Read The Evil Hours for Free Online Page B

pacifist, but what’s it called? An expatriate.”
    â€œYou’ve got a running start being over here.”
    â€œI’m serious, sir. I can’t stand Americans.”
    You could feel it, Reaper needed to be talked to. It was like we were long-separated siblings, and now that we were finally together again, there was some catching up to do. Deep down I understood in a way that didn’t need expressing: the work of soldiering was numbing and having a reporter along for the ride presented a huge opportunity. I was both entertainment and an audience.
    Reaper was twenty-six, a geezer for the infantry. His unit was stationed in Germany, and he had married a local girl, a tall Nordic wonder whose head was practically aflame with fine blonde hair, or so he said. He was from East Texas, so, of course, the first thing out of his mouth when he met her was a joke about her being a member of the Master Race and how he was fated to procreate with her. The way he described her, I imagined her in a convertible Mustang trailing clouds of glory, her hair whipping in the breeze. You got the sense that Germany had shown him something of the world and had dimmed his enthusiasm for the army, the annoyance showing in his face.
    Talking back at the patrol base, he told me the one thing he imagined over and over again was taking his wife to Iraq ten years from now, maybe up in the northern part of the country, up where grass grew over rolling hills. “Just to be back here and actually talk to the people. You know, as people.”
    â€œSir, have you read any Sartre?” he asked, fiddling with his bandana.
    â€œHey, Reaper.” It was Vollmer.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œGive it a rest, we got work to do.”
    Vollmer had an odd face, fixed and expressionless. The feeling must have left it long ago—perhaps during his first tour—and now his features were formed, and he would look like that until the day he died. The lack of emotion gave everything he said a certain authority. Like the broken streets we drove down, you wondered what had happened to make him look this way. It was a mystery that tickled at first, and then it burned: Was it one horrible day in particular, or was it the procession of one bleak day added to the next, until the differences between them no longer mattered? In between answering radio calls, he dipped tobacco, spitting into a Coke can in his hand, a habit left over from his days as an enlisted man.
    â€œYou must be desperate for a story if you’re here,” Vollmer said, dully, his eyes never leaving the road.
    I didn’t like being called desperate, but he wasn’t far off. I’d just spent a month in Dora, a place that Al Qaeda, in their charming way, had been advertising on the internet as their “last castle in Baghdad,” and my nerves needed a break.My first patrol in Dora, which was supposed to be an intelligence-gathering operation, had been interrupted by a nearby platoon getting ambushed. When we arrived at the ambush site, I saw that a Korean-American soldier had been shot in the genitals. I took cover in the shade of a nearby retaining wall, trying desperately not to think about what had happened. I overheard him talking quietly to his first sergeant, saying that while he’d had his doubts before, he was definitely an atheist now, because what sort of God would let a guy get shot in the dick? Every day in Dora had been a variation on this unreal theme: one day it was a guy getting shot in the dick, the next day it was our Humvee driving right over a metal “pizza box” IED that failed to explode for some reason, and the next day it was a patrol I was accompanying being sent to inspect the ruins of a mansion that had been laced with explosives so that it would collapse on anyone who walked inside.
    The close calls. They were like boils in the ocean that held, churning the water for a moment, hinting at something below. You sailed on, but