Fives and Twenty-Fives (11 page)

I fold the note five times and tuck it into the back of my wallet.

On my streetcar ride home, bouncing along the St. Charles Avenue tracks, I imagine the sailboat Paige’s family keeps at the yacht club—in pristine condition, I’ll bet. Not like the wreck I saw this morning in the West End boneyard, up on blocks, and such a mess that the old harbormaster could hardly muster a nice word to say about it, despite his obvious desire to see it gone.

“Well, it would be . . . a real project” was about the best he could say for the battered hull with
Sentimental Journey
stenciled across its stern. “But, then, you’re a young guy, right? No wife, no kids. Gonna take on a project like this, now’d be the time.”

I ran my hand along the pitted gel coat. “How did these abrasions get here?”

“The Storm.” He shrugged. “Surge ripped all the boats off their moorings in the municipal harbor, carried them across the street, and left them piled up in the parking lot when the water receded.
This
gal was lying on her port side at the bottom of the pile. Owner never came back for her.”

After mentally stumbling through a selection of half-remembered nautical terms for an intelligent question to ask, I settled on, “Did you manage to save any of the standing rigging?”

He laughed. “You’re joking right? All that’s left’s what you’re looking at. But you’d want to start over with the rigging, anyway. Gut the interior, too, and rebuild from an empty hull. That’s one thing about these old boats—the hulls are thick. They take a beating, and you can always rebuild.”

If I don’t get back to him by early January, he’s having it chopped up and taken to a landfill. I’m just glad he didn’t ask me about my sailing experience or renovation plans. He probably assumes I’m looking for a party barge to impress girls, and I’m happy to let him.

I get off the streetcar at Washington Avenue and start walking the last few blocks to my apartment. Ahead of me, a funeral procession blocks the way across Coliseum Street as the horse-drawn carriage makes a slow right turn through the Lafayette Cemetery gates. I wait on the corner and shiver while the band and the mourners pass. They have a strange system in this city. A jazz band leads the mourners from the church to the cemetery, playing sad songs along the way so everyone can get their hysterics out. Then, after they put the coffin in its tomb, they play upbeat music so everyone can dance their way back to the church.

It’s free-form and wild, the opposite of a military funeral. But how would I know? It occurs to me with a start that I’ve never attended a military funeral. Never heard a twenty-one-gun salute or seen a widow take her folded flag. We had plenty of back-in-country memorial services, but it wasn’t the same. We always botched it.

I think of Paige and her speech about empathy. She might’ve been onto something with that, and I find myself wishing I’d put up a better fight on her behalf. It’s what Major Leighton missed on the day of Gunny Stout’s memorial. Empathy.

He got up and gave a big speech about getting over it. Heads back in the game. And while that might’ve been the right message from a leadership point of view, it wasn’t effective. It didn’t put anyone’s head back in the game.

No one knew the procedure before Gunny Stout died. He was the company’s first, and we had to learn on the fly. We messed up the family notification message. We messed up his personal effects. We messed up everything.

For starters, we needed a new comment for the personnel status board. We couldn’t just subtract one from the company’s total strength, apparently. We had to keep him on the morning report until after mortuary affairs had prepped his remains for transport. But how to list him? Were we supposed to just scribble the word
Dead
on the board and put his name next to it? No one knew.

Finally, the admin chief walked over to the status board and made a new box:
Outbound Angels—1
.

It offended me. I assumed that the admin chief, a religious guy known to proselytize, had made it up and tried to sneak in a preachy remark. I went to have a word with him, but Cobb stopped me. He told me the admin chief took the words right from the personnel manual. So I looked it up. Sure enough.
Outbound angels
. That’s what we called them officially.

I didn’t like it. No one who saw that vinyl bag, limp like feed, hefted into the helicopter would’ve thought to call it an angel. Even Doc Pleasant, usually pretty good about gore, shut down. He skipped the memorial service. There wasn’t an angel in sight for Doc Pleasant, and he was the type who’d look.

After the memorial service, the other lieutenants, Cobb, Wong, and the rest of them, slapped me on the shoulder and talked tough.

“You made the call, man. Not easy. No shame.”

“Nothing you could do. That’s a lieutenant’s job. Why we make the big bucks.”

“Drive on. New day, brother.”

But underneath, I heard them asking, “Are you sure he died instantly? Are you sure? Weren’t you in charge? Where were you when he walked out there? Why didn’t you tell him no? Why didn’t you make him wear his bomb suit at least? Muscled by a gunny again, weren’t you. Talked out of your rank. Yeah. That figures, runt.”

I imagined them at chow, the whole pack of lieutenants mulling it over at social hour. Cobb, with his square jaw and broad shoulders, leading the discussion. Softly posing the question to my assembled peers: “Who’ll run the platoon for him now?”

Even Gunny Dole attempted, for once, to step up. He ambled over after the memorial service and asked, “Sir, can you use me down at the platoon? Anything I can do?”

I took the opportunity to scold him. It was pointless, but satisfying. “Sure could, Gunny. In fact, I could really use you out on the road.”

He winced and shook his head. “Yeah. I’m sorry, sir. Really sorry. Medical says I can’t go out on the road with the bum knee. Wish I could. I hate missing it. Anyway, I need to run over to the phone center real quick. My wife has a question about the mortgage.” He walked away, the glow of a twenty-year pension around him like an aura.

Major Leighton didn’t bother with any of that. He called me into his office a day later and asked me straightaway, “How many potholes has your platoon cleared so far, Lieutenant Donovan?”

“One hundred and fifty-seven, sir.”

“Out of those, how many have had an explosive device, in some stage of emplacement and arming, buried in the hole?”

“One hundred and fifty-seven, sir.”

“So, it’s safe to assume that your Marines will encounter these explosive devices again.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well then, you need to get back on the road as soon as possible. Best thing for the platoon.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Given time to dwell on this, your Marines will lose all fighting spirit. They will lose the ability to face these devices. They will hesitate. They will spend hours at every hole, poking around endlessly with those damn robots. They will lose the initiative. They will surrender momentum to the enemy, who will find a new way to kill them. While your Marines are stalled by fear, cowering on the same patch of highway for hours, the enemy will have time to maneuver on you with small arms, machine guns, and rockets. Maybe even indirect fire.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The dangers out there are sort of like the ocean.” He chuckled. “You’d never swim if you knew how many sharks there really were.”

“Yes, sir.” There wasn’t much else I could say, staying within military decorum.

“So, we keep the momentum. Here’s the mission.” He rubbed his bald head, sending flakes of peeling, sunburned skin cascading onto the map. “Route Long Island, from the Newport intersection north, all the way to Hit.”

He walked the length of his map table to trace the route. Red dots marked the site of every enemy attack in the previous six months. As he dragged his finger along a major highway over fifty miles of open desert, red dots slipped under his finger like braille. He smiled. “Every pothole wider than a meter across. You fill it, you mark it, you make it safe.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Take the new terp along. What’s his name? Dodge? Get him oriented.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Oh, and one more thing. The bomb technicians are an attachment from now on. None of this split command business. No ambiguity. The bomb techs work for you, and that’s it.” He put his hands on his hips and nodded at me.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

We used that naval phrase by tradition. The Marines. The infantry of the sea. But it wasn’t just traditional. The words had meaning.

Aye, aye
didn’t just mean “Yes.” It meant, “I understand the order. I will carry out the order.” And I understood him perfectly. It was my responsibility, from that point on, not just for the pothole but for the bomb inside it, too.

We rolled the next morning, before curfew lifted and Iraqi trucks and donkey carts choked the streets solid. We took Route Michigan east toward Fallujah, turned south onto Route Long Island, and watched the city slip away on the far side of the river. It was still dark. Generator exhaust shimmered in the green sodium light above the mosques. The shops along Phase Line Fran were all sealed up with corrugated-metal sheets. The radios crackled as infantry patrols came on and off the net with sporadic reports of rifle fire.

We sped up in the empty desert just south of the river, reaching the intersection of Route Long Island and Route Newport, at the southern tip of Lake Habbaniyah, thirty minutes later.

We negotiated the dark intersection and turned north. Gomez came on the net a moment later and announced that a massive hole, three meters across and a meter deep, blocked the road ahead. We stopped and assumed a security posture, still fifty miles from Hit. A crater so soon after the intersection didn’t bode well for the rest of the day.

We parked in the middle of the highway, straddled the white line, and stopped traffic in both directions while we waited for daylight. Zahn tapped the gas pedal every few minutes to keep the engine warm. I sat next to him and worked the radios. Marceau manned the turret, and Doc Pleasant sat in the backseat with Dodge.

Our empty seven-ton truck, running point, was the nearest vehicle to the crater. An empty truck always led the way, as we’d learned by then not to keep anything of value on the first vehicle. No one said it out loud, but the lead truck was a mine roller. Simple as that. A corporal always rode in the lead truck to reassure the junior Marine behind the wheel. The corporals took turns; Gomez kept a list.

Gomez was always second in the order of march, right behind the mine roller in a standard gun-truck, a security Humvee with a turret-mounted machine gun. A long-bed utility truck followed her with generators and compressors, jackhammers and asphalt saws, pallets of concrete in fifty-pound bags, and a ten-thousand-gallon water tank. I always rolled last in the order of march, in a four-vehicle section with three gun-trucks protecting the bomb-disposal vehicle.

We made sure the bomb-disposal vehicle looked just like the others, and we varied its place in line. It was an endless game of three-card monte with the enemy triggermen, for whom killing bomb-disposal technicians was a top priority. According to intelligence reports, killing an American bomb tech could make a triggerman rich, satisfy his desire for revenge, or bring him great rewards in heaven. Plenty of incentive, whatever his motivation.

Dodge sat in the backseat of the command Humvee, looking brand-new in his gear. His crisp flight suit still sported the sheen from its flame-resistant fabric treatment, and the folds on his flak had yet to accumulate a single grain of sand.

Pleasant reached across the seat to adjust Dodge’s flak. “You look like a goddamn soup sandwich over here. We’ll tape up all these slides when we get home. Seriously, you look like some kind of traveling Gypsy.” Pleasant pulled hard on a strap to tighten the fit. “Too tight? Can you still breathe?”

“Yes, man.” Dodge sighed. “I can breathe.”

“Seriously, though—tell me if you can’t. I can loosen it.”

“No, it’s good. Really, man. It’s fine.” Dodge nodded and put a hand over his heart.

Behind the wheel, Zahn spit into his dip bottle and asked, “Light enough, sir?”

“Give it five minutes.”

“Yo, Zahn,” Marceau called out from the turret. “Pass me a can of Copenhagen. I’m falling the fuck asleep.”

Zahn scoffed. “I look like Santa Claus to you? Should’ve fucking thought about that before we rolled out.”

I watched Marceau settle back behind his gun and sigh. He let his black hair, prematurely flecked with gray, grow a few centimeters longer than regulation, and had an oddly flattering gap in his front teeth.

Marceau had a genuinely charming emotional blind spot. Perception didn’t much matter to him. He cared only for reality. As long as he knew he was doing his job, and keeping his friends safe, he was immune to peer pressure. Free to be a Marine without having to act like one. Free to make light of our national follies and remind us all that in the scope of wars that had come before, our war was silly. Worth a laugh or two.

I had Gomez assign him to my turret whenever possible. I was selfish like that.

I watched as daylight crept through the palm trees off to our right and draped Marceau’s face in an orange sheen. The same sunbeam drifted in through the armored window and came to rest on my cheek. I keyed the radio when my skin began to prickle from the heat.