After graduating high school, I was looking for a way out of my quiet hometown in Northern California. A military recruiter on campus told me that if I enlisted, they’d pay my tuition to any college I could get into.
I’d be able to travel the world. And if I got lucky, I might be able to blow some shit up.
He sweetened the pot by saying that he would give me a ten-thousand-dollar bonus by extending a three-year enlistment to a short six-year enlistment. And ten thousand dollars was a lot of money for a nineteen-year-old, so I was sold.
Six months after basic training, I found myself in Kirkuk, Iraq, which is one of the largest oil fields on the planet. Because it’s one of the largest oil fields, it’s also one of the most dangerous places on the planet—it’s a hotbed for terrorism.
Now, my job was mainly to patrol the city around the base’s perimeter, but sometimes I would be posted at the front gates or at checkpoints—patting down potential suicide bombers, hoping to live another day.
Working those “suicide gates,” as we called them, was like this sick lottery that you didn’t want to win.
I knew a few guys who weren’t so lucky.
But for every suicide bomber, for every enemy insurgent, there were a thousand friendly faces in Kirkuk. And one of those friendly faces belonged to a teenager named Brahim.
Brahim was one of a group of kids of all ages that would follow us around while we were on patrol. They would ask us for candy, soda, magazines. They wanted to talk American pop culture.
And I’d always entertain Brahim. I loved having him around. But some of the guys in my squad, not so much, because, after all, we were in a war zone where enemy combatants didn’t wear a uniform.
But in my heart I knew that these kids weren’t terrorists—they were just trying to make the best out of a bad situation, kind of like I was.
This kid Brahim, he reminded me of my younger brother, Rory, back home. They were both very mature for their age. That was to be expected. I mean, Brahim was raised in a war zone, so he’d probably seen things that none of us ever had.
Over the course of that deployment, we had some very deep and intellectual conversations about life and death and religion and politics—conversations you shouldn’t be having with a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old.
When he was a kid, my brother Rory would follow me and my friends around. He’d tag along everywhere. So by the time he was a teenager, he had this very adult sense of humor.
Rory was five years younger than me, but he was my best friend. We did everything together.
And I think in a way Brahim filled that void for me. He was like a little brother.
Brahim worked on our base as a janitor. I thought that was kind of odd, because my brother, who was the same age, was back home going to prom and applying for college.
So I asked Brahim, “Why aren’t you going to school?”
He said, “I don’t have a school to go to. It was bombed out.”
He told me that he was biding his time to become an interpreter for the US Army, because that’s where the real money was. You could make two hundred fifty dollars a week.
See, the US government had this agreement with Iraqis that if you worked a certain amount of years as a translator, once your contract was up, you’d get a visa to come to the United States. The opportunities were there because there was high turnover—not because Iraqis were quitting but because they were all getting killed.
These terror groups, they would execute anyone they suspected of working with the Americans. And sometimes they would kill your family or your friends, just to prove a point.
Brahim said that he understood the risks, but he was willing to do anything it took to feed his family and help end the war in Iraq.
Now, as the deployment went on, I learned a lot of things about this kid. We became really close. He told me about all the friends and family members he’d lost in the conflict. He told me about how he was the sole provider for his household, a house that only had electricity every other week because of the rolling blackouts. The house had piss-poor plumbing, so something as simple as personal hygiene became a struggle.
And I felt partially responsible for that, because after all I was a cog in this war machine that had destroyed this kid’s home country.
So when I got a chance, I went down to the base’s PX, which is like a mini grocery store, and I bought him twenty dollars’, maybe thirty dollars’ worth of soap, shampoo, deodorant, toothpaste—just, like, the bare necessities. The next time I saw him, I presented him with this box of toiletries, and he looked at me with tears in his eyes, like I had just handed him the keys to a brand-new house. And it was an incredibly humbling experience.
I wanted to see how Brahim was living up close. So one day I snuck off base.
He gave me a tour of the city. We hailed taxis, hitched rides, walked for miles. Along the way he pointed out historical landmarks. He pointed toward an ancient citadel that was built two thousand years before Jesus was born. He showed me the tomb of the prophet Daniel from the Bible; he said people of all faiths went to pray there—Jews, Muslims, Christians. He told me how Kirkuk was one of the oldest regions in the history of human civilization.
I could tell how proud of his culture he was. It was pretty impressive stuff.
I told him that Campbell, California, the town I’m from, is famous for inventing the fruit cup.
He didn’t know what a fruit cup was.
We went to a marketplace, and we stopped for kabobs and fresh-baked bread. And I don’t know if I’m romanticizing this meal in my head, but to this day I say that that was the best meal I’ve ever eaten.
I asked Brahim, “How is this bread so good?”
He looked at me and rolled his eyes, and he said, “Because we invented bread.”
A few months later, toward the end of my deployment, Brahim finally got the chance to become an interpreter. And for me that was bittersweet. I knew that he was finally able to provide for his family. But on the other hand, he had just volunteered for his own death.
I knew that I was leaving him to die.
That was a sickening feeling, but what could I do? I wished him the best, and I got on a plane and flew home.
When I got home, things were different. I was different. There was this ultra-vigilant muscle memory that I had.
I remember walking in downtown San Jose with my friends, and I would look at rooftops and windows, searching for snipers. Or I would be at a gathering somewhere, or at a restaurant, and I would be looking at the torso of every single person that walked in the building just to make sure they didn’t have a suicide vest on—it was just second nature at that point. Living like that can be hard—it can make a person angry—and my behavior was straining all my relationships.
I decided I needed a change of scenery, a fresh start, so I moved to Phoenix, Arizona.
I enrolled in college, went to ASU. But things didn’t get better. Actually, for the next five years I struggled with my mental health. I started abusing drugs and alcohol. It was hard to keep a job, because I was in and out of the court system.
There was even a period of homelessness.
But despite weekends spent in the county jail and different homeless shelters, I was a pretty decent student and was able to muscle my way through college.
Then one Saturday morning, I woke up to a dozen missed phone calls and text messages. I called my mother back first, because her name was the first and the last on the list.
When she picked up the phone, there was this fear in her voice that I’d never heard before. Then there was silence. She couldn’t get out what she was trying to say.
But when she did finally speak, she told me that the night before, my brother had been murdered in a carjacking.
I didn’t believe it, because things like that didn’t happen where I was from. I had just purchased plane tickets to fly home to spend the holidays with my family. Only now I was flying home to bury him.
I remember spending that Thanksgiving in a morgue. And then a few days later, I spent my birthday staring at his freshly engraved tombstone.
That Friday, when Rory was killed, he was walking out of a grocery store with his best friend. They were celebrating—he had just gotten a new car, a new apartment, a new job. He was about to turn twenty-two. He was starting his adult life.
As he was sitting in his car, two men wearing ski masks, brandishing firearms, ran up on him. They told him to get out, but for whatever reason they didn’t even give him a chance to comply. One of the men shot Rory three times in the chest and face as his best friend watched in horror from the passenger seat.
I know these details because I watched it.
I watched the high-definition security-camera footage during his killer’s trial.
I watched my brother take his last breath, and it’s something I can still see every time I close my eyes.
I had been through a lot in Iraq. I’d survived suicide bombings and mortar attacks and sniper attacks. But Rory’s death caught me more off-guard than any roadside bomb in Iraq ever could.
I was destroyed.
I decided I should move home to be closer to my family, but before I did that, I would have to go back to Arizona to pack up my apartment.
When I landed in Arizona, I got off the plane and exited the terminal. I remember thinking it was odd that the sky was gray and it was pouring rain.
I went straight down to the taxi stand and got into the first taxi I saw.
We were driving down the 202, and I wasn’t feeling very conversational, but the taxi driver didn’t know that. He started up that standard small talk: Where you from? What do you do? Why are you here? That sort of thing.
And obviously I didn’t want to talk about my brother’s murder, so I half lied and said, “Oh, I just got out of the military a few years ago, and I got this new job in California.”
When I said military, he asked if I’d been anywhere special.
I said, “Sure, I’ve been all over the world. I just recently did a year in Iraq.”
He said, “Iraq?”
And when I said Iraq, his tone changed a little bit, and he said, “I’m from Iraq.”
He said, “Where in Iraq were you stationed?”
I said “In the northeast, in this city called Kirkuk.”
And he paused, and he said, “I’m from Kirkuk.”
And just as soon as the conversation started, it was over.
I knew something was wrong, and I was thinking, What just happened? Did I harm one of his loved ones intentionally or unintentionally? Or maybe he was really antiwar, and if he was, could I blame him?
We sat there in silence, for miles, and I could feel him staring at me in his rearview mirror.
I was trying to avoid eye contact by looking out my own window, and it was in that moment that I saw he had passed our exit.
Now I was terrified.
I told him that he’d missed the exit, but he didn’t respond. He just took the next exit.
When he got off, we went down a few blocks, and he pulled the car over to the side of the road.
Now the red flags were going off!
I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I could see him gripping his steering wheel—working up the guts to do something. What he wanted to do, I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to be there to find out.
So I grabbed my backpack, and I kicked open the door.
But before I could get all the way out of the taxi, he grabbed my leg—and he turned around and said, “Hey, Dylan, Do you remember me? It’s me, Brahim.”
And I looked at him, and I just didn’t understand what was going on.
But he sat a foot taller. His voice was deeper, his English was better. He didn’t have that goofy bowl cut.
Seventy-five hundred miles away from Iraq, there was this kid who had saved my life a lifetime ago.
We got out of the car, and we were hugging and sobbing in the pouring rain, like a scene out of The Notebook.
He explained to me that after I left Iraq, he was an interpreter for four years, and when he finished his contract and got his visa, they asked him where he wanted to resettle. He said he didn’t know, but he wanted to go somewhere where the weather was like Iraq.
So they sent him to Phoenix, Arizona.
I’d learned a lot of things about survival in the military. During POW training one of the things the instructors tell you is that sometimes the pain can be unbearable and the outlook can be pretty grim. But you have to look for these glimmers of hope to keep you going to that next day.
I think that day on the side of the road in Arizona was my glimmer of hope.
I’d lost one brother, and I got another one back.
DYLAN PARK was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 2004 to 2010, he served as a member of a US Air Force unit that deployed to locations all over the world, including Iraq. After returning home, he spent time as a social worker for homeless veterans and as a victims advocate for the Santa Clara County’s District Attorney’s Office. In 2016 Dylan moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing and quickly found work in AMC Network’s scripted development department as a writing fellow. Since then he’s had scripts optioned for both television and film. Currently he writes and directs. Recent projects include a VICE segment covering Alaska’s Muslim community, a music video with acclaimed musician Wyclef Jean, and a short film starring Jonathan Lipnicki (who played the little boy in Jerry Maguire). Dylan is a graduate of Arizona State University, from which he holds degrees in film and media studies, and attended grad school at the University of Southern California. You can always find him with his face buried in a laptop, hiding in a café or a bookstore somewhere in Santa Monica, the city he now calls home.
This story was told on November 5, 2017, at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The theme of the evening was Lost and Found. Director: Meg Bowles.
