I HEADED BACK TO THE UNITED STATES via the same roundabout process that had taken me to Iraq. This time Camp New York in Kuwait was not filled with wonder and hope but, rather, resignation. I had never felt such complete failure. My best had not been enough to stem the tide of blood or even to change lives for more than a few fleeting seconds. Still, there was a part of me that wanted to go back to Baghdad. I thought about volunteering to stay on with another unit. I thought I could make a difference if I just had more time—and more of chance to become “more Iraqi.” Against the backdrop of my own failure to make a difference the first time, I am not sure whether this was a true desire to help Iraqis prosper or a request to retake the test and pass. I had seen a small window of change in myself and could not help but wonder what would happen if I committed myself to being as Iraqi as possible. The dynamics were changing all of the time, though, and Baghdad as I knew it last year was completely different from the Baghdad that awaited the new replacements heading north.
When the plane finally arrived back at Fort Hood, our families greeted us with hugs and tears. There were speeches and yellow ribbons and American flags. It was a hero’s welcome, but I didn’t feel it. It seemed wrong to me that we could simply eject from Iraq without committing to a solution. The military’s repeated rotations there did not give us the continuity necessary to really understand the issues. Once again, I found myself longing to be back. I did my best to set all of those memories behind me and seek out the things that were important to me now, my family and my new life starting law school. Ironically, I no longer felt that close to the Americans around me, and even my family felt further from me than some of the people I had grown to trust in Iraq. Everything about life back in America seemed pretentious, from the carefree way we could drive on the highways to going shopping without any concern for safety. The downside to not facing these dangers was that American society appeared isolated and selfish to me. Whereas in Iraq, families lived together for generations, shopped together, and huddled together in tea houses and on porches, in America cars whizzed by with single occupants, and solitary people pushed their way through life without saying a word to one another. The vivid independence of each American stood in contrast to my recent Iraq memories and made me increasingly uncomfortable. I was not ready to accept this level of entitlement. The disparity between my life in America and my recent experience gnawed at me until I could no longer stand it. I needed to leave again.
A few weeks later, I left the army for good and left the United States for the summer. I rented an apartment in Barcelona, in a sweaty neighborhood in the Arab quarter where the families were piled onto one another. Throughout my building, I could hear their fights and their almost ceaseless chatter and smell their cooking. It was perfect. The return to American society had been too quick, too stark a contrast to the disorder and lawlessness to which I had grown accustomed. In Barcelona I had sought a confusion that would remind me of Baghdad. From my window in a trash-strewn street, the characteristic beats of Arab pop danced between the sounds of the chopping knives of the halal butcher shops. I went downstairs to find comfort in the scrawled Arabic letters on the billboards and the placards and in the steaming cups of tea available in every shop.
I lost myself in these streets as I had during my first days in Baghdad. I wandered until I was exhausted and then drove myself even farther. Whether I was running from something or looking for someone—a council member, perhaps—I can’t say. All I know is that I took comfort in the crowds of men wearing dishdashas and women wearing veils. It felt like home to me, and I became comfortable. Eventually, I began to write. I wrote to memorialize, I wrote to remember, but most of all I wrote so that people would understand that hope was being built and destroyed not in the Green Zone or on CNN but under the table in windowless rooms. The future of Iraq would not be decided in palace halls or conference rooms but in the hopeless streets of forgotten places that Abu Floos knew well.