One September Morning. Rosalind Noonan

her mother’s voice sounds surprised, but she recovers quickly. “Honey, I’m on my way to pick you up,” she says. “You need to come home.”

      Madison panics, thinking of her driving down the street, closing in on the school. “No don’t come,” she says quickly. “I’ll…I can drive myself. I’ve got the Jeep.”

      “Then come right home,” her mother says emphatically.

      “Mom—” Madison wants to argue, but something in her mother’s voice scares her. She’s shaken, not her usual self. “What is it?” Madison asks.

      And then her mom lets loose. In a sobbing voice, she tells Madison it’s John. Something happened in Iraq. “Is he…?” Madison can’t say the word. Neither can her mom.

      “Just come home,” her mother orders, her voice cracking.

      And that’s when Madison knows the terrible reality.

      John’s gone.

      Goddamn George W! This is all so wrong, and now it’s too late. John is dead for no fucking reason.

      There’s a hand on Madison’s shoulder.

      “I’ll drive you home.” It’s Suz, her brown eyes soft with sympathy. Does she know?

      “My brother…” Madison starts to say it but a huge knot in her throat chokes off the words.

      “I know.” Suz pulls Madison into her arms, where the younger girl sobs against her lime green polka-dotted sweater.

      “My J-Dawg cannot be gone,” Madison whispers against the petite woman’s shoulder. He can’t be gone. The world is not going to make any sense without him.

      Chapter 7

      Iraq

       Noah

      He cannot speak.

      If he opens his mouth the rage will spew forth, a roiling fireball of anger, bitterness, and contempt. Anger at his brother for leaving him here alone. Fury at John for selling him on the patriotic notion of signing up in the first place, his sweeping enthusiasm that brought Noah along for the ride, that led him to believe they could do something to make the world a better place. Hell, if you listened to John you’d think that the two of them could protect their country from nuclear war, intercepting the weapons of mass destruction like two star football players. The ultimate power play.

      When Noah left the bungalow, where he was supposed to be getting rest, and set out into the windy desert without his helmet or flak jacket, he knew it was a foolish thing to do. But now, as he considered that the worst-case scenarios were death or court martial by the army, he calculated that there was so little to lose at this point. Life had suddenly become cheap and tenuous and fluid, like a splash of water that dripped through your cupped hands. So what if it was gone in seconds? It was just a fact of life…and death.

      The temperature is bearable—maybe in the seventies—but a brisk wind blows dust and grit into his face. The Sharqi, a southeasterly wind that kicks up this time of year, can be unrelenting, and he reaches under his desert fatigues and pulls the neck of his undershirt up, stretching it over his mouth.

      He passes the guard at the door of the Communications Center, then steps into the dimly lit, air-conditioned room, the only place on the makeshift Fort Liberation where soldiers have access to computers and the Internet. Sgt. Dawicki, or Sgt. Dweeb, as most of the men call the officer who runs the Communications Center, looks up from the eerie blue light of his terminal.

      “Specialist Stanton,” he says, one eyebrow cocked as he sits back in his chair and rests his folded hands on his slight paunch. “What the hell are you doing in here at this ungodly hour?”

      It’s one a.m. in Iraq, and most of the soldiers at Fort Liberation are either on duty or asleep in their quarters. “I need to use a computer.” Noah pushes out the words, only half lying, and he is relieved to see that the two PCs designated for use by soldiers are both free.

      “Sign the log,” Sgt. Dweeb reminds him. “And sorry for your loss. Your brother was a fine soldier and a good man.”

      My brother was a hothead, he wants to say, but instead he just frowns as he signs the log book and takes his place at a terminal.

      It takes less than a minute to insert the thumb drive and access it. And there, beaming at him from the monitor, is the list of files stored in the thumb-size drive that he shared with his brother. All of Noah’s files are titled with the initials NS, while John’s begin with JS.

      Got ’em. Noah’s nostrils flare as he savors the victory. They had taken away John’s physical possessions, but he had access to his brother’s written legacy.

      The need to view these files swelled inside him as he was scrubbing blood from his combat boots, worrying about the army’s wiping all memory and details of his brother clean. His brother’s body was barely cold when Colonel Waters’s goons were already in the quarters, confiscating John’s possessions, taking his photo of Abby, his letters from Ma. Christ, they even took the bottle opener Maddy gave him with the personalized “J-Dawg” nametag she’d made for him. The army’s voracious claim over all-things-John heightened Noah’s sense of loss and injustice. He wanted to tear John’s journal out of the M.P.’s hands, but then reason descended upon him.

      You may own his body, his possessions, Noah thought, but you cannot own his thoughts. And John’s rational arguments for peace would not be articulated in the chicken scratch of his journal; the polished debates would be on the computer.

      They could hold John up as a hero, but in reality he was a vocal opponent of the way this war developed, an adversary of violence, an advocate of peace. Noah knows his brother wrote extensively to this effect, and he wants to have a copy of John’s writings—no matter how polished or rough they might be—so that no one can remake his brother into a dutiful soldier who followed blindly. He opens one of John’s files and finds a journal entry that might also be considered a call for peace.

      I spoke at length to a man in the marketplace today. He doesn’t understand why the American soldiers are here, and I had to agree with him. I told him we’d come to free the Iraqi people from the rule of a tyrant, but he told me things were much better before we came. The women and children are afraid to leave their homes, fearful of the big American soldiers. And since the Americans arrived, the people have no electricity, no water, no gasoline. “When will you be going?” he asked me.

      Of course, I had no answer. When will we leave these people to rebuild their society the way they want it? Yes, things are chaotic here, but conflicts among the Sunni and the Shiite Muslims and the Kurds predate Saddam Hussein. Our armed forces will never have the power to bludgeon these people into peace.

      John should have told Noah what to do with his essays, but then no one had ever guessed things could turn out this way. They’d had such high hopes when they’d signed up. To end terrorism by fighting Osama Bin Laden’s terrorists. To maintain peace by defusing Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

      Only they got to this desert to find that there were no WMDs, only mortar rounds exploding in marketplaces and schools, homes and city streets. He and John came to stop death but landed in a world of fireballs and shrapnel and screams.

      More death than Noah had ever imagined.

      It wasn’t supposed to be this way; John wasn’t supposed to die. He wasn’t supposed to cut out and leave Noah alone here, fighting in a war he had never believed in.

      Contempt burns in the back of Noah’s throat, contempt for the unseen war planners in the top brass, the strategists sitting in a command center somewhere who send down futile, meaningless orders for guys like him. Mission objective: break down doors of dark homes and apprehend insurgents. But no one tells you what an insurgent looks like, and no one can prepare you for the frightened faces of women and children huddled in windowless rooms, their eyes glowing in the green illumination of your NOD.

      Or