But he liked the job. He didn’t want to be stuck inside a tank. Up here he could spot ambushes and bombs. He had so much to watch for, and yet he couldn’t get trigger-happy. A C Company gunner had shot a kid carrying a toy gun, a mistake J.C. had promised himself he’d never make. He knew how to make a crowd back off without firing a shot, and how to tell the heavy thump of a mortar from the deadly hiss of a RPG. Even the officers had figured out he was the best gunner in the company, maybe the whole battalion. So he always rode with Captain Jackson. The Humvee turned left on Santa Fe, a main east-west avenue in central Baghdad. The Iraqis didn’t call the road Santa Fe, of course. They had their own haji name for it, Mohammed Avenue or something. J.C. wasn’t entirely sure. None of the soldiers spoke Arabic, so for the sake of convenience the battalion had renamed the roads after American cities.
Now, squinting into the setting sun as the convoy headed west, J.C. wished he had learned more about Iraq. He had picked up a few Arabic words from Salim, Captain Jackson’s interpreter, a teenager the Mad Dogs called Harry because he wore little round glasses like Harry Potter. Salim had taught him that
Even so, J.C. felt like he was on the moon most of the time. He didn’t understand this place. Why did the men wear those long robes that looked like dresses? Why did they hold hands? And what was up with the women? He’d been inside Iraqi houses with Captain Jackson, and it was like the women didn’t even exist. Once they had served tea, but usually they hid in the back of the house. Not that J.C. had tried to find them. Command Sergeant Major Holder, the senior enlisted man in the battalion, had made that clear. Don’t look at the women, don’t talk to the women, and never — ever—
touch the women.
The Iraqis were hospitable enough, anyhow. Even the ones who barely had furniture made sure to offer up tea and Cokes to Captain Jackson when he visited. But you couldn’t trust them much. J.C. had seen the captain lose his temper after one long meeting with a local sheikh. “Just be honest with me. Tell me the truth,” Jackson had said. The sheikh had flat-out laughed when he heard Salim translate.
“The truth?” he said. “I save the truth for Allah.”
.
the humvee halted as the cars ahead jammed around a traffic circle. Everyone wanted to be home by dark, when kidnappers and guerrillas ruled the streets, sharks cruising in black BMW sedans with smoked-glass windows. J.C. cursed as he looked up the road at an old Mercedes truck belching diesel smoke. He hated getting stopped in traffic. Anybody could take a pop at them. And he hated dusk, when the shadows offered cover but there was still too much light for his night-vision goggles.
Around him the call to evening prayer echoed through the streets, an eerie amplified chant that J.C. knew he would always be able to hear, no matter how far behind he left this place. The sound of Baghdad.
He angled the.50-cal down a notch and watched the men on the sidewalks, looking for the glint of metal hidden in a robe. The Humvee jerked forward, then stopped again. “Come on, move,” he yelled down to Voss.
“You want to drive?” Voss yelled back.
“Fuck no.”
“Then shut up.”
As they inched ahead J.C. wondered what had happened to this country. Anybody could see it had been rich once. Their base had been one of Saddam’s palaces, a huge building with an entrance hall three stories high, marble floors, and gold walls. The Baghdad airport looked newer than the one in El Paso. The highway to Falluja, that shithole, was six lanes wide, good as any interstate. Baghdad had twenty-story hotels and big mosques with beautiful blue domes. J.C. had even seen dusty cracked advertisements for Air France and Japan Airlines. People had once wanted to come here; the Iraqis had once had enough money to leave.
