The One Who Looked on the Deeps, Part 2 of 4
I am doing something a little bit different at the site over the next couple of weeks. I am serially publishing a novel I completed called The One Who Looked on the Deeps. This novel retells the story of Gilgamesh in the context of the Iraq War. With Memorial Day coming up, it seemed like an ideal time to share this story with the public. Part One can be found here. Enjoy!
III.
Somewhere on the ancient savannah, somewhere amid the cooling pyroclastic streams, a clade of half-bestial warriors trod through the ash - keen stones in their hands and pithecine rage in their eyes - hunting the annihilation of a rival hoard, from which victory they would win the right to pass on their own lust for predation to their children, which instincts those children in turn would impart to the barbarians scourging the steppes, the immolating tribes of the jungle, which those tribes in turn would bestow on the knights and their monarchs of blood, which those knights in turn would instill into the flesh and the bones of a sanguine young soldier, gripping his rifle on a hostile patrol and dreaming of the freedom and wealth he would impose upon the glaring inhabitants of the city. He was certain he was meant to be there; he was certain the righteousness of his mission was pronounced by the lips of God. When the congregation in Jackson saw him off before his deployment, they all spoke reverently of what he was about to do, and their eyes sparkled with admiration. The proud old veterans clapped him on the shoulder, commending him for carrying on the tradition of service, and the pastor ardently assured him, in a final tete-a-tete, of the nobility of fighting to spread the blessings of liberty. These words still clung to his ears in country, and the rectitude of his intentions steadied every step of his into the bewildering sands. That faith in his cause was with him whenever he was out on patrol in Karabilah, keeping guard over the slumber of her citizens; it was with him when he ordered his men there to help rig an electrical station that some insurgents had vandalized, so that the people could dwell in comfort. The same joyful flame of purpose burned in him whenever the children gathered around his Humvee to receive soccer balls from his men, and especially that one time he joined them for an impromptu game in a filthy lot on the outskirts of the city, when they teased him for his massive beard, calling him al-shaer, the shaggy one, and asked him all kinds of questions about America – about its wealth, about its freedom – and he told them, with sincerity on his tongue, that he hoped he would greet them all one day in his own country. The people of Karabilah came to cherish him as an invincible shield, because he was kind to them, and earnest in his aid, and because the insurgents fled in terror from his firepower, and when they sat in their courtyards, supervising their children at play in the streets, discussing the fruit trees they would plant in the spring, they remembered that all this was possible because Lieutenant Wild had established justice in the land.
None of this was known to the 2/5 in Baghdad. They had their own sphere of tribulation, with its own set of missions. From one of these missions they had just returned to their decrepit little base, exhausted, sweat-sodden, but mostly unbloodied, sprawling in the midst of their discarded weaponry and gulping down gallons of water, when a convoy of Bradleys pulled up to the base, and began disgorging a separate company. Youngman watched these soldiers lugging their gear towards a set of empty trailers on the opposite side of the base, and wondered aloud among his own men for what reason they had arrived.
“Command called them up here yesterday from the 6th,” answered Private Shepherd. “They are going to start conducting patrols with us. Word is they have placated the people down in Karabilah with a gentler approach to things, and the colonels believe that a lighter touch might work up here as well.”
The Lieutenant heard this, and his face grew taut and severe; his heart blackened with rage, because he knew instantly that the colonels had ordered this to reprimand him for the harshness of his tactics. He bristled at the implicit censure in the order, and resented the judgment of men who had not physically grappled for months on end with the purple-jawed, steel-hearted daemon of the city. He did not think himself innocent, to be sure, but he could not believe that any other man who walked where he had walked would have returned with pristine hands. The notion that another commander would arrive in the city and rule over that treacherous people with a tender and irenic mind was preposterous to him; it aroused in him contempt, and supplied one more reason to doubt the meaning of the entire mission.
Private Shepherd, who could not discern the torment in the Lieutenant’s thoughts, went on gabbing all that he knew:
“You should hear what they say about that Lieutenant in the 3/6. They say he is a true believer. Southern boy; Baptist bred; carries a Bible underneath his flak jacket on every patrol. You should hear the crazy sermons he delivers to his men over chow, they say, how the hearts of the Iraqis hunger for freedom, and how God has chosen America to be the nation that delivers freedom to the entire world. He believes all of that, they say.”
Hearing this description filled Youngman with far greater rage, and malignant intentions began to enshroud his face. “Someone should bring him for a night in Zayouna,” he growled; “see if he still intends to walk with God in that place,” and when he said this, all his men laughed at the suggestion, not intuiting the evil purposes out of which it sprung.
So six days later, at that point in the evening when dusk had just begun enveloping the unpowered city, a bristling convoy rumbled eastwards over the highway and turned into a complex of tawdry buildings, each one uniform in its decrepitude, where the soldiers often snuck to steal a night of recreation. At the minatory growl of their engines, the few disreputable figures who still occupied the street skulked back into open doors and alleyways, and the Bradleys pulled up in front of an apartment undistinguished from the rest except for the barely discernable outline of a young woman hanging over the window-sill, staring out into the night with expressionless eyes. Lieutenant Wild, who had piled into the vehicle with the others, unaware of its true destination and naively curious to discover the forms of pleasure attainable in such an agonized locale, peered sharply into the murk to discern what he could, and when the rest tumbled out of the rear and into the house, he followed them into its cryptic shadows, trembling inwardly at the portentous strangeness of the place, straining his eyes to resolve something recognizably human lurking past the foyer, until they settled on one of the other soldiers – a private from the 2/5 who seemed to have an old familiarity with the neighborhood – joking indecently with the sinister owner of the place, while a clatch of provocatively dressed young women decorated the wall behind him, surmising the Lieutenant with fey, discomfiting stares. The private smiled wickedly in his direction, and came over to whisper to him in the facetious tones of someone who knows he ought to be ashamed, but is not:
“Zyed says there is no charge for you tonight, since you are new here. Consider it a welcoming present, he says,” and when Wild did not respond – when he only continued to gape stupefied at the scene - the private added, “Go ahead – everything is in order. This is a place where you could learn a thing or two.”
What he learned in that place, and at that moment, is that the compulsion to evil does not appear as young and primitive men suppose it, like a horn-whelked dragon pure men sally out and defeat, a blatant monster to be overcome for the sake of righteousness, but something more like a recollected desire, welling up from the heart’s defeated past, a desire too cherishable to be contested. When the black-eyed girl peeled herself from the wall and approached him in his war-gear, taking his hand in her soft, alluring hand, he understood for the first time all that he had only heard of the power of temptation, and he understood now how susceptible he was to its invitations. He was born with the fire of God in his bones. He grew in devotion to his purity. But when he felt the nearness of her raven curls, the pride of that purity seemed a paltry thing, and he intuited – suddenly, without prelude or warning - how readily he would exchange its dubious glory for the certain and encompassing satiations of the flesh. There was a time in his life he thought himself specially wrought; thought his soul uncommonly intended by the very same mind that devised the sun and the other stars, and girded with uncommon virtue, but that was before the gorgeous girl breathed the urgency of her desire into his ear. They passed together into her room, his mind pained by the discomforting sense that he was surrendering something crucial to his integrity, that his self-figuration as a savior was no longer tenable, and that whatever good he hoped to do these people henceforth must not be enacted under the pretense of one exempt from their demerits, but pursued in the certain consciousness of being initiated into all the ungodly practices that transpire in the city of man.
Dawn arrived at last, demarcating nothing at all in regards to the perpetual bloodshed in the streets. No guns were silenced; no missiles were put away; no rejuvenated hopes of peace were entertained. But in the close chambers, bound together amid the tangles of a silken cover, the two strangers started from their short sleep, opening their eyes at first to the grey, unsettling gaze of morning, where it leered around the shabby curtains. She looked at him, and because something needed to be said, she asked him if he served under the one they call Fortress. The mention of this name, following so quickly upon the dawning of his bewildering situation, startled him, and prodded in him a passion akin to anger, a passion unlike any that ever accosted his mind before.
“How do you know Fortress?” he asked her, staring into her indecipherable expression, which, like the face of some chiseled icon, dug out of the ruins of an arcane civilization, hinted at meanings it was powerless to articulate. She did not answer directly, but smiled half-demurely, half-ashamedly. Wild comprehended the meaning of that smile instantly, and was astonished – against the right of reason – to discover that another man had lain where he now lay, at the side of this gorgeous prostitute. A bitter and disorienting jealousy started to claw against his sanity, its ravages becoming even more acute as she finally spoke, in what were unmistakably affectionate tones, of the rival commander.
“It is so long since he has come to dream beside me in this bed. He used to say he would take me to America someday, and he would buy me beautiful clothes and beautiful jewelry – all the most expensive things – and then he would take me to fashionable places in the city, where throngs of beautiful people clutch and throb on the dance-floor all through the night. He used to say all this me, but it has been so long since he has come to my bed.”
She paused in her relation, overcome with introspective tenderness, and Wild, who lay beside her and heard all this, grew ever more enraged. He could discern – as she could not – the falsehood in Youngman’s promises to the girl, their meretricious emptiness, and a flurry of indignation rose in him for her sake. He clasped onto these sentiments, and brandished them before his own awareness, straining to convince himself that they were really the source of his fury, and not his need to believe in the unimpeachable purity of her soul. But she knew nothing of this emotional warfare that raged within him, and so, struck back into speech by an enkindled memory, she went on.
“Now that I think of it, the last time he was here with me he suffered a terrible nightmare. It was the only time he fell asleep in this bed, and when he awoke, with a fitful scream, I was startled out of my wits, and thought for a moment that we were under attack by insurgents. He bawled in heaves – that enormous, fearless man just bawled – and when I wrapped my arms around him to ease his inscrutable grief, I became soaked in his warm tears. He told me he dreamed of his mother, and of their parting in America. Guilt evidently wracked his mind for leaving her alone to mourn his absence, and when he assured her that he went to do his duty, and that the cause of liberty demanded such a sacrifice, the words pricked on the very tongue that spoke them, and he felt ashamed, like a grifter, to pay the tangible love of a dear one with such vague, devalued phrases as this. She must have rued the fate that bestowed such a restless son on her, a son with a heart so high-minded and adventurous, but somehow in her mind, she must have sensed too that it would have been a far worse fate to have given birth to a coward, and that for all the sorrow she had of his departure, it was a kind of blessing and a consolation to know herself the mother of a hero. So she summoned her composure, and offered to him the clichés requisite to his parting; how proud she was of his service, how just the cause he would fight in, until the semblances of these pantomime words confounded her, and she threw herself around his neck and blurted out, through weeping, the authentic burden of her heart. ‘Do not let yourself be altered by this war,’ she urged him. ‘You know that certain men deploy, and return as someone else, and those that love them, those that live with them, hardly recognize them any longer. Do not let it be so with you. Do not let the terrible things you will see devour your soul. Come back to me as you are now. Come back brave and hopeful. Oh my son, come back to me the same kind-hearted boy I have always known.’ These were the words she spoke to him, and as he repeated them to me, there was a kind of reverence in his voice, like one catches when a man recites an ancient prayer. Then the tears, which he had held in abeyance long enough to relate this scene to me, enveloped him once more, rocking his girth and troubling the silent darkness, until, fleetingly, he flung himself once more upon the shards of language, bursting out in an agonized flurry: ‘I am no longer that boy my mother knew.’”
What sort of strange spirit moved in the mind of this commander, wondered Wild, that he could carelessly call down strikes on unreconnaissanced houses and then go weep in the arms of a courtesan for his distant mother? What strange antinomies of fierceness and frailty clashed in him? How like and unlike himself he seemed to be. The story this prostitute shared with him resonated in his bowels, because he too had ached for home in the middle of a firefight, and he too had doubted whether he could ever speak to his siblings of the grotesque brutality he had witnessed in this country, and worried that the experience would render him an outcast for the rest of his life, and he too feared that the cost of it was too much. Strange to say, but the impulse most forcefully possessing Wild at that moment was a desire to throw his arms around Youngman and to speak together with him of their suffering. This man had endured the same tribulations, lamented the same dark fortunes, and what is more, he fought insouciantly through it all, so that he seemed to possess some terrible secret for the preservation of his soul, which Wild might learn from him in time. The love for a comrade welled up in him, and he began to imagine the two of them lugging a patrol in tandem, encouraging their men, and guarding the backs of one another in the fight, like brothers. But then he cast his eyes on the woman beside him, and the awe of her sanctity waved over him again, with the desperate certainty that his own integrity depended upon that sanctity, and then he shook once more with jealous hatred for the man who had lain beside her. He trembled with loathing, and he said to himself, I will fight him when I get back to base. I will beat him down. I will show him that I am the better man.
The clutter of arms and men in the hallway signaled to Wild that the time had come to return to base. He gathered his gear and dressed himself in meditative silence, while the prostitute reclined on the mattress. Lugging his rifle, he swiped one last look at the sprawling girl, relishing and repenting the vision all at once, then grabbed the door-knob, turned to her, and said, as from a sudden thought: “I do not even know your name,” to which she answered, in wistful, far-away tones, “Those who have a place in the world have a name; but I have no place, and I have no name. I just am.”
He piled with the others into the back of the Bradley, slightly conscious of the derisive laughs and glances of his fellow soldiers amused at his easy apostasy, but more consumed by the thousand bitter and enticing passions that lacerated his mind with their relentless thrashing. He strained to extract some comprehensible meaning from their tumult as the vehicle lurched around corner after corner of the dangerous way, until an explosion ahead of them sucked all of their minds into the physical present, and, grasping the stocks of their guns, they tumbled out again, in a hectic rush, from the Bradley’s lowering jaws. As corpsmen rushed forward to the enflamed vehicle, and hollering sergeants positioned their men on the perimeter of the wreckage, Lieutenant Wild knelt and shouldered his M-16, sweeping the smoky landscape with his sights until they landed on something unusual; his finger tensing over the trigger, doubtful.
There was a time in his life, before the instincts of youth had completely waned in him, with their sanguine coloration of every face and every intention, when he would have thought it preposterous to suppose he could so much as strike a boy of ten, who loved to get up to all sorts of mischief, as he once had; whose lithe, unspooling frame augured a fearsome manhood, as his once had; but that was before he knelt in the sands of Mesopotamia, squinting over his rifle at a child who fumbled and swayed with the weight of a rocket launcher he was struggling to level upon the convoy, and before he knew that in such a perilous instant, the nerves will decide a course of action before the reckoning is in. So he watched his own body, stunned, release a burst through the boy, stunned, as he fell to the ground, his inappropriate weapon clattering next to him. His fire drew the attention of some other soldiers, who rushed the alcove where the boy was killed, expecting to find a detachment of insurgents nestled there, but when they stampeded over the crimsoning pavement and through the door, all they found there were a gaggle of the boy’s siblings, peeking around the threshold in wonder at their brother’s new immortality. Wild watched the scene from a distance, horrified as at a catastrophe he had stumbled across, in which his own hands played no part, until the incriminating stares of the children sought him out, because they had observed him pull the trigger on their brother. Then, he felt his efficacy, and his judgment felt the death, and his mind, which could not bear such a reality, grabbed onto the mantra that there is no guilt where there is no will to the action, and started iterating these words over and over inside, though their cadences did nothing to alleviate the sense of pollution fallen upon him, nor to cleanse the children of the irrevocable blood their eyes had beheld.
These memories festered in his emotions as he lay upon his rack later that evening, revolving the changes of the day, when Youngman happened to pass by his doorway and shoot him a mocking glance, or what he took to be a mocking glance. An unprecedented loathing radiated over every corner of his consciousness when he felt that stare upon him, because he perceived in it a privation of the human, the very void which he accounted the source of power in all his enemies, and which he dreaded above all things in the world. He thought to himself, this man would not have scrupled such a killing; he would not feel burdened by such an action. He did not even reverence the body of the beautiful woman when it was offered to him. Nor was his revulsion without sense, for Youngman could never look at his fellow officer without shadows of contempt drifting across his vision: contempt for his idealism, contempt for his hope, contempt for his unvanquished piety, which he could not help but regard, simply by virtue of their existence, as an implicit censure of his own rugged suppression of their force in him.
Wild shouted out to Youngman, in a tone that made no secret of its enmity, and demanded to know why the other was looking at him, to which Youngman, unused to be challenged in such a manner, returned a profane insult. In an instant, Wild was out of his bed and the two of them wrestled in the doorway, straining their elaborated backs against one another, pulling with thick arms on the thick arms of the other man, seething with rage against all that was embodied in the antagonistic flesh they fought. The flimsy walls of the hallway shuddered under the pressure of their contention, signaling the other soldiers to come out of their rooms and observe the fight, each one watching keenly to see which of the principals warring and grappling against one another would turn out to be uppermost. At last, Youngman dragged his opponent across the threshold, overcoming his fierce resistance, and threw him on the ground of the hallway, where he pinned his neck against the floor with his knee, until the other one tapped him on the shin in sign of resignation. Then Youngman tumbled off of him, and the two of them crumbled alongside each other, panting, sweating, aching, but with all the hatred for one another quelled in them, the virtue inhering in the body they had wrestled against too blatant to be denied. It dawned upon each that what angered them in the other was the beleaguered possibilities of their own persona. Youngman studied Wild, studied his still boy-like features, and a strain of tenderness, so long attenuated, awoke in him, because he saw in them the fragile remnants of what he himself once was, what he could never be again, but if he could stand before this man’s unsurrendered purity, could throw his body between that and the corrosive violence of the world, he might attain a sufficient sacrifice nonetheless. And Wild pored over the stone that was in the place of Youngman’s face, perceiving in its rigid proportions the effect of a costly knowledge, by which the frailty and the perdurance of the conscience could be subdued, by which the heart could be hammered to iron. So each man imagined in the other the defeat of his particular deficiency, anticipated in the other what he needed to survive the war. So in that moment, they came to love each other, and helping one another to their feet, they made peace and relented, while the rest of the soldiers poured out into the hallway, exclaiming over how fiercely each one fought, so there was no shame to be had on either part. Then Wild looked earnestly at his comrade, admiration glowing in his eyes, and told him, “I did not think you were so strong,” which made Youngman laugh, and smile benignly on his young friend, and admit in turn, “Neither did I think you were so strong.” Then they shook one another’s hand, each one feeling he had finally discovered the friend he was meant to fight beside.
From that day on, the two commanders fought alongside each other with unyielding resolve, leading their platoons together through all the vicious warrens of the city, and inflicting untold casualties upon the insurgents who dared to confront them there. The rest of the company marveled at their continued victories, how thoroughly they managed to subdue the violence in the neighborhoods they patrolled, and they often remarked on the way that Wild always seemed to thrust himself forward in a firefight whenever Youngman was engaged, and noted too that Youngman would always take the point when clearing houses with Wild’s platoon. So they pacified the city wherever they went, and when they passed on to another quarter, the bombs and the guns would awaken again in the place that they left, and the people there would cry out for their return.
Eventually, the section of Zayouna, which had been so quiet for so long, broke out again in repeated murders and chaos, until the colonels realized they must do something to wrest back control of the place. Their first thought was to send Youngman and Wild, their most outstanding commanders, and that is how the two friends found themselves bursting through a door there and fixing a terrified family to the floor with their rifles, because intelligence relayed a message that they were harboring an unidentified man in their home, and sure enough, when the soldiers searched the house, they found a man hiding in a closet - scraggly, malnourished, evidently stowed away for more than a week - but when they lead him before Youngman, the lieutenant froze, and was startled, because he knew him very well. “Zyed,” he said, and the captive, equally startled to be known in such circumstances, looked up and smiled sheepishly at the familiar soldier. So they sat him at the table, across from the two lieutenants, and brought him something to eat and to drink, and asked him why he was there and not with his women.
“There are no women left. The Mahdi killed them all. Now they are after me.”
A slight shift in their seats and a sudden, knowing glance shared between the lieutenants was all the sign visible of the enormous rifts of remorse burst open in both their hearts by this sudden news. For separate reasons, out of separate desperations, they each needed to know what had happened to the courtesan they loved with separate affections, so they invited the man to continue.
“They had been threatening us for a long time,” he went on, wearily, “They said we were ungodly, that we brought iniquity into the midst of the city. But I told the women that they shouldn’t fear, that we were under the protection of the Americans, and that so long as they looked kindly on our house, we would be free to do whatever we please, just as they do in their own country. But one night, when I was out rummaging for a few items at the market, a squad of these men burst in upon the women – holy men, wrapped face to foot in black - and they began gunning them down where they huddled under the dining room table, and in the bathroom, and naked in the arms of paramours who shared their fate. Every single one of them they killed, even the one who was pregnant, the one who fled to me one night because her whole family had been murdered and she had nowhere else to turn. When they departed, they left a note for me to find, saying they were sorry they missed me that evening, promising they would come and visit me soon. And they warned me not to doubt, or quibble with their judgment, since all that blood had been demanded by heaven, and all those alluring bodies, so tempting in their vitality, had been pierced and heaped as at an offering, so that no ungodliness should take hold in the land.”
IV.
Of all the hours men have jammed with iniquity, since first awakening to the joy of it, the sum was piled up in the grains of the desert stretching under the Blackhawk’s ominous runners, waving, in high, outrageous crests, beyond the limits of all four horizons, blowing hither and yon on the brunt of a wind that made an unending passage of sands. This was the vestige of the green lands, wasted since time out of mind, stretching like a vast, unyielding crescent beyond the city and into the limitless west, the heat of its sands encompassing all evil - from the shores of Gaza, echoing with paeans for an infant smashed to death, to the palace chambers where the tyrant of Damascus revolves his latest massacre, to the endless, factional blood washing down the hills of Lebanon, once fabled only for their tall and stately cedars. The shadows of the choppers, as they moved across its shifting face, had the appearance of something fleeting, something ineffectual, something soon to pass from the earth.
Yet even if there was something else to behold outside the bay of the Blackhawk besides this endless desiccation, it could hardly arrest the focus of Lieutenant Youngman where he sat on a bench studying the resolute armored head of his friend who sat on the opposite bench. The roar of the engine made conversation impossible - made explicit knowledge of his thoughts, his uncertainties, impossible - but Youngman could gaze intently on him all the same, from under his shaded eye-ware, and speculate about what iron-hard intentions clashed and were weighed in that arcane arena, what frightful memories bared their jaws in pursuit of his sanity. How strange it was, he thought, to be sitting across from such an exemplary soldier; from a fighter and a killer without peer, and to be consumed with pity for him, to be overwhelmed with the urge to lay his body over his fearsome body, as a mother envelops a child at thunder. And how bitter and relentless was the renewed anger clawing his mind for this war, for the fact that any man, occupying whatever station of authority, could dream of subjecting such a gorgeous soul to the brutalities of this conflict. It will cost too much, he kept saying to himself, between the cadenced rumble of the rotors; it will cost too much if this man, who came kissing his God and country, lay his eyes here on the worst effects of sinfulness, be confounded, and depart to his home unmoored, unfaithful, without kindness or hope in his life. What was hidden - what suppressed - in the rigid expression summoned onto those helmeted features – that was what he urgently needed to understand, because the fragmenting force of those thoughts was the only thing that could be forestalled in his deployment - not the implosion of this alien country, not the unspeakable suffering of its families, which would continue decades after he flew away from there, no matter how many heinous men he killed beforehand – but the ruin of this one man, so dear to him, was what he set his face against now, was the enemy against which he aimed his rifle now. But already, that cause was lost; the natal cleanness of the man’s will defiled, or so he feared, when three nights earlier, he spied him lying on his rack, his face pressed against the wall, pouring out furtive tears at an hour when all the rest of the company was clutching about themselves the long stretch of sleep their commanders unusually allotted to them ahead of their next mission. He could still feel now, hunched on the bench of the chopper, vibrating along with the force of its anomalous flight, the same astonishment he felt then, in the troubled darkness, to overhear his weeping comrade. There is no sight in the world so full of sorrow as the tears of a warlike man, and the sadness of it froze his tongue to silence. Then Wild, apprehending his searching eyes, turned to his friend, and blurted out the news, “they are sending us to Fallujah,” which made Youngman assume his friend’s tears fell for the prospect of fighting in that infernal place, where men were tortured a thousand ways and the charred corpses of his countrymen swung from the ironworks. “I never thought I would hear the words of a coward from you,” he reproached him, the sting of the guilt still prickling his conscience at the recollection. “Why do you believe in your religion if it does not teach you to accept death when it comes? I myself do not believe, but I will go fight in Fallujah with an untroubled heart.” Wild had only stared at these words, uncomprehendingly, without any sense of the reproach in their meaning, before continuing: “I fought in Fallujah the first time. I rode forward with Lima Company, driving the insurgents from block to block, back to the cusp of the Jolan, where we waited for the order to liberate the whole city from their grip. But that order never came, and we waited like fools on the edge of the industrial sector, trading mortar shells with the enemy. One afternoon, a shell went off just to the right of our position, and as we picked ourselves up off the deck, brushing the dust off our cammies and laughing over another near miss, we suddenly realized that Frederickson was not getting up with the rest of us, so a couple of the boys turned him over, and we all saw at once that a fragment had ripped right through his neck, unsluicing the blood all over his uniform, and petrifying his lifeless face in a gaze of eternal wonder. He was my bunk-mate since basic, and we used to spend our leave at one or the other’s house. He talked endlessly of his girlfriend Laura, and the family he was going to start with her when his enlistment was up, and he was sure they would be happy together. But then the mortar shell came, and the growth and the goodness of the man all came to an end.” His lips pursed tight, and the pronounced musculature of his jaw all swelled with the strain of holding back the tears, but they exploded all the same, rocking his massive frame with their violence, until he was able to blurt out a few more words: “It has cost too much. It has cost too much. Too many boys have died. Too many mothers will never see them home again. It has cost too much, and the victory, if it comes, will never be worth the price of it.” Then Youngman finally understood his friend’s loathing for that place, and he understood too that it was not just the death of this one friend that tormented him, but the recapitulation in that shredded body of all the anger, all the wastefulness, gnawing upon that carrion country, and his own implication in its ravages;
in his abiding knowledge that there was a boy in the world who once wrestled and sprinted and laughed at jokes with his friends, who no longer breathed or admitted light to his eyes, because on a whim he wielded a weapon whose effects he could not fathom, and because in the instant he did, Wild happened to survey him in his sights and snapped the trigger on the unknowing threat. He was the one who had killed that boy, snuffing out all that his life might have meant, and for all the rest of time, until the planets melted back into each other once again, he would be the one who had killed that boy. To speak comfort to his friend would have been an insolence, so Youngman left him and went back to his own room, overcome with sadness at the fact that he had no skill to ease the torment of this eternal regret. That was when he sent a message home to his mother, informing her in vague terms about their new mission, and assuring her, in a manner that unintentionally betrayed his premonitions, of his abiding love for her, mentioning by the way the valor of his new friend. She read his message almost immediately, tears clouding her vision as she did so, and then she reached into her desk and withdrew the weathered beads of her rosary, to implore the Mother of God for his safe return, in the very same manner of mothers whose sons are mercilessly slain in the tide of war. And she mixed her prayers often with lamentations for his recklessness, and for the drive for distinction that had defined his character since he was a boy, and she wondered, without resolution, why a man could not attain virtue in this world except he be willing to throw his life away. But she mentioned none of these things in her reply, only avouching her enormous love for him too, and promising that when he returned home with his courageous friend, she would feed him and embrace him as if he were her own son. So Youngman felt guilty when he read her reply, because it had nothing of the plangent or the desperate in it; because it was so admirable in its composure, and because he knew that that composure must have cost her an agony of defiance, of contention against the heart; and to subject her to such storms of the spirit was the very last thing in the world he wished to do to her, to this woman whose smiling susurrus were the first kind wind that blew across his mind in this world, and he wondered – with gaping, irresolvable wonder – why it should be that the execution of his duty should haunt him – even now, even smeared over and over again by his killings – as the cruelest thing he had ever done. Then it occurred to him, for some strange reason pondering the rigid features of his friend, that he knew nothing of this man’s mother, never heard him speak of her or refer to their time together, almost as if he erupted into the world immediately - inconceived and unbegotten – and that the purity of his heart seemed without earthly antecedent. And he raged again in his mind against the powers and the principalities that had decreed this war by their lies, and thereby threatened to sully that purity for all time, and if he were to give his emotions their precise shape in words, which he would never do, what he would confess was that for all the wastefulness of the war – for all the obliterated cities and for all the mangled bodies and for all the lives rendered incapable of joy henceforth - what filled his mind with the greatest sadness was to think that the gorgeous soul of his friend might be lost in the battle forever.
Still, they must go on into Fallujah, as it was fated, or as it was ordered, or whatever one must say of circumstances unwilled by necessary beings, but which occur of a necessity all the same. Over the sweltering horizon, the ghastly shadows of the city reared in the twilight, its hundred minarets ranged menacingly over its environs, like the horns spined over the charred back of some primordial dragon. The broad highway that had panted across the desert entered there – a weary exile taking rest in a den of cutthroats – and transversed the dull tenements from one end of the city to the other, tapering off in the west alongside the stagnant Euphrates, whose waters had run by for eons without cleansing the place in the least. Heaps of industrial wreckage steamed and festered to the south of that highway, block upon block of concrete apartment buildings squatted to the north. Scattered about on both sides were the rubble and half-standing edifices left behind by the battles that recently raged over every quarter, so that the whole had the appearance of a splayed offering, reeking upon the altar, and auguring only evil things in its circuitous bowels. As the chopper edged closer, and the dimensions of the city grew larger, the streams of crepuscular light flashed lividly over its expanding face, transforming its blunt architecture into a wild, fanatical scowl, infusing a wrathful malice into its squalor, until the whole of it glared and grimaced red in the midst of the desert, like the beast of a thousand nightmares.
On the outskirts of this fantastical domain, amid some toxic ruins that were once the structure of factories churning out machinery useful to the townspeople, the Marines established their base and piled it high with weaponry for the approaching battle. They had M4 rifles, to be their surety whenever they burst through doors at night without knowing who waited for them on the other side; and they had M40’s, to touch the enemy from afar; and they had SAW guns, to rattle over the heads of insurgents where they lingered on nearby murky rooftops. They stocked M203 grenade launchers, to fortify their guns, and AT4 rockets, for when the enemy fought from some well-deliberated cover. And they brought with them mortars and 155mm howitzers, so that the infantry need not be lost on an assault against a strong position. And they had a variety of vehicles to ride into the battle – there were Humvees, that prickled with .50 caliber machine guns, and TOW missiles – the annihilator of obstacles – and Mark 19’s, which streamed grenades onto the positions of hapless insurgents; and there were LAV’s, with their 25mm chain guns that shredded flesh, and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, to hurry soldiers onwards to the places where the violence raged the worst, and there were M1 Abrams tanks, to bull through streets and obliterate the bodies of insurgents into a hundred pieces. And to kill from above, they hangered nearby Apache and Cobra helicopters, to unload death at close range; and there were A10 Warthogs, to swoop down on massed insurgents, and there were AC-130 gunships, which bore an armament all their own to the battlefield. And screaming in from the coasts, there were F-15’s and F-16’s, to drop bombs of five hundred pounds on buildings and make them disappear, and there were AV-8B’s, in which avenging Marines sat ranging for slaughter, and there were B-52’s, carrying obscene payloads to targets and rendering them a thing of the past. So that whatever impediment they should wish to shoot or explode or collapse or implode or disintegrate or sever or disembowel or destroy in the ensuing battle, they would always find the proper instrument to hand.
On their third morning in this place, what was New Year’s Eve on the calendar, the colonels summoned the officers to a briefing in one of the trailers. Keen for a fray from which they had been withheld too long, they all swarmed in, eager to learn the parameters of their mission, each one envisioning the decisive action he and his men were going to take in the following days to turn the tide of the conflict, to pacify the tumultuous country, to bring the culminating triumph into view at last. When all were seated and attentively quiet, the commander of the mission took the floor before them, pausing before he spoke to contemplate the strong, square faces rowed before him, swelling as he did so with a mighty admiration, and a fervor of camaraderie that only the intimacy of death can arouse. Then he spoke of their mission, and on the wall behind him brought up the faces of seven terrorists – faces that had looked on impassively when a child was kidnapped because his father aided the Americans, faces that had scowled on an informer being tortured to death with a power-drill, faces stretched over minds ready for any atrocity whatsoever that served their ends. He told them that these terrorists were now to become their prey.
“Fallujah,” he said, “is oppressed by the violence of these men. They are all foreigners. They have all come here to shed blood. We are going to root them out. We are going to kill them all before they scurry back into the desert. We are going to give the people of Fallujah back their city. I do not want one of these terrorists remaining alive when we are done here.”
They heard, and when they heard, their hearts vibrated joyfully within them. They would ride forward with the flag on their sleeves; they would engage with foes unambiguously wicked, and they would have no doubts. The eyes of Lieutenant Wild grew round and fierce; he thought to himself, this is why I was sent here; this is why I was meant to enlist and fight. The lucid justice of the mission served as a balm to his mind, lacerated as it was by the confounding memories of all he had seen and committed. The easeful certainty of the wounds he would inflict restored the wholeness of his will, and in that restoration brought back to him, for a fleeting passage, the seamless confidence, the unburdened virtue of his prime. The anticipation of it fired his heart, and Youngman, who sat beside him, and who observed that exultation for the battle in his friend, knew something more of its origins than he did.
The next morning, while the stars still clung resentfully to their places, a column from Omega Company shot forward into the city, determined to gather intelligence at the point of their guns about the fiends oppressing the people. Overhead, skimming watchfully across the gilded firmament, a UAV turned its omniscient lenses on the warren of lanes and alleyways tangled before the column, its impersonal ken set on every hand turned to iniquity in the midst of the city. Hardly had they advanced a dozen blocks, when a nest of insurgents beset them from three directions at a mangled intersection, the excess of their black dishdashas streaming behind them like the banners of their own dark purposes. They had just risen from devotions, where they had imbibed an ardor of militancy, a unity of hatred, so that they too rushed into the battle with certain hands upon their triggers, with a wild delusion that they too fought with the wind of God at their backs. By two’s and three’s, they leapt from behind shop-fronts, or aimed over the hulks of blasted cars, unloading ineffective fusillades with their AK’s and then scurrying back into the shadows before the soldiers could tag them with their own bullets. Others poured rounds down from strategically selected rooftops, or hopped out of a doorway in an alley to send an RPG screaming towards the Humvees and then melded with the shadows once again. A swarm of viperous hornets, a cloud nettled with the detritus of the desert floor, they prodded, stung, aggravated the exposed squadrons, then dissipated back into the chaos of the city, inchoate to the metal bullets of the soldiers, to their infuriated aim. With well-drilled coordination, the men of Omega Company fanned out to their respective stations, this one illuminating targets for the wrath of the air support, this one swiveling the iron fire of his .50 caliber gun wherever the promise of death seemed greatest, this one patiently steadying his M16 until an insurgent showed himself around the corner again; so that the whole unit moved and fought like a single angered organism, thrashing with lethal motions against its beleaguering foe. Little by little, corpse by corpse, they began to take back the worthless terrain, overrunning this position, blasting that one away with the main guns of their tanks. Through it all, Lieutenant Wild kept throwing himself into the places on the battlefield that were likely to cost the most, that were most exposed to the fire of the enemy. He clipped two insurgents with his rifle, then leapt some rubble and took aim at another peeking above the lip of a roof overhead, then hustled to the side of one of the Humvees to direct the driver down an alleyway, then turned, knelt, sniped an insurgent leveling an RPG on his column, then threw himself in front of a group evacuating a wounded man and provided them cover. Always, the fervor of duty steeled his nerves in the exchange; always, the lingering sense impelled him, that he was meant to fight in this place, besides these men, for just this laudable cause.
At this point, Lieutenant Youngman arrived on the scene with his men, and instantly began assuming control of the battle space by deploying his men into the most effective positions he could discern. Then, when he had turned the counterpoise of the battle, he stood up straight in the midst of its tumult, concentrating, with aesthetic relish, on the manifold of its kinetic grace, as it revealed itself at a thousand portals of the flesh. Bullets chipped holes in clay walls, and men screamed out in anguish or intention, and dust that was coughed out of the roadway stung his vision, and the engines of war machines growled fiercely, and the heat of the day insinuated itself into his armored torso, and black-clad warriors materialized for seconds across the terrain, while jet planes whined overhead, and multitudinous chatter poured out of the comms, and men he knew – men he had trained and reveled with for years – were dragged, bleeding and half-sentient across the road, and all of these violences beckoned him into the indubitable present, incarnated him, for certain, amid the realm of becoming and passing away. So the thought occurred to him, far back in the formless, wordless chambers of his awareness, that this was precisely the ground he wished to inhabit at that moment, that here, where men slew and were slain, was where life seemed most like life.
Eventually, the prowess of the two friends, and the discipline of the men they led, wrested the intersection back from the insurgents, half of whom sprawled pouring out the contents of their arteries upon a soil that would not be irrigated. Then the platoons gathered their able men back into formation, and advanced in their vehicles further into the bowels of the city, down a boulevard littered with rusting shop grates and mechanics’ wares and other manner of urban debris, then with a sudden left, scraping through a crammed den of hovels and apartments until they found a doorway marked with the address they were hunting. Detonating that door off its hinges, and bustling through the ash with their rifle barrels pointed towards all ends of the compass, they were met by a young woman, and three of her doe-eyed children, not one of whom could have been more than ten, lined up on the couch, contemplating the invading soldiers with gazes of blank, impassive docility, which rendered the aggression of that entrance a preposterous excess. Almost for the first time in the war made cognizant of the outrageousness of the power he wielded among these people, Youngman lowered his rifle and contemplated this family for an instant, with real embarrassment confounding his thoughts; then he sat down gingerly on an adjacent sofa, and gestured towards his interpreter to join him there. He told the woman that they were searching for a young man of the house, a boy called Amar, whom they had reason to suspect had been involved in some recent attacks upon the soldiers; but when the interpreter conveyed the message, her curt response, muttered in a hoarse whisper, and without the least acknowledgment of her eyes, caused the man to balk in astonishment, and he could not speak. Only when Youngman growled at him to share the words did he relent.
“She says she only wishes she knew where you could find her son, so she could have the privilege of watching you destroy the body she birthed so long ago.”
Even for a man of war, even for one inured to all that human loathing can contrive to inflict on a detested rival body, the clang of such an execration on the lips of a mother stilled his vitals with terror, chilled his senses with the presence of some infernal spirit. He remembered his own mother, and the elemental forces that flung him into her arms over and over as a child, the tender, recreative embraces, where the nutritive void of his origins was enacted over and over again for his purification, and he could make no sense of a world where such embraces counted for nothing. He had no concepts to represent such a world to himself, no words to deploy towards its comprehension, and so he only stared blankly at what, for lack of a closer language, he could only believe a woman, and Lieutenant Wild, who by now had sat himself beside his friend on the sofa and heard the woman curse the flesh she had engendered, stared also at her in horrified wonder.
At last, Youngman ordered the interpreter to ask her to explain herself, and when he did so, when she heard that order, she shot a sudden, confrontational glare at the Lieutenant, fixing him with a defiantly embittered gaze, a gaze that seemed almost haughty in its singular consciousness of suffering, and that seemed to spit contumely on this spirit uninitiated into the rites of evil in which she herself had grown into such a distinguished adept. Then, to begin her relation, she fell back into herself, into the agonizing depths of being, with eyes rapt shut, and lips a-tremble for the violent mysteries they were on the verge of disclosing, until the hideous cadences awakened in her bowels, and sybil-like, in low and vacant measures, she uttered forth the dark records of her lineage.
“Amar is among those who fight against you, and will not accept your authority in this land. When your soldiers first arrived in this city, these men rode about the streets at dusk, blaring imprecations to the young men to take up weapons for the defense of their religion, and warning of monstrous repercussions for anyone caught collaborating with the invaders. My father discerned the mischief they were plotting, and was aghast. He did not love you. He did not wish for your presence here. But neither did he wish to see his neighborhood obliterated, to find bullet casings and rubble and dead bodies on every corner, which he knew must be the consequences of their machinations. So he approached one of your colonels, and offered to gather together some men for a police force to aid them in the suppression of the insurgency, thus ensuring that it would be our countrymen who would enforce the law here. When my mother, his wife, discovered his plan, she pleaded with him to relent, to give up his intentions, to be patient with the waywardness of his tribesmen. She asked him how he could contemplate taking up arms against his kin, asked him, with tears in her eyes, how he could doubt whether his own death, and her widowhood, would follow from such an act. And indeed, when word of his plan rippled among our tribe, many grew indignant and bartered schemes to punish him for this collaboration. It fell to Al-Enlil, his nephew, to execute their designs. He was greedy for it, because he believed that by undertaking this crime, he might be honored first in the tribe as my father was once honored. First, he kidnapped several of the men who collaborated with my father, binding them in a basement in the Jolan, and torturing them with fire and knives for whole weeks at a time, sending video of their torments to their families. Then, when these atrocities did not intimidate the police force into disbanding themselves, Al-Enlil sought out my father while he slept, and cut his throat.
“At his funeral, my mother mourned by the side of the shrouded body that in its life was all her life - hysterical, distraught, frantic with tears and ululations - until one of the policemen who was in attendance, a man named Dam Al-zawj, sought her out, and insinuated his vengeful will into her own mind, asking her why she only lamented her husband, and did not contrive a retribution for his murderers, as any faithful wife would do, and, why did she not reveal to him the location of Al-Enlil, so that he could relay that intelligence to the Americans. ‘They will be like demons to afflict your husband’s murderers; like outraged angels frowning out of the clouds, their airplanes will drop fire on their heads. Let me tell them where Al-Enlil is hiding. That much you owe this body.’ All of this he said, because he hoped that when the Americans had subdued the city, they would cherish him as their firmest ally, and entrust their purse to his dispensation, so that all the other sheiks would have to feign regard for him when they passed him in the street. But my mother heard none of this in his voice; all she heard was the summons to revenge, and when she heard it, the lust incubating in her heart took vital warmth and hatched: dragon-clawed, adder-venomed, horrendous as a scorpion’s kiss; it gnawed on every thought, on every feeling , until poison ran in her veins where blood had run, and would not be eased till word of Al-Enlil’s death was delivered to her, as when the head of a rival might have been uncovered before the gleeful eyes of some ancient potentate.
“In the days immediately after, she became like one in a frenzy, like one who had lost her reason. She would sit for hours in the dark, trembling through every inch of her body, screaming with demonic impatience for the blood of Al-Enlil, accursing everyone of us who tended to her for not bringing her word of the death of Al-Enlil. At last, after a week or so, Dam Al-zawj came to visit, and told her of all that had transpired: ‘The Americans, having found your nephew, and those who conspired with him to murder your husband, launched an attack against their hiding place, carrying unsparing weapons to the engagement, irresistible as a storm or a dragon. I myself participated in the assault, holding a perimeter around the neighborhood so none could escape. And none did escape, not even your nephew. He is dead now; their bombs found out his hiding place, and his body was dissipated with the ash of it to the winds.’ Then my mother embraced him, and murmured cryptically into his ear, ‘You have become like a second consort to me,’ and she went on to reveal to him the hiding places of other kinsmen who were warring against the Americans, urging him on to the destruction of these men too, declaring that she would not be dissuaded from the extinction of her whole tribe, since it appeared she had been fated to decree their deaths.
“So the Americans began to kill our tribesmen, four and five at a time, always lethally ready for their ambushes, always mindful of their storehouses and safehouses, as though one with prophetic sight had brought everything out into the open. At last, someone found out it was my mother who was supplying the Americans with all this information, and when the word of this spread among the enraged remnant, they sent for my son Amar and remonstrated with him for the treachery, as they called it, of his grandmother. ‘We cannot understand the decisions of this woman,’ they told him. ‘What has happened to her sense of God, that she could willingly abet the campaign of the infidel against her brothers?’ Then they brought him a knife and told him, ‘Go, and cut out her life; she cannot be allowed any longer to stir up these depredations against us,’ and an imam who was present at the meeting approached him also, and took his face in his hands, saying, ‘By doing so, you will win a lordly throne in Paradise, a festooned dais to couch your spirit everlastingly after you are killed, and you will be first among all the martyrs of our religion.’ So Amar took the knife, and swore that he would do as they instructed him, assuring them that this promise would not alter, that it would not fail.
“I was there on the day he did it. Dam Al-zawj was there as well, slurping tea in the kitchen and gathering further details from my mother to convey to the Americans. I remember that when Amar rushed in, he burst the door open like the winds of a sand-storm, and brandished the knife he was given in manifest declaration of his purpose. I had hardly registered his arrival before he was upon the two of them: Dam Al-zawj at first, who did not contend with him in the way a man would do, but tried to scurry out into the courtyard, and save himself by flight – too late, since Amar restrained him by the back of his shirt and gashed him over and over again until his blood sopped under him on the floor where it did no good to his life – and then my mother, who only sat awaiting the blow, which came too soon, and to her heart, and quelled its fury at last. For a moment, he stood meditating her extinguished body, where it curled up under him with all the gore and rigor of an expelled miscarriage – like a mockery of life, like a thing obscene. Then he stuck his boot upon her spine, and severed her head from her body, butchering her the way one does a sacrifice. The very last sight I had of him – the very last sight of my son I will have in this world – was of him striding heedlessly past me, chanting the verbiage of some arcane prayer, swinging the smeared, embittered head of my mother in his hand.
“For as long as I live, I will never cast my eyes upon a more dreadful vision. I seem to see it still, and it fills me with an incomprehensible wonder, as though through its visitations I have come to know things unfit for human understanding. In those visions, Amar seems much more muscular than I had ever remembered him, his arms and his chest rippling with a perilous virility, and I am astonished to consider that my loins could usher into the world such a staggering capacity for bloodshed. I wait by day and night for someone to bring me word of his death, as my mother once waited for word of her husband’s avengement, and if you are the ones who will satisfy me in this regard, I will bath your hands in kisses when you return to me. I have no son. Amar is dead to my heart. And yet, I often sit and marvel how the delectation with which Jabar and I wound ourselves through one another’s bodies could have engendered into the world such rage and such death.”
As she ended, the agony which canceled out every other element of her personhood suffused itself through her face, wherein the edges of her gaze frayed on the verge of some delusive peace: the wavering sight of a day by day decency that had been her unreflective portion, of which the war had dispossessed her; a world not utopian, but marred by nothing more than the quotidian demerits of life - not daily murder, not unnatural slaughter - a misty and forsaken past which alone, of all the things in the world now, could draw from her an expression not deformed by defiant loathing. That expression floated before Lieutenant Wild’s darkened vision as he lay in his bunk later that night, spiraling into ever more bottomless maelstroms of disorientation, into the adversarial knowledge that in this world, mothers do not always love sons, sons do not always reverence fathers, and those elemental affections imbued in our flesh, the only stays of our moral being, do not always survive their clash with circumstance. This was the unbearable vision that stung his eyes as they closed, but it was not the vision to which they opened, again, in the dark, the tocsin of his comrade’s midnight howl having cracked his repose. What he saw there instead was the heaving, sweat-sloshed silhouette of his powerful friend across the room, on his bed, terrified into awakening. When Youngman caught his startled friend examining him through the gloom, he started to hurl questions at him with the cadences of a madman, asking, “What just happened? Did you touch me? Is there a spirit present in this room? I am freezing, and my skin creeps up my back,” and when all he received as an answer to these entreaties was Lieutenant Wild’s mystified stare, he fumbled with his gaze here and there about the spartan accoutrements of the room, testing the tangibility of their presence, before training his eyes once more upon his friend, and whispering to him, as one does a fearsome secret, the things he saw while he slept:
“I had a horrible dream tonight. I dreamt of two cold towers, and the laboring people within them dwarfed to flies by the vast steel matrices enclosing them in the sky, and of how they fell, and of how many thousands of those bodies were parsed among the ashes of their collapse. I saw two diverted planes scream from the sky, like rabid, maniacal eagles throwing themselves against their prey at the cost of their lives, dissolving themselves into the flames of their own resentment. I saw mothers and fathers descending smoky stairwells, plunging into annihilation with the structures under them, pinned down under its merciless beams to weep for their last fond memory of their little ones. I saw the heavens roar, and the earth tremble, and then darkness, silence, and all the world transformed to ash, and I looked, and I looked, and I saw no hand to deflect that ruin, and then I heard a voice in the midst of it, declaring that the evil days had come upon us, the era of the wolf, when men shall go screaming after God, and only have murder for an answer.”
When Lieutenant Wild heard this, he felt none of the horror overwhelming Youngman; he felt a strange assurance instead. Kneeling by the side of his bewildered friend, and touching his arm, he spoke to him of the justness of their fight:
“You’ve had an auspicious dream,” he said, “a dream that bodes well for our side. This dream reminds us that every time we patrol these decrepit streets and engage with these monstrous adversaries, we fight with God by our side. We need not fear; we need not wonder; we may do our duty with peace in our souls. What was done wickedly in our country we are here to set right, to bring justice to the abettors of that crime. We have what every man longs for in life, and that indubitably – the pain of a righteous cause.”
So sweetly and so alluringly did this promise of a sanctified violence take possession of Wild’s emotions, that his eyes blazed and his face seemed to shine with an unearthly glow through the midnight murk, and his friend, who lay marveling at the transfiguration of his features, took comfort from the sight of it. It was a comfort he continued to draw the following day when their two companies trudged through the quarter they called Queens, to secure that section from insurgents, and he spied Lieutenant Wild stomping forward at the point with a fierce buoyancy - with a certainty to blood - and in the apprehension of his confident friend, he too felt himself impelled by the anger that justifies. So sweetly, so alluringly did he fall into the arms of this perfect faith that when the column paused for some probable IED’s to be cleared from the roadway ahead, he knelt below a market awning, squeezed shut his sweat-stung eyes, and rummaged his memory for the form and the language of a prayer. He started by thanking God for having awakened him in the beginning, as all prayers are meant to signify in their fundaments, and then he professed his intention to walk always according to his precepts, to be his sword against wicked men – and his lips trembled with this resolve - and then he wondered who he spoke with, what mind outside his mind observed his intentions, and the obvious thought confounded him that he but bantered with some other portion of his will; so he squeezed his eyes tighter, and strained harder to gather in his intentions and affix them all at once to righteousness; but then the other kinds of thoughts came, the ones that made him ask who could serve as a proper vessel of that eternal will – what was he, what was his nation, that they should bear the standard of truth – that reminded him of how many generations went marching after the same dream before him, to their demise, that doubted time and words and power, and then his eyes sprang open, and the particularities of his grimy world rushed in, and the prayer failed on his lips. He became too cognizant – too remorselessly cognizant – of the thousand wills that had determined his footsteps on that battlefield, and the veniality and rage that captivated so many of them, and he marveled at how readily the cry “freedom” was woven into a banner to flourish over all violence, and how often it was chanted back home among men and women who never laid eyes on the fruits of it, and then the memories rushed back, the horrors, stained with their carnage still, of the men cut down at checkpoints, their guilt by no means obvious, and of the abolished neighborhoods, and of the hundred corpses splayed over the sukh simply because his detachment often patrolled there. Then the words of his prayer seemed to dissipate into thinner and thinner skeins of futility, and float off into some absolute realm that partook of nothing with the one in which he was mired. He wanted to fight for God, for the right and for justice, but the smoke of war, and the closeness of it, admitted not a beam to guide his steps. He could no longer even know what it would mean to fight for God. But if he did not fight for God, then who would fight for God? And if no one stood forward to fight for God, then how would the world be saved? And the terrible possibility occurred to him that no man taking up a gun, for no cause, could go forward cleanly, and without offense to his own soul, and that far beyond the chatter of a just war, wherewith politicians beguile themselves and the people, far beyond even the agony of good and evil, the force of battle accumulated and rolled on, piling onto its polluted heap the souls of pure men and of wicked men alike, so that any man who partook of its momentum became stained, to the death, and no man, wielding for however brief a span its force, might be saved. Thus he meditated, and feared, and melted to the sands, unable to take a single step forward, and nothing could have moved him from that place, but that a memory stirred in him – conjured by what subterranean forces, who can say – of the time they had a firefight in Karmah, when the insurgents assaulted their patrol in the middle of the day, while the villagers were about their business, so that they were all compelled to scramble into the same cover as the soldiers, and he found himself squatting behind the low, crumbling wall of what was once a fountain - now more flowing with trash than water – pressed face to face with a hysterical, brown-haired girl, who could not have been more than six. With a virtuous shudder, he hurled himself around her, making of his armor and of his limbs a wall – a veritable fortress – against the metal harms that swarmed about them, and locking her in that fierce embrace, with the tears of her eyes draining down his own cheek, he whispered to her over and over – in words she could not understand, words that did not quell her terror in the least – that all would be well, that all would be well.
Once the explosives ahead were neutralized, the column lurched forward again, stalking through the city’s constricting avenues towards their prey. They were a horde of hobgoblins and gremlins, sportive for destruction, with appellations suitable to the mischief they intended: squads called the Watchmen and the Headhunters, wherein served Havoc and Monster and Ghost; and there was Ogre, ugly as battle, and Red-dog, and with the Phantoms, Bones and Black-skull, and Punisher, a fearsome soldier, and Beast and Cerberus too. All crept forward through the abandoned streets with swelling disappointment, as the silence and the safety of the neighborhood seemed likely to withhold from them the combat they were after, when all of a sudden, an RPG screeched out of nowhere, and blasted the treads of a Bradley that rumbled at the head of their line. A fight was on, and no men could have been more joyful or lighthearted at the prospect. They fanned over the terrain, lustful to slay, to explode, to dominate, and only dismayed because the enemy continued to melt away into the shadows of the neighborhood, and no one could identify the source of the RPG. Then a JTAC came scrambling over to Youngman, where he directed the fire of seven soldiers over the low wall of a courtyard, and swore he had seen movement at the window of a house two blocks down, requesting permission to call in an airstrike and level the building, but the men who were with the Lieutenant insisted the man was mistaken, that they had trained their eyes on that building and only saw children peering out the window, at which the JTAC swore again, with far greater vehemence and curses, that it was as he had said, and that these fools would get more men killed when the insurgent stepped forward to fire again.
Then the burden of the choice descended upon Youngman – the unshared responsibility for annihilating a deadly threat to his men, or for directing the explosion of five hundred pounds of ordnance among some toddlers and their mother, with the destiny of souls dependent upon whatever choice he made, his own not least of all - just one of the eternally fraught decisions with which the war importuned him by the minute, by the thousands, and for which he stood absurdly answerable, in these times and the time to come. A voice of mercy whispered in him, a voice of restraint, warming him in his inmost, because the vitality of those instincts perdured in him long after he thought the war had sapped them finally, and the hope stirred that after all there might be something decent in him that would survive on the other side of the war, and the expressions on some of his soldiers’ faces - bright with compassion and noble purpose - seemed to promise the same as well. So his lips stood on the threshold of a refusal, when Lieutenant Wild, who had been observing the debate with increasing agitation, shoved himself between the others to confront his friend with a face carved in implacable fury, screaming, demanding, “call in the airstrike,” and when the only response to his fierce entreaty was a gaze of bewildered awe, he repeated the demand with even greater rage, hollering “call in the damn airstrike.” Shock hardened Youngman’s stare, but more than that, there was a tinge of sorrow and pity in it, and the soldiers, who were all pressed around the two of them, they also turned their eyes aside and lamented. Then, because they were absorbed by this deliberation, none of them observed the origins of the next rocket that came screeching down the avenue and exploded over their position, tumbling three men into the streets with the agony of incinerated shards in their limbs. The stymied soldiers all prodded Youngman once again with their stares, and the urgency leaping from their faces beckoned at him like the prefiguration of another judgment, condemning him for a friend’s death, for a child’s death, so that the moment would not depart from him until he made to it an oblation of his everlasting soul. When Wild perceived his friend flagging under his involition, he thrust himself forward once again, seared in his eyes with resolution, and shook his friend by the cammies as he thundered, “order the bomb! Order the bomb!” so that Youngman could hardly recognize the wrathful face glowering on him, and he marveled at the certainty of righteousness that blazed in it, and he doubted whether it were not only the contempt for righteousness. So he bowed his head, and, less speaking than suspiring the order, as though the words came of themselves, gave permission to the JTAC squatting beside him to call in the airstrike, and this officer, because he was afflicted by none of the same terrors, and only relieved to affect the struggle in some manner, barked a bit of jargon into the comms and summoned out of the sky the ruin floating pendant there. Somewhere behind the veil of the clouds, at a height imperceptible to those who moved and were moved by it, a mechanism was initiated, which triggered another mechanism, which sent a human death hurtling to the earth, and this was all that those below knew of the mindless decree until the ordnance arrived at its destination and eliminated the house in a fantastic detonation, burgeoning fire and ash and blood against the inscrutable sky. Then there was a brief silence, like the one supposed to be in heaven before the end, and the soldiers stood, awe-struck, watching the black efflorescence plume higher and higher, until it reached its verge, and the waste rained down again into the street – heavy, uncadenced, a precipitation of death. The threat apparently neutralized, Lieutenant Wild began snapping commands at the soldiers to advance down the adjacent street and take up positions against a nest of insurgents who were firing off haphazard rounds from the cover of a courtyard there, and the men gathered up their gear and prepared to do so when another RPG came screeching down the avenue, and now three or four of them saw for certain that it originated in the window of the house across from the one that had been leveled. So the JTAC called in another strike, and while the soldiers squatted in anticipation of the next explosion, the two friends’ gazes became intertwined in the space between them, so that all the guilt and despair that was in the one soul was laid bare – entirely bare – to the other soul, and all the knowledge of their own defilement stood mutually confessed. It was only the momentum of battle – its elemental prodding of shame and discipline – that prevented them both from falling over right then on their faces and flooding the pavement with their tears for all that they then knew. The squads pushed forward, and after a while, the quarter was secured, and by the time they passed between the rubble of the obliterated houses, the few residents who remained in the area had gathered there to gawk at the devastation, and one sat keening for the life of the little boy whose shredded corpse still leaked onto the lap in which it rocked, profanely exposed to the blank stares of the soldiers who now came trudging by, who could feel no emotions adequate to the weight of the sight. But this woman, who was a relation of the child, spied them through the convulsions of her tears, and the last extremes of human loathing turned to execrations in her bowels, which she vomited at them as they passed, screaming, “Is this one of the insurgents you came to kill? Is this your enemy?” and when her neighbors surrounded her and tried to allay the violence of her words, lest she provoke the passing soldiers once again, she stared frantically from one face to another, imploring, “Where is justice? Where is God?” and even as the company rumbled down the avenue and passed into the adjacent sector, the men on foot could still hear the desperation of her question haunting the city, calling, “Where is God? Where is God?”
No one spoke of these things on the chopper ride back to Baghdad a few weeks later. The routing of the insurgency, the pacification of the city, the return of governance to the locals – these were all the chatter among the officials, and all that certain men decided to record of what had transpired all those months on the edges of the desert, consigning all the rest to an unspeakable oblivion. Communiques passed backwards and forwards over a hundred bureaucratic channels, so that by the time the 2/5 and the 3/6 returned to their base, the colonels had rehearsed the satisfactory rendition of history they intended to pass along, which included commendations for Wild and Youngman for spearheading the assault into the quarter of Queens. The awards were delivered at a small ceremony the evening of their return, after the soldiers emerged from the showers, and when the colonels handed him the ribbon and certificate, Wild stood holding them in his hands at a distance, contemplating all the rugged past that the rote formality of these tokens aimed to obliterate – all the ambiguous deeds to which his hand had been party, and which the uncomplicated shape of those honors could never represent – and the thought occurred to him that he might sit pondering his experiences a thousand years, and never discover, in language or in rite, the adequate sign to articulate the meaning of all he had seen and performed. The thrust of those badges, he knew, was intended to mute that uncertainty; to whittle history into an illusion of straightness. The colonels perceived nothing of these doubts in the face of Wild, however, and so curtly moved along to present the same awards to Youngman, but he, who had stood watching the tormented thoughts well in his friend’s eyes, and could comprehend the origins of that torment, grew feverish with rage and regarded the gibbering colonels with a stone-eyed, stone-hearted fury. They seemed to morph into the very avatars of his nation, muttering hackneyed orisons to sanctify a brutality the soldiers alone had endured, and commandeering the virtue of those young men to vindicate the empty myths on which the people subsisted; and standing there, studying the features of that beautiful soul so carelessly offered up to the conflict, as it faltered under the knowledge of its own profanation, he became incensed to think how unworthy a cause was this ill-chosen war on which to squander so much goodness. So when the colonel extended those same tokens to him, he lurched back in revulsion, and bellowed with ferocious impertinence at the man:
“Is there no end of the farce that you will make us act? Is there no limit to the delusions we are compelled to reverence? By adorning us as heroes, do you think to dissemble your own villainy? Reality is not so pliable a thing that words alone will wrench it into a suitable image. Our presence in this city, and the deeds we have done here, are not materially altered because we declare them all performed in the name of freedom. The Mongols came here with catapults and siege engines, polluting the air with the stench of the massacre they initiated, and they called themselves conquerors. The hordes of Tamerlane came here, pricking the sides of war horses decorated with the severed heads of their enemies, and they called themselves conquerors. The British came here, in a flying column out of Palestine, littering the desert with corpses, and they called themselves conquerors. Now we have come here, with tanks and with missiles and with jets, to annihilate whole neighborhoods and inflict sorrow on their inhabitants, but we must name ourselves liberators. As though the forces of war demurred for our good will! As though history winked at us alone !”
And when Wild heard this outburst, the love he felt for his friend increased, or rather say, for the first time, he comprehended the origins of that love in the audacity and invincible justness of his friend’s mind, and his heart grew enflamed at this knowledge, and he felt his hands gripping those flimsy tokens more harshly, until, eyes radiating with the anger his friend had taught him to cherish, he flung them at the colonels, shouting as he did so, “I only wish I could stand in Washington and throw these at the face of the men who decided to send us to this war,” and because these words were not enough – because the full violence of his outrage was not expunged in them – he added, “I would gnaw their flesh with my teeth, and tear them limb from limb.” Then he stalked away, and Lieutenant Youngman stomped after him, fixing a stare of death on the offended officers as they went.
In the days that followed, their two companies were sent scrounging around every rathole in the city, mixing it up with insurgents every other day, and piling up casualties and exhaustion far beyond any of their peers, as it seemed the entire onus of the conflict had been saddled on their young shoulders, with the fate of many nations. One night, after a particularly trying engagement, that cost the unit two of their dearest lives, and the legs of another man, Youngman lay sleeping in his quarters when he was lurched awake by the sound of a violent rattling, and when he searched the darkness with his imperfect eyes, he spied his friend bucking his cot back and forth in the throes of a restive sleep. In another instant, Wild was alert, his face awash with sweat and terror, and when he discovered his friend observing him, he stared at him with wide, imploring eyes, asking, “Brother, why have the generals assembled together? And why have they decided I must die?”
What senseless and yet knowing words were these? What echoes of night and phantoms? Youngman gaped, dumbfounded, at the question posed to him, but could not find it in him to dismiss it out of hand. But the pretense of insouciance was demanded by his friend’s anxiety, so he smirked and chuckled and quipped, “Some mosquito stung you while you slept, and now you dream terrible monsters,” but no levity registered on the tortured features of the other one. He only replied with an eerie certitude, “I am going to be killed in the battle, and boxed in a lightless coffin, and we will never speak to one another again,” which words turned Youngman serious, and angered at his friend’s unsoldierly doubts, causing him to growl back, “Brother, I used to expect sensible words from you, but now you are just yammering like an old woman,” but Wild, still entranced by his nighttime visitation, still confiding in its tangible impressions, only answered once more in that strangely oracular tone, “I have seen the times to come, my friend, disclosed in the times that are, and all I have said will unfold as surely as the morning. Listen!
“I stood on the plain, and there was a riot of voices in the air, with great quarrelling; a faceless, mindless contention, and no one believed in anything; no one thought anything was true. Then thunder severed the sky, and a puissant eagle swept down over the earth, but his eyes were like those of a lion. Blood matted his feathers, and the struggle of predation mussed all his array. I screamed out to you to save me, for you were by, but fear disarmed your audacity, and you did not come. So that chimera seized me with his talons, wrenching my arms behind me, and rushing me down to a chamber below the earth, where luminaries, unmade by history, knelt and ground dust for their food. There was no salvation there, as I had been taught to believe; no unveiling of things unseen. No angels uttered or routed the armies of night. Only an endless disputation prevailed, a vacuous tumult of pallid shadows bickering over words without conviction – ghosts of system masters, of skeptics and superseded kings, mocked with the refuse of their discredited reigns, who troubled the air like the tedious discord of toads, croaking unmeaningfully against one another forever and forever. Horror took hold of me, and my lips started trembling with a thousand desperate questions, but before I could implore a single one, the face of some sterile queen interposed itself between us, regarding my appearance with a look of mingled fury and astonishment, until in a flurry she demanded, as of the darkness itself, ‘Why has this one come here in the garb of a martyr? Why do men still slay for cause? What is there left to fight for over all of the earth?’”
Youngman listened, and as he did so, an uncanny guilt radiated along his nerves, as though the misprision his friend related had occurred in true and actual history, as though no real boundary obtained between this world and the nightmare realms, and his old impatience with hope, his resentment of its power to make him feel, and to reverence what he felt, came harrying him again, for no reason pliable to the language of this life. Quietly, without anger anymore – without the right to anger – but full of an endless pity, he whispered in reply, “You cannot fight like this, so doubtful about the goodness of our cause. I will go to the colonels. I will tell them you are troubled. I will have them send you home, so you can have your soul again.”
But Lieutenant Wild, pricked at the note of dishonor in the suggestion, recoiled at the sound of his friend’s words. “If courage and a good will cannot save me in this world,” he replied, with a firm tongue, “then I do not wish to be saved.” But even the subtle confidence of these words, frail and fleeting though it was, could not pass the rigor of his conscience. He recalled the pious young man he had been at the outset of his deployment, the magnanimous hero of his own conception, who landed in country with the intention to set all things to right, and then, how many times afterwards he had to compromise with his own soul, and set his hands to actions he could hardly bear to recall, so that it pained him even to consider the man that circumstance had made of him. Strangely, and for no earthly reason, he began to imagine that the outcome of the entire war hinged on the purity of his own soul, that the reason why the insurgency had grown so fierce and indominable was owing to the weight of his own transgressions, and that if he had only preserved the integrity of his will, had only withheld his hands from any of the dubious duties they had undertaken, then the cause of righteousness would have washed over that country like the waters of spring. If only his intelligence had been flawless, if only his bullets had flown with more discernment, then their side would have triumphed with the final triumph of goodness. So he thought, and the trampling pressure of these reflections seemed to crush him, until, in that state of senseless recrimination, he recalled the beautiful girl with whom he had lain, and how great a remorse had rankled his mind since that evening, and like a talisman carved to evil, he held her face before his mind for an execration, shouting:
“Damn that woman who embraced me in Zayouna! Damn the sweetness of her kisses! Why did she have to gaze on me so kindly? If I had never touched her; if I had never found pleasure in her flesh, I would not walk in dread of death, as I do now. I would have flung myself into the battle, heedless of its sting, and neither wounds nor screams of wounded men would have convinced me I was any less encompassed by the hand of God than when I ran heedless as a boy, dawn’s light on everything, strong and innocent and free.”
These words brought the image of the woman back to Youngman as well, but for his part, he felt no bitterness at the memory, only an old yearning, which, by its warmth, raised to his lips this sad, still reproach:
“If in the midst of all this terror and slaughter, brother, one beautiful spirit entered into our lives, and embraced us, why do you curse her?” and Lieutenant Wild, sensing the truth in the rebuke, bowed his head and kept silent for a while, until at last tears, such as had not clouded his war-like stare for ages, welled up in him, because peering through the shadows of the room, and studying the ambiguous features of his comrade’s bewildered face, he knew he must part from that sight forever, and a gust of love – of the sort that only stirs at leave-taking - came blowing over him out of his stifled depths, agonizing his spirit even as it comforted him, until with earnest, urgent whispers – fraught with the justification of his entire human passage - he pleaded with his friend: “Brother, when I am dead, and carried home in the box, do not forget about all we endured together, and how bravely we endured it,” but Youngman – too moved to respond, too convinced of his friend’s prophetic vision – lurched from his bed and stalked to the door and headed for the consoling spaces of the night, pausing at the threshold only to murmur some words of succor for his comrade, which would not come, and when they would not come, Lieutenant Wild relieved him of speech’s burden, saying, with great bewilderment in his voice, the only thing the hour would allow to be said: “They told us it would be different when we fought, brother; that it was for a different cause we fought. But war is eternally war.”
The vast, uncoded regions of the night sky stretched over Youngman, subsuming his afflicted thoughts into all the reaches of their black and vacuous corridors. He stared and he stared into their last margins, not waiting to be beckoned by their appearance, but obliterated; expunged as a nexus of feeling; his vulnerability to loss and confusion dissipated among the dumb, perpetual cataclysms of the stars. What was sorrow in him, he strained to mold to anger; what passion, to defiance; so that nothing in the world should have power over him; so that he should be free. Sands, city, revolving sky – whatever was tangible, whatever was to hand, the vindictive artistry of his will set to work inspiriting, invigorating, and thereby inhabiting the night with an infinity of combatants, over every one of which he could boast his soul’s invincibility. He was Fortress, the indominable one; the whole of his identity dwelt in his power, his imperviousness, his bent towards prevalence and domination. Now the impending loss of his friend, the vagaries of battle, the all-surpassing supremacy of death, asserted themselves, leveling his own forces of assertion to a par with the forces of air and water, degrading his dream of freedom to an aberration of dust and atoms. He could not will the world to what he wanted of it, and the recalcitrance of things – their affront to desire – exasperated him with rage; but because it was rage, and not anguish, he cherished it, nurtured it, confided in it rumors of the cosmos’ animosity, lest at any moment, the sadness of it all prevail upon him, and he suffer, and be weak. Better to flout the stars in their courses than be moved by them. So he sent his mind rampaging against the array of night and the city, desperate to fling himself against anything opposable, but when it reported nothing – when it concluded the triumph of nothing – he contented himself with the prospect of a restful dissolution among the forces countering him, of meditating on their positivity, their random, purposeless changes, and inferring what he could concerning the meaning of his own sorrow. Head bowed, and heaving frustrated sighs, he abandoned the night for his quarters, where Lieutenant Wild was already feigning sleep so as not to trouble his friend any longer, and as he returned through the threshold, he turned his back on the perplexing desert still stretching behind him, and overhead, the moon, dripping silence, and the weird scattered stars, dripping silence over the cities of the earth.
In the days to come – twelve in all – Lieutenant Wild continued to travail among the 3/6 as bravely as ever, confronting the dangerous spaces of the battlefield – the unshadowed roads, the revolting doorways – as bravely as ever he had. Not the least shirking or wavering on his gun betrayed the fears congealing about his heart, but in the quiet moments, the undutiful tedium that reigned between missions, when the soldiers idled in one another’s company and sunk gratefully back into the quotidian normality of jests and ribald anecdotes, the fraught stares of the man, his aloof silence, spoke all too plainly of the weight his omens laid upon him. Great pain it was to Youngman at such times to observe his friend mired in his own thoughts, and to speculate over all the bitterness those thoughts must be engendering in him, and yet to feel, all too certainly, his perfect impotence to stem the momentum of those thoughts. As one who might search frantically for a steady place to stand while his friend sinks deeper and deeper into a sink-hole, he watched in helpless dismay the signs of his friend’s failing grip on the certain world, his ever more fatal lurches into the vortex of the internal, with its sucking, building, overwhelming pull; its endless, undammable welter; the compulsion of its doubts, its questions and refusals; and the way the mind doomed itself to those depths through the activity of its own struggles. Willingly – gratefully – he would have thrown himself before the knowledge of death, as he had thrown himself before death itself, for the sake of his own friend, but from this adversary he could not spare his soul.
On the twelfth day since the nightmare, the companies were ordered to Amiliyah, a section on the outskirts of the city where the patterns of urban settlement tapered off gradually into the random outcroppings of the wilderness. They set forth as part of an enormous convoy – the greater part of the battalion – with the intention of overawing the inhabitants of that neglected quarter, who were suspected of harboring in their woeful shanties some of the city’s worst insurgents. Black Apaches clucked overhead, and the rumble of the Bradlees sent bunches of indisciplined livestock scurrying hither and yon through the vagaries of the dust they disturbed, and a single old goat-heard, scorched leathern by his labors, leaned on a fence and leveled an inscrutable stare upon the soldiers fanning out over the destitute village. Wild’s company was ordered to keep overwatch from the roof of an abandoned factory – one of two that girt the town. As he pushed through the heavy metal door that barred the roof, the radiance of the prospect stored up there captivated his vision all at once, and drowned the immediate tasks of the soldier in the breathless, meditative wonder of the young man. All was his to survey – the unmargined dunes, the clusters of weary palms, the particulate sky. From the heights of his perspective, they clung together with the serenity of a single thing, into which composition the rumblings of the tanks in the streets below and the hacking of the choppers up above obtruded like the clangorous faults of a distracted artificer. The war kept him from seeing, kept him from gathering the frayed ends of his world together, but he imagined that there was some perspective lingering an indeterminate number of stories overhead, from which even its incessant carnage could be reconciled to something like a meaning, and that if only he could find the stairway extending all the way through the smoke of the conflict to that clarifying pinnacle, then he could see everything at once, and understand, and be stilled.
Chucked in the middle of the dirt path that served as the village’s main thoroughfare, a dead water buffalo rotted unnaturally, far from the fields wherein his bulk was useful. A tangle of wires protruded from its rectum, the clumsy signal of an even clumsier explosive some insurgents had planted there, when they learned of the approach of the Americans. They found the beast wandering along the edges of a parched irrigation ditch, and immediately considered the ways the massive creature could abet their schemes of murder – not what soil it could turn, not what crops it could help invigorate, not what stores of sweetness and growth it could embellish. So they cut its throat, and dragged the rigged carcass to a place they thought most liable, making a sacrifice of its mass and its utility. The soldiers watched anxiously as an outfit of EOD technicians advanced upon the combustive animal, the peril of their own exposure on the roof momentarily diluted in their attention to the peril of their comrades’ task. That was why the crack of the HS50 from the other rooftop took a split second to register - so foreign, so strangely intrusive, was its sound – but when it did, each soldier frantically looked about to see whom fortune had selected, examining his own body first, lest a wound too great to feel was stricken there, then poring over the bodies of his fellow soldiers, lest instead, those others bled unawares. Wild’s first, fleeting instinct, too, was to inspect his men and their safety, but the spreading heat in the back of his head, and the swirling darkness in his eyes, and the insensate failure of his legs all informed him, in that instant before he tottered sidelong onto the concrete, that he need look no further for the chosen of the gun. An enveloping heaviness, as preludes the most welcome of slumbers, extinguished his consciousness, and delivered him far and incognizant from the terrified execrations of his men; their tremulous, futile assays at stanching his wound; their desperate imprecations to his wavering soul to stay and abide. All this clamor raged about his withdrawing brain as though it had no existence, and when the faint flicker of sentience once returned, the sole fact occupying it was the acrid taste of his own blood in his mouth, and the singular word “element” as its faint form of understanding. Then darkness again, negating the flurry of useless ministrations, the panicked screams into the radio, resounding through the air even as the dream of vision returned to his cradled head, as he caught the light, and the heavens sustaining the light, above his head, which made him ache one last time with that nameless aspiration to rise higher, and ever higher, though now the interval seemed far and cold and menacing, and far preferable – far more fitting – were the touch of one embodied like himself, to move and console him. With this instinct, impressions of Youngman quavered in and out of his swirling vision - not merely of the man’s physical lineaments, but the emotional atmosphere of his presence, the melded wonder of their time together, and this brought to him not comfort or resignation, but a bulging mountain of terror to think that never again, in the corporal way, would he fight at the side of his friend, or speak softly of life together, though now, on the cusp of the darkness, it seemed most urgent of all that he hold his hand once more, once more converse of the things they had endured, the things defeated. Hysterical, forlorn heaves waved over his body, as he reproached the fictive image of the friend that had abandoned him, crying, “Fortress…Fortress…we always said we would stand beside each other till the end; we always promised to be there until the end,” and the words, like dessert gales, went roaring out of him, barren and empty of promise.
Yet even as he spoke them, Youngman was thundering up the stairwell, having caught the purport of events over the radio, and abandoning his assigned position to tend to his stricken friend. The sight of him and his blood on the pavement, the vacuous sheen of the stare that failed to rise to his own, sickened him at the heart, and froze his limbs with a cold, portentous certainty. Kneeling in the oozing vitality of his comrade, he closed his eyes and bowed his head gravely, as one present at the performance of some solemn ritual. He struggled to remove the gloves from his hands, and rummaged urgently over the other’s armor and accoutrements to find out his body, and touch the incarnate soul so briefly with him. Some impression of his hand escaped to Lieutenant Wild’s slipping brain, and concentrated that soldier’s sight instantly, so that now he could delineate Youngman’s face before him, and wonder, with the analogy of a doubt, of the nebulous sort that alone can occupy a failing mind, whether it was a true or a fantastic vision, though now, for some reason, the boundaries between the two seemed far less meaningful, far less sure than they had ever seemed to him. Something like joy, something like hope, irradiated his agonized features at the sight, while his left arm spasmodically clutched at the arm extending to him, tremulous with gratitude. He worked his jaw with the laborious strain of one initiating a piece of machinery long disused, but could not clamp down on the shape of the language he needed, and Youngman, watching through tears the pain of these final exertions, and waiting faithfully, silently on their issue, thought he seemed on the verge of a great pronouncement, the utterance of one rapt through luminous heavens, pausing at the margin just long enough to whisper their unspeakable secret to a friend fated to stay behind. But when Lieutenant Wild at last contorted his tongue to speech; when at last the remnants of his mind found out an adequate word, there was no wisdom or revelation in it. He craned, he pressed the drowning syllables from his lips, and he said: “I only go before you.”