REBEL
SEVEN YEARS AGO
“Get down, get down, get down! Watch your fucking head, Duke. You nearly caught that round to the face.” Hands pull at me, bringing me to the ground. I’ve been trained, but boy am I fucking green. My lungs are burning with adrenalin and dust and the shitty realization that I nearly just died.
Cade is on his back beside me, choking on the dirt. Overhead, the powerful blades of the helo that just dropped us into the middle of this shitfight thump at the air, blasting us with even more dirt and dust as it gets the hell out of dodge.
“On your feet, boys. Keep low!” Richter hollers. So far, I’ve followed Richter from the academy, through basic training, all the way across to the other side of the world, and now it would seem I’ve followed him straight into hell.
They warned us how bad it would be. We believed them, too, but the reality of what we’re facing is beyond anything we could possibly have comprehended. Richter’s grabbing at my flak jacket, jerking me upright. He’s signalling to me, tipping two fingers to my right. “Got company, Duke. You’re on right flank. Shoot anything that moves. You okay, son?”
“Five by five.” I nod frantically, my finger on the trigger of my M4 Carbine, but I’m screaming inside my own head.
“You’re on point,” Richter yells. “Take a deep breath and accept this.” That’s his thing—accept that you are where you are. Accept that only you are in control of whether you come out on the other side alive. I push myself up onto my feet, my boots scraping against a fallen street sign half buried in the dirt road. Then we’re moving. Cade’s at my rear, gun aimed over my shoulder, protecting me. That’s our way. We always protect the man in front. In this instance, my heart is in my throat and my dick is hard, and I am in charge of protecting everybody. There are seven men at my back, counting on me to choose a safe passage for them through this madness.
We’ve navigated our way down three streets, choked with burned out cars and building rubble before we make contact. Gunfire rains down from overhead, immediately making my job almost impossible. “Down, down, down,” I yell. I can’t see a fucking thing. The narrow street we find ourselves in is being used to dry sheets—the stained white and yellow and salmon-pink cotton barely shifts on the slight breeze, blocking whatever may lie at the other end of the street from view.
Could be anything back there. We can’t pull through this way. I hold up my closed fist: freeze. All eyes will be on me back there. I know they’ll have already stopped moving and are crouched low behind me. More shots fire overhead, really fucking close. Like right on top of us, close. I hold my hand up in the air, my index finger raised, and I circle it over my head: rally point. Move back to the rally point. We need to find another way. I’m backing up, crouched low, scanning to find the shooters on the roofs over our heads when we hit smoke.
Smoke on the ground means another unit must be close; they’re trying to conceal their whereabouts, too. Couldn’t have come at a better time. I see Cade’s pack in front of me, PRESTON in big black letters across the material. There’s shouting up ahead, along with the rattle of more shots fired.
A cloud of smoke blows across our path, and then I’m stumbling, tripping, falling forward. I’m cursing myself out when I hear the metallic zip of a round firing no more than two feet over my head—exactly where I was standing a second ago.
“Fuck.” Get up, get, up, get up. You need to move. Get your ass up now. I push myself back, onto my feet and I can just about make out the faint shapes of my unit ahead of me. They haven’t realized I’ve fallen behind. I’m less than a second away from calling out to Cade when a darker, more solid shape is rushing toward me, materializing out of the smoke.
Non-American, military age male. He’s holding something in his hands. Takes me the length of a heartbeat to recognize it as a weapon—an AK47. And he’s pointing the fucking thing straight at me. My training kicks in, and I’m lifting, aiming, firing my own weapon before I can think straight. The guy who was rushing toward me falls back, not making a sound. I hear his weapon clatter to the ground, but aside from that the only noise comes from up ahead, from people shouting in English and Farsi. And from their guns.
My blood is raging through me as I hurry forward, my cheek pressed up against the sight on my M4. I keep low, and I stay on my toes. I don’t know where I hit him. Could have been in the heart. Could have been in the shoulder, for all I know. The last thing I need is for him to sit up and start shooting as soon as I draw close enough.
The guy doesn’t sit up, though. He’s flat out on his back, eyes fixed upward, his chest hitching up and down as he chokes on his own blood. I got him in the neck. The motherfucking neck. Jesus. He’s holding both hands up to the raw wound across his throat, trying to stem the blood that’s pumping out of him, but it’s a futile task. He might as well be trying to hold back an ocean’s tide. I’d nicked his carotid, barely scratched it, but it’s enough to be the reason why he dies. His eyes swivel in his head, staring at me, showing way too much white.
He says something to me in Farsi, his voice gurgling out of his mouth, and then he drops his right hand, patting loosely at his side for something. He’s looking for his gun.
“Don’t even fucking try it, asshole,” I snap out. The guy on the floor—he’s a young guy, maybe twenty-two, can’t be any older than me—doesn’t heed my warning, though. He hands scrabble in the dirt, groping, and then he’s holding a handgun. Fear radiates off him as he aims the thing at me.
“Drop it,” I tell him. “Put it down.”
He has tears in his eyes now, blood pumping rhythmically through the gaps between his fingers. He knows he’s about to die. He says something else in Farsi, something I don’t understand, and I can see the moment he decides he’s going to do it. He’s going to shoot me. There’s a split second in time between that moment and me firing my rifle.
Crack!
I shoot him in the head, almost right between the eyes. We’re trained for hours as we become riflemen, laid out on our stomachs, to always go for the head. Always go for the heart. But seeing a real human being, eyes glassy and still filled with tears staring blankly back at you with a gaping hole in his forehead, is very different than being proud of the tiny tear in a paper target on some range in a US Army base. Seeing that hole in his head makes me feel like I’m gonna fucking throw up.
The worst part? The worst part is that my dick is still fucking hard inside my pants. They warned us about this, too. The cocktail of hormones and adrenalin pumping around your system in a situation like this has the most fucked up effects on the male body. I thought they were joking. I sure as hell didn’t think it would happen to me.
I look down into the eyes of the man I’ve just shot and killed, and I know I’ll never forget his face. I’ll never be able to rid myself of the horror I’m feeling right now.
“Jay! Jamie! What the fuck, man?” I look up and Cade’s standing there, the butt of his gun pressed against his chest, a wild look in his eyes. He sees me, sees the guy lying on the ground. Shock transforms his features. “Holy fuck, man. Do you know who that is?”
I just look at Cade, unable to respond.
“Dude, that’s fucking Aarash Zubair. He’s Ahmad Zubair’s son.”
Of course, I know who Ahmad Zubair is. He’s the head of all Taliban activities in this area. He’s been on our watch since before we even arrived. Cade takes out a small point and shoot camera and takes photos. It struck me as some cold shit when we were given the cameras and told to do this, but it makes sense. We need to identify people. And in this case, prove it is who Cade thinks it is.
“Did he say anything to you before you shot him?” Cade asks.
I nod, feeling my body come back to me. My cheeks prickle, feeling odd and strange. “Yeah. Something like, enen waheen.”
“Enen waheen? What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Back at base, Cade shows his picture to Richter and it’s confirmed. The man I shot was Aarash Zubair, son of Ahmad Zubair. One of our translators also confirms what the guy was saying before I shot him:
Enen waheen.
I am alone.