Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  Then White stepped up to me carting a massive duffel bag, dropped it hard at my feet, and addressed the gathering. “No girls want to play?”

  “Shy,” I said.

  “OK, I get it. So, listen up,” he hollered to the ramshackle assembly of boys. “Today we are gonna teach you our great American pastime—baseball.” Then he looked over to a man named Hadir, who was their military interpreter and a Yazidi from our village. Hadir repeated every word in Kurmanji—it was already the best English lesson of our lives.

  White explained the basics: “You need three things to play the game: a bat, a ball, and a glove. And you only need to know how to run, hit, and throw.” Then he directed me to open the big duffel bag.

  On my knees, inside a wall of wide-eyed kids, I yanked at the long zipper. The bulging sides pulled way open, spilling bright colors and newness out into my hands. In the space of one second, my farm-boy eyes spanned ten thousand miles, right across the desert, propelling far over ranges and crossing whole sweeps of ocean—and every village boy came with me. None of us knew a thing about baseball, but it didn’t matter—that stuff was real, bought in a store in America. Leather mitts, balls, and several bats. T-shirts, stacks of them. Bags of white tube socks. This time, we boys kept our cool, and waited.

  Then each soldier found a kid from their team, and we all fanned out in our brand-new clothes over the makeshift diamond. Starting in pairs, simple games of catch. For a moment, I had to stop to watch what was happening and take that miracle in. Then I slipped on my mitt.

  “Looks just like Arizona,” I heard one of the soldiers say. Later, I would search it up on a map.

  White was with me on the plain, yelling out instructions, dark arms full of veins bulging like cannons under his shirt. The first toss sucker-punched my glove, and I fell right back into the dirt. Then I leapt into the air for another catch, leaving my empty shoes behind. I can still see Sergeant White standing out there under a great wing of blue desert sky, smile meeting mine like a second sun, the echoes of his laughter taking flight and filling up the ancient Arabian air.

  WHEN WE ORGANIZED our teams over the playing field, I was first up to hit. White walked behind me with the bat. Standing over my thin shoulders, he brought the bat around and told me just how to hold it. Maybe he knew I was nervous, all eyes on me. He took his time. Deep voice in my ear, he placed those big hands right over mine. Through the warm sureness of his grip, I could feel his pulse beating. We practiced though several slow empty swings.

  “Take it easy now, Shaker. Breathe. You have to feel the hit in your gut.”

  Even now, his voice is as clear to me as my own. Sun on its way to the other side of the world, it was suddenly just the two of us, standing together on the plate. I looked out as the last gold ray melted into the ridgeline, and could feel us slipping into twilight like a pool of cool water. The air went blue.

  When I hit the ball, a lightning crack splintered out for miles, careening in a great arch way into the ozone. People shouted. White hollered, “Run, Shaker!” and I bolted—fast around the bases, lost those shoes, and kept on going all the way home.

  THROUGH THE CALM seasons of 2004, the soldiers from what was called “the Khanasor Water Project” held regular games—football, soccer, baseball—and their routines, patrols, perimeter checks, and drills seemed to braid into the rhythm of our village life. Soon, whenever a game was on, it seemed like half our town showed up to watch and cheer. Families set up grills, played music over speakers, and brought out plates of food. By far, it was one of the happiest times of my childhood, despite the loss of my father and the farm. We were doing all right now on that dull slab of concrete. Saddam was gone. I was learning real English. An American soldier was my best friend.

  After school I went right to the base, delivered drinks and junk food. White always made a little time for me. More than once he brought his team to my house to share a meal with my family. At first, his interpreter tagged along, but as my English steadily improved, I took over. We’d linger in the courtyard under Haji’s winking stars, teaching each other words and talking about anything that came to mind. White had a kind and casual way about him, always came to us with gifts of food that we needed—my Daki said he was all good, right down to his toes.

  White also told me that I could make good money as an interpreter working for the army if the war was still going on when I came of age, and then I could apply for a special visa to live in the United States. The military was going to pay for him to study at an American university, and he promised that he’d help me do the same.

  “We look after our own.” He said it to me many times.

  And the meager borders of my mind stretched far past Shingal and our crumbling little school. White told me that’s what being an American was about—getting rid of the bad guys and letting the good people win. And I believed that for a long time after.

  WHEN WHITE AND his small team of ten men set off on missions into Mosul, he didn’t tell me first. Never did. The soldiers couldn’t risk disclosing their comings and goings. Mosul was the capital of our province, and there was trouble brewing there. As far as terrorists went, some said it was the evil eye of the storm. Despite all the superior foreign firepower and promises, the war wasn’t going the way anyone expected. Soon, you could feel a certain unease rise to a simmer like a change in air pressure. Sometimes when the Chinooks flew in, Apache gunships flanked them the whole way.

  I WAS ON the roof when Naïf told me he heard the sound I was longing for; Daki always said he had the hearing of a bat. I raced into the street, ran past the base and the looming tower, and flew out over the empty field to wait for my friend. Coke in one hand, football tucked close. I was wearing a clean T-shirt and a new pair of shoes. I’d been rinsing out the socks White gave me every single night. Nothing moved over the desolate plain, and I waited low to the ground, ears cocked.

  As soon as I heard that familiar thunder, I was on my feet, hands up to my face waiting for the onslaught of dirty wind. The thrill of those choppers coming into view never lessened, and my heart seemed to beat in time with the rotors as the beasts whined down.

  No one said a word when the hatches opened, and they took their time unhooking their gear from the center line. I waited as I always did, a few yards back and holding my breath. Often the soldiers were as tired as zombies when they came back. Too late for a game tonight, but we’d get out there first thing the next day after school.

  When the team came up to me, walking slowly in the bruised light, they cradled their helmets like empty bowls in their hands. No one had to say a word. The hatches were all empty. The rotors silent.

  Palms on my shoulders now, which started shaking. No way to stop it. My body knew the truth before I did, and I fell to my knees in the dirt. The ball and bottle of Coke left my hands, but I couldn’t feel a thing. Instantly, all of them were down there with me in a huddle, uttering soft words for hard things—words like IED and MEDEVAC that would have to be explained much later. For now, the only ones that made any sense were bomb and dead.

  IN THE MORNING I got up well before the others, long before any living thing for miles, and went into the slumbering hills where we kept our temple. The day we buried my Babo way up there had been the worst of my life. This was the second. So tired from crying and lack of sleep, I searched the earth for a good stone, and held it, offering up a prayer of gratitude. In my culture we left circles of stones around the graves of the dead before leaving, and no other marker. In the cool darkness, I shut my eyes and somehow felt those strong American hands slip over mine again. A warm pulse beat out endless time into my palms, and I stood there a long while. And then I looked way up and let White go.

  We were at war.

  I knew that now.

  Chapter Five

  Mosul

  LUMBERING BUMPER TO BUMPER, A CONVOY OF LOADED FUEL tankers and several cars made their way into the bustling Yazidi towns of Kahtaniyah and Jazeera, joining the lazy flow of ev
ening traffic. Inside each rusted-out sedan sat a lone male driver peering over the wheel, more than a thousand pounds of explosives packed all around him. A boy standing at the side of the road as they slowly cruised by said the men appeared dizzy, but had grinned at him, mocking—though he only realized it afterward.

  Then, at precisely 7:20 P.M. on that bright August day in 2007, just as whole families were sitting down to eat, the vehicles came to a simultaneous stop. The crazed drivers shouted out incomprehensibly. A moment later, the convoy erupted into a towering inferno that consumed four straight blocks. At the epicenter, the living turned instantly to vapor.

  For several minutes after the explosion, there was nothing but an eerie and airless silence. Then a few children hurled clear of the blast wandered half-alive and blind from the ash cloud. Those who could still speak called out for their mothers. One of them held a severed arm in her hands like a doll. The sky had torn off the world, she said. And five hundred Yazidis went with it. More than one thousand more were mutilated.

  Over fifty miles south, I was at home in the courtyard drinking a Coke, which always made me think of Sergeant White. I didn’t know my people had just suffered their own 9/11. Our Baba Sheikh declared a month of mourning while my people dug the bodies from cataclysmic piles of rubble. Sometimes, all we found was a crushed torso or foot; a ringed finger, an ear. For the most part, dead infants came out intact, but charred black as though they’d been dipped in corrosive paint. I gave God thirty days of my silence to pray—hard—and then, at just sixteen, I was in the fight.

  DAKI STOOD ALONE by the kitchen window when I walked in, dark exhaust from the stove drifting, resurrecting stale bread in oil. Another debt collector had just stopped by for empty promises; no money coming in, we were still trying to pay off the weddings. Our cupboards had become an abyss of want. During the war a fresh egg was a jewel to be savored. Sometimes, the hunger was like a fist to the gut.

  In those days honest work was hard to come by, and the Americans paid their combat interpreters well. Always a step ahead, after White was killed in action, Daki had appropriated my Iraqi identification card, desperate to keep her son from fighting in someone else’s war. Military and police checkpoints were going up all over the province, and I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without it. Over the last year, Nineveh Province had become a sanctuary for regrouping insurgents, and we were now square in the eye of al-Qaeda.

  When the conflict veered sideways into a full-blown insurgency, the American government implemented a massive troop surge to put a lid on the apocalypse of bombs. “The New Way Forward 2007” extended the deployments of soldiers already in-country, and twenty thousand more troops were sent to secure the raging capital and blood-soaked Al-Anbar Province. Squeezed clean out of Baghdad, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) had been forced north into the Za’ab triangle, toward Syria. Once there, they counted on a well-established rat-line, the clandestine route used to move illicit weapons and rabid fighters across the border. Now they were right on our doorstep. While we stood in our kitchen jabbering, AQI cells were congregating in the terrain all around us.

  At night, we could hear military convoys pound by; occasional gunfire flashed like falling stars over the hills. Insurgents roamed the desert no-man’s-land disguised as shepherds and nomads, keeping tabs on the traffic, moving arsenals, and waiting for orders. Their leader, al-Masri, “The Egyptian,” had taken over in 2006 when his predecessor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a US missile strike.

  As far as I could tell in the months I’d spent feverously studying the war, al-Masri was well equipped to handle the challenge ahead—outwitting and outlasting “the infidels.” He’d had a hand in founding the first AQI cell in Baghdad, fought in the battle of Fallujah, and had run a steady circuit of suicide bombers out of Syria right down the Euphrates river valley. In his most infamous act, he was said to have ambushed two American soldiers, killing them both with his bare hands. His minions had already infiltrated the Iraqi military and police forces and were securing loyalties among the occupation-weary tribes—just biding their time.

  By the fall of 2007, my brothers and I saw the writing on the wall: if the Coalition failed to secure Iraq, we Yazidis were sitting ducks. There was no room for us in Nineveh: Kurds wanted their own country in the north; the Sunnis just wanted everything.

  By the spring of 2008, I could no longer wait to come of age. At first, my idea was to sign up in Mosul. One year, maybe two—in and out. Pay off our loans and go back to school, and eventually apply for a visa to the USA. Thanks to the teaching skills of Jassim, dozens of young men from our village had already left for military interpreter jobs on bases all over Iraq; they all came back to visit and bought new televisions and cars. They also returned with a high price on their heads—but that was nothing new to a Yazidi.

  THE MAN DRIVING the smuggler’s cab had taken the road to Mosul many times; bullet holes stitched across the back doors on one side, the back windshield blown all the way out. His thick moustache quivered when he talked, but those gun-powdered hands were steady; he kept one assault rifle on the floor next to him and a handgun in his vest. To him, I’m sure I was exactly like every Yazidi boy who’d come before me—fresh bait. He snickered when he saw my clean shirt and pants, and spat out the window. I gave him the twenty-five thousand dinars Naïf had lent me, and promised the rest when we got to the front gates of Camp Marez, the airfield and army base on the edge of Mosul. My appointment with the woman from Global Linguistics Solutions (GLS) was in four hours. It was just before 6:00 A.M.; the transaction, like my trip, had been planned well in advance.

  THE WEEK BEFORE—CHICKEN bones boiling on the stove, the hunger for meat almost unbearable—Naïf figured out how to get my identity card off of Daki. She kept it on her at all times like a secreted diamond. All I needed was thirty seconds with my ID and a borrowed scanner in Naïf’s room. We recruited Markaz, our reluctant sister-in-law, and in a swiftly executed operation that involved splashing Daki with tea, profuse apologies, and an exchange of aprons, it was done. From there, the forgery was easy—Iraqi IDs were crude documents. Within an hour, I was officially eighteen years old.

  THE THREE-HOUR DRIVE would take us east across the high northern edge of Mount Shingal, skimming villages that sat on the valley like strewn cardboard boxes, and then slightly south as we joined the road winding toward Tal Afar: home to once- complacent Turkomans and Sunnis, and now a cauldron of embittered insurgents. We didn’t make it more than a couple miles before we hit the first police checkpoint; we handed over our IDs and never had to get out of the car. Simple. After that I eased into the seat, put my head back, and rested an arm along the open window frame. Sheep grazed the fields for a stretch before we hit the grim factory lands and I fell into my old daydreams of the farm.

  “Only dead men take this road asleep,” the driver said, rib-jabbing me hard out of my stupor.

  My job was to keep both eyes out for IEDs littering the roads, disguised to look like garbage.

  At the next checkpoint, there was a larger contingent of Iraqi officers, all of them patrolling the lanes of increasing traffic. A line of trucks and caravans sat idling along the margins, backs open, waiting to be searched. My driver slipped a callused hand into his pocket, pulled out a small wad of folded-over bills, and held the cash out the window like a parking stub. The officer, who was also smoking a cigarette, grabbed it between drags and slipped it into his front pocket. Then we shifted routes and were off on a tear.

  MOSUL IS ALL of Iraq, distilled down into a city of wrath. Two hundred and fifty miles north of Baghdad, on the banks of the Tigris, it sits on an active fault line of intersecting ethnic, religious, tribal, and sectarian groups. Nearly three-quarters disgruntled Sunnis, and just under one-quarter Kurds, it was a teeming battleground for their ongoing competition. By the time I got there, the city could be divided right down the middle between its eastern and western flanks, sprawling out into dense roadways and tight alleys, some as ancient
as the sand on which they were built.

  The insurgents and Arab nationals had their mean grip on the west; the Kurdish political entities and military forces controlled the east. Before the invasion of 2003, Mosul had been the headquarters of the Baathist party and a critical military center. The fight taking place for dominion there now was in many ways a mirror to the overall fight for the country itself. We were headed toward the airfield just south of the city, but well within its sights. Mosul used to be known for oil and marble; now it was known only for bombs.

  When I saw black towers of smoke rising in the distance, and the trash accumulating into larger and larger piles on the side of the roads, I knew we were closing in. Every mile we hit a military or police checkpoint. Forward Operating Base (FOB) Marez, known as the al-Ghizlani camp to Iraqis, was attached to the airfields of Mosul Airport and a massive military base called Diamondback. We made our approach slowly via a long straight road. The great stretch of the city, all dreary tower blocks, rusted domes, and minarets, rose up past the military barriers. Once or twice, I heard the thud-thud of a blast echo out, and I peered through the dull morning haze into what looked like ten thousand Khanasors lined up in a row. Half the province, over one and a half million people, eked out a living in that ancient urban jungle—the hatreds therein ran deep.

  What you couldn’t see of the scorched city, you could hear: wailing sirens and pounding choppers. No trees, no grass, not a bird in flight that wasn’t made of metal. If there was ever a moment when I second-guessed my decision, it was then—Mosul was the citadel of the devil. The air outside was acrid.