I thought of it as a mild comment. In the Army it wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. And though Zara had stiffened up and ended the conversation a bit curtly, I hadn’t thought her especially bothered. But two days later, I found myself face-to-face with the Special Assistant to the President for Diversity and Inclusion, a round little man with a potato head nestled on fat, fleshy shoulders. I’d met him before. As a veteran and a Copt, I was the most diverse thing Amherst had going.
At the time, I didn’t even know what I’d done. The e-mail said I may have violated the provisions in the Amherst student honor code related to “respect for the rights, dignity, and integrity of others,” with particular regard to harassment for reasons “that include but are not limited to race, color, religion, national origin, ethnic identification, age, political affiliation or belief, sexual orientation, gender, economic status, or physical or mental disability.” That didn’t help narrow things down for me.
The e-mail directed me to report to the Special Assistant’s office the following morning, giving me all the time needed to work myself into a fervor. I was at the school on a combination of the G.I. Bill, the Yellow Ribbon Program, and various scholarship funds. If I was expelled or suspended, I didn’t know what sort of jeopardy that money would be in. Everything was dependent on me remaining in “good standing with the school.” I tried to call the VA but was put on hold so long I threw my phone at the wall. As I collected the pieces, I saw my father’s face, his tired eyes and thick mustache, the mix of disappointment and, worse, resigned acceptance that this was my fate, to turn every opportunity into shame.
The next morning, I walked into the Special Assistant’s office. He was seated at his desk, fat head sitting placidly on his shoulders, hands folded, his Salvation Army “Toy for Joy” posters and Ansel Adams prints framed on the wall behind him. All this was expected, even a little funny. But across from him, leaning forward and studiedly ignoring my entrance, sat Zara. That hurt. She wasn’t a friend, but I’d thought we had a sort of respect. And I’d never picked her for another thin-skinned golden child, walking through campus like Humpty Dumpty on a tightrope, waiting for a scandalous word to unsteady her balance and shatter her precious identity. Worse, I knew what I’d said to her and how it would play.
The Special Assistant explained that this wasn’t a “formal mediation” because Zara hadn’t lodged a “formal complaint.” He spoke in the soothing tones a mother would use to calm a frightened child, but he ruined it by explaining that, though no punishment was on the table, if our dispute “had to go to the dean of student conduct,” the consequences could be “serious.” He furrowed his brow theatrically to let me know he meant it.
I sat in my seat, across from the Special Assistant, next to Zara. If she ever got suspended, I thought, she’d be fine. She’d go back to Professor Mom and Daddy Esquire for a term, think about what she’d done, and then return to the school they were paying for. If I got suspended, my father would kick me out of the house. Again.
“Now, Waguih,” the Special Assistant said. “Am I pronouncing that correctly? Wa-goo? Wah-geeh?”
“It’s fine,” I said.
The Special Assistant told me how seriously Amherst took threatening statements. Particularly against a group that had faced so much discrimination in recent years.
“You mean Muslims?” I said.
“Yes.”
“She’s been Muslim for like three days,” I said. “I’ve been facing that shit for years.”
He gave me a concerned face, and waved his hand at me to continue. I felt like I was in therapy.
“I’m Arab and I lived in North Carolina for four years,” I said. “At least she gets to choose to be the terrorist.”
“Muslims aren’t terrorists,” she said.
I turned to her, genuinely angry. “That’s not what I’m saying. Listen to what I’m saying.”
“We’re listening,” said the Special Assistant, “but you’re not helping yourself out.”
I looked down at my hands and took a breath. In the Army I’d been a 37F, a specialist in Psychological Operations. If I couldn’t PsyOps my way out of this, I wasn’t worth a damn.
I considered my options: grovel or bite back. My preference has always been the latter. In Iraq, we’d once broadcast the message “Brave terrorists, I am waiting here for the brave terrorists. Come and kill us.” That stuff feels better than lying down and showing your belly.
“In the Army we had a saying,” I said. “Perception is reality. In war, sometimes what matters isn’t what’s actually happening, but what people think is happening. The Southerners think Grant is winning Shiloh, so they break and run when he charges, and so he does, in fact, win. What you are doesn’t always matter. After 9/11 my family got treated as potential terrorists. You get treated as you’re seen. Perception is reality.”
“My perception,” said Zara, “is that you threatened me. And I talked to some of my friends at Noor, and they felt the same.”
“Of course they feel threatened,” I said to the Special Assistant, “I’m a crazy vet, right? But the only mention of violence came from her. When she accused me of murdering Muslims.”
The Special Assistant’s eyes shifted to Zara. She looked at me. In a way, I’d lied. She’d never used the word murder. I didn’t want to give her time to respond.
“I got shot at,” I said. “Kind of a lot. And I saw people, yes, gunned down. Blown up. Pieces of men. Women. Children.” I was laying it on thick. “I helped as I could. I did what’s right. Right by America, anyway. But those aren’t pleasant memories. And for someone to get in your face…” I trailed off, glancing toward the ceiling with a look of anguish.
“I didn’t—,” she began.
“Accuse me of murder?” I said.
“I asked a reasonable question,” she said. “There’s hundreds of thousands dead and…”
The Special Assistant tried to calm us down. I gave him a tight smile.
“I understand why she said that,” I said. “But… sometimes I can’t sleep at night.”
That wasn’t true. Most nights I slept like a drunken baby. I noticed a slight look of panic on the Special Assistant’s face and pushed forward, determined to get out of the corner they’d boxed me in.
“I see the dead,” I said, letting my voice quaver. “I hear the explosions.”
“No one is disrespecting what you’ve been through,” said the Special Assistant, definitely panicked now. “I’m sure Zara had no intention of disrespecting you.”
Zara, whose face had held a lively anger moments before, looked surprised and, I think, saddened. At first I thought it was because it disappointed her to see me playing the game. It didn’t occur to me that she might simply be feeling sympathy for me. If I’d known that, it would have made me angry.
“And I had no intention of threatening her,” I said, feeling very clever. “But the damage was done.”
The Special Assistant gave me a long stare. He seemed to be determining just how big a liar I was before deciding on a course of minimum liability. “Okay,” he said, doing a Pontius Pilate–style washing motion with his hands. “So—a rational observer might conclude there was ample reason for both sides to be offended.”
“I suppose that’s fair,” I said, allowing myself to appear calmer. We were in the realm of claim and counterclaim. I felt on firmer footing.
Then Zara explained her concerns in a slightly cowed voice. The “justifiable anxieties” of her fellow Muslims and the degree to which they felt they needed to band together and “move aggressively against intolerance.” She explained herself not as though presenting her case, but as if apologizing for her overreaction. It surprised me, what my so-called sleepless nights had done to her sense of grievance. The spark she always had in class discussions was gone. When she finished, I graciously accepted her rationale for feeling threatened and said I’d moderate my words in the future if she’d do the same. The Special Assistant was all approving nods. He told us, “You two have a lot in common,” and we suffered through a little talk about how this was a teachable moment, how if we could get past our anger, we could learn so much from each other. We agreed to learn much from each other. And then he recommended, strongly, that I look into the health services that the college could offer regarding my sleepless nights. I said I would, and we were done. I’d escaped.
We walked out of the office and out of Converse Hall together, emerging into the sunlight. Zara had a dazed look about her. Around us were students heading to class or to breakfast. Since it was Amherst, there were even a few assholes playing Frisbee or, as they would call it, “throwing around the disk.” The morning had a healthy, vibrant cast to it that played oddly against what had happened.
We stood there for a moment before Zara broke the silence.
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“About what you’ve been through. I’m sorry.”
And without another word she walked away, swishing her legs under her dress and dissolving into the sunlight streaming in from the east.
As she faded, so did my relief at evading punishment, leaving me with what I’d done. She had, perhaps inartfully, asked me a genuine question. I’d given her nothing but lies. And now she had whatever guilt I’d dumped on her. To leave her with that, I thought, was cowardice.
I ran toward her, cutting a diagonal across the grass, pushing past other students, and planting myself directly in her path.
“What the fuck was that?” I said.
It clearly wasn’t something she expected. The whole morning, perhaps, had been like that. Unsettling.
“What?” She shook her head. “What was what?”
“Why did you apologize to me?”
I could hear the anger in my voice and she stared back with amazement, perhaps with a little fear. But she said nothing.
“You think the big bad war broke me,” I said, “and it made me an asshole. That’s why you think I said those things. But what if I’m just an asshole?”
My breath was still coming quick—the aftermath of the run—and I was full of energy. My fists were balled tight. I wanted to pace back and forth. But she was still, sizing me up, colder every second. And then she spoke.
“Calling you a killer was out of line,” she told me, “even if you are an asshole.”
I smiled.
“You push my buttons,” I said. “Good. You’d be boring if you didn’t.”
“And I care?” she said. “Whether you think I’m boring or not?”
“Did you believe that story in there?” I said. “Poor me and my hard little war?”
She gave me a blank look. “I guess,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t care. Whatever happened to you, I don’t care.”
“Sure you do,” I said. “You asked.”
“I’m not asking now,” she said.
We stared at each other, each of us still.
“What if I want to tell you?” I said.
She shrugged. “Why?”
I took a breath. “Because I like you,” I said. “Because you never give me any fucking respect. And because I want to level with you.” I pointed back toward Potato Head’s office in Converse Hall. “But without any of that lame bullshit.”
“This isn’t how you talk to people,” she said. “Why do you talk to people like this?”
“I know how to talk to people,” I said. “I can spin you some bullshit if you want. I’m good at that. But I don’t want to lie. At least, not to you.”
“I’m not your friend,” she said.
I put up a hand to cut her off.
“I never killed anyone,” I said. I let that hang for a moment, and once she nodded I said, “But I did see somebody die. Slowly.”
That made her still. Then I said, “I’d like to tell you about it.”
I wasn’t PsyOpsing her into it, so I didn’t know how she’d react. Or if I was PsyOpsing her, since you’re always exerting some kind of pressure even when you’re laying yourself bare, then it was the least conscious maneuvering I could do.
There was a long silence. “Why,” she said, “do you think I would want to hear about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I let her see, in my face, that it was important to me. PsyOps works best when you mean it.
There was another long silence. “Fine,” she said, and motioned with her hands. “What happened?”
I looked around at the sunlight and the college students. Khakis and polos. Shorts and sandals. “Not here,” I said. “This is a sit-down conversation. I don’t just talk about this stuff to anyone.”
“I’ve got to get breakfast,” she said. “Then I’ve got class.”
I thought for a moment. “Have you ever smoked shisha?” I asked. “You know, hookah. Muslims love that shit, right?”
She rolled her eyes and let out a short laugh. “No,” she said, and I knew she’d come.
? ? ?
After classes I went back to my apartment and brought the hookah to the porch. I sat down on my ratty couch, looked out at the street, and I waited.
When she arrived, ten minutes late, I already had the coals going. She’d had a full day to think it over and seemed restless and a little suspicious, settling herself in the chair with the rigid posture of someone who doesn’t intend to stay long.
I asked her if she wanted rose- or apple-flavored tobacco, and when she said rose, I told her apple was better and she rolled her eyes and we went with that. I told her the rules of hookah—no pointing the mouthpiece at anyone, no left hand—and as I got out the tobacco she said, “So. You want to tell me a story.”
I said, “Yes. And you want to hear it.”
She smiled. “Possession of a hookah is against the student honor code,” she said. “It’s considered ‘drug paraphernalia.’”
“Clearly,” I said, “I don’t follow the student honor code.”
The hookah was ready. I pulled on it a couple times and held the smoke in my lungs before letting it out. It had a sweet, smooth flavor and feel, and it relaxed me.
I told her, “You know, technically I didn’t even watch him die. It just felt that way,” and she didn’t say anything in response. She just looked at me, so I passed her the pipe and she took a pull.
“It’s sweet,” she said, breathing the smoke out with her words. She pulled again and let a slow curl ripple over her lips. Then she put the hose back down, pointed away from both of us.
I didn’t know how to start, which was unusual. I’d told the story before. In bars, most times, and then it was all about the money shot, the death. But that was one death among hundreds of thousands. Meaningless to all but a few people. Me. That child’s family. Perhaps, I thought, Zara.
I needed to ground myself. I began, as you do in the military, with geographic orientation. I told her about East Manhattan, which was a section of Fallujah north of Highway 10. A few weeks earlier, Marines from 3/4 had swept through the neighborhood, jumping roof to roof and clearing houses while thousands of civilians fled the city and the disorganized resistance tried to come up with some kind of plan. A lot of the fighting happened on Easter Sunday, which everybody thought was significant, even me. It was 2004, the third time in my life I could remember American Easter falling on the same day as Coptic Easter, and I spent that day watching a city explode.
But then the battle was called off and 3/4 wound up sitting in houses turned into defensive positions, sniping insurgents. Every fourth house had a sniper team. In the early part of the siege, they’d kill a dozen every day.
I tried to give Zara the feel of the city—not just the dust and the heat and the terror, but also the excitement. Everyone knew the ax was going to fall, it was only a question of when and how many would die.
“Each night,” I said, “the mosques would blast the same messages over the adhan speakers. ‘America is bringing in the Jews of Israel to steal Iraq’s wealth and oil. Aid the holy warriors. Do not fear death. Protect Islam.’”
As PsyOps, I told her, part of our job was to counter those messages. Or at least to fuck with the insurgents and make them scared. Explaining that Islam was a religion of peace wasn’t likely to work, but explaining that we would definitely kill you if you fucked with us might convince a few folks to chill out.
I told her how we used to go out in a Humvee strapped with speakers so we could spew our own propaganda. We’d dispense threats, promises, and a phone number for locals to call and report insurgent activity. We always got shot at. I didn’t tell her what that felt like, hiding in a vehicle with nothing but your voice while you’re taking fire, helpless and angry, depending on the grunts for safety. I just told her that I hated those missions.
The morning I saw someone die, we’d wanted to go out on the speakers again, so we staged behind a building held by 3/4. When we got there we realized the speakers weren’t working. My sergeant, Sergeant Hernandez, fiddled with them as best he could.
When the shots rang out, the heavy burst of a Marine machine-gun section’s 240G, I was in the building, standing in a doorway. The sound turned my head around, and through the corridor I could see the Marines who’d fired. They were stretched across the room in front of me, hiding in shadows toward the back and covering their sectors of fire through the broken windows to the front. They seemed so calm. Whoever got killed probably never even knew the Marines were there. I never heard any incoming AK fire.
“Gunfire was a part of daily life,” I started—but that sounded too hard-guy. I wanted to be honest, so I said, “The truth is, it goosed me, hearing it that close and not being able to see anything, just the Marines.”
I remember hearing a voice from a doorway on the other side of the room say, “Good to go,” and then the response from a thin black Marine with corporal chevrons and a big enough wad of dip in his mouth to make him look deformed.
“Yeah,” he said, “he’s gonna fade for sure.”
A little square-bodied Marine was the one actually manning the machine gun, and he kept saying, “I got him, I got him,” like he couldn’t believe it was true.
The thin black Marine spat and said, “Tell Gomez our section’s a hundred percent now.” That meant every man in his section had killed someone. Which meant the little square-bodied Marine had just done it for the first time.
“And Marines think that’s a good thing,” Zara said.
“Of course,” I said, though I realized I was simplifying. The corporal hadn’t acted like it was a big deal, and it even seemed he found it distasteful, but there was also a lanky Marine in the far corner of the room who’d been nodding, giving the little Marine these small, approving grins.
I looked up from the porch. The daylight had turned soft. We were in that final hour of sun where everyone looks like the best version of themselves.
“And then that little Marine saw me,” I said, “in my Army cammies. And he called out, ‘Hey-o! PsyOps!’ The kid was high off adrenaline. You could tell. His face was flushed. He was calling me out. And I didn’t belong there, looking in on these Marines and their, I don’t know… private moment.”
“Private moment?” Zara said, curious.
“It was their last man finally doing it,” I said.
“Finally doing it,” she said, imitating my voice. “What? You mean he was a murder virgin?”
“Even you don’t think it’s murder,” I said. “You’re smarter than that.”
She sighed and made no argument, so I told her how the little square-bodied Marine’s eyes were wide, his face somewhere between terror and excitement, and he motioned to the scope as if to say, “Look into it.” Somewhere between an offer and a plea.
The squad had been using thermal scopes because the heat signatures made it easier to tell the thin shadows of dogs from the bright white heat of humans. I told Zara how I walked into the room, where I didn’t belong. And I told her how the corporal was staring at me, like he didn’t want me there, and how I ignored him and looked out through the broken windows. The early morning was black. One or two shades of purple stretched across the landscape, but otherwise Fallujah was a dark, undifferentiated mass.
I knelt next to the little Marine, and I looked through the optic, and then the boxy skyline of Fallujah lay out before me in heat gradations of gray and black. Some buildings had a water cistern or fuel tank on the top, and I could tell how much fluid was in the cistern because the cooling line of the water across the metal was written in a light line of gray. A few days earlier, Marines clearing houses had hit a hard point at a building with a fuel cistern, just like that. They shot holes in it, waited until the fuel trickled down all through the house, and set it on fire with the muj inside. I wondered what that would have looked like, through that scope. A lot of white, I guess.
Closer in, immediately in front of me, was an open stretch of road and field and a bright jumble of limbs lying twenty feet out from the nearest building. A black strip alongside must have been the rifle, and I could see the poor bastard clearly hadn’t gotten off a shot. A burst would have heated up the barrel, but all I saw was cold black next to the white heat of the body.
“Why’d you look?” Zara asked.
“Who wouldn’t look?” I said.
“You wanted to see.” Her voice was hard, accusing. “Why’d you look?”
“Why are you here, listening to this story?”
“You asked me to come here,” she said. “You wanted me to hear.”
It was difficult to explain to her how I’d both wanted and not wanted to see, and how the little Marine so clearly didn’t. There was a mix of voyeurism and kindness in me stepping down and looking through the scope. And once I was on the scope, the thin black corporal told me to watch for the heat signature dying, the hot spot fading to the ambient temperature. He told me, “That’s when we’ll officially call in the kill.”
A few kids on skateboards came rolling down the street in front of Zara and me. They looked young. High school, probably. Townies, definitely. You forget not everybody in Amherst is in college. I had no idea where the kids could be going, and we waited until they rolled past and the sound of them disappeared. Then I continued.
“It happens slowly,” I said. “I’d look up for a second and then back, to try to catch a change. The corporal kept looking at the doorways, as if he were worried some senior Marine would see me there and chew us all out. The little Marine kept saying, ‘He’s dead. He’ll fade for sure,’ but I couldn’t tell, so I held my fingers out in front of the optic. They made this searing hot spot, glowing white against the grays of the background. There’s no color in the scope, but it’s not like a black-and-white movie. The scope tracks heat, not light, so everything, the shadings, the contrasts, they’re off in this weird way. There are no shadows. It’s all clearly outlined, but wrong, and I was waving these bright white fingers across the scope, my fingers—but looking so strange and disconnected. I was waving them in front of the body and trying to compare.”
“And?” said Zara.
“And I thought I saw him twitch,” I said. “I jumped back and that sent all the Marines into alert, the corporal screaming at me to tell them what I saw. When I told them the corpse twitched, they didn’t believe me. The little Marine got back on the optic, saying, ‘He’s not moving, he’s not moving,’ repeating it over and over, and the lanky one asked if they had to go out and treat the hajji’s wounds. But the corporal said the corpse was probably just settling. Gas escaping or something.” I looked down at my hands. “The little Marine was angry now, they all were, and at me.”
“Was he alive?” Zara asked.
“The corpse?” I said. “If he was, it wasn’t for long. The little Marine put me back on the optic and it did look darker. That’s what I told them. And the corporal told the little Marine he did good, while I stared into the scope and tried to see the life going out of him. Or the heat, I guess. It happens so slow. Sometimes I’d ask the little Marine if he wanted to look, but he never did. He was an unusual sort of Marine. The adrenaline was fading and he was just left with this thing he’d done, and he didn’t want to watch.”
We took in the late afternoon for a moment.
“So that’s yours now,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“You watched him die.”
“Just the heat signature,” I said.
“That’s yours now,” she repeated. “You took it from him so he wouldn’t have to watch.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither of us had used the hookah in a while, so I grabbed the hose and started pulling smoke into my lungs.
“And now you’re telling me,” she said.
I blew out smoke.
“Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“You asked me how I could kill my people,” I said.
“And what?”
I put down the hose and she picked it up. I didn’t have a real answer for her, and now that I’d told the story, I didn’t feel I’d actually told her anything at all. I think she knew it, too, that the story hadn’t been enough, that something was missing and neither of us knew how to find it.
“Who do you think he was?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The guy that Marine shot,” she said.
I shrugged. “Some kid,” I said. “A stupid death. That’s what we were out there to prevent.”
She let out smoke in a slow, sensual way, but her face looked concerned. Upset. “What do you mean, ‘prevent’?”
“I was PsyOps,” I said. “Psychological Operations. I was supposed to tell the Iraqis how to not get themselves killed. And I actually spoke the language, so it was me on those loudspeakers, not a translator.”
“Right,” she said. “You spoke Arabic growing up.”
I shook my head. “Egyptian Arabic,” I said. “The soaps and the movies mean a lot of non-Egyptians understand it, but still, it’s different.”
She nodded. “I knew that.”