by David Abrams
Fish steps up behind the woman and brings the butt of his rifle down on her head. There is a hollow crack like you’d hear at a baseball game. The woman gives a bleat that runs up a music scale—an ohh! exploding with breath—but it cuts off midcry as she crumples forward, knocking into her son on the way to the floor.
“There,” Fish says. “Let that be a lesson.”
“What the fuck, Fish!” three of us cry at the same time.
“What’s going on?” Cheever calls from the stairwell. We can feel he wants to leave his post and come check out the action. That would not be advisable—not at this point.
The boy wails from where he lies beneath the woman’s body, calling “Mama! Mama!” or whatever it is in Arabic.
The man shouts an unknown word and bends over the woman, lifting her, turning her. There is a dark comma of blood on her green forehead. Through our NVGs, the blood is black and though there isn’t much of it, it scares us.
Fish has raised his rifle again—this time for the father—but Arrow stops him with a single word, a bark of anger and authority.
Fish relents, realizing he’s about to get in even deeper shit, and backs off. We stare at him, not knowing what to say.
Fish. Shit. We should have known. Here’s what Fish likes to do for fun: he’ll grab an armload of Gatorade bottles from the dining facility and after he’s emptied them, he’ll piss in them all the way up to their necks, and screw the lids on tight. Then, when we’re out on patrol with a crowd of thirsty kids fanning out behind the Humvee, Fish climbs up into the gunner’s turret and tosses the bottles to them, calling, “Lemonade! Get your fresh hot lemonade, you little fuckers!” And then, slumping back inside the Humvee, he’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.
“Hey, guys?” Cheever calls from the hallway. “I’m starting to get a crowd out here.”
“Give us a minute,” Arrow yells back.
“Less than a minute,” Cheever answers, his voice winched higher in fear. A communal growl fills the stairwell. The neighbors are getting restless. “You want me to call for an evac?”
We say nothing. It’ll come to him any second now, the stupid PRC-less prick.
“Oh, wait,” Cheever says. “Never mind. No radio. Shitfire and damnation!”
Arrow kneels beside the family and feels around until he has the woman’s wrist between his fingers. Now the man is sobbing along with the boy and he flinches when Arrow crouches beside him. He can’t look at us. Arrow pinches the woman’s wrist and counts to himself. Then he touches the husband on the shoulder and says, “I think she’ll be all right, but you need to get her to a hospital right away. You understand? Mustashfa?”
Park, Fish, O, and Drew are surprised. We didn’t know Arrow spoke hajji. Did our interpreter, that cool cat Hamid, school him during after-duty hours? It seems like something the eager-to-please Iraqi teenager would have done for Arrow.
Hamid. Shit. We could use him right now. But that’s just wishful thinking. Unless we want him to translate through the knife slit in his throat.
Arrow says something else, a full sentence this time, ending with the upswing of a question mark.
The man nods. He still can’t look at us.
Arrow rises to his feet. “We’re done here.”
We leave the room. Dark-green shadows line the stairwell, heads popping out of doorways, bodies standing with crossed arms thinking they can block our way, teeth flashing from behind lips. We gather Cheever and head back down the stairs, not looking to the right or to the left at all the people who have come out to watch. We push through the swarm of mutters like we’re hot shit. Rambo Squad! You don’t want to mess with us, no sir.
We spill into the street, panting and nearly shitting our pants from fear.
“Let’s get out of here,” Arrow says. And we do.
Cheever trails behind, saying on broken-record repeat: “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
* * *
We go three blocks before we stop and Arrow shoves Fish up against a wall, a forearm across his throat.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Fish gasps.
“I should kill you now.” Arrow grinds the words between his teeth.
“Arrow,” O says. “Easy, man.”
“I should fucking kill you right here, right now.”
A red Volvo passes along the street, honks its horn. It slows, takes a good look at us, then speeds away.
O steps in, pries them apart.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Drew says.
We look at Fish.
“It was a moment,” he says. “I just had a moment. Couldn’t help myself.”
“A ‘moment’?” Arrow yells. Two sheiks in conversation down the street stop to turn and look at us. A curtain in an upper-floor window is pulled aside by the back of a hand. We’re still not in safe territory. Nothing is “safe” until we reach FOB Saro. “Butt-stroking a chick is a moment?”
Fish goes, “Guess I lost it for a second. I got pissed off about the situation. Coming up empty—all that for nothing—the fact we were there in the first place, the tits-up Humvee, Sergeant Morgan, the whole nine yards. I just lost it.”
“You lost it.” Arrow takes a deep breath, then another. He’s trying to practice Rafe’s Three-C Theory of Leadership: calm, cool, collected. He’s trying, but it’s hard. How the hell did Sergeant Morgan do it, day in, day out?
“Okay,” Arrow says. “I’ll buy the rest of it, but not the part about Rafe. You could give two shits about Rafe.”
Fish goes, “Hey—”
“Fuck you, Fish,” Arrow says, putting his face too close to Fish’s. “Rafe meant nothing to you.”
“That’s not—”
“Yeah, Fish,” Drew says. “Fuck you and your bleeding heart. Why are you with us anyway?”
We circle Fish. No one says anything.
Arrow is still all up in his face.
“I’m sorry,” Fish says.
Whoa. We never expected him to apologize. It totally takes the wind from our sails. Fish has never seemed like a guy who backs down. Maybe it was Arrow’s arm on his throat or maybe, like the rest of us, Fish wants to keep moving, get out of this sector of the city. But whatever it is, he deflates us with an “I’m sorry” and we know we have to let it go. It will never be spoken of again, now that it looks like the woman will be all right. Will probably be all right.
Arrow spits again off to one side, the last of his anger balled into froth, and says, “Fine. Whatever. But do something like that again, old man, and I will butt-stroke you to death myself.”
Fish smiles, slow and greasy. “You can try.”
8
FNG
Fish is our FNG.
As the fucking new guy he stands at the outer ring of our circles, though he pushes against that barrier whenever he can. We know he wants to buddy up with two or three or maybe all of us, but we’re wary. There is the designated FNG waiting period to be observed, after all.
Fish came to us three weeks ago from Third Battalion, where he was excess personnel, useless baggage on the roster, and they were always handing him shit jobs like head count at the dining facility and stirring the foul fires in the latrine burn barrels. He was glad to put that sorry-ass clusterfuck of a battalion in his rearview, and told us so whenever he could.
Fish is older than the rest of us. He might have even been older than Sergeant Morgan, but who knows. He has the worn-out look of a guy headed for the nursing home twenty years too early, someone who’s been put through the Army’s meat grinder once or twice. Between haircuts, there’s a shine of gray at his temples.
This puts Fish at about fifteen years older than the average FNG.
The story on Fish is that he’s been busted in rank so many times it’s a wonder he’s not pacing a cell in Leavenworth right now. Fish likes to brag he made it as high as staff sergeant once, two years ago, but then he was busted back down in rank—a quick plunge along the ladder—by a sergeant major who had it
out for him.
“That bastard dogged me everywhere I went. He was all over me like stink on shit. Everywhere I went, he went—on PT runs, at lunch in the food court, even off duty when I went to go see a movie downtown in Watertown, there he was, sitting two rows behind me, watching me the whole time, never taking his eyes off the back of my head, until I couldn’t stand it and turned around and said, ‘Do you want to suck my cock, old man? Cuz it sure seems like you’re in love with me.’ I guess he didn’t take too kindly to that. Or to the punch I threw when I cornered him in the parking lot afterwards. That guy was a slimeball and deserved everything I gave him.”
That’s how we heard it from Fish. We doubted it was the whole story.
So, here he is—the old man of the squad, but the lowest ranking. You can see how well he’s been taking this. Just ask that lady in the apartment we’re running from.
We’ve only known Fish three weeks, but most of us already hate him. He replaced Cunningham, a nice guy we all loved until he was killed in an IED blast a month before the one that got Sergeant Morgan.
Fish never got to know Rafe like we did, so we’re not sure why he’s so gung-ho to be out here on this covert memorial mission. We figure he just wants to get off the FOB for a day. Or maybe he’s looking for adventure—a story he can tell chicks in bars once we get back.
That seems more like Fish’s style, the fucking new guy.
9
Grand Theft Humvee
We never expected to get this far.
Four hours gone and here we are, still strolling around Baghdad like tourists. By this time, someone back at Taji has put out an APB for us—a be on the lookout for a cluster of dumb fucks wandering lost and alone. Why we haven’t already been scooped up by another unit or a roving patrol of Iraqi police is a mystery to us.
We figure we’ll get caught soon. It’s only a matter of time before the Humvees pull up in a swirl of dust and barked commands.
We won’t go easy.
We don’t care if we’re BOLO’ed. Do you know who we are? We’re running the Sergeant Morgan Memorial 10k and you are seriously fucking up our finish time. Out of our way!
That’s what we’ll scream, all the way down to the ground, fighting the zipties on our wrists.
But that’s later. For now, we need to continue our mission. Put some pep in our step, as Sergeant Morgan used to say.
We walk on, hustling away from the skull-cracked woman.
We’re in a race now. It had started out a sure thing this morning. And then it all went to shit.
We think about that lottery-winning moment when it looked like we were getting away with this. We raided the motor pool before dawn when it was empty, the mechanics grabbing an early breakfast. We’d planned a predawn start, giving ourselves a cushion of several hours. Good thing, because now it looked like we’d need every ounce of stuffing in that cushion. If we got to FOB Saro early, Arrow said, we could just fuck around for a few hours: go see a movie, stop by Burger King for some Whoppers, cruise the streets in search of hot chicks. Ha!
“It’s what Rafe would’ve done if he were in our shoes,” Arrow said. There was a hitch and catch in his voice the rest of us pretended not to notice.
Out of all of us, Arrow seems to be taking Rafe’s death the hardest.
We think Sergeant Morgan would have approved of the plan, especially how Arrow drew a sand table for us last night and then, when he was certain we understood, swept it away with the side of his boot. We all fist-bumped in agreement (even Park, who was usually allergic to these things), then went back to our hooches to catch whatever sleep we could before the agreed-upon hour our watches would beep us awake.
But none of it seemed real until the moment we snipped the lock with bolt cutters, unchained the steering wheel, and brought the Humvee to life with a purr. Then Park rolled out across the FOB—slow, slow, slow—tires crunching gravel. Arrow rode shotgun, the rest of us hunkered down in the backseat. The FOB’s streets were emptied of all but a few ambitious joggers, their yellow-green safety belts worn like beauty-queen sashes across their chests, reflecting a jagged slash from our headlights. We rolled slow, slow, slow past Burger King, the bowling alley, the chapel, the headquarters building. Soldiers reporting for morning shift passed through the front door checkpoint, flashing their badges and pausing in the smoke shack to take a few deep, hasty drags from their cigarettes before they had to go sit on their asses at a desk for the rest of the day. We grinned at how we were gonna royally fuck up someone’s day at headquarters, all that paperwork needing to be filed for this joyride of ours. We laughed as we rolled through Taji’s streets, a slow-motion escape from authority.
Then we were at the Entry Control Point, the funnel-choke of security for the forward operating base. We sucked in a breath and held it.
Arrow convinced them. He got out of the passenger door, went inside the guard shack with a handful of papers—discarded op orders we’d pulled out of Captain Bangor’s trash can last night when no one was looking. Arrow held a thumb over the date in the upper right corner of the paper he showed the guards and somehow convinced them we were legit. He looked at that pair of fobbits—a couple of lazy asses we’d probably roused from a nap, busted while dreaming of marshmallow clouds and cupcake kingdoms—and said something to them that loosely translated to: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
And, get this, they’d nodded like hypnotized storm troopers and waved us on. The next thing we knew, we were winding through the concrete barriers—amazingly, incredibly, ridiculously free of the FOB.
We slipped away from Taji like fish finding a hole in the net.
“Woo!” said Drew.
“Hoo!” answered Cheever.
We cheered as we sped out onto the highway that would take us to the memorial service.
Grand theft Hummer. We were living the thug life now. We were unstoppable.
10
We Real Cool
“We real cool!”
Our huff-pant voices called back: “We real cool!”
“We left school!”
“We left school!” Our hundred feet soft-clumped in unison on the paved road snaking through Taji. Sergeant Morgan kept pace at our left and called cadence, barking into the dusty morning air. This was two months before his death—about halfway through this deployment—and he was pushing us hard. As always.
“We lurk late!”
“We lurk late!”
This was one of Rafe’s favorite cadences—a home-brewed chant he started back when we were at Fort Drum. He said it was one of his favorite poems, broken down into pieces so we could—real cool—get some book schooling with our morning PT.
“We shoot straight!”
He told us the poet’s name once, but none of us can remember it now. And that makes us sad. We know Rafe would want us to remember this poet even more than he’d want us to remember him. Shit like that was always important to him. He wanted us to be smarter than we thought we could be.
“We shoot straight!”
And these are the kind of things we liked to remember about him: the way he hardly broke a sweat on the five-mile runs every Friday through Taji; the way his teeth gleamed as he called cadence, quick bursts of ivory across his dark face; the way he pushed us through that last mile even though the heat of the day had already started to drain us; the way he sang the word “cool” like it was a glass of ice water waiting for us at the finish; the way he was always out there to our left, encouraging us, goading us, moving up and back along the formation with his teeth and voice; the way it felt like he’d always be there; the way it seemed he’d never leave us.
“We jazz June!”
We didn’t know what the fuck that meant—Rafe and his fancy poets—but we sang it anyway: “We jazz June!”
We dug deep. We pushed hard to the finish line.
“We die soon!”
11
Solitude
We craved it; none of us got it. We
could never find a hidey-hole of alone. Peace and quiet and time just to be in our own fucking mind? Hard as catching windblown sand.
The war was always with us. It tattooed our skin, it clothed us in sweat and sand and blood. It was bright as the eyeball-searing lights set up at nighttime checkpoints, rolled in on generators, poles extended twenty feet into the air, dazzling like the alien landing pad at the base of Devils Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie we all remember seeing as kids. The scientists and government spooks and that weird French guy all had to wear sunglasses at night to keep from being blinded by the mother ship. That’s our war: a mother ship descending with subsonic, glass-shattering hums. Lights blinking everywhere. We wear sunglasses at night.
We cannot escape the war. The distant fireworks squeal of mortars falling two miles away, the soft thud of impact, the rattle of gunfire like boots walking across Bubble Wrap, the slow cough of Humvee engines coming to life. War is our soundtrack.
We cannot get away from our “warself.” Not in the dining facility, or the narrow gravel lanes between our hooches, or the squeeze inside a Humvee. Not in our cots at night, not in the morning shower stall. Not even in the rancid “solitude” of the porta-potty where we are hemmed in by walls of graffiti, the overlapping chatter of profanity:
Cpl. Jennifer Swardos is the mayor of Twatsville
(Population: Everybody)
If you ain’t Muslim, you ain’t Shiite
If you ain’t feces, you ain’t shit
We Flawda Boyz bout to lay all these iraqis to bed. Holla out. —Your Boi
Coles was here Sept. 2004 to April 2005.
Beneath that, someone else wrote:
That’s a long time to take a shit!
We can close our eyes, clap our hands over our ears, but the war remains in our head. It’s a sound that never stops.