Brave Deeds Read online

  We’re all in the same boat. Like the rest of us, this is Arrow’s first trip to the desert. We’re all blind men feeling our way across Baghdad; Arrow just happens to be the one in front with the cane. Like it or not, we trail behind him.

  O looks at Arrow, says, “It’s just a piece of moleskin, dude.”

  Arrow looks away, scans his sector of fire, says nothing more. O does the same—after pulling a patch of moleskin out of his ammo pouch and tossing it to Cheever. We are silent, watching the street. After a minute, Cheever puts his socks back on his feet. As he laces his boots, he grumbles and curses, but that’s to be expected. Cheever being Cheever.

  We move on. Cheever limps but keeps up.

  3

  Sounds Like “Rake” or “Leaf”

  We turn down a street with trees. A chest-high brick wall stair steps to a height above our heads as we continue down the sidewalk. Behind it, we hear something that sounds like a kid bouncing a large rubber ball against the brick. Boing, boing, boing.

  Our skin itches. This heat is a bitch. The trees feel good and we slow our pace to cool our bodies in the shade.

  Arrow looks back, sees how we’re maintaining distance.

  We’re textbook. Like ducklings waddling after their mother.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Arrow says.

  “You said that already,” Drew says.

  “Well, I’m saying it again.”

  “We’re doing all right back here.”

  “Just making sure.”

  Leaf shadows flicker across our helmets.

  “Wish somebody would shut that kid the fuck up,” Fish mutters. “He’s driving me out of my skull.”

  O goes, “How do you know it’s a kid?”

  “In this heat? Who else would be out here bouncing a ball against a wall?”

  “Someone who wants to drive you out of your skull.”

  “Hey!” Fish yells. “Stop bouncing that fucking ball, you miserable piece of shit!”

  Boing, boing, boing.

  “Some father you’ll make,” Drew says.

  “Dude, I’ve got rug rats in every port. I’m doing all right.”

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  The trees peter out. We leave the ball and the kid behind.

  We walk. Cheever limps, bites down on his lips.

  Our gear clicks and clanks. Our breath is ragged with dust.

  Arrow calls, “Hydrate.” He’s starting to sound like Sergeant Morgan.

  We suck the straws on our Camelbaks without breaking stride.

  We turn down another street, and then another. This one is narrower, hemmed in by a ragged assembly of buildings, awnings, corrugated tin roofs.

  “Keep your eyes peeled, ladies.”

  We sigh. “We are, Arrow.”

  “Like an orange,” goes Drew.

  “Like a banana,” goes Park.

  “Like a halter top off my girlfriend’s tits,” goes Fish.

  We have nothing to say to that. We’ve all seen Fish’s girl and if she had saggy, heading-south-for-the-winter boobs stretched out by too many kids, that would be one thing. But she doesn’t. She’s all firm and pert and high. Right now the very thought of her makes us throb with agony. Why did Fish have to bring her up?

  Eighteen months is a long time. How will we ever get through to the other side of this tour?

  Staff Sergeant Raphael Morgan was one of the best men we ever had. Rafe was what they call a born leader. He watched out for us, pushed us when we needed it, backed off when he knew it wasn’t the right time to push. We don’t want to put him on a pedestal or anything, but he really was everything we could have asked for in an NCO. He knew the field manuals inside and out, chapter and verse. He was prime time in the field. The sloppier, wetter, and colder the conditions the better. He encouraged us to find our inner warrior; he was relentless in his quest for our perfection; he made us hate him in the times we were exhausted, blister sore, and sleep robbed. But then that night, he’d sit down with us at chow, give us the lemon pound cake out of his plastic MRE pouch, and ask nothing in return (and not because he hated lemon pound cake—we knew it was his favorite). He was a used-car salesman when it came to persuading us to do the difficult, the near impossible.

  He wasn’t a big man, not one to loom over his subordinates with a barrel chest and a Sgt. Rock jaw, using his NCO stripes to bully us. He wasn’t like the others—the bitter assholes, the career sergeants who delighted in our torment. Rafe never flaunted what he didn’t earn. In fact, now that we think of it, he always seemed to be curled into himself, as if apologetic for his stripes and rocker. Like he was and forever would be one of us, a guy among guys.

  He was short, a stump in the infantry forest, and used that height to his advantage, swimming below the sergeant major’s radar when he was prowling for an NCO to blame for his own fuckups. Sergeant Morgan kept his head down—below shoulder level of his fellow platoon sergeants—and went about his work without unnecessary chatter and bluster. But the unwary were fools if they believed that quiet demeanor: Rafe was iron behind that black velvet. And man, he was smooth. We used to call him MC behind his back. Milk Chocolate. Goes down nice and easy.

  We remember this one time back in the States, soon after we got a new commanding general. Word came down from on high that a weekend detail was needed for what turned out to be some special landscaping work around Fort Drum. Post beautification they called it.

  Names were chosen, put on a roster, but they didn’t tell us what it was all about until it was too late. Captain Bangor gathered us in a huddle after formation on Friday.

  “Dandelions,” he said. And we were all like: What?

  “Men,” he continued, “it seems the new CG’s wife hates the color yellow and so we’ve been ordered to go out and pluck every single dandelion on post.” And we were all like: What the fuck? But we didn’t say that out loud, of course—not in front of Old Man Bang-Her.

  It was up to Sergeant Morgan to get us through the weekend without all of us going to Officers Row, armed with knives, breaking into the commanding general’s quarters, and stabbing him and his wife to death. Or maybe just dumping a bucket of yellow paint on their heads.

  “Hey, guys,” Rafe said that Saturday morning, our garbage bags fluttering in the wind. “This ain’t so bad.”

  We looked at the parade field—the largest plot of grass on all of Fort Drum. It was a carpet of yellow.

  “Sure looks bad,” Arrow said.

  “Naw, this ain’t nothin’,” said Rafe, giving us a milk chocolate smile. “Now 3-5, they got it bad. They been out in the field all week and it only stopped raining yesterday.” (We knew this, but it was good to be reminded of Third Battalion’s misery.) “You think they ain’t sick of each other’s smell by now? And they still got another three days to go. Sucks to be them. But here we are—warm, dry, doing a little gardening for the CG. Can’t believe they pay us for stuff like this.”

  It was still a crap detail, and we bitched and moaned, but we moved forward in a line across the parade field anyway, feeling like we’d somehow one-upped 3-5.

  “Besides,” Rafe said as we bobbed and plucked, “ain’t none of you heard of dandelion wine?”

  None of us had.

  “You never read that book by Ray Bradbury? About the kid?”

  We stared at him, our faces not moving. Sergeant Morgan was well-read. We were not.

  “Anyway,” Rafe went on, “I figure we got enough to make at least a bottle apiece right here at the parade field alone. Just wait till we get over by the housing area.”

  We moved across the field, our boots sweeping softly through the tall grass and weeds.

  “Golden flowers,” Rafe said. “The dazzle and glitter of molten sun.”

  “Whatever, Sar’nt,” we said, turning away to hide our smiles.

  “Dandelion wine—like summer on the tongue,” he assured us.

  “Okay, Sar’nt.” Our smiles gave way to laughter.

&n
bsp; And so we made it through the day, picking dandelions and looking forward to drinking weed wine—which, as it turned out, we never made.

  That was Rafe, always pulling us through the shit the Army shoveled our way.

  That’s why we took his death hard.

  We were there that day, that most horrible day on our calendar of awful. We don’t like to think of our Sergeant Morgan like that—the obscene pieces of him flying through the bomb-bloom air.

  Yes, we took his death hard and, later, one of us might have gone outside to the solitude of a concrete bunker and cried until the snot ran, and one of us probably dashed for the latrine, vomit splashing the side of the toilet bowl, and one of us most definitely would press the tip of a revolver—a cold metal kiss good-bye—to his forehead eighteen months after our return. But we’re not saying who. That’s private stuff we won’t share.

  And so here we are, out in the bull’s-eye center of Baghdad, on foot, moving through hostile neighborhoods with no commo and minimal ammo but with plenty of love for our dead dismembered platoon sergeant. Dismembered but not disremembered. We’re doing this for Rafe and there’s no turning back.

  * * *

  Rafe.

  Not that we would have ever called him that to his face. Oh, hell no.

  It was always, “Sergeant Morgan this” and “Sergeant Morgan that” and “How high, Sergeant?” on the way up.

  But now that he’s gone, we feel a closeness that erases rank so we’ll damn well call him Rafe if we feel like it. There’s no one to stop us from doing whatever we want out here on these oven-hot streets.

  Rafe.

  Sounds like “rake” or “leaf.”

  Something to do with falling, anyway.

  4

  Boots

  Without slowing, Cheever looks back. No blood.

  Not what he is expecting.

  Cheever thinks he’ll see a trail of bloody boot prints behind him.

  Yes, his feet are still killing him. Yes, he’s certain his boots are squishy with blood. And, yes, he does wish someone would call the waaambulance. But no, he will not keep complaining. He’ll suck it up and drive on.

  Cheever knows he’s a whiny bitch and he hates himself for it. The world has never sat right with him. He’s an only child and maybe that explains part of it, how his mother has always given him his way, from the baby carriage all the way through high school.

  He didn’t like the crusts on his PB&J sandwiches? Chop, they were gone. Hated the NPR station that droned when she drove him back and forth to school? Why sure, he could change the dial to 96.1 FM, the Rock. Pouted about the way coach always made them dress out for gym period? No problem—she would write a note to the school counselor and get him transferred out of that nasty-wasty class.

  He at once loved and loathed his single parent who put the “mother” in “smother.” He knew she did him no favors, raising him the way she did, but he wouldn’t change a thing. Complaining gets him noticed. And that’s what he wants: to be seen and heard and, above all, appreciated. Since arriving in Iraq, Cheever has had plenty of things to bitch and moan about (and trust us, at this point, we’re fed up with Cheever and his mouth), but he wonders if maybe it’s time to back off a little bit, dial it down a notch.

  Right now, on this dismounted patrol across Baghdad, right here and now, Private John Hubert Cheever vows he’ll keep his piehole shut for the rest of the day. Isn’t silence the better part of valor? He’s only dragging the squad down with his complaints and, let’s be honest, he’s the idiot who got us into this mess in the first place, isn’t he?

  Well, maybe not the first place, but it sure as shit didn’t help when he left the PRC-119 in the abandoned Humvee. He’s low man on the totem pole today and he knows it. That’s why he vows to keep his lip zipped. That’s what he vows somewhere around mile two.

  Still, these blisters, man. Cheever figures he’ll be showing up to Sergeant Morgan’s funeral wobbling through the chapel door on two bloody stumps. Honestly, he can’t feel a thing below his shins anymore.

  Zip it, Cheeve. Zip it.

  He deserves this. That’s what he tells himself. I’m a fuckup. A fuckup, fuckup, fuckup. He steps to this cadence. Left, right, fuck, up.

  I’m slowing them down. They’d be better off leaving me by the side of the road. Let the wolves come and eat me by sundown. Does Iraq have wolves? Well, it does now. Something bad and deadly out there anyway.

  Cheever wants to die. Bring on the unhappily ever after. The end.

  And he’d be glad to do it himself—one 5.56 mm round up through the chin—if only he’d get the chance, if only the rest of us weren’t always hanging around.

  Cheever wants to die a noble death in solitude. He came close one night a few weeks ago when he was on guard duty and Cartwright went on a chow run to the DFAC. When it was just Cheever, his rifle, and the moonlight, he’d come close to doing a barrel suck, fellating himself into the hereafter. A cloud moved across the face of the moon. It was a sign. Now or never. Hurry before Cartwright returns with the food and those pillow-soft slices of sponge cake tempt him to stay here in this life. Cheever had gone so far as to wrap his lips around the night-cold metal, but his hand stopped halfway to the trigger when he heard a soft cough—someone coming up the path behind the guardhouse. Fuck! He’d almost had it, for fuck’s sake. But, like pissing and masturbating, this was one thing he didn’t want to do in front of anyone else. He ripped the barrel out of his mouth—nearly chipping a tooth in the process—and acted like everything was cool when Sergeant Morgan walked up, doing his rounds as sergeant of the guard.

  Well if that don’t beat all. Cheever smiles to himself now as he limps down the street. Morgan is the one who kept me from killing myself, and now here we are, walking on blisters all the way across Baghdad to pay our respects to the body parts we scooped together into a dustpan and dumped into his coffin.

  (Cheever, the idiot, doesn’t realize there’s no coffin at this service—only a shrine of boots, a down-turned M4, and a photo of Rafe. But we aren’t gonna tell him that. Let him open his big fat mouth when we show up this afternoon and say something stupid like: Where’s the body?)

  Cheever has hated himself from the start. His father, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking college professor, died of a heart attack when Cheever was three years old. But he left his son the legacy of being named for his favorite writer (no relation, not even distantly). Ronald Cheever went so far as to name his son John Cheever Jr., though he was the first in the Cheever lineage to be named John. As a teenager, Cheeve had tried to read his namesake’s work, but he couldn’t get through even one story, scoffing at the ridiculousness of a man using pools to swim his way across a suburb.

  But here we are, as stupid as that guy, walking across an angry city that hates us in order to attend a thirty-minute memorial service. Who came up with this plan anyway?

  We did. We all did.

  Idiots. We’re all idiots, Cheever thinks as he grips his rifle and tries to keep up. His bloody feet slip from side to side in his boots.

  The desire to die hasn’t left him. He’ll do this one last thing in honor of Sergeant Morgan, then when he gets back to Taji, he’ll find a place where he can do the deed without the risk of anyone stopping him.

  Who’ll miss him when he’s gone? Who’ll care?

  At the head of the line, Arrow stops, holds up a fist, and Cheever joins the rest of us as we sink to one knee. Cheever has been so wrapped up in the plans for his death, he hasn’t been keeping his eyes peeled, doesn’t know we’ve snapped to high alert. Now something is up and Cheever is watching the rest of us, trying to follow along, already half a beat behind.

  Arrow motions with his arm and, startled, Cheever dives behind a parked car. He’s relieved when Fish joins him.

  “Thank Christ,” Cheever breathes. “I don’t know how much longer my feet could have held out. These fucking blisters, man.”

  See? He’s already forgotten his vow of silence.


  “Shut up, Cheever,” Fish whispers. “Just shut the hell up. This is the real shit, you know. We could die out here today.”

  “Yeah.” Cheever suppresses a smile. “I’m aware.”

  5

  The Sprinter

  There it is again. A noise, unnatural and sharp in the still air of the deserted neighborhood.

  Arrow halts, holds up a fist, sinks to a knee. Like neighboring dominoes, we do the same.

  Hsst! Listen. Watch.

  Something is out there. A threat, an enemy, a crosshair moving over us, one by one. It’s nothing we can see—not at first—it’s just a feeling that comes over us. It could be the chatter-clatter of metal we heard a half mile behind us. It could be half a face peeping around a corner then whipping back out of sight when we dropped to our knees. It could be a bird flying in the wrong direction, a starburst of light from a second-story window, a prickle of unease washing over our skin, the fact that today is the thirteenth and it’s thirteen minutes past eleven—any of those things. It doesn’t matter what. We are all spooked at the same time and that is something we don’t take lightly.

  We’re crouched, each with his own hasty hidey-hole: Arrow against the wall of a boarded-up café, O behind a lamppost, Fish and Cheever snuggled behind a Volvo, Drew pressed against a Dumpster, Park beside a palm tree whose upper half is gone, blasted away by American tanks in 2003.

  Our heads are on the swivel. Behind our Wiley X’s, our eyes dart north, south, east, west. Our breath slows until we are, without realizing it, inhaling and exhaling as one twelve-legged animal. In, out, in, out … in … out …

  We are frozen for two minutes—tensed, watching, waiting for the threat to reveal itself.

  The feeling passes and we’re about to move on—Arrow even starts to rise from his knee—when it happens.

  A man runs from one side of the street to the other—fast—like he’s barreling down a track at the Olympics. Not something you normally see here in Baghdad. The locals are slow and deliberate, not sprinters.