by David Abrams
The dog livened things up for a couple of weeks.
We taught James Bond to bark when the first sergeant and company commander approached, a signal we needed in order to stuff the contraband girlie mags back down to the bottom of our rucksacks. Nights when we got bored with the Sylvester Stallone DVDs and dominoes were no longer interesting, we watched the dog chase his tail like he was twirling an old European folk dance. We laughed because it was the stupidest thing in the world and stupid was all we had for entertainment in those days. Mostly, though, we liked feeling the lick of another creature’s tongue on our skin. For some of us, it was the next best thing to having our wives by our side.
Even Snelling, a scout who never had anything nice to say about anybody, fell for the charms of the dog.
“Maybe we could learn the fuckin’ mutt to start sniffin’ bombs,” he said one day as we sat around the Connex shipping containers we were calling home during this war. “Put him to work for us around here.”
“He’s doing enough as it is,” Sergeant Morgan said. We could tell he didn’t want to get all mushy over a dog in front of everyone else, but it was hard to keep the catch out of his voice. “He doesn’t need to do anything else but be what he is.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
Rafe hesitated. “He’s, uh, our mascot.”
“I suppose,” Snelling agreed.
“Yeah,” Cheever piped up. “You don’t see any other platoons around here with a dog, do you?”
“That’s cuz all the other platoons smell like the inside of their mothers’ cunts,” Snelling said. “Who’d want to hang around them? Even a dog would roll over and play dead.”
“Not just play dead, but be dead,” Cheever said.
“Fucking A,” Snelling agreed.
“Also,” Rafe said, “there’s that whole General Order Number One thing.”
“That, too,” Snelling said.
“Hey, Sar’nt, you ever think about what’s gonna happen to your dog once we’re wheels up and outta here?” This came from Buckley, who was second only to Snelling in the Department of Pessimism.
“Not really, Buckley. I’m just going day to day right now.”
“Aren’t we all?” Drew said.
“Hey,” Cheever said. “We could try to smuggle him back to the States with us.”
“Lotsa luck getting through customs.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” said Buckley. “We was at an inbrief down in Kuwait and they told us some lieutenant once tried to ship a baby camel back to the States. This dude had been at an outpost somewhere near the border and I guess he’d sort of adopted this camel and started treating it like his pet. So, when it comes time for redeploy, he and a few of his buddies put it in a Connex with some food and water. By the time it got back to the States two or three weeks later, and the customs agents popped that Connex open, hoo boy, that camel was pretty ripe. Like camel jelly kind of ripe.”
Rafe pulled his dog closer in a one-arm hug. It was true. We hadn’t thought about James Bond’s future, but we sure as shit weren’t gonna try a stunt like that. We’d rather see the dog keep roaming the streets of Baghdad than have him show up at Fort Drum all bloated with his eyes popped out and a gangrene tongue.
“Well,” Rafe told us, “whatever happens, I’m just trying to give him a better life while we’re here.”
“You call that sour shit from the chow hall a better life?” said Snelling. “Jesus, it’s a wonder he ain’t been poisoned yet.”
“Hey,” Rafe said. “Nothing bad’s gonna happen to him, long as I’m around.”
“Sergeant Morgan, patron saint of hajji mutts.”
“Fuck you, Buckley,” he said with a grin. “Fuck all y’all.”
“Yeah, fuck you too, Sar’nt.” Buckley and all the rest of us grinning, too.
“Besides, James Bond here”—Rafe rubbed the sweet spot behind the dog’s ears—“he’s our good luck charm.”
Howls of protest erupted from the men lounging around the shipping containers. “Oh, Sar’nt, tell me you didn’t just say that!”
“He said it all right.”
“Quick! Somebody unhex the jinx!” cried Cheever. “Sprinkle some virgin goat’s blood in a circle around Sergeant Morgan!”
“The L word,” Drew said. “Man, you know you never say the fuckin’ L word. That’s like eating a whole pack of Charms out of an MRE. Throw those fuckers away. Bad juju.”
Rafe grinned. “Sorry. Must have lost my head for a minute.” He grabbed the dog’s muzzle and planted a brusque, manly kiss on the moist nose. “Still, you gotta admit, there’s something about this dog.”
“Yeah,” Drew said. “I guess there is.”
James Bond jumped to his feet, alert and bristling. He looked back at the platoon, then forward again. He started barking. We looked up, saw the company commander coming across the sand on his way to the row of porta-potties with a quick, mincing gait—like if he stepped too hard, something would jar loose. We all laughed, even Snelling.
“Hey,” Buckley said. “We could give him to Hamid.”
“Sure,” said Sergeant Morgan. “How about it, Hamid?”
We looked at our interpreter, who’d been sitting some distance away. Hamid looked up, shrugged, grinned. “Maybe, yeah,” he said.
We loved Hamid—almost as much as we did James Bond.
We knew next to nothing about his non-Taji life. Was he married? Did he still live with his parents? Did he have a hot chick of a sister? But what we did know about him was enough. He hated Coldplay, liked the first Die Hard but thought all the others were a waste of Bruce Willis’s time, and chugged the tiny bottles of Tabasco from our MREs like they were tomato juice. (“You’re a stud muffin, Hamid!” we cheered.) He was cool in ways we never expected a hajji to be.
Captain Bangor said he was the kind of interpreter you could trust to get the message right every time. “That Hamid is a stand-up guy,” he’d said on more than one occasion; and Old Man Bang-Her is not one to go tossing around compliments.
Sergeant Morgan bonded with Hamid early on, just like he did with James Bond. They were what some hippy-dippy people might call kindred spirits. Maybe Rafe wrote something like that in an e-mail back to his parents. We don’t know. All we know is the pair stuck together like glue on flypaper. Rafe taught Hamid American slang, and Hamid tried to school him on dance moves from his favorite Arabic pop music videos—which looked like a bunch of Bollywood bullshit to the rest of us, but we got a good laugh watching Rafe try to bust a move hajji style: shimmy sliding, whirling, and clapping his hands in sync with Hamid. They made a decent dance team. We liked to kid Sergeant Morgan about it, saying he should go sign up for the next Baghdad International Ballroom Dance Competition.
Once, shortly before they were both gone, Rafe said he had something for Hamid. He tossed a balled-up PX bag at him. When he’d untied the plastic handles and held up the black T-shirt, Hamid laughed and laughed.
“Let’s see, dude,” we said.
Hamid flipped the shirt around: I FOUGHT THE WAR ON TERROR AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.
We remember Hamid was wearing that T-shirt the day Sergeant Morgan asked him if he’d take care of James Bond when we were gone.
“Sure, Rafe,” he said. “Sure, I take care of him. I make sure he’s good. With a nice barbecue sauce when I’m roasting him on the spit.”
We laughed, though we weren’t sure if Hamid was kidding or not.
Then one day, James Bond’s girlfriend showed up.
“I found her outside my hooch last night,” Sergeant Morgan told us, pointing at a new mutt crouched in the shadow of our trailers, haunches coiled, tense, ready to spring away. “I woke up hearing this whining and scratching at the door. When I opened it, JB flew out before I could get a hold of him.” (Rafe was in the middle of his story, but we wanted to interrupt and say, “Wait a minute, now you’re keeping him in your hooch with you?”) “I thought I was looking at a fight for sure. Teeth snappin
g, fur flying. But it was nothing like that. JB went right up to her, sniffed her butt, then they started wrestling on the ground, making these weird groans, banging their muzzles together. That’s when I realized she was his bona fide bitch.”
“Or bone Fido bitch,” Cartwright cracked.
Rafe said he realized that since he’d adopted James Bond as his unofficial pet, he hadn’t allowed the dog to wander far. “I didn’t stop to think he had a girlfriend waiting for him at home, worried out of her mind, wondering where he’d gone. I figure she tracked him all the way here, maybe digging a hole under the blast walls or—more likely—slipping past one of the checkpoints.”
“Like something out of a movie,” Miller said. “Love conquers all, or some shit like that.”
“Yeah,” Rafe said. “After all that, how could I possibly turn her away?”
We agreed she should stay here with James Bond and we swore we would keep it as quiet as we could, though we knew it was only a matter of time until First Sergeant or Lieutenant Grimner realized our new dog wasn’t exactly a stray but the platoon’s newest permanent resident. We hoped Top or Grimner—or both—would be in a good enough mood not to shoot our dogs on sight. So far, they’d been tolerant about letting us have James Bond—a tolerance that was affirmed when our turn-a-blind-eye battalion commander paid us a visit and didn’t bust Sergeant Morgan’s ass for violating General Order No. 1—but none of us knew how Top or Grimner would react when they saw this new unauthorized pet.
Skinner wanted to know what the girl dog’s name was and Rafe said he hadn’t thought of one yet. Santiago said he thought Esmeralda would be a good one but we shot that down as soon as it was out of his mouth. Holman said if she was James Bond’s girlfriend, then she really needed to be James Bond’s girlfriend. We tried to remember the movies and when all we could come up with at first was Pussy Galore and Octopussy, we knew those names would never work because it would be nothing but a constant reminder of what we couldn’t have—and that if statistics were right, at least one of us would never see again. Miller, the platoon’s self-proclaimed movie geek, suggested Holly Goodhead from Moonraker, but we all agreed that sounded too faggy, and finally Holman said the only Bond Girl he could remember was Halle Berry in the latest one and he thought maybe her name had been Jinx. And because we liked the way Halle Berry had risen out of the sea in her bikini, tits coming ashore a few seconds before the rest of her body, it was decided that Jinx it would be, all of us turning a blind eye to the implications of the name.
We always threw away our unlucky Charms. That should have been good enough.
We all agreed to smuggle extra meat out of the dining facility. Jacovich volunteered to let Jinx sleep in his hooch if things got too crowded at Sergeant Morgan’s, but given Jacovich’s questionable habits and his not-so-secret stash of porn, we worried for Jinx’s health and welfare and so we ixnayed his offer of lodging.
When James Bond and Jinx, still playfully nipping each other, trotted around to the back of the Connexes, Jacovich laughed and said it looked like someone was gonna get him some Octopussy all right.
Then one of us said he saw First Sergeant coming out of his hooch and heading our way, so we scattered like we knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about a new dog in our midst.
That day, we went out on patrol in Sadr City, looking for weapons caches, roughing up a belligerent old man we thought was hiding AK-47s somewhere on his farm, kicking down doors throughout the day, killing two teenage boys who ran at us with machetes, and generally having a piss-poor time of it out there because of the goddamn heat and the never-ending dust. Whenever we looked at Sergeant Morgan, he seemed to be somewhere else, like he couldn’t stop thinking about those two dogs. Like he couldn’t wait to get off the streets and back to the FOB where he could sink his hands into velvet-soft fur.
Not too much later, came the bad day. The worst day yet for any of us. But especially for Sergeant Morgan.
We’d been on edge for hours, ever since Second Squad rolled out the door on their way to what looked like a major disturbance at Firdos Square.
“Trouble brewing,” Lieutenant Grimner said. “S-3 says Mookie’s whipping up his disciples into a frenzy. Effigies and the whole nine yards.”
“Burning effigies, sir?” Cheever asked.
“Of course. What other kind is there?”
Rafe said nothing, but glared at a spot on the ground near the lieutenant’s boots. Apparently everyone but Grimner knew Rafe’s grandparents had had a history with the KKK back in the day, so fanatic Shi’a shit like this always put him off his game. It was like he had shards of glass in his mouth.
“Anyway,” Grimner continued, “this shorthands us. With Second Squad out the door and most of Fourth on R and R, guess who draws the short straw? May as well get your heads in the game now. We’re heading out soon. Mark my words.” There came the expected groans and a volley of curses. For Rafe Morgan, however, we could see the first thing that ran through his mind was: Who’ll watch the dogs?
We’d been rotating dog-sitting duty between squads, everyone pulling their fair share of making sure the bowls had water and smuggling banana bread and saltines from the chow hall if everyone else was outside the wire. By now, James Bond and Jinx were the worst-kept secret on our end of the FOB. The CO, First Sergeant, and even Lieutenant Grimner knew the stray mutts had taken up permanent residence among us. Grimner didn’t like it and we could practically hear General Order No. 1, subparagraph B ticking through his head every time James Bond trotted into sight, but Grimner was lower on the totem pole than the CO and if the CO ignored the dogs, then so be it. Which didn’t necessarily mean James Bond and Jinx were riding home with us on the C-130; it just meant Rafe and the rest of us could enjoy their company for the remainder of our time in Iraq. Nothing more, nothing less.
But this had been Second Squad’s week to watch the dogs and so now that left our squad to shoulder the task, and if we got called out (which, any minute, we knew we would), then it was up to the non-R&R-ing soldiers of Third Squad. But they were all pulling guard duty at the chow hall four times a day, so that meant the dogs were vulnerable to confiscation by the next ass-puckered sergeant major who came strolling by. It only took one senior fobbit with too much time on his hands to end our game of doggy hide-and-seek.
On that day soon after Jinx’s arrival, a morning preluded with predawn explosions in the distant haze of Baghdad, things were blurred with confusion and misunderstandings right from the start. Bad things were going down in the streets beyond the concertina wire and by 10:00 a.m. everyone was walking around with hot pokers shoved up their asses, Second Squad was on its way to Firdos Square and Mookie’s froth-mouthed fans, and we were up in the batter’s box.
First Sergeant Weinz’s poker was shoved up the farthest. When he screamed at us, we could almost see the metal tip in the back of his throat.
“First Squad!” he roared. “Get your shit and let’s go. We got a live one. Baqubah. G-2 claims they found a nest of vipers and, lucky us, we get to go check it out.”
Cheever ran past, intent on stuffing a thirty-round magazine into his ammo pouch, and almost collided with Jacovich coming at him from a ninety-degree angle. “Watch it, bitch!”
“No, you watch out for your own fucking self, asshole!”
The two ran their separate ways.
Weinz was screaming—volume turned up to eleven, veins popping and eyebrows nearly shooting off his forehead. The nine of us—Weinz was coming with us on this one—ran toward the armored personnel carrier. We zipped, we clipped, we strapped it all on, locked and loaded.
Sergeant Morgan was the last to head for the ramp, hesitating at the sight of JB and Jinx. “What about the dogs, First Sergeant?”
“The hell with the dogs,” Weinz shouted. “Just get your ass in here, Morgan.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I said fuck the dogs and I mean fuck, the, dogs!” Like every first sergeant worth his shit in the Army
, Weinz knew when to bluster and when to coddle. We hated him and we loved him in equal measure and we never once thought about contradicting him. We knew his bite was just as bad as his bark.
Sergeant Morgan put his head down and mumbled, “Yes, First Sergeant.” He ran up the ramp and Drummond levered it closed, sealing us into the small metal box. We shifted and settled on the benches. Drummond, driving, gunned the engine, threw the APC into reverse, and we jerked backward.
Then came a yelp and the unmistakable crunch of bone.
Someone started screaming, “No! Fuck no, fuck no!” It was Rafe. It was all of us.
The air was sucked out of the APC and our lungs withered. Even Weinz groaned when the realization hit him. He reached up and pounded against the hull for Drummond to stop.
Drummond levered down the hatch and we got out to look. Sergeant Morgan was the first to vomit, then two others turned and followed suit. From where the treads had ground the body into the dirt, a leg stuck up, quivering in the air, mere muscle memory at that point.
Rafe continued to heave until he came up dry, and then he reached out to grab James Bond, who was dancing and howling at the side of the APC. The dog sniffed the ground around what used to be Jinx. He lifted his head, gave an anguished yip, then let loose in a howl. This went on for some time.
Rogers from Third Squad ran over. He’d been resting in his hooch, on break between lunch and dinner guard shifts, when he heard the commotion. He stopped short of the crying, gagging bunch of us. “Fuckity fuck fuck!” he croaked.
“Rogers,” Weinz said. “Get a shovel. Bury it. The rest of you, back inside. I’m sorry, Morgan, but we gotta get going.”
We piled back into the APC, Drummond’s hands visibly shaking as they took the controls again. Once again, Rafe hesitated at the edge of the ramp, holding a writhing James Bond by the scruff of the neck.