Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

There was no traffic. Beale balled the convoy in at sixty miles an hour and peeled off the highway and cruised straight across the open dirt shoulder to the Muthanna intersection, where the traffic control point had once been. The convoy stopped facing the exploded, smoking front of the nearby building that had been the home to the thirty soldiers billeted there. It was as if, staring at the toy snow globe of a disaster, they’d been sucked inside its distorting glass. Bits and pieces of vehicles decorated this area, axles, tires, hoods; the rattletrap, clanking flagpole that had been mounted in the center of the checkpoint (topped, on her prior visit, by American and Iraqi flags) had fallen and lay like the arm of a sundial across the turrets of several Humvees. Fowler dismounted. Her second step caused a windshield wiper to lever from a yellow-green puddle of antifreeze. Larger hunks of metal were strewn across what had once been pavement, their wiring still cooking off. Tires collapsed and boiled in upon themselves and the bombed soldiers, some in nothing more than boxers, shoeless, jostled and sprinted around the open street with aimless and stunned expressions, emptied fire extinguishers in their hands. The report said that a truck bomb had detonated at the Muthanna intersection, but a different report— This is what it looks like to be losing— was what ran through her head.

She pushed through the crowd until she found herself at the edge of what must have been the blast crater itself. An ossuary down there, soft white smoke, made worse by the fact that the checkpoint hadn’t been fortified — no T-walls, no machine gun towers, not enough personnel. Nobody had wanted to station troops there except Colonel Seacourt, who’d volunteered. Short on manpower, he’d tapped a battery of artillerymen who’d been stationed in Dusseldorf sampling the local beer gardens, procured them a handful of Humvees, and ordered a platoon from Masterson’s Delta Company to show them the ropes. Those soldiers, Masterson’s soldiers, were what worried Fowler as she began to climb the pile of rebar and concrete where the front of the barracks once had been. She did not want to show her platoon another dead soldier from their own battalion, did not want to demoralize them any more than necessary. And so when an unfamiliar sergeant flagged her down on top of the pile and said, “I think one of your guys is trapped,” and pointed to a long, flattened slab of concrete, the first reaction she felt was despair.

“Is he alive?” she asked.

“Hell, I don’t know,” the sergeant said. “Peters, you hear anything?”

The soldier he’d called Peters was lying flat down in the rubble and had his arm thrust in up to the shoulder under the slab.

“I’m touching him, sir,” he said. “I can feel him. He squeezed my hand. He’s right down there, just right down there.” He shouted down into the hole, “We got some equipment. We’re coming down. We’re gonna lift this baby up and you’re out. You’re getting out, okay?”

* * *

They had practiced and practiced this, both at Fort Riley and in the first five or so recovery missions they’d so far made outside the wire. But these situations had involved vehicles that had broken down or been hit with an IED, and thus no actual human life had been at stake. Usually by the time they arrived on scene everyone had been evacuated, the area cleared by an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team. “Eggleston,” she shouted, banging on the Hercules. “We got to go up this hill. Come on. There’s a guy pinned in the rubble up top. Get the winch fired up, get the painter cable out.”

Eggleston popped his head through the hatch on top of the Hercules and gazed at the pile of rubble doubtfully. “This is a flat-ground vehicle, ma’am. Even if I did get up there, there’s no way that I could brace her enough to lift anything.”

“Waldorf!” she shouted, turning away. She could see the rest of her platoon, some dismounted, some still in their vehicles, standing around in shock. Thinking the same thing she had thought when she came in. “Take the painter and a bunch of chains and go up the pile.” There was silence, stubborn gloom, horror, probably.

“There’s nobody fucking alive up there,” Waldorf said.

“Where’d you go to school, Waldorf? Plano High, right?” She was unloading gear from the hatch on the side of the Hercules. “And I know you played ball there.”

“Yes, ma’am. Middle linebacker.”

“Good. Texas football. That’s a real sport.” She tossed him a bundle of cable. “Give your weapon to Jimenez. You’re leading us up.”

“Why do I got to hold his weapon?” Jimenez said.

“You volunteer to go up?”

“No.”

“That’s reason one. Reason two is that you’re Mexican. And reason three is that you played, what, beach volleyball? Come on, man, don’t front me.”

“That’s discriminatory, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “Give those weapons to Crawford. You’re next on the pile.” She banged the side of the Hercules. “You hear that, Eggleston? Let the painter out. You got the pride of beach volleyball at San Bernardino High leading you up.”

“I played soccer,” Jimenez said over his shoulder.

“What, at recess?” Fowler asked. Humor. That was what she’d learned from Pulowski. Disarm them. Push the fear away. It wasn’t exactly Leno, but still, Eggleston dropped down inside the hatch. She could hear the painter cable playing out. Humor and momentum. Motivate each guy individually. Don’t be afraid to look like a fool. That’s the other thing Pulowski would’ve said. Don’t just tell them it’s the right thing to do, tell them why. She hopped up on the fender above the Hercules’ tracks and began to unshackle the boom for the main winch and nodded to Dykstra and Halt and they climbed up to raise it. She was still working on how to calm Eggleston down when Beale stormed around the back of the Hercules, weapon at the ready (for no good reason), trying to pinch his face into what she assumed was his version of tenacity and authority, but which to her looked like he had a stomachache.

“Sergeant,” she shouted. “Do you fucking trust me?”

Beale glanced around as if confused, as if maybe someone else in the platoon would share his sense of how ridiculous Fowler was being.

“Just be honest,” Fowler said. “I’m in a hurry.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t fucking trust you?”

“Why not?” From up on top of the Hercules, some ten feet above the ground, she could see why Eggleston was worried about the huge vehicle tipping. “It’s because you think I’m too fucking cautious, isn’t it? I don’t push the envelope. I got no balls. Literally.” She stood and pointed at her crotch. “No fucking balls! I’m too safety-conscious. I got all these stupid family values rules—”

“Uh,” Beale said.

“Tell him.” She pointed at Eggleston, who’d poked his head back up through the Hercules hatch. “Tell him I went to Pussydale High School in Vaginaville, Kansas, and I fucking don’t know shit about how to take a risk.”

“Why?” Beale asked.

“Because we are going to drive the Hercules up that pile and Eggleston thinks it’s too dangerous and I want you to explain to Eggleston that if Family Values Fowler is in on this thing, then there’s no fucking way it could be dangerous.”

“She’s got a point there, Eggy,” Beale said.

* * *

Fowler walked backward up the pile, waving hand signals to Beale, who stuck his head down into the turret to talk to Eggleston. Whenever the Hercules paused or seemed to teeter, Beale shouted, “Pussydale High!” down into the hatch, and Eggleston would gun the diesel engine and the Hercules would rise farther up the pile like some undersea beast. Fowler hand-signaled Eggleston to stop right at the edge of the fallen wall, like they’d practiced when towing junked cars out of a mud pit at Fort Riley. Beale laid the steel painter cable just along the slab’s edge and Fowler flattened herself beside it and peered into the darkness underneath and tried to shove the cable through, but it bent and wiggled in her hand. She scrabbled at the rubble and got her arm in underneath and wrapped the cable around her wrist and she nodded to Beale and said, “Tell Eggy to drop the blade,” and Eggleston dropped the blade that descended from the front of the Hercules and braced it against the bottom edge of the slab. Fowler wriggled her shoulder in until she could feel cold stone against her cheek. “Pry it up,” she said. Her team jammed pry bars under the top edge of the slab and with every little cautious hand’s-breadth or so that they achieved in lift, Fowler kept edging underneath, careful, careful, careful, with Beale digging under her shoulder until she was beneath the slab entirely and she could feel the weight of it smooth against her chest and her arm was extended beneath the concrete. Something plucked her sleeve. She tried to ignore it, imagining a rat, until she felt the trapped soldier’s fingers silently circle the soft skin of her wrist. Her head was turned in the wrong direction, though, so that instead of being able to see him, she was looking back at Beale’s sweating face.