A Hard and Heavy Thing (14 page)

Nick tried all the tricks he could think of to keep his mind off the rock against his sunburned back. He sang at the top of his lungs. He started with “Don't Stop Believin'” by Journey, but the register was too high and he broke into a coughing fit before anyone joined him. He sang mad parodies of patriotic country songs, but no one paid him any attention. His squad mates stared out into the tall grasses that lined the canals, perking up only when they passed inhabited qalat compounds. No one in the vehicle was in a mood. Or, they were all in a mood.

Nick started hitting Tom Hooper's leg, which rested behind his right shoulder. Tom stood tall and ominous in the turret of the Humvee, not apt to think twice about putting a .50 caliber projectile through the torso of a brown man digging on the side of the road after curfew. Nick kept turning in his seat and hitting Tom's leg. Nick shouted, “We'll put a boot in their ass, right Tom? We'll put a boot in their ass?” Eventually, Tom—in whose mind Toby Keith was only slightly less culturally significant than William Shakespeare—took great offense to Nick's scorn of hard-working and righteously angry Americans. He kicked Nick in the head from the gunner's sling that sat in the middle of the Humvee. This shut Nick up for a while and he went back to stewing in his own sweat and frustration.

The routes in their AO were all named after snakes: Cobra, Boa, Asp, Rattler, Trouser, Alabama Black. They rumbled along the dusty canal roads for hours, unsure of their mission. They rarely stopped, and they didn't make friends when they did.

The longer they bounced along, cramped and sweating, the more Nick boiled. He slammed his fists against the steering wheel. “You know what we're doing here? Nothing. We're just driving around waiting to die. Just driving around waiting for someone to key a radio so some artillery round can take my legs.”

Gassner didn't stop scanning. “Shut up, Annie.”

“I gotta piss.”

Gassner handed him a wide-mouth Gatorade bottle.

“I guess if you want to get technical,” Nick said. “We're driving around waiting to validate our presence. Commanders have this hard-on about relevancy. We have to be relevant. The only way to be relevant is to be in contact, to either take casualties or dish them out, just so we can make this look like an actual war, which we all know it's not.”

“Leave that shit at home,” Gassner said. “Save it for your political science class at whatever fancy college you go to.”

“Yeah, shut your mouth, Annie,” Tom shouted down at him. “You're killing my morale.”

“No use,” Nick said. “I'm a dropout. But seeing as we can't set our own IEDs, and since we don't take much direct fire because these people are all cowards, we're pretty much driving around waiting to get blown up in these rickety, flat-bottomed boats.” He kicked the door of the Humvee with the rusty steel plates, which were stolen and then thrown on by curbstone welders, eighteen-year-old privates and specialists who didn't want to die from something as silly and unglamorous as a stray bullet fired by some running-scared kid whose idea of jihad was spraying and praying from cover. “Just driving around waiting to die. Just so some general can say we're relevant. And for what? To fight an insurgency? We're not fighting an insurgency; we're creating one.”

“Yo,” said Jalaladin, their translator in the backseat. “This is a movement, dudes. A movement to contact because we are some bad dudes. This is a show of force to demonstrate that Archer don't take no crap from nobody.”

Nick turned in his seat. “What do you know, Jellybean? They won't even let you hold a gun.”

“I'll take yours when you get shot at and start crying like a little girl, Annie.”

“And also,” Nick said, going back to his rant. “This is exactly what I'm talking about.” He squeezed the steering wheel. “Show of force? Cruising around in makeshift armored trucks, covered in body armor, sweating our balls off? Being too terrified to stop to take a piss is what they call a show of force?”

Gassner turned and actually looked at him for once. “Shut your mouth, Specialist.”

“We look like scared little kids. At best, we look like dickheads. More than anything, with all this gear on? To these people, we look like alien weirdos from another planet.”

“I'm not going to say it again. Zip it.” Gassner fiddled with the radio and then said, “You know what your problem is? You listen to Hartwig too much. All his philosophizing. You're starting to sound just like him.”

Nick closed his mouth and looked straight ahead. It wasn't true. He didn't sound like Levi. Not anymore anyway. Whereas Levi started out philosophical, intelligent, political, and angry—sometimes contradicting himself but always entertaining—he didn't stay that way. He didn't sound like anything anymore except a sergeant in the United States Army. Levi had drunk the Kool-Aid. Slurped it down like a sacrament. If you want a guy to lose his mind and forget who he is, pat him on the back and give him another stripe.

The silence of Nick's teammates ate at him, and he got to the point where he couldn't help talking. “Case in point,” Nick said. “About looking like jerks? So last week, Ali Baba happens to be walking around in his man dress, herding his sheep. One of these underfed lambs gets a little frisky, runs in front of my truck, and you think it's some master plan to get us to stop so they can ambush us. I try stopping and you yell at me to keep going, so what do I do? I follow orders like a good little soldier and I run over Ali Baba's sheep. Now even though he wasn't an insurgent before, he is now, all because we're driving around for no stupid reason, scared to death of stopping for a herd of sheep.”

Gassner seemed to forget about defending the sanctity of their mission, and he took to defending himself instead. “ROE are clear and published. It wasn't my fault. Pamphlets are everywhere. Locals know that convoys have the right of way. If they don't know by now, it's their own dumb ass fault.”

“Ass fault? What's an ass fault?”

That got a chuckle out of the new kid in the back, Weber, who hadn't said a word all morning. He had recently come in to replace a guy named Ferguson who had died three months prior. He had taken a single bullet to the back of the head, just below his helmet. At first, Nick thought Ferg was faking it when his chin dropped onto his chest. It took them ten minutes of first trying to wake him before they accepted that he was dead.

“Shut up and drive,” Gassner said.

Nick closed his eyes and made a show of banging his head against the steering wheel. Because of the pain in his back from the rock; because of his all-too-frequent sunburn; because of the bouncing of the Humvee and the swelling of his bladder—he refused to use the Gatorade bottle unless he truly risked urinating in his own pants––and because of the idiocy of his team leader, his platoon leader, his company commander, his brigade commander, hell, because of his legislators, president, and his entire country, Nick was now ready; ready, that is, to die.

Back in those days, when so many of them were dying, they often joked about death as they tried to convince themselves it was nothing.

Nick looked at his watch and saw they still had three hours left before they were scheduled to return to the FOB. His mood brightened slightly when he glimpsed the end of the canal road and saw the smooth hardball of Main Supply Route Tampa. Now it would be an hour and a half down the highway to Taji and then an hour and a half back up. Then it would be all over, at least for the day. If they did come across any IEDs, they'd be easier to see on the asphalt. If they missed one, it would be less lethal coming from the shoulder instead of from under the hull. Nick tapped the steering wheel, and as soon as his tires hit the road, he pressed the gas and started picking up speed. More than trying to find the IEDs on Tampa, the platoon simply tried to outrun the blasts.

The traffic thickened as they neared Ad Dujayl. For a while, Nick had enough space to either maneuver around cars or push them out of the way with the heavy cattle guard on the front of the vehicle, but it wasn't long before he was forced to stop. Rusted Japanese minivans and white-and-red taxis filled the median and shoulders. The local cars blocked both lanes of traffic.

“Hold short, Anhalt,” said Gassner.

Jalaladin called from the backseat, “Hold short, Annie.” He cracked up and started singing a show tune from the Broadway musical, infusing it with his thick Arabic accent: “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow. You're only a day away.”

“I'm going to kick you out of this truck and make you walk back to O'Ryan,” Nick told him. The stop irritated him, but mostly, he grew angrier about the rock in his body armor.

Gassner keyed the radio to talk to Archer One-Six and Archer One-Six told him to stand by while they figured out a new route. The longer they stood still, the more comfortable the multitudes felt closing in on them. Kids inched in, hoping for some candy. Young men paced back and forth, scouting. Cars scooted by, ignoring the rules that prohibited them from passing convoys. Everyone hoped to find an opening in the jam.

Jalaladin pointed out the window at a donkey pulling a cart full of grass right next to their truck. “You have got to be filling me full of crap,” he said. He pulled on Hooper's leg in the turret and said, “Hey, can you get this IED-making dirt farmer out of here, dude?”

Nick heard yelling and three percussive warning shots. The donkey went trotting away. A little barefoot boy wearing a McDonald's T-shirt smacked the ass with a stick, yelling in Arabic as he beat the beast.

“Thank you, gunner, sir,” said Jalaladin, and he flopped back in his seat, satisfied. “These people suck.” No one said anything. “These towel heads are ignorant and they are all criminals.” He paused, hoping for the usual laugh that accompanied the denigration of his own people. “We should shoot them all. They need a dictator like Saddam. Someone to keep a big thumb on their heads. You see what happens when we overthrow him?”

Just as they had paid no attention to Nick earlier, the other men paid no attention to Jalaladin. They listened to the sounds of the street. The car horns. The unintelligible yelling. The braying of donkeys.

They looked for any sign that they might be seconds from an explosion. A bulky burqa. Sagging suspensions. A lone, clean-shaven, military-age male chanting to himself as he clenched a steering wheel. A man on a roof with a cell phone. A kid with his hands stuffed in his armpits, hiding grenades.

The enemy surrounded them.

The heat from the transfer case radiated next to Nick and with each passing second, he grew more restless, more scared, more hot and sweaty, and more pissed at Levi for the rock in his shirt. He nearly threw the Humvee into park to step outside to take care of the stone once and for all, screw the risk, when Archer One-Six crackled over the radio, “Turn around and Charlie Mike. I have a new route. I'll let you know when we break free. Over.”

Hooper stood tall in the turret and waved. When the waving wasn't enough, he shot a pen flare at a hesitant driver.

Nick watched the gleaming red pyrotechnic bounce off the windshield before the car skidded to a surprised halt in the median.

After getting out of the traffic and back onto the open highway, Nick accelerated. “Thank God we're out of that mess,” he mumbled to himself.

“You are not kidding me, my man,” said Jalaladin. “But now we'll be out here twice as long, and I'm already starving.”

More than a cheeseburger, Nick just wanted the irksome gravel out of his shirt. He took his eyes off the road and tried twisting his arm up under the back of his body armor to get it. If it weren't for that rock, he no doubt would have seen the three 155-millimeter artillery rounds rigged up to a Motorola Talkabout radio on the left shoulder, right there on the surface, as obvious as an ark in the desert.

Tom dropped into the center of the Humvee. He clubbed Nick's shoulder in the process.

Just when Nick was about to yell at him, he felt a painful crack in his ears. He instantly felt his body flood with adrenaline. The steering wheel pulled hard to the right, and dust obscured his view. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hooper lose his balance and fall onto Gassner in the TC seat.

The windshield cracked. Smoke and dust covered the road in front of them. He couldn't see a thing so he slammed on the brakes. Hooper slammed into the flat front of the Humvee dash.

“Are you stupid?” he heard.

Obscenities piled upon obscenities.

“Get out get out get out,” he heard.

He hit the gas, and the Humvee lurched into action, slowly gaining speed. Nick tried looking in his side rearview, but the driver's side window was shattered worse than the windshield, and it, too, was covered in black soot.

Over the radio he heard, “Victor One, what's your status? Victor One?”

Gassner keyed the radio. “Archer One-Six, Archer One-Six, this is Victor One.”

The radio crackled again. “I repeat, Victor One, Victor One, what's your status?”

“Archer One-Six, Archer One-Six, Victor One. Do you read me?”

“I repeat, Victor One, Victor One, what's your status?”

Gassner looked over at Nick, who was looking at him. “Stop looking at me, douche.”

Nick turned back to the front, despite his inability to see.

Gassner repeatedly slammed the handset against the steel body of the SINCGARS radio. He threw the mic against the windshield and let it dangle by the cord in front of him.

Nick kept his foot on the gas pedal, and when he felt the tires hit the gravel shoulder on the left, he pulled hard to the right, using all the strength in his arms to keep the beast on the road. By the way it was handling, he was certain the power steering was gone or the tie rod was bent. It was drivable, but it wasn't easy. When he felt his tires hit the gravel on the right, he veered to the left until he drifted onto the left shoulder. He played ping-pong with the shoulders, praying the locals got their sedans and donkeys out of the way. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, looking over at Gassner again.