The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  THE GIRL IN GREEN

  Derek B. Miller was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived abroad for many years in Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Israel.

  Educated at Sarah Lawrence College, the Hebrew University, Georgetown, Oxford, and Geneva (PhD), Miller has worked in international affairs for over two decades with the United Nations, think tanks, and non-government organisations. His work has taken him to conflict and post-conflict zones around the world, including broad travel in the Middle East. His lectures on cultural research, history, policy design, and ethics have been presented to academia, the US military, NATO, and the UN. He continues this work as director of The Policy Lab®.

  The Girl in Green is Miller’s second novel. His first novel was the international bestseller Norwegian by Night. He lives in Oslo with his wife, Camilla, and their two children.

  For my wife

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published in Australia and New Zealand by Scribe 2016

  Copyright © Derek B. Miller 2016

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  9781925106954 (paperback)

  9781925307726 (e-book)

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  CONTENTS

  PART I

  An Early Spring

  PART II

  The Long, Cold, Hard, and Dark of It

  PART III

  Other Than Honourable

  Inspired by many actual events

  PART I

  AN EARLY SPRING

  1991

  1

  Arwood Hobbes was bored. Not regular-bored. Not your casual, rainy-day, Cat in the Hat–style bored that arrives with the wet, leaving you with nothing to do. It wasn’t post-fun or pre-excitement bored, either. It was, somehow, different. It felt rare and deliberate, entire and complete, industrial and inescapable. It was the kind of bored that had you backstroking in the green mist of eternity wondering about the big questions without searching for answers. And it wasn’t in short supply, either, because it was being dispensed like candy on Halloween to Arwood and others like him at Checkpoint Zulu, at the rim of the Euphrates valley, in the heart of Iraq, by the world’s largest contractor of boredom: the United States Army.

  How long had he been bored? How long was he destined to be bored? Arwood couldn’t even muster the motivation to care as he melted over his machine gun under the hot, hot sun that was pressing down on the sandy sand around him without a raindrop in sight and no one offering to cheer him up.

  The M60 machine gun was the perfect height for leaning on. It was probably the perfect height for firing, too, but Arwood had no proof of that because he hadn’t fired the gun since qualifying on it, and there was nothing to aim at because everything was far away, apart from a camel; and while he did point the gun at the camel for a while, it ultimately seemed a mean thing to do, so he stopped. That was eons ago. Nothing fun like that had happened since. Even the camel had gone away.

  It wasn’t that Arwood was unfamiliar with being bored and that his resistance was low. After all, Operation Desert Storm — now over — had really been just a month-long air campaign on exposed Iraqi troops, followed by a four-day ground war, which meant there wasn’t a lot of ground war for him or his buddies, or much for people on the ground to actually do. For Arwood, the Gulf War primarily involved him doing a lot of nothing for three months, in the sand, jogging expectantly beside an APC with his gun for a few days, only to be told it was ‘over’. But at least back then there had been a sense that something might happen. There was a sense of possibility.

  Not anymore.

  Possibility was but a popped balloon for Arwood.

  And at the very moment they were all expected to go home, his company drew the shortest of short straws and they’d been deployed here to Checkpoint Zulu, 240 kilometres from the Kuwaiti border. He had no idea why. This time there was nothing to look forward to but peace. Endless, tedious, nondescript, fluffy-white peace.

  You could eat a grenade, you really could.

  It was into this stagnant vortex of quietude and for-nothingness that a form approached Arwood from across the desert.

  Like everything else in Iraq, it came at him sideways.

  Arwood didn’t look. He sort of liked not knowing. Perhaps it was a guy wearing sandals who had a beard like Jesus. Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. Maybe it was the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who was doing his rounds and was there to let Arwood know that — on account of global warming, acid rain, and El Niño, not to mention the global shortage of decent people and the high price of coal — Christmas was going to be cancelled.

  Whatever it was was getting bigger, which probably meant it was getting closer. It probably wasn’t something dangerous, though; it was approaching from this side of the ceasefire line. But it wasn’t going to be anything good, either. It wasn’t going to be one of Charlie’s Angels. It wasn’t going to be Daisy Duke. It wasn’t going to be Kelly LeBrock in her blue-and-white panties appearing out of red mist from a doorway. No, it was probably going to be orders.

  A different mind, a different person, might have welcomed orders because it would have ushered in ‘change’. Not Arwood. The only thing worse than boredom was labour, and he didn’t want to wash anything, dig anything, move anything, stack anything, fill anything, load anything, unload anything, peel anything, or — and this was critical — smell anything awful. Given that he was twenty-two and a private, rather than, say, fifty and a nuclear physicist, all these things were on the shortlist of the possible.

  No, he wasn’t going to look up. He would cherish the uncertainty for as long as he could.

  Which fate had decided would end right … about … now.

  ‘Want a cigarette?’ asked a man who was now man-sized and to his right.

  The man stood next to Arwood’s sandbags. Arwood considered them his sandbags, not so much because he was manning a machine gun behind them, as because he was the one who had filled them.

  Arwood accepted the cigarette by opening his mouth. The man placed it in and lit it. Arwood inhaled, grateful only that it gave him a pretext to keep breathing.

  ‘I’m Thomas Benton,’ the man said.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Arwood Hobbes.’

  ‘Hobbes. Interesting name to take into a war zone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason. Where are you from?’

  ‘America.’

  ‘Yes, I figured, given the uniform. Any place special?’

  ‘Never felt like it.’

  ‘I’m from a village in Cornwall,’ Benton offered.

  ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  ‘Cornwall is in England.’

  ‘That’s overseas, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Thomas Benton squatted down behind Arwood’s sandbags because it was cool and shady there. Benton looked across the desert to the still town a kilometre and a half away.

  ‘You’re a journalist
?’

  ‘Yes. The Times.’

  Arwood did not move from his resting position. ‘When is this war gonna end?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The war.’

  ‘It did. The war is over. This is the peace. Now the lawyers are drafting the UN permanent-ceasefire resolution.’

  ‘We’re waiting for paperwork?’

  ‘It’s the Western way of war. Even Hitler filed his paperwork. Without it we become confused. What’s your job?’

  ‘I’m maintaining a vigilant perimeter.’

  ‘Safwan,’ Benton said, ‘if you’re curious, is way back there. That’s where your general, Stormin’ Norman, met the Iraqi high command. It is also where he made the mistake of letting them fly helicopters, which is what they are using to kill everyone connected to the uprisings down south and up north. It’s a bloodbath.’

  ‘I thought that was Safwan,’ Arwood said, not bothering to motion to the town at the end of his machine gun.

  ‘That’s Samawah.’

  ‘When do I get to go home?’

  ‘The Americans are the ones sticking around the longest, though some of you shipped out on the seventeenth. It could be a while.’

  Arwood finally moved his head by shaking it. ‘It’s not fair that we have to sit around here like the Breakfast Club.’

  Benton shrugged and wiped his face with a red bandana. He was not smoking. He had eaten something in the morning that disagreed with him, and he’d opted not to push his luck further with a cigarette.

  ‘It might not be calm for long. You should try and enjoy it.’

  Arwood perked up. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Doesn’t your commanding officer explain all this to you?’

  ‘You mean Harvey?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  ‘Lieutenant Harvey Morgan. No, he doesn’t explain anything. He’s full of shit, and never makes sense because he keeps reading quotes from the government, and they speak in riddles. What do you mean it won’t be calm for long?’

  ‘The Iraqi civil war. It’ll have to get here eventually. You see that green flag over there? On top of that onion-shaped water tower?’ Benton pointed to a tower in the middle of the town.

  ‘Yeah. If you watch it really, really closely for hours, it sometimes moves,’ Arwood said.

  ‘It’s a Shiite flag. That means they’ve overthrown the Sunni government in the city. It’s only a matter of time before Saddam sends troops here to change that back.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You’re actually in the eye of a storm. You are the American soldier deepest in Iraqi territory. Did you know that?’

  ‘Why are you here?’ Arwood asked. ‘At my post?’

  ‘The view, mainly. It’s as close as I can get without crossing the demarcation line. I’m embedded in your company. I’ve been reporting on what’s been happening with your fellows.’

  ‘Which is nothing.’

  ‘Well, there was the mass surrender.’

  ‘Yeah. That was fun.’

  Arwood had enjoyed the mass surrender. Once the war reached its tipping point, all the Iraqi soldiers gave up. A French journalist had reported that Saddam had forbidden his soldiers to wear white underwear lest they use it to surrender. Arwood had wondered about the mechanics of that. Usually you surrender in really dire circumstances, which is not when you want to be taking your pants off.

  Arwood had become chatty with the POWs when they flowed to his location in late February. That was much farther south, and before they were deployed here. There was a certain affability to the Iraqi conscripts. Sure, they were the enemy and all that, but their accent was endearing, every one of them had a Groucho Marx moustache, and they were incredibly sincere about their desire to give up. There was very little not to like about them once they stopped shooting at you.

  ‘There’s nothing happening now, though,’ Arwood said.

  ‘Not here. But there is over there. And the world would like to know what it is. Or at least I’d like to think they would.’

  ‘Is being English the same as being British?’ Arwood asked.

  ‘No. England is part of Britain. Which is also made up of Wales and—’

  ‘So who banned all that music?’

  It didn’t connect until now, because Arwood had never met anyone British before, but word had gotten down to the troops that their allies — the British — were banning anti-war music back home, and so a good deal of time was spent ragging on them about it in their absence. On the BBC’s blackout list were:

  ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’, by The Animals;

  ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’, by The Bangles;

  ‘Killing Me Softly’, by Roberta Flack;

  ‘Two Tribes’, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood;

  ‘War’, by Edwin Starr; and

  ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, by Tears for Fears.

  ‘That was you, right?’ Arwood said.

  ‘It was the BBC.’

  ‘They really thought a bunch of straight dudes were gonna sing Roberta Flack in the desert?’

  ‘What you have to understand about the BBC—’

  ‘So you’re sitting here with me because you want this civil war thing to get started, and you want a front-row seat?’

  ‘Well, no. That’s not fair,’ Benton said. ‘I do have questions, though. The kind that can only be answered over there,’ he said, pointing to Samawah. ‘Right now, no one knows anything. We’re getting our news from radio broadcasts coming out of Iran and Syria. It’s all ignorance, rumour, and frustration. I’d like to ask them some questions of my own.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like what? Really? Well, like … Did you plan this revolution? Are you getting support from Iran? Who is in charge? What are your aspirations? Do you want to see a whole and stable Iraq, or do you want a new state and to see it carved up along religious and ethnic lines? Or no state at all? Is this the return of the Islamic umma? Can you work with the Sunni after the way you were treated by Saddam? Are you prepared to cooperate with the West? Under what conditions? Are you coordinating with the Kurdish resistance up north? If so, how? Is there a unified command structure? Do you see yourself forming one? How well armed are you? What kind of training—’

  ‘Yeah, OK, political stuff. I got it.’

  ‘It’s the future of the Middle East. In fact, it’s the future of the post-Cold War order. In that town, in the ideas of those people, are the first clues about whether this brave new world of ours will maintain the colonially imposed and Cold War–sustained state system, or—’

  ‘Do Arabs eat ice-cream?’

  ‘That’s the question burning a hole in your mind?’

  ‘I have a follow-up.’

  ‘Yes. They do.’

  ‘What kind of ice-cream?’

  ‘The usual stuff. Why?’

  ‘I want one.’

  ‘OK,’ said Benton.

  ‘And I’ve got an idea that I was thinking up while you were talking. You want to report on all that political stuff from that town, right?’

  ‘I suppose I do, yes.’

  ‘I want an ice-cream, and you said they probably have one there.’

  ‘You think it’s a good idea for me to go to the town and get you an ice-cream?’

  ‘You sort of implied you might be going.’

  Benton sat in the sand. He dug grooves in the earth with the heels of his boots. He’d been in the region since 28 February, the day President Bush declared this ‘a victory for the United Nations, for all mankind, for the rule of law, and for what is right’. Benton’s wife, Vanessa, had argued it was not a good day to leave her or their ten-year-old daughter, Charlotte, behind. Given that the war was over, she’d said, there was no good reason to be there, and it was dangerous. He�
��d said questions remained that no one was asking, because victory is always exciting and therefore wasn’t when people probed for details. He’d said he’d be back in a few weeks. A visit into a rebel-held city — even for a few hours — could justify the cost.

  Benton looked across the windless landscape to the listless Shiite flag. Something significant had already happened there, and something else was going to. He was sure of it. Saddam had forbidden journalists to enter the country, but so what? He was shy of his fortieth birthday and hadn’t won any prizes. It was impressive to be at the Times, but he was among the rank and file, and he’d never distinguished himself. A visit to Samawah could change all that.

  It was an interesting idea.

  There was a downside to the plan, though, and being almost forty rather than in his early twenties, like Arwood, Benton still had some reverence for the wider systems of authority and power that made his journalism possible. You fall out with those, and you’re out. He was talking to Arwood to manipulate the situation, yes, but he was still on the edge about whether to walk the literal mile.

  ‘I was told not to wander off base, or I’d lose my press credentials,’ he said.

  Arwood field-stripped his spent cigarette and flicked the pieces into what should have been wind.

  ‘If you follow the rules all the time, you don’t really have any press credentials, do you?’

  ‘Huh,’ said Benton.

  ‘It is my experience — and I learned this the hard way, believe me — that the trick to getting what you want without getting caught — and this is the important part — is not getting caught.’

  ‘And how do you do that?’ Benton asked.

  ‘I just told you. Don’t get caught.’

  ‘That feels a bit circular.’

  Arwood never took his eyes off the distant buildings and the absolute nothing that was happening over in the town. Now that he had the idea of an ice-cream firmly planted in his mind — which was seeping down into his very soul and filling it with strawberries — he could picture swarms of ten-year-olds suddenly bursting into the corner store and tearing open every remaining popsicle, leaving nothing for him but sticky wrappers. It was a dark image.