Their backs were to the little houses, but Tommie covered them with the shotgun.
The first of the two was a woman. She stopped several meters from them. Lieutenant Sugar could see she had tears in her eyes already.
“Well, fuck me,” said Sergeant Alphabet.
Sugar was thinking that too. He removed his helmet so they could see his face and clipped it by the chinstrap to his body armor. He removed his ballistic sunglasses and stuffed them into a cargo pocket.
The woman clapped her hands together and shook them at Lieutenant Sugar. She was saying something. She canted her head and kept saying it in a loud, wailing voice with her hands clasped together like she was begging. The second of them, a man, put his hands on her shoulders and turned her away from them. They exchanged words as Lieutenant Sugar watched. He glanced at Stuttering John and saw by his expressions that he understood everything they said.
“Is this the piece of shit whose feelings we hurt?” Sergeant Alphabet said.
The woman wore a shawl over her head and layers of rags wrapped thick around her legs and held with pieces of wire. The man was lightly dressed for the morning’s cold. His skinny legs and bare feet were grey with the mud of his field.
The man held his woman by the wrist and called to Stuttering John who said something back to him and gestured with an open palm toward Lieutenant Sugar. Lieutenant Sugar was familiar with this gesture. It was time for him to say something.
The field was bare, and the earth was broken and soft. It extended some distance to an irrigation canal where tall thick grass rose from the mud. Route Lion could be seen beyond it. The farmers both looked at Lieutenant Sugar.
He stepped toward the man. Stuttering John and Sergeant Alphabet came with him, the three of them advancing in a rank.
“Are these the parents?” Lieutenant Sugar asked Stuttering John.
“Sir, I am sure of it,” Stuttering John said without having spoken to the farmer.
Lieutenant Sugar offered his hand to the man, they shook, and Sugar put his hand over his heart in accordance with Arab custom. The woman began shouting again from behind her husband, and he said something over his shoulder at her.
“Tell him my name is Lieutenant Sugar.”
Stuttering John told him.
“Sir, he want to know how is his son.”
The farmer had a thick mustache and a deeply furrowed face and two hard eyes.
“Tell him that I was not here when it happened, but I know what happened, and today I drove here to meet him face to face and to tell about his son.”
“He says thank you and praise be to God and like this, and he want to know about his son.”
“Tell him that we sent his son to the hospital.”
The farmer’s eyes still looked at Lieutenant Sugar. Behind him a car drove down Route Lion past the big gash in the road.
“Tell him that we sent him to the best American hospital.”
Stuttering John told him.
“By helicopter,” added Lieutenant Sugar. He was glad for the helicopter.
The woman had a lot to say. She said it loud and without any holding back.
Stuttering John hesitated, said something back to her, and she replied with the same ferocity.
“Sir,” he said to Lieutenant Sugar, but the woman was not finished.
She was waving her hands all over the place, and Lieutenant Sugar and Sergeant Alphabet watched her hands. Sergeant Alphabet asked Lieutenant Sugar if he wanted him to control her.
“No, not yet,” Lieutenant Sugar replied. “Tell him that I want to just speak with him.”
Stuttering John told them, and the woman quieted again.
“No, tell him that I want to speak with him alone. I don’t want her here.”
There was a debate between the farmers, and the man took the woman to the house. She pleaded with him, using the same gestures as she’d used with Lieutenant Sugar earlier. When the farmer returned, Lieutenant Sugar took out two cigarettes he’d bummed from Tommie and offered one. He lit his own, then passed the lighter to the farmer who cupped his hands to shield the flame from the breeze.
Sergeant Alphabet kept an eye on the house where the woman was.
“Sir, he say you can speak with him honestly. He only wants to know only what is the truth. How is his son? Is he alive? Is he dead?”
“Tell him he is wounded seriously. Tell him that is why we called the helicopter.”
The man asked again if his son was alive.
“Tell him he was alive when he left the Chicken Factory.”
“Sir, he want to know how is he hurt?”
“I don’t know,” Lieutenant Sugar lied. “Tell him he was shot, that’s all I know. He was shot because soldiers think he set off the bomb. Tell him that I wanted to come here and talk, even though I think his son set off the bomb.”
The farmer who’d been looking intently into Lieutenant Sugar’s face with his two hard eyes turned toward his fields when Stuttering John finished. He smoked. Lieutenant Sugar pulled on his cigarette without inhaling the harsh smoke. Sugar wondered if the kid had, in fact, set off the IED.
They looked across the field, over the irrigation canal to Route Lion. It was black and straight where it showed between the reeds of the irrigation canal. Most of the field had dry stalks ploughed into the grey earth. In spots, they stood crooked in the ground. The two of them looked for a long time and smoked.
The farmer turned back and said something and Stuttering John replied in Arabic, and they went back and forth.
“Sir, he says it is good for you to come. And he says like this that it is a very bad thing, but good for you to come and if you will have tea, and I told him you are very busy, and he says if we can come sit inside.”
“Tell him no tea.”
There were bundles of dried reeds beside the house. The trucks outside could see far in every direction. Lieutenant Sugar asked Sergeant Alphabet to make sure he had communication with the trucks through his hand radio. In their body armor, they brushed both sides of the low, narrow doorway.
A young boy who looked like he’d been suddenly awakened stared at them with wide eyes and open mouth. He looked torn between fear and curiosity. Their eyes adjusted to the dim light, and more of the room became apparent. There was a crooked bench along one wall, two chests, and a pile of blankets on the floor that looked like they’d just been slept in. The far wall did not quite reach its adjacent one, and the space served as the doorway to the next room from which they heard a woman’s sobbing.
The farmer gestured lavishly toward the bench, and Stuttering John and Lieutenant Sugar sat down. Sergeant Alphabet remained standing by the entrance. The boy stared at all his equipment. He watched Sergeant Alphabet speak into the radio on his shoulder to do another commo check with the vehicles outside.
The farmer removed a ball of cloth from the hole in the mud wall, which served as a window. A little bit of cold morning light shone through. He placed a lantern on the floor, kneeled beside it, and pumped it vigorously. It lit and he stayed on his knees in front of Lieutenant Sugar and Sugar felt like coming inside was a mistake. He didn’t want hospitality from a poor farmer whose son they’d shot.
The farmer looked from Sugar to Stuttering John and spoke.
“Sir, he says again for you to have some tea.”
“Tell him no thank you, we have a busy morning.”
The farmer said something again, and Stuttering John answered, shaking his head. The farmer paused a moment and said something.
“Sir, he say how can he go see his son.”
The sobbing from the next room quieted.
Lieutenant Sugar knew the names of the towns between here and the base to which the boy was likely sent, and he explained it through Stuttering John.
“He knows now,” said Stuttering John. “If I could suggest something, sir.”
Lieutenant Sugar nodded.
“Maybe a note he can show the soldier at the gate, so they will l
et him go.”
The boy leaned over the heat of the lantern and looked from Lieutenant Sugar to Sergeant Alphabet with his mouth open. Sergeant Alphabet stood by the front door. He rolled his shoulders under the weight of his body armor.
Lieutenant Sugar pulled a notepad from his cargo pocket and the farmer watched him scribble a note. He signed it with his name and rank and dated it, then tore it from his notepad.
“This is bullshit. You should tell him that if his other kid ever tries to blow me up, I’ll shoot him too. And if I have to shoot that little fucker, I’ll make sure I kill him so we don’t have to go through all this shit.”
Lieutenant Sugar handed the scrap of paper to the farmer who folded it carefully and held it lightly between two fingers.
Stuttering John looked at Sergeant Alphabet but didn’t hold his gaze when Sergeant Alphabet looked back. No one said anything and the farmer held the note.
Lieutenant Sugar asked Sergeant Alphabet to leave.
“Hooah, sir. I’ll be outside,” he said.
Lieutenant Sugar made a second note with his name on it and told Stuttering John to tell the farmer that if he has problems, he should come to the Chicken Factory and show this to the guard. Lieutenant Sugar said goodbye in Arabic and put his hand over his heart.
Stuttering John touched Lieutenant Sugar’s arm as they exited the farmer’s home. “You are a good man,” he said. Lieutenant Sugar’s mind was elsewhere. He went outside and saw Sergeant Alphabet walking from one gun truck to the other. He could tell by his stride and by the way he carried his weapon that he was preparing the guys for the trip back.
That’s why they sent me, Lieutenant Sugar told himself. Sometimes you’re handed a piece of shit and the best you can do is put a ribbon on it and pretend it smells like roses.
During the return trip, Tommie talked about those grey, wrinkled sausages they served in the chow hall and how they sounded pretty good about now, and Sugar felt glad he brought him as a driver.
He thought about his girlfriend. It’d be nice to sit down with her and hear her voice for a little while. She was very beautiful, and he wanted to look at her and spend a little time with her before the big mission. It’d be nice to go for a slow walk on that sandy trail beneath the pines, as they had in North Carolina before he left. He decided that as soon as he got back inside the wire, he’d re-read the last letter from her.
* * *
At eleven hundred local time, Lieutenant Sugar received his mission from Captain Yona. He made a plan, and two hours later, gave his operations order to his squad leaders. He sat on his cot and referred frequently to a map and satellite photos spread on the floor between them. He pointed to his first squad leader’s chest.
“Task,” he said, “provide security for the main effort. Purpose. Facilitate their movement to building zebra one one.”
“Third squad.” He pointed at Sergeant Alphabet’s chest. “Task. Clear buildings zebra one one through zebra one four.”
Sergeant Alphabet wrote intently in his notebook.
Lieutenant Sugar pointed at him again. “Purpose. Kill, capture, and deny sanctuary to insurgent forces.”
Lieutenant Sugar completed his order and asked if there were any questions. There were none. His squad leaders gathered their M4s and boonie caps and pocketed their little notebooks and pencils. No more distractions, Sugar thought. Everybody’s thinking about doing their jobs and staying alive. A small part of him was excited at the possibility of finally making contact with the enemy, finally seeing what war was all about.
9
NEW ME
Andrew Slater
I JOINED THE ARMY AFTER MY GIRLFRIEND RENEE drowned because I felt that some people in my hometown would be unable to not blame me. Something would have seemed wrong with the world if they didn’t. The Army was a way for me to leave Elberton for good without seeming like I was making a big spectacle out of it. Renee’s dad called me up about a week after the funeral to ask me why I didn’t go in after her. His voice was calm on the phone when he said it. It sounded like he was reading the question off a piece of paper he was holding with both hands. I think he’d been trying to not say it for a while.
By the time I realized she must be down river I couldn’t see her at all. I had just got back to the riverbank from my car with a pair of foam water noodles and a CD player. I had been scrounging around in the back seat of my Corolla trying to find a CD, something I wanted her to hear. I stood there staring at the flat top of the river, unblemished blue-brown between the cat tails, a foot or two higher than normal with the past week’s rain, but the water was quiet that morning. There was a clear, quiet sky. I never made sense of it.
She picked that spot of the river because it was on her bus route in fifth grade, before her parents got divorced and she moved into an apartment with her mom. It was our tenth date, and she used to put her hand on my arm and lean in to tell me some thought that had struck her in a way that meant a great deal to me. The spot she picked was a sunny bend of the river below the pastures, miles of flat grazing land in all directions dotted by round, browning bales, and she had always wanted the bus to break down there so all the kids could go swimming and miss school. Some fishermen found her on a sandbar a few miles down, and the paper put “All-State Swimmer” on her obituary, like that wasn’t adding insult to injury.
* * *
Nine years later, I was finally discharged from the brain injury clinic at Walter Reed. Before I was leaving, I had a final, obligatory meeting with my overworked neurologist that was more of an informal send-off than a working session. I had told him that I originally enlisted because my favorite uncle served as a Seabee in Vietnam, which was only partially true, because he wasn’t my favorite. The neurologist arrived at our meeting wearing a referee uniform that was a size too small because he was on his way to his daughter’s soccer game, and he said that all the parents had to share the same uniform.
We met at a picnic table in a courtyard I had never been to before. He said he enjoyed the cherry trees there, but I found the people and noise around us a bit distracting. I had forgotten the question I wanted to ask him, which was maybe not a question as much as it was a list of things that still did not seem to make sense. Instead, I just started describing my latest dream.
“So this time we were driving across the Atlantic Ocean in our gun trucks, all the way back,” I said.
“You mean, over a bridge across the Atlantic or something?” he asked. “I should mention this would be a great starting point for your new therapist when you get to your new home in Virginia, but you might find it more helpful to focus on your daily life with him. Or her, of course.”
“No, it wasn’t a bridge. We were driving over the ice. The whole Atlantic was frozen over. There was this flat sheet of ice we were driving on, and you could feel it vibrate because of the waves underneath the ice. We were driving real slow since the traction was bad, even with chains on our tires. As far as you could see it was just ice. And then there were these shantytowns we were driving past on the ice, which had palm tree chimneys whose roots reached under the ice, and you can see them stretching down. Our trucks were airtight so they stunk like diesel.”
“This is with the no-mouth people again?” he asked. “You should actually take comfort in the fact that your short-term memory is retaining your dreams so vividly. That’s probably encouraging.”
“No, I never see any people this time,” I told him. “But the reason we’re afraid of the bombs is not because they will kill us directly, but because we’ll fall through the ice. My truck hits this bomb—I hear a bang and there’s water spray and bubbles everywhere—and the back end of my truck falls through a hole in the ice. I look out through the windshield and I see the bottom of the ice above me as we’re sinking into the sea. I can see the bottoms of the tires of the other trucks making impressions on the ice. There’s a depth gauge in the truck for some reason, and I watch it cross the redline. The hole we fell through is brig
ht and it keeps getting smaller and smaller and the air keeps getting tighter and tighter in the truck. Then crunch, I wake up with a headache.”
“I think we should stay focused, Aaron. Let’s talk about your sleep quality. Your new doctor can put you back on the Ambien for short periods of time, if that’s what it takes. That seemed to help you before.”
“I was actually hoping there was something different than Ambien. I still had bad dreams on Ambien, but I couldn’t wake up out of them,” I said.
“What kind of different? What are you looking for?”
“Well,” I said, “I was hoping there was something that lets you sleep without dreams for a while. Like a dark and quiet place in your head you can go to all night. Something like that.”
“Are you taking your clonazepam before you go to sleep?”
“Yeah,” I said. “As much as I’m allowed to. It kind of wears off before morning. Around two-ish. I was thinking maybe I could take mefloquine again, those malaria pills. They always gave me wild dreams. Maybe that would just clear all the dream problems out at once. Mix things up a little.”
He didn’t say anything, but I saw him underline something on the clipboard more strongly. Just then his cell phone rang.
“Well, good luck,” he said. “I have to take this.”
And he walked off to answer it after shaking my hand, heading in the direction of the hospital. When he did not return, I realized about thirty minutes later that our meeting was over.
* * *
On the drive to our new home from Walter Reed, Emily admitted that she had been telling everyone we were engaged. She only did this, she explained, so a family friend would have a job waiting for me at the Tractor Supply. And also other reasons. After she explained anything, Emily had a habit of staring at me and smiling until I smiled back at her to signal that I understood what she was saying. I just got into a habit of smiling and nodding just about whenever she looked at me. I knew I should feel lucky to have such a patient woman.
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