Free Via Dolorosa by Ronald Malfi Page A

sand, in the dirt, and I remember the way it looked, falling there. As I carried him, my footsteps kicked fresh sand over the stains of his blood, and it was covered up so quickly, it was as if there was no blood at all, and nothing of the sort even existed.” He heard himself snort. “Funny, the stuff you remember…”
    “Christ…” It seemed all Roger was capable of saying. Either that or it seemed the only appropriate thing to say. “Christ, man…”
    “The attack came from a nearby mosque. They hit us hard and fast.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Sometime later, an F-16 came in and razed the mosque.”
    “Everyone was killed?”
    “Yes.”
    “Everyone but you and Myles Granger,” Roger said, and it was not a question.
    “Yes,” Nick answered anyway.
    “Is that how you hurt your hand?”
    “Sort of. A wall fell on it.”
    “How did you get out?”
    “Out,” Nick nearly muttered. “Out. We got out. It’s—we got—we just got out.”
    “I can’t imagine,” said Roger.
    “We just got out,” Nick went on, almost not hearing the bartender.
    Thankfully, Roger had no more questions. Nick did not think he could answer any more, anyway. Yes, he and Myles Granger had been in the same platoon . . . he had been platoon leader, first lieutenant, and he had walked them straight into the ambush. The shelling had started from the windows of the mosque. It shook the ground and many men rolled in the muddy ditch between the road and the giant stone wall. Some were all right. The wall was very large and looked strong but would not provide full protection against the shelling. Further ahead, pressed low in the dirt, he could see Myles Granger with his head down and his hands laced together at the back of his helmet. He looked very dark and small pressed into the dirt. He did not move. No one moved for a long while. At the time of the ambush, Nick found himself thinking of the men that had gone down ahead of them during their campaign from Ramadi and into the city, ambushed by soldiers pressed against the flanks of the high road, and he found he could not take his eyes away from Myles Granger. Even when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded just several yards to his left, he could not take his eyes away from the boy. Later, much later, there would be questions about who had actually instigated the shooting, and accusations that their squad had been the aggressor, had perhaps opened fire on the mosque first. Nick, who found no rationale in such thinking (what were the odds that they would have happened to open fire on a mosque which just happened to be rife with armed Muslim insurgents? He should play the lottery and find himself so lucky), had paid the accusations no mind. Anyway, nothing ever came of it. Nothing, he understood, had come of any of it. He used to think wars killed only the bad, but that quickly proved to be a child’s presumption. Then, after a time, he believed that wars killed both the good and the bad alike. But that proved wrong, too. How could he have been so ignorant? Now, he understood, there existed no good and no bad, and that they were all just lost and broken and weak and, perhaps most importantly, they were all uninformed. He, too, had been uninformed. No one ever becomes informed, he told himself. When you fight, you have no impression of the fighting. Nothing is sustained in you. You are broken and unable to be mended… which lessens the impression of debilitation and heightens the constant ailment of who you were for that brief period in your life, and how it never truly occurred to you that you would ever be there. War—who would ever be there? Who ever imagines themselves dying like a dog without purpose?
    It was an uncontrollable fix, sanctioned by the propriety of youth and youth’s willingness to forfeit. Youth always forfeited, Nick had come to understand. It was akin to those fumbling, constipated groanings associated with adolescent sexual encounters: existing because there was a need