“Before, I watched and learned,” he said. He was nearly as tall as me and twice as wide. Though he was only in his late twenties, the stresses of war, combat helmets, and a young daughter had left his hair a black horseshoe. He maintained a trim mustache and couldn’t understand why American infantry officers weren’t supposed to grow one, since every culture but ours knew that mustaches and masculinity were intrinsically linked. “I’ve seen many Americans come and go. Your units all work differently from each other.”
I asked what else he’d learned.
“For one, there is a difference between allies and partners. Allies do their own thing. Partners work together. For two, Americans have good hearts, but get impatient when they don’t sleep enough.” An eddy of cigarette smoke and yellow molars whirled up at me. “Especially young molazims far from home for the first time.”
I laughed and accepted his invitation for a planning session over chai the following evening.
The two people whom I’d believed would be most distressed by the jundis in the outpost didn’t react the way I thought they would. Alia refused to answer Snoop’s questions about how it affected her side business. And Chambers stressed to our soldiers that it meant progress in the greater mission.
“Appreciate you pretending for the guys,” I said, after walking into his lecture in the joes’ room. “Them bitching about it isn’t going to change anything.”
“I meant it, Lieutenant,” he said. “Every word. I don’t plan on coming back here. Anything that brings that closer to reality is fucking worth it.”
Just because he said he meant it didn’t mean I believed him. We donned our body armor together in silence, me groaning as the armor pressed down on my shoulder blades, him grunting as he velcroed his torso straps. He caught me staring at his strange, wristless hands, though he probably thought I’d been looking at the skull tattoos.
Downstairs, we passed Alia mopping the red-and-white tiles of the foyer. She kept her head bowed, serene as a church bell.
• • •
The June heat was grave. First and second squad stood near the clearing barrels, as did three of Saif’s men. Snoop played Game Boy to the side, a black ski mask pulled over his face and bunched under his helmet. The brigade had mandated that terps weren’t allowed to wear masks on patrols, but Captain Vrettos had turned a blind eye to it, leaving it up to the translators themselves. Since the sniper attack, Snoop hadn’t gone outside without the mask. He said Jaish al-Mahdi was hunting him, in both Ashuriyah and the Sudanese neighborhood in Baghdad where his family lived. Without Captain Vrettos’ relaxed policy, he swore he would already have quit.
I studied the crater-eyed faces in American uniforms. A few wore unauthorized patches of a dark scorpion where the Twenty-Fifth’s lightning bolt should’ve been. Everyone called us the scorpion platoon now, even the commander, though I’d insisted on keeping the Hotspur call sign. Many of the soldiers were familiar, but some were not, a result of Chambers’ platoon trades.
We had… six new soldiers? I wondered. Maybe seven. I needed to ask for an updated platoon roster. I thought of Ortiz and Alphabet and tried to form their faces out of the scattered shards of memory but could put together only parts of their portraits, which were different and wrong somehow.
“Gather ’round, killers. Snoop, turn off the game and translate for the jundis.”
“Okay, LT.”
“Today we’re collecting info on Azhar, better known as Dead Tooth.” I looked for a familiar face and found Washington, fresh from explaining sand niggers to Snoop. “Corporal W, what can you tell us about Dead Tooth?”
“He’s got a dead tooth,” Washington said, earning a few laughs. Satisfied, he continued. “Youngblood punk using his daddy’s rifle.”
Chambers’ pet phrase coming out of my soldier’s mouth irritated me, but I kept it to myself. I asked who Dead Tooth was aligned with.
“Al-Qaeda,” Washington said. “At least he says that. Probably just a pretender.”
As soon as battalion had sent a photograph of the new insurgent leader, I’d recognized the younger cousin who’d picked up his family’s fasil payment in the spring. Same long face, same thin mustache, same brown, crooked teeth filling his mouth. Captain Vrettos had sighed deeply when I’d mentioned the history, then charged our platoon with capturing him because of my “superb diplomatic skills.”
“Reports say he’s been hiding around the Sunni Strip, in the northwest. Write this down, guys.” I stopped for a beat before continuing. “That’s where we’re going. The mosque blocks.”
“Fobbits got nothing else?” Chambers asked from the back. His voice had acid in it. “Why have an intel shop if they’re only gonna tell us what we already know?”
“Above my pay grade,” I said. “Let’s focus on what we can control.” I finished the patrol brief, reminding them that Dead Tooth was wanted in connection with the increase in IED attacks. After asking if there were any questions, I paused. I hated this part of the combat ritual. “Hotspur, you know the deal. Be the scorpion,” I said.
“Be the scorpion!” they echoed.
We locked and loaded and filed to the front gate, Dominguez walking point yet again, zip cuffs dangling from his vest like a necklace of plastic ears. Another platoon’s soldiers occupied the Humvee and sentry shack, a wigwam of ammo crates and sandbags. Some of the guys had wanted to name the shack after Alphabet, but it hadn’t taken.
American soldiers pushed into the unknown once more. We moved with edge, adrenaline juicing our blood, a hyperconsciousness the civilized world could never replicate. If hajj was going to get any of us, he’d have to earn it. There would be no more shots in the dark on the unsuspecting. Over the past few weeks I’d grown proud of what we’d once considered routine. A platoon of infantrymen, young, silly, fierce men from the country and the ghettos, marching into the outposts of hell because no one else would. And I went with them. They’d proven themselves now that things mattered. More than anything, I needed to prove myself worthy of being their lieutenant. Their LT.
A storm brewed as we pushed west. The trash-strewn streets were empty save for dust cyclones spinning at corners like little orange pinwheels. Most Iraqis stayed in the shade during the cruel afternoons, but the storekeepers and porch denizens usually remained firm. Even they had fled the elements today. As we walked, Ashuriyah turned into a biblical van Gogh, the wind painting everything it touched in dizzy strokes of churning earth.
“Simoom season,” Snoop said.
“What’s that?” I asked, wiping dirt from my lenses.
“The poison wind.”
As difficult a time as I was having staying vertical, our interpreter found it impossible. He had one of those angular, bony bodies that only looked natural leaning on something. Wobbling around with his crooked mask and a plastic rifle tucked under an elbow, he resembled a hungover bank robber. Batule, now the radioman, shook his head at our terp and laughed. I smiled and tapped Snoop lightly on the helmet.
We shifted north into the mosque blocks. A small high school building made of granite lay at the intersection. Closed for the summer, chains wrapped around its gate like a metal python, rust gnawing away at the padlock. Big blocks of spray paint covered the gate and parallel walls.