by Richard Fox
“Lieutenant Park, don’t you ever tell my wife I did that.”
“Roger, sir.”
Shelton’s legs quivered as he got out of the Humvee. His adrenaline high was long gone, and the resulting crash was getting harder to deal with the longer he spent in combat. He wasn’t getting old, he told himself. Just wearing out early.
His patrol base seethed with activity as men loaded, the crew served weapons on their Humvees, and the supply clerk cracked open ammo crates—ready to supply a last stand. Their aptly named “Alamo Plan” had been worked out before they deployed. Their base was deep enough in enemy territory that an attack by hundreds of insurgents was a distinct possibility.
He pulled off his helmet and took measured breaths as he made his way back to the operations center. If he showed signs of stress now, they would infect the entire company, and he needed the Soldiers to focus on defending their little piece of the world before that suicide bomber’s compatriots launched their attack. He stopped. Why hadn’t they attacked yet?
He called up the tower. “Thomas, Nesbitt, do you see anyone on foot moving out there?”
Thomas moved the camouflage netting aside and looked down at his commander. “Nothing, sir.”
“Thomas, did you shoot up that truck?”
“Roger, sir.”
Shelton thought for a moment. That Soldier probably saved the life of everyone on the patrol base. “You ever going to smoke pot again?” he asked.
“Never, sir!”
“All right. You’re off shit duty for the rest of the deployment.” Shelton savored the smile that spread across Thomas’s face and chuckled when he heard the slap of a high five in the guard tower.
Shelton turned the corner leading to the aid station and saw Ritter leaning against the wall, a cell phone in hand and a lit cigarette in his mouth. Cigarette ash had fallen onto his boots and mixed with the fresh blood splatter into the toe of his boots like a hellish painter’s palette.
“Why aren’t you interrogating that son of a bitch?” Shelton asked.
“Because he didn’t know much and because he’s dead,” Ritter deadpanned as he hit the dial button on his cell.
“Who are you calling?”
“The guy that called in the bomb threat. I figure we owe him a ‘thank you’ or two. I had him a few minutes ago, but he said he had an emergency to deal with, and I haven’t been able to get him back,” Ritter said, his eyes still on his cell.
“Who is he?”
“Said he’s Abu Ahmet al-Qarghuli. I met him briefly back at the canal we fished that body out of.”
“The guy with Sheikh Majid…The Qarghulis have been trying to kill us since the war started. Why would they save our ass?”
Ritter brought his bloodshot eyes up to look at his old friend. “That’s why I’m calling him back.”
Shelton nodded and turned to leave.
“Greg?” Ritter lowered the cell phone. He wanted to tell Shelton that he and Mukhtar had a history. Mukhtar knew he was here, and that was why a car bomb had almost made it to their doorstep. And the longer Ritter stayed at Patrol Base Dragon, the more he put the men under Shelton’s command in danger. The truth should’ve been easy. The truth should have set him free, but the truth died in his throat.
“I’ll let you know when I get him on the phone,” he said.
Porter zipped the Tunisian’s body bag shut and wondered what they were supposed to do with the body. The company had made several kills during the deployment, all of them well beyond the boundaries of the patrol base, and handling the enemy dead was never an issue. The Iraqis would gather any bodies and bury them before the day was over.
Captain Ritter had told him the dead man was probably from North Africa, one of the “Maghreb” countries. Porter wasn’t sure what a “Maghreb” was, but he doubted anyone else from those countries was nearby to pick up this corpse. Porter stepped back from the body and shook his head. He’d ask Lieutenant Park to call mortuary affairs back at Victory once the excitement died down. Besides, the body wouldn’t start to stink for a couple of days.
The blood all over the floor was the immediate issue. Dime-sized drops led from the building’s entrance to the gurney, interspersed with streaks of dark-red blood from where the Tunisian’s soaked clothes had touched the ground as he was dragged into the aid station. The Tunisian’s blood was smeared under and around the gurney; it had leaked through the mesh gurney and had been subsequently spread by errant footsteps. A list of blood-borne pathogens tugged at Porter’s mind, and no one else was in a hurry to clean up the mess.
He opened his storage locker and pulled out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a bottle that was too light. He shook the bottle; the slosh told him there was barely any left. He checked the locker; no other bottles of hydrogen peroxide were there.
“Damn it,” he said. Hydrogen peroxide was the best way to clean spilled blood. It was no use asking the supply clerk if he had more stashed away somewhere; the only place for hydrogen peroxide was Porter’s cabinet. His other option was bleach. Unfortunately, there was plenty of bleach in his locker.
Sergeant First Class Young would chant, “Bleach is the smell of clean” whenever he hosted a “barracks party,” the non sequitur name for mandatory hands-and-knees cleaning. For Porter, bleach was the smell of pain.
Porter mixed bleach into a bucket of water and stirred it with the top end of his mop. The smell evoked memories of his first tour in Iraq as a crew medic with an air ambulance company. In Vietnam, a casualty had a decent chance of living if he made it on an air medevac. Because roadside bomb blasts caused most of the injuries in Iraq, “traumatic amputations” were all too common. Porter’s patients had bled and screamed, their cries audible through the roaring wind and engines of the Black Hawk helicopter in flight.
Once his patients were handed off to a trauma facility, it was his job to clean the helicopter. Bleach was his only tool; he added it to jerricans of water and flushed out the bloody helicopters before scrubbing them out by hand. After a year of cleaning helicopters, strange things smelled of bleach. He smelled it when he ate, when he looked at the pristine floor of a helicopter, and every time he washed his hands. Each time he caught a whiff of bleach, his mind took him back to the airborne ambulance. Men and women had cried for their friends and loved ones or begged him to say whether their limbs were still there. Lying, like any skill, improves with practice.
He poured half the bucket of bleach and water onto the floor of his aid station. The still wet blood picked up easily and turned the wave of water crimson. His hands tightened on the mop handle as his mind tortured him with memories of the last time he’d done this. The green lieutenant, Oberth—was that his name?—he’d stepped on an IED, lost both his legs above the knee, and died in the same spot the Tunisian had.
Porter’s breathing increased to the point of hyperventilation, which made him breathe in more of the bleach. He swung the mop away from him and stumbled into the rec room outside his aid station. He put his hands on top of a beat-up leather coach, its many tears covered by duct tape, and fought to control his breathing.
“Hey, Porter. You all right, man?” someone said.
Porter looked toward the voice; Sergeant Greely was next to him in full gear.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just too much bleach in there.”
Greely stuck his head into the aid station and sniffed twice. “I don’t smell any bleach,” he said.
“It’s the bleach, goddamn it!”
Greely frowned; specialists like Porter didn’t yell at sergeants like Greely. Porter’s air of panic made it clear this wasn’t an act of insubordination.
Greely placed a hand on Porter’s shoulder. “Porter, Captain Shelton called for a stand-down. Looks like we’re not getting attacked again. I want you to go back to your bunk and take a break. Smoke a cigarette, drink some water, whatever. I’ll get a detail together and clean the floors and the hallway. When you’re ready, you come back and make sure ever
ything’s hygienic. Get me?”
Porter stood up straight, his emotions in check. “I got you, Sergeant.”
“Move out. Draw fire.”
Chapter 19
The fire had a fatal grip on the farmhouse. Flames moved in and out of the smoke, billowing from the windows and peeking through holes in the roof. The sheep in the pen next to the burning home were clumped in a corner, dead. Someone had emptied an AK into the animals, their off-white coats marred by blood.
A cow, tied to a grazing patch by a few yards of rope, slumped onto its forelegs. A single bullet for a cow but an entire magazine for the sheep. Abu Ahmet couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind al-Qaeda’s raid. The Bedouin tradition of raids for theft was well alive in this part of Iraq, so close to the desert where the Bedouin tribes still moved across the desert by camel. Raiders wouldn’t kill what they couldn’t carry off. What if you wanted to steal it later?
Abu Ahmet’s father had taken him on such raids as soon as he could carry a weapon before Saddam came into power and forbade the practice. Abu Ahmet had never killed what he couldn’t take. A well-planned and well-executed raid never shed blood that led to feuds and ruined the sport.
He looked down at the headless corpse at his feet. The body lay belly down; facedown was no longer a possibility. Toes pointed away from the body, hands curled into claws. The black-and-gold-trimmed robe provided the victim’s identity. Sheikh Majid. Abdullah crouched over the body, reciting the al-fatiha, the first chapter of the Koran, from memory.
Theeb ran over. “It’s gone. All the ammo is gone.” Abu Ahmet nodded. The burning home, where Sheikh Majid’s second wife had lived, was the tribe’s once-secret supply point. With their ammo stocks gone, the tribe had barely enough bullets for a single firefight.
“Zakaria must have told al-Qaeda everything before they killed him,” Abu Ahmet said. He knelt next to the body and rested a hand on Majid’s back.
“What do we do now?” Theeb asked.
Abdullah finished his prayer and stood. “Our options are limited. We sue for peace, or we declare war.”
“We can’t have peace! My daughter…,” Abu Ahmet faltered.
“After this, the elders will be afraid, and they’ll want peace. They’ll choose a sheikh that will beg for it,” Abdullah said.
“They’re right. We can’t beat al-Qaeda with our fists,” Theeb said.
Abu Ahmet ignored the urge to beat Theeb senseless and looked at Abdullah. “If you’ll promise war, I’ll make sure you’re chosen as sheikh.”
“You have my word,” Abdullah said. The burning home collapsed with a whoosh of expelled air and smoke. Abdullah looked at the wreckage; his face fell as he looked back and forth from his dead father to the destroyed home.
“We can get the other tribes on our side. They can spare guns and bullets, I’m sure.”
Abu Ahmet touched the cell phone in his breast pocket. There were dozens of missed calls from the American captain.
“I have a better option. The Americans,” Abu Ahmet said.
“Are we that weak? The other tribes will despise us for working with heretics,” Theeb said.
“The Americans are blind to anything but their lost Soldiers. We can lead them by the nose so long as we dangle their missing Soldiers in front of them. As for the other tribes, they don’t have helicopters or the Americans’ money. Plus, the other tribes aren’t begging to talk to me like the Americans are.” Abu Ahmet pulled the cell phone from his pocket.
“What are you talking about?” Abdullah asked.
Ritter snatched a tan, plastic-bagged meal from the box outside the mess hall. He’d shared the last several minutes with Shelton as they explained the attempted car bombing to the brigade’s leadership. Lieutenant Colonel Reynolds suggested that the car bomb be hauled into the patrol base for safeguarding until the explosive ordnance team could tear it apart. Following that recommendation, Shelton’s palm hit his face so hard that Ritter thought it would leave a mark.
Shelton sidestepped the idea by pointing out that he didn’t have the tow capability to move a vehicle the size and weight of the car bomb. Ritter imagined a great deal of head nodding from the assembled field grade officers on the other end of the call. The field grades decided that the vehicle shouldn’t be moved, and the engineers would come out the next day to blow the device in place.
Ritter held the plastic bag up in the pale moonlight to read the label. Chicken fajitas. There were worse meals ready to eat out there.
Ritter saw a shadow sway against the ground beyond the converted farmhouse. His room was just ahead, and someone was waiting for him. Ritter pulled his Applegate-Fairbairn fighting knife from the sheath on his lower back and hid the blade against his inner arm. That someone would try to ambush him while flagging himself or herself around the corner like an amateur hurt his professional pride.
Ritter swung wide of the edge of the building and prepared to toss the MRE into the face of whoever was waiting for him. He sidestepped and cleared the wall.
“Hey, sir? You got a minute,” Kovalenko asked Ritter.
Ritter eased out of his combat readiness and chided himself; paranoia was unbecoming. He reversed the grip on his knife and slit open his dinner. Kovalenko seemed none the wiser that Ritter had his knife out for more lethal purposes.
“Sure. Step into my office,” Ritter said. He sheathed his blade and opened the door to his room.
Ritter sat on his mattress and motioned Kovalenko to the metal folding chair tucked under the desk. Kovalenko sat with his weapon across his lap. Ritter noted the lieutenant’s evident apprehension; his feet and rifle barrel pointed toward the door. Ritter was a veteran of enough interrogations to know Kovalenko didn’t really want a conversation.
“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?” Ritter asked. He even added a smile.
“Sir…this was a bad idea. Never mind.” He stood up to leave.
“Sit down.”
Kovalenko complied instantly. Ritter put his MRE behind him so there’d be nothing between him and Kovalenko; physical barriers hurt rapport. That lemon pound cake would have to wait a bit longer.
“Lieutenant, a man tried to kill every single one of us with enough explosives to launch his tiny nuts to the moon. If anything, we must remember that our time on earth is precious. So let’s not waste that time with twenty questions. What do you want to talk about?”
Kovalenko sank back into his chair and placed his hands on top of his weapon. “Sir, I’m having some trouble.”
“With what? You’re a fine platoon leader, from all I gather.”
Kovalenko perked up at the compliment. “On the day of the kidnapping, I killed an insurgent. That’s why I got this.” He tapped the Combat Infantryman’s Badge on his uniform blouse.
“He was your first?” Ritter asked.
Kovalenko nodded.
“Any since?”
“No…Sir, I’m sorry to put this on you. I tried to talk to Captain Shelton about this, and that didn’t work. The other lieutenants will think I’m a pussy if I tell them, and then God knows what’ll happen next.”
“Tell them what? How you feel now that you’ve killed a man?”
“Yeah, I feel—”
“Terrible?”
“How’d you know?”
Ritter mentally anchored himself to a kill he’d made outside Najaf years back. It had been his first kill while part of an Army unit but not his very first. He could never tell the story of that kill, an al-Qaeda thug in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, to Kovalenko.
“I had my first way down river from here, outside some stinking shit of a village near Najaf. It took me a while to fully accept what I’d done, my new identity as a killer. Do you regret killing that insurgent?” Ritter asked.
“No. No he was armed, and he’d have shot me and my men given half a chance.”
“So you did the right thing?”
Kovalenko nodded. “It’s just.” He looked away. “I killed a man. I killed a
man, and I can never undo that.”
“Killing is an unnatural act for human beings. Despite all the conditioning and training we get Stateside, nothing really prepares you for the consequences of taking life. It’s trauma for the mind. For what it’s worth, the regret you’re feeling is a good thing. It means you’re not a monster that can kill without compulsion.”
“Tell that to my bleeding-heart, liberal brother. He’ll never speak to me again if he finds out I’m a killer. Does it ever get any easier?” Kovalenko asked.
“The killing or dealing with killing?”
“Both.”
“Dealing with the killing—that’s up to you. You can regret what you’ve done for the rest of your life, and it will turn into a cancer of the soul. Men destroy themselves with booze and drugs to numb that pain, or they simply waste away in self-loathing. But that’s only if you regret what you’ve done. If you accept your actions, understand what you did in the context of the time you did it, you can move on. Be confident that you did the right thing.
“The act of killing gets easier, much easier. The good news is you’re now much deadlier in a firefight; no emotional or mental threshold to cross. After enough kills, men discover either that they either enjoy the killing or that killing has no impact on them. Which do you think is worse?”
Kovalenko frowned at the question. “The guy that enjoys it, I guess. He’d kill people just for fun, wouldn’t he?”
“Those are the psychopaths, and they’re easy to spot and remove from society. The worst of the two is the ice man, the guy that can kill without compulsion, forethought, or guilt. We need those men during war, because they ultimately carry the day through their actions.”
“Which are you?” Kovalenko asked.
Ritter’s mind wandered to the Peshawar morgue, where the body of his friend Badia and her baby daughter had lain. Both had died after a drone-fired missile struck a car he’d identified as carrying Mukhtar. He no longer felt guilt over those deaths, even though he knew that if he’d left Pakistan when Shannon first gave him the chance, they’d still be alive. But he wasn’t the one who’d put them in that car. He wasn’t the one who’d brought them into al-Qaeda’s war with the United States. That guilt lay with Mukhtar, the man Ritter knew better as Haider Hussein Mohammed.