Read You Know When the Men Are Gone for Free Online Page A

is my first wife,” Khaled said. “I am a fool for love.”
    Moge tried not to smile, but he did manage to turn the hand-squeeze into a handshake, and then carefully remove his fingers from Khaled’s grip, patting the man on the shoulder. Khaled’s colloquial idiosyncrasies made him the company’s most requested terp, not because of his English accuracy but because he had them laughing as they rolled out.
    “Congratulations,” Moge said, giving Khaled a box with a lopsided bow. He had had Marissa send him a serving platter as a wedding gift. He didn’t know if Khaled or his new wife would ever use it, the bottom was stamped with Made in America and therefore might be a liability in their home, but Moge had wanted to give him something.
    Khaled bowed his head. “Thank you, my cherished friend.” He reached for Moge’s hand again and Moge did not pull it away.

    The army gave him a new terp. A woman terp. Moge was not happy when the first sergeant informed him.
    “I thought this was an infantry company, First Sergeant,” he said. “And there’s a reason we don’t have women in the infantry.”
    First Sergeant looked up from his desk and Moge saw himself through the eyes of the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the company—his hair touching his ears, his wrinkled uniform, his lowly rank. Moge waited for the lecture.
    “You are here to help this country, isn’t that right, Moge?”
    Moge bit the inside of his cheek and just barely nodded his head.
    “You’re not helping anyone if you are cowboying around without an interpreter. Now you have an interpreter. Enough said.”
    Moge rolled back and forth in his boots, knowing he was dismissed but unable to leave. “What if she ... I don’t know, gets hurt, First Sergeant? The guys are going to worry about a woman in the heat of it. It’ll interfere with our mission.”
    First Sergeant arranged the papers on his desk. “She chose this job. She knows the danger better than any of us.”
    Just as Moge was about to step out of the office, the first sergeant called him back. “Sergeant, you’ve really squared away your squad in the last few weeks.”
    Moge nodded. He remembered how, a couple of months before, one of the privates was late for company PT, so the entire squad was tasked with building a pathway to the filthy porta-shitters that were cleaned once a month. Six highly trained United States Army soldiers, among them an investment banker, a high school history teacher, and a cop, laying down gravel and scrap wood across a stench-filled morass of sucking mud. Since Moge had taken over, no one had ever been late for PT—hell, their PT scores were the highest in the battalion.
    The first sergeant was watching Moge as if he could read his thoughts through his forehead. “Your platoon sergeant says you’re thinking of getting out,” he said. “Can’t imagine why a fast-tracking soldier such as yourself would do that when the civilian job market is headed the wrong way down a one-way.” Moge shrugged ever so slightly, enough to voice his disagreement without being outright disrespectful. “Moge, how else you gonna have an opportunity to be a goddamned hero?”
    Moge said nothing. When the first sergeant looked back down at his paperwork, disgusted, he turned and walked out.

    The new interpreter’s name was Raneen. She showed up at formation the following morning wearing camouflage, U.S. Army issue, but the decade-older version, the version used in Desert Storm, not the ACUs everyone was wearing now. She was small, five feet two inches or so, and seemed even smaller in her loose uniform, the sleeves rolled up a few times at her wrists. Her dark hair was uncovered and pulled back severely into an intricate bun at the nape of her neck. She didn’t wear any makeup and her fingernails were unpolished but clean and filed straight across. Moge’s men were silent; they had been in Iraq for more than five months and had seen very few women’s