News From the Red Desert by Kevin Patterson

supply officer was the twelfth he had worked with since 2002. By now, the person everyone was terrified of was usually Anakopoulus. Today he was the one who was scared. He stood up and started to shave. He cut himself twice.

THE PROMOTIONS LIST
    I n March 2005, the former private from Bar Harbor was told by his platoon commander that soon he would be a sergeant. He had been in Baghdad continuously for two years and no one had more combat experience than he did, between Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyway, they needed more NCOs with field experience. Promotions come fast in war. All you had to do was not get in obvious trouble. Not get caught letting your guys do crazy shit, not shoot your mouth off to some reporter or another.
    Which is why the sergeant from Boise learned on the same day as the same platoon commander that he would be commissioned and that his transfer to intelligence had been approved. It meant leaving the Special Forces, which bothered him. He would be promoted to captain, in recognition of his experience as an NCO. The platoon commander, a captain himself, told him this as if it was the biggest gift imaginable. But leaving the Special Forces pained the sergeant from Boise so deeply that he hardly knew whether to be happy or not. He had decided to apply for the commission because he wanted more thoughtful work and because he was tired of killing. That distaste had not yet been discerned by his comrades and so there was still time to act. Another six months or a year, though,and it would be too late. He would be rotated home and given a dead-end desk job. Recruiter, maybe. So it was time to make a move.
    The captain from Utah who had been with them at Taliban’s Last Stand was now a major. He was sitting in an office not far from them, and had just learned that he would become a lieutenant colonel. He had been surprised by the news, and spun his pencil around his finger, thinking.
    In peacetime, a promotion was a life-changing event. You called your wife immediately and you could expect to buy many rounds of drinks at the mess. Promotions came twice a decade, at best, and often they did not come at all. Perfectly competent and ambitious officers retired as majors at fifty-five. But demonstrated ability in battle propelled anyone to the top of all the lists. Lieutenant colonel. He would get his own battalion. More time over here. His wife would pretend to be pleased, for him. He would call her. In a minute.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Green Beans café, KAF
    Rashid Siddiqui
    I met the manager, Rami Issay, when I arrived here after a four-day bus ride from Islamabad. He was excited about just having bought a chess set for his establishment. He said that it was so that he could improve the atmosphere. “What is wanted here on Kandahar Airfield is a proper café—not some industrial-scale coffee-dispensing
depot,
” he declared.
    “In a proper café, people linger. They do not buy their cappuccino hurriedly, and run away back to work, before anyone sees them idling.
Idling
is what a café is all about. Or else coffee would just come as a pill of some sort. And anyway, idlers,” his voice dropped conspiratorially, “need the cover of other idlers.”
    Rami Issay was a jowly jolly little man from Karachi. He told me, his new employee, that he’d lived in Leeds for a dozen years before having to return to Pakistan. There he built and then spectacularly exploded a computer sales mini-empire in the middle of the longest economic expansion Southeastern Pakistan had ever known. If perhaps he were one ten-thousandth as perceptive as he clearly imagines himself to be, he would not now be a migrant worker and bankrupt employed by the Kellogg Brown and Root corporation to run one of their Starbucks-in-camo Green Beans coffee shops on bloody Kandahar Airfield in whatamounts to a large shed. Indeed I soon found out his own expertise was in idling, and in this matter, he knew of what he spoke.
    When I signed up I was not told where