Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  “Colonel Robinson told them not to arrest Sadr’s lieutenant,” King says, leaning against my Humvee, “but they didn’t want to listen.”

  “Of course they didn’t. They just wanna come in here, draw some tick lines on their Kevlars, and go home—treating everyone like the fucking enemy,” Gaul adds. For someone who eventually joins Special Forces, he’s the least violent man I’ll ever meet.

  The Iraqis weren’t the enemy, and 2nd ACR has spent a year establishing that. The squadron spent more time improving Baghdad than destroying it. Troops were sent into the streets to help build hospitals, schools, train the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and new police units. They kicked in their fair share of doors on raids, but even insurgents knew when to shoot and when to not—because you don’t kill those who come to pass out food and medical supplies. But 1st Cav doesn’t know anything about this, and their vehicles are sand beige, a clear distinction between 2nd ACR’s foliage green, and 1st Cav will take fire when we don’t, because they don’t want to help, they want to win.

  There is a splatter of AK-47 fire to the backdrop of our conversation, which we ignore, because we have forgotten what life sounds like without it, but the sound lingers as the rumors build. Protesters have set fire to Iraq. Iraqi police officers have been murdered, expelled from their stations. Convoys going in or out of Baghdad International Airport are ambushed with deadly effect. “Your enemy prefers terrorism,” says cleric al-Sadr, and the cities ignite.

  It’s said that 1st Cav sent in a five-ton to retake the police stations, the massive vehicle getting stuck in the dense urban streets, and it’s the 2nd ACR with Tenth Mountain Division that swept in to save them.

  We hear this in tidbits, bread crumbs of broken stories, some of it true, some of it not.

  “We just had to go in and save their asses,” says King. We as in Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. Not we as in us—we’re linguists. We don’t do the real shit. “And they got twelve of our guys killed.”

  It turns out to be eight soldiers dead, fifty-one wounded, but rumors always inflate the numbers.

  Gaul sits up sharply, pressing his combat glasses farther up his sharp nose. “Twelve? Fucking twelve?”

  “Twelve,” I repeat as my hands clench my elbows. I don’t know the 2nd ACR guys very well but I’ve met a few of them here and there, and familiar faces tumble past my vision. I wonder if it’s anyone I know. I want to be angry. I should want to grab my rifle and burn this shit down. But I’m not. I’m scared. This is the wrong time to suddenly become human.

  “We’re rolling.” Sergeant Daniels appears, as if conjured, slapping the metal roof of my Humvee to get everyone’s attention. We start to scramble into our vehicles, the number twelve sitting heavy on our tongues. The monster at the back of my skull wonders if this puts the numbers in my favor—if we’ve just lost twelve soldiers from our regiment, what are the odds that we’ll lose one more? I hate myself.

  I follow the convoy into the Regimental Support Squadron based at Al Rasheed airfield. A great weight rises from my shoulders as the gates swing closed behind us; I am convinced we have narrowly escaped a tragedy.

  Everyone says we’ll only be here a matter of days, but it’s not true and we amble around our restricted area, kicking up dust in boredom now that our books have been given away and our games handed off.

  Eventually we’re packed into a circular theater room made of gray walls and hard benches. The stone structure keeps away some of the heat, but all the bodies squished together begin to reek of sweat, unwashed skin, and body odor. I can bite the air—it’s filled with stink and tension.

  First Sergeant Bell stands in the middle of the room and drones on about something that doesn’t seem very important. Meanwhile, rumors are still slinking through the ranks. Cities have been lost; hostages have been taken.

  It’s not a good time to be in Iraq.

  But we’ve done our year. The Army can’t extend our time frame—there are rules in place against that sort of behavior. It would cost a hundred dollars a day to keep each soldier beyond their twelve-month mark, and there’s no way the Army is going to pay that.

  So when First Sergeant Bell announces that we’ll be moving to Al Najaf, he’s received with silence. There is no Q&A; no one gets to ask how long we’ll be there, if we’ll get paid our due, or, most important, why us?

  No one asks when we’re going home.

  “Al Najaf?” Locke exclaims, joining our tight huddle outside the briefing building. We haven’t moved far, our limbs are too heavy. She produces a cigarette and Andres takes it. “That’s like the Fallujah of the west. Who the fuck wants to go there?”

  I accept the outstretched cigarette even though I don’t smoke. Andres lights it for me and I pull the smoke into my mouth, slowly cycling it out my nose so that it looks like I’ve inhaled. “We’re never going home.”

  I laugh, because it’s funny. I wait for the rage, the fear, the protest, from me, from anyone, but there’s none. There is nothing. We laugh.

  “We’re already dead,” Andres clarifies with a loud chuckle. “This is actually hell.”

  “It’s certainly hot enough for it,” agrees Locke.

  “We’re all going to die!” I chortle, choking on my smoke, and Locke snorts with me, face flushing red with laughter as she hunches over to hold her stomach. I throw my head back and let out a deep laugh until my ribs ache with the absurdity of it all.

  We’re allowed a quick call home on the satellite phone, a bulky piece of plastic that hisses and spits down the line. My mom answers on the second ring; her cell phone is now permanently attached to her body.

  “Hi, Mom, I can’t talk right now but we’re not coming home.” I spit it out in a rush; enunciating the words would make it too real.

  “What?” she calls back, sounding like she’s at the far end of a tunnel.

  “We got extended so we’re moving to another part of Iraq.”

  “What? For how long? Where are you going? When are you coming home?”

  I glance at the person behind me in line, who is waiting, listening, and I’m pressed for time. “I don’t know. I love you. I’ll call you when I can. Oh, you’re going to get a letter from me. Just ignore it.”

  “Wait, wait!” she exclaims, but I hang up and pass the phone on so that the next person can call his mom and tell her he’s not coming home, either.

  The Ghosts of Al Kut

  We end up in Al Kut instead of Al Najaf. I don’t realize we’re in a completely different city until someone happens to drop the name one day. It doesn’t matter to me. I go where I’m told. Self-agency is a thing of the past.

  The 2nd ACR boys went south into Al Najaf, Al Kut, and Diwaniyah to blow shit up and generally kick ass. They’re sent there before us—the MI, Supply, and support folk—clearing out the cities in short but brutal battles, then calling us down when it’s safe and sound. There’s an immense sense of pride at the ferocity of our regiment. Not only did they get it done, they got it done quickly. I feel ineffectual in comparison, standing behind the bloodied warrior and only there to hand him a few passing notes. It might have been different had we been the Intel who cracked the code, located the enemy, and pointed the machine in the right direction, but we weren’t. Mission-wise, nothing I do in Iraq matters.

  * * *

  Al Kut is the heart of Iraq, if not literally, then in beauty alone. It’s a different sky here, a vast dome hovering over a flat land of muted colors. Night never comes quickly. Day stars burn in a canopy of pink and the moon is a ghost until the last of lavender fades, then glows bright, large, and fat.

  I stand on the flat, clay-brick roof of our house, gazing at the show. The evening air is cooler, tinged with a faint breeze, and gone is the humidity of Baghdad. Instead a small wave of goose bumps sweeps up my arms and across my bare breasts as I bathe on the roof. I feel like Bathsheba, one hand holding the bin to pour water over my head, soapsuds tinged with the dust and dirt of the day. I feel beautiful standi
ng under the ancient sunset, on rooftop architecture that hasn’t changed in a millennium. The only kings watching are the Special Forces just across the way, the Gods of War, who similarly sit on their rooftops. Supposedly, if you catch the light just right, you can see the glint off their binoculars.

  We had rolled into Al Kut on my twenty-third birthday, after spending the previous day on the dusty road from Baghdad and the night huddled in a circle of Humvees somewhere in the flat desert. The night had been surprisingly cold, as if all the heat had been sucked out by the blackness, and even by morning, when I sat on my cot by my Humvee, there was still a bite in the air. Sergeant Daniels embraced the cliché and shaved with a knife in the vehicle’s side mirror behind me. Female King took a picture of me to commemorate my birthday, and I sang “Happy Birthday to Me,” softly as I put my gear away. By midafternoon we had swarmed the sprawling camp of Al Kut.

  This town isn’t what I had anticipated. Coming from Baghdad, I had expected more of the city feel, the stacked sandstone buildings and thick, cloying dust, the wet heat brewed from the Tigris and Euphrates, the continual activity and shooting, shooting, shooting. But Al Kut is silent. Remote. Both larger and less populated than our last camp. Even the wind tastes different.

  And this is the beauty of Iraq—it sneaks up on you unexpectedly, unnoticed until it strikes, engraving a deep scar just behind your eyes. It’s like the frustratingly uneven chords of a song stuck in your ear, annoying, until one day you notice the layers in the sound and you realize it’s a masterpiece. The realization aches, part shame for missing it all in the first place, part unbearable sadness because once you go, you’ll never see this savage beauty again.

  I like it here. Surprisingly. I like my makeshift shower on the roof, bathing under the sky. I like the new privacy of being placed in a house several buildings down from the top brass. Most of the women from our platoon are back together and in one building, our own little ladies’ house. The ten of us carefully clean off blasted debris, sweep away shards of glass and crumbled stones until our hands bleed from blisters. We continuously sweep at the gray dust that storms through the empty windowsills and lays a thick layer on our cots and gear. It’s a small price to pay—the top brass doesn’t care about the women’s house, they don’t visit or check up on us and we don’t want them to. Sergeant Daniels stops by occasionally, pausing just before the door that doesn’t exist to announce his presence, as if he couldn’t see through the gaps in the walls where windows once stood.

  Most of the linguists are back together, but analysts are broken up and shipped off to separate camps. Andres is sent somewhere. We can only communicate through letters delivered at the mercy of the supply platoon. I miss him, but not as much as I should. I adjust way too easily.

  I bathe in the twilight, then dress, ignoring the dampness of my skin as I pull on a clean uniform, and spend the rest of my time on the roof, headphones stuffed into my ears, dancing in senseless circles because up here there is no one but me.

  The houses are all in a line on this side of the camp, much like houses in 1950s suburbia, though they are made of sandstone and floor-to-ceiling windows. We sit at the perimeter, flanked by a minefield that works as a natural barrier. I often stand by the window, squinting at the barren field of sand and clumps of harsh, long grass, imagining the shiny bits of deadly metal sticking out from the dirt. They were protectively laid from a war long before ours.

  The entire camp had once been officer housing for Iraqi upper brass and their families. I imagine they left in a hurry—the land had been smashed and flattened by bombs, all the glass broken, and the houses stripped bare.

  Almost.

  On the walls of our house are flowers drawn in wax crayons. They are low on the walls, green stalks and wide petals imperfect, as if colored with an unsteady hand. A child’s hand. Replicas of houses periodically appear between the flowers, and a bright sun sits in one corner, painstakingly colored in stark yellow.

  In the front yard and curved around one side of our house, little plastic hands break through the dirt. Dolls, half buried, eyes black and filled with mud, are scattered about the yard in shallow graves. We leave them there in the dirt, occasionally toeing a pink arm. No one mentions how creepy they are. No one mentions them at all.

  These are the only remnants of those before us. I tell myself that everyone had been evacuated, and the bombs just fell on empty buildings and deserted roads. No one tells me this, but no one tells me otherwise, and this is what I choose to believe.

  Nothing otherwise occurs to me or dissuades this belief, not even when, pacing to my music on the roof one evening, just on the cusp of dusk, a dark figure cuts directly in front of me. It is the size of a toddler, its little arms pumping up and down as it runs; a disproportionately large and deformed head perches on a skinny neck. The shadow rushes off the roof and down the steps, disappearing into the blackness at the bottom of the stone stairs. I freeze, one of my earbuds displaced from my ear and swinging by my jaw, System of a Down screaming through the silence, and my feet are rooted. I want off the roof and yet I can’t go down the stairs behind the thing; surely it’s waiting there to push me down the already crumbling steps. I’ve seen this horror movie before. So I wait, motionless, as the sun continues to set, making the roof darker, and I’m stuck for ten minutes that feel like an eternity, hairs at the back of my neck straightened to attention. Finally I press my back against the wall, creeping down the stairs, waiting every moment to be pushed, knowing that thing is going to shove me down these fucking stairs and I’m going to break my neck, what a stupid way to die in Iraq, and finally my boots touch the last steps and I’m flying out of the house to stand in the street, spooked.

  I see female King just ahead of me as she strolls down the street with one of the mechanics. It’s not an unusual sight; lots of the soldiers go for walks as the sun sets and the cooler air comes out to play. I shoulder my M16 and rush over to them, falling in step as I ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  The mechanic throws up both hands in the air. “I don’t want to hear it! That shit creeps the hell out of me.”

  King shrugs. “I think there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”

  “I’m serious, because I swear to God, I just saw this kid with a stupidly large head in all black just run off the roof and down the stairs.” I gesture toward my house. “Swear to God, its little arms were going like this.” I copy the pumping movement.

  “Nope, nope, nope! Don’t want to hear it!” The mechanic picks up his pace, shaking his head. “I am never going to your fucking house ever. That shit is haunted.”

  I give him a crooked smile because it could be true, or maybe not. We begin a discussion on demons and spirits, the difference between the two, parallel universes and ghosts, because a soldier believes. Maybe not before the war, and possibly not after, but right now, in the middle of it all, we believe.

  Oddly, I never connect the child ghost with those drawings on the wall, or the broken dolls in the yard. That’s not to say there wasn’t just a little bit of evidence of what may have happened before we arrived. In the back of the supply platoon’s yard, just before the perimeter of the minefield and beneath a tree with pale-gray bark and wide, green leaves, is the shallow grave of King Tut, a charred corpse that was once hastily buried, one foot peeking out from beneath the dirt and blackened toes pointing toward the sky.

  It’s the supply platoon that names him King Tut, led by Staff Sergeant T, who is particularly proud of his find, and he draws massive arrows onto the outside of their house, directing foot traffic to the back of the yard, COME SEE KING TUT! The tomb draws a surprising number of visitors. Starre is back from the cigarette factory with her own stories, and we giggle as we follow the arrows, standing not too close to the grave, marveling at the burnt foot, looking for other body parts, and a little disappointed that the famed Tut is not more exciting. I wonder out loud if the rain will wash away the rest of the grave, but the rains
never come, and once we’ve seen it we never bother going back, though we sometimes wave in the direction of the tomb as we pass the signs. If it’s callous, it’s because we never stop to process what a nameless shallow grave means. That’s saved for much later, when you’re out of the military and home safe in your own bed. That’s when the real ghosts come.

  And perhaps there is something, after all, to the idea that Al Kut is haunted. I sit with Starre on our driveway one evening, bare feet planted on either side of a pink bin. I share some laundry detergent with her, pouring the white powder into already black water, scrubbing the rough material of my uniform together until my knuckles are raw. Behind us, camis of yellow and brown hang on a 5-50 cord, flapping in the light breeze. I like the smell of the sun-dried material, sometimes burying my nose into the uniform once I take it off the line, still warm and smelling like wind. Life is simpler here. It should bore me, but it doesn’t.

  Beyond the dim circle thrown by our battery-powered lanterns, I see it from the corner of my eye—they’re always in the periphery—a shifting thing of all black, and I snap my head to the side, trying to catch it. It’s gone, of course. The shadow creatures mimic animals, like nature gone perverse, some animal you’d expect but with an extra head, or humped back, or tiny, shrunken limbs. Some of the others say they’ve seen things similar, not quite the same but always there at the edge of their vision. I’ve grown used to them by now. It doesn’t even bother me the night I’m startled awake by the dog standing half in the room, as if it had just decided to stroll in through the window. I half sit up because this is a real fear; there is nothing to protect our cots from animals that might wander in off the road. The animal is huge, like a desert wolf, large head hung low as it slowly surveys the room. Then I see it has six legs and I groan, rolling over and burying my face into my makeshift pillow of undershirts, promptly falling back to sleep.