Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

Which was what I was doing that last day as I neared the top of the hill. It was 6:43. It was still eighty-five degrees.

After we’d discovered nothing was when the boredom set in. Excruciating boredom. We’d eat, we’d shower, we’d clean, we’d train. In that order. Then we stopped training, because there was no point. That was about the fifth month.

During the sixth month, I went to the movie theater almost every day. Something had gotten mixed up in the supplies, though, and the theater had only two movies, both Indiana Jones , one of which was dubbed in Spanish. I watched them over and over, even the Spanish one, and then I never went back. A couple of the guys asked the sergeant if we’d be getting any more movies, and his response was “You’re worried about movies when our boys are being killed a thousand miles away?” He had a point.

The days dragged on. Instead of getting in shape, I started to get fatter. If I ever let myself reflect on matters of spirit or psyche, I reflected that at the end of my tour, all I would have to show for my effort was that I was one year older. In short, I was going to get out of the army and be exactly the same person I was before I joined. I was going to go back to that same cubicle with those same spreadsheets. At night I dreamed of fantastic adventures, full of action, shot in vivid color, not unlike the Indiana Jones movies. I dreamed of being possessed by exceptional courage and heroism. I dreamed of confronting the enemy. In the morning I’d wake with disappointment, eat, shower, clean the dorm, and then go bowling. My bowling improved.

Becky would send emails saying that she was worried about me, wanting to know what was going on, wanting to know if I was okay. Eighty percent of her messages would be redacted. For a while I fanned her concern by responding with ambiguous statements like “We’ll just have to wait and see.” Soon her concern started to make me feel foolish, and I stopped going to the Internet café as often. When I did go, I would use my fifteen minutes to look at porn.

About the only thing we could do for the war effort was cheer for the planes that flew overhead on their way to drop their payload on the other side of the country. They sounded like thunder when they appeared, always around noon, two dozen or so, their bellies silver and red. We’d jump up and down, fifty of us guys, screaming at them, waving our arms as if we were on a desert island, hoping the pilots would give a signal that they’d seen us. In the evening they’d pass back going the other way, flying faster because they were lighter.

One day our sergeant said, “What are you waving at them for? There’s no one in those planes. Those are drones.”

I came to the top of the hill. It was 7:12, according to my gun. It was starting to get dusky and gray. I stood and surveyed the great expanse of nothingness. North to south, as I had been trained. Then east to west. The water, the prairie. Nothing.

It was silent up there on the hill, except for the occasional buzzing of the flies. It was always silent, but today even more so. I had a surge of nostalgia: this was the last time I would be standing here. It was similar to the phenomenon that prisoners experience, becoming nostalgic for their cells the moment they are released.

I unzipped my backpack and took out my meal, which came in a little plastic container with an American flag. It was dinnertime, but I hadn’t eaten my lunch yet. Today it was ham and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Yesterday it had been turkey and cheese with an apple and a cookie. Tomorrow I would be making my own lunch. Two days after that, I’d be back at the office in a cubicle looking at spreadsheets. I sat down on a rock and ate my sandwich. The flies buzzed. I felt nostalgic for the army lunches.

And it was then that I saw him. At first I had no idea what I was seeing. At first I thought it might be an animal. All I could detect was some faint movement way out in the prairie, maybe a mile away, a rustling of the grass. It’s just the breeze, I thought. But as I continued to watch, I saw the unmistakable shape of a human head appear above the tall grass. I put down my sandwich and picked up my backpack. My hands were shaking as I took out my binoculars, and I had to clamp my elbows together to steady my gaze. Sure enough, there he was. A tall, bald, fat man, maybe fifty, maybe younger: the enemy.

He was walking with something, a sheep or a goat, I guessed, although I could scarcely see it in the grass. I imagined that he was moving stealthily, the man, that he was trying to keep himself concealed, but when the grass parted, it was clear that he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. It was as if he had gone out for an afternoon stroll. His nonchalance irritated me. It flew in the face of my boredom. Everything I had done for the past twelve months had been in relation to this man’s existence — or nonexistence — and now here he was, seemingly unperturbed by what lay beyond the hill on which I was sitting. He didn’t even know we had built a bridge.

He was moving toward the water, perhaps bringing the goat or sheep to drink. I watched the man carefully through my binoculars. It felt slightly invasive to be watching him so closely, slightly pathetic. Years ago, I had made the discovery that a window in the hallway of my apartment building faced the bedroom window in a neighboring apartment. I was probably about ten years old and had just grown tall enough to be able to peer over the high window ledge. The bedroom belonged to a woman, and I remember that she was rather disappointingly plain, and that she had long plain brown hair, dishwater hair, and she dressed always in baggy pajamas, sacklike, that revealed nothing. All she did was lie in bed and read. For hours she read. For hours I would stand there in the hallway watching her, hoping she would do something exciting, like take off her clothes and masturbate. But she read, and I watched. And then around ten o’clock she would put her book down on her nightstand and turn her light off and I would go back to our apartment, where my father would ask me what I’d been doing for the last two or three hours in the hallway.

“Nothing, Dad,” I’d say. Which was true — I’d done nothing.

Standing there now on the crest of the hill, I did something: I picked up my gun and released the safety. I hadn’t handled the gun in a while and it felt strangely heavy, unwieldy even, as if I were trying to hoist a manhole cover with my bare hands. It pressed down painfully on my shoulder as I peered through the sights. The man was standing at the edge of the lake, and he was peeing. He had his hand on his hip and he was leaning backward in a posture of bliss, and his face was not all that different from the face my father drew on that tree years ago.

I observed the man in the crosshairs. He was 1.1 miles away. He was five feet ten inches tall. He jiggled himself dry, buttoned up, and started to walk leisurely along the edge of the lake back toward the prairie. Soon he was 1.2 miles away. Then he turned in toward the plains, toward the high grass, and just when he was about to disappear for good, I put my finger in the proximity of the trigger. Poof . The gun vibrated gently with its message.

He stumbled and fell face-first onto the ground. It happened so quickly that I thought he must have tripped over something. Surely it couldn’t have been because of me. But no, a small pool of blood began to form under him as he lay there.

The sheep or goat that had been by his side was not a sheep or a goat after all but a little boy. He darted around in a panicked circle. I watched him through the crosshairs. His mania increased until it looked as if he might actually begin to dig a hole in the ground with his feet. He disappeared into the high grass, only to return a moment later to lift the man’s arm and try to drag him off. He couldn’t, of course, and for a moment I had the thought that I would run down the hill and help the boy. I would help the boy and then I would send an email to Becky telling her what I had done. “Dear Becky, Today I helped one of the local boys.”