The Sandbox (11 page)

27

The helicopter arrives
at noon. The sky is the color of a nicotine-stained finger. We hear its engines long before it arrives. A dozen of us gather near the pad, hoping it brings good news, but the sand blown up from the rotor wash is so bad that we have to duck inside the garage to escape. We had all hoped for a few helicopters, but they’ve only sent us one. Cox and I unload crates of ammo and machine parts. More armor kits for the Humvees. This news raises a small cheer among the loitering Joes, although we’ve heard rumors that they aren’t worth a shit. And for some reason, ten cases of strawberry gelatin. Strangest of all are the boxes of expensive Oakley sunglasses. Sergeant Guzman tells us there’s one for each man. Back home, these babies sell for about $250. No cigarettes, no toilet paper, just some crappy dessert and overpriced sunglasses. But we do get a new Military Intelligence guy. He’s a man in his early thirties with a nail-brush moustache and his own pair of expensive orange-tinted wraparounds. When he appears, the dawdlers melt into the background. No cheer for him. Thirty seconds on the ground, and already he’s about as popular as a wet fart. He does not acknowledge our salutes as he steps out of the chopper. When Lieutenant Blankenship salutes him as he comes across the parade ground, it provokes a half-hearted hand movement from the new officer. It’s only then that I notice his captain’s bars.

“Do you think we have a new CO?” I ask Cox.

He just shrugs.

On my fourth trip back to the helicopter, I hear some shouting. Nevada and Boyette carry a black body bag toward the trailers. At first I think it must be Gerling. They set it down near the steps and both the lieutenant and the new MI captain come out and inspect it. The lieutenant nudges it with the toe of his boot and Boyette unzips the bag just enough to expose the face inside. It’s the boy’s uncle. Shit, I think, this ain’t right. Both prisoners dying in the same night?

As Nevada passes on his way back to the clinic, I call him over. “What happened?”

“The old hajji did himself.”

“How?” I ask, incredulous.

“Hung himself with his pants.” Nevada sticks out his tongue, cocks his head to one side and holds up an imaginary rope. “Yup. I cut him down myself. Godawful-smelling little fucker, but crafty, I’ll give him that.”

“He chewed through his flexcuffs?”

“Fuck if I know. He sure as hell got them off somehow. And it ain’t an old wives’ tale what they say about hung people.”

“What do you mean? What old wives’ tale?”

“He was giving me the tent-pole salute when I found him.” Nevada makes a face. “Ugly old dwarf left this earth a squirting his business out both ends. He must of saved it up for some time, cause—”

“All right, Nevada,” I say, waving him off. “Jesus.”

Nevada heads back to the clinic, snickering. I don’t believe it. There’s no way that old man could have gotten out of his flexcuffs. They’re hard to cut with a Gerber knife. Ahmed. That’s what I think of first. Maybe getting rid of people who could identify him. But I don’t see how the hell Ahmed could have gotten a key to the cell. I bend to lift another crate and notice Lopez standing outside the office trailer with the new MI guy. He’s talking and making big, frantic gestures with his hands. After a moment, they both stop and turn my way. Lopez raises his arm and points toward me. Shit.

28

My fatigues are
soaked through with sweat and my armpits feel chafed and sore from moving crates in the blowing sand and 115-degree heat. The cool air beneath the fort feels nice at first, but then I start to shiver. After I spoke with Nevada, I realized I had never given the lieutenant back the key with the pink band. I want to see the cell again, so I slip away after the helicopter is off-loaded and leave Dyson and Studdie to strap Kellen in for the ride back to the hospital at HQ. I feel a pang of envy when I hear the engines power up and take him away. I’m careful to make sure no one sees me go into the old fort.

My flashlight flickers, and I pound it against the heel of my palm until it settles. Its light is dim and failing and so is the daylight too, so I jog down the stairs and make my way along the corridor to the holding cell. The door looks even worse than it did the last time I was here. I have to put my weight on the key just to turn the lock. It nearly snaps off inside. The hinges are pulling away from the crumbling brick and the door scrapes the floor when I drag it open. A deep arc has been gouged out of the packed dirt. The smell inside is as bad as I remember. I see the damp outline of the old man’s body in one corner and a puddle of murky liquid in the center of the room. A shred of fabric hangs from a beam in the center of the ceiling. It is a good nine feet from the floor. I try to imagine how the old man, once free from his cuffs, could have managed it. I go back to the door and run the beam of my flashlight along the hinges. The metal around the screws has been scraped shiny, as though someone took a knife to it, and the screwheads are flattened and misshapen. Stripped. There’s a hammer mark in the metal beside the middle hinge. Someone took the door down. But here’s the rub: this door is very fucking heavy. It would be impossible to hold it up and screw the hinges back to the frame at the same time. This is a two-man job. At least.

Behind me, someone coughs and boots scrape in the hallway. My heart wriggles in my chest as though it’s trying to escape. I shuffle through my worn stack of excuses but don’t come up with anything plausible. I find myself hoping it’s Lopez, so I can thump him one and get it over with. The man who appears surprises me completely.

“Private Durrant,” the new MI guy says, “right?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, saluting.

“Lieutenant Blankenship tells me you interrogated the prisoners.” His sunglasses, I’m glad to see, are pushed up on his head, but it’s hard to see his eyes in the murky light. Even so, I can feel them scrutinizing me.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll have to brief me on that some time.” He pulls a package of Marlboro Reds out of his shirt pocket. “Smoke?”

“No, sir. Thank you, but I quit.”

“Too bad,” he says, cupping his hand to light one. His eyes are a watery, washed-out blue and completely blank. “Do you like it here on this base, Durrant?”

“No, sir,” I say.

He laughs and steps back into the gloom of the hallway. I follow. The beam of my flashlight twitches. So do my hands.

“Unhappy with the leadership here? Is that the problem?”

“No, sir,” I say, baffled by the direction this conversation is taking. “Not at all.” I can’t believe he thinks I’m going to rat out my commanding officer. Even if I hated his guts, which I don’t, I would never do that. This man is either extremely disingenuous or extremely naïve.

“It’s all right to tell me, you know.”

“Really, sir, I have no complaints.”

He sets the pace. We walk a few steps, pause, walk a few more. Somewhere above us, a soldier shouts orders.

“What about the other men? Are they like you, unhappy here?”

“It’s a war, sir,” I say, bristling a bit. “No one wants to be here.”

“Of course it is.”

He leaves it at that and I say nothing more. Up a few steps the corridor twists around on itself. My flashlight goes dead. Obscenities bounce about inside my skull. I have a sudden urge to thump the captain on the back of his head, and, as if he senses this, he swings around to look at me. Water drips in the darkness ahead. He shines his flashlight in my face. I sense his eyes moving over my features. They feel like roaches skittering across my skin. He turns without a word and moves on. As we mount the stairs toward daylight, he flips down his sunglasses. I realize I don’t know his name. At the landing right before ground level, he stops again to scratch under the band of his hat. I can hear the sand scrape against his scalp.

“We’ve been getting strange reports about this base, Private,” he says. His voice sounds bruised and hoarse. “If you can think of anything you might want to tell me about that, I’d appreciate it. It might save you a bit of hassle further down the road.”

This is vague enough to be intimidating, although I genuinely have no idea what he might be referring to. This whole war seems strange to me, as it must to every soldier in every war, but this is something new. I step past him into the sunlight. It feels like a blessing.

“I really can’t think of anything, sir,” I say in a false, cheerful voice.

“Has he ever spoken to you about his home life?” His tone is flat, like he’s reading from a note card. “About his religious upbringing, his family history?”

“Who, sir?” I ask.

“Lieutenant Blankenship. I think you know what I’m talking about, soldier.”

“No, sir,” I say.

He can look it up in the lieutenant’s personnel file if he wants to know this shit. I don’t much care for the lieutenant, but I don’t want to see him run down by some creepy Army spook either. “I can’t say that he has. He’s very careful about fraternizing with the enlisted men and all that. Lieutenant Blankenship is strictly by the book. A seven-dash-eight man all the way.”

“H’mm,” he says. “Yes. Well, if something occurs to you, come find me. I’ll always make time for you, Private.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, although thankful is the last thing I feel.

“You’ll thank me later on,” he says. Behind their orange lenses, his eyes flick about like a lizard’s. “When this is all over.”

“Durrant,” someone shouts in an angry voice, and I happily run to meet it.

29

It’s my talk
with the MI captain that does it. I start wondering about the reasons for all of this. What the fuck are we doing here? That kind of thing. Usually, I try to quash this line of thinking before it goes too far. It ruins job performance. Today this thought sneaks in like a cat burglar and starts stealing my attention. Not only that, it brings along some buddies. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a patriotic guy. I love my country. I stand up and put my hand over my heart during baseball games when they play the anthem. I vote. Well, sometimes. I got all riled up when the towers fell just like everybody else. But that’s not the reason I enlisted. My life wasn’t going anywhere. Each day seemed duller than the last one. I’d pissed away the money my grandpa left me, and the rest was locked up in investments I’d been told would take months to turn into cash. As it turned out, I got it three days after I’d signed my life away. My recruiter thought this was a laugh riot. He busted a gut when I told him the news. But I needed money pronto and the Army offered a signing bonus. My landlord had threatened to evict me, they’d turned my cable off, and I started each day by picking cigarette butts out of my overflowing ash trays just for the little hit of nicotine in them. The only skills I had were base-jumping, beer-swilling, and bullshitting. I looked in the paper and saw I had a choice between working at Arby’s or trying to get a union card for the docks. Shitty or shittier. I was tired of being Toby Durrant, this broke nobody without a family. A sad sack. A loser. At the time, I’d thought that if I were a part of the best army in the history of the world, I’d be somebody. I’d know my place in the world. I’d belong to something important.

Basic sucked. Someone tells you they enjoyed Basic, they’re either lying or brain-damaged or a drill sergeant. But when I came out of it, I felt pretty gung-ho. I was proud to be an infantryman, and I wanted to do a good job. A new concept for me. The only activity I’d ever truly tried my hardest at was base-jumping. So I actually studied weapons manuals and the seven-dash-eight before I went to bed. And the weapons training gave me a serious hard-on. Even after I was kicked out of jump school, I still got a thrill each morning putting on my desert cammies. And when they shipped me over to the sandbox, my attitude was simple: This is my job. I’m going to do the best I can. I’m a soldier, not a politician, so I’m not going to worry about what the suits and ties are doing. Maybe there are WMDs out in the desert. It’s a big place. Who am I to judge? But over time, this place wears on you. You start to wonder. You try to swallow your doubts and get on with your work. Or at least I do. I did. I don’t know. It’s not the hajjis that make me wonder, it’s our leaders. The hajjis don’t want someone else’s army occupying their country. That I understand. Neither would I. Since I’ve been keeping track, our reasons for coming here have changed five or six times. No one even knows what a victory over here means. Doc Greer likes to say we’ll leave when Kurkbil is a Burger King town.

Most of the guys don’t question why we’re here, but the ones who do seem to do it every day. It’ll paralyze you and I know it, but today I just can’t stop. I pick at these ideas the way you would a fresh mosquito bite. It’s one of the worst things a soldier can do while still in-theater, because it’ll kill your will to fight. And it’s true. I’ve seen it. For a while, it almost ruined Hazel.

It happened like this. Some piece of shiny brass up the chain of command decided we had someone on the bad-guy list hiding out in Kurkbil. This was fairly early on in my time here. I’d only been at FOB Cornucopia for a few weeks. Before I came to the Cob, I was temporarily stationed in the capital, and I saw more action there than some soldiers see in their entire tour. The Cob was still at full strength. At least five platoons. One night, early, maybe 0100, they sent a couple of squads out to the village in four thin-skinned Humvees. We didn’t even have armor kits yet. Those wouldn’t come for some time. Our named area of interest was a house on the edge of town. A ramshackle old place plastered over with yellow stucco, but big. Practically a palace, in this part of the country. It belonged to the Habib brothers, the ones who’d owned the toy factory; but by the time we came calling, three families of squatters had since moved in. We set up a perimeter around the house in silence. I came with a weapons squad and carried a squad automatic weapon, a SAW, a big old breechloader that can throw out enough lead to chop a tree in two. We stacked left and right along the outer wall, blew the gate, and hit the front door with a battering ram. Nevada carried the ram and bitched about how heavy it was the whole time. Boyette and Salis watched the other point of egress, the back door, just in case somebody tried to rabbit. This was the first time I’d gotten to use night-vision goggles, and I was pumped to the gills with adrenaline. At one point I realized I was shouting and didn’t know how long I’d been doing it. It was that kind of raid. Hazel and I and a few others cleared rooms on the first floor and looked for our target. Shouting, stomping, waving rifles. All we found were women and children. The women cried. The children cried. The babies howled. Some of the guys were none too gentle with these people’s belongings. Glass crunched under our boots and cushion stuffing drifted around in the air. The only men in the house were either graybeards in their fucking dotage or kids too young to shave. I remember seeing this one guy named Jackson, long since transferred, bitch-slap a middle-aged woman who wouldn’t stop shouting. Hazel saw it too. I had to thump him on the back to get him moving again. He didn’t seem all that worked up about it, but it’s hard to read a man’s expression when he’s in full battle rattle.

The intel they’d given us was shit, per usual, but that was none of our concern. Later we found out from bits and pieces of other people’s stories that the guy we were looking for wasn’t even in Kurkbil that night: he was in a three-star hotel in Jordan. None of this mattered at the time. We were there for a smash and grab. Period. Somebody else could worry about the rest of it. But it was clear to everyone there that the whole op had gone tits-up. This made for hard feelings all around. Again, not so unusual, but frustrating nonetheless.

“All right,” the lieutenant leading the charge said, a young guy named Cavanaugh who has since been shipped off to some other FOB. “Tell the rest of those swinging dicks in back to load up. Maybe we can get a little rack time tonight after all.”

Hazel followed me around the house. I could see something wasn’t right. At some point he’d lost his NVGs. Night-vision goggles. Each time a woman inside the house screamed, he’d twitch his shoulders. And there was a good deal of screaming. I stopped and gave him a close look. His eyes were off somehow, and this worried me. They rolled around in their sockets the way a scared horse’s will.

“Durrant,” he said, “how long before doing this kind of shit turns us into the bad guys?”

I had no idea how to answer this question, and I told Hazel that.

“Is it too late?” he asked me, pulling on the sleeve of my fatigues. This annoyed me.

“Hazel,” I said, “knock that shit off and listen to me. Let’s just round up the rest of them, so we can go back to base and rack out. I don’t have the energy for this shit right now.”

But he couldn’t let it drop and I really didn’t want to hear it. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. We’d already pulled two night missions that week and three full missions earlier that day. It was only Tuesday. I felt like I was about to collapse and my patience needle had dropped into the red.

“Are we already the bad guys? Doing this kind of shit makes me feel like a Nazi, like, you know, in those old movies where stormtroopers are kicking down doors looking for Jews—”

“Listen, Hazel, these
are
the bad guys we’re looking for. Terrorists. Not Jews. Don’t be stupid.”

I could see Hazel was on the verge of a freakout. His eyes had stopped rolling around, but now he had that wide-eyed, crazed look soldiers will get when they’re up to their necks in something hairy. I’d been in that place enough times by then to recognize the look.

“Hazel,” I said, “listen. This isn’t the time to think about it.”

Then he started shouting, “When
is
the time to think about it, huh? After it’s all over, after we’ve done all this bad stuff and we can’t take it back?”

I understood how he felt, but it wasn’t going to help anybody if he lost his shit now, while we were still technically out on an operation.

“It’s not as though we shot anybody, guy.”

“Nevada just about lit that kid up on the second floor. You saw that. And Howley knocked the fat woman on the head with the butt of his rifle when she wouldn’t get down fast enough. And then Jackson—”

I cut him off. “You’re right. That wasn’t cool. All I’m saying is, lock it up until we get back. This isn’t the fucking time or place to discuss it.”

“When?” he shouted, pounding his clenched fists together. Spittle flew out of his mouth with the words. “When
is
the time?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I yelled back at him. “Now calm the fuck down. We have orders to do this and we’re going to finish it. End of story.”

“Orders?” His voice broke. We looked at each other. Him panting. Me about to drop with exhaustion. Without once breaking eye contact, he lifted his rifle over his head and laid it on top of a broken refrigerator beside the compound wall. He started unbuttoning his shirt.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him. “You quit?”

Right then, we heard a couple of pops. Small-arms fire on the other side of the house. Hazel just stared at me. Goddammit, I thought, wake up. I slapped him. Not hard. Just enough to get his attention.

“Pick up your fucking rifle,” I told him, trying to keep my voice level. “Now.”

Hazel did, his eyes still wide and weird. We rounded the house, shouting “Friendlies, friendlies,” so they wouldn’t shoot us by mistake, and found Boyette hunched over by the back gate, laughing his ass off. This other guy, I can’t remember his name now, had shot a cat. He thought it was a mad bomber crawling through the bushes. Salis was laughing so hard, he had bent himself in half over his knees. At first I thought he was puking.

“Hey, guy,” I said to Salis, “can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot,” he said, still wheezing from his giggle fit.

“What the fuck?”

On the ride back to base, Hazel put his face right up next to my helmet and whispered to me. His breath smelled like wet catshit. “Don’t tell anyone about that. Please, Durrant. I just sort of bugged out for a second. It won’t happen again.”

I told him not to worry. Everyone lost it sometimes. Mum was the word. But what he’d said back there had stirred something up in me. He’d muddied up my thinking. I felt furious, but I couldn’t quite figure out where to direct my anger, an aimless anger that made my head feel like it was going to explode.

And now I’ve got that feeling again. I recognize it, but I can’t name it. My hands are sweating so much that I leave a handprint on everything I touch, and my tongue feels like beef jerky. There’s nowhere to put it. The cigar box won’t take abstractions.