Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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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.

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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.