“I don’t think that’s a good way to think about it.”
“Yeah, well, he’s right. In Iraq, we told a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit to the Iraqis. Some of the bullshit worked really well.”
“It’s strange to think of somebody doing that for a living,” she said. “You hear the word propaganda, it makes you think of those World War Two posters. Or Stalinist Russia. Something from another time, before we got sophisticated.”
“Propaganda is sophisticated,” I said. “It’s not just pamphlets and posters. As a PsyOps specialist, as anything in the Army, you’re part of a weapons system. Language is a technology. They trained me to use it to increase my unit’s lethality. After all, the Army’s an organization built around killing people. But you’re not like an infantryman. You can’t think about the enemy as nothing but an enemy. A hajji. A gook. A bad guy needing a bullet. You’ve got to get inside their heads.”
The night had come in force while we talked, and there was a full moon lying low in the sky. The streets were quiet. I felt close to her because she’d listened, and I’d told everything straight, pretty much, with a minimum of artifice. It made me want to go further, but that would require careful packaging.
“You know,” I said, “I lied to you before. A little.”
“How?”
“I did kill people.”
She was very still.
“I didn’t shoot anybody, but I was definitely responsible.”
The two of us let that hang in the air for a while.
“The last person I told this to was my dad,” I said. “It got me kicked out of the house.”
Zara looked down at her hands, folded in front of her, then up at me. She gave a little smile. “Well, I couldn’t get you kicked out of here if I tried.”
“And you sure have,” I said.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t a formal complaint,” she said. “My friends wanted me to make a formal complaint, but all I wanted was for you to have to listen. You’re not very good at that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly.”
She shrugged. “Tell your story.”
“I was in the Battle of Fallujah,” I said. “We did a lot of crazy stuff there. We’d play shit just to fuck with the muj. Real loud Eminem and AC/DC and Metallica. Especially when they’d try to coordinate over their own loudspeakers. We’d play shit to drown them out, hurt their command and control. Sometimes we’d roll up to a position and play the Predator chuckle. You ever see that movie?”
“No.”
“It’s this deep, creepy, evil laugh. Even the Marines didn’t like it. We’d have something going on all the time. And the muj would play shit, too. Prayers and songs. There was one that cracked me up. It was like, ‘We fight under the slogan Allahu Akbar. We have a date with death, and we’re going to get our heads chopped off.’”
“Very poetic,” she said.
“It was horrible. There was gunfire and explosions and the mosques blaring messages and Arabic music and we were blaring Drowning Pool and Eminem. The Marines started calling it Lalafallujah. A music festival from hell.”
“In a city,” she said, “filled with people.”
“But it wasn’t just music,” I said. “The Marines, they’d compete to find the dirtiest insults they could think of. And then we’d go scream over the loudspeakers, taunting holed-up insurgents until they’d come running out of the mosques, all mad, and we’d mow them down.”
“Out of the mosques?” she said.
“You’re in this crazy city, death everywhere, and you see a lieutenant go to his men, as if it was the most serious thing in the world, and ask, ‘Do we go with, “You suck your mothers’ cocks,” or, “You fuck dogs and eat the shit of children”?’”
“Really? Out of the mosques?” she said again.
“Sure,” I said. “What? Are you kidding me?”
She shook her head. “So how did you kill people?” she said.
“The insults,” I said. “And of everything we did, that got the most satisfying feedback. I mean, the muj would charge and we’d listen as the Marines mowed them down. Sergeant Hernandez called it ‘Jedi mind trick shit.’”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s brilliant,” I said.
“Unless your average schoolyard bully is brilliant,” she said, “it’s not. But I get why it worked.”
“Worked almost too well. We spent the next couple months trying to get the same fucks we’d riled up to stop charging because a lot of them were just teenagers. Marines don’t like killing children. It fucks them up in the head.”
“What’d it do to you?” she said.
“I feel good about what I’ve done,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Or why are you telling these stories?”
“What are you?” I said, grinning. “My therapist?”
“Maybe,” she said. “That’s how this feels.”
“Fucking with insurgents saved lives at Fallujah. And then I probably saved lives afterwards, telling the truth about what would happen if you fucked with us.”
“So is that what got you kicked out of your father’s house? Saving lives?”
“No. Not saving lives.” I stopped, then started again. “It was over Laith al-Tawhid. If there’s one guy I killed, that’s the guy.”
Zara didn’t say anything. I picked up the hookah and pulled on it and got nothing. The coals were dead. I felt nervous, even though she’d been good to me. Patient. But if I kept going and told her the story, I didn’t know if she’d understand. Or rather, I didn’t know if she’d understand it the way I did, which is what I really wanted. Not to share something, but to unload it.
“When I got back,” I said, “there was no big ceremony. If you’re not part of a battalion, you come back on a plane with other cats and dogs, soldiers from different shops. I did my redeployment stuff, and then I went home.”
I looked down at my hands, then back up at Zara. I didn’t know how to tell her what coming home meant. The weird thing with being a veteran, at least for me, is that you do feel better than most people. You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you didn’t understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, “I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians.”
At the same time, though, you feel somehow less. What happened, what I was a part of, maybe it was the right thing. We were fighting very bad people. But it was an ugly thing.
“When I’d left for the Army,” I said, “the living room had just three paintings on the wall—two icons, and one Matisse print of fish in a bowl. They’re my mother’s. Now alongside them there’s a framed American flag, and one of those 9/11 medallions that supposedly had steel from the World Trade Center but later turned out to be a scam. It was home, but…”
“You didn’t belong there anymore?” said Zara.
“Maybe not,” I said, “I don’t know. My dad was standing there in a suit. My mom had a little cross hanging from her neck. She got more religious when I went over. She prayed every day. And she told me if I wanted, she’d make me some kosheri, this lentil-tomato dish I love. And she put her hand on my back and started rubbing my shoulders, and I felt if I didn’t do something, I’d start crying.”
I kept my eyes on my hands, telling Zara the story. Looking at her would be too much, though maybe I could have let her see how I was feeling. Maybe she’d have pitied me. It wouldn’t have been entirely manipulative. I felt sad and lost. Somehow it felt the same as that day in my parents’ house, with my mom rubbing my shoulders and me thinking about what I’d been through and how much I would never tell her because it would only break her heart.
“But my dad,” I said, “he wouldn’t have it. ‘The boy’s back from war,’ he told my mom, ‘we should take him out for a real American meal. Outback Steakhouse!’ He thought that was a real funny joke. I didn’t know how to take it. Serious Copts are supposed to eat vegetarian about two hundred days out of the year—no food with a soul—and it was close to Christmas. But my mom didn’t say anything and so we went. My dad ordered a steak to show me it’d be all right. My mom and I had salads.
“We got through dinner with small talk, but when we got home my mom went off to work—she’s a nurse—and that left me and my dad alone. He sat me down in the living room and said he’d make me coffee. Then he handed me a few sheets of paper with a rubber band around them. He said, ‘I sent an e-mail out to the guys in the office, and they all wanted to thank you.’ He looked so happy and proud. It didn’t feel like basic. I wasn’t a disappointment. I’d been to war. And I’d missed him.”
I looked up at Zara and her eyes met mine. The darkness gave her a softer look than she had in the daytime.
“The paper,” I said, “it was printouts of e-mails from his Muslim friends at work.”
“He had Muslim friends?” she said.
“Colleagues,” I said. “Some friends. Sort of. He’d say he was keeping an eye on them. That was his joke. He works for a company that does translation services, mostly for NGOs and government agencies, and he’s in the Arabic department. So there’s a lot of Muslims. And they wrote me letters. Mostly short e-mails like, ‘Good job, thank you for your service,’ or, ‘Whether this war is right or wrong, you have done an honorable thing.’ But some were more involved. One talked about how the war was terrible, but he hoped having a ‘sensitive young man’ like me over there would make the suffering less.”
“A sensitive young man?” she said. I saw a hint of a smile.
“I’ve changed,” I said. “Another was from a guy who’d been in the Yemeni civil war. He told me, ‘Whatever you go through, it is the responsibility of those who sent you.’ And a bunch of the other e-mails were real pro-war.”
“I guess there was a lot of anger among American Muslims toward Saddam.”
“Well, one was so pro-war not even my father could have written it. That guy told me I was going to write a new chapter in history. My dad underlined the sentence.”
“And what’d you think,” she said, “when you saw that?”
“It made me angry,” I said.
My voice was soft, speaking to Zara. It was as though I were saying loving words.
“I didn’t tell him exactly what I told you,” I said. “I wanted to hurt him. I was angry. I’d gotten a lot of Thank You For Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know?”
“You’re angry with your father because people thanked you for your service?” she said. “Or is he why you’re angry with those people?”
“He’s a part of it,” I said. “That sentiment.”
“So should I thank vets for their service?” she said. “Or spit on them, like Vietnam?”
I thought for a moment and then gave her a crooked smile. “I reserve the right to be angry at you whatever you do.”
“Why?”
“It’s all phony,” I said. “When the war started, almost three hundred congressmen voted for it. And seventy-seven senators. But now, everybody’s washed their hands of it.”
“There was bad information,” Zara said. “You know, ‘Bush lied, people died.’”
“Oh, my God!” I clapped my hands to my cheeks and put on a shocked face. “A politician lied! Then it’s not your fault!”
“You used to kill people with playground insults,” Zara said, “and you think it doesn’t matter what the president says? Or here’s a better question. Did you believe it? Did you support the war?”
“I still support the war,” I said. “Just not the guy who ran it.”
“Is that what you told your dad that made him so angry?”
“No.” I hunched over, with my elbows resting on my knees. “No. He knew the war was poorly run. He’s a smart guy.”
I considered how I could frame what I was going to tell her.
“This is not the sort of thing you’ll like,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing my father could deal with.”
“I’m not fragile,” she said.
“Now you’ve got to understand,” I said. “In my family, I wasn’t even allowed to curse.”
I paused. After a second, Zara reached over and took my hand, and I let her. She shouldn’t have done that. It made me want to stop. It made me want to say something cruel, to let her know that what I’d been through had made me stronger, not weaker. From down the street I heard laughter. Frat kids from Psi U, maybe. Drunk, maybe, or just walking over to get a calzone at Bruno’s.
“I guess your dad wasn’t too big on you using dirty words to kill terrorists,” Zara said.
Her hand pressed into mine. “My dad thought the idea of the insults was funny,” I said. “He thought it was brilliant. Tribal culture is honor and shame. Like the rural South. Or inner-city America. But eventually we played that trick too much. We’d shouted too many insults, killed all the insurgents dumb enough to fall for it. And I’m telling this to my dad in our living room in their house in Virginia. It’s not the house I grew up in. They’d moved to a cheaper area once I was out of high school, and we’re in this tiny little room with an icon of Saint Moses the Black, who was a thief and a slave, and Saint Mary of Egypt, who was a prostitute, and Matisse’s stupid fish and that goddamn flag and the fake 9/11 steel coin. And he’s leaning forward, he’s listening. It’s the first man-to-man we’ve ever had.”
“And it’s about war,” she said. “That’s what gets him to listen.”
“So I tell him how there’s this one area where intel knows who the enemy is. This little band of Islamists called the al-Tawhid Martyrs Brigade. And my dad’s like, ‘Okay. Al-Qaeda.’ And I’m like, ‘No. Just desert fuckers who didn’t like having Americans roaming around in their country.’ It was the first time I’d cursed in front of my dad.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing. He just said, ‘Okay. So basically al-Qaeda.’ I wanted to smack him.” I took a breath. “Anyway, we knew the name of these guys’ leader. Laith al-Tawhid. Intel had him on the BOLO list and so I had his name.”
I squeezed Zara’s hand, hard. “I had his name,” I said. “In all the confusion, I could call him by name. I could talk to him and he would know it. And so would all his men.”
“That gave you an advantage.”
“Yes,” I said. “And I had a plan. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t start with a SPC, but they trusted me. They thought I had the magic knowledge, because, you know, I’m an Arab Muslim.”
Zara was leaning forward, the same posture as my father. Her eyes were on me now.
“Now, Laith al-Tawhid was no idiot. He was fundamentalist, not dumb. He wasn’t going to come running because I called him names. But I knew how to get him. Women.”
“Women?”
“His women were at home,” I said. “Outside of Fallujah. And the old-school guys, guys like Laith al-Tawhid, they treat women like dogs. Like dogs who can destroy all your family’s honor if they act up or show an ounce of free will.”
She nodded.
“There was a Marine company holding an office building in front of Laith’s position,” I said. “I told the Marines what we wanted to do and they loved it.”
“What did you say?”
“Laith al-Tawhid, we have your women,” I said, “your wife and your daughters.”
She frowned. “So he had to come and fight you,” she said.
“I told him we found them whoring themselves out to American soldiers, and we were bringing them to the office building.”
She nodded. “You told this to your father.”
“I told him everything. How I screamed out, in the Iraqi Arabic I’d learned in my private time, that we’d fuck his daughters on the roof and put their mouths to the loudspeaker so he could hear their screams.”
Zara pulled back her hand. I’d expected that. “So that’s how you fought,” she said. There was a touch of contempt in her voice, and I smiled. I’m not sure why, I wasn’t happy.
“I didn’t send it up the flagpole. But the platoon loved it. I stayed on those speakers for an hour. Telling him how when his daughters bent down to pray, we’d put our shoes on their heads and rape them in the ass. Rub our foreskins on their faces. A thousand dicks in your religion, I told him, and in forty minutes, a thousand American dicks in your daughters.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said.