Youngblood by Matt Gallagher Page A

thin plume of smoke floated up from its engine. The car was between two orange cones used as checkpoint markers. Four other cars and a minibus had pulled off to the side of the road behind it, none having pushed past the first orange cone. Windshield shards glinted under the sunlight like daggers.
    I walked past the other platoon’s vehicles to the white car. At the driver’s door, I leaned in through the open window and smelled iron. A heavyset man in a dishdasha sat back in his seat with a frozen glare. I’d seen the look before, on my mom, when we’d almost hit a deer on a mountain drive. Both his feet seemed to still be searching for the brake. Machine gun rounds had chewed through his body, leaving slabs of ill-cut flesh and human sludge. As I peered closer, I saw that the right side of his chest had been separated from the rest of him, held together by licorice sticks of entrails.
    I wanted to think he hadn’t suffered, but that wasn’t really possible. I figured him to be about Chambers’ age, in his early thirties, which wasn’t old but probably older in Iraq than it was in America. On the other side of the car, sprawled across the passenger seat and the center console, was a smaller man of similar age and dress. He had jug ears and a furry soul patch, and a cluster of large, red polka dots perforated the right side of his body. He must’ve turned to his side at the last second in an effort to shield himself.
    A group of first platoon soldiers arrived, pulling out the passenger’s body by the core. A stream of blood began pouring out over the center console. The soldiers groaned. I left them to their task, walking back down the road.
    The gunner of the lead Stryker was still in the turret, shouldersslumped, hands tucked into his ballistic vest. I called up at him, but he either couldn’t hear me or didn’t care to. I couldn’t make out his face. Rather than continue to bother him—for what? I thought—I walked to the back of the vehicle, where I found their platoon leader standing on the downed ramp, finishing a radio call.
    â€œPorter,” he said. He took off his helmet with shaking hands. Small pockmarks covered his temples and cheeks. He took a swig of bottled water. “We are so fucked.”
    â€œ Shaku maku , bro,” I said, hoping the native greeting would both relax and ground him. “What happened?”
    He told me they’d been at the checkpoint for seven hours, since before dawn. There hadn’t been much traffic all morning, either foot or vehicle, just the steady drip to which we’d all been subjected. They’d been set to rotate back to the outpost an hour earlier, until higher had ordered them to stay indefinitely because battalion intelligence had determined that “military-age males might use the religious pilgrimage as cover to run guns into Ashuriyah in a white sedan.”
    â€œI asked if one of the targets was named Mohammed,” he said. “They said to stop being a smartass and report back when we found something.”
    His platoon’s dismount team had been finishing the search of another car when the white one appeared, moving quickly and traveling west. It hadn’t slowed at the first orange cone.
    â€œWe’re well into this,” he said, his voice turning barbed. “They know the rules.”
    He’d been in the stone guard shack when he heard the gunner and the dismounts yelling for the car to stop. It’d all happened so fast. When the car neared the second orange cone, the gunner opened up with the machine gun, aiming for the engine. Those were the rules of engagement. The gunner had followed the rules of engagement. The platoon leader pulled out a laminated index card from his breast pocket to reinforce this point; all soldiers were supposed to carry one, as it came printed with the updated rules for when it was okay to shoot and when it wasn’t,albeit in nebulous