Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

I picked up the phone expecting the intel captain from Duke, but instead heard the voice of Sergeant Griffin. She sounded tired but solemn.

“Lieutenant Porter? I need to speak to Captain Vrettos. It’s urgent.”

“I’m the ranking officer on duty. What’s up?”

“Just heard from a green-level source.” She was annoyed to be talking with me, I could tell. “Al-Qaeda’s planning payback for what happened to the mosque. Something big and soon. Supposedly in the next day.”

I had no idea what “green-level” meant, but figured it meant “good” and “believable.” I pantomimed punching myself in the face, which made the night shift laugh.

“You’ll let your commander know ASAP?” Sergeant Griffin continued. “Green-level. This is real.”

“No doubt,” I said. I didn’t question her intent, but I’d been through too many false alarms to take seriously vague threats. Something big? Something soon? Welcome to our everyday, I thought. I was setting the phone down when I heard Sergeant Griffin say, “One more thing,” through the receiver.

I waited.

“Talk to Dan today?” she asked. She meant Chambers, though I’d never thought of him having a first name.

“Haven’t really seen him,” I said.

She said they’d talked earlier, online. He’d told her what had happened at the mosque, how it bothered him. That he wasn’t a young fire breather anymore. That on this, his fourth combat tour, he’d finally had his fill. That he’d survived a lot of close calls, but that yesterday had been the most searing, the bridge too far. That he had his kids to get back to. That maybe he’d take up a friend’s offer and work construction in Dallas. Or switch over to an admin job so he could reach retirement from behind a desk. That he had better things to be doing than running up ancient mosques to kill teenagers who’d had nothing to do with 9/11.

“Just venting, I think,” Sergeant Griffin said. “But I’d never heard him like that. Maybe you can talk with him. Since you were up that tower, too.”

It was his goddamn idea to go up there, I thought. And he didn’t want his kids to grow up fatherless? This was the same guy who’d bragged about not knowing where two of his offspring had moved with their mother.

Then I thought about how I wasn’t really the person I presented to the soldiers, either. There were parts I hid, parts I exaggerated. Maybe Chambers was the same.

Maybe.

I hung up the phone knowing there was no way I’d get back to sleep.

“Where’s the last place you’d expect to find a lieutenant?” I asked the night shift. “Like, right now.”

They told me.

•  •  •

Through night vision binos, Ashuriyah was a phosphorous green pillow. The joe in the north guard station of the roof wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake, either. His body jerked when I came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Go sleep, youngblood,” I said. Among other things, I’d surrendered to the term. The private knew officers didn’t pull roof duty, but was too drowsy to articulate it. He stumbled off with an “LT, thanks, LT,” and I was alone.

That private, I thought. He’d shown up with Chambers, all those lost months ago. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was from North Dakota? New Hampshire? South Carolina? He talked a lot about how smart his Doberman was. He also claimed to have only three chest hairs, and had named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, something the rest of the platoon found hilarious. It was sort of funny, now that I thought about it.

I rotated the machine gun and scanned, the mechanized velvet of the turret rolling smooth. A hunter’s moon gored the sky. Below, beyond the blast walls and mazes of razor wire, lights were scattered like lost candles.

We’d been here almost a year and couldn’t even keep the goddamn power on. I thought about that while my index finger stroked the trigger well and I kept scanning, slowly. Nothing but quiet September black. An autumn chill nipped at my cheeks and at the slits of skin where sleeve met glove. We weren’t supposed to smoke up here. It gave away our position. Revolutions were nocturnal beasts, though, and I figured the large camo nets and an occupation nearing a decade had also given away our position. I lit up a cigarette, cupping the cherry with a palm just in case.

My brother’s message hadn’t been the only one in my in-box. My old ROTC pal Chiu had finally e-mailed back. He was home in Irvine, armed with a medical marijuana prescription, trying to figure out where to go back to school. For what, he didn’t know yet, but he knew school would at least get him away from his parents, who told him every day that having one leg was no excuse for being a derelict. REMEMBER, he wrote, ALL REAL VETS DIE BITTER AND ALCOHOLIC! (LOL).

He’d be okay. The world needed people like Chiu.

A gunshot echoed through Ashuriyah, a tongue popping off the roof of a mouth. When only dogs answered, I grabbed the walkie-talkie and reported in.

“One round fired to the north, approximately three thousand meters away.”

“Roger that, logged,” came the response.

One round could mean anything. Kids messing around. A negligent discharge at a Sahwa checkpoint. An execution in a barn. A sniper’s tidy shot through a car window. Just another prayer bead on the death string of tribal warfare, no different from any other.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t known their names. The people in the mosque. I’d already gotten over that. I didn’t even know what they looked like, though. They were complete ciphers, anyone and everyone all at once. “Locals,” I’d call them in my war stories someday, to sympathize with the faceless people I’d unintentionally helped kill. “Iraqi citizens who wanted peace.”

I finished my cigarette, stomping it out with the heel of my boot.

Some time passed. I thought about the mosque some more, then about what was left of it. Some more time passed. The metal door that led downstairs popped open, loosing a sliver of light. I gripped the stock and asked who was there, flipping up my night vision binos and squinting.

“Why you here?” It was Chambers, his voice flexing, always flexing, but strained, too. I couldn’t see his face, but pictured it drawn and ashen.

“You look how I feel,” I said, waiting for him to laugh. He didn’t. “Still no patrols?”

“On standby.” He grunted. “Spec ops are on a raid somewhere nearby. Might need to clean up their mess.”

“Seems to be a lot of that recently.” I chewed on my bottom lip and waited. I really needed to learn his trick of making people nervous by not responding. “Battalion says al-Qaeda is coming after us soon.”

He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. Then he started balling his hands into fists, flexing his forearms. He stopped when he saw me staring.

“Why do you do that?” My question came out more strident than intended.

He did it again, just once, as if to prove something. “My dad was an addict. Habit I started in high school, to remind myself to not be like him. Guess it stuck.”

“Huh.” That seemed plausible, and made more sense than the bogeyman reasons I’d ascribed it. Still, I thought. Weird. We seemed so far from the time he’d joined the platoon and called me Jackie, so far from the weeks I’d spent trying to get rid of him because everything had changed with his arrival. Another gunshot echoed through the night, this one from the other side of town. More dogs barked. My report was logged.

Chambers leaned against the sandbags, stepping under the dim moonlight. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wad of dip, sticking it in his mouth. I wanted him to leave so I could be alone again, but we needed to talk, and not just because his intel girlfriend was worried.