Just Another Soldier

by Jason Christopher Hartley

  The professors were never openly critical of our country’s leaders, and the students would discuss the regime only in private, with close friends. We were all proud to be Iraqis, we also had no illusions about the impending invasion. Most of us wanted to be with our families, and in many cases this meant leaving Baghdad. Although it went unspoken, we all knew the professors and administrators were of the same mind. The day we were first told of the truncated semester, it was not a surprise, nor was it discussed at school. The professors soberly delivered the message at the beginning of morning classes then continued on with their lessons.

  Every evening after classes, my brother Abdullah and I would meet in the dorm room shared by our two friends, brothers Barak and Kaliq. Normally we would show up at different times and drink tea for an hour or longer while we conversed casually about our day. But when the announcement for the shortened semester was made, we all showed up for tea at almost the exact same time. Unable to talk openly about it in school, we were eager to discuss what our plans were going to be. It was something we had been talking about for several weeks already, but this was the catalyst that finally made it all seem real.

  “Kaliq and I are going to return to Baqubah the day we finish our exams,” Barak told us while Kaliq began making the tea. “Our mother will need the help, and we want to be with our sisters.” Their mother was a grocer, and it was her money that paid for them to attend the university. Their father had been in the army and was killed when the Americans attacked the first time, in 1991. He was a tank commander and died doing what he considered defending his country. Barak and Kaliq understood why the Americans had attacked, but they never forgave them for their father’s death.

  Abdullah and I grew up in the Salah ad Din province north of Baghdad. Our mother and her sisters lived in a small village outside the town of Ad Dujayl. When our parents had first married they lived in Dujayl, where their three sons—me, Abdullah, and Dawud—were born. In 1982 an assassination attempt was made against Saddam when he drove by our town. Dujayl is a mostly Shia town, and there was no love lost on Saddam and his Baathists, but there had been no talk of anyone planning an attack. The assassination was unsuccessful, but the repercussions were brutal. Farms were razed and plowed under with salt, making them unfit for crops. Anyone thought to be involved with the plot was put in jail. More than a hundred men were slaughtered by death squads sent into town by the regime, more than a thousand people were held without charge for sometimes as long as four years, and countless women were brutalized, raped, and sometimes even mutilated in front of their children. Our father, a barber and dentist, was a popular man and well known by many of the people in town. Assuming he would know better than anyone the gossip of town, the death squads killed him in his shop. When our mother heard of our father’s death, she did not shed a single tear. She immediately packed some clothes for me and my brothers, and we left for her sister’s small farm home in a village several miles to the south. I was five years old.

  Our mother was indescribably stolid and self-reliant. I never once saw her mourn in front of us, but there were nights when my brothers and I could hear her quietly sobbing, usually on occasions like our father’s birthday or on their anniversary.

  Our mother remarried in less than a year to a kind but quiet man who owned several acres of vineyard. He lived in the same village as our aunt and had never been married. He was born with a club foot, which seldom put him in favor with any of the fathers whose daughters he tried to court as a younger man. He was in his late forties when he married our mother. His two nephews, Essam and Ferran, lived with him on his vineyard along with their wives and children.

  My brothers and I grew up walking to a small school several miles from our home during the day and helping with the vineyard and animals when we came home in the afternoon. We had become quite attached to our stepfather, and we begged our mother to not make us go to school, but to let us spend more time at home and with him in the vineyards, the same as all our friends. Our mother would become furious anytime we asked her this. She told us it was her wish and the wish of our deceased father that someday we attend the university in Baghdad. Despite the beatings that would accompany this speech, we still would ask her permission to quit school at least every two months.

  After being married two years, our mother and stepfather had a baby girl. She was named Amirah. As Amirah grew up, she quickly proved to be as stubborn and precocious as her mother. My brothers and I doted on her and defended her jealously from other boys in the village.

  To the east there was a vineyard that bordered ours where a family lived who had a girl Amirah’s age, named Zia. Zia and Amirah first met before they could even talk, but they took to each other immediately. Sometimes Zia’s mother would visit our mother, and the two of them would play while the mothers talked. Anytime the two were separated they would both cry incessantly. As the two got older this never changed, so each mother eventually decided to take turns watching the other’s daughter, usually for days at a time. Zia became as much a part of our family as Amirah became a part of theirs.

  For years our family stayed at a pleasant status quo. Our stepfather struggled at times with the vineyard and to provide for our family, but with the support of the other families in the village we got along well enough.

  As my brothers and I got older, we were able to do more work in the vineyard. Then our stepfather’s health began to deteriorate, and we helped keep the family financially afloat by working harder. Sometimes I think my mother was jealous of the loyalty we had for our stepfather and would tell us anytime we suggested quitting school that it was too much manual labor that made a man get a club foot. It wasn’t until we were nearly adults that we learned you couldn’t “catch” a club foot from working too much.

  When we were in our teens, I noticed that an affinity had developed between Abdullah and Zia. I didn’t notice the bond they shared for a long time and mistook his concern for her as the protectiveness we always exhibited for Amirah and Zia. But it was one afternoon when a group of boys on bicycles had ridden by teasing Zia that Abdullah yelled at the boys, as we always would, then mildly scolded Zia for attracting too much attention to herself. I saw him touch her hand slightly. It wasn’t anything inappropriate or really that unusual, it was just the way he did it that struck me. There was an affection to the way he looked at her now and a certain tenderness in the way he touched her. And instead of the usual scowl the girls would give us when we told them to avoid the boys, there was a demure look on Zia’s face and the slightest of smiles. I was unable to acknowledge it to myself that day, something I recorded to memory then promptly put out of my mind. Zia, by all accounts, had become our sister, and I rarely thought of the fact that we were not at all related to her.

  In 1990, soldiers from the Iraq army came to our village looking for conscripts. At thirteen and fourteen, Abdullah and I were considered too young. But Dawud was sixteen and old enough to serve. A week later he was put on a truck bound for a base in southern Iraq. We never saw him again. He was killed a year later by the Americans, part of a fleeing convoy of vehicles on the highway south of Baghdad. We learned of his death a month later from a friend of his who served with him who had survived the attack. Dawud died the day before his seventeenth birthday.

  Once we were old enough, Abdullah and I started going to a secondary school in Taji, a town twenty miles south of our village. For years our mother had searched for other mothers who had similar intentions to educate their sons. By the time we were old enough to attend, she found two other families who were willing to share the cost of a car to drive us to school each day. This arrangement was very unusual for people who lived in our area. Our mother put up with a lot of mockery from the women in other families. She was accused of being a harlot, a thief, and an Iranian, among other jealous epithets. But her determination to educate her two remaining sons was unflagging.

  In the vineyards it was common to have small shelters where seasonal workers would s
leep. These shelters also were a place to keep tools, wheelbarrows, and other common items used in the vineyards. Since both Zia and Abdullah spent a lot of time working in their respective family’s vineyard, these sheds became a common meeting place for them as their relationship grew more intense. Zia was the second youngest daughter of thirteen. The sisters who were too young to be married lived at home, and most who were married lived with their husbands in homes nearby. Zia’s family’s vineyard was larger than my family’s, and all the women continued to work in it. The men of their family all had jobs away from their homes, and the vineyard was run exclusively by the women. Abdullah would work on our family’s property every day, but would find time to visit Zia in secret at least once a week. There was no way this would have gone unnoticed by Zia’s sisters. I had to conclude that the sisters were actually protecting the clandestine affair.

  In Zia’s family all marriages were arranged, and it was no secret between our families that Zia’s sisters hated this tradition. Those who were married tolerated it, and those who weren’t yet married resisted it. Their father was well respected because of his extensive property, and he openly told anyone who would listen that he felt it his pious duty to adhere to the tradition of arranged marriages.

  The week before I was to graduate from secondary school, Zia’s father introduced her to the man she would marry. He was in his forties and already had five wives and twenty-three children, many older than she. He was a very wealthy man who owned several homes and properties in the Salah ad Din province. Zia was introduced to him just before the family sat down for their evening meal. After the meal, Zia’s father allowed the husband-to-be to spend a short period of time alone with her in one of the rooms of the house. Again, this was not an official tradition but something that was common in the area to let the soon-to-be husband become acquainted with his next wife.

  For years Abdullah didn’t tell me what happened that night. All anyone knew was that the “meeting” had gone very poorly and the marriage was called off. The wealthy man never showed his face in our village again, and Zia’s father did not arrange another marriage for his youngest daughter. For years, I prodded Abdullah to tell me what had happened, but he always told me he didn’t know. Finally, just this year, when Abdullah started school at the university with me, he told me that apparently the man had wanted Zia to use her mouth for something other than talking, and she bit him badly. The potential humiliation for the man over what he’d done and for Zia’s father for allowing it to happen in his home was tremendous. Zia made a deal with her father that she would never speak of the incident so long as he never again spoke a word to her of any arranged marriages.

  After I graduated secondary school, I moved to Baghdad. Our family’s money had gotten me to that point but would never be enough to pay for a university education. Once I had been in Baghdad for a year, Abdullah graduated from school and moved into my apartment with me. The first and only time we ever discussed Zia was when he first moved in and I asked him what he intended to do about his relationship with her. He didn’t seem shocked that I knew and he answered without hesitating, “I want her to be proud and I want her to live well. We have agreed to marry once I have graduated from the university.”

  I never brought the subject up again. We went to classes during the day, studied at night, and about once a month we would borrow a car for the weekend and drive home to see our mother. Zia’s sisters, forever the protectors of the secret, made sure she was able to spend time in private with my brother when we came to visit.

  Although Abdullah and I lived together, the friends we spent time with began to diverge over the years. There were times he would bring friends to our apartment who would express religious and political views that were very anti-West.

  When we left the university and moved back in with our mother, Abdullah began spending a lot of time at the Al Sadr office in Dujayl. He had made a lot of friends who were associated with members of the Mahdi Army, who sometimes spent time at the office. I spent most of my time at home, helping my mother with the vineyard. Our stepfather had died a year earlier, and his nephew Essam, with help from my uncle, kept the farm and vineyard going.

  After the invasion, things were very chaotic. Two of Zia’s sisters were killed in separate incidents, one in a crossfire and the other after her vehicle was mistaken for enemy by Americans. This only gave further fuel to the fundamentalism Abdullah was embracing. While in Baghdad, the two of us wore typical Western clothes, usually jeans and T-shirts, but now that we were back home Abdullah was dressing in traditional garb again.

  One night after the evening meal with our family, Abdullah told me that Zia’s father was becoming suspicious and that her youngest sister was threatening to tell him about the relationship if she didn’t end it. Her youngest sister was blind in one eye from when a dog bit her as a toddler and she was jealous of the attention her sisters gave Zia. Abdullah’s anxiety was noticeable when he told me this. He also confided in me that he had been having doubts for quite some time with regard to his religious and political beliefs. He then told me of his plan.

  The Madhi Army would give anyone a thousand U.S. dollars who killed an American soldier. The American Army was also offering a thousand dollars for information that would lead to the arrest of any leaders of the Mahdi Army. Abdullah’s plan was to put a bomb on the side of the road and if he was able to successfully kill an American, he would take it as a sign from Allah that his convictions were true. If it failed, he would tell the Americans what he knew about the Mahdi army. He said that, either way, he would take the money and use it to marry Zia and move back to Baghdad. I tried to explain to him that his plan was ludicrous, but he refused to listen to anything I told him. His desperation was apparent. He told me he had already arranged a day for the attack with a friend of his, and he begged me to be with him. I knew my brother needed someone with him he could trust, so I agreed. I had no intention of hurting anyone and I most certainly would not let him go to the Americans, so I decided to help him because I knew once his attack failed—I knew he had no desire to kill anyone—he could abandon his fundamentalism.

  When the day came for the attack, I met Abdullah’s friend, but never learned his name. He was shorter than the two of us and was young, but had a full, dark beard. He had a tendency to stare at me when he spoke, his brow furrowed, and he spat out his words with conviction. He had with him the materials to make a pipe bomb. He explained to us how to make the bomb, how to set it, and how to explode it. We were told that the Iraqi National Guard would be setting up a roadblock on the highway nearby. There would be an ING soldier standing next to a small hole that would already have been dug. Abdullah was to start a conversation with the soldier and drop the pipe bomb in the hole. Then, later tonight, two men would meet us outside the gate of our property with further instructions. Abdullah listened intently. After his friend was done giving us the instructions, we told him goodbye, and we took the materials to the shelter in our vineyard and got to work.

  As we worked on the bomb, I realized I had no idea how to assemble it properly. Abdullah told me he had been told that it was important that he be the one who actually assembled it. While we were talking, our uncle came to the shelter. I quickly tried to hide the materials, but Abdullah told me it was okay, he had told our uncle everything. Before I had a chance to be furious with him, our uncle greeted us. He told me to give him the materials for the bomb. Abdullah handed them to him and our uncle looked them over. He then handed them back to Abdullah and explained what to do.

  An hour after nightfall, the ING set up a roadblock on the highway near our home, just as we had been told. Abdullah took the bomb with him to the intersection and dropped it in the hole next to the soldier, just as he had been told. Everything was going well so far.

  For several hours Abdullah and I tried to stay busy around the house, always keeping the gate in sight. Our uncle kept us busy with tasks and he also kept an eye on the gate with us. After all the wome
n and children had been put to bed, we locked the chain around the front gate and went out to the road through a side gate through the vineyard.

  For two hours we waited at the gate, talking with my uncle while he smoked. He told me stories I had never heard. How he was once part of the outlawed Dawa party in Dujayl and about all their failed efforts to muster support against Saddam’s regime. I dared not ask him if he was in any way involved with the assassination attempt on Saddam, but I had to assume that he at least knew about it.

  When the two men showed up, one of them was carrying an AK-47 and the other had an RPG. I was used to seeing assault rifles—almost every home in the area had an AK-47—but this was the first time I had seen a rocket. It made me very nervous. The demeanor of the men was stern and cold.

  The two men explained that a wire had been attached to the bomb Abdullah had placed and it ran to a grove of trees that they would lead him to, several hundred meters from the highway. Abdullah was to wait in the grove of trees until the next American convoy came down the highway and explode the bomb somewhere in the middle of the convoy. The two men would be a few hundred meters farther up the road and would fire their rocket at the nearest vehicle once the convoy had stopped.

  My uncle chuckled. He said, “You may be too late. You may not have noticed, but there hasn’t been any traffic on the highway for some time. The Americans may have already found your bomb.” He was right. The highway was a good distance from us, but I hadn’t heard any vehicles for at least the last half hour. The two men cursed. One of them tried to blame Abdullah. He then put a flashlight in Abdullah’s hand and told him to walk up the trail closer to the highway to see if the Americans had found the bomb.