meant he was ready to die. A bad day meant he might as well.
He rolled out of bed and followed the smell to the bathroom. Above the urinal was a message scrawled in thick marker: VALOR HONOR DUTY QUIT WHINING, followed by a second message scratched beneath it in ballpoint pen, in shaded block letters to make up for the wimpier medium—FUCK YOU SIR.
Get dressed. First smoke of the day. Three doughnuts and an omelet. And it was time to go on patrol.
* * *
Before he’d deployed, Candy had given him a book of daily devotionals to take with him. Each day had a Bible verse and inspiring story and ended with some kind of affirmation, like “I know that my redeemer lives” or “I dedicate this day to you, Lord.” After a while it got to be too much to lug around, and he gave it away. The skills of being a soldier were straightforward, but the brain game was a paradox. He never prayed for his own safety, because it somehow felt cowardly, but the whole day became a long rosary for every soldier who crossed his path: Protect him today, Lord. And him. And her. And even though he began every day with an affirmation that he would die, he knew that wasn’t the struggle; there were harder things to reconcile. At the end of it all, you die whether or not you’re prepared to. But he still couldn’t bring himself to think upon awakening, Today is the day I’ll kill somebody.
* * *
His patrol shift was set to end at seven. The day had been slow, hot and boring; they had spent the shift driving around the desert in the Cougar—an imposing hulk of a vehicle, solid as a safe at Fort Knox, with Elias in the machine-gun turret at the top. Now the sun was setting behind the western stretch of land not marked by any mountains, and bands of tangerine and gold streaked the sky. Sunkist, Elias thought. The sky looked like the soft-drink can, and the small fireball of a sun completed the image. The suffocating heat was starting to dissipate ever so slightly; the sweat that trickled to his jaw felt cool. This side of the landscape was disorienting to him, so flat and singularly pale, a planet other than his own. He could sense his pupils contract and open again as he looked at it, like they couldn’t figure out what they were seeing or determine whether to gaze close or far. He was tired.
Elias pushed the sweat from one eye with the heel of his hand and scanned the perimeter. All at once—it was unmistakable—he saw the figure of a man disappearing into a ditch. A crumpled sheet of plastic lay on the other side of the road: the hallmark of a hidden IED. Without hesitation he swung the gun into position and fired on the man, rattling out a volley of bullets at the ditch. The staff sergeant shouted his orders to him quickly: “Don’t kill.” He was an insurgent, and the captain wanted him brought in for interrogation. “Shoot near him until the Buffalo gets here to neutralize it. Keep him down, but keep him alive.”
“He’s wounded already,” Elias called back, but the answer was the same.
The man’s dark head appeared at the edge of the ditch, and Elias greeted it with a fresh round of rifle fire. Minutes stretched on in silence. The sun drifted lower; the sky was a Sunkist can no longer. Darkness was falling over the desert like a hand descending. Elias fired again, watching the bullets skim the sand like flat stones across the quarry lake.
An hour passed.
Two.
The desert around him was black as blindness. He watched the man now through night-vision goggles, which cast the landscape in Ghostbusters green. Now and then the radio crackled, promising the Buffalo to relieve them in short order; his stomach growled protests that he ignored. The man kept peeking out at intervals, eyes frantic and forlorn, and each time Elias shot over him again. Beneath the starlit sky he felt all the exposure of a stage. Darkness and isolation caused paranoia to rear up inside him, and as time wore on he began to feel jumpy on the trigger, desperate for resolution. Just kill him, Elias came the voice in his mind. End this thing. Kill him and you can get back in the Cougar. Chill out and wait for dinner.
But that wasn’t the order.
The ghoulish