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  EOD pulled up, and I briefed their lieutenant on the situation. Fifteen minutes later, all of the Gravediggers had buttoned up in their respective Strykers and listened on the radio as SFC Big Country and the EOD platoon sergeant ensured that everyone was safe before the controlled detonation.

  “White, this is White 4. Report when all personnel are secure in vehicles.”

  I looked over at PFC Smitty, whose face peeked out of the other rear hatch, and winked. I had ensured that Specialist Flashback parked our Stryker parallel with the detonation area, so we had an ideal view for the detonation. Fuck it, I thought. This is war. Everything we do is a combat risk. What’s a little fireworks show?

  “This is 1. We’re good!” I exclaimed with just enough fervor that an awkward silence followed on the radio.

  “Hah, hah, this is gonna be so awesome, sir,” PFC Smitty said.

  “I hope so. Remember, I’m only allowing this because I conducted a thorough risk assessment,” I said with just enough dry inflection in my voice to let my guys know I was kidding. “You got the camera on record, Sergeant Spade?”

  “You know it,” my gunner said.

  “You set, Specialist Flashback?” I asked my driver.

  Silence followed.

  “You set, Flashback?” I repeated.

  More silence.

  “Yo, Flashback.”

  Snore. Snore. Followed by a deep exhale. And then more snoring. I decided to let the detonation wake him up. He could watch the whole event later on the recording.

  The EOD platoon sergeant’s voice came back on the net. “Ten seconds until detonation.”

  “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .” I bit down on my lip and braced for the explosion.

  “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!”

  KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM.

  A small mushroom cloud composed of bright orange smolders and fireball bits pierced the darkness in a flash. Sergeant Spade said later he had seen larger explosions during his first deployment, and was thus a bit underwhelmed, but given that my explosion experience up to this point had been limited to Fourth of July picnics, I certainly was not. A moment of panic had nipped at my brain when I felt a wave of transitory heat brush past my face. Bits of metallic shrapnel did not arrive with it though, thus ensuring that my oral risk assessment conducted earlier could remain a punch line and not a talking point in front of endless field-grade officers’ desks.

  I looked across from me. I knew my visage matched PFC Smitty’s, which glowed through the moonlight—hanging jaw, arched eyebrows deep-fried in wow, and a slight tightness around the temple area that served as visible evidence that men sometimes did recognize the evaded consequences of their stupidity, if only after the fact.

  EOD collected their equipment, thanked us for our patience, and moved out. There was now a large hole in the middle of the soccer field, but at least there weren’t any rockets. I woke up Specialist Flashback, and after the other vehicles had woken up their drivers, we rolled back to the combat outpost. We were all asleep within the hour. Another day of missions and patrolling and fragos and counterinsurgency tedium awaited.

  THE BROTHEL

  “We got nothing, LT.” Staff Sergeant Boondock’s voice ricocheted off the thin walls of the Iraqi hut we had raided in the dead of the night. “No males, military age or otherwise. Our guys must’ve bounced already. Nothing here but the mom, the teenage daughter, a younger kid, a baby, and a crazy-ass grandma who won’t stop giving me the evil eye. Easy, lady! Put down the broom and come outside.”

  I stood with the terp Super Mario in the main room of the house, explaining to the mother why we were there. Yes, of course, you can pick up the crying baby. No, we are not here to talk about your eldest daughter being so sick that she’s in the hospital, although that is awful. Yes, I want everyone in the house outside. Now. No, you cannot talk to each other. I want to talk to each of you separately. Yeah, including the grandmother.

  An hour before, I had been sitting in Sheik Banana-Hands’s living room, drinking chai and watching Suzanne Somers’s workout videos on very expensive and very golden Arabic couches. My soldiers pulling inner security—Sergeant Cheech and PFC Smitty—were slightly confused by the sight, but I had keyed in on the sheik’s dirty-old-man status months ago. Finding him in his pajamas at night learning about the wonders of the Thighmaster only confirmed my suspicions. To his credit though, he hadn’t appeared the least bit embarrassed when he found us on his front porch, checking up on him due to a recent assassination threat put out by a JAM cell. He simply invited us in and lectured me about the benefits of “a woman with experience who still exercise. Heh heh heh. You must become habibi [lover] to an older woman as a young man. It is very important.”

  SFC Big Country, the platoon sergeant of the Gravediggers. An Iowa native, he stressed cavalry scout skills for all of his men, and enforced discipline when necessary. He also advised me on mission planning, and his insights were always both perceptive and precise.

  Sheik Banana-Hands was in the process of bestowing upon me a brand-new chai set when my dismount radio buzzed with want. “White 1, this is White 4.” SFC Big Country had the unmistakable “I-am-relaying-a-frago-from-Higher-would-a-plan-every-now-and-then-seriously-kill-these-bastards?” crispness to his voice.

  “This is 1.”

  “Frago.”

  “But I’m getting my chai set! Can’t it wait?”

  “Not for a raid, unfortunately.”

  “Raid? Fine. At least it’s not another market assessment. I’ll be right there.”

  Two minutes and a chai set bequeathal later, I received the full rundown from Bounty Hunter X-ray. Fadl, a local thug for a Mahdi Army splinter group, had been spotted at a local female shop owner’s house in the northern Shia portion of town with another unknown man. Our source said that Fadl routinely came to this house at night to pay the mother money to freaky-freaky with her teenage daughter.

  A family without a man of the house and unable to sustain themselves financially was not a rarity in Saba al-Bor. Unfortunately, neither was the solution utilized by this particular family. After a quick radio rehearsal and confirmation of the house’s location, our ghost tanks raced off into the darkness, grateful for this unscheduled variation in the nightly patrol grind.

  The vehicle cordon called set. The dismount teams were stacked. I gave Staff Sergeant Boondock the Aloha shaka’, and in they swooped, a silent, efficient testament to hours spent training under the rigid specificity of my NCOs. The raid itself lasted no more than two minutes, yielding no Fadl and no unknown man either.

  “Time to tactically question,” I said, mouth racing after one too many Rip-Its. “One at a time on the patio with me, everyone else in the main room, where you can watch and verify that I am not committing horrible infidel acts to your family members. No talking though. My men are going to search your house. Don’t worry, they won’t break anything. You don’t have any weapons? Not even an AK? No banana-clip magazines? Okay. You first, grandma.”

  I found two chairs in the main room and pulled them out to the patio. I took off my helmet, set my rifle to the side, and instructed the elderly woman to sit down next to me.

  “Hello, ma’am,” I said, completely certain that the manners so carefully ingrained into me by my Southern mother would be lost in translation. “My name is Lieutenant Matt, and I need your help.”

  “I know nothing,” she responded to Super Mario’s translation automatically. “I am an old woman. I am tired. Let me go back to bed.”

  “I will,” I promised. “Just help me first. We’re trying to find bad men we know are causing harm to your family.”

  “I know nothing.”

  “We’ll see. Maybe you know something important that you do not know is important.”

  Five minutes and many rebuffs later, I felt stonewalled.

  “Fine,” I said. “You win. Bring me the little girl. Damn it, I said no talking
in there! Translate that as soothingly as possible, Super Mario.”

  “What’s soothingly?”

  “Nevermind. They got the point.”

  A young girl walked up to me shyly, taking Super Mario’s hand, which guided her to the seat next to mine. She had big black eyes and wore her hair in pigtails. Her mouth hadn’t closed since she had first seen the American giant, PFC Das Boot himself, some minutes earlier.

  “Hi,” I said. “My name is Matt. What’s yours?”

  She gazed at Super Mario for many seconds before answering. “Asma.”

  “What’s her deal?” I asked the terp.

  “She is surprised I speak Arabic,” he said, “because I wear American uniform.”

  “Ah. Okay, Asma. I was hoping you could help me out.”

  “With what?” she whispered, avoiding any and all eye contact. Her eyes kept swinging back behind me, to the doorway where her mother and her older sister still were.

  “Do any men live here?” I asked.

  “Not since my father died.”

  “When was that?”

  “One year ago, I think.”

  “Do any men come here now? Men who aren’t in your family?”

  Her eyes betrayed her once more. She tried glancing behind me again, and when I moved my body so as to block her vantage point, she suddenly became very interested in a piece of concrete below her.

  “No,” she said. “The only men that ever come here come during the day to our shop.”

  “Please, don’t lie to me. I thought we were friends. Aren’t we friends?”

  There was a slight pause before she answered. “No.”

  I couldn’t believe it. My friendship request had been rejected by an eight-year-old. “No? Why not?”

  “Because you are American,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  Well, at least I got one honest answer out of her, I thought. Super Mario laughed, in spite of himself, and gave it a shot. “What about me?” he asked. “I am Iraqi. Can we be friends?”

  She didn’t even bother to hesitate this time. “No, you are Iraqi, but you are American now. We cannot be friends. I’m sorry.”

  I tried to ask her who had said we couldn’t be friends, but one could only ask an eight-year-old so many questions before the kid oystered up. There were pearls of wisdom tucked away in there, but I certainly wasn’t going to uncover them.

  “Hey, sir.” Staff Sergeant Boondock loomed in the doorway. “House is clear. No weapons, no propaganda, not even an expensive TV. Nothing.”

  “Any sign of a man being here recently? Clothes or something?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. The only thing is . . . well . . . I think the story we got is right. There’s only one mattress in the entire house, and it’s in the older daughter’s room. Queen size. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Okay.” I hadn’t been looking forward to this questioning. I was awkward enough with girls, even when I wasn’t accusing them of being terrorist whores selling their body to Mahdi Army insurgents hell-bent on my bloody destruction. “Might as well bring her out here, then.”

  Out came an Iraqi girl so homely it was striking. She was built like a rectangle, seemingly hadn’t washed her hair for weeks, and wore way too much bright red blush. She claimed she was twenty-three, but I wouldn’t have placed her a day over sixteen. The dynamics of this questioning had changed considerably from the last one. Now, my interviewee kept trying to stare at me, while I avoided any and all eye contact.

  “I was hoping you could help us out by answering a few questions.”

  “Sure. I’d love to help out the Americans.”

  “Right. We know you know a man named Fadl. Tell us where he is now.”

  “Fadl? I do not know a Fadl.” I looked back up at her face, searching for signs of a wry grin but found nothing except dreary eyes probing me like I was an alien freshly arrived from Mars. Just like the slutty girls back in high school, I thought, an empty face with an empty gaze. She had seen too much of the primal desires of man already to have any sense of awe anymore. There was no intrigue left in human relationships for her.

  “There is no reason to lie to me. We know what is going on here. I don’t care about that. We need to talk with Fadl.”

  “I do not know anyone by that name,” she said. I couldn’t decide if I had picked up a tinge of smugness in her voice, or if that had been my imagination. I asked her about her bed and was told that the whole family slept on the mattress with her. That was as far as I was willing to go with that subject. We couldn’t help people who didn’t want to be helped.

  I now asked the mother to come out to the patio. I could hear the frustration seeping into my own voice. My men paced anxiously, waiting for me to finish. I went with the expedited version of tactical questioning.

  “Do you know a man named Fadl?”

  “No.”

  “Do bad men come here at night?”

  “No.”

  “Are you lying to me?”

  “No.”

  The mother stared back at me, just as aloofly as her teenage daughter had minutes before, and then smiled. I had lived with a single mother long enough to know that this woman was feigning deference. Behind this masquerade of feminine submission was a tartness as sharp as razor blades and a will as staunch as steel. Boyish charm or no, this woman wanted me out of her house as soon as possible—and that meant perpetuating the lies of her family members. I decided that she was thinking that the known horrors of Fadl were still better than the unknown horrors that could occur if it was learned she’d helped the Americans.

  I tilted my head and looked back at her. “I understand why you’re lying to me. You are scared. I would be scared too.” I pulled out my notepad, tore out a piece of blank paper, and handed that and a pen to Super Mario. “Write down the number to the combat outpost,” I told him, before continuing my talk with the mother. “Call us if you get scared again. We can help you.” I took the paper from Super Mario and pressed it in the mother’s hands. “We want to help you.”

  She bit her lip and whispered back at me. “I will.” She looked around her, absorbing the tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, clean-shaven, stoic profiles of SFC Big Country, Staff Sergeant Boondock, Sergeant Spade, and PFC Das Boot. For the briefest of moments, I thought she was going to collapse into one of their arms and begin weeping. Instead, she simply bit her lip again and stared down at the ground. It was the final, and surest, sign for us to depart.

  On our way out though, I waved the teenage girl out of the house and to the front walkway. She brushed past her still motionless mother and strolled up to us.

  “Tell Fadl,” I said as soon as she came within earshot, “that we’re going to capture him or kill him. It’s only a matter of time.” I turned around and walked on to our Strykers, not bothering to listen to a fresh set of protests of ignorance.

  A few days later—after receiving intel that Fadl had left town—we conducted a patrol in the same neighborhood as the house in question and decided to pay a visit. The dismounts hadn’t even knocked on the front door yet when the gunners radioed us, saying that they had stopped a car with two military-aged males trying to break the cordon and make an escape.

  Neither of them was Fadl. They were just two nobody punks, drunk on something and high on something else. They eventually admitted, though, that they had visited with the dreary eyes on the queen-size mattress. For a price, of course.

  Fadl’s fleeing Saba al-Bor hadn’t solved all of the family’s problems—certainly not the financial ones. We called the IPs, who detained the two for being under the influence, and then we remounted our Strykers. Perhaps there was something kinetic in nature out there for us to deal with.

  If there was, we intended to find it.

  THE MOSQUE RAID

  I saw the stun grenade before I heard it. The flash washed out my night vision, blinding me momentarily. Then I heard the blast break the early-morning silence, crashing like a ceramic plate
dropped to the ground. Harsh, rigid shouts in the distance followed, some one hundred meters to my front. This is not good, I thought. I need to do something.

  I squatted on the side of the road and switched knees to relieve the pressure. I was currently just one small part of a great camo odyssey, along with five members of my platoon—Sergeant Spade, Specialist Tunnel, Specialist Haitian Sensation, PFC Cold-Cuts, and PFC Smitty—a squad of American military police (MP), a squad of Iraqi police, and approximately forty members of Task Force Cobra. The reason for such a miscellany of Coalition forces boiled down to one thing: Task Force Cobra’s heavy-handed reputation. When they told us that they had a target in Saba al-Bor, in the vicinity of the Sunni mosque on Route Gold, our Higher begged them to allow a unit from Bravo Troop to accompany them. Shockingly, Task Force Cobra’s leadership acquiesced. However, because of the raid’s proximity to the mosque, Task Force Cobra’s patrol leader—presumably a special ops captain or major, although he wore no rank and told me to call him Steve, so I didn’t know for sure—asked for Iraqi police support so that they could use the Iraqis to clear the mosque if necessary. This, in turn, meant a squad of MPs joined the mission, as they were under orders to go everywhere the IPs went. All of this baggage frustrated the Task Force Cobra supersoldiers to no end, as they normally operated as an independent entity. Concurrently, my role in all of this was crystal clear.

  “Dude,” Captain Whiteback said to me before we left the combat outpost on foot, “you’re the ranking normal army guy out there. Just make sure they don’t break too much, okay? We’ll still be here tomorrow; they won’t.”

  Easier said than done. My radio gurgled with a report from Task Force Cobra’s assault force. “We got two men on the ground! They’ve been temporarily disabled by the flashbangs, and we’re searching them now. We’re on the roof of the mosque.”