Princes of War (20 page)

“Yeah. We probably should leave. Come back during daylight.”

“You’re right, Sir. Truth is, if a sniper shot from one of these fucking houses, the residents probably got sent away beforehand and know next to nothing about it. Either that or the residents were threatened to stay quiet if they didn’t want a family member’s head to show up in a bag at their door. It’ll be hard as hell to get them to tell us anything.”

He was right, of course. Even if somebody in the neighborhood knew anything, that person might be too scared to talk. Lying was safer. The Wolfhounds couldn’t know for sure.

Wynn stared at the dark outlines of the houses. He didn’t see a single light on the street. The place was as black as erased memory. The relentless obligations of the Wolfhound’s daily work remained and he worried that if his men were too tired tomorrow, the missions could be compromised and the risks would be greater. Weariness augured mistakes.

His hopes for recovering information had been yet another triumph of hope over experience.

“OK. Let’s leave,” Wynn decided.

At 2340 the Wolfhounds departed again for FOB Apache.

Just after 0100, Kale slammed his trailer door shut. His roommates were still out. He flicked the light switch on so hard it hurt his finger.

Damn fools. Damn fools, he muttered to himself. The whole country was a shithole. How in the world they held anything together, how in the world they made anything work, how they lived, how they survived, why the hell anybody stayed, he did not know. He steamed disgust.

Kale jerked his IBA off and threw it on the floor. The clunk of the heavy weight landing on the floor shook the whole trailer. In the process, he ripped the elastic head band of his goggles and they fell to the floor, skittering beside his bed. He slammed his helmet on the desk and kicked the goggles under the bed.

Damn fools. The world is full of fools.

Shooting children! A sniper shooting children! Is there anything more screwed up?

He sat hard on his bed. The Chinese bed frame vibrated noisily, squeaking like a trapped rat.

He put a hand on each leg and looked down again at his blood-stained pants. Blood from the dead boy. The trailer light illuminated the brownish-red of the blood. He looked at his hands and studied the smudges of dried blood and dirt collected in the crevasses of his palms like tiny red footprints.

Had the bastard aimed at a soldier or the boy?

Kale fell backward, swinging his legs up, then lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. White ceilings. White was wrong. He stared straight at the fluorescent lights, defying the discomfort, as if he was seeking purification. He imagined the light was an acetylene torch that could burn his eyes to help him forget, and his eyes started watering, misting over, blurring his vision.

He felt like never using his eyes again.

He ran through the events again, churning every detail in his head, struggling with disbelief.

At a school. The children—smiling children. No guilt or evil in them. Then a boy took a bullet to his chest, killing him. Could they have stopped it? Ulricht, on the gun, had responded quickly. Did he really see anything?

And they couldn’t find the fucking bastard. They had searched for hours, and discovered nothing. Of course no one saw anything. Of course. Same shit.

Damn fucking country. Crazy fucking country.

His bed was wedged tightly between the walls. He kicked the wall hard one time, lashing out at the brutal craziness poisoning the world.

He looked again at the light through closed eyes, the acetylene torch burning behind a thin screen. Can’t burn it off. Never can.

DAY FOUR

12

At 0430, the earth herself still asleep, all Wynn could hear was his feet hitting the gravel of the running trail around the perimeter of the FOB and his steady deep breathing. He hadn’t run for several weeks. He’d decided to run this morning to help purge the craziness of yesterday. After a day like yesterday, night sunk the whole earth into a suffocating silent pit, and he wondered how ordinary life could ever return. Nonetheless, every 24 hours—an immense achievement—the world turned back from the black, muted, and lethargic night into a living, breathing, buzzing spectacle. He pushed the air out of his lungs. Of course everything wasn’t asleep. Bad things happened in the night; things that could hurt his men—people like whoever shot that boy. Wynn’s chest heaved and expanded as he ran, sounding like a hospital breathing machine. He’d rounded the back of the FOB a second time. His body-burn felt good, as if every cell was rejuvenating. He couldn’t change what was happening around him. Part of him maybe didn’t want to. To count when it mattered most was what mattered most.

What does
matter and what doesn’t? Perhaps there are a few true things, a few large and stable rocks in a cold stream that you could use while crossing, while moving through your life. Life was inevitably a precarious crossing; sometimes the stepping stones were wet and slippery. You had to keep going. That was the main thing.

Some didn’t keep going. He had lost one: Ramirez. Wynn hoped, prayed, he would not lose another. Long after the Wolfhounds returned stateside and the war was old history, after the country had moved on to new crises and his men had married beauties and fathered children, and gotten new jobs, and lost jobs, and gotten new jobs again, and gotten divorced, and started again, and kissed grandkids, after they had built a thousand new memories—the one thing they would never forget is that not everyone came home.

After breakfast, Cooke huddled with Sergeants Pauls, Turnbeck, and Singleton. Dawn cracked like a smoldering fire along the horizon. The night’s darkness resisted banishment, and bright light from a pole-mounted fixture shined down on them, the four men’s bodies casting long lean shadows, like dark fingers pointing impenitent at the day to come.

“We got to shake that mess yesterday off the men,” Cooke said. “No man can see kids killed without being affected. Watch your guys. Keep telling them things will be all right. Keep each other safe, that’s the main thing.” He worried that the men would hold on to that image of the dead boy and thereby degrade their performances in the days to come. He kicked at the ground, grinding the toe of his boot into dirt, trying to squash any such possibility.

“We lost him,” Pauls said, his voice sodden with residual frustration.

“Lost what?” Cooke asked.

“The damn shooter. That’ll eat the guys.”

“True. It’s fucked up. But it ain’t over. Keep talking to your guys. What’s important right now is the men need to be reminded that a man, especially a fighting man, wins some and loses some. Being able to handle both is the definition of maturity.”

“We gotta get something to make up for it, kill something, fuck them up. We find the bastards that did this, the guys will put it behind them,” Turnbeck said.

“We watch out for each other,” Cooke said. “We want to bring everybody home. I don’t want to lose anybody else.” He thought about Ramirez. He’d lost one of the Wolfhounds already; it couldn’t happen again. “You remind your guys about that. Remind each other. If anybody lets me down, I’m gonna deliver a really hard time.”

“We got it, Sarge,” Pauls answered.

“The LT and I’ve been talking,” Cooke continued. “We’ll find these bad guys. We all work hard, and we’ll find them. Keep your eyes wide open. Keep your crews alert. We’ll dig until we find some clues. Something will break our way.”

After talking for a few more minutes, the group broke up. Cooke watched the others walk away. Then he stuck his left hand in his pants pocket and fingered a thin strip of fabric. He touched the familiar embroidered letters on the fabric. The letters spelled a name: Ramirez. After Ramirez had been killed, the platoon had packed up all his personal effects to give to casualty affairs. On a table in the FOB trailer where Ramirez had lived had been a small packet of spare uniform items, including three name tapes for his desert cammies. Cooke, seeing these, had softly run his finger over Ramirez’s name and taken one. Ever since then he’d carried Ramirez’s name tape in his pants pocket. Inside Cooke’s kevlar vest cover was another Ramirez memento, a printed picture of Ramirez that Mongrel had taken during the flight from America. The photograph caught Ramirez in the aisle of the aircraft, horsing around, his mouth twisted insolently, his hands extended like two six-shooters aimed at Mongrel. With the photograph inside Cooke’s vest, the dead man remained part of the pack. Whenever the Wolfhounds left the wire, Ramirez still ran with them.

Moose arrived early in the motor pool. Other men, other early arrivals, clambered about their trucks, some with a casual distractedness, privately at work, taking care of business, their minds elsewhere. Their activity suggested purposefulness. Few talked. They were busy, busy in the way of serious men who know their jobs. Each was preparing, checking, rechecking, readying for the day—each alone, yet fulfilling a necessary task for the whole. Moose saw Lee installing a repaired radio. Gung did maintenance checks under the hood of D21. Cuebas crawled inside the back of his truck, rearranging equipment.

Ulricht stood like a centurion on top of his truck, adjusting the gun turret. In addition to his uniform, Ulricht wore an assortment of the combat soldier’s discretionary gear and black gloves. A Leatherman multi-tool hung off his belt. His quick decisive movements—leaning over one second, manipulating the turret the next—made him look vigorous and strong and important. He was all about getting things done. Moose watched him. Ulricht was silhouetted against the sky, his lean body contrasted with the immense blue sky backdrop, as if, in its oddly fragile human form, youth and freshness nevertheless stood up defiantly against the physical world. Maybe his silhouette symbolized how important they each were as individuals. The platoon was a small part of a big Army, yet each man was something big too.

What was Ulricht thinking about yesterday’s events? He was probably still wondering whether it was right to fire, and whether he had hit anything. Everyone was frustrated at their inability to find whoever had shot at them, and each felt bad about what had happened to the boy.

Moose contemplated the day ahead. It wasn’t about helping the Iraqis. He cared only about helping other Wolfhounds. How could they stay safe? Their training had focused primarily on that. They had spent weeks making sure they understood and could work their equipment. They had repeatedly shot their weapons. They studied military techniques again and again. They’d spent dozens of hours on counter-IED training, trying to master taking care of themselves in combat. Sure, they went out to look for bad guys. Sure, they engaged with the local population. But at least 75 percent of it, especially the outside the wire part, was about protecting themselves. After yesterday, the focus on self-protection would increase.

Wynn looked across the hood of his truck at his men. He would give it to them straight. They knew the cost of war, and the difficulty of operations in Iraq. The death of the Iraqi boy yesterday was a cost of war. With all the fat boiled off, the Wolfhounds’ mission was to keep the violence levels in their battlespace as low as possible. After yesterday, his soldiers would be asking whether they had failed. They hadn’t failed. They’d been out in it, doing their part, trying to bring a little better life to the Iraq’s citizens by helping with a new school. Had the Wolfhounds stayed away, progress, such as the construction of new schools, wouldn’t be possible. Whoever attacked them yesterday was attacking Iraq. That attack didn’t negate what the Coalition Forces were trying to do. Wynn wanted his men—today and every day—confident that they were trying to do the right thing.

He studied the faces of war-chiseled men, tested men, tired men, men who had seen things that should not be seen, who had by now spent enough time around death to know it from the inside. He detected their resolute acceptance, a kind of readiness to attempt the task at hand. It wasn’t so much that they believed fully in the mission but that they ought to try. They were all can-do men focused on getting the mission accomplished.

Wynn laid his notes on the hood of the truck. He had spent time last night before falling asleep—and again this morning on his run—thinking about what to say to the platoon about the sniper attack yesterday and what needed reinforcing. Each night he forced his mind to take perspective of where they had been, look forward, and decide how to articulate his thoughts.

He covered his points in a tight, business-like fashion. Speaking about the sniper shooting yesterday, he chose his words carefully, appreciating the gravity of the event. He concluded: “It was very ugly. Can’t hide that. But it shows how ugly our enemy is. There is no blame on us. What we were trying to do is good. Our mission is right. And if it takes a trip to hell to find that sniper, that’s where we’re going.”

Then he paused longer than usual, looked around the group, locking for a second or two on the eyes of several men as if that connection might fix a special confirmation, cement an intimacy. He wanted to see singularity of purpose. They looked back, expectant, receptive.

He told the platoon that orders from higher headquarters required that they continue the census that morning for a few hours. After that, they would go back to Bawa Sah, once again looking for anyone that would give them any information about what had happened.

Wynn saw Cooke ready to speak.

“Listen! You have to toughen yourself. There’s no other way. You have to harden your soul so completely that your concentration, no matter what happens, is not distracted and your actions are automatic. One of two things will happen if you don’t. One, you’ll be paralyzed into inaction, where you can’t do anything because your system is shocked silly, and you won’t be worth a fuck. Two, you’ll be killed, because the bad guy is meaner than you. Dead, or not worth a damn. Two bad options. That’s the way it is. Harden the heart. If we don’t, we ain’t gonna win.” Cooke said all these things like he was born to say them.

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