planned four raids for every one that happened. “How much you wanna bet it’s off?” he yelled down to Corporal Mike Voss, the Humvee’s driver. Voss just shook his head.
Then J.C. saw Captain Jackson walking toward the Humvee, Jackson’s quick clipped stride telling J.C. that they would be going out tonight after all.
THE HUMVEE ROLLED to the two-inch-thick steel gates that served as Camp Graphite’s front door. J.C. tugged his armor down tight over his shoulders and pulled his pistol from his leg holster. He had cleaned it a day before, but he double-checked the slide, as he always did before leaving the base. The metal slipped back smoothly. Good. He chambered a round and slipped the pistol back onto his leg. Not that he expected to need the 9mm. It was a popgun compared to the.50-cal on the Humvee’s roof, much less the machine cannons on the Bradleys or the 120mm main guns on the tanks. If somebody got through all that he was in deep shit, pistol or no. But extra firepower never hurt.
They crossed through the gates, and at his feet J.C. heard the barking chorus of “Who Let the Dogs Out” for the hundredth time:
Naturally the Mad Dogs used the song as their slogan; they played it every time they left base. J.C. tried to remember when the song had come out. Was he in eighth grade? Ninth? Probably ninth. A smile creased the corners of his mouth. That dumb song was good luck. None of the Mad Dogs had died here. The other companies in the 2–7 hadn’t been so fortunate. A car bomb had blown up one of Bushmaster’s Humvees, and a sniper had shot Lieutenant Poley of Commando and gotten away clean. Freaking sniper. Maybe the Mad Dogs would have a chance at him tonight.
The Humvee swung through the chicane of concrete barriers that protected the front gate, then accelerated down a wide avenue west of Baghdad’s tattered zoo. J.C. concentrated his attention on the zoo’s deserted grounds, a natural hiding place for a guy with a rocket-propelled grenade. He had learned the hard way that ambushes could come anytime, anywhere.
J.C. was a gunner. His buddies said he had the worst job in the army: sitting in a harness in a hole in the roof of the Humvee, handling a machine gun that swung 360 degrees. On hot days — which meant every day — he baked in the sun. When they rode the highways he ate dust and diesel fuel and came back to base spitting black clods of phlegm. And gunners had the highest pucker factor around. As in the pucker your asshole makes when you’re squeezing back your fear. The tanks and Bradleys had thick steel armor. Even the Humvees had steel plates and heavy bulletproof glass. J.C. just had his helmet and flak jacket, which wouldn’t do much good against an RPG.
But he liked the job. He didn’t want to be stuck inside a tank. Up here he could spot ambushes and bombs. He had so much to watch for, and yet he couldn’t get trigger-happy. A C Company gunner had shot a kid carrying a toy gun, a mistake J.C. had promised himself he’d never make. He knew how to make a crowd back off without firing a shot, and how to tell the heavy thump of a mortar from the deadly hiss of a RPG. Even the officers had figured out he was the best gunner in the company, maybe the whole battalion. So he always rode with Captain Jackson.
The Humvee turned left on Santa Fe, a main east-west avenue in central Baghdad. The Iraqis didn’t call the road Santa Fe, of course. They had their own haji name for it, Mohammed Avenue or something. J.C. wasn’t entirely sure. None of the soldiers spoke Arabic, so for the sake of convenience the battalion had renamed the roads after American cities.
Now, squinting into the setting sun as the convoy headed west, J.C. wished he had learned more about Iraq. He had picked up a few Arabic words from Salim, Captain Jackson’s interpreter, a teenager the Mad Dogs called Harry because he wore little round glasses like Harry Potter. Salim had taught him that
Even so, J.C. felt like he was on the moon most of the time. He didn’t understand this place. Why did the men wear those long robes that looked like dresses? Why did they hold hands? And what was up with the women? He’d been inside Iraqi houses with Captain Jackson, and it was like the women didn’t even exist. Once they had served tea, but usually they hid in the back of the house. Not that J.C. had tried to find them. Command Sergeant Major Holder, the senior enlisted man in the battalion, had made that clear. Don’t look at the women, don’t talk to the women, and never — ever — touch the women.
The Iraqis were hospitable enough, anyhow. Even the ones who barely had furniture made sure to offer up tea and Cokes to Captain Jackson when he visited. But you couldn’t trust them much. J.C. had seen the captain lose his temper after one long meeting with a local sheikh. “Just be honest with me. Tell me the truth,” Jackson had said. The sheikh had flat-out laughed when he heard Salim translate. “The truth?” he said. “I save the truth for Allah.”
THE HUMVEE HALTED as the cars ahead jammed around a traffic circle. Everyone wanted to be home by dark, when kidnappers and guerrillas ruled the streets, sharks cruising in black BMW sedans with smoked-glass windows. J.C. cursed as he looked up the road at an old Mercedes truck belching diesel smoke. He hated getting stopped in traffic. Anybody could take a pop at them. And he hated dusk, when the shadows offered cover but there was still too much light for his night-vision goggles.
Around him the call to evening prayer echoed through the streets, an eerie amplified chant that J.C. knew he would always be able to hear, no matter how far behind he left this place. The sound of Baghdad.
He angled the.50-cal down a notch and watched the men on the sidewalks, looking for the glint of metal hidden in a robe. The Humvee jerked forward, then stopped again. “Come on, move,” he yelled down to Voss.
“You want to drive?” Voss yelled back.
“Fuck no.”
“Then shut up.”
As they inched ahead J.C. wondered what had happened to this country. Anybody could see it had been rich once. Their base had been one of Saddam’s palaces, a huge building with an entrance hall three stories high, marble floors, and gold walls. The Baghdad airport looked newer than the one in El Paso. The highway to Falluja, that shithole, was six lanes wide, good as any interstate. Baghdad had twenty-story hotels and big mosques with beautiful blue domes. J.C. had even seen dusty cracked advertisements for Air France and Japan Airlines. People had once wanted to come here; the Iraqis had once had enough money to leave.
No more. Now the place was a disaster, dying a little more every day. On the streets the men walked slow, with slumped shoulders and angry faces. Not just unhappy. Hopeless, like life had been getting worse for so long that they couldn’t even dream it would ever get better. And the resentment in their eyes was impossible to mistake.
In some of the neighborhoods the 2–7 patrolled, the stink of sewage and burning garbage filled the streets. Little boys without shoes begged for candy every time they stopped. After a car bomb a couple months before, the Mad Dogs had wound up at Kindi Hospital in western Baghdad. The place was covered with blood and J.C. had seen flies in an operating room, hovering over a girl whose face was cut to pieces. Even the guys who joked about everything didn’t have much to say that day. Baghdad was poorer than Juarez, poorer than any place in Mexico he’d ever seen. J.C. couldn’t understand. These people had all that oil, and they lived like this.
J.C. knew he was thinking too much. His buddies kept it simple: Bank your checks, stay down, and hope your girl is keeping her legs shut back home. And they were right. His job was keeping himself and his fellow Mad Dogs alive. Let the hajis take care of themselves. But sometimes, playing dominoes after dinner in the palace, J.C. felt the doubt sneak up: How did this place get so messed up? Is it our fault?
