The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Read Free Book Online

the image of what could have been your last sight stayed with you. War has always been uncanny. For me, however, it was a siren song—the odd occurrences and esoteric knowledge that came from living so close to death for so long, the hope for deeper wisdom, my near-deaths in towns with names like Karma, Fallujah, and Qaim. Places so out there, so far off the map of normal morality, that anything seemed possible. Anything at all.
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Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
Finding patterns where there shouldn’t be patterns.
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    The soldiers in Dora were different, too. From a famous airborne unit, they were like an old aristocratic family trying to live up to former glories. They were driven to take chances, as if to prove their worth. It was a self-serving cycle. Each close call they survived confirmed their status as blessed men. Each man who was killed reminded them of the special work they were undertaking. Could there be any more exalting work in this life? To challenge death day after day? I found myself excited and exhausted by my time there, by my brushes with death, a deep tiredness in my bones. Walking away from the battalion command post in Dora the last time, the blood felt different in my veins. It was a lesson the war taught me: the body knows things long before the mind catches up. And the month I spent waiting for “my” IED to go off had taken its toll, the dread accumulating in my body like a toxin. *
    I had some time to kill before I was due out west in Anbar, where I had arranged an embed with the Marines, my old tribe. Back in the Green Zone, someone had told me that Saydia was a quiet sector, and so I decided to hang out there until my time came to head into the desert. I was tired and needed some time to myself. A quiet couple days in a quiet sector to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of Shia Baghdad, which was weak at best. As we rolled drowsily along in the heat, I decided this would be my final patrol in Baghdad. After that, I’d take a week out west, catch a flight home, stir in some quotes, and collect a paycheck.
    The radio crackled on the dashboard of the Humvee. Vollmer picked up the handset and quietly took in the situation. After a minute, he said something that sounded like “Roger that. Out.”
    â€œAll right, listen up, gents. There are some houses on fire north of us. We’re gonna go take a look and see what’s what.”
    Most likely some Shia had set the fires, their way of encouraging their Sunni neighbors to seek accommodations elsewhere. It was one of the maddening things about Iraq. There was almost never any direct combat. Almost never was a day decided by enemies duking it out toe to toe. The fighting, when it happened, was always indirect—a sniper shooting at you all day from an invisible spider hole that you could spend weeks searching for and never find—or by proxy—an Al Qaeda fixer paying an unemployed local to emplace a bomb, its detonation something he would never see.
    We drove for a long time, the heat leaking in through the cracks in the Humvee chassis. I had been down so many roads in the city that after a while it became hard to tell if you were awake or asleep. The roads just went on and on, leaving your mind somewhere in the dust trailing behind the Humvee. At some point, I noticed that the streets seemed emptier, paper cups and trash blowing in the flamethrower heat. After a while, I heard the Bradley armored personnel carrier ahead of us turning. I could feel the tracks grinding the blacktop under the Humvee.
    â€œAll right, slow up a bit,” Vollmer told the driver as we turned onto a side street.
    Ahead of us, the street was on fire. Black smoke poured diagonally out of a row of houses to our left, darkening the entire block. The Bradley punched a hole in the wall of smoke and disappeared. It was like we were entering a cave. The driver pointed us into the lowering dark without a word, seemingly