O'Brien told me something at breakfast. We were eating C-rations in the mess tent. The coffee tasted like it had been brewed in a gas can.

"Donovan," he said. "Miller's been cooking the supply manifests."

I looked up from my tray. "Cooking them how?"

"He's inflating the numbers. Fuel. Ammo. Medical supplies. He writes thirty percent more on the official report than we actually ship. And the extra stuff? He sells it. To anyone who pays."

I put down my spoon. "Are you sure?"

"I have a friend in logistics. He saw the real manifests. They don't match the reported numbers. Not even close."

"Donovan," O'Brien said, leaning across the table, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Don't tell Miller I said anything. He doesn't like loose lips."

I ate the rest of my breakfast in silence.

Over the next two weeks, I noticed things. Small things. The kind of things that accumulate until they become impossible to ignore.

Miller's jeep left the compound at 11 PM every night. It came back at 3 AM. Sometimes it carried cargo that was not on any official manifest.

Miller's boots were new. Polish leather. Expensive. The rest of us were wearing issued boots that fell apart after three months.

O'Brien joked about it. "Miller's getting rich," he said one evening, grinning. "We're eating ration number four like it's a banquet and he's dining like a king."

I did not smile.

Miller ordered me and O'Brien to drive to a warehouse outside Baghdad to "verify supply quantities." The warehouse was in an industrial district, past checkpoints and past the part of the city that still had electricity.

We arrived at noon. The warehouse door was open. Inside, the space was empty. Not looted—empty. As if nothing had ever been stored there.

Miller's radio crackled. It was Miller's voice: "Report what you see."

I looked at O'Brien. He looked at the ground.

"Sir," I said into the radio. "The warehouse is empty."

A pause. Then: "Write that up. Report that supplies are in transit and will arrive within forty-eight hours."

I wrote the report. I typed the lie. I signed my name.

O'Brien was killed three months later. A rocket hit our Humvee on a routine patrol outside Fallujah. He died instantly. I survived. I was shaken but uninjured.

I came home. I went to Ohio. I went to college. I graduated. I got a job in accounting. I never told anyone about the warehouse.

Once, at a supermarket in Dayton, I saw a barrel of fuel on the clearance rack. I stood in front of it for a long time. Then I put it back on the shelf and went home.