War Flower

by Brooke King

  The late afternoon sun beat down, wafting waves of heat up from the ground like asphalt being freshly laid. The blood pool around the body had begun to sour, sending a putrid smell of iron and excrement into the air, like burning trash or raw sewage. The corpse of the young boy, fifteen at best, still lay twisted in the position he had landed in, his head in the shade of an apartment awning where a tomato plant in a hanging planter dangled precariously on a metal hook. The wounds on his chest had pools of blood around each frayed piece of flesh—his chest cavity sunken in. Both his eyes were wide as if his eyelids had been glued open.

  The holes in the building in front of me were spread apart, with a crack in the concrete running down to the sidewalk where the boy lay dead. This street must have seen another firefight. The hanging plant twirled in a circle from the wind that had started to pick up. The late afternoons always brought wind, as well as the occasional sandstorm. The building was nothing special, a rundown merchant shop with apartments above the store and a staircase that led up to the roof. Why’d he jump? I looked down at the boy.

  Frail and skinny, Jahir was not suited to a life of hard work in a warehouse, but maybe that’s why piety was something Jahir was sure to be good at. He probably came from a good family that didn’t care for him being a soldier of war the way mine had, but maybe anything was better than his family’s constant nagging about getting his life together. That’s why I left.

  I wondered if the war followed him around to every produce delivery like it did to me in this country—the sound of far-off gunfire, soldiers in Humvees and tanks rolling around the highways and streets, patrols of military men stomping down the same sidewalk he had grown up strolling down, a soccer ball tucked underneath his arm. I wonder if he had spent as little time learning my language as I had his. Or maybe he was forced to spend four years in school, like I had, learning a foreign language that wasn’t spoken in his country.

  Maybe he was like me, a daydreamer. I imagined him drifting off for a moment in a daze, only to be snapped out of it by a merchant who was trying to hand back the signed delivery slip. Had the other boys in school teased him for always having his head in the clouds, like the girls in my eighth-grade class had? Did they tell him that the real world was out there and that he should start living in it? Did the boys chant that he lived in the clouds, looking for Muhammad, the prophet, instead of fighting for him? Did they shove Jahir to the ground, slap the books out of his hand, and make fun of his inability to fight back, like girls had done to me? Did Jahir think about fighting back, like I had, but couldn’t bring himself to do it? Sitting in the cab of the delivery truck, did he wonder how he would he be able to fight in the name of Allah and bring honor to his family if he couldn’t even fight back against the boys at school? He must have fired at me to prove them wrong. Or did he fight for his family or to survive in his country? Would he have been able to move on if it was me lying dead and not him?

  The sun sank below the apartment building’s roof, a shade of soft oleander formed behind the stratus clouds, and it seemed as though they streaked the sky in lines of pink. We had been there too long; the mission had taken longer than the typical drive-by shootings that took place when our Humvees rolled down the streets in the marketplace. The young boy’s head was slanted just enough that his head was toward the oleander clouds, his eyes still fixated, open, staring up as though he were deep in thought. The blood from his mouth had clotted in a rim around it. The stain on his shirt was still wet, as though he had just been shot, but the blood was brown, aged from oxidation.

  The young boy’s limbs were frail and long—barely any muscle definition to be considered an athlete, but maybe it was because he was a bookworm. Maybe he was like me, destined for a future with nothing particularly amazing about it beyond what he was already doing. Our paths crossed here, and despite being on opposite sides of the gun, the young boy I killed no longer had a future—of that I was certain.

  Was Jahir a believer in the possibilities of what could be or had he, despite his father’s persistence that he take over the family business, continued to feed his curiosity about his religion? Maybe there were parts of the Qur’an he had not yet figured out. Did he go against his father’s wishes like I had, taken up a life that my father was certain I was not destined for? Did he quit his daydreaming when he realized that it would get him killed if he didn’t learn how to fight properly? Was he like me, sneaking up to the roof at night when everyone else was sleeping, our footsteps as gentle as we could manage? Did he sit looking out over the city, the vast unknown of his country, like I had before I left for Iraq, and just watch the lights of the city twinkle? Did he pray, like I did every night, for God to give the strength, the courage to serve, to lead him down a path different than this?

  The corpse was entirely in the shade now, the awning covering him. The shadow of night was creeping in. The flies jumped from one side of his body to the next, the wounds on his chest festering as the insects buzzed. No one had come to claim the body or cover him up. He lay half in the street, face pointed up at the growing night sky. The star-shaped wounds were like a constellation on his chest, the ladle end of the Little Dipper. I looked at the talisman around the boy’s neck. I pulled out my dog tags, another sort of talisman. Maybe he and I weren’t so different after all. Maybe we were fated to meet and one of us was fated to die. I put my dog tags away, looked down at the boy, and wondered, What if it had been me? Would I look the same lying on the ground? He lay face up, arms twisted, legs canted off to each side, broken from the fall from the two-story building. He had tried to kill an infidel in the name of Muhammad, but did he fail?

  I imagined what Jahir must have thought about as soon as he pulled the trigger and I swiveled around in the gunner’s turret. Did he think he could’ve survived or did he know that he was as good as dead? When the six bullets pierced the flesh of his chest, did he panic? Did he look down at the ground, at the line of military trucks in the middle of the street, and envision a better ending than this one?

  As Jahir leaped, I heard him wail “Allahu Akbar” over and over again and watched as he fell through the air, down toward the ground, his limbs limp and dangling.

  Even now I haven’t quite figured everything out, but on most days Jahir forgives me and on some days I can barely forgive myself. As I go about the usual routine of the day, doing laundry, picking up pieces of Legos I see stranded underneath furniture as I vacuum, I try not to think about it. I occupy myself with the living. But on rare occasions, when I am out and about, waiting for a car to pull out of a spot at the grocery store or dropping the boys off for football practice, I see Jahir walking, shuffling his sandals as he sways back and forth with his hands in the pockets of his torn linen pants. I watch him as he crosses my path without looking at me. I say nothing but watch as he keeps going, turns a corner, or disappears in the sea of cars. And as soon as Jahir trails off in the distance and is gone, I hear the honk of the car behind me or my boys shouting as they jump out of the Jeep with their football bags dangling around their shoulders, and I forget Jahir and that day until I see him again. Maybe next time, I will work up the courage to apologize.

  Playing War

  The boys were playing in the backyard. I had consented to let them play with their Nerf guns. Bowen was running around chasing Zachary. The bullets whizzed out on automatic fire. Bowen’s finger was mashed down on the trigger. Zachary was running frantically, side to side, trying to dodge the foam bullets. They bounced off his back and neck. One deflected off the Murcott tree. Bowen kept firing, every once in a while missing Zachary completely, and it wasn’t long until Bowen’s magazine of foam bullets was empty. Realizing this, Zachary spun around, unhurt by Bowen’s rear assault. Zachary had a full magazine of ammo and was running toward Bowen. Bowen was now running away in a sprint screaming, “Don’t shoot! I’m out of ammo!”

  Zachary unleashed the bullets from his Nerf gun, one after another. Bowen scrambled to get away. He yelled as he ran tow
ard me, “Mom’s base.” He wrapped his arms around me. “I can’t die because Mom is base. You can’t kill me because Mom is base.”

  Zach got upset. Threw his Nerf gun on the ground and screamed, “No fair. You can’t make Mom base.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  They argued back and forth, but I stood there stunned. Unsure of what to say to them, I held onto Bowen tightly.

  “You can’t use Mom as base.”

  “Yes, I can. Mom came back from war and didn’t get hurt. She’s like a superhero.”

  Zach was visibly upset at Bowen’s rational explanation.

  “Just because Mom has a force field of not dying doesn’t mean she’s base.”

  “Ya-huh, if I hold her, I can’t die.” Bowen looked up at me. “Right, Mom?”

  The Weight of War Takes Us Under

  No one knew when the war had started. Some thought that the war began a long time ago; others believed that it has been there since the beginning of human history, but either way, it existed. Back home, they searched for reasons, the whys and whodunits, because they wanted to believe we had gone for a noble cause, that there could be an end result, a time when there was no more war, a time for it to end. But they were wrong. The war came out of a desire, a petty need to further one’s reach or gaze, and like so many before them who remembered the memory of the great wars and what glory of victory had once felt like when they claimed it, they let us go to war until it followed us, the distance of the past creeping up on our bodies like a five o’clock shadow. Like our grandfathers and fathers, the war would follow us, their sons and daughters, and it would live on after us, if only to see another war take its place.

  At times, when we felt the war closing in on us, we tried to shut it out with more violence, but it crept into every vein pulsing with the need to kill against our skin as though it were trying to escape, but no sooner had the urge to tap the vein subsided once more than we were hurled back into the violence as though our addiction were an absence that could be measured in bullets and weighed in body bags.

  And though we did not know when the war started, what name to give it, how or when it might end, or what place we should give it in our lives once we left the battlefield, we knew it well and still do, as though it is a battle buddy that we still depend on to watch our back. And what we still do not know is peace, the manner in which it is found, or how to leave such a constant friend behind because the necessary training that helped us survive the war also taught us that no one is to be left behind, and so we carry the war with us, a friendship formed through the mutual understanding that our survival is based on how violent one human can be toward another when given the bullets and the means with which to use them.

  It is now more than a decade later, and still there is no peace because the war has not ended and surely never will because there is no real end to war, only the absence of it, a lull in the fighting, a time during which another generation is born for the kill.

  And yet, I pray that someday this world might give us a war and no one will come.

  Epilogue

  Present Arms

  The ceremony could be on Camp Liberty. Or maybe even in San Diego. Everyone from Bravo Company 299th FSB will be there. ACUs. No dress greens. There will be a picture printout. Or a nice framed one perhaps. There will be a pair of boots, a rifle, dog tags, and helmet. They will all be stacked up in front of the formation representing a soldier’s death. A kind of fucked-up irony. There will be no body on display, just the pile of things left behind.

  First Sergeant will stand in front of formation and shout, “Company, atten-tion!”

  Bravo Company will come to the position of attention.

  First Sergeant will call out, “Sergeant Crump.”

  “Here, First Sergeant.”

  “PFC Taft.”

  “Here, First Sergeant.”

  “Specialist Kennedy.”

  “Here, First Sergeant.”

  “PFC King.”

  There will be no reply. Silence.

  First Sergeant’s voice might waver as he says it again.

  “Private First Class King.”

  And as if no response has pissed him off, as if I had been caught fucking up again, he will say it louder with inflection and anger, a sort of controlled rage that bounces off of each syllable.

  “Private First Class Brooke Nicole King.”

  The air will be still as the silence of the formation stands rigid. Some will hold back tears. Others will bend their knees slightly to keep them from buckling under the weight of their own body telling them to fall to the ground and grieve.

  “Taps” will play long and slow, dragging the battlefield’s lullaby in B flat. The formation will stand there and wait for it to end, each soldier acutely aware that some day, it will be them that the trumpet player purses his lips to when the mouthpiece comes close enough to echo the sound of mourning. But for now, they will stand in formation, stare at a picture of who I once was, and think about how lucky I was to have gotten out alive.

  Source Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank several publications for their support of my work.

  “Redeployment Packing Checklist” appeared in It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan, edited by Jerri Bell and Tracy Crow (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

  “Redeployment Packing Checklist” appeared in Incoming: Veteran Writers on Returning Home, edited by Justin Hudnall, Julia Dixon Evans, and Rolf Yngve (San Diego: So Say We All Press, 2015).

  “Redeployment Packing Checklist” appeared in War Portfolio, edited by Brian Turner, in Prairie Schooner 87, no. 4 (Winter 2013).

  “NUMB3RS” originally appeared in Retire the Colors: Veterans and Civilians on Iraq and Afghanistan, edited by Dario DiBattista (Albany NY: Hudson Whitman/Excelsior College Press, 2016).

  “Dog Tags” originally appeared in War, Literature, and the Arts 27 (2015).

  “Breathe through Your Mouth” originally appeared in Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present, edited by Tracy Crow (Lincoln: Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

  About Brooke King

  Brooke King is an adjunct professor of English and creative writing at Saint Leo University. She served in the United States Army, deploying to Iraq in 2006 as a wheel-vehicle mechanic. Her nonfiction work has appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Schooner and War, Literature, and the Arts, and the anthologies Red, White, and True: Stories from Veterans and Families, World War II to Present (Potomac Books, 2014) and It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution to Afghanistan (Potomac Books, 2017).