Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

One step in, a smirking Dominguez handed me a placard. A crease ran down its center like a fault line. “A jundi found it,” he said. “Folded up in the family Koran.”

Opening it, I was greeted by an oversized face of an imam frothing orders. The artist had even added the spit coming from his mouth, which was a nice touch. The imam wore a white dishdasha and a black headband, and his chin fell off the image in a cascade of beard. Behind him, toy men in masks held rockets and guns, facing an unseen, encroaching enemy. A hollow sun marked the top of the placard, jagged Arabic slicing through it.

Back downstairs, Snoop explained that the face belonged to a Wahhabi, the most radical of Sunnis, who called on true Muslims to destroy Shi’a and American dogs alike.

“It doesn’t say al-Qaeda on this,” Snoop said, holding it up. “But it’s theirs.”

The family swore they’d no idea where the placard had come from. One of the little girls started crying when she saw it, and the husband insisted it must’ve been Azhar’s. Without any way to disprove that, I left them the outpost’s phone number, saying to call if they heard from their son and wanted him to live.

I put my helmet back on, then my gloves, then my lenses. As we turned to leave the courtyard, Dead Tooth’s mother spoke, to no one and everyone at once. After a long silence, Snoop translated. “She say this is our fault,” he said. “Azhar was a good boy before the Collapse.”

•  •  •

We walked back into the simoom. I watched a dust cyclone of plastic bags whip around a pair of soldiers, who poked at it with their rifles. As we moved west down the Strip, I asked Fat Mukhtar why the family had been so hostile.

He shrugged and adjusted his headdress in the wind, a world-weary blueberry in a tracksuit.

“It’s not easy seeing your country occupied by foreigners,” Snoop translated. “The mukhtar has a good point.”

I wanted to ask Fat Mukhtar about Shaba again, or if he knew anything about civilian murders in the past, but Chambers was only steps behind. The two men hadn’t seemed to recognize each other, or have any interest in each other, for that matter. One had seen plenty of brawny American sergeants before, while the other had met plenty of outlandish Arab chieftains.

“Tell me how this ends,” I muttered.

No one else knew, either.

Fat Mukhtar stopped at a tin shack. It bore the message YOUSEF’S: BEST FALAFEL IN ALL IRAK! in English on a doorway sign, a gift from some previous American unit. At Fat Mukhtar’s suggestion, we ordered a late lunch. A young shop boy ran into the shack to deliver our order. While we waited, the mukhtar told us he was getting a bear from Syria for his zoo.

I laughed. “A bear in the Middle East? Sure.”

“He say it’s true, LT. The Syrian brown bear. A cousin of your grizzly.”

I pulled out my pad and made a note to google this later, to prove Fat Mukhtar wrong. Bears didn’t come from Syria. They needed trees.

The sense of being observed returned. I looked around. Inside the falafel shop, behind a thick screen door, stood an old man with crossed arms. I recognized him, but couldn’t place from where, and that bothered me. I didn’t forget people. I waved, long and wide. He waved back.

“Yousef,” Fat Mukhtar said through Snoop. “Just a falafel man, but a good falafel man. Many morals.”

A group of children delivered the falafels to our patrol. Soldiers and jundi s strewn across the Sunni Strip greeted the children with pats on the head and shiny coins as tips. My falafel was handed over by a girl in a purple head scarf who had black gemstones for eyes and a gaping red void for a nose. I looked closer and realized it was actually two red voids, one for each missing nostril. Burns covered much of her upper body. The skin on her arms was like paper, and when she cupped her hands to ask for a tip, I could see the bones in her fingers flexing. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and folded it into her tiny palms. Her smile burned through us all.

I swallowed away the lump in my throat while Fat Mukhtar bit his bottom lip. Only Snoop found words. “Allah protect her,” he said. “If you’re up there, fuckclown, You protect her.”

I wasn’t really hungry anymore, but forced myself to eat. The falafel tasted like desert — dry dough, chickpea, and tangy yogurt, all soaked in cucumber juice and olive oil. Fat Mukhtar said we should try Yousef’s lamb, too, but through chewed food I said we needed to go.

“One more thing, LT,” Snoop said, listening to Fat Mukhtar. “He asks about Haitham. He say they are old friends, and the mukhtar has a gift for him.”

Before I could respond, another voice spoke behind us.

“Why do you talk to that guy so much? He’s just a damn drunk. Always has been.” It was Chambers. I didn’t know how to answer either of them, so I did the most outrageous thing possible. I told the truth.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We don’t know where Haitham is.”

•  •  •

The patrol pushed south into Shi’a territory. The muezzin escorted us there, the afternoon prayer chanting gloomily at our backs. I had too much to think about, so I didn’t think about any of it. The simoom found renewed life, blowing us kisses of hot sand and flying trash. I grabbed the hand mic from Batule’s back and told the outpost we were heading in. As I hooked the mic back to the radio, the day ruptured in gunfire.

“Contact to the rear!”

I ran that way with Batule and Snoop on my heels, passing bodies in the prone behind whatever cover they could find, eyes and rifles out. At the tail of our staggered column, in front of an appliance store, I found Chambers standing over a body, bent slightly at the waist, legs on each side of the torso, a cage fighter about to finish off a dazed opponent. His rifle was slung.

“What happened?” I asked, trying to limit my panting. Washington and two jundi s were there, too, all on one knee. Washington took a long, slow drink from his CamelBak tube. Hog stood to the side, his squished face bewildered, holding his rifle like it had soiled itself.

“Barbie Kid,” Washington said, pointing to the mass underneath Chambers.

“Sergeant,” I said. He didn’t respond, and I noticed the dull shine of a sai dagger in his right hand. “Sergeant Chambers.”

“Fucker just tried to stab me,” he said. His voice was hard and flexing. He tossed away the dagger and straightened his back, moving his boot to the Barbie Kid’s chest. He pushed down with his foot, evoking a sharp cry from his captive.

“Easy now,” I said, walking next to the pair. “Talk me through this. Who was firing?”

“Hog,” he said. He kept his face down, lensed eyes staring through the ground. “Shot out a window.”

I looked across the street. Glass shards decorated the ground below an empty window frame.

“Negligent discharge,” Washington said. “No good.”

I looked at Hog, who shook his head and gripped his rifle tight. “I–I don’t know what happened, sir. I heard shouting and I turned around, thinking it was Dead Tooth, and it just — it just happened.”

“No one was hurt,” I said. “Let’s be thankful for that.”

Underneath Chambers’ boot, the Barbie Kid’s unibrow bent up and down, his good eye darting wildly. His arms shook like twigs on a branch, and he gasped for air, still recovering from the boot stomp.

“How the hell did he get so close?” I asked.

“Ran up from behind,” Chambers said. “I heard his steps and tossed him to the ground before he could take a swipe.”

“Must still be mad about his goat,” Washington offered.