Read You Know When the Men Are Gone for Free Online

before the army, how he had been an investment banker. The words sounded ridiculous to him and therefore he assumed they sounded ridiculous to anyone else. There were the lifted eyebrows, the incredulous laugh—women in bars who thought he was trying to get them into bed or men who thought he was boasting about a mythical life that could never be lived on a soldier’s salary. But he wasn’t the only one who had joined up after September 11, who threw away a stable, ordinary American life of freedom and money, stirred by waving flags and the elusive vocabulary of an older generation: duty, honor, country. The others who enlisted for the same reasons were easy to spot: they were older and smarter than their rank said they should be and lately they were more cynical than their army peers. They tended to stick together although they didn’t talk about their previous lives with one another either. Civilians thought they were patriots but they understood that they were just more naïve than the rest of the country; they had heeded a call that most had not, and now they bided their time, waiting to get out. They told themselves they would tell their war stories to their kids, their grandkids, and then it would all be worth it.

    His parents called him David. His friends from Stuyvesant High School, NYU, and Wells Fargo called him David. His girlfriend of four years, Marissa, called him David or a singsong Dav-vy when she was angry with him. But everyone in the army called him Moge. And in the couple of years since basic training, “Moge” had become his identity in a way that unnerved him. Suddenly the name “David” felt too refined and prissy in comparison. Too weak. He wanted out of the army before he became this Moge character forever.
    He started looking up grad schools from the communal computer room of Camp Liberty, his forward operating base outside of Baghdad. He had seven months, three weeks, and six days of his commitment left—once he got back to Fort Hood, he’d out-process and be back in New York in no time, a civilian again, a student, free.
    Then they promoted him to sergeant, even though he had resisted the pressure to reenlist for another year with its twenty-thousand-dollar tax-free reenlistment bonus. A week later his squad leader, Sergeant Raines, was shot through the face, a miracle, missing his eye and nose and somehow even his brain, the bullet emerging through the planes of his face in such a way that Raines kept giving orders during the firefight, had just assumed he’d been fragged in the cheek by wayward shrapnel, until the blood leaking from the back of his neck wouldn’t stop and the medic stuck his finger inside and realized it was an exit wound. So Raines was sent to the hospital in Germany and Sergeant Moge, by default, became the acting squad leader. The guys he bunked with, shared Playboy magazines with, stayed up all night playing Call of Duty with, were suddenly “his men” rather than his buddies. It was the first bit of power the army handed over and it made the Moge in him blossom. While others dragged their feet when they were sent out beyond the wire, Moge’s men were ready and yodeling as they climbed into their Humvees, and Moge, though raised in the East Village, began to speak in an inexplicable Queens accent, his use of the word fuck explosively poetic.
    Just when Moge had become everything the army needed him to be, his favorite interpreter, Khaled, quit. Khaled was getting married and his wife’s family thought his job a much too dangerous profession. They did not approve of his having to move to a different relative’s house every few days, leaving at dawn and taking many different buses, always a different route to the base in order to avoid being followed. Khaled apologized profusely, taking Moge’s palm in his, staring at him intently and holding his hand much too long in a way that a straight man would never hold another straight man’s hand in the U.S.
    “She