by Klay, Phil
“So that’s your story,” she said. “The story you wanted to tell me. Now what?”
I shrugged.
“Do you tell this story to other girls?”
“I’m being honest,” I said. “I’m not honest with other girls. It hurts my chances.”
She shook her head. “You say you joined for college? I don’t believe you.” Then, imitating my voice, “Nobody joins the Army to avoid pulling triggers.”
“You got no idea why anybody joins the military,” I said, the words coming out angrier than I wanted. “No fucking clue.”
She smiled and leaned in, enjoying my anger. It was her, the old Zara.
“I know what you think,” I said. “I know your type.”
“My type?” she said. “You mean Muslims?”
“Why’s it always Muslims with you?”
“I know you don’t like us.”
“That’s not true.”
She shook her head. “We say things for a reason,” she said.
I sighed. “I’ve been hated as a Muslim. The last time my father hit me was after a kid at school called me a ‘sand nigger.’”
“What?” Zara said. “Your father hit you?”
“It’s how I handled it. The fight . . .” I stopped for a moment, tried to figure how I’d explain it to her. “Look, I went to a nice high school in northern Virginia, in a town too expensive for us to live in. My father moved us there when I finished junior high. He wanted me to have the best education. Which was great, I guess, though I really didn’t fit in.
“The fight turned out to be a big deal because a teacher overheard the kid using that word. The n-word. This was after 9/11, and it wasn’t that kind of town, you know? They didn’t see themselves that way. It became a big incident, and there was a lot of sympathy for me, because I was Arab, and because of 9/11, and because of what he said. I hated all of it. I don’t like pity.”
“What did you do to the kid?”
“Yelled back a few names.”
“That’s not really enough, is it?”
“My dad didn’t think so. It’s why he hit me. Because I hadn’t fought the kid who was insulting me and, by implication, our whole family. Or maybe he was just pissed the school principal seemed to think we were Muslim, too.”
Zara looked down and fiddled with her head scarf. “My father thinks Islam is the religion of poor blacks,” she said. “He says people will think I picked it up in prison.”
“Is that why you joined?” I said. “To piss off Daddy?”
She sighed and shook her head.
“So why?” I said.
“I’m learning why,” she said. “The practice of it teaches me.”
“And the clothes?” I said. “The whole . . .” I waved my hands at her.
She touched her head wrap. “It’s part of the commitment,” she said quietly. “What was it you said to the Special Assistant? Perception is reality?”
“Yeah.”
“Wearing this, people treat me like I’ve made a change in my life. Which I have.” She smiled. “That matters,” she said.
“In the military,” I said, “that’s part of why they give you the uniform.”
She nodded and we were quiet again. I could feel her slipping away. Her mind, perhaps, wandering off to other subjects. I knew I’d failed to communicate. Of course I had. I didn’t know what I wanted to tell her, just that I’d tell her anything to keep her listening.
Silence became awkward, then agonizing. She looked at me, her body relaxed but her eyes fixed on mine. Words, I thought, any words will do. If I were seducing her, I’d know what to say.
She broke the silence first. “You told the Special Assistant things turned ugly,” she said, “for you and your family, around 9/11. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I said, relieved we were talking. “If you saw my mother, you’d think she was white, but my dad’s different. He’s darker than me and he’s got that Arab dictator mustache thing going on. He looks exactly like Saddam Hussein.”
“Exactly?” she said. “Like he could be a body double?” She leaned in toward me. That simple movement, the physical expression of interest, excited me. “What I mean is, would you think that if your family still lived in Egypt?”
I laughed. “They look alike, especially with the mustache. And he won’t shave it. It’s a manhood thing.”
“And that caused problems,” she said.
“Some,” I said. “He’s so stubborn. And he became Mister Über-America. He had flags flying at our house, and ‘Support Our Troops’ magnets all over the bumper of his car. Not that that changed anything, the way he looked. Or the way we all looked, and with our Arab-sounding names, going through airport security.”
“I can imagine.”
“No, you can’t. Because when they’d pull him aside to pat him down by hand, he’d tell them, loud so everybody could hear, ‘I know you get a lot of flak, but I want you guys to know I support what you’re doing. You are protecting our American freedoms.’”
Zara shook her head sadly.
“And my mother, Jesus. She came from a totally different universe than my dad. Copt, yeah, but not the type to have family in Garbage City. Growing up, her friends were all Muslim, even one Jew, rich kids who read Fanon and talked radical politics before getting real and marrying each other. But my mom was more radical than all of them. More radical than my grandmom, even, who was a straight-up Communist before the June War. She married my dad. And then he pulled his American freedoms act? I thought she was gonna kill him the first time he did it. That shit nearly broke their marriage.”
“Why didn’t it?”
“She’s religious,” I said.
Zara smiled. “What did you think?”
“I was seventeen,” I said. “You’ve got to understand—my father was there when his cousin died. He was badly beaten himself. And then the people my father had told me were bad all my life had finally got my country really pissed. And those stories he’d told me weren’t bullshit anymore. My father, I mean, the man has never given two shits about me. He’s not a cuddly guy.”
“The Army was a way to make him proud?”
I winced. It didn’t sound so good coming from her mouth. “Make myself proud. But part of that would be in his eyes.”
“I imagine the Arab stuff got worse in the Army.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. It was more direct, though.” I laughed. “One drill instructor, during inspection, he asked what I’d do if my brother joined al-Qaeda. Would I shoot him in the face? My own brother?”
“That’s awful.”
“I’m an only child,” I said. “I told him yes. Basic isn’t a place for subtleties.”
“What about the other recruits?”
“There was one guy, Travis. He had an uncle who worked construction, and after Travis joined the Army his uncle started refusing to work with this family of Muslim electricians. It was in Travis’ honor.”
“I’ve heard stories like that,” said Zara. “Actually, I’ve heard a lot worse.”
“Travis told it to me and then was like, ‘What you gonna do about it, faggot?’”
“What’d you do?”
“I told him I wasn’t Muslim. Or gay. It’s a nice card to have in your back pocket when you run into that stuff.”
“I don’t know if I could fight for an organization that treated me like that.”
“You’re thinking about it the wrong way,” I said. “That shit is just people. It wasn’t alienating. This”—I waved my hand toward the college—“this is alienating. All these special little children and their bright futures. Look, if Travis was the type to die for his buddies, and he might have been, I think he’d do it for me just as soon as for anyone else wearing Army cammies. That he hated me, and that I hated the ignorant fuck right
back, well, there are circumstances that trump personal feelings.”
“The circumstances,” she said, “being a war. Where the Army was going to go kill all those people you’ve been mistaken for. And you get to watch.”
I rolled my eyes, though I was angrier than I let on. So I took the hookah and smoked for a while in silence. The benefit of hookah is that those moments aren’t dead space. You can blow smoke rings. You can perform and not say anything. You can think.
She didn’t seem to realize how this conversation was different from class, where we bullshitted over political theory. This mattered. And every time she contradicted me with her smug little assumptions about who I was and why I did what I’d done, it grated. It made me want to shut my mouth and hate her. Hate her for her ignorance when she was wrong, and hate her for her arrogance when she was right. But if you’re going to be understood, you have to keep talking. And that was the mission. Make her understand me.
“When I graduated from basic,” I said, “my father was prouder of me than he’d ever been. By this point, he was listening to Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Hannity nonstop, and my mother had a standing rule that he wasn’t allowed to talk politics in the house. Afghanistan, back then, felt like it’d been a complete success, and Bush was making the case for Iraq.”
Zara said, “I remember.” I put down the pipe and she picked it up.
“I’d been at Fort Benning,” I said, “getting the shit beat out of me. It’d been hot and awful and I’d been screamed at and PT’d half to death. I hadn’t seen my dad in months. But images of Saddam were everywhere. TV. Newspapers.” I took a breath. “And then there he was. The same face. The same build. He even walked with that cocky fucking strut. And there was that mustache.”
“So you saw him,” she said.
“And I saw Saddam.” I took a breath. “I mean, my dad, too. But everybody, my platoon, the DIs, they all knew what he looked like.”
Zara blew smoke. “You saw him through their eyes.”
“Through my own.”
“But how they saw him,” she said. “Maybe part of how they saw you, too?”
“I wonder if he knew,” I said. “We don’t really talk, but, I wonder. I mean, the man is an asshole. It’s just who he is. But I wonder if deep down, beyond the politics, if the mustache was a giant ‘fuck you.’ Maybe not to America, but to Americans, you know? All those God-fearing assholes who talk Jesus but don’t know that true Christianity is the Coptic Church.”
“My father’s a deacon,” she said. “But he’s not a very good man. It took me a long time to realize that. . . .”
“And I . . . I was there because of him. When he hugged me and told me how proud he was of me—which he didn’t even do at my high school graduation—I took it in. Graduation from basic’s a big deal. All this pageantry. Uniforms and flags and everybody telling everybody over and over how brave we were, how patriotic, and what great Americans we were. You can’t resist hundreds of people feeling proud of you. You can’t. And then my dad, like it was just an offhand comment, he asks me, ‘So, when you signed up, why didn’t you pick infantry?’ and the feeling popped like a bubble.”
“What’d you do?”
“Nothing. I was in the Army now. I went to training. I got care packages from my mom and patriotic e-mails from my dad. He’d send me PowerPoints with pictures of soldiers, or jokes and speeches about ‘the troops’ that talked about them like they shat gold. I was eighteen, I ate it up. But I was also learning how to do propaganda in our classes, and it felt pretty fucking weird.
“We had one instructor,” I said, “who spent a class telling us about all the advertisement that went into us joining the Army and how dumb we were to fall for it. He’d say, ‘I love the Army. But how bullshit are those commercials?’ He was all about getting us to recognize the propaganda in civilian life so we could use the same techniques in war. He’d say, ‘Real life doesn’t fit on bumper stickers, so remember: If you tell too much truth, nobody will believe you.’”
“I don’t think that’s a good way to think about it.”
“Yeah, well, he’s right. In Iraq, we told a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit to the Iraqis. Some of the bullshit worked really well.”
“It’s strange to think of somebody doing that for a living,” she said. “You hear the word propaganda, it makes you think of those World War Two posters. Or Stalinist Russia. Something from another time, before we got sophisticated.”
“Propaganda is sophisticated,” I said. “It’s not just pamphlets and posters. As a PsyOps specialist, as anything in the Army, you’re part of a weapons system. Language is a technology. They trained me to use it to increase my unit’s lethality. After all, the Army’s an organization built around killing people. But you’re not like an infantryman. You can’t think about the enemy as nothing but an enemy. A hajji. A gook. A bad guy needing a bullet. You’ve got to get inside their heads.”
The night had come in force while we talked, and there was a full moon lying low in the sky. The streets were quiet. I felt close to her because she’d listened, and I’d told everything straight, pretty much, with a minimum of artifice. It made me want to go further, but that would require careful packaging.
“You know,” I said, “I lied to you before. A little.”
“How?”
“I did kill people.”
She was very still.
“I didn’t shoot anybody, but I was definitely responsible.”
The two of us let that hang in the air for a while.
“The last person I told this to was my dad,” I said. “It got me kicked out of the house.”
Zara looked down at her hands, folded in front of her, then up at me. She gave a little smile. “Well, I couldn’t get you kicked out of here if I tried.”
“And you sure have,” I said.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t a formal complaint,” she said. “My friends wanted me to make a formal complaint, but all I wanted was for you to have to listen. You’re not very good at that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Truly.”
She shrugged. “Tell your story.”
“I was in the Battle of Fallujah,” I said. “We did a lot of crazy stuff there. We’d play shit just to fuck with the muj. Real loud Eminem and AC/DC and Metallica. Especially when they’d try to coordinate over their own loudspeakers. We’d play shit to drown them out, hurt their command and control. Sometimes we’d roll up to a position and play the Predator chuckle. You ever see that movie?”
“No.”
“It’s this deep, creepy, evil laugh. Even the Marines didn’t like it. We’d have something going on all the time. And the muj would play shit, too. Prayers and songs. There was one that cracked me up. It was like, ‘We fight under the slogan Allahu Akbar. We have a date with death, and we’re going to get our heads chopped off.’”
“Very poetic,” she said.
“It was horrible. There was gunfire and explosions and the mosques blaring messages and Arabic music and we were blaring Drowning Pool and Eminem. The Marines started calling it Lalafallujah. A music festival from hell.”
“In a city,” she said, “filled with people.”
“But it wasn’t just music,” I said. “The Marines, they’d compete to find the dirtiest insults they could think of. And then we’d go scream over the loudspeakers, taunting holed-up insurgents until they’d come running out of the mosques, all mad, and we’d mow them down.”
“Out of the mosques?” she said.
“You’re in this crazy city, death everywhere, and you see a lieutenant go to his men, as if it was the most serious thing in the world, and ask, ‘Do we go with, “You suck your mothers’ cocks,” or, “You fuck dogs and eat the shit of children”?’”
“Really? Out of the mosques?” she said again.
“Sure,” I said. “What? Are
you kidding me?”
She shook her head. “So how did you kill people?” she said.
“The insults,” I said. “And of everything we did, that got the most satisfying feedback. I mean, the muj would charge and we’d listen as the Marines mowed them down. Sergeant Hernandez called it ‘Jedi mind trick shit.’”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s brilliant,” I said.
“Unless your average schoolyard bully is brilliant,” she said, “it’s not. But I get why it worked.”
“Worked almost too well. We spent the next couple months trying to get the same fucks we’d riled up to stop charging because a lot of them were just teenagers. Marines don’t like killing children. It fucks them up in the head.”
“What’d it do to you?” she said.
“I feel good about what I’ve done,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “Or why are you telling these stories?”
“What are you?” I said, grinning. “My therapist?”
“Maybe,” she said. “That’s how this feels.”
“Fucking with insurgents saved lives at Fallujah. And then I probably saved lives afterwards, telling the truth about what would happen if you fucked with us.”
“So is that what got you kicked out of your father’s house? Saving lives?”
“No. Not saving lives.” I stopped, then started again. “It was over Laith al-Tawhid. If there’s one guy I killed, that’s the guy.”
Zara didn’t say anything. I picked up the hookah and pulled on it and got nothing. The coals were dead. I felt nervous, even though she’d been good to me. Patient. But if I kept going and told her the story, I didn’t know if she’d understand. Or rather, I didn’t know if she’d understand it the way I did, which is what I really wanted. Not to share something, but to unload it.
“When I got back,” I said, “there was no big ceremony. If you’re not part of a battalion, you come back on a plane with other cats and dogs, soldiers from different shops. I did my redeployment stuff, and then I went home.”