The Good Soldiers (22 page)

Izzy’s clothing was filthy.

Next to him was his wife, who was crying.

On his other side was one of his daughters, the one born in New York, who appeared to be uninjured.

And in front of them all, wobbly but walking, was a young girl with shiny purple sandals, blood all over her blue jeans, and a bandage covering the left side of her face.

It was the eight-year-old, the daughter born in Baghdad, the one who according to the rules had no standing whatsoever to be treated on the FOB. “Izzy,” Cummings called out, knowing right then that he had guessed wrong. He ran toward the family as other soldiers reached the girl. They lifted her up. She began crying. They carried her through the gate without stopping. They ran with her into the aid station, and as the doors swung shut she cried out in Arabic for her father, who’d been told to remain in the lobby.

Izzy took a seat in a corner. Cummings stood nearby. “Was it a car bomb?” he asked after a while.

“No, sir,” Izzy said. “It was two car bombs.”

And then he said nothing more, not until one of the doctors came into the lobby to tell him that his daughter was going to be all right.

“Thank you, sir,” he managed to say, and when he was unable to say anything else, he bowed his head, and then wiped his eyes, and then followed the doctor into the treatment area, where he saw his Iraqi daughter surrounded by American doctors and medics.

What do the rules say?

At that moment, anyway, no one seemed concerned one way or another: not the doctors, not the family, and not Cummings, who stood at the very same spot he’d stood at as he watched Crow die, watching once again.

The injuries to the girl were serious. There was a deep cut across her cheek, and worse, something had gone into the left side of her forehead, near her temple, and was deeply embedded in bone. Izzy held her hand as the doctors wrapped her in a sheet, making sure to secure her arms tightly. Her mother closed her eyes. The doctors leaned in. It took a while, and at the worst of it the little girl couldn’t remain quiet, but then the doctors were showing her what they had pulled out—a thick piece of glass nearly two inches long.

The glass had been part of an apartment that no longer existed, in a section of Baghdad where the sounds that night were of mourning.

But here on the FOB, the sounds were of a mother whose home was ruined kissing her daughter’s face, and a father whose home was ruined kissing his daughter’s hand, and a little girl whose home was ruined saying something in Arabic that caused her family to smile, and Cummings saying quietly in English, “Man, I haven’t felt this good since I got to this hellhole.”

Because of the curfew, they stayed on the FOB that night in a vacant trailer that Cummings found for them. He offered to take them to the DFAC, but Izzy insisted that they weren’t hungry, even though they hadn’t eaten for hours. “We’ll get you some ice cream. We’ll get you some food,” Cummings said, but Izzy politely declined. He did accept sheets, which they used with embarrassment in the middle of the night to clean up the trailer when their daughter got sick and vomited, but that was all they accepted before closing their door, and when Cummings knocked just after sunrise they were already gone.

They wanted to get home to see what they had lost, which turned out to be almost everything. Their clothing. Their furniture. Their prayer rugs. Their generator. Their plastic tanks that held the drinking water they got from a pump on the roof. What was left was the shell of an apartment with blown-out windows and soot-covered walls, but they had nowhere else to go, and so they continued to live in a building that was abandoned and ghostly now, where six of the twenty-five dead had been their neighbors. One of them was a boy who’d been the age of Izzy’s injured daughter and liked to hang out with Izzy, talking about soccer. “Marvin,” Izzy said one day after he had returned to the FOB, thinking back. “His mother was a Christian. He was a lovely child.” He had been on the roof of the four-story building when the bombs had exploded, probably to get water, or perhaps in search of a breeze on a hot summer day, and the shaking had thrown him over the edge. He landed in front of the doorway, and when people saw his body, no one wanted to go past, even though much of the building was on fire. “‘Please, someone move Marvin,’” Izzy recalled his wife crying out, “but no one would, because everyone liked Marvin very much.” Finally an uncle rushed forward to cover the body with a blanket, at which point people eased past and hurried out to the street.

An Iraqi’s life: the soldiers simply had no idea. Every so often, on a clearing operation, they would see something such as a cross on a wall or a pair of high heels shoved under a teenage girl’s dresser and feel a brief sense of commonality, but for the most part, Iraq continued to be men with prayer beads and women in black drapes and calves in living rooms and goats on roofs. This place wasn’t just strange after eight months, it was ever stranger. Like the guy being tracked one night in October on a night-vision surveillance camera as he walked alone through a field, holding something suspicious-looking in his hand. “What’s that?” a soldier monitoring the feed said with concern, and as calls went out with the man’s coordinates and snipers trained on him to take him out, a man who thought he was obscured by darkness looked around, bent over, dug a shallow hole, lifted his robe, squatted, went to the bathroom, and used whatever was in his hand to scoop some dirt and cover up what he’d done. Was the man all right? Was he without a home? What conditions of a life would lead him into a field as curfew approached? Had his building been destroyed, like Izzy’s? Every act in Iraq came freighted with so many questions—but to the soldiers, once they stopped laughing, and groaning, and covering their eyes, and peeking through their fingers, the question was simply:
Why the fuck would some dude shit in the middle of a field?

So the interpreters were around to broker behavioral mysteries as well as languages. There were several dozen of them on the FOB. A few were Iraqi Americans who lived in the United States, had a security clearance, and earned more than $100,000 a year. Most, though, like Izzy, were out-of-work Iraqis from nearby neighborhoods who happened to speak some English. They were paid between $ 1,050 and $ 1,200 a month, and in exchange for that they took on a soldier’s risks of EFPs, snipers, rockets, and mortars, and the additional risk of being seen by their fellow Iraqis as pariahs.

“You’re a spy,” they would say in Arabic to Izzy when he climbed out of an American Humvee wearing the same camouflage as the soldiers.

“You’re a traitor,” they would say as he stood by during clearance operations, disguised behind large, dark sunglasses and a name tag identifying him as Izzy.

“You’re one of us. You should explain,” they would say as soldiers searched through cabinets and dressers, sometimes roughly, sometimes breaking things.

“No, no, no, no,” Izzy said quietly one time to a soldier who was piling a family’s clothing in the middle of a floor. “Why are you doing this?”

“This man’s lying to us,” the soldier said, and as he stepped on some of the clothing in his dirty boots, Izzy felt ashamed, even though he suspected the soldier was right.

It was that sense of shame, always nearby, that made being an interpreter feel dishonorable at times, not only for Izzy, but for all of them.

“Hey, Mike, please tell him I’m going to take off his pants, but I’m going to leave his underwear on,” a soldier said one day to another of the interpreters for the 2-16 as they began a medical screening for a new detainee. A few hours before, five Iraqis had been rounded up for possible involvement with an EFP cell after being pursued through the sewage trenches of Fedaliyah, and now they were standing blindfolded and flex-cuffed, and were being examined one at a time by a soldier wearing protective gloves. This one was the second of the five. He was filthy and wore a knockoff athletic shirt that read
abibas.
He stood absolutely still as the soldier undid his pants, and when they dropped to his ankles, he continued to stand still in underwear that had a large wet area across the front.

“Ask him if he peed himself,” the soldier said, by now knowing that the innocent ones often lost control of their bladders, or defecated, or trembled uncontrollably, while the guilty ones tended to smirk.

“Peed?” Mike said, confused by the term.

“Ask him if he wet himself,” the soldier said. “Urinated.”

“No,” Mike said, relaying the answer, after asking and seeming embarrassed to have done so. “It happened when he tried to wash his face.”

“Does he drink?” the soldier asked now, continuing down a checklist.

“No drink.”

“Does he smoke?”

“No.”

“Is he on any illegal drugs?”

“No.”

“Ask him if he’s cold,” the soldier said. “Ask him why he’s shaking.” Then, directly to the detainee, who couldn’t see him, and couldn’t understand him, he said, “We won’t hurt you,” and waited for Mike to say the Arabic words for that.

Mike, of course, wasn’t really Mike, just as Izzy wasn’t Izzy and Rachel wasn’t Rachel. They were given American names, army uniforms, a room to sleep in, a cot to sleep on, and free meals at the DFAC, although, unlike soldiers, they were patted down and wanded before they were allowed inside.

Rachel, who had tried to save Reeves, pushing on his chest as his blood leaked into her boots, was one of the few females who did this work. Twenty-five years old, she had been an interpreter since 2003, when the war seemed as if it would be brief rather than everlasting. “When I began this, it was safe. Everybody loved the Americans. Everybody wanted to work with them,” she said one day, explaining how she had become who she had become, which on this day was one more person in Iraq in tears kept out of sight of the Americans. She was trying to hide her face. She didn’t want the soldiers to see. “I speak English. I love America. I was so excited for them to be here. I wanted to work with them, just to feel victory.”

Since then, by her own count, she had been in forty explosions, from car bombs to EFPs, including the one that killed Reeves. She had been burned, knocked out, could no longer hear clearly out of her right ear, and was having trouble seeing out of her left eye. “You go through a lot of stress, and then you’re okay,” she said of what each of the explosions had done to her. “You figure out a way to handle it. For me, it’s a lot of crying, and thinking the good is coming. Nothing good has come yet. But I’m staying positive.”

It was hard, though. Her family was in Syria now, mixed in with the million other Iraqi refugees there and dependent on the money she sent them. They were there and she was here, living a life that offered $ 1,200 a month and little else. “Nobody,” she said of whom she was close to anymore, “just the unit I am working with,” and so her life now was largely imagined. “I am from Syria,” she would tell Iraqis when she was out with the Americans. Or, “I am from Lebanon.” Usually she was married, “with kids,” although sometimes she was just engaged. “Just to make up a story for my safety, because if they know I’m Iraqi, they’ll be mean to me,” she said. But the fact was that she never could be who she actually was, not when she was among Iraqis, or with the soldiers, either, a lesson she had learned when she was working with another battalion and an IED exploded and soldiers who had seemed her friends stopped calling her Rachel after that and began calling her “you bitch.” So far, she said, that was the thing that hurt most of all, and it was why, after Reeves died, she had stood before the platoon with his blood on her and said, “I’m sorry,” and then had said, “I’m not bad like my people,” and then had gone on her own to her room, which she had decorated with twelve photographs of her departed family, an Iraqi flag, an American flag, and a stuffed animal that, if she pressed on its foot, which she did again and again that day, would say, “Oh, you’re a little wild thing, aren’t you?”

This was an Iraqi life. The soldiers couldn’t understand it, and they didn’t understand Izzy’s, either. But he had a sense of theirs. He had lived in the United States from 1989 to 1992. He knew America, and even though he hadn’t been there in fifteen years, he knew what its soldiers liked because of what one of them had written on the door of a metal locker that was in the room he’d been given to live in. “Sex, potato soup, and Johnny Cash,” it said. It had been written in black marker, just above where, in smaller letters, someone had written, “No Iraqi man, woman, or child is worth one drop of an American soldier’s blood.”

Izzy remembered the day he got the room. He didn’t get many visitors, but that day a 2-16 soldier stopped by and saw the locker. “No, that’s not right,” the soldier had said apologetically, and had used a wet cloth to wipe away the second set of words until they were smudged enough to be mostly unreadable.

So that was another thing that Izzy knew, how kind an American soldier could be.

Though not always.

“Old man,” one of them said one morning, as Izzy, sleepy-eyed, toothbrush in hand, stepped outside, on his way to the latrines.

“Faggot,” another said, picking up a rock and tossing it at Izzy.

“Fuck you,” another said to him, also tossing a rock.

Izzy laughed, even as one of the rocks skipped off the ground and hit him in the leg. “Bastards,” he said back to them, kidding as much as they were.

It was a Friday toward the end of October. Two days before his birthday, Kauzlarich was staying in the wire, and Izzy had the day to do whatever he wanted. Not that there were a lot of options. He wouldn’t get time off to go see his family for another week, and he couldn’t contact them, because whenever he entered the FOB his cell phone was confiscated until he left. He wasn’t allowed to have a phone, a camera, a computer, an MP3 player, or anything electronic except for a Chinese TV he had bought on the FOB for thirty dollars. It had been luck, or Iraqi luck, anyway, that he happened to be home when his daughter was injured and his apartment was ruined, because otherwise he wouldn’t have known. No one could contact him when he was on the FOB. No one knew where he worked or what he did for a living except for his wife, two brothers, and a few friends, and they knew only a little. His wife, for instance, didn’t know about the half-dozen times EFPs had hit his convoy, or the constant rocket attacks on the FOB. She knew only that he had a job as an interpreter, that for their safety no one could know what he did, and that every few weeks he would show up at home, unannounced.