Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  The Coalition Forces had already started their withdrawal. Twenty-five thousand troops would remain in Anbar to continue to monitor and advise the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) as they embarked on their first real attempt to take up the helm of their country. For my remaining time as a terp, I was sent all over the province, eventually spending two months in the terrain around Al Qa’im. General Petraeus had tamed Mosul in his time, but the Triangle was another beast all together. Optimistic casualty statistics aside, in Anbar you had to keep your nerve or you were dead—and now I was right back in the thick of it.

  THE DESERT STANK like a sewer and the yellow-tinged air flickered dully as we crossed the empty field. Our convoy parked in a lot outside of Akashat, a small forsaken mining village on the busy smuggling route south of Al Qa’im. The bullet-bitten town walls stood as silent in the July broil as the clay from which they were made, but we knew that barrels were pointed at us from every direction. Those days, commanders of the Iraqi infantry division always made sure I had a loaded 9mm tucked into my belt.

  Dogs barked, an infant wailed, cooking fumes rode the breeze—and then all went quiet. The inhabitants knew we were coming, and that we’d be leaving again soon enough.

  After weeks patrolling the Anbar-fever, the skin on my face thickened to a dark rawhide, and I let my goatee grow out to a smooth Middle Eastern pelt. Before stepping out of the MRAP, I pulled a black balaclava right over my head and put on my shades. Everyone on the many teams I terped for out there knew me as “Mohammed” and made their assumptions—I kept a well-thumbed copy of the Koran in my kit and pretended to pray to Allah five times a day. If anyone asked, I could recite a whole litany of suras as though they were the poetry of my blood.

  In those days, intelligence about high-value targets was gleaned from a growing network of informants within the upper echelons of the tribes. Lately, AQI had been wearing out its welcome, taking over the lucrative smuggling trade, apprehending fuel subsidies to fill their own coffers, imposing draconian Islamic laws and barbaric punishments for simple infractions like smoking tobacco. The elders who resisted often showed up on the side of the road missing their heads. Despite their weakening stranglehold in the region, the terror group still knew how to make an indelible point.

  Entering the village, we walked in formation down the empty main drag, grim houses to either side; each window stood open to a dark void. Dozens of eyes were on us; we could all feel it like a shift in the breeze. I translated as the usual suspects of bomb makers, bandits, and smugglers were hauled out. Criminals of every ilk still called the border villages home.

  On that particular day, we were after a number of HVTs, and I held each nefarious face in my mind as we entered the first location: a simple mud hut like the one I was born in. Photographs of suspects were tacked to the walls of the Iraqi police HQ, and we were told to study them after each meeting. Same routine—one shiftless town after another. You got used to it: the screaming children and whimpering wives. In short order, there was a line of terrorists standing by the trash-filled gutter, hands zip-tied and an IA officer draping black hoods over their bowed heads. I watched as one man wet his pants, the urine pooling at his bare feet. He didn’t so much as move a toe.

  “Look at those motherfuckers,” the American team sergeant said into my ear.

  On the way back to the lot, I could hear several men fulminating about the heat and talking about getting some Gatorades out of the cooler. When I pulled back the sweat-soaked balaclava, a torrent of my own rancid breath escaped, and I gulped the dry-as-a-bone air. Then a boy ran across the lot grinning, arms flailing like a mad bird, and several others chased after him. They didn’t even glance at us. We all stopped at once, and swallowed our hearts, checking each kid over for the telltale lumps of suicide vests. Weapons poised—nothing. You could see the indentations of their ribs though their careworn shirts. A bird of prey sailed over the village walls and hovered. I looked at it awhile, thinking of Khanasor, and tugged at my new beard.

  Then that silent wink of time splintered as a deafening sound cracked the empty firmament. Several yards away from me, a huge parabola of red-tinged dirt went up like a fountain in the lot. My ears roared as I fell, suddenly blinded. I knew the moment for what it was and waited on my back, head pounding. My pulse and breath quickened together.

  Moments later a wet spot on my leg became apparent and I touched it, fumbling for holes, but the torn up skin had gone numb. Reefs of dust fell over me like snow as I gazed up blinking, listening to the cries and pleas of the fallen, who lay strewn all around me. We held our collective breath for the bursts of gunfire that never came. In a moment, I tried to go up on my elbows, and waited, staring out for someone, anyone. Through the miasma of war, I saw nothing but a blurry mayhem: bodies and parts of bodies scattered over the ground, bits of twisted metal, and live soldiers rushing in every direction. I heard the baying of a lamb in the adjacent field and smelled burning meat. Turning to the side, I vomited.

  In a moment, a dust-covered medic appeared like a phantom and started cutting away at my pant leg. I could hear the fabric tear and saw him peering in. He slipped on a new pair of latex gloves. Soon, I could feel his fingers prodding around inside me, but no pain, and I wondered if he hadn’t already given me the shot.

  “Is it that bad?” I said to him. My eyes roved the wounded spread over the field in strange tangles of limbs, under a dirty veil of smoke. “Why aren’t you treating them first?”

  “Them who?” he said. “They’re all cooked. Another medic’s working on the captain, but it’s not looking good. Just lie down. You’re going into shock. Listen, in a second, your leg is gonna burn pretty bad.”

  Then he tore open a packet and poured the contents of thick white powder like icing sugar all over my hemorrhaging calf. Right then, the naked depth of my pain revealed itself—I’d just dipped my leg into the pit of hell. I started to scream, and before I could stop, my voice seemed to rush back into me. All I saw was a searing white light. Hands dragged me up by the armpits and the world disappeared.

  WHEN THEY PULLED me on the stretcher into Camp Taji, a massive military installation seventeen miles north of Baghdad, I stared to one side over the sprawling motor pool and my lids flickered. I heard someone say they were going to send me north to the hospital at Balad. There were incoming wounded everywhere. Doped up on battlefield narcotics, my mind and body cleaved, and each seemed to go about its business independent of the other. I’d been in that nebulous place before. Voices blared from an overhead speaker, and helos beat the hazy air over me. Hundreds of vehicles were parked in the lot like tamed metal beasts, engines still ticking—but I was suddenly there in another time altogether, walking over the ground that seemed to give way under me—under us all. When I opened my eyes, I was in Taji before Akashat, before a lot of things. In my mind it was July 2008, and I was a teenage kid in loose fatigues and full of swagger.

  I SAW MYSELF jumping out of a Humvee, kicking up dirt under my boots. High fives to the others; tossing my duffel over one shoulder and shoving a slice of Juicy Fruit gum in my mouth. I’d been invited to Camp Taji to participate at the MiTT academy and a large-scale meeting, headed up by some of the top commanders in the Coalition and ISF. General David Petraeus, the man who had put al-Qaeda on the ropes, was at the helm. During his command in Iraq the general made it a regular event to meet with the MiTT teams at Taji. It had been an honor to be one of the few chosen participants that day, and a testament to my loyalty. I walked that colossal base, a city unto itself, broad-shouldered and sure, feeling for the moment like the man I wished to become.

  When General Petraeus strode across the base, you felt America and all her might descend like an Apache gunship. A few seconds of reverent silence, and then cheers erupted. He was dressed as most any other grunt; only the four plain stars stitched to his cap betrayed the breadth of his power. More than anyone, General Petraeus was also the man to whom my fellow citizens and I had pinned our dwindling hopes for
a lasting peace.

  First and foremost, the general understood that to secure the people, the military had to live among them; clear out the terrorists, excise the criminal elements, hold the area, and rebuild from the bottom up. He had also forged coalitions among the disaffected sheikhs, and sought reconciliations with the alienated Sunni tribes. His doctrine seemed to be taking hold: casualties and car bombs were way down. The fact wasn’t surprising: when Petraeus took command of Mosul, he’d reined in her furies—and as soon as he left, they’d all returned with a vengeance.

  When I watched the general cross the floor and stand before us, I listened to him in awe and made a simple plan: finish high school and apply to an American university. As long as he was in command of Iraq, I believed I was in charge of my future—and that I even had one.

  THEN I WAS back on a gurney in another trauma ward, waiting in a drug-fueled stupor. Part of me moved back and forth between 2008 and 2010 like a pendulum. A nurse leaned down, shined a penlight into my eyes, and I squinted. Someone pushed a line into my arm and fluid started to fill my veins. It wasn’t as bad as I thought: I’d heard them talking about shrapnel, razor blades and nails they’d have to pull out before stitching up the wounds. Blood loss. No matter, the drugs were still coursing through me like a spell, and I heard the nurse say, “His name is Shaker Jeffrey, a.k.a. Mohammed. He’s in shock. They drugged him up real good.”

  THEN IT WAS 2008 again, and I was standing out on the airfield straddling Taji, General Petraeus striding toward me—just as it had happened. A warm wind sent papers spiraling across the tarmac, and I watched as several officers chased after them; but the general kept walking with his entourage, eyes dead ahead. Moments later, he was standing right next to me, a hand reaching out and grabbing mine as we fell right into a conversation about Yazidis, Khanasor, and my job as terp. Even now, I still see those few minutes with the general on the airfield as the most thrilling moment of my service to the American military. I told General Petraeus that so far I’d taken bullet wounds to my leg and foot and he asked questions about the injuries. The wind grew stronger out there, sending the flags flapping, and we had to lean in to hear each other.

  “Son,” the general said, “you are the guys between us and them. We couldn’t do our job without you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I heard myself say, as I’d practiced for hours. “Is it true, General, sir, that you are leaving Iraq?” Even then, I knew that President George W. Bush had appointed the general to head up US Central Command; it was the talk all over the news, and across the bases, that it was time for the United States to get out of that war.

  General Petraeus nodded and looked me straight in the eye. “The president gives me my orders. You know how it is.”

  “Yes, sir. I respect the American president and his decisions, sir.”

  We talked a while longer about the war and my country, and then he patted my shoulder and said, “Stay safe, son.”

  Just two months later, on September 16, 2008, General Petraeus signed over command of Iraq to General Raymond T. Odierno and I held my breath.

  I SNAPPED OUT of the flashback, and opened my eyes. My head swiveled on the gurney as the corpses were brought in in their black bags, and someone told me they were all Iraqi army, including the captain. Not one American. Hard to tell if it was real or I was dreaming, but I could still feel the gusts from the airfield buffeting my hair and I sensed someone give me another shot; a hand pushed me down, and I slipped back again.

  WAR DRUGS TRANSPORTED me to the DFAC at Taji, after the conference had wound up, the top brass long gone. I was eating Taco Bell, junk food stalls all around me, the smell of hot grease. Soldiers and support staff at the next table were arguing about the troop withdrawal and it was getting heated. Violence was going down; too soon to tell if it would hold. Some wanted out of the war now instead of waiting years; others said this whole thing was a disaster—more than half of Americans believed the invasion had been a mistake. I heard the phrase clusterfuck, and made a mental note. I was eating alone, thinking about my conversation with the general on the tarmac, and everything I’d learned about at the conference.

  “You all right there?” a voice said, and a man sat down next to me. A purple sash was draped around his neck and a gold cross gleamed. He had a steaming cup of coffee in his hand; he took a sip and looked me over as he drank. Finally: “You don’t look OK—I saw you out there with the general.”

  “He’s leaving Iraq.”

  The priest nodded. “Some point, we’re all leaving.”

  “What does that mean for us still living here?”

  He glanced down into his cup, as though reading the future from the surface. Leaning in, his voice barely above a whisper: “Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but this whole country is going to descend into hell—that’s what it means.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Then his voice lowered like a boom.

  “I’d get out of here well before then. It’s going to be a slaughterhouse.”

  Chapter Ten

  Left Behind

  I WALKED THE DESOLATE TRACK PAST THE GATE IN A COLLARED shirt and blue jeans and waited for my smuggler’s cab home. Same long road, opposite direction this time—December 2011. It had been four years since I arrived. Now at all of twenty-one, I felt a thousand years old. Even my name—Shaker—seemed like a fragment from a faraway time and of another person entirely: a poor farmer’s boy in mismatched shoes selling cold sodas to the troops.

  Under the dull crown of a just-burgeoning dawn, my tired country seemed comatose in its stilled and forsaken miles. Daily attacks and bombings, though fewer, had persisted—Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias backed by Iran. President Nouri al-Maliki said his fledgling forces had a good grip on the situation, but it was much too soon to tell. I kicked a stone a pace and counted up my stack of cash. Military trucks idled along the barriers; two Iraqi men in uniform limped out of the morning gloom smoking, one of them dragging a goat.

  It was the tail end of the military withdrawal that began in December 2007, and the last convoys of American troops were making their way south on Highway 1 toward Kuwait. People stood quietly along the ditches and swells of marshland, watching them go out just as they’d watched them invade eight long years before. This time, anyone could see it all unfold live on television. In army bases across the nation, motor pools sat empty and the catering companies had packed up their elaborate kitchens. No more Taco Bell or Popeye’s Chicken. The sovereign state of Iraq was on her own—and so was I.

  When the driver pulled up blaring his horn, I dumped my satchel into the trunk; the hookah nestled inside a taped-up box on the back seat. Nothing else to my name. Standing in the patch of grassland next to the airfield, a shepherd boy watched me awhile, spat in the dirt without lowering his eyes, and then turned to his grazing sheep. One after the other, planes soared off the runway, plunging into puffs of cloud that sat like anchored warships against the leaden sky.

  Driving in the glut of traffic along the 47 past the shelled-out buildings and stretches of ruined walls, I cracked the window to let in gusts of cooling air. The winter sun was pale and easy with its light. Shamag wrapped about my neck, my sunken eyes scanned the freed world outside, and I brushed the 9mm tucked in my waistband—I’d hide it in the duffel as soon as we pulled in to Khanasor. The driver gave me a sideways glance and fingered the radio dial. Static crackled and voices jabbered in Arabic. I didn’t like having the pistol, but not having it wasn’t an option.

  Brownsword’s voice rose from the tides of my memory: “Mikey, you pack heat from now on or you’ll end up packed under ten feet of sand,” he’d said to me in the DFAC before he left. “Who knows which way the winds are gonna blow.”

  We’d said our good-byes months ago—all back slaps, bear hugs, and swallowed male pride—when the first units disbanded during the gradual two-year withdrawal. Right on schedule, ready or not. All those long farewells to my American brother
s and sisters in arms were like a slow bleed.

  “And when anyone asks you what you were doing during the occupation?” Brownsword tested me later while checking over his kit. In less than an hour, he’d be thirty thousand feet in the air, heading west to the other side of the world. Another life entirely.

  “Construction—in the cities. I got it, sir. No problem.”

  “Good boy,” Migone added, holding out an envelope full of dinars. “Just take that and be quiet about it. Changing cash around here is a son of a bitch. Send it home to mom.”

  Then Lieutenant Colonel Migone looked me in the eye long and hard, as though seeing a thing buried deep inside me that he didn’t want to say out loud. And he turned away without another word, hoisting his duffel and kicking up the dirt next to Brownsword, before ascending the ramp to the chopper. Both men glanced back in their turn, disappearing into the bird as though into the mouth of a cave. I held the image a long time like a comforting hand, and then let the memory go to the carbon fog outside the groaning car, as the driver next to me pumped the gas.

  The old sedan was straddling the road next to a trash dump that sprawled like a gangrenous city all its own, and where whole families lived in makeshift dwellings, satellite dishes lashed to the corrugated tin roofs. Children crawled all over the mounds like ants, picking through the stinking heaps searching for scraps of metal to sell at the markets. It was all some of them did all day long. For years, the rash of squalor beyond the bases had seemed so remote, but it hit me hard now.

  Mile after slow mile, I stared out at my splintered country through the grimy window—the Iraqi police standing around at the checkpoints talking into their radios or smoking—and saw what others could not: the corruption, infiltrators, and fear. One night in the Fortress, an afternoon lost in Syria, wannabe soldiers hosing down the desert with bullets. In Mosul alone, I was sure, insurgents could pick them off like sandgrouse.