Reveille

By Douglas Brewster

Baghdad International was every bit as impressive as the vid feeds showed it to be. One the worlds largest and most modern airports, BIA had all the latest in creature comforts but was designed with an obvious ode to classic Middle Eastern architecture. Elaborate archways led to Islamic-themed carvings on its domed ceilings, and everything was painted with a pleasant beige color that reminded Leon of sand. Holo boards were everywhere, conveying everything from flight information to where the highest rated restaurants were in every major language of the region. As Leon waited in a short, fast moving line under one of these boards, he looked around and thought about how this place must have looked to his father during the Iraq conflict seventy years ago. As a professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the University of Texas, he was aware of the history of Iraq, both recent and ancient. But he had always considered his knowledge of recent history superior to that of most, if not all his colleagues. He had a father who fought in the Iraq conflict (as it was now called), and his stories about the war and the people of Iraq had given him boots on the ground intelligence. He laughed at this (among many) military euphemisms he had picked up from Sgt. Major Winston Stackhouse, ret., and now five years in his grave. Leon missed his father so much, and his medals and personal pictures were part of his lecture presentation. His father had been awarded the Silver Star, the second highest award in the nation, for fighting off an insurgent platoon by himself after all his platoon had been killed. There was a digital scrapbook of all the interviews he had given, and he had even been mentioned in a book of American Heroes.  Leon found his baggage claim section, and while BIA was well organized, the sheer volume of people made it a chore to leave.
Waiting on the transport lift with African students, German businessmen and wealthy tourists from Europe and America, Leon reflected on how far things have come for the region in the past seventy years. After the period of “unsettlement”, the Iraqi government solidified and began to take advantage of both the oil and its location. Baghdad had become a center of trading and commerce just as it had during ancient times. With this newfound wealth added to their economy, the people had become more secular (to the dismay of Whabbi). They had begun to understand the profit of a democracy and embraced it fully. The last “insurgent activity” happened twenty years ago and had been nothing more than misguided history students from Hamburg looking to return Islam to its natural state of Jihad, or something like that. They had gotten away with two bombings, killing eleven people before the Iraqi police tracked them down. Without community support, insurgents cannot continue to evade capture, and “The Ghosts of Jihad” certainly didn’t have community support. At the trial, there were mini-riots full of mobs screaming for the heads of the thirteen conspirators to give them the ancient justice of a stoning. While the government was unofficially elated to see the rejection of extremism, any civil unrest was a cause for concern. The thirteen were summarily tried and executed within a week of capture. Since then, Baghdad had all the problems of a major metropolitan area, but no terrorism. Baggage in hand, Leon brushed passed a British couple trying to carouse their four kids and stepped out into the humid night.
The throughways in front of his terminal were crowded with traffic, taxi cabs, family vehicles, and airbuses all combining for cutoffs and impatient beating of horns as all airport terminals do. It had been a long twenty-hour flight, and Leon didn’t waste time catching a cab, pushing past the throng of people to make his way to the front. Getting into one of the more reputable looking cabs, Leon gave the Pakistani driver the address of his residence on campus sat back and reflected that the last time a Stackhouse had driven the streets of Baghdad it was under very different circumstances.
The traffic got better as he left the airport, but the driving got worse. The highways in Baghdad were ultra modern and four lanes, but it was a Friday night and the club crowd and tourists presented the notoriously aggressive taxi drivers with even more incentive to be reckless. Leon had gotten his PhD. at Columbia; the New York taxi drivers were as reckless as they’ve ever been, but the regulations on motor vehicles in the city allowed for the high volume of traffic to at least, be organized. Here, it was every man or woman for himself. Manhattan must have been like this in the old days, he thought as his driver swerved around a produce truck and almost hit a Ferrari doing the same thing. The Sadar expressway was a mix of everything from the newest sports cars and luxury vehicles to 40-year-old cargo trucks and hover bikes.  As they exited the expressway, Leon glanced through the back mirror and saw what looked like an antique military vehicle of some kind. What stuck out for the spilt second he saw the military truck was that he thought he could see through the truck at the headlights of the vehicle behind it. Even more weird was that the headlights created silhouettes of the passengers riding in the truck, and they looked as if they were wearing helmets. Leon sat up to get a better look at it when a limo crossed in front of it (although it seemed to cross through it), but it was night, he was extremely jetlagged, and when they exited the military looking vehicle was nowhere in sight, so he didn’t give it a second thought. Not until later.
  The broad avenue leading to the university was impressive. Concrete islands with illuminated fountains separated the directional traffic. The avenue itself was bustling with activity. People of all nations were hurrying to and fro, conducting business and sightseeing, but now the main activity was enjoying the night life. Clubs, bars, and nightclubs dotted the passing cityscape. As the cab penetrated deeper into the city, Leon could see the administrative sector, a towering group of ultra-modern buildings that dominated the horizon. Leon knew that the university campus would be near. Leon stared out the window, enjoying the sights and taking pictures with his smart glasses. The cab pulled off the freeway and merged onto the avenue that ran across the campus. Soon, he was stepping out in front of the residence and looking forward to washing up, getting something to eat, and getting some good jet-lag sleep. His first meeting was in the early afternoon tomorrow.
After a delicious meal in a restaurant in the academic quarter, Leon got back to his room and tried to settle down. Since he landed he had a vague, uneasy feeling that he could not explain. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was like he was being watched.
Astoundingly silly, he thought. The Iraqi Intelligence Force had no reason to watch him, or any other American. Relations between the countries had been good for twenty years, even if he hadn’t been invited by the Iraqi government. His dissertation on Iraq’s history had stirred up dust academically, and he thought his personal touch given to him by stories from his father is what separated him from the pack. He came to give a speech and answer questions at the university. Brought with him were his notes, his manuscript and some personal photos his father took on the ground in Abu Ghraib converted to digital holograms, as well as his medals and commendations. It was part of his presentation, and he was very proud of his father’s service. Less than 1% of the American populace served in the armed forces back then and even less now. It had been the last American conflict that saw large scale troop movement on foreign soil. That fact alone had lead it to be an object of great discussion and academic debate.
Leon, then an associate professor at UT wrote an academic paper titled “Boots on the Ground: A History of the Iraq Conflict from the Trenches”. There had been plenty written on the subject but, astoundingly, no one had thought to do it from the prospective of the soldiers who fought. Leon tracked down living veterans all over the country, finding it easier than he thought to get them to talk about the war in their advanced age. He did it using his own credits after draining his bank account. That was not the most popular decision with his young wife, but it had been received well from the start and picked up steam in the community. He had been getting interviews and talks on the Web TV about it, and it picked up in the last couple of months as he anniversary of the pulling out of the American forces came around. It helped catapult him to the front of the line when it came to his full professorship, and before he knew it, here he was an invitee to speak to students at Baghdad International University, one of the more prestigious in the Middle East.
Leon settled back in his room and got comfortable. The room, like the hotel, was first class. He had a huge king-sized bed, elevated a little and surrounded by elaborate posts and a faux canopy. The holo projector was built into the canopy so that you could sit in bed and watch the web right in front of you or from all around the room if you wanted. The bathroom was a jewel. A walk-in rainfall shower dominated one side of the room while a huge HD mirror and elaborately carved toilet stood on the other. Leon let out a low whistle when he scanned inside. A man could get used to this, Leon thought. This gig isn’t so bad after all, jetlag or no. He wasn’t tired yet, but he knew from experience that it was going to hit him like an NFL linebacker when it did, so he had better call Carrie now.  He opened his laptop and synced it with the hotel’s network. After a moment it connected, and he called home, wincing at the international surcharge. The holo-screen popped up from the small projector in the laptop, and Leon could see the inside of their bedroom floating in the air in his hotel room. The figure in the bed stirred, and Leon watched Carrie wake up and come to the screen sleepily rubbing her eyes.
“I’m sorry, babe. I just wanted to let you know I’m here in the hotel now.”
“How is everything?” she asked, yawning.
“It’s great. The hotel is really nice. The architecture is unbelievable. Gravity fountains, sun- shielded gardens, it’s beautiful. It’s almost unrecognizable from when Daddy was here. Grander than anything we see in Texas.” The University of Texas had a beautiful campus, but the last half-century of construction and development had turned Austin itself into a sprawling suburb, condos and developments stretching out, eating any greenspace available. The traffic was a nightmare, as Texas had yet to pass regulations on vehicle use. The arteries of the city were always clogged, and Austin’s smog now rivaled that in Beijing.
“That’s not a hard thing to accomplish. Are you ready for your presentation? Did you decide when you’re going to use the personal photos?”
“Yeah, I think I’ll spread them out by date. Hey, listen, go back to sleep. I’m going to try to relax, I think the jet lag is going to catch up with me any minute. I love you.”
“Ok, baby. I love you, too. Let me know when you get ready to go on. I’ll log on and watch.”
Leon kissed the hologram of his wife and logged off. The space in front of him snapped dark immediately, and the room lights automatically came on. He undressed, got a glass of water to put beside his bed, and turned on ESPN International for a couple of minutes before sleep caught him. It came suddenly, and Leon barely had the time to say, “Lights and TV off”, and almost before his head hit the pillow, he was in a deep sleep.
He opened his eyes and knew it was a dream almost immediately. The sun was high in the sky, and searing heat charged through the air. He was inside someone else’s body; he knew this almost immediately, as well. His eyes saw out into a dusty courtyard full of soldiers dressed in old-time uniforms, like his dad wore. And this was one hell of a dream. Leon could smell the fuel and the gun oil. The air had a burnt-tire smell itself, and when he looked around, he could see pillars of smoke rising beyond the walls that surrounded the courtyard. He stood there, looking around until he heard someone say behind him, “Fuck you doing, observing the motorpool?  Let’s go, Stack. Sooner started, sooner done.”
He turned and saw a young Hispanic soldier carrying a mean looking machine gun and a box of ammo. Leon watched his hands grab the box from the soldier. His name tag read “Garcia”. And here was another thing: he seemed to be just along for the ride, whatever this was. He couldn’t control the body he was in at all. He heard his voice ask Garcia if the phone center was packed, and Leon immediately recognized his father voice. It was younger, more unsure than he remembered. He had had an inkling of what was going on when he heard Garcia call him Stack, he knew his father’s friends called him that, shortening Stackhouse to Stack. His friends never did that for whatever reason, so hearing his father’s voice was just a confirmation. Leon knew this had to be brought on by being tired and landing in Baghdad, and he was interested to see where his mind was going with this.
The two young men walked over to a Humvee surrounded by other soldiers. They reached the vehicle and heard one of the soldiers say, “You two took your time. 50 cal all squared away?”
“Roger that, Corporal,” Garcia answered. Leon looked around and saw the other two soldiers at the vehicle were a Specialist Hogan and the Corporal, Brigham.
The young men gathered around the hood and began putting on their armor and readying weapons. Leon felt his father putting on his vest, and he couldn’t believe how heavy it was. As hot as it was, it was less than a minute before his undershirt was soaked with sweat. Leon listened to the chatter back and forth, and he could feel the closeness and brotherhood that going to war together will produce in young men. He himself had not had any brothers, so it was a foreign but welcome feeling.
The men got into the Humvee, and Leon heard a lot of military talk he didn’t understand about routes, raids, and security. The guys in the vehicle all seemed to be annoyed by whatever task they were about to do, but it felt routine. There were two other Humvees in their convoy, and the crackle of the radio was constant. The three vehicles pulled out in formation and drove through a weaving barricade of concrete barriers and through a manned, heavily fortified gate. The guards waved them through, and they pulled out into the Baghdad traffic.
A strange mist--that wasn’t mist at all, but dust and smoke-- hung low over the city. The Humvees picked up speed and moved through traffic. Leon looked out at the city with his father’s eyes and saw the garbage-strewn streets and the markets lining them. He could not equate what he was seeing with what he had already seen of Baghdad. Signs of war were everywhere, from the burnt-out buildings, to the groups of children running shoeless through the streets. He heard Corporal Brigham tell his father to put on some music, and he saw his father reach down to a small gray box-type thing and push a button. Immediately, very old-timey sounding rap music blasted through the headsets they were all wearing under their helmets, used for communicating with the other members of the platoon. Leon’s consciousness smiled, hearing songs he had heard in his house growing up. They were the last truck in the convoy; Garcia was sitting in the gunner’s seat, standing through the roof with the mounted machine gun aimed behind them. As Leon watched him, he pulled around to aim the gun at a car that had gotten too close to the convoy. The music stopped in his headset, and a voice that must’ve been the Platoon Leader came through giving them instructions for deployment when they got to the target. Suddenly, there was a loud explosion off on a street to their left. The radio exploded with chatter, and in the Humvees the soldiers all took the safeties off their weapons and scanned their sectors. The leading Humvee made a hard left heading up the street where the explosion happened, and the others followed.
Leon was excited, but a vague but prominent uneasy feeling blossomed in his mind, and when they turned down the street it turned to dread. He was very afraid to go down that street. If his father was nervous, he showed no sign, re checking his weapon and armor, and getting ready to exit the vehicle. All at once, Leon wanted to wake up. He tried to scream in his father’s mind, force himself to wake up. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t move, couldn’t affect his environment in any way. The Humvee came to a stop, skidding a little, and the men were out of the vehicle in a moment. The street was deserted, and it was eerily quiet. Leon didn’t have to be a soldier to realize that was bad news. The soldiers scanned the rooftops, looking for snipers when a single shot rang out, breaking the silence. Winston turned his head and Leon saw Garcia slump from the gunner’s hatch and drop down in the vehicle. Winston screamed “G!”, and the air was filled with gunfire.
Bullets rained on them from every rooftop, and Leon watched two more soldiers hit the ground, dead or mortally wounded. He heard the air around him wiz with bullets. He looked for cover, ducking behind a scrap-heap car to his side. He heard something that sounded like a loud screen door shutting, and the Humvee in the front of the convoy exploded in a ball of fire. Machine-gun fire tore through the air, and Winston/Leon could hear his friends, his brothers, return fire. He himself was frozen to his spot, ducking down and trying to make himself as small as possible. Leon was frightened, but he was more shocked and surprised by his father’s actions. He had been a hero; the medals in his briefcase were the proof of that. Leon tried to reassure himself that this was just a dream, but something he could not explain told him he was wrong about that.
They had only been stopped for about twenty seconds at that point, but it felt like twenty minutes. Two soldiers from the middle Humvee were cut down, and Leon heard a voice yell “Doc!” Leon knew they were calling for his father, who was the platoon medic during his first tour. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Winston stayed rooted to the spot. The gunfire was increasing, and so were the screams. He didn’t know how long it was before it stopped, but when it did there was dead silence outside, except for the steady crackle of the radios in the vehicles.  Winston looked up fearfully, trying to decide what to do. He scampered into the burnt-out storefront behind him.
This is bullshit! Leon thought. What the hell kind of dream was this? Why can’t I wake up? He watched through his father’s eyes, as he scrambled into the house and looked around. Now he could hear yelling from outside, and while he couldn’t understand Arabic, he could understand when people were celebrating and shouting instructions. Winston ran through the back room and out into a narrow alley behind the store. He crept slowly around the corner and out around the alley. Four months in country told him that the insurgents out on the street had very little time to celebrate. Anyone out in sector would have heard all the explosions and would be racing here any moment without having needed to be called. Winston hunched down and peered fearfully around the corner. He saw one figure, then two rush past the alley and Leon could clearly see the outline of old AK-47’s slung over their shoulders. His father lurched and put his hand to his mouth and with tremendous effort, held back the urge to throw up. Sounds behind him that may have been the neighborhood residents daring to come out and see the damage made him closer to the front of the alley. Now he could see insurgents careful moving to the vehicles and putting extra round into the bodies of the soldiers they passed. Leon could feel the confliction in his father; his friends, his brothers, had been killed by these bastards. Now their bodies were going to be disgraced, but he was frozen to his spot.
There were only four of them that Leon could see, but he knew that the rest of the group were on the rooftops acting as covering fire and a lookout for those on the streets. They ran up to the bodies, and Leon turned to see a teenage boy standing in the shadows. The boy looked at him, looked at the fighters moving in the street and cupped his hands in the universal preparation for yelling. Leon saw his father raise his weapon and fire once, hitting the boy square in the chest. He dropped and the air was immediately filled with yelling and gunfire. Winston hunkered down behind a bunch of mainly empty barrels and fired back without looking or aiming. The air snapped all around Winston, and the barrels he was behind were being torn to shreds. The conclusion of this was inevitable; the Mujahedeen squad were beginning to advance when a sound louder than any thunder Leon had ever heard filled the street. The fighters immediately broke off firing down the alley and turned to fire up the street. It only lasted for a moment, the sound, (which Leon concluded was tank-fire) erupted again and Leon saw one of the fighters disintegrate into a cloud of red mist.
That was enough for the others; they ran into the street and scattered. A moment later, the tank came screaming up the street after them. Then Winston stood up, and a couple of soldiers rounded the corner, their weapons at the ready. They dropped them when they saw Winston and ran over to him. Winston stared blankly at them. One grabbed his shoulder and said—Leon awoke with a snap. He could feel the adrenaline bleeding off him; it had been like the ultimate 4-D movie. With the adrenaline, he also felt an undercurrent of disgust. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew that this was the truth of his father’s Silver Star, the medal he had in his briefcase. He didn’t want to, but he knew it, was sure of it, as sure as he was of anything in his life. The dream was no dream. He been having dreams his whole life, and none of them were anything like that. Leon was a practicing Baptist; believing in spiritual messages was not something unfamiliar to him. He had read his father’s commendation so many times it was burned in his memory. His father had obviously never given the details of the ambush, or he certainly wouldn’t have been awarded a Silver Star. The realization shocked him.  He lied back in bed, feeling the sweat trickle down his face. After a moment, he sat up, and his breath caught in his throat. The room was filled with shadowy figures, and through the pitch-black gloom of the room, he could see the unmistakable outline of helmets, body armor and weapons. He tried to say something, and they suddenly advanced in the blink of an eye all seeming to leap at him in the bed. He finally got out a scream, and the lights came on automatically with his voice. The room was empty, of course. And it was a while before his heart stopped racing, and he could get up and wash his face.
The speech had gone well. Both the students and the faculty were studious and respectful. As the audience were majority Iraqi, he had expected some questions tinged with sarcasm, but there were none. It had not gone as smoothly as some of his presentations in the past. Twice he thought he saw the shape of soldiers lined in the back of the hall, weapons slung over their shoulders, watching him. He blinked, and they were gone. When he presented his father’s pictures and medals, he had a sense of unease that made him rush through faster than usual. The thought had crossed his mind that, perhaps, just perhaps, the stress of his presentation caused him to have some kind of breakdown. But he was otherwise fine. No shakes, no voices, no anything that would suggest he was starting to lose his shit. But there was no denying that something was wrong. Everywhere he went, he felt like someone was watching him, just out of the periphery of his vision.
While he wasn’t hearing voices, he was seeing something. Along with the outline of soldiers in the back of the lecture hall, he was also seeing half-formed shadows, slipping and dipping out of corners. While he was thanking faculty members, he tried his best to keep his eyes from darting here and there. He was seriously beginning to worry about this, when something else happened. Leon felt what could only be described as an itch in the back of his mind. He kept seeing the street his father was ambushed on; it would fade in and out of his vision. And suddenly he had to leave. Find a cab, and find that alley. If Leon was someone who had an addiction or mental disorder, he would have recognized a compulsion when he felt it. But he did not, and after doing the absolute minimum flesh-pressing, he left the campus and set out to find a taxi.
It did not take him long; when he got in the taxi, he told the driver to drive around, and Leon would tell him where to go. The driver wasn’t surprised because many tourists wanted to drive around until they saw something they liked. He was surprised when Leon gave him concise directions calling lefts and rights, weaving through the streets like a local. After getting off an access road, they pulled into a swanky neighborhood, well maintained, and if the cars in the driveways were any indication, very upper class. They reached an avenue that was the center of commerce in the neighborhood. Shops lined the sideways, brightly lit and busy. Leon told him to pull over and got out in front of a French restaurant. He paid the driver and wondered how he was supposed to get where he needed to go. During the ride, a shadow of a Humvee stayed in front of them, leading him here. Leon walked down the block, and to the side, saw the service alley poking out between the sides of the block. Even if he didn’t know that was the one, he would have when he saw shadow soldiers walking down the alley with their weapons at the ready.
Leon didn’t hesitate to follow them. The itch in his mind told him what he needed to do, and he had no problem doing it. He went down the alley. The only other living beings were a couple of rats that paid him no attention. Leon looked up and saw outlines of a platoon of soldiers standing in a semi-circle. Leon had nothing to fear from them; he knew this as he knew the dream was real. He in the middle of the semi-circle, the apparitions not dissipating this time. He opened his briefcase, pulled out the Sliver Star and carefully laid it on the ground. Not knowing what to do now, he simply looked at them and said, “On behalf of my family, I’m sorry.”
The apparitions disappeared, all except one.  It lingered for a moment, and Leon could see the arm raise in a wave, right before it too, dissipated. He suddenly understood his father he been with him, leading him all the way. The realization made him feel foolish for what he said, it was now obvious to him his father had been sorry about that all his life.  Leon looked down, and the medal was gone, and for the first time since the dream, he felt alone. He left the alley with tears in his eyes, missing his father. When he got to the street, the memories of what happened had already started to fade, but Leon felt good all the way home.

****

Douglas Brewster is an aspiring fiction writer, from the Bronx, NY. He did two tours in Iraq with 2/12 Cav and 4/9 Cav in the 1st Cavalry Division, before leaving the Army to acquire his BA from the University of Texas. He is a member of the NY state senate veterans Hall of Fame, and currently work as an Assistant Director at a non profit that houses homeless vets.