Youngblood (29 page)

To my ears, our boots on the path sounded like falling trees, each step a fatal alarm for the enemy above that possessed everything—high ground, larger weapons, the fervor of zealotry. As we rounded two, then three loops of the spiral ramp, the sand winds howled. We faced the dead of north on the third rotation, and it struck with an open palm; I had to stagger to my left to catch my balance. Only Chambers remained upright. Saif pushed past Batule, and we kept moving.

With two more rungs of tower to go, the dirty sky burst into patriotic staples of red, white, and purple. A green star cluster followed. Illumination rounds, I realized, meant to distract the insurgents in the tower. It's Independence Day in Babylon, I thought, turning back to the climb as the lead man tripped over a clear, ankle-high wire spread across the path, landing on his palms and knees.

There was a long, yo-yoing pause during which no one moved. All I could do was bite my lip and tuck my chin before the world exploded into stone. I thought of all the little things that make up life and the ancient howl returned, pushing me into the tower wall. I saw and heard nothing until I did again.

•  •  •

It was the falling debris that brought me back, earth raining back down on earth. I felt my face like a blind man reading braille. One lip, two lips. A nose. The eyes were still there, and they opened and saw dirty sky again, though my lenses had been blown off. I blinked and blinked, pushing away the thousand hammers pounding in my head, and stood up.

Everything was brown ash. As I leaned against the tower wall, trying to remember who and why, a shape came out of the cloud like a monster.

“Sir!” It was talking to me loudly. “Sir!”

“Batule!” I grabbed him by the chest plate and pulled him toward me. His face looked like meatloaf, and his hands were pressed against one of his eyes, his palms lapping up pools of dark blood. Pieces of his uniform on his arms and upper torso had been shredded, but he seemed able to walk. I said to keep his hands pressed against that socket and asked if he could make it down the tower path by himself. He said yes.

“Go,” I said.

“No way, they need help.”

“That's a fucking order!” I was yelling too loud but wasn't sure he could hear me, either. “You're combat ineffective. Go the fuck down!”

He went one way and I went the other, using the curving tower wall as my guide, toward belt lashes of rifle fire.

I floated through steps of exaggerated movement, uncertain where my feet would land, a spaceman sifting through the powder of the moon. Four, five, six steps in, I heard laughter, then the whistles of steady gunfire, then saw the hazy silhouette of a man on one knee firing a rifle up the path. I found my own still on me, dangling from its strap at my hip. I raised it to my shoulder pocket and flipped it to burst, firing into the fangs of the unknown, not bothering to aim, not caring to. A bright lodestar of a tracer lit the way every fifth round. Breathing
in the hot cordite of spent rounds, breathing out the cold sulfur of rounds spent, I kept squeezing until the magazine ran dry. When I dropped it and reached into my vest for a replacement, I found Chambers to my left, on one knee, searching the brown cloud, squeezing off rounds one or two at a time.

“Welcome to the party,” he said. He laughed again, low and loud, breathing in the slag around us. “Get some, hajj,” he said. “Come get some. The infidels are at the fucking gate!”

I asked where Saif was, and he nodded to his far side. A body lay there, leaning up, firing a pistol up the path.

“He's in a bad way,” Chambers said. “Gonna take both of us to get him down.”

“Let's do it.” I hadn't heard any counterfire since I'd sent away Batule. “While we can.”

We each grabbed one of Saif's armpits and lifted, draping his arms around our shoulders. Saif's head sagged to the side. He mumbled something with glazed eyes and splashes of runny, hot drool. I tried not to look down but realized as we started that there was space where Saif's legs were supposed to be, two long holes filled with nothing. Something was dripping, like water from a broken tap. I clutched his body closer and kept moving.

We spoke to one another through labored breaths and grunts, Chambers and I shifting Saif's body to alter the weight placement, slow, waddling steps of minutes that felt like days. The fog of earth was thinning, but not quickly enough; we couldn't see farther than a few steps. Only sharp whimpers of pain now came from Saif's mouth. Just as my shoulder threatened to pop out and my chest and legs churned, Chambers leaned over to set his half of Saif down.

“Quick break here. Should answer that. It's been buzzing this whole fucking time.”

“Huh?”

He pointed to the forgotten radio on my back. I set Saif down and reached across my back for the hand receiver. I hadn't heard anything.

“This—this is me,” I said. “This is Hotspur Six.”

“Hotspur Six!” It was Captain Vrettos, his words like hot silver to my ear. “Did you copy? Are all friendly forces clear of the top?”

“Yes.” I panted through the words. “I mean, yes. All clear.”

Almost instantly a deep rumble swallowed the sky. Then came crashing rock and glass above us, an upside-down earthquake bearing down. We grabbed Saif again and kept moving, an angry god's breath on our heels.

As we turned the last rounded corner of the path, a group of medics met us, relieving us of our burden and placing Saif on a stretcher. Doc Cork tied a tourniquet onto one of the stumps and began twisting. Saif screamed out with chants that sounded like prayers, every revolution of the baton bringing more. Slobber covered his chin and mustache. He grabbed my arm, pulling me to his face, close enough to see black quills of hair in his nose.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes, grabbing his clasped hands with one of my own. In a frail whisper he asked, “My legs. Like fire. How is—how is legs?”

I opened my eyes and told him as calmly as I could that they were fine, he'd be walking before he knew it, he'd be playing with his daughter soon.

His mouth fell open, and he pressed his pistol into my palms. Then he was gone, carried off on a stretcher to the awaiting medevac. I remained by myself for some minutes, tugging at my ears, staring up at the minaret that had tried to kill us, now just a dark splinter. It was evening by the time I walked down the remainder of the tower path, finding my platoon waiting. Everyone else had already gone home.

I don't even know his daughter's name, I thought.

The rumble we'd heard had been a main gun round shot from a 105-millimeter cannon on an outfitted Stryker. It caused much of the top of the tower to collapse in on itself, killing everyone in the rooms and on the walkway, including Dead Tooth, two other military-age males, an old man presumed to be the mullah, two unidentified women, and
a child the official report described as “likely younger than ten years old.” The dome had shattered into a thousand ceramic dishes. Iraqis contracted for disaster cleanups spent days sorting through the ruins, and a State Department official later estimated it'd cost the American taxpayer a cool million dollars to repair the mosque. “If the Iraqi parliament determines it worthy,” he then clarified. “No guarantee. This is the middle of nowhere.”

Both Batule and Saif were sent to Baghdad for emergency surgeries—Batule for a lost eye and a ruptured eardrum, Saif for his lost legs. Their war was over.

I spent the rest of the night smoking cigarettes and watching movies on my laptop, away from our room, where Chambers was. Something he'd said wouldn't go away. We'd been on the tower path, the medics working to stabilize Saif. “Mission accomplished,” he'd said. Then he'd laughed.

W
e didn't go on patrol the day after the mosque got blown up. No one did. “A tactical pause,” Captain Vrettos called it. For him, that meant explaining to higher what had happened. For the soldiers, it meant gym workouts and video games. For me, it meant going through my e-mail. There was a note from my brother, an apology. I didn't know how to respond, and even though I tried to write back, I didn't know what to say. He'd been right about moral courage mattering more than physical courage. I deleted the message.

I spent the day on the smoking patio, watching the walls of camo nets sway with the wind, breathing in wet cigarette. A light rain spat on the ground outside, steady through the afternoon. It would have been cold but for an electric space heater. I sat there reading a magazine article about the commanding general in Afghanistan getting fired for insubordination. It seemed like a stupid thing to get fired for, but things were going to hell everywhere.

Snoop found me there, alone.

“Yo,” he said.

“Yo,” I said.

“Crazy shit yesterday.” He shook his head. “Fucking Arabs.”

“Fucking Americans,” I said. “Stupid. All of it.”

He took a seat in the lawn chair next to me, his long legs sticking out like fishing rods. “Batule?
Molazim
Saif? They okay?”

“They'll live.” I stared ahead.

Snoop pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He was a dark shadow in the pale light. We were close, maybe even friends, and I knew barely anything about him. I was about to try to rectify that when he said he needed some advice.

“I'll help if I can,” I offered. It was such a first-world thing to say.

Snoop's special visa to America had been delayed, along with hundreds of others. The embassy hadn't given a reason or a time line. But he couldn't go home to Little Sudan anymore. Jaish al-Mahdi wanted his head on a spike. He was spending his occasional weekend passes at Camp Independence, an option that wouldn't be there once we left.

“What about the letter I wrote? I thought there was a big push to get terps stateside.”

“Too slow. And only goes to terps who give moneys. I gave them a whole file of letters from American officers I've worked for. It didn't matter.” He paused to spit out a few shells. His words were boring deep into my conscience, and I thought of Rana, the way she looked at her boys when she sent them out to play with soldiers.

“The right way doesn't work,” he continued. “I want to go to America, but getting out of Iraq is first. The war won't end when your army leaves next year. You know this.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere.”

I said I'd help, somehow, reminding him we still had a couple of months to figure something out. “Maybe my brother knows someone in Homeland Security,” I said, though he probably didn't.

“Thanks, LT,” Snoop said, standing. He seemed embarrassed and started moving to the doorway before turning around. “We never talked about Haitham.”

Excuses darted through my mind like manic bats, but I didn't need them. “What you did was right,” Snoop continued. “He was the Cleric, yes? It was the only thing a good lieutenant could do.”

He was wrong, of course, but I still appreciated his saying it.

•  •  •

I found a few hours of rest sitting up on my mattress and against the wall, poncho liner draped over my head. I didn't bother to loosen my
boots, like I was trying to trick myself into sleep. An arm shaking my own woke me at midnight.

My eyes felt like stomped grapes. I smacked my lips and concentrated on the foggy shape in front of me. It was the runner for the night shift. He could tell I was considering going back to sleep, so he shook me again.

“Battalion intel's on the line. And—well, we don't want to get the commander.”

I smacked my lips again and cracked my neck. “He in the sack?”

“Yes, sir. And. You know how it is. He needs to stay down, while he can.”

I slapped my face lightly and hopped off the bunk. “Glad you got me.” The runner thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn't, not totally.

I picked up the phone expecting the intel captain from Duke, but instead heard the voice of Sergeant Griffin. She sounded tired but solemn.

“Lieutenant Porter? I need to speak to Captain Vrettos. It's urgent.”

“I'm the ranking officer on duty. What's up?”

“Just heard from a green-level source.” She was annoyed to be talking with me, I could tell. “Al-Qaeda's planning payback for what happened to the mosque. Something big and soon. Supposedly in the next day.”

I had no idea what “green-level” meant, but figured it meant “good” and “believable.” I pantomimed punching myself in the face, which made the night shift laugh.

“You'll let your commander know ASAP?” Sergeant Griffin continued. “Green-level. This is real.”

“No doubt,” I said. I didn't question her intent, but I'd been through too many false alarms to take seriously vague threats. Something big? Something soon? Welcome to our everyday, I thought. I was setting the phone down when I heard Sergeant Griffin say, “One more thing,” through the receiver.

I waited.

“Talk to Dan today?” she asked. She meant Chambers, though I'd never thought of him having a first name.

“Haven't really seen him,” I said.

She said they'd talked earlier, online. He'd told her what had happened at the mosque, how it bothered him. That he wasn't a young fire breather anymore. That on this, his fourth combat tour, he'd finally had his fill. That he'd survived a lot of close calls, but that yesterday had been the most searing, the bridge too far. That he had his kids to get back to. That maybe he'd take up a friend's offer and work construction in Dallas. Or switch over to an admin job so he could reach retirement from behind a desk. That he had better things to be doing than running up ancient mosques to kill teenagers who'd had nothing to do with 9/11.

“Just venting, I think,” Sergeant Griffin said. “But I'd never heard him like that. Maybe you can talk with him. Since you were up that tower, too.”