Yellow Birds (7 page)

We put our rifles out over the wall and gripped the forestocks tightly. We put out our cigarettes and asserted ourselves against the silence beyond our small encampment. I felt like a self-caricature, that we were falsely strong. When we spoke, we spoke brusquely and quietly and deepened our voices.

The lights formed a more regular line and we began to hear the whine of motors and then the lights disappeared and a cloud of dust rolled toward us above the ground from the front of the building near the road. The LT moved around our defensive perimeter and softly called out to us, “Stay alert. Stay alive.”

Two young sergeants quickly moved from around the building and spread out to either end of the wall. Then the colonel came, short, red-haired and walking upright as tall as he could. He had a reporter and a cameraman with him. The LT exchanged a few words with him and they both turned to us. “How’s the war tonight, boys?” he asked. A broad smile spread over his face in the darkness.

“Good,” Sterling replied with a dull certainty.

As if in need of confirmation, the colonel slowly met each of us eye to eye until we’d all said, “Yes, sir, it’s good tonight.”

Even in the intermittent light the crispness of his uniform was clearly visible. He smelled of starch when he came close to us. He folded his arms across his chest and began to speak, and the smile on his face disappeared. I briefly wondered which face was the real one before he pulled out a piece of paper and began to read from it, pausing ever so slightly to make sure the reporter was paying attention, “Are you rolling?”

“Go ahead. Pretend we’re not here.”

The colonel cleared his throat and pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket and rested them on the bridge of his nose. One of the sergeants came over and shined a small flashlight on the colonel’s piece of paper. “Boys,” he began, “you will soon be asked to do great violence in the cause of good.” He paced back and forth and his boot prints in the fine dust were never trampled. Each step was precise and his pacing only served to firm and define the tracks that he originally left. The sergeant with the flashlight paced beside him. “I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of enemy you’ll be up against.” His voice became a blunt staccato as he gained confidence in his capacity to motivate us, a bludgeon that smoothed the weary creases in my brain. “This is the land where Jonah is buried, where he begged for God’s justice to come.” He continued, “We are that justice. Now, I wish I could tell you that all of us are coming back, but I can’t. Some of you will not come back with us.” I was moved then, but what I now recall most vividly about that speech was the colonel’s pride, his satisfaction with his own directness, his disregard for us as individuals. “If you die, know this: we’ll put you on the first bird to Dover. Your families will have a distinction beyond all others. If these bastards want a fight, we’re going to give them one.” He paused. A look of great sentimentality came over him. “I can’t go with you boys,” he explained with regret, “but I’ll be in contact from the operation center the whole time. Give ’em hell.”

The LT started a round of applause. We’d been told to maintain noise and light discipline, but that had all gone out the window with the camera crew and the colonel’s half-assed Patton imitation. I could tell the colonel was disappointed. I looked at the rest of the platoon to see if I could read anything on their faces. Murph gazed down at the toes of his boots. Sterling listened attentively on a knee from underneath the hawthorn tree. The fires in the dark became lights that fluttered on the backs of my closed eyelids.

The colonel gestured toward the LT, extending his arm out to him, palm up. “Lieutenant, they are all yours.”

“Thank you, sir.” He cleared his throat three times. “All right, boys, we’ll be on fifty-percent security tonight. We move from this position just before light, crossing the open ground out there while we still have the cover of darkness.” There were a few glances over shoulders into the barren space between our position and the city proper. It was far too dark to see into it, but the images were there like an etching through the night. The stench of the dead had cut itself free from the other odors coming from Al Tafar. The trash fires and sewage, the heavy scent of cured lamb, the river; above all this was the stink of decay from the bodies themselves. A shudder ran through my shoulders, a quick shake, as I hoped not to step into the slick mess of one of them as we marched to the fight. “We’ll clear the open ground and pass along the road that swings around the city, using the buildings on the outskirts for cover. When we get to the orchard, we’ll spread out along this ditch here.” He pointed to a map illuminated by a pale green glow stick. It showed a narrow scratch in the earth, buildings crowded behind it, not forty yards from the first trees in the orchard. “Any questions?”

“What then?” someone asked.

The LT glanced timidly at the colonel, bit his lip and said, “They’re in there. We’re going in there.”

Then it was quiet. It seemed we were all measuring the distances we’d travel in the morning. The bends in the road between corners of buildings, a low wall here, there an upended dumpster we could use for cover. The heights of the trees, low enough so we’d enter the orchard hunching, passing through leaves once heavy with citrus and olive, the trees planted in rows so orderly that we thought we’d have clear views from one end of the world to the other. But the orchard was much too large for that. We didn’t know that yet because we hadn’t seen it from the inside. It filled dozens of acres between two spurs of bald, grassy earth that drooped down toward the city. The ground in the little valley lay flat in spots, heaved up in others, the whole of it covered by the old growth of fruit trees and two or three times grafted branches.

The colonel’s voice snapped up our attention. “We’re gonna drop mortars in that rathole for two hours before dawn. They’ll still be shredding those little trees right when you get up to ’em. We’re counting on you, boys. The people of the United States are counting on you. You may never do anything this important again in your entire lives.”

He hupped the two sergeants and the embedded reporters he’d brought with him, and they pulled off from the wall and trotted back to the front of the building. We heard his vehicle start. I heard him ask the reporter how the shots looked and then he was gone.

“Damn,” Murph said.

“What?”

“You think this is really the most important thing we’ll ever do, Bartle?”

I exhaled. “I hope not.”

The LT sat down in his chair again. The low crackle and hum of the radio was back on. The wind seemed to pick up a little and we watched the fires again in the hills. He looked scared and tired and he rubbed the small blemish on his face with the tips of two fingers. I forget most of the time that he was only a few years older than the rest of us, twenty-three or twenty-four, I’d guess. I never took the time to ask. He appeared older, though, like Sterling, and carried himself that way, or maybe we just granted him extra years because he’d done things we hadn’t: drunk at college parties with girls wild enough to run back into a strange room on a dare from their friends, driven a brand-new car.

“How many times have we been through that orchard, through this town, sir?” a PFC from third squad asked.

“The army?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This makes three.”

“All in the fall?”

“Yeah, seems like we’re fighting over this town every year.”

I thought of my grandfather’s war. How they had destinations and purpose. How the next day we’d march out under a sun hanging low over the plains in the east. We’d go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season. We’d drive them out. We always had. We’d kill them. They’d shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages. Then they’d come back, and we’d start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops. While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now.

“Maybe they’ll make it an annual thing,” Murph snapped.

Sterling came over from around the hawthorn where he had cleaned and loaded his weapons and taped down loose and moving parts so that they would not rattle. “Check me out, little man,” he told Murph. He jumped up and down, his hands at his sides. Silence. The only sound he made was the soft humph of his boots tamping down the fine dust. “All right. Good. Bartle, come over here, please.”

I moved over toward Sterling and Murph and watched as Sterling placed black electrical tape over the shiny, metallic pieces of gear that could protrude and reflect a glint of light in through a window in the predawn as we walked. Murph stood there motionless, and Sterling adjusted his equipment firmly and carefully. The look on his face was one of care. He bit at his lip, furrowed up his brow and turned the corners of his mouth down ever so slightly. When he was finished he rubbed his hands along the length of Murph’s body, almost caressing him. “Give it a shot,” he said.

Murph looked over to me and jumped off the ground a little and nothing moved or made a noise.

“Your turn, Bartle.”

He repeated the process for me, the same look of concern marking his face. When I jumped, there was no sound and Sterling patted me on the side of the helmet.

“Sarge,” I asked, “do you think we’re gonna have to fight here every year?”

“Hell yes, Private,” he said. “I was already in the first one. This shit’s gonna be bigger than Ohio State–Michigan.” He chuckled. He could tell I was nervous again. “Don’t worry. We’re gonna do all right tomorrow, OK? Just follow me, do what I say, and we’ll be back on the FOB before you know it.”

He smiled at both of us. He seemed to soften in the strange light from the lamppost. “OK, Sarge. Sure. We’ll follow you all the way.”

In the morning we woke to the narrow whine of mortars as they arced over our position and crumpled into the orchard. It remained dark. The sky was the color of brittle charcoal. What always happened to me before a fight happened then: a feeling I’d never felt until I went to the high desert to fight. Every time it came I searched for something to make the knot in my chest make sense, to help me understand the tremble that took over my thighs and made my fingers slick and clumsy. Murph once came close to describing it. A reporter had asked us what combat felt like. He’d worn a khaki outfit festooned with pockets and mirror-lens aviator glasses that could blind you from a hundred yards away. We hated having him around, but we’d been ordered to tolerate him, so when he came up to a group of us lounging in the dust beneath a large shade tree on base, saying, “Tell me the essence, guys, I want to know the kind of rush you get,” most of us ignored him, a few told him to go fuck himself, but Murph tried to explain. He said, “It’s like a car accident. You know? That instant between knowing that it’s gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car. Feels pretty helpless actually, like you’ve been riding along same as always, then it’s there staring you in the face and you don’t have the power to do shit about it. And know it. Death, or whatever, it’s either coming or it’s not. It’s kind of like that,” he continued, “like that split second in the car wreck, except for here it can last for goddamn days.” He paused. “Why don’t you come out with us and you can take point? I’ll bet you’ll find out.” The reporter left after that, something in the way we laughed made him stutter and backpedal out of our platoon area. But Murph was right about the feeling, and every time it began my body told me it couldn’t sustain the tightened muscles and sweat. But it didn’t end, so I tried not to pay attention to it.

“Noise and light discipline from here on out, boys,” the LT whispered. I was glad not to be out on the point. The guy who was swung his leg over the low wall separating our position from the open field and walked out toward the gray shapes of the city.

Sterling took a small canister of salt out of his ruck while we waited for our squad’s turn to move out. I remember that there was a picture of a girl with an umbrella on the label. Morton’s, I think. He turned the cylinder over and began to shake it over the earth beneath the hawthorn tree. I looked at Murph, and he returned my questioning expression, and we walked toward Sterling. “Uh, Sarge, are you all right?” Murph asked. Sterling spread the salt over the ground where we’d been set up the night before.

“It’s from Judges,” he said, without really noticing us. Then he looked up and seemed to look past us, out into the end of the night, which somewhere over the horizon line prepared to reveal itself as day. “Move out, guys,” he said. “It’s just a thing I do.” So we did. In the distance behind us Sterling walked, just barely in sight, spreading salt over the fields and alleys, over the dead bodies and into the dust that seemed to cover everything in Al Tafar. He spread it wherever he went, the whole time singing or muttering in a voice neither of us had ever heard him use before. It was a pleasant voice, friendly, and although we couldn’t make out the words, it terrified us.

“I think he’s losing his shit, Bart,” Murph said.

“You want to tell him?” I asked.

The mortars still fell. A few times a minute we twitched from the noise of the loud impacts like kettledrums banging in the orchard. Small fires burned. The smoke rose from among the frayed leaves. Once, when it was nearly light, Murph said, “I’m gonna see what Sterling’s up to.” He raised his rifle to use the magnification scope to look back at him.

“Well?”

There was a brief flash of light as the first faint rays crested the foothills to the east and fell along the roofs and walls of the buildings’ pale facades. I looked back and put my hand up on my brow line trying to focus on his figure, barely perceptible in the receding dark. “Well?” I repeated, “What is he doing?”

The figure in the distance was motionless. Perhaps all the salt was spread along this short stretch of the outskirts of Al Tafar. We were very close to the orchard and my legs were still quivering with fear. “Murph, what’s he doing?”