If I keep thinking about her real hard, maybe I can keep her safe. Maybe my thoughts will flow over her like a shell, like armor, like a cushion from harm.
“Brady? You listening to me?”
I hear a noise and glance back at him. Nielsen is climbing over the seat toward me with this scared, needy look on his face. I don’t know what he wants. And I certainly don’t intend to find out.
“Oncoming vehicle!” I shout, although there’s nothing in sight but dust. “Oncoming fast, Sar’nt! Isn’t slowing down!”
“Fuck!” He flings himself back into the front and ducks below the windshield. “Fire!” he screams.
I do. Right up into the harmless air.
“You hit ’em?” he calls, his voice squeaking. I take a peek at him—he’s still lying facedown across the front seats. How a condom-kissing wimp like him ever got to be sergeant, I’ve no idea.
“Just a warning shot, Sar’nt. They’re driving away now. No weapons visible.”
“Good. Keep an eye out there, Brady.” Shakily, he heaves himself up. “Don’t take your eyes off that road for one minute.” He sticks his own weapon out the driver’s window and fixes his eyes on the desert.
Now that I’ve shut the wimp up for the time being, all I can hear is the wind and the blood in my ears thudding and whomping like a chopper flying around inside my head. I wait and wait, muscles taut, trigger finger trembling. Who knows what might come at us while we sit here like toddlers on a toilet? Another homemade bomb? An ambush?
We sit like this for almost an hour, no movement, no news, while, presumably, ordnance clears the road ahead of us of more hidden bombs. I listen for medevac Black Hawks, trying not to imagine the worst for Yvette. Nothing. I listen for another attack. More nothing. Just tension and dread crackling around us like electric wires.
Finally, after what feels like three fucking days, the radio wakes up with a screech, making us both jump. “All clear,” it squawks. The convoy rumbles awake, like a dragon shaking itself out of a nap, and one vehicle at a time, it at last begins to roll.
In a few minutes we pass two of our trucks in the middle of the road, burning. One is tipped over on its side, the other still upright, but both are billowing so much flame and smoke they’re barely visible. I don’t know if it was the IED that did that, or if we set the trucks on fire ourselves so the locals can’t salvage anything from them—we do that to our own vehicles all the time, even if there’s nothing wrong but a flat tire. Please don’t let Yvette have been in one of those trucks. Please.
At first Nielsen has to drive excruciatingly slow, being right at the end
of the dragon’s tail like we are, which frustrates me so much I want to shoot him in the face. But gradually the convoy picks up speed, even more than before—the dragon’s scared now—and soon we’re barreling along at sixty, swinging into the oncoming lane whenever there’s a block ahead, regardless of who might be there. Cars careen off the shoulder to get out of our way. Families stand stranded by the side of the road, blown by our dust and fumes and wind, looking frightened to death. Some idiot with a pickup full of kids tries to squeeze between us and the truck in front, so we wave our rifles at him and scream at him to get the fuck out of the way. But there’s still no news of casualties from the radio, and still no news of Yvette.
“Yvette,” I swear in my head, “if you’re in one piece and we get back from this shithole alive, I’m going to share everything I have and everything I ever get with you. We’ll help each other get through it, okay? Just be alive and whole, please.”
[ NAEMA ]
FOR NEARLY THREE hours, Mama, Granny and I sit in the traffic jam in Umm Qasr, and still nobody can move. Rather, it grows worse, for more people keep arriving, pressing frantically toward the hospital. Everywhere, panicked faces. Everywhere, wounds and illness. Everywhere, cars and people pushing and shoving. Yet we remain trapped.
An old man hobbles up and thrusts an anguished face into our car window. “Water? Sisters, please, do you have water?” he begs in a tremulous voice. “I need water for my wounded grandson, please!”
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