Brave Deeds

by David Abrams

  The day is already hot and heavy at 0900 hours. Along the cordon, your gunners behind their .50 calibers scan their sectors of fire, watching for anything out of place. A flash of light from a second-story window. The wide berth pedestrians give a dog carcass. A man dressed in unseasonably heavy clothes speaking into a cell phone. Anything, anything at all. The gunners have tunnel vision. Their minds buzz like hives. Their eyes zoom and focus like telephoto lenses.

  The morning is hot and dusty and unravels slowly. You’re told this operation could take a while. You and your men settle in for the long haul.

  It’s quiet here along the perimeter. Your soldiers mutter to themselves. In the lulls of conversation, the static bursts from their radios are like fuzzy explosions that make them flinch and cower.

  Some soldiers, not as alert as the gunners, get out of the Humvees—not only to stretch and smoke, but to greet the children who have rushed the military checkpoint, as they always do when the Americans roll through. You yourself love the children. They remind you of your brother’s daughters and sons and oh, how you always loved spending Christmas with them—the laughter, the smell of new toys, the goodwill and peace on earth, if only for a day or two. Now, these Iraqi kids make you feel good, like Christmas was paying you a visit in summer. Right or wrong, you always allow kids like these to break down your military discipline. Your men turn a blind eye.

  “Mister! Hey, Mister!” the children shout, their palms out, their fingers splayed. To them, you’re a candy machine, a big camo-clad sweetshop. The Americans always carry bags of Jolly Ranchers and chewing gum, drawing kids to them wherever they go. If they’re lucky, they’ll get a Beanie Baby or a soccer ball.

  Today, you and your team give fistfuls of candy to the first wave of children, but then you make sure Arrow and Park and the others turn back to the business of keeping the perimeter secure. The children keep coming with their fingers and cupped palms.

  “No more, no more today,” your soldiers tell the children. You, on the other hand, still have a secret stash of Jolly Ranchers in a cargo pocket. You’ll wait for just the right moment to break it out.

  The children keep crowding your checkpoint. Your soldiers hate to do it, but they put on their tough-guy masks, scanning the streets and trying not to look at the little rug rats, hoping they’ll get the message and go away. It hurts to ignore the kids, but it has to be done. Mission first.

  After half an hour, maybe the children have forgotten about the candy, or maybe they’re curious about your gear—the Camelbaks, the flak vests, the flashlights and earplug cases dangling like jewelry. Maybe they practice some giggly high-fives with their American heroes.

  The soldiers play along as best they can, keeping one eye on the road and the shadowy houses while bumping knuckles with the kids in a gruff-tender acknowledgment.

  The children persist. Now they’re laughing and pretending to play grab ass with your soldiers. It’s all happy fun. You play along.

  In fact, you really get into it. Things are quiet in this sector and it feels permissible to unclench the sphincter. You have a few words with Arrow, the specialist and soon-to-be corporal if you have any say in it. You put Arrow in charge while you take a moment with some of the kids. This is a war zone but a guy’s gotta relax every now and then, right?

  As you turn back to the children, you fail to notice Arrow’s smile and the way he looks at you.

  You act like you’re some kind of muscleman on Pismo Beach. Instead of pumping iron, you pump Iraqi kids, lifting them off the ground by twos, one off each bicep.

  From their perches on the Humvee roofs, your gunners hear the giggles and it distracts them. It breaks their concentration, but that’s okay because their brains have been on high alert for more than an hour and by now their eyes hurt after looking at the same doorways and storefronts, over and over. The gunners glance down at the other soldiers, the darting and dodging kids. The gunners grin, but then snap back to the mission at hand. They force themselves to turn their backs on their buddies talking and laughing with the kids. They scan another sector of fire, thinking all the while: That Sergeant Morgan, man. He sure loves them kids.

  That’s when the car, which had been prowling through an alley adjacent to the road, decides to make its move. For the past ten minutes, it has been rolling unseen through the neighborhood outside the military cordon, watching for a weakness in the line of Humvees, waiting for the right moment. The low-riding car is a lion, moving on whisper paws through the shadows of the grass, stalking with professional finesse, before it coils, then roars forward, the engine growling as the driver accelerates into the open for the kill.

  Maybe one of the soldiers standing on the street looks up and knows exactly what is about to happen. Maybe he feels the weight of his mistake. Maybe he tries to scream, but the words stick in his throat. Maybe he raises his hands to push away the car—like he could do that, like he was a Marvel superhero. Or maybe those hands grab the two nearest children and pull them close in a protective embrace. One last effort to save the people of this country. Maybe that soldier prays, asks God to spare these two little girls.

  Maybe that soldier is you.

  The car bomb concusses the air, and we suffer hearing loss as sudden and deep as the time we had our annual exams at the troop medical clinic back at Fort Drum.

  We remember being called in, as a group, to the hearing-test chamber—a small heavily carpeted room with padded walls and two rows of cubicle booths running its length. Large headphones hung on the pegboard wall in front of us as we sat down. We were told to place them on our heads and wait for further instructions.

  The heavy earphones clamped tight as a vice against our skulls. When we put them on, we were underwater and the only thing we could hear was a ringing deep inside our skull that we thought at the time must have been a faint whine from the machinery of our brains.

  A voice crackled—too loud—through the headphones, instructing us to pick up the handset, also hanging on the pegboard, and press the button whenever we heard a beep. The tones would come at various pitches and volumes. “Good luck and listen hard,” the crackle voice said.

  We sat on our stools, straining, closing our eyes—as if that would help—stopping all breath whistling in and out of our nostrils, all so we could hear the tones. Several of us pressed the call button, even though nothing was actually there. Some of us, the pranksters, went ahead and pressed the button in a regular pulse every three seconds, thinking one of those times they would land on the precise moment of a beep.

  We froze in place. We stopped breathing. We went blank with silence.

  That’s how it was for us the moment Sergeant Morgan died: all sound gone in a suck.

  Except, no—there was a faint whisper, a buzzing tickleting deep, deep, deep inside our heads. The whisper gradually came closer and grew louder and louder until it came out in a scream.

  The explosion sucks all sound into a vacuum, turning this one acre of Baghdad into a silent film full of smoke and gore. In the silence, the suicide bomber’s car incinerates with such force that later, when the fire hoses have doused and cooled the scene and the body parts have been marked with tiny flags and all the photos have been taken, the only thing that will remain for investigators to log into evidence is the engine block.

  Children fly into the air, cartwheeling, their bodies aflame. One boy will die with not a mark on him, but all of his clothes will be blown from his body and that very day, before the sun goes down, his sobbing father will place him in a coffin like that, naked and fetally curled. Seven or eight children—who can bear to look long enough to make an accurate count?—are flung against a wall in front of a house. Their bodies strike the bricks and collapse in a heap on the ground. If you didn’t look too closely, you might think it was a pile of dirty clothes that need laundering. If you did look closer, however, you’d see a little girl abruptly sheared of both legs, her blackened face still cooking. A boy has died with both fists clenched. Inside
those fists are Jolly Rancher candies. Another boy, not four feet away, has his hand raised toward his face, as if he is about to suck his thumb. There is a fist-size hole in his forehead, a neatly scooped hole that is so horribly, horribly out of place but yet so undeniably real in its seething red presence.

  Back at the Humvees, someone is screaming. But no one can hear him because all sound has been sucked away and the only thing left is a high-pitched ringing that comes from within. This is a silent movie we’re forced to watch: the smoke, the flames licking the engine block, the scattered children, the twelve dead (including one of the American soldiers), the eighteen wounded, the empty sandals, the pools of blood, the four half-shattered buildings, and the three Iraqi men rushing up with blankets to cover the dead.

  When it happened, Arrow was turning to say something to Lieutenant Grimner. Thinking back on it now, he couldn’t remember what it was. Maybe a complaint about next month’s ten-on, one-off schedule; maybe it was a question about that night’s dinner at the dining facility; maybe it was a joke about going on ghost patrols. Must not have been too important.

  The explosion jolted everything from his head.

  He heard, rather than saw—no, scratch that: felt, rather than heard—the car roaring across the open space. Arrow was seventy-five meters away from Sergeant Morgan, but the vibration of the engine rolled up his spine as if he himself had been standing in the path of the car.

  He turned away from Lieutenant Grimner, with whatever he’d been about to say left unsaid on his tongue. For one nanosecond, he was pissed at this thundercloud of noise interrupting his comment to the LT.

  Arrow saw Sergeant Morgan grab those two little girls, pull them to him, and then there was a sudden puff of dust and metal, the flash already blossoming in orange petals that curled black in a blink.

  He heard Lieutenant Grimner say, “Fu—”

  Then everything went black and blank.

  Until then, for the past two hours, the day had been hot, the mission boring. We’d been lulled half-asleep by the heat shimmering off the hoods of our Humvees. The wind pushed the dust through New Baghdad, same as always. Once the kids’ demands for candy had dwindled, there had been nothing to hold our interest. Sure, we kept scanning the terrain, but once you’ve looked at the same doorway with four dozen sweeps of the eye, it gets pretty fucking old, okay? We felt the lullaby of the distant, bleating goats and the squeak of the gunners rotating in their sling seats, back and forth, back and forth, scan, scan, scan.

  The day pulled on, dragging iron weights behind it.

  Once, one of us announced he couldn’t hold it any longer and relieved himself against the side of his Humvee. That held our interest for a while—the patter of piss hitting the tire—but then it was over and the soldier said, “Aaahhhh … the pause that refreshes.” Someone else said something about it being better to be pissed off than pissed on, and we went back to what we’d been doing. We scanned our sectors of fire and the minutes trickled by too slow.

  Sergeant Morgan circulated the line, checking for heatstroke, squeezing Camelbaks to monitor water levels, commiserating with the occasional: “Yeah, this sucks balls all right.”

  One or two of us—including Sergeant Morgan himself—hadn’t been able to resist playing grab ass with the kids who still hung around the perimeter. Cross-cultural international relations, that’s what Sergeant Morgan called it—and he was the worst offender of us all, the way he got into it with the kids. Rafe pretended he was a carnival sideshow strongman by lifting two thin Iraqi girls off the ground, one on each side of him. The girls, kind of cute even with their rat’s-nest hair and snot-crusted noses, giggled as they held on to Sergeant Morgan’s biceps and rose two feet off the ground when he curled his arms upward. They dangled like bracelets off this funny American.

  We laughed along with the girls.

  But Rafe was always like that, flexing his strength for all to see. He must have thought it was some funny shit to be doing curls with those girls. He probably would have liked how that sounded: girl curls.

  He was cool, that Rafe. Oh, he came off badass, tough as a cement wall, but deep down he was a give-the-shirt-off-his-back kind of guy. He was strong and he took that strength seriously, like it was his personal mission to protect the weaker ones around him. This is how he was with all of us, not just those Iraqi girls. He thought of the other person first, himself last.

  That’s why nobody was surprised when we later pieced it together, what we’d seen out of the corner of our eyes. It was typical of Rafe to react like he did, going into protector mode by instinct. When he realized the car was coming right at him, Sergeant Morgan pulled those girls tight against his chest, wrapping himself around them as best he could. He must have known it was a useless gesture, that he was flesh and not iron, but what else can you do in that split-second of reflex? You’re gonna obey the synaptic impulse of your nerves and the reflexive pull of your muscles, right? You’re gonna grab those girls and hold on tight. You’re gonna duck your head, let the top of your helmet take the brunt of whatever’s coming your way. You’re gonna tuck yourself over those two little heads, the three of you breathing together in that tight space for the smallest of moments. You might even manage to gasp “hold on” to these girls who have no idea what the words are but must sense what they mean.

  Hold on, here we go. Like the three of them had reached the crest of a rollercoaster and were hovering on the plunge.

  From where he stood, seventy-five meters away, Specialist Dmitri Arogapoulos didn’t actually see the incinerating evaporation of Sergeant Raphael Morgan, but he felt it. Oh fuck yeah, he felt it all the way to the marrow. As Arrow fell to the ground, pushed there by the concussion and cradled in the vacuum of silence, he thought it was just him. Maybe he was having a stroke or a blackout or something. For that sliver of time, he was embarrassed and thought how the rest of us would be sure to give him a rash of shit for passing out like a pussy.

  Then, over his head, he saw the cloud of boiling blooming smoke, and he thought maybe it wasn’t just him. Maybe it was all of us. Maybe we were all dead.

  But when the body parts and bits of flesh started raining on Arrow, he knew for certain it wasn’t him. It wasn’t any of us. It took him a moment to slide back to the realization he was still alive, and then another moment to realize this was Sergeant Morgan falling from the sky.

  51

  ECP

  We are equal parts brilliant and dumb. This becomes apparent when we approach the Entry Control Point to FOB Saro. We had a plan, but then that plan went all to shit and we had to improvise, like a jazz saxophonist who loses his place halfway through “Birdland.” Now we’re flinging notes all over the place, hoping they’ll stick.

  We’ve been gliding along Route Irish with the rest of the traffic, zipping down the main thoroughfare with the Opels, the Saabs, the semis, the occasional coalition forces Humvee, with nobody giving us a second look. Yeah, we’re just a bunch of American soldiers rattling along in a hajji van, what of it? We’re dumb, we’re brilliant, and we’re in a hurry to finish the mission.

  And then we see the concrete turret off to our left.

  Arrow goes, “There it is! There it is!” like he was on a whale-watching cruise in Alaska.

  “I see it,” Fish says.

  “Go left! Go left!”

  “I got it, Arrow.”

  Fish moves to the left-turn lane, waits for a break in traffic, then swings us down a road toward the T-walls, the guard shack, the barrier arm the guards raise and lower like a drawbridge.

  ECPs are checkpoints, choke points, pinch points, funnels, X-ray machines, sieves, sorters, and separators. ECPs separate us from them, America from Baghdad, the wheat from the chaff. ECPs are the first and last line of defense. Nothing bad gets through, nothing suspicious will penetrate.

  Right now, in our dust-caked van with Arabic lettering on the side and a big metal daisy sticking up from the roof, we are all kinds of suspicious. We’re
a beetle with a new shell and, for the moment, in our eagerness to get onto Saro, we’ve forgotten what our makeshift carapace looks like from the outside.

  We’re barreling forward in the van, racing the clock because O is bleeding out on the floor in the back and beside him, a baby is trying to come into the world. We think only of Olijandro, and maybe a little of the pregnant woman, too, as Fish steers toward the concrete barriers.

  When we see the guard step out of the ECP and raise his M4, that’s when it hits us, our stupid stupidity, and Arrow yells, “Wait! Stop!”

  52

  FOB Saro

  “Wait! Stop!”

  Fish jams his foot on the brake and the van rocks to a halt two hundred yards from the concrete barrier. Rising dust blurs everything for a moment. Words blare at us from a loudspeaker mounted at the top of the guard shack but we can’t make them out because there’s an ocean roar of blood in our ears.

  We feel the burn of our mistake.

  The barrel of the guard’s M4 doesn’t waver. He stares at us, tightens his eyes to a squint, puts his cheek to the stock of the rifle.

  “No, no, no!” Arrow screams through the dirty windshield.

  “Back up! Back up!” Drew yells, but Fish has already thrown the van in reverse and is moving away from the Entry Control Point.

  More tinny words come at us in a blizzard of static.

  Fish stops after twenty-five yards and Arrow opens his door.

  “Careful, man,” Drew says.

  Arrow looks back at him. “No shit.” He looks at Fish. “Follow me in the van. But slow and steady.” He raises his arms, steps in front of the van, and walks forward. He’s left his rifle in the van. It leans against his empty seat.