Sunrise Over Fallujah

  “Not really,” I answered. “I don’t know if there’s going to be an okay anymore.”

  May 9, 2003

  Dear Dad,

  I know that we have had our differences and everything, but I want you to know how much I really love you and respect you. I never felt that you were wrong in anything you were saying, only that I had to learn everything you know on my own, even if it hurt sometimes. I really appreciate all that you have done for me and taught me over the years and think that it will come in handy in the long run.

  Things are going well over here. The people are glad that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. Some of the Iraqis who are Sunnis are not as sure about what is going to happen because most of the people in this part of Iraq are Shiites. The Civil Affairs guys will have a larger and larger role now that the fighting is over. There are still some disturbances going on but I think they are just the die-hard fanatics. There is also a lot of looting going on. Jamil, the old man who works in our tent, says that there are not many jobs available. As soon as we get into the rebuilding there will be plenty of jobs and then democracy will really kick in and we’ll win the peace as quickly as we won the war. At least that’s what the officers are saying and I kind of believe them.

  Please take care of Mom and don’t let her worry too much. I’m bunking down in the Bubble, which is the Safe Zone, and it is nowhere near the areas where the Iraqis can get at us. Also, the only people who do regular patrols are the Infantry and the marines and some Special Forces guys. Most of the time I play bid whist or watch television. Easy life, right?

  Your loving son, Robin

  Any time a guy gets a large package from home, everybody gathers around hoping it’s something to eat. So when Victor Ríos from Second Squad got a humongous package, all the CA people came over to our tent to see what was in it.

  “I don’t know what’s in it,” he said. “It ain’t from my people in Albuquerque.”

  “That’s not the point,” Barbara said. “The point is that it might be edible. Open it up!”

  “Yo, it could be a chemical weapon or something,” one of the construction guys said.

  Victor looked at the return address. It was from Wyoming. “I bought a toy monkey from Wyoming on eBay,” he said. “But it was like a little thing, man.”

  “A monkey?” Jonesy pulled his head back and squinted his eyes. “You mean like a cheep-cheep kind of monkey?”

  “When I was a kid my abuela gave me a monkey to wear around my neck,” Victor said. “It wasn’t more than an inch high and it was carved in ivory. She said it would bring me luck. I never got shot as a kid, so when I saw the monkey on eBay I made a bid on it.”

  “Open it up,” Jonesy said.

  Victor didn’t like any attention and I could see he was embarrassed as he unwrapped the package. Sure enough, it was a monkey. Big sucker, maybe four feet high. It was a real monkey, only dead and stuffed.

  Harris started cracking up big-time and some of the construction people got on their headsets and started calling people over to come see Victor’s monkey. Meanwhile, Victor was uncomfortable but reaching that point where being uncomfortable was going to spill over into being mad.

  “I’m not eating him,” Barbara said, and started off.

  Captain Miller had heard that something was going on and came to take a look. She examined the monkey and announced that it was an African vervet. Victor was shaking his head; when he found the letter that came with the monkey he started reading it and then threw it down. The construction guy, a big, round-faced dude who looked about twelve, picked it up and read it.

  “‘I am so proud of you boys and what you are doing for our country,’ it says. ‘So I am sending you this monkey instead of the smaller one you won in the eBay auction. Enjoy!’ ”

  “Some people are just stupid!” Victor was really mad.

  “Who’s the monkey going to ride with?” Marla asked.

  “Why don’t you shut up?” Victor said.

  “No, really, who’s he going to ride with?” Marla asked again. “First Squad’ll take him!”

  Victor looked up at Marla to see if she was putting him on. I looked at her, too. She wasn’t. She was leaning over, taking a good look at the monkey.

  “You can have him!” Victor said.

  Okay. To me the monkey looked creepy. I don’t like dead things and the monkey was dead but he was on a stand with a rod up his back so he didn’t look—well, maybe he looked dead because you knew he was dead but his eyes were open. He was grayish brown and the front of his face was black. Marla seemed really interested in the thing, though, and after asking Victor if she could really have it, took it away with all the packaging.

  There was a ball game on television, a rerun of the Mets’ sixth game against Boston from 1986, and we watched that, but all the time I was thinking about Victor wearing a monkey around his neck for good luck.

  The rest of the day went smoothly and when we went to chow I asked Marla if she really wanted the monkey to ride with us.

  “Who? Sergeant Yossarian?”

  “Sergeant who?”

  “Yossarian,” Marla said. “That’s the name we gave him.”

  “He don’t look like no A-rab monkey to me,” Jonesy said.

  “That’s not an Arabic name,” Marla said. “It’s from a novel about World War II called Catch-22. Yossarian was the central character.”

  “Well, Oprah Winfrey got her name from the Bible,” Jonesy said. “So I guess we can have a monkey with a name from a novel.”

  That made as much sense as Jonesy usually made.

  We got back from chow and the nets to put over our tent flaps had arrived. We had asked for them so that we could keep the flaps open and maybe catch a breeze. We had one air-conditioning unit which we could hook up to the generator, but the generator made so much noise and messed up the air so much we didn’t use it. But nobody wanted the flaps open at night, so we decided to wait until morning to put the nets up.

  I told Victor that the women had named the monkey Sergeant Yossarian and that the name was from a book called Catch-22. Victor said that it was stupid to give a monkey a name. I thought he just didn’t want too much attention.

  “Hey, women do that kind of thing,” I said.

  “Why do we have to do this?” Captain Miller was pissed, as per usual.

  “I think the brass is handing us around because they’re trying to sell some of the old-timers on the idea of Civil Affairs,” Captain Coles said. “Everybody knows about us, but for some of the unit commanders it’s still a hard sell. They think we’re just propaganda for the press.”

  “We’ve built an army around the concept that we’re more macho than anybody in the freaking world,” Captain Miller said, “then when we screw up an operation you send the women out to make nice-nice.”

  “We don’t know if they screwed it up.” Jonesy was putting on his Molle vest and checking his ammo. “We know they bombed a target and some civilians were killed. But the way the people fighting us dress, they could have been soldiers, too.”

  “If they’re sending us,” Marla chipped in, “they screwed it up.”

  “One of our planes might have taken out one of their Red Crescent ambulances,” Captain Coles said. “It’ll probably be on Al Jazeera for the next six months.”

  I remembered the time we were attacked by guys hopping out of an ambulance. They were in an ambulance, in civilian clothes, and still had fired on us. I thought about the marines who were killed on the road back to the Bubble, and suddenly I didn’t want to leave the tent.

  We took First and Second Squads and the women from the Medical Squad with Captain Miller complaining at the top of her voice. I guess that was the way she handled things.

  We loaded up three Humvees; one pulled a “water buffalo,” a 400-gallon water carrier that could be hitched onto the back of a truck. Coles drove the Humvee pulling the water and the two medics rode with him. Ahmed went along to interpret. In the seat next
to me, dressed up in a Molle vest with sergeant stripes, was Yossarian.

  Jonesy was behind the wheel and it took us an hour and a half to reach the village, which was just outside of Al-Uhaimir. I didn’t know how anybody could live in such a desolate area. Signs of war were everywhere: burned-out vehicles, spent shells, trees that had been hit by bombs and now seemed to twist their way out of the pockmarked earth. The most impressive thing around was a huge terraced mound that looked like something from another world. We stopped to take a closer look at it. I heard Ahmed calling it a ziggurat; the redbrick mound seemed almost to shimmer in the bright sunlight.

  “The ancient Mesopotamians built shrines on top of them,” Ahmed said. “Read that in the guidebook.”

  “That’s one of the spooky things about this country,” Marla said. “Half of the stuff here was built within the past two or three years and the other half has been here for five thousand years.”

  When we reached the area we were looking for, it was 1300 hours. There were some military trucks, including some water buffaloes, and thirty or forty soldiers. Coles talked to them and found out that the people in the village didn’t want to have anything to do with us.

  “They’re not sure if they’re afraid or just pissed off,” Coles said.

  “Who are they?” Marla asked.

  “The 422nd,” Coles answered. “They’re repairing some damage to the village’s water supply.” The 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion was the main CA support group attached to the 3rd Infantry. They had regular missions and their own agenda while we were just a “flying squad.” First Squad had all talked about trying to switch units once things calmed down.

  “Did anybody talk to the local sheik?” Miller asked.

  Captain Coles shrugged.

  Miller saw some Iraqi women and started toward them. Ahmed went with her, and me and Jonesy followed a few steps behind them. Marla, who had dismounted, went back to the Humvee.

  “Yo, Birdy, check out Miller,” Jonesy said.

  Captain Miller had taken off her helmet and was running her fingers through her hair as she talked to the women. She had said she didn’t like being paraded as a woman but she understood that it did make a difference.

  I saw Miller talking directly to one Iraqi woman. The captain nodded a few times, and then came over to us.

  “We’re invited into one of the houses for tea,” she said. “One of the women speaks English and I think she’s an American.”

  Captain Coles said he wasn’t going in, which surprised me. He told me to go in with the two medics, and Marla.

  “How come you don’t want to go in, sir?” I asked.

  “I think you can handle it,” Coles answered.

  What was happening, I thought, was that the humanity we were supposed to be showing the Iraqis was wearing thin. I didn’t know who my enemy was over here, what rock he might pop out from, from which window he might shoot. I didn’t know which of the figures in robes down to their ankles were praying for peace and which were planting bombs on the side of the road.

  Half of the electricity in the entire country was out, and even the electricity that was supposed to be all right didn’t work most of the time. The house was small, two floors, but the top floor looked too small to be a regular living space. We went into a room that was lit by an oil lamp and whatever light came through the window.

  The woman who directed us to the low tables was young, maybe thirty at the most, with a thin, pleasant face that would have been pretty except for the sadness in her eyes. I thought she could have been an American. She didn’t have much of an accent as she asked us to be seated. One of the other women brought a large pot and placed it in the middle of the table. The smell of tea, very strong, quickly filled the room.

  “Do you want to search my house?” the first woman asked me. “I see you are looking so hard.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You speak very good English,” Captain Miller said.

  The woman nodded.

  We were served the tea in glasses and I remembered my grandmother telling me how she used to go down from Harlem to the Lower East Side when she was young and drink tea from glasses instead of cups.

  “We were told that there were children injured here,” Captain Miller said. “We’re very sorry.”

  The woman spoke to the others, who all turned and looked at Captain Miller. Captain Miller looked back at each woman in turn.

  “You say I speak good English,” said the woman who had invited us in. “My name is Halima Telfah. My friends call me Hali. I studied at the University of Washington in Seattle for three years and got my degree in biology there. I learned English at the university and at the hotel I worked in to support myself. The Hotel Meany. I thought it was a funny name for a hotel.

  “I was very respectful of Americans. I thought you were a wonderful people. You were so free you didn’t even know what to do with your freedom. Your women are free. Your men are free. Your children are free. I had so much respect for you and for your country.”

  “We have respect for your country, too,” Marla said.

  “I don’t think you even know my country,” Halima said.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Captain Miller asked. “Were there children injured?”

  “When the fighting started—when the invasion started—the young men who lived here, there weren’t many, debated among themselves what they should do. They didn’t know why you wanted to kill them. They asked that question: ‘Why do they want to kill us?’

  “They decided that they would put themselves at your mercy. They would wait until you came and see what you would do. Then some Ba’athists came and told our men it was their duty to fight and save their country.”

  “The Ba’athists?” I asked.

  “The Nationalist mob,” she said. “Saddam’s party.”

  “Did they come in a Red Crescent truck?” Marla asked.

  “No, it was just a regular truck. I think on the side it was painted something about soft drinks. The Ba’athists said that our young men should go to the capital to get orders. They belonged to the local reserves but they wanted them to go to the capital because there was so much talk about surrendering to the Americans.

  “We made cakes for our men and packed fresh fruit into bags for them to carry to Baghdad. We cried with them and laughed with them and told them to be careful. The children…”

  She stopped and put her fingertips to her mouth as if to feel the weight of the words that were coming out. Then she took a deep breath and continued.

  “The children were excited. They are only children. Every event is great for them. The men all got into the Ba’athists’ truck and the children waved them good-bye. An American plane flew overhead. One of the men, I think it was one of the Ba’athists, shot at it. The plane circled. The children watched. The truck started down the road carrying our sons and brothers and husbands. The plane circled and dropped one bomb or fired one missile or something. It hit the truck and there was a great explosion.

  “The plane flew away. It had done its duty for the war that day. The truck was only three hundred meters down the road. We ran toward it. The children ran faster. But there was nothing left but pieces of bodies. One little girl began to scream. The horror of it swept over them all but one little girl whose brother was in the truck. She found what was left of him and tried to pull him home.

  “Are they hurt, you ask? Yes, they are wounded deep inside. It is not something children should see. The Americans have come and the killing has begun,” Halima continued. Her low, flat voice was barely above a whisper. “There is so much killing that there is no place left in our hearts to hold our grief or our anger. Now the children are asking the same question as their brothers: Why have you come to kill us?”

  “I’m sorry,” Captain Miller said. “I’m very sorry. Is there anything we can do to help?”

  “Treat our lives as if they are as precious as your own,” Halima said. “That’s all we
ask.”

  I felt torn in a hundred directions. The sadness in Halima’s voice bothered me, but then I thought about the village men who had been killed, and remembered her saying that they were going to Baghdad to get ready to fight Americans. There was a lot less room in my heart for grief, too. I thought Halima knew what I was thinking, because she kept looking in my direction.

  “Are you ever going back to America?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” she said. “I don’t dare make the predictions I made when I was a child.”

  We finished the tea and went outside. Captain Miller asked again if there was anything we could do and Halima asked if we had any toothpaste. We didn’t but Miller said we would get her some.

  “Since the bombing began, it’s become such a luxury to brush your teeth,” Halima said. “I feel guilty just thinking about it.”

  There was a boy standing in a doorway. Nine, maybe ten, and thin, he leaned against the side of the open door. The sun slanted across his legs and I saw that he was barefoot. Under one foot there was a soccer ball. I made a kicking motion and held my hands up. He looked at me for a long moment and then gently nudged the ball in my direction.

  I walked over to the ball and kicked it back. Another boy came out of the shadows, followed the ball to where it had rolled against the wall, and kicked it back to me. They couldn’t help being kids. No matter what happened, they were still children.

  I remembered Sergeant Yossarian and motioned for the first kid to come over. He went with me to the Humvee and I pointed inside. He looked and jumped back quickly. Then he looked again. He reached in and touched Yossarian on the arm and saw that he didn’t move. The smile on the kid’s face was brilliant. White teeth in a brown face enjoying a moment of ridiculous peace. Yes.

  He turned toward the houses and called out.

  I don’t know where all the kids came from, but there were soon seven: five boys and two girls, and one of the boys was chattering something in Arabic. One by one they looked into the Humvee and the braver ones touched Yossarian. Then the first kid turned to me and spoke in Arabic.