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Iraqi contractor to haul gravel to a construction site inside Muthanna. Spreading a little U.S. taxpayer money around. Somebody must have slipped the driver the right papers. Not to mention filled him in on our entire routine.”
    â€œWe were paying the bomber?”
    â€œOr at least his boss. Look, you got off of this detail easy, Pulowski. Everything about the Muthanna intersection has been a clusterfuck from start to finish. Setting the cameras up yesterday was strictly a cover-your-ass project for the colonel. It didn’t work. He’s got a bigger problem on his hands now. If I were you, I’d leave it that way.”
    He smiled at the comforting Homer Simpson nihilism of McKutcheon’s advice. He’d been called in to work intel when Alpha Company lost a tank back in January. The ambush outside Al-Shula. During all these disasters McKutcheon had talked this way.
    By then he’d slipped into the battalion’s “Cyber Café,” which occupied a ramshackle wood shed, and a private showed him to an ancient, clicking Acer computer, set on a long plastic folding table, bookended by a pair of palm trees. It was in the base’s smaller public spaces—the toilets, phone banks, and computer clusters—that McKutcheon’s philosophy made the most sense. A half dozen soldiers hunkered around him, heads bowed, boots spread wide, postures submissive—already defeated—before happy onscreen cornucopias of bank ads, Web graphics, and interactive news feeds. One had begun to cry, hands clutching the back of his head. All of them were or would soon be involved in the hunt for Beale, and every inch of their unhappiness could be explained and even possibly prevented by his own personal cartoon slogan: Safety Comes in Can’t.
    He’d invented it in this very room, on similar nights when shit had gone bad and he had sat here trying to email his mother, staring up at a plastic banner mounted by the same geniuses who’d named the cafeteria Camp Chillin’:
    SAFETY COMES IN CANS
    I CAN
    WE CAN
    YOU CAN
    What if somebody, somewhere, had simply argued that the safest thing was can’t ? Even Senator Kerry hadn’t quite had the guts. He’d stood there, grim and hatchet-faced at the convention, watching can-do photos of his Vietnam days, and then the swift boats came and took him out. Why? Because ’Nam had been a great big pile of can’t. As a signal officer, can’t was one principle Pulowski never sold short. The other came from a book he’d read for English class at Pitt, whose touchy-feely motto he’d also Homerized: Do not connect. Both self-evident truths, nowhere more obvious than in the pleasures of the Cyber Café when shit was truly going bad. The fact that he’d never managed to convince Fowler to see any of that wasn’t his responsibility.
    At the same time, none of this accounted for how he’d felt when he’d watched Carl Beale disappear into that alley doorway. That was the tidal wave of stupid that he’d been counting on McKutcheon to talk him out of, its oncoming boil cold and gray, carrying with it death and rot, wreck and stink. “So what you’re telling me,” he said, “is that we have a device that might very well … no, no, no … would be demonstrably helpful to our soldiers in the field. Americans. People who you and I know personally. And yet you’re lying about its readiness because … why? Because we’re afraid to go outside the wire and set up the thing?”
    The phone was dead by then. When he hung up, Pulowski stared for some time at the email on his screen, reading first the text, and then allowing his eyes to swim across the Kelly-green banner flashing at the top of the screen:
    E * TRADE—DISCOVER THE POWER OF YOU
    Also deeply stupid. Also clearly not a message designed for geeks. It would’ve been much better if he hadn’t worn the shirt.