Kaboom by Matthew Gallagher

in the center of this no-man’s-land. I took this opportunity to radio back to my mounted elements and exchange situation reports with them, while the soldiers spread out, finding cover, rifles and machine guns oriented in a half-moon shape bowing north. The T-72s now turned around and headed south, out of our view.
    â€œWhite 4, this is White 1,” I said.
    No answer.
    â€œWhite 4, this is White 1,” I repeated.
    No fucking answer. Nothing but radio static.
    I broke into a profanity-laced tirade, which culminated in my beating my hand mic against my helmet. Despite the tenseness of our situation, my rambling antics cracked a few of the guys up. Still nothing more than a very serious mind doomed with a clown’s soul, I thought. Then I remembered Sergeant Spade still had radio communications from the Stryker, and I had him relay our update. Deep breath. We still had commo with the outside world.
    â€œ4 copies,” Sergeant Spade yelled down from his hatch. “The section in cordon is still in position and reports that the IA are the only ones shooting now. Also, Steel still reports receiving contact in the south.”
    I looked over at Staff Sergeant Boondock, who just shrugged his shoulders. “Keep moving?” he suggested.
    â€œRoger,” I said, signaling to the soldiers to resume their column positions behind my Stryker. No more than twenty meters after we continued our movement, though, my Stryker came to a halt. I heard Sergeant Spade’s voice rise in pieces above the engine and other extraneous noise.
    â€œLT . . . a bunch of guys . . . waving . . . civilian clothes . . . they might be Sahwa . . . armed.”
    While I didn’t have the sights Sergeant Spade did in his hatch, a quick glance around my Stryker confirmed his report. There were definitely Iraqi men to our front who were definitely waving at us and definitely armed to the fangs with foreign rifles. The problem was, we couldn’t walk behind the Stryker all the way north until we could confirm that these men were indeed Sons of Iraq. A series of shabby huts canalized the maneuverable terrain ten meters in front of our current position. The civilian world referred to this as a stalemate. The French called it an impasse. American soldiers knew it as a clusterfuck.

    I felt compelled to instigate some course of action and remembered the first thing they taught us at the armor officer basic course: It was better to execute a shitty plan quickly than to wait around for the perfect plan. Well, I could do that. To hell with it, I thought, these bastards can’t hit anything they shoot at anyway. Stepping around the side of the Stryker, I started walking toward the group of armed, faceless Arab men and told my guys to stay put. I took three steps, then felt a firm hand grab me from behind, at the neck collar, yanking me backward.
    â€œNo way, sir. Let me go first,” Specialist Haitian Sensation said. He was nice enough to say it like I had a choice in the matter, as he had flung me back with the chiseled ease of someone who regularly benched twice my body weight. I regained my footing, smirked to myself, and followed, waving and loudly yelling all the friendly Arabic I could think of. The rest of the dismounts wedged out behind us.
    The group in question turned out to be Sahwa, as we had hoped. Actually, they were Colonel Mohammed’s Sahwa and had somehow ended up in a massive gunfight with the IA in a bizarre turf war instigated by a routine traffic checkpoint. I talked to Colonel Mohammed—as a retired Iraqi air force helicopter pilot, he still felt entitled to such a title, an assessment all of his people readily agreed with—and he was clearly rattled by the exchange, livid with the IA, and shocked by our being there. He also quickly claimed that groups of armed, masked men, unknown to him and unaffiliated with his Sons of Iraq, had joined the firefight soon after it began. They had been located