Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  “Nothing like enabling future terrorists,” Staff Sergeant Boondock shouted, all the while handing out candy. He noticed me arching an eyebrow his way and started chuckling. “Don’t judge me, LT, and don’t you dare think I’ve gone soft. It’s all a part of my master plan.”

  I turned to a small child with doubting eyes, ruffled the hair on his head, and pointed at him. “Ali Baba?” I asked, using the Arabic term for thief and general villain. The group of kids around him giggled hysterically and chanted, “Ali Baba! Ali Baba!” while the victim of my slandering protested his new label. I put my hands out and let the kids play with the hard plastic that lined the knuckles on my gloves.

  The children ran away from Private Das Boot, petrified that the American giant would accidentally step on them. They pointed and whispered from afar though, and Phoenix translated their murmurings: “A man that tall must be able to see the whole world.” Private Das Boot just snorted and shook his head, bumming a cigarette from Specialist Flashback.

  “Don’t these little bastards ever go to school?” Sergeant Cheech asked. I didn’t think it was a serious question, although it was a legitimate one.

  I looked across the coil and saw Corporal Spot turn to Sergeant Axel. “Think it’s cool if I give them dip and tell them it’s chocolate?” he asked.

  “No,” SFC Big Country said, walking up behind them. He had a large trash bag filled with toys sent to us from family members back home. He attempted to organize the gaggle of children into a single-file line of disciplined order, a concept so foreign to them that they simply laughed at his directions and encircled him. Most of the children barely came up to his waist, and while towering over them, my platoon sergeant began to pass out small plastic cars. Pandemonium ensued.

  “Stay in line! Goddamn it, stay in line!” he yelled without effect. He ignored the temptation just to throw the bag into the middle of their youthful jubilee, though, and handed the toys out to the snatching hands one at a time.

  “Now the fireworks start,” Doc said to Specialist Tunnel, watching as the kids began to steal the cars from one another, often using the toys themselves as synthetic weapons of mass destruction against each other. This phenomenon inevitably led to hysterical cries and tears. Staff Sergeant Bulldog strutted over to one of the head-cracking bullies, grabbed a toy away from him in a huff, and brought it over to a well-mannered runt standing away from the mass, watching quietly.

  “Staff Sergeant Bulldog, you’re the biggest bully there is!” Specialist Haitian Sensation yelled, smiling. “You bullied the bully!”

  Staff Sergeant Bulldog nodded, satisfied. “You know it.”

  “Time to go,” I said, moving away from the vehicles with one dismount team, while the other one stayed with the Strykers for local security. Half the children followed our movements into their neighborhood, something I didn’t mind. Being encased by a bubble of Iraqi street urchins probably contributed to our security element in ways I barely comprehended. The enemy had to fight the public relations battle as well, and shooting at Americans surrounded by local kids wouldn’t go over well with the Arab soccer moms.

  The Iraqi children spiraled around our wedge formation, collecting rocks out of sewage dunes the way their Western counterparts picked out seashells on beaches of white sand. I sporadically selected local citizens to engage in discussion, sometimes seeking out the welcoming faces, sometimes seeking out the hostile ones. This day was like any other day spent asking the populace to explain the details of their daily existences: Life in Iraq sucked and had always sucked and continued to suck. The specific neighborhood didn’t matter; the citizens of Saba al-Bor all had the same complaints. “We don’t have clean water.” “We don’t have jobs.” “We only have fifteen minutes of electricity per day because the Sunnis take it all.” But the Sunnis say the Shias take all the electricity, I remembered. “They Ali Babas. We think America very good. Gimme water, mistah. Gimme job, mistah. Gimme power, America.” Gimme, gimme, gimme.

  “We’re trying,” I told them, “but shit like this takes time.” I felt momentarily obliged to instruct the locals to turn to their own government for these civic matters, as a way of empowering themselves, but quickly discarded such thoughts. I’d already learned that lesson. Mere mention of the Iraqi government just led to another stratosphere of bitching from the Saba al-Bor citizenry. I also internally debated whether I should discuss the history of America’s evolving democracy and explain that civil services took time to establish themselves, especially in Third World countries. Ever heard of the Articles of Confederation, Mister Unkempt Iraqi Man addicted to the hand-out? That era made the Paul Bremer years look like pure genius. I smiled to myself, thinking about this lunacy. I had tried that approach once too, some weeks ago. It hadn’t spawned the intended effect.

  I sometimes felt my compassion for fellow human beings leaking out of me like oil leaving an engine, so slow it was barely evident and yet dripping with enough regularity that I knew the problem was severe in nature. I had only been deployed for three months; twelve more months of seepage waited. I hoped being cognizant of this leak would help me plug it back up when the time came to do so. Not that such a time awaited on any near horizon.

  I took another sip of chai. I now conversed with a group of local men who claimed the Sunnis didn’t let them use the fuel station on the other end of town. They also insinuated that the Sunni Sons of Iraq were housing a sniper somewhere near this fuel station, knowing full well that the word “sniper” ensured we would check out the validity of the tip—even if “sniper” for Arabs usually just meant an unknown person firing a gun somewhere within audible distance. This qualified 90 percent of Iraqi men for sniper status.

  As the conversation continued, I caught a fleeting glimpse of two pairs of alluring dark eyes peeking out at us from behind a cracked front door across the street, alluring dark eyes that belonged to young female faces and flowing black robes that failed to cover every curve the way they were designed to.

  I wasn’t the only one who took notice. Phoenix left me alone to discuss business in broken sign language with the men, while he walked across the street, waving the young women out. Usually this direct tactic failed to work, but today it somehow managed to succeed; I assumed the girls’ parents were not home. Without my terp, my conversation with the locals quickly dissipated, but Phoenix’s exchange had just begun. We spent the next ten minutes pulling security around a house in a small alleyway of Saba al-Bor so that our twenty-one-year-old terp could flirt with two giggling Iraqi teenagers in Arabic. I finally yelled, “Phoenix! Wrap it up!” He smiled, embarrassed on finally realizing an entire section of scouts was watching him, but he still pulled out a piece of paper to write down his cell phone number. He gave one of the girls the paper and waltzed back over to me.

  “I big pimp,” he said.

  “You big liar,” I responded. “Those chicks think you’re an American, don’t they?” His black skin and dummy rifle often confused the locals.

  He shrugged his shoulders and repeated one of his favorite sayings, picked up from watching Staff Sergeant Bulldog play poker. “If you ain’t bullshittin’, you don’t deserve to be playin’.”

  When we returned to our Strykers, a frago message from Captain Whiteback awaited us. Due to an extemporaneous meeting at Camp Taji regarding squadron uniform standards, he wasn’t going to be able to make a planned engagement with Sheik Banana-Hands, so he needed me to go in his stead.

  And. Roger.

  Time passed differently on missions; seconds, minutes, and hours disappeared into an abyss of repetition and flickering echoes, sometimes slowing things down, sometimes speeding things up. Sometimes time stopped so that the mind could take a mental snapshot of an unchecked shadow, a dead dog, a lonely child, a desert sun fading into the abstract possibilities of tomorrow. A stranger in a strange land issued habitual orders on the radio without any real thought. And then we were on the south end of Saba al-Bor, traveling on Route Swords, to Sheik B
anana-Hands.

  Goddamn it. Remember why you’re here, I thought to myself. It isn’t for your dreams. It’s for theirs. Stay sharp.

  “Chai hunting again, sir?” My platoon sergeant asked on the radio.

  “It is absolutely instrumental to the continued development of Iraqi security that as much chai as possible be consumed by Coalition forces,” I replied. “It’s somewhere in the counterinsurgency manual.”

  My Strykers automatically moved to the intersections, gunners scanning alleyways and rooftops, waiting, hoping really, for a heat signature to be identified as a terrorist’s skull. Ten Iraqis in body armor and carrying AK- 47s were clustered around a small gate in front of Sheik Banana-Hands’s warlord manor—a sizable two-story house by Western standards but absolutely Gomorrah-esque for Saba al-Bor. As soon as Specialist Flashback dropped the back ramp, I stalked over to the Iraqis position with Phoenix. Private Smitty scurried by me, assuming the point position. He took his unofficial role as my guardian very seriously, and I’d still been unable to figure out which NCO tasked him with that mission. It wasn’t like I wandered off by myself. Not anymore, at least.

  Sheik Banana-Hands greeted us at the gate, hand outstretched, smile open and welcoming—just a bit too open and welcoming for Staff Sergeant Boondock. “I’ll take charge of the dismounts out here, sir,” he said, chuckling at my offer to join us inside. “Let me know when I can use my weapon again.”

  We walked into Sheik Banana-Hands’s office, Private Smitty in front, Sergeant Cheech and Corporal Spot filing in behind me. They posted security inside the room with one of the local Sons of Iraq, with whom Private Smitty exchanged cigarettes. I joined the sheik at the back end of the room, away from the doorway and all of the windows. We sat down across from one another on hard wooden chairs, and Phoenix grabbed a plastic chair from a corner and sat next to me.

  “Captain Whiteback is very sorry he could not make it today. He only missed this because an emergency popped up at the last minute.”

  The sheik covered his heart with his long fingers. “I hope no one is hurt,” he said.

  I thought about the meeting Captain Whiteback had been forced to attend and the circumstances leading up to it; Lieutenant Colonel Larry and Sergeant Major Curly believed the line commanders and first sergeants weren’t listening to their demands for strict adherence to the published uniform standard. “Me too,” I replied. “How are you, though?”

  He sighed heavily and stroked his recently trimmed grey beard. “I am very tired,” he said. “I have been awakened in the night many times due to Mahdi Army attacking my checkpoints.”

  “I know. We’ve been sent out three times in the past week to help.”

  He nodded. “Yes, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Coalition force support is very important to us, and it gives my men strength. But it is not just no sleep that makes me tired.”

  I arched an eyebrow Phoenix’s way, thinking something hadn’t been communicated correctly, which caused the sheik to continue talking.

  “You will see it is harder to sleep when you get old,” he said. “You are still young. Your mind stays with you with the years that come.”

  Phoenix’s translation wasn’t the greatest, but it got the point across. The sheik had explained a concept I already understood and was slowly beginning to experience more and more: The weightier the decisions of the day, the longer they lingered in the night. Enough of my soldiers had accused me of being an insomniac that I had started to believe them.

  We continued to talk, three very different men of very different cultural backgrounds and motivations and experiences, stuck in this moment of time like a bug caught in a spiderweb. This particular web stuck with bureaucratic inanity and slowness: What the sheik’s people needed and craved, we couldn’t provide or wouldn’t, in the name of legitimizing the Iraqi government; what I needed and craved, he couldn’t provide or wouldn’t, due to the potential future of his nation and his neighborhood, his family and himself. We both knew America’s time and interest in Iraq was fleeting.

  Some forty-five minutes later, after a second round of chai, I realized that I was yawning and we were no longer talking about security or electricity or medical clinics but about Clint Eastwood movies. I thanked Sheik Banana-Hands for his hospitality and began to stand up, but he leaned over and squeezed my shoulder, speaking in his native tongue.

  “He say that he has gift for you, LT,” Phoenix said.

  Sheik Banana-Hands yelled something in Arabic at his Sahwa bodyguard and clapped, which caused the bodyguard to bounce up from his chair like a jack-in-the-box and disappear into a side room. Phoenix whispered into my ear. “He say something about tube of mortar.”

  Fifteen seconds later, the younger Iraqi walked back in, holding a Russian military mortar tube and tripod. Both were immaculately clean. The sheik spoke again.

  “He say that his men find this in neighborhood behind house, position facing to the market,” Phoenix translated.

  I tried not to sigh audibly. It was all a part of the counterinsurgency game. Like we didn’t know they all had their own personal caches leftover from the sectarian wars. Whatever, I thought. It was one more weapon off the street.

  I thanked him, cupping my right hand over my heart. “It pleases me that you and your men care so deeply for your people,” I said. “Security brings peace, and peace is what we all seek.”

  Sheik Banana-Hands also placed his right hand over his heart. “Peace is wonderful,” he said. “Both in here”—he tapped at his chest—“and around us.”

  I stared at the wall behind the sheik and fought through the arriving space-out. Phoenix nodded in agreement, moved by the profundity of Banana-Hands’s words. I used to have both, I thought. Now I just hope for either.

  I didn’t say that though. I just stood up and shook hands with the sheik. “Let’s move,” I told my soldiers, as Private Smitty scooped up the mortar tube and tripod.

  We walked back outside, and I told Staff Sergeant Boondock to load up the local security. I thought about getting back to the combat outpost. The Joes would flock to the phones and to the computers, of course, still connected with the old world, while the NCOs would head to their makeshift poker table, content and comfortable in our new one. I had a patrol debrief to write, but after that, a nap was more than in order.

  When I got back to my Stryker and got on the radio, however, SFC Big Country relayed a message from the TOC. They needed us to meet up with a local woman who worried her son had fallen in with a bad crowd—the insurgent, IED-emplacing kind. She wanted us to talk to him and hopefully scare him out of a future that would lead to American 50-caliber rounds riddling his body. Fuck it, I thought. Anything for a mom.

  “White,” I said. “Throw up the hate fist, and let me know when you’re redcon-1. We got another follow-on mission.”

  “This, uhh, White 2,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog drawled. “We redcon-1.”

  “This is White 3,” Staff Sergeant Boondock boomed. “Hate fists are up, and we’re redcon-1!”

  “This is 4,” SFC Big Country thundered. “Let’s move.”

  “On your move, 2,” I said, watching the wheels of my senior scout’s vehicle churn forward.

  This today was just like any other except for the todays that were different.

  OLIVER TWISTED

  Just another day in the Suck. Just another day of counterinsurgency tedium, solving a nonconventional, nation-building, political problem with a conventional military used to nation destroying that sometimes forgot it was trying to be nonconventional. Just another day of our dismount teams walking with me between creeping Strykers, winding through the back alleys and alley backs of Saba al-Bor. Just another day of talking to the locals and listening to their multitude of gripes, bitches, and complaints. Just another day of “mistah, mistah, gimme—”

  “Please, sir, I want some more.”

  Last calling station . . . say again? You’re coming in lucid and earth-shatteri
ng.

  I looked down at the originator of the voice. Three Iraqi girls, all with shining black eyes and long black hair, had crowded around me and Suge Knight. They had their hands outstretched, hoping. All three were dressed in pink Barbie sweats caked in months’ worth of mud.

  “What did you just say?” I asked.

  I doubt any of them understood me, as they repeated their original request: “Mistah, mistah, gimme chocolata!”

  I shook my head. The sun must be getting to me, I thought. I yelled at one of the gunners to toss down three bottles of water and turned back to the three children. I handed one of the girls a bottle of water, then I handed Suge one, and I kept the third.

  “He has chocolata,” I said to the girls, pointing at an oblivious Sergeant Cheech, located twenty feet to our front, peering down an alley. The girls bounded off in the direction of my finger, moving like hunters zeroing in on wounded prey.

  “You okay, LT?” Suge asked me. “You do not seem happy.”

  I smirked and patted him on the back. “I’m good, man. Drink up, and we’ll keep moving. But no Coke!”

  Staff Sergeant Bulldog takes a local Iraqi child for a spin on a commandeered bicycle.

  Suge giggled and spoke. “You are good leader of me, LT!” A few days before, I had learned that Suge suffered from diabetes, something he had known about for ten years or so. Such knowledge hadn’t stopped his sugar cravings and soda abuse, though, something we were all trying to wean him off of now, for his own good.

  I took a swig of cool water, and as it dribbled down my throat, my dismount radio crackled. “White 1, this is White 3.”

  I snatched up the hand mic, eager to find out if Staff Sergeant Boondock had discovered something beyond the status quo of disgruntled locals. “Send it, 3.”

  “Yeah . . . we have a situation back here. I think you may wanna check it out yourself.”

  I glanced over at Suge, who had wandered over to Specialist Tunnel’s position to yell at some surly teenagers for failing to produce their ID cards in a timely manner. Artful dodgers, the lot of ’em. Staff Sergeant Boondock was a block over, near a house I had purposely chosen to bypass; some weeks earlier, after putting out a small house fire, we smelled burning fur and went inside the house to investigate. We found the smoldering carcasses of dead dogs scattered across the main room, as lifeless as the Arabian Desert itself. After questioning the neighborhood, we learned that after the fire started, the locals had hauled the already-deceased wild dogs into the house, hoping to create some sort of roasted meat for food. That was the type of poverty found here—and why something as simple as a candy bar sent throngs of children into mass hysteria. I didn’t want to head back down that street, but if Staff Sergeant Boondock—he of the “The way out is through” mantra—had discovered a situation that required the lieutenant’s attention, duty beckoned, sensibilities be damned.