Station Zed (7 page)

Meanwhile, inside my CHU, I led a radically simplified life: no decorations, purely functional furniture, and not much of it—and a gas mask against Sarin and other forms of nerve gas, packed neatly in a small cardboard box with a convenient black plastic handle. The warning read DO NOT REMOVE.

But after a while, staring up at the white ceiling, letting my thoughts drift, I’d remember the daily body count—the bodies, which had seemed so abstract back in the US, began to take on solidity and form. From the very first night in my CHU, I’d established a routine (maybe more of an obsession) of going online to check on that day’s violence. During the night and day it took me to reach Iraq, twelve liquor stores, run mainly by Yazidi Kurds, had been shot up in drive-bys from SUVs: nine customers and owners had been killed. Although no official group stepped forward, conservative Shia, whose version of Islam decrees death for drinking booze, were probably the gunmen. Then on Sunday, forty-six more people were killed, this time by Sunnis terrorizing mainly Shia neighborhoods: the places they hit were crowded shopping areas, markets, and auto-repair shops. If the bombs had gone off in corresponding borough neighborhoods, they would have been the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, Hunts Point Market in Queens, and the lower reaches of Fourth Avenue’s garages in Gowanus.

LATE ONE NIGHT WHEN I COULDN’T SLEEP, I went onto Donald Rumsfeld’s website, and clicked onto a secret, now declassified, memo that he had written in 2002, a year before the war began, when he was still Secretary of Defense. It was entitled, appropriately enough, “The Parade of Horribles.” The term derives from the nineteenth-century custom of mummers parades, in which one’s fellow townsfolk would dress up like monsters and grotesques, and lurch down Main Street on the 4th of July. I clicked on the memo, and watched as twenty-nine Horribles marched down my screen—including number 13, in which no weapons of mass destruction are discovered. (Rumsfeld himself placed three check marks after this Horrible). Other Horribles include sectarian battles between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds (one check mark); US postwar involvement lasting ten years, not two to four (one check mark); the cost of the war becoming ruinously high (no check mark, though the cost to the United States and Iraq is $200 billion and climbing); and world opinion turning against the US because Iraq would “best us in public relations and persuade the world the war is against Muslims” (five check marks).

after the “Supplemental Report on September 11 Detainees’ Allegations of Abuse at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York”

According to Lieutenant 1, he confronted

another lieutenant who was responsible

for escorting detainees (hereinafter “Lieutenant 2”)

after seeing Lieutenant 2 slamming detainees against

the wall. Lieutenant 2 also supervised many of the other officers

whom Lieutenant 1 witnessed slam detainees against the wall.

Lieutenant 1 stated that Lieutenant 2

told him that slamming, bouncing, pressing against the wall

were all part of being in jail and not to worry about it. To confront

such things when nations everywhere are responsible

for “Admax”—administrative maximum security—against

terrorist cells puts security staff, particularly frontline officers,

under seismic pressures that make officers confront

not only the many hidden drives that are responsible

for terrorism, but the subtle way the wall,

if detainees breathe or move at all, calls out: whoever is against

terrorism haunts the detainees’ minds with the specter of Lieutenant 2,

who becomes in the detainees’ self-hatred of their own inner officers

a general hatred that rears up into a wall

walling detainees in, nobody now “against”

but all submitting to a kind of law that makes detainees confront

what they would like to see as an officer’s pathology, an officer’s

need to feel the “Admax” of being responsible—

a predictable pathology for detainees who hate Lieutenant 2,

the more dangerous, the more unconscious, as if the wall

shoved itself against the faces of detainees responsible

for their welcome to America in this way, faces slammed against

a T-shirt THESE COLORS DON’T RUN that the officers

have taped to the sally port, and that Lieutenant 2

videotapes to make sure that the detainees confront

what it means to have their hands “goosenecked,” to make a wall

“waltz” with a stripped-searched detainee responsible

for making us act the way we do, you, me, Lieutenant 1 and 2

forced by these detainees to throw off our mental chains and confront

star-crossed perplexities amongst our officers:

so welcome to my castle, you fucking terrorist: up against

the wall, don’t think I don’t know how to make you responsible

for the ways we Lieutenants, both 1 and 2, train our officers

to confront the walls you terrorists love, and love to shove your faces against.

THE CHOPPER’S SIDES WERE OPEN TO THE NIGHT AIR, and I instinctively shoved myself back on the bench as far as I could get—not very far, it turned out, certainly not far enough to quell my unease about hurtling through the air with no door in front of me.

The contractor gave me thumbs up, and I at least knew enough to give thumbs up back, and then the chopper blades accelerated faster and louder. He slid the lenses of his night-vision goggles past the lip of his helmet and down over his eyes to keep watch for snipers on the ground, and then we slowly ascended, the nose of the chopper dipping slightly as the tail lifted up, and we soared straight up until the pilot adjusted the pitch of the rotors and we shot ahead, eventually climbing to about a hundred feet over the city.

Everything was dark down below for the first quarter mile, and then we were crossing over Baghdad, the lights of the cars on the road flickering softly, houselights shining in the windows. The pilot occasionally flicked a switch on the instrument panel, and then, as we rose higher, and the night air got very cold, the contractor slid the Lexan-glass doors closed on the passenger part of the tiny cabin. The chopper shimmied back and forth in the light wind, soft buffets, almost the way a child might pet a cat on the head. Just above the pilot’s helmet silhouetted against the curved glass of the windshield shimmered another little galaxy. Switches glowing in the darkness, an overhead instrument panel lit up the pilot’s hand as he leisurely lifted his left arm from time to time to switch something off or on.

For a moment, I felt immensely happy: I had the reverie of myself as a child, looking up at dayglow stars stuck to the ceiling over my bed—a memory I knew to be false, since I’m way too old for such things to have existed when I was a kid, nor were my parents the type to indulge me with dayglow stars. I knew, even as I took pleasure in it, that my fantasy was out of sync with the reality on the ground, not to mention the contractor hunching forward, his gun in his lap, intently scanning the darkness below. At least the contractor had his orders and his night-vision goggles. What I had to go on was the drone of helicopter noise, its surgical detachment from the neighborhood alleys and streets, and the way my own hypervigilant senses magnified and crystallized the light and dark flow of the city beneath me. One of Saddam’s former palaces, encircled by a moat that testified to the dead dictator’s love of water, glowed dimly below us, looking like an Arabian Nights fantasy in bad taste, and reputed to have a torture chamber in the basement. Aloft in the chopper and looking down, I found and continue to find it hard to know what tone to take when the truth is both atrocious and banal.

And if you were on the ground looking up? In an oral history of the Iraq War, I’d come across this account of a pregnant woman, Rana Abdul Mahdi, who lives in Sadr City:

The light lift “Huey” rose from the floor of night

into the darkness of the brain

where it felt the sullen winds pushing it this way and that,

following the current of a thought

into a blankness and far-seeingness

that, as I rose in the actual chopper, released me

to confront the scabbard of Orion’s belt.

Behind him the scorpion menaced his exposed heel.

But then the rotor roar filled up the space between night sky

and ground-dark.

The imagination slipped down over my eyes

like a pair of night-vision goggles: what they showed me

was myself strapped in, staring down at Baghdad

at one of Saddam’s kitsch palaces

that looked like something out of
The Thousand and One Nights

in which only Scheherazade’s unending flight of words

to keep the sultan from murdering her

can preserve her from his scimitar.

How picturesque the imagination

envisions the storied world lit up by infrared.

How the helicopter’s retracted doors letting in the cold night air

refreshed and restored the sultan in me

while putting under threat of death

the insurgent imagination that thinks it can talk its way

out of the void it hovers in, its blades rendered

an invisible blur as it holds its position

in the darkness, intent on the levitating heaviness

that allows it to convince itself, suspended

in the air,

that it’s really weightless.

ON OUR WAY BACK FROM ONE MISSION IN BAGHDAD, I learned that a suicide bomber had gotten inside the Green Zone, or what since the US troop withdrawal in 2011 had been rechristened the International Zone—the IZ, as the locals put it. That meant the rest of the city qualified as the Red Zone. But the Red Zone, the IZ, no matter—sure enough, a day later, the bomber blew himself up not too far away from where we’d just conducted a workshop.

But such incidents, after the workshop with Mariam, now took on a subtly different quality. I had begun to feel such rage about the relentlessness of the killing, the zealotry that could inspire it, the religious mania that seemed to brutalize people into killing other ordinary Iraqis who most likely weren’t particularly religious, except as a formal, societal, or familial instinct, and who had no doctrinal grudge against anyone. Their only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But since Mariam’s story, written and read with such understated feeling, my rage, and the comfort it gave me because of my certainty that it was justified, could never take hold of me without also seeing the image of her brother, gently, very gently, bending down to kiss his sister, to ask her if she needed anything at the market, and whispering, again with the utmost gentleness, that this would be the last time he would ever see her.