Now and Again

2.0 ORDERS

2.1 Gordon Falwell

Two weeks before Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Falwell’s Forward Support Battalion was scheduled to go home, Falwell was informed that all tours were being extended. The order had come down “effective immediately,” but whether he did it out of fear or compassion, the colonel put off telling his troops. He had considered writing a letter on official stationery that they could have in their hands as he made the announcement, but he couldn’t get the wording right. He liked to write things. He liked the feel of ink from his West Point pen flowing onto a fresh sheet of paper and he liked the crisp credibility of the final word-processed document. Above all, he liked finding the perfect word for a particular sentiment. But what was the perfect word for “fucked”?

As the day of liberation neared, discipline had deteriorated to the point of insubordination, which reflected badly on all of them, but mostly on Falwell himself. All day long, irritation had been squeezing his eyebrows together and forcing itself into the cavity behind his lungs, and now he was being called to brigade headquarters to get their new orders. Which meant he had to tell his troops ASAP.

One leadership lesson he’d learned was to get his ducks in a row before making a pronouncement, but his ducks depended on other people’s ducks, all the way up the chain to the president, who had the upcoming election to consider. Meanwhile, did he continue to send supplies to the northern bases? What did he tell the news crew that had come to interview him about the New Way Forward, which was also being called the Surge? And where did he put the incoming troops if nobody was leaving? He was jumpy. The jumpiness, combined with the guilt he was feeling, made him snap at Miller, his Command Sergeant Major, when Miller came in with yet another stack of reports. Lunchtime came and went. By midafternoon he could put it off no longer. He slammed his fist on the desk and told Miller to muster the troops. An hour later, 300 men and women stampeded into the DFAC, tipping over chairs and telling high-spirited jokes because they still believed they were going home.

“One more trip to Tikrit and we’re free,” said one of the soldiers.

“Too bad we missed Mardi Gras,” said a second soldier, and a third said, “There’s always Burning Man.”

“Haven’t you seen enough of those right here in Iraq?” asked the first.

“Yee-haw,” said the third.

“They can celebrate after we win the war,” grumbled the colonel as he followed Miller to the front of the room. Washington promised that a surge in troops would be accompanied by a surge in support for the war, not only among Americans, but among Iraqis. But Falwell thought they should have fucking surged back at the beginning instead of committing to that zip-in-zip-out light-footprint strategy, which had been the only way to sell a war without raising taxes and upsetting the folks at home and which someone or other had described as “just enough troops to lose.” Not that political considerations were any of his concern, but now and then he couldn’t help thinking, What the fuck?

Whenever the door opened, a gust of wind puffed the cheeks of the tent in and out according to some unseen geophysical rhythm, and still the colonel stood silently next to Miller, waiting while the men scraped into the chairs, some of them whistling and others laughing and punching each other on the arm. The ones who were sitting were banging their fists on the tables, and the latecomers, who had elbowed their way into the gaps between the tables in order to hear, were now pushing at one another and asking what was up before deciding it didn’t matter: just two more days and they’d be gone.

Falwell thought how easy it would have been only a year before to bark out the facts and turn on his heel, but an unfamiliar wave of indecision washed over him, leaving him unsure of how to proceed. Sometimes he liked to shout out “Terror and ecstasy!” at strategic places in his inspirational speeches. Even though the troops didn’t know the words referred to Nietzsche’s view that only by joyously affirming suffering could man transcend meaninglessness, and even though the colonel didn’t remember anything about Nietzsche but that, it still felt good to say the words. Now he wanted to say something that would penetrate their thick buzz-cut skulls and detonate their centers of understanding, but he didn’t know what that something should be.

Falwell appreciated that the male prefrontal cortex didn’t mature until the mid- to late-twenties, which was why young, uneducated men made such good soldiers and why college students, like Falwell had once been, admired Nietzsche’s early writings and also why, at forty-seven, he couldn’t think of anything pertinent to say that would transcend the wide gulf that separated a man with a developed brain from a room full of men without. Men and women, he corrected himself. He didn’t know much about women, and what he thought he knew was always turning out to be wrong. Just ask his ex-wife and his daughters how much he knew about women and they would say jack shit.

His mouth was dry. His lips were cracked. His tongue felt like a hairless animal caught in a trap. Not to mention that lately he’d had a persistent, hacking cough that he should probably see a doctor for. “Fucking desert,” he said to Miller, and Miller said, “Yes sir,” in that well-oiled, agreeable way he had.

The noise in the DFAC was deafening. Even though some of the sound was absorbed by the soft canvas ceiling and the plywood floor that had been laid over the shifting desert sand, Miller had to shout to be heard. “At ease the noise!” he bellowed.

One by one the stragglers collapsed into the remaining chairs or shuffled forward from the back of the room or stood against the wall with their legs apart, increasingly alert to the long shadow of silence cast over the room by their commander. After a few seconds more, most of them had stopped pounding on the tables, and when Miller barked, “I said, lock it up!” the last of them stopped talking too, until the only thing Falwell could hear was the flapping of the canvas roof and, somewhere, a loose board banging in the wind. Even the tent seemed to be holding its breath and waiting for him to speak. Still, he gazed a fraction of a minute longer at his men, seeing in them his own youth, his own heedlessness, and also his own desperation to believe in something larger than himself.

Finally, Falwell cleared his throat. He confined himself to pointing out that full participation in life involved disappointment and tragedy and that the troops should enthusiastically embrace their lot, first because they were soldiers and second because there wasn’t any other choice. He added a few sentences from his Center of Gravity speech, which was loosely based on the theories of the great Prussian general and strategist Carl von Clausewitz. “Where the U.S. Army tends to conceive of the COG as the thing standing in the way of accomplishing a mission,” he said, “I see it as an individual’s source of moral and physical strength. That’s something every one of you is going to need.” Then he bluntly announced that the tours were being extended, no exceptions, end of case. “I am headed to Command Headquarters this afternoon to receive new orders. I will brief you again as soon as I return.”

Miller was standing stiffly at the colonel’s side, glaring at the troops arrayed before them until one by one the men and occasional woman stood at attention. One by one they stood tall and straight and focused on the middle distance, not looking at their colonel — just as he was not looking at them — but at the nothing the army had taught them to look at in order to avoid distraction, in order to be completely attuned to the form of things, in order to be tensed and settled and ready for whatever might be coming next. Content would follow form, the army had promised them, and for the colonel, it had. He believed in the mission completely and in the soaring American spirit backed up by the taloned might of American power. But sometimes he wondered if anyone knew what they were trying to accomplish. Sometimes he asked himself, What the fuck?

Falwell was nearing the half-century mark, and what lay beyond the middle distance when he dared to look that far was no longer what he had seen there as a young man or what the young men before him would see if they refocused their eyes. What lay beyond the middle distance, for him, was not the terror or ecstasy of youth, but resignation and a belief in partial truths. And beyond those things was the face of Sarah as she had been on the day of their wedding and also as she had been on the day of their divorce. He arranged his features to convey fierce devotion to duty. He straightened his already straight shoulders, and then he barked out, “Dis-missed!”

The men in the front started talking quietly, but the men farther back resumed their jokes and laughter.

“But sir,” said Miller, “I don’t think they heard you.”

The wind was blowing again, shrieking, really, and maybe it had never stopped.

“Not now,” said the colonel. “It’s already past fifteen hundred hours. I’ve got a chopper to catch. I’ll get my gear. Have the driver bring my vehicle out to the yard.”

2.2 Penn Sinclair

Captain Penn Sinclair’s outlook had changed since joining the army. For one thing, he no longer heard his father’s voice in his head saying, “You’re a Sinclair, son, and the Sinclairs have never been Keynesians.” He led a logistics unit, tasked with making sure supplies got to the soldiers who needed them, and it was more likely that the voice in his head would say, “You name it, we’ll get it for you or die trying.” He no longer needed to decide if existence preceded essence or if the universe was a grand illusion perpetrated by an unseen force or if there was a foolproof way to distinguish right from wrong or if numbers were real or constructed. “I no longer wonder if you and I see the same thing when we look at the color red,” he had told his girlfriend of four years over the telephone only the day before. “But I could build a school for you in less than six weeks.”

“I like you better this way,” Louise had replied.

“So do I,” said Penn.

“I’ve changed too,” she told him. “The old me would have tried to convince you that red is only good as an accent color. Of course, I still believe a little red goes a long, long way, but now we’re meeting somewhere in the middle — conversationally, I mean. What’s halfway between macro and micro?”

“Six to eight trucks,” said Penn, because at just that moment his NCO, a steady man who was known as Velcro, came over to remind him he was late for a briefing.

“You see?” cried Louise triumphantly. “I was thinking the exact same thing, except about bridesmaids. The optimal number is six, seven including the maid of honor.”

“Big enough to cover each other, but small enough to move quickly,” said Penn.

“Exactly right,” replied Louise.

And it no longer made him angry when his father said, “What do you say you put those government-issue leadership skills to work for me?” He could reply, “I’m not cut out for finance, Dad,” without feeling he had to scrape the glue off of his feet or ace his serve to win the set.

Immediately after the meeting in the DFAC, the colonel sought the captain out for a quiet word. “Hold tomorrow morning’s convoy for a couple of hours,” he said. “Just in case something changes and the supplies are needed somewhere else. I’ll let you know by eight hundred thirty hours.”

Sinclair followed the colonel toward a vehicle that was waiting for him near a row of containerized housing units. “Where might they be needed?” he asked.

“I’m guessing Anbar Province, but I’ll know more after my meeting at HQ.”

“Al Anbar Province? We’re abandoning our projects in Tikrit?”

“We’re not abandoning anything yet, Sinclair. Did I say I’d have more information after my meeting at HQ?”

“Yes sir, you did. It’s just that we’ve collected some books and other supplies for that school we’re building on the outskirts of Samarra. I thought the men could drop them off on their way north.”

Some months before, Sinclair had joined forces with a construction unit that was building a school in its spare time. He saw it as a way not only to make a lasting contribution, but also to foster cohesiveness in his cobbled-together logistics unit, which increasingly seemed to be made up of misfits transferred out of units where they had gotten into trouble or failed to fit in. And the unit had gelled — at least it was gelling. Now Velcro only had to say, “Look sharp!” for whomever he was addressing to jump away from the computer where he was playing solitaire or trying to discover what his girlfriend was doing behind his back and say, “Yes sir! What can I do for you, sir?”

Now and then he or Velcro laughed and said, “Don’t forget that we were transferred in from other units too. What does that say about us?”

“Good,” said the colonel as he got into the waiting Humvee. “Building infrastructure is an important benchmark. But the strategy is changing, which means the kinetics will have to change as well. This isn’t just about winning hearts and minds, Sinclair. This is about searching out the bad apples before the rot spreads. This is about clearing neighborhoods and safeguarding residents from violence and intimidation. We’ll have to wait to see if and how your school fits in.”

“Finishing what we started is important to the men.”

“No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy,” said the colonel. “Do you know who said that?”

“Yes sir.” It was Moltke the Elder, but it could have been Penn’s father, who never tired of stressing the Darwinian need to adapt.

“What we started is a war,” said the colonel. “Not that we started it.”

“Yes sir.”

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,” said the colonel.

“Clausewitz,” said Penn.

“The little things are the big things.”

“I don’t know who said that, sir, but the school nicely illustrates the point.”

“I said it, and you can quote me. I’ll let you know about the school.”

The colonel squinted at something over Penn’s shoulder. Then he signaled the driver and shouted above the noise of the revving engine, “The stop-loss is bound to hit some of the troops pretty hard. Don’t let them sit around bemoaning their fate. Don’t let them skimp on safety. Tell them they have the rest of today to get it out of their systems, and then you expect them to buckle down. I’ll let you know where to send the convoy. And give any troublemakers something to do!”

The wheels of the colonel’s Humvee dug in and then spun free, causing it to buck forward while the wind sent a column of dust spiraling across the yard. Sinclair stood watching the vehicle drive off and trying to get the grit out of his mouth and eyes and deciding he’d continue with the convoy briefing just in case they got lucky and were able to finish the school and also trying to ignore his father’s voice, which suddenly intruded on his thoughts.

“You make your own luck!” his father liked to say, as if luck and opportunity hadn’t both come up sixes for him and his children, all boys, all athletic, all destined to follow the trajectory of Sinclair success — all of them quick to shout out “Buy!” or “Sell!” or “Anti-fragility!” which was an investment strategy that not only withstood a turbulent market but performed better under such conditions, just like the Sinclairs. Of the four brothers, only Penn had no interest in finance or the family business, but he had internalized the lessons about running down the hall and shouting, “Follow me!” What he had learned was that people tended to do it without asking where they were going. It was a useful skill for a leader, although unlike his brothers, he had a tendency to overthink things, the way he was doing now.

Facta, non verba, he reminded himself. Deeds, not words.

This led to a thought about how the word “fact” was more closely allied with actions and fabrications than with bits of discoverable truth and how words sometimes contained elements of their opposites, which was the kind of insight he loved and the kind his father hated. “Interesting thought,” his old man would say. “But who’s going to pay you to think it?”

Deeds, not words, Penn reminded himself just as Velcro came up and said, “I’m a little worried about the troops.”

2.3 Danny Joiner

Their tours were being extended. That’s what the colonel’s long-winded meandering had been about. That’s what the muffled grumbling in the front rows and the funny silence meant. The news reached Danny Joiner where he was sitting in the shade of a makeshift shower stall taking his weapon apart in order to clean and oil the action for the third time that afternoon. He had been absorbed in this task and only realized something was going on when Pig Eye ran around the corner of the yard shouting, “Can they do it? They can’t do it, can they?” As if somebody had a definitive answer as to what the U.S. Army could and couldn’t do.

Pig Eye was desperate to get home, and with each passing day, new fantasies about his wife’s infidelity blossomed in his brain. “Extending our tours would be illegal, wouldn’t it?” he whined. But they were talking about the people who both made the rules and interpreted them.

“What planet you livin’ on, man?” asked Specialist Le Roy Jones, and Staff Sergeant Mason Betts, who was their squad leader and who happened to be walking by just then, batted the side of Pig Eye’s head with an open palm and said, “Toughen up, man,” before he disappeared into the shower stall.

Everybody had some factoid to contribute, some phrase from their enlistment papers, some personal theory of right and wrong honed on the steel of their childhoods, some favorite chapter or verse guaranteed either to make sense of their personal situations or to start an argument if not a war, until Le Roy got everyone’s attention by whispering, “Slave labor, that’s what it is!”

The whisper passed through the unit like a pressurized stream of combustible gas. Le Roy kept whispering, “Slave labor,” over and over again to anyone who came within earshot. He said it to Danny just as Danny was trying to convince himself that the trickling sound of water from the shower stall was rain. What he wouldn’t give for a downpour — send in fucking Katrina if that’s what it took to break the heat that sucked the spit from his mouth and the sweat from his pores and the glaze from his ever-aching eyeballs.

“Jeezus, Le Roy,” he said. “Can’t I have some peace?”

“You heard, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Then why are you just sitting there?”

“What am I going to do about it? You tell me that and I just might consider it. Meanwhile, I’m oiling this rifle so if I ever need it, it doesn’t jam.”

Le Roy ran off to find someone more excitable to talk to. When Betts emerged dripping and the water sound abruptly stopped, Danny tried to sustain the daydream — wet dream, he thought — ha! That brought to mind his girlfriend Dolly, who was waiting for him at home just the way Emmie was waiting for Pig Eye and E’Laine was waiting for Le Roy and someone was waiting for all of them: girlfriends and parents and wives.

Or not waiting. The women back home were always posting pictures of the fun they were having on Facebook, where anyone could see them in their low-cut dresses, raising their glasses and blowing kisses (“This one’s for you, honey!”), which made the men crazy because it was hard to tell the difference between passing-the-time-’til-you’re-home-baby prowling and a full-bore, cat’s-away, see-ya-later-buster hunt, and anyway, what were they going to do about it here?

Danny wiped his fingerprints off the barrel with a ragged chamois cloth, the sweaty skin of his massive forearms shining more brightly than the metal of the gun, and then he ambled around the corner into the yard just in time to see Corporal Joe Kelly climb up on the hood of a Toyota flatbed pickup and bow his head as if in prayer. But something about how Kelly’s muscles were twitching told Danny that prayer was the last thing on his mind. Even when Pig Eye climbed up beside him, Kelly faced ahead and slightly down, not turning the way Pig Eye turned to check on who was watching and not smiling or catching anyone’s eye before ramming his fist into the bone-dry air just as Captain Sinclair opened the sagging canvas door of his office and stepped out into the yard, followed by Velcro, whereupon both men jumped down, but not before a television crew that was passing through camp on its way to Tikrit caught the incident on tape and afterward went around asking the soldiers what the stop-loss orders meant for them.

Having an audience fired Le Roy up again, and he repeated his incendiary message into the microphone and also to a truckload of new recruits who drove up looking both shocked and optimistic. But by dinnertime, the furor was dying down and the men trooped off to eat, anger already giving way to resignation.

Danny watched the scene unfold from a corner of the yard, trying to remember the last lines of a Shelley poem that might sum up what he was feeling, if a creeping sense of desolation and inadequacy shot through with a deeply percolating anger was even subject to summation. He knew that most anger was born of misunderstanding, and he wanted to understand. More than that, he wanted to fit in. But he had never fit in, not in school, where he had wanted to study literature, and not in the army, which was why he had been transferred to the logistics unit and why, if he had asked Kelly the proper technique and thrust his own fist into the air and called him and Pig Eye “brother” or whatever the proper word was in order to let them know he shared their disappointment, they would have stared at him without a speck of comprehension. He understood that their identity in a funny way depended on his, and his was alien to them, which was just the way they wanted it. Men like Kelly wanted solidarity and separateness at the same time. It would have filled him with sadness if it hadn’t first filled him with other things, one of which was anger, but another of which was something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“It’s not good enough to be an American anymore,” he said to Harraday, who was standing near him.

“What?” asked Harraday. “I’m with them. This stop-loss bullshit really sucks.”

Harraday spat and walked off, and Danny would have given anything to have an exclusive hand gesture to wave in Harraday’s face, a gesture that defined the knife-edge of identity and proved to Harraday that, whatever Harraday was, Danny wasn’t that.

Instead of going to dinner, Danny made his way to the latrine, where he took off his uniform jacket and carefully rolled the sleeves of his T-shirt in overlapping folds, which made his bulging biceps look almost as big as, if a little softer than, Kelly’s biceps looked when he rolled his sleeves the same way. Danny glanced behind him to make sure he was alone, listening carefully for the sound of footsteps on the packed earth outside the door. But most of the troops were in the DFAC and all was quiet. He stood at attention in front of the rectangular sheet of metal that served for a mirror and searched his face for signs of what he was thinking and was glad when he couldn’t find any. Then he took a deep breath and thrust his fist into the air. The exposed ridge of arm muscle hardened, and for a moment he didn’t recognize himself. His gray eyes darkened a shade closer to black, and his brows soared above his nose like the wings of a raptor.

Danny was startled to find that the gesture had both an outside and an inside. All he had known of it before was what it had looked like when someone else did it and also that it had worried him, the kind of worry that turned to anger before you knew it was really fear. But now, standing in the latrine where the only observer was a tinny mirror image of himself, he felt the adrenaline rush and almost understood what Kelly and Pig Eye had been thinking when they had practiced the gesture on the rest of the battalion. He could almost feel, rising within him, a big Fuck You to the war.

2.4 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy had to laugh. All he had to do was say “slave labor” and everyone’s panties were in a twist. He had to laugh at the fresh, unbaked faces of the new recruits, who didn’t know the first thing about war but were about to find out. And there was Pig Eye, waving a torn envelope and wondering now that the US of A had them in Iraq, was it allowed to keep them there?

“Shit, man, they can do anything they want,” said Le Roy. “Isn’t proving that the point of the war?”

“But,” said Pig Eye, and then he just stood with his mouth open and his eyes bugging out and the letter hanging limp at his side.

“Slave labor,” he said to Kelly, and it was a beautiful thing to see that man’s muscles tense and his eyes become hard and dense, like if you touched Kelly’s trigger, they’d come shooting out of their sockets straight at you. Kelly could be a politician, the way people automatically looked in his direction — if he could control his temper, that is. If he could control his mouth.

Velcro said, “Nobody here cares what color you are, Jones. You have to go back home for that.” But Velcro was like an android, strictly by the book. If something wasn’t written down in a manual, Velcro didn’t know about it. So Le Roy said, “Slave labor” to the new recruits, and he laughed to see their jaws drop open and their eyes go wide. Jeezus, it was funny. What did they think they were getting into? What did they fucking think?

It was funny until a current of something that wasn’t quite so funny ionized the air around him. It was what his girlfriend E’Laine would have called paranormal because she believed in electromagnetic fields and how energy was neither created nor destroyed, which meant that when people died, their life force had to go somewhere — and where it went, she insisted, was either into other people or into the atmosphere, so that at any given time a person might be surrounded by a hundred souls or blobs of plasma and electrons or whatever it was that hadn’t yet found a new body to inhabit.

So it was natural Le Roy thought of E’Laine when the current made the hairs on his arms stand up, for even though he considered E’Laine’s energy conservation theory to be superstitious and probably false, he couldn’t deny that the tremor coursing through him was more than an idle premonition. It was as if the mood of the world had changed or the air molecules were bunching up and crowding in on him. He’d felt that way before — in moments of despair, but also in moments of wild but unrealistic hope. Like the time his computer science teacher had asked, “Have you ever thought about college, boy?” The question had caused the atmospheric molecules to shift and part, and Le Roy had seen a path to a different future, a path that lingered in his imagination long after the teacher forgot all about the college talk. He didn’t meet anyone so optimistic about his future again until that army recruiter had said, “You interested in computers, son? Damn right we can teach you that.”

It was better to laugh it off. It was better to say, “Fuck that shit” and go about his business. It was better to be the one who said the words that got other people all riled up than to be the one who took the words on board and started to hope. Meanwhile, he had E’Laine, who was a whole hell of a lot steadier than Pig Eye’s wife, even if Pig Eye’s wife was smoking hot. E’Laine would be there for him when he got home. One hundred percent she would be there waiting. Whether it was tomorrow or a year from tomorrow or a year or two years after that, she’d be waiting for him with one of her special recipes sizzling on the stove and a cold beer in the fridge and an eternal flame of love for Le Roy Jones keeping vigil in her heart. Meanwhile, he didn’t mind finding his fun where he could get it. Meanwhile, he told Hernandez he’d better get someone to check on Maya and his little boy, and then he whispered, “Slave labor” into Garcia’s ear.

“It sure don’t seem fair,” said Garcia.

“Now we’ll see who the real men are,” said Harraday, who, along with Kelly, had transferred in from a combat unit and who never smiled except when he was telling stories about his old team and the fun they’d had until he’d gotten into trouble for something he said he preferred not to talk about but hinted at anyway now and then. But now even Harraday’s shoulders sagged, and suddenly Le Roy’s heart wasn’t in it. Still, he passed the news to a few more men and had to laugh at how their eyes went dark and their faces started to smolder. He had to fucking laugh because it all depended on what you meant by “fair.” And then he was thinking about E’Laine again and seeing her as she would be when he told her he wasn’t coming home, not yet anyway. She would cry. He could see it clear as the dragon tattoo on his arm: the softening of her features, the downturn of her mouth, the leaking of her eyes the way they had leaked the day she drove him to the airport, acting like it was his last day on earth.

And then his heart was in it, even though it wasn’t funny anymore—because it wasn’t funny and because he was feeling the rage spiking out of Kelly and the panic from Pig Eye and feeling a slow, sure burn in his own guts as well.

2.5 Pig Eye

When the commotion broke out, Pig Eye had been thinking about his wife Emmie. He alternated between thinking she was unfaithful to him and thinking she wasn’t — but if she wasn’t, why not? She was beautiful, while he was short and funny looking. Even though Emmie had only had drug-dealer boyfriends before meeting Pig Eye three years before, he knew he didn’t deserve her. But whenever he said, “Why do you love me when you could have anyone?” she would reply, “You might be small, darlin’, but you’re all muscle.” Or she might say, “Every girl needs a superhero, and baby, you’re mine.”

Pig Eye ran a car repair shop with his buddy Earl, and when he left, Earl promised he would prioritize diligent bookkeeping and quality control exactly the way Pig Eye always had, but now he wondered if Earl was cheating him moneywise or if he was prioritizing Emmie behind his back. In her most recent letter, Emmie had written, “Earl is taking care of business.” Pig Eye’s eyes stuck on that line like it was glue. He had to read it over and over, and still he wondered if she had left out the word “the” on purpose or if it had been a mistake — or if it was just a casual way of writing, kind of like a person would talk. And if it was a mistake, was the letter telling him a bigger truth than Emmie meant to tell?

Kelly’s gesture released something that had been trapped in Pig Eye for a long time, something to do not only with skin color but also with the fact that he had round cheeks and small eyes and a drop-dead gorgeous wife. He didn’t stop to think before stepping up on the truck beside and slightly behind Kelly — he knew not to stand right next to him, of course he knew that — and putting his arm in the air too. It felt good to glare out over the heads of the men and women who paused as they went about their duties to look at him with surprise and new respect. It felt good to stare straight at Kelly without looking away first. Now he knew what it was like to be tall and powerful, not just because Kelly was tall and powerful and anybody Kelly liked shared in that power, but because he was acknowledging something about himself, freeing some un-free thing that was the reason for his insecurity and stepping beyond his short, awkward exterior to show who he was deep down inside.

It only lasted a couple of seconds, but afterward, people thumped him on the shoulder or made a point of knocking into him in a friendly way, and he knew he had done the right thing in stepping up beside (and a little behind) Joe Kelly. After marrying Emmie and opening the car repair shop, it was the most right thing he had ever done.

2.6 Penn Sinclair

Sinclair followed Velcro out of the office to where a commotion was brewing in the yard. A few minutes earlier or later and he would have missed the whole thing, but he didn’t miss it, and it worried him. It wasn’t only that the men looked angry and inscrutable and that anger was catching. It wasn’t only that he and the colonel had known for two weeks before springing the news on them that they wouldn’t be going home, though of course that added to his sense of complicity and guilt. It worried him because he was losing control — not only of his troops. He too wanted to go home. He too had a girlfriend who loved him and a future to plan.

“Should we put a lid on it?” asked Velcro.

“They’re just letting off steam,” replied Penn, even though he knew that something little could easily turn into something big and that it was up to him to stop it. The little things are the big things, the colonel had said.

“We’ll give them the rest of today,” he told Velcro, remembering the colonel’s advice. He walked farther out into the yard. “Listen up,” he barked. “You have the rest of the evening to let off steam, and then I want your heads back in the game.” The mere act of shouting relieved a little of the tension that had built up inside him ever since the stop-loss order was announced. “Convoy briefing at zero seven hundred hours,” he added.

“I thought we were waiting,” said Velcro.

“We’re waiting on the go/no-go, but we’re sticking to our established battle rhythm. The more we stick to routine, the better for the troops.”

At the morning briefing, Penn said that the convoy had been postponed and that he’d know more soon.

“So we’re going, we just don’t know when or where,” said Kelly.

“That’s about right,” said Penn.

“Shee-it,” said Le Roy. “That’s bad juju right there.”

“The key to survival is the ability to adapt,” said Penn. Then he pulled Staff Sergeant Betts aside and told him to keep an eye on the pre-checks. “Make sure they don’t slack off,” he said.

“What are we supposed to do with the stuff for the school?” asked Betts.

“I’m worried about that too,” said Penn. “I should know more in a couple of hours, but meanwhile, put it in the last four trucks. Your squad will take those.”

Sinclair was proud of his men for wanting to help extend educational opportunities to girls. “Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque,” he had said when the idea had first come to him, and it had become a kind of motto for the men.

“Make free men out of children by means of books and a balance,” said Betts now, but he frowned at Velcro when he said it, and Velcro spat in the dirt.

“Building infrastructure is an important benchmark,” said Penn before moving off toward the communications center for the intelligence update. He was almost out of earshot when he heard Harraday say, “Try books and a bazooka. Maybe that would work.”

The grumbling started up again during the pre-check, and now two of the squads were fighting in the yard. The more restless the men became, the more Penn worried, and the more he worried, the more he thought he couldn’t wait for the new orders before he sent the convoy. “Give any troublemakers something to do,” the colonel had told him. Taking the supplies north would be doing something.

“If you’re holding a wolf by the ears,” he said to Velcro, “is it worse to continue to hold it or worse to let it go?”

“You’ve got to kick that wolf in the balls,” said Velcro. “You can’t put up with any shit.”

Penn had to agree. They needed a mission pronto, so when he hadn’t heard anything by zero nine hundred hours, he released the convoy to start heading north. He told the men to monitor the radio in case the new orders came through, and he told Betts to take an extra gun truck so the vehicles destined for the school could make the short detour while the rest of the convoy continued on to Tikrit. Things would calm down once the men had a mission to focus on. They always did.

“Yes sir. I’m on it,” said Betts, taking the need for further action out of Sinclair’s hands.

“You made the right call, sir,” said Velcro. “You’re killing two birds with this — giving the men something useful to do and getting the supplies up the road for wherever they’re needed.”

“Three birds,” said Penn, thinking of the school and feeling the familiar sense of accomplishment that always accompanied a tough decision.

And then, suddenly, Penn didn’t want to go home. He didn’t want to go back to a life where nothing he did would matter in the grand scheme of things and probably wouldn’t matter in the not-so-grand scheme either. He liked the high-stakes missions and calling the shots when the shots were not easy to call. Sinclairs did better in turbulent conditions! He thought about his place in the continuum of history and how he was carrying on a legacy bequeathed by the ancient Greeks and Romans, who had determined that war and peace were flip sides of a single coin, and by the philosophers and scientists, who had figured out that in some ways people were not much different from insects, with their workers and soldiers and queens, and that in other ways, people were not much different from gods.

2.7 Pig Eye

Things might have settled down if a wispy cloud hadn’t obscured the sun just as Le Roy was saying that thing about juju. They might have stayed settled if Pig Eye hadn’t shown Hernandez a letter from his wife or if Hernandez hadn’t taken it from him and passed it on to Tishman, who passed it to Kelly, each man reading it as if it were his own wife or girlfriend who had penned the description of what she was wearing and how she was going to take the items off one by one once her honey-man was home. Garcia slapped his thigh and said, “Oooeee Momma!” just as Kelly grabbed the letter back for another look. “Wait a sec,” said Kelly. “Who’s this guy Earl?”

“I told you about Earl. He’s my partner in the shop,” said Pig Eye. “He’s handling things while I’m away.”

“I’ll say he is,” said Kelly.

“What do you mean? What do you mean by that?”

Harraday walked over and cast a shadow on the letter, which was smudged and wet where someone had put his lips to it and tongued it. His eyes were puffy and his breath was as rotten as if he had just rolled out of bed after a night on the town. “He means your friend Earl’s porking your wife and now you’re stuck here and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Pig Eye again.

“Handling,” said Harraday. “Your partner is handling things at home.”

“The letter doesn’t say ‘handling,’” said Pig Eye.

“But you did. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t suspect something was up.”

“Don’t listen to Harraday, man,” said Danny. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

But Pig Eye didn’t have to listen to Harraday to know he didn’t trust Earl worth a damn. It was all he could think about when he was checking the fuel. He overfilled one tank and forgot to replace the cap on another. “Jeezus, what’s wrong with you?” asked Betts when he hurried past to see if the orders had come through.

“Nothing,” said Pig Eye, but he could tell that Betts was down too when he walked past thirty seconds later muttering that he couldn’t find his cargo manifest even though he was holding it in his hand.

Pig Eye found a detonator on the ground and slipped it into the pocket of his uniform where he kept what he called his escape kit. Now and then he stroked his thigh to make sure the kit was still there or adjusted the Velcro closure to make sure it was secure. He had made the mistake of telling Hernandez and Le Roy about the kit, and now and then Le Roy would say, “Stick with Pig Eye in case you’re captured. He’s got a magnifying glass that can burn through rope or zip ties using solar energy.”

“You don’t use a magnifying glass to escape from zip ties. You’d burn your arm!” said Pig Eye before he realized it was a joke.

Pig Eye didn’t mind the teasing until Harraday joined in. “Anybody need a tampon, Pig Eye’s your man. He’s got emergency supplies.”

Pig Eye tried to laugh it off because nobody wanted to get crosswise with Harraday, but sometimes he imagined revenge scenarios where Harraday’s fate was in his hands and he could save him or not. In the scenarios he always ignored Harraday until he was crying and pleading for his life. “Die, motherfucker,” a tougher version of himself would say in the fantasy, but then Harraday would beg for forgiveness and the tougher Pig Eye would soften and do whatever needed doing to set him free. Thinking about Harraday gave Pig Eye a pain in his gut, so it wasn’t always worth it to picture him crying in the desert. Sometimes it was better not to think of him at all.

“Hey, man, you’re riding with me,” said Danny. He slapped Pig Eye on the shoulder, and together they walked to where the trucks were waiting.

2.8 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy could smell Pig Eye’s sweat. He had noticed it earlier, when they were checking the load. Pig Eye’s going to be a problem, he thought, and when Joe Kelly walked up with a map of their route, all he had to say was “Pig Eye” for Kelly to frown and nod as if he was thinking the same thing. But because it was more important to make sure the radio was operational and to identify danger spots than to confirm each other’s worries about Pig Eye, they didn’t say anything out loud.

“Do we have maps of both routes?” Le Roy asked Pig Eye, who was standing around patting his pockets and fiddling with something he had picked up off the ground.

“What do you mean, both routes?”

“Christ,” said Le Roy. “Didn’t you hear the captain say we might be redirected? And locate Sergeant Betts while you’re at it. Tell him it’s SP minus five. And Rinaldi — where’s he at?” Rinaldi was one of their gunners. He and Le Roy, who was the radio operator, would be riding in a converted Humvee with their medic Satch and whoever was driving. “Who’s driving this Humvee?” he asked, but Pig Eye was already sprinting back to a row of supply shacks in search of the second strip map. “Anyone seen Harraday or Rinaldi?” he asked when Danny and Kelly came by with the cargo manifest.

“They were with Betts and the captain,” said Kelly. And then he said, “This can’t be right — just two cases of H2O? Don’t tell me they’re hoarding water again.”

“Per truck,” said Danny. “I’m sure that means two cases per truck.”

“Two per truck isn’t enough,” said Kelly. “Trucks might run on diesel, but soldiers run on water.”

Kelly went off to see about the water just as Pig Eye came back with the map and said, “Betts says we need to get going. It’s getting late. It’s only going to get hotter, and they’re getting a buzz about some kind of movement up north.”

They were ten minutes late. Then fifteen. Danny was going over the cargo manifest item by item one last time when Betts came up and said, “Five minutes. Tell the others to be ready in five.”

“I’m just checking the list,” said Danny, and Le Roy said, “Shit, man, you can check and recheck, but that sucker’s already been fired.”

“I know,” said Danny with a grin. “But I’m checking anyway.”

It was an article of faith among the troops that there was no rhyme or reason to who made it and who didn’t. The bullet with a soldier’s name on it had already been fired if it was going to be fired, and if it wasn’t, well, you were good. It was the kind of comforting fatalism that appealed to Le Roy. Whenever E’Laine worried about him, he said, “Don’t you worry, baby. If my number’s up, it’s up, and if it ain’t, it ain’t.”

But they did what they could anyway, so Le Roy made sure both radios were in working order and the tanks were full of fuel while Danny checked and rechecked the straps that secured the equipment and Kelly rustled up the cases of water and filled his CamelBak and an extra canteen because water was important to Kelly, not that it wasn’t important to all of them, and Harraday paced back and forth and got himself into what he called “mission mode” and Rinaldi fished out his cross and kissed it and Pig Eye patted his pockets and looked around kind of wildly.

“Pig Eye’s going to be a problem,” said Le Roy, but he was talking to himself because everyone was busy taking care of last-minute tasks before hoisting themselves up into the trucks just as Summers blasted the horn of the vehicle Le Roy was riding in and Tishman climbed up into the front right seat of the extra gun truck and Finch and the other gunners climbed into their slant-sided turrets and the line of trucks ahead of them ground into gear. Then Betts shouted, “Okay, boys, let’s roll,” which Le Roy remembered was what that guy on one of the 9/11 planes had said just before it exploded over a field in Pennsylvania.

2.9 Pig Eye

Pig Eye spent the boring hours driving or on patrol imagining different escape scenarios where he not only had to get away, but also had to make it back home under his own steam. A major component of the fantasies was imagining what he would need in order to accomplish the task. It gave him something to do to plan elaborate lists of supplies and to keep an eye out for useful items. When he found one, he added it to his kit: a protein bar, a travel alarm clock, an extra pair of paracord laces, a spool of wire, a folding knife, and now the detonator. The pocket wasn’t big enough for everything in his collection, so he had to rotate what he kept in it. He stored the items he didn’t have room for in a drawstring canvas bag in his locker.

When they were together on patrol, Le Roy or Hernandez would come up with a situation and ask Pig Eye how he would get out of it, or they would quiz each other about escape techniques. “What’s the breaking strength of paracord?” Pig Eye might ask. Or Hernandez might want to know, “When is the best time to escape?”

“Right away,” Pig Eye would say. “Your first opportunity is always the best one you’ll have.”

On patrol the previous evening, Hernandez had taught him a time-slowing trick that involved imagining he could throttle down the surrounding action so it played at low speed, giving him more time for whatever he was doing, and Pig Eye had imagined a scenario where barbed wire figured in. So that morning he had switched out the cigarette lighter for a pair of wire cutters he had won off another soldier in a poker game. “Just in case,” he had said when Hernandez caught his eye, and Hernandez had said, “Yeah, man, just in case.”

The only book Pig Eye had ever read voluntarily was The Things They Carried, and the idea that what a man carried with him said something profound about who the man was had stayed with him. He had come to disdain the sentimental and useless treasures most of his comrades pulled from their own pockets to moon over at night. A letter from his mother wasn’t going to save his life. A picture of Emmie wasn’t going to get him home. Still, among the things in the cargo pocket was just such a picture. He knew it said something about him, and what it said was that he was irrational and soft. It was awareness of his weaknesses that made him extra meticulous in his plans for escape, even though he also knew that escape was impossible, for let’s say he could get away from his captors, where would he go in that forbidding and alien land?

One of Pig Eye’s most shameful secrets was that his escape fantasies didn’t always entail escaping from Iraqi captors, but from his unit. When he had thoughts like those, he felt like a traitor. But even when he closed his eyes and forced himself to imagine he was being held hostage by both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, he couldn’t always get the bad kind of fantasy out of his head.

“What are the two most important things in any escape?” asked Pig Eye, trying to start a conversation with Danny, who was sitting next to him in the front seat, alternately scanning his sector and siting down the barrel of his M4.

“A howitzer,” said Danny.

“No. These things are commonplace and they don’t take up so much room.”

Danny thought for a minute and then said, “Water.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Pig Eye. “I don’t have either of them in my kit.”

“Why the hell not?” asked Danny. “If they’re the most important thing.”

“Because everyone has them and no one does.”

“Okay, riddle man, what are they?”

“Time and opportunity,” said Pig Eye. “Opportunity and time.”

After that Danny fell silent again and Pig Eye went back to thinking about Emmie and how because of Harraday “taking care of” had morphed in his mind into “handle” and “handle” had morphed into “pork.”