Read Online The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller - Free Book Online Page B

Brits, others from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain. Their boots all muddy, they were yelling a thousand thoughts in a thousand tongues.
    Arwood wasn’t paying attention to any of this. He didn’t have a plan or a motive or a strategy. He was present only in the moment, and responding to its imperatives. He took one step and then another. Arwood carried the child — as thin as a shadow, and vivid as a dream — in his arms by placing each foot that hadn’t blown up earlier on the same spot so it wouldn’t blow up later. Step by step, unhurried, he walked with the boy back to the ridge and up its slender path, past Tigger and Herb, and close enough to Märta and Benton so they could look into the child’s eyes as he was carried past.
    Arwood handed the child to the people crying most before disappearing into the wailing crowd that surrounded him with hands, arms, and love.
    Hours later, after dusk fell and the mob had dispersed, Märta went looking for Benton. She found him sitting alone on a rock with a can of Fanta. She said, ‘Want to join me in Wonderland?’
    Benton looked at her. ‘I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.’
    â€˜It’s a recreation tent. I want to talk to you about what happened this afternoon with your friend. I haven’t been able to focus.’
    â€˜It was quite a day.’
    â€˜You seem to be taking it well.’
    â€˜You don’t know me.’
    Soldiers weren’t welcome at Wonderland. It was a recreation space of five large tents arranged into one covered area where the international staff of different non-military agencies would decompress at night after what counted for a day was done. It earned its name from being the place where everyone could wonder out loud what the hell they were doing there.
    The military lived behind walls. They dug in like Romans. In the Forward Operating Bases, or FOBs, the military served home cooking that agreed with their soldiers’ tastes and tummies, played hard rock and hip-hop, and built a colony as hermetically sealed and dissociated as a Marriott hotel on Mars. The command renamed every local road, destination, and object so it was memorable and pronounceable to kids with high school educations. In making life easy, because war is hard, they created a universe so artificial that you could be stationed in Iraq for years and never learn a thing.
    The humanitarian staff lived in tents on the ground among the people. Listening to the same sounds, they heard the same conversations. There were no walls, no guards, no weapons. They were safe, not because they had defences, but because they’d been invited.
    That night, Wonderland glowed yellow from the inside. A Honda generator hummed its syncopated beat, and some thirty people were hanging around on the floor and chairs. A few were reclining on an expensive red Roche Bobois sofa that seemed to have dropped from the sky, because no one could account for how it had got there.
    The majority opinion was that it had belonged to Saddam. The dissenting minority opinion was that Saddam didn’t have good enough taste to explain the sofa. The first group was anxious without an explanation, no matter how preposterous. The second group was simply happy not to be wrong. The sofa faced a 19-inch cathode ray-tube television. There was nothing to watch on Iraqi television but the dictator himself, and no one — not even the most media hungry of the student volunteers who might speak Arabic — wanted to watch Saddam. Luckily, though, some enterprising German kid had had the foresight to bring a VCR with him to Kurdistan, as well as the necessary RCA cables to plug it into the back of whatever television set might be found. So, at night, Wonderland lit up like Cinema Paradiso .
    The German kid’s name was Dominik. He came from Kaiserslautern at the edge of the Palatinate Forest. Being near Ramstein