Redeployment Page 10

  “Tell him,” I said, “we want real widows this time. At the last women’s agricultural meeting, Cindy said she thought they were all married women.”

  The Professor nodded, then spoke some more.

  “This will not be a problem,” he said. “Iraq is short of many things, but not widows.”

  • • •

  The baseball bats and mitts arrived not long after the Abu Bakr meeting.

  “I’ll take care of these, too,” said Major Zima.

  “Don’t just dump the bats like you did the uniforms,” I said.

  “I would never!” he said.

  “Every time I go outside the wire,” I said, “I see different kids in the uniforms, but I have yet to see a baseball game.”

  “Of course not,” said Major Zima, “they don’t have bats yet.”

  “I don’t want to see U.S.-supplied equipment in a torture video,” I said.

  “Too late for that,” said Major Zima. “Besides, if there’s one thing I’ve learned doing Civil Affairs in Iraq, it’s that it’s hard to come in and change people’s culture.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Right now,” he said, “the Shi’a are pretty set in their ways of drilling people to death. And the Sunnis like to cut off heads. I don’t think we’ll manage to change that with baseball bats.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “Too late,” said Major Zima, frowning, “you’re here.”

  • • •

  The next day, I visited the women’s health clinic for what I feared would be the last time. I didn’t look forward to telling Najdah, the social worker there, that I’d failed her again.

  “I am Iraqi,” she’d said on my previous visit. “I am used to promises that are good but not real.”

  Visiting the women’s clinic was always odd, since I wasn’t allowed inside. I’d meet Najdah in a building across the street, and she’d tell me what was going on.

  The clinic was, perhaps, the thing I felt most proud of. That and the farming education program, though the farming stuff was mostly Cindy’s work. Najdah seemed to know what the clinic meant to me, and she’d always push me hard for more help whenever I showed up. She also thought I was somewhat crazy.

  “Jobs?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Is there any way we could use this as a platform for starting businesses?”

  “Platform?”

  “Or maybe we could have a bakery attached to the clinic, and women could . . .”

  She looked so puzzled, I stopped.

  “My English is not so good, I think,” she said.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s a bad idea anyway.”

  “Will our funding be continued?”

  I looked out at the clinic across the street, the love I had for it feeling like a weight in my chest. Two women walked in, followed by a group of children, one of them wearing a blue baseball shirt with sleeves longer than the child’s arms.

  “Inshallah,” I said.

  • • •

  I made another trip out to JSS Istalquaal with the intent of meeting with Kazemi, but as soon as I arrived the mission was canceled. Kazemi, I was told, was dead.

  “Suicide bomber on a motorcycle,” said the S2 over the phone.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “All he wanted to do was pump water.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said the S2, “I don’t think he was the target. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The S2 didn’t know when the funeral would be, and he strongly suggested that it would be unwise to attend in any case. There was nothing to do but try to get on a convoy back to Taji. I arranged for travel in a sort of haze. I ate a Pop-Tarts and muffins dinner. I waited.

  At one point, I called my ex-wife on an MWR line. She didn’t pick up, which was probably a good thing but didn’t feel like it at the time. Then I went outside and sat down in a smoke pit with a staff sergeant. His body, with armor on, formed an almost perfect cube. I wondered how much time, as a career military man, he must have spent here already.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you here, risking your life?”

  He looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. “Why are you?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That’s a shame,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, which was only halfway done, and ground it out.

  • • •

  Major Zima was doing jumping jacks when I got back to Taji, his belly bouncing in counterpoint to the rest of his body. He would go down and the belly would stay up, then his feet would leave the ground and his stomach would come crashing down. I’d never seen a man work out so much and achieve so little.

  “How’re things?” he said breathlessly.

  “They’re breaking my heart,” I said. And then, because Bob didn’t care, and Cindy was outside the wire, and there was no one else to talk to, I told Major Zima what was happening. He already knew about Kazemi. It was old news at this point. But he hadn’t heard about the clinic’s funding. He stood and smiled at me, nodding encouragingly, a look of pure idiocy on his face. It was like confessing your sins to Daffy Duck.

  “How,” I said at the end, “how do you deal with it? The bullshit?”

  Major Zima shook his head sadly. “There is no bullshit.”

  “No bullshit?” I said. “In Iraq?” I cracked the sort of cynical smile Bob was always shooting in Cindy’s direction.

  Zima kept shaking his head. “There’s a reason for everything,” he said, sounding almost spiritual. “Maybe we can’t see it. But if you were here two years ago . . .” His face was blank.

  “If I was here two years ago what?”

  “It was madness,” he said. Zima wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anything. “Things are getting better. What you’re dealing with, it isn’t madness.”

  I looked away, and we stood there in silence until I couldn’t put off going to work any longer. I went to the ePRT office, he went back to jumping jacks. When I got to my computer, I sat and stared at it, unsettled. It felt as though Zima’s mask had slipped and given me a glimpse of some incomprehensible sadness, the sadness you saw all around you every time you left the FOB. This country had a history that didn’t reset when a new unit rotated in. This time, these problems, they were an improvement.

  • • •

  Two days later, Major Zima strolled into our office, whistling. He had a large green bag in one hand and a blank piece of paper in the other. He put the paper on my desk, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

  He said, “I’m not really sure how you State boys write these things up, but here goes.”

  Then he pulled out a pen with a flourish, hunched over the paper, and started writing, reading aloud what he put down.

  “Our women’s business association,” he said, “has proved highly successful—”

  “No, it hasn’t,” I said.

  “Highly successful in sparking entrepreneurship among our AO’s disenfranchised population.”

  Bob looked over, an eyebrow arched. Zima kept going, “In fact,” he said, scribbling illegibly with great speed, “due to its growing membership and the increasingly key place it has taken within community power structures, it has, on its own initiative, begun expanding its operations to encompass—” He looked up. “That’s a good word, right? Encompass?”

  “Encompass is a great word,” I said, curious.

  “To encompass a more holistic approach.”

  “Have they now?” I said, smiling in spite of myself.

  “Several promising businesses have failed, despite substantial opportunities for female employment, due to a lack of adequate child care and medical facilities. Providing these services is a prerequisite to a f
lourishing free market and represents a business opportunity in its own right.”

  “Oh,” I said, getting it. “Very nice.”

  Bob scowled.

  “We are still collecting broader metrics, but two projects have been hamstrung by a lack of health care. One female bakery closed after two workers, both widows, stopped coming due to complications from untreated yeast infections.”

  “There’s no way that’s true,” I said.

  “Maybe someone gave me bad information,” the major conceded, “but I can’t be held responsible for that. We get bad information all the time.”

  “I,” said Bob, standing up, “am going outside for a smoke break.”

  “You don’t smoke,” I said. He ignored me.

  “Statistics show,” Zima continued as Bob walked out, “that countries which improve health care do a better job improving their economies than countries which focus exclusively on business development.”

  “Is that true?”

  Major Zima put on his shocked face. “Of course it’s true,” he said. “I deal only in truth-hood.” After a moment he added, “I saw it in a TED Talk.”

  “Okay,” I said. I looked down at the paper. “Can you get me the name of the speaker? Let’s see if we can do this.”

  “Good,” said the major. “Glad we can work together on this. You know, I think I can even convince the colonel to throw in some CERP funds. . . .”

  “That would be amazing,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, “and I was wondering. Could you help me with something?”

  “What?” I said.

  He pulled a blue baseball helmet out of the green bag and put it on my desk. “G. G. Goodwin wants a picture of kids playing baseball.”

  • • •

  The next two times I went outside the wire, I went out with a baseball helmet, mitt, and bat. No uniforms in sight, though.

  • • •

  “I know what you’re doing,” said Chris Roper over the phone, “and this bullshit is not going to stand.”

  “What?”

  “You want to push the money for the clinic through the women’s association? You know ninety percent of it, if not more, is gonna go right into Abu Bakr’s pocket.”

  “You wanted me to keep them going,” I said, “even knowing that. So why not have some of the money going to something real.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Very clever.”

  “Something is better than nothing,” I said, “and funding for the clinic runs out next month.”

  “Wow,” said Roper. “Honesty. How refreshing.”

  “The clinic is big in the community,” I said. “It’s not a bad thing if the sheikh takes ownership of it.”

  “It’s big for the women,” he said. “Have you met an Iraqi who gives a fuck about women?”

  “There is a direct link,” I said, “between the oppression of women and extremism.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” he said.

  “This is real,” I said. “And he’ll keep it going. It’ll hurt his reputation if he stops it.”

  “Any buy-in from local councils?” he said.

  “It says in the—”

  “I know what it says,” he snapped. “Is there real buy-in?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Minimal financial support. As long as we’re funding something, the Iraqis don’t want to step in and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but the bit in there about the distribution network—”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna sit on this and think it over.”

  It was more than I had any right to hope for.

  • • •

  The next week, while meeting with Sheikh Umer about the beekeeping project, I saw three children, two of them in uniforms. One gray, one blue. Perfect.

  “Holy shit!” I said. “Professor, tell him I need to get a photograph with those children.”

  Much explaining later, along with the understanding that I now owed a favor, I had one extremely confused child wearing a baseball helmet and another with a glove on his hand. I also had one highly irritated translator.

  “I hate you more than I have ever hated you right now,” the Professor said, rubbing his glasses hard enough that I thought they might break.

  “Why do you even work for us?” I said.

  “Forty. Dollars. A day.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You’re risking your life for us.”

  He sized me up for a second. “There was hope at the beginning,” he said. His face softened a bit. “Even without hope, you must try.”

  I smiled. Eventually, he smiled back.

  After another bout of more or less patient explanations, we had the children lined up right, the one crouched like a pitcher and the other standing as if at bat. I saw a woman hurrying toward us out of the corner of my eye, but Sheikh Umer cut her off and began speaking to her in Arabic.

  “Tell him to swing,” I said.

  The kid swung as though he were using the bat to beat someone to death, lifting it overhead and bringing it brutally down. I wanted to send that shot to G.G., but instead I showed the kid how to swing correctly and went back to taking photos. The timing was difficult, but after about twenty swings I got it perfect, the bat blurry, the batter’s face pure concentration, and a look of worry from the catcher, as if the batter had just connected with a pitch. I turned the camera’s display around and showed the picture to the Professor and the kids.

  “Look at that,” I said.

  The Professor nodded. “There you are,” he said. “Success.”

  IN VIETNAM THEY HAD WHORES

  My dad only told me about Vietnam when I was going over to Iraq. He sat me down in the den and he took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a few cans of Bud and started drinking. He’d take long pulls of the whiskey and small sips of the beer, and in between sips he’d tell me things. The sweatbox humidity in the summers, the jungle rot in the monsoons, the uselessness of the M16 in any season. And then, when he was really drunk, he told me about the whores.

  I guess at first the command organized monthly trips to town, but it didn’t last because everybody’d get too crazy. Once the trips stopped, the brothels moved in next to base and Marines would either bust through the wire at night or invite girls in as “local national guests” during the day. Those girls, he said, you’d treat more like girlfriends, which made it better.

  By his second tour, he said, the whole thing was a pretty smooth machine and there was a wide range of services, even different brothels for white and black Marines. If a girl who worked in a white brothel ever got found out servicing a black man, she’d wind up dead or at least beat till she couldn’t work anymore. He didn’t agree with that, but it happened, and he said it amazed him, to think you could just do that to somebody.

  Then he told me about one place where they had dancers and a stage where the girls would do this trick to make a little extra money. Customers would put a stack of quarters on the bar. Then the girls would squat down over the stack, drop their vag on top of it, and pick up as many quarters as they could. That was the thing at that bar.

  Dad was pretty well gone at this point, but he didn’t stop knocking them back, pulling on the whiskey and taking those small sips of beer. He looked so old, deep wrinkles running down his face and little gray spots on his hands.

  “I had this friend,” he said, and one time this friend goes to that bar and drinks, all night, not talking to anybody. And he takes out a stack of quarters and puts it on the bar, and then he hunches over with his arms around it so no one can see, and he takes out his lighter and holds the flame on those quarters till they’re branding iron hot. Then he calls over a girl. “Just any girl,” said my dad, “my friend, he didn’t care which.” My dad took another pull of the whiskey. “It smelled like sizzling steak,” he said.

 
I was like, Jesus. All right. Well, thanks, Dad. That was helpful.

  We didn’t keep drinking much beyond that. Dad was too drunk to even sit right. Before I brought him to his bed, he mumbled to me about being careful and gave me a tiny metal cross, the sort you’d wear on a necklace. He said it carried him through Vietnam. A few weeks later I was overseas.

  • • •

  We weren’t in Iraq long before I told Old Man my dad’s story. In the team, Old Man was the one you’d go to with things like that. West, our team leader, would have thought badly of me. With West, you were either a hundred percent or you were a piece of shit. Old Man was different. He’d joined the Corps late in life, so he had age and, we thought, wisdom. When I told him, all Old Man did was laugh and say, “Yep. In Vietnam they had whores. I guess that’s one thing they had over us.”

  I thought about that the first time I jerked off in a sandstorm. Being nineteen and seven months without getting laid makes you all kinds of crazy. I thought about it again when West died, and Old Man said he wished to God he knew where the Iraqi whorehouses were, ’cause he’d get himself a big fat whore who’d let him cry into her tits.

  But we didn’t know where the whores were, and that convinced me we didn’t know anything about Haditha. In training we’d learned to observe our environment, get the rhythms of city life. A man who walks this way every day is suddenly avoiding a particular street, an unusually tall woman you’ve never seen before strolls through the market in a hijab and people get out of her way. A bunch of kids that used to play soccer in a dirt patch near the road don’t play there anymore. I spent so much time looking at women through scopes. Sometimes I’d switch from eye to eye, closing one and then the other. Look at women through my bare eye. Look at women through the sights. Human, animal, human, animal. Me and my dad used to hunt.

  But I never scratched the surface. I never had a chance to look at a woman and think, There is a whore.

  First Platoon, though, in Kilo Company, we were sure they’d found a place. They got herpes all at once, and we thought, That’s it. They’re going on patrols and visiting a brothel when they’re supposed to be meeting sheikhs and drinking tea.