I just discovered that Humvees are keyless! A switch for the engine, a switch for the lights and off you go. To me it sounds odd, but then my keychain is so damn cool. If the shorter snippets bother you – I say this because it enervates me, it's done in the interest of brevity since stringing all these together would add a good thousand words in background fodder without advancing the plot an iota and that annoys me even more.
Du'aa: A suplication; in this case of a Qur'anic verse said for the souls of the dead by their friends and family.
"Are you really leaving Sergeant?"
Dumphy was watching his compass pack, unsure of whether he wanted to beg to come along or help him go over his packing list. Shit missions came and went. People got transferred for having sex in the laundry room and the toilet paper came in varying degrees of roughness proportional to the laxative power of the mess hall food but Staff Sergeant Christopher 'Scream' Silas could always be depended upon to be in a bad mood and to scream. It was a loud, dysfunctional constant on which to measure change but then Pvt. Frank Dumphy was getting a little long in the tooth for a real security blanket.
"Don't worry Dim, I'll bring you back a snow globe." Dumphy scratched the bandages in his hands surprised by both the humor and the sedate tone in his superior's voice. Sergeant Murphy poked his head in the tent.
"We're leaving in ten man."
Silas folded his special pass and travel orders neatly into thirds then into a jacket pocket before he slipped into his flak jacket. He slung his limp duffel bag on one shoulder and followed Sgt. Murphy to the Humvee waiting to join the convoy headed to Marez. If Silas was happy, Murphy had been made ecstatic by the prospect of a post exchange with more than three items in stock and the junk food, oh the junk food. Murphy jumped in the driver's seat and pushed the handbrake forward bursting with nervous energy.
"St. Claire get me that map?" SSgt. Silas asked settling as much as the uncomfortable seats allowed.
"Yup." Murphy said pointing to a wad of papers wedged between the windshield and the dash. Silas reached for the photocopies in question and tried to locate Jamila's street address. "Raincoats were extra," Murphy added with a sly smile throwing a six-deep strand of Trojans on Silas' lap, "those are on the house though. I fleeced Fox last night."
"What the fuck?" Silas said arching an eyebrow. He began to give them back.
"Don't ask, don't tell man." Murphy slapped the strand of condoms back to their new owner. "Just do the world a favor and get yourself laid tonight."
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'No soldier is allowed in the store without a weapon, by order of the camp commander.'
Home was now close enough to smell. The promise of sleeping on a real mattress had done wonders for Silas' mood and he chuckled at the sign posted on the door to the Post Exchange welcoming the rush of cool air on his face as he walked into the store. Murphy headed straight towards the extensive selection of potato chips in the back of the store and he stood in front of the signs that listed each of the aisle's content wondering what he was doing. Would it be a current address? Would she be there? Would she want to see him? Was he an idiot? Was there any merit to Hunter's suggestion that Jamila would have latched on to anyone who could take her out of Al-Hadith?
Silas grabbed the fanciest box of chocolates at eye level then put them back. It'd been 90 degrees in the Humvee. He'd have nothing but liquid chocolate and silvery foil before even making it out of the base. Stuffed animals seemed ridiculous. He discarded music and movies on grounds of practicality and taste, –his preference for obscure documentaries was definitely an acquired taste, and he moved one aisle over questioning his sanity as he went. Two years of sandstorms and baby-wipes based hygiene changed people right?
He scanned the paperback rack and began discarding most of the available selection because he knew better than to try to woo a woman with anything by Tom Clancy or because he had no idea what half the books with interchangeable author's names were about. He looked past everything by John Grisham and every book with Fabio look-alikes on the cover and then happened upon it, an Oprah's Book Club selection, something his tenth grade English teacher would have liked, something that might not embarrass him completely if he got past her door: Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August scuffed but more or less intact in a pretty, illustrated box.
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After ten minutes of staring at his phone and willing it to ring, it was pretty clear Colonel Casper Ryan didn't have any extraordinary brain powers left undiscovered. The black, dated telephone on Uday Hussein's former desk had not burst into flames, melted, moved an inch nor rang despite his undivided attention. His grip on the handset had turned his right hand white from fingertips to wrist, while he sat there waiting for a snowstorm in hell. Three more minutes ticked by on the wall clock before the phone came alive.
"Ryan," he barked.
"I'm sorry man," the other party apologized "she won't do it. I even offered more money. I'm sorry."
He hung up foregoing sundry pleasantries and relaxed his death grip on the handset wincing a he tried to stretch his cramped hand, now officially out of strings to pull and people to call. In two more hours, the late Jerusalem Harms, first packed in ice, would be loaded into a C-130 and flown home to be buried next to a father she had hated, who had died without ever bothering to know her, in a ceremony she would have despised. He took inventory of his desktop; the metro section of the Washington Post, a helmet, dusty office supplies and the useless phone.
'Captain Jerusalem Heather Harms, 36, of Alexandria, VA died September 27th from third degree burns following the explosion of a Medevac helicopter by enemy forces in Mosul, Iraq. She is the 1,903rd US soldier to die in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the 41st female fatality of said conflict...'
Ryan traced the outline of her face in the obit's picture and the tiny black print beside it where his face would have been if the photo hadn't been cropped to fit. The picture came alive in his mind with painful detail: the room service operator's confusion when Jerusalem ordered two quarts of ice cream for breakfast, the maid who snapped the shots, their suite in the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, the smell of her skin, how she wouldn't stop running her hands against his three day beard, the dimples in her smile when she jumped on his lap for the second photo; everything about the last time she had been his wife.
"I'm sorry baby," he managed choking on the words.
He pulled the helmet closer to him and caressed the camouflaged lining, thumbing each of the letters in the nametape tenderly, like one would baby a child. The 'h' and the 's' in the name were scorched leaving only the 'arm' in the middle to identify the former owner. Ryan turned the helmet upside down and reached in the concave bowl to pull out one of the gray foam donuts everyone seemed to purchase though they didn't make the helmets that much more comfortable. He closed his hand around the cheap synthetic padding and buried his nose in it telling himself it smelled like her strawberry shampoo even though it sat in the sun for days in a makeshift memorial made up of her brother's and the other casualties' gear before he could make off with it.
He had failed the only person to ever see him at his worst, the only person to ever matter beyond how thy could be exploited, to see him naked of all the shit, of all the filters he needed to do his job and accept him at that basest, barest form. He only realized he'd been crying because the front of his jacket was wet to the touch.
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Al-Bareed was fairly well patrolled and the section of Road 52 that Silas was interested in was in good enough repair, urban, boring, a barber shop, fruit vendors, kitschy trinket stands set up for the soldiers on patrol with disposable income and bored enough to spend. He'd done his homework and it'd been lucrative for Cpl. St. Claire to the tune of fifty dollars, his price to keep Silas' interest in the locals under the radar barring torture; unlikely for a supply clerk. No one in their right mind wanted Mop & Glo that bad.
"I'll wait for five minutes," Murphy said once both men were satisfied anvils were not going to rain down from the heavens, nothing was going to blow up, get shot at, or be otherwise martyred in the vicinity of their vehicle and that it was safe to step outside. "If I don't see your ugly head I'm going back to base 'till shift change and if um if anyone asks, you are um… busy with a new outreach program," he added clearing his throat conspiratorially.
To Murphy growing amusement, for the fourth time in one day the company grouch found something funny. He watched his friend walk down the side of a garden and reappear half way up a haphazard stairwell with the wrapped gift he'd refused to show him secured protectively under his free arm. Silas vanished behind a bend in the stairs but his shadow danced on the opposite wall as he changed his weight from one foot to the other. Murphy started his stopwatch never losing sight of second floor praying in Gaelic. He too had an affectionate friend to visit for some rest and recuperation of his own and he didn't want anyone cramping his style. A door opened with three minutes to go and Murphy doubled the speed of his supplications, smiling widely when the door closed behind his fellow Ranger. He'd gone through twenty Hail Marys when the watch's beeping let him off the hook.
Silas would have liked to yell 'do-over' when he heard Jamila's voice through the door asking who was knocking and he yelled a simple 'it's me.' Me who he'd asked himself preoccupied not noticing the speed with which the locks on the door were turning and the smile on her face only after she threw herself around his neck and pulled him into the living room speaking excitedly in Arabic, much too fast for his transient familiarity to make any sense of the words.
"Allâhu Akbar," she whispered letting go of him, calmer now. "God is great." Hesitation crept into her stance. She loosened the black veil around her head and put it back up again.
"I like your new haircut," Silas said trying to get rid of whatever had dampened her joy. Jamila's hair was short, cut almost like a man's and in a completely different way, the look still suited her.
"Doctor Jerusalem cut it, it's easier to hide the scar this way," she said self-consciously covering the three inch spot on the right side of her head that her ex-husband had scalped her five months earlier. Silas pulled her closer having shed his helmet and his M4 on a chair. She had a neat pink scar in her neck over her vocal cords from surgery to repair a fractured larynx and lighter scars on her chin and along her jawline where her headscarf pins had cut her face in two places during the same struggle. He brushed the older scars with the back of his hand and kissed her lower lip.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be," she said simply, kissing him back. "I must turn off the stove!" Jamila disappeared with a blur of dark blue fabric in her wake leaving Silas alone in the living room free to look around. The furniture was spare, shabby and functional, nothing like the luxury of the house in Al-Hadith. The tile work and the finishes in general were as shoddy as the work on the stairs outside with tiles crooked or missing entirely and gaping holes between the window frame and the wall. He scanned the paperbacks crammed into several flimsy, squat bookcases trying to see if she had the Faulkner books he'd bought at the Post Exchange.
"Do you want tea?" Jamila asked from the kitchen. "It's fairly fresh. I think. Sit down."
"Okay." Silas untied the strings holding the curtains back and let them fall over the windows before he sat on the edge of the sofa holding the wrapped books like they were a cure for cancer. Jamila came out with a teapot in one hand and two highball glasses in another.
"The good china is for state dinners," she said pushing a coffee table closer to the sofa before setting down the old teapot.
"Are you okay?" He asked taking the proffered tea, noticing the palms of her hands were callused.
"I have a vegetable garden," she said following his eyes. "It's not forced labor, look." Jamila lifted the curtain and pointed outside to a patch of brown dirt and tall, sickly plants that didn't look very different from weeds. "They are supposed to be corn but I'm not a very good gardener." Silas looked at the scraggly shrubs he'd passed on the way up deciding then and there to keep his comments to himself. He coughed trying to clear some of the ground mint leaves stuck on his throat. "Tea's not my thing either." She laughed, taking his glass. "Don't worry, I won't make you drink any more, I know it tastes like dishwater."
"I brought you something." He put the books on her lap, feeling decidedly sophomoric at almost 32. "I hope you haven't read those yet." Jamila peeled back the corners of the pretty green paper and turned the books over on her lap. She skimmed through each of the titles separately with tears in her eyes. "Is something wrong?" He asked. The chocolates might have been better after all.
"Is it true Doctor Jerusalem died?"
"Captain Harms?" She nodded wiping her face with a sleeve.
"Yes, she was killed," he said swapping died for killed, needing to make the distinction.
"Inna lil-laahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji'oon." Jamila whispered the du'aa for the dead and clutched the books to her chest. "I kept hoping the Mullah was lying. She brought me books when I was in the hospital." She was talking to her hands on her lap, trying to steel her voice. She looked up fiercely. "Did you get the bastards who did it?"
"Yes."
She was quiet for a long time.
Oh yeah and even though technically this was all supposed to be one chapter, I had to chop it agian. It was over 5,000 words!
Thy author.
Bianca: You'll notice I vetoed your Ryan objection. Coffee's on me.
