Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

The snow had melted and the sun shone down on a muddy world. It promised to be a bright, warm day. Levi and I got into the HiLux, and on the ride away from the LZ, I congratulated him and asked how it felt to be a father.

“It is strange,” Levi said. “I have never much worried, but sefferal times a night now I wake up afraid the boy is dead. And I sneak into his room and, like this”—he wet an index finger and held it under his nose—“I check his breeding.”

“And he’s okay?” I said.

Levi sat hunched over, with his knees above the dash. “Yes,” he said.

I looked out the windshield at the war, which, stamp-wise, could’ve been a scene from Brueghel’s Triumph of Death —one that, without a skeleton playing the hurdy-gurdy, or a wagon full of skulls, or a dark iron bell, still raised the question of salvation. At the smoldering trash pit, I turned right, onto the road that ended at the artillery range.

“We will make a fire mission?” Levi asked.

“Correct,” I said.

Excited, Levi got out the big green radio and started messing with freqs. I parked at the edge of the range, where the ashen hulks of what might once have been tanks had been bulldozed into a pile. Presumably, the same dozer that had cleared these wrecks had also scraped the giant concentric rings in the field of mud before us. Way out on top of the bull’s-eye was our target, Chin and No Chin’s truck, right where I’d asked for it to be slung.

Hal and I had met at the dog cages the night before to discuss the rise of M.J., and whether or not Levi still had a place with us. While the dogs had rolled around, we’d devised this test.

I sat on the hood of the HiLux as Levi shot a bearing to the target with his compass and gauged the winds by the smoke blowing off the trash pit. Then he called it in, his Dutch accent somehow thicker after two weeks in Texas. But the howitzers’ read-back was good. And, soon enough, iron scratches appeared against the clear blue sky. I followed them to impact, where fountains of mud ascended out of white-hot flashes. The mud fell, the booms rolled by, and I saw that the hits were good: the truck was badly damaged.

Still, enough of it remained to be hit again, without question. While Levi questioned, the magnetic pole upon which his bearing was anchored drifted ever so slightly; the breeze against which he’d applied his correction stiffened, and the men cradling the heavy shells of his next barrage cursed the unknown reasons for the holdup.

Afight broke out on the far side of the dining facility, over by the milk. A fridge door slapped shut, followed by sounds of shoving and punches being thrown. Soldiers dodged out of the way before a few brave souls went in to break it up. There were noises of slipped holds and flail, of tables and chairs scraping across the concrete floor. Then Digger’s voice rang out— I’ll kill you! —and for a moment it seemed like this night, a Friday, was about to transcend all its false promises.

Every Friday was rib night at this DFAC. Soldiers spent all day making the sauce, marinating the ribs, and stoking mesquite embers in split oil drums. They baked a cake the size of a garage door. They decorated the DFAC—a giant white tent—with balloons and streamers. They went to all this trouble, I knew, with good intentions. They wanted us to feel appreciated, and to give us a taste of home. They wanted us to enjoy, at least, the illusion of a party—as if this were a real Friday night, with an actual weekend to follow, and we might find it within ourselves to break a few weekday rules. Fighting, however, was prohibited.

Tables and chairs were being moved back to where they belonged, and a new line was forming for the milk. Digger walked over to where Hal and I sat, where we always sat, by the Jell-O cart.

“No one waits their goddamn turn anymore,” Digger said. The collar of his T-shirt appeared to have been balled up and jerked around. Bright red scratches swelled on his neck. His eyes were red and bleary, like he hadn’t slept.

“You all right?” Hal asked.

“I’m fine,” Digger said.

Digger set a partially crushed carton of chocolate milk on the table. He laid down his cardboard tray, scattered with a few ribs he must’ve salvaged off the floor. He sat across from me, and flies settled on his ribs.

“I can’t eat this,” Digger said.

I’d tripled up on trays to prevent rib grease from soaking through. I separated the bottom tray and loaded it with half my ribs. Hal gave half his ribs, too. Digger—on the backside of the adrenaline rush that had fueled his fistfight—was staring off into nowhere, so I reached across the table and slid his old tray aside. Flies lifted off those ribs and spun their little orbits. Digger tilted a bit in his seat. As I pushed the new tray in front of him, his mouth dropped open and his eyes closed.

The DFAC was packed with soldiers who’d spent all day in the summer sun. Their faces were shiny with sweat, their eyes wild with heat exhaustion. Their laughter bounced off the tent’s taut skin, reverberated in its aluminum frame, and rattled the turnbuckles, S-hooks, and galvanized wire that held the whole thing together. Hal dropped one clean bone after another at the center of the table. Flies walked across Digger’s face to drink from the corners of his mouth. He’d been up all night the night before, on that mission out in Wardak, then up all day wrestling demons in the heat. Tired as he was, he’d fought that poor guy over by the milk.

Digger appeared to skip the early stages of sleep—in which his body would’ve cooled, his heart rate slowed—to plunge directly into REM. His eyes shifted as he began to dream. I watched them draw triangles under their lids.

AROUND TWO A.M. that morning, during a raid on a compound out in Wardak, Digger had killed three men in a room. They were sleeping in three corners, with an AK-47 resting on the floor in the center of the room, when Digger crept in. The first man in the first corner woke, reached for the AK, and Digger shot him. The next man in the next corner reached, and Digger shot him, too. The third man’s fingers were almost touching the weapon when he died.

I heard the shots from where I stood, outside the walls of that compound, with Hal. Each shot sounded like when you walk into a dark room, flip a switch, and the filament in the bulb pops. I went into the room after the fact. Seeing the men reaching out for that AK, in death, I figured there had to have been some sort of conversation between them. Like, who would sleep in what corner, and where would they put their only weapon, the muzzle of which had been wrapped in orange wire, in what seemed to me a superstitious way. Like the wire had transformed the AK into a good luck charm, and the men had seen fit to leave it at the center of the room, beyond arm’s length of any one of them, so that the good luck might extend to them equally. Yet they’d all reached for the AK when Digger had snuck into the room.

We searched the compound and found nothing. We took digital fingerprints of the dead men and beamed them back to Higher, who ran them through the database. Results were inconclusive. From the compound, we walked a mile through tall grass to where the helicopters would pick us up. An owl circled overhead in twilight, until the helicopters dropped out of the sky and scared it away. Digger and I climbed into the same helo and sat across from one another in the cargo bay. Sunrise through the window behind me lit Digger’s stoic face as we flew back to Sharana.

It was already hot by the time we’d arrived at our outpost on the north end of the runway, where we lived in old shipping containers. Mine smelled as if it had been used to transport pepper. I stood my rifle in a corner and propped my armor against a wall. I closed the shipping container’s heavy metal door and lay down on my cot. I fell into as deep a sleep as the heat of the day would allow. My dream was short-circuiting.