Hold still, their doc said.
Doc’s mad at me. Think I’m goin home?
Fifteen days after they had arrived in-country, they drove over an IED in a soft-skinned vehicle and lost Chidester. The explosion leaped out of the road and rose like batwings. In the following vehicle, Skinner’s ears popped and cut off like overloaded speakers. The process of evacuating the casualties did not go smoothly. There was a mound of dried black lava on the ground and his mind kept focusing on it instead of on tasks he had been given. When they got back inside the wire, the platoon was in a shambles. Someone ordered Lawson to clean the blood off and Lawson said I don’t feel the need to do that. Skinner’s ears were ringing still. They were ordered right back out again and spent the night on overwatch, seeing the land in infrared. The word was that we will bomb the city from the air. Dear Lord, please let me kill someone tonight. For days inside the wire, they sat around with their shirts off, their chests pasty and macerated from their armor and covered in heat rash, wearing shades, smoking cigarettes, examining their peeling feet.
Bomb the living shit out of them.
That’s not going to happen.
Burn them all alive with Willie Pete. Yes, it will. That’s why we’re getting downtime.
It turned out there was an argument going on between Captain Friedman and the battalion. When he came back, he said there’s been some discussion about survivability with the kinds of attacks we’re getting out here. He chose what he said carefully. We will be adaptive. They were dismissed. At the end of the month, a second memorial got set up by the rotting drums. Well, it turned out Lugo hadn’t made it either. Why’d you have to tell me that? Lawson demanded. He pushed the chaplain’s arm off his shoulders. The colonel showed up and spoke about the viscous medium of combat. Did he say vicious? When he was gone, their captain told them the best way they could honor those they had lost. They rigged the trucks with hillbilly armor and went back out in the city.
It now stank like something you could not imagine. They rolled by villas with ironwork terraces and Skinner looked for the families that had been there. Instead, he saw bearded men with cell phones, shiny watches. One had had his eye cut out, you could tell. In some sections, walls were perforated like lace. Through the holes you could see movement and hear noise and then see dogs ripping at something in the rubble. A freestanding staircase led up to nothing. Sarge, who do I get to kill today? Lawson said. They came upon a bus without wheels resting on its axles. A woman with her head covered came out and emptied a bucket into the shit lake on the ground. The day never ended. Skinner shifted in the glare, holding the weight of his gear on his body, turning back and forth, looking around, touching his safety with his thumb, standing in rubble, feeling watched, chewing on his Camelbak hose, sucking water, tasting warm bacteria plastic.
Time jumped or crawled. How long have we got left? Nowling said and guys told him to shut up. Let me see. He counted on his short fingers but came to no conclusion. For a week, another unit bivouacked with them. Skinner watched their dark-skinned zip-tied prisoners, on their way to Abu Ghraib, eating MREs like contortionists. The outside world seemed far away and less than real. He watched them praying, whispering with their eyes shut, foreheads pressed to the dirt. A scratching loudspeaker in the city was playing the call to prayer.
Allah can’t help you, a soldier from down south said. Now you got me.
They shot a farmer’s goat and Broadbent cooked it over a drum, Jamaican style. It was meant to be Chidester’s wake. The translator could get you hash. It was a celebration after a fashion. They told stories about Chidester, about the man he’d been.
In the middle of the night, Captain Friedman came out of the hangar and came right at them.
Would those motherfuckers of you who are drinking fuckin haji booze like to join me when I notify the families of the buddies you’re going to get killed?
Skinner hung his head.
Have a nice fuckin party.
Their captain left and they stared into the dark orange glow evolving in the drum. Their translator sold them pills. Dominguez’s trousers fell off. I must of lost like twenty pounds. Everyone was thin.
Two guys got in an argument and started threatening to frag each other. Here’s the deal, the squad leaders said. Anybody who’s a problem child, the whole unit is gonna beat their ass next time. All of us. And if that don’t work, you will get fragged. By me.
In broad daylight, they snuck up on a boy hiding an explosive device on the side of the road under a plastic bag and they photographed him.
I just can’t take the anxiety, Jones said to the doc. I’d rather do whatever and get it over with.
Then you need to talk to a combat stress nurse, not me.
A rumor went around that they were going to be sent somewhere else, but they knew it wasn’t true. They didn’t believe anything they heard. They got resupplied. Y’all make a chain, the driver said. I gotta turn and burn. The ammunition boxes formed a cube nearly ten by ten by ten. The Texan with the radio cleaned his battery contacts with a pencil eraser and checked his fill three times before going out. The heat intensified, if that was possible, and they had a heat casualty, Pomerant. The consensus was that he was bullshitting. There were fewer and fewer of them. A building exploded when they were in front of it and Danzig, a high school wrestler, disappeared. Skinner’s mind interpreted a piece of twisted metal as a person who had been burned and crucified, but it was not. A sniper shot their staff sergeant in the head. Their staff sergeant scrambled after his Kevlar like a fumbled football, caught it and put it back on. Guys jumped away from him as if he were covered in hornets.
They did IED sweeps on foot, down the roads along the canal. He kept thinking this is the last thing you are going to see, the red earth with the sun glaring off it.
A man wearing brand-name knockoff sunglasses and tight jeans came walking towards them through the heat shimmer. He was pulling along a dirty little boy by the wrist. The boy was filthy and his hair was full of powdery dust. The man ignored the weapons pointed at his chest. Gesturing at the blasted dwellings, he said:
These people are enemy. I am friend. You will come to me for cooperation.
He was wearing perfume, a heavy, cloying, womanly, boudoir fragrance.
I don’t know you, Graziano said, rubbing his black-whiskered jaw.
You will know. Believe me.
Skinner saw the inside of a green room that had been a school. The furniture had been piled against the windows. You saw the charred buildings across the street through interlocking table legs. Flies were clustering on the eyes and mouths of the children on the floor. He held his rag over his face to breathe.
When they were driving and the hot wind was blowing over them, he tied the rag over his face to block the sand. He used the rag when he took apart his weapon and rubbed his firing pin, leaving black streaks on the cloth that smelled like cordite and CLP.
Cross-legged, he dumped the rounds out of his magazines and, taking his time, cleaned each one of them individually using the rag, the cigarette hanging out of his mouth, fingernails black with cordite, and loaded each one of them back in one at a time, taking them from the candy bowl of his helmet and putting them back in his magazines, which he rapped against his helmet when he was wearing it, before he shoved them in his weapon.
They called their captain Freebird. At ease, he said. He had a whiteboard on an easel and a dry erase marker in his hand. Lessons learned. We know they talk to each other. We know about the cell phones and the loudspeaker on the mosque. When you are in the same location more than five minutes, you are getting in the red zone. There needs to be a countdown in everybody’s head. The roads that are soft, that they can dig under, obviously those are our danger areas. Anytime you’ve got a road going over a culvert or a stream, they can emplace something under there. You’ve got the sides of the road to look at. If the sides are hidden, it means they can get to the road without you seeing them. We’re talking about bigger and bigger munitions. He drew a circle on the whiteboard. We’re getting inside the kill radius before we can even see anything, so we need to look at that. We’re looking for trigger hides, anytime you see piled up rocks, little hooches, whatever. Det cord sticking out of the ground. Trash, plastic bags, anything that covers something else. I need you talking to each other. This is everybody’s ballgame. Our safety zone is here. He tried to draw it on the whiteboard but the marker was out of ink. Fucking thing. He threw it. Let me see your Ka-bar, Staff Sergeant. Thank you. All you men in the back stand up so you can see this. The twenty-year-olds stood up. He drew a line in the sand. This is Tomahawk. Here is Hogan. He drew another line. This is the no-go line. The ammo can is Town Hall. The rock is the Post Office. The eraser is the Goat Farm. He took his G-Shock watch off and put it on the ground and squatted over it with the knife. Can everybody see? This is what we want to do. We can’t do everything we want to do, so this is it.