David Corbett - Do They Know I'm Running

As they practiced their run-throughs, Godo seemed distracted, one minute almost incandescent in his focus, the next wrapped inside himself so tight he looked like he might lock up in a kind of trance. The problem wasn’t physical-the infection in his leg had settled down, he moved okay, looked strong. Happy drew him aside as he was doing a final weapon check, gestured toward the door. “Outside for a minute?”

The night was damp, a rustling roar from the walnut trees whipping around in the wind. The clouds were plump in the moonless sky. Chafing their arms against the cold, they tested their way along the gravel to where the van and pickup were parked, out of earshot from the house.

Happy lit up a smoke, needing two matches in the wind. He took one long drag, then said, “What’s wrong?”

Godo was still rubbing his arms. “Who says anything’s wrong?”

“Don’t fuck with me, not now. This is too important.”

“I know how important it is.”

“Then tell me the truth. What’s eating you?”

Godo’s breathing became slightly labored, then he coughed. “Hard to talk about.”

“That’s why it’s important to talk about it.”

“Who are you now-Dr. Happy?”

“This about Iraq?”

“What isn’t? Fuck you, by the way.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don’t-”

“I told you my story. You think I was proud? I felt like a total chickenshit. But something’s got you by the nuts, it’s got some power over you. Tell me about it. It’ll lose some of that power, I promise.”

A smile crept across Godo’s pitted face. “Where’d you learn that-Oprah?”

“Listen to me. You’re the one I gotta lean on, Godo. You’re the one who gets it. I can’t have you going in and out. Every second, you gotta be there.”

“I know what I gotta do.”

“It ain’t a question of what you know. It’s a question of what’s gonna get in the way at exactly the wrong time if you don’t wrestle it to the fucking ground. Now talk to me about it.”

HIS UNIT WAS NEARING THE END OF THEIR SHIFT ON FALLUJAH’S WEST ern outskirts, a flash checkpoint, no concertina wire, no sandbags, no glow sticks, just the Humvee with the engine running for the sake of the headlights, the diesel fumes increasingly noxious as the hours passed. Dawn smeared a thickening mustard haze across the east while overhead the night sky softened from black to a gritty shade of brown. The sand beneath their feet crunched with every step.

The usual shabby low-slung houses bordered the road, while beyond them, emerging in murky silhouette, were palm and eucalyptus trees, elephant grass, a distant camel, a water buffalo. Soon the day’s first prayers would blast by loudspeaker, courtesy of the local muezzin, from the nearest minaret, same thing all across the city, mosques that during the battle served as secret armories, pillboxes, sniper hides.

It was always a toss-up, which would start first, the morning prayers or the daybreak dog barking. Everybody’d come to hate the dogs, but shooting them for sport was a no go-the locals saw it as cruelty, not pest control-so Godo held his fire as he caught sight of a slinking form maybe twenty yards behind the Hummer, sniffing its way forward, a skeleton with a tail and a nose. The wind was brisk, the dust thick, the cold piercing; all this time in-country, he still hadn’t adjusted to the sixty-degree temperature swings on any given day.

Among themselves, the marines sometimes joked that they’d made Fallujah the safest city in Iraq-by reducing it to a pile of rocks. On the plus side, there were fewer bats. As for the ruin, it wasn’t like they’d had much choice, given the way the mujahideen had prepped the battle space, the way they’d chosen to fight. Now, with the elections over, the new year in full swing, civilians were testing their way back into the city to sort through the wreckage and recover what remained of their lives.

Military-age males-MAMs, they got called, another joke-were fingerprinted, given retina scans, issued special ID cards they had to display whenever confronted. Few vehicles were allowed inside the city limits and the ones that were got tossed inside out, nothing left to chance. It was drudgery, it was tense, it was the fucking pits. It was the shores of goddamn Tripoli.

The problem was Ramadi. Thirty miles west, it hadn’t suffered the holocaust. A loose-knit bloc of insurgent gangs ruled the souk, the mosques, the winding alleyways where things got bartered for a favor down the line or sold outright for cash. Route 10, the open road between the cities, was the biggest but by no means only ratline connecting the two locales. Every way in and out of the city had to be tamped down tight.

Meanwhile, the gradual influx of redevelopment money had brought a certain breed of carpetbagger to Al Anbar, negotiating deals on landfills and power plants and water-treatment facilities, few of which seemed to be getting built. The men with the bags of money and the big ideas had to get around, though, and they did, with their well-paid condottieri, dressed in cargo pants and flak jackets and Oakley shades, armed to the tits and charging around the country in their SUVs at ninety miles an hour, slowing for no one, running down dogs and sheep, old men and kids. Accidental deaths alone had caused untold grief for the marines. Intelligence dried up, resistance to the simplest request became routine, defying orders became a badge of honor, especially for MAMs.

Then a team of contractors with an outfit named Harmon Stern Associates gunned down two Sunni men repairing their pickup on the road between Ramadi and Fallujah. Iraqis near the scene said the two men shot down did nothing. Tribal leaders and imams pressed for a face-to-face with the colonel, they wanted justice. They were assured the men responsible would be apprehended but promised nothing more. A BOLO-be on the lookout-went out with the names of the contractors. Every unit throwing down a checkpoint knew what to do if the men showed up on their watch.

Chavous manned the up gun on the Hummer. Godo and Benedict and Pimentel and the new guy, Bobby Salgado-Mobley’s replacement, a transfer from the Three Five-did the hassle work on the ground.

Salgado hadn’t been welcomed much, not like it was anyone’s fault. The loss of Mobley still pissed everybody off but it wasn’t just that. You knew the next guy could get lit the same way, so why bond? The buddy-up camaraderie of the invasion and the first flush of battle got countermanded by death. Goodbye only got harder if you bothered too much over hello, so everybody just gave a nod, figured the new guy knew his job. If not, he’d get told.

Turned out Salgado-a true vato loco , Sycamore Street Mid-nighter from Huntington Beach-had some piss up his spine. He hadn’t enjoyed the color-blind unit cohesion Godo had so far. His previous platoon had included two die-hard haters and that’s all they needed, the one to back the other up when launching off on some phobic jag of anti-Latino bullshit. They were just as outrageous to the blacks but that wasn’t Salgado’s problem. He was still hot over the constant niggling wetback pepper-belly nacho-nigger bullshit. He told Godo not to be stupid.

“These cats ain’t your friends,” he said one night over a cold MRE. “Don’t get your cholo ass in a bind and forget that.”

Godo pretended to give that deep thought. He wasn’t sure what to make of Salgado. Kind of guy, he thought, who might pitch himself off a roof, convinced all he wanted was a better view. “Mobley fought his black ass off for me, I watched him die. Chavous is a fucking redneck but he never failed me once. Ditto Pimentel, who’s crazy but that comes in handy sometimes. And I’d lay down my life for Gunny Benedict.”