Basketball

On evenings when I’d get tired of reading the self-congratulatory e-mails and press releases coming from the Embassy, I’d go out to watch the nightly basketball game. We had brought a backboard and regulation hoop all the way from the States, and the soldiers played as the air cooled off. The game was three-on-three. The soldiers played in a tight, disciplined way, not moving much but just enough, aikido-like, using the smallest of muscles in the slightest of ways to make the ball go where they wanted it.

The youngest of the players was not yet nineteen. He’d been eleven years old when this war started, just a little older than the kids to whom Bush read My Pet Goat while New York burned. WMDs, 9/11, Colin Powell at the UN, Mission Accomplished, and torture at Abu Ghraib were events in history, like the tariffs and the Stamp Act he and the others probably tuned out in school. To them, we might as well have been standing at Sharpsburg or Gettysburg. The chances were good that this time last year at least one of the players was in high school, numbing his teachers with insistent pleas of “Why do we have to learn this? When are we ever going to use it in real life?”

I doubt any of the soldiers thought much about their high school days. What mattered now was what the Army had taught them about how to fight and of course what they already knew about playing basketball. In this place, a fortresslike home in the middle of a war in Iraq, where things existed not to be beautiful, only necessary, they were the beautiful. The way they moved, the sweat on their arms, the grace in their exertion, the failing sun behind them were all beautiful, and even the most prosaic soul would not say anything different. The Iraqis spoke incessantly about seeing God’s hand at work, and watching this you could almost believe it.

The sun was dropping fast, as it does in the desert. There were no floodlights to give away our location to the insurgents who some nights still lobbed mortar shells our way. That was what made this different from a million pickup games in driveways and high school parking lots and inner-city cages: the possibility of sudden death. It gave an edge to the game. Chances were good that many of the insurgents were no older than the boys on the court. Like the players, they had grown up with this war as a fact, their daily life. The Americans had always been here and the place where we were standing had never been anything but a FOB. People had inhabited this part of the world for millennia—this was Mesopotamia, the biblical Eden—yet nothing mattered but this moment.

The light had gone, but the darkness did not seem to bother the boys on the court. They had established a rhythm and they apparently knew one another well enough that the occasional bump or muttered “motherfucker” was all they needed to keep the game going. For me, though, another day had ended. This war had been going on for years now, many years plus one more day.