20 in 10

PFC Munoz has good intentions today. To be vigilant, to stand guard, to make it through his duty and get back to base safely.

He stands to the right of a concrete filled steel drum, with a long wooden arm that he is tasked with raising and lowering. A yellow flag marks it as the final post in an intricate, improvised roadblock of jersey barriers, nail-studded cables, and his job consists of keeping the traffic moving. His job, along with four heavily armed, sun tortured US Army troops. Depending on estimations of their worth, there might also be a pair of assisting Iraqi police officers, as well. But Munoz and his counterparts don’t think those two really count. Unless they need translators. When—if, if—the bullets start to sing, Munoz knows from experience that these police officers will be as good as ghosts. Gone, or blasting away in every direction, indiscriminate and deadly. As nearly all of the poorly trained Iraqis are known to do. And when that happens, there isn’t much use for translation. Munoz eyes the officer closest to him, trying to see if he is sleeping behind his mirrored sunglasses. Even the thought of another soldier shirking his duty reminds Munoz to be more vigilant.

Scanning the distance, Munoz sees the squat-rise landscape of the brown-tone city. Behind his wrap-around sunglasses, he squints out of reflex; the desert, dull and ugly as it is, can take on the reflective quality of water.

This is Baghdad, he tells himself. Welcome to Hell. Like a refrain in a drama he cannot escape, he tells himself this nearly every day, when scanning the same drab landscape. The joke is tireless and exhausting at the same time. The plot is unrelenting.

It is hot. That is the sticky thing Munoz has slugging along through his brain. That he is hot. It is an obsession he can’t escape, the sun broiling him. Which is why he keeps re-seeing the dream he had this morning. The dream. He can’t seem to get past it.

He is tracing a path back to the images in the dream he cannot shake.

He tries to recall the feel of the cold, the bite of winter air, the soft crunch of snow under boots. He’d woken up to it that morning, before first light. The drum of his trailer’s air conditioning might have been wind tracking through the streets of his old neighborhood. His eyes stayed closed for as long as he could hold them that way, hoping the feel of the cold, the memory of home, wouldn’t pass, but would linger with him for the rest of the day. So bad is his desire to be back in the world that sweet dreams are cruel. They are cruel because they sap the will; they crowd a piece of the brain for hours, for days. Lay siege to the will and refuse to let up. And what is worse is that he knows the memory of home and the vivid pictures he sees will not fade, nor will the emptiness, but the cold will pass, the sun, while it burns sensation, cannot erase memories.

He lay for a moment more, fully awake, and tried to memorize the picture so he could retrieve it later. Munoz and his little brother, walking home from the train. Late on a very snowy January night. His neighborhood is still lit for Christmas, blinking lights stretched across windows, a series of smiling Santa Claus prints, stars and wreaths hanging from the street lights. The window of the bodega at the end of the block is filled with electric candles, all of them lit and glowing in a soft white light. It is cold outside, but walking by the store window, the neon beer and soda signs extinguished just this one time each year to let the candles shine, he can almost feel the warmth of their glow. In the echoing hall of his mother’s church, St. John the Baptist, he would light candles with her and pray for the...