“What happened?! Kirk, what happened?! Can you hear me? Kirk!” I didn’t know.
“I don’t know. What happened—” A pain, indescribably fierce, exploded in my mouth as I tried to answer. I shot them a scared look and tumbled into a well of agony. A ravine of flesh ran between my eyebrows. Blood flowed bitter from the nostrils of my broken nose past the shredded remnants of my upper lip and onto my front teeth, which were dislodged from my broken jaw. My chin flapped below it all.
Carolyn sprinted to the telephone and made frantic phone calls in search of directions to the nearest hospital, which was over an hour away. Dad ran to get the keys to my uncle’s pickup truck, and Derek, who had once taken a course in emergency medical technician training, stayed with me. Primitivo stood off to the side and spoke with Derek and Carolyn in Spanish. “¡Se cayó!” he kept repeating. “He fell!”
I was eased into the shotgun seat of the truck. My brother gave me a towel and told me to press it against my face to keep pressure on the tears. We tore westward from the small resort town of Caberete, in search of the Centro Medico Bournigal in Puerto Plata.
“My teeth are gone,” I groaned.
“No, they’re not,” Derek said firmly. “Keep pushing on that towel.”
“Yes they are.” My tongue probed the area but retreated after a fresh peal of pain.
It was dark still, and there was little moonlight. The headlights were weak, and I stared through the windshield at the curving road. We came up to a steel bridge painted forest green, identical in construction and color to the green iron Blackwater bridge, where the burned corpses of the mercenaries had been strung up. Fallujah General Hospital was on the other side of that bridge, so I turned in horrified confusion. Everyone was still there. My eyes stung from the blood if I kept them open for too long.
“Awww, Kirk! Buddy, your wrists!” Derek cried out. “Look at them!”
Both wrists were broken. The pain ravaging my face was so overpowering that I hadn’t even felt them, and it explained the difficulty I was having with tugging the towel against my face. My hands twisted out in odd, acute angles.
The truck accelerated. After an hour, we were in Puerto Plata, but lost. They had brought Primitivo along to help with directions, but he had never left Caberete and was useless. My brother sprinted over to a firehouse, where some firefighters were dozing, and asked for directions. One of them hopped on a small scooter and led us the final few blocks to the hospital.
* * *
It took about an hour and a half before my face was stitched back together. They wheeled me over to a room with an X-ray machine, which was the most high-tech equipment in the hospital, hoisted me onto the table, and left to deal with another emergency. Derek came in and sat next to me while we waited. I looked up and caught a reflection of my face in the polished glass of the machine overhead and barely recognized myself. I let out a self-pitying whimper. My brother, realizing that I could see myself, moved the X-ray away to spare me my reflection.
“Did someone do this to me?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet. You still don’t remember anything?”
“No. Just going to bed; I remember that fine.”
“I mean . . .” He spoke slowly. “It looks like you got hit with a crowbar.”
Even though Primitivo had told them his version of events, my family was doubtful. If I had been attacked by someone, it would make sense. My wrists could have been broken in a defensive posture.
“Yeah, maybe! See if you guys can find anything around where all the blood is.”
The medical team came in, slid the X-ray plate back into place over my head, and vacated the room while the scans were taken.
A few moments later, a surgeon came in. Derek and Carolyn translated as he explained what was about to happen to me. First, they would put me under. Then they would run a series of small wires around each tooth and bind them to a bracket to wire the jaw. Then they would stitch my lip back together. Then they would break the nose back into place. Then they would set my wrists and put them in casts.
“Okay?” the doctor asked. All I cared about was the first step, relieved that I’d be able to sleep through it all.
“Yep,” I mumbled. As they wheeled me off, I looked over at my family and said, “Find the weapon.”
* * *
My mom and oldest brother, Soren, slept through it all. We were supposed to golf that morning, and when Soren came downstairs in his golf shirt and shorts and found us gone, he thought we’d left without him. My dad eventually called over and explained what he knew, and asked them to go search for the weapon that might have been used on me. They found a small pond of my blood under the window just as a resort employee wandered over with a mop and a bucket of hot water and soap.
* * *
I awoke in a dim room. No machines beeped. It was a simple medical clinic. A small box television was mounted high on the wall, almost touching the ceiling. It was unplugged and broadcasted my reflection. I was in an anesthetic haze and couldn’t see very well. There was something ringing my vision that produced the effect of looking through a tunnel. I squinted at the TV screen and saw a blue and white mask over my face. I knew something bad had happened but was trying to remember. I groaned.
“There he is! How you feeling, KJ?!” My family had been off in the corner of the room, waiting for me to wake up.
I saw Derek and remembered our last conversation. “Did you find a crowbar?” My hope was unbridled. If it had been another human, someone who attacked me and fled, there would be no mystery. If not, if it had just been my brain and me . . .
I knew the answer before he spoke, revealed in his tightened lips. “Didn’t find anything.”
My dad’s voice quivered when he spoke. “Kirk, do you know where we are?”
“Yes. The DR.” I understood the point of his question and suddenly worried about the state of my brain. Given the extent of the trauma, there had been a concern about hemorrhaging, but the hospital had no equipment to check. I silently went through the names of my grade school teachers, grade by grade, testing my ability to recall. I conjugated a verb in Arabic in all ten forms. I remembered the password to my email account. Things seemed to be working.
Except for the fifteen minutes from the night before. What had happened in those minutes held the key to explaining why I was now in the hospital. I searched for them, but they had already fled to an undiscovered country in my mind, and now amnesia had clawed an impassable ocean around them.
My dad squeezed one of the few toes that wasn’t bandaged. “Can you feel this?”
“Yes.” His posture relaxed. I was not paralyzed.
A nurse came over and spoke very loudly in my ear. I didn’t understand what she was saying. She jabbed a needle into my right thigh and injected something. It felt like a billiard ball was lodged in my muscle, just sitting there. She slapped my thigh and rubbed it around, and the medicine dissolved into my body.
“I wanna get out of here,” I moaned.
“We know you do, guy. You gotta heal up here first, then we can go home.”
* * *
I wanted to be alone, desperately—not to avoid my family but to be freed from any demands of social interaction. I didn’t want to act positive. I wanted to make sense of what my brain had just done to me. I wanted to feel sorry for myself. I wanted to watch an ungodly string of movies, I didn’t care which ones. I didn’t want to answer the same questions everyone asked each morning. “No, no new memories. Yes, I can still move my toes.”
The loud nurse appeared every few hours and shouted something in my ear as though I were deaf and injected drugs into my legs. I hated her. I tried to glare whenever she came in, but glaring tugged painfully at the stitching between my eyebrows. She wouldn’t have seen it underneath the mask anyhow.
I couldn’t breathe through my nostrils, which were stuffed with cotton balls. Wooden Popsicle sticks were jammed up my nostrils to help anchor the mask to my face. I could brea
the only through my mouth, and since I couldn’t chew anything, this meant that I had to take a deep breath before my brothers or parents tilted a can of chalky-tasting Ensure into my mouth.
“I can’t stand it here.”
It had been only a few days since my fall, but I begged my parents to get me back to West Chicago. If all I was doing was lying around, I’d rather do that back home.
I began a relentless campaign to get out of there, redirecting every conversation back to my wish to go home, until a surgeon strode into the room in military fatigues. He was a medic in the Dominican military but kept a practice at the hospital. He was going to get me ready for the trip to Chicago, he said, speaking through my brother. This meant making some striations in the casts so that my arms wouldn’t be crushed when they swelled in flight at thirty thousand feet.
But it also meant removing my mask. I hadn’t seen my face in days and was horrified by how I might look. An assistant came in with a steel tray, which she held with white rubber gloves. My eyes flared as the surgeon asked my brother to leave the room. On the tray were two large syringes filled with a broth-colored fluid.
The doctor picked at the medical tape affixing the upper part of the mask to my forehead and tugged slowly. The tape ran directly over the gash between my eyebrows, and the stitches strained to hold it together. The woman with the tray stood there to my right without moving, and I stared at the syringes.
The tape removed, all that held the mask in place were the Popsicle sticks and cotton balls in my nostrils. The cotton had hardened after absorbing so much blood, so when the surgeon gave a gentle tug at the sticks, they didn’t budge. I began to breathe heavily when I saw his hand gather one of the two syringes. He didn’t say anything as he inserted the syringe and shot the hot briny solution into my right nostril, which loosened the cotton and freed the wooden stick. I roared, “Motherfu—” but the rest of the word turned into a choking gargle as the solution flooded into my mouth. With weeping eyes, I spat it out, and the doctor placed one of the two Popsicle sticks on the nurse’s tray.
His cell phone rang. He unclipped it from the holster on his hip. After a brief conversation, he snapped it back, and I saw a large smear of my blood on it. His rubber-gloved hand reached for the second syringe, and I began to beg pitifully, “Please! No! No más! Please!” I braced for the second blast.
* * *
We flew back to West Chicago on January 1, 2006, exactly one year after I had left for Iraq. My dad pushed me through the airport in a wheelchair and pulled my US government official passport from my chest pocket for the Transportation Security Administration official, who stared at me for a second and mumbled “Welcome back” before waving us along. Kids stared at me until reproached by their parents. I tried to swallow a dose of antibiotics and painkillers, but the water just trickled out of my mouth and into the tear across my chin. My dad wheeled me over to the baggage carousel, and I watched the bags loop in silence.
Heaves of snow lined the highway home. I hobbled across the icy driveway and directly upstairs to my bedroom. The door was shut. I tried but failed to turn the knob, which was a rubbery orange miniature basketball I had installed a decade earlier. In an unsteady voice, I called downstairs to ask my dad to come open the door for me. I crawled into bed, took another Vicodin, and fell asleep. I was home.
8.
Human Rubble
EXCERPT FROM:
INFO MEMO
FOR: SECRETARY OF DEFENSE [Donald Rumsfeld]
SUBJECT: “What Did Not Happen?” (U)
(C) You asked for a list of the things for which we planned in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM that did not happen.
• Iraq descends into anarchy.
• There is widespread vigilante justice.
• Shi’a holy sites are damaged or destroyed.
• There are large numbers of internally displaced people and international refugees.
• “Fortress Baghdad” holds out indefinitely.
• There are mass Iraqi casualties.
• Another state (e.g., North Korea) takes advantage of US focus on Iraq.
DECLASSIFIED
AUTHORITY EO 12958
The Vise Tightens
Yaghdan and his colleagues besieged their American bosses for help, for special badges allowing them to drive into the Green Zone rather than wait in the dangerous checkpoint lines, for promises of emergency housing in case they were targeted by militias. Month after month, year after year, they asked for protection but received none. The Americans wore condolences on their faces while they said they were looking into things.
Yaghdan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He wished the Americans would buy better computer monitors. These were too small, and the resolution strained his eyes after hours of poring through row after row of the database of USAID projects, which would someday become an unimportant digital artifact of history. On the wall of his cubicle hung a picture of Mashael, a young woman beloved by her Iraqi colleagues who had been killed one morning a few months earlier when she stepped out on the balcony after breakfast. A black stripe to signify mourning cut diagonally across the corner of her picture. Nobody ever found out if it was a stray or targeted round.
It had been only a few months since he ran from the white Opel. There was no point looking back now, he thought. The catalog of if-then considerations were exhausting and unsatisfying: in the end, he had made the decision to help the Americans based on what he knew at the time. In his mind, he defended himself against the lethal stigma clouding those who worked for the United States by stressing that he worked for a civilian agency, and not the military, which he felt bore the responsibility for many of the shameful parts of the occupation. But his civilian employer was losing funding and drifting into the margins of relevance.
Down the alleyway of cubicles from him sat Tona and Amina, two young women who worked in the human resources office. They were best friends; they had attended high school and college together and had worked at USAID since its earliest days. Whenever Iraqis were hired, it was Amina who helped them get their badges; her name was on the back of scores of USAID badges as the “signing authority.” Whenever Americans were hired, it was Tona who took their pictures with a digital camera and uploaded them into the badging system. American badges were blue; Iraqi badges were yellow.
When an Iraqi colleague was killed, Tona took an empty tissue box from a shelf in her cubicle and collected money for the victim’s family.
At the beginning of the month of Ramadan in 2005, Tona and Yaghdan and the other Iraqis working for the United States were invited to a luncheon at the embassy in their honor, hosted by the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. The executive officer called in the Iraqi staff for a meeting before the lunch. “Don’t say anything to him,” she warned. “Just eat and come back.” She knew that anytime the Iraqis were able to get in front of a powerful American, they asked for protection from the militias waiting for them on the other side of the Green Zone’s blast walls. “It’s not a good time to talk about this. He’s being nice to have you over for lunch.” So they went and stood quietly in a long line for a picture with a grinning Zal. None of them ever received a copy.
Not long afterward, Tona and Amina walked out of the Green Zone through the Qadisiyya checkpoint, which opens onto the airport road. They had just cleared the American gate when a young man in an Iraqi police uniform stepped toward them and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. As he took their picture, Amina sprinted at him and started to yell, asking him what he was doing. She snatched his phone and ran back to the American soldiers guarding the checkpoint. The cop boldly followed to retrieve his phone, which the Americans were now examining. In addition to a picture of Tona and Amina, they found a video clip of an insurgent attack on an American convoy. They arrested him, interrogated him, and then took him away, but it was no comfort. They had just gotten the cop arrested, but for how long? A day? A year? Surely he’d search for them when he was released.
&n
bsp; A Spark in Samarra
As the sun climbed over the city of Samarra on the morning of February 22, 2006, seven heavily armed Sunni militants dressed in Iraqi Special Forces uniforms strode into the entrance of the golden-domed Al-Askari Shrine and tied up the security guards. Visited by Shi’a pilgrims since the year 944, the mosque was of irreducible importance to the Shi’ite community. They carried in a number of bombs, which were strewn throughout the building. Shortly before seven o’clock, the bombs went off, bringing down the golden dome and any delusions that Iraq was not hurtling toward a civil war.
The response was miasmic. Militias laid claim to neighborhood after neighborhood, hoisting their flags over seized checkpoints, at which they checked IDs for Sunni or Shi’a names. In this manner, the once-mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighborhoods of Baghdad and other major cities were ethnically cleansed. More than a thousand bodies a month piled up at the Baghdad morgue alone. Before long, more than fifty thousand Iraqis were fleeing into Syria, Jordan, and other countries each month.
It was a midterm election year in America, so the news from Iraq filtered in a little differently. The only metric that counted in public opinion polling was the casualty rate of US forces, and since fifty-five Americans were killed in February 2006, and only thirty-one killed in March, what were all the war critics talking about? The thirty-one killed were twenty fewer than the number killed in March 2004, and still four fewer than the number killed in March 2005. Yes, there were seventy-six Americans killed in April 2006, but that was a far sight better than the 135 that were killed in April 2004.
Meanwhile, the refugee crisis became the fastest growing in the world, as nearly one in eight Iraqis was running from the violence: the equivalent of 38 million Americans flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 11