Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“Don’t. Move.” A nasal voice whispered from the center of the depression. Nervous glances over our shoulders confirmed what our ears had told us: Sergeant Miller had walked into the middle of our defensive position.

“The other squad has been captured,” he said, taking a knee. “Chiu is now your commander.” Forgetting our security responsibilities, we turned to Chiu, whose face had turned to ash. “What now, Cadet Chiu?”

“We… we need to get our guys back?”

“Correct. And the enemy doesn’t know you’re here. They’ll let their guard down. Believe it or not, you have the advantage.”

With prodding, the Vein got Chiu to order us out of the depression and through the woods, in the direction of the lost squad. To Chiu’s credit, he maintained control over our movements. By splitting us into two fireteams, one moving at a time, a sort of leapfrog motion developed. Minutes later, those of us in the front heard muffled voices.

Chiu crawled up to us, Sergeant Miller following. The voices got louder and louder, and between tree trunks and foliage we saw a short line of faux prisoners about a hundred feet away, the faded inside-out uniform of the enemy interlaced among them.

“Now’s your chance,” the Vein said. A man of action, he treasured opportunity above all else. His eyes were dancing with anticipation. “Initiate an assault, Chiu!”

The correct way to initiate an assault in modern war, or even pretend modern war, is to open fire with the primary weapons system, in this case, the rubber M249 light machine gun. The element of surprise maintained absolute precedence, as battles could begin and end in seconds. All the Vein wanted was for Chiu to give that order, so the cadet carrying the machine gun could yell, “RAT-TAT-TAT!” and then the rest of us would begin firing our rubber rifles in “BANG BANG BANG!” succession. Questions that tours in Iraq and Afghanistan taught us — like “Couldn’t you potentially hit the prisoners?” and “Why didn’t you radio higher for support?”—didn’t exist in ROTC, nor did they cross our minds then. Nonetheless, what followed couldn’t ever have been right, even in the pretend wilds behind the ROTC department.

Desperate to initiate the assault, Chiu picked up a large stick at his side and stood up, rifle in his other hand. Before the Vein could snatch him back down, Chiu pointed the stick in the direction of the prisoners’ march and unleashed a raw scream, not a semblance of hesitation in his voice:

“CHAARRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGEEEEE!”

Chiu ran north, fireteams following, unsure of what else to do. Some began yelling themselves, and a bizarre mix of Rebel yells and howling filled the woods. First dismayed, then frightened by the voices and bodies coming their way, enemy and prisoner alike fled, eager to return to a world of power naps and stale beer. We followed, running with a child’s delight we believed long ago shed, only to find that the advances of puberty and irony hadn’t killed it off after all.

Chiu’s Charge, though never again attempted and often derided, went down in the annals of university history. Sergeant Miller made no mention of it at physical training the next day. In the years after, though, Chiu swore the Vein flashed him another toothy sneer that morning. “Even he,” Chiu told us, “recognized my tactical genius.”

A week after his unit arrived to Afghanistan, Chiu was nearly killed in a mortar attack south of Kandahar. A round crashed through the roof of a housing trailer, carving a master sergeant in half. Shrapnel from the explosion cut through Chiu’s upper leg, almost severing a major artery. Medics stabilized him, but not quickly enough to save the leg. A smaller piece of shrapnel cut off a chunk of his left ear, leaving him partially deaf.

In my stead, my brother visited Chiu at the hospital. A general had already come by and awarded Chiu his Purple Heart, something he’d taken to using as a bookmark for his robot romance novels. He seemed in good spirits, given the circumstances, and Will asked about old college stories to keep the mood light. One of the first tales my brother heard was Chiu’s Charge.

“I never figured out what the right answer to that situation was,” Chiu said after finishing the story, shaking his head. “Guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?”

The joint part of the joint security station arrived the morning after Ortiz’s service: twenty jundi s, all wearing the baked chocolate chip uniform of the Iraqi Army. The change had to be done to maintain a permanent armed presence in Ashuriyah, something the town council had requested from Captain Vrettos, who had to clear it with the Big Man, who had to clear it with the brigade commander, who had to clear it with the division commander, who had to clear it with the Multi-National Force — Iraq commander, who had said yes.

They moved into the stale, dusty rooms of the first floor, to the fury of nearly everyone.

“Everyone in my fireteam is sleeping with one eye fucking open,” Dominguez said.

“I’m gonna smell like camel jockey now,” Batule said.

“I can’t believe they’re making us live with sand niggers,” Snoop said.

“My men are as bothered as yours,” Saif, their platoon leader, said. “As officers, we must lead by example.”

I patted Dominguez on the back and told Batule to keep his mouth shut and had some of the black soldiers explain to Snoop the irony of his slur, but I hadn’t known how to respond to the Iraqi platoon leader. During previous interactions, Saif hadn’t revealed any hint of his fluency in English, the result of twelve years of tutoring with an uncle who’d once lived in Toronto.

“Before, I watched and learned,” he said. He was nearly as tall as me and twice as wide. Though he was only in his late twenties, the stresses of war, combat helmets, and a young daughter had left his hair a black horseshoe. He maintained a trim mustache and couldn’t understand why American infantry officers weren’t supposed to grow one, since every culture but ours knew that mustaches and masculinity were intrinsically linked. “I’ve seen many Americans come and go. Your units all work differently from each other.”

I asked what else he’d learned.

“For one, there is a difference between allies and partners. Allies do their own thing. Partners work together. For two, Americans have good hearts, but get impatient when they don’t sleep enough.” An eddy of cigarette smoke and yellow molars whirled up at me. “Especially young molazim s far from home for the first time.”

I laughed and accepted his invitation for a planning session over chai the following evening.

The two people whom I’d believed would be most distressed by the jundi s in the outpost didn’t react the way I thought they would. Alia refused to answer Snoop’s questions about how it affected her side business. And Chambers stressed to our soldiers that it meant progress in the greater mission.

“Appreciate you pretending for the guys,” I said, after walking into his lecture in the joes’ room. “Them bitching about it isn’t going to change anything.”

“I meant it, Lieutenant,” he said. “Every word. I don’t plan on coming back here. Anything that brings that closer to reality is fucking worth it.”

Just because he said he meant it didn’t mean I believed him. We donned our body armor together in silence, me groaning as the armor pressed down on my shoulder blades, him grunting as he velcroed his torso straps. He caught me staring at his strange, wristless hands, though he probably thought I’d been looking at the skull tattoos.

Downstairs, we passed Alia mopping the red-and-white tiles of the foyer. She kept her head bowed, serene as a church bell.