Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  CHEATING DEATH WAS an amphetamine. As soon as I walked out of the unit, battle-scarred and several notches above alive, I returned thicker-skinned to the gladiator ring for another long round. Back with my crew and ensconced in the bunk at COP, singing in the back of the MRAP, shooting the breeze in the yard. The Coalition Forces had to succeed in dragging my beleaguered Iraq to her feet—I knew that now more than ever. There was no going home to Daki and the concrete house with its new satellite TV and pretending we were not ensnared in a battle for survival. Babo had carried me through the Armageddon, and I truly believed it was to fight for what could be, not what had been.

  TEAM SHADY DISBANDED, and in the early spring days of 2009, I was out in the dirt and on base in my getup: shamag, shades, tambour in my hands. I leaned against a blast barrier like a dog of war, watching a plane hurtle along the runway out of Diamondback. Inside, many of my band of brothers ascended over the city that had almost eaten us alive, before their metal bird pushed into a gauze of cloud and was gone. I tried to imagine what they were going back to: farms in Iowa, fishing towns in Maine, apartments in the city, base housing in Miramar; college, babies, discount malls, and grocery stores—peace. I couldn’t envision any of it. Team Shady was already a dream of a dream. The sun would never shine on us all at the same time again.

  Weeks earlier, I’d been standing near the very same place to a different view, when a CH47 carrying the new MiTT (Military Transition Team) Spider descended in great updrafts of dust. Captain Robert Brownsword was the first one to saunter off, carrying a rucksack in one hand and an unlit cigar dangling in the other. Blue-eyed, white-teethed, and tanned in his grinning prime—all of America distilled into one young man. He had a thin Clark Gable moustache and ready grin. Not too far behind, a bullet-shaped Lieutenant Colonel Jay Migone walked down the ramp in meaty strides, eyes roving the terrain. Grabbing the cigar from Brownsword, he punched him in the arm. In unison, they both looked way over at me and smiled.

  “What the hell kind of guitar is that?” Migone called out when he saw my tambour.

  I told him that I liked to sing to pass the time. Daki had sent me the instrument after my surgery, believing I’d undergone some minor procedure unrelated to my violent line of work. Migone was lighting the cigar and sending out clouds of smoke. He and Brownsword were making their way over, almost as though they’d been expecting to find me right there, right then—Spider’s new terp. Back in the bird, the others were pulling gear off the center line and dumping it out the back.

  “Sing about what?” Migone said through a warm shroud.

  I smiled and strummed a quick chord. “About loving women, drinking beer, and hunting terrorists—I’m Yazidi.” In those days, I also felt like a bona fide fighter—death had made a try for me, and I’d won.

  Brownsword, his stubbled face so bronzed it was more freckles than skin, brought his earnest East Coast eyes in close, talking to his own cool reflection in my shades.

  “Got the lingo and the look—been around the block already, haven’t you, Yazidi? Oldest religion in the world, right? Original sons of Adam.” He nodded. “I’ve studied your people.”

  “Yes, sir. But I don’t believe in magic,” I said, raising a finger. Word had it that a number of Yazidis had gone missing and then turned up dead all over Nineveh; above all else, most of them had been accused of witchcraft.

  “Who cares?” Migone laughed. “Believe whatever you want. This base might as well be Tucson, Arizona. You’re free as an eagle inside these walls.”

  Brownsword looked over. “Yazidis believe in seven angels, and one of them, Tawusi Melek, fell to earth. Some of his Muslim countrymen think that means they worship the devil and magic. Magic is against the law.”

  “What kind of law is that?”

  “The kind that lands you in chop-chop square. Like in Saudi Arabia. Over here, I guess they pick ’em off one at a time,” Brownsword said. “Let’s go down to our CHU and settle in. You come on too, Mikey. Basim is here—he’s Yazidi. Pretty much all our terps are.”

  TEAM SPIDER WAS a different animal altogether. Ten soldiers, five terps—Gus the Turkoman, James, Basim from my village, Hussein, and me. We got tight, fast. They swaggered around base like some new kind of twenty-first-century Wild West posse, dressed in fatigues and armed to the hilt: handguns and knives strapped to their legs, fingers spread, reflex-ready to duke out the war. Their crew of terps could always be found right at their side: in the DFAC eating, in a CHU watching movies, in the back lot playing cards. For the next six months to a year, we’d be base-hopping all over the northern provinces, looking for bad guys along the rat-line and trying to get the IA and border police in shape.

  MRAPS IN THE city, but Humvees in the desert, on patrols I usually sat in the lead truck with Captain Brownsword, who was also the gunner. In Team Spider, every soldier wore three hats, and responsibilities were tethered to abilities, well before rank. The first time we went out in the sand, I watched him lug .50-caliber ammo belts and the machine gun out of his CHU and prop it up in the turret.

  “I sleep with my baby every night,” he said. “Always be ready to go.”

  A few minutes later the operations officer, Major Iavecchia, a welcome leftover from Shady, strolled over, talking about the food on offer in the DFAC: pancakes, eggs, bacon—chicken noodle soup was my favorite. Soon we were all out in the lot, filing into trucks and heading out over the hot sea of dunes.

  Our four Humvees pulled out of the gates and joined a convoy of vehicles from the IA’s 10th Brigade, 2nd Division, which included a number of Ford pickup trucks courtesy of the American government. We were on our way to FOB Sykes, a US Army forward operating base located just south of Tal Afar. Brownsword explained that the top brass in the IA liked to use the pickups even though they weren’t armored, because there was air conditioning inside, and out in the desert oven, staying cool ranked slightly higher than staying in one piece.

  A section of FOB Sykes known as PAD 2, which I was told was short for “lily pad,” was almost empty, so we each got our own CHUs. After five minutes to unpack in my container, I stepped out to a waft of coal smoke—we had enough red meat in the deep freeze to last until kingdom come. I found the team setting up lawn chairs and strings of Christmas lights, and flipping burgers over a barbecue. Iavecchia put country music on the loudspeaker and wandered around belting out every tune.

  By sundown, I was lying back next to Migone in an armchair, chewing on rib bones between taking deep sucks on my hookah pipe. Migone turned to me, smoke pouring from his nostrils.

  “What do you call what we’re doing right here—in your lingo?”

  “We are smoking shisha, sir. It’s good. No funny business in it.” As I drew on the pipe’s long tentacle, lying back under the purple hue of an Ottoman sundown, part of me had forgotten we were even on a sterile military base—sitting ducks in a desert crawling with terrorists. Even the weather here, like the war, could change on a dime. I’d been told FOB Sykes was called a “no frills” outpost, but I’d never felt closer to being right in the middle of America—and I liked it.

  OUT ON THE rat-line, the convoy cruised vast tides of sand, IA vehicles on one side, Team Spider’s some distance away on the other. We were out there to check on the fledgling border patrol units, whose job it was to form a tight net to stem the malicious flow of fighters and weapons perpetually sneaking over the line. Sometimes, we’d set up a perimeter of vehicles and just wait, idling, observing. More often than not, we’d watch as a ragtag group in an old van would come careening across the flats and an Iraqi contingent would dive in like a lasso. On some days, we could sit out there twelve hours or more, just picking border crawlers off. They were like cockroaches—every time you got one, you’d loose ten more.

  Often there was a wild firefight, but small guerrilla groups could not hope to overcome the hard-boiled firepower of a battle-hungry Iraqi brigade-in-training, keen on lobbing mortar shells like a candy dispenser. Most of those guys
used their machine guns as though they were garden hoses. The Iraqis were also known to be merciless with their catches.

  “We keep a good eye on them out here, but who knows what the hell they do after they ship them out to the detention centers,” Brownsword said. “What the heck can we say after Abu Ghraib, though, right? It’s their country. And some might say we had a bit of a hand in fucking it up.”

  “Are they doing good enough, sir?”

  Those days, I was always asking. Rumor had it the Coalition was leaving sooner rather than later, but the borders were still hemorrhaging guerrillas, and the tribes were weary of living dirt poor in a war zone. Under Saddam they’d had a tacit agreement: see no evil, hear no evil—and plenty to eat. Lately, they were running out of reasons to make deals.

  “Half the time, Mikey, I don’t know what they’re doing. But, believe it or not, the border units are doing better than they were. The powers that be fired the whole Iraqi army, and we had to start over from the bottom of the barrel.”

  We looked over the bands of sand shifting like veils, overlapping back and forth in the gathering winds. An Iraqi soldier was firing his AK-47 into the air and hollering at the empty heavens. All around him, the others laughed as a line of prisoners was led to a waiting truck; hands bound in zip ties, their caches of contraband lined up on the ground. A soldier walked up and kicked one of the captives in the groin. No reason. We could see Migone barking and wagging a finger. When I looked over at Brownsword, he was walking the other way, back to the Humvee for his turn in the turret.

  ONCE AGAIN IN the truck, I sat behind Iavecchia, who was chewing on a day-old piece of Juicy Fruit gum and manning the Blue Force Tracker, a GPS-enabled mapping device. We all had our team radio headsets on to an encrypted frequency that only our small crew could hear. Migone, who was in the lead vehicle with Basim, was relaying information over from the IA battalion about linking up with another contingent after we were done with our patrol. We coasted over a burnished sea following the IA convoy—no sign of any roads, just those rolling mounds of sand stretching like time from horizon to horizon.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Migone sputtered over the radio. We’d been wandering the desert for over three hours, and he was certain the IA were lost. Migone went quiet for a few minutes, and we carried on making plans for dinner. Steak, again. Team meeting right after, then a Van Damme movie—my turn to choose.

  Up ahead the convoy came to a full stop and Migone hopped out of his Humvee and came to ask Iavecchia just how far off we were. Iavecchia studied his computer screen and waited a few beats before looking up.

  “How about Syria, sir?”

  Gripping the sides of the open door, Migone looked down at his boots and up again. “You telling me we crossed the border and this sand I’m standing on right now is Syrian, Iavecchia?”

  “Yes, sir, I am—and you are.”

  Brownsword laughed. “So much for movie night, boys.”

  And all I could think was: My country is starting to look like a lost cause.

  SUMMONED INTO THE meeting CHU: a mock-up of northwestern Iraq—from Syria right across the great outwash of desert—was laid out over a table like a makeshift toy model. Dixie cups labeled with the names of bases, army divisions, and landmarks punctuated the beige paper terrain: FOB Sykes, Turkish Castle 10th BDE, COP Destroyer, Garry Owen, Kisik Division HQ, Diamondback, Marez, and the furthest point south, COP Nimur. In my time, I’d see them all. A rock for Mount Shingal. I took a fingertip and planted it north of the stone, just where Khanasor would be.

  “That’s where I was born,” I said.

  “And that’s me too,” Basim said, smiling, touching the same spot. “The other side of the village from you.”

  “Basim’s little brother was in my class,” I told the others. “He got all the brains.”

  “Hey, you guys are Yazidi?” a brand-new terp said from the threshold. He closed the door behind him and came over to the table. We knew him only as “RPG,” an acronym he’d acquired as a moniker while working with another team. We assumed he was Kurdish, but he never said—and we would not think to ask, though he seemed friendly enough when playing cards and eating candy bars in the CHUs.

  “Yes, we are.”

  Right away, I wished I hadn’t said it, though in time, the fact would become obvious enough.

  RPG grinned, showing both decks of his gleaming teeth, and patted me on the back. “It’s OK, Michael,” he said. “Chill.”

  Then he picked up the stone marked “Mt. Shingal,” tossed it about in his palm, and let a laugh out through his nostrils.

  A moment later, Captain Brownsword stood over the table model, pen held out as a pointer; Team Spider converged all around like football players in a huddle.

  “Welcome to Upper Mesopotamia, heartland of the ancient Assyrians—territory of genocides, prophets, and warring empires as old as time,” he said, sweeping his hand over the long folding table. “Since the Arab Islamic conquest of the seventh century, this blood-soaked desert has been known by the Arabic name of Al-Jazeera—and it is now our area of responsibility.”

  Then he took his ballpoint and stabbed a lone black square sitting over the beige surface between COP Kisik to the north, and our FOB to its south. A small strip of paper marked it simply: The Fortress.

  We’d be pulling out at first light.

  “Their battalion commander wants us to give their units a good once-over. He has some concerns. You know the drill.”

  A “ HABOOB” STORM crossed the Al-Jazeera at dawn and a thousand-foot wall of wind-driven sand descended from all sides like a giant blindfold. The enfeebled sun went red-eyed and the raging desert turned the day to night. For hours, we languished in our CHUs, shuffling cards and writing letters home, while seething onslaughts of orange grit lashed the metal walls. Nothing to do but wait for the lull that would come as suddenly as sleep.

  When the current finally dispersed, an eerie calm followed and we ventured out like sleepwalkers into the dead-silent aftermath. Dirt blanketed every material thing. Surveying the scene, you suddenly understood humankind’s lonesome place in the blind infinity of time: From one end of my country to the other, the ruins of lost empires were buried. Centuries from now, I thought, an excavation will find our spent mortar shells and razor wire entombed among barbecues and army helmets. What history would write about our season on this land—where thousands of wars had already been lost, or won and long forgotten—was far from determined.

  Late in the day, the convoy headed north into the hinterland of Al-Jazeera that we’d seen in the mock-up. Through the dusk, a somber facade came into view, rising like a black ship anchored to the desert. Swirls of choked air rushed over the ramparts and the massive turrets, each three stories high and set into corners from which high-caliber guns sat waiting. Our small armada poured over the flat sea of sand, kicking up a long dry wake that made our approach impossible to conceal. An Iraqi flag fluttered, and silhouetted figures positioned along the bulwark watched our steady approach. Brownsword gave us a quick history on the Fortress, one of Saddam’s old POW prisons converted to an Iraqi army base.

  Someone in the back called out, “Creepy as fuck.”

  No one else said a word.

  GOING IN WAS like entering an unholy cave; the walled-in air was rank. Along each of the four stories were rows of darkened medieval cells set behind bars, and at the end of each corridor stood locked gates at which a mute Iraqi soldier stood sentry in his uniform, weapon poised and face shaded in the vague light. From the outset, there were no niceties here, as though the grim atmosphere of the building and its dark history had infected the current inhabitants, who numbered in the hundreds.

  Team Spider took over half a row of cells on the second and third floors, and one corner turret. We hauled in our kits, each member taking a small chamber for a room. I lay down in mine a moment and rested; my deep breaths echoed into the windowless void as though they were not my own. In that cool quiet, t
he hollowed-out souls of the men who’d been imprisoned there before me seemed to stir. I shuddered and sat straight up.

  Minutes later, Migone and Brownsword and the full team passed by and gave me a silent signal to follow. We made our way to a narrow staircase, and went down. All around us, the clanking of gates reverberated through the prison, as our feet whispered against the smooth stones. Brownsword made his way along the stairs first, eyes clocking the shadows that swallowed us like fog.

  “Saddam usually had his torture chambers in the basements,” he told us. “Makes you wonder about the men who went down these steps before us and what happened to them. Saddam was bad enough to his own, but he held the Iranian POWs here. I can almost feel it. Can’t you guys?”

  “What, sir?” I said. I had my eyes on the back of his head, which kept going back and forth, back and forth like a gun on a turret.

  “Their screams, Mikey. Extreme pain like that, en masse so to speak, it takes over the air of a place. Saddam’s son, Uday, liked to hang prisoners upside down from cables and electrocute their genitals. Maybe rip off the fingernails, hack limbs off one at a time, starting with the hands. Or put a cigarette out against an eyeball.”

  “Will you shut up, Professor Brownsword,” Migone said. “You’re scaring the kids.”

  “I’m not scared, sir. This is my country—I know what happened.” And I did.

  “All right, Mikey,” Migone said. “Our host, the battalion commander, has summoned us for a little private chat. There’s going to be a reason he wanted it underground. Let’s concentrate on that.”

  When our team squeezed into the low antechamber that was hewn out of the subterranean rock, we knew right away there was trouble. The battalion commander, who was at the helm of the facility and its numerous occupants, stood alone and alabaster pale against the wall, waiting for us. When we walked in, his deputy and two officers stepped forward from a shadowed corner. The commander said nothing and gestured to the entrance, a sheen of sweat over his brow. I swung the door gently, clicking it shut.