Jane Smiley - Golden Age

One night, Guthrie and Harper talked about how you would run a war if you could do it right. The only thing they could come up with was a standing army of fourteen-year-olds who didn’t know what death was, who would never be allowed back home, who would be conditioned and trained to kill or be killed, who would be bred to the game and then penned up (though treated well) after the war was over. Not an all-volunteer army, but an army of purebreds, like racehorses or hogs. It made them laugh while they were talking about it, but then Harper talked in his sleep again, and Guthrie didn’t get any sleep at all.

—

EVERYONE WAS SUPERSTITIOUS about approaching the end of their deployment. Only an idiot talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Harper said that there was no objective reason to believe that you were in more danger in the last weeks or days or hours before they got you out of this hellhole, but, still, he did not say what he was going to do when he got home. Even so, things entered Guthrie’s mind. When he heard about the Shiites’ kidnapping of dozens of Sunnis from the Ministry of Higher Education, he got the image of the Memorial Union at Iowa State — he’d been there on a school trip senior year and was impressed by it. When the Sunnis then attacked the Health Ministry, he couldn’t help imagining the big square white buildings of Usherton Hospital, where he’d gone once after a basketball game for an ankle X-ray. Baghdad was nothing at all like Usherton — maybe it was like Phoenix? But he didn’t want to think that, either. Sadr City he did not mistake for anywhere he had ever been. There were palm trees, there was heat, there was chaos, there was dirt, there were donkey carts, there were holes blasted in walls and doors, there was beautiful Arabic writing in black and blue on white walls, there were lines of people waiting to go into a bank, there were women in full black burqas, men in long robes, and children running and jumping everywhere with hardly anything on, there were soldiers aiming their weapons around corners, standing beside women sitting on the pavement, holding babies. There was a terrible stink. There was the absolute flatness of the landscape, absolute flat blueness of the sky. There was an everlasting rolling blast of noise, and sometimes, or at least that one time, there was a series of huge explosions in the middle of the afternoon, when five car bombs went off one after another in a square that Guthrie had walked through the day before, and after that there were bodies and blood and rubble and mess. No one, no one could stop them, no matter who wanted to or how much they wanted to. The folks back in Washington could say this or that, they could ask for more money in addition to the millions of dollars per day that they were spending, but it was all for naught, and everyone in Guthrie’s unit knew that as well as they knew their own names.

—

A WEEK LEFT; go out on patrol, be glad it was cold and the streets were more or less empty. Six days; work the checkpoint, hope that no one would appear, scream at anyone who even twitched an eyebrow the wrong way. Five days; go out on patrol again. Go slow, watch out for doorways and corners, don’t say anything about the future. Day four; go out on patrol again, this time in Karbala, not Sadr City. Don’t look at the women — every billow in every burqa could be a bomb. Don’t look at the fingers of your friend lighting his cigarette — they are trembling.

Remind yourself that the Americans had nothing to do with the execution of Saddam Hussein. He had been tried by his fellow Iraqis, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and now was going to be hanged. Most of the guys in Guthrie’s unit had seen that picture of Saddam and Rumsfeld shaking hands in the eighties. But most of them didn’t care — if you enlisted, even for practical reasons rather than patriotic reasons (or religious reasons; there were guys scattered about who had imagined in another lifetime that they were going to witness to the Iraqis and show them how to be saved, but nobody did that when they got their boots on the ground), then you did not pretend to understand the ins and outs of two guys shaking hands one day and attacking each other another day. But Harper knew something that Guthrie didn’t know, that the Shiites in the government had chosen to hang Saddam on the worst possible day — some sort of holy day. Harper said, “It was like they hung the Pope on Christmas, or even Good Friday. It was like they handed their enemies a martyr.” One of the other guys said that was pretty rich, Saddam Hussein as a martyr or a victim, and Harper just shrugged. He didn’t care anymore what you thought or whether you agreed with him, he was just waiting, like they were all just waiting. What they all knew was that when Saddam was hanged, no matter how secret that might be, everyone would know instantly, and the Sunnis would go bananas, and Baghdad would have another one of those weeks — most casualties since the invasion.

One day to go. The afternoon of Saddam’s hanging, the skies were cloudy and the weather was damp — it could get that way. You didn’t know whether you wanted to be wearing all your gear or not. They were assigned to a checkpoint. The first car that came through seemed harmless: a family, a veiled wife, a husband who was friendly, three kids in the back seat. Behind them, close behind them, were three guys, maybe nineteen years old. They seemed jumpy and impatient; their old, dirty car bumped against the back of the family’s car. Harper, Corning, and Randall made them reverse, get out and leave the doors open, then the three kids cocked their weapons, gave the guys the once-over, and sent them back the way they came. A farmer went through in a little truck with a couple of goats in the back. A man in Western clothes went through in a rather nice car, papers on the front seat. The jumpy guys did not return. The weather warmed up and the clouds dissipated. Off in the distance, they heard the boom of an explosion, saw a flare. It was too far away for them to hear the screams. Randall made a face, and said, “Happy New Year.”

THE PARKING GARAGE was not full at all. Claire found a roomy spot in a corner, got the kids out, and assembled them in two columns in front of her, Lauren with Dustin, Ned with Dash. She took Rhea’s hand and Petey’s hand, and said, “Think about what you want to buy. The slower you go, the more you get.” What she was really curious about was what, when given the choice, each of them might pick.

Yes, being a grandmother was a wonderful thing. With her own mother as a model, she hadn’t expected that. Frank had always said that Rosanna appraised her offspring with an eye to their market value. Though Claire hadn’t actually believed him, she’d seen no evidence of the adoration she felt for her grandchildren. No faults in them, and she didn’t take credit for it, either, since she found plenty of faults in Gray and Brad, and certain faults in Angie, Doug, Lisa, and Samantha. The children walked into the atrium and paused to stare at the fountain, then up at the ceiling. They kept going, though, and stepped carefully onto the escalator. They looked around, pushed their hoods back; their voices were low; they held the hands they were instructed to hold. In the eyes of her fellow customers, only admiration.

She had enjoyed working here before her party business took off, and agreed with irate customers that they could have retained “Marshall Field’s”—not every department store in the United States had to be called “Macy’s.”

The toy floor was bigger than Claire remembered, and she felt a little intimidated, but upon arrival the kids all stopped and looked up at her. What next? She walked down one aisle and halfway down another, stopping in front of the Legos. She said, “Petey and Rhea and I will stay here. Look at the display at the end of the aisle. Dustin, what’s that?”