CHAPTER 16

Ramadi, 2006

Luc and I tried to relax in a small room on one of the US forward bases in downtown Ramadi. We had gone there to report on how the military was coping with one of the hotbeds of the insurgency. I was on one bunk and Luc on another, facing me. We lay in this room for hours. Sometimes we talked; sometimes we were quiet for long stretches. Occasionally one of us fell asleep, until the other woke him. Time slipped by.

He pulled out his phone and checked the clock. He carried all of his music on it. There were only a few artists: Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Serge Gainsbourg, and the Clash.

To pass the time, he suggested we play musical trivia. He began. ‘An easy one,’ he said. ‘On which album will you find the song “Tangled Up in Blue”?’

‘Easy,’ I agreed. ‘Blood on the Tracks.’

He increased the difficulty immediately. Playing me a few seconds of a song, I had to guess what it was. I knew the song — it was Dylan — but I didn’t know the title. ‘“Mister Jones”?’

‘“Ballad of a Thin Man”,’ he corrected me. The chorus re- verberated: Because something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?

Luc smoked little brown cigarettes. We all approached death from different directions. Sometimes we rushed headlong towards it, suddenly and madly curious, dazzled by its allure. Sometimes we watched from a great distance with utter boredom. Twelve dead in a plane crash? Our fascination with the irrelevant detail made our contempt for the dead that much more acute — what sort of plane? A storm? Anyone famous? Other times, most times, we ran away.

And then there was the waiting Luc and I were doing, the subtle orchestration of events that would bring us into close proximity to the beast. We wanted to slow death down, understand it, and describe it; we wanted to be swept up in its swirling currents for a moment. Isn’t that what we wanted?

It was so bright in the Iraqi desert in summer. To avoid the glare, I usually closed my left eye completely and squinted with the right. If not, I began to sneeze. It was a photokinetic allergy. When I was a child, the glare from the snow-covered peaks of the Austrian Alps — at a highway chalet where my dad and I stopped briefly in the summer of 1980, on our way across the Iron Curtain and into Yugoslavia — had thrown me into fits of uncontrollable sneezing.

‘What’s wrong?’ my father had asked, and when he realised that I could only bear to open my eyes into tiny slivers, he put his aviator sunglasses on my head. ‘We’ll have to get you a good pair of those.’

They never really helped. In the desert sun, I squinted at the world. Soldiers suddenly disappeared from my vision; I felt the 130-Fahrenheit degrees of heat, but I no longer saw it shimmering.

A marine showed me to the lead humvee of the convoy we would be taking for a foray into Ramadi. He was a tall Latino, and very muscular. He wore sunglasses with dark lenses and shouldered an M60, one of the big guns, just like Rambo. Soldiers weren’t like sailors or racers; their vehicles were androgynous. Their weapons, on the other hand, were cradled and caressed.

‘We call this one Lucky,’ he said, pointing to my vehicle. He showed me how to lock and unlock the door, and pointed to the seat behind the driver. ‘You’ll sit here. We get hit all the time, but Lucky has never been hit. That’s why we’re putting you in here.’

There was an awkward moment of silence as he realised he had somehow cracked the wood that one mentally knocks on. So he bowed to fate. ‘You guys’ll probably get hit today,’ he said. There was no smile. It was a simple statement of fact.

These marines were from Weapons Company, part of a regimental battalion based in Ramadi — which, in that summer of 2006, was the most violent, chaotic city in Iraq. Much of the city had already been destroyed. Instead of buildings, there was the wreckage of a city that once was. Towering walls of various heights were angled oddly against each other, and the skyline was in ruins. Roofs had collapsed into courtyards, windows had been blown out, powerlines were down, and giant hulks of concrete, rebar, broken steel, and glass lay everywhere on the ground. Repeated American bombings had blown tall buildings to shards, and their dirty remains were scattered across the blight. And there was often not a human in view — only birds that floated in and out of the rubble looking for food or a home.

When I look back now — and I think I was even aware of it very dimly at the time — I realise that I went to Ramadi in part because it formed part of the array of goods with which my father and I would eventually barter. I didn’t tell him or my mother about these trips. I kept it a secret, my secret, at least until it was over; until I could go to them and say: Here, look! Here is what I have found out on my own. And then the reckoning could begin. Does this square with what you have told me? Have you told me the truth?

In Iraq in those years, there were simply too many truths swirling around for any one of them to be definitive. Taken together, it often seemed like chaos. I liked that. My job, I told myself in those moments of self-absorbed triumph, was to delve into the chaos and wring from it the truth. Truth permitted all sorts of indiscretions and offenses, not only to others but also to myself, just as it had when I was a child. I often reverted to the mindset that I was somehow different, invincible, and that the rules that governed the world did not apply to me; that I could skate through unharmed. It was that same feeling I had on the day my father told me his secret — there was a sort of impunity that our illicit world bestowed upon our actions. The world didn’t know what I knew, and therefore I had an advantage over it.

The soldiers I saw in Ramadi didn’t feel that same advantage. They were terrified — and rightly so, because they felt that their invincibility had run out.

One day, as we continued our reporting, Luc and I were sitting in one of the bunkers at the governor’s palace downtown. The marines were watching the streets, or what was left of them, from behind the wire. There was an intersection a few hundred metres down the road from us. Now and again people scurried from one side to the other. A man on a bicycle rode up and down again, seemingly oblivious to armed marines who surrounded him on three sides. Perhaps he was mad. An old man sat in a chair on one side of the intersection. The marines believed that any of them could be insurgents, killers, or terrorists.

Then one of the marines noticed, in the middle of the street, a small box that no one had yet seen. There was no explanation for its sudden appearance. The marines tensed immediately. They squinted through their binoculars at this box. A child screamed giddily and ran up the street. The obvious question: how was this giddiness possible in this situation? The irretrievable answer: it was not. It was a ruse, a trick, and the child must have been complicit with those who had left the box.

‘Watch that fucking box,’ one marine ordered. Several pairs of binoculars swivelled away from the child, focusing again on the box. The lenses on these binoculars were green and shiny, much bigger than average binoculars — rounder, more like eyes, reducing the world to digits of infinitesimal movement.

‘Is that fucking box moving?’

‘Could be on a rope.’

‘Who’s pulling?’

‘That old man?’

‘Watch that kid — where’s the kid?’

‘Is it moving?’

‘Can’t tell.’

‘I want the road closed.’

‘Close alpha now.’

‘Where’s that fucking kid?’

‘You see rope?’

‘No.’

‘It hasn’t moved.’

‘I don’t care. Shut it down now.’

Men and women continued to cross the street, yet now, with the appearance of the box and the child, their movements looked more like a delicately choreographed dance. I focused my eyes and ears on the street: the old woman’s clothed frame; the crooked nose of the old man, and his bony, sandalled feet; the whirring of the bicycle wheels. There was no air anymore. The fate of the world seemed to be contained inside this box. No one looked away.

And then a tall man came strolling along. He was lanky, an Iraqi jughead. He swung his arms blithely. He came along, and whack — kicked the box and sent it flying down the street.

There was an audible gasp behind me, and then murmurs.

‘You were one dead sumbitch.’

‘Stupid fuck.’

‘Fucking box.’

But the world had been released. The sky opened up again; the clouds drifted. It even looked like it might rain.

Now, near Ramadi, it was mid-morning, and we waited on the tarmac where the soldiers were gathering. Four armoured humvees were lined up, including Lucky, the lead vehicle. About 30 marines were getting ready for the mission, which had been described to us as an attempt to draw fire from the insurgents to coax them out of hiding, and then kill them. Those who had been spared this morning’s run stood around in T-shirts, talking softly and helping their fellow marines don their gear and load their vehicles. They checked weapons, patted each other on the back, and gave encouragement — because you never knew who would be next, or when death would come. They were getting killed here, too: Americans were dying at the rate of about two per day across Iraq that summer, and when you looked at where those deaths were occurring, Ramadi took a disproportionate toll. Between ambushes, improvised explosive devices (IED), and snipers, hundreds had gone down in the last several months alone. They took the bodies of the dead back to Baghdad by helicopter, shrouded them in American flags, and sent them home. Each time a US soldier fell, the resolve to retaliate grew stronger.

Many of the soldiers seemed dead inside already. The sergeant preparing the mission was one such man. He had been in Ramadi for about six months, and had already been IED’d 21 times. He was a bald, heavy-chested Southerner who chewed tobacco and smoked. His eyes were hooded and, it seemed to me, full of pain all of the time. I didn’t know if he wanted me there, or if he wanted to be doing so much killing, but today he had to accept both.

The air was too still, and the heat was blinding. I looked at Luc, and his face betrayed a degree of uncertainty for the first time. Luc was never uncertain — not once since I had started working with him five years earlier in Afghanistan. The helmet they made him wear was far too big, and it sloped to one side of his head, the chinstrap dangling loosely. He looked like an ambivalent adolescent, bundled up by mother for the winter walk to school.

The sergeant came over to me, checking my armoured vest and slapping my helmet. ‘If we get hit, the first thing you do when you come to is check your body to see if you’re all there.’ He patted his chest, face, legs, and head in a cursory once-over. ‘If you’re all there, you yell out, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” If you’re wounded, you yell out, “I’m wounded.” If you can yell. If you can’t, well ...’ He looked to make sure I understood. ‘You get out of the vehicle but you don’t run away. You wait for one of us to tell you what to do. Got it?’

I nodded.

He pulled open the door and I climbed in. It closed with a bang and a click.

The various companies on the Ramadi base had different missions. Some patrolled the quieter areas. Some did civil affairs work, trying to meet locals and befriend them with offers of tea and money in exchange for cooperation. But Weapons was different. Weapons drove all around the city, and there was no neighbourhood that was off-limits. Weapons had only one objective — to draw fire. When that happened, their job was simple: kill.

Fuck it, I thought to myself, because it was too late to turn back, because this was what I had come to see.

For the rest of today, you must not step on any cracks, anywhere, of any sort. If you do, you will die. If you lived by that rule for one hour, it might approximate the obscene attention to detail required to drive in Ramadi. We headed out the base’s front gates, passing a few tanks that had been positioned to guard the entrance and exits. Soon, we arrived at an empty intersection that was a popular site for IEDs. The sun was beating down on the footpath, turning it white. The engine growled mechanically. I waited for the blast, but nothing came. And we were through, moving into a narrow street where the buildings on each side closed us off. Then we were just moving forward slowly, waiting.

The sergeant began to talk, directing the private in the driver’s seat. ‘Slow down here … watch that sand pile … move six inches to the right … stop … okay, go ahead … is that wood? Clear that plank, stay way right … slow down … move left … more … okay … gunner, where does that wiring go?’

These streets were empty. They were dirty and strewn with rubbish, including long, dry fronds discarded from date palms. The doors of the houses were metal, and brown walls lined the sides of the road. The traffic islands were canals of dried and caked mud.

There was air-conditioning in the humvee, but it blasted out hot air. I could see the back of the private’s neck. He was young and white, and his neck was burned pink. I couldn’t stop clenching and unclenching my jaw. I repeated phrases, and counted their syllables with my toes. Take this right here; four. The gunner swivelled on a moving turret by my side. It was similar to the swivel turret used by Chewbacca, Han Solo’s copilot on the Millenium Falcon. The muzzle from the M16 jostled up against my blue flack jacket, which identified me as a member of the press corps.

If a bomb exploded, my face would fill with glass and heat. It could possibly melt off my skull. The worst luck would be if the bomb came from my side of the vehicle. A better scenario would be if it exploded in front or behind us, or came at us from the other side. The better scenario would be if other people died. The worst possible case would be if it exploded as I looked out this window, for no distinguishable reason at all. One of the most memorable scenes from Star Wars was when Han Solo put the Millenium Falcon into light speed and it vanished into time. I am not driving, but if I were, I would speed us up right now. Instead, we slow down. We stop beside a pile of sand. It turns out this spot, in time, in space, is not within the vortex. It is negative space; it is dead space.

We set off again and turned on to a broad avenue. There were lanes going in both directions, and both lanes were empty. We had seen a few solitary men moments before, but they had darted into doorways or down curving alleys and disappeared. Our column stopped in the middle of the long avenue with the date palms down the middle, quiet houses on each side. Then we started moving again.

‘Get over to the right,’ the sergeant barked. When the private didn’t, the sergeant yelled, ‘Hey!’

That was the last thing I heard before there was an explosion.

Apparently, we flew. We were lifted high, flung about like a tetherball; five tonnes of metal and steel, and another half-tonne of human flesh, lifted up more than a metre — 150 centimetres high — to the height of my throat; lifted as if by God’s hand, shot up from underneath, or within, a pop of the weasel, straight into the palm of the Lord.

I only heard the bang afterwards, and I might even have imagined it, needing to attach a sound to the explosion. And then I felt the vehicle crash-land, windscreen down.

I followed instructions to a T. I felt my chest. The flack jacket was hard. I felt my head. The helmet was hard. I felt my face, my eyes, my mouth, my lips. I am in love with my lips, I thought. I looked at my hands. There was no blood. I felt my legs, and they were intact. ‘I’m okay,’ I yelled. ‘I’m okay.’

My father had an itch to push things to the edge. If I asked him not to do something, fearing for his safety, he would do it. He was accident-prone, too, which complicated matters. He took a jump at a French ski resort once, right after I had asked him not to, then crash-landed and dislocated his elbow. He would forget — deliberately, I sometimes thought — to regulate his insulin intake, sinking into incomprehension and anger before eventually succumbing to an insulin recalibration. He was forever testing boundaries, with himself and with others, in an attempt to prove his invincibility. As a young man, he had taken up diving in Hawaii, where he worked as a tour guide, and once almost died when he free-dove 22 metres and barely made it back to the surface in time.

During our hiking trip in the Pyrenees in Spain years before, we had been hiking for about five days when we crossed a vast stone bowl ringed by pillars and bottomed out by a meadow of swampy reeds. We began to make our way up a long ridge, over which was another valley that sloped down and circled back to our starting point. The ridge-top was crumbling, and studded with boulders that would be difficult to climb over. So instead, we started to cross on glacial ice over a deep indentation in the mountainside.

When we got to the edge of the snow bank, I told my father I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea for us to cross there. The bank was steep and slippery. He wore leather boots, and his pack was heavy and poorly balanced. But he just turned around and smiled at me, starting to kick steps into the snow and, with his hands out in front of him for balance, to move laterally across the bank, one step at a time. I waited on the rocky edge and watched him, trying to guide him from a distance with the advantage of perspective. He was about halfway across when I began to relax. He was kicking well, and his balance seemed good. He smiled at me. ‘This is a cinch!’ he said.

And then, in an instant, he wasn’t there anymore. I had looked away, and when I turned around my father was on his back, sliding fast down the snow bank. Worse, he was sliding headfirst. Below him, a couple of hundred metres down the bank, were the jagged teeth of the boulder field. Across it was a creeping, tentacled field of yellow lichen. The thin, winding lengths of fungi were everywhere on the boulders, like a single-bodied organism; and my father was hurtling towards them, a white body attached to a clanking frame of metal and plastic, with his head, the most delicate bloom of all, lodged in its midst. Not a cloud was in sight in the blue sky. I imagined my father’s death; I saw the blood. It would be a day of blue and red. And, with all those finely wrought lichen, of yellow, too. All I could see were those colours.

I shrieked. ‘Dad!’ I shouted. ‘Dad!’

He was still sliding towards the boulder field. His body was twisting as it fell; now he was sideways. I could hear the scraping sound he made on the ice. I dropped my pack and started running, then jumping down the boulders. I fell, but got up and continued. I kept shouting his name. There was no sound from him. Mine was the only noise in the universe then, and it was frantic. I answered myself, more calmly. My voice came back to me from across the valleys, muted and tinny. There are three of us now, I thought. Two of me, and one of him. And he will be gone, so that will leave just the two of us.

‘Shit, shit,’ I muttered to myself. My echo didn’t answer.

‘Dad!’ I screamed. And this time it answered back again.

He hit the rocks. He tumbled. He flipped. The rocks made a low grumble, like dice in a leather cup, and then sharper, like ice cracking. He lay still. His white shirt was still white. I raced down the rocks, stumbling and falling on myself. I banged my knee. Then I was on him. He looked up at me and smiled. The fall had knocked the wind out of him, and he was having trouble breathing. I checked for broken bones, but he seemed to be okay. ‘I think I’ll just lie here for a minute,’ he said, and smiled again.

I sat down beside him and he stared up at the sky. The high rims of the valley walls were all around us now. We were in a stone bowl whose vertical sides rose up like thousands of thick fingers — columns many tens of metres high, stained orange and brown, and glowing in the midday sun as if they were alive, as if they had been woken by my father’s fall and were staring at us. On the bank above, I could see the long trace of my father’s freefall through the snow. The line was smooth and slightly hollow, marked randomly by holes where he had tried to grasp at something to hold on to. A few rocks had been unearthed by his chute.

I gave him some water. ‘I managed to turn myself around,’ he said. ‘I was going down headfirst there for a while.’

‘I know,’ I managed to say.

He patted me on the knee and smiled.

Now I unlocked the door of the humvee and crawled out. Right near me was the prospect of death, just as it had been when I saw my father a decade earlier. It was a marine, the driver who had been sitting in front of me. The bomb had detonated under the engine block — the explosion threw the floorboard up, crushed his feet, smashed his head into the roof, and then somehow threw open the door and tossed him five metres away, where he lay writhing. ‘Oh my God,’ he screamed. ‘Oh my God! Help me, help me!’

I maneuvered around to the other side of the humvee, helping marines to carry the wounded driver to a less exposed place behind one of the humvees, and we lay him on the ground. The others, meanwhile, provided cover for us. They had begun to kill as soon as we were ambushed. Bodies, sometimes dressed in black, with kaffiyas wrapped around their heads and carrying large guns, darted in and out of doorways, crouching in the street long enough to get a few rounds off at us. If they lingered too long, the marines mowed them down. The Latino with the big gun stood on his vehicle and let loose with such a clatter of mayhem that I had to plug my ears. He was a madman. Two bodies now lay in the sewage-filled gutters. Another fell in a doorway and stayed there, slumped like a drunk or an extra in a movie, until he was quickly dragged out of sight by unseen hands.

By now the marines had taken off the driver’s boots. His feet were smashed and broken. They fed him morphine right away, and he began to grin. His teeth were broken, and blood seeped from his mouth. Is he going to die, I wondered? Why have they taken off his boots? Was that really a priority? His socks were white and fresh, and glowed brightly in the noonday sun. The mothers and fathers at home made sure to send their boys fresh bundles of socks. So his socks were clean, but his feet were in a shambles. The marines had taken off his socks and laid them on his unlaced boots. Now they hovered over his face, talking to him amid the chaos.

Around us, the clanging fire rang on. At the end of the north-facing street, an insurgent armed with a shoulder-mounted RPG bent down and levelled his weapon at us. He was just about to let a rocket go when a marine mowed him down.

Now and again, I heard a ‘whoo hoo!’ — the sound of marines hollering as they killed. With each whoop they had hit another. In the adrenaline, I wanted to live inside that sound. The killers, I was with the killers. I wanted to be a warrior, to vanquish, to identify the enemy and conquer. But I could not.

One of them leaned down to me. ‘You’re doing good,’ he shouted, before popping back up to let off a few more rounds. ‘You should have been a soldier,’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘You should have been a fucking killer!’

When I became a journalist, I thought I wanted to know, or discover, the truth. That was the myth behind the profession, to seek and destroy all manner of impurities, to wage war on the propagandists and deceivers, to record history as it was being made. There was the impulse to delve into chaos and unravel the truth from it. But those things were so impossible, really. There were only stories, one after another, these overwhelming stories. The moral world — an incipient universe of malleable laws, a jungle in which Mowgli would have felt at home — was still being formed. There was a terrible privilege to being able to witness people’s nakedness, their grotesqueness or their nobility, when they were put in truly awful predicaments — and that included me, and my own.

Eventually, after an hour or more of steady streetfighting, the marines managed to kill or scare away the remaining insurgents, and we holed up in a nearby house to wait for help. A Quick Reaction Force evacuated the wounded marine. The rest of us waited for a while, then tied the broken humvee to a working one and limped back to the base at a crawl, afraid that another bomb would explode beneath us at any moment.

Afterwards, when we were safely back on the base, Luc put his arm around my shoulder. ‘You have to stop that,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘That’s the second time you’ve given me a scare. I saw your truck explode and I thought you were dead.’

Luc and I had been in scrapes together before — several — and each time we had made it through, but barely. ‘Maybe it’s you,’ I said. ‘This only happens with you.’

But the strange alchemy of the day began to work on me. Later, I borrowed Luc’s soap to take a shower. It was a special kind he had brought from France, a gift from his wife and child — a totem that he carried with him in a blue plastic case. When I returned to the trailer we shared, Luc asked me where the soap was. Oops, I had forgotten it. When I went back, the soap was gone.

‘I’ve lost the soap,’ I told Luc. ‘It’s gone.’

His face darkened. His lips pursed. He scowled, absolutely furious.

I got dressed quickly. I wanted us to arrange for our helicopter ride back to Baghdad. We trundled off to headquarters. As we walked, Luc said, ‘You’re going to get me some new soap. I need my soap.’

When we got there, I asked the sergeant if he had any soap. ‘Luc needs his soap,’ I said, with as much scorn as I could muster. Luc was standing off to one side. He shook his head, livid at my tone. He was scathing of me. The sergeant brought a small bar of military soap. I took it and handed it to Luc.

‘No!’ he said. ‘You carry it.’

We were suddenly both very small children. We were reduced to this. The sergeant didn’t move, just watched.

‘No!’ I shouted back. ‘It’s your soap, you fucking carry it.’ I shoved it into his hands. We trailed out the door, and I walked away first, back to our tent.

I heard Luc’s ragged voice break out behind me. ‘Assume!’ Luc was screaming at my back as I walked away. ‘Assume, Scott!’

There is no simple way to explain the word, the phrase it conjures, in English. What he was saying was ‘assume responsibility for your actions’. Assume responsibility for your life. Rise to the occasion. Rise! Defend!

I continued walking.

In that moment, I thought about my father. I felt, suddenly and deeply, very ashamed. I sensed all eyes upon me. I had survived something incredibly scary that day, and yet now I felt as if I could crumble from the inside out. It dawned on me how willing I had been to give up the life he had given me. Why did I keep doing this? And each time with more ferocity, more anger than the time before. I didn’t think I had anything to prove to him, or to myself, and yet there I was, in Iraq. This was a solitary experience. It was all mine, and no one, not even him, could take it away from me. Maybe this was why young men went to war — to claim their own hold on life, on death; to wean themselves from their fathers; to kill or be killed on their own terms.

When I called him later, I told him ‘something’ had happened. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said, ‘but everything’s okay, everything’s fine.’

Two days before my 33rd birthday, I was back from Ramadi. My father had been writing to me, asking how my ‘adventure’ had gone. I called him. ‘You’ll read about something that happened to me in the magazine,’ I said, ‘but don’t worry, I’m okay.’

When my article came out a few days later, detailing the violence I had seen in Ramadi, he wrote to me. ‘You’ve certainly earned your paycheck these last two weeks,’ he wrote. ‘I love you, and reading the article (Ramadi) made me as uncomfortable as you anticipated when you thoughtfully called. Dad.’

I called him later that night and he asked how I was doing.

‘I’m okay,’ I told him, ‘but it was pretty bad.’

There was a silence on the other end.

‘I wish…’ he started, then, ‘God, I have horrible dreams about it sometimes.’

‘About what?’ I asked.

‘About you being over there. Please be careful, Scotty. Promise me.’