Matt Gallagher: Youngblood

Standing out of a rear hatch, between gulps of baked air, I considered Haitham’s phone call to Snoop. Then I asked the soldiers for their thoughts on the Iraqi.

“Never trust an alkie, sir,” Hog said from the driver’s hole, causing me to turn down the volume dial of my headset. “All they care about is booze. That’s how it works in Pine Bluff, at least.”

I looked to my right, where another one of the joes stood, a sulky kid from Ohio named Specialist Kucharczyk. His wide shoulders barely cleared the hatch.

“Agree with that, Alphabet?” I asked.

He shook his head, readjusted his goggles, and went back to watching the roadside.

“That’s our Alphabet,” Hog said. “Man of few words.”

The sky had cleared somewhat. The sun slid across it, leaving crayon streaks of orange and red. Sand berms gave way to shacks made of tin. At a stone arch bearing the image of a bespectacled, snow-bearded cleric, our Stryker turned left. An eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle the shade of caterpillar green and shaped like a parallelogram, the Stryker was called “the Cadillac of Mesopotamia” by the men. General Dynamics had designed it for urban assaults, meaning it could go eighty miles per hour with an infantry squad in the back or be retrofitted with a 105-millimeter tank gun, depending on the mission. I preferred the more luxurious features of the vehicle, like the iPod dock.

Once the turn was complete, Dominguez spoke through his headset from the machine gun turret.

“Hog.”

“Sergeant?”

“You could learn something from Alphabet. It’s good for a soldier to be quiet.”

With the sun in slow retreat, Ashuriyah had begun to stir. My platoon’s four vehicles were lined up in a row like ducklings and staggered to minimize the effects of an IED blast. The smell of hot trash filled the air. We crept through the town marketplace, pretending to scan for suicide bombers, hoping instead to spot a pretty teenage girl.

Young men in jeans glared at our armored vehicles and kicked at the newly laid asphalt under them. Women dressed in black burqas shuffled from shop to shop, keeping their heads bowed. Middle-aged men hawked fake cans of Pepsi and real blocks of ice, waving at us with one hand and stroking their mustaches with the other. Children threw rocks off the Strykers’ tires and yelled phrases of random, broken English. Old men played dominoes on the side of the road, so used to foreign soldiers they didn’t bother to acknowledge the war machines rolling by.

Some of us waved back, some of us didn’t. Some of us smiled, most of us didn’t. Someone in the trailing Stryker tossed candy to the children. We weren’t supposed to do that anymore, not after a unit across the canal ran over a kid and turned him to flesh pudding.

That’s Chambers’ vehicle, I thought. I kept picturing the look on his face when I’d asked about Shaba. What had that been about?

“You should talk to Alia,” Dominguez said. “She grew up here. I bet she could give you the lowdown.”

“That’s my girl!” Hog said. “For an Iraqi, she sure can slob the knob.” A few seconds passed. “That’s what someone said, anyway.”

“I didn’t hear that,” I said. “Play the damn game.” It was an open secret the outpost’s cleaning lady doubled as a hooker for the enlisted guys, and if whispers counted for anything, business was booming for the forty-something. The other platoon leaders and I had adopted an informal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on the matter. We were well aware there were worse pastimes to pursue for soldiers at a far edge of the world.

We turned right, the outpost rising above the slums like a desert acropolis. With the afternoon siesta over, the area teemed with activity, from the sheiks at the front gate dressed in fine white dishdasha s to the snipers prowling the roof behind drooping camo nets.

“Why the man-dresses here?” Alphabet asked, pointing to the sheiks.

“Sahwa contracts, probably,” I said. I had deep misgivings about our alliance with the local militias, but tried to keep them to myself. “Always a negotiation.”

“Fucking Sahwa,” Alphabet said, spitting into the wind. “They killed Americans before we paid them off. I know they did. It’s just, I don’t know. Dishonorable.”

“Yeah, they got paid,” I said. “And maybe it was dishonorable.” Our Stryker stopped in front of the main entrance, and its back ramp lowered. Inside the vehicle, sitting on long cushioned benches, Snoop and Doc Cork woke up. The terp hopped out. “It was also smart.”

I took off my headset and followed Snoop’s gangly steps through the entrance and into the outpost, clearing my rifle and stripping off my body armor. I felt another headache coming on and couldn’t stop thinking about Chambers calling me Jackie. In the air-conditioned office upstairs, I filed the patrol report while the platoon refueled before heading in themselves. Outside, the heat endured.

Though the outpost didn’t have internet — something the joes bitched about constantly; how else were they going to meet women? — we did have access to satellite phones in a first-floor storage room. After mulling over my exchange with Chambers for a couple of days, my pride finally caved and I called my brother. He’d know what to do.

Four makeshift phone stalls had been jammed into the room. Alphabet was using one, hunched over with his back toward the door. He didn’t realize I’d come in. I sat down in an empty stall and started dialing, breathing in more stale bleach than air. Will picked up on the third ring.

“Yo,” I said.

“Jack!” he said. “You okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just calling to catch up.”

A deep sigh blew over the connection. “You know calls are usually bad news.” He sighed again, though this one was less pronounced. “So. My little brother a war hero yet?”

“Hah. Not quite.” Captain William Porter, Commanding, West Point graduate class of 2002, had pulled two of his soldiers from a burning Humvee during the Battle of Baqubah in 2007, earning a Silver Star. “Just lots of meetings about a water filtration project. Things have settled down a bunch since you were over here.”

“That’s what the news says. Keep alert, though. Don’t drop your guard.”

“Yeah.”

“Chin up, man,” he said. “Who better to deal with guerrillas rising against empire than a descendant of Irish rebels? We were bred for this shit.”

“Yeah.” I bit down on my lip, not ready to prostrate myself in front of him and reveal weakness. “How’s Stanford?” I asked. He was in his second semester of business school. “Enjoying it?”

He laughed. “Glad you asked. Got our goon on the other night.”

Will started bragging about his latest conquest, something I wouldn’t have cared about even in person. He hadn’t been like this growing up, but time and war had changed him. The principles of his youth had walked off with the former friends and exes whose names we couldn’t mention anymore because they’d incurred his Old Testament wrath, and returned in the form of army values like LOYALTY and HONOR.

I’d once asked about this potential inconsistency in his worldview, after a Thanksgiving meal that’d brought us home to Granite Bay. He’d quoted Walt Whitman: “ ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ” Then he’d switched over to Dr. Dre: “ ‘I just want to fuck bad ladies, for all the nights I never had ladies.’ ”

“Ladies?” I’d laughed. The badass terrorist-killer was still an awkward romantic at heart. He’d been unable to bring himself to say “bitches” in our mom’s living room. I’d kept laughing until he punched me in the chest.