by Klay, Phil
I looked down at my hands, then back up at Zara. I didn’t know how to tell her what coming home meant. The weird thing with being a veteran, at least for me, is that you do feel better than most people. You risked your life for something bigger than yourself. How many people can say that? You chose to serve. Maybe you didn’t understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn’t matter. You held up your hand and said, “I’m willing to die for these worthless civilians.”
At the same time, though, you feel somehow less. What happened, what I was a part of, maybe it was the right thing. We were fighting very bad people. But it was an ugly thing.
“When I’d left for the Army,” I said, “the living room had just three paintings on the wall—two icons, and one Matisse print of fish in a bowl. They’re my mother’s. Now alongside them there’s a framed American flag, and one of those 9/11 medallions that supposedly had steel from the World Trade Center but later turned out to be a scam. It was home, but . . .”
“You didn’t belong there anymore?” said Zara.
“Maybe not,” I said, “I don’t know. My dad was standing there in a suit. My mom had a little cross hanging from her neck. She got more religious when I went over. She prayed every day. And she told me if I wanted, she’d make me some kosheri, this lentil-tomato dish I love. And she put her hand on my back and started rubbing my shoulders, and I felt if I didn’t do something, I’d start crying.”
I kept my eyes on my hands, telling Zara the story. Looking at her would be too much, though maybe I could have let her see how I was feeling. Maybe she’d have pitied me. It wouldn’t have been entirely manipulative. I felt sad and lost. Somehow it felt the same as that day in my parents’ house, with my mom rubbing my shoulders and me thinking about what I’d been through and how much I would never tell her because it would only break her heart.
“But my dad,” I said, “he wouldn’t have it. ‘The boy’s back from war,’ he told my mom, ‘we should take him out for a real American meal. Outback Steakhouse!’ He thought that was a real funny joke. I didn’t know how to take it. Serious Copts are supposed to eat vegetarian about two hundred days out of the year—no food with a soul—and it was close to Christmas. But my mom didn’t say anything and so we went. My dad ordered a steak to show me it’d be all right. My mom and I had salads.
“We got through dinner with small talk, but when we got home my mom went off to work—she’s a nurse—and that left me and my dad alone. He sat me down in the living room and said he’d make me coffee. Then he handed me a few sheets of paper with a rubber band around them. He said, ‘I sent an e-mail out to the guys in the office, and they all wanted to thank you.’ He looked so happy and proud. It didn’t feel like basic. I wasn’t a disappointment. I’d been to war. And I’d missed him.”
I looked up at Zara and her eyes met mine. The darkness gave her a softer look than she had in the daytime.
“The paper,” I said, “it was printouts of e-mails from his Muslim friends at work.”
“He had Muslim friends?” she said.
“Colleagues,” I said. “Some friends. Sort of. He’d say he was keeping an eye on them. That was his joke. He works for a company that does translation services, mostly for NGOs and government agencies, and he’s in the Arabic department. So there’s a lot of Muslims. And they wrote me letters. Mostly short e-mails like, ‘Good job, thank you for your service,’ or, ‘Whether this war is right or wrong, you have done an honorable thing.’ But some were more involved. One talked about how the war was terrible, but he hoped having a ‘sensitive young man’ like me over there would make the suffering less.”
“A sensitive young man?” she said. I saw a hint of a smile.
“I’ve changed,” I said. “Another was from a guy who’d been in the Yemeni civil war. He told me, ‘Whatever you go through, it is the responsibility of those who sent you.’ And a bunch of the other e-mails were real pro-war.”
“I guess there was a lot of anger among American Muslims toward Saddam.”
“Well, one was so pro-war not even my father could have written it. That guy told me I was going to write a new chapter in history. My dad underlined the sentence.”
“And what’d you think,” she said, “when you saw that?”
“It made me angry,” I said.
My voice was soft, speaking to Zara. It was as though I were saying loving words.
“I didn’t tell him exactly what I told you,” I said. “I wanted to hurt him. I was angry. I’d gotten a lot of Thank You For Your Service handshakes, but nobody really knew what that service meant, you know?”
“You’re angry with your father because people thanked you for your service?” she said. “Or is he why you’re angry with those people?”
“He’s a part of it,” I said. “That sentiment.”
“So should I thank vets for their service?” she said. “Or spit on them, like Vietnam?”
I thought for a moment and then gave her a crooked smile. “I reserve the right to be angry at you whatever you do.”
“Why?”
“It’s all phony,” I said. “When the war started, almost three hundred congressmen voted for it. And seventy-seven senators. But now, everybody’s washed their hands of it.”
“There was bad information,” Zara said. “You know, ‘Bush lied, people died.’”
“Oh, my God!” I clapped my hands to my cheeks and put on a shocked face. “A politician lied! Then it’s not your fault!”
“You used to kill people with playground insults,” Zara said, “and you think it doesn’t matter what the president says? Or here’s a better question. Did you believe it? Did you support the war?”
“I still support the war,” I said. “Just not the guy who ran it.”
“Is that what you told your dad that made him so angry?”
“No.” I hunched over, with my elbows resting on my knees. “No. He knew the war was poorly run. He’s a smart guy.”
I considered how I could frame what I was going to tell her.
“This is not the sort of thing you’ll like,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing my father could deal with.”
“I’m not fragile,” she said.
“Now you’ve got to understand,” I said. “In my family, I wasn’t even allowed to curse.”
I paused. After a second, Zara reached over and took my hand, and I let her. She shouldn’t have done that. It made me want to stop. It made me want to say something cruel, to let her know that what I’d been through had made me stronger, not weaker. From down the street I heard laughter. Frat kids from Psi U, maybe. Drunk, maybe, or just walking over to get a calzone at Bruno’s.
“I guess your dad wasn’t too big on you using dirty words to kill terrorists,” Zara said.
Her hand pressed into mine. “My dad thought the idea of the insults was funny,” I said. “He thought it was brilliant. Tribal culture is honor and shame. Like the rural South. Or inner-city America. But eventually we played that trick too much. We’d shouted too many insults, killed all the insurgents dumb enough to fall for it. And I’m telling this to my dad in our living room in their house in Virginia. It’s not the house I grew up in. They’d moved to a cheaper area once I was out of high school, and we’re in this tiny little room with an icon of Saint Moses the Black, who was a thief and a slave, and Saint Mary of Egypt, who was a prostitute, and Matisse’s stupid fish and that goddamn flag and the fake 9/11 steel coin. And he’s leaning forward, he’s listening. It’s the first man-to-man we’ve ever had.”
“And it’s about war,” she said. “That’s what gets him to listen.”
“So I tell him how there’s this one area where intel knows who the enemy is. This little band of Islamists called the al-Tawhid Martyrs Brigade. And my dad’s like, ‘Okay. Al-Qaeda.’ And I’m like, ‘No. Just desert fuckers w
ho didn’t like having Americans roaming around in their country.’ It was the first time I’d cursed in front of my dad.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing. He just said, ‘Okay. So basically al-Qaeda.’ I wanted to smack him.” I took a breath. “Anyway, we knew the name of these guys’ leader. Laith al-Tawhid. Intel had him on the BOLO list and so I had his name.”
I squeezed Zara’s hand, hard. “I had his name,” I said. “In all the confusion, I could call him by name. I could talk to him and he would know it. And so would all his men.”
“That gave you an advantage.”
“Yes,” I said. “And I had a plan. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t start with a SPC, but they trusted me. They thought I had the magic knowledge, because, you know, I’m an Arab Muslim.”
Zara was leaning forward, the same posture as my father. Her eyes were on me now.
“Now, Laith al-Tawhid was no idiot. He was fundamentalist, not dumb. He wasn’t going to come running because I called him names. But I knew how to get him. Women.”
“Women?”
“His women were at home,” I said. “Outside of Fallujah. And the old-school guys, guys like Laith al-Tawhid, they treat women like dogs. Like dogs who can destroy all your family’s honor if they act up or show an ounce of free will.”
She nodded.
“There was a Marine company holding an office building in front of Laith’s position,” I said. “I told the Marines what we wanted to do and they loved it.”
“What did you say?”
“Laith al-Tawhid, we have your women,” I said, “your wife and your daughters.”
She frowned. “So he had to come and fight you,” she said.
“I told him we found them whoring themselves out to American soldiers, and we were bringing them to the office building.”
She nodded. “You told this to your father.”
“I told him everything. How I screamed out, in the Iraqi Arabic I’d learned in my private time, that we’d fuck his daughters on the roof and put their mouths to the loudspeaker so he could hear their screams.”
Zara pulled back her hand. I’d expected that. “So that’s how you fought,” she said. There was a touch of contempt in her voice, and I smiled. I’m not sure why, I wasn’t happy.
“I didn’t send it up the flagpole. But the platoon loved it. I stayed on those speakers for an hour. Telling him how when his daughters bent down to pray, we’d put our shoes on their heads and rape them in the ass. Rub our foreskins on their faces. A thousand dicks in your religion, I told him, and in forty minutes, a thousand American dicks in your daughters.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said.
“Everybody laughed as we came up with what we’d tell them. All the Marines had suggestions, but I turned them down. Americans think the best insults are all ‘cunt’ and ‘pussy,’ but in Arabic it’s all ‘shoes’ and ‘foreskins’ and ‘putting a dick in your mother’s rib cage.’”
“I get the idea,” she said.
“Well, this worked,” I said. “They didn’t charge out of the mosques like idiots, but they still assaulted, and they got mowed down.”
“I don’t care if it worked.”
“I mean, all this guy’s men were hearing him being disrespected. Humiliated. For an hour. This was a violent time. There were a hundred little insurgent groups, a hundred little local chiefs trying to grab power. And I was shaming him in front of everybody. I told him, ‘You think fighting us will win you honor, but we have your daughters. You’ve fucked with us, so you’ve fucked your children. There is no honor.’ He didn’t have a choice. And I never saw him die. I never saw him at all. I just heard the Marines shooting him down. They told me he led his little suicide charge.”
“I get it,” she said.
“But you don’t like it,” I said. “My dad didn’t either. He’d rather I shot them in the face. In his mind, that’s so much nicer. So much more honorable. He’d have been proud of me, if I’d done that. You’d like me better, too.”
“I’d rather you hadn’t done anything,” she said.
“And I told my father everything. Insult by insult. What I said. All the things I’d learned in America, all the things I’d learned from him, all the things that’d been said to me, all the things I could think of, and I could think of a lot.”
“I get it,” she said again, this time in the same tone of voice that my father had used when I told him and he’d said, “Enough.” But with my father I’d kept going, described every sexual act, every foul Arabic word. I’d cursed for him and at him in English, in Egyptian, in Iraqi, in MSA, in Koranic Arabic, in Bedouin slang, and he’d said, “Enough, enough,” his voice shaking with rage and then terror, because I was standing over him, shouting insults in his face, and he couldn’t see his son any more than I—standing over him and letting my rage wash out—could see my father.
“You think I’m ashamed of it?” I said to Zara, and I saw my father, heard the words he couldn’t even get out of his mouth because the shock of it was too much. His hands had trembled, his eyes were downcast. There was gray in his mustache. He looked old. Beaten. I’d never seen him that way before.
Zara asked, “What happened to his daughters?”
I didn’t know.
“When I think about killing that man,” I said, “I think of that kid with the heat fading out.”
I slumped down into the couch. We were quiet again. I thought about firing up more coals but I lacked the energy. After cursing my father I’d spent the night in a Motel 6, where my mother found me and brought me home. My father and I didn’t talk for the rest of my leave.
“Okay,” Zara said. She paused, looked out at the street. “So . . . what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to forgive you?”
“Forgive me?” I said. “How? For what?”
“And even if I did,” she said, “would it matter? Because I’m Muslim? You think that matters to the kid you watched die?”
I smiled at her. How far from the point, I thought, was that kid’s death. It was at best the point of somebody else’s story, though I guess Zara knew that.
“I tell vets the scope story,” I said. “They usually laugh.”
Zara stood up slowly, anger lighting her face. I didn’t move from my seat. I looked up at her and waited for a response. Even covered up, her body was still lovely under her clothes. I kept smiling, enjoying her in front of me and enjoying the superiority I knew I’d feel when her outburst came. No one can really cut you when they’re angry. It clouds their mind too much. Better to be like me in Fallujah, lying through your teeth and shouting hateful things with calm intelligence, every word calibrated for maximum harm.
But Zara’s outburst didn’t come. She just stood there. And then some emotion I couldn’t identify moved through her, and she didn’t seem angry anymore. She stepped back and looked at me, considering. She reached up and adjusted her shawl.
“Okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay.”
For the first time since that morning, walking into the Special Assistant’s office and seeing her there, I was the unsettled one. She wasn’t playing any of the moves I’d envisioned for her.
“What do you mean?” I said.
She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder, her touch light and warm. Even though her face was calm, my heart was beating and I looked up at her as though she were passing down a sentence. There was an unearthly quality to her then.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you can talk about it.” Then she walked down the steps of the porch and stopped at the bottom. Behind her were the elm trees and the shoddy clapboard houses of South Whitney Street, housing for the off-campus frats and the few Amherst students who didn’t live in dorms. She didn’t quite belong here, I thought, and neither did I.
Zara stood in the yard, not mov
ing. After a moment, she turned back and looked up the stairs to where I was still sitting by the hookah.
“Maybe we’ll talk another time,” she said. Then she gave a slight wave with her hand, turned, and walked back to campus.
WAR STORIES
“I’m tired of telling war stories,” I say, not so much to Jenks as to the empty bar behind him. We’re at a table in the corner, with a view of the entrance.
Jenks shrugs and makes a face. Hard to tell what it means. There’s so much scar tissue and wrinkled skin, I never know if he’s happy or sad or pissed or what. He’s got no hair and no ears either, so even though it’s been three years after he got hit, I still feel like his head is something I shouldn’t stare at. But you look a man in the eye when you talk to him, so for Jenks I force my eyes in line with his.
“I don’t tell war stories,” he says, and takes a sip of his glass of water.
“Well, you’re gonna have to when Jessie and Sarah get here.”
He gives a nervous laugh and points to his face. “What’s to say?”
I take a sip of my beer and look him up and down. “Not a lot.”
Jenks’s story is pretty obvious, and that’s another weird thing because Jenks used to be me, basically. We’re the same height, grew up in the same kind of shitty suburban towns, joined the Marine Corps at the same time, and had the same plan to move to New York when we got out. Everybody always said we could be brothers. Now, looking at him is like looking at what I would have been if my vehicle had hit that pressure plate. He’s me, but less lucky.
Jenks sighs and sits back in his chair. “At least for you, it gets you laid,” he says.
“What does?”
“Telling war stories.”
“Sure.” I take a sip of beer. “I don’t know. Depends.”
“On what?”
“Circumstances.”
Jenks nods. “Remember that little reunion we had with all the ESB guys?”
“Hell, yeah,” I say. “Way we were talking, you would have thought we were some Delta Force, Jedi ninja motherfuckers.”