The police station in Bini Ziad, a small town west of Baghdad, is in a long cinder-block building that has been painted white with a blue stripe. It’s early June. Lieutenant Emma Fowler follows an Iraqi constable and her company commander, Captain Hartz, through the front entrance and down a dank hall to a makeshift interview room, its walls constructed of sheets hung from wires overhead. The mother of the Iraqi whom Fowler shot that morning is there. She refuses to take Captain Hartz’s hand and then, checking her chair as if something might have climbed up on it, sits down with a sweep of her hand beneath her black skirt. She wears a Western blazer with gold buttons, a black scarf about her head, her mouth drawn prim and fierce. None of the humor that Fowler remembers in Pulowski, no self-deprecation, no eye turning inward. Instead, the woman speaks offhandedly to the Iraqi officer, her gaze askew, and moments later, a hand pokes through the sheets with a glass cup of chai. Money is what this says to Fowler; here’s someone who’s used to getting what she wants in this place. Captain Masterson is already there, seated at the table, his body armor piled in the corner. Fowler strips down too, but Hartz chooses to sit down in full gear, so that he appears swollen, like a giant pumpkin, the skin of his neck flushing scarlet. “This letter, ma’am,” he says as he unfolds a piece of stationery, “constitutes an official condolence for your son’s death from the coalition forces and the United States Army. This letter is not an admission of guilt. Your son was present during an attack on coalition forces, during which three soldiers were killed. We believe our soldiers acted properly to defend themselves.” He casts a hopeful glance at Fowler, which she does not match. “Unfortunately, these actions appear to have resulted in your son’s death. It was an accident, which doesn’t make it less of a tragedy.”
While these words are being translated, the woman rolls her eyes and grimaces at the curtained wall off to the interpreter’s left. But when the interpreter stops, and a silence falls in the small room, the woman’s face crumples in on itself, as if her resistance to the ridiculousness of Hartz’s monologue has been the only thing keeping her features in place. She begins to sob.
“I’m sorry,” Hartz says. He pushes the letter forward with a gloved hand.
This at least gives the woman something to do. She flinches and flares away from his advance, striking out and swatting the letter to the floor. Relieved, Hartz bends over to retrieve it, is stopped by the resistance of his body armor, and, grunting, scoots his chair out and drops to a knee.
“Can you even say his name?” the interpreter is asking by the time Hartz regains his seat. “Ayad. My son is Ayad al-Tayyib. Do you think a letter brings him back? Do you wonder why people are not happy in the way George Bush has freed our country? For what? So my son can die and bandits can drive me from my own house?”
“Yes, about these bandits,” Hartz begins.
“Why don’t you shoot them?” This the woman says in English.
“That’s what we’d like to do, ma’am,” Masterson says. His back is to Fowler, who has stationed herself by the beaded door. She can feel the whisper of the room’s sheet wall against the back of her head like a shroud. Hartz laughs nervously, as if his fellow officer is a crazy uncle, friendly but given to overstatement.
“The reason we’re asking you to help us,” Hartz continues, “is that there were five bombs found buried in the field right behind your house, which we believe is your property. Is that correct, that it’s your property?”
The woman nods, almost imperceptibly.
“If so, these are very troubling charges, ma’am. Very troubling. If we were to find out, for instance, that you knew that your son—or anybody else—had planted those bombs there. And you did not come forward. That would be a very serious offense. And, well, I’m sorry to say we believe that an American soldier’s body has been hidden there. Buried, I mean.”
“Sorry to say!” Masterson bursts out. He opens a manila folder. From it he retrieves two sheets of yellow legal paper covered in handwritten Arabic. There’s a photo clipped to each page.
“These are sworn affidavits that your son was involved in an insurgent group dedicated to the resistance of the coalition forces. Can you explain to me why these Iraqi citizens would say your son was involved in the insurgency if he was not?”
“Hold on a second here—” Hartz says.
“Why would I do that, Captain?” Masterson says. “These documents are proof that this woman’s son engaged in anti-coalition activity.”
As soon as Fowler sees the affidavits, she knows they’re fake. One is from Masterson’s former interpreter, Faisal Amar, who is conveniently dead. The other is accompanied by a photo of a sheikh she recognizes, a man in his fifties, with a heavily lined face. She and Masterson had interviewed him at the schoolhouse in Bini Ziad the day of Beale’s abduction. He knew nothing about Beale—though at one point he spread his hands, a bargaining man, and explained that perhaps he could be more helpful if the captain told him whom he wished to blame. But the affidavits don’t matter. What interests her is the woman’s reaction to the files, the way her gaze slides contemptuously off to the side. Fowler wants a confrontation, wants her anger, wants the woman to dare to challenge their legitimacy. She leans forward until the woman meets her gaze.
Immediately, the woman speaks, abruptly, haughtily.
“These people are nothing,” the interpreter says.
“Nothing in what way, ma’am?”
“Her son was educated,” the interpreter says. “These are village people. They can’t even write. It’s an insult to bring her this testimony.”
The woman speaks with pure contempt, a clear, high-octane cook-off of hatred, which Fowler finds herself more than ready to meet.
“So you know them, then?” Fowler asks.
“Who is this?” the woman asks.
“Ma’am,” Hartz says, halfway rising, “this is Lieutenant Fowler, one of my subordinates. She was in the field when your son was … received his injuries. She lost three soldiers herself…”
But the woman has no interest in Hartz. She’s locked on to Fowler now.
“My son was deaf,” the interpreter says while the woman, loosening her scarf, pulls her ear as if she intends to rip it off and hand it to Fowler. “He was deaf. He was deaf. You are a woman. You tell me, what kind of animal would kill a man like that?”
“Ho now!” Hartz says. He’s up and out of his chair, sweaty and red, waggling his pale palms in her face, as if he might rub her away. “Let’s take a break, okay?”
“No,” Fowler says. “I’ll speak to that. I shot your son.” Hartz has collared her now, hauling her away. “But if I’m an animal, then maybe you can ask her where she was when I came looking for him. Why don’t you ask her that?”
The interpreter dutifully begins, but Hartz waves him off. “No, no. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?” Fowler says. It’s ugly what she’s saying and she knows it, but she can taste Pulowski’s death in her mouth, choking her, and she will say anything to get it out. Even animals have to breathe. “Single males living alone are the people most likely to be targeted by insurgents. That’s the profile. She knows that. You leave a kid out there alone, with no clue what’s happening, nobody to speak for him—ask her what kind of animal does a thing like that.”
* * *
The backyard of Ayad al-Tayyib’s house is a mess of men. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team is rigging charges to clear the remaining IEDs from the field so that Fowler and her platoon can safely dig out Beale’s body. She exchanges nods with these men, brief waves. Pulowski’s body is long gone, on the first transport out the night before. Coming through the side yard, she has a couple of flashes of him scrambling away from her, as if she has become a person whom he does not know, or cannot see. It feels like she’s peering through the wrong end of a telescope at a universe from which she had been barred, passport revoked, papers out of date. She goes into the living room to get Eggleston, who’s watching TV. “Eggy, come on,” she says.
“I can’t believe those guys are dead, ma’am,” Eggleston says. The video is of a cricket match, a sport she doubts the sergeant has ever seen before. Or cares about.
They watch it together as a memorial to the dead, the vast glowing park of green space, somewhere in Pakistan. No stranger than the fact that Crawford, McWilliams, and Pulowski have gone away. “You get any intel from the mother?” Eggleston says.
“Enough to make me sick,” she says. She’s moving already to the back of the house, through the parquet-floored hall in front, past a varnished, spindle-legged table, a nice one, whose front drawer has been opened, spilling papers, bills. “Look at this shit. It’s like a fucking country club around here. Fucking lady, you should’ve heard her.” She paws through these bills listlessly, recognizing the stationery, but seeing Crawford’s peppercorn eyes. “Fucking sob story. Calls me an animal for shooting her kid. Meanwhile, she’s fucking sitting around watching cricket while Beale rots in the backyard.”
“That’s bullshit, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“And then the captain shows her sworn testimony that her son was running with bad guys, and what’s she do? She attacks the witnesses. Hear no evil, fucking see no evil, huh, Eggy? You can’t help people if they act that way.”
Someone had carried down Pulowski’s camera system from the roof while she was away and placed it just inside the front door of the dead man’s house. A cord runs out of a hole Pulowski had bored in the side of one of the Rubbermaid tubs, and up into the hollow base of the camera’s metal stand. She traces it with her finger to the smoked bulb of glass at the curved end. A black glass eye. She stares into it, but it’s just a camera. Unlike Pulowski, it doesn’t flinch or shy away. But his last signal is somewhere inside. “Where are the guys?”
Eggleston jerks his chin, indicating outside.
“How are they holding up?”
Eggleston has a fleshy, baggy face with violet bands beneath the great big hooded globes of his eyes, a face that belongs inside, overfleshed and heavy, like a guy you’d see on a subway in New York City. “Waldorf’s having a hard time with it.”
“Why’s that?” She’s hot with embarrassment. She realizes what it is now. She’s embarrassed at how happy she was to bring Pulowski here. How fucking naïve it was to wish even for a second that they could’ve ever returned to anything.
“He feels like it was his fault that we left the compound. He should’ve stuck with your orders instead of listening to Pulowski.”
“Yeah? And who was the genius who brought Pulowski out? And then left him behind with you guys to whine about some fucking dog he saw on TV?”
Now its Eggleston’s turn to be embarrassed. He shuffles his feet.
“Answer my question, Sergeant.”
“You were, ma’am.”
“So you can tell Waldorf to quit crying about it, then. I don’t have time for everybody to be running around crying today. That’s how you make mistakes.”
It’s hot and still in the dead man’s house. She does not want whatever Eggleston is trying to give. “I do think Pulowski was legitimately trying to help, ma’am,” the sergeant says. “For what it’s worth.”
“Well, it’s not worth very fucking much, Eggy, is it?” She has a little problem with voice control at the end of this. “You tell Waldorf this. Pulowski made the call to go out, not him. I’ve known that guy a long time. I should’ve known he wouldn’t follow orders. He has no concept of orders. I’m sorry he’s dead, but he made the mistake.”
* * *
She finds her platoon outside the north wall of the compound, sitting with their backs against the stone and looking out at the field. There’s a tiny strip of shade along the base of the wall. They are sitting with their heads in the shadow and their boots sticking into the sunlight. Waldorf’s hands cover his face. Dykstra has wrapped his arm around him. Others, like Jimenez, have their eyes closed, trying to sleep. Down below them, in the wheat field, a lieutenant from the EOD Team walks out of the field, away from the abandoned hulks of her Humvee and Eggleston’s Hercules, back toward the compound gate. He carries a great spool of copper wire under his arm, unrolling it as he goes, the wire flashing and gleaming as it bucks and falls into the grass, like a string of fire.
“All right, guys,” she says, crouching down into a squat. “Come here, gather in with me. Waldorf, where are you?” He’s off to the left, hunched over, at the far end of the line of faces, and she reaches a hand out to him and pulls him in closer, so that he has to squat beside her. She drapes an arm around his neck.
“I just met with Captain Hartz.” She looks up. “He told me specifically to relay to you his pride and gratitude for the bravery of your actions here, recovering the body of Sergeant Beale. The two guys we killed in that field were our enemies. I have the testimony here to prove it. They killed Carl Beale. They buried him in this field like an animal. They would have left him to rot here permanently.”
Dykstra snorts and shakes his head.
“All right, maybe he didn’t say that,” Fowler admits. “So fuck him, then, I did.”
When she glances over her shoulder, she sees the EOD lieutenant, his goggles flashing, waving with both hands like a priest for her to kneel.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?”
“I think he wants us to take cover, ma’am.”
“Oh, for chrissakes, we’re too far away. He can’t hurt anybody.”
“Fire in the hole, I need you to take cover, please!”
This time the lieutenant is pointing at her directly, and Fowler stands and waves him off and squats down again. The harsher instructions she’s given to Eggleston will be transmitted in their own way. Now what she wants is control. She will give them a story and they will accept it and she will drive away the laggards who attempt to tell it a different way. “Six more months,” she says. “That’s all we got left. You did what I trained you to do. The men who died here did not die because of you. They died for you, and it’s you who are going to bring the truth of what they did back.” She waits for an argument but there is none, and so they bow their heads, waiting for the blast.
Even in the worst circumstances, there’s usually something funny about a controlled detonation. Amusement at the power of the explosives, relief that the bombs were friendly and their power would not be directed at them. This time, though, when the charges rip, Fowler and her men pull in together, touching the brims of their helmets.
They stay there for a while longer, after the all-clear. Nobody’s saying anything. When she looks up, she can see everybody’s eyes. Who here will be the dissenter? Who will be her Judas? Who will dare report her murders? What breaks the tension, relieves the awful interrogation of her gaze, is the rain of dirt from the explosion, pouring down out of the sky. It rattles on their Kevlars. “Fucking typical,” Jimenez says.
Then she stands and leads them all into the wheat.