Now and Again

4.0 BLOOD

4.1 Danny Joiner

Danny raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered up the road, searching for the rest of the convoy. “We should have caught up with it by now,” he said.

“You’re sure this is the right road?” asked Pig Eye.

Danny pulled out the strip map and said it had to be, because of the canal that was visible down a slope to their right. But just in case, he radioed up to Betts, who was in the second vehicle.

“Affirmative,” said Betts. “This is it.”

As Pig Eye drove, Danny fingered his weapon and scanned the roadside from eleven to three o’clock and back again, looking for shadows or movement, but all he saw was an endless expanse of brown-upon-brown that faded to blue at the horizon but was greener down by the canal. Now and then they passed a burned-out vehicle or a ramshackle farm or a farmer and, once, a kid on a bicycle who stopped and waved at them as they passed and then a group of kids who didn’t wave, and through it all, the dusty and colorless road.

He wondered vaguely what Dolly was doing now. It was very early at home, so she was probably still in bed wearing the animal-print nightgown or the one with the hearts on it. He wondered if she had rubbed lotion onto the calluses on her feet and if it was the almond-scented lotion or the stuff that smelled like milk. He wondered if she had replaced the torn coverlet or gotten new curtains for the windows the way she kept talking about.

Then something wasn’t right — a shift in the color spectrum, an eddy in the shimmering air. He scanned the road for the hundredth time: left to right, then right to left, then a glance at the driver’s side. There! Movement behind the low wall of an animal enclosure. A glint of metal by the side of the road. The lead vehicle slowing down. It was probably nothing, but a prickle of alarm jumped across the synapse separating him from Pig Eye.

“What is it? What is it?” asked Pig Eye, twisting toward him from the driver’s seat. Danny saw a wrinkle of worry cross his brow just as the lead vehicle exploded and the next one swerved into a ditch. Pig Eye slammed on the brakes, causing the top-heavy cargo truck to wobble and roll and catapulting Danny forward while Pig Eye fell away and down, as if he had pulled a rip cord or performed a trick and disappeared. Before he lost consciousness, Danny heard a daisy chain of detonations. He tasted cordite and heard the beginning of a shout just as he remembered the last lines of the Shelley poem: The lone and level sands stretch far away.

4.2 Pig Eye

Pig Eye was thinking about the day he had first met Emmie. He hadn’t been called Pig Eye then; he had been called Nerf. And she hadn’t been called Emmie. She had been called E.Z.

It was back before he had joined the army, back before the two big guys came looking for him and before the altercation in the bar when one of the guys insulted Emmie and grabbed her by the hair. Back before Earl had said, “I’ll take care of things here if you need to get out of town for a while.” And it was before, just when they were getting the repair shop on its feet, the landlord raised their rent. He cited improvements in the property even though Pig Eye and Earl had been the ones to improve it. They had converted a corner of the shop to a convenience store, and the neighbors were grateful because the nearest grocery store was two miles away, right smack next to a second grocery and a Walgreens and a Stop-N-Go and a bank, but too far away for them to easily get to. The landlord cited the new laundry and the Dollar Mart, despite the fact that without the convenience store, the laundry and the Dollar Mart would never have opened. Instead, the crack dealers would have moved in and property values would have gone down, not up. Now there was talk of a bus stop and a school.

Pig Eye had arrived one morning to open the shop and found Emmie passed out in a corner of the second bay, blood on her clothing and a pool of vomit crusting over on the concrete slab. With a high forehead and tangled hair and knobby knees that stuck out from underneath her satin dress and, he found out later, slanted eyes with a hint of green in them, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

“What kind of a name is E.Z.?” Pig Eye asked her after she had been there a week and had started to smile.

“I’m from New Orleans,” she said. “The Big Easy is too long for a name, doncha think?”

“But you’re not big,” said Pig Eye, not putting two and two together about her name because that was when he was noticing the slanted eyes and the dimples in her cheeks and the hole in her earlobe where something had ripped clean through.

“And you’re not a Nerf,” she replied, so even though Pig Eye kind of was a Nerf back before he had joined the army and muscled up, it seemed to him like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him.

“I’m going to call her Emmie,” he told Earl when she had been there a month and Earl had started asking when she was going to leave. “She’s going to stay for a while, and I’m going to take care of her.”

“She’s not a pet,” said Earl. “Are you going to teach her to fetch the coffee in the morning? Are you going to teach her to roll over on command?”

That was the first time Pig Eye laid Earl flat, and Earl let the subject drop until the day a couple of big guys who seemed to know Emmie showed up.

“She’s going to cause trouble,” Earl said, and Pig Eye laid him flat again.

“They don’t call her E.Z. for nothing,” Earl said when Pig Eye announced that he and Emmie were getting married and if Earl didn’t like it, he could be the one to find other accommodations.

And she had caused trouble, but she hadn’t meant to. Trouble followed Emmie, and after she moved with them into the apartment over the shop, trouble seemed to follow Pig Eye too. It followed him in the form of the two big guys and the raised rent and the expensive things Emmie needed and Pig Eye wanted her to have. Even so, the vision he had of Emmie was one of near perfection. He thought of her as flawless and still, like the exact center of the universe, like the shining point around which the stars and the planets and even the truck he was riding in were spinning — spinning and veering out of control.

4.3 Pig Eye

Pig Eye thought he was having one of his escape fantasies. He was face down in the dust, pinned by a force he couldn’t name. Situational awareness was a prerequisite to forming any plan of action, but he couldn’t turn his head far enough to see more than a patch of what looked like earth from a distance but was, up close, a mix of powdery dust and desiccated vegetable matter and glittering crystals mixed with stones of various sizes and also unidentifiable bits of garbage and ash and, for all he knew, bleached and pulverized bones from the years of strife and fighting that had taken place in that desert since the dawn of civilization. Gradually he realized he was stuck underneath the truck, and all that kept him from being crushed was a shallow depression in the earth.

As a precaution, he took an inventory of his body parts as if he were doing a vehicle pre-check or filling out a spreadsheet of parts for Earl to order. He could wiggle his fingers and toes — check. He could move his legs — check. And although his right arm was lodged beneath him and starting to go numb, his left hand and arm were free — check. When he raised the arm as far as it could go, he could feel a flange of hot steel, but whether it was hot from the explosion or hot from the sun, he couldn’t make out. He pushed against it and it moved slightly, but his arm was weak in that position, so he scrabbled in the dirt until his right arm was free too. This opened up another inch between his shoulders and the metal above him, which he now suspected was the heavy armored door of the truck. He thought of his escape kit and recognized the folly of believing that a few miniature tools would help him against all of the machines of war. A spool of wire, for Chrissakes. A powerberry protein bar. A tiny slingshot and a miniature frigging clock. Even if he could have reached the cargo pocket, the things it contained were useless for raising the reinforced slab of metal that was holding him down. Still, he despaired that he couldn’t reach the pocket. He despaired until he remembered what the colonel had said about his center of gravity, which wasn’t the pocket after all. The most useful part of his escape kit was his body, and the most useful part of his body was his wits.

He inched his fingers into an indentation in the edge of steel, and instead of pushing, he pulled at it with all his might. And miracle of miracles, it shifted slightly. He pulled again, and it shifted more — he gasped to feel the pressure on his legs and would have cried out if his mouth hadn’t been pushed into the dirt and if he hadn’t now been able to engage both of his shoulders with the metal, so that when he heaved up against it, the pressure eased slightly, allowing him to maneuver in a way that gave him even better leverage. Then he adjusted the left side of his body, and again he could shift his legs a fraction of an inch. By working within the narrow range of available motion and space, he positioned his hands more solidly underneath him. With a mighty heave, he pushed upward and then from side to side. The metal rocked and shifted until finally he was free to shimmy backward into a deeper part of the ditch.

He sank exhausted into the dirt, depleted and disoriented and slightly afraid, but then he remembered something else that was tucked into the bottom of his kit, and the fear was replaced with jubilation. He rolled onto his side and carefully extracted a tiny foil-wrapped package containing two pills Joe Kelly had given to him after the black power salute. “For when you want to really escape,” Kelly had said. And then Kelly had winked at him and slipped him the pills.

Pig Eye unwrapped the package and studied its contents — one bullet-shaped capsule and one baby blue disk. He tried to decide which one to take. Then he put both of them onto the sandpaper of his tongue and wished he had a drink of water before pulling himself up just high enough to peer into the front of the destroyed truck, where Danny was slumped against his seat belt. “Hey, man, you okay?” Pig Eye whispered. He could tell Danny was breathing, but his eyes remained shut, so Pig Eye slid his knife from its sheath and cut the strap of the binoculars that were still hanging around Danny’s neck. As he was searching for his weapon, which had been stowed behind his seat, a spray of bullets pinged metal, and he dropped down behind the heavy shield of the truck door that had almost killed him. Using the wire cutters and spool of wire from his kit, he looped some lengths of wire around his arms and legs and neck and then tucked bunches of weeds and grasses into the loops before raising his head out of the weedy ditch that bordered the east side of the road in order to assess the situation.

4.4 Danny Joiner

Danny forced himself to open his eyes. He remembered going over the equipment list. He remembered Kelly going on about the water and Tishman about the time, everybody focused on the one or two details they could actually control — or not focused, just shuffling through the motions, their thoughts on how they weren’t going home after all or on the endless stretch of weeks that lay ahead. But something else tapped at the door of his consciousness. Something he should be noticing but couldn’t quite grasp. He could see that the front of the truck was tilting strangely, and he understood from a stray flap of canvas that the top had ripped loose despite the double- and triple-checked fastenings — triple-checked because that’s the way Danny did things.

Gravity pulled his body against the seat belt, and his legs were angled toward the steering wheel as if the truck had been reconfigured. He could taste the dust and smell the acrid odor of explosives, which is when he realized that the top-heavy cargo truck had rolled and that the thing he should be noticing was the silence, the complete absence of sound except for a muffled ringing in his ears. And he understood that Pig Eye wasn’t slumped on the seat beside him and that his helmet had come off and that he had hit his head and that his weapon was wedged between the gearshift and his knee.

IEDs were deadly, but they weren’t precise. Shouldn’t the men from the other trucks be scrambling around and shouting? Shouldn’t they be calling out for survivors and coming to find out how he was? His instinct was to assess the situation without moving — the condition of his body, the position of the enemy, the status of the other men — but he couldn’t get his thoughts together because of the ringing and the thick, mashed ache in his head. He remembered climbing into the truck beside Pig Eye, who wasn’t slumped beside him, who wasn’t anywhere that he could see. He remembered reaching over to beep the horn of the truck as the convoy rolled out that morning. He remembered checking the straps on the canvas that covered the cargo, and he remembered helping Kelly stow the extra cases of water even though Tishman kept chasing at his heels like a terrier and saying, “Hurry up. We should have left when it was dark.”

He remembered Kelly asking for the updated strip maps, and even though checking the vehicles had been Tishman’s job, Danny had double-checked everything himself. Then Harraday and Rinaldi and Finch had climbed into their turrets — most of the vehicles had crew-served guns, but not the long cargo truck — and Danny had climbed in beside Pig Eye and tooted the horn just as they pulled into line behind Hernandez and Harraday and Betts and in front of Tishman and Kelly and Finch, who were bringing up the rear. He remembered tooting the horn, but he didn’t remember anything after that.

It was too quiet. Could he have gone deaf? He wanted to test his hearing by saying something, but he thought he should wait until he knew exactly what was what. Meanwhile, the silence pressed in on him, but little by little, his vision cleared. He remembered checking the cargo straps and reaching over to beep the horn. But where was Pig Eye? Not on the seat next to him. And where were the men in the two vehicles in front of him and the one that had been behind? As he struggled to free himself from his seat belt, a volley of gunfire broke through the silence and he hoped it was Rinaldi or Finch or Harraday, giving the bastards hell.

4.5 Pig Eye

Pig Eye crab-walked backward, trying to see around the carcass of the truck. Because it was too risky to raise his head very high, his eyes had to burn through a jumble of brush and spiky grass in order to assess the status of the convoy: the blackened husk of the lead vehicle, the second Humvee swerved into the ditch, his own rolled truck, and the rear vehicle, which had been hit but not destroyed. It made sense now. There had been a series of explosions, explosions that must have come from IEDs wired in a daisy chain. It was an increasingly common tactic. A purposely ill-concealed decoy bomb would stop a convoy, putting the line of vehicles in position for a buried chain of smaller bombs that were then detonated by trigger men — men who were probably still hunkered down somewhere not too far away, ready to take potshots at anything that moved. From the sound of sporadic gunfire, Pig Eye guessed the hide position was a low wall that formed part of an animal enclosure about one hundred meters off the road.

Just as Pig Eye was wondering what had happened to the other men, Finch stood up in his turret, his face bloody and his helmet skewed. C’mon Finch, get down, he thought. Then a spray of bullets and Finch was reeling drunkenly in a slow collapse. After that the guns were mostly silent and everything was mostly still, but Pig Eye knew the Iraqis were out there waiting, invisible behind the wall.

Where the hell were the other men? The same marine who had taught him about using vegetation for camouflage and moving through the landscape undetected had said, “If you don’t fight back, you die.” But they were mechanics and drivers and communications specialists. Still, they couldn’t retreat, so why the hell wasn’t anybody firing?

Pig Eye tried to recall what his truck was carrying. The tables and chairs and sheets of galvanized metal had been unloaded at the school, along with a toilet and sink and the books they had collected. If only he had studied the cargo list as carefully as Danny had studied it. There had to be something he could use to lay a trap for the insurgents the way the insurgents had laid a trap for them. But if he stood up to look for it, the men with the guns would see him. He was bellying back toward the bed of the truck when he saw it — a hand grenade nestled in a patch of brown weeds like a prehistoric bird’s egg in a nest.

4.6 Joe Kelly

Waking up was like coming up from the bottom of the creek in Wimberley, up from the deep pool where the creek bent around a grove of cypress trees, like coming up through the muck and the slime and over a slick of limestone rock, up through the fronds of light that penetrated from the surface like bendable knives, up through the heavy quiet, measured not in decibels, but in pounds per square inch or atmospheres. It was like breaking through the tensive surface to the air above, and once the broken water had healed itself, it was like seeing the trees soaring up toward the clouds and also down through the glassy water and not knowing which set of trees was real.

Kelly could hear his mother calling to him: “Joe, honey, you still asleep?” Her musical voice echoed off of what he presumed to be bathroom tile. He tried to swim up and out so he could answer her that he had been awake for a long time, but it was hard to call out from down at the bottom of wherever he’d been — where he still was. He could measure it in atmospheres, but not in seconds, not in inches or miles or feet.

He must have gone back to bed, which is why she thought he was sleeping when he wasn’t. He couldn’t be sleeping because he heard her talking to his father, who everyone called Joe Senior even though he kept saying, “Call me Dad, son. A boy should call his father Dad.”

“Okay, Dad, okay.” He was awake. It was the month they had moved to New York, the week he had started his new school. “Whatchu you lookin’ at?” asked a police officer who had been staring at him from the opposite corner as Kelly crossed the street. “Whatchu lookin’ at?” he asked again as Kelly mounted the curb and headed toward the brown brick school building with plywood still nailed over the window where a rock had been tossed through.

“Keep your head down,” Joe Senior was always telling him. “Don’t act like you know everythin’. When I was your age, I thought I knew everythin’, and nothin’ good ever came of it, so however you act, don’t act like that.” His hair was grizzled and his face was gaunt, and it was hard to believe he had ever been young.

“Okay, okay,” said Kelly.

“I walked around like I was king of the world, but I wasn’t king. I wasn’t nothin’, and then I went to prison, and I was less than nothin’. So keep your head down. That’s the way to stay out of trouble.”

But that day in the Bronx, Kelly’s head was up. He was looking around at the other stragglers, who were loaded down with satchels full of books or not loaded down and kind of slinking in the shadows as if they too were deciding whether to go to school or bolt. He was looking at the blinking traffic signal and at the passing cars, at the way the morning sun painted the bricks the color of dried blood and at the cop who was kind of snarling at him and rocking back on his heels with his thumbs stuck in his belt.

“Smile,” Kelly’s mom had told him. “That’s the way to make new friends.”

“You hard of hearing?” asked the cop.

Kelly gave the cop a neutral smile. He didn’t want new friends. He wanted his old ones, but they were back in Wimberley, probably still lolling around in bed because of the time difference.

“Answer me when I ask you a question, boy!”

“I’m lookin’ at you ’cuz you’re lookin’ at me.” Even though it was true, Kelly suspected it was the wrong thing to say.

Kelly’s head was up when he looked at the officer, and it was up when he climbed onto the Toyota and rammed his fist into the air the way Tommie Smith and John Carlos had done at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City the same year the Reverend King was assassinated in Memphis and Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and anti-war activists seized five buildings at Columbia University to prove the people were ready to take their country back, all of which Kelly knew because it was also the year his father was born, and his father liked to talk about those things as if his lowly birth to an unwed teenager was part of some grand and inspiring civil rights trend.

In Mexico City, the two track champions had stood shoeless and determined on the podium, fists thrust into the air and heads bowed prayerfully while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played and while the Australian silver medalist stood beside them in silent support for which he was later ostracized at home. But first, Carlos and Smith were evicted from Olympic Village and suspended from the U.S. team. “But they stood up for themselves,” Joe Senior said every time he talked about them. “They stood up for themselves and eventually their medals were returned.” There was a lesson in it, that’s the thing he wanted his children to remember. “What’s the lesson?” Kelly wanted to know. “Justice prevailed,” his father always replied. “Don’t you forget that justice prevailed.”

Kelly heard his mother calling him to come for breakfast and then it was his father, reminding him to vote. “I lost that right when I went to prison, so you have to vote for the both of us,” he was saying. “Every Election Day, you make sure to get up early and exercise your constitutional right.”

For some reason, one of their new neighbors started a rumor that Joe Senior had killed a man back in Texas, which is why he’d come to New York. “It explains a lot of things,” the neighbor would say, and the other neighbors would nod sagely to each other. “That would certainly explain it,” they said.

Kelly preferred to believe his father had been locked up for killing a man than for bungling a robbery, but either way, Joe Senior hadn’t been home much, and then, suddenly, he was. He was home and they were moving across the country for a fresh start and a job. Another story went around that Kelly was the one to throw the rock through the school window. What would you expect from a boy whose father was a killer? They were only rumors, but once a story took hold, it didn’t matter if it was true. So Kelly started to say, “I’ll set my old man on you,” whenever anyone gave him trouble, and whether it was that or the fact that he grew four inches over the course of that first year in New York, no one gave him trouble anymore. He didn’t need his old man to handle things. He could handle them himself.

It was handling things that led to his first night in jail. It was a minor scuffle over a girl that did it, but Joe Senior sat up late, wringing his hands. “They’ll take away your vote if you’re not careful,” he said. “You ain’t a real American if they take away your vote.”

The night in jail had scared Kelly. He had looked out through the bars at the dog-faced deputy and realized something about the world and also about his place in it. But then he had gone back to being angry, and after a couple more years of barely scraping by at school, he had given up and joined the army.

And then his mother called out again, “Joe, honey, I’ve saved two big ol’ pancakes just for you. That’s surely worth waking up for.”

Kelly thought about telling his parents that sleeping was something he hardly ever did these days, but then it seemed not to matter anymore, so he sank back down to the quiet place, the place where the frogs were buried in the silt and the tadpoles slid on their bellies across the stones, smooth as coins, turning inexorably into frogs, their slippery skin evolved through eons of living in water, which surged relentlessly over them, oblivious to all of the life that depended on it in its search for the lowest point.

4.7 Pig Eye

Just as Pig Eye was worrying he was out there alone, Hernandez started gunning the motor of the second Humvee, rocking it out of the ditch and repositioning it up the road, farther away from the insurgents’ hide position. Harraday got his.50-cal. going, and Betts joined in with his M4, holding the triggermen down and forcing them to fire mostly blind, which meant Pig Eye could move more freely. Now you’re talking, he thought. Now they had a fighting chance! He held his breath, fondling the grenade and thinking that if Harraday could keep the Iraqis occupied, he might be able to get close enough to lob it over the wall of the animal enclosure, which would fix the triggermen once and for all.

The plan he settled on was to move twenty or thirty yards back along the ditch before cutting away from the road and making a run to the east side of the enclosure, out of the line of fire. He stuffed some more brush into the loops of wire, hoping to blend in with the landscape and counting on the others to keep the Iraqis busy. Then he bellied along the ditch, cradling the grenade in his hands and every now and then raising his head slightly to check on Tishman, who had gotten Finch back inside the vehicle and was now wrestling with the.50-cal., which seemed to be jammed or broken.

How close should he get before he tossed the grenade? What if his aim was bad and he missed? What if his aim was good, and one of the hostiles caught the grenade and threw it back at him? As he pushed himself nose-first through the dust, Pig Eye thought about all the hours he had spent working through various scenarios, none of them remotely like the one in which he found himself. Danny had been right about the howitzer — that’s the thing he needed now — that or aerial support.

Thirty seconds more, and he’d leave the road. Once he pulled the pin and threw, the grenade’s handle would fly off, releasing a spring that would throw the striker against the percussion cap, igniting the fuse. The fuse would take about four seconds to burn — more or less depending on variables in the design of the device that Pig Eye had no way of assessing. Then the detonator would ignite, setting off the main explosive charge. He imagined the blast wave and the fragments of casing ripping through anything they encountered and, if he was lucky, slicing the hell out of whoever was hiding behind the wall.

Everything was set. The only thing left to do was to run and aim and toss — or it would have been the only thing if one of the triggermen hadn’t peered over the wall and pointed his weapon down the road at a distant puff of dust that signaled a vehicle approaching from the direction they had come. Through the binoculars, Pig Eye made out a small pickup truck, a Toyota HiLux, he guessed. It seemed to be riding low, which meant there were probably people in it, but he couldn’t see any people, only the driver, so there was no way of telling how many others might be hunkered down in the back of the truck and if whoever it was were insurgents or civilians. So far, Harraday and Betts had the triggermen mostly pinned, but a truck full of reinforcements would drastically lower their odds. He calculated the Toyota was three or four klicks away. If it was traveling at forty miles per hour, he would have between three and four minutes to do something that raised their chances of escape. If it was moving more slowly, he would have longer. He refocused the binoculars, which was when he noticed that, in addition to riding very low to the ground, the approaching truck was old and had black temporary plates — all signs that it was filled not with passengers but with explosives.

4.8 Pig Eye

Kelly’s pills worked even better than Hernandez’s time-slowing trick. They brought everything into sharp focus so that Pig Eye had a chance to appreciate the shimmer of the pebbles under his hands and the rustle of dry grass and the scratch of the spiny seed heads against his skin as his mind squeezed off a round of calculations: thirty miles per hour, he decided, but gaining speed, which meant that in approximately two minutes the pickup would reach the Humvee that contained Tishman and Kelly and Finch. It was a bomb and it was going to blow the Humvee to kingdom come, killing the men it contained and lowering the odds for the rest of them.

“Never change the plan at the last minute unless you have to,” the marine had told him, but what if he had to? He had to neutralize the truck.

Once he understood the situation, his indecision and doubts vanished. Unless it was the pills that chased them, for suddenly he wasn’t worried anymore. Suddenly he felt like Superman, drenched in a downpour of rightness and karma and luck. Above him, the sun was a hot lid on the day. The earth embraced him from below as if he were not quite separate from it, as if he were poised somewhere between what he had been and what he would become. Then he pulled the pin on the grenade, holding the handle tightly in place and tensing his muscles for a run.

He couldn’t slow time down, but he could speed it up. He could speed it up by running toward the truck, which floated soundlessly toward him on its cloud of dust like a low-flying desert-colored bird. He couldn’t stop the bomb, but he could detonate it prematurely, before it reached the Humvee. And he could improve his accuracy by tossing from close range into the truck bed, where he figured the explosives were packed. In his imagination, the vehicle would sail by, continuing on for another three or four seconds while the fuse burned and while he kept running another three or four seconds past it, putting him outside the primary blast zone if he was lucky and exploding the truck before it reached his buddies. It was the best he could do, given the situation and the fact that he didn’t have any more time to come up with a better plan. Time and opportunity were the two most important elements in any escape kit — he had them, he just didn’t have enough.

4.9 Danny Joiner

Danny spent a moment trying to find his binoculars, which would have been useful in assessing the situation, but they weren’t around his neck and they hadn’t fallen to the floor. He slid out of the truck and took cover behind it before shouldering his rifle and firing frantically at the wall before settling down and aiming, which helped to pin down whoever was there even if he didn’t hit them.

The seconds ticked by. Whenever one of the Iraqis showed himself, Harraday would pop off a round, or Danny would, but then Harraday’s big gun went silent — jammed or out of ammo — so now Harraday was crouching in the gun turret and blasting away with his M4, which is when Danny noticed a vehicle that looked like a pickup truck approaching from the east. Danny figured the truck would have to leave the road at some point to get around the debris, but it didn’t leave the road. And it didn’t slow down. It was then that he noticed how the truck was riding very low to the ground and how it was heading straight toward Tishman and Kelly’s Humvee. “Incoming!” yelled Danny, but his head was pounding and he couldn’t even hear himself.

The best thing he could do was to stop the truck before it reached the Humvee and detonated, which was what was going to happen if he didn’t do something quickly. He rammed another round into the chamber and steadied his arm. He remembered to breathe. He remembered that his left eye was dominant. He remembered to flip the safety. Now that he had a plan, his hands were weirdly steady. His head was clear as glass. He could have been a sniper, he was so cool and controlled. As he squeezed the trigger, elation flooded through him because he knew even before the windshield shattered that it was a money shot and that his buddies in the Humvee were safe because of him. The driver pitched forward. The pickup swerved and abruptly stopped. And then the feeling changed into whatever was the opposite of elation as his laser focus opened out again and he saw that something had detached from the roadside and taken human form. The figure had time to run a few steps farther up the road before the truck exploded and with it, Pig Eye and everything predictable about the world.

4.10 Penn Sinclair

Penn Sinclair woke with a start to the enormity of what he had done. He lay sweating on his cot for over an hour before rising and dressing carefully in the dark. By the time the pink desert light filtered in at the plastic window, he had written a two-page statement outlining what had happened between the announcement that the tours were being extended and the encounter with the IED.

The men had been insubordinate. He had worried about losing control and overreacted. He had justified his actions by telling himself that the school was a priority, as was getting the supplies up the road for when the orders came through. But the truth was, he hadn’t asked enough questions or adequately assessed the intelligence or understood the implications of the surge for road-clearing crews or the general confusion that accompanied the implementation of any new strategy. He re-read the statement and thought again about how facts weren’t much different from fabrications. But it was the best he could do.

At 06:30 he knocked at the door of the colonel’s quarters. Falwell was blessed with a permanent interrogatory look that made people answer questions before he could ask them. When he opened the door, Penn wished him good morning and handed the two sheets of paper across. Falwell’s expression turned from Who’s bothering me so early? to What the fuck is this?

“It’s my statement, sir.”

Statement? asked the look.

“Confession, rather. To attach to the after action report.”

Falwell opened his mouth for the first time and said, “I was just about to have coffee. Why don’t you come in and join me, Captain.”

Penn didn’t want coffee. He didn’t want to sit down next to a picture of Falwell’s teenaged daughters or notice that in the picture, the daughters were lounging on a beach holding some kind of fruity drink while two dark-skinned people with trays hovered behind them and smiled for the camera. But he found himself sitting with a coffee cup balanced on his knees and blurting out the story of how he had sent the convoy before receiving the orders and how, once he had received them, he had allowed a unit to continue north to deliver a load of supplies to the school. “My actions were almost certainly the reason the convoy was attacked.”

“Almost certainly,” said Falwell.

“Certainly, sir.”

“How many things in life are almost certain, Captain? Death and taxes, crabs — that’s about it.”

“Likely, then.”

“I see,” said Falwell. “Was it yesterday? Or was it the day before? Or maybe it was Wednesday of last week or the week before that.”

“Yesterday,” said Penn, his eyes straying to the daughters, who wore oversized sunglasses and strapless dresses and the confident smiles of girls who knew how to get what they wanted. “It was the day after the troops found out they weren’t going home.”

“My point is that it could have been any day. It’s too dangerous to send supply convoys every day of the goddamned week. But, of course, it’s also too dangerous not to send them because that would hang the guys on the front lines out to fucking dry.”

The colonel swallowed a slug of coffee and said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.”

It was Sinclair’s turn to give Falwell a questioning look.

“Sun Tzu,” said the colonel.

“But I sent them before the orders came through.”

“I heard the men were causing trouble,” said Falwell. “And the supplies got to where they were needed way ahead of schedule. It’s conceivable that the entire convoy would have been ambushed if it had started later. You might have saved something even worse from happening. Did you ever think that those first trucks only got through because of you?”

“Five of my men were killed and others were injured. What could be worse than that?”

Penn blinked and lowered his eyes. When he raised them again, the colonel was blinking too and the questioning look was gone.

“No person on earth is sorrier about that than me. No one. Not a single fucking person cares more about his troops than I do. But it sounds like they were out of line and you tried to control them. You just couldn’t control the Iraqis. If you could, you’d be sitting here instead of me.”

The rising sun cast the room in a warm and almost otherworldly glow so that with a little effort, Penn might have convinced himself that he would walk outside to find a row of beach umbrellas and smiling waiters peddling the illusion that the world was a beautiful place and that those who weren’t yet happy would be after another mai tai or a hot stone massage or a leisurely swim in the blue-black infinity-edge pool.

“So, what?” asked the colonel. “You want to be punished, is that it? Well, that won’t solve a goddamned thing.”

“I made two bad decisions in a row. First to send the convoy before receiving the orders, and then to split the platoon.”

“And why were those bad decisions?”

“Because they led to unnecessary deaths.”

“The end justifies the means, then? An action is good if it leads to a state of affairs that is better than the one you started with? Setting aside the well-worn tropes about torturing or killing some people in order to save others — we’ve all heard those arguments a thousand times — how does focusing on the consequences provide guidance about what a person should do? Here you are, assessing your options, and you decide that sending the convoy will accomplish more than not sending it. But in the end it doesn’t, so now you determine that your action was bad. The problem with this theory is that you can only see what you ought to have done after the fact.”

“In any case, I want to take responsibility for it. And I want to keep from doing any more harm.”

“There’s an easy answer, then,” said the colonel. “Go ahead and shoot yourself now. Or join a monastery.”

Penn tried to take a sip of his coffee, but the cup was shaking in his hand, so he put it back down and checked out the daughters again, calmed somewhat by their innocence or whatever it was that allowed them to look so alert and oblivious at the same time. One of them was prettier than the other, but he could tell that the second one had bigger — well, the word that came to him was “balls.” She reminded him of Louise, except that Louise would have managed to convey that behind the perky smile was an important itinerary, and only by rigidly sticking to it had she carved out that moment of relaxation and fun. Still, they had the same assured look, a look he recognized because he used to have it himself. He owed Louise a letter or an email, but he didn’t know what he would say to her or what he would want her to say in reply.

“Call me a pragmatist,” said the colonel, “but I don’t believe there’s a single, unified answer to any of the questions we might ask ourselves about how a person decides what to do. Should I be concerned with the consequences? Of course I should. Mostly I don’t lie, but when the Nazis come knocking, I don’t tell them where Anne Frank is hiding. I take my best shot given the available time and information — that’s the thing I’m paid to do. Anything more than that is above my pay grade, and certainly above yours.”

“But if I’d waited a little longer, thought a little harder…”

“There are the thinkers and there are the doers, Sinclair. The thinkers sit around in their libraries talking in circles about what is morally required or permitted — you can’t judge a person without considering his actions, and you can’t judge actions without considering consequences. But consequences can’t be predicted with any accuracy, so you talk about intentions — and where does all that mumbo jumbo leave us? It leaves us exactly where we are. Someone has to be out here on the front lines doing something about all the shit in the world, and that’s us. We’re the doers, Sinclair. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until we’ve got the theory all worked out. While those guys are trying to come up with answers — and don’t forget, they’ve been trying for thousands of years — life is happening all around us.”

“And death,” said Penn.

“Which is a really lousy part of life,” said the colonel.

“It’s not really part of life,” Penn started to say, but he wasn’t sure of his ground, so he stopped.

The colonel got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He looked at Penn and then past him at the scratched plastic window and the yard where groups of soldiers had started to move about, their faces glowing in the morning light as if lit from within. “To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing,” he said.

“Aristotle?” asked Penn.

“Elbert Hubbard, whoever the hell that is.”

The colonel rose and moved toward the door. The morning light hit the crevices of his face, but when he turned, his features were erased by shadows. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Sinclair. I don’t much like confessions.”

“Sorry sir.”

“Do you know why I don’t like them?”

“No sir.”

“They create problems is why. And I think you’ll agree we’ve got problems enough.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn, gesturing toward the pages Falwell was holding but hadn’t read. “Anyway, it’s all in there.”

“Which computer did you write this on?”

“My personal computer, sir.”

“Are there other copies?”

“No sir.”

“Good.” Falwell walked to where a waste receptacle was nestled in a corner of the room. He put the pages in the receptacle and lit a match, and they both watched as the paper burned. “You didn’t email this to anybody, did you? You didn’t save it on a disk?”

“No sir.”

“See that you don’t. You go delete that file and then you empty the trash bin on the computer and then you never mention this to anybody again. And when the incident report is written up, make sure it’s routed through me.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn. Then he added, “I think I cared too much about the school. And I cared too much about how I looked to the other officers. I let those things overshadow my duty to my men. That’s the thing I can’t forget.”

“You sent some troops on a mission that might or might not have been poorly timed, which had the side benefit of letting some hotheads cool off. The orders changed and you adapted the best you could according to the information you had at the time. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, Sinclair. But I’m glad you told me about this. I’ll write a press release. We’ll inform the next of kin.”

Penn said, “Yes sir.” He moved the untouched coffee from his knees to a table.

“You’re like me, Sinclair. The army needs us, but we need the army too.”

As Penn left the hut, the weight that had been pressing down on him since the afternoon before left his shoulders, but it settled somewhere deep inside his rib cage. When he got back to his quarters, he deleted his confession, but only after emailing it to his civilian account and only after enclosing a printed copy in an envelope and addressing it to himself care of his mother, who would recognize the handwriting and wonder vaguely why he was writing to himself. Then she would carefully sort the envelope from the bills and invitations, and the next time she went upstairs, she would put it in the top drawer of the antique chest that stood in the hallway underneath the Sinclair family crest with the rooster on it and the words they repeated at holiday gatherings but otherwise forgot: COMMIT THY WORK TO GOD. She would recognize his handwriting, but she wouldn’t open the envelope the way Louise would open it if he sent the letter to her.

4.11 Gordon Falwell

I should have been a priest,” said Falwell before the door closed. “I should have been a fucking priest.”

He’d been told to cancel all logistics missions until after the meeting at HQ, which he had done. But now he had five casualties to explain in an incident where supplies were being skimmed off for an unauthorized school and who knew if that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the supplies went, not to mention that certain road patrols had been temporarily pulled, which is a detail he had known but hadn’t passed on in a timely fashion because he’d thought canceling the missions was enough. If he had, though, Sinclair would have made a different decision when it came to disciplining his men, and this rat fuck could have been avoided. It was ultimately his fault. Something like this could stall his career. Now he’d have to change the date on the incident report. Or fudge the time line. Hell, he’d figure it out. At HQ he’d talked to combat commanders, and all of them had reported that insubordination among the troops was on the rise, as were visits to mental health personnel, as were IED attacks, as were demands on soldiers to do things for the Iraqis that the Iraqis should be doing for themselves, as was the belief in counterinsurgency of exactly the school-building kind, and as was the inability to tell who was the enemy or where he was hiding. The war was 360 degrees with surround sound, so how were he and his officers supposed to make good decisions when either way they were fucked.

“Lessons learned” had been the catchphrase of the meeting, and now Falwell had to submit yet another after action report that would be scoured for useful observations, information, and lessons — OIL. The report would trigger still other reports and analyses that would be sent up the command chain, where new policies would be crafted and handed back down with the hope that past mistakes could be avoided. Ha!

He winced at the AARs already littering his desk — the one where the lesson learned was about keeping engines from overheating in this blast furnace of a country and the one where it was about destigmatizing mental health care and the ones about combatting complacency and up-armoring cargo trucks and conserving water and building trust and preventing rape and recognizing likely ambush points. And now the one about how the light footprint strategy had been a — well, people had started to use the word “fiasco.” Just thinking about the piles of paper and analyses one more incident would spawn was enough to make him weep.

And yet, the optimism he had brought back with him from HQ hadn’t completely dissipated. There was something about tragedy that strengthened resolve and annealed the soul, and there was something about the surge that spelled “Fresh Start.” A new strategy always conjured up in his mind a pristine set of pages, ones with that fresh-ink smell and the lines not yet filled with fuck-ups and confusion. He called his CSM and said, “Everyone in the DFAC in thirty.” Then he spent a few minutes pondering the HQ briefing and deciding what to pass on to the troops. He’d keep it short. In war, only the simple succeeds, he told himself, quoting Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. He liked the words “simple” and “focused” and “decisive.”

By the time he was walking across the yard, optimism was tugging his center of gravity by its string. The men were sitting quietly this time, waiting and wary, but they snapped to attention when he entered the room. As he spoke, he amped up his speech a little, and instead of “attempt,” he said “high-octane effort,” and instead of “senseless deaths,” he said “magnificent contribution.” And then he talked about balancing kinetics with human intelligence and diplomacy. As he spoke, he saw that there were valuable lessons to be learned after all and that he was articulating them forcefully. Fuck the papers and reports. It was he, along with the men and women arrayed before him, who would make the difference in this war.

“There is nothing you cannot do,” he said, and he saw his belief reflected in the faces in front of him. The troops who had been sitting back leaned forward, and the ones who had been leaning forward squinted and tensed their jaws.

“If you fall,” he said, “you will pick yourself up and do your job. And if the enemy pushes you down, you will pick yourself up and you will push back harder, and then you will do your job. But if he pushes you down and steps on you…”

Now the colonel was feeling the old sort of ecstasy, the kind that could only be forged of forces that were nameless and primal. He thought of quoting General Patton, who had said, We will twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him, decided not to, and then the words burst past his lips and had on his own mind the effect he hoped they would have on his troops. And for an instant, in spite of everything that had happened before that moment and everything that was to come, he felt pretty goddamned ready for the surge.