“Clear!”
“Room clear.”
“Sir, the hut’s clear! One enemy target down!”
I could see all this my fucking self, since only eight of us could fit into the hut, and the flashlights on our rifles had lit the room like a flare. I called for Doc Cork to check the body, told a fireteam to stay inside to search for intel, and pushed the others outside to do the same.
Doc Cork turned over the body. “Gone, baby, gone,” he said.
The man looked too old to be Dead Tooth, his skin sallow and lined. Too old and too small. Two scarlet pennies swelled through his shirt. The shooter had put the rounds through the chest three inches apart — a shitty target group, considering, but it had done its job, tearing through flesh and muscle and bone in spinning, raging angles to minimize the marginal effects and maximize the lethal one.
“Only thing we found is a bottle of cheap Iraqi whiskey.” It was one of the soldiers. “Still looking for a weapon.”
I nodded, the faintest pangs of what no weapon meant tapping at my soul. I looked back to the body. It wore an oversized soccer jersey, green, like the Iraqi national team’s. A cherry fluid trickled out of the mouth, a ribbon of blood with nothing left to circulate. Its jaw hung open, loosing a thin purple tongue and a set of jagged teeth the color of rot.
“Oh God,” I said. “Haitham.”
I took off my helmet in the now-swaying heat and rubbed my hands through my short hair. I took a knee and asked very calmly and very particularly who’d shot and why.
“It was me, sir,” Hog said. “I–I got stuck in the blanket, and when I pushed it away, I thought the bottle was a gun. He had it up like he was gonna shoot or something.” Hog fell against the far wall, sliding down in a heap. His rifle lay flat on the ground, and he covered his head with his forearms, grabbing the top of his helmet with his hands. When he spoke again, it sounded like a small candy was lodged in his windpipe. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck, this is bad, huh? Fuck me. Sir? I didn’t mean to, I swear to God, I fucking swear to God, sir. How bad is this? Talk to me. What now? What now, sir?”
“Everyone out.” Chambers stood in the doorway. “Everyone out but Hog and Lieutenant Porter.”
I felt seasick. I stayed on one knee as Doc Cork grasped Haitham’s little dead fingers with his own and then left with the others. I knew what was going to happen before it did, but I just stayed there in the middle of the room, looking at Haitham’s face forever etched in dirty sweat.
“Corporal. Calm down. Every Iraqi household has an AK-47. It’s allowed by law.” Ever certain. Ever clear. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and look at the doorway, so I focused on a speckle shaped like a leaf on the far wall. “That AK’s got to be around here somewhere. I bet one of the other guys already grabbed it, and it’s outside waiting for us. These things happen all the time. To good soldiers and good men. Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”
Isn’t that right. Such a funny phrase, when I thought about it.
“Haitham was a wanted man.” I stood up. “A good kill. Stand up, Hog. Let’s get some air.”
Hog looked up and laughed, full-throated. His amber eyes were fixed on something far away, and his mouth kept drooping as he tried to speak. He stood up and pulled out a cigarette. I lit it for him. As he followed me through the door, Chambers whistled in the back corner, low and without melody.
“All right.” I gathered the soldiers together, near the entrance. The swinging door had fallen from its hinges and now lay in the dirt. A ring of cigarette cherries surrounded me, their orange eyes seeing through the blackness of my words. I found a crate and stood above them. “So we got the Cleric,” I announced. “A good kill. No question. But you need to always remember the rules of engagement — don’t shoot unless they’re armed. You can’t shoot unless they’re armed. We’re American soldiers. We’re the good guys.” My voice was shaking. “You fucking hear me?”
They all said Yes, sir, we hear you.
By the time I walked back into the hut, someone had found an AK-47. They took a photo of Haitham’s body next to it. I stood in the back corner and radioed the outpost while the men pulled a body bag out of a backpack. As they unfolded the bundle, an olive-green sack designed to hold leaking carcasses, a camel spider jumped from one of its inner flaps. It was a hairy, ugly thing, the size of a baseball, primed up on its legs like they were ladders. It crawled across the ground and onto the dead man’s face.
The soldiers assigned to body bag duty jumped back. I told the outpost to wait one. The spider burst under the heel of my boot, leaving guts, fur, and green juice splattered across Haitham’s forehead.
“Clean that off before you zip him up,” I said. When they didn’t move quickly enough, I did it myself.
“Be easy, habibi,” I said, closing his jaw and eyelids. Then I got back on the radio while the soldiers bagged him.
30
Saif came the next morning to the patio, where I was watching the pink-and-purple light of the seven o’clock hour blink out. The Sultan was rising again, a new day. I hadn’t slept, and held a cigarette that wouldn’t stop quivering.
“She’s here,” he said, handing me a photocopied map with a red circle on it. “Can you hear me, Loo-tenant Porter? This is where she is.”
We went to her. I needed to do something with the day.
She lived in a hamlet west of the Villages, just across the Anbar border. I coordinated with the marines, since they were the landowners there, which suddenly sounded like such a ridiculous term.
Captain Vrettos commended me for my initiative when I said I needed to talk to a source outside our area. He looked almost healthy for once, even had color in his face. The news of the Cleric’s death had already ricocheted up the command — we’d received congratulatory messages from the Big Man and brigade commander, and were expecting one from the division commander. Captain Vrettos thanked me again for what we’d done the night before.
I didn’t say anything, because I couldn’t. He asked if I was okay. I said I was. He said he was always there if I needed to talk about the rigors of war and leadership. I said that was cool to know.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Oh?” I said.
“It’s the first day of Ramadan,” he said. “Just so you know.”
• • •
We left Ashuriyah. I saw the Barbie Kid on the roadside, alone near the northern fringe of the market. He leaned against a crooked utility pole and his pink sweats shined in the morning like a fallen star. He still didn’t have any shoes on his feet. I waved, but he just watched us and texted on a cell phone. We passed under the stone arch. Though I didn’t turn around to face the dead cleric and his beard of snow, I felt his glasses on my back. Somehow, I thought, he knows I’m off to find his daughter.
We drove west, the countryside melting into shades of dun. Berms rose and fell like ocean swells. This is the desert, I thought, free and true. I took a gulp of Rip It from the back hatch and breathed in baked air and laughed because it didn’t feel so strange anymore. None of it did. The soldiers asked what was wrong, and I brought up Ramadan.
“The Muslim fasting month,” I said. “We should do it with them.”
We hit an IED. One of the tire-popping kind that rattle the brain cage but fail to actually pop tires. A few months before, it would’ve caused an uproar, stirring the bantam energy of men yet untested. The vehicle’s emergency system was the only one who spoke. “Exit the vehicle immediately,” she said. We got out, checked our ears for blood, and made sure the Stryker still worked. Then we kept going.
At a dried-out reservoir bed, we turned south onto a thin road made of silt. Everyone seemed nervous, the radios clear of chatter, limbs taut and stiff. No one liked unfamiliar areas this late into a deployment, and before the mission I’d overheard some of the joes bitching about me “glory hunting.”