“FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED,” RAMOS SAID. HE WAS CATALOGING HIS collection and deciding whether scrutiny from the officers necessitated burying some of his plunder. What had begun with a few enemy shells and bayonets for fun was now beginning to look like the seeds of a proper retail outlet. Jimmy was impressed, first and foremost, with the level of organization. Posters with Saddam’s face and emblazoned with Arabic script were rolled into a single tube. Flags, with different patterns but all some combination of red, black, white, and green, were neatly folded together. He had medals and insignia clinking together in a metal bandage box.
“Isn’t it stealing, though?” Jimmy said glumly.
“It is not stealing,” Ramos insisted in his businessman’s voice, which regularly supplanted his gangster tone now. Fatherhood could change a man, Jimmy thought, even if he had never seen his baby. So could war. He wondered which was a stronger pull on Ramos right now. “Much of what you see here is the result of barter. That is a long-standing tradition, trading things that I have a lot of—like MREs—for things that they have a lot of, like shit from Iraq.” Jimmy had observed before that the private could bring a lawyerly logic to bear on the question of his enterprise when called upon to defend it.
“Those are the government’s MREs,” Jimmy pointed out.
“Damn, if you’re going to be getting picky like that, Jimmy, it’s going to be hard for us to, like, engage this debate and shit.” Ramos looked a little wounded. “They’re burning flags, tearing up signs. It’s worthless to them. Back home it isn’t.”
“I guess,” Jimmy admitted.
“They don’t need all this Saddam shit in the new Iraq. They have to look to the future, J.,” Ramos said optimistically. “For my little girl, it’s bringing us another future, in a place I call Baby Gap.”
“The promised land,” Jimmy agreed.
“For the general audience at home, it needs Saddam on it. They don’t know nothing about Iraq without Saddam.” He held up a watch with Saddam’s face on it, off center so the hands didn’t sprout indelicately from his nostrils. “On the other hand.” He reached into his bag. “There are real military collectors, they want real hardware. Like this shit. Mortar sights and sniper sights. I got one of each.” He pulled them from a small sack. The mortar sight looked like an old sailing tool to chart the stars, the sniper one a sleek modern spyglass.
“Wow,” Jimmy said.
“Soldiers are all into weapons. So like, that shitty-ass pistol I had? I traded that for some more silverware. Here.” It was wrapped in a pair of his drab underwear, the softest—and Jimmy hoped the cleanest—thing he had to protect his most valuable loot. It looked to Jimmy like any fine place setting, but there was the familiar eagle stamped into the handle, marking it as Iraqi treasure. “See, even if Iraqi stuff isn’t worth anything, this is real silver, so it’s always gonna be worth it.”
“Real silver,” Jimmy repeated. He was sweating hard even in the shade. With the electrical grid out of service, there was no air-conditioning in the rising temperatures of the Iraqi spring. Jimmy could not even imagine summer. While the constant heat was oppressive, it took second place behind the swarms of large blackflies as the most unpleasant thing about Baghdad in April.
“That’s my best piece,” Ramos said. “But, shit, I heard about this dude got a gold-plated pistol from a presidential palace. That’d probably put my little girl through college.”
“How are you going to get it back home?” Jimmy asked.
“Some things maybe don’t have to go home. You can sell to the guys coming in, the ones who missed the gold rush. Other things mail home real easy in a letter—patches, insignias, things like that. Money,” he said. He had a thick sheaf of banknotes with Saddam Hussein in a suit and tie on each. “It goes in the envelope home, at U.S. postage rates. Thirty-seven cents. It’s bonus time.”
“This is so…American,” Jimmy said.
“Dick Cheney getting rich. Why should Halliburton make all the cash? Halliburton didn’t have to kill nobody. I did.”
“I could probably help you get some stuff home,” Jimmy said.
“We can talk about that when it’s time to ship out,” Ramos said. “But don’t think I don’t feel the love, Jimmy Steves.” He punched Jimmy affectionately in the shoulder.
“No, I mean I might be going soon,” Jimmy said. “Isn’t the war over?”
“Damn,” Ramos said. “It’s like I’m losing a brother.”
“Come on, now,” Jimmy said, feeling bashful.
“And gaining a smuggler.” Ramos had suckered him.
“I see how it is,” Jimmy said. They both laughed, but the look in the young private’s eyes was genuinely sad. Jimmy took out his laptop. Ramos began carefully ordering the Iraqi bills by denomination, an inflation-wrecked fortune shuffled through a nineteen-year-old’s fingers.
Jimmy stood by a decimated block of houses, interviewing residents. The men wore Western clothes, tracksuits and sneakers or slacks and button-downs. In Baghdad there was little of the traditional dress of the hinterland. While a surprising number of Baghdadis spoke English, it was usually broken and imprecise. It frustrated Jimmy that he couldn’t speak Arabic.
“Ask them when it got hit,” Jimmy said to the chubby, mustached man who was acting as an impromptu translator. There was an overflow of opinions raining down in their language that must have gone well beyond the date and time. Strangers bicycling past pulled up to hear the complaints to the journalist. As always, the children were the most curious.
“One week,” the volunteer interpreter said at last.
“How many dead?” Jimmy said.
“Twenty-one.”
“And what have they done for shelter, shelter”—he made an upside-down V with his hands, hoping it suggested roof—“since…” He didn’t finish because of the explosion—not too far away, but not close enough to present an obvious danger to them. Jimmy started to try to ask the question again but stopped. No one seemed too worried just then. There were so many explosions. But he looked over his shoulder instead of repeating himself.
It was a small trail of smoke, campfire small. It could have been a grenade or even something trivial like a car accident and a bad gas can. Already the wind was teasing the belch of black smoke apart into diffuse strands. There was no sound, just a widening smear of gray in the blue sky.
Jimmy acted nonchalant, in the mode of the new Jimmy who wasn’t afraid of explosions and gunfire. He flipped a page in his reporter’s notebook for fresh scribbling. He looked up again. There wasn’t a trace of the fumes from the little blast to be seen, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it. They had left the Humvee around the corner, past another apartment building that had been spared by the bomb that leveled its neighbor. The explosion might have come from that direction, if he wasn’t imagining it. He put the top on his pen. He put the pen and the notebook in his backpack. “I think…I think I need to go back to my guys,” he told the local interpreter. “I’m really sorry. I’ll come back.”
Instead the man followed a few steps behind Jimmy, and the people crowded after them, maybe because they were telling their story and they didn’t want to stop or just because they were inquisitive. Jimmy broke into a run as he went back up the street. He stumbled on a loose paving stone but kept going without looking down. When he found his crew, there would be mockery to come. The new Jimmy was still yellow, still spooked by a little pop in the distance, one of the smallest explosions he’d heard. He turned the corner.
“Oh, no. Oh, no. No, no, no,” he said. He wanted to sit and he wanted to run, so he stood still. He wanted to close his eyes, but he stared.
The Humvee’s windshield was broken out and the passenger’s side charred. Harper was slumped against the half-open door, his clothes and body nearly black, not like the Iraqis killed by air strikes but like a body, cooked, still full of flesh. Martinez sat on the ground a few steps away, blood streaming from a wound to the side of his head. Harper’s entire body looked like Martinez’s back.
“What happened?” Jimmy asked, inching closer to Martinez. “What happened? Are they still here? Jesus, what happened?”
“Macho. He found something. I don’t know what. Might have been a grenade. Or a fragment bomb. Sergeant said put it down. Put it down. They’re dead. Shit, man, they’re dead.” Jimmy touched Martinez’s back. There were sharp things sticking out, windshield or metal or whatever hits a person when they’re standing far enough away not to die with their friends but still too close.
He hadn’t seen Ramos, and when he went around the side of the Humvee, he realized there wasn’t much to see. It had blown up in his hand, and that hand and that arm and a lot of other things were gone. And Harper must have been sitting in the front passenger seat looking bored and surly and telling his nineteen-year-old private to stop being an asshole when it happened.
They were dead, and they looked so small. Ramos was the size of a boy, and Harper, so imposing alive, was in reality hardly bigger than Jimmy, stripped now of his air of command, his personality, his life. They were small, small and dead.
Jimmy sat down next to Martinez and folded himself up, put his head on his knees and waited. He wondered why he didn’t take his shirt off and cover Martinez’s back. There was no question that he should have gone looking for help. The crowd had stopped a few paces behind him. No one moved to do anything, so they waited, suspended. Jimmy didn’t even know what they were waiting for.
They were waiting for Dabrowski, who had gone back to his Humvee to radio for a medevac because he was the best Marine they knew and was always doing the right thing. Then there were more Marines than they even needed and they were rough with the crowd and angry, guns drawn. They were pushing and threatening the locals. Jimmy saw one Iraqi push back and take a rifle butt to the head. He did nothing.
There was gauze and there were compresses and three docs plugging up Martinez. But he was talking to Jimmy, saying, “I was taking a leak. At the back of the truck. Harper said put it down. It isn’t fair. Harper’s dead and stupid little Macho’s dead.”
“I know,” Jimmy said.
“Isn’t fair,” Martinez tried to continue but stopped, tears in his eyes. “Little Macho. You stupid little fucker.”
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He turned toward the Humvee, then turned quickly again and started walking away, walking past the wet spot on the road that explained why one of them was alive while the other two were dead. What was Jimmy’s excuse?
If he’d known they were going to fly Martinez out, he would have waited. They took him away, and he could have been on the USNS Comfort in the Gulf or at Ramstein or wherever serious casualties ended up. In some hospital ward, Martinez would lie under a dripping bag of saline, trying to figure out where to draw the line between lucky and unlucky. In his daze Jimmy missed his chance to say good-bye to the only one of the three he could say good-bye to.
He couldn’t stop thinking about them, not as he’d last seen them, but alive and laughing in the Humvee or lying back in the fading red desert light, talking about the first thing each of them would do when he got home. Their faces wouldn’t leave him.
It was breathtaking that someone could spend weeks in a war zone and only worry about himself. It was egotism worth noting in a textbook somewhere, but he didn’t know where. Jimmy was alone for the first time. Now he threw up, puked his guts out under the tires of a high-backed Humvee, more scared than he’d ever been. Fear for one is only so big, but fear for dozens or hundreds was too much. Doug and Woody could get hit on assignment. He needed to find out where Becky was, if she was okay. Their families back home must have been sick with worry. And his own family. He wanted to do something. He owed everyone so much, and there was only one option. So he wrote.