Youngblood (31 page)

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not sure,” he said. “Surf's up, maybe.”

Rana had just called. She was worried about us. A coworker of her husband's had said to avoid the paved road by the big American base for the next couple of days. Malek hadn't needed to ask why; he knew this coworker had family in the Sunni insurgency. Her husband had called in sick and was planning on doing so until he knew the road was clear again.

“She risked a lot calling,” Snoop said. “Her husband would be angry if he knew.”

“Right.” It didn't take much to connect this with what Sergeant Griffin had called with the night before. I told the patrol to stand by. Historically, IEDs were a retaliatory tactic for local al-Qaeda. It made sense.

I radioed battalion and asked when the engineers had last cleared Route Madison.

“One week” was the reply.

“Roger. Got intel that”—this would need to be phrased delicately—“an attack is forthcoming along Route Madison. Recommend the road is shut down until cleared.”

Battalion wasn't happy—they really wanted us to get that damn satellite dish—but after explaining to two majors and the Big Man that our source was credible, they agreed. Our patrol dropped the Strykers' ramps and hung out under low gray clouds, playing cards and talking about the best clubs in Hawaii to meet slutty tourists.

I was only half listening when Dominguez asked how my girlfriend was doing.

“Who?” I asked. He had a strange look on his face. I wasn't sure if he meant Marissa, or if this was his way of asking about the local “slam piece” rumors. Denial would get me nowhere, I knew. But neither would the truth. “Oh. Her,” I said, turning it into a joke. “Honestly, I'm not sure.”

He seemed to consider what that meant before turning back to the debate over clubs.

I walked away from the group to the back of my Stryker. It was open and empty. I lay across a cushioned bench and tucked my helmet under my head so it served as a hard, round pillow. I didn't know when it'd happened exactly, but I'd become the type of person who preferred resting in the day to resting at night. I was somewhere between sleep and consciousness when the explosion happened.

The soldiers thought a jet had crashed, because of the noise and because of the black fireball to the east. We thought we'd be sent out the gate immediately, but Captain Vrettos radioed and told us to remain on standby until higher figured out what'd happened.

We already knew, though. Two of us did, at least.

“That was the bomb in the road,” Snoop said, crawling into the back of the Stryker to sit next to me. “That was meant for us.”

“Maybe.” I grabbed an orange from a food bin and started peeling the skin into small jagged pieces. When that was done, I split the orange into lumpy slices and swished one around in my mouth. Snoop just watched.

“She saved us,” he finally said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It was true. She had. Information about what had happened drifted down to us, slowly at first, like ticker tape, then faster and faster. The tip had spooked the engineers, too, so they'd sent their best mine-resistant vehicles to patrol Route Madison. They crept along the road at five miles per hour, scanning for piled trash and potholes.

Along the western edge of Checkpoint 38—Sayonara Station—a bomb exploded under the lead vehicle's front right tire. Forensics later estimated that the IED contained two hundred fifty pounds of homemade explosive, primarily fertilizer and acetone, designed to trigger under the pressure of an armored vehicle. The insurgents had taken advantage of our absence the day prior and had dug, dropped, and repaved without anyone noticing, or caring to.

The twenty-ton vehicle rolled forward like a shot elephant, its outer hull spraying the roadside with large metal chunks. All but one of the ballistic glass windows shattered upon impact. Inside, all five soldiers were hurt, two of them knocked unconscious. The final tally counted four concussions, six broken bones, and a fire extinguisher–induced gash along a neck.

Strykers weren't built to withstand massive IED attacks. Had it been us on that patrol, like we could have been—like we should have been—it would have been a matter of body parts and pink mist, not casts and splints.

“She saved us,” Snoop kept saying to me, long after he left me alone to tear apart more oranges. “She saved us, she saved us, she saved us.”

T
he room smelled of rot. I couldn't determine the source, couldn't parse it from the other odors—the rain outside, the bouquet of wildflowers in the corner, the foul stink of angry men in sweat-starched uniforms and man-dresses. Still, after another breath, there was no mistaking it. There was rot somewhere.

Twelve of us had gathered in Fat Mukhtar's sliver of a meeting room. The attendance of the Big Man, Captain Vrettos, and an Iraqi Army major meant I didn't have to speak; the presence of the
mukhtar
and a host of other tribal leaders meant I still needed to listen.

“The sheiks demand
fasil
for all the dead but Azhar,” Snoop said. His voice cracked with angst. “They will not budge from this. They say all the others in the mosque were innocents.”

There'd been drama even before we'd arrived. At the outpost, the Big Man took one look at Snoop's ski mask and plastic rifle and said our entire company lacked discipline. Captain Vrettos had tried to explain the complexities involved, to no avail. Snoop had saved his job by taking off the mask and setting down the plastic rifle. Time would tell if he'd traded it for his life.

Pallid Arabic brought me back to the meeting. Fat Mukhtar rose from the rug like a false idol, joints cracking, knees popping, the cement wall behind him bracing his back. Once he finished unfurling, he pointed to the far wall. The watercolors of American rivers and forests still hung there, but the
mukhtar
's index finger wagged above them, at three portraits. His finger moved from frame to frame, tracing invisible lines.

“He wants the American officers to look,” Snoop translated. “Those are the men who ruled here before. The one on the left was his great-grandfather,
who worked with the Ottomans.” The size of a paperback cover, the hot wax painting displayed a young man with a long, broad nose and a little chin. Soft curls bounced across his head, and his eyes were like two brown suns. “The man in the middle, with the beard? He was the
mukhtar
's grandfather. He worked with the British to overthrow the Ottomans.” This man was middle-aged, the black-and-white photograph capturing an august face and rigid body, clenched fists dangling from arms tucked neatly into a
dishdasha
. Had he met T. E. Lawrence, I wondered, perhaps on the famous march to Damascus? “The third man? His father, who worked to bring down the last king of Iraq.” Larger than the others, and slightly crooked, this color photograph presented a man more like the heir, round and mustached, dressed in olive fatigues and holding a large-caliber revolver. He possessed a physical poetry his son lacked, a sort of grace fixed in the photograph.

Have those always been there? I thought. Or did Fat Mukhtar bring them out for today? That felt likely, though I couldn't be sure. Perhaps I hadn't noticed them before.

“The
mukhtar
says he works with Americans now,” Snoop continued. “Americans who will leave, as the Ottomans and British left.”

Captain Vrettos loosed a soft whistle. The Big Man made a feeble attempt to explain why we were different. He mentioned clearing, holding, and building. My eyes moved from dead face to dead face to dead face. I tended to think that those who came before were worthier, more distinguished. At first glance, the same held true for these Iraqi tribal leaders. But Fat Mukhtar's great-grandfather, he of the biblical eyes, also had pouty lips. And his grandfather's mouth hung open, like a fool's. And his father—he must've posed with the gun for show, as tightly as he gripped it. I remembered Lawrence had been stationed in the outpost of Cairo only because his superiors had deemed him a goof and a nuisance. I belong here as much as anyone, I thought. Because at least I have the goddamn dignity to question being here to begin with.

“Lieutenant Porter.” It was the Big Man. “Update us on your Muslim soldier.”

The fatwas were old news, so none of the Iraqis acted surprised. The Big Man seemed to want them to be. Every time I bumped into Ibrahim at Camp Independence he looked more despondent than the last, but he never whined or complained. He just said “One day closer” over and over again, until I left him alone.

“We have nothing to do with that,” Fat Mukhtar said, slumping against the wall and sliding down it, resuming his seat. “That's the Cleric.”

“Not possible,” the Big Man said, his fingers stubby rocks aimed at the
mukhtar
's head. “Lieutenant Porter's platoon got him last month. What was his name again?”

“Haitham,” I said, staring at a triangle of light from the window's reflection that'd gathered between my legs. His black-and-white mug shot was wedged into my Lawrence book along with every other document I didn't know what to do with. “His name was Haitham.”

“And it was you who led us to him.” Captain Vrettos spoke now, his voice charged with a voltage I didn't recognize. Recent events had amplified the pressure on him from higher, though the Big Man had supposedly refused to fire him when pushed to by the generals. I looked at Captain Vrettos and clucked my tongue to try to calm him, but his red-faced exhaustion had eyes only for the
mukhtar
. “You fed the Rangers that information. So, with Haitham dead, just who the hell is dictating the fatwas?” The volts surged. “Someone here knows the fucking answer to that.”

The room turned helter-skelter. Tribal leaders shouted at one another and at us, fingers wagging, fists shaking; the Big Man yelled at Captain Vrettos, who yelled right back, saying he was sick of ignoring the obvious. I pulled my knees tight to my chest and watched the triangle of light dance between my legs. I wondered what Rana was doing. Probably hanging laundry to dry, or demanding Karim lie down for his afternoon nap. She'd said her husband would be home all week. She'd have called otherwise.

I looked up at the portraits of the dead men and sighed. We said
we wanted peace. What we really wanted was calm, something else altogether. They said they wanted peace, too. What they really wanted was power, which maybe wasn't something else altogether. After we'd destroyed their mosque, it was tough to argue otherwise.

One of the tribal leaders, a younger guy I'd met at Abu Mohammed's wake, started shouting, “Nina leven,
fasil!
Nina leven,
fasil!
Boosh! Boosh! Boosh!” I winced. Captain Vrettos flipped him off with both hands, which made the Iraqi yell louder.

Through all the noise, I smelled decay again. I watched a man with a large lip sore and a salt-and-pepper beard emerge from the corner to shush the other Iraqis. The stench seemed to be coming from his sandaled feet, his toenails little gnarled knives poking out at the world. Wearing a gray
dishdasha
and a red-and-white checkered turban, thick wrinkles splayed across his forehead, sagging in the middle. Yousef's eyes studied the spaces between the men in the room, one a deep hazel, the other the cloudy brown of cataracts. I realized where I'd seen him before, even before the patrol through the sandstorm. He'd been the man demanding
fasil
at the car accident in the spring. I wanted to ask why a falafel man had been invited to this meeting, but stayed quiet.

“This isn't the time for blame.” Snoop translated for Yousef with taut exactitude, as if he were afraid to neglect even a syllable. “We've all lost friends, American and Iraqi. While it seems wise to keep the American Muslim away, we must remember the death sentence was also placed on brave Iraqi soldiers.” The IA major nodded vigorously. “And we must remember the neighborhoods of Ashuriyah are being covered with lists of targets stuck to telephone poles. Sunni and Shi'a. Not all are just threats.”

While Yousef continued, I watched the faces of the other men in the room.
Wasta
isn't a thing to pursue, I thought, or even possess. It's not just power. Yousef knows this, and that's why he has it. Despite the Sahwa contract, despite the luxury sedans, despite all the bombast and circumstance, the
mukhtar
didn't. One glance his way showed he knew it, too.

Yousef was still speaking when Fat Mukhtar interrupted. At first the older man tried to speak over him, but when the
mukhtar
continued, he stopped and turned his head toward the ceiling, exasperated. Fat Mukhtar then stood up again to shout down his opponent. An argument ensued, one voice restrained and firm, the other wild as a roller coaster. The rest of us sat in awkward silence, watching while pretending not to.

“They argue about who's in charge,” Snoop said slowly. “Fat Mukhtar say this is his house. The falafel man tells him to calm down, this is not the time.”

Fat Mukhtar spat on the ground toward Yousef's feet and wiped his palms together like he was cleaning his hands. He said something to all the room with his arms spread wide and turned to Snoop and me, jerking his head to the door. Then he stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

Snoop's voice returned to a robotic pitch. “The
mukhtar
say he's the only one who can stop the terror men,” he said. “Then he tell LT Jack and me to go outside with him, since everyone else here just wastes time.”

“Go,” the Big Man said. “Settle him down, we need him here.” I stood, and Snoop began to do the same. “We need the terp.” Anticipating a protest, the Big Man waved me outside. “Be creative, Lieutenant. Put that liberal arts degree to use.”

I scooped up my helmet, slung my rifle, and walked out into a chalky sun.