Both Batule and Saif were sent to Baghdad for emergency surgeries — Batule for a lost eye and a ruptured eardrum, Saif for his lost legs. Their war was over.
I spent the rest of the night smoking cigarettes and watching movies on my laptop, away from our room, where Chambers was. Something he’d said wouldn’t go away. We’d been on the tower path, the medics working to stabilize Saif. “Mission accomplished,” he’d said. Then he’d laughed.
38
We didn’t go on patrol the day after the mosque got blown up. No one did. “A tactical pause,” Captain Vrettos called it. For him, that meant explaining to higher what had happened. For the soldiers, it meant gym workouts and video games. For me, it meant going through my e-mail. There was a note from my brother, an apology. I didn’t know how to respond, and even though I tried to write back, I didn’t know what to say. He’d been right about moral courage mattering more than physical courage. I deleted the message.
I spent the day on the smoking patio, watching the walls of camo nets sway with the wind, breathing in wet cigarette. A light rain spat on the ground outside, steady through the afternoon. It would have been cold but for an electric space heater. I sat there reading a magazine article about the commanding general in Afghanistan getting fired for insubordination. It seemed like a stupid thing to get fired for, but things were going to hell everywhere.
Snoop found me there, alone.
“Yo,” he said.
“Yo,” I said.
“Crazy shit yesterday.” He shook his head. “Fucking Arabs.”
“Fucking Americans,” I said. “Stupid. All of it.”
He took a seat in the lawn chair next to me, his long legs sticking out like fishing rods. “Batule? Molazim Saif? They okay?”
“They’ll live.” I stared ahead.
Snoop pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He was a dark shadow in the pale light. We were close, maybe even friends, and I knew barely anything about him. I was about to try to rectify that when he said he needed some advice.
“I’ll help if I can,” I offered. It was such a first-world thing to say.
Snoop’s special visa to America had been delayed, along with hundreds of others. The embassy hadn’t given a reason or a time line. But he couldn’t go home to Little Sudan anymore. Jaish al-Mahdi wanted his head on a spike. He was spending his occasional weekend passes at Camp Independence, an option that wouldn’t be there once we left.
“What about the letter I wrote? I thought there was a big push to get terps stateside.”
“Too slow. And only goes to terps who give moneys. I gave them a whole file of letters from American officers I’ve worked for. It didn’t matter.” He paused to spit out a few shells. His words were boring deep into my conscience, and I thought of Rana, the way she looked at her boys when she sent them out to play with soldiers.
“The right way doesn’t work,” he continued. “I want to go to America, but getting out of Iraq is first. The war won’t end when your army leaves next year. You know this.”
“Where would you go?”
“Anywhere.”
I said I’d help, somehow, reminding him we still had a couple of months to figure something out. “Maybe my brother knows someone in Homeland Security,” I said, though he probably didn’t.
“Thanks, LT,” Snoop said, standing. He seemed embarrassed and started moving to the doorway before turning around. “We never talked about Haitham.”
Excuses darted through my mind like manic bats, but I didn’t need them. “What you did was right,” Snoop continued. “He was the Cleric, yes? It was the only thing a good lieutenant could do.”
He was wrong, of course, but I still appreciated his saying it.
• • •
I found a few hours of rest sitting up on my mattress and against the wall, poncho liner draped over my head. I didn’t bother to loosen my boots, like I was trying to trick myself into sleep. An arm shaking my own woke me at midnight.
My eyes felt like stomped grapes. I smacked my lips and concentrated on the foggy shape in front of me. It was the runner for the night shift. He could tell I was considering going back to sleep, so he shook me again.
“Battalion intel’s on the line. And — well, we don’t want to get the commander.”
I smacked my lips again and cracked my neck. “He in the sack?”
“Yes, sir. And. You know how it is. He needs to stay down, while he can.”
I slapped my face lightly and hopped off the bunk. “Glad you got me.” The runner thought I was being sarcastic, but I wasn’t, not totally.
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.