Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

We spoke to one another through labored breaths and grunts, Chambers and I shifting Saif’s body to alter the weight placement, slow, waddling steps of minutes that felt like days. The fog of earth was thinning, but not quickly enough; we couldn’t see farther than a few steps. Only sharp whimpers of pain now came from Saif’s mouth. Just as my shoulder threatened to pop out and my chest and legs churned, Chambers leaned over to set his half of Saif down.

“Quick break here. Should answer that. It’s been buzzing this whole fucking time.”

“Huh?”

He pointed to the forgotten radio on my back. I set Saif down and reached across my back for the hand receiver. I hadn’t heard anything.

“This — this is me,” I said. “This is Hotspur Six.”

“Hotspur Six!” It was Captain Vrettos, his words like hot silver to my ear. “Did you copy? Are all friendly forces clear of the top?”

“Yes.” I panted through the words. “I mean, yes. All clear.”

Almost instantly a deep rumble swallowed the sky. Then came crashing rock and glass above us, an upside-down earthquake bearing down. We grabbed Saif again and kept moving, an angry god’s breath on our heels.

As we turned the last rounded corner of the path, a group of medics met us, relieving us of our burden and placing Saif on a stretcher. Doc Cork tied a tourniquet onto one of the stumps and began twisting. Saif screamed out with chants that sounded like prayers, every revolution of the baton bringing more. Slobber covered his chin and mustache. He grabbed my arm, pulling me to his face, close enough to see black quills of hair in his nose.

I bowed my head and closed my eyes, grabbing his clasped hands with one of my own. In a frail whisper he asked, “My legs. Like fire. How is — how is legs?”

I opened my eyes and told him as calmly as I could that they were fine, he’d be walking before he knew it, he’d be playing with his daughter soon.

His mouth fell open, and he pressed his pistol into my palms. Then he was gone, carried off on a stretcher to the awaiting medevac. I remained by myself for some minutes, tugging at my ears, staring up at the minaret that had tried to kill us, now just a dark splinter. It was evening by the time I walked down the remainder of the tower path, finding my platoon waiting. Everyone else had already gone home.

I don’t even know his daughter’s name, I thought.

The rumble we’d heard had been a main gun round shot from a 105-millimeter cannon on an outfitted Stryker. It caused much of the top of the tower to collapse in on itself, killing everyone in the rooms and on the walkway, including Dead Tooth, two other military-age males, an old man presumed to be the mullah, two unidentified women, and a child the official report described as “likely younger than ten years old.” The dome had shattered into a thousand ceramic dishes. Iraqis contracted for disaster cleanups spent days sorting through the ruins, and a State Department official later estimated it’d cost the American taxpayer a cool million dollars to repair the mosque. “If the Iraqi parliament determines it worthy,” he then clarified. “No guarantee. This is the middle of nowhere.”

Both Batule and Saif were sent to Baghdad for emergency surgeries — Batule for a lost eye and a ruptured eardrum, Saif for his lost legs. Their war was over.

I spent the rest of the night smoking cigarettes and watching movies on my laptop, away from our room, where Chambers was. Something he’d said wouldn’t go away. We’d been on the tower path, the medics working to stabilize Saif. “Mission accomplished,” he’d said. Then he’d laughed.

We didn’t go on patrol the day after the mosque got blown up. No one did. “A tactical pause,” Captain Vrettos called it. For him, that meant explaining to higher what had happened. For the soldiers, it meant gym workouts and video games. For me, it meant going through my e-mail. There was a note from my brother, an apology. I didn’t know how to respond, and even though I tried to write back, I didn’t know what to say. He’d been right about moral courage mattering more than physical courage. I deleted the message.

I spent the day on the smoking patio, watching the walls of camo nets sway with the wind, breathing in wet cigarette. A light rain spat on the ground outside, steady through the afternoon. It would have been cold but for an electric space heater. I sat there reading a magazine article about the commanding general in Afghanistan getting fired for insubordination. It seemed like a stupid thing to get fired for, but things were going to hell everywhere.

Snoop found me there, alone.

“Yo,” he said.

“Yo,” I said.

“Crazy shit yesterday.” He shook his head. “Fucking Arabs.”

“Fucking Americans,” I said. “Stupid. All of it.”

He took a seat in the lawn chair next to me, his long legs sticking out like fishing rods. “Batule? Molazim Saif? They okay?”

“They’ll live.” I stared ahead.

Snoop pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He was a dark shadow in the pale light. We were close, maybe even friends, and I knew barely anything about him. I was about to try to rectify that when he said he needed some advice.

“I’ll help if I can,” I offered. It was such a first-world thing to say.

Snoop’s special visa to America had been delayed, along with hundreds of others. The embassy hadn’t given a reason or a time line. But he couldn’t go home to Little Sudan anymore. Jaish al-Mahdi wanted his head on a spike. He was spending his occasional weekend passes at Camp Independence, an option that wouldn’t be there once we left.

“What about the letter I wrote? I thought there was a big push to get terps stateside.”

“Too slow. And only goes to terps who give moneys. I gave them a whole file of letters from American officers I’ve worked for. It didn’t matter.” He paused to spit out a few shells. His words were boring deep into my conscience, and I thought of Rana, the way she looked at her boys when she sent them out to play with soldiers.

“The right way doesn’t work,” he continued. “I want to go to America, but getting out of Iraq is first. The war won’t end when your army leaves next year. You know this.”

“Where would you go?”

“Anywhere.”

I said I’d help, somehow, reminding him we still had a couple of months to figure something out. “Maybe my brother knows someone in Homeland Security,” I said, though he probably didn’t.

“Thanks, LT,” Snoop said, standing. He seemed embarrassed and started moving to the doorway before turning around. “We never talked about Haitham.”

Excuses darted through my mind like manic bats, but I didn’t need them. “What you did was right,” Snoop continued. “He was the Cleric, yes? It was the only thing a good lieutenant could do.”

He was wrong, of course, but I still appreciated his saying it.

•  •  •

I found a few hours of rest sitting up on my mattress and against the wall, poncho liner draped over my head. I didn’t bother to loosen my boots, like I was trying to trick myself into sleep. An arm shaking my own woke me at midnight.

My eyes felt like stomped grapes. I smacked my lips and concentrated on the foggy shape in front of me. It was the runner for the night shift. He could tell I was considering going back to sleep, so he shook me again.

“Battalion intel’s on the line. And — well, we don’t want to get the commander.”

I smacked my lips again and cracked my neck. “He in the sack?”

“Yes, sir. And. You know how it is. He needs to stay down, while he can.”

I slapped my face lightly and hopped off the bunk. “Glad you got me.” The runner thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t, not totally.