Yellow Birds Read Online Free PDF Page B

slightly.
    “So, where is it, Sarge?” Murph asked.
    “Al Tafar. Up north, near Syria. Like a hajji proving ground up there. Gets real fucking heated sometimes. I wasn’t supposed to tell you yet, but I need you to understand something.” He was slouched beneath the bunk above him. It caused him to lean slightly forward toward us and across the white space of the buffed tile floor.
    Murph and I looked at each other and waited for him to continue.
    “People are going to die,” he said flatly. “It’s statistics.” Then he got up and left the room.
    Somehow I slept, but fitfully. I’d wake from time to time and look out to see how the frost had gathered on the windowpanes. Murph called to me once, in the small hours before daybreak, and asked me if I thought we’d be OK. I kept looking out the window, even though the night had covered it over completely with a small layering of ice. A streetlamp glowed with a pale orange through the opacity. The air was cool and crisp in the room and I pulled my rough wool blanket tight around me. “Yeah, Murph. We’ll be OK,” I said. But I didn’t believe it.
    In the morning, before first light, we dragged ourselves over the sides of the company’s deuce-and-a-half trucks and convoyed to the range. The snow had changed to rain overnight and we pulled our hoods over our helmets as far as we could. The rain was cold, percussive. The drops slid down the backs of our blouses and jackets, each one seemingly on the cusp of freezing. No one talked.
    When we got to the range, we circled in the grayish snow for our safety briefing. I was tired and had a hard time focusing. The voices of the range cadre barked out through the mist like an unpracticed choir. I watched the rain fall onto the dead leaves, causing a kind of shimmer in the nearly naked branches. The sound of magazines being loaded by the range detail carried over the thin winter air from the dilapidated ammo shed. The white paint peeling off the sides reminded me of a country church I’d passed on my way to school as a boy. The noise emanating from the shed was strange and mechanical and droned in my ears until I couldn’t hear a word the safety officers said. Sterling and Murph had taken their places in line to be rodded onto the range. Sterling glared at me, then cupped his rifle into the crook of his elbow and pointed at his watch. “Waiting on you, Private,” he said.
    Sterling was attentive in his marksmanship instruction. Murph and I both had our highest qualification scores ever. Sterling was pleased with us and seemed to be in a good mood. “Anything less than forty out of forty is operator error,” he said. We moved to a small hill that sloped down from the firing line. We relaxed and sat at his feet as he reclined on the hill, oblivious to the snow. “I think y’all might be all right.” For a while we didn’t speak. It was enough to be satisfied with his approval. The sun was still high over the berm at the end of the range when Murph started talking.
    “What’s it like over there, Sarge?” Murph asked sheepishly. He was sitting cross-legged in the snow, his rifle over his lap like he was cradling a doll.
    Sterling laughed. “God, that fucking question.” He had begun gathering rocks and tossing them into my upturned Kevlar.
    Murph looked away from him.
    He spoke firmly. “They aren’t gonna pop up and wait for you to shoot them. Remember your fundamentals and you’ll be able to do what needs to be done. It’s hard at first, but it’s simple. Anybody can do it. Get a steady position and a good sight picture, control your breathing and squeeze. For some people, it’s tough after. But most people want to do it when the time comes.”
    “Hard to imagine,” I said. “You know, whether we’ll be one or the other?”
    He paused. “Better get to fucking imagining.” He started to chuckle again. “Just gotta dig deep. Find that nasty streak.”
    I listened to the crack of rifles on the line.