Phil Klay - Redeployment

I squeezed Zara’s hand, hard. “I had his name,” I said. “In all the confusion, I could call him by name. I could talk to him and he would know it. And so would all his men.”

“That gave you an advantage.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I had a plan. Normally, this sort of thing wouldn’t start with a SPC, but they trusted me. They thought I had the magic knowledge, because, you know, I’m an Arab Muslim.”

Zara was leaning forward, the same posture as my father. Her eyes were on me now.

“Now, Laith al-Tawhid was no idiot. He was fundamentalist, not dumb. He wasn’t going to come running because I called him names. But I knew how to get him. Women.”

“Women?”

“His women were at home,” I said. “Outside of Fallujah. And the old-school guys, guys like Laith al-Tawhid, they treat women like dogs. Like dogs who can destroy all your family’s honor if they act up or show an ounce of free will.”

She nodded.

“There was a Marine company holding an office building in front of Laith’s position,” I said. “I told the Marines what we wanted to do and they loved it.”

“What did you say?”

“Laith al-Tawhid, we have your women,” I said, “your wife and your daughters.”

She frowned. “So he had to come and fight you,” she said.

“I told him we found them whoring themselves out to American soldiers, and we were bringing them to the office building.”

She nodded. “You told this to your father.”

“I told him everything. How I screamed out, in the Iraqi Arabic I’d learned in my private time, that we’d fuck his daughters on the roof and put their mouths to the loudspeaker so he could hear their screams.”

Zara pulled back her hand. I’d expected that. “So that’s how you fought,” she said. There was a touch of contempt in her voice, and I smiled. I’m not sure why, I wasn’t happy.

“I didn’t send it up the flagpole. But the platoon loved it. I stayed on those speakers for an hour. Telling him how when his daughters bent down to pray, we’d put our shoes on their heads and rape them in the ass. Rub our foreskins on their faces. A thousand dicks in your religion, I told him, and in forty minutes, a thousand American dicks in your daughters.”

“That’s disgusting,” she said.

“Everybody laughed as we came up with what we’d tell them. All the Marines had suggestions, but I turned them down. Americans think the best insults are all ‘cunt’ and ‘pussy,’ but in Arabic it’s all ‘shoes’ and ‘foreskins’ and ‘putting a dick in your mother’s rib cage.’”

“I get the idea,” she said.

“Well, this worked,” I said. “They didn’t charge out of the mosques like idiots, but they still assaulted, and they got mowed down.”

“I don’t care if it worked.”

“I mean, all this guy’s men were hearing him being disrespected. Humiliated. For an hour. This was a violent time. There were a hundred little insurgent groups, a hundred little local chiefs trying to grab power. And I was shaming him in front of everybody. I told him, ‘You think fighting us will win you honor, but we have your daughters. You’ve fucked with us, so you’ve fucked your children. There is no honor.’ He didn’t have a choice. And I never saw him die. I never saw him at all. I just heard the Marines shooting him down. They told me he led his little suicide charge.”

“I get it,” she said.

“But you don’t like it,” I said. “My dad didn’t either. He’d rather I shot them in the face. In his mind, that’s so much nicer. So much more honorable. He’d have been proud of me, if I’d done that. You’d like me better, too.”

“I’d rather you hadn’t done anything,” she said.

“And I told my father everything. Insult by insult. What I said. All the things I’d learned in America, all the things I’d learned from him, all the things that’d been said to me, all the things I could think of, and I could think of a lot.”

“I get it,” she said again, this time in the same tone of voice that my father had used when I told him and he’d said, “Enough.” But with my father I’d kept going, described every sexual act, every foul Arabic word. I’d cursed for him and at him in English, in Egyptian, in Iraqi, in MSA, in Koranic Arabic, in Bedouin slang, and he’d said, “Enough, enough,” his voice shaking with rage and then terror, because I was standing over him, shouting insults in his face, and he couldn’t see his son any more than I—standing over him and letting my rage wash out—could see my father.

“You think I’m ashamed of it?” I said to Zara, and I saw my father, heard the words he couldn’t even get out of his mouth because the shock of it was too much. His hands had trembled, his eyes were downcast. There was gray in his mustache. He looked old. Beaten. I’d never seen him that way before.

Zara asked, “What happened to his daughters?”

I didn’t know.

“When I think about killing that man,” I said, “I think of that kid with the heat fading out.”

I slumped down into the couch. We were quiet again. I thought about firing up more coals but I lacked the energy. After cursing my father I’d spent the night in a Motel 6, where my mother found me and brought me home. My father and I didn’t talk for the rest of my leave.

“Okay,” Zara said. She paused, looked out at the street. “So… what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to forgive you?”

“Forgive me?” I said. “How? For what?”

“And even if I did,” she said, “would it matter? Because I’m Muslim? You think that matters to the kid you watched die?”

I smiled at her. How far from the point, I thought, was that kid’s death. It was at best the point of somebody else’s story, though I guess Zara knew that.

“I tell vets the scope story,” I said. “They usually laugh.”

Zara stood up slowly, anger lighting her face. I didn’t move from my seat. I looked up at her and waited for a response. Even covered up, her body was still lovely under her clothes. I kept smiling, enjoying her in front of me and enjoying the superiority I knew I’d feel when her outburst came. No one can really cut you when they’re angry. It clouds their mind too much. Better to be like me in Fallujah, lying through your teeth and shouting hateful things with calm intelligence, every word calibrated for maximum harm.

But Zara’s outburst didn’t come. She just stood there. And then some emotion I couldn’t identify moved through her, and she didn’t seem angry anymore. She stepped back and looked at me, considering. She reached up and adjusted her shawl.

“Okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay.”

For the first time since that morning, walking into the Special Assistant’s office and seeing her there, I was the unsettled one. She wasn’t playing any of the moves I’d envisioned for her.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She reached over and put her hand on my shoulder, her touch light and warm. Even though her face was calm, my heart was beating and I looked up at her as though she were passing down a sentence. There was an unearthly quality to her then.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you can talk about it.” Then she walked down the steps of the porch and stopped at the bottom. Behind her were the elm trees and the shoddy clapboard houses of South Whitney Street, housing for the off-campus frats and the few Amherst students who didn’t live in dorms. She didn’t quite belong here, I thought, and neither did I.

Zara stood in the yard, not moving. After a moment, she turned back and looked up the stairs to where I was still sitting by the hookah.

“Maybe we’ll talk another time,” she said. Then she gave a slight wave with her hand, turned, and walked back to campus.