Maybe.
I hung up the phone knowing there was no way I’d get back to sleep.
“Where’s the last place you’d expect to find a lieutenant?” I asked the night shift. “Like, right now.”
They told me.
• • •
Through night vision binos, Ashuriyah was a phosphorous green pillow. The joe in the north guard station of the roof wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t quite awake, either. His body jerked when I came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Go sleep, youngblood,” I said. Among other things, I’d surrendered to the term. The private knew officers didn’t pull roof duty, but was too drowsy to articulate it. He stumbled off with an “LT, thanks, LT,” and I was alone.
That private, I thought. He’d shown up with Chambers, all those lost months ago. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He was from North Dakota? New Hampshire? South Carolina? He talked a lot about how smart his Doberman was. He also claimed to have only three chest hairs, and had named them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, something the rest of the platoon found hilarious. It was sort of funny, now that I thought about it.
I rotated the machine gun and scanned, the mechanized velvet of the turret rolling smooth. A hunter’s moon gored the sky. Below, beyond the blast walls and mazes of razor wire, lights were scattered like lost candles.
We’d been here almost a year and couldn’t even keep the goddamn power on. I thought about that while my index finger stroked the trigger well and I kept scanning, slowly. Nothing but quiet September black. An autumn chill nipped at my cheeks and at the slits of skin where sleeve met glove. We weren’t supposed to smoke up here. It gave away our position. Revolutions were nocturnal beasts, though, and I figured the large camo nets and an occupation nearing a decade had also given away our position. I lit up a cigarette, cupping the cherry with a palm just in case.
My brother’s message hadn’t been the only one in my in-box. My old ROTC pal Chiu had finally e-mailed back. He was home in Irvine, armed with a medical marijuana prescription, trying to figure out where to go back to school. For what, he didn’t know yet, but he knew school would at least get him away from his parents, who told him every day that having one leg was no excuse for being a derelict. REMEMBER, he wrote, ALL REAL VETS DIE BITTER AND ALCOHOLIC! (LOL).
He’d be okay. The world needed people like Chiu.
A gunshot echoed through Ashuriyah, a tongue popping off the roof of a mouth. When only dogs answered, I grabbed the walkie-talkie and reported in.
“One round fired to the north, approximately three thousand meters away.”
“Roger that, logged,” came the response.
One round could mean anything. Kids messing around. A negligent discharge at a Sahwa checkpoint. An execution in a barn. A sniper’s tidy shot through a car window. Just another prayer bead on the death string of tribal warfare, no different from any other.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t known their names. The people in the mosque. I’d already gotten over that. I didn’t even know what they looked like, though. They were complete ciphers, anyone and everyone all at once. “Locals,” I’d call them in my war stories someday, to sympathize with the faceless people I’d unintentionally helped kill. “Iraqi citizens who wanted peace.”
I finished my cigarette, stomping it out with the heel of my boot.
Some time passed. I thought about the mosque some more, then about what was left of it. Some more time passed. The metal door that led downstairs popped open, loosing a sliver of light. I gripped the stock and asked who was there, flipping up my night vision binos and squinting.
“Why you here?” It was Chambers, his voice flexing, always flexing, but strained, too. I couldn’t see his face, but pictured it drawn and ashen.
“You look how I feel,” I said, waiting for him to laugh. He didn’t. “Still no patrols?”
“On standby.” He grunted. “Spec ops are on a raid somewhere nearby. Might need to clean up their mess.”
“Seems to be a lot of that recently.” I chewed on my bottom lip and waited. I really needed to learn his trick of making people nervous by not responding. “Battalion says al-Qaeda is coming after us soon.”
He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck. Then he started balling his hands into fists, flexing his forearms. He stopped when he saw me staring.
“Why do you do that?” My question came out more strident than intended.
He did it again, just once, as if to prove something. “My dad was an addict. Habit I started in high school, to remind myself to not be like him. Guess it stuck.”
“Huh.” That seemed plausible, and made more sense than the bogeyman reasons I’d ascribed it. Still, I thought. Weird. We seemed so far from the time he’d joined the platoon and called me Jackie, so far from the weeks I’d spent trying to get rid of him because everything had changed with his arrival. Another gunshot echoed through the night, this one from the other side of town. More dogs barked. My report was logged.
Chambers leaned against the sandbags, stepping under the dim moonlight. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wad of dip, sticking it in his mouth. I wanted him to leave so I could be alone again, but we needed to talk, and not just because his intel girlfriend was worried.
“Been smoking, Lieutenant?” He was looking at the butt on the ground. It was a bad example for the men, we both knew. It also didn’t need to be said. I leaned down and stuck the butt into a cargo pocket.
“You okay, Sergeant?” I asked. “Yesterday was — well. Fucked-up, you know?”
He answered quickly, as if he’d been rehearsing.
“All good. I mean it. Yesterday was the result of a half-assed strategy set by old men in suits who don’t have a fucking clue. They hear ‘counterinsurgency’ and think it’s War Lite — a smarter, cleaner way. But it’s not. War is always dirty. War is always about force. Yesterday’s on a lot of people. But not us. We just happened to be the grunts sent there to do what no one else would. What no one else could.”
I wanted to agree with him. I wanted us to absolve ourselves of blame, deflect the accountability elsewhere. I wanted to chalk up the ruin we’d wrought to something unknowable, like providence, or chance, or bureaucracy. But something inside implored me not to. That’s too easy, it said. Be stubborn. Fight for understanding.
It had my grandma’s voice.
“It wasn’t anyone, though,” I said. “It was us.”
Chambers laughed, spitting out a wad of dip, the spartan creases in his face glinting. He pushed aside the droopy camo netting and looked over the roof wall at the pool of elephant grass below. A breeze stirred through the meadow, playing thistles, banging flowerheads.
“ ‘God, grant us men to see in a small thing principles which are common things, both small and great.’ ” He turned his hard gray eyes my way. I must’ve looked perplexed. “Still haven’t read Augustine,” he said.
“Oh.” His quote had gone over my head. “Not yet.”
“Doing right by soldiers can get messy,” he continued. The smell of hot tobacco in his mouth filled my ears. “We have less than three months left. Three months until they’re home with their wives, their parents. Fucking kids. Just get them home. Nothing else matters. Didn’t always feel that way, but I do now.”
“Yeah.” Some other things mattered, I knew, or at least some other people, but I couldn’t control any of that. Still, though — I’d decided that I wanted to leave Iraq having done one good thing. One good thing free of complication and ambiguity, one good thing that proved I wasn’t the type of man who used drop weapons or destroyed mosques or couldn’t remember his dead soldiers’ faces. A good thing rather than a lucky thing, like being told where a man’s bones were. I wanted to tell Chambers all this, even though he’d probably scoff. Before I could, he spat out another wad of dip and cleared his throat.