by Phil Klay
So the video didn’t bother us. If anything, it was gratifying. Most of us had been in enough murky war zones to lack the near-religious faith in democracy that the war was sold on. If you’d asked our team, “Tell me how this ends,” we probably would have answered, “Badly.” And though weapons of mass destruction remained a top PIR, and would stay that way through at least 2005, that was rapidly becoming a joke. No one thought we would find those weapons. No one thought that somehow, in some bunker, we’d uncover the reason we were there, the thing that would give purpose and meaning to the chaos swirling around us, to the deaths of the men we were about to lose over the next decade. And yet there we were, the finest soldiers in the finest army in the history of the world, bumbling about, making up our own purposes. And the torture houses were one thing we had on our side, a sign, almost like a sign from God Himself, that there was an enemy here who might be worthy of us.
As we shuffled out of the briefing room, I looked at the photo Jefe had passed out. How strange it was to see the child of a man you were about to hunt down. You don’t think of the bad guys having children. You think of them having torture houses and hacksaws and stashes of porn, not daughters.
Please God, I prayed, no more kids.
We stepped out, made our way to the target, and ended up facing an unassuming apartment in a middle-class district of west Baghdad. It would have been unimpressive, deflating after all that prep, but part of the beauty of war is how it heightens your sense of the weight and reality of things.
Before you hit a target there’s a sharpening to every second, eyes and ears tensed, breath shallow, the vibration of your heart beating, drumming through your chest. Your mind stays calm, detached, registering the fear, the excitement, the small movements of the men you’ve trained with, each in their positions, as trained and executed time after time so you don’t have to see but feel Diego, Ocho, Jason, and the rest, and the fear building in your limbs radiates out to them. Radiating back, there’s this sense of control, of power, of yourself as part of a larger organism capable of covering every bloody angle of approach. You pray for something quick. Murderous. And in the long, drawn-out seconds of, well, is it joy? Awe? Something more? In those long, long seconds there are these quick rapid instants, between the blink of an eye, when your instincts, honed predator instincts, they give way to a different kind of alertness. To the alertness of prey. To the knowledge that the men you hunt are meat eaters, too. And that feeling, that sense of yourself and your own mortality and that of the men around you—it lends an aura of the sacred to the profane work to come.
We burst into his house, and the first person we encountered was not Arif himself, but his tiny, young, delicate-looking, and extremely pregnant wife. Who didn’t scream in terror. Who didn’t weep or shout curses at us in Arabic, like we’re accustomed to. Who merely clutched at the wall and started moaning, low, long, and sad. Noises like the ones from birthing videos I’d seen with Natalia before I left, and now here’s this tiny woman, tiny but huge with child, stomach heaving, stretched. I froze. I thought she was going into labor.
I helped her to the floor, pushed aside an end table. A vase with yellow flowers fell off and shattered. There were yellow flowers in every room of that house. It’s funny what you remember. Her eyes were deep brown, she had a long thin face and dark, dark eyebrows.
Ocho found a very young girl with big scared eyes hiding in a closet, the baby from the photo grown up a few more years, and when we brought her in to be with the mother she calmed a bit. Arif put up no fight, which is more common than you’d think. He was heavier than in the photo, more jowly, with a thicker mustache and thinner hair. He sat sullenly, not looking at us, not looking at his hugely pregnant wife, and I got so angry. Look at her. Apologize. This is all your fault.
We wrapped up quick. Nobody wanted to linger. Toward the end we helped his wife up and he shouted something at her, something beyond the Arabic of anybody in the room. It was the first time he seemed emotional, and as the words struck her she stiffened, went cold, refused to look us in the eye. I’ve always wondered what he said. It’s awkward, fighting a war in people’s homes.
Right after, I had all these feelings I couldn’t put a name to. Al-Zawba’i’s daughter kept popping into my head, and so did the dying toddler. I kept thinking of the noise Arif’s wife had made, and I had this fucked-up regret that she hadn’t really been going into labor, or, even more fucked up, that Arif hadn’t tried to pull a gun on us. It would have been something, to take a guy out and deliver his child on the same night.
I called Natalia on an MWR line, wanting to hear how her thirty-four-week appointment had gone.
“Everything is fine,” she said, “fine. Blood pressure’s a little high, baby’s growing a little less than they want, but she’s fine, we’re fine, it’s fine. Come home soon. You don’t want to miss her.”
“You should have Inez say a rosary,” I told her. A priest had told Natalia’s grandmother her prayers had special pull because of her devotion, and she’d never let anyone in the family forget it.
“I’m her favorite grandchild. She’s probably praying right now.”
I hesitated. There was a lot of turbulence in my head then. I thought of Arif’s snuff films, and they calmed me somewhat.
“We got a really evil motherfucker today,” I said.
“Oh.” I could tell Natalia was confused, to have me switching subjects. But the things were all muddled together in my mind.
“His wife was pregnant, and she freaked out when we hit his house.”
“Oh. Okay. That must have been . . . strange.”
“It was, it was.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nah.”
There was a pause, and then, to close things off, I said, “Today was a good day. It’s a better world, with him in prison.”
Which was true. Obviously. In training for Special Forces, an instructor had explained the difference between direct-action missions and foreign internal defense missions as the difference between treating the symptoms of an insurgency and treating the disease. A guy like Arif was a symptom. A weak government and a military without the support of its own people was the disease. I understood that. That day was a day for treating the symptoms. Tomorrow, hand-holding an Iraqi unit, would be treating the disease. That all made sense to me. But after those three missions, I couldn’t just think about the symptoms and the disease. I was increasingly worried about the patient.
I didn’t say this to Natalia, though. I switched back to talking about the baby, and her high blood pressure, and all the reasons neither of us had to worry.
2
JUAN PABLO 2016
There’s a gringa hen and a Colombian pig, and one day the hen says to the pig, “We have known each other for so long, and we have always done well together. We should start a business.”
And the Colombian pig thinks, Yes, I have known this gringa a long time, though I’m not so sure I’ve always done well by her. Still, she’s always done well, so perhaps going into business together will work out for me, too. And the Colombian pig says, “What is the business?”
And the gringa hen says, “We’ll sell breakfast sandwiches. I’ll provide half the ingredients. You provide the other half.”
“That sounds fair,” says the Colombian pig. “What is your contribution?”
“The eggs, clearly,” says the gringa hen.
“Clearly, yes,” says the Colombian pig. “And what about me?”
The gringa hen smiles. She lays a wing on the pig’s shoulder. “You? My sweet little Colombian pig. You’ll provide the bacon.”
My daughter told me that story. My daughter, Valencia. She heard it from her professor of law, who is, like seemingly every professor of law at Nacional, very much a man of the left. She told it to me the way she tells me every little excess or flourish of her professors,
with an eye roll. “Not quite a mamerto, but almost,” she said, echoing what I have told her often before. But, for perhaps the first time, I detected a question behind her eyes. Perhaps she herself did not know it was hiding there.
“There’s some truth to that,” I told her. But I didn’t say more. We don’t talk about my work. It is not appropriate for children to know more about it than the honor it is due, and I still think of her, twenty years old, beautiful, with her mother’s eyes and, unfortunately, my weak chin, as a child. But it is true. I, more than anyone, would know. After all, for the past twenty years, I have been the bacon.
We left it at that and, in the manner of our family, did not return to the issue. I told myself, as I have told myself many times before, that one day we would have a talk. Or maybe I would write it all down, the true story of my life, without evasions and without the boundaries that distinguish the relationship between father and daughter, in which I must be the authority and the source of wisdom and she the subordinate, incapable of judgment or even of talking back. Maybe I will one day write it down and tell it to her like I would tell a friend, or a priest, or God. If I believed in true friends, or priests, or Gods.
But I think of her professor’s little joke tonight, as Valencia does her schoolwork and as my wife, Sofia, chops onions and I tap my fingers on my cigar box, trying to decide whether to pull out the Cohibas or the more expensive La Flor lanceros, given to me by General Campos on the day of my promotion to lieutenant colonel. Tonight, we have Sergeant Major Mason Baumer to dinner. He’s what brings Valencia’s joke to mind. Because if I am the bacon, then Mason, the U.S. embassy’s Special Forces Liaison, is the gringa hen laying my eggs.
“You’re sure he likes Italian food?” Sofia says.
“Everyone likes Italian food,” I say.
“Didn’t you say his wife is a paisa?” Sofia says. “I could have asked my mother how she makes bandeja . . .”
“My arteries cannot handle bandeja,” I say. “And Vale doesn’t like bandeja. And you don’t like bandeja. Besides, she’s not coming, and it’s her family that’s from Medellín. She grew up in North Carolina.”
“North Carolina, ah,” Sofia says. I can tell she’s thinking back to the trip we took to Fayetteville. “Probably never had good Italian then.”
I give the cigars one more look. Unequal partnership or not, Colombia still needs those eggs, especially as the peace deal looms and the nature of the war shifts. Gringa hens need to be kept happy. I decide upon the lanceros, and let out a long breath, then walk to the dining room to examine the table settings. Everything is ordered. Centerpiece precisely centered, place settings distributed evenly, symmetrically, with one setting on the left for our guest, providing him the view out the window, and one on the right side for our daughter, with Sofia and me at the end, creating an effect that is almost perfectly harmonious. I check the tablecloth, the mats. One is not quite right, I tap it gently on the right side, moving it so its edge runs parallel to the edge of the table, precisely an inch away. I let out another long breath.
“I can hear you,” Sofia says from the kitchen. “Stop it. Tonight will be fun. American military are fun.”
“Not this one,” I say.
“You’re a snob,” she says.
Perhaps, I think, though it’s more than that. The nature of my current job, and my relationship with Mason, revolves around an unpleasant truth, which is the extent to which a third-tier official from the American State Department or Department of Defense can make decisions with huge consequences for my country. Mason is not even a third-tier official, but he is one of the principals in the American embassy’s MILGROUP, as they call it. And as the man who brings operators in and out of the country, he’s the man I work with most regularly, the man most directly involved with our operations at the tactical level. Which means he’s a man whose opinion those third-tier officials will care about. I’m an officer, and he’s enlisted. He’s no suitable partner for me in any sense, and certainly not my social equal. But the Americans view their enlisted as the equivalent of our officers, one of many insults we suffer, and so his opinion matters.
“Mason is a little strange,” I say. “Most U.S. operators are”—I make a fist—“more supportive of us.”
Sofia doesn’t respond. Maybe she will like him. Valencia will definitely like him. Vale wants to be a lawyer, and Mason should have been a lawyer. Every operation, every request, from him I get nothing but questions, constant questions, half the time questions with no answers, or no good answers, or answers that are designed for politicians and diplomats to think about, not soldiers. For a while, I’ve been debating with myself whether or not this means he’s weak. Nothing is certain with him, the ground is always shifting, which is terrible in any partnership, but especially in one that involves violence.
“Just,” I say, “be careful what you say around him. He’s not so easy as the last one.”
Mason arrives on time, an irritating habit American military have. Sofia barely has her makeup on, and Vale is still in the bathroom. Mason, leaner than most Special Forces but still a big, thick-necked man, walks into my sitting room and takes a chair, as if it were his apartment, and we’re his guests.
“Beautiful,” he says, staring out at the room, the paintings on the wall, the battered crucifix my father had recovered from a destroyed church during his war in Medellín, the photos of Valencia.
Sofia offers drinks, and we talk about the weather, about how comfortably Natalia is settling in to Bogotá. Mason’s Spanish is flat but clear, easier to listen to than the previous SFLi, a Dominican who chewed on the last syllable of every word he gargled out of his mouth. When Valencia emerges, in a red dress I have never seen before and which her mother would have picked out for her, she greets Mason with a touch of formality. I remember our conversation about the Colombian pig and the gringa chicken and wonder again what she is being told at that school. Perhaps, I think, I should try to avoid talk of politics tonight. It is a delicate time. The peace treaty with the FARC goes up for a vote in October, and though most of my colleagues and family members will be voting no, everyone expects it to pass. The guerrilla will leave the jungle and end the war. Which means both a changing security environment and a changing relationship with the U.S. military. What happens in the next few months will shape the future for men like Mason and myself. This means it will shape Valencia’s future, too, and perhaps I should have explained all this to her beforehand but it’s too late now—the evening will proceed how it will. And then Sofia claps her hands and calls us to the table.
* * *
• • •
After both courses there’s much praise, and wonder, and a little bragging on Sofia’s part. “You can imagine how hard it is to find authentic stracchino in Bogotá,” she says, knowing he has no clue what stracchino is. I don’t know what stracchino is, I only know that I just ate it, and it was delicious. And then, over Sofia’s homemade limoncello, Mason ruins the mood.
“Are you worried about the peace?” he asks me.
“Why would I worry about the peace?” I say, though of course I’m worried, and everyone knows it.
“I want to say . . . are you going to vote yes, or no?”
Mason’s government is very much in favor of the treaty. So is mine, of course, and I tell him so.
“Then . . . you will vote yes?”
“He won’t tell you,” Sofia says, smiling slightly and circling a finger over the rim of her glass.
“I’m a soldier,” I say.
“The treaty is trash,” Sofia says. “I hate that they even call it a vote for peace. ‘Vote yes for peace!’ Only a monster could be against peace. But I’ll tell you a secret . . .”
She smiles seductively and leans forward, her chest on display, a silver pendant gleaming between her breasts. “You’re dining with monsters.”
She goes over the usual reasons
. That it lets the FARC off too easily for their crimes, it lets them keep their drug money, it lets them have representatives in Congress when all they deserve is prison. She points out that even left-wing organizations like Human Rights Watch are attacking the peace for allowing guerrillas who have killed civilians, kidnapped civilians, committed widespread sexual violence, and forced children into military service not to spend a day in prison if they confess.
“There is a saying in America,” Mason says. “No justice, no peace.”
“I like that,” she says. “No justice, no peace.”
“What do you think?” Mason says, his eyes casually fixing on mine.
“I’m a soldier,” I say, not liking the turn the conversation has taken. What I want from Mason has nothing to do with the guerrillas, and nothing to do with the so-called peace. “Soldiers don’t have any business thinking about justice.”
“No?” Mason shakes his head. “What do you mean?”
He waits, and I’m not sure what I want to say. That war is like love, that the world is chaos, so two people say to each other, Everything is uncertain. Friends become enemies, health becomes sickness, wealth becomes ruin. But we two, we will create one small space of order in the chaos. I will rest on you, you on me, and we will not break. And in that small space, we will have room for human feelings, maybe cruel, maybe tender, full of arguments or never-ending kindnesses, but more important than the nature of the love is the space we create for it to exist. And that the same goes for the state.