Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

Everyone separated, and we stood in a tight circle. The chief warrant officer was built for a parade, every corner crisp, his boots unsoiled. His face exuded the pink shine of a daily high-and-tight.

“We’re supposed to be postracial now, Chief,” I said. “I’m sure you were just about to explain that.”

“It has nothing to do with him being black!” The chief shook his finger again. “I meant young soldiers who have been promoted too quickly and have no discipline. He in your platoon, Lieutenant?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can tell me what the hell that scorpion is.” He pointed to Washington’s patch, but his eyes were all over my lopsided cap. “I don’t care what medal he got today, he’s still a soldier. Their uniforms are un-sat. Yours, too. This isn’t the bush.”

I smiled goofily. “You a regs man, then? Regulations are important.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw uncertainty cross my soldiers’ faces. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” So certain. So smug. “That’s why I stopped him.”

“Then why the fuck aren’t you at attention when addressing a commissioned officer of the United States Army?”

It was like I’d backhanded him. He snapped to attention, unleashing a sarcastic salute and yelling, “Sir, yes, sir!” Every eyeball in the chow line was now on us. I had two options: escalate the spectacle or end it.

“Your service to country tonight is noted, Chief.” I leaned down into the man’s face, our noses touching, his stunted seafood breath tickling my chin. “You’re dismissed.”

“Lieutenant.” He spoke low now so only I could hear him. “Do that again, you’ll spend the rest of your life drinking through a straw.” I was going to call his bluff, but he continued. “You think you know me? You know shit. Just ’cause I don’t wear it, don’t mean I don’t have it — I’ve been blown up more times than years you’ve been alive. Your boys are out of control. So are you. Rein it in. Be a leader. Respect the uniform. Respect yourself.” With a salute, he was gone into the dirty night, just another shape drifting through the camouflage sea.

“Show’s over!” I shouted to the line, where heads ogled and voices jeered. The madness had passed. Now I was just embarrassed. “Enjoy your meal, vote Republican.”

“Holy shit, sir.” I turned to the soldiers. It was Doc Cork. “That was awesome.”

“Thanks, LT,” Washington said as we exchanged knuckles. “Owe you one.”

The three soldiers moved away while I got in line. Then something gloomy pricked at me and I called them back. I asked Washington and Batule to remove their scorpions until we returned to the outpost. They balked.

“That guy was a racist,” Washington said. “Why you taking his side?”

“I don’t doubt that. But he’s right about the patches. Tell the same to anyone rocking the scorpion at Salsa Night. We’ll be back soon.”

“But, sir—”

“Did I stutter? Move out.”

Whatever goodwill I’d earned was lost. They walked off grumbling about power-tripping officers, but replacing one another’s patches. I envied them for their solidarity.

“Lonely,” I sang to myself, not ironically, not cheerfully, watching the three soldiers fade away. “I’m Mister Lonely. I have nobody… for my own.”

They served surf and turf for the holiday. The cooks wished me a happy Fourth, and a thickset female with a dreary smile told me she’d been up twenty hours preparing food, and I felt bad for every mean, nasty thought I’d ever had about fobbits, because the truth was we needed them more than they needed us.

I ate in a back corner. On a nearby television, I watched Cleveland sports fans burn the jersey of some basketball player, a self-proclaimed messiah who’d left because winning was hard there and it’d be easier in Florida. After a tenth jersey burned, the howling of proletarian pride and pain broadcast across the globe, I went outside and bummed a cigarette from a contractor. We tried small talk, but his English proved rudimentary and my Korean nonexistent, so we smoked next to each other in quiet, observing the night.

Watching soldiers come and go through shadows, I longed for the other side of the wire. It didn’t always make sense out there, but sometimes it did. And it offered purpose. I forced myself to contemplate the sniper shot that’d almost turned me to pink mist, and I fantasized about what that would’ve done to Marissa. A sick pleasure took hold; I saw her weep and regret. Her life would’ve never been the same. It would’ve destroyed her. Then I saw what it would’ve done to my parents, to Will, and I remembered it would’ve destroyed me, too, in the most literal of ways. Chambers, I thought. Chambers saved me. He’d said to embrace the beast within, and now I knew he’d been right. He’d been right about everything.

I’d see Haitham and Azhar dead before we left, I promised myself, not because I hated them, but because that was what I was supposed to do. That was why we were here. I walked to Salsa Night, my patrol cap tilted up only slightly.

An empty warehouse on the southern rim of the base, the club lay at the end of a gravel path, next to the airfield, in a deep mire of Halliburton trailers. The generals intermittently tried to shut down the club, but like an obstinate weed, it kept returning. Higher had relented in order to maintain the perception of control. Officers weren’t supposed to go, but we weren’t banned from it, either.

I just needed something to do.

The walk was dark and quiet. At the airfield, I watched a group unload a cargo jet with neon ChemLights, little dancing birds of hallucinogen. The crates alongside the fence line were filled with machine gun ammunition and milk shake powder mix. There was no other activity on the tarmac. Cresting a small ridge, I heard the club rumbling well before I saw it, a shining boom box of a building. Blue and yellow lights flashed through partially boarded windows, and I asked myself if watching bored joes grind up on each other was really how I wanted to spend my evening.

A slobbering whistle filled the darkness, followed by the sounds of exploding air. I looked up for fireworks but instead saw mortars running down the cheeks of night. To the north, the noise of earth being punched from above echoed. The base alarm system shot to life. I ran forward for a bunker without knowing where one was.

At the intersection of the gravel path and a back gate of the airfield, I found a sandbag mound. I jumped into it headfirst, landing with my rifle under me. I groaned, having knocked the wind out of myself, failing to notice the large shape on the other end of the bunker.

“You okay, sir?” it asked.

“Sure,” I took a deep breath and spoke through gasps. “Forgot to tuck and roll.” I peered through the tunnel and rose to my knees, the brim of my cap brushing the ceiling of the bunker. “Ibrahim?”

“Yeah.” My eyes adjusted to the dim. He looked like a sad panda at the zoo, gnawing on a jerky stick like bamboo. His plastic-rimmed glasses kept slipping down the bridge of his nose as he chewed. “What’s going on?”

“Mortar attack. Shouldn’t last long.”

“Oh.”

I sighed and asked what was wrong. He said nothing. I said that was an obvious lie, and since we were going to be spending the foreseeable future together stuck in a bunker, he might as well tell the truth.

It wasn’t just one thing, he explained. It was everything. He’d Skyped his parents earlier, only to learn his sister was talking about dropping out of college. Even though Dominguez had said he was a good soldier and getting better every day, he didn’t think that was true. And ever since we’d made the other joes stop teasing him, they just ignored him, which was worse. That’d been what happened at the club that night. He’d heard them and some fobbit females laughing at his back as he left, minutes before the mortar strike, and he’d taken refuge in here to be alone.