Birdmen: A Story About Our Wars

By Phil Williams

Birdmen is a story about our wars. More specifically, it is the story of two young men caught in the middle of the conflict in Iraq, and their attempts to carve out meaning and purpose in the midst of a war they do not fully understand.

As an old veteran in the book says, Something inside all of us dies in a war. Hope innocence maybe just navet? In a sense, we are all struggling in some form or other for a victory that seems to constantly elude us. Suddenly we find ourselves fighting a battle that may provide no real sense of absolution in the end. War is truly ugly. Truth becomes abstracted. Redemption reveals itself as an often unpleasant and complicated process.

Soldiers come home from a war expecting to be free and clear of the thing, only too often to find they are still carrying it around inside them. For those who live through it, the war is never really over, and there may be no such thing as a happy ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450268332

Phil Williams

Born in California, the author spent six years as a child growing up in Saudi Arabia. He served two years in Iraq as a Ranger and Infantry Officer with the 101st Airborne Division. He currently lives in Sacramento, California.

Book preview

Contents

By Way of Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

A Parting Shot

By Way of Introduction

Most who read birdmen will understandably assume that it is autobiographic. Perhaps those who are most cynical will attempt to apply some of the more dramatic scenes in this book to my attempt at some kind of confession or exposé. And while I cannot deny that there are definite signatures here of my own experiences in Iraq and the subsequent homecoming, I can promise you those that do occur are solely a symptom of a limited imagination. Hemingway wrote that once you write it down it is all gone, and to that extent this project has been rather cathartic, but that catharsis should not be understood as lending itself to exposure in exchange for any kind of recognition, however little it may be.

This book is a work of fiction set in an historical context. I chose the campaign in Iraq as my stage because of my belief that war serves as the most critical rendering of our human condition. In war we come to find that some of the beliefs we hold are really just silly little luxuries, and not any kind of hard truths. War telescopes our perspective of our proper place in the world—puts us back in the dirt with the animals—and reminds us just how far we are from Heaven and how near to Hell, and that the only difference between the two is a simple matter of choice. You is sharks, sartin; preached Melville’s Fleece, but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.

What I attempt to accomplish in birdmen is to tell the story of a generation that has fought in a war that we do not entirely understand. And while I must be careful lest I be accused of arrogating to myself a privilege that may very well be beyond my poor talent to treat justly, nevertheless this project is an attempt at just that. The characters in birdmen are meant to be microcosms of the struggle between faith and despair that a generation robbed of heroes and Truth and Justice and the American Way are faced with. The Wyatt Earps and John Waynes are all dead and gone, and we are left only with their ghosts to contend with.

I don’t think you can talk about my generation without also talking about Vietnam. That war left scars on our parents’ generation that were passed onto us like a gene; those who did not avoid service were either killed, maimed or—if they were lucky enough to make it home in one piece—shunned, made to feel as if they had somehow betrayed their country, as if they were the ones who should be ashamed. The implications for who we are as a people and the value we place on selfless service are enormous in light of that blinding national blemish. Now we are forced to mythologize World War II and glean our heroes from the beaches of Normandy and the snows of Bastogne. Back when we knew who the bad guys were and why they were our enemy.

My generation went to war operating under the unspoken recognition that it was all screwed up from the get-go; there are no more absolutes and sharp delineations between the good guys and the bad. We had helped put Saddam Hussein in power in the 1970’s, and now he was our enemy? We had supported and even armed the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980’s, and now they were our enemy? While in An Najaf, Iraq, in 2003, after we had been briefed that the Sunnis were now the bad guys, I commented to a fellow platoon leader that I thought the Sunnis were the ones who had been pro-western?

Shifting alliances and fleeting truths, and something happens to a people’s sense of what is real and permanent. Suddenly we find ourselves fighting a battle that may provide no sense of absolution in the end. War is truly ugly. Truth gets abstracted. Faith in anything becomes rather complicated.

Birdmen is my attempt to communicate those ideas and realizations through a fictional story. I harbor no illusions regarding my talent as a writer, nor to my right to speak for others; it may very well prove to be the case that I elevated myself to a position that I am all too ill-suited for. Still, I feel this is a story worth telling, and if it proves to be the case that I have missed the mark, I sincerely hope that someone else will pick up where I fell short. Wherever I may seem to go too far—or not go far enough—I hope those giants I fought beside will forgive me.

Before we begin, I would like to use this opportunity—by way of introduction—to relate one actual account from Iraq, if only because it illustrates a point I’d like to make before we begin.

During my second tour in Iraq, I served with the 101st Airborne Division as the Reconnaissance Platoon Leader for 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment. Having attached myself to one of our teams for a particular mission one night, we inserted into what we had expected to be an empty and abandoned building. We were surprised, to say the least, when we found a woman with her young daughter sleeping on the ground inside. Through the aid of our interpreter, James, we discovered that they were homeless, and that the woman and the little girl Sowsun (which I assume is a variation of Susan) lived in the building—a library, we discovered—and guarded it. Evidently, in Iraq—where all the evil terrorists are—they allow their homeless and destitute to stay inside public buildings under the auspices that they guard those buildings. The fact that we were able to enter undetected in the middle of the night may testify to their security prowess.

Later, after the sun had come up, a wealthy man from the neighborhood brought by a bowl of chicken that would feed the two for over a week. All day long, as we took turns pulling security and waiting for our target, the little girl danced and sang and laughed, sharing her small world with us. I will not speak for the others, but I cannot erase her smile from my memory, though it has been five years now. Before we left later that night, the other men with me and I took up a small offering and gave it to the woman as a sort of recompense for having detained them the whole day. If I remember right, some of our offerings were rather generous, and I wonder if we were not trying to atone for something else. Just before we left, Sowsun kissed me on the forehead, offering me a warm and heartfelt "Shukran," and wished me a blessed Feast of Eid.

It seems to me that we in America are suffering from a lack of definition. We have forgotten that which makes us distinctly American, and I cannot help but feel that if we are to keep from losing our sense of who we are as a people, then we must re-engage in a national discussion of what exactly it means to be a citizen of our country.

I wonder if any of us today can fully appreciate what our founders accomplished so many years ago when they stood up and essentially said, Liberty! At whatever cost, but liberty! Can we imagine the very real consequences that such subversion to the British crown was then bound to elicit when they pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor?

Today, our demand rings slightly different, doesn’t it? Something more along the lines of, Safety! At whatever cost, but safety!

When did we become so afraid?

When did we as a people abdicate the kind of passion for liberty that comes only at the execution of our fears? The desire for freedom is in our blood. They say that America is so diverse that trying to concoct a national identity is next to impossible. I say our identity is that which stirred men to utter treasonous words, and calls peoples from faraway lands, braving seas and scorching deserts. The American dream used to be that you were free from the oppression of others’ beliefs and values, that you had certain God-given rights which no man nor instrument of man had power to sever. But somehow the American dream has since devolved into a three-car garage, 70-inch TV, and a robust 401(K).

We must reclaim the dreams of our founders, the dreams of men and women who would be free first, and safe next.

Contrary to what candidates may thunder on the campaign trail, our military is not the mechanism responsible for keeping us free. While it does provide a kind of freedom, it is a basic freedom from physical harm. Our military keeps us safe from foreign aggression, and they are very good at it. However, in a democracy, the people are the institution responsible for keeping themselves free. It is why Mr. Franklin told us that we were to have a democracy—if we can keep it.

But fear, that silent thief in the night, steals into our dreams and our natural insecurities and twists them into nightmares. Fear would replace our passion for liberty with a desire for comfort and safety, and in doing so would rob us of who we are as a people. Fear would rob us of the very thing that distinguishes Americans: that we are fanatical about our liberty. That we are a people who would rather die free than live fettered by a concern for a safe and comfortable life. We must reclaim that. It is the one thing that sets us apart from all other peoples: a scandalous insistence on the God-given rights of every man and woman to define for themselves the course their lives will take.

If I may be so bold, that is America. Man or woman, black, white, yellow, red or brown, gay or straight, no matter by which name you call God, if you hold to the truth that all mankind are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then I am happy to call you my countryman and my comrade.

America is an idea that knows no borders. Let them build their walls in the desert; freedom-starved people across the world will continue to lift their eyes to Ms. Lazarus’s New Colossus, who stands in a harbor proclaiming that wall’s very antithesis: This is the United States of America, and we do not build walls here. Let them pass their acts couched in patriotic rhetoric which are nothing but direct attacks upon our nation’s most sacred document and a shameless exploitation of our deepest fears; nothing will stir men so deeply as the words We the People….

I see something happening in my generation. I hear it in conversations at night after dinner over a bottle of wine. I see it in the faces of those who are organizing our communities, teaching in our schools, serving in our wars, creating and working for non-profits, volunteering at polling stations, studying public policy, fighting disease and poverty, all serving their country, all heroes, all great patriots. I see the poison running its course, like venom from a snake-bite. The poison of self; of me and mine before my neighbor. The poison of fear.

It is high time that the true patriots of America as idea, America as incarnate hope, stand up and silence the servants of America as place and position. It is high time for a revolution—not one fought with guns and swords, but one fought with the most powerful weapon any one person was ever handed by their government: personal responsibility for their country. Our informed participation rages against the bigotry and fatalism disguised as patriotism and American, if only we will engage.

My service in the Army exposed me to incredible people who consistently placed the welfare of their country before their own. Men and women who believe that America is capable of standing taller than she now does, and who are willing to place their lives at the alter of that more perfect union should it be asked of them, because they believe in the idea that is America. That America is much more than just a place; it is a goal, a process. Their sacrifice calls us to take courage and press on; their service sounds like a thunderclap in the face of our own pessimism and civic apathy.

As soldiers, we swore our lives in defense of the Constitution and charged into the fray singing, God Bless the USA, only to come home and ask ourselves, This is what I fought for? This? But let me be careful lest I be accused of speaking for others.

As an American citizen-soldier, there are some things that I simply will not accept. I do not accept an environmental and energy policy that rapes our nation’s natural places, poisons our soil and our water, and neglects the fact that the world is running out of oil.[1] I do not accept veterans who come home to nothing but a bottle of Jack and a street corner: those are my brothers and my sisters,[2] and I will not stand for spineless equivocations from lawmakers who never wore any kind of uniform. Who speak easily of service to nation, just so long as it involves limousines and mahogany desks. I unequivocally reject the kind of policy prioritization that gives our nation’s most precious resource—our children’s education—a second-class treatment in terms of resources and funds, while we spend millions of dollars a week propping up tenuous alliances. What of the implicit alliance we have with the next generation? Are they not our greatest ally?

Nowhere is the poison of fear so manifest as in our national budgets, for it is there we find where our true values find expression. Defense spending is enormous, while the monies and resources we appropriate to educating our children are paltry in comparison.[3] Let’s take some of the money that we spend on increasingly expensive weapons, and pour it into our schools. Let’s pay our teachers a salary that reflects their value, and at the same time place demands on them as if the future of our great nation depends upon them and their students instead of on missiles and new bombers. Our teachers are our nation’s true heroes; let’s start giving them medals and throwing them parades; they are the ones who communicate and preserve our national heritage, they are the ones who protect us from our own ignorance. I have a plan for a national corps of teachers that I would love to pitch to anyone who is listening.

The lack of attention we have given to education expresses itself in areas as seemingly innocuous as our prison policy. An embarrassing number of our nation’s young men find their way into our prisons every year, and recidivism runs rampant in our justice system. The fact of the matter is that prison is an institution for certain populations in this country, and extricating them must become a national priority.[4] We can do that by offering them a legitimate chance at making an honest living. Education—the honest pursuit of knowledge—is the key to reversing the threat that a growing prison population and the attendant social philosophy pose to our country.

My grandmother taught me to seek knowledge so that, among other things, I am able to detect and confront error. Knowledge is the key to defeating the kind of religious extremism that perverts glad tidings and messages of peace. (And no, I am not thinking of Muslims.) What is truly abhorrent to me is the way our faiths have been subverted by political agendas to the point where our beliefs and our politics have become completely antithetical. The same man who goes to church on Sunday morning asking for mercy is among the first to deny 60 million of his countrymen access to healthcare that will dramatically improve their lives. Are we not called to practice more than mere mercy in the abstract? The same woman who will chain herself to a sapling will deny the enormous potential of an unborn human life on some principle. What principle, exactly? That a tree is worth more than a human life? No. Either life has value or it does not. Either we believe in mercy or we do not. There is a profound lack of integrity in our beliefs, and the dissonance and cacophony in our lives bear testament to the severance.

It is too easy to assign blame for the state of our country on our elected officials, and does a disservice to our heritage as Americans. Responsibility ultimately lies with us—We the People—in whose hands stewardship for our nation’s future has been firmly entrusted.

Instead of calling us to rise above our prejudices and our fears, our leaders have exploited them in order to maintain and perpetuate their own powerbase; the great tragedy is that we have allowed them to do so. The profound lesson to be drawn from the Iraqi people in my story above is that, even in the absence of a government, even when a foreign army had occupied their country, they did not abdicate responsibility for each other. In a sense, they have taken the message of the American Founders to heart in a way that we seem to have forgotten—that the people are in fact the government, and that perhaps instead of relying upon a Leviathanic abstraction to provide for us, we ought to insist on our responsibility as a free people to care for our neighbor and protect our country.

But our country has gotten rather big, hasn’t it? In a country of over 350 million people, it begs the question: Just who is my neighbor? It’s not a new question. A man who makes quite a show of his faith asked me that once, and in answering I could not help myself: A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…. In the midst of such a huge and diverse population, it is easy to start to eye each other with suspicion. But we mustn’t.

Instead we must recognize that a fundamental error has occurred in what protecting America has come to mean, for the only way to truly protect our country is to fight the threats to our heritage as a free and vested people. It is precisely during times such as the one we are now in that we must stubbornly insist on the perpetuation of our national values of liberty for all people, service to our neighbor, and sacrifice for the greater good. We must demonstrate the courage as a people not to act from our fear, but rather to act from our devotion to liberty and our faith in mankind. If we can accomplish that—especially now—then our country is safe from perhaps the only threat that can actually destroy her: ourselves, We the People.

The bible lying on my bedside table tells me that where there is no vision, the people perish. Too long the vision communicated to us by our elected officials has been one of paternalism and fear. Too long we have looked out for ourselves and our narrow-minded interests first. Too long the vision for the American dream has been the accumulation of wealth at the expense of integrity and honor and service. It is time for a new vision.

It is time that we stopped asking how to advance our own selfish and often short-sighted agendas, and instead begin asking ourselves more profound questions about the legacy we will leave behind. Whether one hundred years from now our beloved country will inspire the same devotion from our great-grandchildren as she does now from ourselves is entirely up to us. How will the echo of our lives resonate with those who must follow us?

I wonder what my generation’s legacy will be. Will it be fear and despair? Or will our generation take its place among those great, audacious believers in mankind who cast their lot into a future they could not see, and who spent their lives for a people they could only imagine and hope for?

This is our heritage as Americans. This is our calling. And to this end may we renew to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

-Phil Williams

February 2011

And Dismay came knocking

on my door again today;

just happening by this way.

But I had nothing much to say,

so I slammed the door.

But I had nothing much to lose,

so I laced up my lucky shoes.

And I asked Dismay to dance.

- Jordan Lindsey, One Wonderful Thing

Prologue

You know, Randolph said softly so just the two of them could hear, son, I don’t know what you’re doing in here—a young man on a Friday night—and that’s none of my business, I guess. But you shouldn’t be laughing at old Tom over there. Ain’t nothing funny about old Tom. I suppose he doesn’t dress too nice, and he talks to himself, and he drinks too much, but none of that’s all that funny.

Sam grew quiet a moment, focusing on the label on his beer. What happened to him? he heard himself ask, as if he were asking to be forgiven for laughing at John the Baptist dressed in faded flannel.

Randolph shrugged his thin, old shoulders. Don’t know, really, he said. Served in Vietnam. Had a name in his old unit, evidently. Called him Birdman. Was wounded twice from what I hear.

Hoping there would be a funny story behind the name that would lead them away from Randolph’s lecture, Sam asked, Why Birdman?

But Randolph only frowned and shook his head.

BOOK I

Chapter 1

Fire! he yelled into the night and the oncoming headlights. The explosion from the machine gun next to him split the darkness, bursts of white flashes shooting out from the barrel. Through the deafening concussions, he heard other, smaller barrels firing to his right, where Olk stood by his Humvee.

The left headlight went out as the dull yellow of the remaining headlight listed to his right and started to slow. It came to a rest when it ran into the front bumper of the Humvee Olk stood behind. The young soldier peered down the smoking barrel of his rifle, into the windshield.

The noise of the machine gun fire had shot right through him; his ears rang and his head buzzed from the concussion. His vision slowly came back, though he felt stunned and unsure on his feet. Feeling drunk and somehow detached, he ran up to the passenger door.

He flipped his night vision monocle back down, casting his world into various shades of green. He saw they had fired on a small white pickup, and that it had been shot up badly. Olk quietly came up next to him, still holding the rifle ready to fire. A simple nod to Olk and he knew what to do. He stepped a little to the left, along the side of the truck so that he’d be able to see when Olk opened the car door. Out of the corner of his eye he saw steam rising from beneath the hood, and he knew that whoever was inside the cab was going to be in pretty bad shape. He prepared himself for what he knew he would see as Olk reached forward and grabbed the handle and pulled the door open, stepping out of the way so that he could see in.

And though he had tried to prepare himself for what he would see when Olk opened the door, what came falling out of the car and into his arms just before it hit the ground still surprised him. As if he had not seen it all before: big, surprised, feminine eyes and a gaping mouth, all pleading silently for help which the punctured lungs could no longer voice; a protruding stomach with several splotches of red quickly creeping outward. As he caught the quivering body and set it gently down on the ground, he felt her hands grab the back of his neck and pull his face down close to hers, her mouth closing and opening slowly, as if trying to tell him something. Terrified, paralyzed with fear as he felt the damp and warm breath from her mouth on his face, he was repulsed and resisted the urge to throw up.

He began to struggle to get away, using all of his strength to tear himself from her hold, which seemed impossibly strong. The harder he struggled, the harder it became for him to move at all, and he found that her strength was beyond that of a dying young pregnant woman, as she held his face inches from her own, her eyes, which were retreating into darkness, boring into his, pleading and accusing at the same time. He thrashed madly, yelling for help, for someone to pull him away from the woman and out of her eyes, but he suddenly realized that he was alone and that no one could help him. Where had Olk gone? The fear of suddenly finding himself alone, being drawn farther into those dying eyes, transformed into panic as he desperately tried to free himself from her grasp. He could hear gurgling noises from the blood flooding her lungs, and in his desperation he began to punch her in order to free himself.

He hit her first in her kidneys and sides, but then in her pregnant stomach, and when she still did not relax her hold, he began to strike his fists anywhere they would land, in her chest, her face, anywhere, frantically driving his fists into her flesh as he began to swear and scream at her to let him go. As he fought her, becoming exhausted with the effort and seeing that it had no effect, he watched the life in her eyes continue to fade to nothing, and the gurgling and hissing finally stopped.

Though he outweighed the young dead woman by at least fifty pounds, still he could not free himself, and suddenly the thought of being held by her for what may be the rest of his life struck him with renewed fear and panic, and he thrashed frantically about with renewed energy as he continued to scream for help.

He woke suddenly in the dark of the large warehouse, the ambient light from the approaching dawn casting the sleeping men next to him in a soft purple light. Streams of sweat ran down his face, and his heart thumped in his chest as he forced himself to believe that he was now awake and that the dead woman was a dream. Then he remembered the parts that were the nightmare and the parts that were not, and he sighed heavily, sitting up on his cot and wiping the sweat off his brow. He saw Anderson sleeping in the cot next to his, the man’s back to him, his broad shoulders slowly rising and falling. He rubbed his face and eyes, trying to erase the terrifying image of the dying woman’s face. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out his small bible, the pages stained with oil and dirt, and quietly walked outside into the bare, dusty courtyard where the Humvees were all parked.

The sky burned red from the fire of the yet-risen sun. A speaker crackled to life in the early morning heat, its song bouncing off the hard dry ground into the still air and over the flat rooftops of crumbling houses. A deep, guttural voice sang the words of the salaat, while the aging public address system popped and cracked as the words echoed across the quiet land: Allahu akbar….

At the end of the prayer, before rising, the worshippers inside the mosque each turned to the man on his left and right. "As-salaamu ‘alaykum wa rahmatullah," they offered to their neighbors.

One man, who but for the gleaming-white cleanliness of his dish-dasha looked no different than the other men in the mosque, quietly stood up and carefully began to roll up his sajada. He sighed as he saw the two round spots on the little rug where a lifetime of kneeling had worn it threadbare, and remembered the words his father had spoken when he had given him the prayer rug when he was just a boy. Smiling with the memory, he walked out into the street, his dark eyes sparkling with the knowledge of untold secrets as a small group of green American Humvees roared by. He smiled and waved at the gunner in the second truck, the soldier’s upper torso sticking up through the roof, the baby fat on his cheeks the only part of his face showing, his eyes hidden by large, black-rimmed goggles.

The boy smiled and waved back.

Day one hundred and seventeen. It’s June twenty-fifth, and I’ve been here for one hundred and seventeen days, Jonathon Garcia thought to himself in the quiet heat of the morning as he sat on the hood of a Humvee, his unopened bible lying next to him.

The sun was just starting to show itself over the ridge of low mountains to the east, but the air had none of the excitement typical of the mornings back home. The nights usually only cooled down to around one hundred degrees, and the ground and the Humvee that he sat on still radiated an oppressive heat. And even though it was already ninety-eight degrees that morning, it was a lot better than the 130 degree days. At least the sun wasn’t up yet, and he reminded himself to be thankful at least for that, as he sat quietly on the hood of the Humvee as the sun rose much too quickly over the horizon.

He was lean—maybe 160 pounds—with sharp, strong features. His face was long, without an ounce of fat on his cheeks to match the rest of his body. His dark eyes were clear and sharp, resting underneath thick, black eyebrows, and thrust forth onto his world an innocence of accepting things at face value. When he would furrow his brow, as he was doing now, the thick eyebrows would plummet down and nearly cover his eyes. He was young, only twenty-four, and his light brown skin was dry and hard due to the life he had been living for the past five months. His whole demeanor, from the way he sat to the way he spoke, was that of constant consideration, which that particular morning was especially pronounced.

The muezzin in town had just finished the morning salaat. When he had first heard it four months ago in An Najaf, he had searched for a translation. When the battalion finally got a translator, he had asked him for the words, and had taken the time to memorize them so that when he heard the prayer, he could sing with it. As a Catholic, he wondered what Father Christopher and the folks at home may think of him whispering a muslim prayer—that he had gone native—but he thought with no small measure of satisfaction that the words were… well, catholic. So he had sung along with the muezzin:

"God is the greatest!

In the name of God, the Beneficient, the Merciful.

Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,

The Beneficient, the Merciful,

Master of the day of judgement.

You (alone) do we worship, and you (alone) we ask for help.

Show us the straight path,

The path of those You bestowed favor upon, not anger upon, and not of those who go astray.

God is the greatest!"

But the prayer didn’t help with the nightmare he was still struggling to forget. Not that it ever had, or, at this point, did he really think it ever would. But still he thought it could, and so he had tried it, again. But the image was still there, the woman’s dark eyes with the dilated pupils and the gaping mouth with the yellow teeth.

He sighed heavily and opened his bible and read Isaiah 48:18 again, then he moved onto Psalm 51, but words that used to—especially at this time of the day—move him, didn’t really seem to do much at all anymore. Ever since Najaf and that damned pickup. Still, reading and praying whenever there was a morning like this one, where no one else was awake and he found himself alone, was a habit he had developed through the years, and he stubbornly clung to it. And even though the prayer and the verses never helped anymore, still he had believed they could. But lately his faith in these exercises had turned more into a kind of hollow hope, more like superstition than sacrament. He sighed disinterestedly and put the book down and thought that dreams were cruel things.

His thoughts trailed off. They never used to, but now they often did. He used to be able to follow a trail of thought until it was exhausted, but he had spent too much time during the past few months in meaningless thought, and his mind had grown lazy with idleness. Hours and days of staring at nothing, swatting away swarms of flies, had made his mind dull.

His memory took him to another morning, in another life when he felt as if he were another man, and another sun was coming up over another ridge of mountains as he sat by himself before everyone else was awake, holding his bible. That sun had warmed his face against the frosty air, and had filled his mind with a sense of perpetual hope and immortal youth which he was now fighting to retain. He felt the cold sting of the clean, crisp air against the back of his throat, and remembered the way the morning sunlight had shimmered off the lake spread out in front of him.

That had been a long time ago now, he thought as he relived that moment. His mind grew still again and a wave of grief flowed through him. Tears flooded his eyes. He went to wipe them away, but stopped, remembering that he was alone and would hear anyone coming up to him in plenty of time to compose himself, and let the pools rest in his eyes.

Not that anyone would bother him; it would have to be pretty important. They all knew that he liked to spend a few minutes in the morning alone, and they left him to it. Besides, the grief, he realized with surprise, was refreshing. His bored mind lunged at the realization of emotion and sank its teeth into it.

The sun, now fully exposed over the ridge, burned against his face as he raced through his own catalogue of regrets. Suddenly his mind jerked back as two flies landed on his lips, and he was back at Camp Bulldog in Makhmur, Iraq. Sweat started to bead against the light brown skin of his face from the heat of the sun. The air hinted of the smell of gasoline and human waste as a group of men burned the cans that were used as latrines. He could see the black smoke as it rose from behind the warehouse where his platoon slept.

There is nothing else quite like that smell, he thought. I don’t think there’s work nastier than that. He gagged as he remembered standing over the mixture, stirring in the gasoline, the black, putrid smoke rising around him.

The sound of approaching footsteps caused him to look back over his shoulder. His heart quickened from embarrassment at the apparent foolishness of sitting on the hood of a Humvee at six in the morning, staring at nothing, as Andy Walker walked toward him, his short, tussled red hair bright in the morning light.

Hey Andy.

Mornin’ Jon.

How’d it go last night?

You know how it goes. Sit out there all night, driving up and down those roads, and… nothing. I think the bad guys are all gone, Andy sighed and shook his head. Time to pack it up and go home. They both smiled sadly.

That’d be nice, Jonathon forced himself to say. The two grew quiet a moment.

Andy shook his head as if trying to wake himself. Yeah. Well. He smiled and shrugged it off. I gotta go see the CO. Take it easy brother.

You too.

Andy hurried off, obviously aware that he had interrupted Jonathon’s time alone, though Jonathon sighed when he heard more footsteps shuffling along in the dirt, and knew that his time alone was over. The men would start getting up, finally accepting the fact that it was too hot to go on pretending to sleep. He slid off the hood, reached for his bible, and walked inside the tin-sided warehouse where his platoon stayed.

Hey sir, his platoon sergeant, Kevin Anderson, mumbled as he sat on the side of his cot, elbows on his knees, surveying the men of the platoon as they lazily got up and started to get dressed.

Hey sar’n. Jonathon sat opposite of him on his own cot. For a couple minutes the two sat there, occasionally glancing toward the men if one of them cracked a joke or made some snide comment about the heat. There was not much for the two men to talk about. They had spent every day together for over one hundred days, eating, sleeping, doing nearly everything together. They knew the names of each others’ families, where they were from, what sports they had played in high school, favorite music, movies, and food. They had talked about God and religion and politics and the news and the weather and had beaten to death the subject of when they would go home. They had become friends of a sort, though more like brothers than friends. Jonathon knew other pairs who were closer, but the two of them were very different, and they had both accepted the balance of friendship and professionalism which they had found.

Head out today at seventeen hundred, sir? Anderson’s gruff voice asked him from underneath the handlebar mustache he had started growing in Kuwait one hundred and sixteen days ago. The hair on his face served as a stark contrast to the clean, straight-arrow man Jonathon had known back at Fort Campbell.

When Jonathon had first noticed it growing, he had asked Anderson about it, teasing him. Anderson had stroked it affectionately, saying that it reminded him of his motorcycle back home that he had built himself. Anderson had almost knocked Jonathon down when Anderson had asked him if it was all right with him. Jonathon, flattered, asked whether he was kidding, and that of course he didn’t mind. He had suggested a full goatee. Anderson had only laughed and said that he didn’t think First Sergeant would let him get away with that. Too bad, though, he had said, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. Because I do look good with a goatee—even better than I normally do. Even if you do say so yourself. Jonathon had laughed, and Anderson had returned it, and Jonathon was glad to have him at his side then, in the sands of Kuwait, on their way to war.

Yeah. I’ll talk to the CO today at breakfast to make sure, but I can’t see why anything would’ve changed, Jonathon answered him.

By now they were both all too familiar with the rotation after four straight weeks. There were five platoons in Delta Company, with each platoon at about eighteen men. The company was tasked with running a Traffic Control Point about forty minutes west of Irbil, twenty-four hours a day, as well as running a couple patrols each day. The rotation that the company commander had set up was that of a five-day rotation: day one they would pull midnight to zero-six hundred at the TCP; day two, zero-six to twelve hundred; day three, twelve to eighteen hundred; day four, eighteen hundred to midnight; and day five they would run two, four-to-six hour patrols. At the beginning, it really didn’t sound like a lot, and Jonathon remembered thinking that it seemed pretty light when Captain Pham, the Delta Company Commanding Officer, had briefed it a month ago. But it was tough.

What made it so tough was not the schedule itself, but all of the hey-you’s, as they were called, that seemed to come down every day. These ranged from escorting somebody or something somewhere, to a patrol through the more remote country to maintain a presence there. It ended up averaging out to well over twelve hours a day, not including tower and gate guard, which also had to be pulled. The first week had been the hardest: the men complained the most then, and carefully crafted suggestions to the commander that it was too much. But the bottom line was that it needed to be done. So the men did it, day in and day out. They had passed the point of being tired a long time ago. Now they were just surviving. And surviving meant eating, sleeping, and going on patrol or pulling guard.

And doing whatever else it was they were told to do. Anderson also made the men do some physical exercise every day, except for Sundays. When Jonathon had questioned the logic in making the men do even more, he hadn’t even budged.

It’s good for the men to get out and get the heart rate up, sir, he had insisted. Otherwise they’ll just sit and feel sorry for themselves. It’s good for ‘em. And that was the end of the conversation. Sergeant First Class Kevin Anderson had been in the Army for over seventeen years, and First Lieutenant Jonathon Garcia had been in just over two.

The men had dressed and shaved and were making their way across the dirt courtyard to breakfast. Jonathon picked up his rifle and followed after them, and ran into Captain Pham in the unlit hallway.

Come see me after chow, Jon, his commander said to him.

Yessir.

He stumbled over an empty MRE box as he walked out of the sun into the dark interior room where the headquarters element slept. Already there, eating his breakfast, was the Company First Sergeant, William Allen, a tall, lean man with dark, hard looking skin and sharp creases around narrow eyes.

Easy there Grace, that ground’ll git ya, he said.

Mornin’, First Sergeant, Jonathon said as he pulled up a full MRE box to sit on, and got out a flashlight so he could see to take notes.

The other platoon leaders came into the room; two others stumbled over the same box as they came in. The first sergeant’s eyes screamed with amusement. Jonathon smiled to himself. Allen saw his smile and gave him a playful wink. Generally, as a rule, he didn’t like lieutenants, but he had found that he could not help liking Lieutenant Garcia. Anderson spoke well of him.

After they had all found a seat, the commander opened his notebook. I have some good news, guys. In about a week, we aren’t gonna have to pull that TCP anymore. Andy gave an audible sigh of relief. The Kurdish Peshmerga are going to take it over, and we will concentrate our efforts in the country, conducting our analysis on the status of water, electricity, schools, sanitation, and presence of insurgents in the AO. We’ve been given an area for the company and I’m in the process of assigning each platoon a sector that holds roughly the same amount of towns. There are reports that an insurgency is starting to surface, and that the enemy may be better organized than we originally thought he was. If he’s out there in our AO, then we need to take the opportunity that this analysis affords us and see if we can’t figure out who and where he is and how he’s operating. So, just a heads up for you all, in the next few days you can expect a change of pace.

They talked about other things, the status of getting mail in and out of the country, uniform standards, and the meeting was over. Jonathon walked back across the courtyard and sat down on his cot.

The Peshmerga were Kurdistan’s military. They were known to be ruthless, and the U.S. soldiers liked them for the most part. Meaning, of course, that they were the lesser of two evils. In