Brave Deeds

by David Abrams

  “First Sergeant—”

  “Don’t say it, Morgan. Don’t even fuckin’ say it.”

  “I gotta bring him, First Sergeant. I can’t leave him here. I can’t. You know that.”

  “Have a heart, First Sergeant,” O said.

  “I got more fuckin’ heart than you’ll ever know,” Weinz growled at him, but we could see his face was fighting itself. We could see it even in the dim green light. Something tore diagonally across his brow, cheek, and jaw, and finally he growled, “Fuck it! Fine.”

  Rafe scrambled aboard, James Bond in tow. “Thanks, Top.”

  “But you better fuckin’ keep that fuckin’ mutt quiet or I’ll have your fuckin’ ass in a sling so fuckin’ fast you’ll be inside out before you know it.”

  “You won’t hear a thing, Top. I promise.”

  We roared out of the FOB and shuddered our way up to top speed on the highway, racing toward Baqubah, our stomachs turning and clenching with every lurch of the APC.

  Sergeant Morgan spent most of the trip rubbing James Bond’s neck, trying to keep the whines from bubbling up, and whispering in the dog’s ear, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Shh-shh. You’ll be okay, boy. You’ll be okay.” Every now and then, JB’s tongue came out and licked away the tears on Rafe’s cheeks. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

  And everything would have been fine, it really would have, if Drummond—jittery and distracted by the echo of bone crunch—hadn’t taken a right instead of a left and then overcorrected by going two blocks too far and taking a left when he should have gone right, at which point the buildings, looming like stacked boxes, were determined to get him completely turned around and the next thing we knew we were heading down a dead-end alley. Drummond backed out of there only to take another wrong turn onto a stretch of road that looked like somewhere we’d already been, but turned out not to be, and then none of us—not even Weinz—had any clue how close we were to the alleged nest of vipers. When we called back to HQ and swallowed our embarrassment, admitting that yeah we were pretty fucking lost, HQ turned out to be no help at all because they’d lost track of the APC fifteen minutes ago and, as it turned out, the servers were down so they couldn’t get a good fix on us. But stand by because they were doing their best to get everything back online as soon as possible. Just hold tight and don’t go anywhere.

  Weinz told Drummond to cut the engine and we sat there listening to the ticking metal. Holman, the gunner, kept swiveling, freaked out by the way the buildings seemed to be built completely out of nooks and crannies. We knew we shouldn’t be this jumpy—we had the superior firepower, after all—but something about the way everything pressed against our faces like a pillow and the fact it was deadly silent out there, save for the grunting flap of laundry on an unseen line, yeah, we were pretty fucking unsettled by the current situation.

  We sat and waited for HQ to come back to us. None of us spoke above a whisper there in the half dark. We sat tight against the benches, hands gripping our weapons, swallowing against the hammering of our hearts, flinching every time the laundry billowed or Holman hissed around the turret in another half swivel.

  That’s when James Bond wriggled free of Sergeant Morgan’s hands, leapt to the space between the benches, and started to bark.

  Rafe reached out and clamped down on the dog’s muzzle with both hands.

  Weinz hissed, “Shut him up now, Morgan!”

  “I’m trying, Top. I’m trying.” To James Bond: “Shhh-shhh-shhh. Dammit, boy!”

  The bony muzzle took on a life of its own as James Bond thrashed his head from side to side, finding the strength to break free of Rafe’s grip. The rest of us reached out, hands lunging into the green air.

  The dog twisted and barked, finding an open spot near the back of the hatch where he could tip back his head and unleash a howl. Like the rest of us, his brain was probably still fogged with confusion, not understanding how and why Jinx had been sucked beneath the treads, exploding in a jet of blood, the musk of urine flooding his nose, and all he could do was howl, howl, howl.

  We saw the glint of First Sergeant’s 9 mm come out of its holster.

  “No, Top, no!”

  Rafe reached out and took the dog by the throat, squeezing, trying to press the howls back inside. The dog coughed, snarled, and once again slipped from his grasp and wheeled back and forth in the cramped confines of the APC, howling, howling.

  “Either you do it, Morgan, or I do it,” Weinz hissed.

  “Top, Top, Top!” This was Skinner or O or Drew or maybe all three.

  “Shut him up, Morgan!”

  The dog, the dog, the dog. He wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

  Holman swiveled in half circles, freaked out by the commotion at his feet and the silence of the neighborhood.

  James Bond barked and barked and barked. His eyes were wild, rolling with white half-moons.

  First Sergeant held out the 9 mm to Sergeant Morgan, shaking it with insistence.

  “Psst, psst, psst!” O tried to snare the dog’s attention, distract him into silence.

  James Bond threw himself from side to side, bouncing off the metal hull, acting like he was trying to bring the wrath of the neighborhood down on our heads.

  “Morgan, I’m warning you for the last time!”

  Rafe reached out to take the pistol. His head was floating over his body now, bobbing there in the green murk. This wasn’t happening, was it?

  Rafe tightened his fingers around the handgrip. He reached out for James Bond, and the rest of us put our fingers to our ears, none of us protesting now because we knew, all of us knew, down to the last man, this had to be done, it was just a fucking dog and none of our lives were worth losing over it. We hoped Rafe would send the round deep enough into the dog that it couldn’t ricochet out and kill one of us.

  Sergeant Morgan gripped the neck fur between his fingers and pressed the barrel against James Bond’s forehead. He couldn’t look at those rolling eyes flashing their white moons, so he closed his own eyes. And then we all went deaf from the bang in the half instant before the blood splashed across us.

  15

  Fake Smile

  We enter a marketplace. It is full of chatter and movement, people everywhere, but we pass through like ghosts.

  We’re ghosts because no one notices us. We walk past and they carry on, drinking their tea, reading their newspapers, babbling their conversations with fingers and tongues.

  We pass a bookseller’s stall full of magazines, laid out on a soiled rug. Bright, lurid covers full of celebrity faces none of us recognize. The Middle Eastern Tom Cruises and Kardashians. The Arabic words crawl across the faces like worms. One of the celebrities looks like Hamid, but we know this cannot be. Our terp was never anything but our terp. Still, the face on that cover has Hamid’s smile.

  The magazines are held down with fist-size rocks to keep them from blowing away. As they would from the wind of passing ghosts.

  “Keep moving,” Arrow says. Like he needed to say that.

  * * *

  They fished Hamid from the Tigris on the hottest day of our summer.

  We’d given him a few days off to be with his family—something about his uncle coming to visit—and were doing our best to get along without him by improvising with ridiculous sign language, which did nothing but make the sheiks laugh.

  All that morning we’d bitched about the triple-digit temps as we did a door-to-door in East Baghdad, trying to find patches of cool in the shade, yanking helmets off our throbbing heads, dousing them with bottles of tepid water. Nothing helped, nothing relieved. So by the time we pulled back into Taji at the still-broiling dinner hour, our throats were hoarse from cursing. We weren’t hungry, but we went through the motions of standing in the chow line, letting them pile food on our trays, all the time impatient to reach the cooler of Gatorade bottles. We drank until our bellies were tight.

  We heard about Hamid halfway through the meal when Thomasma from Third Battalion sat
down with us and said, “Sorry to hear about your terp.”

  “What do you mean?” we said.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “No,” we said, our furnaced skulls suddenly going chill.

  Thomasma proceeded to tell us about the floating trash in the Tigris, Hamid facedown amid it.

  About the rope with the grappling hook the police used.

  About how they managed to snag him under his armpit.

  About the hand-over-hand pull into shore.

  About the bloat (which rhymes horribly with “float”).

  About the way Hamid rolled over in the water and seemed to smile up at the cops, until they realized that was just the gaping slit across his throat.

  About how they dragged Hamid onto the sandy bank and the body had settled with gaseous burps in the afternoon heat.

  About how Hamid was naked except for that stupid T-shirt Rafe gave him.

  About how the Iraqi police had stood around in a circle, smoking cigarettes and trying to figure out what the caption on the shirt meant.

  I FOUGHT THE WAR ON TERROR AND

  ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT.

  We listened to what Thomasma had to say, thanked him for telling us, then when he exited the dining facility, we followed and casually asked him to step around behind the building, where we beat the shit out of him.

  16

  Chicken

  Now Rafe is dead, too, and we’ve got an appointment with his funeral.

  We walk, we walk, we walk. Through the dust, through the thirst, through the sunbake, and now, through the Iraqis filtering into the marketplace with their goats, their dishdashas, their wind-flipped magazines, their snapping teeth, their cooking smoke.

  Damn. Smell that?

  We are hungry.

  None of us had time to grab chow this morning before we stole the Humvee and none of us had thought to get an MRE from the backseat after it broke down. We are such idiots. And now our stomachs think our throats have been cut. (Sorry, Hamid.)

  We push deeper into the marketplace. Skinned goats hang on ropes. Pyramids of pomegranates, figs, neon-yellow mangoes. Two men crouch over a grated fire, turning puddle-shaped slabs of flatbread with their bare hands. We can smell the sweet yeast and it drives us bat-shit crazy.

  Arrow calls a halt, gathers us on a side street no bigger than an alley.

  “Look,” he says. “If we don’t eat, we’re gonna get ourselves shot. We’re so distracted we can’t think straight. Especially Cheever.”

  We look at Cheever. His lips are wet and bright.

  “Time check,” Arrow says.

  Park pulls back his sleeve, then says, “Straight up noon.”

  “Shit,” Arrow says. “That leaves us three hours.”

  “So we pick up the pace,” Drew says. “We grab a bite to eat, then we head out at a double-time.”

  Arrow goes, “We’re already at double-time.”

  “So we do triple-time.”

  “I think we need this,” says O.

  “Gotta feed the frame,” agrees Cheever.

  Cheever’s frame doesn’t need any more feeding. The rest of us on the other hand …

  “Maybe there’ll be food at the service,” says Arrow.

  “Fat chance,” Drew says. “This is the no-frills Army, remember?”

  “There won’t be any food,” Park says.

  He’s right. This wouldn’t be like the time Cheever’s Uncle George died and there were meatballs on toothpicks, pasta salads, cream puffs barely thawed because Cheever stopped at Costco on the way from the cemetery to the reception because he couldn’t show up with nothing in his hands. It wouldn’t be like the time O and his mother went to Denny’s, just the two of them, directly after his father’s graveside service and sat there looking at each other over the menus tacky with syrup and the paper placemats with a cartoon map of the USA—a tiny car stuffed with big-headed people, arms waving out the window, somewhere in Iowa—and neither of them knowing what to say because that cartoon family looked so happy, didn’t it? And it would be nothing like the afternoon of Jernigan’s wake back in Watertown when we’d all ended up at a sports bar raising a glass in honor of that stupid PFC we all loved before he went and got behind the wheel drunk. The bartender kept thanking us for our service, though none of us had been to Iraq at that point. We weren’t about to let that stand between us and free drinks. We nodded, and said, “You’re welcome.” The beer kept flowing as we made up stories for the bartender about Jernigan and how he’d been like Medal of Honor brave that time in Ramadi. Man, did we have some laughs that night.

  It won’t be like that this afternoon at Sergeant Morgan’s memorial service. No meatballs, no platters of sliced cheese, and for damned sure no beer. If we’re going to feed the frame, it has to be here and now in this noisy, dirty, dangerous marketplace.

  “Fine.” Arrow relents. “Fine. But we pull security—three eat, three on overwatch. Got it?”

  Fish, Park, and Drew are reluctant to give credence and credit to Arrow’s new role as King Big Balls—no one and nothing but Sergeant Morgan’s death elected him to that office—but he’s all we’ve got at this point, so everyone shrugs, nods, and divides into two groups of three.

  It feels like the street has gone quieter, like someone gave a half turn to the left on the volume knob as we move forward into the square. Eyes watch us. Hands flash secret signals at waist-high level. Women draped head to toe in flowing black garments part to let us through—like curtains pulling back in a theater.

  That’s right, hajji. We’re America! Coming through, coming through. Step aside.

  Arrow thinks this is nutso, but he lets it happen anyway. He’s hungry as the rest of us. And damn if that chicken doesn’t smell good.

  The bird has been slow roasting all morning as we’ve made our way across this sector of Baghdad to make this date between fowl and appetite.

  We form a ring around the men crouched over the fire. Drew, Park, and O are on the first security shift; Cheever, naturally, is the first to put his face into the smoke and say, “How much?”

  The men at the edge of the fire are frightened. We can see that right away. They shift on their legs and look at each other. Can you blame them? Who wouldn’t be edgy surrounded by a hedge of American uniforms prickled with rifle barrels and a fat kid drawing too near too fast. The men open their eyes wide and shake their heads.

  We don’t know if they’re refusing to do business with us, or if they just don’t understand Cheever’s demand.

  Arrow says quietly: “Kam thaman hada?”

  The men look at each other, mutely signaling across the space of their squat. Then one of them, the younger one, holds up two fingers. What does this mean? Two dollars? Two dinar? Two minutes until the chicken is done?

  “Hurry it up back there,” O says.

  “We’re trying, man,” Cheever says. “But hajji is being hajji.”

  “Okay, but we’re starting to draw some attention here.”

  Arrow says something in Arabic to the men that must mean: “Hurry it up or we’re leaving and taking our dinars with us.” Because all of a sudden there is food in our hands—all of us, including the ones pulling security. Arrow nods and Drew, Park, and O go to sling arms.

  Glistening muscle meat of chicken is cupped in soft, yeasty flatbread. Our noses fill with the scent of cloves, allspice, and pepper. The more food knowledgeable among us (meaning Cheever and O, who is a die-hard foodie back in the States) detect cardamom, coriander, and turmeric in the background of the aroma. We fold the blanket of bread around the meat and raise it to our mouths, as solemn as a communion service. We need two hands for the job: one to insert food, the other to catch juices in a cupped palm.

  We bite into the chicken.

  For nearly six months, we have subsisted on MREs and the slop at the dining facility. Cheddar cheese in a tube. Dehydrated peaches. Mystery-meat hamburgers.

  Now, this marketplace food fills our mouth
s with clouds of flavor.

  The crisp brown skin of the chicken crackles under our teeth, releasing the spices across our tongues. We think of backyard barbecues in Watertown, the camaraderie of beer and meat. We also think of perfumed tents in the desert, candlelit interiors piled high with pillows, a harem of half-dressed women serving us tea and platters of food. We lean back and open our mouths for grapes. Arabian Fucking Nights, man.

  We take the food into our mouths and for a moment, on this saddest of days, it fills us with peace.

  Even Fish—whose palms still sting from the jolt of rifle butt striking skull—enjoys the chicken.

  We eat and eat and eat. We wipe our fingers on our pants legs and ask for more. The squatting men smile and say, “Good, good”—or something like it in the local lingo. More food appears in our hands and we continue to gorge until we can’t speak, only moan.

  Cheever wants thirds, but Arrow reminds us of our timetable and, grumbling but nodding, we unsling our rifles and go back to port arms. We must move on.

  We reach in our pockets and withdraw a linty mix of dollars and dinars. We toss the bills at the men and move out.

  Cheever looks back. The men remain crouched, staring at the flutter of paper in the dirt, refusing to pick up the money, even after we are down the street and about to turn the corner.

  17

  Cheever

  For Cheever, as you can imagine, food is the flaw—the unregulated, unchecked intake of calories that has only grown worse since his arrival in Baghdad. The dining facility’s 24/7 buffet aside, we have watched Cheever tear into care packages—even ones not addressed to him, but left lying around the dayroom waiting for their rightful owners—casting aside the shampoo, the baby wipes, the greeting cards, and the Stephen King paperbacks until he found the cookies (homemade by housewives and children and now reduced to ziplocked baggies of crumbs), the beef jerky, the jelly beans, the potato chips (also reduced to crumbs during the transatlantic flights), and the ramen noodles. He’ll leave the cellophane packets of microwave popcorn since he hasn’t seen a microwave since he left Fort Drum, but he’ll gather up the rest, a hunter clutching his bagged game to his chest with both arms, and make his way to his hooch, where he’ll arrange the new food in his footlocker with as much care as a pioneer girl once packed her hope chest. He thinks the rest of the platoon doesn’t know—but we know everything. We see him in the aftermath of hard missions, boot sore and head ringing from gunfire, as he goes first to his footlocker to pull out not his weapons-cleaning kit, but a smooshed Twinkie. The rifle can wait; the crème filling cannot. Cheever is a food vacuum, sucking everything into the nozzle of his mouth. We’re embarrassed when we go to the DFAC. We keep him at a distance, pretend he’s someone from another unit stuffing his face up there. We tell others: Nah, we don’t know that pudge holding out his tray for extra helpings of Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes … That’s not our guy, the one piling on two slices of cheesecake, plate overlapping plate on the small tray … Cheever? Never heard of him. But yet, we’ll watch him from the corners of our eyes as he sits in exile at the end of the table, ignorant of his ostracism as he plows into a ravenous gobble of steak, potatoes, cheesecake, buttered bread, ravioli, creamed corn, cheeseburger, quiche, soup, apple fritter, bacon, sausage, ham, and enchiladas. He is not a silent eater. He is a tooth clacker, a lip smacker, a finger licker. Once or twice, he groans like he’s having sex. It all goes down the gullet in one big in-suck. We can hear threads on his uniform snapping from the pressure. Somehow, Cheever manages to maintain. For all his bulk, he keeps up with the platoon on morning runs around the FOB, never scores lower than 220 on his physical fitness test, passes all the body-fat measurements. Boot blisters aside, the lard ass doesn’t slow us down and we are both astounded and angry at his success as a competent soldier.