Youngblood Read Online Free

The grind was getting to me. So was the heat, and it was only April.
    â€œSome locals got killed a few years ago,” I said. “I don’t want to sound cruel, but this is a war.”
    â€œAshuriyah used to be a bad place, LT. Before the moneys and the Surge and the counter-surgery. And check it, Haitham say a man the new sergeant helped kill? The only son of a powerful sheik.”
    â€œCounterinsurgency,” I said, stressing the last four syllables of the word. “It’s pronounced ‘counter-in-sur-gen-cy.’ ”
    â€œYeah, that’s what I say.”
    I didn’t bother to correct him again. Maybe this is a big deal, I thought. But probably not. “Which sheik?”
    â€œDidn’t say. Just that he doesn’t want to be a source anymore. Something about respecting the Shaba.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œ Shaba is ‘ghost.’ ”
    I gave him a puzzled look.
    â€œLike respecting the dead,” he added. I’d no idea what the hell that could mean.
    â€œHe knows we won’t pay him anymore, right?”
    Snoop nodded. “He’s scared of something, for sure.”
    I walked downstairs to the cooks’ pantry, grabbing a warm can of Rip It. It tasted like liquid crack should, flat fruit punch with a splash of electricity. I headed back to our room, hoping the poker game was still going, but instead found everyone napping or reading magazines. Rage Against the Machine blared from the speakers of an unseen laptop.
    â€œWho won?” I asked.
    Dominguez cursed under his breath in Spanish. I followed his stare to Chambers, who lay in bed, boots still on, hands wrapped behind his head. Straightening his arms, Chambers pointed to a black, hollow-eyed skull on his right forearm. Five other skull tattoos lined his arm from the bottom of his bicep to the top of his wrist. He balled his hand into a fist once, twice, three times.
    â€œNice try, Lieutenant,” Chambers said, his eyes pale as slate. “But this ain’t my first rodeo.”

3
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    T raffic checkpoints were the kind of missions we’d trained a lot for stateside, but didn’t do much of anymore. The Iraqi army and police handled them. But on a late April morning in his airless office, Captain Vrettos said our platoon needed to complete one more joint mission to meet the month’s quota.
    â€œAnd,” he said, “Bravo Company doesn’t fudge quotas.” He had the wide shine in the eyes that came with severe sleep deprivation, so I didn’t fight it.
    We went that afternoon. It was hot, but the sky was gray and cloudy. Chambers organized things while I conducted a radio check with the outpost.
    â€œDominguez! You got security from your twelve to your four o’clock. No son, your four.
    â€œFucking hell, Doc, have you ever unraveled razor wire before? Use your boots. Like this.
    â€œWhere your gloves at, Hog? Your pocket. Is that where they belong? Right is right, wrong is wrong, and you’re a soup sandwich.”
    I had to admit, Chambers was instilling discipline in the guys. They’d need it when we got back to garrison life in Hawaii. He didn’t like the way we parked our four armored Strykers, either, and reorganized them into a diamond position.
    A rusty station wagon drove down the paved road and stopped at an orange cone fifteen feet short of the checkpoint. Chambers pulled the driver out of the car and showed one of the cherries how to pat down a local, twisting the man’s clothes into bunches while searching. Wearing a gray dishdasha and a turban, the driver—an old man with a large lip sore and a salt-and-pepper beard—looked bored, movingonly when a jundi from the Iraqi army asked him to open the trunk. The old man waved at me like we knew one another. He was on his way a few minutes later, the silence of the desert replacing the sound of his car’s motor.
    I pictured myself calling Hog a