Youngblood: A Novel

On a nearby television, I watched Cleveland sports fans burn the jersey of some basketball player, a self-proclaimed messiah who’d left because winning was hard there and it’d be easier in Florida.

I belong here as much as anyone, I thought. Because at least I have the goddamn dignity to question being here to begin with.

“We can’t save them all. I know your heart’s in the right place. But as an officer, your head’s got to be in the right place. Remove it from your asshole. Now.”

He knew the board like it was kin, displaying foreknowledge of open shots and an accuracy he’d concealed at first. He’d wanted to watch me shoot to learn my strengths and weaknesses. Whereas I was reacting to the game, he anticipated it. There was a counterinsurgency lesson in this somewhere, but I had neither the time nor the patience to figure it

Our grandfathers had pushed back the onslaught of fascism. Just what the fuck were we doing?

She was right, but that didn’t make me wrong.

My mind was thrashing. It’d been trained to equivocate, molded from birth for clever escapes and third options. It kept grasping for something beyond the either-or, anything but the either-or, except there was nothing, nothing but the either-or.

“Before we left, we thought we were steel. But even those of us who’d deployed before didn’t know what hard was. Not yet. Our platoon sergeant, he had an idea. Kept saying it wouldn’t be like the Invasion, or Afghanistan. That the war had changed, evolved. Kept calling us youngbloods, to try and get us focused. We thought it was a big joke. Ha fuck

We left for Ashuriyah at dawn. I snapped my bracelet and dropped broken beads onto the desert road one at a time, like breadcrumbs. What had once led home now led nowhere.