The man dug on the road. Their bodies pressed together in the prone, JP and Carlos breathed slowly. JP leaned into his heavy spotter’s scope, nearly tipping it over. Carlos pulled the slack from his trigger. They each felt the movement of the other. The wind changed and Carlos eased off the trigger. He couldn’t figure the correction for wind: JP always had to do the math for him.
“Come up two, right four,” said JP.
Carlos’s eyes came out of the scope and he made the adjustments and got back behind the gun. The man was gone. JP said nothing. Aside from these types of corrections, Carlos had always been good. They’d spotted some civilians in the area—that would be their excuse for botching the shot. Afterwards people talked about how the two of them let a shot go, one they shouldn’t have, and Carlos and JP had to wait nearly three weeks before they were assigned another mission. JP used the time to catch up on reading magazines and watching movies but Carlos wasn’t interested in any of that, and he sank deep into himself, sleeping most of each day, waking only to clean his rifle. He ate MREs on his cot instead of going to the chow hall with everyone else. Then a new mission came along and JP and Carlos were waiting on their bellies again, looking over the road. They sweated the dust beneath them to mud and the sun pounded everything to clay. The man returned to bury a package on the roadside. This time there was no wind: Fire. Fire. Fire.
*
On the ridgeline, JP and Steve keep still in their hide. JP scans between the ash trees and sagebrush. Steve fingerbowls, hitting muted strikes and spares. Then, when his phone runs out of batteries, he shoulders alongside JP. Through his birdwatcher’s binoculars, he looks down into the skunk pigs’ wallow. He explains to JP that most of the fresh water is north of where they are and that the pigs will probably come into the valley from the north. He also tells Steve to watch the treetops, especially in the places where the sagebrush is thickest. Here the pigs butt up against the trunks to scratch themselves, moving the branches above.
Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone. He lives in Istanbul, where he writes on the Syrian Civil War.