Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

Spot savored a fresh influx of nicotine, affording us time to imagine what we’d reflexively survived at Qa’im. Which, I tried.

I really did.

Iraqis stuffed rags, blankets, and foam rubber in their windows to protect against who knows what. Heat, perhaps, or noise. Maybe light. We got in regardless.

In a corner room on the second floor of a three-story building in northwest Hit, I backed into a queen-sized roll of foam rubber poking out a window. The window’s sash pinched the roll in the middle, leaving half of the foam extending out over the courtyard behind the house, with the other half protruding into the room. I hadn’t noticed the foam when I’d entered the darkened room. Now it appeared to me on night vision as that which was not space. Across from it, four feathers sat against a wall, having sorted themselves by age.

“Feathers” was our code word for women. These four may have been a grandmother, a mother, and two daughters. We’d broken into their house looking for the cameraman who’d filmed the executions of Iraqi police officers. We’d expected to find the cameraman, of whom we had a blurry digital image, asleep in his bed. Instead, we’d found the feathers. I’d also found a military-aged male, maybe sixteen years old, hiding in a third-floor closet. After we’d declared the house secure, we’d corralled the feathers into this corner room. I’d been sent downstairs to guard them.

The grandmother whispered prayers. The mother rocked from side to side. The oldest daughter had a cleft palate. The younger girl asked me, “Why are you here?”

Her eyes appeared blank on night vision, but I felt her stare on me well enough. She wanted me to explain my presence in that room. Or, maybe, she wanted to know why, of all the houses in Hit, we’d chosen to raid hers. I didn’t know how to explain in English, let alone in Arabic, that it had come down to the toss of a coin. Heads was this house, tails the other.

“Why are you here?” she asked again.

“Shh,” I tried.

“But why?”

“Be quiet, dear,” said the grandmother.

A thump sounded through the ceiling.

“What was that?” asked the older daughter.

I’d found the young man hiding in a closet in the room directly above us. Actually, I’d found the young man’s phone, which he’d held while squeezing his knees to his chest in the dark. As the troop’s technician, this was my job during the assault phase: finding phones using a passive homing device.

Tull had picked the lock on the front door and we’d snuck inside. I’d followed the phone’s signal up the stairs to the third floor. I’d chased the signal down the hall and into a bedroom. I’d homed in on the closet and pointed. Two SEALs, Zsa-Zsa and Mike, had pulled the young man out.

Having analyzed the execution videos, I had an idea of what the cameraman looked like. The boy was too young and squat. Furthermore, I knew what make and model phone the cameraman had used, and the boy’s phone didn’t match. Nor did it have any evidence in memory of having communicated with the phone in question. Following procedure, I lifted the boy’s fingerprints, digitally, then searched for their match in our database. The results came back negative.

The boy would be interrogated, regardless. Zsa-Zsa cuffed him, stood him in a corner, and told him not to move. The thump we’d heard was probably the beginning of his interrogation. It was probably his knees hitting the floor.

Through the ceiling, I heard the boy say, “Please.”

“That’s Saif,” said the mother.

“Impossible,” said the grandmother. “Saif is in Baghdad.”

“He sounds far away,” said the older daughter.

The mother held the grandmother’s hand. “Mama, you’re thinking of Ali. Ali is in Baghdad.”

“Be quiet,” I said to all of them, in Arabic.

Back at our outpost, in the plywood hut where we dressed for missions, a list of Arabic phrases hung on the wall. Thumbing rounds into a magazine, I’d study that list: the words for “hands up,” “tell the truth,” “everybody out,” et cetera. The only phrase I could remember, though, was the one for “be quiet.” Probably because every night that I walked across the moonlit desert, or crept through the blue streets of Hit, or crouched while getting into position for a raid, I felt like I was making too much noise. My knees cracked, my breath rattled, my ears rang. I’d stop breathing and not move a muscle, yet I couldn’t keep my thoughts from jangling.

“You speak Arabic?” asked the younger girl.

“No,” I answered, in English. I understood Arabic, however, if I paid attention. It was like listening to Zeppelin backward.

I’d first heard the rumors about Zeppelin’s satanic messages back in 1981, when I was in the eighth grade. Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist of the band, had made a deal with the devil in exchange for fame. Satan himself had woven a backward message into the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven.” Exposure to that message turned listeners into disciples of the Antichrist. I hadn’t necessarily believed all that, but I’d wanted to hear the message for myself. So, one day I put Led Zeppelin IV on the turntable. I found the lyrics in question, shifted the turntable into neutral, and, with my index finger on the label, spun the record in reverse. It took a while to get the speed just right, so that something like a voice creaked out of the speakers. The voice that emerged, however, sounded more like that of a regular person than Satan. But a regular person in a parallel world who, upon finding a door to ours, had managed to crack it open long enough to say a few words. Having tuned my ear to that frequency, I was able to understand the feathers.

I understood the dogs in the same way. Packs of wild dogs roamed the deserts of Iraq. I’d see them while sitting in the door of the Black Hawk, next to the cannon, during our long rides out into the night. We’d fly over rolling sand dunes of uniform amplitude, frequency, and moon shadow as the dogs ran in wedge-shaped packs below. The gunner would lead them while test-firing the cannon.

The muzzle’s heart-shaped flame would warm my cheek. Tracers would bend down toward the running dogs, who, leaving their dead behind, would take off in a new direction. We’d touch down in the sand, far from anything. I’d step out the door, my legs half-asleep. The lifting Black Hawk would raise the sand into suspension, creating a golden haze on night vision. Off goggles it’d be pitch-black. I’d wait for the sand to settle, and for my teammates to emerge from the haze. Then I’d fall into formation for our walk across the desert toward Hit, Ramadi, or Fallujah. Along the way, dogs would swoop in from distant sand dunes. They’d climb out of deep, twisting wadis. They’d leap straight out of the pitch-black nothing. And they’d start talking.

The dogs would appear white-hot on night vision. Blue static would crackle in their fur. To the naked eye, they’d look jet-black and oily. Sneezing and baring their teeth, they’d trot alongside us. Earlier that night, as we’d patrolled eastward across the desert toward Hit, one dog had chosen to follow me. When I’d sped up, it had sped up. When I’d stopped to rest, it had stopped, too. During one such respite, the dog had looked at me, and said, “Sometimes sedition, sometimes blight.”

Months later, after I returned home, I looked up “sedition.” I also looked up a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “Boots,” which the dogs liked to recite when covering large distances.

Kipling’s poem is about a British soldier in Africa during the Second Boer War who, as a member of an infantry regiment, endures a forced march across eight hundred miles of hot, shifting sands. The days and weeks spent marching are compressed into lines and stanzas. At the outset of the poem, the soldier seems resigned to his lot. The dogs in Iraq, therefore, chant in time with the march: Boots! Boots! Movin’ up and down again! Then the miles begin to take their toll on the soldier. His heart knocks like a tiny fist; his head throbs under the hammering sun. Day after day, all he sees are the boots of the men marching in front of him. Boots rising and falling. Boots kicking up sand. Boots disappearing and reappearing in a gritty haze. The sight eventually drives the soldier insane. So, by the end of the poem, either the dogs are telepathic or it’s just my imagination whispering, Boots.