None Left Behind by Charles W. Sasser Page A

average size with an olive Mediterranean complexion and quick, dark eyes.
    â€œThis ain’t no place for a good Southern boy,” Smith said.
    Smith was asking him if he was scared without actually coming out and saying it. It was so dark in the vehicle by this time that faces even close up were blurs against a darker curtain.
    â€œI’m scared spitless,” Mayhem admitted, interpreting the code. One thing about Mayhem, he never hid behind any phony macho.
    â€œNaw, man,” Fletcher said. “Know why? Yea, though we walk through The Triangle of The Valley of Death, we shall fear no evil—’cause we the baddest motherfuckers in
this
valley.”
    â€œYou got that right.”
    They gripped their weapons and peered out the windows into the forestof shadows creeping closer all around them. Mayhem remained silent.
He
was scared; he had been in Baghdad during the 10 th Mountain Division’s last deployment in 2004–2005. Only a fool or a greenhorn wasn’t scared.
    The moon shone weak and pale, stars cold and distant. A cow lowed somewhere, answered by sheep bleating from somewhere else.
    â€œYou know,” said Smith, “one of these days we’re all gonna be back at Fort Drum having some beers and we’re gonna look back on this shit and just laaaugh.”
    â€œMaybe so,” Pitcher agreed. “But right now all this shit does is suck.”
    â€œYou gotta love this job,” Sergeant Parrish joked half-hearted from the turret. “Guys—”
    He froze.
    â€œHold everything. I thought I heard something.”
    Tension shot right out the top of the hummer. Parrish scanned through his NVs. After a few minutes, he relaxed.
    â€œIt’s okay. It’s a fucking goat.”
    â€œLight him up. Barbecue the bastard,” Pitcher proposed.
    â€œNow look what you’ve done,” Smith said plaintively. “I’ve gotta piss.”
    â€œQuit being a pussy. Suck it up. You know, the way I look at things, I’d kill every bitch and her son from here to Baghdad if it’d get me home a day earlier.”
    Looking through NVs made everything liquid and surreal. There wasn’t much to see anyhow, what with the foliage and shadows. This land along the Euphrates was nothing like the desert most of the soldiers imagined Iraq to be. It was a very scary place where you couldn’t afford to let down security. Ghosts of night fog creeping through the trees became, in the imagination, terrorists and bombers plotting, scheming, waiting for the right time to attack. The brush of a breeze through palm fronds, the snap of a falling twig, the sleepy chirrup of a night bird was enough to make soldiers flinch and look nervously about.
    Hardly anyone dared doze off. Bad guys could sneak right up on the trucks and no one would know it until they were right
there
.
    Around midnight, the sound of a distant explosion reverberated across the land, further escalating tension inside the trucks. Mayhem wasn’tsupposed to be here, not this time. Except for Stop-Loss, he would have been a civilian by now, hanging around the beaches back in Florida ogling the foxes in their teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy bikinis.
    He thought about going home at the end of all this and never coming back to this shitbag country where the babes covered up their faces, hajjis shot off AK-47s in the air every time they got drunk, and where American soldiers in The Triangle of Death were the biggest targets in the world.

NINE
    For the first platoon to venture onto Malibu Road and
stay,
daybreak seemed an eternity coming. But arrive it did at last, as all things in time do, with a burst of color that first illuminated the sluggish stretch of Euphrates River visible from the curve in the road. After touching the river gently, slow sunlight melted yellow butter over an expanse of forest and undergrowth before touching the roofs of the few houses in the vicinity and reaching the covey of four