The sandwich comes. Benton places the napkin on his lap, and Lester glances at the TV, where a news presenter is showing the latest footage from Iraq about the mortar attack that happened a bit over a week ago. It shows men in black headscarves running from the launch point after the smoke clears. The commentators have opinions to share. They are the opposite opinions to the ones they voiced a week ago. This goes unmentioned.
‘Here you go,’ Lester says, putting the napkin and cutlery beside the sandwich. ‘Front-row seats to the world’s events.’ He looks up at the TV on account of Benton’s interest. ‘The things going on out there — Shiites, Sunnis, all these ancient hatreds just playing themselves out, day after day. Good thing we’re not there anymore, I can tell you. I wouldn’t want our boys over in the middle of all that. What are you gonna do, right? It’s all a damn shame, is what it is. A damn shame. Don’t you think?’
‘Yes, it is,’ Benton says. ‘It’s a damn shame.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to my agent, Rebecca Carter, at Janklow & Nesbit, for reading numerous versions of this manuscript and providing essential insight; to my wife, Camilla Waszink, who was my first reader, my second reader, and my third reader (…); to my friends in the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and also at the United Nations; Mat Zeller at No One Left Behind (nooneleft.org) for his thoughts and figures on those national staff and translators and allies we in fact did leave behind; singer and songwriter Mike Doughty for saying I could use his song title ‘Into the Un’ as a possible title for this book, which I then didn’t; to PJ Mark, Henry Rosenbloom, Angus Cargill, Lauren Wein, and all the unsung heroes with Janklow & Nesbit and with my publishers who helped turn a pile of loosely affiliated words into something called a ‘book’.
This story drew heavily from my own PhD dissertation (2004), which became the book Media Pressure on Foreign Policy: the evolving theoretical framework (2007), in which I studied the Iraqi civil war of 1991 in depth. I was haunted by many of the stories I read, and I knew that, somehow, I needed to return to the subject matter through fiction in order to explore and share other truths.
Field-level history about Operation Provide Comfort drew facts, anecdotes, and timelines from Dr Gordon Rudd’s excellent 1993 unpublished PhD dissertation from Duke University, accessed through UMI.
The setting of Checkpoint Zulu near Samawah was suggested by a 31 March 1991 article in The Washington Post written by Nora Boustany, called ‘U.S. Troops Witness Iraqi Attack on Town in Horror, Frustration.’
The first draft of this book was completed on 30 January 2014 — before ISIL rose to international prominence; before the Yezidi were massacred on Mount Sinjar; before the Kurds fully joined the fight and became backed by the West … sort of. This book, therefore, did not rush to press chasing headlines: it preceded them. In retrospect, my primary flaw of analysis was failing to anticipate just how bad it would all become.
The proof discussed by the Syrian father on the football pitch refers to photos from the Syrian defector called Caesar. I have changed the chronology slightly to allow for this conversation.
The working title of this book was ‘Welcome to Checkpoint Zulu’ because, in a way, we are all at Checkpoint Zulu now.
The phrase ‘It’s a Big Old Goofy World’ was taken from John Prine’s song of the same name (1991).
And, yes, the frozen-chicken thing really happened.
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