Fives and Twenty-Fives (22 page)

A plywood sign hung on an empty Hesco behind him, with stenciled letters reading
iraqi army advisory team six welcomes you to combat outpost chili mac on the beautiful euphrates river
. Near the bottom, a poorly drawn cowboy proclaimed in a dialogue bubble, “Can be combative.”

Across an overgrown field, a dozen more white trucks idled in a courtyard flanked by several long, one-story barracks buildings. Iraqi soldiers squatted or shuffled around in their combat gear. Some tried to find shade by standing with their backs flat against a wall, barely managing to get their faces out of the sun. Iraqi officers walked the edges in green cotton uniforms reminiscent of Saddam’s time, smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones.

We followed the kid in running shorts and parked at a building in the far corner of the compound, across an empty field from the Iraqis. The convoy team stumbled out, stretched their backs, and ripped at the heavy Velcro on their body armor. Flak jackets swung open and wet heat trapped for hours against their chests burned away like scraps of onion paper to a flame. The Marines exulted in it.

I stepped from my Humvee and called out to Gomez, two vehicles ahead. “Clear these crew-serves.” I pointed around at the turrets. “Do it now.”

She nodded and started yelling at the vehicle commanders, “Unload and check those barrels! Right fucking now!”

I stripped off my gear and staged it on my seat. I pulled off my Nomex hood and rubbed the sweat from my hair, my fingers raking up grains of sand and little rocks along with it. As always, I left my rifle locked to the seat post.

Dodge leaned against his door and chatted with Doc. He kept his hood on, letting it cover his whole face. “These guys, Lester?” Dodge pointed to the Iraqi soldiers across the compound. “All these
jundis
? These Iraqi soldiers? They are pissed-off Shia dudes from Basra. Pissed-off dudes, Lester. If they can manage it, they will take me to the desert, make me feel some truly astonishing pain before cutting off my head.”

“Why? What’d you do to them?”

“This is quite the long story, Lester. Just know that I will not remove my hood, nor my sunglasses. Not today.”

Without breaking stride, I waved to Dodge. “You’re inside with me. Doc, go see where Sergeant Gomez needs you.”

I pushed through the plywood door with Dodge behind me and found a long, tiled hallway. Camouflage ponchos hung over the entrances to four side rooms, which I assumed were sleeping quarters for the adviser team. Their accommodations were Spartan, save for tables lining the hall and piled high with juice boxes, muffins in cellophane wrapping, and open care packages.

I heard voices from the end of the hall, in a dark room that seemed larger than all the sleeping quarters put together. The room overflowed with radio traffic, and I walked instinctively to the sound, taking note along the way of the high ceilings and the walls covered with fading murals.

“What is it?” I heard someone ask in the dark. “What have we got? Two civilian dead? Three?”

I stopped at the entrance to the room while, behind me, Dodge lingered at the muffin table. I leaned on the doorframe and watched a young captain speaking into a field telephone. Taller than me, maybe six feet, with thinning, brown hair and skinny arms. He had small shoulders and I imagined that a heavy pack would slip right off.

He called across the room to a radio operator, “How many?” Then, back into the phone, he said, “Three civilian dead, sir.”

Sandbags covered small windows near the ceiling. A small amount of sunlight trickled in, but most of the room’s light was provided by a fluorescent construction light hanging from a parachute cord, bathing the room in a sickly green.

Across from the young captain, three senior enlisted Marines stood around an older officer in a field chair. They crossed their arms and spoke quietly past each other.

“How many wounded he say?”

“Yeah, what’s the story on that postblast response team?”

“On their way back now?”

I couldn’t discern anyone’s rank. Except for the captain, they all wore sandals, utility pants, and green T-shirts. Isolated from the prying eyes of the commanders in Taqaddum and Fallujah, military advisory teams tended to loosen their grooming standards. Who could blame them?

The captain saw me, hung up the phone, and walked over. “Hey, man. Sorry to keep you waiting. Big morning. So, you the resupply truck? Everybody good?”

“Yes, sir. We’re all fine. Bomb was way behind us. We didn’t even stop.” Realizing instantly the potential shame of this admission, I added, “Got your air conditioners, too.”

“Fucking
right
!” Then, to the man in the chair, he said, “You hear that, sir? Air conditioners.”

The man held up his hand to let the captain know he was busy listening to the radio traffic.

“A little tense in here,” the captain said, and I followed him out into the hall.

I pointed to Dodge, rooting through the muffins. “That’s our terp, sir. I wasn’t sure what it would look like out here so we brought him along.”

The captain shrugged. “Never a bad idea.” Then, with an odd sort of enthusiasm: “Shit, man, sorry. Drew Kelly.” He offered his hand. “What’s your name again?”

“Lieutenant Donovan.” I shook his hand.

“No, I mean your first name.”

“Oh. Pete, sir.” No captain had ever asked me that.

“All right then, Pete. Let’s see what we got here.”

We left Dodge to his scavenging and walked outside to the truck stacked high with brown MRE cases, bottled water, and window-mounted air-conditioning units that looked like they’d been looted from a housing project.

“Know where these came from?” Captain Kelly asked.

“I think the supply officer said they came in from Jordan, sir.”

“Yeah? Look like shit.”

Before I could respond, we were interrupted by the sound of a hundred men screaming one word. Turning around, I saw that the Iraqi soldiers who’d been milling around their barracks were suddenly standing up, agitated, as they watched the three white trucks bouncing back through the gate, filled with men in civilian clothes tied up in the Iraqi style: Piled on each other; hands behind their backs; empty sandbags over their heads. The adviser team’s Humvee followed at a distance, still playing sheepdog.

Captain Kelly laughed and said, “Just in time for the show, Pete.”

Another, older voice came through the plywood door behind us. “So it’s Dodge, then? Okay, Dodge, walk with me.”

I turned around and saw the officer from the field chair, now wearing a blouse with the gold oak leaves of a major on his collar. He had a Mediterranean complexion, with thick, black hair graying at the temples. Tall as Captain Kelly but with broad shoulders that conveyed an older man’s strength.

The major walked over. “Resupply?”

“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Donovan from Engineer—”

“Hey, Sal Franco. Good to meet you. Glad you brought your terp, too.” He smiled like a salesman. “Mind if I borrow him a little while? I’m walking over to have a conversation with Colonel Hewrami. Like to have my own interpreter when I do that.”

I stood quietly for a moment, confused. A major hardly needed my permission for anything.

“Our guy’s still out in town with that mess,” Franco continued. “Won’t be back for a while, looks like.”

“Oh. Well, yes. I mean, yes, sir. No problem.” I spat out the words, caught entirely off-balance.

“Great, son. Appreciate it. Join me? Drew can handle things here.”

Major Franco put on the sunglasses he had hanging by a lanyard around his neck and started walking. Dodge and I followed a half step behind him, with Dodge still wearing his hood.

Iraqi soldiers unloaded their trucks as we walked through the field. First, they ripped the sandbags off the heads of their prisoners, who, to a man, kept their mouths shut, looking down like they knew the drill. The soldiers let the older men among the prisoners step from the trucks, even helped some of them. But the younger guys were pushed callously, even violently, to the ground, lucky if they landed on their sides or their backs.

As we weaved through the crowd, Major Franco stared at his boots. A dust cloud grew as the Iraqi soldiers dragged men through the dirt and put them on their knees in rows of five. The faces of the prisoners bled, and most of them had bits of yellow shrub in their hair. Not one of them said a word.

Kneeling at the end of the first row, I saw, was the old man, the alfalfa man from the market. He rocked back and forth on his knees, tears running down to his chin, through his beard, and into the sand. He mouthed words to himself and shook his head.

Suddenly looking up, as if he sensed my gaze, he started whispering. I stopped walking and let him talk to me, my face telling him that I was listening. His voice trickled out like exhaust from a car on the verge of a stall.

“Min fadlak,”
he rasped.
“Min fadlak . . . Ada’tu tareeqi.”

He had blood in his hair and a gash above his beard in the thin, worn skin of his cheek. It was hard to imagine how that cut would ever heal, in skin so old. His voice ran out, but he kept mouthing the words. Until it was just one word, over and over. As he bowed his head, I imagined all the things he might want to tell me.

Help me. Let me go. Save my donkey. Save my alfalfa.

An Iraqi soldier walked over, put the tip of his rifle against the old man’s chin and pushed his face away. The alfalfa man closed his eyes and sat still.

I started jogging and caught up with Major Franco as he reached the advisory team’s Humvee, parked twenty meters away from the Iraqi soldiers and their prisoners. Major Franco leaned against the Humvee while his Marines stripped off their gear. The weary rancher with his sheepdogs, he sighed and put his hands in his pockets, looked out over the river, up at the sun, then back at the Iraqis.

I walked over to him, my mouth suddenly dry, licked my lips. “Sir?”

He looked at me and smiled. “Yes?”

“I just wanted to say, we didn’t halt back there. Didn’t secure that scene. But I saw that old man over there selling in the market just before the explosion. He might know something. Thought maybe we could get him out of those cuffs.”

“Tough call. Tough call.”

“I’m pretty sure they meant that bomb for my convoy. My vehicle, even. But I knew the adviser team had a quick-reaction force ready to go in here, so I just rolled through.”

“That bomb killed an old man and his two granddaughters walking through the market. It’s a pretty bad scene out there. Bad scene.”

Franco’s men moved around their Humvee, checking equipment. The kid in the turret leaned over his gun and gawked at the Iraqi soldiers unloading their trucks. He yelled into the crew compartment, laughing, “You
see
this shit, man?”

A chubby guy stepped out from the backseat. A corpsman; I could tell by the medical scissors tucked in the webbing of his flak. The blood on his trousers was still wet.

Franco put a hand on the corpsman’s shoulder. “Hear you saw some pretty evil shit out there.”

The corpsman shrugged and spoke with a Mexican accent. “Yes, sir. Not good, you know. Couldn’t do nothing for them. Little girls and an old man. Pretty much dead before we got there, I think. And everyone on the street, they were just sorta looking around.”

“So who’re these guys?” Franco swept his arm over the prisoners, at least twenty of them now.

“These dudes?” the turret gunner answered before the corpsman, like a kid who’d seen a good movie and wanted to talk about it. “
Jundi
s just started rounding them up, sir.” He laughed.

“Really?” Franco craned his neck to look at the gunner. He crossed his arms and frowned. “Huh.”

“Yeah, they took everybody. It was awesome. Just throwing dudes in the truck.”

I searched the crowd and found the alfalfa man sitting with his mouth open, a rope of saliva hanging from his lower lip.

Then I found Dodge. I’d lost track of him as we’d pushed through the field, but now he had an open water bottle in his right hand and was trying to give one of the prisoners a drink. An Iraqi soldier stood in his way, shaking his head, both hands on his rifle.

“Dodge!” I called out. “Get over here!”

He hesitated, not ready to give up the fight; then seeing no support coming from me, he put the cap back on the bottle and walked toward me, quaking with a rage all but imperceptible under his heavy gear.

Over Dodge’s shoulder, I noticed how the platoon was also taking note of the prisoners baking in the sun. Zahn and Marceau stood out front, watching us with their arms crossed. Behind them, Marines scurried around gathering water bottles from the pallet meant for the adviser team, filling their packs and cargo pockets. Pleasant stood next to Gomez like a greyhound in the starting box, ready to run into the field with his medical bag the moment Gomez opened the gate.

Probably wondering why I wasn’t opening the gate for her.

I swallowed hard, turned to Franco, and pointed to the alfalfa man. “Sir? See this guy over here? This old guy? He looks injured from the explosion. Can’t imagine he had anything to do with it.”