Free The Good Lieutenant by Whitney Terrell

command-and-control programs for the computer systems that they would be using when they got to Iraq. None of the equipment actually existed there, physically, at the fort: it was all in Iraq, already installed, and so mostly they worked from manuals and on a few emulators that McKutcheon had managed to wrangle out of the supply chain. The whole thing had felt dry and dead—worse, in its way, than anything he’d done in college. Not to mention the fact that, in a way he’d not considered when in college—in a way that he’d thought he’d be protected from, since he had assumed that the war would be over by the time he graduated—he had for the first time the realization that he’d made a terrible mistake in judgment to join the Army.
    He was not the only person, he figured, who was having this feeling. But it didn’t filter into daily conversation that much except for McKutcheon’s side comments, his tendency to repeat tidbits from the Secretary of Defense’s press conferences in a flat voice, without any clear inflection one way or the other, and then to stare at Pulowski, or some of the other junior intel officers, as if he wondered what they were looking at him for.
    So talking about Beale had become a way of admitting, indirectly, his fear. Or even of really, clearly defining what that fear might be. As a soldier, Beale had been everything that Pulowski wasn’t and hoped never to be. He was brash, he was boastful, he was exceptionally jingoistic, he was constantly disregarding Fowler’s instructions to him—or, if not disregarding them, complaining that their training was not more active, that Fowler wasn’t aggressive enough, that she did things too much by the book. All of this Pulowski had taken as a joke—and Fowler had too, in at least some way, or she wouldn’t have told Pulowski stories about the troubles she’d had with Beale.
    Fowler, of course, had already been through something like this. He assumed that the difficulties she’d had with her brother—his running away, his stealing, his drunk-driving arrest in Texas—were at least part of what made her comparatively cheerful at the prospect of leading a platoon of soldiers into Iraq. He’d learned most of this at the La Quinta Inn in Council Grove, Kansas, about half an hour south of Fort Riley, which was where he and Fowler slept together in order to keep their relationship secret. Maybe if he had been closer to Fowler, if he had made some public commitment to her, they might have been able to find a way through this together. But in the La Quinta Inn, the thing he’d liked most about Fowler was her secrets. There was a darkness in her, which he recognized, and a good strong streak of anger—at her mother, for instance, whenever Pulowski brought her up. (And only if Pulowski brought her up.) She’d believed that she was a poor officer, she fretted that she would not have her platoon properly trained, worried about packing, about what Captain Hartz’s opinion of her was, about her weight, and most frequently about Beale. None of this had been said self-pityingly, which was how it would’ve come out had Pulowski been talking. But naturally, and at intervals—usually after they had made love and were lying in bed watching Leno, naked, and she had her leg draped over his and she would yawn and reach over to pat his chest and deliver whatever concern it was that had troubled her that day in a flat, direct voice.
    He could see Fowler now, through the doorway of a different schoolroom, seated on a folding chair beside Masterson, interviewing the local sheikhs: she looked mannish, not fat, but full in the shoulders, very muscular in the thighs. It had been a violation of the prime directive of being a signal officer, lying there in bed talking to a lieutenant—all of which could not have been more exciting for Pulowski. Not the sex, which was fine, or even