A Hard and Heavy Thing (19 page)

The airman looked honestly stunned, but he handed over the camera. “I had no idea,” he said.

“You're no journalist, dude. You don't get to sit back and report on all this like some bystander.” Levi looked at the images and pressed some buttons. “You brought a gun over here, not a camera. You don't have the privilege of pretending you had nothing to do with it all. You own this shit too.”

The airman looked embarrassed and he said nothing as Levi handed his camera back.

When the young airman whispered, “Roger, Sergeant,” Levi walked away.

Nick plodded along to his own truck and took his seat as driver. He stared out the front window with his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel. The glass was still cracked, but someone had cleaned off the dirt and soot. He didn't have great visibility, but he would at least be able to finish the mission.

Hooper shouted something down to him from the turret, but he didn't bother to respond. Jalaladin slept in the backseat with his head tilted back and his mouth hanging wide open. Weber the Mute sat in the backseat staring out his window. The LT and squad leaders conferred.

When they had finished, Gassner knocked on Nick's window. Nick opened the door.

“Turn around,” Gassner said. “I'll spot you.”

Without a word, Nick put the truck in reverse and waited while the other trucks did the same. In turn, each truck maneuvered forward and backward, forward and backward until they were turned around. When they were turned and once again in the lead, Gassner took his spot in the TC seat.

“Take us home,” he said. “Tampa's blocked or something and there's another jam by Ad Dujayl, so head to Boa, then to Trouser, then Dover to home.”

“Boa?” Nick said. “Are you serious?”

“That's what I said.”

“So we can just get blown up again?”

“Hello? Were you with us today? You think Tampa's any better? No difference.” He stared out the window. “Less traffic on Boa. Means sooner to chow.”

“This is insane,” Nick said.

“It was your boy Hartwig's idea.”

Too frustrated, tired, and angry to get into it, Nick shook his head and drove.

He bumped along the canal road at about twenty-five miles per hour. Any faster on the rough terrain would bruise the forearms and ribs of all the gunners in the turrets. Not to mention, the lack of steering power would mean a certain loss of control if they went any faster. Hooper leaned back into his sling, which creaked under his weight with the swaying and bouncing of the Humvee.

After nearly fifteen minutes, Nick turned west onto Route Boa. He flipped down his visor to shield his eyes from the orange setting sun looming large on the horizon, but it did little good. The orange light glared off the cracks in the windshield, and the tall grasses lining the shoulders cast dark swaying shadows across the road. Nick drove as much by feel and memory as he did by sight. He pressed on the gas pedal. The engine whined. Nick gritted his teeth, stared straight ahead, and thought about cheeseburgers. Big fat American cheeseburgers. The kind Oma made at her tavern, so slimy the grease leaked through the paper used to wrap them.

The men rode in silence into the sunset, and the falling sun grew bigger and brighter as they drove, and finally, it burst in front of them.

The next thing Nick saw was the driver's seat, that is, the seat he had been sitting in. Flames licked at the seat, and the olive drab vinyl boiled and bubbled in front of him. The electronic countermeasures crushed his leg, and his driver's side door came to rest on the highway. He looked down at his chest and saw an arm, and the arm was not his own. The blast had torn the passenger's side door from the vehicle, and the opening poured thick black smoke into the air. Nick stared at the opening, catching glimpses of the orange sky during gusts of wind in which the smoke billowed away for less than a moment. He could not move, and he could not hear.

They had spent many hours crawling down the dusty canal roads. The monotony of it all, the slow pace, the lack of conversation, and the crash from the day's earlier adrenaline rush nearly caused Levi to fall asleep. He stretched as well as he could in such a small space, and he complained about being bored.

His driver, Specialist Pete White, looked over at him and nodded in commiseration, but he had nothing to say.

After Levi saw his best friend's Humvee disappear into a cloud of fire, dust, and gravel, both time and sound stopped, which left Tom Hooper flying through the air, suspended against a backdrop of smoke and flames, weightless and serene. His unbloused DCU-patterned pants were rumpled by the wind; his limbs were spread against the sky, one foot bootless but still covered by a green sock. Levi stared in wonder at his friend, who was not flying, but was simply the subject of a photograph, oblivious to his surroundings, or to gravity.

When Levi lurched forward because White had slammed on the brakes, time started again and Tom hit the gravel on the side of the road. Despite the height from which he fell, his form did not bounce, roll down the shallow embankment into the tall grass, or move in any way at all. He simply stopped when his body met resistance. Tom lay supine, staring up into the sky, one arm stretched out, the other seemingly twisted under his back. Levi looked left at White, but he only saw wide eyes and a moving mouth.

Levi turned to the side and fumbled with the steel handle of the heavy door. His gloved hand lifted and pulled on the lever, and he slammed his shoulder against the door. When his foot hit the ground, his ears opened again. He heard the blast wave echoing while something else whistled past his head. He set the other foot on the ground and Lieutenant Michaels appeared in front of him. Levi looked down and saw the lieutenant's palm outstretched on his vest.

He heard the LT yell, “Contact. Get down,” and he watched helplessly as his own left hand thrust the officer's arm from in front of him while his right fist struck a blow to the man's chin, a blow that released the chinstrap on the LT's Kevlar and knocked him to the ground. He did not hit the man out of anger, but because he stood as an obstacle, and Levi would not be stopped.

He ran toward the cloud and the Humvee wreckage, and because time does not exist in combat, and because his legs were heavy and slow, he had the time to gawk at the squat palm trees sitting on the side of the path like overgrown pineapples. Because there was no time, he was able to take the time to see that Tom Hooper's eyes were wide open, his mouth was wide open, and he was dead. His arm was not twisted behind his back as Levi had thought, but instead, it was not there at all. He admired the orange horizon and the way the smoke went straight up into a shimmering column, the same way it had the night that he and Nick had graduated from high school.

With bottles of champagne and six-packs of Coors, Nick, Eris, and Levi spent the night at his dad's hunting cabin toasting the end of four years of veritable prison. They celebrated the beginning of adulthood and a new adventure. They started the bonfire just before dusk. They drank and smoked and the boys played their acoustic guitars while the smoke drifted into that orange sky. Eris swooned, and later, when Nick fell asleep on one of the two couches, Levi claimed the lone single bed. Eris climbed under the covers with Levi, and between the champagne and the beer, Levi thought that even though he had been too chicken and confused since he had met her freshman year, he might finally have enough courage to make something happen before life changed for all of them. But she was asleep within seconds, and he spent the night unable to sleep, acutely aware of every accidental touch, of every innocent brush of one of her silk kneecaps against his leg as she moved in her slumber. He was afraid to embrace her and too timid to wake her, but he spent the night hoping she would rise and touch him on purpose. He was a fool for thinking such things.

And at such a time as that.

As his steps pounded the gravel, as his rifle clanged against his thigh, as he marveled at the pineapple palm trees and the sky, and as he ignored what was going on around him, he was oddly aware that he was doing it again: daydreaming, that is. He knew full well that his mind was not present with his body, as was so often the case.

As Levi neared the truck, he heard a tumultuous crash. A great crack stung his ears and he felt the peal rumble through his stomach. He wondered why it would be thundering when there were no clouds in the sky. It was only after the second crack of thunder shook his head and nearly knocked him over that he realized it was not thunder at all; but rather, it was the warheads of rocket-propelled grenades exploding near the left side of the truck. With this realization came other realizations. The smaller cracks he had been ignoring were bullets snapping past him. The more sporadic and lower-pitched pops were rounds burning and exploding like popcorn in the rear of the Humvee. As he heard his own rapid panting and the hollow drumming of his heart inside his chest, he realized he wasn't bored anymore.

When he reached the truck and climbed up onto its side and looked down in the passenger's door to view the gruesome scene within, he realized that the wailing he heard was not coming from within the wreckage at all, but from Brody Gassner lying in the road in front of the Humvee. Gassner was stranded and he was pushing himself up with an elbow trying to sit up, but his left leg was shredded near the knee. He kept falling back. Blood pooled beneath him.

Levi glanced up and saw two bearded men prone in the long grasses nearly fifty meters away. They were firing AK-47s while a third man knelt a few feet from them, aiming what appeared to be his final rocket-propelled grenade. Levi jumped down the seven feet to the road. His legs buckled beneath him and he fell back onto his butt. He leaned his back against the flat bottom of the Humvee. He tried to get up again, to go get someone, but as soon as he was up, he dropped down again as he remembered that his reason for jumping down in the first place was because he needed cover. The RPG whooshed harmlessly over the Humvee with an arch too high for contact. It traveled into a grove of palm trees and disappeared without exploding. Levi closed his eyes and took three deep breaths to steel himself.

One of the front tires still burned. It poured a black column into the sky, but every few moments the wind shifted and sent the thick smoke down the road toward Gassner. Levi crawled toward the front of the Humvee and the burning tire, and he waited for another shift in the wind. The smoke wouldn't provide much of a screen, but it was all he had.

When he felt the early evening air blow against the sweat on the back of his neck, he waited three seconds for the smoke to move out ahead of him; then he ran toward his wounded comrade. Gassner drew in his breath, choked down his screams, widened his eyes, and held out his hands like an infant waiting to be picked up. Without a word, Levi ran behind him and pushed his own rifle to his side and underneath his armpit. He tucked his hands beneath the shoulders of Gassner's body armor and spun him around, watching the bone and shredded skin and muscle scrape against the gravel as he turned his torso. Levi pulled as hard as he could. He shuffled backward in a crouch toward the cover of the Humvee.

The collar of Gassner's body armor pulled up into his throat and all he could manage were a few gulping whimpers as he was pulled violently across the gravel. A crater bigger than any foxhole Levi had ever dug in training spread across the north side of the road. Levi aimed for this hole in the earth, which had been created by the blast that had blown the Humvee on its side. When they reached the blast crater, Levi dragged Gassner down into it. He let go of his vest, and Gassner's head dropped onto the dirt.

He climbed out and hustled to the back of the Humvee. He took a knee in a position where he could look up the road for his platoon while also looking around the truck's rear corner to survey the enemy. One gunner up the road engaged the enemy in the opposite direction. The other two fired in the direction of the three men Levi had spotted in the grass.

After looking up the road, Levi peered around the truck. His breathing was shallow and rapid, his heart soared, he could not articulate a thought, and he could not name which cardinal direction was which. From his low vantage point, Levi could see dirt kicking up in the grass from the firing of the heavy fifties. He scanned the field, trying to pinpoint where he had last seen the men.

As he scanned left, a man dressed in a black salwar kameez popped up and ran through the grass toward him. Levi brought his rifle to his shoulder, closed his left eye, and peered through his ACOG with his right. At first, he could see nothing through his scope but the grass field shaking. He opened both eyes and looked over his scope again and pointed it toward the man. Through the magnification of his optics, he could see the look of terror on the man's face. Although he was bearded, giving him the appearance of age from a distance, Levi's scope revealed his soft skin and delicate neck. Levi squeezed his trigger. After he had fired his third round, he realized his eyes were closed.

When he opened them and looked over the barrel of his rifle, he saw that the man was still running toward him. He held an AK-47 in one hand at his side, both his arms flailing as he ran. He kept looking up the road at the heavy machine guns that fired into the field at him. The young man hadn't even seen Levi yet, and with everything else going on, he hadn't noticed that Levi had fired at him and missed. Levi took a deep breath, exhaled, and held it. He looked through his optic once more and aimed for center mass. He pulled the trigger with just the pad of his index finger, slowly, not allowing himself to be surprised by the shot. He remembered his fundamentals. The shot went high and Levi saw the man's head pop back as if he had just taken a jab to the nose. As the man fell and turned, Levi saw the gaping hole in the back of his head. He let his breath explode out of his mouth in a rush, astonished. A sudden wave of euphoria consumed him and he looked around, wondering if anyone had seen his shot.