War Flower

by Brooke King

  Part 3

  Somewhere in a Desert

  Now Entering Starvation

  On June 10, 2007, in the neighborhood of Fajr in Baghdad, Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers found twenty-four naked and abused boys, ages three to fifteen years old, in an orphanage, chained up in several dark, windowless rooms. A locked room fully stocked with food and clothing was found nearby.

  Six Hours without Food

  The paste of stale oatmeal mixed with dirt-brown water clings to his bones. The glucose giving him enough energy to sit upright after another night of restless sleep. Nassir’s dazed eyes from the dimly lit room do not reveal to him that his captors, the men who run this place, are walking in to strip him of his clothes. The chains dangle from their hands, the jagged unhinged smile of anticipation clings to the men’s cheeks before the children are beaten and shackled to the empty metal cribs. Naked and unsure, the other seven boys in the room look at each other but cannot translate the anger of their religion that slaps contempt for their existence across their backs as their food bowl drops from their hands and splatters the oatmeal mush onto the concrete floor. There will be no more bed. No more food. No more clothes to comfort their frames from the cold and damp of the room they are chained in. Nassir does not recognize the harsh taste of his tongue as it breaks open after the seventh hour. He begins to cry from hunger. The dull twinge in his stomach confirms that the door slammed shut will not open again for some time, his future translated into a language that only the ticking of time past can decipher.

  The children do not ask when the food will come when a shadow crosses from underneath the doorway. Or cry out that they are hungry. They sob. Close their eyes. Remember the sound that jasmine wheat rolls make when the spine of the loaf is cracked open. The smell of saffron cutting the air that wrinkled the nose. Or the feel of holding the leg of their mother as she dressed the lamb for dinner. The boys do not ask after six hours when the sunlight drips into the horizon, the hallway light glinting under the metal door, offering the only hope that they will be set free. The boys, chained to cribs, are left, abandoned, forsaken.

  Twenty-Four Hours without Food

  Try holding food in your mouth for as long as possible, savoring every granulated piece, the mushy texture resting on your soft pallet, the half-cooked oats squeezed between your teeth, stored for just one more hour before your will to satiate your stomach threatens your tongue, urging it to swallow what little life you have left buried in your cheeks. Imagine ketosis taking over, the depleting of your body. What little fat left gradually disappearing. Your intestines moving the food out of your body too quickly for your bloodstream to absorb it as you lie on a cold slab of stone. Imagine defecating close to your body to keep warm that night. The slow malformation of your stomach. Men’s voices laughing through the peephole in the door when you slam into the metal crib and piss yourself because you have lost the strength to urinate away from where you sleep. Imagine slowly forgetting the definition for the word freedom.

  Seventy-Two Hours without Food

  Your muscles are wasting away. Your cheeks are sunken. The door opens for the first time in days. Then men come in. Yell. Hit you with the metal buckle of their belt. Butt the cribs up against the walls, dragging you behind it, the chain cutting into your skin.

  A woman walks by with a ripped-up, gold-sequined dress, fresh bruise in her eye socket, blood crisping the outside layer of her lips, the ghost of a woman made into a whore, a vessel for another child due to makes its way into this room. The brothel operates at a steady pace, the children raised for torture in the next room, the building breeding darkness, the forgotten remnants of what the war has done to this city. Nassir thinks of his mother, her offering to a suicide vest, of his father, now insane, who gave the men money to have Nassir taken away. Here, surrounded by his peers, Nassir rubs the faded chalk drawing he made of his mother the night he came to this place. It is his salvation from the present. The outline of her jaw smudged from his fingers tracing the hair he had quickly drawn on before his memory forgot how one suborned strand of hair always came loose from her hijab. He sleeps with her every night. His frail body hugging every line. Maybe tomorrow. Freedom.

  One Week without Food

  This room. This dying chamber. It’s an abyss of hate for these boys. It hasn’t decided whether to kill them yet. The men are too occupied with their new toy, a fourteen-year-old girl they ripped from the streets before she could make it to school, her fate as uncertain in this building as the boys’. But this room invites Death to visit. It creeps along the ceiling edges, swings from the shadows, spitting molded, stagnant air around the cribs, the amalgamation of intrigue and wonder. It studies Nassir. He is the most vexing. It is amazed by the skin plunging in between bones, pressing the pigment thin of color, the tipped edges of knees and elbows that jut out, seducing the concrete with the hopes of blood. Sometimes repulsed by the defecation, it moves silently next to him, threading the chill over and under each vertebra as it watches from over his shoulder as Nassir’s eyes close, his body curls, his abdomen distends, and his breathing slows enough for Death to be bored of him again. There are seven more boys that gasp for its attention.

  The End Stage

  There were twenty-four boys discovered in the orphanage—or only a handful, depending on if you believe the lie that the Iraqi health ministry told the world.

  The soldier’s boot scuffed the chalk drawing of Nassir’s mother’s face as he was cradled and lifted up out of his own feces. Outside, the light burned his eyes, but he was too weak to cover them. So the soldier shielded his face.

  Hauled out of the building, the children were placed in white plastic patio chairs. Some naked. Some lucky enough to be clothed. IV bags. Juice boxes. Teddy bears. The lost children of Baghdad, the war’s cargo, counted and loaded into ambulances. Their names were checked off one by one according to their need for medical aid. The worst saved for last.

  Jamail—the charming

  Gabir—the consoler/comforter

  Ammar—the virtuous

  Latif—the gentle/kind

  Yasin—the thoughtful

  Malik—the powerful

  Hazim—the prophetic/wise

  Nassir—the granter of freedom (the essence of war forced him to learn the meaning of his name).

  On Thursday June 21, 2007, Nassir died at Dar al-Hanan orphanage, eleven days after his rescue. He suffered from marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition and energy deficiency, characterized by loss of muscle mass, edema, and stomach bloating.

  Morning

  The sun had barely risen in the east, but the crested lark sat atop concertina wire; its talons gripped between the razor edges. Looking back and forth, it chirped small echoing sounds of the morning. Dew had formed on the windows of the Humvees, the droplets running down in sporadic descent, collecting and forming larger streams like veins scattering inside a body. The crested lark chirped again as I ran past. My pace quickening, my uniform pants rubbing against my inner thigh. My breaths were short, huffing in and out. My boots, hitting the ground hard, scattered the dirt and rocks in my wake. The o-dark-thirty pounding on the door signaled the call to mount up on a recovery mission; the bodies were still warm, the blood not yet browned and coagulated on the ground. There was barely any light, but the streams break through the windshield, reflecting fragmented rays into the cab of the truck. The rifle was light in my hand as I set it next to my seat, but the empty body bags weighed down the backseat. There was no time for goodbyes, no prayer before we left.

  We swung wide through the barrier blockades at the back gate, pushed forward onto the blacktop, the wheels of the HEMTT wrecker grinding the rocks to rubble, the sound of radio checks as we sped past the gun towers. The lark was surely gone by now. The strange and momentary silence of a simple morning broken by an IED blast.

  The hole was big enough that the Humvee’s front end was halfway submerged, its front grille ripped apart like wrapping paper, the sides of metal sticki
ng up like claws curled up and scraping toward the cab of the truck. The engine was exposed, the pistons compressed, sunk into the heart of the compartment; its last breath was the huffing rattle and hiss of oil spewing from a hose that used to connect to the body. The windshield was cracked, splintered from the right side toward the middle, like spider webbing shaken free from a brisk wind. There were no mirrors, only shards of glass that, when looked down at, cast the reflection of horror back at you, the look of shock, repulsion, and hate as you lifted a severed arm that had been cut off at the elbow, a wedding band still attached to the ring finger. It went into the bag.

  This was where the mourning began in Iraq.

  James (#2)

  My head snapped back when he pressed down too hard. The synaptic misfires of my brain reeled as he moved in circular swirls with his padded fingertips. The movements were slow and methodical but still as precise and formulated as the muscle memory recall of clearing a double feed of a rifle jam—cock the pin back, drop the magazine, clear the bullet, slide the bolt forward. My knees bowed out, bent, and released toward the fitted sheet, making room for his wide shoulders as he moved slowly past my hips. A grip on the pillow with my teeth allowed no words to pass from my lips, a stifled moan into the feathers was all he heard before my thighs gripped tight around the nape of his neck, my fingers searching for his high and tight, a place to hold onto that was not bare skin, but rather a handhold for what was about to come. An arch of my back, a shiver, and tighter grip on his head, and he knew that he had released what little tension I had left in my body to give. He moved his way upward and before I could catch my breath and take in the moment, he was finished. We were lying there in the bed, and it was then that I notice how sweaty we were and that even though we were in Iraq, this was a different sort of dying.

  The Only Stars I’ve Seen

  The Paladin tanks of First Cavalry, Eight-Second Field Artillery, had been firing shell rounds for an hour, creating a low-lying fog around the base from the barrel smoke of their guns. Their constant firing echoed like thunder and the flash bangs from their turret barrels reflected off the smoke like lightning. The war-generated storm that had engulfed our base reflecting the mirage of a foreign battleground from history’s past. Atop the back wall of our base, our brigade colors flew true in the slight wind that had picked up. It had made the battle sounds of firing guns less persistent, as the artillery unit battled not only the wind but the incoming barrage of mortar rounds that were starting to land inside our concrete barrier–lined base.

  It had been a few months since my near-death experience with the mortar round, but I still couldn’t sleep; the residual pain in my healing shin and the noise outside kept me awake. I’d climbed to the top of my tin-roofed hooch, and as darkness fell I sat there thinking about what every soldier far from any familiarity would think about—home. I thought back to Kyle and the last night I spent in his pickup, his hand trying to find a space on my leg—how he finally settled on my knee, firmly holding it with his sweaty palm. I remembered wishing that he had found a place for his hand closer than my knee. I thought back about what I could’ve said in the silence of that cab or what I could’ve done, but I knew only a good fuck and an “I love you” would have made him wait for me. I looked out beyond the concrete walls lined with razor-edged concertina wire and realized how stupid I’d been to leave home and come to this hellhole. All I wanted now was Kyle’s loaded “I love you’s” and the warmth of his suggestive hand on my knee.

  The outgoing fire had ceased. The smoke from the barrels was too thick, making vision nearly impossible. From my perch, sitting in the rusted lawn chair I had acquired earlier from the smart-mouthed medic who lived behind me, I watched as the smoke slowly rose into the air. I’d been trying to fall asleep when the outgoing fire started, but I now found myself looking up at the night sky, waiting for the outgoing guns to start up again. It was the only sound of war I looked forward to.

  Whenever the cannon cockers of Eighty-Second Field Artillery began outgoing fire, it was tradition for Tina and me to watch the outgoing shells. The artillery unit had missions only when the sky was completely clear. Normally it was covered with smog, sandstorms, or clouds. Tina and I missed the clear skies of our homes in California—dark nights full of twinkling stars and crisp, cool night air that could suck the breath out of you if you didn’t wear enough layers. Of course it was dangerous to be outside because of the return fire, but we braved it. It was the closest we could get to seeing the night sky, a taste of home. I had gotten the bright idea one night to sit on top of the roof of our hooch while incoming mortar rounds were whistling into the perimeter of the base, but it only took one time for Tina and me to be sent scrambling from incoming mortar fire for her to say that she was never going up there again. But those nights were few in number. Most times I sat for hours by myself on the roof looking up at the stars. When Tina joined me, I’d sit down on the stoop with her, swapping funny stories or talking about our families, and sometimes we just sat without saying anything, just looking up at the clear night sky, listening to the incoming and outgoing fire.

  Tonight Tina had been called into company headquarters for the first shift of radio duty, and so I was left alone to watch the night sky by myself. The military field chair I had acquired from outside of First Sergeant Hawk’s hooch stood beside me empty, as I sat in the white plastic chair I stole from a Charlie Company medic for mouthing off to me in the showers the night before. The smoke was beginning to lift, but I guess not fast enough for the Eight-Second’s gun bunnies because they began to shoot flares up into the night sky, staining it with red streaks of bright light. The flares’ light gave away my position, and Sergeant Lippert, who happened to be passing by, looked up and found me sitting on the roof.

  “King,” he shouted up, “just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”