by David Abrams
18
Rafe Would Have Liked the Chicken
“I don’t know if that was really chicken, but it was good,” Cheever says.
“Damn straight,” says Fish.
“Sergeant Morgan would have liked it,” Park says.
“Yeah,” we agree. We think of our platoon sergeant as we walk and scan, scan and walk, our eyes darting geometrically to sectors of vision, watching for the odd and out-of-place movement. We wonder: Would Rafe be proud of us? Or would he think we were fools for coming out here like this? We’re not sure. Rafe was the kind of guy who could go either way. One thing’s for sure: he would have liked the chicken.
Sergeant Morgan was by the book, lead by example, the field manual is my Bible one minute and a crazy fuck-the-FM son of a bitch with a wild hair up his ass the next. But that car chase through Sadr City back in March? That was a different Rafe. That 2.0 version of him scared the shit out of us.
We were responding to an incident that could have gone either way: boring as toast or high-body-count tragedy. We rolled off Taji clenching our jaws, our rifles, our bowels—anything clenchable. Sergeant Morgan was quiet, like something was eating him, but he didn’t want to tell us about it. That was okay. We let Rafe be Rafe. Until, in one gunfire instant, he changed into someone else. That Rafe freaked us out.
We were answering a 911 from a convoy of contractors—engineering geeks from Harvard hired by the Army to come up with solutions for a better water system in north Baghdad. This pocket-protector squad had gotten themselves into a jam: ambushed in Sadr City, surrounded, fired on, SUVs set ablaze until the convoy was down to only one vehicle crammed with four surviving contractors, an interpreter, and three security sergeants from 3-1 who were doing their best to hold off the snipers.
We came galloping over the hill like the cavalry, heralding hope with our bugles (actually, we were just barreling through the streets, scattering women and kids with toots from our Humvee’s horn). Hold on, guys—we’re on the way!
We pulled up and, despite the three cars on fire and the smell of shit-filled underwear coming from the contractors’ surviving SUV, the situation looked normal. No bullet blizzard, no brave-but-stupid Shi’a martyr tap-dancing toward the convoy with an AK-47 up to his cheek. By all appearances, this was just the aftermath of a single hasty attack.
A long line of backed-up cars needed to be checked and then funneled to side streets to get the traffic flowing again.
“We got this, boys,” Sergeant Morgan said. We loved it when he called us “boys.” Showed how much he cared for us.
We set up a perimeter, choking off pinch points north and south so no other cars could drive away until we’d checked the drivers’ credentials.
Sergeant Morgan went up to the contractors—pale, sweating, and walking around like they’d just kissed death and lived (which they had)—and said it was cool: have a full team on-site soon enough to get everything towed away and cleaned up. Out of respect, he didn’t say anything about the six charred bodies still smoking in the trail vehicles.
“Not a problem,” Drew said to no one from where he crouched at his post along the line of waiting cars. “We got this. We guard these dudes until everything gets fixed and they leave and then easy peasy we’re outta here.”
He shouldn’t have said that.
We weren’t the only ones hoping to get out of there.
Sergeant Morgan’s radar started pinging when he saw a black sedan do a three-point turn to extract itself from the bumper-to-bumper line of cars. The sedan lurched up and over the median and squealed away in the opposite direction.
It could be a harmless Local National—some guy already late for work and getting to the impatient “fuck this” point of hightailing it out of there. Or it could be the guilty party responsible for the attack, trying to blend in by hiding from us in plain sight, then getting freaked out when they saw Snelling and Cartwright work their way down the line, checking IDs and searching the trunks and undercarriages. It could be our bad guys trying to wriggle from the net, or it could be the proverbial innocent bystander.
This could go either way and we hated to abandon a perimeter to go chasing wild geese.
Our indecision blew away in a puff as Cartwright ran across the road toward Rafe. “Hey! Sergeant Morgan, those guys had guns! Four MAMs total and they all had weapons!”
Well, it wasn’t some poor shmuck late for work after all.
We set off in pursuit of our MAMs—military-age males—leaving half the team with the shit-drawers contractors (who’d now added fear vomit to their playlist). They’d be okay until a team from higher headquarters showed up.
It was Sergeant Morgan, Cartwright, Drew, and O in one Humvee; Park, Buckley, Snelling and Hamid in the other. It took us four blocks to catch up with the black sedan. Traffic was heavy, which made it easy for us to see it ahead of us, snaking between slower cars and bouncing over curbs onto sidewalks. As we got closer, we saw the rifle barrels.
These Shi’a were anything but subtle.
We got close enough for the four men in the sedan to see us. The driver floored it, pulling away.
Oops, our bad.
“Go, go, go!” Sergeant Morgan banged on the dashboard and then keyed the mic to tell Park, who was in the lead Humvee, to glue himself to hajji’s ass and stay there. Park pulled up and closed the gap.
After a quarter of a mile, the sedan hooked a sharp left at a gas station—too sudden for Park to follow.
Sergeant Morgan’s Humvee squealed around the corner then roared ahead to catch up.
Park turned left at the next intersection, hoping to stay parallel with the rest of us.
The black sedan kept going faster and wilder, blowing through stop signs and squealing around corners, trying to shake us loose. We stayed right up on his ass, despite the extra weight of the Humvee. Cartwright knew what the hell he was doing.
We couldn’t see Park at this point, but we figured he was out there somewhere and would rejoin us when it mattered the most. As it turned out, we didn’t see that crew until we all regrouped on the FOB hours later.
The driver of the sedan gave it all he had and he was doing okay for a while since we had to pause at a couple of intersections to avoid hitting cross-traffic.
Then the sedan slowed and came to a stop in the middle of the street.
“Ha!” Cartwright crowed. “Fucker ran out of gas!”
We pulled up behind the sedan.
“No,” Sergeant Morgan said. “I don’t think that’s it. Look at where we are.”
We looked out the windows: on one side of the street, a church, on the other, a school.
It’s like Rafe knew what was about to happen, like he saw the whole thing unfolding seconds before it happened. He frowned and started to say something, which got lost in what happened next.
Four windows rolled down, four rifle barrels poked out, four sparks of flame licked the air as automatic fire rang out.
Brr-rap! Brr-rap! Brr-rap! Brrrr-rap!
They weren’t firing at us.
On either side, we saw people go down. A beggar holding out a paper cup in front of the church never had a chance. With quick surgery, bullets removed his hand. Coins flew up, then came down in a jingling rain. On the school playground, a boy flying high with giddy joy on a swing set jerked once and fell to the ground. We watched as bullets tore a girl in half, sending her severed body in opposite directions. We’ll spare you the rest, but it was bad.
This all happened so fast none of us had time to react. We were numb, paralyzed, couldn’t even feel the weapons in our hands.
The black sedan pulled away again, tires squealing with laughter.
Nobody said a thing. We had a choice to make: get out and help the living or take off after the bad guys. We wavered.
Sergeant Morgan was the first to break the silence. “Go!” he barked. “Go, go, go!”
Cartwright jammed his foot down, giving our Humvee everything it had.
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nbsp; We caught up. Drew was alive in the gunner’s seat, firing bursts at the sedan, but not making contact because those fuckers were slippery, weaving from side to side. One of the passengers broke out the back window with the butt of his AK-47, then rested his muzzle on the shards and fired at us. Rounds hit the top of the Humvee and Drew ducked down inside for a second before popping back up and squeezing off another couple of bursts.
Cartwright kept up, bouncing us through the dips at intersections. This went on for several blocks, our weapons conversing in brr-raps and iron-struck pings.
We were still in a movie, but it wasn’t fun anymore.
The whole time, Sergeant Morgan had this look on his face. It’s hard to describe, but it was something like if a school bully had pulled down his shorts in gym class and that pissed him off enough to think about jumping the kid after school and punching his face until it turned to butcher meat. We’d never seen him so focused with the sole motivation of anger. He burned.
Eventually, the black sedan ran out of luck. When the killers tried to merge onto a four-lane highway, they hit a bottleneck at the on-ramp.
As we closed in on the sedan—whose taillights were blinking like a moth beating against a windowpane—all we could think about was that little girl they sliced in half on the playground. We had a new reason to finish this. The contractors were one thing, but this was a whole new territory of rage for us.
The sedan was slowed but undaunted by the traffic jam at the on-ramp. The driver found holes, places between cars where he could move forward, foot by metal-scraping foot. If we didn’t do something, these guys would push themselves out and be free to speed away on the highway while our heavier Humvee hung back trapped behind the other cars. Some of the drivers had already pulled over to the side when they saw what was happening.
We were all shouting, “Shoot them! Shoot them!” But Sergeant Morgan tapped Drew on the leg and shouted, “No! Hold fire!” Then he turned to Cartwright and said, “Ram them.” Cartwright hesitated and Sergeant Morgan grabbed the steering wheel in his left hand and growled, “Private, I’m giving you a direct order to ram their ass.”
The guy in the back was reloading and looked like he wanted to treat us to a second go-round.
Drew slipped down out of the gunner’s seat and we all braced ourselves against whatever we could and Cartwright leaped us forward.
It was like bumper cars at the carnival. The bad guys’ heads snapped back as they were thrust forward. The sedan shot through a cleared path in the line of cars. Its back end was a crumpled mess—no match against the superior iron will of the American-forged Humvee. Can we get a hoo-ah?
We rammed them again. The sedan then took a half spin to the left and came to a stop. It was wedged between a silver SUV and a delivery truck hauling buckets of paint. One of the buckets tipped out, splashing red paint on the hood of the sedan.
We nosed forward until we were pressed against the sedan’s front door. No escaping us now, motherfuckers!
We were within an arm’s length of the sedan. We could have reached out and shook hands.
The men inside stirred and looked around at their options, which included bringing their AK-47s up off their laps.
Without another word, Sergeant Morgan opened his door, got out of the Humvee, and walked up to the sedan. His M4 was at his cheek. Rafe didn’t hesitate.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
It was done. Four shots to four startled faces.
Drivers in the cars around us looked away. They wanted no part of this.
Sergeant Morgan got back in the Humvee, buckled up, then told Cartwright to get us out of there. That’s all he said: “Let’s go.” Not another word the whole ride back to the FOB.
Fucking A. That was our Sergeant Morgan: breaker of international law, stoically doing the right thing. We were in awe.
When we got back to Taji and Buckley said, “Where’d you guys go?”, we clamped our jaws and looked away. To protect Rafe, those of us in his Humvee kept mum about the whole thing. Tick a lock and throw away the key. We scrubbed the black paint off the Humvee’s fender, made sure there were no telltale dents, and went about our business. If Sergeant Morgan had any thoughts on the matter, he kept them to himself until the day he died.
So, yeah, we think he would have blessed off on our car theft, our AWOL, our determination to make it through the city on our own.
Rafe would have liked that chicken.
19
Fish
Years before he entered the military, Fish killed a man and got away with it, no one ever discovering the body.
In Fish’s opinion, the man—Charles Yardley—deserved every one of the eighteen stab wounds he got.
20
Nightmare
We dream of capture, of torture. We think about the slow death, flesh flensed from our bones in long strips with thin blades.
We’re warriors, but we’re also worriers.
The other night, Drew gnashed his teeth against his pillow, soaking it with drool, as he found himself in a dungeon lit by flickering torches. Very old-school Hollywood. Off in the distance, he heard the squeal-screech-clang of a heavy iron door closing and the echo of maniacal laughter.
Drew was strapped down to a metal table—or maybe it was stone. Whatever, it was cold against his back. He’d been stripped of his clothes. When he looked down the length of his body, it was like looking at a white sand dune, rising and falling, pocked with footsteps and furred with tufts of grass. He couldn’t see his dick past the swell of his belly, but it was there somewhere (at least he hoped it was still there). What loomed largest in his vision were his thighs. They looked like hocks of meat hung in a butcher’s window.
“Oh God, oh God,” he groaned.
More mad-scientist laughter echoing through the dungeon’s passageways. Then footsteps. Nearer and nearer and nearer.
The torches guttered and the light in the room dipped, winked out.
(In his hooch at Camp Taji, Drew drooled and chewed his pillow, tried to surface from the dream, but sank back to its depths.)
Dream blink. Change of scene. Now he really was strapped down on a metal table. Tissue paper crinkled under his body and he realized he was in a doctor’s office. His feet were in stirrups and his knees were bent like he was about to deliver a baby. Jesus! He couldn’t see his dick and he was pretty sure it was gone this time. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Dead flies speckled the tubes.
“We have to take them, you know.” A short woman old enough to be his grandmother stood near his feet. She wore a white lab coat and had a plastic face shield strapped to her head. She held up a circular saw. “The legs,” she said in a sweet, cheery voice. “I’m sorry, but you know we have to take them.”
Drew looked down the length of his body again. Someone had drawn dotted lines across the tops of his thighs with a marker.
“Do you have to take them?” he asked.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie, but you know we do. We’ve run out of options. They aren’t coming for you.”
“Can’t we wait a little longer? Please? Please, I’m begging you!” Drew had never begged for anything in his life and he hated the whine in his voice as he cried out to the old woman.
“We’re out of options. We’re out of time.” (What, were they in a fucking horror movie?) “The legs must go.”
“Oh God, oh God.”
“Bush called and said it was okay.”
“What!”
“He called my boss and said it was okay, as long as we started with the legs.”
(In his hooch, Drew’s legs twitched and kicked, caught in the sweaty tangle of his bedsheets.)
“Oh Jesus God!”
The woman played with the trigger on the saw and the blade roared.
“You need to relax, sweetie.”
Drew whimpered (he’d never whimpered about anything in his life) and he begged (again), saying, “Okay, okay, but can you give me something for the pain? Numb me up, bitch!”
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“You know I can’t.” The woman shook her head. “You know it has to be like this.” She revved the saw a couple more times—rrr-arrr, rrr-arrrrr!—and smiled as if that would have served as an apology. “Just relax and it won’t hurt as much. I’ll try to be quick.” She flipped the face shield down.