Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

So many secrets here, I thought, trapped in a glint of the afternoon sun. So many veils, too.

After I rejoined the mourners, a group of old women in black abaya s were exiting the house, moving with slow steps to the tarp. They chanted dirges, low and ominous. The old men passed around a collection plate, which Saif quietly explained was for the women, professional mourners hired to sing of the dead’s accomplishments and the world’s loss. They’d go for hours, if necessary, and would return each afternoon of the three-day ceremony. I tossed in a ten-dollar bill.

I hadn’t seen Snoop sneak away, but as the lamenters performed, he waved me to the back of the tarp. He held his phone tight in his hand.

“Haitham,” he said. “He asked if we were at the wake for Abu Mohammed.”

“Shit.”

“I didn’t tell him. But he say if we were here, we should dig near the cypress tree. He say — he say we will find the body of Shaba there. Then he hung up.”

I turned around to look out into the desert. Nothing but yellow badlands until Baghdad, I thought. Who knew how many bodies lay in the barren earth beneath us.

“I am just a terp, but we should dig at that tree,” Snoop said. “I believe him.”

I strode to the cypress, all gnarled branches and leaves like asparagus. The dirt around its trunk was cracked and sun-scorched. None of it looked disturbed. Then I looked up and saw the Iraqis looking over their shoulders at me, pretending to listen to the dirge.

“Get Saif over here,” I said to Snoop. “We need to be delicate about this.”

The Iraqi lieutenant’s eyes flashed like pinwheels when we told him, and he stroked his pistol holster. I argued we should wait to dig until after the mourning ceremony, but Saif pointed out they knew that we knew now. Unless we wanted to post guards for three days, we needed to dig right away.

“It’ll be better if my men do it,” Saif said. “And your Muslim soldier.”

I sent Snoop to the sons to explain that we weren’t trying to be disrespectful, just following a tip. The laments ended as Ibrahim and the jundi s put shovels into dirt. Two and three at a time, the mourners fell away to their cars and homes, Fat Mukhtar leaving with his guards in a Mercedes. Only the dead sheik’s family remained for the excavation.

It took ten minutes for one of the jundi s to find a piece of plastic. It stuck out of the ground like a candlewick, crusted in dirt and barely discernible. Thirty minutes after that, we stood around a shallow hole with a bag of human remains in it. The body had been stripped and burned, giving the carcass a smoky, charcoal shine. Maggots had long ago chewed through the clear plastic to feast on the insides. The skull wasn’t attached to the body but had remained intact, falling to the bottom of the bag. I stepped into the hole to look it in the eye. A chipped bottom tooth was fixed prominently in its mouth, death reckoning life with the stupidest of grins.

“Not right,” Saif said, looking up at the branches of the rigid cypress. “Even to an enemy. Such things are against Allah’s will.”

I heard the joes whispering from above, around the tree. “Think it still has the Green Beret tat on it?” one asked. The others told him to stop being stupid.

“Who is it, sir?” Ibrahim asked, his face and words drained of color. “Or was it, I mean.”

“Not sure.” I set the skull and bag back in its hole. “But he may have been one of us, once upon a time.”

Then I got on the radio with Captain Vrettos, apologizing for waking him, telling him he wouldn’t believe what we’d found.

We detained the sheiks’ sons, though battalion let them go the next day, since none of them lived with their father and they all claimed ignorance of the body. The remains were sent to Baghdad and then to Germany for identity confirmation. Per higher’s instructions, we spent the rest of the afternoon digging up the entire yard, looking for more bodies. We didn’t find any.

We returned to the outpost in the early evening, just as the desert beetles began trilling. Chambers met me at the top of the stairs, under the watchful stares of the Iraqi wall mural. He’d donned his body armor for a night patrol while I was preparing to shed mine.

“You found him,” he said.

“Believe so.” I stood straight and proud.

“Huh.” He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, like a man finding air after a long swim. When he opened them, his eyes had turned to chips of glass. “My turn to say thank you.”

He stuck out a wristless right hand. I shook it and tried not to wince when he squeezed too hard.

“Where is he?” Chambers asked. “I’d like to see him.”

“Oh.” It was like I’d removed some great millstone from around Chambers’ neck. He wasn’t looking at me with contempt, or even irritation. Something had changed between us. I’d done something he couldn’t, that he hadn’t. He respected me now. Which made telling him that his friend’s bones were already en route to Baghdad even harder.

I reached down and put my hand on his shoulder, where armor met cloth. His shoulder was tense, but he didn’t shrug me away.

“We good?” Chambers asked. He wasn’t looking directly at me, but he wasn’t looking away from me, either. His right arm had gone slack, and he was balling his hand into a fist.

“Yeah,” I said. “We good.”

With that, he was gone into the Ashuriyah night. I stayed on those stairs for a long time, chewing over his words and the miracle we’d just stumbled across.

The hell of July passed in a seared haze. Hours and days melted into one another under a sun so tyrannical the soldiers began calling it the Sultan. Siestas weren’t sometimes anymore, but most of the time. On the barren stretches of no-man’s-land and in the alleyways of town, we asked the Sultan for compassion. There was no response.

We patrolled during the mornings. For our efforts, the locals called us majnun s, madmen. They weren’t wrong. “Don’t you understand?” they asked. “The insurgents work at night.” In between, I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of Rip Its and watched DVDs about 1960s-era Madison Avenue and Prohibition-era gangsters. They made me miss home without reminding me of it.

We’d made national news for finding Rios. NO MAN LEFT BEHIND was the headline blasted out by the army to every news service that still gave a shit. I spoke to an Associated Press reporter over the phone, reading a statement prepared by a public affairs officer. “We acted on a tip provided by a local, evidence that Iraqis are ready and willing to take control of their nation,” I said. “As important as this moment is for Americans and the U.S. military, it’s just as important for the Iraqi people.”

“You believe that?” the reporter asked. “The violence numbers are increasing all over the country.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

My mom found my quote in ten different American newspapers and cut out and framed each one, even though they were all from the same AP article. “You’ll want these someday,” she assured me.

Even Will was impressed. “This is a big deal,” he said. “And good leverage for you when you make your move against Chambers. What’s the deal with that, anyways?”

“Nothing new,” I said. I still hadn’t told my family about the firefight or the medal for valor. I didn’t want to worry my parents. I didn’t tell Will for other reasons.

A two-star general called from the Pentagon, asking to speak to me about finding the remains. “You Porter brothers sure are something,” he said. “I want you on my staff. Could use some hard-chargers back here, whip some bureaucrats into shape.”