Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  “Colombia.”

  II

  What good is a revolution if we’re counted among its casualties?

  —Aria Dean

  1

  MASON 2004–2005

  My father was a miner back when that was still a thing, back when you could be a miner and think that someday your son might be one, too. These days he walks with a stoop in his right shoulder, the gift of a rockfall in ’83. He’s got arthritis, and there’s a delicate way he gets up from chairs, navigating himself around the damage he’s done to his body. He has raging tempers. Bouts of deep depression. But doing hard work, physical work, he always told me, was the best way of quieting yourself and fastening your mind to God.

  When I started out in the teams, I thought it wasn’t so different. The work a bridge between my father’s life and mine. You could see it in the way a man like Jefe, my team sergeant, prepared his kit. Not with love, not exactly. Not the way a gun enthusiast oils an AR, or a suburban dad fastens bits in his eight-hundred-dollar power drill. No. With a practiced, unconscious care. If you could see that care and then see the way my father prepared, bringing his gear in line—lamp battery, breathing canister, rock hammer—bringing himself in line, each limb, each finger a piece of equipment, then you’d see that connection. Men like us are always aware of the tools our lives hang on, their capabilities and weaknesses, just like we’re always aware of our bodies, of our pains and limitations—shot knees, shot backs. Sore muscles strung across rough bones.

  Back then I believed my father’s work digging coal in the Pennsylvania hills and providing for his family really was a prayer, made not with words but with blood and sweat. And I believed my work was the same. But I was starting to be troubled by the occasional mission that made you question. Like the raid on Ammar al-Zawba’i.

  * * *

  • • •

  Al-Zawba’i’s house was the nicest I ever raided. Not the wealthiest—we raided plenty of pimped-out palaces across Iraq—but it was classy. More books than I’ve ever seen in any house, American or Iraqi or otherwise. Some were in English. Mostly history books but also a worn old Huckleberry Finn. I won’t forget seeing that.

  While we were flex-cuffing him, his fifteen-year-old son charged down the stairs, coming for us. His jaw hung slack. His eyes were unfocused. He shouted garbled, incoherent words. We could have shot him, I suppose, but we didn’t.

  “No,” al-Zawba’i screamed. “He is ill! He is ill!” His English had what sounded like a British accent, and was far clearer than any of the terps we worked with. He was a former intelligence officer in Saddam’s fedayeen, well educated, connected, and knee-deep in the more nationalist and less religious factions of the then-growing insurgency. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have said we should leave him alone and focus on the real crazies, but, you know, hindsight.

  The son stopped in the middle of the room, wild-eyed and confused, then stepped toward me. I shifted my weight and slammed my buttstock into his stomach, sending him down hard. The father started shouting in Arabic, very fast and loud, as I zip-tied the son. I guess he was too emotional to reach for his polished English. Our terp, a young Yahzidi kid named Tahseen who within ten years would be murdered by ISIS along with his whole family, exchanged some rapid-fire talk with al-Zawba’i, and then filled us in.

  “He was taken by the Angels of Death.”

  We’d never heard of it. Yet another militia that’d basically named themselves like a heavy metal band.

  “They are a Shi’a . . . maybe under Sadr . . . maybe . . . ummm . . . crime . . . they crime . . .”

  “Gangsters,” al-Zawba’i said, irritated.

  “Yes. Gangsters,” Tahseen said. “They took him and put electric cables to his head. Now he needs medicines.”

  “He cannot help being this way,” al-Zawba’i said.

  In an upstairs bedroom, decorated with stuffed animals and Monet prints, the ex-fedayeen’s seven-year-old daughter was cowering behind her bed. We brought her down and tried to calm her. She seemed to have some sort of disability, maybe a genetic disorder. Her left side didn’t function right. She was shaking with fear, and my friendly “Salaam aleikum” didn’t help. She’d seen a lot already, I suppose, in her short time on earth, and things weren’t about to get better. Her eyes were already puffy, she’d already been crying, but she burst out again.

  “Where’s her mother?”

  Our terp shook his head. Not alive, I guess.

  “Is there a neighbor?” Jefe asked al-Zawba’i. “Someone we can call to look after your daughter and your son?”

  He sat, stone-faced. Any name he gave us, that’d be a lead and he knew it. I shrugged. The house had three desktop computers, two laptops, and seven cell phones for the analysts. We’d have more leads soon anyway.

  At one point, al-Zawba’i looked at Ocho and said, “Maybe not all of you, but some of you will die here.” He smiled.

  Ocho laughed. “If I die here,” he said to al-Zawba’i, “I hope I die fucking your mom.”

  We finished up, and as we prepared to leave, I asked Tahseen what he thought would happen to the little girl.

  He looked her over slowly, considering the question, and then said, “She will marry a man who beats her, and have children who cannot read.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I was a junior medic then, an 18 Delta new to Special Forces and a little out of place but getting away with it because medics are allowed to be weird. And I had a baby on the way. Natalia in her third trimester, me a soon-to-be new parent eight time zones away and still wrapping my head around the notion of childbirth, around what was happening to Natalia, and to me, that we were slowly becoming a family, or perhaps had already become a family, while I was over there, driving on endless boring patrols, playing Xbox, and, occasionally, killing people.

  “Hey, try not to die, okay?” Natalia told me over the phone a few days after the al-Zawba’i raid. “I’d rather not raise this baby alone.”

  “Well, in that case . . .” I said.

  At the time if you’d asked me why I was over there, despite having a pregnant wife at home, due close enough to my redeployment date that I might miss the birth of my daughter, I would have said I was doing it for my family. That I was experiencing the violence and horror of this place so they didn’t have to experience the same things in Fayetteville, North Carolina. That I was behaving honorably. Being a good citizen. A good soldier. A good man. So my child could have a parent to look up to, to see as a role model. So my child could understand that anything good in this world requires sacrifice, real sacrifice, and pain. And I would have said the mission was worth it, that the men we were hunting were truly evil, and we had the videos to prove it. And on later deployments, back to Iraq, still with the CIF, when we were doing the same missions but also training up Iraqi special forces, it was gratifying in a different way. Ninety-day deployments, raid after raid after raid in Baghdad and in the belt of suburbs around the city, and the Iraqis getting a little better each time. You feel this huge sense of purpose. Like you’re really making a difference in the world. And I want my child to see what it’s like to have a parent who really puts his heart and soul into what he does, and gets back a sense of identity and value and meaning.

  That’s what I would have said. The truth, though, is that I loved it. I couldn’t have even said why. At the time, I was so young I didn’t know what was going on. It was a blur. Before some raids—don’t laugh—but I’d have an OCB, which is the official DoD nomenclature for Out of Control Boner, and I’d be thinking, what’s with the goddamn chubby in my pants? I’m supposed to be thinking about my sector, about digging my corner, clearing the fatal funnel, but everybody’s going to see I’m popping a goddamn chubby! And if you’d asked me the first time I got shot at and survived what it felt like, the best I could have told you was it felt like I’
d fucked the prom queen, run the winning touchdown, all that good American shit. And after a raid, Christ, I’d just sit there on my way back, my limp dick against my thigh, not knowing much about what just happened and being able to explain even less. All I knew was that I was in my early twenties, I’d had some ups and downs, but this was the happiest I’d ever felt in my life.

  So what happened with al-Zawba’i and his daughter, that was at first easy to forget. And had things turned out differently, or perhaps if Natalia hadn’t been pregnant, I can see a very different life that would have unfolded for me. Special Forces, which was supposed to be the unit of warrior-diplomats, of language and culture specialists who could learn the cultural terrain, build up host-nation forces to fight so Americans didn’t have to, was already becoming more and more a direct-action unit. Raid after raid after raid. Over the next ten years, the “diplomat” portion of the “warrior-diplomats” would wither, FID missions where you were trying to build up local institutions would be seen as a waste of time, and a dark kind of pure warrior, “see you in Valhalla” mentality would grip more and more of us. I could have been that kind of soldier, and that kind of leader.

  But then, after a long stretch of working with a not particularly competent Iraqi police unit, we got word we were finally heading out on a raid, hitting a target with foreign fighters, no less, the kind of mission where you can expect to get into a gunfight. I was less excited than relieved. Yes, this is what I’m here for. And then, right before we stepped off, Ocho brought up the coming baby. It was almost like he was trying to screw with my head, or knock me off balance just to see how well I recovered.

  “Listo para ser padre, maricón?” Ocho asked me in the ready room, smiling, as the air filled with the metallic sound of magazines slamming home. Since I was one of the white guys in 7th Group and didn’t grow up bilingual like all the Puerto Rican and Mexican dudes who’d been funneled into SF’s Latin America–focused group, Ocho liked to fuck with me in Spanish.

  “No, hijo de puta. But it’s happening.”

  “If the kid pops out and you think, shit, that sort of looks like Ocho . . .” he said, putting his hands out as if to say, don’t blame me.

  I sighed, and picked up an M9. “So,” I said, “are you suggesting to a man with a weapon in his hand that you impregnated his wife?”

  Ocho chuckled. He was the senior medic. Theoretically, I was supposed to be learning from him, but mostly he just told me stories about having sex with Colombian whores back in the Cali cartel days, teaching me lessons I didn’t want to learn. He was in his thirties, looked like he was in his fifties, and talked about sex like he was still a teenager.

  “I would never disrespect Natalia like that,” he said. “I’m just saying, maybe you spending all this time around a man of my potency did something to your balls. Put the man back into you.”

  Jefe looked up, caught Ocho’s eyes, shook his head, and went back to prepping his kit. The rest of us followed suit. There was a quietness to Jefe, a dignity that could even sweep up Ocho in its wake. His fingers moved methodically, dismantling and then reassembling an M4, moving on to his IFAK, checking the placement of ammo pouches, a choreography identical each and every time, regardless of mission. You wouldn’t know from his movements we were preparing for a raid, that there were three Jordanians holed up in an apartment filled with guns and explosives, that people were about to die and that we had no way of knowing if some of those people were in this room. Whether it was a raid or a convoy or a MEDCAP, the movements never changed. And the last thing he did, the very last each time, was to fish a small crucifix out from around his neck, where it hung with his dog tags, kiss it, and tuck it back inside.

  Jefe got up the way he always did, slow. It made him look old. He was old, and seemed calm. I was young, and thinking about death. I wanted to be more like him and less like myself.

  He walked to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Pretty sure we’ll get home in time. You think Iraq is hard, wait until you’ve got a newborn.” And then we stepped out.

  It’s jarring, the transition out of those deeply private seconds when you’re preparing your kit and your body for what’s to come. When the work begins, and you’re rushing down the backstreets of Hilla or just below the ridge line of a mountain in the Hindu Kush, private thoughts recede. Ideally, you disappear and the team’s collective will takes over. It’s true that sometimes, especially at the beginning of my career, thoughts of death would sneak in. When I was starting out, not enough of us had died yet for it to become normal, and we were still more accustomed to killing than grieving, which requires different muscles, muscles my father knew well, having seen violent death in the mines, deaths where the body was crushed or severed or in some way made inappropriate for display in a coffin.

  At first the raid was anticlimactic. Our supporting element, a group of bozo National Guard guys, took it upon themselves to open up on the bad guys with a couple of AT-4s. If you’ve got serious firepower, I suppose they figured, why not use it? Besides, rockets are cool. The gunfight was over before it began. Then we heard screaming and wailing, and it became clear that the adjoining house was really just a sectioned-off part of the same building, separated not by concrete or brick but by drywall, and those rounds punched straight through into the other apartment, where a family lived.

  The first thing I saw inside was a toddler whose stomach had been blown open by shrapnel that hit his little belly crosswise, spilling his guts onto the ground. His mother was crouched over him, mechanically stuffing the intestines back into the dead child’s chest cavity. The kid’s eyes were open, looking upward, and he had a baseball cap on that read “Pay Me!” It was a fucked-up thing to see. We continued to clear the house, and in the first room to the right there was an old man whose left knee had been shattered so thoroughly the bottom of his leg was just hanging on by skin tissue. He was still alive, if you want to call it that, still conscious anyway, and choking on his own blood. I gave him morphine and he died minutes later. The rest of the family was huddled together, cut up by bits of debris and building material sent flying. I let Jefe and our terp tell the family what had happened to the old man and the little boy, and then watched as Jefe left to speak with the Rangers outside, who were celebrating their first kills as a unit. I wanted to bring them inside to look at the boy, to see what they’d done, but Jefe said it was a bad idea.

  “They’re normal kids,” he said. “It’ll fuck them up.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Stuff like that doesn’t fuck people up the right way.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant, because I hadn’t been to Afghanistan as part of a detachment yet, and hadn’t seen the ways people become cold. But I trusted Jefe, like we all did, and backed off.

  After that incident, I tried to do the old soldier’s routine of lies and half-truths to the family back home. “We got some pretty evil guys the other day,” I told Natalia over the phone, speaking about the raid like I was delivering a press release. “Foreign fighters. Guys who came to Iraq because they wanted to kill innocent people.”

  “What’s wrong?” she said. One thing I like about Natalia is that she sees through me. But I knew I probably had the wives’ network on my side, voices in her head telling her not to press too hard. Your soldier needs his space.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, scrambling for what to say, how to deflect. “It’s nothing. Just a little strange, you know. Jefe says a soldier’s job isn’t to kill, but to protect life. It’s just that he protects life by killing.”

  “What happened?” Natalia said, her voice firm.

  A part of me wanted to tell her nothing. She’s not a soldier, she couldn’t understand. Or something like that. This part of me spoke in a stern, gruff, manly tone. She’s a pregnant woman, she can’t deal with it. Only guys like me can deal with this shit. Of course, I was really just terrified of what she’d
think of me. And beyond that, terrified of what I’d think of myself if I started talking about it.

  “We shot a kid,” I said. “I did what I could, but . . .”

  I’m not sure if that was selfish or brave.

  Things were slow after that, op-tempo at a crawl for two weeks and then—one final incident. It began with a photograph.

  Jefe showed it to us in the old dining hall of one of Uday’s palaces, a place we’d taken over and turned into a briefing room. There was a giant, crystal chandelier, gilded molding around the walls, and a pile of debris from bombing damage. “This is courtesy of Fifth Group,” he said, and handed out a photo of an insurgent named Sufyan Arif at, of all things, his baby daughter’s first birthday party. In the photo, Arif was tall, dignified, holding on to his daughter with both hands as she perched uncertainly on, I kid you not, the back of a camel. The girl was in a shiny silk dress, Arif was in some fancy sheik getup, and neither was smiling.

  “The girl,” Jefe deadpanned, “is not a target.”

  And then he showed us a few more photos, these of flayed feet and severed heads.

  “This guy is a real piece of shit,” Jefe told us. On the unit laptop he pulled up a grainy video of a masked Arif wielding a knife. In front of him was a weeping young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and Arif put the blade to the kid’s neck and started cutting. An amazing amount of blood rushed out, but Arif wasn’t getting enough of a sawing action to sever the neck so he withdrew the knife and started hacking. It’s the kind of thing we’d all seen before. Most of these guys are pretty unimaginative when they’re filming their torture porn. There’s even something weirdly cartoonish about it, like it’s a low-budget horror film, not real life. Earlier in the deployment we’d hit a real, no-kidding torture house, and even that was only a bit shocking. On the one hand, we were face-to-face with actual, mutilated corpses. I forced myself to remember that once, these were bodies intertwined with souls and made in the image of God and so on. But after enough of that stuff . . . I forget who said it, that stepping over a single corpse is painful, but walking over a pile of corpses doesn’t bother you at all.