The Sandbox (3 page)

When I straighten up to wipe my face on the sleeve of my uniform, I see a brief flash of movement on the far side of the main building. The factory yard is filled with all manner of construction waste and general debris: piles of broken masonry, tangles of rusty wire, chunks of rebar-studded cement, and waist-high patches of dry weeds full of wind-blown cans and wisps of weathered paper. My eyes are bleary and I might have been mistaken. It feels like a fuse burned out somewhere deep in my head and, in the sudden dark, my brain stopped working right. Still and all, I’ll be damned if something didn’t move over there.

I make sure my M4 is locked, load a round into the chamber, and start backing out of the factory yard, scanning the windows and mounds of trash for movement as I go. I’m used to the heavier M16, so I find myself constantly checking to see if I’ve forgotten to load my clip. A squadron of flies has already discovered my puke. The buzzing of their wings seems unnaturally loud and grating. And then I see it again. Something purple flits between two piles of broken brick. I blink and look hard, but whatever it was, it’s gone now. Maybe a jackal. I’ve heard they get pretty big. I take a step back. Pebbles rattle behind a nearby heap of gravel. Then the little purple creature zips one mound closer to the factory’s main door, one mound closer to me. It looks like a small woman or a boy. A long rope of tangled black hair bounces on this miniature person’s back as it runs. Immediately, I think of it as a her. Not even teenage boys in this country let their hair grow past their shoulders. Whoever it is doesn’t seem to have a rifle, but she could be packing a small handgun or a grenade. I consider firing a warning shot, but that would bring the entire squad over here. They’d pound every inch of this place with lead before I had a chance to explain, and then my ass would really be toast. Back on the road, someone shouts. It’s unintelligible. My ears still ring from the IED blast, but it isn’t really noticeable until I try to make sense of people’s speech.

It’s time to move. The lieutenant’s probably pitching a fit back there. I take a quick glance over my shoulder to measure the distance I’ll have to run until I have decent cover. A good dozen yards or more. Just as I’m bracing myself for the dash, I spot her again. Without a sound, she appears, perched like a purple sparrow on a stack of broken brick. I freeze. We stare at each other for a very long moment. I’m no longer positive it’s a female. Angular, dirt-smeared features and waist-length hair that even from twenty yards away looks matted and ratty and infested. Hunger has made the child’s eyes huge and its body UNICEF-thin. It’s very hard to tell ages here, but this one can’t be older than thirteen or fourteen. The kid’s dressed in what looks like a collection of knotted purple rags. Maybe it
is
a girl. The sex of young children is often impossible to figure out in this country, a fact that fucks with the head of many a soldier when he first arrives.

“Hey,” I say, letting my rifle strap slide so the barrel points toward the ground. I hold up my hands.

The kid hisses. Her eyes narrow. And then she bolts away like a feral cat, leaping over the puddles of broken glass and the rusting clumps of rebar. I want to give chase, but out on the highway, Lieutenant Blankenship shouts something in a tone of voice I can’t ignore. I heft my rifle and jog back to the convoy. A fifty-yard dash. My heart rate increases when I see they’ve already finished changing the tire and loaded up the jack. Nevada smokes a cigarette and points his rifle at the factory. He grins at me as I jog across the highway and then points to his ass.

Before word one, I knock off a crisp salute. I’ve found that making my salutes as straight-backed and formal as possible sometimes has a soothing effect on the lieutenant. In this case, it doesn’t help.

“What in the fuck all was that?” Lieutenant Blankenship shouts through the window of the lead vehicle. His face is gray and strained, and I immediately wish I’d listened to Rankin. “If you’ve got to take a shit, you know the appropriate defecation formation. Two armed men as escort and no more than ten yards from the convoy. You could have—”

For a moment, I think of lying, but I’m caught off balance by what just happened. Seeing the girl has got me feeling something I wasn’t prepared for, something I can’t quite name. “I’m sorry, sir,” I stutter. “I had to be sick, and then I saw a child and—”

“A child?” he asks, incredulous.

Behind him, Lopez glares at me as he gets into the Humvee. I want to flick him off, but I’m in enough trouble as it is. Lopez is soon to become a sergeant and officially outranks me, something he never lets me forget. He and the lieutenant are chess buddies. They like to quiz each other on regulation minutiae and regimental nicknames.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “A little girl, I think.”

He rewards me with a thoughtful frown before turning to look at the other men in the Humvee. “Did any of you see a child back there?”

“No, sir,” they sing.

“What the hell would a child be doing out here, Durrant? Use your fucking head. If there was one here, and I’m very far from believing such a thing, she’d be out to set us up. Get your ass back in your vehicle. We’ve got wounded men. If someone so much as fires a BB gun at us, I’m blaming you. This is a perfect place for an ambush, you stupid—”

“Yes, sir.”

I turn and run before he can finish. My face is hot. He’s right. I had no business running off like that. Gerling looked pretty bad, and I know Kellen got hit in the leg with shrapnel.

“Man, he’s pretty fucking P.O.’d. You should of heard what he was yelling on the set,” Rankin says, tapping the radio with the thumb of his cigarette hand and knocking a worm of ash onto the dashboard. “He’ll have you stirring shit for weeks.”

I groan. Stirring shit is what we call burning the waste from our homemade field latrines. It is possibly the worst detail there is. The ashes are greasy and leave marks on your uniform, and the smell of burnt shit sticks to your clothes and hair. Since we don’t have enough water to wash our uniforms more than once every few weeks, it means you reek like that for quite a while. Oddly, it smells like burning meat. Haul a hotplate out to a Porta-John and fry some beef jerky until it burns and you’ll get some idea of the smell. Usually we pay one of the local hajjis to do it.

Rankin puts the Humvee into gear and we lurch forward. “At least you blew off some of the stink while you were out there running around.”

“But be honest. You saw her too, didn’t you?”

In the rear window of the Humvee in front of us, Hazel holds up his hand as though to wave at me. Then he pretends to crank down his fingers with his other hand until only the middle one is left, all the while grinning his lopsided grin and shaking his head. With his other hand, he holds up a twisted piece of metal, probably shrapnel from the artillery shell they used to make the IED. Hazel loves to collect the bits of metal left over after the enemy tries to blow us up. If he doesn’t find some after an attack, he tends to freak out. Hazel has this desert voodoo notion that his collection will protect him from mortar attacks while he’s sleeping.

“Huh?” Rankin says, giving me a sidelong glance.

“That little girl.” As I say it, I crane my neck and look out the rear window to see if I can spot her again. I know I didn’t imagine her. I was almost close enough to smell her. I saw a girl. Or a child. You don’t hallucinate something like that. I wish she would come out again for a second, just long enough for somebody else to see her.

“I didn’t see nothing.” He squints at me again, concern crinkling up the skin at the corners of his eyes. “Just a broke-down old factory and a seriously pissed-off officer.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Rankin. Please. I’m serious.”

He gives me a long, slow shake of the head. “You really got thumped back there, didn’t you? We best get you checked out when we get back to the Cob.”

5

The Cob.
The old Corn Cob. Or, as it’s known on paper, Forward Operating Base Cornucopia. A 300-year-old fortress constructed of mud bricks and undressed stone blocks. At sunset it resembles a huge golden-brown corn cob laid on its side. It was originally built by the Khalifa Omar Rahman to defend himself against attacks by his younger brother Mohammed Rahman. For a time at the end of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, it served as a prison. Then, in the nineteen eighties, some enterprising government official converted the compound into a cement factory. Now we have it.

The actual fort stands in the center of this enormous, empty space about the size of eight football fields, which in turn is surrounded by a thick brick wall. We only use eight or so of the stone rooms at the front of the fort, but behind this there are dozens and dozens of smaller rooms and crumbling corridors. We call this unused space the old fort. Underneath it is a dungeon, which I’ve heard stretches out beneath the entire base. We reinforced the original fort with cinderblocks and it became the motor pool, armory, and supply facility. Directly across from the fort is a cement factory, which was built around a flimsy steel frame and covered with corrugated fiberglass sheets, half of which have blown off. The only thing we use it for now is to house one of our latrines. The Army put up the rest of the base pretty quickly, which is to say shittily.

To the west of the fort, several rows of enlisted men’s tents stretch out in the dirty yellow sand; to the east, there are the two common tents for recreation and the mess tent and kitchen. To the east of the cement factory are the command and communications trailers and the officers’ Conexes, big steel prefab boxes about the size of railroad shipping containers with two-man living quarters built inside. All of these buildings combined occupy less than an eighth of the space inside the Cob. It feels like a small settlement on a large plain.

Whenever I pass in through the Cob’s front gates, I always feel a little of my anxiety lift away. The perimeter walls are nearly fifteen feet thick. Although the bricks are crumbling and rotten in places, it would still take a pretty mean artillery attack to breach the walls. The base is self-contained and has a rough sort of comfort. Although I never forget I’m in a war zone, once I get on base it’s nice to know the bad guys are locked outside. On hard nights when I feel rattled, I try to imagine we’re as secure as jewels in a strong safe. Every once in a while this actually works.

When I first arrived here, we had almost three times as many soldiers and twice as many tents and trailers on base. Once the Army decided this area was pacified and secure, they trucked or airlifted all the decent buildings off to Inmar, including the Porta-Johns. Now all we have left are a smattering of two-man tents pitched above wooden pallets, a few office trailers and Conex units, a random assortment of canvas-covered structures, and forty-two active-duty soldiers. During a sandstorm the month before I arrived, the mess tent literally blew away during breakfast. The roof broke free of its stakes, flapped around in the wind for a while, and then fell in on itself. One soldier broke his arm and another one almost suffocated before they dug him out. After that, we stabilized everything with sandbags and two-by-fours. The office trailers look like tiny Gothic cathedrals with flying buttresses made of PVC piping and guy wires.

One of the worst aspects of base life is the latrines. They promised to bring us new Porta-Johns when they trucked off our old ones. You’ll see them in a week, HQ said. They lied. We built a few groups of two-man latrines the next morning out of scrap plywood and two-by-fours set above old fuel drums. At first there was only a back wall to lean up against when struggling with the infamous MRE constipation. Every passing Joe got a view of your knobby knees and red straining face. For pissing, we have white PVC tubes that drain directly into the sand (regulations state you can’t mix Number One and Number Two; the Army even likes to control your bodily functions). After a week of this sorry situation, somebody, probably Hazel, strung up pieces of oil-stained canvas around the latrines, shower curtain–style. My theory is he wanted a little privacy for his stroke mags.

For some reason, when they carted off half the base, they left behind an artillery battery, but they didn’t leave anyone trained to use it. Rankin thinks they just forgot about them. And us, I told him.

For the most part, we feel safe here. Or at least as safe as anybody can feel in a place where half the population wants to kill you and the other half hates you. Once the Army took over the Cob, they set up floodlights and guard towers and a minefield. Ribbons of concertina wire curl through the sand. We’ve got M60s and wire-guided missiles, .50-caliber Ma Deuces, Eagle Mount 240 Bravos, and plenty of M4s and M16s. Nevertheless, there’s one thing that’s never far from any of our minds, especially on those nights when the wind whips up from the desert and the stars disappear and mortar rounds start dropping into the compound. The Khalifa’s brother took the fortress in a single night, and in the morning he stuck Omar’s head on a pike.

6

The storm appears
at the far edge of the plain as we reach the outskirts of Kurkbil, the village just below the base. A bulging wall of dark and dirty yellow that stretches from the floor of the plain to the upper edge of the sky. It moves as quickly as a tank at top speed and seems to obliterate everything in its path. This beast sweeps across the desert like the Hand of God. The way it looks, I can almost imagine it as a living creature, a huge and malign force bent on swallowing the world from horizon to horizon. Nothing escapes the storm. And once it engulfs something—a house, a tree, a boulder, a road, a man—it seems to have vanished forever. A sandstorm looks like the end of the world.

7

Even before we
reach the base, Lieutenant Blankenship is shouting orders over the radio. He’s out of the Humvee before it comes to a full stop, swinging a green metal lockbox and yelling for stretchers. His teenager’s face looks pinched and serious and we work quickly to do what he asks. The insides of the Humvees are smeared with blood. Everyone looks pale and dirty. Faces blur. Boots beat the sand. Voices are raised. We hustle, for our wounded and for ourselves. Nobody wants to be outside when the storm hits. Already we can hear the winds. They shriek and rumble as though the storm is scraping the desert down to bare rock.

Studdie and I carry Kellen to the clinic. Doc Greer gave him a shot of morphine on the drive back to the base and Kellen doesn’t open his eyes until we settle him into a cot. Even then his eyelids only flutter briefly, showing just a narrow arc of white before they close. Studdie wasn’t on this run to Inmar, and I can tell from the breathless way he questions us about it that he’s sorry he missed the fight. Doc Greer won’t answer him. In fact, he turns his face away from each question, so I end up laying it out for him. Studdie’s a tall guy with broad shoulders and thin, sandy hair. He grew up in a military family, went to an academy high school, and enlisted the day he turned eighteen. His grandfather woke him up that morning by telling him he could enlist today or leave the house. Until he’d done his service he couldn’t take part in the family business, a turpentine plantation just outside LaGrange, Georgia. But Studdie says he would have done it anyway, and I believe him.

I run from there to help secure the motor pool and tell Ahmed to head home to the village. Ahmed is a local guy who works on base most days, filling sandbags, unfilling sandbags, burning trash, helping Cox in the machine shop, and cleaning vehicles. Basically, he does the shitwork. As scrawny as he is, Ahmed can heft a good bit of weight and always seems to be busy even when he’s not doing anything, a skill I’d like to learn. I think he’s in his twenties, despite the wrinkles on his forehead and the thinness of his hair, but he could just as easily be thirty-five or forty. When I find him, he’s listening to an old Walkman Cox gave him and messing about with a pile of screws. As soon as Ahmed sees me, he pulls back his yellow-and-white-checked headscarf and smiles, making his eyebrows meet above his nose, but he doesn’t waste time with his usual chat and gets the hell out of here after I tell him the news. Everyone respects a sandstorm.

Just after I finish winding down one of the bay doors, I hear the crunch of sandy boots on concrete. It’s Lopez. He stands in the doorway beside supply room number two and watches me. The wind ruffles the collar of his uniform. Behind him I can see the storm swallowing the highway leading into Kurkbil. It looks like a moving wall of night. I briefly imagine standing alone before the full force of the storm, allowing it to sweep me away. Lopez steps through the doorway.

“What were you saying to him?” He gestures behind him with his thumb.

“What?” I ask, honestly having no idea what he’s referring to. I’m still thinking about the storm.

“Ahmed. What were you talking to him about? The IED?”

“No,” I say, “I told him to get home before the storm arrives.”

“Right.” He spits the word out. “He couldn’t see it coming on his own.”

I clench my jaws to keep from saying something smart.

“Not inside the motor pool. No.”

This seems to stop him for a moment. In the gathering darkness, his eyes seem very shiny, like wet black rocks. He steps forward, and for a second or two, I think he’s getting ready to punch me. His face looks so grim and determined. I glance around him to see if anybody else can see us. There’s no one on the parade ground, and Specialist Cox, the mechanic, has already left the motor pool. We’re alone. Lopez takes another step forward and screws up his face as though he’s about to shout.

“What, Lopez?” The storm is close enough for me to have to raise my voice. “What do you want?” The look he’s giving me is starting to get on my nerves.

“I know what you’re up to, Durrant.”

“Yeah, what’s that?” This whole conversation is creeping me out. He seems to be on the verge of confessing some terrible secret I am certain I do not want to be privy to.

“I know why you ran into the factory today.” He pauses and gives me a meaningful look. “Did you sabotage the tire, so we would have to stop there? I found a clean cut on the tire. Only a knife would make that.”

“No, what the fuck is up with you, man? How the hell could I make a tire blow out just when I wanted?”

He scrunches up his face into this exaggerated expression of disbelief. Now I really want to punch him. I realize I’m clenching my fists and force myself to jam them in my pockets, which are still slightly moist. I reek of piss. With the storm coming, I didn’t have time to change. This makes me even angrier. Remember what happened the last time, I tell myself. Don’t be an idiot.

“I know what you’re up to,” he says again, and then he points to his eye, like a warden in a second-rate prison movie. “I’ll be watching you.”

I want to say, that’s right, man, that’s exactly where my fist will land. Instead, I just stand there and stare at him like my head is empty. He takes two steps backward before turning to walk away. Asshole.