Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“My M-Nine is upstairs.” I didn’t carry my pistol much, but felt it necessary to point out that I had one. “But yeah, we’re big on equality. All for one, one for all sort of thing. Goes back to George Washington, I think.”

“George Washington?” Saif raised an eyebrow. “One of your slave-owner presidents, yes?”

He stood to go brew the tea in his makeshift kitchen, a wooden counter mounted between his couch and dresser. He seemed embarrassed to be using an electric kettle, and spoke of how seriously his father took chai.

“Begin with springwater,” he said, twisting the cap off a plastic water bottle. “Not tap, never distilled. The more oxygen your water has, the better the chai.” He poured the contents of the bottle into the kettle and pressed a green button. The kettle rumbled to life as he sat down again.

We discussed how we’d become army officers. He’d originally become an Iraqi policeman to escape his family’s rice farm south of Baghdad, near the banks of the Euphrates. He’d been at the police academy when the Invasion occurred.

Saif wanted to know about my childhood in California, refusing to believe I didn’t surf. He scoffed when I suggested the suburban dream was decaying, telling me that American-style villages were all the rage in the affluent parts of northern Iraq. When I said I’d spent a college semester in Ireland, he asked how the Irish had dealt with their diaspora.

“We have the same problem now,” he said. “All the minds have fled — the doctors, the politicians, the businessmen.”

The kettle beeped to indicate the water had boiled. The jundi platoon leader kept talking as he rose to his feet again nimbly, a physics problem in action. He scooped Earl Grey tea leaves into a small teapot and cracked open two cardamom pods into the pot.

Though he’d been raised Shi’a, his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Sunni, something that proved useful during the Surge, when the Iraqi government, desperate for diversity in the Shi’a-heavy army, offered bonuses and promotions to souls brave and stupid enough to make the jump.

“The ministries didn’t actually want us to switch,” he said, pouring the boiled water into the pot, shielding my view of the procedure as if it were some secret recipe. “They were under pressure from the American generals. The Shi’as controlled the national government for the first time, and wanted to keep control of the army and police. The Sunnis countered by creating the Sahwa gangs. So I used my grandfather’s name as my own, and was sent to officer school and got more pay. My trainers didn’t run me off, once they realized I was Shi’a like them.”

“Higher didn’t catch on?”

He loosed a cavalier smile. “I blamed the paperwork. It was one of my family names, so it wasn’t hard.”

Setting the teapot on top of the kettle, Saif resumed his seat across from me. “The leaves soak for ten minutes,” he said. “Proper chai must be dark, with lots of sugar. Nothing like the Iranians make. That’s not tea. It’s water.”

Pretending to understand what this brewing preference signified about Persian culture, I thought about how the only food or drink I could make was an orange cappuccino for my mom. I couldn’t even cook, unless instant ramen counted. This seemed like hard evidence for our earlier discussion about the decay of suburbia, but I wasn’t about to embarrass myself like that in front of a colleague.

“You’ve been quiet, Loo-tenant Porter.” His head tilted in consideration.

I sighed. For weeks — months, really — I’d needed nothing more than a sounding board to salvage my sanity. Will could do only so much from across the sea, and Marissa was still unresponsive. But I barely knew Saif. I wanted to trust him. I really did.

“Tough day. My platoon sergeant almost got stabbed over a dead goat? I don’t know. Maybe the heat’s getting to me. And I just found out that a friend killed himself back in the States.”

“Was he a soldier?”

“An officer. A young officer. Like us.”

Saif leaned over and put his hands on my shoulders. “I mourn with you. The martyrs who fall after are still warriors. You will see him again.”

I didn’t know how to explain that I’d never met Grant, so I just said thank you.

We swapped information on Dead Tooth. He hadn’t known about the shooting death of Azhar’s cousin, but said it didn’t surprise him. Excuses for stupidity were an insurgent’s calling card, he said. He seemed skeptical of Fat Mukhtar’s claim that Dead Tooth wasn’t welcome on the Sunni Strip, saying that one of their sources had seen him there the night before. He called the Sahwa leaders ali babas, arguing that they were just armed thugs who’d filled the power vacuum created after the Invasion. That may be true, I said, but they’re still our allies.

“Allies or partners?” he asked. “Big difference.”

“Insha’Allah?” I was growing fond of the many meanings this one Arabic phrase provided.

The sweat underneath his pits had gathered into pools, and he plucked small hairs from his mustache, hiding the freed hairs in his palm. Dark, puffy circles hung under his eyes like speed bags. Everyone touched by war seemed aged or corroded in some way. Saif wasn’t even thirty yet, but he had the calloused look of a man nearly twice as old.

“You hear anything about a new insurgent named the Cleric?” I asked. “Got a tip he was involved in the attack on my soldier last month.”

“The Cleric?” he said. Seconds passed in warm, heavy silence. I realized belatedly there was no fan in the room. “A bad joke. The Cleric is dead.”

Saif stood again and took four long steps to the chai. He placed two cubes of sugar in white teacups, pouring the tea from the pot over the sugar. He then stuck a small spoon in each cup and set a biscuit on each of the saucers.

“It’s hot,” he said. The chai was golden-brown, like wheat husk. I took a sip and bit my lip while my tongue simmered.

I was about to explain the tip, but Saif spoke first. “The Cleric was a powerful sheik in Ashuriyah some years ago, after the Collapse and al-Qaeda wars. He was a tribal leader, not a real cleric, but the townspeople called him that out of respect.”

“The guy on the arch?” I asked. “With the beard?”

Saif nodded. “Yes. Sheik Ahmed.”

“Ahmed.” I closed my eyes and bowed my head, remembering the name from a First Cav statement. Though our relationship with Karim the Prince’s father, Sheik Ahmed, and the Sunni Coalition of Ashuriyah have been negatively affected… “I’ve heard of him.”

“He died of tuberculosis before I came to town as a police cadet. We did security for the funeral procession because his family wouldn’t allow the Americans to come. He’d worked with them for many years, but it was his dying wish.”

“Because they killed his son.” The words tumbled out of my mouth like dominoes, and I took another sip of chai to mask my enthusiasm. Now cool enough to taste, it reminded me of warm Kool-Aid. “That’s what I heard,” I added. “An American kill team. Supposedly.”

Saif waved off the rumors of past civilian murders, claiming every Iraqi town and village had them. “Propaganda from the militias,” he called them. He said he’d heard of the sheik’s al-Qaeda son, though he didn’t recognize Karim’s name. Nor did he seem to recognize Chambers, laughing off the notion that he was the same man who’d frightened locals in 2006.

“Just as all Iraqis look the same to your eyes,” he said, “all Americans look the same to ours.”

“You never heard anything about a kill team?” I asked again. I hadn’t revealed that Chambers had admitted to being in Ashuriyah before, but something about Saif’s dismissive laughs made me think he knew more than he was letting on. “What about a guy called Shaba?”