News From the Red Desert (20 page)

John Wayne's roommate, who also an interpreter, told him once, in elegant classical Pashto, “We are not bound together by a capacity to kill. It's the shared threat of death that welds men to each other.” He was older than John Wayne and presumed from time to time to instruct his younger acquaintance. It was easier to listen to him than it would have been to tell him to be quiet.

This night John Wayne had gotten off his helicopter after a long day's patrol and walked to the interpreters' barracks past a flickering cone of horizontal light sprayed against the coffee shop wall. He considered
stopping in to watch the movie for about one second but he had been up since five and had walked twenty-eight kilometres that day in body armour and boots. He had to be awake at four the next morning and already it was dark.

When he got to his room he saw light seeping out from under their door: his roommate was still up. He hoped to God that he was not feeling poetic.

When he opened the door the first thing he saw was the Baluchistani glowering at him from a steel chair. Then he saw three American men in khaki adventure wear standing around his bed. They had their pistols out. One of them held his laptop and another his cellphone.

After the movie ended, Rashid watched the crowd slowly disperse. He did not see General Jackson leave, though he'd been there earlier, standing at the back. So he had slipped away before the end of the film.

“What did you think?” Rami Issay asked him.

“Ed Norton is a brilliant actor.”

“And Brad Pitt?”

“He is very beautiful in this film.”

“Did you find the politics in the film distracting?”

Rashid began picking up and collapsing the folding chairs. “I was surprised that such a liberal movie would resonate with all these soldiers. Maybe after all these months I still misunderstood them rather badly. All these people came here. Presumably to make the world better. That is not a conservative impulse.”

Rami Issay watched Rashid folding chairs. “Some people may make war for noble reasons, I suppose.”

Captain Waller sat in the corner of a cell made out of shipping containers inside the Special Forces compound. He was making notes in
a binder with numbered pages. John Wayne sat on a metal chair in front of him, with the CIA interrogator hovering over him. Waller had anticipated not having to use an interpreter, but as John Wayne grew more upset he claimed to lose his English, and eventually one of the SF's interpreters was brought in.

The SF interpreter grew ferocious when he realized that John Wayne was also an interpreter: one of them, on the inside. CIA told him he had been caught sending large files to an ISP address in Pakistan. When the contents of the file were examined, they found hundreds of pictures of casualty trophies, including some of those that had been posted on the internet. John Wayne claimed they had been given to him by his friends, the soldiers, and he had sent some to his brother, because he wanted his brother to know how difficult this work is. He wanted to impress him.

The SF terp would have none of it. Every phrase was prefaced with “He claims…”

The CIA officer slapped John Wayne until his mouth was bloody. Then the SF terp joined in, with a closed fist. Captain Waller looked up at that, but the CIA officer shook his head, and so he let the beating proceed.

John Wayne began weeping, leaking bloody foam and tears with each gasp. No, he couldn't name his friends; no, he didn't remember who had given him the pictures. A tooth was knocked out. He vomited, spraying the walls of the little room with bloody bile. CIA put on a smock. He had brought extras. He handed one to each of the other men in the room. When Captain Waller put his on, his face was so wooden he looked as if he was dead.

D
eirdre felt a sense of foreboding from the moment she got off the plane in Jerusalem. She had always loved the city, but this time, all she could think of was what had to happen. He knew it, too. Their lovemaking was perfunctory, and their conversation clipped. The long, meandering conversation that had filled their days together was gone. He had been profiled in the
New Yorker
that week. There was talk about a run for the presidency. All eyes would soon be upon him, or were, already. And those eyes would then be upon everyone near to him. Which is why that could no longer include her.

“I'm saying this because we have no choice,” she said.

“I know. Thank you,” he said. He was sitting on the bed, still naked, watching her dress.

“Then you agree?”

“I understand your point.”

“And you agree with me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I'll take a cab to the airport. Can you wait a little while before you go, too?”

“Of course.”

And then she bent to kiss him goodbye. She wanted him to see how much this hurt her. As she stepped back she looked at him, to show him. All she saw was relief.

A
fter the KAF film club's successful debut, Rashid started doing more night shifts at the café so that his days were free to organize future screenings. He did not mind this so much, and wouldn't have at all, were it easier to sleep during the day. Most of the time, after it got hot, he got up and helped out anyway. It occurred to him that this may have been what his boss had anticipated.

Of course, Rami Issay wanted to show another film right away. Rashid supposed that if a thing was worth doing, it was worth overdoing. Issay had heard from his supervisor that his effort was appreciated—a phone call had been placed from General Jackson's office to the Kellogg Brown and Root managers and they were thankful for the goodwill he had earned them.

As he took the chairs off the tables and returned them to the floor after he'd finished mopping the place, journalists, up to do interviews with American evening news programs, lined up outside the door. The sky began to lighten faintly in the east. The air temperature reached its nadir and the fleece-shrouded writers and broadcasters huddled together and complained about the time difference, the cold and the
café's habit of being especially busy just when they had to start work. Deirdre O'Malley stood in that line and listened to the groaning and did not participate in it. Pointedly.

When Jeremy Jackson joined the queue a few people behind her, Deirdre did not turn around, though everyone else did. They all wanted to interview the general, but understood that no impromptu questions would be answered and it would be much better to win a nod from the general than to pointlessly irritate him.

Jackson wished it was less busy. Deirdre acted as if she hadn't noticed him. He was grateful. He would reciprocate.

Deirdre had just been told by a source that the leaker had been found, and wasn't American. She was skeptical. It seemed too neat, too exculpatory. And there were no details about who it was they had. She decided that after her coffee she would go by the Special Forces' compound and say hi to the long-suffering (“We never comment on operations. No, you can't print anyone's name or rank.”) public affairs officer there. She would ask to see General Lattice. She had asked before and been rebuffed, but she'd try again. She knew him from Iraq. He had even thanked her for some of her better pieces, but that was back when that made her uncomfortable and she hadn't responded with any particular warmth. He'd continued to grant her interviews when it suited his agenda, but the thank-yous stopped. He was a proud man and an egoist, like anyone who ever gets anything done.

She wondered if he knew about her and Jeremy then gave her head a shake. Old news.

Jackson was thinking about how his reputation had been made in Iraq, pacifying Anbar. As he waited in line and watched the sky begin to lighten, he thought about how much easier a problem that had turned out to be than this was. In Iraq there had been an established civil society, until right before the invasion. Kids went to school, hospitals admitted sick people, engineers ran water plants, and the army had uniforms and paid wages. There were sectarian and tribal divisions that could be put to use, too. Here the situation was more
different than similar. And there were mountains. And an open border to Pakistan. And the ISI. And every month the security situation was worse, not better, notwithstanding the declarations of the PA guys. Notwithstanding his own assertions in the media.

Not for the first time, he thought that accepting this command may have been a mistake. The next cycle of primaries would start in three years. He had worried the War on Terror would be fading from memory by then. Now he wondered if he should worry that it might not.

She had spent enough time pretending not to and wishing that she didn't, the realization was painful: she missed him. He was standing just a few feet behind her now, and in that undefended proximity—he couldn't see her face—the tenderness she still felt for him revealed itself. Even if she'd have liked to hit it with a stick.

She'd first seen General Jackson in the Green Zone a few weeks after the fall of Baghdad, walking to a press conference. She saw why the reporters liked him. He didn't swagger. He was the only skeptic about the Iraq war who still had senior responsibility. All the rest, Shinseki on down, had been marginalized or retired. But Jackson was insulated because everyone conceded that his technical skills were needed, and he was pretty careful with his media profile. He did not get involved with controversies. When the insurgency began truly to announce itself, he became indispensable. By that point, his technical skills were in daily, even hourly, demand.

Falluja felt like it was fifteen minutes ago. Car bombs going off every twenty minutes and snipers on every rooftop. Whispered conversations, urgent and potent, about all the players in that complex stew of actors: Zarqawi, Moqtada al-Sadr, the wary Sunni tribal elders and all those boisterous and disappointed young men with no jobs, no women, no houses and nothing to lose.

One night they'd talked for four hours in a basement about the aesthetics of battle, about how manned fighters, paratroopers and first-light stand-tos continued to stir people long after these things were practically useful and so they were retained, like glinting swords on the parade ground. In war, the warriors must be given reasons to think themselves
ferocious. Look at the Republican Guard and they how they folded once they realized they weren't. Or not as much as the First Marine Division, anyway.

Two days after that conversation, she got a call to do a long, in-depth interview with him, no conditions, no no-go zones. The results of that interview got her the cover of
Time
magazine and a Pulitzer nomination. It made her career—and contributed to his own ascent as a celebrity general.

Afterwards, they did not want the other reporters to view them as too close to one another. So they began meeting in places where they would not be seen and recognized. There was a hotel in Jerusalem—the Inbal. Journalists and soldiers did not often stay there and that suited Deirdre's and Jackson's purposes. Jackson supposed that Mossad probably watched him when he was in the country wherever he stayed, and so he had to be careful about what they talked about—it wasn't just her discretion that was at issue. Deirdre thought he was joking the first couple of times he said that.

When he was scheduled to go to London or Berlin, he found reasons to mention it and she found reasons to be there, too—though in those cities they were careful not to stay at the same hotel. The surprising thing was how long the fiction that they were creating for the outside world endured for them, too. They did not so much as touch one another on the first five trips to western European capitals. They met for suppers in his room. They walked in Luxembourg Gardens late at night and in Kew Gardens and along Wilhelmstrasse and on Leidseplein. They discussed the nature of war, and the way it suspended normal discourse.

They both knew it was a mistake from the start. But the war made it inevitable. At the end of their walks along the Seine, they got back on separate airplanes to Baghdad. Every week they lost colleagues to IEDs and snipers. They both learned Arabic and they both stopped going back to the States. Jackson's kids were all grown and his wife was self-sufficient, in the way of military spouses. They felt more alive than they had, ever. Three years earlier she had been reporting city council meetings and he had been supervising a training centre in Georgia and
running a hundred kilometres a week. On five different occasions she had held a bleeding cameraman in her arms. In all this mayhem, they felt there was just one other out there who understood and who was not a rival.

The amount of time they spent thinking about one another vastly outweighed the amount of time they managed to spend together. They went weeks between email contact, and everything written was composed with an eye to a third party reading it. As far she could tell, Jackson worked a hundred hours a week, and she was at a loss to account for how he sustained the pace. She read and wrote long into the night most days, too, but everyone worked hard. What Jackson managed was something else entirely. She remembered how her boyfriend in Cincinnati would sleep in on Sundays until one in the afternoon and refuse to shave unless they went out for supper someplace nice.

It was not just that he was a powerful man. With her, he seemed unconscious of that power, and that drew her even more. He did not boast and rarely even talked about the current famous version of himself. When he spoke personally, it was about growing up in Michigan, going ice fishing and trying to find interesting books in his local library. She could picture him then, wiry and shy, asking the librarian for history books and sucking them up like a grain auger. Late seventies rust-belt economy and he would not be dragged under. Every man she met told her over and over again what a good job he was doing, how smart he was, and how strong. Jeremy's version of this was just that he had a great staff, that Fred had taught him lots. She broke all her rules for him, and the breaking of those rules greased the skid on her better judgment. Reservations were tossed out like articles of a lapsed faith.

She wondered what he was thinking about now. She'd heard he had been to the café to play chess. It would be inconvenient if this turned into his favourite place, too. She guessed she could spend her time at the press tent, if she had to.

He missed her, too. He stared at the spot between her shoulder blades and remembered watching her laughing hard and the way her whole body had rocked. He remembered that first long interview he did with her, with public affairs handlers hovering, and the way she looked right past all of them and pushed away his talking points with pointed ease. He was surprised to find her so aggressive and subsequently warned the PA guys and his boss that the interview hadn't gone well, that whoever had recommended that he sit down with her should be warned about her—and reprimanded. Seymour Hersh's piece about Abu Ghraib had just come out; she had asked many questions about accountability and the legitimacy of the American example. He was worried about it right up till the piece came out. Every one of those points made it into the article—but in her account of their interview, he'd responded with an air of worldly calm that he did not recall possessing. The PA guys told him he had conducted the model interview. Acknowledged the hard questions and faced them squarely, and tried to contextualize them. They suggested he sit down with the
New York Times
editorial board the next week, and he did. While he was in the city he did the Sunday talk shows, and then that became a regular thing. People were so desperate to see some evidence of calm competence. That became his label.

But in that first interview she had not been patient with his contextualizing. When she'd asked about enhanced interrogation, her cheeks had flushed. She'd looked angry when he'd equivocated about the difference between modes of interrogation and her next question, about the courts martial of Japanese war criminals who had employed the same techniques, had him backpedalling like a sophomore debater.

He could not account for the piece that came out of it. Every time he was congratulated, he became more puzzled. He thought he had hurt his career deeply and had phoned his wife afterward to fret. She soothed him, as she had countless times, irrespective of the details; she always grasped perfectly the essence. He invited Deirdre to his office in Baghdad a week after the article appeared. He did not refer to it and neither did she. He asked her what she was hearing in the street from
the Sunnis. Who did they hate more, the Americans or the Shia? It was the first time she had been asked a question by a senior officer. Months later, over breakfast in the airy hotel room in Jerusalem, she'd said as much. That had become another one of his labels: the general who asks more questions than he answers. Every journalist mentioned the habit and assumed it to be an old one.