From: William Porter
To: Jack Porter
Re: Intel?
July 1 9:05 PM
Jack—
Grant is dead. Killed himself a couple years back. He tried to testify at Winter Soldier a few days before, but the organizers deemed him too unreliable. Who blows their brains out in their childhood home for their parents to find? Jesus.
A few of my classmates knew him from Fort Hood, said he was a good dude who never pulled it together post-deployment. Happens to a lot of guys, unfortunately. (We’ll talk about that when you get back—being a leader doesn’t end when the bullets stop flying.)
Enough preaching from me.
Found Tisdale—we have some mutual Facebook friends, but none are close enough for me to inquire about him. Got his email if you want to write him or something—KenDTisdale75@gmail.com.
Any luck finding a local to write a statement? I’m telling you, that’s your ace in the hole.
Nothing really new here. In San Fran for that summer internship. So many hot women in this city, it’s ridiculous. And my apartment is above a gourmet barbecue joint. I don’t even know what that means, but it smells delicious.
Be safe, Jack. And be strong. Only a couple months left.
Will
P.S. CALL MOM AND DAD
P.P.S. Grant was born and raised in Twain country. Hannibal, Missouri. Thought you’d appreciate.
I stared at the screen in a trance. Grant was dead. By his own hand. I hadn’t known the guy beyond a name on some papers, but still.
Maybe it was because his mud huts were now my mud huts. Maybe it was because he’d once been a junior officer overwhelmed by the ambiguities of the desert and I was now a junior officer overwhelmed by the ambiguities of the desert. Maybe it was the shared relationship with Chambers, or the vision of him trying to right his wrongs at Winter Soldier, seeking absolution.
Maybe it was just the day, the moment, the headache.
I promised myself I’d track down his family when I got home, the same way I would Alphabet’s and Ortiz’s. New Concord, Ohio. Hannibal, Missouri. Tucson, Arizona. I’d make a road trip of it.
We had internet at the outpost now, in a third-floor guest room formerly for embedded reporters. Journalists didn’t come to Ashuriyah anymore. First Sergeant said they were all in Afghanistan. A green fly buzzed around my head. I waved it away, and it landed on the computer. Walls of plywood formed small cubbies, each soldier tucked into a station like a lunch box.
My watch said I was late. I refreshed my e-mail one last time, hoping for a note from Marissa. Still nothing, despite my last e-mail to her being titled S.O.S.! (JUST KIDDING). I’d wanted to know if she’d come visit Hawaii again when we redeployed. I resisted the urge to rip the bracelet from my wrist, and logged off. To calm down, I thought about partying with my brother in a city saturated with young women. It helped, a little bit.
The hallways were filled with the dissonant sounds of men at war. From the ancient, guttural cadence of bullshitting to the iron poetry of machine gun bolts slamming into place, I breathed it in and told myself to value it, to cherish it, that someday it would be moments like this I’d miss, even if the moment itself wasn’t worth missing.
On the second floor, pockets of huddled soldiers mumbled greetings as I passed. I smiled back, cracking jokes and slapping backs, presenting the image of the blithe lieutenant because I thought they needed that. Free until the next morning, most of my sergeants were playing poker in our room. I’d been invited, but said I couldn’t make it. I didn’t like gambling with my men much anymore. It wasn’t how I felt when I lost, either. It was how I felt when I won.
I turned down the stairwell and found Captain Vrettos coming up it, a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders and head.
“Jack!” he said, grabbing my forearm with both his hands. “Was looking for you. About to start a movie. The new Civil War one.”
His eyes were cracked and bloodshot. My eyes had been red like that before, back in high school when I’d smoked too much and needed Visine before I went home to face my mom’s inquisition. Captain Vrettos looked like he could use some weed.
“Sir? You need to sleep. The runners will wake you if anything pops.”
He shook his head, telling me he was fine, he could sleep when he was dead. After explaining that I had a meeting with Saif scheduled, I pressed once more, asking what the point of delegation was if not for sleep. He straightened the hunch in his back and said to remember my rank. I nodded and said I’d left Caesar’s memoirs on his desk like he’d asked, in case he got bored with the movie. The Mother Hajj and Pedo bin Laden escorted me down the stairs. She was looking more despondent than I remembered; he, more manic.
The foyer was warm, and the evening air was wet. As I moved into the Iraqi Army quarters, I stroked my slung rifle. I had three full magazines in my cargo pockets. There had been a rash of green-on-blue attacks in the past month, all out of our sector, sudden moments when jundis or Iraqi policemen turned their weapons on their Coalition allies. I wondered if I should have brought Tool or Dominguez with me, but figured it was too late.
A wine-red curtain spread across the entry of the first room in the hallway. I heard hip-hop blaring, so I knocked on the open door and poked my head inside.
“Molazim Saif?”
Four jundis were watching MTV Middle East on the couch. I smelled dirty laundry and sour body odor. On the screen, an Egyptian clone of Notorious B.I.G. rapped in hoarse Arabic, pointing at the gold chains around his neck and to the luxury sedans behind him. The room was dingy, splashed with bright colors from the television. None of the Iraqis turned around, but one pointed silently to the room across the hall.
“Shukran,” I said, and removed myself.
Saif was in the next room, a narrow nook he occupied alone. He wore a dull black undershirt shoved into cargo pants. Under the yellow ceiling light, the folds in his forehead were more pronounced, the clipped hair on the sides of his head highlighting the baldness on top. Built like a pear, he was somewhere between stocky and fat—Hog would’ve called him “country strong.” His skin, darker than that of most of the local Iraqis, was the color of an old penny.
His quarters were sparse, the Sheetrock walls bare. Three pressed uniforms hung in his dresser, the Iraqi flag shoulder patches facing out, green Arabic scrawl darting and cold. Taped to the side of the dresser was a picture of his daughter, a bucktoothed girl with a sunflower in her ponytail. Below that was a hand-colored engraving of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. A plastic trunk sat in a corner, locked, a rifle-cleaning kit on top of it. A pullout couch was in the adjacent corner. I accepted his invitation to sit across from him on the floor, my back against the near wall and legs out, his legs tucked under him and his back straight.
He began by chiding me for my tardiness. I told him I didn’t think Arabs cared about time. He laughed, shaking his head. I complimented his digs and asked if he ever got lonely.
“We are different, Loo-tenant Porter.” I asked him how so. “We keep separate from the soldiers. Better for discipline.” I waited for more. He pointed to my rifle. “A soldier’s weapon, not an officer’s weapon.” He patted the semiautomatic pistol in its holster on his leg, the Glock’s metal rattling.
“My M-Nine is upstairs.” I didn’t carry my pistol much, but felt it necessary to point out that I had one. “But yeah, we’re big on equality. All for one, one for all sort of thing. Goes back to George Washington, I think.”
“George Washington?” Saif raised an eyebrow. “One of your slave-owner presidents, yes?”
He stood to go brew the tea in his makeshift kitchen, a wooden counter mounted between his couch and dresser. He seemed embarrassed to be using an electric kettle, and spoke of how seriously his father took chai.
“Begin with springwater,” he said, twisting the cap off a plastic water bottle. “Not tap, never distilled. The more oxygen your water has, the better the chai.” He poured the contents of the bottle into the kettle and pressed a green button. The kettle rumbled to life as he sat down again.
We discussed how we’d become army officers. He’d originally become an Iraqi policeman to escape his family’s rice farm south of Baghdad, near the banks of the Euphrates. He’d been at the police academy when the Invasion occurred.
Saif wanted to know about my childhood in California, refusing to believe I didn’t surf. He scoffed when I suggested the suburban dream was decaying, telling me that American-style villages were all the rage in the affluent parts of northern Iraq. When I said I’d spent a college semester in Ireland, he asked how the Irish had dealt with their diaspora.
“We have the same problem now,” he said. “All the minds have fled—the doctors, the politicians, the businessmen.”
The kettle beeped to indicate the water had boiled. The jundi platoon leader kept talking as he rose to his feet again nimbly, a physics problem in action. He scooped Earl Grey tea leaves into a small teapot and cracked open two cardamom pods into the pot.
Though he’d been raised Shi’a, his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Sunni, something that proved useful during the Surge, when the Iraqi government, desperate for diversity in the Shi’a-heavy army, offered bonuses and promotions to souls brave and stupid enough to make the jump.
“The ministries didn’t actually want us to switch,” he said, pouring the boiled water into the pot, shielding my view of the procedure as if it were some secret recipe. “They were under pressure from the American generals. The Shi’as controlled the national government for the first time, and wanted to keep control of the army and police. The Sunnis countered by creating the Sahwa gangs. So I used my grandfather’s name as my own, and was sent to officer school and got more pay. My trainers didn’t run me off, once they realized I was Shi’a like them.”
“Higher didn’t catch on?”
He loosed a cavalier smile. “I blamed the paperwork. It was one of my family names, so it wasn’t hard.”
Setting the teapot on top of the kettle, Saif resumed his seat across from me. “The leaves soak for ten minutes,” he said. “Proper chai must be dark, with lots of sugar. Nothing like the Iranians make. That’s not tea. It’s water.”
Pretending to understand what this brewing preference signified about Persian culture, I thought about how the only food or drink I could make was an orange cappuccino for my mom. I couldn’t even cook, unless instant ramen counted. This seemed like hard evidence for our earlier discussion about the decay of suburbia, but I wasn’t about to embarrass myself like that in front of a colleague.
“You’ve been quiet, Loo-tenant Porter.” His head tilted in consideration.
I sighed. For weeks—months, really—I’d needed nothing more than a sounding board to salvage my sanity. Will could do only so much from across the sea, and Marissa was still unresponsive. But I barely knew Saif. I wanted to trust him. I really did.
“Tough day. My platoon sergeant almost got stabbed over a dead goat? I don’t know. Maybe the heat’s getting to me. And I just found out that a friend killed himself back in the States.”
“Was he a soldier?”
“An officer. A young officer. Like us.”
Saif leaned over and put his hands on my shoulders. “I mourn with you. The martyrs who fall after are still warriors. You will see him again.”
I didn’t know how to explain that I’d never met Grant, so I just said thank you.
We swapped information on Dead Tooth. He hadn’t known about the shooting death of Azhar’s cousin, but said it didn’t surprise him. Excuses for stupidity were an insurgent’s calling card, he said. He seemed skeptical of Fat Mukhtar’s claim that Dead Tooth wasn’t welcome on the Sunni Strip, saying that one of their sources had seen him there the night before. He called the Sahwa leaders ali babas, arguing that they were just armed thugs who’d filled the power vacuum created after the Invasion. That may be true, I said, but they’re still our allies.
“Allies or partners?” he asked. “Big difference.”
“Insha’Allah?” I was growing fond of the many meanings this one Arabic phrase provided.
The sweat underneath his pits had gathered into pools, and he plucked small hairs from his mustache, hiding the freed hairs in his palm. Dark, puffy circles hung under his eyes like speed bags. Everyone touched by war seemed aged or corroded in some way. Saif wasn’t even thirty yet, but he had the calloused look of a man nearly twice as old.
“You hear anything about a new insurgent named the Cleric?” I asked. “Got a tip he was involved in the attack on my soldier last month.”
“The Cleric?” he said. Seconds passed in warm, heavy silence. I realized belatedly there was no fan in the room. “A bad joke. The Cleric is dead.”
Saif stood again and took four long steps to the chai. He placed two cubes of sugar in white teacups, pouring the tea from the pot over the sugar. He then stuck a small spoon in each cup and set a biscuit on each of the saucers.
“It’s hot,” he said. The chai was golden-brown, like wheat husk. I took a sip and bit my lip while my tongue simmered.
I was about to explain the tip, but Saif spoke first. “The Cleric was a powerful sheik in Ashuriyah some years ago, after the Collapse and al-Qaeda wars. He was a tribal leader, not a real cleric, but the townspeople called him that out of respect.”
“The guy on the arch?” I asked. “With the beard?”
Saif nodded. “Yes. Sheik Ahmed.”
“Ahmed.” I closed my eyes and bowed my head, remembering the name from a First Cav statement. Though our relationship with Karim the Prince’s father, Sheik Ahmed, and the Sunni Coalition of Ashuriyah have been negatively affected . . . “I’ve heard of him.”
“He died of tuberculosis before I came to town as a police cadet. We did security for the funeral procession because his family wouldn’t allow the Americans to come. He’d worked with them for many years, but it was his dying wish.”
“Because they killed his son.” The words tumbled out of my mouth like dominoes, and I took another sip of chai to mask my enthusiasm. Now cool enough to taste, it reminded me of warm Kool-Aid. “That’s what I heard,” I added. “An American kill team. Supposedly.”
Saif waved off the rumors of past civilian murders, claiming every Iraqi town and village had them. “Propaganda from the militias,” he called them. He said he’d heard of the sheik’s al-Qaeda son, though he didn’t recognize Karim’s name. Nor did he seem to recognize Chambers, laughing off the notion that he was the same man who’d frightened locals in 2006.
“Just as all Iraqis look the same to your eyes,” he said, “all Americans look the same to ours.”
“You never heard anything about a kill team?” I asked again. I hadn’t revealed that Chambers had admitted to being in Ashuriyah before, but something about Saif’s dismissive laughs made me think he knew more than he was letting on. “What about a guy called Shaba?”
Saif raised a bushy eyebrow. “Shaba.”
He set down his saucer and pushed himself up once more, his knees cracking. He went to the trunk in the corner, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked it, as if to ensure that I wasn’t memorizing the combination.
Everyone’s so goddamn paranoid around here, I thought.
He sifted through his trunk, stacking folders of passports and driver’s licenses in the corner. Confiscated from detainees, he said. He pulled out an envelope of photographs, flipping through them before raising one into the air.
He handed the photo over. An American soldier’s plate carrier, a thinner, lighter version of our body armor, was covered in blood and dirt and set against a house wall. Much of the photo was a void of black, and the time stamp read, APRIL 5, 2006, 4:25 A.M. The nametape was missing, but the rank was not: the barbed chevrons of a staff sergeant pierced through the dark.
“My police mentor gave me that, when the army assigned me back here,” Saif said. “Said I needed to remember what Ashuriyah really was.”
“The hell?” I asked, shaking the photograph as if an answer would fall out of it.
“Let me remember.” He sighed, returning the piles of evidence to his trunk. “The older I get, the more my mind turns into that of a Marsh Arab.”
Yes, of course he’d heard the legend of Shaba. Shaba was the man who could travel by shadows at night to kill terrorists but handed out money in the day to the townspeople. His mentor had been on duty the night Shaba disappeared and had taken the photograph I now held. After a long firefight near the stone arch, they’d rushed to the scene, finding only the bloody plate carrier and shell casings. Hundreds and hundreds of shell casings, Saif said, his mentor had always stressed that. They looked for Shaba for many months but never found him.
He’d first learned of Shaba at the sheik’s funeral. The townspeople couldn’t shut up about him. No one knew what had happened, not exactly, but there were theories.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Just crazy gossip,” Saif said. “Some said Jaish al-Mahdi killed him because he’d joined al-Qaeda. Others said the opposite. He was out there by himself that night, that’s certain. No one knew why, not even the Americans. So strange.”
As for the sheik, he’d had many relatives, but his wife had been dead for years, and there was only one living child, a daughter. And no one had seen her for some time. Not until the funeral.
A jewel, Saif said. Even from afar, even covered in her mourning burqa. She’d caused a minor scandal by refusing to wear a face cover, opting instead for a translucent veil. But she didn’t seem bothered by the reactions it provoked. She walked, Saif said, like royalty, snubbing everyone she passed on the street, looking down on everyone else even when they were on level ground. She’d come to Ashuriyah with her husband and two little boys. The townspeople said the youngest looked so much like his father, but the eldest had a different appearance, Iraqi coloring with no Iraqi features.
Some of the townspeople said an American soldier had raped the shiek’s daughter during the sectarian wars. Others said the dead sheik had promised her to an Anbar doctor. Still others said she’d been taken as a wife by al-Qaeda, and when her husband was killed by the Americans, she’d gone to prison and given birth there.
But most people, Saif said, simply didn’t want to talk about it. They hushed the others and told them to respect the memory of the sheik. It was funny, he said, even though he’d returned to Ashuriyah many months before, he hadn’t thought about these names and people for years.
“They are the past,” Saif said. “It is the future I’m interested in.”
“The daughter?” I asked, trying to contain my interest behind a swig of chai. “She alive?”
He shrugged. “Ask the cleaning woman. She used to be one of Sheik Ahmed’s servants.”
My mind reeled. Had Alia meant to mislead me? Had I asked the wrong questions? Had she been conspiring with Chambers this entire time? She’d said that Shaba had “died like anyone else in Iraq. By the gun.” What exactly had that meant? It seemed like the more I learned, the less I understood.
“What troubles you, Loo-tenant Porter?” Saif asked.
There was no more chai in my glass to drink, so I sucked on what remained of the sugar cube. I wanted to tell him everything, how everything was troubling me, the past, the present, and the future. But I kept down my half-drawn story of love, war, and consequence. I looked back at Saif. He’d resumed sitting on his knees. He was a thick, sweaty, balding man with brown skin from here. I was a thin, sweaty baby face with white skin from there. He was still a them. I was still an us. No amount of chai could change that.
“Nothing,” I said. “Think I could hang on to this for a while?”
His eyes followed the photograph in my hand. He seemed to be in deliberation with himself, though I couldn’t tell why.
“A gift,” he said with a tight smile. “We are partners now.”
I nodded and handed him my glass and saucer. After a handshake and arm clasp, I left the room, stealing a glimpse of him locking his trunk behind me. Later I pulled out my own trunk and stuck the photograph into the Lawrence of Arabia book with the sworn statements. It seemed the thing to do with a bloody vest.