Redeployment (19 page)

“I’ve heard stories like that,” said Zara. “Actually, I’ve heard a lot worse.”

“Travis told it to me and then was like, ‘What you gonna do about it, faggot?’”

“What’d you do?”

“I told him I wasn’t Muslim. Or gay. It’s a nice card to have in your back pocket when you run into that stuff.”

“I don’t know if I could fight for an organization that treated me like that.”

“You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” I said. “That shit is just people. It wasn’t alienating. This”—I waved my hand toward the college—“this is alienating. All these special little
children and their bright futures. Look, if Travis was the type to die for his buddies, and he might have been, I think he’d do it for me just as soon as for anyone else wearing Army cammies. That he hated me, and that I hated the ignorant fuck right back, well, there are circumstances that trump personal feelings.”

“The circumstances,” she said, “being a war. Where the Army was going to go kill all those people you’ve been mistaken for. And you get to watch.”

I rolled my eyes, though I was angrier than I let on. So I took the hookah and smoked for a while in silence. The benefit of hookah is that those moments aren’t dead space. You can blow smoke rings. You can perform and not say anything. You can think.

She didn’t seem to realize how this conversation was different from class, where we bullshitted over political theory. This mattered. And every time she contradicted me with her smug little assumptions about who I was and why I did what I’d done, it grated. It made me want to shut my mouth and hate her. Hate her for her ignorance when she was wrong, and hate her for her arrogance when she was right. But if you’re going to be understood, you have to keep talking. And that was the mission. Make her understand me.

“When I graduated from basic,” I said, “my father was prouder of me than he’d ever been. By this point, he was listening to Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Hannity nonstop, and my mother had a standing rule that he wasn’t allowed to talk politics in the house. Afghanistan, back then, felt like it’d been a complete success, and Bush was making the case for Iraq.”

Zara said, “I remember.” I put down the pipe and she picked it up.

“I’d been at Fort Benning,” I said, “getting the shit beat out of me. It’d been hot and awful and I’d been screamed at and PT’d half to death. I hadn’t seen my dad in months. But images of Saddam were everywhere. TV. Newspapers.” I took a breath. “And then there he was. The same face. The same build. He even walked with that cocky fucking strut. And there was that mustache.”

“So you saw him,” she said.

“And I saw Saddam.” I took a breath. “I mean, my dad, too. But everybody, my platoon, the DIs, they all knew what he looked like.”

Zara blew smoke. “You saw him through their eyes.”

“Through my own.”

“But how they saw him,” she said. “Maybe part of how they saw you, too?”

“I wonder if he knew,” I said. “We don’t really talk, but, I wonder. I mean, the man is an asshole. It’s just who he is. But I wonder if deep down, beyond the politics, if the mustache was a giant ‘fuck you.’ Maybe not to America, but to Americans, you know? All those God-fearing assholes who talk Jesus but don’t know that true Christianity is the Coptic Church.”

“My father’s a deacon,” she said. “But he’s not a very good man. It took me a long time to realize that. . . .”

“And I . . . I was there because of him. When he hugged me and told me how proud he was of me—which he didn’t even do at my high school graduation—I took it in. Graduation from basic’s a big deal. All this pageantry. Uniforms and flags and everybody telling everybody over and over how brave we were, how patriotic, and what great Americans we were. You can’t resist hundreds of people feeling proud of you. You can’t. And
then my dad, like it was just an offhand comment, he asks me, ‘So, when you signed up, why didn’t you pick infantry?’ and the feeling popped like a bubble.”

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing. I was in the Army now. I went to training. I got care packages from my mom and patriotic e-mails from my dad. He’d send me PowerPoints with pictures of soldiers, or jokes and speeches about ‘the troops’ that talked about them like they shat gold. I was eighteen, I ate it up. But I was also learning how to do propaganda in our classes, and it felt pretty fucking weird.

“We had one instructor,” I said, “who spent a class telling us about all the advertisement that went into us joining the Army and how dumb we were to fall for it. He’d say, ‘I love the Army. But how bullshit are those commercials?’ He was all about getting us to recognize the propaganda in civilian life so we could use the same techniques in war. He’d say, ‘Real life doesn’t fit on bumper stickers, so remember: If you tell too much truth, nobody will believe you.’”

“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.