The border lights were blinding, the crossing a scrum of sharp elbows and shoves. For a thousand Syrian pounds apiece, about ten US dollars, the driver could assure their passage to Lebanon through a contact. All the passengers assented to pay, though their differing levels of reluctance showed how much this sum meant to them. Then the driver disappeared with their passports, their money. They waited in the taxi.
Abed’s imagination continued to race as he opened his door and made his way toward an empty blockhouse of toilets, like those cemented into the rest stops of any major highway. He locked himself in a stall, clutching his journal and memory stick. The driver would return at any moment. There was no time left. Abed made a choice. He ripped the pages from his journal, flushing them down the toilet. In these pages, he had written drafts of the slogans he and the other protestors shouted in the streets: “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one!” And he had written what it felt like to shout those slogans at the police, at the soldiers, at the paramilitaries; to shout in the face of a regime that had muzzled him for his entire life. He flushed the memories away, erasing the descriptions written in his hand. The toilet basins didn’t fill quickly enough. He ran between the stalls, flushing all the toilets at once while he ripped the pages. He could hear the noise of those protests swirling in his ears, and now, at this dark crossing, in the quiet, the toilets were too loud. Habitual fear toyed with him. They will burst in on you, Abed. “What is all this flushing?” they’ll say. But I once rushed the barricades at the al-Rifai mosque. I once shouted with my whole voice. But that was then, Abed; now the flushing is too loud.
Then, quiet; he was finished, and nothing was left—just the flimsy wire of the notebook’s spine, which he tossed outside into the dust. He waited at the bathroom door. He still clutched the memory stick, but he would toss that to the ground if he saw a border agent heading toward him. Betrayal was on his mind, the same as a suicide, for what he had just done felt like a bit of both. His body responded: a contortion of sobs that he wrestled down. If the border agent came for him, he must appear indifferent, unfeeling, an innocent. But indifference isn’t innocence, he thought. Grief is. After the years of killing, the political setbacks, he had stopped believing in the conscience of an indifferent world, one that had done nothing for Syria. Only those who grieve can be trusted. About this time, though he didn’t know it, Laetitia lit her candle for him. Then he saw the driver walking under the border lights, passports in hand, alone. Abed came from the door. He was given his passport. When he saw the stamped page, he finally let go. But the sobs didn’t come.
He crossed the border in silence.
Then Beirut, the sea. Strands of neon lights hung from dance clubs. The pockmarked facades of the Barakat building and the Holiday Inn—a once-famous hide for snipers—were reminders of another, older civil war. A telephone. He dialed +41, the Swiss country code, and then her number. “I am safe. I am here.”
A steady quiet.
“I am okay,” he told her.
“Is it true?”
* * *
That night just before Christmas, Abed climbs the stairs to my attic room. He’s brought a gift, a poem about his home. It reads, in part:
The Damascene House
Is beyond the architectural text
The design of our homes
Is based on an emotional foundation
For every house leans on the hip of another
And every balcony
Extends its hand to another facing it
Damascene houses are loving houses
They greet one another in the morning
And exchange visits . . . Secretly—at night
His name, in fact, is not Abed; this is the name he picked for himself during the revolution. The poet is a distant and famous uncle, also an exile, who died far from Damascus, his life spent as an expatriate for other, more provocative words than these. I thank Abed for the gift. Then he returns to his unheated room downstairs.
* * *
In the first days of the New Year, the Islamic State seizes swaths of al-Anbar Province in Iraq. Their columns shuttle down roads I know well; when I shut my eyes I can still navigate them without a map: Route Bronze to Route Uranium, Route Uranium to Route Michigan—on and on, a net of roads we gave American names to, as if by so naming them we could capture the country in that net.
Masked fighters now stand proudly in the backs of pickup trucks, perched behind machine guns, clutching black flags with the shahadah lashed in curls of white calligraphy: I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God. They lean on their horns, turning out the crowds—a parade renewed along the streets where I spent my early twenties fighting. In the years since, those streets have never been far from my thoughts. Like Abed and his uncle, I am, and forever will be, living in a strange type of exile, an expatriate of places like Fallujah, Hit, Haditha, and others that barely dot a map. Like any expat, I am defined by a place I might return to someday, the idea that somewhere on my life’s horizon is a time when I’ll again walk those streets knowing my war is finished.
In reaction to the Islamic State’s gains across al-Anbar, a chorus of pundits wonders about the cost of America’s war in Iraq. Marines I fought alongside are quoted in newspapers across the country. They appear on television programs, their voices wrestling with a single question: Was it all a waste? I have a hard time pinning down my emotions about this. Instead a memory keeps looping in my mind, flickering like old archive footage.
* * *
It is my birthday. It is also Corporal Pratt’s, Sergeant Banotai’s, Lance Corporal Ames’s, and Lieutenant Dan Malcom’s. We sit in a column of fourteen armored personnel carriers, called amtracks, nearly two hundred of us. It is November 10, 2004, the Marine Corps’ 229th birthday. Hydraulic wiring threads our amtrack’s steel interior compartment, sweating oil, which drips onto helmets, night-vision goggles, rifles, assault packs. A blue infrared light illumines the confines, casting an icy glow against our faces, as if we’re all trapped beneath a frozen lake. We exchange whispers of “happy birthday, Marine,” which is the custom. We are four kilometers outside of Fallujah, the city of mosques: a forest of minarets rising from kaleidoscopic facades, all mosaicked in bursting hexagonal patterns of turquoise, crimson, and cobalt. Our single company is part of the First Marine Division, a force of thousands. Within minutes, our column will ride into the heart of the city to seize the Government Center, a walled complex of five buildings defended by the Islamic State’s precursor, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Our amtrack lurches into gear, jostling a few of us onto the deck plates. The radio squelches to life, and I recognize the voice of our executive officer reading the traditional birthday message crafted by General John A. Lejeune nearly a hundred years before:
On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of the Continental Congress. Since that date many thousand men have borne the name Marine. In memory of them it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the birthday of our Corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.
Through the inches-thick glass of the amtrack’s armored cupola, I peer into darkness. The city in front of us is on fire. The radio is silent. And I swear to God I can hear all of us breathing.
* * *
Two weeks before the battle, they pulled us into a camp just outside of the city. We were supposed to prepare, but instead we waited. When we arrived there was nowhere for us to stay, no barracks, no tents. The logistics officers showed us to a series of vehicle service bays, long garages where Saddam Hussein’s army once maintained its trucks. The soft earth around the bays was planted with unexploded cluster bombs, remnants of last year’s invasion, and we made sure only to walk on the paved roads. The noise of brooms sweeping up broken glass and rubble filled the camp as we worked with T-shirts tied around our faces so we wouldn’t inha
le the great clouds of dust that varnished our sweating limbs with a film of grime. Then we showered by holding liter bottles of water over one another’s heads.
The assault would begin on D-Day, and it made us nervous that we would be part of a D-Day. We memorized our orders: what would happen on D plus one, D plus two, and so on. Truth be told, the plan didn’t extend in any real detail past that first day, when our company would seize the Government Center, with its symbolic significance in the heart of the city. After that, no one really knew.
A concrete porch with a corrugated steel overhang circled each of the garages where we slept. From these porches a steady hum of conversation rose up each evening. Perched on collapsible camp chairs and field stools, with our rifles and machine guns stacked like teepees and our floppy bush hats and vagrant stares, we assumed the air of modern-day Hatfields and McCoys, well-armed idlers awaiting the violence coded into our DNA. During those days of waiting, Ames, my radio operator, a kid who smelled like old socks, looked like he should’ve been in the National Guard, and sounded like he had a stuffy nose, would charge batteries and clean dust off his radio’s connections with a pencil eraser. He liked to talk politics and speculated that if in a few days John Kerry won the presidential election, the assault might get called off. Although several of us explained to him that the inauguration wouldn’t be until January, he still thought there was a chance. Banotai and Pratt, two noncommissioned officers, would pitilessly make the younger Marines inventory and reinventory their assault packs, counting out rockets, grenades, and types of ammunition with names like HE, HE/DP, 5.56 link, 5.56 ball, Willie Pete, AT-4. Across a dirt courtyard, in a garage just like ours, was the company headquarters. Dan, the weapons officer who controlled air strikes and artillery for our company, would sit out here, a portable magnetic chessboard balanced on an upturned case of MREs. Dan spoke with a smooth Virginia drawl—when he spoke, which wasn’t that often. On the weekends back in Camp Lejeune, he didn’t trawl bars like Rumrunners and Squeakies, or strip clubs like Cherry’s or the Driftwood. Instead he spent his evenings at Books-A-Million and began dating the register girl, a sturdily built blonde who, if I remember correctly, stood a bit taller than him.
When the assault’s estimated casualty figures slipped out, I was sitting with Dan one evening, losing at chess. Seventy percent—that’s what the planners expected. I don’t know how the number leaked to all of the Marines; probably some lance corporal saw it on a PowerPoint slide and told one of his buddies, who told another in turn. Rumors in the infantry spread from the bottom up, and official information from the top down. The most sensitive plans and orders are often mulled over for days at the higher levels of command, among the generals and colonels, before they’re passed down to the captains and lieutenants. But there’s always some kid on the staff, a private or a lance corporal, who will overhear a conversation, see a briefing, and let out the word. As a young officer, I quickly learned that if all of the junior Marines were walking around with a hangdog expression, they’d heard of something going on at higher headquarters that I wasn’t privy to yet. Usually I’d find Ames, who was tapped into the underground mill of lance corporal rumors, and more often than not, my orders would filter up through him a couple of days before they’d filter down. This made us a bit of a team: him looking down, me looking up, neither of us really understanding what was coming our way.
Dan didn’t think much of the 70 percent figure. He kept staring at the board between us, stroking his chin with long, tapered fingers that seemed designed to pluck at chess pieces. I asked if we could finish the game later—I thought I should gather up the Marines in my platoon and talk to them about the estimated casualty rate, a little don’t worry, you’re not going to die pep talk.
“What good’s that going to do?” Dan asked.
“Maybe make them feel better,” I said.
“The only way to make them feel better,” he answered, “is to make them not think at all.”
For a fighting man, the imagination is a dangerous trap: painful ways to die, life-shattering wounds, your grieving family—these are all too easy to conjure, so either shut off your imagination or succumb to it. For the rest of our chess game, that’s what I struggled to do, unsuccessfully wrestling the figure from my thoughts. Seventy percent, seventy percent. There were forty-six of us in the platoon: thirty-two of us would end up casualties; fourteen wouldn’t. Those sums replaced seventy. The odds were probably a bit worse for me, if I was being honest. The lieutenants always get picked off. The guy running down the street waving his arms, shouting orders into a radio, trying to get everyone to move in the same direction—that’s the guy you want to shoot. Ames’s odds were probably a bit worse than mine. That radio would be strapped to his back, a ten-foot antenna wobbling upward from his spine.
When Dan called checkmate, my mind was barely in the game and I couldn’t recount the series of moves that’d led me into this position. No options existed for me. A pile of my pieces lay stacked by Dan’s side of the board. I quickly counted them, trying to add up what percentage of my army he’d had to destroy before it was all over.
* * *
Our amtracks sprint toward the Government Center, and the other companies are calling medevacs across the radio, moving out their casualties. “This is Cajun 3. I have two priorities at the intersection of Phase Line Henry and Juliet, over!” Or, “This is Beowulf 1. Three urgents, one routine, at the intersection of Phase Line George and Eleanor, over!” In the background of these transmissions, the loud static crack of gunfire interrupts the idling radio’s low static hum. Like two mirrors placed opposite another, each medevac reflects the one before it, creating an impression that bends outward toward infinity. Medevacs have three classifications: routine, priority, urgent. Routine medevacs are for two things: a very minor wound, which in the heat of battle likely won’t warrant a medevac, and the dead. Death has a low priority. Why conduct a risky medevac for a body? Protocol demands that only number, location, and type of medevac are passed over the radio—no names. You can’t function if you turn the priorities, routines, and urgents into so many people.
Now the city is dark. The fires that burned in front of us are gone. We’ve moved beyond the corridor that the other two companies had fought all day to open for our advance. It is quiet and I strain to make out the barrier between the sky and the looming, motionless buildings. I place my night-vision goggles up to the cupola’s glass. Many of the homes have had whole walls lopped off clean, so they open to my view like dollhouses, their sofas, chairs, and beds upturned and rearranged as if a petulant child, becoming bored with nice play, had shaken them. Our column stops and the amtracks’ engines idle warmly in the dark. I remove my night-vision goggles and hear, but don’t see, the whine of two tanks as they rush past. Then a blossom of sparks, followed by a low, rhythmic pounding. More sparks. More pounding. With their main guns, the tanks are punching holes in the cement wall that surrounds the Government Center.
I climb down from my seat beneath the cupola, into the troop compartment. Everyone is standing, facing the back ramp, burdened under the loads Pratt and Banotai had checked and rechecked. Our amtrack jars forward, lumbering toward the breach the tanks are shooting into the Government Center’s outer wall. Like rush-hour commuters in a crammed subway car, we strain to grab something that might steady us—a piece of the armored hull, a handle, each other. From night-vision goggles, two coins of green demon light project onto a dozen sets of eyes that are all very open.
Then everything is still.
A hydraulic wheeze. The back ramp drops.
* * *
Our platoon had planned to clear four of the five buildings inside the Government Center: a school, a six-story building called the “high-rise,” and, on the farthest, southern side of the compound, a pair of identical buildings we’d christened Mary-Kate and Ashley, an homage to the Olsen twins. After issuing these orders, my company commander, a la
nky career officer named Cunningham, whose voice I wouldn’t recognize if it wasn’t partly muffled by the enormous chaw of tobacco he habitually chewed, pulled me aside. “I don’t expect you guys to make it through all four buildings.” I stared at him for a moment, a little confused. Cunningham was a fair commander who didn’t dole out undeserved criticism. Even though we had our problem children, Marines who never seemed to get anything right, I felt a bit hurt that he didn’t think our platoon could complete this task. Then he added, “I don’t think you guys will be combat-effective by the end.” And I understood—it was that number, 70 percent. Cunningham then outlined a plan only I should know of, in which another platoon would backfill us once we’d sustained too many casualties to go further. He then took me over to the battalion headquarters, where the intelligence section had a few minutes of video filmed clandestinely by a cabbie who had driven our route into the city. The film was out of focus and shaky, as if the cabbie were either drunk or terrified when he took it.
After watching the video, I stepped outside. Our entire battalion, several hundred of us, gathered in a circle around a three-star general and a sergeant major, the two senior-most Marines in Iraq at the time. They’d come to deliver their own pep talk before the assault. They said some stuff about Fallujah being an iconic battle, like Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, or the Chosin Reservoir, names our Marine Corps selves had grown up on as surely as our civilian selves had grown up on Full House. Then the sergeant major, a fit guy in his late forties whose trim physique and perfectly shaved head demonstrated an equal contempt for fat and hair, paced around the assembled group, arms crossed, as television cameras from our embedded journalists rolled. “Now this is what I’m talkin’ ’bout. This is a whole can of whoop-butt! It is an honor for me to be able to serve with each and every one of you hard chargers. . . . You going to go in there and do what you always have done: kick butt!”
Places and Names Page 6