But what was the difference, maybe, if you were an Iraqi? Every one of the coalition troops was wearing the same camo, the same boots, the same caps. Everyone carried the same weapons, and everyone had been trained to treat the Iraqis the same way—from a distance. Partly that was self-defense: you don’t express friendship to someone with a multitude of enemies; you try to stay neutral, so that at least, if you were killed, it was a neutral IED that did it, not some kid with a weapon staring at your very own face.
A day or so later, more about the rape and the killings came out. It was a squad who guarded a checkpoint just south of the city, a place no one wanted to be assigned to, it was so dangerous. Six guys kept staring at this girl who lived in a house nearby. They got drunk, and that was probably the least of it, and went over to the house and killed the parents and the sister first, then raped the girl, shot her in the head, and tried to burn up the evidence. They then blamed it on Sunni insurgents, but that unraveled. Another episode, said Harper, in the History of Stupid People, which, Guthrie had to agree, was a long and eventful history. Everyone involved had kept this under deep cover for a while, but of course it would come out—the Iraqis got to know all about it, and the longer it went unattended to by the coalition forces, the more certain it was that something bad would happen, and then it did. But that was the way it was this time, Guthrie thought. His first deployment, he had been scared, but the worst days were at the beginning, even including the Fallujah battle. This time, the vermin, and pardon him for saying that, were getting the upper hand, but he was speaking scientifically—bacteria always evolved immunity to antibiotics, broadleaf weeds always evolved past the Roundup, the insurgents always developed better methods of resistance. In the meantime, the army kept promising vehicles that might actually withstand a roadside bomb, but where were they? And though there were checkpoints everywhere, the violence was getting more frequent and more menacing; if you were manning a checkpoint, any person approaching, any child, any dog, not to mention any vehicle, made you nervous. Yes, maybe the Shiites hated the coalition forces the most—Muqtada al-Sadr tried to make sure of that—but no one, at this point, had a reason to befriend the coalition forces.
Guthrie asked Harper if his dad or his uncles had been in the army. No; one uncle had been a career naval officer, got in during Vietnam, got out after the Gulf War; he was against this war and had even rallied against it in Santa Cruz, California. He had said to Harper that if he had to join up, the navy was the place, but Harper decided he was too tall for the navy. This was his first deployment. Maybe that was the key—he hadn’t expected it to be any easier. Guthrie watched him; he was good-humored, and things rolled off his back pretty quick. He was also uniquely observant, Guthrie realized. For some unknown reason, Harper could sense something odd in any scene; if he bumped into a shelf and something wobbled, he caught it without thinking about it, every time. Month by month, Guthrie had come to the conclusion that somewhere not far from Harper was the safest place to be. But in Baghdad, even that spot wasn’t terribly safe.
One morning after the story about the murders came out, they were at their assigned checkpoint. They had been there since dawn. Dawn was cool enough, but now it was getting hot, and Guthrie, as always, was feeling sweaty and uncomfortable in his gear. A kid did approach, a little skinny kid in shorts and sandals. He came toward them with his hands away from his sides, his shirt flapping in the wind. Their checkpoint was not out in the open; there was a wall and some wrecks of apartment buildings not far away. The road to the checkpoint had been cleared, but it came down a small rise. The boy had a can in his hand—a Coke can. He was smiling, and he waved the can, then threw it. As it left his hand, someone, not anyone right around Guthrie, shot the can like a clay pigeon, and the boy jumped back. The very moment he jumped back, Guthrie expected the can to explode, but it didn’t, it just fragmented from the hit—the aluminum sparkling in the sunlight. It was the boy who was killed, shot in the neck and the chest. He collapsed to the ground. None of the coalition soldiers went out to him. He lay there. His blood was dark on the dirt. After what seemed like a long time, two guys in Iraqi uniforms drove up to the body in an old jeep. Even they approached the body cautiously. But the corpse didn’t blow up. They laid it in the back of the jeep and drove away. Guthrie, like everyone else in the squad, watched, said nothing. Then the corporal said, “I don’t see why the insurgents shoot kids with Coke cans.” And that was the explanation—another example of in-fighting. Guthrie knew better than to look around for any telltale grins, knew better than to ask, knew better than to wonder. It was the kid’s own fault, wasn’t it? Throwing that can.
—
EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT how Zarqawi was the mastermind behind some beheadings, plus lots of bombings and attacks. He was a Sunni from Jordan, Bin Laden’s best friend, but after Zarqawi was killed, Guthrie noticed that all the coalition commanders seemed to be surprised that the insurgents got more and more violent. It was like they looked within and said, Gee, if I died, the war effort would grind to a halt. Why didn’t that happen when Zarqawi died? Guthrie told Harper about another letter he’d read from his great-uncle Frank to his dad: Frank’s company was somewhere in Italy, attacking a monastery or a castle on the pinnacle of a hill. The only plan of battle was to send platoon after platoon up the sides of the mountain, even though the hillside was barren of cover except bomb craters, and the German planes came in all day, every day. After they’d been up the mountain a couple of times, one of the guys in Frank’s squad told the lieutenant he would kill him if he ordered them to attack again. And then he did, and they did kill him, though they pretended the Germans did it. When you came right down to it, why would troops keep fighting if they thought they could get away with not fighting? Pride, said Harper.
Revenge, said Guthrie. If Zarqawi was really Al Qaeda, and the insurgents were Al Qaeda, wouldn’t a desire for revenge motivate them the way it would anybody else? But you didn’t avenge generals, you avenged your buddies, and the more of your buddies that got it, then the more pissed off you became.
Bombs were everywhere. The worst bomb they’d heard about must have been a Zarqawi idea, a car bomb the year before. Some American soldiers were handing out candy to kids in a busy part of town, not far from a checkpoint. Then, out of nowhere, an old car like a Ford Explorer (that’s what Guthrie imagined, anyway) barreled into the crowd and blew up—killing twenty or thirty kids and the soldiers. It was a Shia neighborhood—poor, too. Were they really Al Qaeda? Or were they Sunni, enraged at how the Shia seemed to be taking over? Everyone had a theory, but the only solution was Harper’s solution: pay attention. If there was an indentation in a road, or a figure on the horizon, Harper went on the alert. It wasn’t like the movies—Iraqi bombs didn’t know to go off on their own, so someone had to be watching, waiting to detonate. More than once, when they had been driving along, Harper had stopped: something about the setup, whatever it was he couldn’t himself always explain, had bugged him. So he halted the vehicle, waited. When kids approached for candy or money, Harper put one of the kids, usually the most talkative one, in the vehicle with them, and drove carefully along to the checkpoint, where he let the kid go with some money or some food as payment. Once, when he was especially nervous, he made the kid sit on the hood of the vehicle as they drove. And it had to be a boy. Harper said that the Iraqis didn’t value girls enough not to set the bomb off.
It was said that, for every coalition soldier killed, ninety to a hundred Iraqis were killed. Harper said that the War Between the States had lasted 1,488 days (that he would know this was the sort of guy Harper was); 620,000 people had died. That was 417 people per day. What was especially interesting, according to Harper (where did he get this stuff?), was that the population of Iraq was about twenty-five million, more or less. In 1860, the population of the United States was about thirty million. So were the Iraqis in a civil war yet? Only they would know, Guthrie thought, and they weren’t saying.
Guthrie,
unlike Minnie and his mom, had not opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom. The congressman, as he was called around the farm, had supported it, or at least not opposed it. Guthrie would not have said at the time that he knew enough to oppose it—when half your family voted Republican and half voted Democratic, then you had to believe that both parties were basically okay. After his first deployment, he would have said that he’d seen some bad things but that, all in all, it was not a war like previous wars that they’d studied in school. You could be, he had thought, against the Vietnam War and in favor of the Iraq War. But all the guys agreed that this war was going south, and there wasn’t much the coalition forces seemed to be able to do about it. The Iraqis complained that the coalition was keeping the good weapons and good armor and good equipment to themselves—but why would you give weapons to people who might turn around and kill you? They could kill you because they hated you, they could kill you because you were in the way, they could kill you because they didn’t know what they were doing, they could kill you because they didn’t have anything better to do.
—
GUTHRIE DIDN’T LIKE IT when he and Harper got different assignments, especially if his assignment included driving the road between Baghdad and the airport, which was about as dangerous as any road in Iraq—maybe not a bomb (but maybe yes), but rocket fire, sniping, mortar attacks. He had worried about the insurgency when he was first redeployed, and all of his worries had been not nearly enough. The plane, who was in the plane? It was a cargo plane. It was coming in, and then started circling; Guthrie, hunkered down behind the security perimeter at the airport, could see it approach, turn, disappear into the cloud cover. But the pilot seemed determined to land. Then he did land, and everyone on the plane was hurried to a helicopter, and that took off without being shot down. Guthrie could see Condoleezza Rice get off the plane and into the helicopter; only a few other people went with her. Guthrie and his squad then accompanied the rest of them into Baghdad on the road—no explosions, insurgent recon wasn’t always very good. Harper was assigned to get her from the helipad to the Green Zone; he carried a machine gun and stayed a few paces behind her. He heard her asking about Saddam Hussein, where was he, what was going on with the trial. Guthrie had forgotten that Saddam was still alive. Harper had also heard someone ask her about a book that had been published, but he didn’t hear what it was. Apparently, it was uncomplimentary, because she had stopped walking, snorted, and gotten huffy about it; the guy behind her had almost knocked her down. She was a pain in the ass, said Harper—not because she wanted to be a pain in the ass, but because she was used to being listened to and respected, she was used to the lights not going out, she was used to standing a certain way, walking a certain way. Harper, who was as cool as a cat, came home freaked out after they put her back on the plane and chased her away. That no one had shot her or blown her up was just a matter of luck, he thought.
Harper stayed freaked out. When they went on patrols in eastern or western Baghdad, Harper was jumpier than everyone else. One night, Guthrie asked him about it. He said, “It’s like we’ve gone over some edge, where there’s just too much shit going on. You know what scares me most? It’s not being killed, it’s being blown up but not dying. Used to be, they got you or they didn’t. Now they only get part of you. The medics rush in, and they do their shit, and they think they are doing you a favor, saving most of you, but are they? I think about that every time we go out on a fucking patrol.”
Guthrie tried not to think about anything. Even when Kassen was shot in the neck and Peters had his leg blown off, Guthrie kept his thoughts muffled down, flat, stuffed away somewhere. He would deal with it later. He also stopped talking to Harper about stuff, because Harper was rattled, talking in his sleep. Guthrie thought maybe Harper had never confronted any situation before where he didn’t know his way around. But he wasn’t the only one. The guys who had had their deployments extended were worse. The army said it was only six weeks or a month, but everyone knew that, once you started down that road, there would be no end—you joined up, they said they would give you certain guarantees in exchange for the fact that you could get killed or worse, and then those guarantees turned out not to be guarantees at all, but just crap. He’d never thought he’d say this, but thank the Lord he didn’t have a girlfriend back home, or, for fuck’s sake, a wife. Those guys were the worst. They tried to keep in touch, or they didn’t try to keep in touch; they tried to have something to live for, or they were restless with longing, or, the worst, they didn’t give a shit anymore but they didn’t dare say anything about it. And where were the hookers? According to Harper, World War II had been all about hookers, and in Vietnam the soldiers had access to hookers like no American had ever seen before, but no hookers in Iraq, at least that anyone Guthrie knew had discovered. Harper said that hookers were practically a soldier’s right. No hookers, and the female soldiers expecting not to be hit on—it was an impossible situation.
One night, Guthrie and Harper talked about how you would run a war if you could do it right. The only thing they could come up with was a standing army of fourteen-year-olds who didn’t know what death was, who would never be allowed back home, who would be conditioned and trained to kill or be killed, who would be bred to the game and then penned up (though treated well) after the war was over. Not an all-volunteer army, but an army of purebreds, like racehorses or hogs. It made them laugh while they were talking about it, but then Harper talked in his sleep again, and Guthrie didn’t get any sleep at all.
—
EVERYONE WAS SUPERSTITIOUS about approaching the end of their deployment. Only an idiot talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Harper said that there was no objective reason to believe that you were in more danger in the last weeks or days or hours before they got you out of this hellhole, but, still, he did not say what he was going to do when he got home. Even so, things entered Guthrie’s mind. When he heard about the Shiites’ kidnapping of dozens of Sunnis from the Ministry of Higher Education, he got the image of the Memorial Union at Iowa State—he’d been there on a school trip senior year and was impressed by it. When the Sunnis then attacked the Health Ministry, he couldn’t help imagining the big square white buildings of Usherton Hospital, where he’d gone once after a basketball game for an ankle X-ray. Baghdad was nothing at all like Usherton—maybe it was like Phoenix? But he didn’t want to think that, either. Sadr City he did not mistake for anywhere he had ever been. There were palm trees, there was heat, there was chaos, there was dirt, there were donkey carts, there were holes blasted in walls and doors, there was beautiful Arabic writing in black and blue on white walls, there were lines of people waiting to go into a bank, there were women in full black burqas, men in long robes, and children running and jumping everywhere with hardly anything on, there were soldiers aiming their weapons around corners, standing beside women sitting on the pavement, holding babies. There was a terrible stink. There was the absolute flatness of the landscape, absolute flat blueness of the sky. There was an everlasting rolling blast of noise, and sometimes, or at least that one time, there was a series of huge explosions in the middle of the afternoon, when five car bombs went off one after another in a square that Guthrie had walked through the day before, and after that there were bodies and blood and rubble and mess. No one, no one could stop them, no matter who wanted to or how much they wanted to. The folks back in Washington could say this or that, they could ask for more money in addition to the millions of dollars per day that they were spending, but it was all for naught, and everyone in Guthrie’s unit knew that as well as they knew their own names.
—
A WEEK LEFT; go out on patrol, be glad it was cold and the streets were more or less empty. Six days; work the checkpoint, hope that no one would appear, scream at anyone who even twitched an eyebrow the wrong way. Five days; go out on patrol again. Go slow, watch out for doorways and corners, don’t say anything about the future. Day four; go out on patrol again, this time in Karbala,
not Sadr City. Don’t look at the women—every billow in every burqa could be a bomb. Don’t look at the fingers of your friend lighting his cigarette—they are trembling.
Remind yourself that the Americans had nothing to do with the execution of Saddam Hussein. He had been tried by his fellow Iraqis, found guilty of crimes against humanity, and now was going to be hanged. Most of the guys in Guthrie’s unit had seen that picture of Saddam and Rumsfeld shaking hands in the eighties. But most of them didn’t care—if you enlisted, even for practical reasons rather than patriotic reasons (or religious reasons; there were guys scattered about who had imagined in another lifetime that they were going to witness to the Iraqis and show them how to be saved, but nobody did that when they got their boots on the ground), then you did not pretend to understand the ins and outs of two guys shaking hands one day and attacking each other another day. But Harper knew something that Guthrie didn’t know, that the Shiites in the government had chosen to hang Saddam on the worst possible day—some sort of holy day. Harper said, “It was like they hung the Pope on Christmas, or even Good Friday. It was like they handed their enemies a martyr.” One of the other guys said that was pretty rich, Saddam Hussein as a martyr or a victim, and Harper just shrugged. He didn’t care anymore what you thought or whether you agreed with him, he was just waiting, like they were all just waiting. What they all knew was that when Saddam was hanged, no matter how secret that might be, everyone would know instantly, and the Sunnis would go bananas, and Baghdad would have another one of those weeks—most casualties since the invasion.
One day to go. The afternoon of Saddam’s hanging, the skies were cloudy and the weather was damp—it could get that way. You didn’t know whether you wanted to be wearing all your gear or not. They were assigned to a checkpoint. The first car that came through seemed harmless: a family, a veiled wife, a husband who was friendly, three kids in the back seat. Behind them, close behind them, were three guys, maybe nineteen years old. They seemed jumpy and impatient; their old, dirty car bumped against the back of the family’s car. Harper, Corning, and Randall made them reverse, get out and leave the doors open, then the three kids cocked their weapons, gave the guys the once-over, and sent them back the way they came. A farmer went through in a little truck with a couple of goats in the back. A man in Western clothes went through in a rather nice car, papers on the front seat. The jumpy guys did not return. The weather warmed up and the clouds dissipated. Off in the distance, they heard the boom of an explosion, saw a flare. It was too far away for them to hear the screams. Randall made a face, and said, “Happy New Year.”