Youngblood by Matt Gallagher Page B

lawyer jargon that confused more than clarified. I patted my own breast pocket and found it empty. I must’ve left my card in the laundry again.
    Except now it didn’t matter that those had been the rules of engagement. It didn’t matter that the car matched the description given to them by battalion intelligence. It only mattered that there hadn’t been any guns or IED-making materials or even a switchblade in the car. It only mattered that there were now two dead hajji civilians and three injured hajji civilians and the company commander was furious because the battalion commander was furious because the brigade commander was furious and he was so fucked, they were all so fucked. One of the dead men’s mothers was on the side of the road, and he couldn’t bring himself to go over there.
    He sat down on the ramp and bowed his head against balled fists.
    â€œSayonara Station,” I muttered. “He was right.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œNever mind. Don’t worry about the crowd, man, I’ll handle that. And don’t worry about higher. I mean, these things happen. It’ll be okay.”
    The void in his white, watery eyes told me he didn’t believe me. As I walked toward the gathering crowd, I realized that I didn’t believe myself, either.
    About twenty Iraqis stood on the gravel, some of them pilgrims, others bystanders. Facing them was a group of first platoon soldiers tending to the wounded or the grieving. My men were helping. Doc Cork had his medical kit out; he was dressing the head wound of a gored Iraqi woman, telling her through Snoop to go to the hospital and yelling at Alphabet to find her bottled water. A jundi consoled a frightened boy squatting in the dirt. Chambers held back a pair of angry young men, skinny as thatch, who wanted to get to the white car on the road. Chambers told them to wait, and when they kept pressing forward, he squared his rifle like a pugil stick and pushed them back.
    The mother was there, too, dressed in a cotton striped dress anda red head scarf, surrounded by consolers. She wailed in hot Arabic, thumping her chest and lifting her head skyward, as if wresting fault from above. She was short with wide shoulders, what my college friends would’ve called a Soviet plow, not that any of us had ever worked a farm. Trench-deep cracks in her face rose and fell through her skin. I got as close to her as the protective circle would allow—five feet or so—when an older man with a salt-and-pepper beard grabbed my forearm.
    â€œ Fasil! ” he said, citrus on his breath and a large lip sore on his mouth. “ Fasil! ”
    I looked at him with confusion and shook my arm free. He stared back with the hard, unblinking eye of poverty.
    I took a step back. I’m no great Satan, I thought. He reached for my forearm again. I took another step back. He kept repeating the same word, so I turned to the soldiers and asked if anyone knew what he wanted.
    â€œ Fasil ,” Snoop called out. He and Sipe were dealing with other enraged locals farther down the roadside. “Blood moneys America owes their family. To make things good.”
    I pulled out my notepad and a pen, wrote down the outpost’s phone number, and handed it to the man. Then I pantomimed calling a telephone. He nodded slow, as if trapped in a fever dream.
    The crowd gradually dispersed. Alphabet ran up to say that the commander wanted us at Camp Independence, “Time now.” The checkpoint was going to be crawling with field-grade officers soon. I patted Doc Cork on the shoulder as he packed up his medical kit and walked over to my platoon sergeant and terp.
    â€œThe driver was addicted to khat, according to one of his neighbors,” Sipe said, lighting a cigarette. “Might explain why he kept driving.”
    â€œKhat is nothing,” Snoop said. “Children chew it. He just made a stupid mistake. Arabs, yo.”
    I felt the distant pangs