“Sort of. Mostly we provided security at American installations, air-bases, sensitive infrastructure, that kind of thing. They moved us around a lot. Iran, Iraq, Saudi. Chechnya for a little while. My last duty was at Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan. Usually it was pretty routine, verifying equipment manifests and checking foreign workers in and out. But once in a while something would happen. The coup hadn’t happened yet, so it was still American-controlled territory, but there were Taliban all over the place, plus Al Qaeda and about twenty different local warlords duking it out.”
He paused, collecting himself. The next part was always the hardest. “So one day we see this car, the usual beat-up piece of junk, coming down the road. The checkpoints are all well marked, everybody knows to stop, but the guy doesn’t. He’s barreling straight for us. Two people in the car that we can see, a man and a woman. Everybody opens fire. The car swerves away, rolls a couple of times, comes to rest on its wheels. We’re thinking it’s going to blow for sure, but it doesn’t. I’m the senior NCO, so I’m the one who goes to look. The woman’s dead, but the man is still alive. He’s slumped over the steering wheel, blood all over. In the backseat is a kid, a boy. He couldn’t have been older than four. They’ve got him strapped into a seat packed with explosives. I see the wires running to the front of the vehicle, where the dad is holding the detonator. He’s muttering to himself. Anta al-mas’ul, he’s saying. Anta al-mas’ul. The kid’s wailing, reaching out for me. This little hand. I’ll never forget it. He’s only four, but it’s like he knows what’s about to happen.”
“Jesus.” April’s face was horrified. “What did you do?”
“The only thing I could think of. I got the hell out of there. I don’t really remember the blast. I woke up in the hospital in Saudi. Two men in my unit were killed, another took a piece of shrapnel in the spine.” April was staring at him. “I told you it wasn’t very nice.”
“He blew up his own kid?”
“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”
“But what kind of people would do that?”
“You’ve got me there. I never could figure that out.”
April said nothing more; Kittridge wondered, as he always did, if he’d told too much. But it felt good to unburden himself, and if April had gotten more than she’d bargained for, she had a way of hiding it. In the abstract, Kittridge knew, the story was inconsequential, one of hundreds, even thousands like it. Such pointless cruelty was simply the way of the world. But understanding this fact was a far cry from accepting it, when you’d lived it yourself.
“So what happened then?” April asked.
Kittridge shrugged. “Nothing. End of story. Off to dance with the virgins in eternity.”
“I was talking about you.” Her eyes did not move from his face. “I think I’d be pretty screwed up by something like that.”
Here was something new, he thought—the part of the tale that no one ever asked about. Typically, once the basic facts were laid bare, the listener couldn’t get away fast enough. But not this girl, this April.
“Well, I wasn’t. At least I didn’t think I was. I spent about half a year in the VA, learning to walk and dress and feed myself, and then they kicked me loose. War’s over, my friend, at least for you. I wasn’t all bitter, like a lot of guys get. I didn’t dive under the bed when a car backfired or anything like that. What’s done is done, I figured. Then about six months after I got settled, I took a trip back home to Wyoming. My parents were gone, my sister had moved up to British Columbia with her husband and basically dropped off the map, but I still knew some people, kids I’d gone to school with, though nobody was a kid anymore. One of them wants to throw a party for me, the big welcome-home thing. They all had families of their own by now, kids and wives and jobs, but this was a pretty hard-drinking crowd back in the day. The whole thing was just an excuse to get lit, but I didn’t see the harm. Sure, I said, knock yourself out, and he actually did. There were at least a hundred people there, a big banner with my name on it hung over the porch, even a