Youngblood Page 2

  I could tell the terp was annoyed by the way the game had ended, but he did as instructed. The Barbie Kid, all ninety pounds of him, moved to us with bare feet covered in dust, rolling a cooler of goods behind him. A dark unibrow raced across his forehead, and he stank like a polecat, wearing his usual pink sweats. The Barbie doll’s face on the sweatshirt was smudged with mud and crust, forever spoiling her smile.

  “Any ali babas around?” I asked.

  The Barbie Kid looked up at me with his good eye, the lazy one staying fixed to the ground. “None the Americans would care about,” he said through Snoop, his voice cracking but tart.

  Fucking teenagers, I thought. They’re all terrible. Even here.

  I reached down and lifted the Barbie Kid’s sweatshirt to reveal the handle of a long, dull sai dagger tucked into his waistband.

  “Still carrying that around,” I said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  The young Iraqi frowned, then argued. “He is a businessman and must protect his business,” Snoop translated. “He asks why you care? There are boys younger than him who work for the Sahwa militias. They carry AK-47s.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Want any Boom Booms, LT? He offers a special deal, because Hotspur is his favorite platoon.”

  “I’m sure he tells that to all the girls. How much?”

  “Two for five dollars.”

  As I rummaged through my pockets for money, a sound like wood planks slapping together broke the peace. Then again. My heart jumped up and my feet jumped back, unprepared for fired rounds. Chambers stood in the center of the road, back straight, rifle wedged tight into his shoulder. The bronzed dirt in the air had parted around him, giving off a strange, glassy sheen. A wisp of smoke curled out the end of his barrel and the goat with big pink balls lay collapsed on the far side of the street, near a pair of soldiers in a wadi. I exchanged a confused look with Snoop. Then the Barbie Kid unleashed the most primal sound I’d ever heard, a scream both high and low, as abrupt as it was lasting. He ran to the goat’s body, and we followed, slowly.

  “Goddamn it. What did I just say about keeping the enemy out of our perimeter?” Chambers yelled, lowering his rifle. “If that thing had been a suicide bomber, you’d be explaining to Saint Peter why the fuck you’re so stupid.”

  The Barbie Kid fell to the ground next to the dead animal, cradling its body and petting it. He wept uncontrollably. The goat was lean to the point of emaciation, and its coat was splotched and stringy, like shredded paper. Its balls were even bigger and pinker up close. It’d been shot through the brain at the bridge of its nose, giving the look of a third eye. Fat, gray insects were hopping off its coat into the Barbie Kid’s hair, so I kept my distance.

  “Sergeant Chambers,” I said. “We’re not supposed to shoot animals. Higher’s pretty strict about that.”

  “They’re a menace,” he said. “But okay.”

  I looked around the platoon. Most peered in at the scene, a strained quiet gripping them. There were no jokes, no sounds of spat tobacco, no jingling of gear. Dominguez shook his head and turned back out, instructing the joes nearby to do the same.

  I pointed to the goat. “Pretty close to some of the men.”

  Chambers pounded his chest twice and hooted. “A perfect kill. Never a danger.”

  Snoop was on the ground with the Barbie Kid, placing a hand on his back. “LT Jack? This was his pet, his only habibi. He say his parents didn’t let it in their house, but he fed it and played with it for many months. He’s very sad.”

  “I can see that.” I chewed on my lip. “For fuck’s sake.” I reached into my pockets and pulled out all the bills and change I could find: seventeen dollars and fifty cents, and eight hundred dinars.

  “Tell him to take this,” I told Snoop. “Condolence funds. And Sergeant? Throw some money in there.”

  Chambers sneered, but did as ordered, tossing a twenty-dollar bill to the ground.

  The Barbie Kid wouldn’t take the money, nor would he abandon the dead goat. Putting the bills and change into his cooler, we left him hugging and petting and snotting over the carcass.

  The electricity recon took ten hours. I met with a half dozen Iraqi families over chai and flatbread, discussing the neighborhoods and the Sahwa militias and the problems with electricity and clean water. They had many questions, and I had few answers. Chambers ran security for the rest of the mission, staying out in the bronze fog the entire time. Throughout the day, both the Barbie Kid’s scream and Chambers’ hoot twisted in my mind like screws. Not even Doc Cork’s headache pills could make them go away.

  2

  * * *

  Yo, LT Jack. Source called.”

  I looked up from the poker table. Snoop stood in the doorway, a swirl of dark skin and shadows. I could tell by his voice that the matter was urgent, but there was three hundred dollars in the pot. I’d spent a good hour sandbagging hands. Maybe some of the platoon originals saw what I was doing, but Chambers hadn’t. He’d no clue, thinking I was just another dumb lieutenant who didn’t know how to play cards.

  “Duty calls.” Dominguez’s chipmunk cheeks widened into a grin as he rubbed his shaved head. He’d clean up quickly with me gone. “Insha’Allah. As God wills it.”

  “Something like that,” I said. I stood and put on my uniform top, an amalgam of digital camo, tan and green and gray and ugly as puke. “I’ll cash out when I get back.” I followed Snoop out of the windowless room, the poker game resuming behind us.

  In the two days since the goat incident, everyone had stayed silent about it. There wasn’t much to say. I’d wondered how my brother would’ve handled things, since he was the perfect leader of men or something, but hadn’t been able to land on anything specific. I could always call and ask, I thought, before rejecting the idea. He’d just lecture me for letting it happen in the first place.

  On the other side of the outpost, Snoop and I angled by the command post, where Captain Vrettos hunched over the radio like a broken stork, updating battalion headquarters. He had a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders and head as a shawl.

  “Yes, sir, I understand the tenets of counterinsurgency,” he was saying. His voice was brittle; he sometimes slept in there during the days, on a folding chair, so he could stay up and track our company’s night operations. He must’ve been speaking with someone from battalion. “Clear and hold. Then build.”

  In a whisper, Snoop asked if I wanted to stop and check in with the commander. I shook my head wildly. When battalion got going on the tenets of counterinsurgency, there was no stopping them.

  The interpreters’ room lay on the far reaches of the hallway, across from a small gym. We walked into dank must. The other terps were playing a soccer video game in the dark. I flipped on the light switch and a ceiling panel flickered to life.

  “Lieutenant,” one of them said. “Surf’s up.”

  “For the millionth time, I’m not from that part of California. I grew up in the foothills. By a lake.”

  The terps’ faces remained blank. There was only one California on this side of the world, and nothing I could say would ever change that.

  “Haitham called,” Snoop said.

  Haitham was the town drunk, a toy of a man with flitting eyes and rotting yellow teeth. He was also the Barbie Kid’s estranged uncle. For being a Muslim on the bottle, we figured. We paid him twenty thousand dinars a month, and he still claimed he couldn’t afford toothpaste.

  “He drinks too much.” Snoop liked him more than I did. “But he’s no liar.”

  “True,” I said.

  “He say he watched us the other day. When the new sergeant shot the goat.”

  “He did? Why?”

  “He remembers the new sergeant, from before. He say the new sergeant helped murder Iraqis during the al-Qaeda wars, when the Horse soldiers were here. Called him a white shaytan.”

  I leaned against a bunk with a wood frame and plush foam mattresses. It was a great mystery h
ow the terps had ended up with better beds than us. “Horse soldiers?”

  “First Cav,” another terp said, eyes fixed on the video game. “The horse on their unit patch.”

  “Okay,” I said. “They were here four, five years ago?”

  Snoop shrugged. “I was a terp in the south then. And these Arab fuckclowns”—he pointed to the others—“were still schoolboys in Egypt.”

  Originally from Sudan, Snoop was an equal opportunity racist. The frantic mashing of buttons served as the only response.

  “This makes no sense,” I said, waving away Snoop’s offer of sunflower seeds. He stuck a handful into his mouth. “Chambers is a big white dude with brown hair. Ninety percent of the army is big white dudes with brown hair.”

  “He saw him do this.” Snoop let his right arm go slack and balled his hand into a fist repeatedly, causing the forearm to flex. “How he knew.”

  “Snoop—”

  “He swears in Allah’s name. Big thing to swear on. Even for fuckup Arabs.”

  I rubbed my eyes and fought off a yawn. The grind was getting to me. So was the heat, and it was only April.

  “Some locals got killed a few years ago,” I said. “I don’t want to sound cruel, but this is a war.”

  “Ashuriyah used to be a bad place, LT. Before the moneys and the Surge and the counter-surgery. And check it, Haitham say a man the new sergeant helped kill? The only son of a powerful sheik.”

  “Counterinsurgency,” I said, stressing the last four syllables of the word. “It’s pronounced ‘counter-in-sur-gen-cy.’ ”

  “Yeah, that’s what I say.”

  I didn’t bother to correct him again. Maybe this is a big deal, I thought. But probably not. “Which sheik?”

  “Didn’t say. Just that he doesn’t want to be a source anymore. Something about respecting the Shaba.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Shaba is ‘ghost.’ ”

  I gave him a puzzled look.

  “Like respecting the dead,” he added. I’d no idea what the hell that could mean.

  “He knows we won’t pay him anymore, right?”

  Snoop nodded. “He’s scared of something, for sure.”

  I walked downstairs to the cooks’ pantry, grabbing a warm can of Rip It. It tasted like liquid crack should, flat fruit punch with a splash of electricity. I headed back to our room, hoping the poker game was still going, but instead found everyone napping or reading magazines. Rage Against the Machine blared from the speakers of an unseen laptop.

  “Who won?” I asked.

  Dominguez cursed under his breath in Spanish. I followed his stare to Chambers, who lay in bed, boots still on, hands wrapped behind his head. Straightening his arms, Chambers pointed to a black, hollow-eyed skull on his right forearm. Five other skull tattoos lined his arm from the bottom of his bicep to the top of his wrist. He balled his hand into a fist once, twice, three times.

  “Nice try, Lieutenant,” Chambers said, his eyes pale as slate. “But this ain’t my first rodeo.”

  3

  * * *

  Traffic checkpoints were the kind of missions we’d trained a lot for stateside, but didn’t do much of anymore. The Iraqi army and police handled them. But on a late April morning in his airless office, Captain Vrettos said our platoon needed to complete one more joint mission to meet the month’s quota.

  “And,” he said, “Bravo Company doesn’t fudge quotas.” He had the wide shine in the eyes that came with severe sleep deprivation, so I didn’t fight it.

  We went that afternoon. It was hot, but the sky was gray and cloudy. Chambers organized things while I conducted a radio check with the outpost.

  “Dominguez! You got security from your twelve to your four o’clock. No son, your four.

  “Fucking hell, Doc, have you ever unraveled razor wire before? Use your boots. Like this.

  “Where your gloves at, Hog? Your pocket. Is that where they belong? Right is right, wrong is wrong, and you’re a soup sandwich.”

  I had to admit, Chambers was instilling discipline in the guys. They’d need it when we got back to garrison life in Hawaii. He didn’t like the way we parked our four armored Strykers, either, and reorganized them into a diamond position.

  A rusty station wagon drove down the paved road and stopped at an orange cone fifteen feet short of the checkpoint. Chambers pulled the driver out of the car and showed one of the cherries how to pat down a local, twisting the man’s clothes into bunches while searching. Wearing a gray dishdasha and a turban, the driver—an old man with a large lip sore and a salt-and-pepper beard—looked bored, moving only when a jundi from the Iraqi army asked him to open the trunk. The old man waved at me like we knew one another. He was on his way a few minutes later, the silence of the desert replacing the sound of his car’s motor.

  I pictured myself calling Hog a soup sandwich. Even in my head it sounded contrived.

  I walked over to the stone guard shack on the roadside. It was the only piece of shade for miles on the bleak stretch between Ashuriyah and Camp Independence, the base to our east that served as a northern border for Baghdad proper and as a logistical hub. Chambers joined me a couple of minutes later.

  Our new squad leader looked out at the road, still critiquing our positioning. Low and broad, he swung his shoulders side to side, stretching his back. Deep lines slit his face, creases that gave him a rugged sort of dignity.

  “How old are you, Sergeant?” I asked.

  Chambers spat out a wad of dip. “Thirty last month. Don’t tell the youngbloods, though. Don’t want them thinking their papa bear is too old to whip their ass.”

  I’d thought him older. A pocket of acne scars on his temples somehow aged him too, as did stained teeth and his gray, pallid eyes.

  “Got a wife or girlfriend back home? Kids?”

  “Two ex-wives, four kids that I claim.” He waited for me to laugh. “Two in Texas, the others, not sure. Last I heard, they were moving back to Rochester.”

  “Huh.” Though it was common enough, I hated hearing about young children having to deal with divorce. My mom and dad had managed to stay friends, but that tended not to be the norm. “Lady back home?”

  He snorted. “Learned that lesson. Hope you’re smarter than that, Lieutenant. Jody is a dishonorable son of a bitch, and he got your woman months ago. When they say there’s no one else, just know there always is. Part of a soldier’s life.”

  Good thing Marissa and I broke things off before we left, I thought. Though she had stressed that there was no one else. A lot.

  “Jody can’t get a girl that don’t exist.”

  I had no idea why I’d said “don’t” instead of “doesn’t.”

  “Been banging a new piece of ass at Independence, when we’re there,” he continued. “Intel sergeant from battalion. A choker.”

  There was only one intel sergeant from battalion he could be talking about, a quiet woman with milk chocolate skin who somehow filled out the shape-repressing uniform with curves and angles. I’d talked to Sergeant Griffin a few times. She was kind. Every enlisted man in Hawaii had been trying to get with her for years. None had been successful, as far as I knew.

  I whistled. “How’d you do that?”

  “Power of persuasion,” he said, his voice slurring past the tobacco nestled deep in his cheeks.

  I fumbled about for a change of topic. Talking about women I didn’t know was one thing, but Sergeant Griffin was a fellow soldier.

  “Rumor has it you’ve walked this strip of paradise before,” I eventually said.

  “Fuck, Lieutenant.” He considered his answer, longer than seemed natural. “I’ve spent more time in the desert than I can remember.”

  “Oh yeah? With who?”

  “Once to the ’Stan with Tenth Mountain. Two times here, with Fourth Infantry right after the Invasion, the other with First Cav. Now back with the Electric Strawberry.”

  I bristled at his use of the derisive nickname for the Twenty-F
ifth Infantry, though I wasn’t sure why—I myself had used it often enough. I leaned against the shack and stuck my hands in my pockets, looking far into the brown sands. Lasik-sharpened eyes might’ve spotted a lone mud hut, but besides the large berm to the north that hid the canal, there was nothing. This was our no-man’s-land.

  I heard laughing and looked over at the checkpoint. Doc Cork and three other soldiers were watching something on a cell phone. Two jundis with them began air humping, one with his rifle, the other with a metal detector. Dominguez, up in the Stryker’s gun turret, flung a water bottle at one of the gyrating Iraqis, hitting him in the back.

  “Savages,” I said, trying to impress Chambers, belatedly realizing he might have thought I meant our own soldiers. He didn’t appear to care either way.

  “So,” he said. “It true our commander’s a fag?”

  “I guess.” I’d met Captain Vrettos’ purported boyfriend many times before we left. A CrossFit coach, he’d come in and led physical training once, and could bench more than anyone, even Sipe. That’d stopped most of the gay jokes.

  Chambers shook his head. “What the fuck has happened to my army.”

  “He’s a really good leader,” I said. “Everyone’s a little gay, right?”

  There was no response. A minute or so passed. A gust rose up, spraying our faces with sand pebbles. I shielded my eyes with an arm. Then it was over, and the stillness returned.

  “What you all call this place again?” Chambers asked.

  “Checkpoint Thirty-Eight.”

  “That’s right.” He paused. “Used to be Sayonara Station.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He looked at me in a way that made me understand. “Oh,” I said.

  His blistered lips thinned into a smile. “You know why we have the checkpoint here, Lieutenant Porter?”

  I sucked down some warm water from my CamelBak tube. Petty alpha male games with the sheiks were one thing, but playing them with our own noncoms irritated me.