Youngblood: A Novel

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

“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 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.”

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

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.

And he didn’t want his kids to grow up fatherless? This was the same guy who’d bragged about not knowing where two of his offspring had moved with their mother. Then I thought about how I wasn’t really the person I presented to the soldiers, either. There were parts I hid, parts I exaggerated. Maybe Chambers was the same.

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

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.

My mom had grown up an admiral’s daughter and said that senior officers functioned so that no truth could betray the myths, of either the past or the mind.