Memoirs written by soldiers and Marines who fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq and the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan portray many events that caused their authors anguish. Below I describe three particularly wrenching episodes. More than narratives of harrowing combat action, they illustrate the emotional strife wrought by war.

The first two episodes are from Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight. McPadden served as a US Army platoon leader in 1-32 Infantry, 10^th Mountain Division, on a 15-month deployment to the Korengal and then on a subsequent redeployment there with the 2^nd Battalion, 75^th Ranger Regiment.

The third episode is from Alexander Saxby’s Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. Saxby, a rifleman in 1^st Battalion, 8^th Marines, recounts his participation in the house-by-house fighting in Fallujah in November 2004.

As you read my summaries of the events, consider what would you have done if you were in the authors’ boots and how would you feel about the events now.

The Powerless Lieutenant

Late in McPadden’s first tour in the Korengal, he and his platoon are visited by their battalion commander (a lieutenant colonel) and command sergeant major (the senior enlisted soldier in the battalion). McPadden and his men have been in the field throughout their deployment, seeing much fighting and also engaging extensively with local nationals on more peaceable terms. They have endured a long, cold winter without many amenities, and as McPadden puts it, “climbed every mountain in Kunar twice.” McPadden and his men clean-up as best they can for the visit, for they sense it is as much an inspection as a friendly chance to thank the platoon for a long, hard job well-done. Throughout We March at Midnight, McPadden recounts a love/hate relationship with his chain-of-command. On one hand, he idealizes his company commander and battalion commander as soldier-warriors he hopes to impress. However, he also often finds them out-of-touch with the actual circumstances he and his men face and prone to issuing orders that are impossible to fulfill.

The visit begins well, but then goes horribly wrong. A soldier in McPadden’s platoon attempts a funny retort to a question from the sergeant major and the sergeant major, a by-the-book stickler for order-and-discipline, is not amused. He rips the soldier a new one, and then orders the soldier to pack his bags; the soldier is unceremoniously being removed from the platoon. By the sergeant major’s book, an insubordinate wise-ass given to pop-off answers has no place in the unit, no matter how good a fighter he has been or how entrenched he is in the platoon family. The platoon, already short-handed as a result of combat death and injury, must now endure the last few weeks of deployment without one of their beloved members and a trusted fighter.

The soldier is crushed, and McPadden stands there dumbfounded. He appeals to the battalion commander, but the colonel is anything but sympathetic. “It’s decided,” he retorts, “Trust me, we are doing you a favor,” as if he too believed the soldier was a cancer that needed excising for the good health of the platoon. McPadden, suddenly aware how powerless he is and how capricious is his chain-of-command, stands paralyzed as the soldier packs his gear and stows it in one of the colonel’s trucks. McPadden writes:

Minutes later the colonel’s convoy departs with [the soldier] crying in the back seat of the second Humvee. I cannot stop thinking about this little warrior, crying at being removed from his platoon and squad, destroyed at being forced off the battlefield.

Former Friend, Now a Foe

Toward the end of his tour in the Korengal with 1-32 Infantry, McPadden befriends a local policeman named Abdul, who then becomes McPadden’s partner in several military, infrastructure, and governance projects. McPadden and his men are invited into Abdul’s home for meetings and meals, where they meet his family and are always extended hospitality. All good, but two years later McPadden returns to the Korengal as part of a Ranger strike-force charged with killing-or-capturing Taliban leaders. As one mission unfolds, McPadden finds himself and his Rangers lined up outside Abdul’s residence. An Afghan male emerges from the compound and is shot dead by the Rangers. McPadden makes a funny quip about the man’s death rattle, but upon inspecting the body recognizes the man as Abdul’s father. The Rangers then raid the residence and McPadden follows his men inside. There, he sees Abdul lined up against the wall with the other detainees. McPadden writes:

His aquiline nose I will never forget. If this were a movie, at this point, we would lock eye and one of would say something with tremendous gravity. In reality I freeze, then spin away and duck out of the house, fearing Abdul has seen my face. I do not know what he would say to me, whether he’d insist this is a mistake and plea for release or maybe admit to being bad. Perhaps he will blame me for everything that afflicts his homeland: poverty, lack of social mobility, decades of civil war, scarce natural resources, corruption, economic instability, and religious fanaticism. I don’t really know. I do know that when we shot Abdul’s dad, I mimicked his death sound perhaps to convince myself that I didn’t care about these people. In any case, I decide the worst thing would be Abdul failing to remember me at all.

Death in a Minaret

A week into the Second Battle of Fallujah, on Alexander Saxby’s birthday, a good friend of Saxby’s is killed. Saxby’s unit fights on, and later they assault a mosque from which they are taking fire. They return fire and then enter the mosque and climb to the top of the minaret. At the top, they discover the now-dead bodies of two insurgents who are obviously not Iraqi nationals. Confirming the presence of foreign fighters is a high priority information request from Saxby’s higher headquarters and also of interest to two New York Times journalists embedded with Saxby’s platoon.

A few hours later, Saxby describes to the two journalists the foreign fighters lying dead in the minaret. The journalists want to see the bodies for themselves, and the fighting calm for the moment, they convince Saxby’s platoon leader to assign a squad to escort them back to the mosque for photographic documentation. Saxby doesn’t go, but another of his good friends, Bill Miller, is part of the journalists’ escort. Unbeknownst to the patrol, the mosque has now been reoccupied by insurgent fighters. As Miller leads the journalists to the top of the minaret, he is shot and killed.

That evening, Saxby and one of the journalists are on the roof of a house the Americans have occupied. Saxby writes:

The New York Times reporter was sitting near us, trying to get a signal to send out his stories. He looked at me and asked what I had gotten for my birthday. I didn’t even look at him when I said, “Two dead friends.” I knew it would be many years before I celebrated my birthday again, assuming I made it past the next few weeks.

I have described the scenarios starkly and solely from the point-of-view of the authors. McPadden’s colonel and sergeant major may have seen more troubling signs than McPadden realized. Abdul, as McPadden notes, may have been a Taliban or Taliban sympathizer all along. The two journalists in Saxby’s account actually do have their say in later pieces (links below).

That’s all fair, and the confluence of perspectives have potential to change the thrust of the stories I have described. But that’s not work I will do here, and would probably be of little use to McPadden and Saxby. In the moment, and for years after, events occur on the battlefield that forever impress themselves on the participants without easy or satisfactory resolution. The average ordinary circumstances of deployment and combat are challenging enough, but sometimes an extra-added quirk or fillip of circumstance elevates the average and ordinary into the overwhelming and unfair. Soldiers rely on training, their mission orders, their instincts, and their sense of what their rank-and-duty role entails to see them through, but nothing prepares McPadden and Saxby for the events described above. Power, or powerlessness, is at the heart of the issue in each vignette, but not simply in the form of being subject to the cruelty of rank. The vignettes speak to the powerlessness of soldiers in the face of circumstances they couldn’t have seen coming and whose unintended consequences place undue demands on their ability to make sense of them.

****

The New York Times reporter in Saxby’s vignette is Dexter Filkins, the author The Forever Wars, an excellent journalistic account of the Global War on Terror campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. With Filkins is photographer Ashley Gilbertson. They offer their version of Bill Miller’s death in a recent PBS Frontline interview titled “Once Upon a Time in Fallujah”:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/once-upon-a-time-in-iraq-fallujah/transcript/

In 2008, Filkins wrote at length about the event in a New York Times article titled “My Long War.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/magazine/24filkins-t.html

Ray McPadden, We March at Midnight. Blackstone, 2021.

Alexander Saxby, Fallujah Memoirs: A Grunt’s Eye View of the Second Battle of Fallujah. 2021.

For all Strike Through the Mask! columns and especially this one, thanks to Wrath-Bearing Tree editor Michael Carson for suggestions and inspiration.

In my blog Time Now: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Art, Film, and Literature I rarely reviewed memoir and non-fiction. I also tried to promote stories about war other than those by infantrymen and stories about war that encompassed more than the battlefield.

In Strike Through the Mask! I’ve expanded my reach to address memoir, non-fiction, and actual events. In some columns, including this one, I have also begun exploring stories of fighting men and women in combat.

Two locations dominate the Iraq and Afghanistan “booksphere.” In both cases, the locations were scenes of intense fighting. In Iraq, it’s Fallujah, particularly the Second Battle of Fallujah, which was fought in 2004. For Afghanistan, it’s the Korengal—the river valley and surrounding mountains in Kunar province that featured some of the biggest battles of Operation Enduring Freedom and arguably the longest, most sustained effort by Americans to fight the Taliban.

The Second Battle of Fallujah saw a large combined-arms force, led by Marines, fight insurgent house-by-house through a city known for its many beautiful mosques. In the Korengal, US forces, led by the Army, strove to rid a remote, mountainous region of Taliban fighters and Taliban influence on the local populace.

Fallujah and the Korengal each generated a large number of memoirs, non-fiction accounts, and in the case of the Korengal, movies. Judging by the numbers they seem to be the places where the fighting that mattered most in the Global War on Terror took place. What do I mean by “matter”? Here I’m not thinking about strategic importance or overall mission success-or-failure, but in terms of geographically-centered experiences that seems to have deeply impressed themselves on veterans, interested commentators, and reading audiences. By this point, the very names Fallujah and Korengal inspire a certain reverence, as if any story told about them is sure to be momentous.

On my bookshelf, I have the following books about the Second Battle of Fallujah: Bing West’s non-fiction account No True Glory, Nathaniel Helm’s biography My Men Are My Heroes: The Brad Kasal Story, David Bellavia’s memoir House to House, and Alexander Saxby’s memoir Fallujah Memoirs. Elliot Ackerman’s Places and Names also describes the author’s experience fighting in Fallujah, where he won a Silver Star as a Marine platoon commander. Interestingly, I don’t know of a novel that portrays Marines and soldiers fighting in Fallujah. And though there are several documentary movies about Fallujah, it has not yet been portrayed by Hollywood, as far as I know. A movie based on No True Glory starring Harrison Ford was once announced, but seems to have never been made. Still, the opening lines of Saxby’s memoir illustrate the allure of Fallujah:

I’ve been told you never forget your first time. Your first kiss, your first love, your first car. My first time overseas was an experience that I will never forget. I experienced something that many people only read about in history books. The Second Battle of Fallujah is a watershed moment in my life. It serves as a frame of reference for many memories; before Fallujah and afterward.

Regarding the Korengal, for non-fiction I’ve read Sebastian Junger’s War, Wesley Morgan’s The Hardest Place, and Jake Tapper’s The Outpost. I’ve watched the movie based on The Outpost, as well as Junger’s Restrepo. I’ve read Ray McPadden’s memoir We March at Midnight, and also Medal of Honor winner Dakota Meyer’s memoir Into the Fire. This list might be expanded by inclusion of books such as Lone Survivor about special operations in Kunar in the early years of Operation Enduring Freedom. The novels And the Whole Mountain Burned by the aforementioned Ray McPadden and The Valley by John Renehan are coy about actually mentioning the Korengal, but it seems clear both are either set in or inspired by the Korengal. The dust-jacket blurb for The Valley reads:

Everything about the place was myth and rumor, but one fact was clear: There were many valleys in the mountains of Afghanistan, and most were hard places where people died hard deaths. But there was only one Valley. It was the farthest, and the hardest, and the worst. 

Scholars tell us that such places of lore and implication are tightly bound up with their geographical and physical setting. The idea is that the significant events were fated to take place on sites that lay waiting through the centuries for historical amplification. However that may be, the sense of the material look of Fallujah and the Korengal greatly impressed themselves on the participants who fought there as the right-proper backdrop for the events that subsequently unfolded. This heightened sense of possibility is reflected in the prose written by combatants.

Elliot Ackerman, in Places and Names, writes of Fallujah: We are four kilometers outside of Fallujah, the city of mosques: a forest of minarets rising from kaleidoscopic facades, all mosaicked in bursting hexagonal patterns of turquoise, crimson and cobalt.

Roy McPadden, in We March at Midnight, describes his first encounter with the Korengal: A six-hour voyage brings us to the maw of the Korengal Valley, a gateway of rock into more rock. Slicing out of the mountains here is a protean stream of the same name, which in spring and early summer is a ribbon of whitewater fed by a massif of twelve-thousand-foot peaks. By summer’s end, the peaks are naked of snow, and the stream slows to a dribble. I am no lover of rivers, only a field commander who has to cross them. 

Later, McPadden writes: Of all the provinces, I shudder at the word Kunar, for its black heart is the Korengal Valley. I harbor secret thoughts of a collision with it and confess that in this interlude of life, the valley has grown into a phantom of gigantic proportions.

As the quotes suggest, the upshot of this author-and-audience interest in Fallujah and the Korengal is that both places now resonate with higher orders of meaning. Through what one scholar calls “the complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” books and films about Fallujah and the Korengal participate in a “collaborative process of creating significant places by means of story.” In other words, there are the things that actually happened in Fallujah and the Korengal, and the “textualizing” of spaces by which they have assumed prominence in veteran and public memory. The geographic “spaces” of Fallujah and the Korengal have become hallowed “places” that dominate and even define the two separate theaters. As a result, other places and other narratives struggle to command attention.

I know this is true in regard to Afghanistan. My own deployment to Afghanistan taught me that the Khost-Paktika-Paktia region was home to much fighting and many events central to the American story in Afghanistan. Those who fought in Kandahar might say much the same thing. But Khost and Kandahar do not loom large in American thinking about Afghanistan, and other provinces where Americans deployed such as Herat and Zabul even less so. Stories about those places just plain don’t excite readers as much as do those set in the Korengal. They fight uphill to assert their importance.

Taken together, books and movies about Fallujah and the Korengal accrue a momentum and logic of their own. To have fought in those places is one thing, to tell a story about them is another, and to read about them is another. The relation of stories to actual events and stories to other stories are both dynamic and reifying, with the underlying themes and structures of the events and narratives reverberating in odd correspondences. Events and description of events are related by layers of meaning that transcend simplicity. An event casually mentioned in one narrative become central in another; some events are examined in prismatic detail in multiple accounts. One story begets another, and though individual narratives may differ, together they constitute a distinctive collective memory and pattern of thinking about their subjects. To participate in the story-telling flow either as a writer or a reader is to further instantiate their legendary status. Doing so implicates the author and reader in the enterprise not so much of truth-telling as myth-making.

The objection, or fear, is that the men and women who fought in either Fallujah or the Korengal have accrued a superior wisdom predicated on what’s been termed “combat-gnosticism”: their participation in events gives them wisdom not available to the rest of us. If anything, though, each new narrative about Fallujah or the Korengal now has trouble transcending conventional themes and takes, adding only the idiosyncrasies of personal experience. As a quote from a reader of one of the books mentioned above puts it on Amazon: “30 different people, 30 different stories.” Some of the narratives emit a self-important aura, or verge on romanticizing death and carnage. But it is also true that each new story-telling variant piques the interest. And why not? The textual hegemony of Fallujah and the Korengal is not salutary in all aspects, but it is by now very real. I know there will be more books about these places, and I know I’ll read most of them. If conditions ever permit, I would like to visit Fallujah and the Korengal in the company of veterans who fought there, or the journalists and historians who have written about them, and listen to their stories on the ground they took place.

***

The quotes from academic sources came from the following scholarly studies of links connecting geographic places, historical events, and narrative memory:

Nile Green, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India (2012): “booksphere” “textualizing space”

Virginia Reinburg, Storied Places: Pilgrim Shrines, Nature, and History in Early Modern France (2019): “complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend” “the collaborative process of creating significant places by means of a story”

Hulya Tafli Duzgun, Text and Territories: Historicized Fiction and Fictionalized History in Medieval England and Beyond (2018) was also consulted.

James Campbell, in “Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry” (1999) argues that critics buy too readily into the idea that literature about war reflects “a separate order of wisdom.”

Muhamet reaches for a plastic water bottle resting on the metal filing cabinet that serves as a nightstand. He drinks the last of it, tosses the empty bottle to the floor. It’s early, no sunlight seeping in yet through the open seam in the plywood and sandbags that cover the only window. He rolls out of bed and pulls on clean coveralls and dusty work boots while the dull, familiar soundtrack of small arms fire echoes in the background. Before the war, the camp was a Ba’ath Party resort, a favorite of Uday’s and Qusay’s. When the Americans arrived they named it Camp Baharia, but everyone here calls it Dreamland.

He takes a deep breath, pushes open the door, steps out under a pale moon onto loose gravel that crunches under his weight. It’s a two-cigarette walk to the Hydrologie office. A modest, regional wastewater firm based in Düsseldorf before the war, Hydrologie was now global, with expertise in logistics, cybersecurity, force protection. Hired as an electrical engineer, Muhamet spends his days cleaning portable toilets and repairing the generators and A/C units that keep Dreamland powered up and cool. When he reaches the office, he jams his cigarette into a bucket of sand by the door and steps inside, letting the aluminum door swing shut behind him. He flips on the overhead lights and trudges over to the calendar pinned to the wall above Fatmir’s desk. With a black marker he draws a diagonal line through March 13^th. Another week and this war will be the same age as his daughter.

He brews coffee and takes a cup out to the small courtyard behind the office, sinks into a white plastic chair. Holding a fresh Marlboro, he runs his fingers through his thinning hair and looks out to the north, where he can see tracer rounds careen like little red meteors, the ricochets charting a random and ruinous path through the sleeping hamlets beyond the wall.

He lights up and inhales as a tangerine sunrise spills out over the desert. This is why he comes out here so early. Over time, the walls of the camp can numb the senses. When he isn’t working, he passes the time watching movies or playing ping pong in the rec tent. But it’s only here, sitting alone, a slight buzz from the caffeine and nicotine, that hemanages, however briefly, to forget about the heat and the thousands of miles between his heart and home.

He ventures back inside and sits down at his desk, using his sleeve to wipe the dust from the framed photo of his family that was taken before he left Ferizaj, an old city in the rolling foothills of the Sharr mountains of Kosovo. The situation back home is far less dire now than it was three years ago, when half a million ethnic Albanians fled the country to escape Milosevic and his Serbian nationalists. By the time Muhamet left, he had the luxury of a return date. But fighting for peace and independence is one thing, and buying food and warm clothes for the winter is another. Leaving Kosovo was the only way he could earn enough to provide for his family. When he thinks too much about that day at the airport, he can’t breathe.

***

Now the fifth-largest city in Kosovo, for centuries Ferizaj was an anonymous farming community in a forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire. Then, in 1873, a new train station was built that linked it to the Orient Express, a massive rail network that stretched all the way from Istanbul to Paris. Over time, the flow of goods transformed it into the modern city it is today.

On his way to school every day as a child, back when Kosovo was still part of Yugoslavia, Muhamet would pass by a mosque that stood right next to an orthodox church. The only thing separating the two houses of worship was ashared courtyard. Today this phenomenon is a tourist attraction, a symbol of religious and cultural harmony in a region long plagued by sectarianism.

Nearby, just west of town along a country road his family would drive on weekend trips to the mountains, isanother phenomenon: the fork in the Nerodimka River. It’s one of only two rivers in the world with a natural fork that drains into two different seas.

And a few miles in the opposite direction is Camp Bondsteel. When half of Kosovo was unemployed after thewar, this sprawling new NATO base became a lifeline. Thousands of locals, Muhamet among them, earned reliablewages in the warehouses, kitchens, chow halls, and laundry facilities on base. Muhamet drove a sanitation truck and ate Taco Bell six days a week, always bringing extra home for his family.

It was at Bondsteel that he first heard about the job offers in Iraq. By then, several men he had known his entirelife had already signed up and left, and it wasn’t long before rumors circulated about the bonuses they had earned for being in a war zone, despite living and working a safe distance from the front lines.

The morning before he left, Muhamet drove west of town, past the neighboring church and mosque, until hereached a small park. It was empty, and he sat in the cool grass and stared down at the fork in the muddy Nerodimka. Some of the water flowed to the left and some flowed to the right, some people prayed in churches and others prayed inmosques, and some people stayed while others left. Leaving was a big decision, but most days he felt more like a drop of water in the Nerodimka than a man making his own choices — part of a larger system that is perpetually movingforward, twists and turns and currents carrying you to greener pastures or dumping you an ocean away from the people you love.

In the framed photo on his desk at Dreamland, they’re laughing, huddled together in the snow in the main square in Ferizaj, in front of the cubist mural of a waiter that covers the side of the Hotel Lybeten. A passing stranger took it a few days before he left, on the last night they all went out together as a family.

***

Fatmir arrives at the office and mutters a tired good morning. Muhamet wipes his eyes and sits up in his chair when hehears him come in. Trailing Fatmir are two Marines, one tall and dark-haired, the other short and stocky, his head shavedclean. Muhamet recognizes them from 2/6, an infantry unit from North Carolina that arrived at Dreamland around thesame time he did. Fatmir introduces them.

“The American law firm of Preston and Godchaux?” Muhamet says, grinning as they shake hands. He cringes to himself and is grateful when they laugh at the joke.

They sit down together at the small table in the middle of the room. The Marines notice Muhamet eyeing the green sea bag lying on the floor at their feet.

“Right, almost forgot,” Godchaux says. “We brought gifts.” He opens the bag, pulls out two new pairs of combat boots and a box of cigars, pushes them across the table to Muhamet.

“For us?” Muhamet says. “What for?”

Godchaux shrugs, smiles. “Fatmir says you’re his best driver and his best mechanic,” he says.

“We hear you’re good with generators,” Preston adds. Muhamet glances at Fatmir.

“I already told them we aren’t allowed to leave the camp,” Fatmir says. “If we did…” He snaps his fingers, thinking. “What’s the word I’m thinking?”

“Hypothetically?” says Preston.

“Yes, exactly. If we did, hypothetically, there could be no paper. Handshake only.”

Godchaux speaks next, but Muhamet has a hard time focusing and only hears some of what he says. They want him to join their nightly convoy that resupplies the Marines scattered across their area of operations. There’s a faultygenerator at one of the observation posts, and the portable toilets and showers need service from Hydrologie’s “honeywagon.” They assure him it’s a one- time request, to support a “hygiene surge” ordered by their commander. In turn, they’ll pay Muhamet and Fatmir each five hundred U.S. dollars — equal to three months’ pay back home and two weeks of his Hydrologie wages.

Muhamet clears his throat. “Your vehicles, they have armor?”

Godchaux and Preston exchange a look. “That’s right,” says Preston. “And a lot of firepower. Nobody messes with us out there.”

“You tow my truck and I ride with you? Behind the armor?”

Godchaux frowns. “I wish we could do that, Muhamet, I really do,” he says.

“Unfortunately…”

He tries to explain, says something about “maintaining a tactical posture,” but Muhamet isn’t listening. He’s thinking about the roads, how dark they must be at night. His palms feel clammy. He imagines straining to keep his truck from rolling over into an irrigation canal.

The Marines promise to stop by again the next morning to check in. The convoy leaves at dusk.

When the door closes behind them Muhamet says, without looking up, “If you like this plan, why don’t you go?”

Fatmir smiles patiently. “One, because I can’t fix a generator, and two, because I have a shop to supervise.” He places a hand on Muhamet’s shoulder. “It’s your call.”

***

He spends the rest of the day and a fitful night of sleep mulling it over, surprised that he’s even considering it. The money would help, of course. And Dreamland is teeming with contractors like him in search of a payday. If not him, they’ll find someone else, and they won’t even have to pay as much.

Unable to sleep, he walks to the phone center and uses a prepaid card to call home.

“It’s me,” he says, softly, when Samira picks up. It’s late in Ferizaj, too, just an hour behind.

The call woke her up, he can hear it in her voice.

He calls often, and sometimes, on days he’s feeling particularly homesick, he writes long, poetic letters that she reads aloud to Adriana, their daughter.

“I was hoping it was you,” she says.

“Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know, someone calling with bad news. But I don’t want to think about that. Guess what?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s snowing.”

“No. This late in the year?”

“I know, I wish you were here to see it. It’s so pretty. The river is frozen over.”

He can hear the furnace popping in the background, and he imagines walking home in the snow, stomping the slush from his boots and stepping through the front door to a roaring, cozy fire. Samira takes his coat and hands him amug, and he feels the first sip of steaming rakia coating his throat and chest.

“Muhamet?” “I’m here, love.”

“How are things there? Has the rain let up?”

“Yes, no more rain, but it’s getting hot now. I wish I was there.”

After they say goodnight and hang up, he leaves the phone center and heads for the gym, where Fatmir looks up from his stationary bike. “I’ll do it,” he says.

***

He arrives at the staging area just before dusk. A stiff wind has stirred up the desert air and painted the row of armoredvehicles a mix of deep orange and shadow gray, the patterns shifting with the setting sun. The motor pool is a beehive ofactivity: silhouettes of turret gunners greasing up their crew-served weapons, mechanics in tan flight suits making last-minute repairs, Godchaux gathering his drivers in a semicircle for the pre-brief. There’s a detailed model drawn in the dirt. Parachute cord marks the route, small rocks represent the vehicles. Popsicle sticks from the dining hall for the hamlets, twigs and bunchgrass for the vegetation, red dice for the radio checkpoints.

Godchaux — shorter than his troops, square and muscled, his freshly shaven head glowing pink — spots Muhamet and makes his way over. “Glad you could make it,” he says, smiling. “You’re just in time.”

He turns to address the drivers. “Ok, everyone on me,” he says. His voice booms. He pauses while the young men standing before him, who look to Muhamet more like orphaned boys than grizzled fighters, gather around. “This here is Muhamet. He works for Hydrologie. You’ve seen their trucks all over the camp. He’s Santa Claus tonight, so make surehe has everything he needs.”

Before Muhamet can ask, Preston appears and pulls him to the side as Godchaux kicks off his convoy brief. He’sgrinning, holding something white and fluffy. “Santa Claus beard,” he says. “Cheers the guys up when we deliver theirmail and supplies. Normally we draw straws to see who

wears it. It’s rare that we have a guest.” He looks down, then back up, like he’s just remembered something. “Shit,” he says. “You’re Muslim, aren’t you? I didn’t think about that till now.”

Muhamet lets out a full-throated laugh. Maybe it’s his nerves, or the look of doubt on Preston’s face, over something so silly when they’re about to do something so serious. Whatever the reason, it cuts through the tension in theair. He grabs the beard by its elastic band. “It’s okay,” he says. “We celebrate Christmas in my country, too.”

Preston pats him on the back and motions to another Marine, who hands him a Kevlar helmet with night visiongoggles attached to the front, a flak vest weighed down by thick ceramic plates, and a small digital camouflage backpackthat contains a pair of Nomex gloves, wrap-around ballistic eyeglasses, and a handheld Icom radio and headset fortalking to the other vehicles in the convoy.

“Here, like this,” Preston says, moving the goggles back and forth on the hinge to lower them to eye level and back up. “It might feel weird at first, but your eyes will adjust. Just take it easy and follow the truck in front of you. Ifanything seems off to you, or you need something — anything at all — just hold the talk button down here and speak clearly. We’ll take care of the rest.” He smiles. “Good to go?”

When Muhamet gives a thumbs up, he can feel his hand tremble.

After Godchaux ends his brief with a reminder to stay alert and follow radio protocol, Muhamet climbs up intothe cab of the Hydrologie truck, starts the engine, checks his mirrors and gauges, tests the pump switches by turning them on and off. Then he jumps down and does a walkaround, checking the treads on the tires, looking for a screw ornail, anything that might cause a slow leak, and takes a quick inventory of the long metal box that’s bolted to the back of the cab in front of the sludge tanks. There’s a tire jack, a toolkit, some spare generator parts, a backup pump hose, eight twelve-packs of toilet paper for the resupply. Satisfied that everything’s in order, he dons the flak vest and helmet and climbs back into the cab. Idle chatter, inside jokes and wordplay that’s hard for Muhamet to follow, fill his Icom headset. He closes his eyes and takes deep breaths to calm his nerves.

***

It’s dark when the Humvee in front of him finally inches forward. He fights the instinct to turn his headlights on as they weave through Dreamland’s date palm-lined streets. Preston was right, he thinks to himself. I can’t see a thing.

They halt just inside the front gate. Seeing the Marines dismount, he puts the truck in park and follows along. A voice from the front of the convoy calls out “Condition one!” When every weapon is loaded, they climb back into their vehicles.

Muhamet’s Icom crackles, followed by, “Victor One, Oscar Mike.” Moments later, the convoy is rolling through the gate and the radio banter goes quiet. The lead Humvee calls out the first checkpoint when they reach Route Michigan.

The first stop is the police station in Karmah, on the outskirts of Fallujah, where the Marines from Echo Company live with a dozen Iraqi police. Even Muhamet knows Karmah’s reputation for violence. He’ll have twenty minutes to fix a generator, clean and restock the chemical toilets, and fill the mobile shower units with fresh water.

At Route Golden, the convoy turns left through a break in the median. Golden is a two- lane road that starts on an incline. When it levels out, the minaret of a mosque comes into view. Narrow dirt roads splinter off the main route at random intervals, the turnoffs overgrown with wormwood and other thick brush. They’re essentially long driveways thatconnect the paved road to small hamlets of sandstone houses that twinkle under the moonlight. Muhamet sees something move up ahead, and in the quiet of the cab he can hear himself gasp. There’s something by the road, and now a second shape emerges from behind the first one. Eyes. Four of them, green and glowing.

There’s static on the handheld, followed by Preston’s baritone: “Fuckin’ dogs.”

***

They weave through the serpentine barriers at the IP station, where a working party is waiting to offload the supplies from the seven-tons. Godchaux jumps out of his vehicle and ground-guides the convoy into a defensive posture whilePreston helps Muhamet back his truck up to an opening in a row of Hesco barriers. Muhamet cuts the engine and steps down from the cab. Lifting up his night vision goggles, he’s stunned by the ragged appearance of the working party. They look like the feral dogs they just passed on the way in: pale and skinny, dark circles around their eyes. Muhamet whiffs a nauseating mix of body odor, cigarettes, foot powder.

“Look, Santa’s a fuckin’ Haji.” They’re pointing at him now, laughing. Only then does he suddenly feel ridiculous in the beard.

He knows this vibe from his time at Bondsteel — a mix of youth and tribal hostility toward outsiders that’s more bark than bite. Thinking fast, he grabs the end of the vacuum hose from the back of the truck and holds it up in the air.

“Ho, ho, ho!” he yells. “You have been good this year, boys and girls. Allow me to suck your shit!”

The working party doubles over in laughter, and Muhamet goes about his work while they offload the trucks. He cleans the toilets and refills the shower tanks, and Preston points out the generator and holds a flashlight for him. Muhamet takes a knee to get a closer look, and when he bends down he notices three men sitting on the opposite end of the courtyard. They have long beards and they’re wearing dark pants and light blue shirts with the sleeves rolled up.

Preston squats down by his side. “See how they just sit out here all nonchalant, no body armor or nothin’?” hesays. “Like they know they’re safe somehow.” He nudges Muhamet. “Watch this,” he says, standing up.

“Evening, pig fuckers!” he hollers. The three men glare at Preston, who waves back at them. “SalaamAlaikum!” They frown and say something that Muhamet can’t hear over the gargle and spit of the generator.

***

From the IP Station they head north to a small observation post on the north end of town. They have a schedule to keep if they hope to make it back to Dreamland before sunrise.

Muhamet tails the Humvee in front of him as they turn back onto Golden. They move slow, scanning the road ahead, ready to stop on a dime. It’s still and quiet under the curfew, and with the first stop behind them he lets his shoulders relax for the first time all day.

“Watch your asses,” Godchaux growls over the Icom. They’re approaching a traffic circle the Americans call the Lollipop. On one side is the mosque.

As soon as Muhamet’s truck enters the roundabout, there’s a bright flash. Something has knocked the wind out ofhim. He feels a vibration surge through his body, like a fault line cracking open his insides, then nothing.

He comes to face down on the side of the road, a loud ringing in his ears. Voices in his headset sound distantand muffled, and he tries to speak into his handheld but nothing comes out. He tastes metal, and before he can think about it his vision narrows and he loses consciousness again.

***

When he wakes up, he tries to stand but stumbles, his legs rubbery. Out of nowhere, Godchaux appears and grabs hisarm to keep him from falling. He can feel something wet under his clothes. He reaches for his thigh, expecting blood, butpulls his hand back to see blue liquid from his truck.

He leans back against a berm and sees the charred remains of the truck halfway submerged in the canal. Metal fragments are scattered across the road and the adjacent field. A medevac helicopter clatters overhead.

But when he looks up he’s surprised, and delighted, by what he sees: falling snow. It looks beautiful through his night vision goggles. An ethereal, emerald green flurry. that he realizes is a cloud of ash and burnt toilet paper whipping around in the air from the force of the blast and the rotor wash.

Godchaux reappears. Maybe he never left. “Are you okay?” he shouts in Muhamet’s face. Muhamet points up at the snow, not knowing it’s just ash and burnt toilet paper swirling from the force of the blast and the helicopter’s rotorwash. Godchaux looks up, then back down at Muhamet. “Just sit tight,” he says. “Doc’s on his way.”

His head throbs, his heart beating in his throat. He nods at Godchaux, who disappears again behind the white cloud of a fire extinguisher someone is spraying at a burning Humvee tire. His Santa beard has melted away and his mouth feels gravelly. He wipes an index finger along his gums, to scoop out the debris, and pulls out the pink fragmentsof a molar. Feeling his vision start to close in again, he gazes up at the eerie green snowflakes, swirling around and around, waiting for gravity to take hold. He sticks his hand out, hoping to catch some, but he feels dizzy and steadies himself against the berm. He closes his eyes and thinks of home. With a little luck, he’ll make it back before Christmas and take the family to Gjyla, their favorite restaurant. Samira and Adriana will wear the new coats he can afford to buy them, and they’ll warm themselves by the crackling brick hearth until their table is ready. He smiles at the thought of it when he feels himself being lifted into the air and carried away.

Numbers don’t lie, they say. 2 + 2 = 4. No matter how you rearrange it; no matter how you solve it. Turn it into subtraction (4 – 2 = 2), and it still works. Math’s rules are inviolable, unyielding. Particular inputs yield fixed outputs. Even, say, in cases of absolute value, where more than one answer is possible, the results are still finite and consistent.

Then again, numbers can be irrational. Complex. The existence of a mean requires that data fall above or below it. There are exceptions to rules (the commutative property doesn’t apply to division); theorems, you realize, rest on assumptions. You start to see that numbers, perhaps, aren’t as honest as they appear. Sometimes they trick you. Sometimes they betray you.

Twelve feet was how far the mortar had plunged into the ground of the CIA compound. People said the thud shook every trailer. I was on the other side of the Green Zone and heard about it on my radio. Lucky thing I’d been gone: the mortar had landed behind the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation building, only twenty feet from my trailer, along the path I walked to work every morning. A dud, thankfully: no detonation; no injuries. By the time I returned, workers had buried the unexploded ordnance, blended new soil with the old so thoroughly I could barely see the point of impact. Invisible, as though the thing had never existed—a null set, an imaginary number.

The mortar landing in the neighboring compound a few weeks earlier should’ve been a warning. But somehow an incursion into our own house seemed different. There were rules, hard-and-fast—of physics, probability—that all but guaranteed something like this wouldn’t happen. That assured us the chances were almost nil.

In November 2004, Iraq was many things: the location of my first tour as a CIA counterterrorist case officer; home to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; safe haven for terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; a sweltering, palm-freckled desert; the most dangerous place on earth. By November 2004, more than 800 American soldiers had been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

At the CIA station in Baghdad, we were trying to track down Zarqawi, but the war kept getting in our way. We couldn’t conduct source meetings in the Red Zone. Couldn’t do the usual things: eavesdrop in cafés, schmooze on cocktail circuits, dine at strategic restaurants. Couldn’t even leave the Green Zone to walk the streets. We were trapped in a fragile green bottle. Five attacks a day. Ten. Twenty. Some in daylight; some in darkness. Some aimed at the center of the Green Zone; some, the fringes. Some victimless; some fatal. An almost infinite number of variables.

Iraq was the place I learned to do math.

Like an alarm, mortar rush hour began most mornings at 0700. I’d open my eyes a fraction, watch the neon green numbers on my small digital clock, guess the seconds before another mortar would launch. Outside, “Big Brother”—the centralized public address system—would broadcast unintelligible instructions from the neighboring U.S. embassy compound. Sometimes—depending on my ratio of fear to exhaustion—I’d drag myself out of bed and run to the bunker outside my trailer. I knew by heart the graffiti inside its concrete slab walls: slogans and drawings that laughed at war, taunted war, ran from war, tried to make sense of war.

We’d heard stories—of the State Department officer reading in his trailer when an inert rocket pierced the wall; of the Gurkhas, huddled inside a building, killed by a mortar. One station officer confessed that he slept on the bottom bunk, wore body armor to bed, and drank himself to sleep. Others talked of spending the night at the CIA station, which had a sturdy roof and walls. I was arriving at work earlier and staying later.

But amid the hailstorm, nothing had ever struck our compound—which surely meant that nothing could. After all, what good is data if it can’t predict outcomes, offer certainty?

There were rules, I’d learned. Mortar attacks were preceded by audible launches (deceptively gentle, like hiccups). Rockets offered little warning—except a high-pitched whistle on close ones—but produced deafening explosions. Car bombs were deeper, more sonorous, lasted longer. If you could hear but not feel a detonation, it was remote. When the ground shook and pebbles sprinkled down, you ran for cover.

Insurgents launched more attacks in warm weather, some at the station postulated. But others countered that wintry air prompted action. Daylight offered insurgents good target visibility and freedom from curfew, but night provided cover. During the occasional rain shower, U.S. military helos couldn’t fly and deter attacks. But insurgents’ trucks and grip stocks would get stuck in the mud. Everything boiled down to probabilities.

I was doing my own calculations. I didn’t condition my hair in the morning: five fewer minutes in the shower meant five fewer minutes under my flimsy trailer roof. Didn’t hit the snooze button. It was, we all knew, just a question of out-calculating the enemy: Master the math and you’d be fine.

Sometimes I chatted about the mortars and rockets with the Military Police on our compound. A few shrapnel-resistant guard booths offered shelter, but the MPs spent most of their time outside, unprotected.

“Shoots,” my favorite MP dismissed the threat. “We been noticin’ them mortars always go over our compound. Comin’ from the other side of Haifa Street. We ain’t in their trajectory. Ain’t got nuthin’ to worry about.”

Everyone had a rule. A failsafe equation. Until the dud mortar landed in our compound.

Some four months into my tour, and the sky was gem-blue, translucent. Usually, the air was choked with dust, char, and smoke from explosions and burn pits; at night, stars pulsated through the thick haze like small dying hearts. You never got a sky so rich, so blue.

I’d gone for a long jog. Stripped off my running clothes and turned on the shower. Iraq’s first democratic elections had triggered a fleeting and tenuous peace, and the mortars and rockets had temporarily receded, a bully nursing his wounds. The sky was quiet. I didn’t know how long it would last, but for now I could condition my hair.

I dropped the bar of soap. My left hand returned to my right breast. A lump. Hard, palpable, so close to the skin it was almost visible.

Naked, dripping wet, I walked to my bed, probed the small mass. The statistics, the calculations, began. I was too young. No one in my family had ever had breast cancer. I didn’t smoke. Most lumps were nothing. Worst case scenario, breast cancer had a high cure rate. The odds were all in my favor. Math, trusty friend: don’t fail me this time. Like you did with the mortar.

I palpated my breast and stared at my trailer’s thin ceiling. Pairs of Blackhawks descended toward Landing Zone Washington. I wondered if I’d miss their sound when I left. They’d keep coming and going long after a new tenant occupied my small trailer, after I was gone.

On my next home leave, I had a biopsy. The lump was benign. The math hadn’t failed me. But I knew the law of averages: eventually, you’re bound to land above or below the mean.

1,900? 1,950? How many soldiers had been killed? My yearlong tour was drawing to a close, and the number plagued me. More than double the count when I’d arrived. It couldn’t break 2,000 before I left Iraq, I decided: this was my hard-and-fast rule. Every day, like a fanatical horoscope reader, I checked the death count.

One month left in Baghdad and days slowed down, passed in paralyzed motion, as though they were slogging through mud. The math wasn’t adding up; 24 hours was longer than 24 hours. Thirty days became sixty, became a hundred, became infinity.

October 25, 2005. Number of American soldiers killed in Iraq: 2,000.

I left a few weeks later.

A week? A month gone by? Writer Graham Greene said, “When you escape to a desert, the silence shouts in your ear.” So it was for me. When I escaped Baghdad, the silence was deafening. Leaving war didn’t necessarily mean that war had left me, I found.

These days, it’s almost clichéd to recite the litany of stumbling blocks upon a return to civilian life—traffic jams, loud noises, big crowds. Some days, just getting out of bed. (Does anyone, in fact, come back from war without these stories?) Often, I stared out the window for hours at a time. Days fell through holes, disappeared like the mortar under the ground, as though they’d never existed.

I moved from my cramped condo in Washington, D.C. to a more spacious, quieter house in the suburbs. It was near Reagan National Airport. At night, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, I could hear airplanes descending. I thanked God they weren’t Blackhawks and at the same time wished they were.

It was a degree of luck, I knew, that I’d survived. For others, the math hadn’t worked out so well.

I volunteered at Walter Reed Hospital. I delivered care packages to injured and ailing soldiers. My fellow volunteers and I roamed the sterile halls around every major holiday like tooth fairies. The psych ward—the largest in the hospital—was off-limits. Nurses warned us not to put sharp objects in care packages. Even mentally healthy soldiers weren’t allowed to have access to instruments of suicide. War had reached every bedpost.

One evening, our charity organized a casino night for the recuperating soldiers: card games and raffles bearing prizes like stereos and computers. My job was to talk to the veterans while they played cards, divine what they wanted in care packages. Every soldier had ideas. They were unflappable, oblivious to their missing arms and legs, the bandages around their heads, the wheelchairs to which they were confined for life. Shot glasses, robes, candy, they suggested. Small things made them happy.

As casino night drew to a close, the volunteers assembled on the stage to announce the grand prize. The soldiers gathered below, excitedly comparing numbers of tickets won and lost. Two men—not more than forty years combined—boasted only one ticket between them, intending to split any prize they won. One had lost his legs and was lying on his stomach, leaning over the stage to grasp half of the precious ticket, while his buddy, in a wheelchair on the floor below, held the other half. They clutched the scrap gleefully like it was a ticket to another world. The odds, I knew, were overwhelmingly against them.

The announcer called the winning number. They’d lost.

I have a complicated relationship with math. Sometimes it’s my friend, sometimes my enemy; sometimes reassuring, sometimes brutal and uncaring. Either way, it’s here to stay, like a childhood memory or a scar. I still find myself crunching the numbers, often on a daily basis. Anytime I feel death might win.

During the pandemic, I computed the chances of getting COVID from passing someone on my morning jog. How likely was I to die if I got sick? (I was middle-aged, healthy, didn’t smoke…my numbers were good.) After getting vaccinated, I calculated the necessity of a mask, the risk of transmission at a restaurant, a concert. How long would it take for my inoculation to wear off? For a booster to kick in?

As I grow older, I get increasingly nervous at doctor appointments. I wonder if the smog of burning trash, ordnance smoke, and other toxins we breathed daily in Baghdad will eventually defeat my body’s defenses, warp my cells. If the math will tell me it’s my turn. Statistically, I know, I’m at higher risk.

Now I’m a parent, and every time there’s a school shooting, the numbers start forming columns on the page. Chances are small, I tell myself, that it will ever happen to my son. That a school in our district will be the next target. Miniscule probability that it will be my son’s school. Half a percent? Quarter percent? His classroom. Surely less than an eighth of a percent. (Right? Don’t fail me, math. Please don’t fail me on this one.)

Math is my memento from Baghdad. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing chances of death, looking for answers and rules and reassurances, something to hold onto in a world that feels every day, in a million ways, like a war. All I can do is hope the numbers are on my side.

She came from the south, wearing a bright red dress and carrying a light blue backpack, weaving through the well-worn paths on the banks of the Euphrates that had been carved out by foot traffic and various other forces of erosion for millennia. The same ground carried her ancestors and bequeathed them their fertile crescent, upon which they birthed a cradle of civilization and set forth the foundations of human history and society, with all its triumph and suffering. For all that had changed in the sweeping conquest of ecological momentum and Westphalian geopolitics, the beauty of the Euphrates remained. Its flora flourished, hosting palm trees and wildflowers, poplar trees and different species of reed, camel thorn and prosopis, that all combined to a bright, magnificent green to the armed predator drone circling 25,000 feet above. She may have heard the slight hum of its engine as it watched over her with its hellfire missiles and multi-spectral targeting system that held several high-quality cameras to broadcast the feed of her image to SPC Yates’ screen, but it’s unlikely. Drones circled over her head everyday while she went to school and went on with her life, oblivious to SPC Yates’ existence as a set of eyes that was capable of seeing her every move and even ending her entire existence.

His real name was Brian. If it were not for the college loan forgiveness program that brought him into the Louisiana Army National Guard, that’s what he would have preferred to have been called. But it did, and the Army named him SPC Yates. He sat at his desk in the base defense operations center (BDOC) of Al Asad Air Base and watched his screen. Around him, other SPCs carried out similar tasks, monitoring drone feeds and security cameras littered throughout their area of operations in Al Anbar province. Together, they looked for things that could kill them, rockets or drones riding in the bed of a Toyota highlander or being loaded into the back of a trailer. SPC Yates was good at his job. He tasked drone pilots, far away in their air-conditioned trailers on an air force base somewhere in Nevada, to survey certain areas and strike certain targets depending on the needs of the day and the orders he received from the battle captain that sat at the back of the room. He stared at suspicious trucks and dangerous looking people. More often than not, they were nothing. A group of insurgents loading rockets into a pickup would end up being a family moving a mattress. An individual fitting the description of a known terrorist would be an old man herding goats. Through these laborious tasks and the daily monotony of his screen, SPC Yates came to know the village of Al Baghdadi, ten kilometers to their north, its winding roads and paths, and all its nooks and crannies. He immersed himself in the foliage of the river that cut between it, colorful and bright, and yearned to be around the green of his childhood, the marshes and swamps around New Orleans where his father taught him how to fish, instead of the bleak and barren landscape of sand and dust that waited for him outside the door of the BDOC. He came to recognize the people, the shopkeepers and merchants, schoolchildren and insurgents. But he had never seen anyone quite like this, the little girl in a red dress.

She walked with an ease and absolute lack of concern or awareness about the dangerous world around her. In the strikingly vivid and detailed quality of the drone’s cameras, SPC Yates could see the pattern of her dress, floral and white, as it blew with the breeze that swayed the green all around her. She skipped up and down, and bobbed her head from left to right, holding the straps of her backpack with both hands as it bounced gingerly with each leap. She had dark brown hair that she let flow past her shoulders, free of a bun or head scarf, which was uncommon. Brian thought he could see the sun reflecting off of it when she tilted her head in just the right direction. Every few steps, she would stop, and pick a rock up off the ground and skip it across the water to her right. He found her fascinating. She was unlike anything SPC Yates had seen in his eight long months sitting at his screen in Iraq. The simplicity with which she existed astounded him. He wondered what was in her backpack, books about the history of Mesopotamia, or perhaps mathematics, maybe even literature filled with pros of faraway lands. The joy he felt in her orbit was almost unrecognizable after being away from his true joy along the Mississippi for so long.

Along that magnificent and mighty body of water that cut through his small town in Louisiana all the way to Canada, SPC Yates was home. He was Brian. He remembered skipping rocks with his sister as a boy. When he was older, they would play hooky and sneak down to the banks where they watched the barges go by, as they drank cheap beer and cheaper cigarettes, speaking of days when they would leave their Louisiana outpost along the river. He thought of his sister, Laura. She wanted to be a makeup artist and work on movie sets in Los Angeles. After an unplanned pregnancy and an unreliable boyfriend, she ended up staying on those same banks and raising Brian’s nephew, Ben. Before he left for the deployment, Brian promised he would send him a picture of a camel, but he never did. He didn’t even call for his birthday last month. It’s not that he didn’t want to. He just didn’t have the energy to fake the smile and laugh he knew he would have to muster to reassure them he was okay. But, watching the little girl in the red dress prance along the Euphrates, Brian decided he would finally call Laura back and tell little Ben about the camels he saw in Kuwait to wish him a late happy birthday.

Then it happened. The alarm blared. He was no longer Brian.

“Incoming, incoming, incoming.”

SPC Yates’ heart stopped and jumped into his throat. Before he could think, he was on the ground where his heart raced again, beating like a drum into his chest that threatened to break through his sternum and spill onto the floor. He scrambled to reach for his kit, the Kevlar vest and helmet that lay next to his seat, reaching his left arm out to cling for the facade of protection. The explosions were distant at first. But as Brian pulled his vest across the plywood floor, they grew closer. The ground shook. The walls shuddered and the ceiling sagged with each thud that grew louder and louder. He couldn’t make his hands work. He flopped and flailed on the floor, trying to get on his vest and helmet, grappling with clasps and fighting with clips in his desperate attempt to live even though he knew it wouldn’t save him. Those around him did the same, completely disregarding their assigned duties and tasks as all semblance of order collapsed and everyone embarked on a journey of personal survival, no matter how in vain. The room filled with dust when a rocket impacted a T-wall outside, tearing a hole into their plywood fortress and filling it with smoke, soot, sawdust, and sand. Brian couldn’t hear. He inhaled the toxic mixture into his lungs and nostrils. He gave up on the vest and hugged the ground as tightly as he could. He made himself as flat as possible. He wished that he could dig through the earth and come out the other side. The ground around him continued to shake. The grains of sand in front of his face bounced with each additional thud and he felt that he was one of them, a victim of circumstance and location that left him completely at the whim of the explosions that rocked across Al Asad Air Base. He could hear again. People were screaming. Help! Get the fuck down.

They were anonymous screams that Brian could not identify. He was too paralyzed to try. His surroundings and all of his bodily senses collapsed onto him into a single mass of noise. The explosions. The screaming of orders. Get that gun up! The pleas for help. Holy Shit. Jesus Christ. The inaudible cries from friends. The beeps of the monitors and systems. The alarm. All of it, even the unheard, the smells and vibrations, combined into a terrible cacophony of noise that paralyzed Brian completely. Frozen and resigned to his own death, Brian thought of nothing. He did not think of God, or his sister Laura, or his nephew Ben, or even his friends who could be dying around him. Fear, fear, fear, was all his body could muster. The fear gave him no purpose or drive, nothing to combat or defend against. The fear simply was. It ate alive at his insides and propelled his heart harder and harder against his chest. Nothing in the biological array of his body, no organ, no frontal cortex, nothing, could sustain a thought or sensation other than absolutely paralyzing fear. And then it was over.

The explosions stopped first. And as the mass of noise evaporated, it created a vacuum that was filled with utter silence. The mosh pit of yells, and screams, and barking of orders was replaced by a tense quietude. It was as if anyone spoke or made a sound of any kind, it would all begin again. The dust in the air slowly settled back onto the ground as the earth no longer shook with fury, but instead lay there like the inanimate rock that it was before. The smoke began to clear from the room. And in that silence, they were brought back. The fear and panic dissipated, replaced by a slow, burning anxiety that sat like a tripwire. It could be activated at any time when chance would again return the chaos. The people around Brian became aware of their surroundings. He himself was no longer paralyzed. Instead, he felt hungover. He was stuck in a deep sludge, like a dream where your feet never move fast enough, and you can’t outrun the monster chasing you no matter how much you try to make your legs move. People checked themselves for wounds, feeling and looking for blood. They did so for their friends around them. Brian patted slowly around his torso and down his legs, praying that the adrenaline wasn’t so strong that he hadn’t noticed a chunk of flesh missing. He wasn’t hit. Aside from a couple superficial wounds, lacerations to faces and extremities from shards of plywood and other shrapnel, no one was seriously wounded. They were alive. Finally, someone spoke. It was the battle captain.

“We up?” he spurted out through his cracking voice. “Everybody good?”

The NCOs responded in the affirmative. After the brief shock of realizing they were alive, their duties and responsibilities sprang back into their collective mind. The base needed to be defended. There could be more attacks. Accountability of personnel needed to be collected and the wounded tended to. The chaos returned. This time, it was in the form of orders being barked and confusion running rampant as people sought answers for important questions. Is that gun up?! Where did it come from, I need a grid?! Where’s the mass cal?! Do we have a medevac en route to that location?! How long until the QRF is up?! Do we have air support on station yet?!

Brian sprang back up to his station and started directing all of his drones to various locations to find where the rockets had been shot from. He looked along the MSR that weapons were regularly transported on. He scanned abandoned lots in Al Baghdadi. He searched known firing areas and recognizable landmarks where previous attacks had been carried out. He tasked his drones to every location he could think of, changing their course intermittently as orders and the person giving them changed by the second. He searched frantically for the mysterious ghost that could begin shooting again at any second. Every truck was carrying rockets. Every house was hiding insurgents preparing the next wave. Every individual was a spotter who guided the rockets to their target.

“Point of Origin located, prepare to copy grid!”

Finally, someone found it. As Brian directed his drones to the location, he heard people shouting. So focused on his own task, the words blurted out around him were blurred out. Truck. Mosque. Burning. Civilians.

When Brian finally got a predator over the location, he put the pieces together. He made out the scene through a cloud of smoke. The vibrant and gorgeous green that he had fallen into earlier was replaced by utter devastation and sheer turmoil. A truck blazed with a powerful surge of bright red and orange. Twenty meters away, a trailer smoldered, disconnected from the burning cab, and emitting a large and continuous plume of black smoke through its twisted steel. Secondary, smaller explosions set off throughout the frame. To the right of his screen, Brian saw a building split in half. A wall was caved in by the blast. Cinder, concrete, and wooden shards were strewn across the ground. Through the smoke, he saw a crescent moon on the remaining part of the roof and realized it was a mosque. It was a Friday, the holiest day of the week, and people were certainly inside. Zooming in with one of the cameras, he saw a mass of red. Body parts, legs, arms, and the unrecognizable alike, combined to make a ghastly mural of blood, flesh, and bone. Brian quickly averted his eyes and began dry heaving off to his right.

“SPC Yates, get your eyes back on your fucking sector!” shouted his sergeant.

Covering his mouth with his fist, Brian continued to gag as he resumed his scan of the area. The drone pilot was in control of the flight path and the cameras, so Brian simply watched the carnage like a helpless onlooker of an interstate car wreck. The pilot continued circling above the site as it completed its battle damage assessment, until veering off to the Southeast. The camera slowly followed a blood trail that led out of the larger, unidentifiable mass of red. The size of the trail grew. It began with small dots that grew bigger as the drone flew Southeast. Then it turned to a steady stream of dark red that grew thicker and thicker the farther it went. The drone slowly followed the trail down the banks of the river until it reached a thick area of brush where the trail stopped. As the camera zoomed out and the pilot reoriented himself, Brian noticed a red figure at the top right of his screen right along the water. The camera zoomed in and Brian saw her.

The little girl’s red dress was still red, but there was a dark stain covering her right abdomen and the lower portion of her back. Her blue backpack was gone. She lay face down with her right foot caught in the root of a tall poplar tree. Her left knee was bent as if she was climbing up a steep cliff. Her left arm was curled under her torso and out view, while the right was sprawled out to her side as if she was reaching for something. Her hand was open and palm facing up towards the camera of the drone. In it, she carried something, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Her face rested in the mud, inches before the river, and her hair was sprawled out into the water in front of her, revealing the back of her neck. The current slowly drifted her dark brown locks back and forth. As she slowly crept out of the frame of the camera, Brian watched the water ripple off the top of her head and the bottom of her dress blow delicately in the wind. Then she was gone.

Brian finished the rest of his shift. He sat there in silence, staring at his screen until his replacement arrived a few hours later. He grabbed his rifle and his kit and walked out of the room, noticing the full scope of damage for the first time. He saw splinters all over the dust and sand covered floor. He saw the hole in the wall at the other end of the BDOC where the rocket’s blast had blown through. When he walked out, he saw T-walls blasted and Hesco barriers torn apart by the more immediate blasts. Further off, he saw smoke from small fires that continued to blaze throughout the base. He walked back to his chu and saw he had a text from Lauren. He ignored it. He laid down in his bed and rubbed a picture of him and Ben playing fetch with his parents’ dog in a creek bed that ran off the Mississippi. He took a bottle of NyQuil he had stored under his bed and drank the half bottle that was left. He opened the bottle of sleeping meds that the base doctor had prescribed and swallowed a handful. He fell asleep.

That is how Brian finished the last month of his deployment. When he wasn’t on shift, watching his sector, he’d go back to his room and take enough sleeping meds to fall asleep. He would direct drones over to where the little girl in the red dress had died every once in a while. There was nothing there. Just an empty patch of mud and a tall poplar tree. Sometimes Brian would stare at the empty space and dream of sneaking off the base and leaving a flower at the site, or maybe a book that she would have liked to have in her backpack. The rest of the deployment was uneventful. There were no more attacks. Their replacements eventually arrived, and Brian did his best to teach the new SPC that sat in his chair everything that he could. But the kid didn’t really listen. His name was Hanson and he talked about wanting to get into a fight. He wanted to get attacked. He wanted to transmit an order to a drone to conduct a strike. He wanted to see the blast and carnage. He wanted to feel the power of holding death in his hand. He talked about the Iraqis he saw on his drone feed like they were actually just little specs in a video game. Brian ignored him.

Just before he finally went home, Brian went down to the bomb yard where they kept blown up vehicles and trash. They had brought the truck that shot the rockets at them there the day after the attack. The insurgents hid all thirty of the rockets behind bags of flour to get through a checkpoint, causing them to ignite and cook off the rockets inside halfway through their launching. That’s why the truck blew up, the mosque was destroyed, and the little girl in the red dress slowly bled out alone on the banks of the Euphrates. It’s also probably why Brian survived. He stood there at the gate of the bomb yard and stared at the smoked out twisted steel that remained of the truck that tried to kill him and his friends. He wondered if it was a piece of shrapnel from the twisted mess that had pierced the little girl’s red dress and dug into her liver or another vital organ. He thought of flour and how a simple cooking ingredient had decided who would live and who would die. He considered how and why no combatants from either side were killed, only innocents. He thought of the fourteen innocent men, women, and children who had been torn to shreds in that mosque. He wondered how many more had been wounded. He thought about how he could find no mention of it in any US news sources. He thought of his friends and fellow soldiers he didn’t even know who were wounded. He remembered the little girl in the red dress.

Two weeks later, Brian was home. He moved in with Lauren because, after he gave up his lease for the deployment, he had nowhere else to go. He was remote and cut off. She would try to get him to come out for social occasions or family get-togethers, but she couldn’t even get him to come outside of his room for dinner. She left a plate outside his door every night. Eventually, the extra sleeping meds he stashed from Iraq were gone, and he had to come out. No longer able to sleep, he set himself out to fix Lauren’s crumbling porch. He used up about half of the money saved from the deployment on lumber, tools, and finishing, and got to work. It was August in Louisiana, and it was hot. Unlike Iraq, it was humid. He demoed and worked to put in a cinder block foundation so that it could ride out the hurricanes and flooding that had brought it to such a state of disrepair in the first place. Lauren would bring him out water and plead with him to get out of the heat and come inside to the air conditioning. Anything to get him to talk. But he just kept working.

Finally, in October, the work was done, and the deck was finished. Brian had done an outstanding job. The foundation was solid. From it, six solid posts of cedar rose up. A finished staircase led up to a deck of pressure treated tropical hardwood. Ben helped him build some Adirondacks out of fresh pine. Together, they sanded and treated the wood, so the chairs looked rustic and modern at the same time. Once the foundation was finished, Lauren planted a garden around it of beautiful hibiscus and phlox. With all the work done, Lauren was worried what Brian would do next. He hadn’t returned to school like he planned. He was going to study to be a marine biologist and move to Miami. After getting back, when he would answer her questions, he’d just say “eh, I’ll figure something out.” But she wasn’t so sure. She often thought she questioned him too much and should leave him alone, but she was genuinely worried and felt a responsibility as his big sister. She decided to take a family trip to Brian’s favorite spot on the river to celebrate the completion of the porch and Ben’s good grades from the fall term. She was surprised when Brian agreed.

When they got there, it was exactly as Brian remembered it, a small hideout in the River State Wildlife Refuge where the noisy barges couldn’t be heard, and the drunk New Orleans’ tourists wouldn’t be found. Sitting in the blue, still water, oak and cypress trees let their leaves sway back and forth in the wind while the wildflowers bloomed on the shore. Lauren set down a picnic blanket and took a couple of beers out of the cooler for her and Brian. There was a juice box for Ben. She prepared both of their favorites: fried shrimp po’boys. She looked over at Brian, who stood on the shore of the river delta, and thought she saw a slight smile. Ben ran alongside them chasing a dragon fly.

Brian looked out at the still water and smelt the air through his nostrils as he inhaled deeply. He looked down at his feet and saw the water slush up between his toes as it mixed with the mud and turned into a milky brown. He looked up at the sky and wondered what he and his family would look like to him from a camera on a predator at 25,000 feet. He knew the answer was specs among bright green. All around him was the beauty of the wildlife that he had yearned for in that desert where nothing lived. He looked back at Ben, who was now running around Lauren and playing with her hair and thought about how carefree his nephew was. He considered whether that was for the better or worse. Brian crouched down, placed his fingers in the water, and started making little circles in it. He bent down onto his knees and sunk his fingers in the mud. He dipped his hair, now long and curly, into the water and felt the ripples wash up against it. He felt himself in the river, in the mud, in all of it.

As he closed his eyes, he saw himself amidst the beauty of the Euphrates, surrounded by the same luscious green. He walked the well-worn paths he had watched on his monitor for countless hours during those 9 months. He followed a pair of footprints along the water that did not have a discernible pattern, zigzagging back and forth, stopping and starting, and leaving rocks unsettled from their natural place. He kept walking. He heard laughter. As he turned the corner around a tall poplar tree, he saw a little girl in a red dress dancing in a clearing of mud between the foliage. She laughed as she rocked her head from side to side and twirled in circles, amused by how her dress flowed up with her movement. Her innocent smile and sparkling eyes were oblivious to Brian’s presence until he took another step and snapped a branch. Surprised but not startled, she turned towards him and smiled, saying something in Arabic that Brian could not understand. She giggled again and reached her hand out towards Brian, gesturing him towards her. Unthinkingly, he followed, taking her hand and following her down to the water. They walked out into the river, as the water passed her ankles, then her knees, and eventually rose to her hips. She let go of Brian’s hand and leaned back, floating atop the water, and let the current take her downstream. Brian began to follow.

“Hey, you okay?” Lauren whispered into his ear. She was crouched beside him with her hand on his shoulder.

Brian pulled his head out of the water and sat up on his knees, turning towards her, tears bubbling in his eyes.

There was a long silence before he said, “there was this little girl.”

Lauren got down on her knees with him and nodded her head earnestly.

“Over there?” She asked.

Brian nodded, “she was just so little, not much bigger than Ben. And she was beautiful, Lauren.” A slight grin broke through his tears.

“You know, just this beautiful little girl skipping along the river. And she had on this red dress.”

He paused before exhaling sharply and looking out at all the green across the water. He gazed at the oaks and the cedars and the cyprus. He looked at the marsh land’s vegetation sticking out from the river’s surface. He looked up at the sky and thought he heard a slight humming sound.

“Would you look at all that green,” he said to Lauren.

“Yeah, it’s really something isn’t it?” She responded.

Brian took off his shirt and slowly waded out into the still water until it reached waist height. Lauren looked on from the shore. With his jeans still on, he leaned back and let himself float freely, completely at the whim of the light tide. He stared up at the sky around him and saw nothing but clear, blue air. He imagined himself riding the river all the way down to the Gulf, getting caught in the loop current and finding his way to the jet stream that would carry him across the Atlantic. From there, he’d latch onto the warm water flow around the horn of Africa and go up into the Indian Ocean, where he would have to find his own way to the waters of Oman and all the way up through the Persian Gulf. At the mouth of the Euphrates, he would travel north along its banks until he found that inconspicuous patch of mud on the shore just south of Al Baghdadi.

Joy Damiani:  If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin’ (and other lessons I learned in the Army)

Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions

You will hate this book.  You will hate being compelled to finish Damiani’s story in one sitting (you’re excused if it takes two).  You will hate spewing coffee (or other beverage) onto your computer keys if you are reading the book on Kindle, or sopping a few pages of the paperback, because of Damiani’s humor and sarcasm.  And you will hate that the story she tells is, regrettably, true, not only about her personal experiences but also about her analysis of military culture in general and the Iraq War.

Formerly known as Emily Yates, the author now goes by Joy (her middle name) Damiani (her family name).  She “traded in” her “old name” to put closure on her divorce and to move ahead with new projects.  As a musician and songwriter she has released a number of albums and music videos; a recent music video, a lively romp, is entitled “Brains in Meat Suits.”  She is also a poet.  “I Am the Savage” relates to her time in Iraq, while “Yellow Ribbon” criticizes the empty patriotism of civilians who feel that a yellow ribbon on their car absolves them of complicity in war.  Damiani has published essays on veterans’ issues, especially the difficulties faced by women vets returning home.

She now turns to memoir. If You Ain’t Cheatin’, You Ain’t Tryin’ (Joy Damiani Words & Music, 2022), “Dedicated to every veteran who has lived these lessons and to every young person who learns them for the first time here,” is divided into thirteen chapters that describe Damiani’s teenage pre-military years, the reasons she joined the Army at age 19, her six years in the military, with two Iraq deployments writing “Army news” as a Public Affairs Specialist, and concluding chapters that assesses her experiences and offers a bit on her immediate post-deployment life.

The book begins with a brief mention of 9/11 and then a flashforward to 2004, where Damiani, as a nineteen-year old Public Affairs Specialist, has to revise the post newspaper to include a KIA report and a photograph.  She “mechanically considered” the change, “calculating the dead in terms of column inches.”  Then she learns that the KIA was actually a friend, Tuazon; he had only been in Iraq for two months.  She had learned to separate herself from any emotions about her stories, especially about those killed, but she realizes her well-crafted professionalism is starting to crack when she thinks of all the dead and that she is just repeating a script: “A wave of nausea washes over my body . . . I was so proud of my well-rehearsed presentation—showing no sorrow, always professional!  But now I seem to be playing the part without trying.” She smooths over the crack with Jim Beam.

Damiani’s journey to the Army is somewhat circuitous.  Her sarcastic bent and dislike of authority lead her parents to more or less spirit her away to the Family Foundation School in order to cure her of her sins of sarcasm and rebellion.  (The Family Foundation School, in Hancock, New York, closed in 2014 amid lawsuits and accusations of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse of its teenage students).  In the eighteen months plus she spends at the school the only bright spot is a class in folk music, where she develops an “affinity” for Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Kris Kristofferson, among others, and writers Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.  Sure cures for rebellion!  Unfortunately, Damiani is not suitably cured of her sarcasm, and she faces another six months of “supervised rock-picking.”  Eventually, she decides to leave the school and hitchhikes back home to Syracuse, where her parents put her on a strict regimen in order to live at home.  She also enrolls in a local community college and after six months back home gets a call from an Army recruiter, offering her, for a five-year hitch, a journalism, or “Public Affairs Specialist,” opportunity.  It takes Damiani all of twelve seconds to answer in the affirmative.

She goes to Fort Jackson, South Carolina for basic training.  She stumbles through, with sprains, blisters, a broken nose, and two black eyes, but compared to her time at the Family Foundation School she writes that, “the Army’s attempts at indoctrination seem almost quaint.”  Her rebellious tendencies are still in evidence:  She does qualify in marksmanship but names her M16 A-2 rifle “Bungalow Bill” after the Beatles’ song.  She also pokes her finger in the eye of the Army in other ways:  “The drill sergeants ignore me when I hum ‘The Times, They Are A-Changin’’ while on guard duty, or when I use my turn calling marching cadences to lead the platoon in a rousing chorus of ‘War! What is it good for?’”

The next chapters detail Damiani’s first deployment to Kuwait for training and then to Iraq.  When she finally reaches Baghdad her job “is to put out a decent newspaper . . . I’ve come to take it seriously.”  Although she is still a rhombic peg in a triangular hole she does have the commitment to do her best; “the option of apathy has never even been on the table before.”  She has integrity about her work even as she remains cynical about the “big picture.”  At the same time her dream of being a real “war reporter” is evaporating:  “Now, I feel defeated, rotting away in a combat-zone cubicle, waiting—wishing—for one of those incessant mortar attacks to successfully explode the headquarters.”  After her complaints, bordering on insubordination, Damiani does get the opportunity to go out on joint U.S. and Iraqi patrols.  Unfortunately, that assignment is short-lived.  Because of her criticism of an incompetent co-worker on the journalism team, she is removed from her associate editor position and basically has to cut and paste articles from Google searches.  She still has seven months to go.

After a year in Iraq Damiani’s cynical side begins to emerge more and more. She writes: “I’ve already spent the better (or worse) part of twelve months in Iraq as part of what I have come to recognize as an illegally-invading force.”  She notes that Orwellian language needs to be used to present everything in a positive light.  “‘Interrogation’ becomes ‘intelligence-gathering’”; the “occupation” is “‘reconstruction’”; the “war” is a “‘peace-keeping mission’”; “suicides” become “‘non-combat-related deaths.’”  She feels herself to be a “foreign invader.”

Interspersed with her time in Iraq, Damiani uses flashbacks to chronicle her disastrous marriage.  She was married a few months before deployment and right before her return to the States after a year in Iraq she realizes that the relationship had devolved further, that she has become “expendable.”  As she sits alone in her trailer at Camp Liberty she reaches her nadir, writingthat she “eyed my assault rifle and let my mind wander . . . absentmindedly measuring the distance from the trigger to the barrel, the distance from my fingers to my head.”  Damiani does return home and the marriage hits bottom, involving her arrest for domestic violence and a stay in a psychiatric hospital after suicide threats.  She is released after seventy-two hours and returns to work at [what base?]:  “The information war must go on. The war inside my head will have to wait.”  Her resentment over assignments grows:  “I’ve come to accept that by the time a typical day is over, I will want to cut someone open and feed them their own intestines. I see this as a step forward in my quest for self-realization and inner peace.”

When there appears to be light at the end of the military tunnel the threat of stop-loss is the oncoming train, to paraphrase poet Robert Lowell.  Damiani believes that she will be out before stop-loss takes effect, and if she re-enlists she can choose her duty, but the Army comes up with a creative way to hold on to her.  They devise an Orwellian “do-not-retain,” but still deployable list, albeit a falsehood, which is a method to guarantee her second deployment to Iraq.  Damiani agrees (without really agreeing) to return, and it is worth a look at her reason:  “The thought crosses my mind that I would feel like a jackass if I tried to get out of the Army on time while everyone around me shipped out. Even if it was an option, could I bring myself to be that soldier?  I’m not deploying because I want to, or because I think it’s a good idea. I’m doing it because deep down, I believe that if I don’t do it—if I get out of it on a technicality—I will be making light of everyone else’s sacrifice. I’ll be saying that I am special, that I deserve to stay home when my fellow soldiers pack up and go to war, and that the contract I signed is negotiable . . . Without realizing it, despite every effort to resist the Army’s conditioning and retain control of at least my own mind, I have suddenly become the kind of soldier the Army has always wanted: even when given the choice, I can’t quit the team.”

She returns to Iraq for fifteen months, and the Public Affairs duties are not much better.  Damiani’s major project is photographing visiting morale-boosting cheerleaders.  She also details the secretive drinking and an attempted sexual assault by two soldiers she thought were friends.  Faced with an extended deployment, she decides on the (not so) subtle course of annoying her superiors (“Intimately aware of the drastic repercussions for out-and-out revolt, I’ve swiveled my sights in the familiar direction of subtle rebellion.  The delicate dance of expressing my displeasure while also staying out of trouble requires more finesse than I usually can claim”).  This entails including quotes from Hunter S. Thompson and lyrics from Bob Dylan in official emails, to the consternation of a major and a colonel, and creating a custom-made ID badge with a decidedly unserious face.

As the memoir winds down, Damiani becomes more critical and somber about the whole enterprise, seeing failure everywhere.  She writes:  “As far as I can tell, five years after the ‘surgical’ airstrikes flashily-nicknamed ‘Shock and Awe’ leveled the nation’s cities, government, and infrastructure, our presence in Iraq is a clear indicator that if an exit strategy ever existed here, it has to have gone horribly awry. Either that, or—I shudder at the thought that I don’t want to believe—this whole debacle could be intentional.”  As a kind of bookend to the death of Tuazon mentioned at the beginning of the book, she learns of the death of a friend from her first deployment, Mele, killed by an IED.  Choking back tears she is left with one thought:  “What is the fucking point of this? What. Is. The fucking. Point? Nobody is winning here.”

The book closes in 2011, three years after Damiani’s return to the States.  She is twenty-nine years old.  She spends some of her GI Bill at Cal Berkeley, where one of her courses includes study of the Iraq War.  Her fellow students are ten years younger.  To them, the war is an object of study; to her, it is still “present tense.”  She writes:  “My friends are still fighting it, after all. Sometimes I wonder if I am, too.”  She begins to second-guess herself with “what ifs?”  and “maybes.”  But after all is said and done, she ends with the recognition that “The Army didn’t make me blind. My sight is the clearest it’s ever been.”

Although she might protest my estimation, Damiani is the type of soldier the Army needs.  She refused to take the easy way out, to fall victim to simply “playing the game” to make her time more agreeable.  Even with the disappointments, the misery, the betrayals, and the lies that she endures, sometimes with humor, sometimes with rancor, she retains the integrity of her commitment.

For further reading:

“Joy Damiani, Writer, Podcaster, Musician, and Army Veteran,” Interview with Frank Morano, https://wabcradio.com/episode/joy-damiani-writer-podcaster-musician-and-army-veteran-11-11-2022/

A selection of music videos:  https://www.youtube.com/c/JoyDamiani

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/joydamianimusic/

https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2020/09/artist-profile-musician-emily-yates/

What did you do if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and believed the wars you volunteered to fight were unethical or badly managed? Keep quiet and perform your duties as best you could? Take your concerns to the chain-of-command? Express your reservations privately to friends and family? Protest publicly by writing a congressman or news outlet? Or, wait until you were out of service to tell the world about your misgivings?

In Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars (2022), editors Andrew Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen invite fourteen veterans of the Global War on Terror to describe acts of public protest they made while still serving or in the years afterward. The contributors describe the events that led them to protest and explore the consequences of their actions. They also reflect on the shape dissent has taken in the post-9/11 contemporary political and cultural climate. 

Contributors include field-grade officers, junior officers, and enlisted service members; former non-commissioned officers are notably absent. Army and Marine voices dominate, with only Jonathan Hutto representing the Navy and no former Air Force or Coast Guard personnel featured. Hutto is the lone African-American voice, and Joy Damiani’s the sole woman, while Buddhika Jayamaha’s contribution illustrates the multi-cultural make-up of America’s post-9/11 military. Arguably the most-well known contributors are National Football League star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman’s brother Kevin and Army veteran-author Roy Scranton. In many cases, the contributors’ acts-of-protest were letters written to influential decision-makers in Washington or opinion-pieces published in the New York Times or other high-brow journalistic outlets. Others were published in military venues such as the Armed Forces Journal, or in book form. Contributors often describe brief moments of mainstream news notoriety, but curiously, the Internet as an outlet for protest or as a possible galvanizer of public outrage is rarely mentioned. Only a few authors report actively participating in public protests or anti-war organizations. 

The lack of a vibrant antiwar movement is foregrounded in Andrew Bacevich’s introduction, as Bacevich, a retired colonel, came-of-age in the Vietnam era. That war’s glaring sins and mistakes, as well as the ensuing public demonstrations, are on his mind: “In fact, from its very earliest stages until its mortifying conclusion, America’s war in Vietnam was a crime.” The implication, then, is that Iraq and Afghanistan were also crimes, with the additional message being that we have ignorantly repeated Vietnam’s mistakes. “…of this we can be certain,” Bacevich writes, “rarely has such an excruciating experience yielded such a paltry harvest of learning.”

The dismal historical record drives Bacevich to ask contemporary contributors to examine the disconnect between their isolated protests and popular tolerance of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, marked as they were by torture, wanton killing, disrespect for our allies, helplessness in the face of Improvised Explosive Devices, unresolved debates about policy and strategy, and, most of all, lack of success. The personal narratives that follow Bacevich’s introduction are varied and compelling. 

For the field grade officers represented, such as Jason Dempsey, Paul Yingling, and Gian Gentile, speaking out against failed policies and tactics came not in the guise of impassioned outcries, but as reasoned analyses in books and thought-pieces aimed at military decision-makers. To a man, they report their ideas and objections fell on deaf ears. Gentile, an Army colonel who served in Baghdad at the height of the surge and subsequently took issue with COIN strategy and its primary proponent General David Petraeus, states it most bluntly: “From what I can tell, [my] seven years of professional military dissent had no impact on the actual US strategy and the conduct of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Instead, the failure to conform to repeat the party line brought upon their authors ostracization leading to early-retirement. No one’s going to feel too sorry for colonels forced to live on a colonel’s retirement pay-and-benefits, but taken together, the essays by this group of authors are savvy about military institutional politics and culture, particularly within the officer corps and especially in regard to its capacity for intellectual honesty and rigor.   

The essays by junior officers typically begin by describing the youthful idealism that led the authors to the military, followed by accounts of how their idealism was crushed first in training (or in their educations at West Point or Annapolis), and culminating in scornful howls fomented by battlefield events in Iraq and Afghanistan. Army infantry officer Dan Bershinski describes how losing his legs to a mine in Afghanistan made him a pariah within the infantry corps. Rather than treated as a hero who might speak the truth of combat to officers in training, he was isolated from the junior officers whom he wanted to help become better leaders for fear his words and injuries might bum them out. For Marine Gil Barndollar, two desultory tours in Afghanistan drove home the point that the war was unwinnable, in equal parts due to failed American overarching strategy, the incompetence of the Afghan military, and his own units’ risk-averse and uninspired tactics. For Marine Matthew P. Hoh, experiences in Iraq similar to Barndollar’s in Afghanistan soured him. For these former officers, the gaping chasm between stated goals and ideals and actual experience of the war was intolerable. The sentiment expressed by Hoh that after leaving the military he vowed “to live a life according to how my mind, soul, and spirit dictate—to be intellectually and morally honest for the remainder of my days”—unites their accounts.   

The contributions by junior enlisted service members are the most varied and in many ways the most interesting reflections in Paths of Dissent. Often, they recount dutiful performance of duty while in uniform, even by left-leaning and artistically-minded soldiers such as Joy Damiani and Roy Scranton. Airborne paratrooper Buddika Jayamaha reports with almost chagrin and regret an act-of-protest—an article he and squad members composed for the New York Times—he undertook while serving in the ranks while in Iraq. Frankly, the sense that the military was a reasonably tolerable institution for young men and women just starting out in life seems to predominate. Only Jonathan W. Hutto’s essay describes a sustained and contentious wrangle with his chain-of-command and the big Navy while in uniform born of miserable terms-of-service. For most of the enlisted authors in Paths of Dissent, the real drama takes place after leaving the military. Several accounts report flirtation with anti-war movements. A more common experience is a period of drift and dysfunction as they sorted out their past lives as soldiers with efforts to build meaningful lives afterward. Jayamaha writes, “I had too many choices, and every choice seemed hollow. I had survived the war relatively unscathed, thankful to my colleagues, leaders, and God for saving my dumb ass… But what would be the most meaningful way to spend the rest of my life? How could I be of service again?” Similarly, Roy Scranton writes that “…dissent may need to take form not in words but in deeds: not as yet another public performance of critique but as the solid accomplishment of repair.”

The principled literary objections to small-unit practices or big-military policies recorded in Paths of Dissent differ from more overt forms of protest, such as refusal to obey orders or demonstration outside the halls of power. There are, however, other ways veterans manifested dissent than by writing letters, disobeying orders, and marching in the streets, which Bacevich and Sjursen seem not inclined to foreground. We might think of the low-boil burn virtually every deployed soldier felt about the wars. It was evident to almost everyone that that victory was far-off as the wars were being imagined and fought. As someone who has read dozens of Global War on Terror soldier memoirs and fictional portrayals, I’m surprised that the truculent dissatisfaction of lower-enlisted soldiers and junior officers surfaces in only a few Paths of Dissent accounts. Damiani’s essay points to it, as does former-Marine’s Vincent Emanuel’s; general readers might know this spirit of unruly disobedience best from the sarcastic Terminal Lance cartoon strip. 

We might also consider how the national conversations around Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and veteran suicides represented if not direct dissent, then touchstones by which the ill-begotten wars were often measured. In other words, the cries for help broadcast by troubled veterans might be understood as a dissent that had not found the right words for what those cries signified. Only Jonathan W. Hutto’s contribution directly references racism as a rationale for dissent; Hutto’s unfortunate experience illustrates how large could be the gap between the military’s stated ideals and the reality of life in the ranks for people-of-color. Even in Joy Damiani’s essay, which wonderfully documents what might be described as an early case of “quiet quitting” to silently register protest, gender inequity and sexual assault and abuse are not explored for the rottenness they all too often exposed at the core of military culture and the war effort. Finally, the idea that alienation generated by disgust with military hypocrisy and incompetence might lead to anti-establishment fervor for President Trump and radical conservative outrage is not considered in Paths of Dissent. What might Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who died storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 have to say on the matter? Or active-duty Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller, Jr., whose tirade against President Biden for his perceived mishandling of the evacuation of American allies at Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021 effectively ended his military career?  

So, Paths of Dissent leans heavily toward mannered outcries-from-the-left against the American war machine, inspired by conscience, principle, and duty. I like that fine, but the mannered approach also hints at reasons why protest never caught hold with the populace as it did in the Vietnam era. Bacevich and many contributors view the tepid indifference of the American public as structurally facilitated by the all-volunteer military that allowed the populace to safely avoid thinking about the war. Considered from the populace’s perspective, the Global War on Terrorism did not exact much of a cost, and was hazily connected with the fact that there were no more major terrorist attacks on American soil. “Thank You for Your Service” and “Support the Troops” rhetoric was enough to demonstrate care and assuage guilty consciences about not personally doing more to fight “terrorism.” Left mostly unspoken was a less-flattering corollary in regard to veteran protest: “Well, what did you expect? You volunteered for it.” Even more: “You volunteered for it and were well-compensated for your service.” Vets themselves were subject to the force of these sentiments. It’s also hard not to think that a significant portion of the American public rationalized that there were plenty of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Taliban in Afghanistan who hated America and wanted to kill American soldiers. To continue to fight them—to not admit defeat—registered as legitimate, whatever the problems that accrued in the process. 

Thus civilians, deferring to the military itself to shape and win the wars, did not demand accountability from political leaders, who in turn did not demand accountability from senior military leaders. In the absence of oversight, the military in the field floundered. Units did what they could, which often wasn’t much. Soldiers, murky about the big picture, understood missions in terms of tactical proficiency, loyalty to their squads, and body counts of dead Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Without clear orders and a winning strategy, soldiers made up their own minds and often took matters into their own hands. Some fought more brutally than policy and circumstance called for, while others turned in lackadaisical efforts that focused on staying safe and doing as little as possible. 

While demanding that civilians and civilian leaders listen more carefully to the voices of soldiers, Paths of Dissent zeroes in on the military’s own culpability for creating the specific conditions that caused soldiers to dissent, as well as its inability to correct those conditions. An overarching message repeated often is that the military was and is incapable of critiquing or reforming itself. The accounts by field grade officers illustrate that perpetuating the status quo is the imperative that most governs military culture, not winning wars or taking care of soldiers. Even relatively sustained efforts at internal change, such as the pivot to a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, or application of manpower “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been poorly conceptualized and wracked by group-think and “flavor-of-the-day” thought-processes. A political sphere and populace that either refused to exercise oversight or just didn’t care made the situation even worse. That the whole war enterprise might have been a disgraceful crime, as Bacevich suggests, tugged at the mind of all participants, thus adding layers of denial and self-deception. Given such inadequacy, is it any wonder that junior officers and junior enlisted felt unsupported and unheard? 

*****

Paths of Dissent is dedicated to Ian Fishback, the Army special forces officer who took his grievances about the lack of guidance regarding the use of torture while interrogating prisoners in Iraq to the Washington political establishment and media mainstream in 2005. Bacevich reports that he asked Fishback to contribute, but Fishback was too overtaken by the madness that consumed him at the end of his life to author a publishable essay. Bacevich himself is no stranger to dissent; a retired Army colonel himself, he has written books whose titles illustrate his own objections to America’s modern wars: The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), and The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (2020). Co-editor Daniel A. Sjursen is not as well-known, but he’s a retired Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now associated with the website Antiwar.com.

Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars. Edited by Andrew  Bacevich and Daniel A. Sjursen. Metropolitan-Holt, New York. 2022.

I swore I would never become a soldier like my mother.

She called it a blip, a few months out of an otherwise enjoyable career with the Army. No one saw the blip coming. Both of my grandfathers served in the military, but their wars stayed cold. My mom’s reserve unit, Seattle’s Fiftieth General Hospital, with 750 personnel, was too big, too expensive deploy, the very reason she’d chosen the unit. Aft er three years as an active-duty Army nurse, she wanted to start a family. The Fiftieth promised stability; for them to deploy, it would take World War III.

On Thanksgiving weekend of 1990, my mom got a phone call. She had been receiving practice calls ever since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, drills to make sure the phone tree was accurate, to keep everyone prepared. This time, the call wasn’t a drill. The unit was put on alert for deployment orders. My sister, brother, and I were asleep, so we didn’t see the white-faced shock when Mom answered the phone. We didn’t watch her crumple into Dad’s arms when she told him or see the shock mirrored in his own face as questions of her safety, the family’s well-being, single parenthood flooded his mind.

Mom and her hospital unit wouldn’t receive orders right away. They would spend Thanksgiving with their families, worrying and hoping—hoping World War III would dissipate with the holiday weekend; hoping their orders would leave them as local backfill for active-duty soldiers who deployed or send them to Germany, the unit’s assigned overseas operating location based on the Cold War model; hoping their orders would be short.

None of these hopes materialized. Mom’s orders were for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for an undetermined length of up to two years.

I hardly recall the Army’s presence in our family before Desert Storm. The Army slipped in and out one weekend a month and two weeks a year when Mom put on green clothes and went “camping.” Sometimes we ate hotdogs and pretended to camp too. With that Thanksgiving phone call, though, the Army consumed us. I had just turned seven, my sister, Shavonne, was eight, and my brother, Matt, barely two. Suddenly, we were no longer a regular young family. Mom had always been the center mass around which we all orbited, and now our gravity fi eld had shift ed. In preparation for the deployment, she took frequent trips to the local Army base, sometimes for days at a time. Big green Army bags piled up in the living room where we used to build puzzles and pillow forts. Instead of driving to school with Mom, Shavonne and I went to daycare with Matt early in the morning when Dad left for work. Neighbors stopped by our house to drop off funny-tasting casseroles. They said nice things like, “We’re praying for you,” and “Let us know if you need anything.” I just needed my mom. I was restless in school and gymnastics practice, anxious to get home and hug Mom and hold onto her forever.

Before she left for Saudi Arabia, I told my mom I hated the Army. “Oh sweetie,” she said, “I know it feels like the Army is being mean, but it’s the Army’s job to go help people. A bad man invaded another country, and we need to go help the people there and get him out.” With that, she redirected my hatred to Saddam Hussein. The Army wasn’t taking Mom away; a bad man was making her leave. Shavonne and I even learned a song about that man and how much we all hated him. We sang the song over and over, and Mom laughed the hardest: 

Joy to the world, Saddam is dead!

We barbequed his head!

Don’t worry ‘bout the body

We flushed it down the potty,

And round and round it goes . . .

I don’t remember this, but my parents tell me that before she deployed, I asked Mom if she could die. I imagine myself climbing into her lap. In my mind she’s wearing the soft blue bathrobe she had when I was growing up. I’m clutching it, nuzzling into her brown permed curls. Mom wraps her fuzzy blue arms around me, and I can feel her heartbeat, strong and serious. She gazes out through her thick-framed glasses, her eyes light like mine above the long, sharp nose and freckles inherited by Shavonne. Mom purses her lips. She’s thinking about my question, about my life—all our lives—without her. She’s thinking about the briefings the hospital unit received, the expectations of chemical weapons and massive casualties, the potential for an attack on Israel and an ensuing holy war of nuclear proportions. She’s thinking this might be a suicide mission. Mom pulls me closer and strokes the top of my head, trying to memorize the feel of me. She’s weighing her need to protect her child with a desire for honesty.

She answered my question: “I’m going to do the best I can to come back to you as soon as I can.”

“Don’t tell her that!” my dad said. “Tell her no!” But my mom couldn’t lie.

Just before she left, Mom wove Shavonne’s and my hair into double French braids, like she did when we had soccer or T-ball games, the only thing that would keep my thin hair and Shavonne’s unruly curls in place under helmets and through trips up and down the fi eld. These braids were special, though. They held the memory of Mom’s touch: her gentle fingers brushing across my scalp, the nail of her little finger drawing a part down each side, her soft breath on the back of my neck. I wanted to keep the braids forever. I promised Mom I would. It would be our connection while she was gone, and every time I looked in the mirror I would think of her.

Mom deployed right after Christmas. Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, and the occasion carried extra weight in 1990 because we had Mom with us. The Christmas morning snowfall seemed magical to us kids but made a treacherous drive for our relatives, who commuted several hours for everyone to be together. I don’t know if our house has ever been so full; it’s funny how war brings people together. We had an epic snowball fight with my cousins, opened presents, ate roast beef and mashed potatoes and gravy, and took pictures around the Christmas tree, just like every year.

A few days later, we watched Mom board an Army transport bus. She waved to us through a grimy window until her pale face was lost to camouflage and dust and distance. On the bus she was surrounded by other moms and dads, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, and a single twenty-something medic. The medic had no family to wave to through the grimy window, but he saw us: a man with red-rimmed eyes standing next to two girls with double French braids. Both girls clung to the man and cried. In the man’s arms was a small boy. The young soldier couldn’t hear it, but the boy repeated, “Where’s Mommy going?” over and over, long after the bus rolled out of sight.

“Looking at your family when we left was my war moment,” the medic later told my mom. “Seeing how heartbroken they were.”

My memories of Mom’s deployment blur into a fuzzy background, punctuated by snapshot images of clarity. I remember cheese quesadillas, “cheese pies” I called them, cooked in the microwave. A neighborhood mom who watched us aft er school served them to us while we waited at her house for Dad to pick us up. One day while there, I got the stomach flu. The neighbor tucked me into a nest of blankets on the couch with Gatorade and a bucket, but I kept getting up. I walked to the hallway and threw up. I threw up in the living room. I kept walking, looking for my mom.

As the days passed, oil slickened my hair and my precious braids started to unwind. I remember an angry fit of protest, and an ultimate compromise. Every few days the gracious neighbor cleaned and re-braided my hair. It looked exactly the same. But it wasn’t.

I cried every night in bed aft er Mom’s tape-recorded voice finished reading a bedtime story. I saw the school counselor for a few weeks. I don’t recall her name or what she looked like or even what we talked about, but I remember staring out her window at the snow-crusted ground. My classmates were at recess, throwing snowballs, having fun. For the first time I did not feel normal.

We were the only local kids who had a parent deployed. Neighbors took turns babysitting and delivering meals. A yellow ribbon hugged the big maple tree in front of our elementary school. When she returned, my mom would cut the ribbon off to a whooping chorus of cheers from our classmates. But while she was gone it hung there, through rain and wind and snow. I saw the ribbon every day, and I hated it.

We lived for weekly calls from Mom, letters, occasional pictures, anything to let us know she was safe. Each trip to the mailbox was its own tiny Christmas, marked by expectation and, too often, when no letters came, disappointment. At one point, Mom sent Shavonne and me matching T-shirts with pictures of camels wearing combat boots and gas masks. I still have that shirt, a child’s size small, buried in the back of a drawer. Dad pointed out Saudi Arabia on our office globe. Mom was there, inside the little star that represented the capital of Riyadh. It didn’t look very far away.

We watched news reports every evening on TV. Headlines that spring covered topics that interest me now as an adult: an escalation of violence in Sudan following the imposition of nationwide Islamic law, an historic meeting between Nelson Mandela and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Haiti’s appointment of its first elected president, the controversy over Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s assisted suicides, the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In 1991, I could focus only on the war. My world expanded exponentially when Mom deployed; I wasn’t yet ready to stretch beyond the Middle East. Besides, the Middle East was everywhere, dominating TV, radio, and newspaper reports. In a letter home Mom noted that we were probably getting more news of the war than she was; TV was censored in Saudi Arabia, and she didn’t have free time to watch anyway.

In the States, we witnessed a new era in broadcasting, the first time war received real-time coverage from reporters on the ground. They showed awesome footage of planes taking off from aircraft carriers and terrifying shots of exploding missiles. All around were people in camouflage, but not the green and black my mom wore on Reserve duty. These uniforms were brown like dirt. There was a lot of dirt on the news when they talked about the war. I thought it must be hard for Mom to stay clean. I had never watched the news before. Sitting on the couch, my legs curled beneath me, I got my first exposure to the industry of which one day I would be a part. As a public affairs officer I would be there, against the dusty brown backdrop of war, ushering reporters, directing camera angles, providing talking points to the people in camouflage, filtering conflict for the families back home.

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm represented a new era in warfare too. Mom was part of the largest reserve component ever activated in support of an armed conflict, and the first involuntary call requiring reservists to report to active duty since the dissolution of the draft. In total, the government activated more than 227,000 reservists. The Army provided the bulk of personnel, nearly 140,000, with around fourteen percent in medical specialties like Mom’s hospital unit. Mom was also part of the largest contingent of U.S. military women ever to deploy. By war’s end, 40,000 women had served overseas, almost as many as had been on active duty during the height of America’s last large-scale conflict, the Vietnam War. Desert Storm saw two American women held as Prisoners of War, and thirteen killed in action.

Sometimes on the news they talked about people dying. At recess one day I was by myself, as I often was during that time, wandering along the edge of the concrete basketball court, when my class bully sauntered up to me. “Hey, I heard about a lady that got killed in the war,” he chided, “Do you think it was your mom?”

I hadn’t heard about the lady. Had she been on the news the night before? No one had called to tell us something bad had happened. Wouldn’t they call? But what if they had called; what if Dad answered and didn’t want to tell us before school? What if they knocked on our door but no one was home? Maybe the bully had seen a news report that I’d missed? The thought of never seeing my mom again overwhelmed me, and I sat down on the concrete and cried for a long time.

While Mom was gone, we made up games to make time and distance not seem so massive, to trick ourselves into feeling like we might have some sort of control. For “When will Mom come home?” the whole family—my dad, sister, brother, grandparents, and I—scribbled our return date guesses across the calendar. My sister’s prediction, March 12, 1991, was the earliest, three and a half months aft er Mom’s departure. The rest of us hoped but doubted she was close.

As March arrived, we only got a couple days’ notice that Shavonne’s guess was exactly right. As suddenly as war had swooped into our lives, it ended. We let ourselves be consumed by frenzied preparations for Mom’s homecoming, spending hours tracing letters and gluing glitter onto bright sheets of poster board. There were trips to Party City to buy trunk-loads of yellow ribbons and American flags. We must have alerted the relatives the elementary school, my Girl Scout troop, the whole neighborhood, and Mom’s college roommate, because hordes of them showed up at McChord Air Force Base outside Seattle on the morning of March 12.

Together we stood behind a chain link fence, a crowd of hundreds, watching the empty runway. Shavonne and I held signs and chattered with our classmates. Matt, too young to understand where Mommy had been or why, just knew that this was the day she was coming home. He coiled his tiny hands around the fence and rocked back and forth, back and forth, eyes glued to the tarmac. His expectant little face, framed by a puff y black and red jacket, became a popular clip on local news segments.

I don’t know how long we waited before we heard the drone of an approaching aircraft . The crowd hushed. We twisted our heads frantically and shielded our eyes from the sun. A dark speck emerged on the horizon, and we erupted into a cacophony of cheers. The dark speck got bigger and turned into a place that drift ed slowly across the landscape. As it inched closer, the crowd grew wild. We screamed and shook the fence. My dad scooped up my brother. Someone, a grandparent maybe, grabbed my hand. Reporters yelled into their microphones. We were supposed to stay behind the fence, but when the plane landed and the first camouflaged figure emerged, we stampeded the runway. All I could see was legs: jeans and khakis and sweats, then a trickle of camouflage moving upstream, and then a pair of legs that stopped and dropped a bag and bent and hugged and cried, and then I was in her arms and nuzzling my face into her hair and the world was whole again.

For a while after her deployment, I screamed every time Mom put on her uniform. Then, gradually, the Army faded into the background again, one weekend a month, two weeks a year. The blip, Desert Storm, followed us all like a shadow, not unpleasant, but always there.

We were extra thankful on Thanksgiving when the phone didn’t ring. We got teary-eyed whenever Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” came on the radio, an anthem for Mom’s unit. For years, our schools asked Mom to give Veterans’ Day speeches, and Shavonne and I modeled Saudi Arabian clothes she’d brought back as souvenirs: black draping capes and veils that covered everything except a square around our eyes, similar to the burqas I’d see eighteen years later in Afghanistan. I loved being a part of Mom’s experience, if only from under the veil. I liked to twirl and see the fabric billow around me. Mostly I liked watching my mom.

She talked about how difficult life was for women in Saudi Arabia. “They have to cover all their skin, even when it’s really hot outside,” she said. “If they don’t, the police can arrest them! And they aren’t allowed to drive!” Even as an American, Mom said, she couldn’t go certain places because she was a woman. She told our classmates about the armed guards on the hospital buses and around the compound to help keep the doctors and nurses safe. Mom shared that she was afraid at first to take care of Iraqi prisoners, but she learned that they only fought because their families were threatened by Saddam Hussein. I thought how brave she was and how lucky I was to have a mom who was more than just a mom, but also a soldier, a healer, and a hero who helped save people from that mean man. After Mom finished speaking everyone clapped for her, and I beamed under my veil.

I didn’t know how painful those events were for my mom. I didn’t realize she struggled diving back into her roles as wife and mother and everything else we heaped on her. She didn’t discuss her terror at nightly air raids, or her aching loneliness, or her doubts about her ability to handle combat. I didn’t know she carried trauma with her every day, even aft er she returned home. I didn’t understand her earnestness when we made a family pact that no one else would join the military, because one deployment was enough.

When I first saw the photo of David Spicer in a 2009 Army Times, I was excited to recognize my friend there on the page staring back at me.  The picture was closely cropped around his face, but I could tell he was in his dress uniform when the picture was taken.  I could see the globe and anchor on his high collar.  There was no smile, except in his eyes.  Marines don’t smile, but David sure looked happy to be one.  David and I were friends while growing up: grade school, middle, and high school.  He always talked about being a Marine, and he joined up before he even graduated.  The picture was lined up with half a dozen others, all servicemen and women, their faces inside their own individual boxes, names and ages typed out neatly beside.  Above all of the pictures in a much larger and darker font than the rest was a headline.  It read: “Photos of the Fallen.”  My initial excitement evaporated as I looked back at the picture of David.  Underneath his name and age was another block of text: “KIA, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.”

As most high school kids do after graduating, we went our separate ways in life.  Even though we had both enlisted in the military around the same time, I had heard nothing else about David until I saw the picture.  In that moment, we were jarred back together in recollection and sorrow.  I had known others that had been killed in the War on Terror, even served with some. But this was the first time I had grown up with someone who had been killed in combat.  I saved that issue of Army Times, folded it neatly, and tucked it away in the back of a notebook.  On the first page of the notebook, I wrote David’s name and the date of his death.  Beneath the inscription I added the names of others I had fought beside in Iraq but didn’t make it home.  In the years that followed, anytime I heard of a friend’s passing in Afghanistan or Iraq, I wrote the name down.  One by one, the names kept coming. A guy named Cota who I knew from Basic Training in Fort Knox.  A Sergeant named Rentschler I knew while stationed in Germany.  Sometimes months would pass between names, at times only weeks, but the list kept growing.  The wars in faraway lands kept chewing up friends and acquaintances.  I had more than one turn in the same meat grinder, and during these deployments I would lose men who were as close, and at times, closer than my own family.  Brothers.  Slowly and deliberately I inscribed each letter until the page bore their names with honor.  The names sat together, unified without regard to color, race, or creed.  Melo. Sherman. Tavae. Edens. Morris.

As days turned to weeks and months and years, the list kept growing but much slower.  The fog of pain surrounding the list would slowly lift and I began to look at the names with less sadness and more admiration and respect.  I began to understand their loss as a by-product of conflict and war.  It didn’t matter if we believed in the reasons or politics of the wars, we would always honor their memory.  In early 2015, it had been close to five years since my last combat deployment and I retired from service.  The list had stopped growing altogether.  The notebook was put up, tucked away along with the rest of my war memories.  Hidden, to be looked upon only through a haze of whiskey and tears.  At some point the ink used to write the names began to fade.

Now, with quite a few years since my retirement, most of the men I served with have gotten out of the Army and moved on with their lives, as have I.  Though my part in the war is done, or should be, I am still fighting.  There is still a war raging.  There is still death.  New names to add to the list.  I find I can’t add these names though, as the deaths are much harder to accept.  I don’t know if they belong next to the others.

I find out in the same ways, while doing the same things.  Someone from an old unit will call out of the blue.  Maybe a message on social media.

“Did you hear? Chad Golab just died.”

“How?”  I hope the answer is a vehicle accident, or a robbery gone wrong.  Murder.  Anything other than what it really is, but deep down I already know what happened to Chad.  The caller’s reply comes easily in a matter of fact way.

“Shot himself.”

Slowly the story is told.  There is little emotion given with the caller’s words and I give none in return.  We are both well versed in giving and receiving horrible news, numb to tragedy.  At least, on the outside.  Inwardly I feel sick.  I flashback to a memory from years earlier in Mosul.  I see Chad Golab leaning against a wall out of breath.  He had just sprinted across an open area through a hail of bullets and rocket propelled grenades.  He wore a smile from ear to ear.  He was laughing.  So very alive.  I can’t believe that the man I saw in that moment was the same one who was found outside of a convenience store in the front seat of his car, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.  But it was.

The same types of calls and messages have continued at a steady pace, to the point that I dread seeing the name and number of an old Army buddy pop up on the caller ID.  Each time a call comes I learn yet another person who made it back from “over there” decided they had had enough.  The question of “Why?” always lingers in the air, drifting along searching for an answer.  The answer never comes, only more of those horrible phone calls.  More names.  More questions.  I’m angry.  I feel a deep sorrow and love for these men.  I also hate them.  I hate them for what they have done to themselves and the unfair enigma they have left behind for us all.  We cry for those who have gone before us, yet they are the very ones who have created our pain.  What sense can be made of this?

Why did they do it?  Why?  We will never know what only they knew.  We are left to guess in wonder.  And mourn.

After these calls of notification are over, my mind floods with more questions than answers.  Deep down inside, my old wounds, the ones which don’t leave visible scars, fester once again.  The wounds never fully heal and the pain they create is always there, subdued, yet constant.  The hard, built-up crust covering these wounds is ripped away and the pain returns in full force, always stronger than before.  I sit with hot embers burning away at my gut, wishing for one more chance to talk with these men.  The chance for one more conversation.  I want to ask them questions and I need them to answer me.  What has caused their pain to be so great they decided to leave this world behind?  What was the whole point?  Why did we work so hard to keep each other safe when there was so much harm surrounding us?  Why end it now? You made it home!  You made it back to mom and dad and wife and child and friends!  Why now?  I want to tell them I’m sorry.  Sorry for their pain.  Sorry for my anger and hate.  Of course, I am left to render my own conclusions, more a meditation in pain than an answer.

War is a journey, a journey with many paths and roads moving different directions to different places.  In my own experience the trip begins and ends at the same destination.  Home.  Or at least whatever place each person finds most dear.  It might not even be a place.  It might be a person or activity.  This “thing,” whatever it may be, is what the warrior turns to when things are at their absolute worst.  It’s what they turn to after they have been away from home for months and it’s hot and it’s only going to get hotter and they are carrying 80 pounds of extra weight up the same fucking hill for the one thousandth time and someone they have never met tries to kill them and instead kills their best friend who was standing right next to them and then they have nothing to look forward to except that they get to do it again tomorrow. And the next day.  And the day after that.  When you go through days like that, there has to be something that keeps you going, makes you say, “I’m going to make it out of here.”  And then, finally, one day, you do make it out.  Make it back home.  Everyone cheers and is happy and claps their hands and you smile and you are truly glad to be home.  Home in a physical sense.  In body.  Your mind however is still in turmoil, still back in the desert or on the side of a mountain, stuck at a crossroads with no idea which direction to take.  I think everyone who experiences war travels down the same road passing the same intersections.  There are no signs to follow.  No light to show the way through the darkness.  Each intersection is a question which needs to be answered to make sense out of the senseless experience of war.  The questions are impossible to answer.  No one ever makes it completely back, but you can make it most of the way.  Maybe these people, these guys like Chad, never make it far enough back.  They take a wrong turn and lose their way. They get caught at a spot between the Hell of war and the comforts of home.  The division becomes blurred by expectation and guilt and shame.  Months of constant fear and excitement mixed with boredom and hate has made them question reality.  Their loved ones are foreign beings.  The precious people who occupied every waking thought and dream and fantasy are happy to see their soldier.  Glad they are home.  Home safe and in one piece. They give hugs and shake hands and have no idea the soldier is still fighting.  Still “over there”.

Of course, the soldier is glad to be home too.  But home is different now, not at all like he remembers.  His family and friends, like the soldier, have changed.  His fantasies were a lie.  He wants to talk about the war but can only do so with those who will understand.  Only his brothers in arms will do. The one’s he laughed and cried with and got blown up with, and shot at people with.  Killed people with.  They are gone now.  They live across the country or are out of the Army, working at a home store or drawing disability from the VA.  Some are buried and forever seared into the soldier’s mind.  The soldier wants to talk to the dead the most.  The situation is an ocean of impossibility.   They miss home while they’re at war but find they miss war when they get home.  To them, salvation can only be found at the bottom of a bottle or inside of a gun barrel.

I don’t know if it does any good to sit here and ponder these questions or make half-hearted attempts to understand why my brothers have killed themselves.  Wondering why they have survived so much only to give in at the last minute.  I won’t stop though.  I can’t stop.  I can only keep asking the questions.  And wait for the phone to ring.

Note: M.C. Armstrong’s new novel, ‘American Delphi,’ will be out October 15, 2022 from Milspeak Books. It has been hailed as “riveting, wise, and wonderful.” Please feel free to pre-order here, or purchase wherever books are sold.

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From ‘American Delphi’ by M.C. Armstrong

“How do you tell the world that your brother is a psychopath?”

“You don’t,” my mom said.  “Get away from the screen and journal about it.”

She took this black and white notebook out of her grocery bag and handed it to me like it was supposed to be the answer to all of my problems. So here I sit, notebook and pen in hand, being a good girl while Zach is standing in the kitchen literally jumping up and down about how the world is ending and how America has more cases of the virus than any other country on the planet and how he saw a video of somebody fall off a motor scooter in Indonesia and watched the guy’s face go black before vomiting blood and dying right there by his scooter and you would think, by listening to my brother describe the story, that he was talking about a corgi or some Australian getting playfully punched by a kangaroo on YouTube. But this is somebody dying and for Zach it’s like the best thing that’s ever happened. It’s like it’s confirming all of his theories about apocalypse and totally justifying all of the whips, knives, guns, and fireworks he’s been collecting in the closet of his crazy-ass bedroom upstairs.

“Buck says the virus is the medicine,” Zach said, getting up in my face and breathing his hot breath all over me.

Buck London is Zach’s special friend. Buck’s an old man who just moved into Orchard Chase and smells like mothballs, and I can tell from Zach’s smell that he’s been spending way too much time with Buck.

“Get away from me,” I said. “You’re not practicing social distancing.”

“We are the virus,” Zach said.

“You are the virus,” I said.

“Nobody is the virus,” mom said, tossing a salad with a bunch of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, avocado and falafel (feel awful). Mom said we should use the plague as an excuse to go vegan, but there goes Zach behind her back, just standing, smiling at me as he’s shoving disks of salami into his mouth. It’s like he’s proving this psychopathic suicidal point by eating meat while mom is making a salad, and I said: “NINA!” because I call Mom by her name when she won’t listen. But by the time Nina turns around, Zach’s pretending like he’s tying his shoe and I’m taking a picture of this journal just in case he kills someone someday.

*

Mom said her biggest fear is that I end up a “twentysomething grandma” like Tanya Purtlebaugh. Mom’s entire life seems organized around making sure that I don’t end up like Mrs. Purtlebaugh, but I said “seems” because Nicole, Tanya’s daughter, did just have a baby at seventeen and Nicole’s two years older than I am and her mother is exactly seventeen years older than Tanya which makes her mother thirty-four and that’s only three years younger than Mom which, if you do the math (which I do), it’s pretty clear: Tanya Purtlebaugh is not a “twentysomething grandma.” In other words, Mom’s entire mission in life right now (and she’s succeeding) is keeping me from having sex so I don’t basically have a ME which, if you think about it (and I do), is really sad and it makes sense why she lies and covers up by blaming it all on a “twentysomething grandma” who’s not actually a twentysomething grandma.

Mom doesn’t want me to see what she calls “the elephant in the room”: Her biggest fear is actually another ME. I am the elephant. Mom is afraid she’s like the virus and has passed on all her bad decision-making to me and when I told her, in the fall, that I didn’t want to play tennis in the spring or take any “private lessons” with Pastor Gary, she flipped out because she basically wanted to ensure that I was constantly quarantined in clubs and sports and stupid boring activities where I was sweating and bickering with other girls instead of having “idle time” with boys, but look at everything now. What happened to the tennis team? Same thing that happened to track, soccer, drama, ballet, baseball, archery, karate, and everything else—canceled.

Everyone’s in their room by themselves except Nicole with her screaming mixed-race baby, but guess who’s used to being alone? The elephant in the room, that’s who.

*

“This is like a taste of being old,” Mom said as we drove to the grocery store, Zach riding shotgun, me in the back.

“Nina,” Zach said. “Please tell us exactly what you mean because I wasn’t listening.”

“Okay, Zachary,” Mom said. “I mean this is what we’ve been looking forward to all day, isn’t it? Our one chance to get out of the house, where nothing is happening, just so we can listen to some music in the car and see a few people at a store. Think about how many old people don’t have soccer practice, piano, or archery.”

I’ll give Nina credit: she made me see things differently for a second. There was an old black woman covered in a clear plastic bag in the produce section picking through apples really slowly, and I felt bad because the one place where this old woman gets to go is now invaded with danger, and we are the danger, and I wonder how long until she gives up and has some granddaughter teach her over the phone how to have groceries delivered to her front door by a drone?

“Off your phone!” Mom said to Zach as we passed by the meat shelves which were picked totally clean of everything except the meatless meats. So much for America using this crisis to wean itself off fossil fuels and diseased beef.

“Look!” Zach said.

Passing by a little mirror near the cheap sunglasses, I saw my stupid, long witchy nose. I hate my nose.

“Look!” Zach said.

“Look at what?” I said.

I put my palm up to my nose as if to smash it back into my head. We wheeled past the glasses and down the coffee aisle so Mom could get her “medicine” when Zach showed me a picture from MIMI of the socially distanced sleep-slots for the homeless of Las Vegas, a parking lot that had basically been turned into a dystopian slumber party for all these Black Americans who live in this city with a hundred thousand empty hotel rooms. But because we are America, we force the poor people to sleep in a parking lot, and there was this woman in a white hijab or bonnet standing over the homeless like she was some kind of monitor to make sure the poor were keeping their distance. Or who knows? Maybe she was nice and asking them if they were okay, or if they wanted soup. What was not okay was the way psychopath Zach was grinning as he was thrusting the screen in my face.

“Why are you smiling?” I said.

“He’s smiling because he’s alive,” Mom said, sweeping three bags of Ethiopian coffee into our loaded cart, and Mom’s answer would have been totally perfect if it weren’t for one thing: IT’S HER ANSWER. NOT HIS! MY BROTHER IS SICK!!!

*

I have a wasp in my room because my window won’t seal. But a wasp is just a bee, so his brain is as big as a flea, which means he won’t fly through the crack, and there’s a yellow jacket on the other side of the window, and he’s just a bigger bee, so he’s dumb too. He doesn’t know he just has to fly in the little slit if he wants to see his friend or fly a little higher to show his friend where the opening is so he’ll stop going crazy and bouncing off the walls. Instead, the yellow jacket just hovers and buzzes while the wasp goes nuts and it’s actually kind of funny. I think the yellow jacket is pretty much watching TV, and the wasp is his show for the night, and I guess I am, too, and it’s like the birds have stopped quarreling and are now laughing like a sitcom audience, like the birds know everything.

What do the trees know?

There goes my brother running through the grass. Wonder where the psychopath is going with his big backpack. It’s like a scene from a movie. The psychopath with his backpack loaded with knives and fireworks walking through this totally dystopian, suburban wasteland of saggy porches and American flags towards this half-moon that looks like a lemon wedge while Toast, the Kagels’ new corgador, rams up against the invisible fence with his special red cowboy bandanna around his neck, and how can I tell my brother’s a psychopath, you might ask? God. Just look at him baiting Toast by charging the invisible fence. You can totally tell Zach loves electrocuting Toast, and you know what they say about boys who are cruel to animals. Zach is totally toasting Toast so I open up my window and scream at him to stop and when I close it back up the wasp is gone.

Mom’s right. This is what it must be like to get old. I have to take my sunset walk and “get my steps in.” I walked by Aria’s house and then the Kagels. I called Toast to the edge but I didn’t taunt him like Zach. We just sort of looked at each other, mirroring one another. Toast blinked. I blinked. Toast tilted his head. I tilted my head. Toast looked right. I looked left. Then I noticed at my feet some magenta letters. Maybe they were mauve. I don’t know. The words on the sidewalk were written in this pinkish chalk and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen the graffiti. For the last two weeks the parents of all the little kids have been outside drawing pictures of daisies and birds and smiley sunshine faces with their kids, and Zach and I are too old for that, but some of the older kids have been using the chalk to say other things or to mark their times on their bike races since they’re being forced to exercise outside for the first time in their lives and they’re actually having fun with it, but this graffiti wasn’t like that.

This was different:

Go Vegan.

I walked a little farther and read in yellow:

Media Lies.

A little farther in blue:

Big Pharma Kills.

A little farther in red, white, and blue:

Government Lies.

And then in white:

Black Lives Matter.

And after that it was back to magenta:

The Truth is a Virus. The Truth Leaks. Spread Truth.

And I was like, okay. How do you do that?

How do you spread truth?

I kept walking. Now, in purple, but with the same handwriting, they said We Need Change. And I’m like, okay. Duh. But then, near the turnoff from Cedar to Byrd—right where you could see this big stack of logs against the side of Buck London’s house—there was one more phrase before I turned around and it said: American Delphi.

I was pretty much across the street from Buck’s, staring at this dark green holly bush he has in front of his house and this stuffed armadillo everyone can see on the chipped paint planks of his porch, but because of the huge prickly holly bush, you can’t really see anything else. I couldn’t tell if he was sitting on his porch in his underwear smoking a cigar with a one-eyed cat in his lap, or if he was inside on his couch looking at naked pictures of girls. I have no idea why Zach spends so much time with Buck, and I have no idea what American Delphi means.

But I am going to find out.

Kate Schifani’s memoir, Cartography, maps faulty practices and question of fault over her year serving in Iraq as an advisor and logistician to the Iraqi military. In her dangerous deployed experience, she excels in her ill-defined, nearly impossible advisory role while serving during the context of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal that personally affected her as a gay woman. The everyday events she details build to bigger questions about the U.S. role in the Middle East and our country’s culpability for its impact on Iraq.

Schifani’s gritty, no-bullshit narrative places her voice within the scope of widely varied war literature such as M.C. Armstrong’s The Mysteries of Haditha, Brian Turner’s My Life as a Foreign Country, Teresa Fazio’s Fidelis, and even Tim O’Brien’s classic novel The Things They Carried. A confident and unforgettable narrator, Schifani brings us down to the paperclips, dried-up Wite-Out, government pens, and the Saddam lighter in her desk drawer sketching the details of a convoluted conflict. Cartography leaves us grappling with the figurative (and sometimes literal) fragmented remains of the people the American military should have been protecting: Iraqi citizens acting as interpreters for the U.S. military; innocent Iraqis caught in the midst of this conflict; American servicemembers’ and their families’ lives disrupted by seemingly unnecessary deployment; the LGBTQ+ members of the armed forces, and more.  

Cartography is a series of connected, chronological essays that highlight the Catch-22-esque absurdity of Schifani’s experiences in Iraq which waver between outlandish cultural differences with her Iraqi counterparts to painful dissonance with her homophobic American peers. Keeping her sexual identity hidden in an inevitably misogynistic, hyper-sexual deployed environment leads readers to question if there is anywhere that this young Air Force captain does not face threats. The Air Force sends “a B-52 aircraft maintenance officer serving here as a logistician embedded with two dozen Green Berets” or as she puts it, “the least qualified person for this job” as an advisor to Iraqi military. She only mentions her career experience and barely highlights the possibility that these men will not listen to a young woman. Reading how she earns respect is one of the most satisfying aspects of this memoir.

We bump along early in the account through humorous stories of a forklift that turns only one direction and outdated Iraqi gym weight loss equipment that jiggles the user on a 1950s belt. Then she shifts us into more serious and heart-stopping moments as the humor behind her experience dissipates. The absurdity never changes. The worst of Schifani’s many meetings with the Iraqis she advises happen in the middle of the night, and we are like a film audience begging characters not to check out a noise in a horror movie. But she unfailingly performs her mission in the hours of darkness and pre-dawn hours, bumming rides when they lose transportation, and coming up with successes against all odds. She finds mattresses and air conditioners and all sorts of items the Iraqi military needs, even as the American people she works with marvel at her ingenuity. The tension in Cartography builds with such a subtle trajectory that we find ourselves longing for her tour to be finished, for her to leave this unpredictable and unwelcome deployed mission, because the bigger shoe feels constantly ready to drop.

Military readers will recognize the tightwire act Schifani negotiates of gender discrimination from all fronts during a deployment where she’s making an impact and doing her job surrounded by men and hiding the fact she is gay. Already, only a few years after her experience, we’re coming to believe things are better for women and for gay servicemembers. They probably aren’t.

In a theme common with so many other women writing about the military, Schifani explores the sense of indoctrination into an outdated boys’ club mentality. Military units, especially deployed units, flatten out individuality and make juvenile, worn out jokes about “no homo” and “your mother” along with a table-top, full-size poster “of a woman entirely naked except for a pair of shoes and a bandolier that sits between her obviously augmented breasts” unquestioned, common practices. Schifani’s masterful dialogue is one of the best places we witness this smart, capable woman navigating the discrimination bombarding her from all sides. One exchange between an Army lieutenant colonel, embarrassed and unbudging, ends with her quiet victory, only marred by the overheard “Motherfucking air force cunt waltzes in here with some haji motherfucker and tells me how to fucking count.” The stream of obscenity trailing down the hall after her feels as if it could sum up most capable young women’s military experience. But we can tell Schifani shrugs off this and most of the rest of the hostility she faces. She saves her emotions for when they matter most.

Cartography wins us over in the details as if Schifani has drawn out a treasure map with dashed lines of her experiences drawing the relatively unscathed pathway through the landmines of her deployment. Still, we dread what we’ll find when we reach “X” marks the spot. Yet, every time a sentence begins with “We shouldn’t be allowed to,” Schifani joins a chequered and popular lineage of military people doing what it takes to complete their mission while skirting around the more restrictive rules. O’Brien’s young soldiers giggle over tossing a smoke grenade between them and Fazio’s deployed boyfriend cuts deals to obtain air conditioners from the logisticians, to name just a few instances. We know there is a long history of military stories about people shouldn’t have done something, but they do it anyway. With Schifani, we learn it’s a way of life.

Schifani becomes competent at something other than her Air Force trained career path and, though she wouldn’t say it outright, damn good at her job in a way that constantly surprises her immediate superiors but that seems second nature to her. She makes the phone calls, listens in meetings, and comes up with “the goods” when everyone seems to expect her to ignore the requests. In a quiet way, she proves her gender and sexuality have nothing to do with her outstanding performance.

If the book is a map of experiences, the sense of place and movement is hard to follow in a reader’s head, mostly because her deployed location was surely classified or adjacent to a classified compound. We drive off places with Schifani, but we’re not always sure what is part of her compound, what is out in the unprotected space beyond the compound walls, and what locations are important to pay attention to. When she takes us to a partially built building as the narrative is coming to a close, we’re not sure if it’s in her compound. Knowing the layout and proximity of this scene is essential to the plot. At this building, her story abruptly ends. While Schifani could be enacting the sudden way the U.S. ended the mission at her location, readers might wonder what she means when she says in those final lines “I think I did this.” How metaphorical is her intent?

Schifani’s memoir is a vivid book that places readers in a combat zone for a glimpse of the mind-numbing dullness punctuated with moments of paralyzing fear, the circular nature of huge bureaucracy, and the thrill of life that wavers on and off a razor-sharp edge of uncertainty. In a palimpsest of individual experience, she maps fault lines in the U.S. military Middle East involvement through the ingrained cultural narratives of misogyny from the American military and from the Iraqi people.

Cartography is a must-read to understand more about deployed military experiences. The unspoken questions are just as important as her richly rendered narrative—who lets this situation happen? Who allows both the Iraqi and American soldiers act toward this woman? Who thinks any of this is normal? And, finally, who is at fault?

Schifani offers a quiet and clear criticism of our role and influence in Iraq, questioning her own culpability for what happens in the country. As she might say herself, after her deployed experience there, Insha’allah.

Okay—let me set the record straight. It started as a bunch of rumors first, before we lost control of it. But it really started as a stupid word game at a mission briefing.

“Your porn name!” LT began. “Pet’s name and the street you grew up on.”

He was keen on figuring out everyone’s combination. Mine was Bella Tulane. Not bad if I was a chick. We got some other good ones: Snickers Calhoun, Georgie Wilder, Sherry Potts. Then this quiet, young private comes in and LT demands his info.

“Uh. Jack Fleming,” the kid says, and our jaws drop.

There is a moment of silence before LT says, “My God, that’s a handsome name,” bringing fingertips to temples like it’s too much for his brain to process.

“Jaaack Flemmming,” Sergeant Kim tries it out, and sure enough, it’s as smooth on the lips as it sounds in the ears. A phonetic Adonis.

Rivera starts slow clapping like this kid just did something Silver-Star worthy. And it wasn’t just Rivera; we were all possessed by the garish weight this name carried.

“Jack Fleming could be an American James Bond,” I say.

“Very classy, indeed,” LT agrees. “The type of name that’ll wine and dine you—before taking you back to its apartment for a tender pounding.”

This poor kid spoils our fun by telling us that Jack is a fluffy white Maltese, and Fleming is a residential byway in meth-town USA. We get a few more jokes out of it and then stop laughing when the captain comes in so we can all shout “at ease” at the top of our lungs. Captain throws a pen at Rivera, who’s the loudest, and we’re once again reminded that people will most likely try to kill us on our next mission passing out rice and beans.

*

We go about our business the next few days with no mention of Jack Fleming, that glorious gem we’d tripped over only to neatly rebury in the dirt for being too beautiful for any one man to possess. Like any good improv joke, it was kind of a one-time deal. Outside of that briefing room it wouldn’t have made much sense.

Then the Battle of Jowgi River happens. You might have heard of this one: Taliban down a Black Hawk and decide to ambush the rescue party. You haven’t? Well, we get out there; it’s outside our AO, but we’re available so we go. These pararescue guys are dug in on the wrong side of the river. They had already recovered the pilot’s remains and incinerated the bird, and they’re taking heavy fire by the time we arrive, trying to decide if they should risk getting wet running or just fight their asses off. And Rivera—crazy sonofabitch—starts laying down 240, and he is just on-point, I mean—we’re watching bodies drop while these PJs are stringing a rope across the river to exfil. I’m surprised Rivera didn’t burn the barrel off—he was just rolling in brass by the end. So, the PJ guys get away, and they come up on our net flabbergasted.

“Who’s the maverick on the 240?” they ask. “We want to know the name of the man who saved our lives.”

Rivera is just all pink. I mean, we respect the hell out of these guys, shit—most of us wanna be these guys, or Rangers or SF or what have you.

“Aw, geez,” Rivera says, twisting his foot like a schoolgirl. “Tell ‘em . . . tell ‘em Jack Fleming did it. Yeah, Jack Fleming is a machine-gun Mozart.”

It made us laugh pretty good.

And that was just about the birth of it. We can blame it all on Rivera. If he wasn’t such a humble prick . . . You see, he set the precedent. Anyone did anything cool afterwards—Jack Fleming got the credit.

—Jack Fleming shot and stopped a VBIED, though it was really Kim

—he CPR-revived a choking baby; LT did that one

—unearthed and snipped an IED

—rendered aid to an Afghan cop with a sucking chest wound

—befriended a pugnacious village elder

—attended Mosque with a terp and locals

—found multiple weapons caches

—got all our confirmed kills

The list goes on. Anything even remotely noteworthy, we all just said Jack Fleming did it. Why? Fuck, I don’t know. We were bored, I guess. Even I caught two dudes at 0300 pushing an IED in a wheelbarrow and said Jack Fleming spotted them. Saw them clean and green through an LRAZ atop a cliffside OP. Called it in; got put in for a medal. Though back at the FOB and outside of official paperwork, me getting these guys was a rumor added to the growing list of miracles performed by one Jack Fleming. For some reason this felt more meaningful than another stupid ribbon for my Class A’s.

*

Now I first started to suspect we had opened Pandora’s gossip-box when my little cousin serving in Iraq’s drawdown messages me on Facebook. My deployment had ended, and I was back in Fayetteville being pulled around the mall by my preggers wife Christmas shopping. So, I check my phone while she’s checking juicers or salad spinners or some such nonsense, and there it is.

[Hey Cuz! You ever serve with a Jack Fleming? Might have been around during your rotation?]

My first instinct—apart from laughing my ass off—is to push this farce as far as I can before coming clean with the truth.

[Fuck yes, I did! Jack Fleming is the goddamn patron saint of mayhem! You know how many lives he saved by being so deadly? No one wanted to do shit for ops without Jack Fleming covering our six!]

Now, what he says next causes me to pause. Maybe I feel chills, too.

[Well, he’s here in Iraq! Must have volunteered for another deployment. I haven’t met him, but it gives me peace of mind knowing he’s out there.]

So, once we get home from x-mas shopping, I call up LT, Kim and Rivera and tell them we might have a little problem on our hands.

*

We figure it’s highly improbable that our collective imagination gave birth to some sort of phantom Fleming—if that’s what you’re thinking. More likely there’s some poor bastard in Iraq who just so happens to be named Jack Fleming. Some unwitting private who we just turned into a wartime legend. You hear our rumors, then you pass a fit-looking kid at the FOB rockin’ Fleming nametape, and you think: could it be?

We figure it’s probably best just to let this one run its course. We’ve seen a few shenanigans in our time. For a hot minute, after this one episode of Family Guy, everyone was shouting Roadhouse! at anything requiring the least amount of physical effort. Well, we stopped saying roadhouse after so long, so we figure we’d all stop with the Jack Fleming bullshit, too.

But uh. . . man. Was I ever wrong on that account.

*

We get sent out to endure us some more freedom, this is over a year later, mind you. Different crew, but still got Rivera, Kim, and LT is now a captain.

We land in country eager to meet our ANA counterparts and quickly realize the whole Jack Fleming thing has turned somewhat cultish. Beyond your desert-variety war stories. I’m talking mythic proportions. You can’t so much as take a shit without seeing graffiti about an impossible sniper shot made by Jack Fleming. You hear people in the chow hall chatting about orphans he carried out of a fire or the high-risk livestock he helped birth. Stranger stuff than that, stuff people have no right believing in. How he shot an RPG out of the sky. That there’s really three Jack Flemings, triplets who enlisted at the same time. One Jack Fleming donated a kidney to another Jack Fleming who got shot—I mean, it’s just getting bizarre. Kim comes up and swears he saw a Jack Fleming morale patch worn by some Navy Seal types. Apparently, it’s a cartoon face of a sly 1950s-era alpha male: Ray-Ban sunglasses, a dimpled chin and slicked-back hair. An acronym in gold underneath: WWJFD?

Even the ANA are hip to the Fleming mania. We’ll be sitting before heading out on a patrol, and they’re rattling off Pashto: “Something, something, something—Jack Fleming!—something-something-something,” and they all start laughing.

The more this goes on, the more I rue the day we ever discovered the name.

*

It’s worse for Rivera. While it annoys me, it terrifies him. Maybe it’s his strong catholic morals, prohibitions against lying and all that, or maybe he feels more responsibility because—as I said—he started all this.

“I’m freaking out, man,” he says. “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’m not worried about getting schwacked by the Taliban, I’m worried about what people are going to do when they find out we’ve been stealing our own fucking valor.”

“Wait now,” I say. “Do you really think people believe in Jack Fleming?”

“The other day I saw two local national kids huddled over a drawing book. I approached with a smile expecting to see Ninja Turtles or some shit, but—no—it’s a custom-made Jack Fleming coloring book. Someone designed it and ordered up a plethora online. They’re all over Afghanistan, man!”

“Okay,” I say. “But what can we do? This is bigger than us now.”

“We have to put Jack Fleming to bed.”

“Yes, but how?”

“I don’t know. But it has to be huge . . .

“We’re going to have to kill Jack Fleming.”

*

So, we put on our murdering-hats and spend an inordinate amount of free time scheming how to pull it off. It sort of feels like trying to kill King Arthur. You can’t just make up lore; these things unfold organically.

And then OP Tiger Eye gets overrun. Now, I know you’ve heard of this one. It had been hit once or twice before, yet from what I gather it was a fairly chill place to kick back and survey the land. Well, the boys up there at the time get ejected, practically tumble down the mountain. A Taliban flag flies up the pole. Prudent thing to do would be to send out a drone, forget we were ever up there. Well, when QRF responds they light up the mountain with indiscriminate 50-cal, just as an f-you on their way out. This starts up a damn-near four-hour firefight neither side wants to break from. OP Tiger Eye is a landfill by the end of it. We take some casualties, and there’s even an MIA who never made it off the mountain. Real fog of war shit. It’s the perfect opportunity we need to kill Jack Fleming.

*

We spread the seeds of hearsay far at first, and it’s amazing how quickly it doubles back to us. Any FOB we visit outside of our AO we circle up and gab about Jack Fleming’s untimely demise. We write in Sharpie on DFAC tables:

Jack Fleming, KIA OP Tiger Eye.

God rest his beautiful soul

And you know what? It takes. Better than we could have hoped. A little too well. People go into public mourning. FOB Fleming gets erected. I’m seeing little candle-lit vigils outside of MWR hooches. It seems the only thing we did by killing Jack Fleming was to further cement his legacy. Looking back, I’m not sure why we expected a different outcome. Course, everyone present at OP Tiger Eye claims “It’s not true. Jack Fleming wasn’t even there. Which means . . . he’s still alive!” This—I guess—is how a series of counter-rumors gets started. Kim tells us that he heard from a Marine out in Helmond that his terp heard from a jingle truck driver that Jack Fleming secretly married a war widow and now lives peacefully with the local population out in Mazār-i-Sharīf. Luckily, these marriage rumors are branded conspiracy and most go on believing Jack Fleming perished.

*

We edge closer to heading home and it becomes increasingly clear we must do the right thing and shatter the Jack Fleming mythos. People can’t go on believing something that doesn’t rightly exist. Also, Rivera will probably need psychological counseling. Not for PTSD, but he can’t live with these lies any longer. They’re corroding his insides.

A soft-spoken ANA sergeant approaches and asks if we know Jack Fleming’s wife and children back in the States, and Rivera starts trembling like he’s about to spontaneously combust.

“Please tell his family,” this sergeant says to me, “that we are praying for God’s peace to surround them during this sorrow.”

“That’s such a kind sentiment, Hakim. I’ll make sure they know!”

And Rivera stares me down with the look a man makes right before he stabs you in the fucking face. I tell him it just wasn’t the right time or person.

We decide the “right time” is conveniently our last day in country. Captain—formerly LT—holds an emergency formation, a “family meeting” as he calls it. The ANA form up, too, and Rivera, Kim and I march out, somewhat informally.

Kim starts us off. “We wanted to say a few words about . . . Jack Fleming.”

Heads lower in reverence.

Kim looks at me, looks at Rivera. No one wants to be the one to squeeze the trigger. Rivera stands in awe before this humble formation of both Afghan and American soldiers. Hard-working people, a little rough around the edges, who believe in a better world so much that they’re willing to die for it.

“Fuck it,” I say, using aggression to hype me up. “Listen here, men. You people need to know that Jack Fleming is nothing but a big, fat—”

“American hero!” Rivera practically pushes me over shouting this. He looks left, he looks right. “And Afghan hero,” he says. “A hero to two nations. And I’m proud to have served with such a man. But he wasn’t extraordinary. He was just like you and just like me. Having Jack Fleming on our side didn’t give us a superhuman advantage out there. He was a simple man who only wanted to do his best. And his best was pretty damn good. He wanted to be good. As we all aspire to be. And I think you know that deep down we all have the capacity to be our own Jack Fleming.”

The formation ends in mass applause. We’re clapping, some are crying. As this goes on, Kim leans into Rivera and says, “So, I’m pumped and all, but what happens when we get back and the president wants to award nine posthumous Medals of Honor to Jack fucking Fleming?”

Rivera bites his lip. “We’ll cross that landmine when we come to it.”

Holding Dick Cheney’s shotgun is not exactly how I thought I’d be spending my time when I joined the Marines. It was summer of ’06 and the meatgrinder of Iraq was going full-tilt.  President Bush had gathered all his advisors and generals and a host of other ne’er-do-wells at Camp David to come up with a strategy to unfuck the war. You’ve probably heard of it.  The Surge. I’m sure whatever white paper commando coined the term was very proud of themself. Anyway yadda yadda blah blah you get the picture. I was stationed there at the time as a security guard. Our biggest threat were angry Code Pink moms.

The morning of the big arrival I was called down to First Sergeant’s office and told my orders to an infantry battalion had come in and I’d probably be in Iraq within a few months. Now, normally this was the best news a Camp David Marine could get, I’d finally get out of this chickenshit assignment and get to do what Marines are meant for, what all my friends from bootcamp had been doing for the past two years. I was twenty and dumb and had naively requested these orders a few months prior, had eagerly awaited to hear back as I went through the same groundhog day routine of six hours on duty and twelve hours off, over and over, staring at nothing but trees and fucking duty rosters. My gung-ho attitude changed however, when I received news of Cody, my bunk mate from boot camp.  He had been killed just a few days earlier when his Humvee got ripped apart by a massive IED somewhere outside Haditha. He was the first person I really knew to get wasted and I remember feeling suddenly ashamed of my excitement and eagerness and the orders in my hand grew heavy with consequence and complicity. Processing this was too much for my twenty-year-old brain to handle, so I did what any Marine faced with a complex emotional dilemma would do; I tried to ignore them.

That’s the headspace I was in when all this went down.

Now let me get to the big visit.

VIPs wouldn’t arrive for a few hours, but Secret Service advance teams were already setting up shop around the facility and we had begun standing up all the extra guards a presidential visit requires. Hoping to keep myself distracted I hid in the React Room with a squad of Marines fully kitted out in body armor, M4 rifles, ammunition, smoke grenades, night-vision goggles, hell, even an M240G medium machine gun. We were watching The Notebook.

Sgt Zak walked in and flipped on the lights, producing a round of boos and shouts as we shielded our eyes in the windowless enclave.

“Be quiet, you frickin’ snakes.” He was standing in front of the TV and holding a clipboard and though he was only 5’6, he knew how to take up a lot of space.

“Oh come on, sarnt!”  Dave, who told dubious yet colorful stories of his time as a pool-boy in Daytona, was visibly upset. “Noah and Allie were just about to rekindle their love after he rebuilt the old house!”

“Love can wait.”

More boos. Someone threw their hat. Sgt Zak ignored them.

“Okay, morning announcements. Trailblazer will be arriving later this afternoon at 1520, soon followed by the press corps. Other cabinet members will be arriving periodically from 1600 to 2000, so be prepared for several LZ Ops.”

Trailblazer, of course, being the president’s Secret Service codename. All the Bush family and most of the higher-up cabinet officials had codenames—usually some dumb reference to the person’s character or interests. In Bush’s case, he loved mountain biking.

“Also, Angler,” that’s Cheney, ^“will be arriving at 1000 and I’ve been told wants to squeeze in some time at the skeet range. I’ll need one of you to go out with him as Range Safety Officer.”

A bit of context: maybe you remember but Cheney had just recently shot a friend in the face with a shotgun while out quail hunting. He said it was an accident.

The banter died down as all of us in the room suddenly found something very interesting to inspect on our uniforms and gear. I started picking at my name tape, which was coming unstitched on one side. Travis got up and walked for the door.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Sgt Zak said.

“Some rich white guys want to go out and shoot guns and you expect the one black dude to go out there with ‘em?”

“Ah dang, good point.”

Travis opened the door and left the room.

“Come on, you guys are usually fighting over the chance to get some close-up time with VIPs.”

“You know he just shot a dude in the face, right?” I said.

There was a round of agreement, but Sgt Zak just crossed his arms.

I thought I might slink out of the room like Travis, seeing that I wasn’t even on the react team and in no mood to entertain the powers-that-be, but I got the sense that was a one-time deal. My chances were probably better staying grouped up with everyone else, a united front.

“He ain’t even on react, send him.” Dave said, pointing at me.

Despite his amusing eccentricities, Dave is foremost an asshole.

“Gosh dangit.  Dave, give me a mag.”  Sgt Zak didn’t wait and instead ripped open a velcro pouch and took one of Dave’s loaded pistol magazines. He then picked up the hat that was thrown earlier and began unloading the bullets into it.

“Ah what the fuck, sarnt?” Dave protested.

Sgt Zak then pulled out a sharpie from his pocket and drew a black X on one bullet.

“Each of you take a bullet without peeking, whoever gets the X gets to RSO for Angler.”

He came around with the hat and we each did as we were told.

You can guess where this is going.

“You got the X!” Dave laughed, again pointing at me.

The rest of them were laughing too.  There’s nothing more amusing to Marines than seeing one of their own suffer.

“Yo, make sure you wear your glow-belt out there.”

“Nah, wear like five fuckin glow-belts.”

“Yeah, sling ‘em around your chest like Rambo.”

“Nice knowin ya, dude.”

“Rest in pieces, bro.”

Obviously, this did not improve my mood. The idea of shooting anything felt strangely perverse given the context of what Bush and the cabinet were there to do. One would think the moment demanded a sober retrospection of all that had led to the clusterfuck they had gotten us into. I remembered when Cody and I got smoked by our D.I. after getting our wisdom teeth pulled because Cody had the gall to let blood drip onto the quarterdeck.  He kept whispering “I’m sorry” over and over to me through gauze-filled cheeks while doing endless mountain-climbers.  I wondered whether he had been buried yet, or if he was still at Dover getting pieced together for his parents.  Maybe, had I taken Sgt Zak aside and confessed all of that to him he would have let me off.  He probably would have. But I couldn’t. Duty, pride, toxic masculinity, whatever you want to call it, held my mouth shut as I eventually got voluntold for the assignment.

So anyway, there I was, holding Cheney’s shotgun and contemplating my life choices.  This is something one does a lot in the military. It’s actually the first thing one does in the military. But at this particular moment, I was tallying up every decision I made that brought me to signing those enlistment papers, which I had thought was the Right Thing, but now know to be the Wrong Thing, so if I could go back and change one of those decisions I would have ended up doing the Wrong Thing instead of the Right Thing, which would have actually been the Right Thing and not the Wrong Thing, but if I had done the Right Thing I know I would have felt bad for not doing the Wrong Thing and would then convince myself that the Wrong Thing was the Right Thing and I’d be right back to doing the Right Thing and I’d still end up standing at the skeet range holding Cheney’s shotgun.

Angler was forty-five minutes late when he finally rolled up in a golf cart with the presidential seal glued onto the front it like some perverse, snub-nosed, boomer Popemobile.  One of his aides was driving and brought the cart right up to the firing line, past the sign that read “No Vehicles Beyond This Point.” One look at him told me this was headed for a worst-case scenario. I shit you not, despite this being a skeet range overlooking a perfectly manicured and level lawn, and with no reason to leave the covered and shady confines of the firing line, Angler wore his full hunting regalia. Now this is summertime Maryland, the temp was hovering around 92 degrees and about a million percent humidity and here he was in rubber galoshes, Mossy Oak camouflage pants and shirt, and a hunter orange shooting vest with a dozen different pockets and pouches.  And he was drinking a healthy three fingers of whiskey from a glass in his left hand.

“I’ll take that,” he said and grabbed the shotgun from my hands.

One step at a time, I told myself.

“Sir, I’ll be your Range Safety Officer for today.”

“Yes, yes, I’m quite familiar with range safety rules,” he said without a hint of irony.  “Let’s get this show goin,’ all the morons will be here soon and I wanna get some shooting in before they’re all running around getting in the way of everything.  Lord knows there’s been god damn enough of that lately, ain’t that right, Quincy?”

I assumed he was talking to the aide, who looked exactly like his name, but Angler neither looked back at him nor waited for a response.

“Where those shells at, son?”

I pointed to a nearby table where I had neatly stacked several boxes of shotgun shells.  He opened a few and began filling his pockets until he was satisfied with the amount of ammo on his person.

“I say ‘pull’ and you release the clays.”

I couldn’t tell if he was asking or telling, but the long, thin smirk that never met his eyes told me it was the latter, and so I grabbed the remote.

“PULL!”

The violence of his voice shocked me for a moment before I pressed the button, sending two white clays sailing through the air in a long and slow parabola.  He shot them both cleanly, so that they exploded into little white puffs.

“I told ya, Quincy, I told ya.” He turned back to the table on his left and grabbed his drink.  He had the shotgun cradled in his arm and it waved wildly with his movements, flagging everything behind him, including Quincy.

“Sir, please keep the firearm pointed down range,” I said as sternly as I dared.

“Oh don’t worry my boy, it ain’t loaded anymore.”  He took a gulp of whiskey before adding, “We’re the only ones out here.”

Witnessing Angler in person was growing more difficult than I had anticipated.  This man, I thought with a growing anger that continues burning to this day, would very likely be deciding my fate over the coming days, had already decided on so many others’.  This man with his stupid fucking smirk, a ridiculous orange vest that bounced up and down in time with every nasally laugh, his halitosis, this man who kept referring to himself as Angler, would send us all to our fucking doom, killing and dying.  And we let him do it.

We went like that for a while, him shouting “PULL!” and me pushing the button.  He never missed a clay.  And before you ask, yes, the discrepancy between his so-called “accident” and this impressive display of accuracy was not lost on me. Quincy even came up for a turn once Angler began to slow down, the alcohol finally reaching him.  It was obvious Quincy had never held a weapon in his life, and Angler was taking a little too much pleasure in watching him fumble with the shells. When he did fire the gun he flinched hard and put a nice shotgun blast into the ground about ten feet in front of us, sending a dinnerplate sized divot into the air. Angler loved that. Needless to say, the lanky wasp didn’t hit a single clay.

Cheney had finished his drink and had switched to smoking a stubby cigar, the smoke of which kept invading my nostrils and causing me to sneeze in fits. He thought that was funny too.  I suffered through this until Cheney—apparently bored—held out the shotgun in my direction, and instead of waiting for me to grab it, just let go, sending me scrambling to reach it before it hit the ground. “Why don’t you go ahead and take a few shots” he told me. Now, like I said, I was in no mood for shooting and in-fact considered anything more than somber contemplation a violation of some ancient trust between soldiers and leaders, and more importantly, me and Cody. And plus, pretty soon there’d be dozens of staffers and other officials of varying power and stature wondering around like so many walking monsters and I wanted to get the hell outta the kill zone, maybe hide out with the react team and The Notebook again.

“Thank you sir, but as RSO my job is to ensure safety.  Can’t do that and shoot at the same time.”

“Why not?  You’ll have the gun.”

He had a good point, but again, I wasn’t in the mood for it, and plus, protocol dictates that we just supervise, try and stay in the background as much as possible. And then I got to thinking that if some officer happened to drive by and see me he’d think I was intentionally getting too friendly, and then he’d start wondering why some idiot corporal was out here shooting and rubbing elbows with Angler when it really should be him and that’s just not fair because rubbing elbows with the big-wigs was exactly the reason he used up two good favors to get this assignment and how was he supposed to wrangle that cushy job and promotion to major or colonel if he didn’t have some god damn connections and names to drop at parties with other officers who would be silently comparing him and his social status to all of his colleagues gunning for the same promotion and said cushy job and that if he didn’t get them then he would have to give up on this ill-fated career that his father warned him against and end up going to law school or getting his MBA which was what his father wanted him to do all along but that he didn’t think he was ready for because he just barely made it through Penn State as it was and he wasn’t exactly what you’d call intellectually minded but neither is that god damn corporal and he sure as shit didn’t need to build up a rolodex so just what the hell does he think he’s doing?

I politely declined.

Cheney then stuck a box of shells in my hand.

“Shoot the god damn shotgun,” he breathed up into my face.

I was only an inch taller than him but I made sure he noticed every bit of it.  He didn’t care. I couldn’t give in, not to him. I was afraid of what might happen if I did, though I didn’t know why. I’d love to get all poetic and revisionist and say it was my guilt over Cody’s death driving me, but it was more than that. It felt celestial. All I know was there was something telling me to resist, refuse. Someone had to say, No.

I stretched myself taller and looked down into his pale colorless eyes and he laughed.

And all my feelings of resistance evaporated.

I took the shotgun and loaded the shells. “PULL,” Cheney yelled for me, and I fired. The two white clays landed softly in the grass, untouched. I missed.

Humiliating, I know. To fast forward a bit: after I was mercifully done with Cheney, I ended up back in the react room. And because I apparently hadn’t learned my lesson from the last time I needlessly hung out there, Sgt Zak again voluntold me for another assignment, this time as a road guard checking IDs of people trying to get to Aspen. Fun fact: The cabins and buildings aboard Camp David are named after trees, which I rather liked, to be honest. Dogwood, Eucalyptus, Redwood, Sequoia, Willow, Birch, Walnut etc.  Aspen was the presidential cabin where POTUS and his family lived while they were here.  It was also where all the important meetings would be taking place. I doubt you want to hear about me standing at the end of Aspen’s driveway for a few hours, so I’ll fast forward some more.

After standing at the end of Aspen’s driveway for a few hours with not a soul to come by, save the occasional Secret Service agent, a man in khaki slacks and a blue polo came striding towards me. He was older, seventies perhaps, and looked vaguely familiar to me, but only in the sense that all old white men tend to be. He wasn’t wearing any badge, so I stepped in his path and asked to see some identification, my one responsibility. “I don’t have time for this,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. He tried walking around me. You could say I was still smarting from earlier but his self-importance annoyed me and when he got close I grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back in front of me, it didn’t take much effort. He fucking exploded.

“How dare you touch me,” he said with a disgust so genuine it bordered on self-parody.

“No unauthorized personnel past this point.”

“Are you dumb or something?” By the look on his face you’d think I had a dick growing out of my forehead.

“Of course I’m authorized, I’m the god damn SecDef!”

That’s right it was Don-fucking-Rumsfeld! As soon as he said that I recognized him, and yes, I know, as a Marine I should have recognized Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, his picture did hang in every one of our offices, after all.  But, to be fair, I had only ever seen him wearing a suit and glasses, neither of which he had on then, and neither did he have his usual entourage of aides trying to keep up with him.  Anyway, fuck that guy.

“Get out of my way, I have meetings to get to.”

He tried shoving past me again but I held him in place. Even though I recognized him I remembered Sgt Zak, “check IDs and badges.” My failure to stand up to Cheney had put me in a work-to-rule kind of mood, and I told Rumsfeld that I couldn’t let him past without some identification. This did not go over well.

“Listen here you dumb grunt, I am your Secretary of Defense and I am ordering you to let me pass.”

“Do you have identification to prove this, sir?” I was feeling myself a bit and let it show. I was also thinking of Cody again and wondering if his Humvee had been properly armored.

“I don’t have to show you anything.  Do you not recognize me?  Call your commander up right now.”

“He’s busy, sir.”

“I said now!”

It was then that Sgt Zak drove up in a golf cart, doing his rounds checking on all the posts.

“Tell me you outrank this imbecile,” Rumsfeld said, nearly running towards the cart.

“I am the Sergeant of the Guard, yes.  Is there a prob—”

Rumsfeld cut him off, “I want this moron relieved of duty!  He assaulted me and refuses to let me pass.”

Sgt Zak looked at me with a “Is that true” kind of look.

I shrugged.  “He’s got no ID or security badge.”

Rumsfeld nearly choked.

Zak looked exhausted—being SOG during a visit is no rose garden after all, having to coordinate with half a dozen different agencies and staffs.

“Let him pass, Corporal.”

“Cant.  No ID.  Goes against the General Orders.”

“I don’t know what sort of incompetent operation you run here, Sergeant, but you can guarantee I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer about it.”  Rumsfeld knew he had won.

“I’m ordering you to let him pass, Corporal.”  Sgt Zak said, emphasizing my (lower) rank.

Now I’ll say here that I love Sgt Zak, he’s a good guy, but I fucking resented him in that moment. There were rules for a reason. Guidelines we were supposed to follow and adhere to. I’d be failing my duty if I were to allow Rumsfeld to just walk around them and it pissed me off that I was being told to do just that. I clenched my fists and stared hard at Rumsfeld, but I had done all I could. It wasn’t enough, not even close, but I had to let him pass.

Sgt Zak relieved me after that. Told me to go back to my room and get my head straight before my shift tomorrow morning, it’s been a stressful day for all of us, he said. My room was the last place I wanted to be, though. I couldn’t just lay down and stare at the ceiling, Cody and my orders and Iraq all floating around my head with nowhere to hide.  I wanted to unthink. Ignore everything, pretend I could go back to a few weeks ago when everything was clear and not complicated. Before the inconvenience of Right versus Wrong, when duty still granted a sense of agency in the face of the inevitable. Even now, more so even, I wish that were possible. I skipped my room and headed over to Eucalyptus where there was a bar and pool tables and a small arcade. Sometimes that’s enough.

Golden-Tee was my game of choice. You know, arcade golf. There was something soothing in the way you had to roll your hand over the big white ball on the controller, how, if you were good enough, could get the perfect backspin for Pebble Beach, or hit just the right angle on the doglegs of Torrey Pines. I wasn’t the best player, but I had been marching my initials up the leaderboard since I had arrived at Camp David. The one legacy I’d leave behind.

Anyway, I was two strokes in to the fifth hole at TPC Sawgrass when someone elbowed me in the ribs during my swing, causing me to slice into the woods. I turned around ready to cuss out the offending asshole when I came face-to-face with Trailblazer himself.

Of fucking course.

“Nice swing there, hoss,” he says in that long-practiced drawl of his, like we all don’t know he’s a fucking WASP from New England. And then do you know what he said?

And this is no shit, but he says “How bout we play a game?  They’ve had me in meetings all day and I’ll be damned if I don’t need some relaxation.” I was done with this shit.  Should have just stayed in my room and sucked it up, faced my emotions head on, or at least pretend I could ignore them.  Or read a fucking book. Anything other than falling into the same traps with these fucking guys. To be humiliated over and over, to be used and discarded.  Like Cody and the countless other wasted youth of our generation—American or otherwise—to get churned up in the political machinations of the feckless elite, selling our sacrifice as something heroic and victorious rather than the pointless political capital it truly is.  Yes, that’s right, I said it. Every death was meaningless. Past, present, and future.  And before you start calling me cruel, defeatist, or un-American or whatever, remember that I was there. Witnessed it all first-hand.

To the extent that any of it meant anything is completely limited to whether you survived or not. Some of us did. A lot of us didn’t. Of course, we’re at fault too, which is honestly the most angering part of this whole fucking mess. We can’t escape our own complicity in the things we did, the things we wished for, the things we allowed to happen. None of that excuses those at the top, however, and I’ll continue to vent my fucking rage for it all towards them, the most deserving. I thought it took years for my anger to show itself, long after my first deployment, but retelling this story now I can see it manifested much earlier.

Now listen fucking close because this is what I’ve been building to. Cheney, Rumsfeld?  Fucking appetizers for the main course. Absurdity injected into the veins.  So absurd it can only be true, and that’s no shit. Here it is:

I stopped playing right away, not bothering to finish the hole, and headed for the door.

“Sorry, sir, but I need to get some sleep before my shift in the morning.”

He grabbed my shoulder, stopping me.

“Now hold on their, honcho. I could really use something to take my mind off all these damn dreary meetings I been in all day.”

“I really have to sleep, sir.”

“Am I gonna have to pull rank here?” He laughed.  “Come on, son.  Join me in a game.”

That spark came back.  That feeling from earlier with Cheney.  Maybe it was the drawl, or his buddy-buddy good-natured attitude, but something told me to push back.

“Let’s play.”

Bush ordered a Frito Pie from the bar and then picked out which course we would play.  He chose one of the computer-generated maps where each hole was a Frankenstein collection of memorable hazards, greens, doglegs, and fairways from the various PGA courses. He called it an even playing field, which I assumed meant that he thought I had memorized all the real-life courses, which I had.

The first hole was a narrow but straight par-four with a sloping green. We both drove the fairway easily and ended up just short of the rough that sat between fairway and green.  I decided to lay my next shot onto the green down-hill of the hole. There wasn’t much green there, so I had to be careful with my backspin, I didn’t want the ball rolling back into the rough. I thought of trying to lob my ball over and letting it roll down toward the hole, but I was afraid of hitting it too far and landing in the bunkers behind the green or again, have too much backspin and watch it roll right past and into the rough.  So, I played it safe. Everything went according to plan; my ball landed right where I wanted it, and I made a firm, but smooth four-foot putt for a birdie.

“Not bad there, sport,”  Bush said.

I allowed myself a knowing smile.  It was a challenging, but fairly routine shot and putt to make.  Nothing you’d brag about back at the clubhouse over beers, but still a solid display of knowledge and skill.

Bush was up and I figured he’d go for the same safe play. I didn’t expect his short game to be as good, but he could at least make par. Instead, he hit a high arching shot over the hole, landing at the top of the green. The ball rolled downhill straight for the hole, picking up speed until it hit the cup and bounced three or four inches into the air and came right back down. An eagle.

“You’ll have to do better if you wanna beat me, chief,” he said, nudging me again with his elbow.

His Frito pie arrived and he took a big spoonful before quickly spitting it out and blowing out his mouth.

“Hot hot hot!” he said, a string of melted cheese dangling from his chin.

I had to beat him. There was absofuckinglutely no god damn way I could allow myself to be humiliated by this asshole. It. Wasn’t. Going. To. Happen. This was where I’d make my stand. Like the fucking Spartans at Thermopylae. Gandalf and the Balrog  The Alamo.  I got down into a proper fighting stance behind that big white ball and pressed the button for the next hole.

The battle that ensued was an epic on par with the greats of Marine Corps legend. And like those battles many of the details have since been lost to history—and traumatic brain injury. I can tell you that Bush pulled ahead early, and for a while the issue was in doubt.  My short game became inexplicably bad as I put my ball into bunkers and rough and even a water hazard. But Bush had his slip ups, too, and I managed to keep within five strokes.  By the third hole, the other Eucalyptus patrons had begun to gather round and it didn’t take long for sides to form along strict class lines. Political appointees, staff members, and officers were all Team Trailblazer. Bar staff, along with my fellow enlisted; soldiers, sailors, airman and Marines; stood on the side of the righteous. The cheering was quiet at first, respectable golf claps, oohs and awes, but devolved into near chaos during the back nine as insults were traded, bets made. At one point, an NSC staffer and Navy Seabee stepped outside to settle an argument, returning bloodied and shirtless minutes later. The biggest shit talker was Bush himself, never missing an opportunity to jab my ribs and point out a failed wind consideration or improper club choice. I remained quiet. Focused. I made no fancy shots, but also never repeated a mistake, and slowly caught up one birdie at a time.

By the final hole we were even. Bush had finished his swings and putts, making par. I was on the green, one twelve-foot putt away from a birdie and the win. The room was silent. I approached the console.

The bar door burst open then and we all turned to see Angler stride in visibly annoyed.

“God damnit, George, do you know what time it is in Iraq right now?  We have to get back to the matter-at-hand.” Cheney said.

“Don’t get your panties in a wad, Dick, my game is almost over.” Bush replied, gesturing towards the console and me.

To my surprise, he recognized me.

“Ah, look who it is,” Cheney said, smirk on his face.

This was it. That earlier feeling of resistance that had been simmering all game suddenly rose to the surface again. It was more intense this time and I felt it give me strength, felt my body fill with the force of something cosmic. This fucking subconscious primal instinct told me that this, this was the most important thing I’d ever do, that I had to hold firm no-matter-fucking-what, that I wasn’t just doing this for myself but the whole god damned human race, and this moment right now would change the fate of fucking planets. I thought of Cody and myself and the nameless other thousands whose fates were not theirs and I got down behind that white ball and rolled it back and then forward with my palm in one smooth motion and the golf ball marched forward towards the waiting maw of the cup and it marched and marched with the curves of the green and it slowed and then slowed some more until it reached the edge of the cup and teetered into oblivion.

The crowd erupted and someone was shaking me, congratulating me. “New High Score” flashed across the screen and without hesitating, I entered Cody’s initials. I turned back toward Bush and Cheney, triumphant and defiant.

They both smiled and shared a look between them as if they were gods among mere mortals, and laughed.

Early on in Nico Walker’s Cherry, the narrator, working a dead-end shoe store job to pay for drugs while his parents pay for his college, says that he has a well cultivated sense of shame. This is true. He does. Many people do not. Many people are shameless. They do not care how they degrade themselves as long as society says it’s okay to degrade themselves in this way. Or they are full of shame in an uncultivated way. It just spills out here and there, at rare moments, when they let their guard down. It makes you wonder if they even care about their shame. If they too are shameless as those that are shameless.

That would make everyone shameless except for Nico Walker. I think this might very well be true. I think only Nico Walker feels shame. He is the only writer from the recent wars that I’ve read who has taken his shame and cultivated it to such a degree that it is impossible not to be ashamed of the Iraq War (or whatever the journalists and historians are calling it now).

He makes you ashamed of your country. He makes you ashamed of yourself. He makes you ashamed of being alive.

It’s glorious. Cherry is an absolute delight. I have not had this much fun reading a book in a very long time.

Maybe it’s because Nico Walker robbed a bunch of banks. Maybe it’s because Nico Walker was a bad soldier. Maybe it is because Walker had a “bad” war (whatever that means). Maybe it is because Walker was a junkie. Maybe it is because Walker is actually funny. Maybe it is because Walker can write. Or maybe it’s all these bound into one. Maybe the urge to make it about one or another is to miss the point. It shows a terribly uncoordinated sense of shame. It is maybe, even, a little shameless.

So I kind of love this book. Walker’s narrator doesn’t play fuck fuck games (as they used to say in Ranger school, one of those schools that train us to kill better, to play roles better, to take pride in shamelessness). He gets straight to the point. He knows the ending. Death, indignity, compromise. The ending, as he says, is fucked.

Here he is talking about Emily, the woman that provides a strange and mysterious through-line in the novel, which feels, at times, to be more of a fantasy than anything else, the idea of a woman we might imagine for ourselves but also, miraculously, a woman who insists on being herself:

“The day I met her we went for a walk after class and we ended up in her dorm room. We talked for a while there and then for whatever reason I got to crying, like really bawling-my-fucking-eyes-out crying. I’d already seen everything that was going to happen and it was a nightmare. Something like that. And she was really sweet to me. I don’t think there was ever anyone who felt more compassion for weak motherfuckers.”

Whoever Emily is, whatever her fictional or physical reality, I love her too. I love this compassion. I love the fact that she disappears and then reappears mysteriously under sewer grates. That she follows the narrator through the war and then into drugs and his life of crime and that she puts ice on his crotch before his final robbery that sends him (and Nico himself) to eight years in jail. That she is always cursing. That she is fucked up, that she sees that it is fucked up, all of it, yet somehow, she still has compassion for a man who says (idiotically, perversely, criminally), “I take all the beautiful things to heart and they fuck my heart until I about die from it.”

She is an ending that is not an ending. She is the possibility of a person. He tries to be good for her. Not jerk off to anyone but her. Not sleep around. Keep her high. He tries to be decent in a world that is not, that cannot be, that does not care about beauty, that does not want to die from beauty so dies all the time, forever and ever.

Mid-deployment, between one succession of pointless deaths and mutilations and murders and the next succession of pointless deaths and mutilations and murders, the narrator and other soldiers watch pornography and see that the “unsuspecting” woman wears a wedding ring and that the reality TV pornography is not reality TV pornography.

The narrator says:

“And we know then that life was just a murderous fuckgame and that we had been dumb enough to fall for some bullshit.”

If we don’t have compassion for the weak, for those who don’t have a choice and those who make bad choices, we have nothing.

Or not nothing. Not exactly. We still have Staff Sergeant North.

North looks like Morrisey. North is from Idaho. North is a killer. He grows to hate the narrator for being incompetent. For being, deep down, a faker. Not a soldier. North disappears from the narrative. But we are told that he survives the war unscathed, that he goes on to bigger and better things. Killers often do.

The narrator is not a killer. It kills him.

He’s a medic, though. A bad one. Here’s the narrator trying and failing to save an Iraqi that his squad accidentally murdered for leaving his own house at night.

“I should have packed the haji full of gauze, I should have kept packing the wound til I couldn’t pack it anymore, til it was packed tight. But I didn’t. I should have had him lie on the side he was wounded on. But I forgot. I said I was going to prop the haji’s feet on my helmet because he could go into shock if his feet weren’t propped up that way.  And even though this was true I was only saying it just to say things because there was no exit wound and I didn’t know what to do. The haji’s eyes rolled up in his head and then came back, focused again, rolled up again. I said I was going to give him morphine to keep him from going into shock.

North said, ‘Do what you have to do, doc. You don’t have to tell us.’

I gave the haji morphine, so I could look like I was doing something right. I stuck him on his right thigh and went back to working on a line. His arm was thin. I couldn’t get a flash. Then I got a flash, but he moved and I lost it.

I said, ‘Keep still, you fuck! I’m trying to help you.’

North said, ‘Be quiet, doc.'”

The narrator does not listen to North. The narrator is not a professional. He cries. He yells. He makes jokes. He commits crimes. He goes crazy. He counts his failures one by one, lovingly, like someone with a well cultivated sense of shame. Like Jerry in Edward Albee’s play “The Zoo Story” (which provides the epigraph to one of Walker’s sections), the narrator won’t shut up, won’t not fall on his own knife. He is going North from the zoo. To tell his zoo story. Our story. That life is very often a murderous fuck game and that we are almost always dumb enough to fall for some bullshit.

So. This being a fact. What do we do with this? Where do we go from here?

We might laugh at flying babies. Before deployment, the narrator is put in charge of a recruitment “rockwall” in Ohio somewhere. Parents hand him babies and the babies don’t weigh enough for the pullies, so they just fly up to the top of the rockwall. The narrator doesn’t know what to do but the parents keep on handing him babies. He straps them up and away they go.

We could also, perhaps, be crushed by the beauty of it all, as the narrator often is. This, remember, is what makes him a weak motherfucker in the first place.

Here is Emily and the narrator getting fake married for real extra benefits. She’s wearing some kind of gas station attendant uniform and his nose is swollen from a friend’s headbutt:

“And we knew at that moment we were the two most beautiful things in the world. How long it lasted, I don’t know, but it was true for at least a few minutes. Six billion people in the world and no one had it on us.”

Vonnegut once said that there are billions of people in this world and that he supposes they all want dignity.

They do. They do. And sometimes they even get it.

Vonnegut also said remember the nice moments.

Here’s a nice moment from Iraq:

“One time the prisoners all sang together and you could hear them outside the jail and it was very beautiful and it made you feel like an asshole.”

I feel like an asshole after reading this book.

It’s okay. Sometimes it is good to feel like an asshole. Sometimes we need to remember we are assholes. How else could we ever stop being one?

There’s been a lot of controversy lately about the book and the movie and instagram photos. Some say that Walker didn’t write it. Or he doesn’t deserve this after what he did or didn’t do. Blah blah blah. The internet keeps on handing us babies. Away the babies go.

The question is this: Do we want a hero? Or do you want a novelist? I for one have had enough of heroes. Bring on more Nico Walkers. If only because Nico Walker cares about how he degrades himself. He is sensitive to his degradation and the different ways that each one of us degrade ourselves on a daily basis. He lives it, understands it. I would not recommend this way of being to anyone else but Nico Walker. I wouldn’t even recommend it to Nico Walker (not all the time anyway). But I’m glad we got this book out of it. Because that war was fucked. And we should be ashamed.

The motto of the U.S. Marine Corps, or USMC, is “Semper Fidelis.” Commonly translated to “always faithful,” the motto—adopted in 1883 upon the urging of Colonel Charles McCawley, 8^th commandant of the Marine Corps—replaced earlier mottos, including “with courage” and “by sea, by land.”

The definition of the motto and what it “means” to be a Marine is different for different people, and almost never exactly what one probably thinks from the outside looking in. Now commonly shortened to “Semper Fi” by Marines, the motto and its history bear testament to the essentially arbitrary way in which rules are enforced not only in and by the USMC, but by and in American society, as well. After all, “Semper Fi” means “always fi,” in Latin—fi means nothing, it’s a nonsensical term. Taken at face value, the reduction of a motto to shorthand underlines the motto’s essential mutability. Faithful… to what? Each other, the constitution, the president? Always… since 1883?

Meaning, as every adult understands, is highly contextual. This essential truth underlines most modernist and all post-modernist art and literature. When one takes the changeable truth of life and runs it through a harsh and dogmatic set of ideals, the resulting psychical energy is sufficiently powerful to drive some people to superhuman acts of discipline, in the name of honor and self-respect, and this is very useful when fighting a dedicated enemy. It drives almost everyone else mad, according to the extent to which they failed to live up to those ideals. Some rationalize their misbehavior, building up elaborate personal philosophies to justify their actions. Others descend into pessimism and become jaded.

Teresa Fazio is a proud former Marine, and her war memoir—Fidelis—grapples with that mutability at the heart of everyday life, and her own efforts to live up to ideals. It is a top rate book about war, and how serving in the Marines requires great reservoirs of emotional energy under normal circumstances, but especially on deployment to Iraq. It will resonate with anyone who has served in the military. Fidelis may even give military leaders something to think about when it comes to setting and enforcing rules.

The story begins with Fazio’s difficult family background—a household broken by infidelity, and an abusive stepfather, the type of situation that breaks many people down and ruins their potential before they have a chance to properly begin their lives. The setting did not break Fazio. Instead, she discovered great reservoirs of personal forbearance that complemented an aptitude for science. She put herself through MIT on a Marine Corps ROTC scholarship. She also learned early to rely on herself to succeed and overcome obstacles in an effort to achieve independence in two worlds dominated by men, first, that of science, then, that of the military.

One of the threads that Fazio follows from her childhood through the military and then afterwards is her complicated relationship with femininity. Growing up, she seems to see in her mother’s adultery a kind of moral hazard specific to women, and this feeling is reinforced by the masculine circles in which she moves. It takes time and great effort for Fazio to overcome this inherent bias against her own identity as a woman, both in her own estimation and from others. The parts of her memoir that deal with this question are unsparingly honest.

Once in the military, Fazio proves herself a competent leader whose attention to detail makes her ideally suited to ensuring that communications for a Battalion-sized fort ran smoothly. The war intrudes in the form of dead bodies from outside the wire, and also mortar attacks, one of which nearly ends her life. Nevertheless, Fazio’s greatest challenge arrives in the form of a man—a much older, and (not incidentally) married man, who seduces her in Iraq, and with whom she sleeps after the deployment. Far more troubling to Fazio than the embarrassment of having fallen for a manipulative adulterer is her violation of two codes: her personal code, which depended on a lifelong repudiation of using femininity to gain any advantage (in this case, the attention of a man), and her violation of her expectations of herself as an officer and a Marine.

Above all, Fidelis is a memoir of endurance; a story about how a person can bear up under the weight of external and internal expectations. The prose is spare and straightforward, assembled carefully, attentively, and in a way that drives the reader forward sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter all the way to the end. Capable of being experienced in a weekend, or even over the course of a single day, at 215 pages, Fidelis is, like Fazio’s deployment, intense.

The story is also filled with moments of understated wit, such as when she describes the midnight runs necessitated by a shift schedule that required her to stay awake at night:

Before midnight, I ran on the rough gravel roads, carrying a flashlight so trucks could spot me. Even with its bouncing beam, I could hardly see five feet ahead, and I tripped over concrete chunks, bruising my knees through OCS-issued sweats. I got up and kept running. Head- lights higher than my head screamed toward me, and I scrambled off-road to avoid them. Trucks roared past, carrying water or sewage to or away from this place; I couldn’t tell. I turned around and jogged back for a freezing shower.

Of a rebound relationship, “if I squinted, it looked like love.” Of the internet and cell phones, technology made it easier to talk, but not to connect.”

According to Fazio, and the strict rules of the Corps, in helping a married man cheat, Fazio failed to live up to its standards of behavior. But she was surrounded by people who were skirting the system—drinking on deployment, cutting corners, focused on their own happiness and well-being first, before that of the corps. Not, in other words, being Semper Fidelis.

This is one of Fazio’s greatest accomplishments: she remains essentially optimistic, loyal to the Corps and to her memory of the military. In spite of the failure of various Marines to live up to the ideals of the Corps, in spite of her own inability to reach perfection, Fazio carries out her assigned duties faithfully. Making an error, even one that consumes a substantial portion of one’s energy and attention, does not define an individual, and although Fazio’s error was apparent to her at the time and since, this aspect of her life does not capture her essence any more than it captures the essence of any human. The experience could easily have ruined her as an officer and a human, embittering her and turning her toward cynicism — but she must have been a competent and caring officer, and earning a PhD at Columbia after leaving the military establishes her bona fides as an intelligent and steadfast worker.

In writing Fidelis, Fazio more than makes up for her in retrospect understandable transgressions, by offering aspiring young men and women a realistic and expertly-written account of what it’s like to go to war. Her unprepossessing prose, dry humor, and faithful rendition of the trials and temptations faced by deploying women should be read by anyone curious about what it was like to be a woman in the Marine Corps.

The following excerpt is from Teresa Fazio’s Fidelis: A Memoir, reprinted with permission from Potomac Books. 

A week before leaving Iraq, I shuffled through my post-deployment health assessment, a quiz to divine if we were crazy or sick or prone to shooting our loved ones. I gave the pasty Navy doc the answers he wanted: Yeah, I’m fine. No, I haven’t seen anyone killed—lifting that transport case doesn’t count. Yes, of course I was exposed to sand. No, no nightmares, not lately. Shit blows up, whatever. No anxiety, just stress. I’m an officer; I can handle it. Let me go.

I was impatient with anyone who hadn’t also been in Iraq for seven months, laying cable like my wire platoon. Our replacements’ questions—where did this cable lead, when was chow, was there really a shot-up mural of Saddam Hussein—disrupted my precious workaholic routine, the one for which Marla, another female lieutenant, had nicknamed me Rain Man. With the new troops swelling our numbers, we spent the next several weeks laying as much cable as possible. The Marines bore down, digging what trenches they could with a motorized Ditch Witch, then pickaxing the more sensitive areas bordered by concertina wire. They laid cables straight into sandy trenches, zip-tying them every few feet and burying them under fine grains. Their knees shone white, and they washed grit from their hands and necks before meals. It sucked, but it was celebratory for the Marines leaving country: a last hurrah, the old guys willing to do anything to get out of there, the new guys excited to do anything at all. Even if it meant pulling cable hand over hand, fingers pruning with sweat in canvas gloves. As they tipped blue strands of Ethernet, bits of plastic tumbled to the ground, until everything was wired in. I watched Marla help dig, her slim figure bent at the waist, forearms dirty, red bun over delicate features. Though half the company comprised new troops, I didn’t overhear anyone hit on her.

Fortunately, a squared-away comm-school classmate named Torres took over my wire platoon. Major Davis tossed me the keys to our battalion’s SUV, so Torres and I could inspect the cable line. Airfield to the left, headquarters to the right, the rest of Camp Taqaddum a desert plateau. The Euphrates winked below us if we craned our necks just right. Though I hadn’t driven in seven months, the potholed roads felt familiar. Torres’ clean uniform stood out against dusty upholstery.

I pulled over within sight of some junked Soviet planes, where I’d once gone on a long run with Jack and one of his sergeants.

Torres asked if mortars hit around TQ a lot. I told him that in the past month, most of the danger had stayed outside the wire. Except down that road—I pointed toward the gate where insurgents had crashed a vehicle full of explosives. And, I continued, when the mortars got close to regiment, peppered that empty tent—that was bad. Cut our fiber optics. Fucked up like a football bat. I climbed out of the car and kicked a toe in the sand, unearthing zombie cable. Torres didn’t ask any more questions.

A few afternoons later, hopped up on caffeine with nothing to do, I called Jack from the Systems Control hut. He couldn’t hang out; he had an angel coming in, he said, a mortar victim from Fallujah. All of the other times I’d been in his room, he’d shooed me away when the calls had come. This time, I asked to watch him work. I wanted to finally witness the cause of his sleepless nights.

“Major Davis would crucify me if I let you see this without him knowing,” Jack said. But when I asked the major if I could watch Jack work, he just braced a hand on the two-by-four door frame and said, “Yup.”

In his bunker, Jack pressed play on James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. It calmed him, he said. Two Marines lay a stretcher on sawhorses and unzipped a body bag: an ashen Navy Seabee with a fresh haircut. Blood sluiced to the sawdusted floor. One Marine held the clipboard; several more circled the body. They marked the locations of wounds and tattoos, crossing the Seabee’s stiff arms over his chest for balance. Jack donned nitrile gloves and pulled a brand-new pack of Camels from the Seabee’s pocket. A fist-sized hole bled where a heart had once beaten. Fire and Rain kept time.

I shifted from foot to foot as Jack counted dog tags, ID card, wallet, and photographs into a manila envelope. He motioned me back with an outstretched arm and a frown.

The whole process took only fifteen minutes. Soon the chaplain thumbed a cross on the Seabee’s brow. The Marines put him in a fresh body bag, strapped it into a flag-draped transport case, and tied it tight with twine.

After, Jack wadded his nitrile gloves into the trash and led me to his room. We shut the door, no matter his Marines cleaning up in the outer bay. He pulled me in, kneading my back; I pressed my nose into his T-shirt and inhaled. Together, we breathed.

• • •

The next night, there were no casualties. I stayed long enough after midnight to hear Jack say my name and “I love it when you touch me” and his son’s name and “I love you.” He saw the dead when he slept. He thought of them constantly, he said, except when he was with me. We dozed an hour. Then I pressed my lips to his forehead, found my glasses, and slipped away. Six more days left in Iraq.

The next morning, on my walk to stand watch, I ran into Sanchez exiting the chow hall. I teased him about the samurai pads snapped to his flak vest: floppy hip guards, shoulder pads, a flat, triangular groin protector. Each piece sported a different pattern: digital desert, analog woodlands, Desert Storm chocolate chips. He was a Marine Corps fashion nightmare.

When I got to work, I found out the reason for all that gear. A vehicle-borne IED had hit a convoy northwest of Fallujah, killing seven Marines and wounding six. A “mass casualty” event. Jack, Sanchez, and others rode out on a convoy to recover the bodies.

I couldn’t sit still, so I walked into the TechCon van. Maybe the sergeants could offer distraction, whether with work, or with Nip/Tuck, their latest binge-watching addiction featuring plastic surgeons in compromising relationships. We watched for three hours, until we hit an episode where the plot revolved around infidelity.

I remembered that Jack was on the convoy.

This “other woman” had terminal cancer. Her adulterous lover helped her commit suicide before the cancer took her. The woman penned letters and sipped milk to coat her stomach while swallowing handfuls of pills. As she watched a lakeside sunset and the soundtrack played Elton John’s Rocketman, I felt a wash of fear.

Jack was still on a convoy.

While watching the show, I wondered, Will that be my punishment, too? I’d become increasingly anxious about our imminent return to the States. Even more than getting caught, I feared losing what I thought was my only chance at love. Jack’s wife in California loomed far larger than any bomb threat. A thick sludge of guilt coated my powdered-egg breakfast. I controlled my breathing.

He was still on a convoy.

After the episode ended, I stumbled out of TechCon into sunlight, blinking back lethargy from hours of TV. I had to do something good, something officer-like: inspect the cable. Check on my troops. I controlled my breathing and swallowed the lump in my throat.

At the far end of the flight line, my Marines were deepening a trench in a spot plagued by heavy truck traffic. I walked the fiber optic lines along the airfield’s edge, checking them for bald spots, kinks, and cuts. The air reeked of diesel. Helicopter rotor blades blended into a buttery hum. Sparrows flitted along eight-foot-tall Hesco barriers. After fifty yards or so, I stopped and peered down the flight line. Maybe a hundred yards left. Hot, boring work. I figured I could get to my Marines more quickly on the other side of the barriers, where there was a concrete path. I ducked behind them at the next opportunity.

• • •

WHUMP. Seconds later, a mortar landed on the airfield. I felt the blast wave in my chest and teeth. I took a few steps forward, thinking of my troops digging near the flight line entrance.

WHUMP. Another mortar round, a little farther away. A small rock kicked up by the blast flew over my head, or was it shrapnel? I had the urge to reach for it, to catch it, but I did not. Instead I turned around to head back to our company’s headquarters. As my Marines fast-walked past me, carrying ammo cans full of tools, I thought only of counting their heads.

In the following months and years, I would wish I had been on the exposed airfield side of the Hesco barriers when the mortars hit, that I had sprinted full-tilt toward my Marines digging that trench, instead of taking a few steps forward before retreating. I would even wish I’d been hit by shrapnel, like a vigilant lieutenant. Was that the most fitting consequence of what I’d been doing with Jack? If he returned from his convoy to find me lifeless, would caring for my body have made him love me, made him stay?

In any case, he returned. Late that night, I lingered outside Comm Company’s compound under a hard pearl moon. A hundred yards away, Jack’s Marines unloaded one, two, three, four, five, six, seven body bags from their refrigerated truck. Then they hefted still more.

Under the floodlights, I made out Hoss’s lanky silhouette, spotted Mullins’s round shoulders and rolling gait, almost heard his Southern drawl. Two more darted around the truck, its tailgate the height of their heads, shepherding paperwork. Sanchez stood straight and musclebound, lifting tirelessly. Sergeant Jonas barked orders.

Soon they all moved inside; they must have been grabbing clipboards and unzipping body bags. I stared at the bunker doors, wishing I could enter. If I had tried, Jack would have shouted me away, and Mullins and Jonas would have shaken their heads. I would like to say decorum held me back from going over there. Really, it was shame. The most honorable thing I could do was stay away. Wait to go home.

Fazio, Teresa. Fidelis: A Memoir (Potomac Books, September 2020).

We were the HMDs: the human mine detectors. In a sense the job was easy, but impossible to do well. There was no good method, for example, by which to differentiate animal carcasses packed with high explosives from those concealing only bloat and maggots. If roadkill was sighted, rather than stop to investigate, one of us gunners would shine a spotlight to indicate the location of the foul thing that might kill us as we drove past, taking the widest possible berth, clinching, waiting. If nothing exploded, we had not found an IED.

That was the job, repeated most every night, with every fresh patch of asphalt, each curb that looked like it might’ve been sledgehammered and pieced back together, every mound of garbage dumped on the roadside, each stray, suspicious length of wire. We didn’t have the time or resources to search it all properly. We spotted the vast majority of devices when they were triggered, not before. It didn’t take much more than a few catastrophes like that for us to reach the conclusion: the army must not mind us finding them that way. Why else would they keep sending us out there, if not for a deep appreciation of our talents as HMDs?

It was on one of these IED sweeps, not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, that I was standing in the gunner’s hatch of our truck and someone first tried to kill me—I mean, deliberately tried to do it. I was fortunate enough as a cocky young volunteer soldier to sort of want that to happen, but wasn’t awake enough to realize it had. I had nodded off on my feet, my IED-finding spotlight wedged between the roof of our truck and the gun mount, so it appeared I was doing my job, scanning the pavement and rubble for the fourth consecutive overnight hour, when in fact my head was drooping, bobbing, snapping up every so often with that sudden falling feeling you get when you drift off someplace you hadn’t meant to.

We were on the return leg of the sweep, nearing Checkpoint Delta, a traffic circle, when the first RPG woke me, the rocket engine hissing and shrieking as it flew like a high-powered Roman candle, missing the truck ahead of ours and striking an adobe shanty just off the road where it exploded in a flash of orange and dust. Half a dozen heartbeats and another rocket, this one missing our truck, brought me fully awake and cemented the idea. They were trying to kill me. Who, I didn’t know. Someone I couldn’t see and had never met hated me or the thought of me enough to want to end my life right there in an instant on that lonely stretch of road, like something out of loneliest New Mexico, if you must place yourself somewhere more possible than Iraq.

Below me in the truck our lieutenant was hollering, “Turn that shit off, man—turn it off!” and when he grabbed my leg, I saw he meant me, my spotlight. Not so effective at locating hidden bombs, it was far more useful to the enemy as a million-candle-power bull’s-eye.

I switched off the light and set it on the roof of the truck, taking the gun off safe and fumbling with the tension knob on the gun mount for a few seconds until it came loose. I swung the mount toward the east, the direction I thought the rockets had come from. I couldn’t see much past the starlit road. Beyond it was a farmer’s field growing some kind of summer crop—muskmelons, I think it was—and on the far side of that, an irrigation canal I’d noticed in the day but couldn’t pick out now. A cluster of electric lights on the horizon marked a squatter village we called Squaretown for no other reason than its geography.

One of the other gunners started shooting into the field, and even though I couldn’t see anything out there, I followed his lead and opened fire, letting off a wild burst from my machinegun, I don’t mean an M-16 but a truck-mounted machinegun that could send bullets the size of fingers through engine blocks and concrete walls. Every fifth round was a tracer and there were several burning in the air at any given time, the smell of hot brass and powder, shell casings streaming out of the ejection port; somehow, one of them was ejected in such a way as to kick back and lodge under the collar of my Kevlar vest.

I had no idea what had happened. I yelped, my neck suddenly on fire; I ducked through the hatch into the truck’s cab with the rest of the crew. In the front, Yarrow was passing the lieutenant a hand mic, while in the rear, Lorcin was discharging his M-16 rapidly on single shot out the passenger’s side window. Martinez sat opposite him with his rifle between his legs and his hands placed calmly over his ears to muffle to noise. Ducking and stooped on my knees in the center of the truck, roughly at the midpoint between all of them, I spun toward Martinez.

“I think I’m hit! Can you see it, can you see it?”

The immediate burning sensation had subsided some, but it still hurt, and I was freaked, frantically lifting my chin to expose my neck to the medic, who always rode in our truck. That wasn’t by accident. The lieutenant, top man in the platoon, also always rode in our truck. The lieutenant was slick like that: keep your friends close, your first aid closer.

Martinez leaned toward me and swept his hands over my neck and shoulders, feeling for blood and in the process discovering the hot shell casing, which had migrated off my skin and down between my uniform and vest.

“You’re not shot, bro! It’s just some brass!” Martinez shouted over the deafening report of the rifle firing inside the truck. Lorcin had dropped a mag, reloaded, and resumed shooting. He was nineteen, a typical age for a private, but unlike any other I had met, he was technically still a French citizen, working on his U.S. citizenship (a fact he had been able to keep hidden from most of the platoon, not having a discernible accent, and which he had sworn me to secrecy about after confessing it one night on guard duty). The kid, Lorcin, had spent most of his life in Vegas where his dad worked as a chef. He was a good soldier. Martinez was, too. He actually was from some lonely place in New Mexico; I forget the name of the town but remember him turning twenty-two later that summer, making him about my same age. To my knowledge, it was the first time any of us had been shot at.

“Brass, what?” the lieutenant roared indignantly, turning his attention from the radios to the commotion over me in the turret. The LT was a big man who had played some college ball and was very physically brave. I’m not suggesting, with the thing about Martinez always riding in our truck, that the lieutenant was a coward, only that he was not above taking advantage. He distrusted the competence of others, is one way to put it.

“Goddamnit!” the LT yelled. “Get your happy ass back up there!” He slapped me on the helmet to hearten me. I got to my feet in the hatch, and he went back to making his radio report about the shit we were in, carrying on three simultaneous conversations: two by radio, with the platoon and higher headquarters, and also one with us, in person, in the truck.

No more rockets had been launched after the initial volley, but that didn’t stop us from shooting up the landscape a while. I don’t trust my memories of time in those situations, but it couldn’t have lasted much more than thirty seconds after the point I’d mistakenly thought I’d been shot, burned by my own brass. You could try consulting an official report to get the army’s stats on the engagement, rounds expended, an exact timeline, but that information, even if it weren’t classified, would be no more reliable on the whole than what I have put down here. What happened at Checkpoint Delta was altogether unusual but ordinary in at least one respect. The official version was riddled with omissions, errors, and lies.

“Cease fire, cease fire!” the lieutenant ordered. “Punch it around these fools! No, that way!”

Our driver, Specialist Yarrow, sped past the other trucks, leading them to the checkpoint, out of the kill zone, the roar of gunfire petering away to ringing ears and scattered pops. A short time later we pulled into the traffic circle, one truck stopping off at each of the four cardinal directions. To the west lay our camp; to the south, Baghdad proper; to the east, Squaretown; and if you took the northern spur, after passing through a number of other hardscrabble villages, you’d eventually reach desert as open and empty as the surface of Mars.

Some of us dismounted at the checkpoint to assess the damage, of which there was none. Not a single man or truck had been hit. No one had seen who had shot at us; many guys had seen the rockets, but our descriptions of their points of origin were in disagreement, and none of us had seen “an actual fucking bad guy firing an RPG,” as the lieutenant eventually put it, ending that line of speculation. Battalion ordered us to hold the checkpoint and wait there for the quick reaction force to arrive from camp. Only the throbbing red mark on my neck and our warm gunmetal yet proved the firefight was something other than a collective hallucination.

*

Our reinforcements were late. According to the latest from battalion, the QRF was “spinning up,” whatever that meant. The transmission on their status was a bad turn and it came through on the radio not long before a pair of headlights appeared on the road leading to the traffic circle from Squaretown. The eastern road. We had been fired on from the east. There was a sundown to sunup curfew in place, and no civilians were supposed to be on that road at that hour. Even without the preceding ambush, the sight of headlights approaching would have been alarming.

We prepared to face round two alone. On the lieutenant’s orders, Yarrow moved our truck to the eastern spur, supporting Sergeant [Redacted]’s position there. [Note: The occasion for this account is truth-telling and the airing of long withheld grievances. With that being the case, I do not take the decision to redact lightly. But I’ve recently learned from a trusted source that this former sergeant is, for whatever reason, struggling with severe addiction. I make it a point to say Sgt. R. is addicted for whatever reason because, by his own admission before going to war, he was a drinker. The lingering effects of combat could not have helped his disease, which was nevertheless preexisting: who knows why he originally took to drowning his sorrows? I don’t feel sorry for him, either; that’s not why I’ve redacted his name. I’ve got enough on my conscience as it is, and the small portion of the truth that I’m blotting out is not worth being questioned someday by another ghost. His, waiting in the wings, whispering to me that I got it all wrong. What would be the point in opening myself up to that? There are untold thousands like the old sergeant, wandering free in the United States of Amnesia, and I have no evidence compelling enough for any prosecutor to pursue charges against him for something that happened fifteen years ago in a foreign country. If my source is correct about the state of his health, the judicial system might be the slower route to justice, anyway, depending on how you define it. Either way, I can’t stand the thought of becoming entangled with his fate any more than I already am.]

“Sergeant R.,” the lieutenant said, never taking his eyes off the approaching headlights. “Throw a couple flares out. Far as you can.”

R. opened the hatch of his truck and found a stash of road flares in an oily canvas bag he kept there. He struck a flare to get it going and lobbed it end over end, burning bright red into the spur ahead of us. He did another, and another, a line of flares intended to signal to the approaching driver that the traffic circle was off-limits: turn back immediately.

The driver did not turn back. He did slow down, then stopped, then lurched forward again but slower than before, and continued to vary his slow speed erratically after the appearance of the flares, as if he had obviously seen them and our position, yet still insisted on approaching, albeit indecisively.

“Hold fire! Fire on my order!” the lieutenant yelled up and down the line. “Don’t come any closer, you dumb son of a bitch,” he said to himself. Only those of us near him—meaning Yarrow, Lorcin, Martinez and me—heard him say that last part.

The driver stopped again at about a hundred meters. Redacted had gone out ahead of our trucks to toss the flares, which were at fifty meters. In their backlight I could make out the shape of the car, which looked like an old Volkswagen sedan. Those were everywhere in Baghdad. We were thinking it might be nothing, but who knew. Worst case, the car was rigged to blow, the driver getting cold feet, or maybe stalling purposefully, and the second wave of the ambush would hit us at any second, a mistimed Trojan-horse-style scenario.

The driver rolled down his window and stuck out an arm, waving in apparent distress. None of us budged. He took his foot off the brake and idled forward.

“The fuck’s he doing?” Yarrow said.

“Could be wounded,” the lieutenant said. “Could be one of the guys who shot at us.”

“Or some random drunk asshole.”

“Flash your brights at him.”

It was at that point—the lieutenant telling Yarrow to flash his headlights—that I remembered my own spotlight. We carried no brighter light than the one I had with me up in the hatch, and I flicked it on and shined it at the Volkswagen. The car dipped to a stop. Another gunner turned on his light. Our crossed beams penetrated the windshield to meet on the driver, no longer a dark silhouette but a young Arab man squinting and turning his head. The hand that had been held out of the window was now raised to his face, shielding his eyes. He appeared to be alone, upset, confused or traumatized or drunk or all of the above, dazzled by the spotlight’s glare. Nothing changed from one moment to the next. Then, Sergeant R. opened fire.

Only a handful of people have ever read the official report on the incident. This exclusivity should not be attributed to its juiciness, more the opposite. It’s hard to overstate how successfully the army reduces even spectacular violence to a series of boilerplate phrases that signify little about the reality of war other than its essential bureaucracy. Like all such reports, if this one still exists, access is restricted. It’s not in the trove of documents famously leaked in 2010, not even tracked there as a serious incident in the master list, as no U.S. personnel were wounded. I haven’t seen the report since 2004, when the lieutenant asked me to proofread it before he submitted it to our company commander in the form of a sworn statement, but I remember it, and other similar reports, well enough to recreate the crux with some accuracy.

The local national driving the vehicle approached a U.S. position after an RPG ambush on Route Predators near Checkpoint Delta. The vehicle failed to stop after being warned repeatedly to do so with flares and lights. Deadly force was subsequently used by soldiers of 1^st Platoon, Alpha Company, 1^st of the 15^th Cavalry, who reasonably believed they were at risk of death or imminent great bodily harm.

Once R. started shooting, two other men in the platoon did as well, and between them they discharged a dozen or more rounds before the lieutenant could scream “Cease fire!” loud enough to stop them. Our rules of engagement stated that a vehicle or person could be declared hostile simply by the act of one of us shooting at him/her/it. So, when R. opened fire, those other two soldiers followed their training and his lead. The sergeant might’ve seen something they had missed: a detonator in the man’s raised hand, wires running into the car’s trunk, a group of insurgents creeping toward us in the dark muskmelon field.

I had seen nothing like that and was not one who fired at the car. I might’ve done it—probably would’ve, by twitchy nervous reflex—if my finger had been resting on the trigger when I’d heard the shots, instead of being curled around the handle of my spotlight. Unintentionally, it had served to pinpoint the target, increasing the accuracy of R. and the others, their gun smoke wisping and curling in the unsteady beam that magnified the trembling of my hands into the world.

The Volkswagen’s windshield, now frosted with bullet holes, obscured the man inside, slumped over the steering wheel. The car’s horn bleated pathetically and continuously under his weight.

“What happened?” the lieutenant asked, his voice missing its usual bravado. “What the hell’d you see?”

“He wouldn’t stop, sir.” R. said it with such perfect conviction that—though I’d just seen the car was stopped, had been completely stopped and the man had had his hand up, shielding his eyes—I wondered if I had missed something crucial.

“He was stopped,” Martinez said.

“Bullshit,” Redacted said. “He did for a second before he floored it.”

“Yeah, after you started shooting.”

“Bullshit.”

“Sergeant R.,” the lieutenant said sternly, “You and Yarrow go clear that vehicle.”

R. gave the lieutenant a questioning look that turned sour as the lieutenant made no move to reconsider his order. Typically, a squad leader like R. would not have been given such an immediately dangerous job as clearing a possible suicide car bomb. The lieutenant was breaking protocol and assigning this duty to him as a kind of rebuke, I thought. The implications of that were disturbing, but at the time no one said anything more about the circumstances of the shooting. We were not out of the woods, providing over-watch as R. and Yarrow hunch-walked down the spur toward the Volkswagen, which had come to rest with one of its tires wedged against the curb.

“There’s someone in the backseat!” Yarrow said. “Some dude hiding in the backseat!”

“Get out, now! Ishta!”

“I think he’s dead, man. Fuck. I don’t know.”

“Open that door. I’ll fan out and cover you.”

“You open the motherfucking door, brah. You’re the one shot these motherfuckers.”

R. outranked Yarrow but put up no more argument. He crept against the car and popped the rear door latch. Nothing happened. He nodded at Yarrow, who took up a good angle. He flung the car door open. Still, no movement, and Yarrow repeated his opinion: the man in back looked dead.

Hearing that, R. glanced in the car, stood to his full height, and poked around in the backseat with the muzzle of his rifle. I was a ways off and didn’t see it clearly, but heard Yarrow tell it back at camp. R. poked one of the dead guy’s eyeballs with the muzzle of his rifle. Not hard enough to pop it out of his skull, but hard enough. I was told it’s what hunters do with large animals they’ve shot, to make sure they’re truly dead before letting their guard down. Now satisfied the man in back was not merely unconscious or faking, R. went to the driver’s side door, opened it, and pushed the other dead man off the steering wheel to stop the horn sounding. The noise had been uncanny, the steady accusation of a machine.

“Ain’t shit in the trunk but trash and shit,” Yarrow said. “It’s clear, LT.”

The lieutenant and the rest of our crew moved closer. The inside of the car stunk of burnt cloth and blood. The man in the driver’s seat who’d been shot was in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a wedding ring. His eyes were half-lidded, and the expression on his face made it look like he’d died in agony. It was the first time in my life I’d ever seen anything like that, and it shook me up, but not how you might expect. The lows came later. In the moment, the feeling was nearly the opposite. I felt so high I was almost sick, not from disgust, but the nauseating thrilling impossibility of being alive while this other human being was suddenly not.

“Gimme a hand here,” Martinez said. He was attempting to drag the other dead man from the backseat. That guy was older than the driver, not quite elderly but almost. Though the two were separated by decades, some of their features bore a close resemblance, too much for a coincidence, I thought. They were probably a father and his son.

We dragged the old man out of the car, onto the road. He looked beyond saving, his skin the color of a pale blueberry, but Martinez went through his checks, patting him down systematically, searching for blood by touch. He turned his head and held it over the man’s pale blue lips, feeling for a wisp of breath, using two fingers to check for a pulse on the carotid. Nothing.

“He ain’t shot,” Martinez said. “I think he had a heart attack or something.”

“Because of the firefight?”

“I doubt it. Probably just bad luck.”

To me, however, it remains an open question, one of many from that night. Did we (and the militiamen who’d ambushed us) literally scare that old man to death as he slept in his bed and we sent rounds downrange in the vicinity of his home in Squaretown? Was the driver of the car really his son? Had he brought his dying father to us at the checkpoint in the hope we could save him? Iraqis sometimes did ascribe miraculous technological powers to U.S. foot soldiers, including when it came to medicine—or was it just the driver’s terrible fate to have taken a route to the nearest hospital that happened to cross our path? Was it a series of unfortunate coincidences, or a tight chain of cause-and-effect? In the end, no one could say. They couldn’t tell their story.

Martinez unzipped his aid bag. He removed a ventilator mask for CPR and three clear packing tubes that held epinephrine autoinjectors for the couple guys in the company who suffered from dangerous allergies. He cracked each tube and shot the injectors into the old man’s thigh. Then he straddled him and with the heels of his palms started chest compressions, counting them out. Something like a tree branch snapped in the dead man’s chest. Yarrow gagged. He was holding the mask over the man’s nose and mouth, pumping the ventilator ball to breathe for him when Martinez said to.

They went through one cycle of compressions and ventilations, then another.

“He’s gone, Martinez,” the lieutenant said respectfully.

The medic acknowledged that likelihood but kept working. We were still waiting for the QRF to arrive and there was nothing better to do, so the lieutenant let him work. Someone actually said it was good training, like it was good the guy had croaked so that Martinez could practice his CPR on real flesh. Some of the men stood watch, facing out on the perimeter; others followed the lieutenant’s lead, drifting away from the Volkswagen and its gruesome scene to attend to their trucks; and still other soldiers lingered or moved closer to the bodies, beginning to get comfortable in the presence of death. Sergeant Redacted went back to his truck and found a digital camera he’d bought in Kuwait. The lieutenant stopped him on his way back to the Volkswagen.

“What’re you doing with that, Sergeant?”

“We should get a few pics of their faces,” R. said. “We might have to ID these guys. They could be important.”

“Put that shit away,” the lieutenant said.

“Sir?”

“I said stow it. Now.”

R. pocketed the slim silver camera. He elaborated no more on his intentions but it seemed unlikely he had meant we might have to identify the dead men to their next of kin. Either he was lying about his reasons for wanting a photo or he genuinely believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he had just shot two insurgents who were big-time enough to be known by face to military intelligence.

I have an opinion on why the camera came out, but it’s only that. By way of factual background, I can say R. was a self-described good old boy from Tennessee who liked to hunt and fish and whose dream, after serving out his twenty years, was to open a bar with a veteran’s small business loan and his pension. He hated politicians and especially liberals. Along with his outdoor hobbies he liked all things Star Trek, pulp sci-fi, tabletop wargames, and was, surprisingly, a gourmand: sort of a dorky redneck, you might say, if forced to sum up a personality in a few broad strokes.

Once, in the lead-up to our deployment, I’d heard the sergeant say he wanted to “stack a few bodies over there” as revenge for 9-11. As far as he was concerned, that was why we were in Iraq, and he was fine with it. There’d been a lot of that kind of talk going around, and it was hard to know who to take seriously. It seemed incredible to think his vicious streak ran strong and dumb enough for him to murder a man in cold blood in front of fifteen witnesses before attempting to photograph the evidence with his own camera. Then again, a state of war does afford the psychopath much leeway.

A few days later, I brought up my concerns with the lieutenant in the privacy of his room when I returned the incident report with typos and awkward phrases marked in red.

“You don’t think he did it on purpose,” I said, somewhat between a statement and a question.

“Of course he did it on purpose,” the LT said.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant.”

“Oh.”

“Listen. I’ve talked to Sergeant R., okay? I talked to him for a very long time. I have no doubt he was in fear for his life when he made that decision.”

“He didn’t seem that afraid to me,” I said, skirting the edge of insubordination.

“You’re forgetting that two other soldiers fired as well.”

“Only because he did.”

“You weren’t afraid at all then, Corporal? Can you honestly say that?”

I shrugged, not knowing how to answer that question without sounding snippy or absurd. I was afraid every single time we went outside the wire. You learned to deal with it. Fear didn’t give us a license to kill.

“Well I was,” the LT continued. “And you know what? If I, as a reasonable person, believe R. might’ve been right—not that he was, but might’ve been? Well, you better believe I’m not gonna accuse him, or any of you guys, of a thing like that. We need men like Redacted. I can’t have you all hesitating in a decisive moment.”

“Sir. The car was stopped.”

“Briefly. You saw the guy; he was driving all fucking…herky jerky and weird.”

“You said to fire on your order, sir.”

“Do you know something I don’t, Corporal?” he said, a tired-sounding challenge.

“No. I saw what you saw.”

“Exactly. So we’re done here. Go tell the guys we’ve gotta go out tonight at zero three hundred. Another IED sweep.”

“Roger, sir.”

“Hey. Wait. I know this isn’t easy, okay? It’s a terrible thing, but we have to put it behind us. We don’t have a choice. How do you think Sergeant R. feels about it?”

I said I didn’t know, while secretly doubting the LT’s considerations were all so selfless as he made out. We were at the very beginning of our tour, with forty-some-odd weeks left to suffer the war and each other. Any serious accusation or investigation would’ve torn the platoon apart, guaranteeing discord, scandal and ruining the lieutenant’s command reputation, no matter what, if any, justice was ever done. Given the circumstances of the shooting and our rules of engagement, the scales were tipped toward R.; without a confession, there was no hard evidence he had acted with malice. The sergeant wasn’t exactly popular among us, but there were those in the platoon who would’ve had his back with testimonies of the shooting to counter any accusing witnesses, which, though some of us talked privately about our misgivings, never emerged publicly to point a finger. Even those men who had misgivings and didn’t care for the sergeant on a personal level were reluctant to inform on a fellow volunteer-prisoner, both for the sake of upholding the inmate’s code—you don’t rat, no matter what—and for fear of violating it and incurring reprisals.

There were none for the shooting. Nothing formal, at least. The killing near Checkpoint Delta went unpunished and was only avenged in a proximate and random way by the IEDs that picked us off by ones and twos every few months for the rest of the year. R. was never so much as wounded on that or any of his deployments. We are not friends, but I can see his profile pic on Facebook. It’s him looking sharp in his dress blues; the photo might have been taken at his retirement ceremony, two years ago. He made it to the finish line and got his pension, but from what I’ve heard, he blows it every month on bar tabs, and not at his own watering hole, which he’s never gotten around to opening. I think his drinking picked up so dramatically after he left the service, not because he was so torn up about what had happened overseas, but because he thrived on that sort of thing, missed the thrill, the absolute sense of purpose, and felt bored and aimless without it. He is doing now what he did back then, times he was bored and free to drink, only, there are many more free nights now, post-retirement, for him to burn out his liver with Old Crow and hillbilly heroin, neither of which should be mistaken for karma.

The only other time I heard the sergeant talk about the shooting was the day after. He was eating chow with a few of the other squad leaders from our company. One of them asked him about it, and after a little prodding, he told them the story. The way he told it made no mention of the car being stopped. Instead, he focused on its erratic approach, how close it had gotten.

“You know the deadly radius for exposed personnel in a car bomb blast? By the book it’s like three hundred meters. Dumbass hajji—how was I supposed to know?”

His story had changed in a day’s time. Whether or not the car was stopped had been the sticking point in the immediate aftermath. Now, that point had been dropped entirely, in favor of the maximum effective range of car bombs and the situational difficulty in determining whether a stranger’s baffling actions indicated hostility or foolishness.

If the Volkswagen really had been loaded with explosives, it might have killed some of us, it’s true. The sergeant’s new explanation for why he’d fired was stronger and more valid than his original one, but mostly it struck me as a red flag, upon hearing it in the chow hall, precisely because the explanation had changed. To my mind, this shifting logic suggested R. had been lying from the beginning. He had refined his initial story into one more plausible with the benefit of another day to think it through.

In that case, he is guilty of a war crime: shooting a civilian, knowing the man was probably not hostile, exploiting the uncertainty of that night’s events to get what he had wanted all along. Here was his chance to stack some bodies. The facts do fit that scenario, but I must admit they also fit one in which the sergeant acted honestly (and stupidly). It could be the lieutenant was right and R. truly had believed we were in imminent danger when he pulled the trigger. If so, the conversation I’d overheard in the chow hall was not evidence of premeditation; rather, a state of denial, which had lifted enough, in a day, for the sergeant at least to acknowledge he’d not killed an insurgent, while at the same time continuing to blame the dead man for what had happened.

Enough conjecture. It can be tediously endless and abstract. I was an eyewitness and should lay my cards on the table. In my opinion, the man is a murderer, though I don’t believe he’s ever thought of himself as one. To this day, I imagine he remains the beleaguered hero of his own story, or the victim, or something like both, simultaneously. Anything but the villain. Few of us can stomach being that.

*

“I’ve got a pulse!” Martinez said. I had moved off from the Volkswagen to monitor the radios, listening for any word on our reinforcements, but now I rushed back to see for myself. The old man remained unconscious and laid out in the road but his skin had lightened up, no longer so blue, and his chest was rising and falling rapidly.

“Holy shit. You brought him back.”

“What were those shots you gave him?”

“Epi-pens. Basically, pure adrenaline.”

“Good work, Martinez. Yarrow. Goddamn outstanding work, you two.”

“He’s not out of the woods yet, sir. He needs evac’d. Like, now.”

“The QRF are two mikes out. Soon as they get here, we’ll take him to the CASH.”

And so we did. And I cannot tell what happened to the old man after that. He was alive and unconscious when we left him at the combat support hospital. For all I know, his heart might’ve stopped again, shortly thereafter, or he might’ve wound up living for years but as a vegetable. I suppose he could have recovered from the episode only to have suffered another, more horrible death in wartime Baghdad, anytime from 2004 to this writing. Statistically, it’s unlikely, but he may still be alive. He would be a very old man for Iraq in 2019.

His revival was one of the more incredible things we were involved in during our deployment. Throughout the rest of the year, the story came up often. Hard and cynical as some of us were, I think we liked to fall back on telling it to feel better about ourselves, if you can believe a person might be comforted by the events I’ve just conveyed. Like any story, how it’s received depends on how it’s delivered, the focus of it, and where the listener is, the context. We were all eye-deep in the shit and generally proud of Martinez for what he’d done, one of the few acts of redemption we accomplished in a year of waste and toil, or so we thought. With more distance, it’s easy to realize the old man might’ve rather stayed dead of a heart attack than come back to life to learn of his son, killed while delivering him to an unlikely salvation.

We left a dead son and, in the best case, his father to live another twenty years with a cruel debt he couldn’t repay. From where I stand now, our one act of grace, that resurrection, seems closer to a tragic curse. I can’t remember anyone insisting on that obvious point, back then. Nuanced consequence was lost on most of us. We were in our teens and early twenties, even our leader the lieutenant, and the stakes were too high and stark to accommodate the over-contemplation of grey-shaded outcomes. I imagine we all would’ve preferred to be revived if it came to it, and so naturally, whatever we thought and said privately about the shooting itself, when we recalled the story as a group or to outsiders, we focused on conjuring the thing we most wanted from its elements that were actually true.

That was life. Survival. Fortunate, unexpected, persistent life, snatched from the jaws of death by a feat of willpower and know-how. A charm against death was what we all wanted, and we told our buddies in other platoons about Martinez and the old man, the incredible thing we’d seen with our own eyes, while minimizing the tragedy of the dead son and R.’s role in making it a tragedy in the first place. Instead of the one time over there when we might have saved a life without taking more.

“You hear what happened the other night?”…. “Naw, he wasn’t the one shot. Heart attack or some shit.”…. “It was crazy. Freakish, really. Dude was fucking blue, right, like his ticker had been stopped, and this sumbitch right here, this motherfucker, he brings him back from the dead, man.” “Best medic I ever saw.” “For real. Dude’s a miracle worker.”

“I don’t do miracles,” Martinez said once, fed up enough to overcome his usual reticence. “I did what I could, and it worked. He wasn’t meant to die. That’s all it is.”

As word got around, someone started calling Martinez, Lazarus. The nickname stuck and was perpetuated within the platoon by a certain dominant clique that referred to him that way almost exclusively for the remainder of the tour, even though Martinez hated the name, and even though, according to the Bible, Lazarus was the man Jesus raised from the dead, not the one doing the raising. For the allusion to make sense, we should have called the old man Lazarus. More than once, I said as much to the guys, but nobody who had gone over to using Lazarus, primarily, ever changed his behavior and went back to “Martinez” as a result of me pointing out the inherent error.

“Come on, Professor,” they said, using their nickname for me that I hated. “We’re not calling him Jesus. That’s just dumb. He’s Lazarus, brah. Seriously. Don’t overthink this shit.”

Americans do not genuinely support the troops. This is the impression Ben Fountain’s 2012 war novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk left me with. Though American society supports their military in theory, they don’t care beyond their own comfort zones. And by comfort zones I mean luxurious “La-Z-Boy’s” close to the remote for changing the channel as soon as it gets uncomfortable.  I am aware that this is a broad and exaggerated statement to make, but Fountain’s novel made me question America’s supposedly infinite support for its veterans and challenged my assumptions about American patriotism.

When the novel opens, it is Thanksgiving Day at Dallas Cowboy Stadium. The 19-year old Billy Lynn and his fellow Bravo squad members have just finished two weeks of special leave from Iraq for an act of heroism caught on film by a FOX News camera crew. They have been paraded throughout the country to reinforce America’s faith in the war, and they will now spend their final day, and the entire novel, at a uniquely American holiday celebrating a uniquely American sport. When the day is over, the eight “Bravo Squad” Soldiers will return to Iraq. Unless—again in uniquely American fashion—they can land a movie deal first. Right away, Fountain’s plot reveals how, for America’s entertainment elite, the true battle has nothing to do with Iraq. FOX News producers, Cowboy Stadium CEOs, and Hollywood directors do not really want to celebrate these soldiers for who they are or what they did. They would rather celebrate capitalism by fighting each other over who can make most money off these soldiers’ traumatic experiences.

Through a close third-person narrative, Fountain gives unfiltered access to an impressive amount of tangled emotions and interactions happening over the course of one single day. Streams of consciousness collide with word-clouds emphasizing words in uncommon ways (e.g., “nina leven”, “currj,” and “terrRist”). This creates confusion and distracts from things happening outside of Billy’s head, but, at the same time, Billy’s intimate and honest inner monologues tied me to the novel. It felt voyeuristic, allowing insight into thoughts far from my reality. Imagining the “overcaffeinated tag teams of grateful citizens trampoline right down the middle of his hangover,” I got the feeling I knew his moods and opinions better than the overcaffeinated “grateful” citizens. Yes, I even almost felt his headache worsen as the manager kept forgetting to get a real twenty-first century “hero”—Advil.

Fountain’s decision to name the squad “Bravo” points to the endless thanks given to veterans, handed out as effortlessly as clapping your hands and yelling “Bravo” at overworked stage stars. Like actors, these soldiers wear costumes to fit expectations and re-appear for encores despite being tired after the big show. This thread of superficial gratitude stretches throughout the entire novel, pointing out not only the civilian crowd’s thirst for sensation but also their longing for justification. “It was worth it?” they ask Billy. “Don’t you think? We had to do it, don’t you think?” Billy, having seen the reality, wishes that “just once somebody would call him baby-killer.” While doubting the legitimacy of his duties to patrol, shoot and kill, he experiences how society glorifies a soldiers’ violent agency. Being celebrated for “the worst day of his life,” Billy questions whether the U.S. Army’s actions abroad are fully understood and if his fellow citizens even desire to do so. This impression gets reaffirmed when the squad is expected to march onstage unprepared during the Halftime Show. “The explosions start,” Billy says, “and they all flinch, boom boom boom, lum rounds are shooting off from somewhere backstage, smokers that explode with the arid crackle of cluster bombs scattering over a wheat field.” These cheering fans fail to notice that fireworks might not be as entertaining to veterans as they are to civilians. Nobody bothers to wake Bravo Squad up from this PTSD nightmare.

In addition to the stream of consciousness and word clouds, Fountain provides flashbacks to round out Billy’s character. We find out that Billy might not have even joined the military voluntarily. The reader re-experiences his many moral challenges and choices, and Fountain manages to convey the unfamiliar situation of a teenager who survived frontline battles while still being unsure if he had adequate alternatives besides enlisting.  Furthermore, Fountain digs up emotions merely hidden underneath layers of stereotypical masculinity. Lacking role models in his father and community, Billy looks up to his fallen supervisor, the NCO “Shroom,” who shared not only advice, but also his final moments with Billy.

Fountain satirizes themes of masculinity and femininity in other moments too. He provocatively reduces manhood to muscles and materialism while minimizing womanhood to sexual temptations. Billy and the other soldiers objectify every female in the novel, infusing the war-hero-trope with the thirsty testosterones of a sexually deprived teenager. Additionally, Fountain critiques America’s second biggest source of pride (next to its military): football. When Billy sees the football players’ excessive protective equipment, he reasons: “They are among the best-cared for creatures in the history of the planet.” So why not “send them just as they are at this moment, well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat?” “Send the entire NFL!” he shouts—“Mere bombs and bullets bounce off their bones of steel. Submit, lest our awesome NFL show you straight to the flaming gates of hell.” Obviously, Billy, a soldier who has fought for life and death rather than for a championship, does not want autographs.

The author creates a tornado of national pride, suppressed emotions, consumerism, and trauma, and leaves the reader both speechless and yet also asking, “how should we treat veterans?” This, in addition to the jumps from reality to flashback and Billy’s constant hangover, makes Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk a stressful read. Fountain provides long build-ups to multiple dramatic turning points, including the movie deal, the return to war, the need for intimacy and the official “Halftime Show” climax. As a reader, I constantly hoped for success while suspecting failure. Eventually, I began to question society as a whole. I asked myself, if this is true, if society does use solidarity to hide self-absorption,  what’s the point of this book? Why put ourselves through this? But Ben Fountain assists the reader at the right moment. He leads us through Billy’s twisted experiences, making sure we stay with the novel, understand its message, and take heart from the experience. Toward the end, Fountain has Billy observe that “his reality is their reality’s bitch.”  Those words kicked in like the Advil Billy never got. They made me rethink the fake, oversaturated, and questionable life America and maybe even I call reality, what Fountain describes in another work as the “Fantasy Industrial Complex.”

This book is a stressful one. But this is exactly what makes Billy Lynn a page turner. We bond with Billy faster. His thoughts and feelings stick with us after turning the last page. A worthwhile read, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk changes our perspective of the world, which is what, in my opinion, a war novel should do.

By M.C. Armstrong and Noor Ghazi

Protestors in Iraq have a great deal in common with the new wave of protestors in the United States. David McAtee, the owner of a barbecue restaurant and an unarmed demonstrator in Louisville, Kentucky, was shot dead by police shortly after midnight on May 31^st while marching in response to American police brutality. Safaa Al-Saray, an Iraqi blogger, was also unarmed when police struck him in the head with a tear gas canister in October of 2019. Al-Saray died from his injury, and this is tragic, to be sure. But why should Americans care about Al-Saray? Why should they embrace a protest movement thousands of miles away from US borders?

Many Americans would like to forget about Iraq, but, unfortunately Iraq does not have the luxury to have amnesia. Whereas America has not been occupied by a foreign nation since the War of 1812, Iraq, in spite of having nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, remains under American supervision, and Iraq is now, once again, on the verge of chaos, which certainly raises questions about the quality of this supervision. One of the richest countries in the world in terms of cultural heritage and natural resources, Iraq is suffering today from a dangerously high rate of unemployment, a lack of quality education, and a dearth of public services such as electricity and clean water. But there is hope. On October 19, 2019, just before the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, a powerful wave of protests disrupted Baghdad and the target of this “October Revolution” was the corrupt political system that emerged from the ashes of the 2003 US invasion.

The first round of revolt spread quickly across the country after originating in Al Tahreer Square. The marchers launched a peaceful crusade of free speech in the streets of Basra, Karbala, Maysan, and Babylon, the multi-generational gatherings chanting for change in a government many now believe to be controlled by the mullahs in Iran. Just as the Americans had Iraqis locked in their grip during the first decade of the twenty-first century, the power dynamic has now shifted to Iraq’s neighbor to the East. In both cases, the influence became unwelcome and has, once again, created the potential for civil war. The Iraqi government faced her peaceful protesters with live ammunition and tear gas. The government ignored multiple international calls, warnings and condemnations. Just as McAtee was not the only American casualty of police brutality, Al-Saray was not the only casualty in Iraq. More than 500 martyrs were shot down in the streets. Just as African-Americans wonder where the forces of freedom have gone when their young people are murdered or choked to death on the streets of the United States, Iraqis also wonder what it will take to activate the forces of freedom.

According to the Independent High Commission for Human Rights of Iraq, nearly 15,000 Iraqis have been injured since October of 2019 when the Iraqi government took desperate measures to regain control of Al Tahreer Square, ground zero for demonstrations. Like in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011, these despotic attempts at suppression included police brutality, curfews and internet blackouts to limit communication between protestors. Such media suppression enabled the government cover-up of violent criminal actions and left millions of Iraqis isolated from the rest of the world.

As the pandemic wakes up so many across the planet to the realization that “we’re all connected,” the situation on the ground in Iraq reveals the other side of that platitude and that very real connection. Yes, a virus in China quickly becomes America’s worst nightmare in this globalized world where the line between tourism and terrorism grows blurrier every year. And yes, it is wonderful to witness international cooperation on the effort to pioneer a vaccine for Covid-19. But before public health became America’s favorite media frame in 2020, its predecessor was war and terror. Most Iraqis have no interest in a third decade of the Global War on Terror, but whether its occupiers like it or not, Iraq does have an interest in freedom and democracy, and if Iraq’s people can win a democratic future, the public health consequences will almost certainly be positive. After years of bombing, burn pits, police brutality, and depleted uranium one has to wonder: could the public health of Iraq possibly get worse?

Under occupation, the answer is yes, but that is precisely the point. The occupation must end. Just before Covid-19 leveled Western economies and turned so many countries inward, young people in Iraq were marching like their Egyptian friends of 2011 and like so many Americans in the 1960s and again right now. Thousands of demonstrators started requesting United Nations intervention to stop the atrocities against peaceful civilians who were simply asking for human rights and a better life. Iraqis frequently raised the UN flag in Al Tahreer Square to grab the world’s attention and make the message clear: If the UN wished for peace, democracy, and freedom in the Iraq of 2003, where there was no war, why did they send war and then, two decades later ignore the homegrown calls for peace? When will the basic dignity and humanity of the Iraqi people trump America’s hunger for one more fix for its fossil fuel economy?

In November of 2019, as the October Revolution was reaching its climax, The New York Times and The Intercept shared 700 pages of leaked documents about how Iran and America have used Iraq as a battlefield for a proxy war ever since the American invasion of 2003. Far from his 2016 campaign promises, Donald Trump has maintained the policy positions of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and the mullahs have responded in kind. The Intercept documents revealed conversations from the Iranian embassy in which Iranian officials decried the free-thinking of Haider al-Abadi, an Iraqi candidate for prime minister whom Iran viewed as insufficiently servile to their interests. These leaked files “show how Iran, at nearly every turn, has outmaneuvered the United States” and its formidable network of intelligence agencies. But what is urgent to state before the eyes of the world is this: There are human costs for the ways in which “Iran and the United States have used Iraq as a staging area for their spy games.”  The occupation must end.

These human costs can be heard in the voices of the protestors and seen in the pattern of mass arrests among activists. Intimidation, torture, and in many cases, assassination, has been the tactic at “play.”  Take the story of the activists, Hussein Adel al-Madani and his wife Sara Talib. Al-Madani and Talib were some of the first Iraqis to march against Iranian influence and government corruption. Talib, in particular, was one of the first women bold enough to take to the streets of Basra.

“But they had to stop,” claimed a friend named Abbas. “Gunmen raided their home late in 2018 and asked them to write down the names of other protesters.” Talib and al-Madani, like so many Iraqis before them, fled their country. They traveled to Turkey. But also like so many before them, Talib and al-Madani returned to Iraq. Just before the launch of the “October Revolution,” they came home to Basra. Then, on October 2^nd, assassins entered their home and shot Al-Madani three times. They killed Talib with a single shot to her head. And what was their crime? Why were the protesters sentenced to death? Was it free speech? Idealism? Talib provided medical aid to her own people while her husband helped with organization. They spoke openly, opposing the influence of Iran-backed militias on Iraq.

The occupation must end.

Many other activists were kidnapped by the armed militias such as Ali Jasib, a human rights attorney who helped with the release of many arrested activists. Ali was kidnapped in Maysan province. But as the chaos in America and the Covid-19 pandemic steal the headlines, the international community seems to be forgetting about Iraq and protestors like Ali Jasib.

The Iraqi protests began with simple demands. The Iraqi people want quality education, decent employment, and public services. However, as so often happens, these demands were quickly revised when the first protestor fell dead. The Iraqi people called for the ouster of the government and an end to corruption. They asked for new electoral laws that would protect the country from regime change wars. The persistence of the protestors did force prime minister, Adil Abdul Mahdi, to submit his resignation in November of 2019, but a demonstrator from Al Tahreer Square exclaimed, “Adil Abdul-Mahdi’s resignation will not make the required change. We want a new government that can respect our demands and needs. We want a home.”

The occupation must end.

Just as so many Americans tire of the regime change wars they were forced to pay for under Bush, Obama, and Trump, Iraqis, too, have grown tired of the wars. But Trump continues to ratchet up the tension between Washington and Tehran. First, he withdrew from the United States’ nuclear treaty with Iran, which was a small albeit imperfect first step toward peace in the region. Then, in a provocative move, Trump assassinated Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, Qasim Soleimani, on Iraqi soil. While Trump’s supporters chant about “blood and soil” in America and America expands its Global War on Terror to now include its own homegrown protesters like Antifa, the American president continues the Global War on Terror’s policy of pell-mell assassinations overseas, broadly, and in Iraqi territory, specifically. Like Obama’s drone assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and his fifteen-year old son in Yemen back in 2011, Trump’s killing of Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport in January of 2020, raises serious questions about international law, human rights, and the rationale for America’s continued presence in the Middle East. The attack, far from being framed as a defense of Iraqi civil liberties, was described, instead, as a response to the death of an American contractor on December 27, 2019 at the hands of an Iranian-backed militia. Most Americans, one suspects, do not even know that contractors, intelligence operatives, and special forces are still occupying Iraq. But the occupation continues and the occupation must end.

“General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region,” the Pentagon said in a statement. “General Soleimani and his Quds Force were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American and coalition service members and the wounding of thousands more.”

Although the Pentagon report may well be accurate, the larger and more uncomfortable geopolitical truth is that Soleimani and his Quds Force never would have had a chance to kill so many Americans if America had not invaded the wrong country after 9/11.

In any event, after the American drone killed Soleimani, Iraqi politicians, religious leaders, and conservative protestors chanted for the immediate withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq, which inspired fear among the more liberal protestors that such an evacuation would only allow for the expansion of Iran inside Iraq. This is the chaos of occupation. The occupation must end.

When Iran announced its retaliation on the US by targeting airbases housing US forces on Iraq’s land, the demonstrators rejected this violence, too. Iraq does not want foreign drone attacks and Iraq does not want foreign missile strikes. Like the US and Iran, what the vast majority of Iraq wants is peace, freedom, and respect for its sovereignty.

In the wake of this most recent chapter in The Global War on Terror, mayhem ensued and the streets were again filled with protest and revolt. The government scrambled to establish order. Iraq chose Muhammed Tawfeeq Alawi to be its next prime minister, but Alawi was rejected and so was his successor, Adnan Al Zurfi due to disputes over ministerial portfolios and budgets. Also, they were utterly rejected by protestors since they didn’t meet the basic demands. Like so many failed states around the world, the United States included, Iraq is waking up just as the independent media, international travel, and respect for civil liberties is beginning a potentially indefinite pandemic hibernation. Covid-19 has not been a friend of free speech. Iraqi protests could not be crushed by drone attacks, missiles, torture, or government-imposed internet blackouts. But a public health crisis is a different story.

“The pandemic has adversely impacted the situation on the ground,” says an Iraqi protestor who has asked to remain anonymous. “Protestors demands haven’t been answered.”

Although many protestors initially resisted the demands of the World Health Organization and stayed in their tents in Al-Tahreer Square, others went home. They retreated into social media where they witnessed, among other things, shared grievances from their fellow American protestors, but also a surge in honor killings and domestic violence in Iraq, a country more terrified of doctors laying hands on their wives and daughters than on corrupt leaders usurping their civil rights.[1] Meanwhile, the Iraqi government used this international public health crisis as an opportunity to consolidate the old order’s power by appointing Mustafa Alkhadimi, the former head of Iraqi Intelligence, as the new prime minister. As protestors overwhelmingly reject Alkhadimi on social media, one wonders at this point if such rejections do little more than provide valuable intel to this spy who now runs Iraq.

Did America’s Global War on Terror successfully deliver democracy to the Middle East? Just as Tahrir Square passed in Egypt, some suspect the October Revolution in Iraq will also pass away. But what those with roots in Baghdad know is that a critical mass is gathering, both in Iraq and abroad. The Iraqi people recognize that the October demonstrations were different and far more powerful than any other in the past. The Iraqi people are getting a taste of freedom. The hunger for freedom and change is going viral just as an actual virus spreads around the world, and although Covid-19 is frightening, it is nothing compared to the horrors of war the Iraqis have witnessed for nearly four decades. This new generation of Iraqis, like other brave young people around the world, is speaking up against corruption and they are not afraid. Like Hussein Adel al-Madani and Sara Talib, they came out in October seeking a better life for the next generation. They want to be left alone by Iran and they want the US to lift its knee from the neck of their country. As one father in Al Tahreer Square said, “I am here today because I am looking for a better future for my daughter. I don’t want her to live through this poverty and broken system as I did.” It has been almost nine months since the start of the October Revolution and as the demonstrators continually repeat: “We will not return home until our demands are met.” The occupation must end.

—————————————————————————————————————–

M.C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province and reported extensively on the Iraq War through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Mantle, Epiphany, Monkeybicycle, Mayday, YES! Weekly, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. His memoir, The Mysteries of Haditha, will be published by Potomac Books in 2020. He lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Noor Ghazi is an international peace activist. She was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and after time in Syria, immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 2008. Ghazi is Visiting Research Scholar with a Master’s Degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is currently an academic translator with the Iraqi Alamal Association in Baghdad translating two books by the eminent peace studies scholar John Paul Lederach into Arabic. She has written academic articles in both English and Arabic and recently gave a TEDx Talk titled, “Lost In My Home For 12 Years.”

[1] From Human Rights Watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/22/iraq-urgent-need-domestic-violence-law#

It was a relatively clear and cool night in the spring of 2008 on our fortified U.S. compound, Camp David, which was co-located on the property of the Najaf Technical University at the southern end of Najaf, Iraq. I was smoking hookah and watching Arabic TV with our local Iraqi guards, something I did nightly, when my Captain, a West Point grad, sheepishly poked his head in the door and asked if we could talk. Of course, I said, then passed the hookah’s hose to the Iraqi next to me, ensuring the tip was pointed back toward me so not to give offense (passing the phallic hose’s tip facing outward is considered vulgar). I rose, then walked to the door.

My Captain, a tall, thin, dirty blond in his late 20s, was in uniform: combat boots, ACU bottoms, and a military-issue fleece top; I, on the other hand, was wearing my usual ensemble: Vibram-soled Merrell hiking boots, Dickies work pants (a California staple of ‘90s skate culture), plaid snap-button shirt, and a navy-blue nylon windbreaker.

“What’s up, Sir?” I asked.

He scanned the room pensively. There were no other Americans around, just the two of us, and our non-English-speaking guards inquisitively throwing casual glances away from the TV toward our conversation.

“Soooo….” he began to say. “I’ve heard you take little trips outside the wire in civilian clothes…”

I looked at him, trying to keep my expression neutral. The accusation, though true, was quite salacious. U.S. Military personnel in Iraq, even Special Forces like he and I, were strictly confined to the guarded installations, Military Camps and FOBs, and only left under direct orders to conduct a mission or move to another installation. When leaving “the wire,” soldiers travelled in convoys of heavily armored military vehicles with guns big and small, medical supplies, commo gear, and anything else needed for a prolonged fight. No soldier would want to venture out alone as a vulnerable civilian–logically it didn’t make sense.

“…if you happen to be out tonight, do you mind checking to make sure the MSR is clear?”

Clear, I thought to myself. What does he mean by clear? I asked. The Captain explained his concern that there might be something hidden in the roadside trash (sporadic piles of trash line every major road in Iraq) on the MSR (Main Supply Route) in front of our compound. Apparently, he’d read some intelligence cable claiming terrorists were threatening to disrupt U.S. Army convoys in the region with IEDs, and he was apprehensive about his resupply run the following day. This didn’t surprise me. I’d seen Special Forces officers refuse to get out of armor-plated trucks during a mission, fearing stray bullets. I’d known Special Forces commanders who reject orders of battle that position them at the head of a convoy, fearing roadside bombs that often target the first truck.

I reiterated his request in more direct language: “So you want me to go outside the wire in civilian clothes and dig through trash piles looking for bombs?”

His response: “Basically, yes, if you’re out already.”

I asked again. Maybe he was tired and didn’t understand the ramifications of his request. He wasn’t suggesting an official military mission with bomb detection technology and protection gear; he was proposing that I go out, unsanctioned and unprotected, into what was technically a war zone, risking my personal safety to ensure his. What if something happened, like if I was kidnapped or blown up? Surely this would get him in trouble, maybe even court martialed. He was such a straight arrow, a by-the-book kind of guy. Why would he risk this?

Was he really that scared?

Was he a coward endangering someone else for his own protection?

But in my Captain’s defense this wasn’t an order, like how they say in movies “that’s an order!” It was more like a suggestion, and I felt free to decline his request (although consent becomes fuzzy when there’s an asymmetry of power: he a captain and I a sergeant). Actually, I think he was asking me for a favor, that’s probably the best way to describe it. And that surprised me more than anything.

He and I’d had a rocky relationship up to that point. To be honest, I’ve had a rocky relationship with authority my entire life. This came up in my psychological evaluation during Special Forces selection, and I was almost kicked out over it. Fortunately, they let me pass with the excuse that I was young and would therefore age out of my rebellion, which I don’t think ever happened. So I don’t think my Captain knew what to do with me. I, and a few others on the team, often did things without asking his official permission and ended up begging for his forgiveness after. I never hesitated to do what I thought was right. He hated that, but he needed me. I was one of the more senior members of the team, and I ran all of the HUMINT (human intelligence) operations.

So maybe this favor was a proverbial olive branch, a way for me to get back into his good graces. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe he felt like a disrespected outsider and wanted to be included in our extracurricular activities. Maybe he wanted my respect? It was no secret that I thought of him as weak and ineffectual. That’s how we were taught to think of officers; and most I’d encountered (but not all) lived up to those expectations.

*

To add to the confusion that night, I think I’d been drinking with our Iraqi guards. Technically, U.S. soldiers in Iraq weren’t allowed to drink alcohol, but I and a few others on my team were released from General Order No. 1 so we could drink during meetings with intelligence sources. Of course we abused the privilege. I’ll confess that once or twice my team (minus the Captain) got drunk and then went out looking for a fight.

Anyway, I gave my Captain one last chance to retract his request.

But like a good officer, he stayed the course: “Let me know if you find anything!”

Dumbfounded, I went to get Jim, our Senior Weapons Sergeant and my partner in crime. Jim is an interesting guy, physically imposing, sort of a redneck, and up for anything; he definitely fit the stereotype of an SF dude. And he’s one of the most kind and loyal people I’ve ever known, though we did have some heated arguments.

“What the fuck?” Jim asked. “Is he serious?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“This is fucking ridiculous.”

“What isn’t?”

“He’s such a fucking pussy…”

Jim and I continued to discuss the bizarre tasking. We couldn’t deny his accusation: in the past few months, Jim and I, along with an interpreter, had on several occasions dressed up like locals and quietly snuck off our compound. Sometimes it was to meet an intelligence source, or attempt to recruit a new source, and sometimes it was just for fun, like to go to a restaurant or sightsee. There weren’t many places in Iraq where U.S. soldiers could get away with this sort of thing in 2008, especially in southern Iraq, but Najaf was a relatively peaceful city because of all the Shia holy sites that brought over a million tourists every year, mostly from Iran. As long as we kept our mouths shut and dressed like locals, people would hopefully assume we were light-skinned Iranians on holiday.

So it was far from unreasonable for Jim and I to accept our Captain’s secret mission. We were frankly bored in Iraq, and we’d do almost anything, no matter how dangerous, to get the wartime experiences our egos craved–that’s why we joined Special Forces. Despite the military’s emphases on rules, structure, and hierarchy, many soldiers (especially in Special Forces) flagrantly break those rules with the excuse of “making mission,” as we called it, with little to no thought of the repercussions. This, at least in our minds, seemed heroic. So how could we refuse our commanding officer’s tacit permission to break the rules, knowing there was a chance we’d uncover IEDs and potentially save American lives?

“At the very least,” I told Jim, “this will make for a funny story later.”

“Yeah, if nothing fucking happens.”

“Right…” I said looking at Jim. I could tell he didn’t particularly want to go, but we’d spent so much time talking shit about others on our team, like the Captain, how they were weak, how they were pussies, that I think we both felt saying “no” would have made us hypocrites, and potentially cowards. My pride couldn’t handle that.

Jim looked at me. He wasn’t going to back down if I was in.

“Let’s just do it,” I said.

“Fine.”

Jim and I decided not to bring an interpreter on our trash-digging escapade since we weren’t expecting to meet anyone that night. But we did bring one of our local Iraqi dogs, Willy. Willy had an athletic, medium build, droopy sad eyes, and a burnt orange and white coat. We thought he’d happily dig through trash piles looking for uneaten food and expose any explosive devices. We loved that dog and we’d hate to see anything happen to him, but if someone was going to get blown up that night, better him than us.

Jim and I chose to drive our newly acquired covert POV (Privately Owned Vehicle), a white Toyota 4-Runner with ballistic glass, steel-reinforced doors, and armored seats. Wearing civilian clothes, we grabbed our body armor, Glocks, M4s, bugout bags, and the dog, then jumped into the SUV. We exited our compound through the main gate onto a side road. It was after midnight and the Iraqi gate guards gave us funny looks; I can’t imagine what they thought (there were all sorts of rumors swirling around about our activities in Iraq, like that we were putting sharks in the aqueducts to eat children). We drove a few hundred meters down the main road, and then we stopped at our first large pile of trash. The houses on that MSR were set back pretty far back from the road, so there was plenty of room for us to park in the dirt. And lots of trash.

At the first pile, we opened the car door and shooed Willy out. Of course, the scaredy-cat looked at us, then looked at the open door, then whimpered. We tried to pull him out, then we tried to push him out, but Willy absolutely refused to exit the vehicle. I think he was afraid we’d leave him out there, outside of our cozy compound. Iraqi dogs have a harsh life in the unforgiving desert, but live in near luxury on U.S. military camps (I bet the Iraqi dogs think we invaded the country just for them. And who knows, maybe we did).

So, Jim and I had to search the trash ourselves. Our first instinct was to take turns; one would stay inside the protective vehicle while the other checked a trash pile, and then we’d switch. But neither of us could stomach the thought of watching the other get blown up while cowering in the truck, survivor’s guilt and all. So we got out together. Willy still stayed in the truck though. I think he was the only one that night thinking clearly.

We carefully approached our first pile of trash. Jim extended the muzzle-end of his rifle into the pile and carefully turned over several pieces of trash. I followed suit. Willy watched suspiciously. Nothing, thank Allah.

We searched through a few more piles, fortunately still nothing. Then we moved farther down the road, still nothing. Just as we were about to give up for the night, Jim and I looked up to see lights flashing in the distance. We were on a main road next to a suburban area a couple miles south of downtown Najaf, and not surprisingly, we attracted the attention of local residents who probably assumed we were actually planting IEDs, not looking for them, and called the police. So just when we thought this night couldn’t get any weirder, Jim and I looked at each other.

“We’re about to get arrested, in Iraq.”

As we watched the lights approach, I tried to imagine what the police would think, rolling up on two bearded, heavily armed white guys in western garb rummaging through piles of trash after midnight.

“What the fuck are we going to do?” Jim asked.

“Uh, I don’t know… but we may know these guys.”

The cops arrived, a pickup truck loaded with Iraqi police officers brandishing AK-47s. We lifted our hands to present a non-threatening posture, and I offered the traditional greeting, “salaam a’layk.” Then I quickly told them we were American soldiers stationed in Najaf: “Ihna Amreekan, saakin gareeb minna.” Then I asked, in more broken Arabic, what police station they were from. Their response: the station about a mile southeast of the city limit. This confirmed my suspicions. We did know these guys, unfortunately.

*

A few weeks prior, our SF team in armor-plated, turret-mounted-.50-Cal Humvees descended upon the Iraqi police station at the southern end of Najaf, about a mile east of Camp David, in a “show of force” unsanctioned by our Captain.

We were pissed.

It was common practice for police in Iraq to arrest someone on fictitious charges and extort money from his family for release; the Iraqi police were considered quite corrupt by the general population. But unfortunately for this particular cohort of extorting police officers, their hostage was one of our coalition partners, a soldier from the Iraq Army unit located on the northern end of Najaf. This unit came to Camp David several days a week for training, and we conducted joint combat operations together. So we were pretty close with these guys.

The kidnapped soldier lived in the neighborhood next to Camp David, and after he was arrested, his wife and a few fellow Iraqi soldiers quickly rushed to our compound to inform us. At this point in the deployment, we were sick and tired of watching our collaborators get exploited and sometimes slaughtered while we stood idly by, usually waiting for bureaucrats to sanction intervention. So this time, before any military officers could debate the appropriate course of action, or more likely just schedule a meeting to discuss who’d be in charge (who’d get to take credit), we decided to grab our guns, pile into our military vehicles, and rush to the Iraqi police station to conduct an impromptu rescue operation.

Our Captain wasn’t consulted.

We pulled up to the police station aggressively, jumping the curb and nearly ramming one of the buildings. We trained our .50 Cals on blind corners and quickly exited the vehicles. We swiftly disarmed each cop we encountered as we made our way to the headquarters building. We kicked in the door, pushed everyone up against walls, and demanded to speak with the person in charge. He timidly revealed himself, a short pudgy dark-skinned man.

We yelled. We bullied. We demanded. And out-gunned, the police chief relented (thank Allah this went as well as it did).

We got our guy back and tucked him into one of our gun trucks. Then we thought it’d be funny to disarm the Iraqi cops, so we grabbed all their heavy weapons, about 4 “BKCs” (Russian PKM machine guns) and a few AKs, and brought everything back to our compound. We laughed all the way home.

But our Captain didn’t find it funny when several Iraqi police officials showed up at Camp David an hour later complaining about what we’d done and demanding their weapons back. Our Captain came undone, red-faced and nearly hyperventilating, yelling at us:

“What the fuck were you thinking!” He kept repeating, almost to himself.

Jim and I looked at him but didn’t respond. The Captain was in no mood to hear our excuses, or argue. He was angry, yes, maybe uncontrollably angry, but I think he was also deeply embarrassed. And afraid. Our Captain was afraid of injury and death, much more so than Jim and I were, we already knew that, but I think he was also afraid of something else, maybe his biggest fear: ruining his military career. This was the first time he’d personally had to face our action’s consequence, and I suspect he feared word might get back to his (and our) superiors. We’d get a slap on the wrist and probably a chuckle, but since he was technically in charge, he’d surely be scapegoated for our actions.

“You better give the fucking guns back!” he continued.

Jim and I still didn’t respond. Then we quickly walked away before our discomfited Captain realized we weren’t taking him, or this threat to his career, seriously–in our minds, the only thing to fear was cowardice. We knew we’d pushed him over the edge, but that just made the situation even funnier for us. We laughed awkwardly as we weighed our options. But we didn’t have much of a choice. So begrudgingly, we gave the guns back.

I wondered if the Captain would ever speak directly to me again. He did of course: a few weeks later he tasked me with a secret mission to dig through trash looking for bombs.

*

So needless to say, Jim and I were a little apprehensive when a truck full of these same Iraqi police, with their weapons, emerged out of the darkness. This time we were the ones outgunned.

Gesturing to us and the surrounding area, one of the cops asked what we were doing: “Shitsawi hun?”

Willy could be seen through the windshield peeking over the passenger seat.

“Walla inshoof a’la mutafegiraat [we’re looking for bombs],” I said. I expected a laugh, I thought the situation was pretty funny; but they just stared. I continued to explain, or at least attempted to explain, that our commander heard there might be an IED on this road and we were searching for it. I asked if they’d seen anything: “itshoof walla ishi?”

“Lah,” was the curt response; they showed no interest in continuing our conversation. I could tell they were confused, maybe by my shoddy Arabic, and they must have thought we were complete idiots (which we were of course). Then without offering to help, they abruptly left us there on the road. “Bishoofak ba’adayn,” see you later fellas.

Jim and I left too.

On the ride back, Willy was finally at ease.

Back at Camp David, Willy happily bounced out of the truck. I think he was ready to call it a night and snuggle into his warm bed (he slept with one of the interpreters).

“Now he finally gets out of the truck,” I said to Jim.

“Fucking pussy,” Jim said with his usual levity, and a dip in his lip. Then he spat on the ground.

Willy scampered into the interpreters’ building. He’d survived another day of our crazy war. And he’d have to survive many more days to come. We’d all soon go home, back to the U.S. to get on with our lives and military careers, but Willy would stay. Deployment after deployment, SF team after SF team, Willy would have to find a way to survive. We didn’t understand that. We never thought about the long-term consequences of our actions.

“Let’s go tell the Captain,” I said.

We found him waiting outside our team room in a small courtyard, looking up at the stars. “What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing, Sir.”

“Good,” he responded casually, and went back inside.

And that was that.

*

About a decade after I left the military, I saw my Captain in the dining facility of a compound belonging to one of the most elite units in the Special Operations arsenal. I had since gone back to school to study physics, graduated with an engineering degree, and was now hawking high-tech solutions and methodologies to problems the U.S. government wasn’t yet facing. Jim had retired after a long and successful career in the Army, and was now building his redneck dream home in the hills of rural Tennessee. And there was my former Captain, who was probably a Lieutenant Colonel or even Colonel by now, standing near the salad bar.

I hadn’t seen him since leaving Iraq in 2008, but he looked about the same, maybe a little older and a little stockier. I was the opposite, about 30 pounds lighter from sporadic bouts of fad dieting. We were both in civilian clothes, but I could tell he was still “in the fight”: probably hunting the next Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Well, not hunting himself. I’m sure he still sent enlisted soldiers to do the fighting. But even then, I envied these soldiers, the simplicity of their mission. I still imagined their experiences capturing and/or killing HVTs (High Value Targets) most closely aligned with my idealization of the heroic military life. In contrast, my experiences digging in trash looking for bombs felt meaninglessly reckless.

When I first saw the Captain, I reflexively smirked. Look who it is, I said to myself conceitedly as chills ran up and down my spine. But how could he be here, amongst the bravest of the brave? The best of the best? How could they not see him like I did, as a coward who sent others into harm’s way for his own protection and professional advancement? I knew in that moment, even after ten years, I still wanted to feel superior to my Captain. I still wanted to see him as the career-obsessed coward, and me, in opposition to him, the self-sacrificing soldier willing to risk everything, break any rule, to do what was right, what I thought was right.

But I also knew I was wrong. There’s nothing right in war. My smirk had always been a defense mechanism hiding something deeper. I felt it almost immediately. It welled up in my stomach, my mouth relaxed, my countenance dropped. In Iraq, I just wanted the experiences of war—to feel what it felt like to be a hero—with wanton disregard for any of the long-term consequences suffered by the Iraqi people. But now, seeing my Captain, who after ten years had reached the pinnacle of the “heroic” military system I’d envied, I could no longer pretend. My actions overseas, disrupting a country in which I didn’t belong, weren’t brave. They were an attempt to live out a juvenile fantasy. Thinking my Captain a coward was just an excuse to justify this selfish pursuit.

I took a step in my Captain’s direction. There was one thing left to do, the right thing. I needed to say, “I’m sorry.” I was sorry for how I treated him. I was sorry for who I pretended to be. I was sorry for almost everything I did in Iraq.  But for some reason, I hesitated, and he walked out of the room.

I guess that makes me a coward too.

In high school, I was invisible–acne and braces, last year’s wardrobe. I didn’t have close friends. My grades weren’t going to win me any scholarships. The football coach offered me the equipment manager’s position after tryouts.

In the ninth grade, 9/11 happened. In tenth grade, I watched the Air Force drop daisy cutters on Tora Bora. In my junior year, I watched the Marines level Fallujah. There were yellow ribbon magnets on every car and American flags on every porch. The military was a way to be somebody.

So after I graduated, I ran to the recruiter’s office; shaved my head before I even shipped out. Some guys hated basic training. Not me. I couldn’t wait to get home in my dress uniform and strut through town, to show all those people who had looked over me or looked through me instead of looking at me. I’d be impossible to miss with a chest full of ribbons and medals.

I finished basic and shipped to Fort Bragg. My unit deployed to Iraq three weeks later, just in time for me to get some. But our area of operations was only peace and the endless desert. Nobody had died in almost a year. No Americans.

My platoon drove around Iraq in humvees, pointing our guns at the horizon, hoping to draw fire. We escorted supply convoys. We transported detainees. We set up checkpoints.

The recruiter never said shit about supply convoys. And he definitely didn’t mention sitting at a checkpoint, in a hundred and fifty degrees, in body armor, in a truck in the desert, just sitting. That lying prick told me about kicking in doors, calling in airstrikes, airborne infiltrations. Never checkpoints.

But, no shit, there we were.

When we arrived, the lieutenant radioed in our coordinates. Sergeant Schwartz and the other team leaders arranged orange cones and stretched out large, spiral coils of barbed wire creating a temporary barrier. Two soldiers positioned signs at either end of the checkpoint. In Arabic and English, they read, “Caution. Stop Here. U.S. Forces Checkpoint Ahead. Wait for Instructions. Deadly Force Authorized. Caution.” My job was to stand in the turret and man the .50 caliber machine gun, to provide security while the other guys set up.

Sergeant Schwartz pulled the heavy door shut as he got back into the truck.

“And now we wait,” he said.

Scwhartz took a pinch of snuff and tucked it in his bottom lip. He passed the can to Carpenter, the driver. I heard them spitting into empty bottles.  Out past the barrel of the .50, the dirt road shimmered like water. Two hours went by, then three. Farmers’ trucks kicked up dust as they drove from one rural village to the next.

So far, we had searched two vehicles and had found nothing.

“Hey Sergeant Schwartz,” I called down from the turret. “Is it always like this?”

“Like what?”

“This…” I said, “boring.”

“The last deployment wasn’t,” he said. “We were up near Baghdad. Urban environment.”

“What’s the craziest thing you ever found?”

“No shit,” he said. “This one time, we stopped a car full of midget hajjis.”

Schwartz told us that Bobby Barrow, one of the other team’s sergeants, had halted four lanes of traffic so he could take pictures. This was back when he and Schwartz were still privates. While Bobby was getting his picture taken, the search team found a wooden box full of Iraqi money hidden under a spare tire. So Bobby and Schwartz had to zip tie all these tiny little hands together while the lieutenant radioed headquarters. Turns out, all the money had Saddam’s face on it, so they let the driver keep it. Before they left, one of the Iraqis tried to get Barrow to marry his daughter and take her home to America.

“Bobby told him, I can’t take no hajji girl home to my mama!” Schwartz finished, laughing.

A truck approached.

“Punisher 7,” I called it in. “This is Punisher 4. Vehicle approaching from the south. Over.”

“Roger. Over.” The bored reply.

A door clunked open and the truck rocked as Sergeant Schwartz stepped out. I heard the team leaders from the other trucks doing the same. Out at the furthest clump of orange cones, the white pickup truck slowed, as if the driver was reading the sign. I stood in the gun turret and held my hands and arms straight out in front of me like a traffic cop, but he kept driving, rolling past the sign.

The team leaders, standing in the road beside my truck, raised their long guns and pulled the butt stocks tight into their shoulders.

I fired a signal flare, a warning. The flaming red ball arced past his windshield.

Still, the pickup didn’t stop; it accelerated toward the barbed wire, our position.

“Light him up!” Sergeant Schwartz nodded at me.

I aimed. I fired three rounds.

The pickup lurched and jerked and skidded to a halt. The passenger’s side sagged off the dirt road into an irrigation ditch. A door screeched open, and three female figures scrambled out, screaming and crying. The search team corralled them. Someone shouted, “Clear!”

There was nothing in the truck.

And then Doc sprinted up and pulled the driver out. She laid him on his back in the road, cut his pants apart, and stuffed handfuls of gauze into the gaping wound in his groin. And then she gave up. I heard the call for a body bag on the radio.

I clambered up out of the turret, pulled my headset off, and ignored Carpenter’s questions about what I was doing, his warnings that I would be in trouble for leaving. I marched down the road, around the serpentine of barbed wire to where the truck had stopped.

One round had passed through the windshield of the truck high on the passenger’s side, a cloudy spider web centered around a clean hole. Another hole in the grill, driver’s side. Fluids leaked from under the truck, oil and antifreeze. Blood soaked the driver’s seat, dripped out the door and puddled in the sand to form tiny lakes.

I caught glimpses of the driver, with all of the people crowded around: the platoon sergeant, the medic, the team leaders, too busy talking about the details of “the report” to notice his wispy moustache. They didn’t see the zits that dotted his face, because they were talking about proper escalation of force. They didn’t notice me either, standing outside of their huddle.

Two young girls wailed on the side of the road. Their mother, or grandmother, was ancient and dry. The lieutenant asked the interpreter why they didn’t stop at the sign, and the interpreter turned to the woman and said something in Arabic.

Her voice was papyrus. She held her hands out in front of her and patted her breast with her hand.

“She says they didn’t know what to do,” the interpreter said.

“Did they not read the sign?” the lieutenant asked.

“She says there is no school here,” said Nasir.

The old woman patted her chest again and again.

“There’s no school here,” the lieutenant said, almost to himself. And then, not so quietly, “JESUS! FUCK!”

Heads turned to look at him, including the platoon sergeant’s. I stood in the middle of the road. His eyes flicked to the empty turret 40 meters away.

“What are you worried about that for?” He jerked his head back over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be worried about your fucking sector of fire, dumbass.” He shoved and pulled me to the truck and ordered me back up into the turret.

I watched my sector while the platoon packed up road cones and signs. They loaded everything into the trucks.

The platoon sergeant and interpreter spoke to the old woman, telling her how to file a claim. They gave her a piece of paper with the information printed on it. Before they left, Schwartz kneeled and offered the girls a package of M&Ms. The smaller girl burst into tears and clung to the woman’s burqa.

As they walked away, the old woman stopped and rasped at me, “Asif.”

“I don’t speak your language,” I told her. “I don’t understand.”

“She says she is sorry,” Nasir said.

*

On the ride back to base, Schwartz kept telling me not to worry. We did everything by the book.

“You’ll have to write a statement when we get back. Probably answer some questions, but just tell the truth,” he said. “We did it all by the book.”

It was annoying, the way he kept repeating himself.

I finished my tour of duty. The army gave me a medal. Later, they gave me my discharge papers. I grew out my hair and enrolled at a state university.

I didn’t strut around town in my dress uniform.

*

Two years later, Carpenter’s email arrived. It was short.

“Hey G,” he wrote. “I don’t know if you heard, but Schwartz died. Wanted you to know. Hope you’re doing good.”

The first email came a week after I left the army. Donahue died. Suicide attack in Baghdad. Last year it was Bethea. IED on some road in Afghanistan. He had gotten married the month before. Now Schwartz.

At the bottom of Carpenter’s email, there was a link to an obituary. “Staff Sergeant Michael A. Schwartzenberger, age 32, died on…”

I hadn’t talked to Schwartz, or practically anyone from the unit, since I left the army, but I felt like there ought to be more than just some dates and a list of people he left behind.

I read his name over and over. Schwartzenberger. The name tape on his uniform had the tiniest little letters so that they would all fit. We had just called him Schwartz.

I emailed my professors and left that morning.

*

The honor guard stood off to the side with their rifles. Some hairless kid in a baggy dress jacket held a bugle.

Standing behind the crowd, I searched the backs of heads for familiar faces. Bobby Barrow was conspicuous, his shoulders as broad as ever. He was the only person in a dress uniform who wasn’t part of the honor guard. Carpenter would be here somewhere.

The chaplain stood next to the coffin rambling through generic scripture– The righteous perish and no one takes it to heart. The devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil— I wanted to shout him down. I wanted to tell Schwartz’s real story.

Schwartz was 20 when he joined the Army.

His grandfather and his father worked in Youngstown, but Schwartz was born the year after the steel industry moved to China. There was no future at the plant.

The Volunteer Fire Department didn’t offer a pension. No benefits package either. Fourteen dollars an hour might have been enough for him and Melissa, just the two of them, but then the baby came.

Schwartz was an all-American kid: athlete, honors student, Eagle Scout. The recruiters had hounded him right after high school. Then, he had tucked their cards into his wallet and nodded and smiled. When things got tight, he dug through the drawer in the kitchen where old wallet clutter was archived with dead batteries and receipts of questionable importance.

Melissa’s belly was seven-months-fat when the recruiter came to pick up Schwartz for basic training. She sobbed on the porch while Schwartz rode away.

“Don’t worry,” the recruiter told him in the car. “You’ll be gone for a couple of months, and then you’ll move her and the kid down to Fort Bragg, and you’ll see her every night. Except for a training exercise every now and then.”

After basic training, he moved Melissa and Emily to Fort Bragg. He spent every night with them, except for the occasional training exercise.

After 9/11, the exercises came more often. The nights he spent at home, he lay awake, straining to sleep. He never explained it explicitly, but I understood. Some part of him needed to record the sound of his wife’s soft snores or the smell of her hair. He needed to absorb the blank hiss of the baby monitor.

On a tiny base in Khost Province, he earned an Army Commendation Medal and corporal’s stripes. He kept a picture of his daughter in his helmet. He wrote letters home every week. The letters never mentioned rockets or mortars or any kind of trouble. He told Melissa about his promotion. He wrote how much he missed her.

They had been in Afghanistan for six months and already there were murmurs about Iraq.

He received another medal and another promotion in Baghdad. He wrote letters. He kept a copy of his wife’s sonogram along with the pictures tucked in his helmet. The unit arranged it so that he could make a phone call home on the day that Ashley was born.

These are the stories he told us while we were overseas together–his third deployment, my first and only.

*

Schwartz’s unit was still in Afghanistan. The honor guard had been scraped together from the fuckups left at Fort Bragg. The rifle detail and the bugler were privates, fresh out of basic training or discipline cases. The detail’s leader was a fat, dumpy sergeant first class. All of the able bodies, and minds, were in Afghanistan.

The chaplain finished the service. The fat sergeant stepped up to the casket and raised his right arm in a slow salute. I watched to see who would jump at the first volley of shots. As the last volley’s echo rolled through the cemetery, the bugler started to play “Taps.”

It wasn’t even a real bugle. There were so many funerals, and so few trained buglers, that the army had to use fakes. The digital bugles played a perfect rendition every time, but anyone who ever played a brass instrument would be able to look at the kid in the baggy jacket and tell he wasn’t playing. He didn’t even know how to hold the fucking thing.

The fat sergeant handed the folded flag to Schwartz’s mom.

Some of the attendees walked back to their cars. Others waited to pay their respects to Schwartz’s parents, still seated, looking as if they’d be guarding his grave forever.

*

Bobby, Carpenter, and I met at a bar near my hotel.

Neither of them knew how Schwartz had died. Bobby said Schwartz’s unit had deployed eight or nine months ago, but like the rest of us, he’d lost track of Schwartz after leaving Fort Bragg. Carpenter hadn’t really talked to anyone since he’d been kicked out–cocaine.

Schwartz’s honor guard walked into the bar a little after sundown. They were in civilian clothes, but I recognized the fat sergeant who had handed the flag to Schwartz’s parents. Bobby asked about my hair: “So, when your girlfriend is pegging you, does she pull your hair? You know? And, do you have to put it back in a bun when you’re licking her balls…”

I nodded toward the door, distracting him.

“Hey bartender,” he yelled. “Get these boys some drinks!”

We sat at a table and told stories about Schwartz. Bobby had known him far longer than me; Carpenter too, so I let them do the talking. I was drunk. I smiled and nodded in the right places, chimed in with exclamations when I was expected to.

We kept waiting for the fat sergeant and the honor guard to open up. They were happy to drink on Bobby’s tab, but they stayed quiet, like we were still at the funeral. They seemed surprised by the way we described him. It was like they had never even met Schwartz.

We wanted to hear their stories about him, but what we really wanted was to know how he died. The obituary had said nothing, not even where he died. And it wasn’t like he was a spy, out doing something classified. He was in the fucking field artillery.

The jukebox died. Bobby was content to give it a rest. There was a lull in storytime.

“Tell ‘em about that kid you smoked at that checkpoint,” Carpenter said.

My stomach dropped. I focused on the beads of condensation running down a bottle of beer, but all I could see was that dusty, old woman. I could hear her voice, her rusty tongue dragging across the roof of her mouth. Asif.

She says she is sorry.

I struggled away from the memory and looked up, hoping for an interruption, an earthquake, a meteor strike, anything not to have to relive it.

The men from Schwartz’s honor guard stared at me hungrily, waiting for blood. Bobby wouldn’t meet my gaze. He understood that this was necessary. If I shared my story of bloodshed, then they would tell us what happened to Schwartz.

Blood calls for blood.

“So,” I said, “this kid, who it turned out couldn’t read, blew through a sign at our checkpoint, and I thought I was doing the right thing, but it turned out–.”

“Dude!” Carpenter interrupted me. “Tell it right, man!” He turned to the fat sergeant and the rifle detail. “So no shit, there we were, in the middle of this fucking dirt road …”

He told it all.

When Carpenter finished, the fat sergeant raised his bottle towards me, and then everyone at the table did the same. I waggled my bottle side to side. The label lay in shreds on the table.

“Sorry boys,” I said. “I’m empty.”

“Get me one too!” Carpenter called as I walked away from the table.

The parking lot was dark and cool. I pondered getting in my car and driving back to Asheville. The keys were in my hand.

Raised voices and breaking glass forced me to do an about face.

Inside, Bobby stood in front of his overturned chair, red-faced, cursing down at the fat sergeant. “You don’t fucking know. You weren’t there, you tubby shit!”

And now the fat man jerked to his feet knocking his chair to the ground too. “Listen, sergeant.” He pointed his sausage fingers in Bobby’s face. ”You need to tone it down. I don’t know who it is that you guys knew, but it wasn’t the guy that I knew. Schwartz was a fucking shit bag and a drunk. That’s why they left him in the rear.”

“What?” Bobby’s arms sagged.

When a unit deployed, they left people back in the States to take care of admin stuff– bitch work. They called it rear detachment. It was for broke-dicks, whiners, fuckups. Schwartz wasn’t any of those things. This was a mistake.

“They. Left. Him. In The. Rear,” the fat sergeant repeated, accentuating every word. “Schwartz got a DUI, and then he got busted for being drunk on duty. His ex took his daughters and got a restraining order. He was about to get busted down to sergeant.”

“Liar!” Bobby said. Angry tears brimmed from his blue eyes.

“That morning, when he didn’t show up to P.T. formation, no one blinked, because, like I said, Schwartz was a fuckup. When he missed 0900 formation too, we sent a couple guys to his quarters.”

Bobby made harsh cawing sounds and the tears spilled over.

The fat sergeant continued. “When they knocked, no one answered, but they knew something was wrong. So, they broke in. They found him in the garage, in his truck with the engine running.”

Bobby crumpled into a chair. Until now, I’d never seen him look deflated.

“Did he leave a note?” I asked.

“Sort of,” the fat sergeant said. “That’s how the guys knew something was wrong when they went to Schwartz’ place. He wrote Sorry in giant, spray paint letters across the garage door.”

Asif.

1.

Celebrate them.

2.

Celebrate the soldier who went to war

Just to kill.

This soldier accused of shooting and

Killing civilians. How the men from

His own platoon. They say he did it.

He shot civilians. He shot at civilians.

Shot a girl in Iraq in a flowered hijab

In her stomach.

Blooming wound. Like a daisy eye or

Hole in her gut. How he shot an old

Unarmed man dead. His white robe

Drenched red. The stain a spreading

Blood sun.

And they say they saw him. Saw him

Kill a teenager.

An ISIS fighter. Wounded and waiting

For a medic on the dirt floor in Mosul.

How they say the soldier said

Lips into a radio

Don’t touch him.

Because he’s mine.

Before driving his knife deep and deep.

Hunting knife

Into the boy’s neck. Through skin and

Muscle. Tissue and ligaments an artery.

3.

Or how

There is a photograph.

The soldier squatting in the sand.

Full battle rattle next to the ISIS boy.

His dead body. Face up. Arms bare.

Calves exposed. His legs sprawled.

And the soldier. How he has the boy.

His hair. Gripped in the fist. And he is

Yanking. Yanking him. The boy’s head.

His face up. For the camera.

How in the photograph.

The boy is dead.

And the soldier is smiling.

Because the boy is not a boy.

He is deer kill.

3.

Celebrate him.

Celebrate that soldier and the way it felt

When he held that soft sweat tuft of

Human hair.

Between his thumb and fingers like.

Like feathers.

4.

And why. Why stop there?

How there are more. More soldiers

5.

Soldiers who stood over dead bodies

On a video. Standing over the dead

Bodies of Taliban fighters they killed.

Killed in war in Afghanistan.

How the soldiers exposed their penises

And urinated on the bodies. Urinating

On the dead bodies or how

They are laughing.

Celebrate them. Celebrate those soldiers.

Celebrate how they felt when that stream

Of urine. Their urine.

Hit the men. Hit the dead bodies. Hit dead

Legs and dead torsos. Dead faces. Splashing

Open dead eyes. Into dead mouths.

Celebrate how.

How it felt. When their urine

Filled the dead men’s nostrils.

6.

Celebrate Abu Ghraib.

Celebrate that it happened. Celebrate

Soldiers who stripped prisoners naked.

Raped them with truncheons. Strapped

Dog collars around their necks. Soldiers

Who dragged men on leashes like they

Were dogs. Who placed bags over heads.

Made men stand on boxes with wires

And electrodes attached to fingers and

Skin. Soldiers. Soldiers. Soldiers who

Tortured men.

Soldiers who piled men. Piled men up

And into contorted piles. These piles

Of tortured human flesh.

7.

Celebrate them.

8.

Celebrate all the soldiers who do it. Who

Do things like this.

Celebrate them even though. Even though

The military is filled and filled and filled

With soldiers who

Would never. Who never do these things.

9.

Just don’t say. It is because

They did nothing wrong.

Don’t say. Don’t say they didn’t do it.

10.

Celebrate them because you know.

You know they did.

11.

Celebrate them because you like it.

PIXELATED WOMAN, WEBCAM SHADE

Pixelated woman, even your shadow
I know as my lover.
It whispered.
Ash-white dry-erase lips
part with a foreign tongue.
A felt-tip that deletes
as it divines.
Voices like accord
rip frets, necks, and tones.

Lately, you’re singing
disjointed love ditties
to abscond almighties.

I spend my night
in ichor rivulets & “I miss you”
trying to coax it back.

III / W-E-L-C-O-M-E

ً
احلل
on the board
at 20º incline
resting restraints
non conscious
(not unconscious)
unknowing
flesh and sinew
the body prepares
or—refuses to.
my body prepares
its tentacles to carve
a name, a meaning,
a translation for unknown—
all its forms will be
mine—inscribe—unseen—
in your being
beneath being—so
I could still give you
to your mother
and she would call
you by my name
whip you then transform
clusters of paper cardinals
into a fallout shelter
or whatever her soul
needed most.
on the board
at 20º incline
resting restraints
non conscious
(not unconscious)
an unknowing—
a drowning that
refuses to drown
you—brother prayer
to the fire prayer—
my fire prayer:
always to burn
and not burn out
on the board at 20º incline
a never-prayed-for whirlpool—
a prayer that never knew
the tempests stalking you—
my rhinoceros is your language—
ivory horns bubble from your throat.
on the board at 20º incline
the word-food will flow
I am your un-prayer—
your roiling, waking tempest—
that which drowns you
but never drowns you out.

ADJUSTMENT PERIOD

That year I was camouflaged—
with bruises of being proud—
sitting, legs crossed, peeling
OD green linoleum flooring.

A year sifting through dog tags—
dead yellow edges dangled—
like lead ghosts from bank office windows
and high school goal posts.

The enlistment was rough—
all half-sheet and nicotine stain—
the scars and wounds and tattoos
will run together in a half-century—

My body will be held up—
a battle standard
the stained Iraqi sand bleeds
every night—

I dream my daughter dances across it—
she grows tattered
like tree branch topographies
twist together with vague silhouettes.

Everywhere being is dancing.
Even the warring mausoleum
of my mind
is the one-sided scrap paper of God.

—

These poems appear in Aaron Graham’s poetry collection, Blood Stripes, and are reprinted with permission of the author.

Ozzy
stuck pennies in Huey’s door, wedging it shut, and we all stood in the hallway
and laughed as he tried to get out. Serinson and Crater built a wall of beer
cans and set it outside Gregg’s door so he crashed into it on his way to the
shower the next morning. Butthead and No-neck tied a rope to the handle of two
doors across the hallway from each other so no one in either room could get
out, and I have to say I found the shouts amusing, quizzical and comical at
first, growing increasingly angry, until the entire dorm was filled with the
word fuck.  

On Sundays Simpson wandered the perimeter of the tennis courts collecting lost balls; late Sunday night, from his third floor window, he and I aimed them at the cars below us in the lot, setting off the alarms, shattering the one night of stillness on campus. Devins threw Skoal packets in the washers and dryers in the community laundry, and Jenkins filled the soap dispensers with mayonnaise. Every night someone flooded the sinks, and every morning some new witticism like “Here I sit broken-hearted” had been scrawled on the toilet stalls.

When Pace passed out we drew a penis on his face. When Stevenson slept we shaved him, then short-sheeted his bed. Davids we ducted-taped his wrists and ankles together, and the only thing that kept us from taping shut his mouth was we were afraid he might choke on his own vomit, drunk as we all were.

What
we didn’t do was go to class. I’ll say it was because we were too tired from
constantly watching our backs, or maybe it’s that we only have so much
creativity inside us, and when we use it coming up with ways to attack others,
we forget to expand ourselves. It’s also possible we had given up. Or were so
busy trying to lock someone else in that we shut ourselves out, too busy attacking
to protect.  

That first semester we had all been friends. It was only in the winter, when the First Gulf War began, that we tried to hurt each other. This was after watching the news every night: the bombs over Baghdad, the Tomahawk missiles flying in from the Red Sea. We didn’t know then how war would loom over our adult lives, how we’d move from one war to another without even realizing we’d moved. No wonder we were too tired to go to class, or care. No wonder we built so many walls, shut so many doors. It would be years before I quit sabotaging others, and still more before I realized there’s no end to the creativity we can control, it’s only that there’s a limit to how much emotion we can handle. I’ll prove it to you now. Tell me, when’s the last time you remembered we were still at war?

Paul Crenshaw is a writer and essayist. His essay collection “This One Will Hurt You” was published by The Ohio State University Press in spring 2019. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by Houghton Mifflin and W.W. Norton, Oxford American, Tin House, Brevity, North American Review, and Glimmer Train, among others.

Ghosts

The young Iraqi girl stared back at me, her face covered over in black; only her eyes shown out from under the cloth. For years the girl I saw in the marketplace haunted me. I used to wonder what she saw. We were almost the same height, and though I had armor and a weapon, she stood there across the street from me staring at me as though she couldn’t decide if I was a friend she’d once known long ago when she was child. We did not speak to one another, but I often wondered what I would have said to her, what she would have said to me. She stood beside her mother, who was waiting for water and aid from one of the soldiers who was handing out supplies from an LMTV truck bed. The girl’s hands were clasped onto one another, her gaze direct. Her abaya and hijab covered her figure and her hair, only leaving the eyes for me to see. They were restraints from her religion, but they did not seem to bother her. She had lived that way as long as she could remember. She watched her mother carry out the same routine in the morning before she ever left the house: this is how you wrap the hijab around the head to cover the hair, she would say, pin it here underneath the throat and wrap the rest up and over the head. As a girl, she practiced it every day. Now a young adult, the girl had a hijab that was perfect, wrapped tightly and neatly around her head, the black shielding her from me. Her eyes peered at mine, locked in an understanding that this was her home, her street, the marketplace where her father sold spices, and though I was only there to make sure she received water and medical aid, I felt as though I were an intruder. I smiled at her, and it was then that she looked at my rifle. Two days from now the marketplace will be a pile of trash, rubble, and bodies. She will be dead. Her mother will cry out for her, not knowing in the chaos where she is, and the next time I look at her in the eyes, there will be no life in them. But I did not know that now. Right now, she stared back at me, as if to acknowledge that we were both trapped, that at some point one or both of us will die, and that for a short while we must continue living, if only to come to the understanding that the world consists of people waiting to die.

The Only Stars I’ve Seen

The Paladin tanks of First Cavalry, Eight-Second Field Artillery, had been firing shell rounds for an hour, creating a low-lying fog around the base from the barrel smoke of their guns. Their constant firing echoed like thunder and the flash bangs from their turret barrels reflected off the smoke like lightning. The war-generated storm that had engulfed our base reflecting the mirage of a foreign battleground from history’s past. Atop the back wall of our base, our brigade colors flew true in the slight wind that had picked up. It had made the battle sounds of firing guns less persistent, as the artillery unit battled not only the wind but the incoming barrage of mortar rounds that were starting to land inside our concrete barrier–lined base.

It had been a few months since my near-death experience with the mortar round, but I still couldn’t sleep; the residual pain in my healing shin and the noise outside kept me awake. I’d climbed to the top of my tin-roofed hooch, and as darkness fell I sat there thinking about what every soldier far from any familiarity would think about—home. I thought back to Kyle and the last night I spent in his pickup, his hand trying to find a space on my leg—how he finally settled on my knee, firmly holding it with his sweaty palm. I remembered wishing that he had found a place for his hand closer than my knee. I thought back about what I could’ve said in the silence of that cab or what I could’ve done, but I knew only a good fuck and an “I love you” would have made him wait for me. I looked out beyond the concrete walls lined with razor-edged concertina wire and realized how stupid I’d been to leave home and come to this hellhole. All I wanted now was Kyle’s loaded “I love you’s” and the warmth of his suggestive hand on my knee.

The outgoing fire had ceased. The smoke from the barrels was too thick, making vision nearly impossible. From my perch, sitting in the rusted lawn chair I had acquired earlier from the smart-mouthed medic who lived behind me, I watched as the smoke slowly rose into the air. I’d been trying to fall asleep when the outgoing fire started, but I now found myself looking up at the night sky, waiting for the out- going guns to start up again. It was the only sound of war I looked forward to.

Whenever the cannon cockers of Eighty-Second Field Artillery began outgoing fire, it was tradition for Tina and me to watch the outgoing shells. The artillery unit had missions only when the sky was completely clear. Normally it was covered with smog, sandstorms, or clouds. Tina and I missed the clear skies of our homes in California—dark nights full of twinkling stars and crisp, cool night air that could suck the breath out of you if you didn’t wear enough layers. Of course it was dangerous to be outside because of the return fire, but we braved it. It was the closest we could get to seeing the night sky, a taste of home. I had gotten the bright idea one night to sit on top of the roof of our hooch while incoming mortar rounds were whistling into the perimeter of the base, but it only took one time for Tina and me to be sent scrambling from incoming mortar fire for her to say that she was never going up there again. But those nights were few in number. Most times I sat for hours by myself on the roof looking up at the stars. When Tina joined me, I’d sit down on the stoop with her, swapping funny stories or talking about our families, and sometimes we just sat without saying anything, just looking up at the clear night sky, listening to the incoming and outgoing fire.

Tonight Tina had been called into company headquarters for the first shift of radio duty, and so I was left alone to watch the night sky by myself. The military field chair I had acquired from outside of First Sergeant Hawk’s hooch stood beside me empty, as I sat in the white plastic chair I stole from a Charlie Company medic for mouthing off to me in the showers the night before. The smoke was beginning to lift, but I guess not fast enough for the Eight-Second’s gun bunnies because they began to shoot flares up into the night sky, staining it with red streaks of bright light. The flares’ light gave away my position, and Sergeant Lippert, who happened to be passing by, looked up and found me sitting on the roof.

“King,” he shouted up, “just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The sound of his hard voice shouting up to me made me jump. Soldiers were not allowed on their roofs because of safety issues, something Tina and I ignored at least once a week. We had managed thus far not to get caught.

“Hey,” I said, clearing my throat, trying to come up with a bullshit explanation that he knew was going to be a lie. “I just wanted to get a look at the action that’s going on by the back gate.”

He glared at me in disbelief. Normally soldiers didn’t intentionally put themselves in harm’s way, but that didn’t matter much to me anymore. He kept staring up at me. I knew he was contemplating whether or not my excuse for being on the roof warranted his attention. A couple of seconds had gone by before he looked like he’d come to the conclusion that I was up to no good.

He yelled at me and pointed to the ground, “Get the fuck down from there. It’s one in the morning. You don’t need to see anything but the back of your eyelids.”

I leaned forward in my seat and peered down at him. “Not to be a smart-ass or anything,” I said, as I gestured down at him, “but you’re not exactly slamming back zzz either.”

I was still sitting in my seat atop the roof when Sergeant Lippert stomped closer, with a heaviness to his stride like he was putting out a fire with each step. He didn’t looked pissed off, but his stiff and quick gate suggested he was none too thrilled at my remark. In a few seconds he was next to my front door and I was stuck on the roof, cornered. For a couple of seconds he disappeared and then reappeared again.

“Hey, King, how the hell did you get up there?”

I leaned out of my chair, cringing as if he was already within arm’s length of me with his hand stretched out trying to snatch me up. “You’re not going kick my ass or anything, are you?”

“No, now tell me how you got up there or I am going to kick your ass.”

For a split second I contemplated whether or not he was bluffing about kicking my ass, but looking down ten feet at him next to my front door, I realized that either way I was fucked. I sighed and said, “All you do is scale the side of the concrete bunker by sticking your feet in the metal rings on the sides. Then when you’re on top of the bunker, swing a leg up onto the roof.”

He started up, his combat boots slipping on the bunker wall. “It’s easy, once you get the hang of it,” I said, as I watched him struggle up the side. He looked like a dog trying to scale a chain-link fence to get to a cat. It took him three tries before he finally got to the bunker roof, and next thing I knew he was sitting next to me in First Sergeant Hawk’s chair.

“This chair looks familiar.”

“Really?” I said, looking away from Sergeant Lippert, who was inspecting the chair. “It’s Specialist Kennedy’s.”

Trying to shift Sergeant Lippert’s attention from the familiarity of the first sergeant’s lounge chair, I quickly changed the subject.

“So,” I said with a nonchalant smile, “what brings you up here?”

“I wanted to see if your bullshit excuse about being able to see the action was true. But from what I can see, you have a pretty good view of the back gate.”

“Yeah, well,” I paused. “That bit about the artillery wasn’t exactly true.”

We both looked at the back wall; the gun bunnies had reloaded the guns and were getting into position inside the turret. The fog from the guns had started to lift and the night sky was visible again—the stars breaking through the haze in patches.

“I thought so,” Sergeant Lippert said, as he shifted his weight in the chair to look at me. “So what the fuck are you really doing up here?”

“Don’t laugh, okay?”

Private, tell me what the fuck’s going on or I’m going drag you down from here,” he said, pointing to the ground, “and smoke the shit out of you.”

“Okay, okay.” I took a deep breath. I knew he wasn’t going to believe me, but telling him the truth was better than doing pushups until I couldn’t feel my arms. “Specialist Kennedy and I come up here when the artillery is going off because it’s the only time you can see the stars at night.” I pointed up to the sky. “That’s what we do up here.”

As I spoke, he looked up, then back at me, and then back at the sky as if to study if I was fucking with him or not. For a minute I watched him, his head tilted back, quietly looking up.

“You know,” he said, his voice dropping a little, “if you sit on the deck of my parents’ house back in Austin, Texas, you can see a whole sea of stars. So many stars, you can’t even begin to count them.” He leaned back in the chair, arching his neck so he could get a better view. “I used to love sitting out there on summer nights with my kids. I used to point out the constellations. The kids would point at other stars, trying to make them into different things.” He was smiling with his hands on his chest. “Jeanie, my youngest one, she loves horses. She’d swear up and down that Orion’s Belt was really a horse.” He laughed and glanced at me. “You couldn’t tell her anything,” he said, shaking his head, “stubborn, just like you.”

I looked over at him. He didn’t say anything for a minute but sat there quietly squinting up. I could tell he was thinking about the same thing Tina and I thought about when we came up on the roof to look at the stars—home. Though he was probably thinking about more memories of his wife and kids, I was thinking about my dad and where he lived now in Colorado. He always used to tell me about this lake, Turquoise Lake, where he would go camp out underneath the big Colorado sky. I wanted to be there now.

I turned and looked back up at the sky and said, “You know what’s great about the stars?”

“No, but I’m sure you’re going tell me,” he said, as a smirk cracked across his face.

“Constellations never move, only the earth does, so no matter where you are in the world, your loved ones are staring at the same sky as you are right now. It’s like looking up at a little piece of home.”

For a while, Sergeant Lippert sat there staring up at the sky. Then he looked at me and nodded before he got up from the rickety chair and started scaling back down to the ground. “You okay?” I asked, as I watched him move down the side of the bunker and then disappear out of sight.

Below me, the gravel shifted and rustled. I stuck my head out over the edge of the roof to make sure he’d made it down all right. After a moment he reappeared below, brushing off some dirt from his ACU top. He shouted up to me, “King, don’t fucking stay up there all night, you hear me?”

I smirked. “You got it, Sarge.”

I watched him walk down the aisle of hooches. He’d just disappeared around the last hooch on the corner when I heard Tina call to me. I chuckled at Tina’s skinny, gangly legs striding out of sync as she walked toward our hooch, flinging gravel behind her.

I called her name as she got closer to the door. She looked up. I smiled.

“No way in hell.”

“C’mon, I got you a chair.”

Slinging her M16 over her shoulder and scaling up the side of the bunker, she shouted, “We better not get in trouble for this!” I decided not to tell her about Sergeant Lippert or the fact that I had thrown her under the bus a little bit. As she made her way onto the roof of the bunker and then onto the roof of our hooch, I said, “You’ll be fine.”

“Where’d the chairs come from?”

Smiling coyly at her, I said, “You really want to know?”

With one eyebrow raised, Tina said, “Ah, something tells me no. I heard over the radio that the outgoing fire is going to start any minute now.”

“Did you happen to grab any munchies?”

She plopped down in First Sergeant Hawk’s chair, set her m16 next to her, opened both cargo pockets of her ACU pants, and pulled out two bags of Hot Cheetos. She handed me one of the bags.

“Thanks, battle.”

“Anytime,” Tina said, smiling.

Opening our bags of Cheetos, we leaned back in our chairs. We peered up at the clear night sky as we waited for the out- going fire to start up again, both content to sit and gaze at the stars all night. Again my mind wandered home. I missed the routine sounds of familiarity, the slamming of the front door, Grandpa yelling, “Don’t slam the door!” The low chuckle Nana used to make every time I purposely slammed it so I could hear Grandpa holler at me from wherever he was in the house. I missed Dad’s loud music, the crackled sound of the stereo blaring Grateful Dead that echoed in the driveway like an amphitheater. I missed how Dad burst in the door every night, yelling with a crescendo in his greeting, “Hello!” I thought about the last time I’d called home just to hear their voices. I’d only gotten the answering machine, the sound of Nana’s voice, “Hello, you’ve reached the Kings. We’re not home right now, but if you leave a name, number, and a brief message, we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you and have a beautiful day.”

I closed my eyes, trying to see the faces I knew so well. But the memory was blurred. I clenched my teeth in anger. I needed home right now.

“Do you think it’s too late to call the West Coast?”

Underneath her patrol cap, Tina was trying to figure out the time difference as though it were a calculus equation. Using a Cheeto and an invisible chalkboard, Tina leaned out of her chair, counting the hours with her Cheeto, trying to deduce the correct answer. Nodding her head in agreement at her calculations, she turned in her chair and said, “I think it’s only five in the afternoon in California.”

I lifted up my ACU sleeve and looked at my watch. It was one in the morning. Nana was always my first choice. Counting nine hours back from my time, I realized that it was only four in the afternoon California time.

“Tina, you suck at counting.”

“What?” she said, raising one hand in the air, a Cheeto caught in between her index finger and thumb.

“It’s four in the afternoon, not five.”

Throwing me a cocky look, Tina’s green eyes stared at me, daring me to challenge her again. “No, Brooke, it’s five.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, shaking my head. “You count back nine hours from our time. It’s one in the morning here, which means it’s four in the afternoon in Cali.”

With a furrowed brow, Tina threw a Cheeto at me. “Whatever.”

It bounced off my forearm and onto the tin roof. “Waster,” I said, leaning over and tossing it into my mouth.

I decided to give a phone call a shot, hoping to reach Nana. It was Thursday, which meant that she’d be home from her stint at Saint Therese’s, where she sat in the chapel every Thursday for an hour to pray. As I pulled out my phone—a red Motorola Razor, the only perk of being stationed so close to the Green Zone in Baghdad—I contemplated what to tell Nana. I couldn’t tell her that I was having a hard time being in Iraq and that I was seeing way more combat than I anticipated. You just didn’t say those things to Nana. She was a gentle and sensitive Old Italian grandma who got what she called “worrying stomachaches.” Ever since she’d had her bleeding ulcer two years back, I had tried not to worry her about my army stuff. She was having a hard enough time with the fact that I’d been deployed.

I dialed my home phone number, hoping that Nana would pick up. I let it ring twice but then closed the top of the cell phone and hung up. It felt wrong to call home, but I needed to hear her voice. Her gentle but frail voice always reassured me that everything, no matter how bad, was going to be okay. I opened the phone back up and dialed again. I sat waiting, looking up at the stars, thinking of my bedroom back home. For my seventh birthday I had begged my dad to buy me a packet of plastic stars that I could stick on my ceiling. Grandpa had said no, but Dad ignored him and bought them anyway. The night of my birthday my dad woke me up at midnight to give me my gift: the ceiling above my head covered with stars and even a glow-in-the-dark full moon. He had snuck up to my room and put them up while I was sleeping. Of course Grandpa was mad, but by the time I was in high school I had bought enough stars to cover the whole ceiling, so I had the constellations inside my bedroom. I looked up at the night sky and thought of my room with all the twinkling stars plastered to my blue ceiling as I sat there waiting for someone to pick up the phone at home, but it rang four times before going straight to the answering machine. Nana’s voice—a resonating crackled sound that echoed through the receiver I held to my ear. Tears welled in the corner of my eyes. From the other end I listened to the background noise of the greeting—the living room TV turned on, the sound of someone shuffling past in the kitchen, the distant sound of Molly, my Alaskan malamute, barking at the back door. As the greeting came to an end, Nana’s voice grew louder as she said to have a beautiful day. The usual cadence of silence passed before I was prompted by the answering machine beep to leave my message. In a shaky crackled voice I said, “Hi, Nana. I couldn’t sleep and just wanted to hear the sound of a familiar voice. I guess you’re still at the church, probably praying for me not to die here. I guess I’ll call tomorrow or something. I, ah . . .” I tried to rush the rest of my message before I totally lost it. “I miss you and love you. Talk to you later, bye.”

I slapped the phone shut and shoved it back into my pocket. I was a total wreck. I threw my hands over my face and bent forward, resting my head on my knees.

Looking up from her bag of chips, Tina asked, “You okay?” I turned my head toward Tina, wiped my tears onto my uniform, and said, “Ah, no. I think I successfully just left the worst message a granddaughter, who is at war, could’ve left on the family answering machine.”

Leaned back in the chair with her legs crossed, Tina canted her head toward me, raised her eyebrows, and nodded her head in agreement as she said, “Yeah, that was pretty bad.”

Chuckling, I wiped snot from the back of my hand onto my black pt shorts and said, “Oh gee, thanks, Tina.”

“Eat a Cheeto.” Tina handed me the one in her hand. “It’ll make you feel better.”

Shoving the Cheeto into my mouth, I let the hot flavor of the chip dissolve in my mouth, hoping that it would take away the longing for home that I felt, but it wasn’t making my home-sickness go away fast enough. I started shoving them in one after another until my mouth felt like I had just shoved ten habaneros inside of it, but I still didn’t feel any better. I didn’t feel anything but the need for the normality of home.

“Ease up on the Cheetos, Brooke.” Tina put a hand on my arm, preventing me from putting another Cheeto in my mouth. “You’re throwing those things back like some anorexic chick who hasn’t eaten in days.”

“Fuck you,” I said, spattering half-chewed debris from my full mouth.

Tina just shook her head at me, eased her hand off my arm, pulled another chip from her bag, turned to me, raised one of her Cheetos in the air, and said, “To home.”

I leaned over out of my chair, put my arm on her shoulder, raised a Cheeto, and with my mouth still stuffed full, I echoed her toast, “To home.”

A loud booming sound rippled through the air like a shock wave. The outgoing fire had begun again, but it didn’t bother me. I was thinking of my bedroom, of home.

“Ghosts” and “The Only Stars I’ve Seen” have been excerpted from War Flower: My Life After Iraq by Brooke King (Potomac Books 2019).

I don’t know your name, but we tried to kill each other once.

Do you remember it? It happened on November 5, 2005, on the second day of our big weeklong offensive in Husaybah, Iraq—a dense square of markets, mosques, and homes tucked into the corner where the Euphrates River meets the Syrian border. Nearly 2,000 U.S. Marines, me among them, had stormed into Husaybah before sunrise the previous morning. We had attacked across the trash-hewn desert west of town with our eyes coated with the green electric glow of our night vision goggles. We quickly smashed into the first row of homes and shoved our rifle barrels into the faces of the sleepy men who opened the doors and blew apart the locked doors of homes that had been abandoned. Children startled awake by our voices and our boots shrieked against their mothers in terror. I remember that.

Husaybah had been a violent place for us then. Plenty of our Marines had died there before we came, and our leaders wanted Husaybah mollified once and for all, and so we searched through your homes, sifted through your cupboards and closets, through your unmentionable things with the anger of a raw nerve. We looked for anything that tied the houses and people living inside them to Al Qaeda-in-Iraq forces, or ‘AQI’—just another letter set in the endless greasy sop of military acronyms.

On my second afternoon in Husaybah I stood on a roof and gazed out over the geometric madness of buildings that surrounded me. It was cloudy. Parts of the city crackled with rifle fire. You appeared around a corner of a wall that defined the small compound of a house the same way chain link fences surround our yards. I liked the walled compounds for their dominance and privacy—like fortresses. Gray metal fences are just ugly and noisy. Walls can last forever. You appeared from behind it wearing a dirty gray sweat shirt and pants, like the track suits worn by fat New Jersey mobsters. You already had the launcher on your shoulder. It was made out of white PVC pipe with a cheap wooden handgrip and a battery switch bound with electrical tape. We always laughed at them whenever we captured one. Compared to our shoulder-mounted anti-tank rockets, our wire-guided missiles, and our heat seekers, your homemade bazookas were shoddy and infantile, completely weightless against our intractable technology and sophistication. But we knew they could kill, and if we had found you before you fired it, or just simply found you carrying it, building it, handing it to someone else, or even burying it in your cousin’s backyard in a rage of benevolent rebellion against all war, we would have blown your body to pieces with high explosives that have been tested and refined and improved since the First World War. We would have scattered your atoms in a wide plume with a professional calculus learned and taught and relearned in the way of tradesmen, which is what the American military was and still is today: a profession of arms, trained to execute the final thousand meters of American foreign policy, which in this case was to kill you. We’re good at it. American troops train for battle like athletes and our officers study war like scholars. To us you are dilettantes, a junior varsity team. Many still feel this way.

Yet given all this you pivoted around a corner in a dirty sweat suit and aimed your homemade rocket launcher at my friends and me. As I sit here now I think about the resolve it must have taken to do that, to build this cheap weapon and aim it with the hope and faith against the best weapons in the world created by some of the richest nations in history. Surely you must’ve felt it when you wheeled around corner. Yet it didn’t seem to matter to you, did it? Was it God or money or hatred or maybe just boredom? You are an Arab man. An Iraqi man. A Sunni man, no doubt. Faith has driven plenty to violence. But so have debt, hunger, oppression, and just blind hatred. Did you shoot at me for those things? Can I blame you? There are many Americans, more Americans than I’m comfortable with, who stock their homes with firearms and talk as if an invasion is a real possibility, be it from some outsider or from their own government. But there is little chance of invasion for us. I am from a country that will likely wither and die by its own self-destruction.

But that wasn’t a luxury for you, was it? We were in your country uninvited. You turned from behind a corner to see a real invader. What did we look like to you? I imagine we looked like armored toadstools perched on your roofs with our black weapons held at our chests. I saw you. I saw your eyes. They were wide and filled with terror. Did our sight scare you? Your face was haggard, your hair and beard short and ragged. You looked like you were in your late twenties, perhaps older. It’s hard to say. I only saw you for a few seconds, but looking back and remembering . . . Yes, I’m certain you were maybe twenty-eight, thirty at the latest. You were older than me. I was twenty-five then. Thoughtful, but brash. I could almost hear you chanting your battle cry—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar—over and over and over again, begging your God for victory or maybe just to spare your life, your breaths short and fast as you quickly aimed and fired. Were your palms wet? When the circuit closed on your launcher your body was surrounded with a wispy cloud. I heard the rocket motor fire. A Marine near me yelled “RPG!”

***

Surely you remember the Persian Gulf War. How could you not? I was ten years old. My stepdad was in the U.S. Air Force then. He was sent to the Emirates to fix the American fighter jets we deployed after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was in fifth grade then. As I turned and walked up a broad snowy path between a set of houses on my way home from school a cold afternoon in January, I noticed my friend Chris trudging through the deep snow toward me.

“Come on, dude. Something’s going on,” he said. “I think it’s started!”

We waded through the snow and plopped cross-legged in front of the television in his living room. We watched titillated as the special news reports showed grainy night-vision video of your anti-aircraft tracers arching toward our fighter jets high above your capital city. Whenever the screen erupted with the white flash of an exploding bomb we cheered because we knew we had killed some of you. There was nothing gory about it. We didn’t see your blood or your body parts. It was clinical and precise. Even later, when we began to see the fuzzy bomb camera footage aired on the nightly news as 1,000 pound bombs crashed into bridges and factories and aircraft revetments, we saw the thermal signatures of your people—maybe your soldiers, maybe not, but all unlucky unlike us—become engulfed in the smoke and fire of our long-learned ability to destroy the human body.

Soon your whole army fell apart in front of us. When our tanks and armored vehicles crossed the border, you surrendered to us by the thousands, trudging across the desert half-dazed with your hands above your heads, flapping coalition leaflets imploring you to surrender. When you did fight us, it was almost cartoonish. Stories came back to us from the desert, or “The Sandbox” as we called it, of the shells from our main battle tanks punching through two and three of your tanks with a single shot and of bulldozers burying your troops alive right in their trenches. Just over 1,000 of our troops were killed or wounded fighting your country. To die as an American in the Persian Gulf War quickly became the unlucky punchline of a sad joke. We were so good at killing you that within four days of launching the ground offensive we annihilated an estimated 20,000 of you like we annihilate anthills in our backyards or roaches in our cupboards.

Our whole country felt as if we had returned to the heady day’s right after World War II, when America basked in the destruction of two of the ugliest regimes in the history of the planet. We used your body to eradicate the ghosts of our mindless destruction in Vietnam. We felt as if we had returned to glory, that a curse had been broken. Our money had killed the Soviet Union. Our bombs had killed your fellow Iraqis. Our army was confirmed best in the world. We were Americans, natives from the “city upon the hill,” citizens of God’s Country. We sang Lee Greenwood songs at school recitals. Your destruction was our absolution. We felt invincible.

Americans rarely seem to make the connection, but the two wars—the one our fathers fought in and the war where you and I finally meet—are really all part of one big war, at least in a spiritual sense. Our victory over the forces of your dictator gave us carte blanche to press our moralistic notion of empire upon your people through the use of our bolstered military confidence. Because of your indomitable dictator, coupled with a strain of American Exceptionalism, we despised you all collectively. After your generals surrendered at Safwan in March of 1991 we restricted your airspace and suffocated you with the boot heel of economic sanctions. We dangled food before your face in exchange for your precious oil. Sometimes Saddam Hussein took it. Other times he did not.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with your dictator, and certainly not your country, but I can’t help but think that many of your citizens saw the smoke and ash of the fallen World Trade Center, the cavity drilled into the side of the Pentagon, and the detritus of Flight 93 scattered across a field in Pennsylvania and realized with a quiet dread that your country, as proxy for your dictator, would inevitably be called to stand tall and answer for crimes real or imagined. If you didn’t, the subsequent rumblings and fist poundings from our punditry would have certainly signaled our brutal intentions. Americans wanted blood for the death of our citizens, and in many ways it was a completely justifiable desire. Our people were killed because of religious extremism, by Bronze Age clerics and zealots who failed to understand the concept of free will, and who harbored just as much sanctimonious moral superiority as the Western governments they claimed to loathe and sought to punish. You had nothing to do with it, but we came and made our demands anyway, and then we dropped more bombs.

I was a Marine by then. In late March of 2003 I watched our “Shock and Awe” air campaign smash Baghdad into rubble on CNN. I watched fire and high explosives rubble the skyscrapers of your capital with clarity of a dumb Michael Bay action flick. None of that grainy bomb camera footage that marked the opening moves in 1991. This was the modern era of the mass media spectacle. The scene felt like a cheap gratuitous facsimile of the first time, like a movie sequel that tried cover up a cheap plot with high-powered special effects.

Our leaders paraded themselves on television like conquering warlords before our troops had even crossed the border from Kuwait, counting the gold their hordes hadn’t even pillaged yet. We never discussed your plight or what you may have wanted for your own futures. You were never even considered. We just shrugged it off. We told the world we were coming to rescue you from the clutches of an evil dictator and that we would be greeted as liberators. It was only by sheer luck that the results of our hubris briefly matched your exuberate expressions of freedom when your fellow Iraqis beat on the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square with fists and the dusty soles of their shoes. But that exuberance didn’t last, did it? That same dumb hubris prompted a U.S. State Department toad named Paul Bremer to fire your entire defense industry, a move which put hundreds of thousands of trained Iraqi security personnel—men who wanted to rebuild your country, perhaps even you—right out of work and single-handedly created an insurgency (up to and including ISIS) that locked us into a quagmire for the rest of the decade. A hubris that killed and wounded so many of us and exacted a still-untold cost on you. It was the same hubris that put you and me at odds with each other.

***

And so here we are, back to the moment you closed the circuit on your homemade rocket launcher and tried to kill me. I might say you were brainwashed by psychopaths who arrived in the chaos of our occupation and who used the intellectual shackles of religion to make you a willing participant in my death. There is also the hard possibility these same psychopaths dangled a few hundred American dollars before your impoverished eyes, or maybe just pressed the hot blade of threats against the lives of your family in order to accomplish their bidding, which in this case was to kill Americans with a rocket propelled grenade.

Before I could seek cover behind the wall that surrounded the roof, your rocket exploded with a sharp crack against a building nearby. My veins were flooded with adrenaline and terror. My eyes had widened and my mouth drooped slightly. The sound reverberated across the madness of Husaybah for a number of seconds before it blended into the chatter of distant firefights. My joints felt stiff. I breathed slowly and began to unravel a knot of fear in my gut.

None of the others said much of anything. I suspect we were all ingesting just how lucky we had been. Had you raised the tube a few more inches your rocket might have carved a path right to the wall that surrounded the roof we commandeered, right to where we stood, and exploded with the same flash, spraying hot slivers of metal that might have pierced our bodies and punched frothy little holes into our livers and lungs. The sudden overpressure under our Kevlar helmets might have burst our eardrums and detuned our synapses. You might have killed us. But you were nervous and afraid, so you didn’t.

You appeared again a few seconds later. I saw you in a gap between two buildings as you ran. I knew immediately it was you who had fired the rocket because you looked back over your shoulder at us with wide eyes and a face that seemed to me as if grayed by terror. The emotions that arose in me in a millisecond I can only really describe as a crossbreed of disgust and atavistic rage, backed by the same glaze of self-righteousness that put us in your country to begin with. I was a member of the most skilled military on the face of the planet with the largest reach of any dominion since the British Empire. You were a terrorist from a broken nation. I raised my rifle.

Though it happened too fast to do so then, as I brought my rifle to my shoulder I could trace a trajectory of wanton caveman stupidity from your body to my barrel, through my rifle, and into my shoulder and beyond, all as a dark timeline of American foreign policy misadventures and the stone-crushing hubris of empire that created them. I could trace a hard red line back to the elected officials—thereby including many of us—who had read just enough glorified history to think America was somehow anointed with the right to interfere and manipulate the fates of other nations, as if your wishes, hopes, and aspirations for the future of your country seemed to be of little worth if they didn’t match our own. I can’t help but believe that to be true. We found nothing in your country. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear program. No terrorists but for those we ultimately brought with us, in part because of opportunistic religious thuggery, but also because of our ham-fisted American bombasticism.

For many years after 9/11, the United States, in many ways, became Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, chasing the White Whale of our national security through the “War on Terror” to all corners of the world. Like Ahab, we’re a nation with a wounded soul. A whole subset of our population refuses to allow itself to heal. Many of our people gnash their teeth with blood-thirsty indignation and rage, shaking their fists at lands they’ve never seen or even understand. Every anniversary of 9/11, we beat against our sores with old reels of doom and loss. Civic leaders, campaigning politicians, and even sitting statespersons routinely trumpet the call to arms with the fear of your hordes running through our streets with zealotry in your heart and a bomb strapped to your chest. They bang their gavels and shovel money and citizenry into the black maw of war to kill you, hoping that one more body—more than 200,000 civilian casualties in Iraq, so far—will pack that festering wound and finally bring peace. They do this in spite of the understanding that coming into your country was just a few short semantics away from being an outright war crime. But every time we lash out with drones, precision bombers, and surveillance measures the thin vindication that follows clouds a realization that every single bomb we drop, every bullet we fire, and every person we kill in the name of security only chips away at our overall safety. We will simply never be able to kill enough to bring about peace. But we’ll certainly try.

***

And so, with my rifle in my shoulder, I fired three shots.

My bullets struck out with the same thick vitriol that left my mouth when I saw you running away. I don’t remember what I said, but it was undoubtedly profane. My eyes were wide and white with controlled, but crystalline rage. The brass shell casings jingled against the concrete roof and settled. I clicked the rifle safety and let it rest against my body armor. I lit a cigarette. All that bile settled inside me and my heart rate slowed. The rage and indignation was suddenly replaced by a hollow sense of futility.

What am I doing on this roof with a rifle trying to kill you? I wondered. The thought left as quickly as it came; there was no sense in asking. But the hollowness remained and later grew, fueled with similar experiences. For many years after there was a small part of me that grew angry when I thought about you trying to kill me with a rocket propelled grenade. RPG’s are serious business, and you tried to kill me and my friends with one. Over the next few years I would think about you with the same self-righteousness that carried us to your country. Slowly, though, after I put away my rifle and left the service, the self-righteousness morphed into emotionlessness, then finally retrospection.

Regardless of my feelings, I’ve always wondered if you are still alive, and I have to recognize the odds are not in your favor. If we did not kill you before we left Iraq in 2011, then perhaps you died in Syria. Or maybe you were forced into ISIS—the monster that filled the vacuum once we finally left—and the threadbare Iraqi military cut you down, or perhaps we finished what we started and bombed you with our own airpower in our campaigning. Maybe you were killed by Kurds, or by pro-Syrian forces, or Syrian rebels, or perhaps by Russians. Or maybe you’re still out there, lost to the blinding winds of the Forever War, trapped by the flippant whimsy of our commitments.

I’ll understand if you don’t wish to hear any of this. Many things I write here are for you; some of them are for me. I cannot expect either of us to forgive the other for our intentions, nor can we reasonably ask for it. We intended to kill each other for reasons that were both out of our control.

Sometimes I daydream that perhaps the same futility that flooded me after I shot at you also filled your veins, and that you fled the war. I like to think you have a family, maybe a business, and you’re living in peace somewhere. Sometimes I wonder if there is ever a chance when you and I might walk through Husaybah and marvel at the stupidity of our insignificant little battlefield. I wonder if one day I will be able to talk with you, to explain to you how the world I lived in brought me to the world you lived in to destroy your life and finish ruining the lives of those who might have loved you. I want to explain to you what it looked like to see you in your town as I stood on its rooftops with the weight of an empire pressing me toward you. I want to show you the world we lived in when I came with my friends to kill you and others in the name of security for my people. We call it freedom and liberty, but what we really mean is security. I want to show you all the neuroses that fueled the tanks we sent rumbling across your streets and sent high explosives blasting into your home and the homes of thousands of others, neuroses that loaded the bombs onto our jets and dropped them from the clouds and turned to rubble the bones of so many of those you may have known. I want to show you how afraid of the world we had become and in many ways still are today. I want to show you the worth of all the tin gold trying to kill you has earned me, has earned us all. Unfortunately, that will have to wait; I’m still trying to tally its value.

But all these thoughts are nonsense and so I cashier them, yet I know they’ll return at bored moments while I am driving to work on a cloudy Tuesday morning. They’ll show up when I’m jogging, reading a book that I’ve grown bored with, or walking home from a bad date. But no matter how often I think of these things, whenever I think about those three bullets I shot at you and the fear and rage and blinding national stupidity that fueled them I’m always glad about one thing:

I’m glad I missed.

Michael Florez felt called to the Marines. “No greater love than dying for your brother,” the 42-year-old Oregon resident says. In 2004, Florez was deployed to Ar Ramadi, Iraq, with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines. He was the point man, the first guy in to clear buildings of Al Qaeda, Taliban and foreign jihadists. These missions scared the hell out of him because he worried about who would be shot; he wanted that bullet if it meant saving his brothers. He’d been warned that the first deaths in combat would be Marines he didn’t know well, but that each successive death would hit closer. “It was always up close and personal for me,” Florez says. At the end of his first deployment, he came home and locked himself in his house. Every day he stared at the walls, his brain replaying the scenes of fellow Marines dying. His wife would come home to find him curled up on the couch crying. 

Fourteen years and two more deployments later, Florez says every day feels like Groundhog Day. Small things, like hearing his children cry, can trigger a flashback, putting him right back in Iraq, lifting wounded Marines into the Humvee. Today, Florez still looks every inch an active duty Marine, clean-cut and shaven. In the past month he’s lost nearly twenty-five pounds. Eating makes him sick. There’s blood in his urine, and he’s worried about a recurrence of bladder cancer (he’s been in remission for more than a year). But it’s the depression that paralyzes him. There are weeks when he doesn’t leave the house, plagued by thoughts of what he might have done to save a fellow Marine and wracked with a physical pain so intense he’s thought about ending his life. 

“You come home,” Florez says, “and you’re fighting a whole other war with PTSD.” He lost fifteen comrades in combat, half of them right in front of him. Since returning from Iraq, eight of his buddies have committed suicide, one in the past month. The numbness Florez experiences is its own kind of hurt: “I love my kids, but the numbness keeps you from the love you should be able to feel, but you can’t because the pain’s too bad.” When Florez physically lashed out a family member, his wife turned to the Central Oregon Veterans Ranch.

Central Oregon Veterans Ranch (COVR), a nineteen-acre working ranch north of the city of Bend, opened in 2015. The Ranch is home to chickens, llamas, a productive greenhouse, and the Honor Quarters, a fully accredited Adult Foster Home that provides specialized end-of-life care to veterans. It is estimated that there are around 20,000 veterans in the tri-county area of Central Oregon—as of 2018, the Ranchhas served nearly one hundred of them. Many veterans find their way to COVR through family members, including Mike Florez’s, who are desperate for help. 

The Ranch is Executive Director Alison Perry’s life’s work. In 2007, Perry, a licensed professional counselor, was working at VA clinics in Bend and Portland and beginning to despair. She saw combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan being shuffled through a system that pushed pills and sent them home to families who felt helpless. Many of these veterans were abusing drugs and alcohol; they talked about suicide. In the meantime, Perry’s own brother, a pilot in the Army, was in Iraq, and she worried about him every day. Caring for veterans was a personal and urgent mission, and she felt like she was failing them. She remembers saying offhandedly to a colleague in Portland, “I wish we had a sheep ranch out east where we could send these guys when they got home…where they could work the land, sleep under the stars, and be in a community of other vets.”

During this time, Perry was also counseling combat veterans of Vietnam and Korea and noticing a common theme in their conversations about dying. Time and time again, older veterans spoke to her about their wish to die alone, away from family and friends. These men were afraid of losing autonomy and becoming a burden to their families. Perry’s vision of a refuge and place of healing began to take shape. How could she provide a safe environment for veterans to commune and heal, and, ultimately, to die?

Perry, 46, is an energetic woman whose reverence respect and concern for veterans is palpable. When she refers to the veterans at the Ranch as “my guys,” she touches her heart. In developing the unique model of COVR, Perry considered two of the biggest risk factors for suicide: the lack of a sense of belonging, and feeling like a burden. If the property was going to facilitate healing and nurture a sense of self-worth, it had to be more than just a gathering place for veterans; there had to be opportunities for meaningful work and purpose, and ways for veterans to develop a new sense of identity and self-worth. Since opening the Ranch, Perry has witnessed firsthand the “regenerative energy” of caring for animals and working the land.

The Honor Quarters look out to the snow-capped peaks of the Cascade Range. In the entry way, a sign reads, “Heroes Don’t Wear Capes. They Wear Dog Tags.” The Quarters feel like an inviting family home in the modern farmhouse style. A couch and chairs are drawn in close around the fireplace, which is covered in a distressed wood rendering of the American flag. The dining table is decorated with military challenge coins displaying the seals of different units in the Armed Forces. Each bedroom bears cozy, personal touches, like quilts donated by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a throw pillow with the word “Dream.” The Ranch is still awaiting grants and additional funding before it can house full-time residents, and as Perry leads me through the empty bedrooms, she expresses both grief and frustration that there are veterans who would benefit from being here right now. 

Ed Ford, a veteran of Desert Storm and Iraq, is a familiar face at the Ranch, and one of many veterans who are indispensable to COVR, according to Perry. Ford comes out at least twice a week to cut lettuce in the greenhouse or dig out irrigation ditches. He speaks with a strong Boston accent seldom heard in this small town in the high Oregon desert. At 53, he’s still a burly guy. He wears a tee shirt from a local multi-sport racing event. A tattoo of the Grim Reaper shadows his left bicep. Like all veterans at the Ranch, he is exceedingly courteous. Ford served twenty years in the Marines—he retired in 2004 and then spent the next eight years working for a private contractor doing security detail in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2011, he was the Director of Operations when the lead vehicle in a convoy returning to Kabul was destroyed by an IED. Five men were killed, among them Ford’s close friend, Ness. “Looking at him there on the slab, confirming his remains, I knew it could be me next.” Ford finished the job and got out.

These days, Ford tries to stay busy. He holds down two jobs but gets out to the Ranch every chance he gets. Working on the property provides“a good workout” and “burns out a day.” He says it is a relief to be around “like minded individuals” who understand what he’s gone through: “No one’s gonna judge you.” And he knows if he needs to talk, the veterans at the Ranch will be there.

Hanging out with the guys at the Ranch is one of the only things that brings Mike Florez some relief. The first time he went out to COVR, he was introduced to Vietnam vets and immediately recognized the look in their eyes: “the thousand-yard stare…they’d been suffering in silence too. It never leaves you.” Florez says it struck him that the older veterans had been struggling for more than 40 years, but they were still there, getting out of the house, and coming to work on the Ranch. 

“Maybe they can show me something that helps,” Florez says, smiling for the first time. “And maybe I can help the younger fighters getting out. They have no idea what they’re coming home to.” 

Contact the Ranch at info@covranch.org or COVRanch.org

Jean, not Jean

by Matthew J. Hefti

When I look in the mirror, I think I look stupid. Otherwise, I don’t even think of how I look. But when I do look in the mirror, it’s like I can’t look away. Also when I do, I pick a lot. Today is especially bad.

My mom said once that it’s anxiety from stress.

My dad said, he’s thirteen. What’s he got to be stressed about?

I’m pretty torqued on the way to school. I don’t really know why. I think it’s because I missed the bus. I missed the bus because I couldn’t stop picking at myself, and I think it’s because I can feel everything—like how tight my socks are and how my feet are already a little moist and my socks aren’t doing anything about it, and my shirt’s a little tight in the armpits and it’s pulling at my armpit hairs, and one of the hairs in my eyebrows is curled or something and it’s really annoying me, and I think maybe I have a hair growing in my ear. I’m not sure.

My mom asks what she can do to put me in a better mood.

I tell her that she doesn’t have to do anything.

She says my happiness is important.

It’s important to you, I tell her.

Jean isn’t at school today. He’s probably my best friend. He had an allergic reaction yesterday. He’s allergic to pretty much everything.

Mr. Rogers is subbing again because Mrs. Neumann is sick. Mr. Rogers hates when we call him that and tells us to call him anything but that. We called him all kinds of things for a while, like Mr. Fluffy Head and Poo Poo Bear, but it got boring because he really meant what he said about being able to call him anything. He didn’t care.

You wouldn’t guess it by his name, but Mr. Rogers is this tough looking dude that used to be in the military. He still has a flat top.

Mr. Rogers calls Jean’s name three times, pausing for infinity each time as if it’s not completely obvious there’s an empty desk and no one is responding. But he says it like Jean, like something you wear or like he’s a girl, but his name is Jean, like Victor Hugo’s hero. It rhymes with Shawn. You’d think he’d know that by now.

I’ve never read anything by Victor Hugo, but that’s what Jean’s mother always says when someone says it wrong: It’s Jean, she says. Like the greatest hero in western literature, drawn in full by Victor Hugo. Except she says litra-ture. And then if people say, who’s that, she won’t answer. She just snorts a little like they’re stupid.

I asked his mom once if I could see the picture of the Jean in the book. She said, What do you mean? I said, the one drawn by Victor Hugo. She snorted. I guess she thinks I’m stupid.

Jean told me that his mom named him that because the Jean in the book is like a kind of Christ.

I asked him what that was supposed to mean since there’s only one God.

He said, he’s not Christ. He’s a type of Christ.

I said, you can’t be a type of something if there’s only one of that thing.

He said he asked his dad about it once and his dad said that the only thing he’s the hero of is the miserable ones.

Who? I said. Jean or Christ?

Jean shrugged. Both I guess.

I used to call him Jean too. Even though it’s Jean, not Jean. Everyone did. He’s small and kind of nerdy looking. Plus he’s sick a lot, and saying Jean made us feel stuck up. But now most of us have gotten used to it. It’s just his name.

I didn’t call him Jean because he was nerdy. I called him that because he was my arch nemesis. He stole my job as milk monitor last year, when we were in sixth grade. Each of us had a class duty, and I had the best one.

It wasn’t the best because counting the orders and getting the milks at lunch was so great or anything. But the milk monitor for the fifth and sixth grade classroom had to go with the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth grade classroom. And Heather Saint James was the milk monitor for the seventh and eighth graders. Heather Saint James didn’t have the prettiest face—that was Jennifer Gohrman—but she did have the biggest boobs in the school.

The way it worked was, the older kid would bring the milk crate and wait by our door. That was like the signal to Mrs. Neumann that she needed to wrap it up. Then she’d say, raise your hand if you want chocolate. Then, raise your hand if you want white. You’d count the hands and then go to the gym closet with the older kid to get the milks, and then you’d bring them back.

Heather Saint James would put the milk crate on the ground to slide open the big fridge door to get the milks and put them into the crate.

I could see right down her shirt where those big heavy things were hanging. While she waited for me to stammer the count for our class, she would stay bent over like that with her hand on the bottom shelf. Like she didn’t even realize they were there.

To get to the gym closet, you had to walk through the whole school and then finally the principal’s office. You could go through the gym instead of the principal’s office, but we weren’t allowed to go that way.

When I was in fifth grade and David Pfeiffer was the milk monitor, I thought they made them go through the office because they were afraid the milk monitors would start playing in the gym on the way there. That was before Jean even went to our school.

But then when I got older, I realized that didn’t make any sense because all the balls and toys and stuff were stored in the gym closet, which is where you had to go to get the milks anyway.

After I had spent some time as the milk monitor myself, I realized they made you go through the principal’s office because they were probably afraid that if you went through the gym, you’d probably goof off in other ways. I never did though.

Jean says I chickened out and had plenty of chances, but that’s not what happened. What happened is that he stole my job.

One day while I was doing the sweater stare—it was fall by then—I had forgotten the count when Heather Saint James asked me the numbers. I thought fast and gave her two numbers that added up to eleven. That’s how many students we had in our class after all.

But Jean doesn’t drink milk. He’s allergic. According to his mom, deathly allergic. So the real number was supposed to add up to ten.

I should have guessed that anyway because that’s how many kids had been in my class my whole life until Jean showed up. But I remembered the new kid made us eleven.

It wasn’t the first time I had gotten the numbers wrong. It wasn’t even the first time I made the mistake of bringing back eleven milks. But the first time I did it doesn’t count. I just did it that time because I thought that Mrs. Neumann would let me have the extra chocolate instead of taking it back.

She didn’t like that.

I told her I couldn’t take it back because Heather Saint James already went back to her classroom.

She told me that she was sure I would find my way. She was always saying that, even when it didn’t make sense in context.

The time I forgot the numbers on accident, she asked why I brought back the wrong number of chocolate milks again.

I told her it was because I forgot Jean was allergic to milk.

She said, you know who won’t forget that Jean is allergic to milk?

No, I told her.

Jean. That’s who.

So she made Jean the milk monitor.

When I told my dad what happened, he laughed and said, Well, there’s dramatic irony for you.

I was pretty mean to Jean for a while. Then one day he asked why I cared about being milk monitor so much, and I told him it was obvious.

He said it wasn’t obvious to him.

I mentioned Heather Saint James.

He said, that’s it? Then he claimed he didn’t care about that because he could look at all the boobs he wanted because they had the internet at home. I think he just wanted me to like him.

He offered to stick his finger in one of the milk cartons so I could get the job back. I think he wanted to be liked so badly that he would have really done it, but I told him not to because they might give the job to anyone. And if someone else got the job, he’d just be risking his life for nothing.

It made me feel bad that he was so obsessed with being liked that he would risk his life to get a friend and also give up the chance to sneak peeks down the shirt of Heather Saint James.

So I said sorry for being so mean and that I wouldn’t view him as my arch nemesis anymore.

After me and Jean became friends, I asked him why he came to our school.

Jean said the public school told him he missed too many days. He didn’t want to be stuck in fifth grade.

So I asked him why he could be in sixth grade in our school when everyone said it was harder than the public school.

He said the state couldn’t tell our school what to do. Then he said our school was just as easy as public school. But going to any school is a waste of time, he said.

He had a point there.

When I asked him why he didn’t just get home schooled, he said his mom told him that all home school kids are weird.

He had a point there too.

But why our school? I asked. You’re not even Christian.

Yes I am, he said.

But you don’t go to our church, I pointed out.

Are you stupid or just brainwashed? he asked.

I told him he could use some milk of human kindness.

We both had a good laugh at that one.

It was milk that gave Jean the reaction yesterday, but it could have been anything considering practically half the normal foods in the world are like phosgene or mustard gas to him. I learned about phosgene and mustard gas yesterday in history class, not from Mr. Rogers, but from Jean.

When history class started, Mr. Rogers asked what we were learning about from Mrs. Neumann.

Jean told him World War One.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand and said, why do we always have to learn about wars in history class?

Mr. Rogers told her it was because wars were like the epicenter of an earthquake in a country’s timeline with seismic waves moving out in every direction. If you wanted to, he said, you could pick any given war and study the whole country’s history just by studying that war. You could ask yourself what led to the war and then what were the consequences of the war. By asking what led to the war, you could go as far back into history as you wanted. By asking what the consequences of the war were, you could study all the history from the war until the present and then as far into the future as infinity if you wanted.

Tabby Gardner told him we’d already been studying World War One for infinity.

I have to admit, I was pretty bored myself.

Well, Mr. Rogers said, if a war is like an earthquake in a country’s timeline, then wouldn’t a World War be like an earthquake in the entire world’s timeline? So doesn’t it make sense to spend time studying it?

Okay, Tabby Gardner said, but we already know everything about it.

Then tell me what you know about the war, Mr. Rogers said.

Jean raised his hand, like always.

Mr. Rogers said, I want to hear from Tabby. But then she didn’t say anything for a long time, and Mr. Rogers called on Jean, like always.

Did you know, Jean said, that in World War One, they used phosgene and mustard gasses? Also, did you know that the Germans would hit troops with gasses that could get through the gas masks? It would hurt their eyes and nose and stuff so bad that they would take off their masks, even though that could kill them. Then after taking off their masks, they’d inhale the phosgene and mustard and stuff like that. Their lungs would start to blister and their eyes would bleed or they’d start coughing so bad they could puke up their stomachs and all sorts of stuff.

Tabby Gardner raised her hand.

Mr. Rogers called on her.

Real prissy she said, can we please not talk about blistered lungs and puked up stomachs?

You could tell Mr. Rogers was thinking about it because he didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he said, so like I was saying before about the earthquakes, I actually know a guy who got messed up really bad—big red oozing blisters all over his body—after he put a mustard round in his truck thinking it was a regular old projo.

Then he told us all about IEDs made with chlorine tanks, stock piles of mustard rounds, troops that got gassed that couldn’t get benefits once they got home, and how the whole reason we were there was because some General convinced the UN that there were WMDs there.

Jean ate it up. He loved that kind of stuff.

But what happened with the milk yesterday was, after history class we had lunch. I was reading the joke on my milk carton, and I said, I don’t get it.

The jokes were like numbered in a series. Everyone with a number five, for example, would have the same stupid joke. An example would be, Why was the cow jumping up and down? Because it wanted a milkshake. But that wasn’t the actual joke yesterday.

Mr. Rogers was at his desk eating his lunch and drinking his milks—he always ordered two chocolates. He asked me what number I had.

Twelve, I told him.

Me too, he said. It’s a pun.

But I don’t get it, I told him.

He said, you know back when I was in school, milk cartons didn’t have jokes. They had pictures of missing kids.

But these have jokes, and I don’t get this one.

Instead of jokes, we’d have to look at pictures of these kids who were abducted, he said.

Jean asked what the joke was.

Mr. Rogers said, it’s not a joke. It’s a pun.

Then Jean said, well then read me the pun.

Mr. Rogers said, you wouldn’t get a pun like this if I told it to you. You have to read it.

I can’t read it myself, Jean said. I’m allergic to milk.

When I was a kid, Mr. Rogers said, we didn’t have all these allergies either. All this helicopter parenting. Kids are too sheltered these days. Protected from everything so they can’t handle anything.

I think Jean didn’t want to look weak in front of Mr. Rogers. He grabbed my milk carton to look at it for himself. And I guess a little spilled on him or something because it wasn’t long before he started turning red and wheezing and everything.

It’s a good thing Mr. Rogers was subbing that day, because Mrs. Neumann probably would have freaked out. She’s the nervous type, but Mr. Rogers has all that war training.

Mr. Rogers acted all calm like it was no big deal. He asked Jean if he had an EpiPen and where it was. It was in his desk, so Mr. Rogers grabbed it in no time and gave him the shot. Then he pointed at someone and said, you, go down the hall and have the secretary call 911. Then he pointed at me and said, you, go in the top pocket of my backpack by the right side of my desk. There’s an EpiPen in there. Bring it to me.

In pretty much no time, the ambulance had come to take Jean to the hospital.

Mr. Rogers said it was just a precaution.

Jean loves Mr. Rogers. Every time he subs, Jean spends all recess talking to him, and Mr. Rogers doesn’t seem to mind.

But today at morning recess, Mr. Rogers just stands at the corner of the soccer field with his hands in his pockets. He swings his foot back and forth like he’s kicking apart an ant hill or something, but he does it the whole time. He never looks up at the kids to make sure we’re not fighting or anything.

Mr. Rogers looks pretty lonely without Jean there. But before recess is over, the principal comes out and says something to him. Mr. Rogers doesn’t say anything back. He just goes inside early and the principal follows after him.

I asked Jean once why he wanted to waste all his recess time talking to the teacher about boring stuff like history.

He said we had to study history because those who don’t study history will be doomed to repeat it.

Sounds like the opposite would make more sense. If you don’t know about it, it would be pretty random to repeat it, which makes repeating it seem pretty unlikely.

I told him so, and he said we should ask Mr. Rogers what he thought.

I told Jean I’d just take his word for it.

But I guess Mr. Rogers is pretty lousy at the whole not repeating history thing. What I mean by that is, Mr. Rogers isn’t in the classroom when we get back inside from recess. While we’re all just waiting around, I hear Paisley Schmitt say they fired him because he was talking about bleeding eyeballs and coughed up stomachs during history class yesterday.

That makes sense coming from her.

I say that because the first time Mr. Rogers subbed for us, he told us not to ask if he killed anyone unless we wanted him to kill us. Then the principal made him apologize to the whole class after Paisley Schmidt narced on him to her mom.

And it’s doubly believable because Mrs. Neumann shows back up, even though she still looks sick and sounds like she’s going to cough up her stomach.

I don’t think Mr. Rogers is as great as Jean does, but I think he’s okay. He says bad words sometimes when he’s telling stories, and you don’t often get to hear a teacher say swear words. It’s easy to distract him and his stories are pretty good. Better than Mrs. Neumann’s anyway.

But that’s kind of just how he is. He’ll talk to you like you’re on the same level.

Like when he started his apology speech after Paisley Schmitt narced on him. He said, apparently, you’re not supposed to talk about killing with middle schoolers. You could tell he thought the whole thing was stupid by the way he said apparently.

Me and Jean had a good laugh at that too.

Zone Rouge

(for the centennial)

1.
When the land was.

2.
Full of bodies dead. And twisted.

3.
When the fighting was.

4.
Sustained.

5.
With bodies. Dead. Twisted on a riverbank.

6.
Wrist bent. Hand hovers. Over water.

7.
Dead bodies with fingers. Like feathers.

8.
Stretched feathers or the calamus.

9.
Attaching to bird skin.

10.
These are bodies. Bodies of war.

11.
Dead with. Feathered fingers.

12.
Wing of a bird.

13.
300 days of shelling.

14.
The shells were 240 mm. Full of shrapnel.

15.
Mustard gas.

16.
Hitting men and hitting ground.

17.
Making holes. Upon impact.

18.
Shrapnel bursting.

19.
Bloom and rip.

20.
Ripping through dirt and faces.

21.
Ripped skin. Ripping off tissue.

22.
A nose.

23.
Hole in the center of an ear.

24.
Exposing canal and bone.

25.
Missing teeth. One lower jaw is.

26.
Gone. A set of lips.

27.
The chunk of a chin.

28.
And the shells. Shells from Verdun.

29.
Are still there.

30.
Unexploded ordnance. Sunk.

31.
Into dirt pockets. Like seeds.

32.
This blooming. Metal war.

33.
Shrapnel that looks like rocks or.

34.
Smooth egg of a bird.

35.
Soil made of mud and men and metal.

36.
How. Metal leaches and clings.

37.
This soil of war.

38.
Chlorine and lead and mercury and arsenic.

39.
Where every tree and every plant and every animal.

40.
Each blade of grass.

41.
Where 99% of everything died.

42.
Ground stripped raw.

43.
Stripped earth tissue or how this is.

44.
What war also.

45.
Also does.

46.
Damage to properties: 100% 

47.
Damage to agriculture: 100%

48.
Impossible to clean.

49.
Human life impossible.

50.
The government declared it uninhabitable. 

51.
A no-go zone.

52.
Broken skeletons of villages.

53.
And the craters that bombs make.

54.
Deep and round holes.

55.
How the bomb craters filled with water.

56.
Making. War ponds.

57.
This is a place.

58.
Where almost everything died.

59.
But the land.

60.
The land was still alive.

61.
Grass stretching again and.

62.
Grafting itself over the bone.

63.
Bone of what happened.

64.
Stretching over trenches and scars.

65.
Like new skin.

66.
And plants and trees and vines.

67.
Rodents and snails and voles and mice.

68.
Deer. Wildcats with metal stomachs.

69.
Still living I say. To my husband.

70.
Who went to war.

71.
War that he did not want.

72.
Afghanistan.

73.
How he came home with hands and feet.

74.
Covered in blisters. Lesions the doctor said.

75.
Skin burning. Waking up to him crouched.

76.
On the floor and scratching. Saying I don’t know.

77.
And I know.

78.
That this is how war is.

79.
Or later. I will lay in the darkness.

80.
And think about burn pits in Iraq.

81.
Black smoke and jet fuel and fumes.

82.
About Vietnam sprayed. The bare mudflats after.

83.
Defoliation of trees. And birds. Missing mangroves.

84.
How dioxin poisons wind. Sleeps. In a river or sediment.

85.
The fatty tissue of a fish. Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and.

86.
Nagasaki. The incineration of bodies and land.

87.
Tearing skin off people. Tearing trees out of ground.

88.
Tearing everything.

89.
Away.

90.
How black rain fell. Radioactive bomb debris.

91.
Into mouths. Of people and rivers.

92.
How radiation lives. In grass and soil. The intestine of a cow.

93.
About the GWOT. Blood soaked years and streets and.

94.
How many miles of land. Where we left bombs.

95.
Unexploded or forever.

96.
I will think about Zone Rouge.

97.
Trenches like scars.

98.
My husband gardening. The tendons in his arms.

99.
Moving like trees.

100.
Or how war never goes away.

                                                                Amalie Flynn

                                                                October 2018

“The Interpreters,” a new documentary film by directors Sofian Khan and Andres Caballero, is a raw, emotionally vigorous, and, only too often, devastating look into the lives of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters and their efforts to flee home for the United States.

When it comes to narratives of the Forever Wars, interpreters consistently rate as some of the most important people working on the ground, frequently appearing in the novels and nonfiction works coming out of these conflicts, darting the intricately woven fabric of U.S.-focused narratives as charismatic, generous, and occasionally suspect men of two worlds. Very rarely, if ever, do they get to speak for themselves. This film gives them that opportunity.

“The American forces…call us interpreters, not translators,” a resonant voice narrates over opening frames of desert sand, Americans on patrol, soldiers and villagers deep in conversation. “The translator, he will just translate the word, exactly. We are interpreters. We interpret what they say to our soldiers, and what the soldiers say to our people.”

According to the documentary, over 50,000 local nationals have served with U.S. military and coalition forces since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But these so-called invaluable assets have found themselves flung forcibly from one fire into another, having been labeled traitors by their home countries for aiding outside forces, only to find themselves unable to acquire the necessary visa to enter and resettle in the United States.

Khan and Caballero make three such men the narrative focus of “The Interpreters,” which debuted at Telluride Mountainfilm Festival during Memorial Day weekend, 2018. “Philip Morris,” a quick-witted chain-smoker from Iraq; “Mujtaba,” a protective and desperate father of three from Afghanistan; and “Malik,” an Afghan interpreter still serving with the U.S. Air Force, whose striking features are half-concealed by a keffiyeh throughout the film. They are men who, were it not for the efforts of the filmmakers who sought them out, would otherwise be names on bureaucratic paper, anonymous victims of the machinations of the U.S. government.

Phillip Morris, Mujtaba, and Malik are three representatives of a significantly larger whole, men who were promised Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) by the U.S. government in exchange for their work as interpreters. They did this work at risk to their lives and the lives of their families. “When I started working with the U.S. Army, I was trying to help them to help us,” says Phillip Morris. “We spent our lives suffering because of Saddam’s regime.” With the outside support and aid of his best friend, Minnesota National Guard veteran Lt. Paul Braun, Morris’s SIV application moves through the doldrums of Washington bureaucracy and—after some tense back-and-forth traveling between the U.S. and Iraq—eventually sees Morris and his family safely relocated to Minnesota. According to the documentary, by law, the application and approval process should take no more than nine months. Morris’s takes four years.

Were it in Hollywood’s Midas hands, “The Interpreters” would be made as a kind of filmic victory lap with Morris as the only subject, a golden testimonial to the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and the generosity extended to interpreters by our government. Of the three subjects in the film, Phillip Morris is the resounding success story, and certainly carries the bulk of the narrative. But what Khan and Caballero have done—smartly, and well—is avoid the gilded trap almost entirely. They choose not to rest on the laurels of Phillip Morris’s story alone, and instead show a range of experiences that are far more indicative of what it means to be an interpreter marked for death while waiting, interminably, for a promise made by a foreign government to be upheld.

In Mujtaba’s case, the waiting becomes impossible, and he flees the country with his wife and children. After arriving in Turkey, Mujtaba seeks out a smuggler who can take him and his family to Greece. In their desperate attempt to cross the Aegean Sea, the small smugglers’ boat capsizes, and Mujtaba’s wife and two of their three young children drown.

Following their rescue at sea, Mujtaba and his son are returned to Turkey. Now refugees, they are forced to try and negotiate the SIV application process while simultaneously avoiding deportation. Mujtaba is adamant in his belief that his wife and two children are still alive, and enlists the help of a volunteer from a refugee organization to look for them. It’s a painful thing to watch, knowing what Mujtaba is risking by living in denial and extending his time in Turkey because of it. The longer he stays behind to look for his family, the less tenable his refugee status becomes, and if his SIV is not approved, Mujtaba and his young son will be forced to return to Afghanistan.

It is a life lived between impossible choices, every one of which is likely to end in some degree of tragedy. Mujtaba eventually receives approval from the State Department to continue with the SIV application process. The approval, unfortunately, comes two months after his wife and two children drowned in the Aegean. He continues to refuse to go anywhere without them.

Throughout the film, American voices—both military and civilian—maintain what is (or should be) abundantly clear to anyone watching the film: Iraqi and Afghan interpreters are service members of U.S. and coalition forces, and they are being abandoned. It is an ongoing injustice, an ugly stain not only on the U.S. military, but the government that sent those Americans into Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place.

Journalist George Packer, who appears in the film, authored one of the most significant contributions to the conversation surrounding interpreters, SIVs, and America’s responsibility toward the people it enlisted to help fight its endless wars in 2007. Packer’s New Yorker piece, Betrayed, drew back the curtain on what was already a messy issue at the time. Reading it eleven years later, one can easily imagine seeing Malik, Mujtaba, and Phillip Morris’s names in place of those like Othman, Laith, and Ali, given how similar their stories are, the events and struggles of earlier years repeating themselves ad infinitum with each generation of interpreters looking for a way out. It could just as easily be Malik on camera in Afghanistan telling us what Laith told Packer in Iraq so many years ago: “Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”[1]

In the film, Packer—who reinforces the importance of interpreters in these ongoing conflicts—attempts to draw a line between past and present by referencing the unofficial evacuations from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War and the interpreters being left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan today: “For some Americans, their finest hour in Vietnam was at the very end, and I wondered if something like that was happening in Iraq—were people organizing some kind of exodus for their Iraqi contacts? It wasn’t as clear-cut a situation. But if you’re an Iraqi who’s gotten a death threat, it doesn’t matter.”

When the Americans began their own gradual exodus in 2011, Morris knew he faced an uncertain future. “I told [Lt. Paul] Braun, I told him, ‘When you leave, what’s going to happen to me?’”

In the case of Malik, another Afghan interpreter and the third subject of the film, that abandonment is a very real life-or-death issue. A marked man (his sixteen-year-old brother was beaten for information regarding Malik’s whereabouts), Malik is forced to move his family from house to house and never shows his face out of doors. The film follows him as he continues to serve as an interpreter while he waits on a response to his SIV application.

Malik holds to his belief in America’s mission in Afghanistan despite knowing that he cannot stay to help rebuild his country when and if we leave. He works diligently under the pall that is the outstanding threat on his life: “As I go to my work location,” he says, “I won’t take the same taxi, the same bus, and I won’t take the same gate every day. Daesh, Talibs, Al Qaeda…if they find out that I’m still presently working with the U.S. Air Force in Kabul, they may get me, and they’ll kill me.”

The SIV program for Iraqi interpreters was enacted in 2008, but stopped accepting new applications in September 2014, leaving tens of thousands of people—interpreters and their families—in the lurch and forcing them to go through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for resettlement, to little to no success.[2] The same SIV program was extended to Afghan interpreters in 2009 (the Afghan Allies Protection Act) and is still active, but the number of applicants accepted dwindles with every passing year. According to Human Rights First: “As of July 2017, over 11,000 Afghan principal applicants and 13,000 of their family members are still waiting at some point in the application phase.”[3]

In the end, too many people are being forced to fight over too few visas—for those principle applicants and their families, for example, a grand total of 3,500 SIVs have been allocated for fiscal year 2018.

“The Interpreters” is a visually striking and narratively incisive investigation into a human rights issue that is as long and convoluted as the Global War on Terror itself. Interspersed with cell phone camera footage throughout, it is very much a documentary of the moment, immediate and jarring, and the stakes are all too real. Any faults are few and far between, a roughness in the editing that does little to take away from the effectiveness of the whole.

In a film full of emotionally resonant scenes, the one that arguably strikes the strongest chord is also the most subdued, the most well-earned: late in the film, having just watched Phillip Morris reunite with his family only to hear Trump extoll the virtues of the Muslim Ban seconds later, one feels braced for the worst. It’s impossible to forget, after all, that while throngs of protesters outside John F. Kennedy Airport chant “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here,” that Mujtaba’s wife and children remain lost to the sea.

But then we see Malik, in 2017. A long white line at the bottom of the screen illustrates the amount of time it took the U.S. government to grant him his SIV. It is a freedom moment, a cause for joy, as much as it is a long pause that carries the weight of six long years of mortal uncertainty. We see Malik, and his quiet reveal reminds those of us on the outside looking in that a face is just a face, except when it is a target.

Malik and his family arrive in America in early 2017, just under the wire of Trump’s initial ban. His success is nothing short of a statistical miracle: between January and April 2018, only thirty-six Iraqi interpreters and their families were admitted into the United States.[4]

Khan and Caballero have made a landmark documentary, a film that is by turns devastating, uplifting, enraging, and only too timely: as of this writing, the Supreme Court of the United States has voted to uphold Trump’s Muslim ban, sparking renewed outrage among American citizens and recalling the most inhumane of Supreme Court decisions past. Having watched “The Interpreters,” I can only wonder what thoughts are on Phillip Morris’s mind. Is Malik at risk of being deported? How is Mujtaba—still a refugee in Turkey at risk of being deported back to Afghanistan—contending with this latest in a long series of setbacks?

Because of the Supreme Court’s decision, it stands to reason that by this time next year, thirty-six Special Immigrant Visas will seem like a lofty goal.

Early in the film, Malik says, “I hope that they won’t forget what I do for them.” Facing away from the camera, he looks out across the American base in Kabul, his body silhouetted between an aircraft hangar and a broad swath of dusty blue sky, tracking a single C-130 as it flies up and over the sun-bleached mountains in the distance. In that moment, Malik could be any one of the thousands of interpreters left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan—men still biding their borrowed time behind threadbare keffiyehs in the hot sun, waiting for a piece of paper to decide their fate.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/26/betrayed-2

[2] https://www.stripes.com/news/us/special-visas-dwindle-for-afghan-iraqi-interpreters-1.524194

[3] https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/resource/afghan-special-immigrant-visa-program

[4] https://www.stripes.com/news/us/special-visas-dwindle-for-afghan-iraqi-interpreters-1.524194

Matt Young is a writer, teacher, and veteran. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good. You can find his work in Catapult, Granta, Tin House, Word Riot, and elsewhere. He teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Centralia College and lives in Olympia, Washington. His first book, a memoir titled Eat the Apple, is out now from Bloomsbury Publishing.

WBT: In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino, the Italian novelist and World War Two veteran, discusses how he “gradually became aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world—qualities that stick to writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.” Calvino then relates the myth of Perseus and Medusa. Perseus, Calvino argues, not only kills Medusa with his shield’s reflection, but must also carry the burden of his experiences—and Medusa’s head—with him indirectly; otherwise, he will, well, turn to stone. Perseus’s strength, Calvino claims, “lies in his refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden.”

I have found this a useful metaphor for the problem of relating war experience. Too literal, you kill the experience. Too abstract, you don’t say anything at all. It is also the first thing I thought of when I encountered Eat the Apple’s humor, diagrams, cartoons, and pronouns (“you” and “we” and “Recruit” and “Young,” instead of “I”). Can you talk to us about how and why you decided to recount your military experiences indirectly?

YOUNG: The change in POV started off as art imitating life. In Marine boot camp you’re required to refer to yourself as “Recruit So-and-so” and it felt unnatural to write a story about boot camp using “I” so I let the third person do work there.

I struggled with the fact that most war memoirs I’d read had some kind of extreme circumstance at their center—that kind of Special Forces narrative that inundates the media these days. My experiences by comparison seemed tame and silly. But I thought about all the grunts I’d served with who’d had similar experiences over the four years we were together and I thought about all the battalions that had replaced us in country full of similar guys who’d also had similar experiences. Those two thoughts gave rise to that communal first person plural voice—I realized it was best to lean into that idea of not having a unique experience, painted myself as no different than any other.

Lots of early pieces I wrote were ‘How to’ stories. Some of those made their way into the final draft, but many more changed focus later on. That highly imperative second person, felt like it confronted both military and civilian complicity in Iraq. But ultimately, the second-person perspective loses its power quickly because it often forces the audience to acknowledge they’re reading a story in ways other perspectives don’t so I tried to keep it to a minimum and fit it with form to make it feel more natural.

I also found that those other perspectives helped me confront my past actions in a less direct manner and helped me be more honest about who I’d been and what I’d done. They made me feel less alone, took me off the page and put me next to the reader and let me show them something I couldn’t have with just “I”. There’s something about the removal of the “I” that let me cut a little deeper.

WBT: The essays in Eat the Apple are relatively short and incredibly poignant. I experienced each and every one like a punch to the gut. Did this economy come into your writing naturally? Or did you have to refine longer essays into the powerful vignettes they became?

YOUNG: When I started writing I set off to write flash. I wanted the essays to mimic memory, and flash felt like a natural fit. It’s often how I remember moments—a smell or image or sound recalls a tiny thing and sends it zipping through my brain for a microsecond and then it’s gone, but I’m left thinking about it and reflecting on it sometimes for days.

I didn’t write or journal during my time in the Marines so I had to do a lot of memory recall exercises, late-night texting of former platoon mates, and research online to find incident reports. That process itself felt fractured, which also seemed to fit what I was trying to do—piecing together four years of experience and emotion to make a narrative.

I love the lyricism that generally comes with flash essays—it felt like a fantastic way to spice up the sometimes complete banality of war. In the beauty of those lyrical descriptions the horror of what I’m writing about maybe becomes a bit easier to stomach for a reader as well—that’s the hope anyway.

WBT:  In a Time Magazine essay, you write the following: “I tried to fictionalize what I’d done because I wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge that I never fulfilled that manly heroic expectation people have of military service.” As someone who writes fiction, I found this unsettling (in a good way). Could you expand on what you meant here and maybe tell us a little about what you consider the relationship between fiction and nonfiction?

YOUNG: It happened on two levels for me. My senior Marines had fought in Fallujah. I saw them as the peak of manhood, real heroes. They’d been in firefights, cleared houses, killed people. I wanted to have done those things then. I’d been told those men were the pinnacle of maleness and I was so uncomfortable in my skin and lacked so much confidence as a young man that I was an easy sell and bought in fully. Then, when I got home after my first deployment I didn’t feel like I’d measured up to them and when I went to tell my family and friends about what war was like, I felt like I didn’t measure up to their expectations, either. So I made up stories to tell them, made my experience more like my seniors’. I lied. And I kept lying for years because it made me feel good and it kept me from having to reflect about what I’d done and what had happened.

Then, by the time I got to undergrad at Oregon State and started writing I had those lies mixed up with my truth. When I tried to write stories about my experience I saw myself in the characters I created and immediately began to defend them, to make their experience mean something. I wanted them to be heroes, and so they turned into caricatures. They spent their time in my stories explaining “the real world” to civilians unironically. There was no truth in those stories, because I couldn’t be truthful with myself.

It’s a bit odd, maybe. You usually hear from writers that fiction is a more direct vehicle for the truth. But for me it wasn’t writing fiction that got me there. It was using fiction writing techniques. Lines between fiction and nonfiction are super blurry a lot of the time. The moment an event happens and someone documents it, it’s filtered through an individual’s lens—that person’s contextual place in the world. Are the things I recount and the stories I tell considered fact? Probably not, by most standards. Are they truth? 100%.

WBT: Toxic masculinity is a topic much in the news recently. For good reason. We spend a lot of time of WBT debating and thinking about violence and its effect on communities. But sometimes we can forget how cultures of violence eat away at men too, at how this toxicity is a two-way street. Eat the Apple bravely confronts this exact issue. For example:

“You’ve chosen the United States Marine Corps infantry based on one thing: You got drunk last night and crashed your car into a fire hydrant in the early morning and think—because your idea of masculinity is severely twisted and damaged by the male figures in your life and the media you surround yourself—that the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war.”

I feel Eat the Apple responds to this “idea of masculinity,” and I encourage readers interested in this subject to buy and read the whole collection through (a couple times). Did you set out to write on this idea of what it means to be a man in the U.S. today or is this simply a byproduct of describing your particular experiences in the Marines?

YOUNG:

Short answer? No.

Longer answer? I set out to write my experience as an infantry Marine and it was impossible to write that experience without writing about the antiquated ideals of masculinity and anti-feminism, which construct the ethos of both the Marine Corps and especially Marine grunts. It was delivered via Drill Instructors, School of Infantry Instructors, senior Marines, and higher-ups—a kind of disdain for everything feminine. Drop back on a hike? You’re a bitch or a pussy. Have a girlfriend back home? She’s fucking some other guy behind your back because you can’t trust Susie Rottencrotch. Women Marines—WMs—are dehumanized; called Wookies (which I never got) or walking mattresses. Those are the more overt portions of toxic masculinity I, and most, experience.

Then it hits you from civilians, too. Again with their expectations—what a soldier is supposed to be, what they’re supposed to have experienced and done, and how they’re supposed to react to that experience. Usually civilians expect you to have killed someone, to be damaged irreparably by post-traumatic stress, to be that strong silent type, to be a hero.

But calling someone a hero negates their experience or their feelings about that experience. It tells them their individual feelings are wrong and replaces them with a narrative people are more comfortable with. Hero worship is part of toxic masculine culture and it’s an act of silencing. It says, Shut up about your experience, smile when I thank you for your service so I can feel better about myself, and take the beer I just bought you. It perpetuates the tough guy military narrative—a thing I’d bought into so much I lied about my true experiences to family and friends when I returned home. I really couldn’t write about anything in my life right now without confronting masculinity in our culture.

WBT: Hard question time. That quote above. Isn’t this exactly what happened? Didn’t the experiences recounted in this book change you in ways that you both wanted and did not want? It’s okay if you just say, “read the last chapters of Eat the Apple.” Readers should.

YOUNG: Unsatisfying answer time: For sure. Doesn’t every experience do that? Before that quote I speculate as to what might happen if I don’t join. Do I think now that becoming a Midwest caricature was the only other outcome? No. I could’ve joined the Peace Corps, or sucked it up and enrolled in community college, or reconciled with my parents, or hit the lottery. There are infinite futures I could’ve had that could’ve changed me and affected me in infinite ways, but at that time I thought I was a bad man on a road to even more badness. I thought the Marine Corps would give me direction and purpose. I thought it would make me a man. I’m impulsive by nature, so I went with it.

I spend most of the rest of the book examining how misinformed I was and how directionless I became. This is really the problem I had with writing fiction about my experience when I got out. I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to know the world and myself better and more fully afterward—or wanted to pretend my military service had enlightened me to those things—but everything became more convoluted. It took being out and going to college and gaining education and language that I could use to articulate my experience to help me understand my experience and myself more fully.

WBT: I teach Slaughterhouse-Five to students every year. Every year they get upset by the descriptions of masturbation, pornography, and the picture of Montana Wildhack’s breasts. I ask them why they get upset by the masturbation and not all the massacres of human beings. Eat the Apple does not pull any punches when it comes to the sexual life of Marines. Can you tell us about Eat the Apple’s reception? Have you had any pushback?

For the most part people have appreciated the honesty. I write a lot about masturbation in the book for a couple reasons—one because I (and most of us) did it a lot. It really is a way to stay awake on post or pass the time or make you feel like you’re still somewhat human, so it becomes part of the fabric of Marine grunt experience. But also, it’s super intimate—in some respect more so than sex. You’re at your most vulnerable when masturbating. All your shortcomings, your kinks, your dumb facial expressions, whatever. You don’t have to hide any of those things when you’re jerking off by yourself. I wanted people to see that part of myself. It helped me let down that masculine guard that’s always up in military memoirs. Everyone masturbates. It’s a great way to build empathy.

Some people see it as crass and childish or disgusting, which says more about them as readers and people unwilling to engage with difficult topics. Most of the pushback comes from older men who don’t like me scuffing up the spit polished Marine Corps veneer. They’re a dying breed I think—those men and the stories they love so much. People want more. If the festering gash that is civilian/military divide is ever going to heal it’s going to take acknowledgement of the breadth and depth of service experience out there.

That people clutch their pearls at sex and not violence is an issue of our puritanical and patriarchal roots. Sex is bad because it empowers women. Violence is good because it establishes dominance and power—regressive masculine traits.

WBT: A fellow WBT editor and I have an absolutely unscientific generalization about war literature. There has not been, we contend, a war book published in the last fifty years that has not mentioned dogs, dead or otherwise. We have many theories as to why, none of them particularly insightful. Your work spends a lot of time talking about dogs too. Why do Americans write so many war books about dogs?

YOUNG: Man’s best friend, maybe? Relatability to the audience? Shock value? Killing a dog probably has some kind of purpose in the moment—to get them to stop eating corpses, or to get them to shut up, or out of boredom. In terms of literary merit, the killing of a dog is maybe more powerful than the killing of a human. We’re so desensitized to human death. The killing of an animal, especially a dog, is much more rhetorically pathetic.

Tobias Wolff has maybe the best line ever about U.S. war writing in In Pharaoh’s Army: “And isn’t it just like an American boy, to want you to admire his sorrow at tearing other people’s houses apart?” Of course, Wolff—being the brilliant writer he is—does not actually admire his sorrow, but interrogates it through the essay form itself—opens up the tensions implicit in recounting morally repugnant wartime experiences. I believe Eat the Apple to be one of the few memoirs since Wolff’s that accomplishes something similar. I also believe there is little “sorrow” in Eat the Apple and even less patience with those who might admire it. Did you consciously reflect on the privilege of reflection when writing these essays? How did you avoid falling into the trap Wolff describes?

YOUNG: I love In Pharaoh’s Army. One of my undergrad professors, Keith Scribner, recommended it to me when I was trying to figure out how to write about the Marines. Now that you mention that, maybe he saw me admiring my own sorrow in my fiction? Damn. My mind is kind of blown right now.

Anyway, after trying to fictionalize my experience I became very aware of the benefits and detriments of reflection. Honesty and humor kept me out of the trap. Those POV switches and different forms and styles were all working towards honesty and let me pull out the magnifying glass and pinpoint a sunspot to scorch the living hell out of my past self. Most of the humor in the book is self-deprecating—lacerating I suppose. I wanted the audience laugh at me. The humor at my own expense is naked honesty; the audience is laughing because of how horrible I am, which maybe makes the feel a bit of shame because of the rhetoric surrounding the military (“Support Our Troops!”). It creates a balance with those poignant moments and keeps me from verging into woe-is-me-I-signed-up-for-the-Marines-and-they-made-me-go-to-war-isn’t-that-sad? territory.

WBT: You teach writing. What do you tell your students on the first day of class?

YOUNG: Anyone who gives you a prescriptive fix for your writing, and means it, is a cop.

WBT: What do you tell your students on the last day of class?

YOUNG: Go make art and be good.

Purchase Eat the Apple here.

An excerpt from the novel Strawberry Fields. Alice, a reporter, and the detective Modigliani are both working on the case of five murdered veterans of the Iraq War (including Kareem, named below). The investigation has extended in many directions, including toward the private military contractor Xenith, with whom the victims were involved.

Alice

Modigliani came over, a bottle brown-bagged in his hand. I’d hoped for wine but it was gin. He poured for us both and produced a jar of olives from his jacket, with his fingers dropped three into each glass. Thank you, I’m sure, I said, eyeing the greasy floating pimentos. Your table sucks, he said, rocking it back and forth with his hand.

The death of Farzad Ahmad Muhammad, I said.

OK, Modigliani said.

You remember it, I insisted. He was murdered in US custody. A British journalist got interested, and so there was an actual military follow-up. A few guys were held responsible, or kind of—I pushed photos toward him, tapped each face in turn—this one spent two months in jail, this one was demoted, this one not even discharged. These photos, I added, were Kareem’s. He was working on some kind of amateur investigation.

OK, Modigliani said.

Modigliani bent down and slid the lid of the olive jar under the short leg of the table. Now we have to finish these, he said. How did he die?

I said: He was hanging from the ceiling by his hands, which is common practice, but he was left there for days, and they beat his legs to interrogate him, the backs of his knees. Pulpified, is how the autopsy describes his legs—if he hadn’t died, they’d have had to amputate. They said the beatings were normal, but none of them realized how many teams were going at him, how many altogether, and blood pooled around the injuries until his heart stopped, with him just hanging there. They found him on the morning of the fifth day.

Modigliani nodded. And where does Kareem come in?

He knew one of the guys who was later held responsible, the guy who went to jail. They were based out of the same compound for a while, they met socially, if that’s the right word. I’m trying to see if maybe Kareem is the one who tipped off the journalist in the first place. Like, he gathered this evidence to give it to her.

And this works out to a motive for killing Kareem, what, seven or eight years later?

Fuck, I said, fuck.

Modigliani stacked the photos and pushed them back toward me, maneuvering around drinks and olives. He said: If the guy who killed the prisoner was Kareem’s friend, Kareem could have been looking to get him off, not get him punished. But you know that. Not to mention, he added, that we have four other victims.

I know, I said. The photo on top was of the bruised legs, and I covered it with both hands.

Alice—Modigliani said, looking in the direction of the air conditioner—your thinking is the opposite of conspiratorial. It’s the web without the spider.

He said: I think I’ve always liked that about you.

Later I understood this was the one thing he ever said that I truly believed.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, he went on, I’d think you were trying to distract this investigation from its real target.

Bill LeRoy, I said obediently, Xenith.

Right now he’s angling to replace the military in Afghanistan, Modigliani said. All private contractors, private air force. British East India Company model.

I said: At the same time he’s selling his forces to countries hoping to keep migrants in or migrants out. Or rather, Muslims out. Turn back the boats at gunpoint.

Modigliani shifted and I thought he was going to lay his hands over the photo, over my own.

What happens, I wondered, when a spider mistakes itself for a fly?

Modigliani finished his drink and rose. The table rocked again.

Have you ever noticed, he said, how rarely I ask a question?

After Modigliani left I went on: I’d called the guy who’d served time, the guy Kareem knew. He was punished most severely because he’d visited the prisoner the most and was supposed to be the one signing off, keeping track of the others.

I was only halfway through Kareem’s name when the woman who had answered the phone interrupted: He doesn’t know anything. Don’t call here again. She was gone and with her the background sound of a child’s off-key singing. I called again. I thought of going out there, to the Midwestern farmland where they lived, not far from where I used to visit a long-dead uncle of my mother’s. Amish in buggies or on bicycles on the road’s shoulder, cornfields, trampolines in yards that back then I’d coveted. He was a farm boy, this man, and at first I thought this should damn him. Shouldn’t a boy like that have known, have understood the body and what it won’t endure? Only once did they unhook Muhammad from the ceiling and by then he could no longer bend his knees. But tonight, the refrigerator assuming the role of crickets, the floor athrum with someone’s bass, I understood why this made no difference.

Strawberry Fields was published in April, 2018 and is available from Fence Books or your local bookseller.

I met a woman on my way to Iraq.  Just before I stepped onto the midnight plane to Baghdad, she asked me what should have been a simple question:

“Who do you work for?”

Her name was Moni Basu. She was a journalist. She had thick dark hair, an intense demeanor, and she wore a helmet that said “Evil Media Chick.”  We were drinking coffee at a picnic table behind a beverage kiosk at the back of Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait. Her traveling companion, a photographer named Curtis Compton, had caught shrapnel from an IED during a previous embed.  A moment before, Moni had given me, a rookie journalist, an important Arabic term: mutar saif.  It meant lies, bullshit, summer rain, a thing that just didn’t happen in the desert.

I told her I worked for a magazine called “CQ.”

“GQ?”

“No.  CQ.”

“You write for Congressional Quarterly?”

The questions never stopped with Moni. She could smell the bullshit.

“Convergence Quarterly,” I said.  “It’s a new magazine.  This will be our first issue. We’re sponsored by North Carolina A&T.”

“You work at North Carolina A&T?”

I nodded nervously. I’m white.  A&T is a historically black college in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Many people argue that the student protest movement of the 60s began at A&T when four courageous young men conducted a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1^st, 1960.  This was the part of our history that we advertised to the world.

“Do you know who graduated from there?” Moni asked.

“Uh, Jesse Jackson?”

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?”

She said it like that, like a question, like she couldn’t believe that I was here with her and didn’t know this crucial fact.  It was early March, 2008, the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.  I’d been working at A&T as a lecturer in interdisciplinary writing for the past three years, but didn’t know a thing about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“This is the guy who masterminded the attacks on 9/11,” Moni said.  “You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”

Moni glanced at Curtis who was applying a cloth to a lens with calm circular strokes. It was just beginning to dawn on me that I might be in way over my head, like maybe I was the man my father was afraid I was, a rube destined to die a ridiculous death in the coming days, my charred body hung from a bridge in some war-torn hamlet, men in loose-fitting garments cheering as my ashy corpse twisted in the wind.  Or they’d put me in one of those orange jumpsuits and cut off my head, whoever “they” were.

I took a long sip of my coffee.  Surely, whatever crush I had on Moni would not be reciprocated given my astounding ignorance about the war on terror.  There I was, about to embed with Navy SEALS in Haditha, one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq, and I had no idea about the man who had started the very war I was trying to cover for a magazine that hadn’t even released its first issue.  Yes, I was the guy who had traveled seven thousand miles to learn that the mastermind of 9/11 had been educated in my own backyard.

“Excuse me,” I said.

Rather than behave like a good journalist and question Moni relentlessly about KSM, I retreated to the bathroom to attend to suddenly struggling bowels.  I stared at the graffiti from the troops:

Chuck Norris doesn’t consider it sex unless the woman dies.

Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer.  Too bad he never cries.

Here I sit, cheeks a’flexin, ready to unleash another Texan.

Here I sit, upon the crapper, ready to produce another rapper.

Can’t wait to go home.

Have a nice war.

They called my bus.  I put on my army surplus helmet and bulletproof vest, jotted down a few notes about the jokes in the toilet. I sat close to Moni as the bus filled up. I didn’t want to lose her. I felt like I needed her, and I wasn’t used to that feeling, that fear. Basically, I didn’t want to be left alone in Iraq. On the drive to the plane, I made small talk about the record-breaking drought back home.

“It’s so bad in Atlanta,” she said, “that I keep a bucket in my shower just so I can save enough water for my garden.”

We walked across the tarmac and up the ramp into the loud bloated hull of a C-130 Hercules.  It was me, Moni, Curtis, four soldiers, and two contractors. The C-130 is an exposed experience, a cabin stripped of padding and panel, the seats nothing more than net and pole, the lights a dim red, white, and blue, the floor studded with traction pads.  After the plane took off, Moni fell asleep and so did one of the soldiers.  Another sat with his headphones blasting so loud it sounded like spit was coming out of his ears.  I smelled grape Kool-Aid powder.  I looked around at the seemingly calm faces occasionally jostled by the turbulence.  There was no turning back.  For the past six months, I’d been obsessed with seeing the war for myself and escaping the media-saturated mindfuck of left versus right, peace versus war, WMDS, beheadings and 9/11 conspiracy theories.  I wanted to see the thing for myself and now that I was here I couldn’t stop thinking about how blind I’d been to the very place I was escaping:  America:  my own backyard.

Other than KSM, what else had I missed? Was I about to get kidnapped and beheaded, my father dropping to his knees in our front yard with photographers clipping pictures all around him, just like the dad of Nick Berg, the famous decapitated contractor?  And were contractors—these men snoozing all around me—were they the bad guys like everybody said?  Was America evil? And why were our troops so infatuated with Chuck Norris?

All the lights went out in the Hercules, the cabin a dark tunnel of jiggling multi-national bodies as this massive airship began its spiral descent to Baghdad, the famous lights-out, corkscrew roller-coaster free-fall approach the military’s way of evading RPGs and demonstrating to rookie journalists just how simultaneously colossal and agile America can be if she truly wants to keep herself a secret.

_____

Baghdad seemed calm before dawn, more a dense constellation of sapphire lights than a bombed out wasteland.  I pressed my cheek against the glass of the Blackhawk.  Here was one of the oldest cities in the world, Babylon herself on a Sunday morning.  As a thirteen-year old boy I’d seen SCUDS and Patriot missiles doing their duty on the news, my country at war for the first time in this city down below, but Iraq meant nothing to me back then.  In high school, I owned a bong named the Enola Gay.  History was just a game, a trivial pursuit, a place to get names for marijuana paraphernalia.  Now I was here, in the center of the mediated world, seated next to Moni and Curtis and two soldiers manning swiveling guns as we strafed over the dark crawl of the Tigris River.

We touched down on a slab of cement behind a barricaded building known as LZ (Landing Zone) Washington.  Apparently most of the soldiers at this chopper terminal for Green Zone activity were employees of a contractor firm known as Triple Canopy Security Solutions. Moni, Curtis, and I walked into the office with two soldiers who were in town for a court-martial.

The first thing I noticed inside LZ Washington was a photo on the wall, an autographed black and white shot of Chuck Norris next to the sign-in desk.

“What is the deal with all the Chuck Norris worship?” I asked Moni.

She shook her head and smiled, like I was paying attention to the wrong things.  As we waited for a our ride to CPIC, the Combined Press Information Center, I stepped closer to the Norris board, the little flapping scraps of pink and green post-its framing the autographed photo, the post-its scrawled with doggerel travelers had dedicated to this classic example of the Whitmanian American, that man who contains multitudes. Norris’ life was actually quite remarkable, I realized at that moment.  Not only was he an actor, but he was also a former contractor, a highly decorated martial artist who formed an entire school of Karate, and, on top of it all, he was a devout Christian political wonk who’d recently taken over William F. Buckley’s conservative column in hundreds of newspapers, railing against premarital sex, gay marriage, and other such signs of the apocalypse.  The picture of Norris I saw posted in LZ Washington had him seated atop a motorcycle that might as well have been a white horse.  Beneath were bits of wit like:

Chuck Norris doesn’t read.  He stares at the book until it gives him information.

Chuck Norris wears cowboy boots.  They’re made of real cowboys.

Chuck Norris doesn’t mow his grass.  He dares it to grow.

I wrote down as many of these jokes as I could, determined to keep alive the lighter side of Iraq, but as we drove through the sunrise streets of Baghdad, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Moni had told me just before we’d gotten on the C-130.

“You don’t know who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is?”

How bad is America’s amnesia, its will to blindness?  And to what extent is that blindness connected to our sense of humor, our addiction to nervous, absurdist jokes? Was I the only one who didn’t know the names of our enemies?  How little did we know about “them”? From the back of a Humvee, I looked for faces.  We passed by monolithic cement barricades, flashes of street vendors with exhausted leers pushing bales of blankets, a statue for the soldiers who’d fought against Iran in the grisly chemical weapons fueled war of the 1980s.  God, how did I not know that the man who started this whole “war on terror” was a graduate of the school where I taught? Was the gap a function of too many rips off the Enola Gay as a teenager?  Was I the only American who was this clueless about the Global War on Terror? Sometimes I felt extremely uncomfortable about just how much I had in common with the fool we’d elected President: George W. Bush.

_____

My father gave me some advice before I left for Iraq.  He said that Operation Iraqi Freedom was just as much our civil war as it was theirs.  He said all anybody talked about in the press was whether we were the good guys or the bad guys.

“But what about them?” he said.  “Who’s their good guy?  Who’s their George Washington?  That’s the story you want to find.  Talk to them.”

That was my goal.  I knew I had bigger fish to fry than the graffiti dedicated to Chuck Norris, but talking to actual Iraqis without intrusive oversight was easier said than done.  After being in Iraq for more than a week, I still hadn’t met a single Iraqi.  On the eighth day of my tour, along with my military escort, a large mustachioed Mormon named Reynolds, I landed at Al Asad, a sprawling base that reminded me of summer camp, soldiers jogging and playing volleyball, fobbits zooming around in golf carts, a commissary store loaded with candy and chewing tobacco and cellophane wrapped soft core magazines displaying pin-up girls. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, under a shelter at the back of the base, as I was paging through a men’s magazine, I heard a familiar voice.

“Eat Boy!”

I looked up from my picnic table and ran down to the barricaded cul-de-sac where my SEAL platoon had parked their humvees.  I hugged my old friend, now the Lieutenant for this platoon that was actually a Joint Special Operations Force (mostly SEALS mixed with contractors, CIA, and Rangers).  Diet was a man I’d known since I was five years old.  He looked different, his thick bristly mustache designed to create an air of gravity and power—what the Iraqis called wasta—but to me, it was pure comedy, a nod to the porn stars of the seventies or perhaps the viceroys of nineteenth century colonial England, Panama Jack.

“Nice stache,” I said.

Diet commented on the disproportion between the hair on my face and the hair on my head.  Whereas he was growing a mustache, I was growing a beard, having learned from him that while mustaches suggest power to Iraqis, the beard suggests holy man.

“You’re in the back,” Diet said, as we stepped towards a humvee with the name “Leonidas” spray-painted on the back.  Leonidas was an ancient Spartan king, and also a fictional character from a recent movie, “The 300,” which followed one Spartan unit’s heroic exploits during the battle of Thermopylae. According to historical legend and the movie, the Spartans died valiantly fighting against King Xeres and his Persian horde, the Spartan story told only because Leonidas was wise enough to send a man named Dilios away from the platoon on the night before the decisive battle so he—Dilios—might tell the story of the soldiers’ bravery to the masses.

“We’re driving?” I said.

Diet nodded and smiled.  I was surprised and pleased, and scared shitless. I’d enjoyed the aerial views of Iraq, the absence of Iraqis, but was growing a bit suspicious of the embedding strategy, the careful hopscotch from base to base, the way we avoided all the spaces between, the people.

“You scared?” Diet said.

“Should I be?” I said.

“No,” he said.  “That’s part of the story here.”

I put on my helmet and ceramic plated vest. Complacency Kills, said a spray-painted sign on the edge of Al Asad.  A soldier named B. Dubbs was driving as we passed beyond the wire, the concertina and the cement barriers. Diet passed back a tin of Copenhagen.  I threw in a pinch, feeling like high school, about to go rallying through the woods on a winter day, except we weren’t entering a state forest or the rutted lanes of an apple orchard.  This was a war zone.

Diet had described Haditha to me as the West Virginia of Iraq, a triad of tribal villages a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Baghdad.  Unemployment was seventy percent.  There was desert everywhere, many of the people making a living the way they had for thousands of years: fishing and farming, ghostly figures shepherding goats on the smoke-plumed horizon.  There were men in robes selling what looked like lemonade from cheap collapsible roadside tables.

“That’s gas,” Diet said.

I nodded my head.  Children ran along the shoulder with their hands outstretched.  We threw them candy, jolly ranchers.  I felt good.  I loved the way the desert sky was skinning my eyes, the taste of my fresh chaw and its fiberglass shards tearing through my gums, the feeling of sharing a buzz with Diet in this surreal landscape that seemed to go back and forth between war-torn and exotic, novel and vivid on the one hand, tragic and impoverished on the other.  I listened to the gobble of radio communications, smelled the sweat of the men, saw fruit stands pass by along the road, date palms and eucalyptus, a graveyard of jets, a black burned out hulk of a sedan on the shoulder a reminder that I was not in the Disney version of Iraq anymore and that, at any moment, one of these swaddled and stoic-faced roadside strangers might decide to press a button on a cell-phone he’d converted into a remote control and thereby remind me that not everybody shared the enthusiasm of the children for the foreigners with their tanks and their sunglasses and their gargantuan guns and their swollen lower lips.

I tried to keep my head in the moment as we approached Haditha, my vision of the world at that moment an opaque dust-smeared profile of Diet riding shotgun, his face a single sunglass eye and the edge of that thick mustache, a wire coming out of his ear, his lips mutely mouthing orders into a mic as we passed through a gate, and then we could suddenly see a lake to our left and the Euphrates valley to our right down below, this ancient river of grade school lore now a roaring spout from the cement jaws of a massive dam, the slabby Soviet architecture and the sulfurous smell of the Haditha Dam not enough to mute the feeling of ancient resonance, the awe of seeing distant cities of mud huts clustered behind palms on the east and west banks, a vast desert stretching out forever on the southern horizon, no billboards anywhere.

“Can we go for a swim?” I asked.

“You do not want to swim in there,” Diet said.

I wondered what that meant.  Was the river polluted or was he wisely discouraging the appearance of recreation, a spring break scene of buddies privileged white men splashing around in sacred waters while dark people downstream were cutting each other’s heads off? I’ve always been a sucker for symbolic baths, half-hearted ablutions.  When I see a new body of water, I want to swim.  I kept telling myself to shut the fuck up, to remember the wisdom of Mark Twain: “It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

We parked the humvees and stepped out, were greeted by a pack of sand-colored mongrel dogs that threaded their way through our dispersing ranks.  I gave one a tentative pat, stretched my legs and spit out my dip, then looked around the base at black missile-shaped tubes of inflatable boats leaned up against the cement barriers that fortified the borders, red and green storage containers forming a wall against the southern end of the camp, an empty plywood watchtower like the first leg of a Trojan horse.

“Who’s on the other side?” I asked Diet, as we stood on the bank of the river looking across at the camp on the eastern shore.  He told me that was where the contractors slept.  Sure enough, I saw the letters “KBR” sprayed in red on a cement wall, a few extremely thick men milling around.  Kellogg Brown Root was a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton.

“What do they do?” I asked.

“They more or less take care of the trash,” Diet said.

The great secret of my time in Iraq, I thought for awhile, was that trash, the burn pits KBR ran and the rash of scary symptoms discovered in soldiers and in Iraqis, or maybe, I came to think, it was a chemical weapons discovery at the Haditha Dam, a story one of those KBR contractors told me in a tent one night back in Kuwait.  According to him, we never told the media about these “WMDs” because the serial numbers indicated American origins. This was a big story, I thought, as big as they come, but after I put it out in The Mantle the very week C.J. Chivers of The New York Times released a similar story about such weapons being discovered all over Iraq, I realized people didn’t care, that our complicity in Iraq’s development of the very WMDs we’d used to justify the war meant nothing to most Americans.[1] [2] No, I now believe that the big secret of Iraq is still that thing my father told me to explore: the people.

Diet showed me the trailer where I could take a shower, then ushered me into a maze of corrugated storage containers.  I followed him across a wooden plank past a dark empty plywood room.  Behind this was another row of these metal containers, the “ConEx” boxes that served as the sleeping quarters for his men, each door sprayed with their nicknames, monikers like “Lurch” and “Tree.”  Diet’s door was marked by two big black letters:  “LT.”

“Damn.  Not bad,” I said, as I walked inside and beheld strands of Christmas lights forming vines above a red bed and a wall decorated with an ornate tribal tapestry, the pattern a pointillist spread of teal and brown leaves.  I saw trunks of care package goodies everywhere, a Macbook on a desk under a reading lamp.  Behind Diet’s computer sat a black and white photo of his father from his time in the Marines during Vietnam.  Above the photo were Diet’s books, including a tattered copy of William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust.

As Diet took off his gear, I sat down in his black swivel desk chair and read through his Faulkner.  I came across a line on a page that had been dog-eared, a passage I wrote down for some reason:  “When a feller has to start killin’ folks, he most always has to keep killin’ em.  And when he does, he’s already dead hisself.”

“You hungry?” Diet asked.

“What do you think?” I said.

“I know.  Stupid question.”

He laughed.  Eat Boy’s always hungry.  Diet offered me one of his care-package nutrition bars, something with flax and honey and other progressive ingredients.  It felt good to eat, to take off my shoes, to savor for a second the sense—the illusion—of finally having arrived.

“Fucking Eat Boy,” he said.

“Bet you never thought this was going to happen,” I said.

“No,” he said. “To be honest.  I didn’t.”

I looked at the cutouts of women from Maxim magazine he’d taped to the walls.  He had a white dry board on the back of his door.

“Let’s come up with a list of five stories,” he said.

I didn’t like the sound of that.  I told Diet I could find my stories on my own. Diet, for good reason, looked at me skeptically, or perhaps paternally is the better word, or maybe it was close to the same look Moni gave me when I asked about Chuck Norris and told her I’d never heard of KSM.  All three of them—Diet, my dad, and Moni—knew I knew nothing, and thought this was to my detriment, but sometimes I wondered if there wasn’t a certain advantage to my naïvite.

“Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Why does there have to be five?”

“It’s a good number, Eat Boy.  One story a day for a full work-week.”

Three months earlier, after our local newspaper had backed out on sponsoring me because my father had threatened their editor (his patient) with a lawsuit if anything happened to me while I was in Iraq, Diet had called from me Haditha and challenged me to “be a man,” to make the trip happen in spite of my father’s resistance.  So, like my president, I faked my way into Iraq, came up with a magazine of my own.  I was proud of this, my American ingenuity, but as Diet stood there telling me what stories to write, I felt like he was meddling.

“I wanna meet some Iraqis,” I said.

“Right now?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna meet Captain Allah?”

“Yes, I wanna meet Allah.”

That’s how the name first sounded to me—Captain Allah—Captain God.  Like, sure, let’s go straight to the top.  I had no idea who he was, but he sounded important and he definitely sounded Iraqi.  Diet and I walked back through the maze of trailers that finally spilled out into the open air of the Iraqi night, some of the brightest stars I’d ever seen, the lighting of the base kept deliberately low, the vast miles of desert all around us offering no diffusing glow to the constellations, Orion stippled with a dress of chain mail armor, stars below his belt I’d never seen before.  I spun around in the cool night air like I was stoned, saw a tall black SEAL walk out of the shower hut with a towel around his neck, saw the mongrel dogs play-fighting down at the southern end of the base by the red punching bag hanging beneath the watchtower.

We walked into the room of one of the platoon’s translators, a thick-bearded Jordanian named Rami who had a large American flag posted over his bed in the same fashion that Diet had a tribal tapestry tacked over his. Cutout pictures of women in skin-tight apparel modeling machine guns dotted Rami’s walls.

Diet was briefing Rami on what was about to happen and I was admiring a photo of a blonde woman in a black dress wielding a black rifle when a tall man with a feathered mullet and a gold tie walked through the door, his entrance worthy of a sitcom scene.  I half expected a studio audience to explode into a roar of applause.  He was gangly, a silver pen clipped to his left breast pocket, his white dress shirt and olive suit freshly ironed, his eyes moving left to right in a furtive display of awareness and anxiety that evoked Kramer’s character from Seinfeld.  But this was unhinged, unrehearsed.  Here was a man like me, who did not know his role, and no feature of his appearance suggested this more than the feathered mullet.

“Matt, this is Captain Al’A Khalaf Hrat.  He’s the leader of the thirty man Iraqi Swat Team we’ve been training over the past few months.”

“Assalamu Alaikum,” I said, rather proud of myself for remembering this rote greeting.

I shook the man’s hand, felt a strong calloused grip.  He responded with a deep voice and an abridgement of the conventional crib sheet Arabic greeting:

“Salaam.”

He took off his jacket, revealing a shoulder holster, two pistols tucked beneath his arms.  He took that off as well, spoke at length, looking back and forth between Diet and me, never once looking at Rami, which I thought was “interesting,” as they say.

“He wants to know where you’re from,” Rami said.

Either Arabic is the most inefficient language in the world or Captain Al’A wanted to know more than just where I was from.  Rami wore a tan jumpsuit with an American flag above his left breast.  I was anxious, aware that a lot was going to be lost in translation.  I had my journal in my hands with all of the questions I wanted to ask, but felt tempted, as I almost always do, to improvise, to throw my notes aside, and go with the feeling of the moment.

For the first time in my life I was not only in Iraq, but I was finally sitting with an Iraqi, the leader of a SEAL trained SWAT team, perhaps the Iraqi equivalent of Vic Mackey, Michael Chikliss’s character from my favorite cop show, The Shield.  Was it possible that Captain Al’A’s mullet meant to Iraqis what Mackey’s shaved head meant to Americans?  Was I dealing with the alpha dog, the badass, a rogue cop, the sort of man who made his own rules?  I kept getting this comic vibe from Captain Al’A, the ghost of the American mullet and its connotations of “I don’t give a fuck, throw me another beer” mentality.

After telling Al’A that I was from a town close to Washington, D.C. I decided to forget my questions about statistics and George W. Bush and the fifth anniversary of the invasion and “the Al Anbar Awakening,” and I elected, instead, to ask him about his hair.  I told him I liked his mullet.  I told him that I understood that different hairstyles meant different things to different people, that the mustache was supposed to mean power and the beard holiness, “but what does the mullet mean?”

I exchanged a quick look with Diet who shook his head in crestfallen disbelief.  Captain Al’A crinkled his eyes and also looked toward his boss, perhaps not expecting the interrogation with the American journalist to broach such serious subjects as the symbolic significance of a mullet. I felt like such an amateur. I wondered what Moni would do.  Over a hundred thousand Iraqis had already been killed in the war and I was asking questions about hair care.  I looked down at Al’A’s feet, determined to get serious with the next question, scolding myself for my improvisational approach, my belief in naïvete perhaps nothing more than the sophist’s justification for laziness, a tragicomic foreshadowing of the America to come.  In the seconds between my question and Al’A’s answer, I noticed the Captain wore ankle length socks.  There were subtle pin stripes in his pants, a sharp pleated crease.  He removed a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and offered me one.

I took it.  We both lit up.  And then he began to talk, his deep voice drawn into higher registers by the frenzy of his thoughts, glottals and hisses clashing, Rami listening from his desk, the Captain seated on the translator’s bed, Diet standing over us.  When Al’A finished speaking, he took a deep inhalation and blew a clean two-pronged stream of smoke out of his considerable nostrils, his face—his wide eyes and large nose a bit reminiscent of the Muppet character, Gonzo.

“He says that his men are not afraid of death,” Rami said.  “He says that in some cities his haircut is not allowed, that it means a man is gay, and if you are gay you can get killed.  But he is not gay.  He just does what he wants.  He is not afraid of death.  He has lost eight family members, three brothers kidnapped and killed.  His uncle, who was the police chief—he and his three children were murdered.  It has been a terrible time for Hadithans.  Hundreds of people leaving the city for Syria and elsewhere.  Refugees.  There was a man, an insurgent, who spoke to an American in public so everyone could see.  Fifteen minutes this man and the American talk so everyone can see.  Then the insurgent goes and kills an old innocent man, a barber.  What do you think people thought?  Do you understand the game they play?  You cannot be afraid of death.”

Lately, I’ve given a lot of thought to this moment, the story that emerged out of that question about hair.  Many of the men we armed in Al Anbar, men like Al’A, joined up with the Islamic State.  Many of those who did not continued to flood Syria, contributing to the destabilization of that country and its civil war that goes on to this day. So I’ve thought about Al’A’s words a lot, his story, the flood of death in his family.  I’ve thought about these words specifically: “You cannot be afraid of death.”  This value, what some used to call bravery, has not aged well in the twenty-first century, or at least the American version.  Sometimes we now call people who embrace death “cowards.” The absence of fear in the face of death runs totally counter to the American way of life and the way it’s so structured around careerism and self-interest, retirement and insurance and health care, keeping people alive into their nineties, banking their bodies in the faceless retirement communities we find near our beaches and deserts, Florida and Arizona.

That night I looked into the spaniel calm of the Captain’s eyes as another divided slide of smoke issued from his nose.  A million thoughts were rushing through my head.  I thought of Native Americans, the ones who got the haircuts and joined us, the ones who didn’t, the Shawnee who occasionally came to dance at my elementary school when I was a child. Was I engaged in a timeless rite in that moment, sharing tobacco with a Brave? How ironic was it that the white man, or at least the white man’s corporation, was now the one to provide the tobacco? And who, truly, was the savage in this “game” of drones and beheadings, snipers, IEDs and WMDs? What would you think if you were in the Captain’s shoes, an Iraqi man working with Americans in the heart of a war that might well be illegal and might possibly (and simultaneously) produce positive unintended consequences, your every move fraught with the implications of poverty versus complicity? A simple conversation could cost you your life.

I felt a tremendous surge of affection and pity for Captain Al’A. We continued the interview.  I learned that he belonged to the tribe known as the Jughayfi. He was born the son of a worker at a local oil refinery.  He witnessed the Iran-Iraq war and thereafter the first war with America.  For a long time, like most Iraqis, his hatreds were pure, thoroughly controlled by an oppressive regime and its lockstep media, a government that kept tight control over the textbooks in the schools.

“You were not allowed to think,” Al’A told me. “Everything was military.”

God, I wanted to drink a beer with this guy and tell him about what it had been like the last five years in America, generals galore on TV, generals on the radio, CIA on NBC, assassins on Fox, anchorwomen cheerleading the war, military budgets exploding, everybody in the country shaving their head like yours truly, everybody with their support our troops bumper stickers and tree ribbons, every chicken hawk politician suddenly with polished flag pins posted on their lapels, country musicians turned to jingoistic sycophants for the war machine, everybody every day constantly reminded by the streaming ticker on the TV that we were living in code orange and it was all the fault of people like Captain Al’A.

“How have things changed?” I asked him.

“Come downtown with me,” he said.  “Come see the souk.  It used to be so small you could fit it into the back of a truck.  Now it’s like, it’s like—it’s like Europe.  It’s like Paris.”

Rami laughed, said to me, “Matt, it’s not that nice.  Definitely not Paris.”

“You should come to the market,” Al’A said.

I looked to Diet like a teenage son begging permission from his father to go to a party with the older guys, that archetypal convertible revving in the driveway.  Diet looked back at me like I wasn’t quite ready to take that ride, a long pointed blink.

“Don’t worry, Eat Boy,” he said.  “We’re going downtown tomorrow.”

I was terrified—thrilled, intoxicated by war, confident in the seal of my spectatorial membrane, my security detail. I’d never been “downtown” in a place where barbers were murdered in the streets, a city where there were “attacks” every day. I felt like I was doing the right thing. I was finally getting around to my father’s advice. I was talking to an Iraqi. But there was still a veil over the scene, a translator and a lieutenant, cement barriers everywhere outside.  To go “downtown”—that might actually qualify as reality, an authentic “beyond the wire” glimpse of Iraq.  Hot dog!  Come on, Daddy-o! Can’t I see beyond the walls?

Diet told me to wrap it up. I suggested a photograph with the Captain before calling it a night. Then, in a moment I’ll never forget, Captain Al’A stood up and brandished a small bottle of “Axe” cologne. This baffled me. We’d been sitting incredibly close the whole evening and not once had he broken out the cologne. Smell, of course, is not conveyed in a photograph, so why the hell would a man spray himself with cologne prior to a photo?  To comb one’s mullet or tighten one’s tie—this I understood.  But as I flew back to America, I couldn’t stop thinking about this final gesture. Why had this man with a mullet sprayed himself down so profusely with cologne before locking arms with me? Was this a custom my crib sheets had neglected to apprise me of? And why, of all colognes, was he wearing Axe? And why do I focus on trivial things like haircuts and colognes when there are body counts and ideologies and elections and secret prisons everywhere?

Perhaps the answer is simple. I don’t know. I’m a coward. I’m an American idiot. But maybe that’s too easy, modesty to the point of dishonesty and disavowal. So let me try to step it back. Most Americans know Axe as the Walmart of colognes. Axe is the most aggressively advertised cologne slash body spray on the marketplace, a cheap and strong smell for young men looking to score. Axe is what we advertise to the young after advertising Viagra and Cialis to the old and Coke to all. As I sought Iraq, perhaps Iraq sought me as well, reaching out with the one smell that could not possibly be misinterpreted. Maybe Iraq, too, was befuddled by the multitudes Chuck Norris contained, the strange mixed messages of our muse and our media.

Ultimately, whether Iraq and Captain Al’A were are as confused about us as we were about ourselves, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never forget either. Captain Al’A, the way his mullet brushed my bare scalp as we wrapped arms for the photo, his locks dusting me with a musk laced with body odor and American tobacco, his ribs for a moment in contact with mine, their texture uncovered by his absent holster, the awareness of those bones sharpened by that most pungent of musks; begging for my approval, hungry for my adoring stare.

[1] http://www.mantlethought.org/world-literature/spring-break-iraq

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html

M. C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Epiphany, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Viva la Muerte and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with Yorick, his corgi, whose interruptions to his writing are frequent but welcome.

13 WAYS TO APPROACH A THREE-HEADED DOG

I.

Those who tell you

to carry raw meat

have never met me.

Bones are better,

they last longer,

but if there’s

no bones to be had

bring peanut butter.

II.

In this analogy

I am always Cerberus.

My beloved is inside,

changing.

When he wants me

to sleep in his bed

he comes to me

shaped as a body

like yours.

III.

I grew old here.

Compliment the quartz

mouth of my cave,

my heavy collars,

the bronze of my bark.

Tell me I sound

familiar.

IIIa.

I live to be recognized.

IIIb.

My hearing is spent.

Your language

is a red fruit

everyone loves

to chew.

If we lock eyes

I’ll stand.

V.

I wouldn’t call

human souls

delicious

or even tempting.

I swallow

what I must.

Dogs escape

all the time,

cats too, crows

and wolves.

I let wolves pass

because they sit

a while before

they go,

they don’t trust

this river any more

than I do.

We watch it twist

around itself together.

VII.

What would I buy

with your money?

Lie down. Stay.

VIIa.

I do not know what a changed mind

feels like. Grass? Maybe sun?

VIII.

In this analogy

you are convinced

you are sui generis.

You will be the one

with quick feet.

In this analogy

the ferryman drops

your fare into a sack

with everyone else’s.

Bring water.

I’m not saying

it will buy you

time

but I am thirsty.

In this analogy

you are the one

who thinks you saw

the city shimmer

before it split.

You’re not wrong.

XI.

My beloved

has built a city

where all the bread

is free.

XIa.

His garden

is free of spiders,

nothing

that can be crushed

is sent there.

XII.

Show me what

a sleeping dog

looks like.

XIII.

Are you the moon?

If you are,

make me know it.

I keep a song

in my throat

for you.

HOW TO DIE IN PEACETIME

Welcome the cancer cell,

its sense of justice

more twisted than the DNA

inside its rebel membrane.

Welcome its obsession

with reproduction and division,

the way it makes a home

in the left breast and waits

so patiently, still a pearl

within a pearl within a pearl.

Welcome its false history

and family-friendly values,

its desire for more and more

children, the way it butchers

its own meat forgiven

by the prayers it sends abroad,

the way it campaigns for leader

of the immune system

and loses gracefully each time

until it doesn’t, until the first

letter is tied to the first

brick and flies through the first

window of a neighbor’s house.

Welcome its lavish parties,

electrons everywhere,

flags that flicker like emblems

of peace in the bloodstream,

welcome its marksmanship

when it shoots down the doves

who wake it each morning.

Your body is a sovereign

unable to wage war on itself,

your body is a black night

rippling with radiation.

This is peacetime, this is grace,

this is our merciful killer

rising like a star in our bones.

Let us raise our telescopes

and toast to its brilliance,

its speed, its true aim.

ARMY BALL

You’ve outgrown the army ball,

the men I mean, not us, the wives,

who spend hours buffing time

from our necks and faces.

We dazzle in our pearls

and tennis bracelets clipped like medals

to our limbs: my OIF amethyst,

OEF diamond studs, SFAT cashmere.

Some new wives miss the mark,

overshoot the dress code

and show up in wedding gowns.

They pick and pick at the tulle,

the crystals, the ruching.

At our table, your jaw is softened

by gin and a single year,

the one before Iraq

when Blackhawks dropped you

into the unarmed mountains of Alaska

and you floated down like bread.

We toast the dead and drink.

We howl like dogs for the grog.

Men come forward with liquor bottles

so large they contain entire wars,

dark rum for the jungles of Vietnam,

canned beer for Afghanistan.

A bowl the size of a bus tire

is filled with two hundred years

of booze and we serve ourselves

with a silver ladle made in America

but polished last night, too early,

its grooves blushing with tarnish.

RANGER SCHOOL GRADUATION

A cadence is written like so:

wives show up for the mock battle

at Ranger School graduation

in heels and spandex skirts,

some of us threaded into silk thongs

and some bare-assed,

some in black and gold

I heart my Ranger panties,

all of us too late

to hear this morning’s march:

You can tell an army Ranger by his wife!

You can tell an army Ranger by his wife!

Because she works at Applebee’s

and she’s always on her knees,

you can tell an army Ranger by his wife!

This is how we sway like choirgirls:

America oils our hips.

Rope off the wood chips

and call it a combat zone.

When you’re paraded into the lot

beside Victory Pond I pretend to know

which smudge of red is you.

Already I am washing your uniform, your back.

Your mother says oh, oh!

and claps: the sound of deer ticks

kissing your blistered necks

before we can.

Jay Baron Nicorvo’s novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press), was picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List, Library Journal‘s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers. He’s published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way), and his nonfiction can be found in The Baffler, The Iowa Review, and The Believer. You can find out more about Jay at www.nicorvo.net.

Interviewer:

We must first start with the sentences.

Some samples from your opening (check out more here):

“Specialist Smith gunned the gas and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.”

“She sped out of the hotdamn Ozarks through the Mark Twain National Forest. She threw her ringing phone—Travy—out the window and into the parched summer. It smithereened in the rearview. She used her teeth to pull off her wedding band and engagement ring. Spat them into her hand and shoved them into the trash-crammed ashtray, mall-bought diamond solitaire be damned.”

T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Hold It Till It Hurts and Welcome to Braggsville, once argued that writers should consider the paragraph a sentence rather than limit themselves to movement between two individual periods (my rough–very rough—paraphrase). Your novel sparks from the first clause to the last, and each paragraph feels carefully crafted, as if itself a sentence. Can you give us some perspective on your syntactical choices?

Nicorvo:

Thanks, and I couldn’t agree more with you and Mr. Johnson. I’ve got zero patience for shoddy craftsmanship. The neat masonry of reading in English, left to right, row after row, is a bit like brickwork. And writing is little more than masonry. Stacking, unstacking, restacking. If the basic building block is the word, than the syllable — where we’re able to isolate the music, the meter, of each word — is my mortar. Sounds of words reverberating off one another, that holds my sentences together. The syntactical choices I make are often musical. If a word doesn’t sound right, even if it has the right meaning, it’s got to go.

And it sounds fussy, but I’m not satisfied with the perfectly uniform bricks you get at the big box stores. I like a flaw. Give me those old terracotta bricks cut by hand, no two alike. They’ve got a warmth, a life, a history and a heft you can feel in the hand. Sure, they’re more brittle and difficult to work with — they smithereen — but that’s part of the satisfaction. Each sentence, like each brick, should be radiant, alive, tell a story and have its own weight. No two alike. And so, too, each paragraph. That’s how you get — ultimately and after interminable years — to the place where you’ve built, brick by brick, not just a whole novel but a whole world. But that thing I said earlier? That writing is little more than masonry? That’s some bullshit right there.

Interviewer:

Your novel is one of the first to directly connect the experience of two American wars—Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq—both through the lens of establishment outsiders and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not coincidentally, anxiety runs through each page and each word, and the reader is often rewarded with poignant paragraphs like the following:

“She loved being on the road, when the road wasn’t going to explode beneath her. She gave it more gas. Milt leaned back as the van accelerated—slowly, surely—and reached the speed limit, 55. There she coasted. She was driving like an old lady. What’s state motto was Live Free or Die? Freedom was like war that way: if it didn’t make you nervous, you weren’t truly engaged in it. Driving, she felt anxious, she felt alive.”

What drew you to this subject and these points of view?

Nicorvo:

Well, I suppose I’m an outsider and I consider myself anti-establishment. I’m a civilian who wrote a war novel — though it’s really a post-war novel — so my perspective has to be farther from the frontline. This has its drawbacks. Harder for my point of view to have the immediacy — never mind the moral authority — of Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, Elliot Ackerman’s Green on Blue, or Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood. These are breathtaking novels by novelists who’ve had fingers on combat-weight triggers, and their stories are close-quarters. But every position has its disadvantages. The trick is to be aware of them, and then use that difference to possible advantage.

As an outsider, maybe I’m more inclined toward the long view, from the homeland, but also historically. I can’t help but see the invasion of Iraq — Afghanistan is different — through the warped lens of Vietnam, but through, too, as many other conflicts as I’m able. Civilians should feel obliged to read more about war, and some of them to try to write war. The author of the Iliad was a blind man. The Red Badge of Courage was written by a reporter. A Farewell to Arms is the work of an ambulance driver. Tree of Smoke was conceived by a hippy burnout. The Sympathizer came from an academic.

The late Tom Hayden is a bit of an easy target, a peacenik Freedom Rider and the second of Jane Fonda’s three husbands, but there’s a quote of his I think about a lot: “If you conduct a war, you shouldn’t be in charge of narrating it.” I take this to mean that those who conduct our wars should be doing the narrating, but not all of the narrating, and I don’t believe anyone should be in charge of who gets to tell a story. We’ve got no shortage of soldier writers. Oddly enough, though, they’re mostly dudes in my demographic: white working-class. I say oddly. One of the most beautiful things about the American military is how the institution takes in all kinds — though it likes the poor kind best — and puts them on firm but equal footing. I can’t think of a more meritocratic American institution — for men, at least, though the women are securing their rightful place — and in my mind that makes it ideally American (even if the real America is about how best to subtly tip the scales in your favor).

So I’m an outsider in some ways, not in others. I’m right up there on the emotional frontlines, for one. I was diagnosed with PTSD about a month before my agent sold the damn novel. I like to joke that novel writing — and trying to publish a novel — caused my traumatic stress. But the hard truth is that I’ve suffered from anxiety overload (as you so perfectly put it) all throughout my adulthood, induced by my childhood sexual abuse, something I kept largely secret for 35 years. Phil Klay’s got a killer essay, “After War, a Failure of the Imagination,” that closes the gap between traumas. A funny thing about trauma — haha. The experience of it is absolutely singular. No two alike. You can never know my trauma. But the after-the-fact symptoms of trauma are all shared. That tourniquet chest. Those quick sipping breaths. The feeling like you’ve been here before and will, for fucking ever, be here again. Our emotional fallout is communal. You can’t know my trauma, but you can share my anxiety, because anxiety is contagious. Once I can overcome my anxiety — which is not the same as having no anxiety — then I can tell you the story of my trauma. In my experience, that’s one of the hardest things a person can learn to do, never mind do well.

Interviewer:

Irish novelist John Banville once said, “the world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.” D.H. Lawrence famously wrote at length about the dramatic divide between the didactic and art. Yet, with a novel like yours, I feel “reality” and “language,” are not necessarily mutually exclusive (or the former the product of the latter exclusively). Further, you have written powerful non-fiction about the United States Code of Military Justice, Bowe Bergdhal, Trump, and the history of democracy. Particular political wrongs and historical injustices seem to motivate your writing. What, then, are your thoughts on the relationship between politics and art?

Nicorvo:

I don’t really recognize those dichotomies: reality, language; art, politics. In my fiction, I’m trying to make a recognizable reality using language. I’m doing the opposite in my nonfiction: trying to make reality recognizable using language. I’m not someone who believes all art is political, all politics is artistry. Music can be apolitical, I think. But writing, as an art form, has to be political. There’s no way around it; it’s guilt by association. They both traffic in the same medium: words. Novels and laws require nouns and verbs. The US Constitution isn’t a piano concerto or saxophone solo.

Maybe because I grew up poor — sometimes on welfare, sometimes off — I’ve long thought the system was rigged. But one thing I learned pretty early was that command of language is a way to overcome some of the trappings of that system. Because our language shapes our reality. This, in part, determines the resistance to political correctness. When people try to shape our language, it quickly comes to feel like mind control. It’s authoritarian. What Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief” required for immersion into a good story might more accurately be classified as a willing surrender to authority.

Reading is submission to mind control. And some people can’t take it. The reader gives up his inner self for a time — in what should be understood, in this egocentric age, as nothing short of heroism. When you read, you allow the writer, in this case me, to take up residence in your head. While you read this, your thoughts don’t exist apart from mine, as I’ve here expressed them. This is, in part, what gives the word of God, as captured in the Bible, its control. Most of us have only a tentative grasp on the extent of this power — here’s where politics comes in — but all of us feel its sway.

In my writing, what I’m aiming to do is to honor the trust you’ve given me — the leap of faith you’re willing to take — by choosing to read what I’ve written. The way I best know how to hold up my end of this bargain is by making the effort to write about our most difficult issues — the wrongs and injustices — in a way that doesn’t try to put them in a good light or a bad light but in a true light. If I do, you can tell, because the light hums.

Interviewer:

A lengthy author’s note in the back of The Standard Grand lists a wide variety of source material. Your epigraph includes a quote from a Josh Ritter, a contemporary country singer. You have told me that particular television shows like Rectify inspired moments in The Standard Grand. Not all artists are comfortable acknowledging the collaborative nature of an artistic project. Some would resist lumping different mediums together into fiction. Obviously, you have no anxiety of influence. How did you come to this expansive (and refreshing!) view of the art of the novel?

Nicorvo:

Failure. I’m a firm believer in failure. And debt. One of the dumbest things F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote, in The Last Tycoon, was that “there are no second acts in American lives.” That reflects the backwards thinking of someone born into excessive privilege, where there’s no where to go but down. Look no further than the White House. America, where our pariahs become president. I’ve found that there’s nothing more expansive than failure if, ultimately, it’s overcome. And a debt repaid offers significant gratification. But if you succumb to your failings, if you’re overwhelmed by your debts, well, there’s nothing more isolating and suffocating. An awful feeling, getting choked out by the world. Failure imparts humility. Hopefully, it’s balanced out by a dram or two of success now and then. Otherwise, you’re reduced to sniveling, that or the tortured thinking of the conspiracy theorist or the lone gunman. If you’re lucky and stubborn enough to meet some eventual success after multiple failures — The Standard Grand, my first published novel, is the fourth one I’ve finished — I think you’re instilled with an increased capacity for gratitude. Because I have a great deal of influence anxiety — maybe more than my fair share — but it’s overshadowed by my gratitude. We vastly overestimate our independence. Especially in this country. And among writers, it’s no big secret that we take a great deal, knowingly and unknowingly, from everyone and everything around us, in order to finish what me make. I wanted to go on record acknowledging that I am not owed. I owe.

An excerpt of the debut novel Sid Sanford Lives!

by Daniel Ford

Sid stepped into the desert surrounding the cramped forward operating base just as the sun surged over the distant mountaintop. He scratched his patchy, three-day-old beard. He inhaled deeply, the already warming air singeing his raw nostrils. The sand didn’t crunch so much as slither away from the hot breath of desert wind.

He eyed the line of beige Humvees parked by sandbags piled waist-high. He strode over and climbed into the makeshift garage. Sid propped himself against the tall front tire of the closest vehicle. He stretched out his legs and crossed them, feeling the full weight of his still stiff boots on his ankle. He shifted his position just enough so he could awkwardly pull his notebook out of his back pocket. He stuck his pen behind his ear, sure the words that had been eluding him since the troubled descent through the mountain range would come before the afternoon sun boiled his internal organs. For now, Sid propped his head up against the hard, black rubber and tried to remember how he’d landed in this dusty valley.

Roger Ray’s slamming door muffled the newsroom’s buzz. So many conversations from which Sid had long ago felt disengaged continued in shouted whispers once Ray started howling in earnest.

“I’d be weakening my damn city desk in the middle of a mayoral election,” the aging editor said. “On top of everything else, I’d be giving you, a little pissant, a promotion ahead of, frankly, a long line of more goddamn qualified reporters.”

“Someone else can cover the Bronx borough president’s philandering and embezzling,” Sid said over Ray’s incoherent grunting and molar grinding.

“Plus, I’d catch all kinds of holy fucking hell from the board…” Ray said. “Wait, what did you say?”

Sid patiently reached into his messenger bag and retrieved a blue folder that looked like an overstuffed jelly donut. He tossed it on Ray’s desk and watched as he casually flipped it open. Ray rolled his eyes as he read the top sheet, but that hadn’t stopped him from skimming the tax forms, illicit photos, and tawdry phone records bulging underneath.

“Sources?” Ray grunted.

“Waiting for a phone call from whomever you decide to assign the story.”

Ray held Sid’s gaze, hoping his young reporter would wear his self-satisfied grin just long enough for him to slap it off his face with a hefty Sunday newspaper.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Ray said, slamming his hand on the pile of front-page fodder. “I could just as easily order you to write this.”

“I have a draft someone can polish if that helps,” Sid said. “You don’t even have to use my name. Actually, I’d prefer you didn’t, I don’t want to get banned from Harlem and its chicken and waffles.”

“Listen, son…”

“I believe you owe me one,” Sid said, his jaw stiffening.

Ray waited a beat before nodding weakly. He got up, sat down on the edge of his desk, and put a hand on Sid’s shoulder.

“A desert warzone isn’t an appropriate place to overcome personal demons,” Ray said.

“That’s not what this is about,” Sid said. “I’ve just moved beyond writing about tainted politicians and transit complaints.”

“You better hope so. You survive our security training and I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can do.”

Sid took the deal and flew out to the Middle East three weeks later.

A sharp pain in his shin brought Sid back into the present. He cursed his luck, certain he’d been stung by a scorpion. However, the pain dulled quickly, but not before another kick to his boots forced him into a crouch. His eyes burned red as he opened them fully. He put his hand against the sun and made out a camouflaged hulk wielding a wrench standing in front of him.

“Scared the fucking piss out of me,” the soldier spat.

A tobacco-infused glob of spit now sparkled in the sand between the two men like a brushstroke of oil puddled in a Queens parking garage.

“Sorry,” Sid muttered.

“You’re not supposed to be here. I could have put a bullet in your fucking head. Probably give me a damn medal considering you’re a reporter.”

“I get it,” Sid said. He brushed the sand off his pants as he stood. “I’m leaving.”

“Don’t be a pussy,” the soldier said, extending his hand. “I’m Mason.”

“Sid.”

“Oh, I know your name. We get daily briefings on how to talk to you.”

“Is that why no one has done it yet?”

“Fuck, easy killer,” Mason said. “PR is not our strong suit.”

“Funny considering that’s part of your mission.”

“Enjoying the heat while you’re preaching at me?” Mason asked, slapping a wrench into his palm.

“Had to get out of the AC,” Sid said. “Too small a space and too many closed windows.”

“You want to open those bulletproof windows for the enemy, be my guest, but make damn sure me and my friends are all in the latrine when you do. And try not to make too much of a mess for us to sop up later.”

“Yeah, well, never been a fan of central air. Messes with my sinuses.”

“You been in a sandstorm yet?”

“No.”

“Might change a few of your preconceived notions about our little air conditioned shit box.”

“I didn’t mean to offend anyone.”

“Well, could you not offend anyone a few paces to your right. I’ve got to park my ass under the vehicle you’ve been using as a hammock.”

“Right,” Sid said. “Yeah.”

He moved out of the way and heard Mason slide under the front bumper. Sid rubbed the back of his head.

“Something wrong?” Mason asked from beneath the vehicle.

“Can I help you with anything?” Sid asked.

“You know much about auto repair?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then I’m good.”

“Well, how about I just keep you company then?”

“Like to work alone.”

“This is the longest conversation I’ve had in days,” Sid said. “Give me something.”

“I didn’t shoot you, what more do you want?”

“Son of a bitch,” Sid mumbled.

The clangs and grunts stopped. Mason wagged his boots back and forth.

“Coffee,” he said.

“Do you want anything—?”

“Black.”

“You got it.”

Sid headed back to the FOB. He found another hulking figure in fatigues leaning up against the counter, waiting for the coffee pot to finish gurgling.

“Lieutenant Núñez,” Sid said, keeping a respectful distance.

The officer growled something through his dark mustache that sounded like, “motherfucker.” Sid contemplated reaching for his notebook and peppering Núñez with questions before the man had even poured his morning coffee, but thought better of it.

“Given any thought to my, um, repeated requests?” Sid asked instead.

The officer’s severe, but sleepy, brown eyes motioned toward the coffee pot.

“Got it,” Sid said, grabbing two Styrofoam cups from the stack.

“Thirsty?” Núñez asked.

“Getting one for your mechanic.”

“Are you referring to Sergeant Ward?”

“This would be a lot easier if you didn’t break my balls every time we had a conversation.”

“But it wouldn’t be as fun,” Núñez said. He filled his mug and turned to walk out the door. “Don’t bother my men without my permission or I won’t talk to you at all.”

The officer knocked into Sid’s shoulder as he left.

“Sir?” Sid called out.

“You’re not ready to leave the wire,” Núñez said, pausing in the hallway. “Some of my men aren’t ready. Request denied.”

“Thanks for your time, Lieutenant…” Sid muttered.

He knew picking fights with commanding officers wouldn’t get him anywhere, but he hadn’t been raised to keep his mouth shut (or respect authority for that matter). However, Núñez had just confirmed Sid’s suspicions about the base’s preparedness. What Sid couldn’t piece together is whether that mattered in this country or not.

Sid returned to the Humvee and found Mason’s boots pointing out the opposite end. Sid pounded his fist up against the bumper.

“Jesus H. Fuck!” Mason yelled out.

Sid heard tools thump against the sand.

“Delivery,” he said. “I’m allowed to give you coffee, right?”

“Hell yes,” Mason said.

After climbing out from the car’s underbelly, Mason grabbed the cup and downed the coffee in one swallow. He tossed the cup back at Sid who caught it while preventing his own coffee from sloshing out.

“That must have felt good,” Sid said.

“Nothing feels good here. Needed a jolt.”

“Happy to help. Does this mean I can ask you a few questions?”

“Hope you’re not looking to fill column inches with me,” Mason said. “I’m a pretty boring story.”

“Yeah, I figured that out pretty quick,” Sid said. “But I’ll take what I can get right now.”

“What are you writing about?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“See, you want us to engage, yet you have no fucking clue what your plan is.”

“I’m here, that is the plan. A lot of people have questions about what’s going on over here.”

“Tell you what, a lot of guys over here have a question or two on what’s happening.”

“Maybe we can learn from each other.”

“When can I say I’m off the record?”

“Whenever you want.”

“And you can’t use what I say?”

“That’s how it works.”

“Then I’m off the record.”

“Fine by me.”

Sid leaned up against the door, burning his elbow on the hot metal handle. He pulled it away, more pissed about the squad’s antipathy than by the glowing red blotch on his arm. Mason wiped his forehead with an oily rag and then got back to work.

Mason clamped his thick hand down on Sid’s shaking leg.

“Really? Still with the fucking nerves?” Mason asked. “The mission is over, fucking relax.”

Sid adjusted his helmet and nodded.

“Lieutenant, Bob Woodward here is still pissing himself,” Mason yelled above the roar of the Humvee. “Any suggestions on how he can calm his delicate senses?”

In the passenger seat, Núñez turned his head slightly and growled something that sounded like “fucker.”

“Well, I wouldn’t do that to your mother,” Mason said. “Just sit tight, we’re almost home.”

Sid had hounded Núñez for nearly a month to authorize his first patrol. The squad now fancied itself a crack staff, impervious to the anxiety and turmoil endemic to other platoons across the desert. Outside of the occasional pop-pop-pop in the distance, however, none of the men crowded in the FOB had been in a firefight or had to halt a long caravan in order to investigate and detonate an IED. How would they react in the face of something more treacherous than cleaning out latrines or standing at attention for Reveille?

It turned out that Sid’s hands refused to stop shaking the moment he parked his ass in the Humvee. They shook all through the meeting with the hard-eyed, sun-scorched elders of the nearby village. Núñez listened patiently to the staccato Arabic flying off the leader’s rotten teeth like acid. He absorbed the overwhelmed translator’s stuttering and backtracking while nodding and trying to maintain eye contact with his counterpart. Sid watched as younger, more anxious men prowled along the back of the tent, shouting and pointing every so often. They had been stripped of their arms before entering, but their danger still permeated the cramped space.

“What are they pissed about?” Sid had asked Mason.

“No water. Limited food. Enemy offering it all at discount prices,” Mason had said. “It means we’re fucked. Now shut up and keep close to me or anyone else with a gun.”

Sid’s concentration was broken by Mason leaping out of his seat and climbing on top of a snoozing soldier in the rear of the Humvee.

“I said move your hand, Bee,” Mason shouted, slapping his subordinate on the cheeks.

“Wake the fuck up, this ain’t fucking nap time.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Bee said.

“Up all night playing ‘Call of Duty’ again?” Mason asked.

“Nuh-uh, Sergeant,” Bee said.

“Christ, just what Uncle Fucking Sam had in mind when he signed your sorry ass up,” Mason said, retaking his seat. “Has more goddamn kills online than he does in real life. Put that in your article, Sanford.”

“Why do they call you Bee?” Sid said, ignoring Mason’s jabs to his bicep. “Hard to figure considering your nameplate reads Zdunczyk.”

Bee glanced at Mason, who nodded his approval.

“Real name’s Frank,” Bee said.

“I’m aware,” Sid said. “Why Bee?”

“Aw, tell him,” Mason said, throwing in another scoop of tobacco below his bottom lip.

“My first day in the mess I wanted to make conversation,” Bee said. “So I started talking about this article I read about bee hives being like a communist society. Then I started in on the similarities and differences between hives and military bases. Kind of explains it all.”

“You’re so fucking lucky ‘Queen Bee’ didn’t stick,” Mason said. “Whole squad was fucking howling so bad Núñez smoked the shit out of us. So worth it.”

Sid reached the pocket of his flak jacket and pulled out his recorder. He waited for Mason’s affirmative before turning it on.

“Why’d you sign up?” Sid asked.

“No one needs to hear that fucking story,” Bee said, wearily looking at the slim device. “No offense, sir.”

“This is your penance for conking out,” Mason said. “Be thankful it’s not fucking licking my boot whenever the fuck I tell you to.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Bee said. “It all started when my father was murdered…”

“Murdered?” Sid asked, the quake in his hands now having less to do with nerves or the Humvee’s shimmy.

“Yeah, couple of townies broke into our house looking for shit to pawn to buy meth or some shit,” Bee said. “My dad went to investigate and they dropped him with one to the head before he could raise his pistol.”

“Holy shit,” Mason muttered, spitting tobacco juice into a cup. “Where were you?”

“Getting high in the woods with a bunch of fucks from school,” Bee said. “We all passed out there. Cops ended up coming out to find me. We all scattered thinking they were going to bust us for weed. Ran home and right into the yellow caution tape like a goddamn marathon runner.”

“They catch the bastards?” Sid asked. “I mean…did they apprehend the suspects?”

“Nah, this is the best part,” Bee said. “They stepped over my dad and started ransacking the rest of the house. Probably looking for money or trying to cover their tracks. Make it look like there were more than two shit kickers. My mother had holed up in her closet and waited for them with a Remington 870 shotgun she bought on layaway from Walmart. Blew both motherfuckers away when they opened the door.”

“My kind of woman,” Mason said. “Shit, sorry about your Pops, but this is making my shit hard.”

“So how’d that lead to you enlisting?” Sid asked, once again ignoring Mason.

“Despite being relieved, my mother was pissed as hell I wasn’t home when it all went down,” Bee said. “She told me that since she took care of my father’s killers, the least I could do was go shoot some towelheads in the desert. Sorry, is that too crass for a newspaper?”

“I’ll clean it up, don’t worry,” Sid said. “You regret it?”

“Only regret I have is not killing those pricks myself. And not having a chance to kill anyone here. Fucking glad-handing political bullshit isn’t my thing.”

Sid nodded and pressed the pause button.

“Thank you for trusting me with your story,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m sorry to hear about your father.”

“Oh, I don’t trust you for shit,” Bee said, shaking Sid’s hand. “But Mason does and I report to him. I’m just as liable to shoot you next time you come near me.”

“Understood,” Sid said. “Just make sure Mason’s behind me when you do it. Takes care of both our problems.”

“You fucks know I’m still fucking here, right?” Mason asked.

The Humvee’s breaks squealed like a downtown bus as the hulking transport swerved abruptly. Sid tumbled into Mason’s lap just as the cup of dip flew out of the Sergeant’s hands and onto Sid’s chest.

Núñez shouted something unintelligible from the front of the vehicle.

“Shit,” Mason said. “Look alive, fellas.”

Sid’s nerves actually calmed as the camouflaged men around him checked their weapons and reached for additional ammo. He heard a distant whistling that aggressively faded into dense thuds nearby.

“Fuck, we’re in the shit now, boys,” Mason said.

The Humvee shook after a mortar landed a few yards away, spraying sand and debris across the small windows. The whistle intensified as the enemy’s aim improved. Núñez’s orders came out in a stream of profanity and pseudo-Spanish as he exited the front seat. Sid could feel the ripple of steel and sand as the Humvee continued to race across the desert. Mason shoved a finger into Sid’s chest.

“What did I fucking tell you before?” He asked.

“Stay close,” Sid said. “Preferably next to someone with a weapon.”

“Good,” Mason said. “Don’t fucking forget it.”

And then the world went white.

***

https://www.amazon.com/Sid-Sanford-Lives-Daniel-Ford/dp/1947048104

http://www.writersbone.com/

Daniel Ford is the author of Sid Sanford Lives! He’s the co-founder of Writer’s Bone, a literary podcast and website that champions aspiring and established authors. A Bristol, Conn., native (and longtime Queens, N.Y., transplant), Ford now lives in Boston with his fiancée Stephanie. He’s currently working on a short story collection.

To watch soldiers load into planes on television
To ignore veterans who manage to make it home

To cry out when an airman murders four of your friends
To never question the valiance of combatants

To have visions of your father stabbing you to death
To lose your sight in vodka and cigarettes

To flee the western night for that big bright eastern city
To discover there is no such thing as relief in escape

To forget the names of the slain from your hazy youth
To remember in excruciating detail the site of their wounds

To learn there is nothing you can do to raise the dead
To spend your life writing the killed into existence

To read the greatest fear for men is being embarrassed
To understand that for women it’s being murdered

To be the only female in the room of camouflaged men
To befriend the lonely fighter in the city of civilians

To love a Marine who became a decorated firefighter
To lose him in the North Tower that blue September

To watch soldiers load into planes on television
To embrace veterans who manage to make it home

for Deborah, Amy, Melissa, and Heather Anderson
and Captain Patrick “Paddy” Brown

Photo Credit: U.S. Army photo by Maj. Adam Weece, 3rd CR PAO, 1st Cav. Div.

Concerning whether or not I am a horse

I strap torso & press arms

to diaphragm with breath

deep the distressed
voice of mistress
mumbles wishes
amid plum trees
& white headlight
bum-rushes the alleyway—

Am I a horse

kicking at its leathers?
How many full rides & how should I count?

Thought made in moonlight appearing
cogent, succinct behind glass
what makes a full ride?

Pulling hard & pulling harder, making iron
break soil, dancing in dirt, hooves
wet, mane draping the strength of a neck—

Am I

if no bit made better a turning
head? No harm but tightened
hips? & if my breast hardened by use?
My rump sheened in sunlight

Am I a horse?

Many hands have made my length
& I’ve never been bought.

Many hands have made
my length. Many hands.

God Between Us & All Harm

Lighted hallway, delighted guest,
the television the
lens of it, lends itself to you.
Trump again, brackish, weighted
eyes dilated, throat-moaning

“The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.”

Beleaguered, who can even remember a face
these days? My grandfather used to say things
like you can drown in a teacup of water
if you fall right. He was gladly on his way out.

Sometimes I see his point:

LSU live tiger-mascot dies of cancer at age eleven
his empty cage strewn with flowers, paper cards
a student says, “”nobody else had a live tiger.”

company shares tumble by 8%
top of the news feed
taking so much light
I’ve forgotten there’s war in Ukraine •

Afghanistan • Iraq • Nigeria • Cameroon • Niger •
Chad • Syria • Turkey • Somalia • Kenya • Ethiopia •
Libya • Yemen • Saudi Arabia • Egypt • India • Iran •
Myanmar • Thailand • Israel • Palestine • Philippines •
Colombia • Armenia • Azerbaijan • China • Bangladesh •
DRC • Algeria • Tunisia • Burundi • Russia • Mali •
Angola • Peru • Lebanon • Mozambique •

where &

& where else?

L asks what I think of the song

Listening with ears pricked upon
to Young Thug’s Wyclef Jean
I cannot be sure where I meet it

when he says let me put it
& I think of course not—but then
fingering the hem of my skirt

do I reject his desire to squirt
his cum on my face slick as a ghost
because I’m honestly or dishonestly

deposed? I want my skin touched—
perhaps it’s how he asks,
telling me to deny my desire to bask

In the wet filth & become
part perversion myself. Because it was me
that morning who told

my beloved to do it & yes, I did want
kneeling deep in the tub looking up
all my skin like a socket, drooling mouth

blossomed, filled like a pocket.
L said to me, You don’t think
about the implication, the intention.

I said, I don’t think
of the gesture as blind contravention
or anything more than body & mess

upon mess in the deluge of sex. I confessed
I want to be seen as a canvass.
She said, I don’t want to be mean,

with the swat of her hand, but
he’s no Jackson Pollack.

Photo Credit: Cesar Ojeda

Across the eight-lane roadway from the observation post was a gas station where Iraqis waited for days, siblings and cousins trading shifts and standing guard, eyeing the other clans and tribes. Pierstein crouched behind a chest-high wall of dusty sandbags and hugged the shade it created just outside the post’s front entrance, a long piece of floppy plywood propped against the doorway and secured with a string on a nail. Trash tumbled in the road, clung doubled-over to the curbs. He wiped his brow and watched them mill around through the line. They paid no attention to the Detroit chug of turbo-diesels pulling up on Pierstein’s side of the road.

He called back into the OP, “Log run’s up.” His voice skipped off the ceramic floors of the three-story mansion’s interior and wound up the marble-columned atrium to the upper floors, finally muffled out against the sand bags stacked in the window frames. The roof had fortified posts with bulletproof glass, and central Fallujah and its desert environs spanned out unbroken but for minarets and crackling calls to prayer that mingled with smoke clouds from burning garbage.

Pierstein heard Corporal Baylor’s throaty notice to fall out followed by the heavy-laden footsteps of 1st Squad scuffing down the tiled stairway inside.

Pierstein walked out into the nascent daylight as the first truck stationed itself in front of the house next door. The turret gunner swept his weapon outboard, slumped and mechanical. A covered trailer hauling cases of water and rations followed the second truck, and Cullen stepped out of the passenger side.

“Any ice today?” Pierstein asked.

“Negatron, dude. Generator’s still down.”

“Well, fuck our lives,” said Pierstein.

Cullen snapped to attention and saluted, “Fuck our lives, aye-aye.” He let the trailer hitch drop and clang against the frame. “Plenty of piss-warm water though.”

Pierstein’s squad filed out to the trailer. “Got another surprise for you though, Piers.”

“Finally get your dick hard?”

“You’d like that wouldn’t you? Nah, but this might get you up.” Cullen opened the rear door. A gaunt man, blindfolded and soiled, with a patchy beard and big goofy ears sat with his hands zip-tied behind his back so that he had to slouch deeply, his knees crammed into the back of the driver’s seat. A black gash poked out from under the blindfold. His left cheek was a dark pulpy purple and his lower lip was split, the corner of his mouth pinched red and raw. A silty mist swarmed the sunlight passing through the truck around the man’s face. “Think you two have met.” He shrugged.“Sorta.”

The man’s stench cut through the burning garbage and diesel, and Pierstein gagged and turned to his side and spat.

“Yep. This piece of shit smells like straight shit.” Cullen leaned past Pierstein and gave the man hard shove. “Don’t ya, you fucking Muj fuck?” The man was stoic. Pierstein was not impressed.

Pierstein was unsure at first but then recalled the elvish ears from the posters all over the FOB. Iqbal bin Hassan. S-2 said he was the guy behind the scope, shadowing the battalion’s movements throughout the city and pulling the trigger at choice, vulnerable moments. Pierstein recalled the hole where Ben’s face should have been, his battle buddy like a mannequin propped up against a heap of rubble. Pierstein had scrubbed his trousers for an hour but couldn’t get the blood out. He was down to two pairs now. S-2 said a lot of fucking things.

Iqbal’s breath was slow, tidal, though he must have known where they were taking him. It occurred to Pierstein that Iqbal probably knew better than he did. This was a confrontation Pierstein knew he was meant to relish. Another platoon had picked him up three days before, and the CO had come to find Pierstein to tell him They got the son’bitch, but Pierstein was relieved that they would not let him see Iqbal.

Cullen tried to fill the space opposite the open truck door like a valet, peering around, scanning behind the truck and checking the windows of the neighboring homes. Pierstein stared. “That’s him?”

“That’s him,” said Cullen.

Pierstein stepped closer to the truck. He started to reach out to touch Iqbal, looking for a parallel to how Iqbal had reached out and touched them. His heart beat dragged. No cry for blood rushed to face or his fists. Looking at Iqbal, defenseless and whipped, he felt like retreating, like dropping his gear and shutting his eyes.

“That’s the dirty haji fuck right there, bro, fucking Muj motherfucker.” Cullen peered around some more.

Pierstein stepped closer. The diesel hummed, and a gust of wind sprinkled a glittering of sand through the open doors. He watched it collect on Iqbal’s swollen lips. Pierstein let his rifle hang loose and shifted it to his back. The scents of gas and sewage danced back and forth. He could see a thin piece of string tied in a simple knot around Iqbal’s wrist. Too slight to serve a tactical purpose, Pierstein wondered if it meant something, a friend back home or a reminder not to bite his nails. He wondered for a moment if Iqbal ever jerked off during the long hours hunting behind his gun, waiting for a Marine to wander into his aperture, the same way they all did on post. Did he feel guilty about it after? Like he had sullied the mission?

Pierstein pumped his fists, rolling his fingers in and out of a ball, wishing his arms would leap out on their own, but somehow Iqbal’s placidity was contagious, and Pierstein could not find the way to violating it. The failure huddled in his stomach. He tried to believe he would stay as calm as Iqbal was if the roles were reversed and winced the question from his mind, a new failure altogether. It was not like he would ever get his trousers back.

Was it even calm he was seeing in Iqbal? Hard to tell with the blindfold, without knowing what his eyes were doing. His even breaths and slouched posture could just as easily be his body opting out. Probably he had not been allowed to sleep for days. But Pierstein was inclined to believe it was fear that held Iqbal in check, the second-to-second will to not make another mistake, to not invite more pain or abuse, to breathe each breath so that it will leave room for the next. In the three previous days, the man, whoever he was, had learned not to beg or cry, learned only to survive the next minute.

The working party stopped, the drivers, the guys up in the turrets, his squad cradling cases of food and water mid-step, all watching him, all waiting for the show.

“That’s the motherfucker.”

Pierstein heard his squad leader from the house. “That’s him?” Corporal Baylor trooped across the dirt lot from the house wearing only a t-shirt under his flak, arms sinewy and bulging. Baylor didn’t say anything else as he dropped his rifle against Pierstein’s chest and went in. Cullen peered around again for onlookers.

Baylor did not touch Iqbal’s face. Gripping the nape of his neck and shoulder with one hand, he put his other to the spot where abdomen meets oblique, about a fist’s width in front of the kidney. Pierstein watched Baylor’s uppercut land over and over again, ashamed of his relief that someone else was doing his job for him. Iqbal let out a couple involuntary grunts and yelps, but he never cried out. After the fourth or fifth punch, Pierstein looked away and all he heard were muffled gags and impacts like fruit splattering on the sidewalk from fifty stories up.

Pierstein wondered about that: why the gut? Wasn’t the face more satisfying? The one whose effect you could measure and say That spot right fucking there? His blood on your knuckles? The one he will see in the mirror and recall the exact moment he received it–from you–and wince when he turns his head over his pillow and wakes up because of it? Feel it chewing food, dragging on a cigarette, bending his forehead to the ground. Chuck Norris never round-housed dudes in the hip.

When they finally pulled Baylor off Iqbal, he was not throwing punches anymore. He had Iqbal by the collar in a sort of combat conference, practically mounting the guy in a cultural exchange of sweat. It sounded like growling at first and strings of Baylor’s saliva unfurled on Iqbal’s swollen face. It was only when Pierstein and Cullen were pulling him off that Pierstein heard what he was saying to Iqbal, over and over again through his teeth: Baylor.

Later, thinking back on it, Pierstein realized why Baylor had chosen the gut. The face was already bloody and bruised, a pulpy blast zone previously claimed. Baylor wanted agency, and his wrath would not be felt on the face. If he had the time, he would have tattooed his name on Iqbal’s oblique or anywhere else. But all he had was a few seconds, so he claimed his spot.

Free of Baylor, Iqbal crumbled out of the truck and started puking in the gutter, the mealy bile nestling in the bright green household sewage. Somebody said something about a corpsman. They let him linger there a minute unmolested. Pierstein was not sure if this was a deliberate mercy, that Iqbal should have this respite to reflect on his misery and talk it out with someone in his head, or if it was an exhibition in its own right—the dominated bared at the pleasure of its dominator.

Cullen eventually hooked him under the arm pit, said, “Get the fuck up,” and crammed him back in the truck and slammed the door home. Baylor told the squad, “Let’s get these guys out of here.” Pierstein still had Baylor’s rifle, and he watched as Baylor slapped the dust from his hands off on his trousers before reaching for it.

How can a society so disconnected from its wars welcome back its fighting women and men? What do we lose when we privilege individuality over collectivity? WBT Writer Drew Pham joined in a panel discussion with Sebastian Junger on his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, alongside Columbia University Professors Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Peter Coleman. Venera Kusari of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at Columbia moderated.

Watch the recorded discussion below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCPYV1MN8E]

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War and Tribe.  As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.   

Dr. Peter T. Coleman specializes in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Dr. Coleman holds a Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, where he today serves as Professor of Psychology and Education. He directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, and is the Executive Director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at the Earth Institute. 

Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida is a faculty member and the academic director of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program, Director of the Youth, Peace and Security program and Co-Executive Director of AC4, all at Columbia University. Dr. Fisher-Yoshida teaches classes in conflict resolution and related fields and conducts participatory action research, and research in the areas of conflict and conflict resolution with a focus on intercultural communication, transformative learning and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). She i received her Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California.

The violence that reached our shores left me at a loss—every attempt to conceptualize these tragedies failed to capture the emotions moving me. I tried to make sense of San Bernardino and Orlando by writing, but after a dozen drafts I realized that failure is at the heart of my shock and sorrow. We bore witness as attacks ravaged Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey. I watched each attack unfold, felt each death defeat me. We fought for Afghanistan, for America, but it was for nothing.

My friends that served in Iraq echoed similar sentiments in the spring of 2014 when Daesh captured swathes of Iraq and Syria. They watched everything they struggled for fall apart. It was a cruel turn to watch ISIS flags fluttering from American Humvees. We were warriors in the world’s most powerful military, but most of us were helpless to act. More than six thousand of our brothers and sisters died, more than fifty thousand wounded—what will their legacy be?

Like many of my brothers and sisters that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I poured my heart and soul into this war. I knew we were fighting an uphill battle when I joined, but I thought if we fought for the Afghan people, maybe the terrorism they faced wouldn’t come home with me. I failed. I remember reading a Washington Post article about my area of operations—the Jalrez Valley in Wardak Province—mere months after we returned home in the fall of 2011. When we arrived, two girls’ schools thrived just outside our outpost, our Afghan counterparts enjoyed good relations with the locals, and many local villagers helped us fight the Taliban shadow government. One girls’ school is ruined now, the other beset by drive-bys and bombings. The article said Jalrez was named “the Valley of Death.” My Afghan comrades—with whom I broke bread and bled alongside—despair that the population threw their lot in with the Taliban. The valley is theirs now, how long until they seize the province? The nation?

The day after Orlando was warm and sunny—the summer felt garish and irreverent against my frustration. I tried to explain to a civilian colleague what I felt, and she asked me how I could feel responsible for the attack. She said it seemed so removed from my deployment in 2010. Many of us were brought up in the military schooled in counterinsurgency, which taught us that what the “strategic corporal” did on the ground impacted the whole war. Indeed, leaders on the local level like Colonel H.R. McMaster influenced national policy. I learned that war is not just red and blue symbols on a map, but a complex and entangled system that includes every one of us. Each raid, each dollar, each soldier a thread in a web. It connects a rifle to a villager, a villager to a valley, a valley to a nation—each strand leading to another variable, another effect. What implications did losing Jalrez have on the war? I can’t pretend to know what Omar Mateen thought of the war on his family’s country, but if it was mine I would be full of rage and sorrow. I can’t say where those feelings would take me, and maybe that’s why I can’t make Omar into the enemy no matter how hard I try. Every attempt to understand his decisions dropped me into a void. I told my colleague that I couldn’t draw a line from Jalrez to a mass murder, only that I felt responsible.

In a society so divorced from the implications of war and foreign policy, veterans not only bear the physical and emotional costs of war, but shoulder the moral responsibility as well. Only during the Global War on Terror has the term “moral injury” entered into the lexicon of mental health and trauma. One need only look to the International NGO Safety Organization or Team Rubicon to see veterans’ commitment to duty and social responsibility. If one thing can be said of veterans it is our need to act, but there’s something else driving us. In the words of Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives us meaning. Danger makes life simple—survival supplants wardrobe choices and cocktail selections. There is a singularity of purpose and a definition of clarity I have found nowhere else. It joins us irrevocably. Sebastian Junger’s new book Tribe examines the bonds that come from collective hardship in wartime—one woman in the book, Nidzara Ahmetasevic, was evacuated from Bosnia only to make a harrowing return trip back to Sarajevo because it was too hard to keep going while her family suffered. “We were the happiest,” she told Junger. “And we laughed more.”

Like her, I miss much of my war. My brother, an active duty Infantry Sergeant and OEF vet, says he wishes he was back in Afghanistan. He holds out hope for another deployment, another opportunity to get back into the fight. The thought terrifies me, I don’t know what I would do if I lost my little brother. At the same time, another part of me wishes I could go back with him. War gave me camaraderie and meaning, but it was an addiction. Karl Marlantes called combat the crack cocaine of adrenaline highs, with crack cocaine consequences.

I look at the attacks at home and abroad, and I wonder if the source of my despair isn’t the tragedy of each event, but a yearning for combat. We said we were in Afghanistan to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, but when fighting season came I savored the fighting. It came to eclipse the desire to build infrastructure, capacity, and governance in Afghanistan. It even eclipsed the beauty of the little girls that welcomed us into their schools. I lost Jalrez because I was too intoxicated by the smell of gunpowder and the power of calling Apache gunships to raze the valley. I kept the Afghans I was supposed to serve at rifle’s length out of fear, alienating them. When I came home I tried to pay penance for my blood lust by working for veterans non-profits and by working with refugees to the U.S. I thought if I could save enough lives, make a big enough difference, then I could eventually make up for leaving Jalrez in chaos. For a while I told myself I was doing good work, making a difference. Then a car would backfire or the neighbors would set off a string of firecrackers—I would break into a sweat, my glands taking me out of reality and back into the fight. After that the pathways addicted to adrenaline reactivated like reopened wounds, a bitter reminder of internal war between my compassion and savagery.

After Orlando, it feels as if there may be no way of erasing my guilt because we brought home the dualism we took to war. In many ways, the contradiction of duty and conscience against violence and war reflects the contradictions in our national narrative. When we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, we said it was to liberate the oppressed. At first that held true: many Afghans and Iraqis welcomed us, welcomed the opportunity we appeared to herald—though our collective desire for revenge colored the decision to engage in both wars. The product is the despair of a failed enterprise of our own making. We say that all men are created equal, but black Americans are still murdered with impunity. We call for an end to violence in Iraq and Syria, but our only action is to drop bombs. We brought other things home—our police forces mutated into paramilitary organizations, our xenophobia morphed into something that politicians actively encourage to win elections with. Perhaps this will be the legacy of the war on terror that so many of us veterans and countless more civilians suffered for.

My good friend and confidant Kristen is a fellow vet, a Florida native, and identifies as part of the LGBTQ community. In the days following Orlando, she said,

“I fought for them. For the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. And it’s come to this.” Her tears fell.

I projected all my guilt, all my failure onto those words. In my head, I listed people I left behind in Afghanistan, the people that have to live with my mistakes. My guilt was immobilizing me into inaction, another failure. Kristen said something else.

“Why aren’t we celebrating the resilience of gay communities? Why aren’t we celebrating the lives of the people of color killed in this hate crime?”

I despair because I am complicit. We all are, yet despair and failure alone cannot define us. We must take ownership of our wars and their effects to face the future. We saw the consequences of war because we answered the call. For us, duty doesn’t end when we take off the uniform. We must share our experiences lest we leave the nation deaf and blind. Tomorrow, we build. Leading voices like Phil Klay, call on veterans to make art for the urgent cause of cultivating a more responsible body politic. Our definition of community must shift from the brotherhood of warriors to include voters, fighters, and victims of these conflicts. Then, we avenge the victims of these hate crimes, these terror attacks.

 Then, when we fight it won’t be for nothing.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme- mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-} We live in uncertain times. As of this writing, the U.S. stock market has taken two consecutive days of beating, losing nearly 5% of its value. The conspiracy theorists came out to claim that China was mounting an attack on the financial system, and that America was on the verge of economic collapse. China and Russia conducted joint military exercises, and are both engaged in active territorial contention outside their borders. North Korea is on its highest state of alert and military readiness in years, helmed by an unpredictable madman. The middle east is burning more intensely than at any point in the last century. It’s little wonder, then, that one of the most popular and enduring narratives is that of the post-apocalyptic wilderness. Among those post-apocalyptic narratives, none has proven more successful or enduring as that of the zombie apocalypse.

This type of story, about individuals surviving in the herd, is a sort of meditation about what can happen when systems fail, and, in order to survive, the individual is suddenly compelled to act violently and cynically without any moral boundaries. Guns are important, as is a very limited, teamwork based on an equal mixture of tribalism and proto-democracy. In other words, it’s a specifically American fantasy, designed for an American audience. Key to maintaining the illusion of zombie apocalypse fantasies being relevant or interesting (rather than stupid and facile, as they are) is that one ignores this basic fact of its American-ness.

Witness the recent Foreign Policy piece that pretended to investigate whether countries would withstand the zombie apocalypse well or poorly, and concluded that the country best suited for this was Russia. The evaluation made some basic assumptions about the nature of the zombie problem, and about how governments and cultures would be suitable (or not) to responding. It privileged authoritarian governments that have supposedly-swift decision-making capabilities, and placed bureaucratic (and therefore democratic) governments at a disadvantage. It also assumed that countries with larger, urban populations would be vulnerable to zombie hordes, as would countries with sophisticated infrastructure. Stepping back, Foreign Policy’s take on the zombie apocalypse looks a lot like a medical researcher’s evaluation of a pandemic. This is the only way to justify the otherwise strange and insupportable conclusion that Russia is best positioned to support a major challenge to its social and political structures.

It’s possible that Russia would be well suited to dealing with an epidemic – the populations are spread out, infrastructure is not developed, and (as pointed out) it’s simple to make decisions at the top and expect them to be obeyed at lower levels. But zombies aren’t a conventional disease – you can’t kill a disease with guns or machetes, because disease is bacterial or viral and remain active after their hosts die. And one of the key components of any discussion of zombies is that these are human-like creatures that can be stopped by severing the brain’s connection to the rest of the body. Why is this important? Because if a disease can be killed like a human, by conventional weapons designed to kill humans, then certain countries and cultures will have an innate advantage – those that glorify and glamorize weapon use and violence, and those with heavily-armed populations.

On the other hand, historically, the populations least capable of reacting to crisis have been led authoritarian regimes, not the other way around. Authoritarian or totalitarian countries are filled with cowed and timorous populations who’ve been acclimatized to wait for guidance and official instruction. Populations in authoritarian countries tend to view violence skeptically or even with open hatred; the one thing authoritarian regimes depend on is an actual monopoly on state-controlled violence, and usually have few qualms about dispensing it. Hitler and Stalin, the archetypical 20th-century totalitarian/authoritarian dictators (the conflation is broad but useful for these purposes) proved very poor at handling crises, and their countries both suffered as a result, the latter’s Soviet Union nearly collapsing due to bad decision-making apparatus, and the former’s Nazi Germany being utterly destroyed by the Allies in World War II in large part due to the same flawed decision-making institutions.

Democratic countries, on the other hand, have populations accustomed to making decisions for themselves, and exercising choice and opinion (even when those choices are fairly limited, as in America). Democratic countries countries would be filled (at least in the beginning) with many non-zombie people who were capable of resisting in a way that their authoritarian / totalitarian cousins would not. In other words, countries with authoritarian populations and cultures, as well as those where weapons were not readily available to everyone (authoritarian governments tend not to allow heavily-armed populations as a rule) would be very disadvantaged.

While bureaucracy-heavy and democratic governments tend to move more deliberately than authoritarian countries, they do not blunder in times of catastrophe or crisis. In fact, their true power comes from well-educated and agential populations. The focus on how effective a country would be at surviving a zombie trauma then depends not on its’ government’s response, but how its people responded after government becomes overwhelmed (as it is inevitably in this type of situation). In the case of America, it’s not difficult to imagine a swift that without a credible, robust central government, the country would devolve into regions, and then states, and so on, down to individuals. At each level, however, there would be action and response, a check against chaos and entropy.

In a place like Russia, governors are little better than representatives of their central government, and would be asking that central government for help and guidance.  America and similar Western governments have more room for non-reactionary, positivist individual initiative and choice. This makes them far more resilient in a real way.

Population centers and urban areas are hallmarks of a developed country no longer fully reliant on agriculture – and they would be vulnerable to zombies, especially when one considers that urban populations tend to be demilitarized and conform to liberal stereotypes like pacifism and a reduced affection for guns and violence. This would seem like the ideal place for zombies to be successful. Nevertheless, there’s an important component that analysts seem to overlook here, which is that massive population centers can be easily quarantined or destroyed if necessary. I’m talking, of course, about nuclear weapons. For those who are not read up on the basic capabilities of nuclear ordnance, suffice it to say that a single garden-variety strategic nuke would be sufficient to destroy all combustible biological matter on the island of Manhattan. The places where the most zombie damage can occur is also the place where it’s easiest to eradicate severe outbreaks.

Urban areas are good things for humanity, then, as ways to concentrate risk – but also further underline the fragility of authoritarian organizations like China and Russia, where the entire state is concentrated in those places that are most vulnerable to zombies. America could lose Washington D.C. and NYC, LA and San Francisco, and “America” would survive quite well – similarly, Germany without Berlin is still recognizably Germany. Russia without Moscow and St. Petersburg is – well, it’s a collection of people who speak the same primary or secondary language with varying degrees of fluency.

The points about culture and language and where and what makes a person American versus, say, Russian are important, because, the “zombie apocalypse” has always been a metaphor for how an idea can spread and wipe out opponents. The first Night of the Living Dead is a meditation on how communism works, while later sequels interrogate ideas like corporate consumerism. The zombie apocalypse isn’t really about the end of the world – it’s an eschatological shift, the end of a way of thinking about things. The nuclear family, hetero-normative social structures, science-based empiricism, sex- and gender-based standards for certain types of military service, the glorification of technology in peoples’ personal lives.

And it’s no surprise, then, that upon closer examination – examination of who would win in the zombie apocalypse (heavily-armed democratic individualists predisposed to articulating a vision of the world that depends on the purifying and redemptive power of violence) and who would certainly lose in the zombie apocalypse (everyone else for various reasons) – the zombie apocalypse ends up being a quintessentially American story, set in places and situations where American strengths are privileged. America has witnessed successful movies, a popular television franchise, books, and many thought-pieces on the subject, including this one. It all ends up coming down to the same thing: deprived of actual deprivation like that experienced casually by much of the developing world, Americans are hungry to be used for the ends to which they’ve been conditioned and raised. They are, to a far greater extent than other countries, prepared to encounter the zombie apocalypse – in spirit, if not in reality.

A final irony worth mentioning is that zombie apocalypse films were originally created for an outlier audience – they were considered outré films, about how to resist mob mentality (as stated earlier, associated first with communism and later with consumerism and capitalism). Now, zombie fantasies have been commercialized for the mainstream. Dissent has become fad, revolution is an aesthetic in which one indulges on Sunday evenings.

As genuine intellectual inquiry, the zombie apocalypse does not hold up to scrutiny – it’s an interesting thought, and amusing at first, but once one realizes that it is a meditation designed for Americans, and one where the game is rigged, it’s difficult to stay interested. America would win in a zombie apocalypse, but America would win most games of violence it designs for itself. It’s what America does.

After war, most societies look for love. Instead of dealing with the various manifest issues that remain after years of chaos and wanton murder, they seek the understanding and hope that can only be provided by stories based on faith, something greater than the brutal logic of expedience. A certain type of story presents love as a gift to the audience, a sanctuary from the tension brought about by strife, a coherent conclusion. A happy ending. It seems, from reviews of Preparation for the Next Life, as well as the recent reception of American Sniper and the relationship between Chris Kyle and his wife that forms its logical heart, that many Americans feel that they deserve such a story as well.

Preparation for the Next Life is not about love – it’s a terrifically clever and realistic accounting of the ways in which people seek escape from life at the bottom of a capitalist society. The plot's logic depends in part on offering readers the catharsis of a conventional love story, then switching the terms of the bargain without losing any momentum. By the time readers realize that Preparation for the Next Life uses love like toreadors use their capes, it’s too late. And instead of salvation, readers encounter a tragic tale of poverty and paucity that leads into a scathing indictment of the choices Western culture has made over at least the last fourteen years. More, if one counts Chinese communism, itself a product of Western culture.

There are two main characters in Preparation for the Next Life. The first to whom readers are introduced is Zhou Lei, an ethnic Uighur from the northwest of China. The Uighurs are Muslims, and the ethnic (Han) Chinese tend to dislike or hate them, which leads to her being alienated in her own country. Zhou travels from the type of crippling poverty one encounters in the third world to America (land of opportunity), where she is still viewed as an outsider by the predominantly Han Chinese immigrants. Despite the many hardships in her background, Zhou is defined by an inexhaustibly optimistic nature. This optimism draws its power from the myths her mother tells her when she’s a child, and is framed logically by her father, who believes in 60’s-style nationalistic, pro-Chinese propaganda. It’s interesting to see how easily this propaganda fits into Zhou’s idea of herself succeeding in the context of Western capitalism, as well.

The book abounds with stories and myths that the characters hear, and which they tell each other – they form the novel's life-blood, and are simultaneously vital to the plot and empty of all meaning. The myths that Zhou Lei's mother tells her, for example, serve as touchstones that readers can follow like signposts throughout the narrative. In one, offered in the beginning of the book, Zhou’s mother explains that distant mountains conceal a land of plenty. Much later in the book, a tired, hungry, and distressed Zhou finds herself talking with an Uzbek Afghan grocer, who has seen the same mountains from his native country of Afghanistan. The Uzbek offers her food and water, and Zhou experiences momentary relief, which leads nowhere. In another of Zhou’s mother’s myths, a girl travels to the faraway land of plenty with nothing but seven seeds to sustain her. The girl burns her feet while traveling over an iron desert, but makes it through to a blue river, where she’s healed. The occurrence of blue and injured feet later on in the book at various points offer useful guideposts on Zhou’s actual journey – or, at least, gives readers a sense of how she views a given situation; in keeping with the book's relentless realism, these signifiers are logical to the narrative and unto themselves, but don't actually deliver any more profound truth.
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The next character readers meet is Brad Skinner, a former bodybuilder who joined the military after 9/11, and served three tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army Infantry, including during the invasion. His background, delivered in the third person, states that the impulse behind joining was the terrorist attack on the twin towers – but it’s more complex than that: “9/11 was the big reason, but he would have gone anyway, just to do something.”

Skinner is surely one of the more complex veteran characters to emerge in contemporary literature. It would be a mistake to say simply that he is a broken veteran of the Iraq War, or suffers from PTSD – while both are undeniably true in the context of the text, they simplify and reduce his essential characteristics in a way that diminishes his experiences. The character readers encounter isn’t a fundamentally decent man, twisted and misshapen by war – he’s a savvy, emotionally manipulative adolescent who has been allowed to hide his defects behind his service, and attempts to do so immediately, as well as throughout the text. Skinner understands the archetype he’s playing – the “war hero” – and he cynically exploits expected civilian reactions to this type, again and again, describing himself as a veteran whenever he senses that the listener could be sympathetic to such an introduction. We meet him on the road into New York City, having hitched a ride from a very tolerant trucker after leaving the military – after acting like an entitled jerk and getting kicked out at the first gas station possible, Skinner walks into the city and attempts to pick up one of the first women he meets:

“I just got here, literally like an hour ago. Two hours ago. We could have a drink or something and you could tell me about yourself.”

“Thank you, no.”

“You sure? I just got out of the army yesterday. I literally just got here. All I want to do is buy you a drink to say thank you. Howbout it? I mean, you’re not talkin’ to a bad person.”

“I realize that.”

He moves on from this rejection, which he handles with characteristic irritation, Skinner heads to a patriotic bar. There, patrons buy him drinks for his service. Despite a desire on the part of readers to, maybe, see Skinner as a good person exposed to the horrors of war (and he was exposed to the horrors of war), few soldiers or veterans act, consistently, the way Skinner does – he’s been written this way to a purpose, and that purpose, when one reads the entire novel, is a subtle repudiation of the debatable notion that moral injuries sustained in combat lead inexorably to bad ends. Sometimes injury and moral injury does lead to tragic decisions, but more often, as pointed out by thinkers like Nietzsche and Jung, moral injury from war leads to good and decent men growing and expanding – undertaking political service, as in the Greatest Generation, or literary works, as in Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22. Skinner is a different breed.

The physical descriptions of war arrive through Skinner’s dreams, or shaded recollections, and tend toward the surreal. They feel authentic – the way one sees vivid experiences from the past, unmediated by the conscious mind – especially in the beginning of the deployment: “They crossed paths with other units, soldiers who had been in heavy house-to-house fighting and there was a bad feeling, like they wanted to hurt somebody and you were it.” As time goes on in the war, readers experience combat like an especially urgent impressionistic painting in which Skinner has become trapped: “In the arc-weld light, solid forms appeared to shift – the hanging dust. Shadows were running. The drilling deafening thundering never stopped. The razor lights leapt straight across the black, flashed past – he whipped his head around – and they went away and went arcing slowly down like baseballs. The ground and the air were being shocked.” He loses friends, and (at least at first) dreads his memories of those experiences – until later in the book, when, thoroughly in the grip of the delusion that war can provide some sort of balm for his aching soul, he dreams of the war as a happier place, a time of fellowship and shared purpose.

There’s no question that Skinner has encountered severe moral injury based on what he sees and does in combat. He murders civilians, for one thing, and photographs them in awful positions for another – he is a war criminal, in other words, the lowest, most thuggish level of war criminal, but a criminal nevertheless, and carries PTSD. But the ravages of that awful psychological disorder – from which so many veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan suffer – do not explain or excuse his actions in the middle and end of the book. No – in Preparation for the Next life, Skinner’s choices, in and out of war, belong to him.

The relationship between Zhou Lei and Skinner is complicated, and depends in equal parts what each character represents to the other, which comes down to "escape." Zhou seeks in Skinner a replacement for her father, a sergeant in the Chinese Army who died during one of the collectivization phases of Chinese development in the 70s. To support this dependence on the pro-military narrative in Zhou's life, references to her belief in and admiration for soldiers and the military abound. She claims to have “military training” and admires the trappings of Skinner’s service – his military gear, his camouflage, his boots. She does not, however, understand Skinner, and by the time his PTSD manifests and he begins acting as selfishly as he feels, she’s trapped with an emotionally abusive, self-destructive adolescent. To Skinner’s credit, he often describes precisely what is important to him – his war, his pistol, his dream of one day returning to Iraq – rather than concealing his ambitions. Although he usually talks about the return to combat as a way to make money, it is quite clearly a dream to destroy himself, for a variety of reasons. Whether Zhou Lei willfully misunderstands Skinner, or it is simply a misunderstanding based on her desire for what he represents is left to the reader. For Skinner’s part, he sees Zhou Lei as a sexual object most of the time, and, as time goes on and his condition worsens, alternately as a source of stability and a burden of which to be rid at any cost, until the book’s unforgettable and dramatic conclusion.

This fixation on superficial aspects of love helps explain an otherwise curious phenomenon wherein physical fitness correlates with moral health. This, alongside Zhou Lei’s idea of soldiers as a sort of ideal, is the most prevalent strand running through the book: immoral or insane characters project internal dissatisfaction through broken bodies, while moral or decent characters do the same through near-religious attendance to working out. Here’s one of the primary characters exercising at a public park, in a scene of retreat that evokes Faulkner, Hemingway, and Hawthorne: “Skinner was doing pushups with his boots up on a ledge. When he was done, he had trouble standing up. He sat down and did nothing for quite a while, just sat at the bottom of a slide, his chin dripping, looking down at the sweat drips falling between his fingers. When he looked up, he saw a pit bull, a beautiful powerful animal with tight glossy skin over striated muscles…” The primary antagonist, on the other hand, “looked like a white meaty insect whose exoskeleton has been peeled away exposing the mechanical workings of muscles and white sacks of flesh, which had never been in the open air before.” The antagonist’s family members, too, suffer from physical ailments or deformities that feel linked to the choices they’ve made in life — the landlady is fat, so much so that she ends up suffering a heart attack. Her daughter, Erin, is described as “giant” when introduced to readers, then again on several occasions. While few would object to the medical assertion that a correlation exists between good health and good spirits (Mr. Carson of this blog argued the contrary here), Preparation actually bases part of its moral hierarchy on disciplined workout regimens, or “military training,” as Zhou Lei puts it, so much so that the final image in the book is that of a good character preparing to squat more weight than they have ever before attempted. A character’s fitness or health does not mean, necessarily, that they are good, or healthy, but the absence of fitness is a sure sign of spiritual poverty. In the context of the book’s ostensible theme, then, characters use working out as a replacement for the affection they don’t derive from external sources, or as a means of escape from a world over which they otherwise have no control. Working out, according to the logic of the text, is an activity that leads nowhere, and gives its participants nothing beyond temporary respite from a sense of existential terror that runs like rapids throughout the text.

Many people believe that love offers some sort of redemption – a way to balance out the sins of violence, the choices its nation made in war. When Skinner disagrees with Zhou’s proposition that love makes the world go round, she challenges him. “What makes the world go round,” she says, and Skinner answers: “War… Actually, I’d say money first. Money and then war.” America, a capitalist society that seems addicted to both money and war, has made serious mistakes in its pursuit of both – like torture, like bullying, like unnecessary violence, like sexual assault, like disastrously unregulated financial markets, all to no apparent end. And as much as readers would like a classic love story to make it all seem okay, that redemptive narrative isn’t here for American society in the way that it seemed accessible or deserved after World War II. In the end, after all the struggles, perhaps the best analogy for this book in the western canon would be one a disillusioned Hemingway wrote after The Great War – A Farewell to Arms. The sad truth is, there is no transcendent understanding bought when one covets trauma and violence – only more trauma and more violence – a pessimistic, never ending cycle. Preparation for the Next Life delivers both, and in such a way that one cannot help but grow from reading it.

Preparation From the Next Life is by Atticus Lish, published by and available through Tyrant Books.

American Sniper, a new film based on the book of the same name, is being released on Christmas Day. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring and produced by Bradley Cooper, it tells the story of Navy SEAL super-sniper Chris Kyle, widely-praised as the most lethal sniper in American history with at least 160 “official” kills, and apparently many more “unofficial” ones. The film’s catch phrase is “the most lethal sniper in history”, and the trailer shows Bradley Cooper undergoing a moment of moral doubt before (presumably) shooting a child carrying a bomb. The Hollywood studio is banking not only on the film’s popularity, but that Americans will want to spend their Christmas Day watching such morally questionable lethality. The trailer immediately reminds me of another Bradley Cooper role in The Place Beyond the Pines (a much better movie than American Sniper, by the way), where Cooper’s entire character is built around the fact that he killed a man with a young son the same age as his own and felt guilt and regret for the rest of his life.
Digression about the title American Sniper: why are there so many films beginning with “American” something or other? Cooper has already starred in one such movie only a year earlier than this one (American Hustle), and then we have American Psycho, American Beauty, American Pie, American Gangster, American History X, American Outlaws, and many, many  more. I understand that the double iambic rhythm of America’s adjectival form lends an especially strong sound that leads to strong titles, and it is hard to find any other nationality adjectives which convey such emphasis (the few scattered examples are exotic rather than emphatic: The French Connection, The Italian Job, The English Patient, The African Queen, The Manchurian Candidate, The Good German. Even here we see the definite article almost without exception, which is never necessary with “American”). Rather than exotic, titles beginning with “American” are meant to be paradigmatic of something true and universal and worthy of such a phonologically forceful appellation. We can speculate that Kyle, in choosing the title for his war memoirs, intended to tap into this paradigm with himself representing the ideal Platonic form of “sniper” or “killer” by means of his qualitative Americanness. It is beyond doubt that director Clint Eastwood and the Hollywood producers agreed.

Moving back to the original story, after 10 years in the military and four tours in Iraq, the real-life Chris Kyle left the Navy in 2009 and started a private security consulting firm in his home state of Texas. One of his priorities was supporting wounded and troubled veterans. When his book was published, he donated the entire $1.5 million check to charities supporting such veterans. He was a devoted family man as well as a noted gun-lover and hunter (it remains unclear whether he killed more human or non-human animals).

Kyle, along with a friend, was killed in 2013 by a troubled ex-Marine who shot him in the back when Kyle took him for his own brand of “therapy” at a shooting range. The funeral was held at the Cowboys Stadium in Dallas to accommodate the huge number of mourners. This man was a hero to millions of people in America. My purpose is not to disrespect Kyle in any way, but to point out some of my thoughts and observations about the circumstances which lead him to become such a hero to so many.

It is obvious that Kyle was a conflicted individual, which is perfectly understandable if we consider the inhuman amount of death and bloodshed he was involved in. Many veterans return from war with PTSD, often despite never even firing a shot or being shot at. War is traumatic, and the training and mindset that prepares an individual for war can sometimes be even more dehumanizing. I recognize the goodwill Kyle felt towards other veterans, but should it be considered the wisest decision to bring a suicidal, mentally-unstable veteran whom you had never met to a shooting range? Kyle’s death, while tragic, is not surprising. Jesus Christ reportedly said “live by the sword, die by the sword”. Kyle, a lover of guns, personally killed hundreds of humans with guns. Is it shocking that such a story should end in his own death by gun? Kyle was also a proud Christian man who must have fallen into confusion about the meaning of his Lord’s words extolling pacifism. He had more of a mentally of Crusader-against-the-infidel Christian than a turn-the-other-cheek one. Yet this is beside the point as he was not the first man to justify his violence through his religious beliefs, and he won’t be the last.

Another relevant thing I found out is that Kyle never expressed any regret or doubt over killing people on such a Herculean scale (here is a quote from his book: “It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it. The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her.”). One must imagine that it would become quite routine after a while to aim, shoot, and repeat. This is no video game, however, nor is it aerial bombing, artillery, or even run-of-the-mill machine-gun fire. Every one of those kills Kyle would have previously and skillfully planned, calculated, and then witnessed in gory detail by means of a powerful telescope sight. That such a thing would be desensitizing is understandable. I would not take such a job, but if it were me I would also by necessity strengthen my personal convictions about my own righteousness if only as a way to avoid insanity (another quote from the book: “My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than that woman’s twisted soul. I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.”).

There appear to be some unsavory parts of Kyle’s story. First of all, I must ask myself why Navy SEALs and other special operations guys call themselves “silent professionals” when there is nothing silent about the stream of lucrative book deals and Hollywood productions involving former Navy SEALs and their ilk telling all the dirty secrets about their work (which is to say, how efficient they are at killing other humans). Kyle’s book and movie are just one of an entire sub-genre which the French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard would label “war porn”, and its popularity in the military and American society as a whole is revealing. Just as in similarly violent video games, the wide-eyed reader/viewer can excitedly imagine himself killing everybody in sight and single-handedly saving the day/winning the war. Such a mindset, while quite common, is psychologically unhealthy for individuals, and politically unhealthy for a democracy.

Kyle also had problems telling the truth. Though apparently no stranger to garden-variety barroom brawls, he invented a story about a bar fight in which he punched out former wrestler, actor, and Minnesota governor (and fellow Navy commando) Jesse Ventura. Ventura sued and was eventually awarded over a million dollars in damages. Kyle also apparently made up a story about killing two guys who tried to rob him somewhere in Texas, which never happened in real life. I wonder why he would feel the need to make up superfluous falsehoods when he was already well-supplied with enough martial anecdotes to win admiration from his armed acolytes. It reeks of the braggadocio and machismo that is all-too-common in the special operations communities. He was also a heavy drinker, like many fellow veterans. Alcohol is one of the most common and most readily available means for veterans to cope with the trauma of war and homecoming. Sadly, we should not be surprised by such a man leading a violent life, even if he is by no means alone.

The idea of the Hero is one that is as old as humanity, and well-documented in the ancient stories of Heracles and Achilles on down the line. Thomas Carlyle famously popularized a theory of hero worship whose exemplars were nevertheless praised as much for their cultural and literary feats as for their martial and political prowess. Likewise, we will not find today’s ersatz heroes in the pages of Nietzsche, whose morally-transcendent, classically-trained heroes would come to rule over the common rabble. The current American myth of the hero is not so sophisticated as its predecessors, whatever their flaws. If we think about Joseph Campbell’s  famous theory of the monomyth, Chris Kyle could, through the narrative of his book and the film, be seen to follow the universal mythical paradigm of departure, initiation, and return. The thing about Campbell’s theory, though, is that it applies to the myths that human societies create, but not to human societies and individuals themselves. In other words, we create the myths that we want to believe. The myth of Chris Kyle and the hero protecting their freedom from evil-doers is one which many Americans would like to believe.

Like I said, Kyle, for all his personal problems, is not himself the problem, but a symptom of a larger problem. He was just doing his job, as horrible as that job was. The real problem is with the segment of society that glorifies this behavior as heroic, holding up Kyle in particular as a super-hero. I think it is twisted logic that holds up people like Kyle, and soldiers in general, as heroes while failing to question the cause or need for war and violence in the first place. In fact, if it has not been clearly enunciated up to this point, I do not care much at all for the term “hero”. Heroes are for people who see the world as black and white, good guys and bad guys, us versus them, without much thought for nuance or second-order effects (another telling quote from the book: “Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy “savages.” There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there.”). I think it is no coincidence that super-hero movies are especially popular at the moment–the desire for super-heroes in adults comes from the same line of thinking, and the same weakness of critical thinking, that produces hero worship. This same line of thinking also enables the propaganda and social and political environment which facilitates war and stifles dissent against it.

Chris Kyle was no super-hero, let alone hero, though many people (and maybe he himself) saw him as one. The world needs neither fake heroes nor mythical super-heroes with super-human powers or super-human killing ability to be able to solve the world’s problems or kill all of the bad guys. The society that produced Chris Kyle and his unquestioning world view will sustain itself with tales of heroes like Chris Kyle who defend our “freedom” from the bad guys. The thing about bad guys is that, to them, the other guys are bad guys, and they are fighting for their own version of “freedom”. Killing over 200 “bad guys” is just as ineffective a way to peace or freedom as killing two million “bad guys” if there is no reason why and no plan to stop killing them. This false heroism creates more problems than it solves and multiplies the violence in the world. Chris Kyle did not protect or make anyone safer; his story is one small part of immoral (and probably illegal) war that has only increased the vicious cycle of violent retribution that exists in the world. Such a cycle will continue until someone, dare I say one akin to a real “hero”, tries to stop the cycle with understanding, dialogue, and diplomacy. The world does not need heroes; it needs human solidarity.

I read a piece on Vox recently (compliments of former roommate and exceptional human being Damien Spleeters) the point of which was to disabuse readers of “myths” surrounding the Islamic State. The piece had a useful goal: to educate readers about the Islamic State, presumably so the reader could make more reasonable decisions about whether or not to support military engagement, or how to help resolve the problem of the Islamic State. I read the piece, twice, and while I found it better than much of the analysis elsewhere in mainstream media, it failed to disrupt the broader myth of the Islamic State. I want to continue the dialogue here, by examining what we hope to accomplish, and why.

Fact number one: Americans love violence. We love it in our movies and literature. We buy it en masse. The best television dramas aren’t just full of violence – they depend on it, without violence (and especially that most acceptable acts of violence – revenge, or retributive, or just violence) much of our entertainment would cease to make any kind of sense. This is true for American-made, American-written stories in a way that it is not for almost every other culture in the world, with the current exceptions of Chinese and Japanese cinema and literature, which are similarly saturated with violence, rape, and murder. Unsurprisingly, Japanese art has a large and enthusiastic following in America – unsurprisingly given our politics, Chinese art does not.

Fact number two: American love for violence extends into the political sphere. This is accomplished by adventurers who are wearied by peace, and bored by long-term projects to increase sustainability in communities, foreign and domestic. It is accomplished by cynical career politicians like Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove, both of whom understand that being seen as a powerful leader is part of what makes a good political candidate. And whereas there used to be a dominant isolationist, business-oriented, violence-sublimated strain to American politics – the old Republican Party, the boring, sober, clear-eyed realists of American politics that largely went extinct in the 70s and 80s, replaced by the current group of wild-eyed missionaries and Kulture-zealots. The Democratic Party still benefits from the perception that its constituency helped end the Vietnam War – they did not, it was the old, extinct Republican Party, Democrats began and expanded our involvement in Vietnam – but utopians on the left have always been the biggest proponents of foreign intervention on a small and large scale. Only recently, again, have utopians on the right begun to appropriate that narrative for themselves. For personal and professional reasons, as well as owing to the fact that journalism is a profession like any other, and there is no licensing process for thinking or talking or writing, most of the media coverage of every international event will be slanted toward creating the perception that American intervention is absolutely necessary.

Fact Three: American military intervention in other countries’ affairs usually makes things worse – occasionally much worse. Sometimes it doesn’t make things awful. That’s what we’re playing for, in the real world. It’s like that time on The Simpsons when Homer is asked to relate the particulars of some event – in his mind, he’s a tall, buff man, talking with the President of the United States, while (for no good reason) he is surrounded by aliens. Marge is exasperated by this obviously impossible account of events, and shuts him down. Advocates for military intervention are always prone to being Homer. Marge doesn’t exist. Let’s glance over big-ticket American military interventions over the last century:

Spanish American War – we freed Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spanish hegemony. That was such a staggering success for us and for our foreign policy that each of those three countries are… oh, right. Currently in shambles.

WWI – we beat the Germans, so the English and French could win WWI, because we liked their uniforms better (or something – there is actually no good reason we became involved in WWI and anyone who wants to dispute that is welcome to do so in the comment section), and then Europe was peaceful forever after that. WWI kicker – intervention in Soviet Revolution, against Lenin. Huge win for U.S., made everything better.

China in the 30s and 40s – we helped the Chinese resist the Japanese, which was cool, by supporting a monomaniacal tyrant who was happy to exterminate large swaths of the Chinese population, which was confusing because Chiang Kai-sheck could’ve looked like Tojo with glasses. What, they all look the same! Anyway, our support for the Chinese made everything better in China forever.

In World War II, we armed and equipped the Soviets and British to fight against Germany, then fought on the Allied side when Japan declared war on us. Defeating the Japanese actually did make things better over there – the Japanese may be the one place and time where our intervention actually helped. Our interest in doing so was tied to fear of the Soviets, who, despite our help during WWII, didn’t like us very much, as anyone with half a brain could’ve predicted going in. Germany’s life did not get better as a result of our intervention in WWII, they lost more of their territory, which made France and England happier, were split into two, and occupied. Sadly, everyone with some exposure to Soviet documents now understands that the Soviet Union was expecting us to attack them, and were never in any position to take over Europe, making the Cold War at least 50% our fault. Crazy when you think about it that way, but there you go.

Korea was a push – we made South Korea, run by a brutal dictator into the mid-eighties, look a lot like Japan. Life in North Korea after our military intervention did not improve – it actually got worse, to the point where it is actually a cliche that describes how awful life could be.

Iran – If you want a really sad, depressing accounting of how overseas, please read the official account of the Iran coup of 1953. Makes you feel bad for Iran, and bad about us. Eisenhower’s weak link as a president was British, and despite history assigning the responsibility for this one to us, it really was a British screw-up.

Vietnam – the less said, the better. We intervened militarily and things got so much better, it hurts even to think about it. Excruciating irony kicker – after arming or allying with South Vietnamese to fight their North Vietnamese cousins in order to protect them against Chinese and Soviet communism, the newly-reunified Vietnam fought a bitter, vicious war with China just a year after we closed our embassy. How’s that for gratitude – they could’ve at least pretended to be friends so as not to hurt our feelings. I mean, that’s one insanely useless war!

Cambodia & Laos – I don’t know much about these places, but am told that what happened after we intervened militarily helped their tourist industry. You’re welcome, Cambodia and Laos. Can’t wait to visit.

Africa – strongest continent on earth!

Iraq I – made things better for Kuwait, by keeping that territory out of Saddam Hussein’s hands. Were it not for our actions, the one quarter to one half of Kuwait’s population that’s actually Kuwaiti, and not some kind of slave, would have had to call themselves Iraqi instead. And as everyone knows, being an Iraqi sucks.

Somalia – We did not improve Somalia.

Afghanistan – Has life gotten better since the Taliban left? Well – it hasn’t gotten much worse. That’s gotta be worth something.

Iraq II – Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who terrorized the Middle East until we deposed him. He massacred 30,000 Kurds, which is awful. Unfortunately, things didn’t get better in Iraq while we were there, until we hired 20% of their population as security guards. Sort of disingenuously, Republicans and neo-conservatives have made it sound like it was having U.S. soldiers on the ground that was keeping Iraq safe. All I’m saying is, we had a lot of soldiers on the ground there while not paying off 20% of the population and we got attacked all the time. Had a lot of soldiers there while paying off 20% of the population and things got real quiet. In any case, shit’s out of control there right now.

Libya – Don’t bring up Libya. It’s fucking horrible there right now. A nightmare in every sense of the word.

Iraq III and Syria – shipping arms to militant groups we like at the moment has a way of burning us. It’s always the same story, too – they’re heroes when they need weapons, and then they’re awful, raping, human-rights-violating criminals afterward. Putting boots on the ground will not lead to a long-term deterioration in security, it will do so at the expense of American lives. Airstrikes are worse than useless, although they seem to make us feel better about ourselves. The Islamic State is a group that is using Western-style propaganda videos, and speaking to us, and encouraging us to become involved in Iraq and the Middle East right when it looks like we’ve extricated ourselves. Why? Because they know that our involvement in the Middle East will make things better for their cause! Why can’t we see this? Why do so many believe, against all visible proof to the contrary, that involvement in Iraq or Syria will improve anything in those countries? The counterargument – well, we can’t leave them to the Islamic State, that’d be horrible, distorts reality. However horrible it will be for Iraqis, Kurds, and Syrians to face the Islamic State alone, it will only be worse if we intervene by arming proxies, or by deploying soldiers and carrying out air strikes. I know this, and can say so definitively, because I have two eyes, and a brain, and am literate, and was paying attention to what happened over the last fifteen years.

Meanwhile – just so we know how the Middle East perceives us – the place we want to stabilize through the creation of a client-state in Kurdistan, or through Iraq, or – I’m not sure what our plan is because all the options are so bad – in any case, our reputation is so shitty in the region that as The Huffington Post reported recently, Middle Easterners believe that the CIA is funding the Islamic State. We are a myth to the very people we insist on helping – a nightmare – why are we so insistent on participating in yet another bloodletting? When they’re both expensive, and do no long-term good?

Thought experiment. Someone you know, and who knows you, but not very well, says in public that you have no integrity. Like this: “You have no integrity. Zero. None. That’s what I think. This is my serious face.” How would you respond? Take a second with that thought.

According to a piece in Guernica, during a talk between Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition (an exceptional piece of writing, according to many whose opinions I trust) and a veteran moderator, one such moment occurred recently. Blasim asked the veteran: “All the time, I hear American soldiers say they are proud. But how can you carry a weapon and invade another country and call yourself proud?”

Helen Benedict, the piece’s author, and the one who relays that quote, is an author herself, and a professor of writing at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. She makes many statements in her essay, titled The Moral Confusion of Post-War America that develop from Blasim’s question. She seems to feel that the choice to serve in war is an inherently bad one, and doesn’t understand how one could see or do or choose to see and do those things and still feel good about the experience, to honestly claim that one is proud. Of country, of self.

Helen is a friend. I don’t know Blasim, or his work, but I’ve read enough about it to have a healthy respect for his imagination and his talent. I’m going to attempt to answer the question, now, of why I believe what I did was – not just necessary, but good – despite the horrors – perhaps because of them. I should preface it by saying I have the utmost respect for Helen and her point of view, which is a view shared by my father and most of his friends, so far as I can tell – this is not surprising, given that they grew up during the Vietnam era, when the moral choices available to citizens and draftees were very different from the choices available to us today.

Assuming that Blasim really wanted an answer to his question, and wasn’t merely trolling the vet with a paradox designed to introduce intellectual discomfort, which is also fine. Blasim’s native Iraq (he lives in Finland) was invaded and plundered and destroyed by war. He’s entitled to his ideas about things – I’m not challenging his logic, or his position. He is correct.

I am an American soldier, and I carried and shot a rifle, and fired artillery and dropped bombs, and ordered people forward again and again, mostly to attack, and people died by my hand and by the hands of others who obeyed my orders. And I am proud of my service.

I didn’t get to go to Iraq. The first time, my unit was supposed to go and then, a month before the departure date the surge pushed us off the chart to Iraq and we were rerouted to Afghanistan. Everyone had been learning Arabic. The second time, my unit was supposed to go and then, three months before the departure date, the surge pulled us onto the chart to Afghanistan, so I didn’t see Iraq. But I joined to lead soldiers in Iraq, so that should count for something.

I also protested Iraq. I was on 1^st Avenue with Aidan McGlaze, blocks from the UN, near 50th street. We watched Desmund Tutu. There were over 100,000 of us. I vocally and actively participated in this demonstration, and other smaller events, and felt fully committed to the notion that we should not invade. When we did, anyway, it was a bitter blow, and disillusioning in the way one probably imagines such things are for young men.

Blasim might ask why I didn’t do more, or less, and the answer is that it wouldn’t have mattered. America invaded Iraq despite my wishes, against my better judgement. This is the point at which he and I, and Helen and I part paths. Because once it became clear that the war was not going anywhere, that it was happening, an indisputable fact of our lives – that it would not end any time soon – I went to the Army recruiting station. Late November of 2004. Bush had four more years. Abu Ghraib was blowing up (though the original incident had occurred in May). We were still in Afghanistan.

In a country with a professional Army, the choice is not whether or not to avoid service. Everyone avoids service, by not being presented with a choice to avoid it or not. You get to not serve unless you really want to or need to. That’s fine, and acceptable, and in many ways all to the good. Save that in a country of rampant economic inequality, many more people need to than want to, and, ultimately, service becomes an economic obligation for some, while others can do as they like.

I felt that under such circumstances, I needed to serve, and this idea caught ahold of me like a conviction. I knew that war was wrong. I knew that killing and carrying a rifle would produce moral injury. I also understood that the people in my society, like me save for a trick of biographical history, who’d been compelled to serve for a variety of reasons, would return with moral injury, and I’d never be compelled to endure any privation.

My friends will tell you that I talk a lot about loving America, mostly in ironic terms. In truth, I feel a great affection to the country that my ancestors helped found, for which generations of ancestors have fought and toiled and bled, the country that allowed me to have a peaceful, moral upbringing, and the best education in the world, at a fantastic prep school (Hopkins) and a fantastic college (Yale). I feel, strongly, that the red, white and blue – the best of it – flows in my veins. I don’t begrudge that feeling to anyone – it’s an inclusive feeling. The best part about America, my favorite part, is that the promise is that anyone can share in that dream. My ancestors were peasants and nobility and drifters and criminals and schemers and farmers and lawyers. Like everyone. Come to America, take part in the dream, you’re welcome to be my brother and my sister.

I like that idea, although I know that in practice it rarely works out that way, and less and less as time goes on. So – why am I proud of my service? Because in every era, there is a war. Each generation faces its struggle – to participate or not. I chose to participate in the proper way this generation, which is correct for this generation in a way that it wasn’t for the Vietnam era, or for WWII, or for the Civil War.

I sympathize with Blasim, whose country has been ravaged by war and dictatorship and injustice, systematically – whose native country has been exploited by successive empires for centuries – whose birthplace, Iraq, was doomed by the British and French decades before he or I first drew breath. He talks about war, I’m told, as a series of ghosts that haunt the living, and each other. Well – I don’t feel particularly haunted by my ghosts – they are my guardians, the certainty that I will attempt to act a little bit better than they did, that I will avoid making the same mistakes they did.

And in Afghanistan, we did avoid those mistakes. We did make progress. We did good. I did that, carrying a rifle, because I represented the strong, and I was willing to stand up to the bullies in the areas where bullies called themselves Taliban, and they were defeated. They would not have been defeated without weapons. I suppose someone could talk about how the Taliban was given weapons by the CIA in the 80s, or through funding to Pakistan’s government, but that’s a ghost speaking. In the 1980s I was watching schools of minnows in a tidepool, or reading, or riding my bicycle. I don’t know what the 1980s are.

I’m sorry things have worked out the way they did in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and many places in the world. I understand now that the role of the writer is to help present people with truth, and I think Blasim has probably done that. Helen certainly has. In my opinion, the world is complicated, and one must sometimes hold opposing ideas in one’s head simultaneously. Like carrying a gun, and murder, and pride, and kindness. That’s not jingoism – that’s life, and participating in life.

Helen is correct in her view that war is awful, and should be avoided at all costs. I believe that and agree with her. I can’t disagree with any of her points, and I will stand side-by-side with her shouting against war until the day it breaks out. Once it has broken out – once Wotan’s spear has been shattered, and all the old alliances and civil obligations we owe each other as humans are gone, and the great calamity has returned for any reason, I believe that one must choose to participate if one can – if one is physically or emotionally able, if one is free from familial responsibilities (as I was) – to help bear some of that moral injury, to bring it home, and to digest it and move on with one’s life.

Blasim and Helen disagree with me on this point. I hope that Blasim wouldn’t hold it against me, and that Helen doesn’t, because I have great respect for them both as thinkers and writers – Helen through experience and Blasim by reputation. I’ve made choices in life, and am proud of them.

Yes.

The suicide bomber came from the wrong direction. He drove a maroon Toyota Corolla into the middle of a group of Afghan police and militia – just an hour into a massive  operation to help defeat the Taliban – and brought everything to a screaming stop. His car was packed with screws, nuts, nails, pots, ball bearings, and explosives, and when the shrapnel and overpressure shot into the crowd, it wounded five of my soldiers. It also killed fifteen Afghans (seven civilians, six police, two militia), and seriously damaged two vehicles.

My boss called me. I was told that if the police pulled out from our location, the mission was a scratch: we couldn’t go forward alone. The policemen wailed, wept, and collected the pieces of their dead countrymen. I watched as they loaded the dead into pickup trucks and left, all but four of them – leaving us with a token force for our mission. I thought, If we stop now, their lives, this all will have been for nothing – worse than nothing. We need more than ever to impose our will on these bastards. I told my boss that the Afghans were still with us, totally committed to the operation. I lied, bald-faced – without Afghan support, we should’ve stopped, called it all off. I insisted that we continue forward. I made that choice. More people got hurt, later. I made that choice, too.

If my experience were rendered in the style of most existing war literature, this engagement should’ve felt completely useless, a total waste. Writers with combat experience from World War II or Vietnam would likely characterize such an event as fruitless, hollow, or even criminal. Instead, when I was there on the ground, it felt like the most important thing in the world – and neither time nor perspective have changed my mind.

How do civilians take in the stories of war? War itself has evolved: information-sharing technology has helped turn Napoleonic squares of uniformed citizens into essentially fluid conflicts between professional soldiers and hidden insurgents. Civilians get glimpses of it through isolated YouTube videos of drone strikes or firefights, or Hollywood films of SEAL teams and Rangers riding helicopters into raid compounds. But the actual, real-time war experienced by soldiers on the ground doesn’t have such a neat beginning and end: war is the omnipresent threat of chaos from any direction. Contemporary war – at least the one I saw  – is a place in which nobody is safe, anywhere, ever.

But contemporary war literature has not kept up with contemporary war. We need to a develop a literature, one that escapes the limits of both glorified war narratives and cynical condemnations for how war crushes the individual soldier. Neither extreme on this good vs. bad trajectory is true to war today. We must create something new.

To be fair, things used to be different. They really did. Before the industrial revolution, war was smaller, more personal, and comprehensible. Even while nations were fielding armies of greater sizes – tens to hundreds of thousands of people – the means of procurement were villages, hamlets, and towns. During the American Revolution, for example, towns sent small groups of men armed with rifles to ambush British formations, and later to fight in European-style units. Even given the large numbers, however, most soldiers were fighting alongside people they’d grown up with. Communities grieved their losses together, and war was a social as well as personal calamity – the consequences of war were inescapable.

The industrial revolution made every aspect of human society narrower, more specialized, and distant. The Civil War was a transition point, and it catalyzed the growth of increasingly realistic literature, a marked departure from ideal, Romantic representations of war. Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is an example of this progression. In the spotlight is Peyton Farquhar, who is about to be hung from the Owl Creek Bridge because of his Confederate sympathies; his treasonous support of the Southern army is real, but the act he is being executed for was a set-up by a Union scout. Bierce’s characters feel like real people, equally trapped by their institutional or cultural prejudices and the choices they’ve made.

World War I prompted the dawn of the modern literary modernist movement, which obliterated traditional forms of tradition and narrative. Nearly every memoir or fictional account from the modernists emphasized horror, disassociation, and individual impotence in the face of war on an industrial scale. As poet and soldier Wilfred Owen wrote about a collection of his poems: “This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.” Owen was later killed in battle, a week before World War I ended. Ernest Hemingway, meanwhile, drew from his experience as a wartime ambulance driver when writing A Farewell to Arms, a novel emphasizes the ambivalence of soldiers and the depersonalized destruction of war through his short staccato sentences and bleakly simple story. There is no room for flourish here.

Not long later, World War II veterans like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller wrote literature that confirmed and elaborated on those negative themes, describing mechanized warfare as fundamentally dehumanizing, while emphasizing the absurdity of heroism. In Catch-22, rational choice is circular, leading directly to combat, and death. Orr and Yossarian, two of the main characters in Catch-22, are Army officers who attempt everything they can to get out of flying additional bombing missions in WWII. The war is almost over, and the missions seem guaranteed only lead to more chances to be shot down by the Germans or Italians. Awards and positive recognition mean nothing to either of them. From the novel:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

Revelations about passivity and absurdity in modern war literature paralleled a recognition that similar situations exist in corporate structures; it has been fashionable to describe life within an institution using the language of sarcasm and irony ever since, from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

But for all that, I didn’t see much passivity in Afghanistan.

Very quietly, technological advances (internet connectivity and smart phone technology) in and outside battle have returned soldiering and warfare to their personal, pre-industrial state. Each decision of every soldier can have strategic consequences for good or for ill. Instead of individuals overwhelmed by their inability to make meaningful choices, I saw an incredible, almost debilitating amount of agency and responsibility on an hourly basis, always. We risked getting torn apart by dull or sharp metal every time we left our bases, chucked high by overpressure. We risked the same when we were on our bases — as revealed by the Air Force officer killed by a rocket while jogging inside the perimeter of our base (known as FOB Kunduz).

After a suicide bomber destroyed so much in the middle of our mission, I’d decided to go forward, and we did. The bombing emboldened the Taliban, so as we walked forward under the blistering summer heat, we were moving toward a savage battle across a half-mile front. Armored vehicles, led by engineers, rumbled forward single file down the broad dirt road. The lead vehicle struck an IED, totaling it. The Taliban mortared one of my platoons and attempted to flank our position from the east, then west, blanketing us with bullets. Brass casings from my machine gunner rained down onto my helmet, a soft, hollow rain of clinking as I fed reports higher, and coordinated the defense. Two “Apache” helicopters arrived. The Taliban shot another two U.S. soldiers, and more Afghan police and militia. We pried two compounds away from the Taliban, but it was night-time before, finally, they stopped fighting.

My boss wanted to know if it was worth staying there, after all. What did we hope to accomplish when most of our Afghan allies were mourning?

We needed to stay, I told him. We’d held our own, and could move over to the attack in the morning. I requested more assets, and more time. I doubled down, hoping, but not knowing, that if we could trade punches long enough with the Taliban, we’d kill or exhaust enough of them to make them quit.

But we could fail. This notion terrified and appalled me. It also reveals that my choice was a real one: it had consequences. Acting — taking ownership for a decision, not backing away from the moment — risks humiliation and high-stakes defeat. Pointing our guns and firing, running forward into the woodline, fighting our way into buildings: we could just as easily have accomplished nothing, or worse.

My experiences and those of, say, Tim O’Brien — who wrote The Things They Carried, one of the most important accounts of the Vietnam War — were different. For a long time after returning home, I did not know exactly what those differences were. I couldn’t enumerate them. But when I sat down to try my own hand at contemporary literature – Afghan Post, a memoir — they began to crystallize before me.

By writing and reflecting on my experiences I discovered that the challenge in processing my experiences in Afghanistan was not due to a feeling of vulnerability or impotence, but to a stifling sense of horror that a thing I said or did might have terrible consequences. Rather than confirming the lessons I’d gleaned from Vonnegut or Heller or O’Brien — that I’d been trapped in a situation completely beyond my control, the proverbial “Catch-22” — my time in Afghanistan convinced me of the opposite. I was never forced or compelled to move forward into battle, and I never demanded that my soldiers move forward, either. The words “I order you” or “I command you” never crossed my lips, literally or implicitly. There were choices to act, every step of the way.

This is not to suggest that Heller and O’Brien and Vonnegut are now irrelevant. Not as humanists, or satirists, or historians. But they are cataloguing a thing, a state of affairs that has no meaning for soldiers or officers like me, veterans who saw what I did. We are soldiers who chose to take a picture of dead Taliban, or not. Soldiers who chose to give their food or water out to impoverished villagers—in violation of orders, but gaining unexpected goodwill. Other soldiers may have made different choices. Still others may have been posted in cities or forts away from the borders or restive Pashtun areas – places that saw little fighting, where all they could do was observe action on a television screen.

For everyone back home, to whom this war must have been a received event on YouTube or at the movies, passivity really is the way to describe their experience of the war. Michael Lokesson, another veteran of current wars, described the prevailing argument best in an article he wrote recently in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

As war became more mechanized and regimented, and fought on a far larger scale, incorporating new technological implements of death – rifles and cannons, planes and armor, drones and improvised explosive devices – the agency of the individual soldier, however lofty in rank, has diminished.

I wasn’t with Lokesson in Iraq, and cannot claim to know his experience or that of his comrades. But while his logic may hold true up to Vietnam and in Iraq, it didn’t hold true for Afghanistan, at the very least. Quite the opposite – the agency of the individual soldier has increased.

If there was a bottom to the “agency” parabola, it was likely during WWII, where entire armies and fleets were destroyed without any effect on the outcome of the war. The Japanese sank most of our fleet in the Pacific, and destroyed some hundreds of thousands of British, Americans, and Chinese. They endured the first and last atomic bombings. The German Wehrmacht gobbled up five Russian armies groups whole – some four million soldiers killed or captured over five months of significant fighting – the consequence of which was that four years later, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. It is utterly plausible, among the firebombing of cities, dawn of the atomic age, and mechanized warfare, to imagine, as a soldier, that staying awake on guard wasn’t going to make much of a difference on any collective individual or level.

Meanwhile, two military police soldiers in Abu Ghraib  took pictures of themselves psychologically and physically torturing prisoners, and the world paid attention. Edward Snowden absconded with 250,000 sensitive documents from the NSA, and it had severe repercussions for international relations, repercussions that echo into the present, as former allies and democratic sympathizers such as India and Brazil side with a notorious tyrant (Putin) rather than America. And I and those like me fought through the dust and wet, humid heat, through thin air in the unforgiving mountains, under our own power, by our own choosing.

After that mission in Kunduz Province in early August, I wrote a letter to one of my best friends. Describing the circumstances surrounding the battle, I wrote that:

We really could’ve turned the mission into a success if we’d been postured to follow it up, but the way the assets were being committed was too piecemeal, there wasn’t any organization or long-term plan. This was my fault. We’d planned to be on the offense for three days, and I made no contingency plans for follow-on operations; we should’ve planned for more.

The letter is a simple accounting of action, taken by individuals; it is not a nihilistic account wherein the characters are all helpless, subjective or mere tools of an uncaring fate. As it turned out, we were rewarded for the choices we made. Although we had to turn back without accomplishing our objective within the Taliban-held areas, the Afghan police and army came back with a renewed fervor after their mourning was complete, and the story of our desire to fight on their behalf and fight along with them struck a chord with the population. When we returned to our fort after the last day of fighting, the roads of Imam Sahib city were lined with Afghans waving at us – families, children, little girls. Our efforts produced measurable, real effects, and laid a solid foundation that we drew on to go back, and back again, and again, until the Taliban were driven out.

Paul Fussell, an infantryman from WWII and a fine author, wrote a superlative essay for Harper’s Magazine in 1982 titled “My War: How I got irony in the infantry.” In it, among a great many other example of the roots of his irony (and that of an entire generation), he describes how the worst battle of his life went forgotten because of its relative unimportance in the overall scheme of WWII:

That day in mid-March that ended me was the worst of all for F Company. We knew it was going to be bad when it began at dawn, just like an episode from the First World War, with an hour-long artillery preparation and a smokescreen for us to attack through. What got us going and carried us through was the conviction that, sufferers as we might, we were at least “making history.” But we didn’t even do that. Liddell-Hart’s 766-page History of the Second World War never heard of us. It mentions neither March 15 nor the 103rd Infantry Division. The only satisfaction history has offered is the evidence that we caused Josef Goebbels some extra anxiety.

In Khanabad, in Imam Sahib, every time we drove down the new, black paved roads, or along the dusty, cratered dirt trails, or walked into the marketplace, we had an immediate and noticeable effect – we were the war. And yet, current war literature like The Yellow Birdsby Kevin Powers, asserts the opposite: “The war tried to kill us in the spring.” This is a stance that lags behind the truth: The war was us, we chose and made it. And so far as I remember, we weren’t trying to kill ourselves.

If one’s primary interaction with Iraq or Afghanistan has been watching a ninety-second clip on the nightly news of a tiny fort being overrun in some nameless valley, or a firefight, or one of the ubiquitous recordings of sleek, black-metal American air power sniffing out and destroying nighttime Taliban infiltrators in black-and-white, I understand how one might conclude that war is sporadic or even forgettable. Maybe for people who were driving up and down the same road in Bradley light tanks, or Abrams, some of them getting blown up, some surviving arbitrarily – maybe for them the war was as absurd and unknowable as it was for Yossarian in a B-24 bomber flying over the skies of Bologna in WWII.

But I did not see absurdity where I was in Afghanistan – at least, not WWII-Albert-Camus-grade absurdity. I saw people making choices, for good and for ill. In the mountains and valleys, the places where the 173rd, 101st, 82nd, 3rd, 4th, and 10th patrolled, we didn’t wage war with a nuanced appreciation for the infinite variables that affected every bullet fired on both sides. When we patrolled — scrambling over sun-baked walls, our poorly-designed, sweat-soaked uniforms ripping under the stress, down rocky, uncertain draws, clambering and dragging ourselves and each other up hills, behind the next piece of cover — it was conscious, earnest. The bullets zipping and ker-twanging around us were the least ironic of all. They had one purpose: to instruct each of us how fragile and sporadic a thing we were.

No. What I saw while firing my rifle from the trenches that the mujahedeen or Soviets dug to fight one another years ago was a series of intensely personal battles on a tribal level, for local security. The soldiers, sergeants, and officers I worked with helped stitch together the battles we fought in rural thirty-compound villages (with a solitary stream running through the middle for irrigation) into something bigger: security at a sub-regional level. When you’re walking forward, putting one sore, boot-clad foot in front of the next, and you know that the boom of a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade and chatter of Taliban machine-guns is minutes or seconds away, you don’t feel (I didn’t feel) passive. I felt that a thing was about to happen, a thing for which I was partly or wholly responsible.

More often than not, at the end of the day I felt content with what happened. After all, I couldn’t account for Kabul, or Washington D.C., or Islamabad – those places with people I’d never see. All I saw was my own little slice of the broader struggle to give Afghans a chance at less corruption, a freer society, and a better justice system. By the time I left Afghanistan for good, the Taliban were gone, and I’d seen two women – two – wearing blue jeans in the cities under my unit’s jurisdiction, Imam Sahib and Khanabad. That seemed like progress.

War literature as it stands today describes a kind of war that is foreign to me. According to Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, and their contemporaries, war (life) is unknowable, mediated, somehow beyond comprehension (Wolff said that war made him stupider). Would that this were the case today! The fact that Iraq and Afghanistan have been more observed than lived by many citizens helps give the notion of passivity traction. I understand its logical roots, but its day as an organizing principle for war has passed. In fact, it’s even worth considering whether the idea of soldier passivity during warfare always existed for its audience at home as a way to defend humans from facing their awful, bestial capability during legal, community-sanctioned violence; a way of denying the things that one permits one’s sons and fathers (and now daughters and mothers) to experience. After all, even the legendary warriors of Homer were media constructs – the battle between Hector and Achilles is moderated entirely by the goddess Athena, who selects Achilles as victor.

In the end, I can only write the war I know: to try to characterize human behavior in our own time. I’m indebted to those thinkers who came before, but am free from the constraints of their experiences and successes. The great writers of the past have done their part, but the war literature that will speak truly to this age will be as different from The Things They Carried as that great Vietnam story was from Slaughterhouse-Five. There are writers out there right now working on taking contemporary war narratives to the next level — among them are Brian Castner, Phil Klay, Brian Van Reet, Matt Gallagher, Kristen Rouse, and Mike Carson. This emerging generation of writers and war veterans (male and female) act, speak, and write — just as they patrolled, built, and suffered — in full possession of their faculties. Not victims of government or circumstance or passion, but, rather, agents who are ultimately responsible to themselves, and for their actions.

This is the legacy of the first all-volunteer American army to head overseas: whatever one’s feelings on the invasions, the war didn’t happen to us. We owned it, start to finish. It was ours – it is ours.