ALSO BY ELLIOT ACKERMAN
Waiting for Eden
Dark at the Crossing
Green on Blue
PENGUIN PRESS
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Copyright © 2019 by Elliot Ackerman
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Ackerman, Elliot, author.
Title: Places and Names : Reflections on War, Revolution, and Returning / Elliot Ackerman.
Description: New York, New York : Penguin Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018041429 (print) | LCCN 2018042703 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559979 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559962 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Ackerman, Elliot. | Iraq War, 2003–2011--Biography. | United States. Marine Corps--Officers--Biography.
Classification: LCC DS79.766.A25 (ebook) | LCC DS79.766.A25 A3 2019 (print) | DDC 956.7044/34092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018041429
Version_1
For Chui
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.
Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted—
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
—“The Triumph of Achilles,” Louise Glück
Contents
Also by Elliot Ackerman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: The Revolution Is Over, or The Music Will Live Forever
The Triumph of Death (Summer 2013)
The Fourth War (Autumn 2013)
In Dara’a, a Spark and Fuel (Spring 2011)
Expatriates (Winter 2014)
A Prayer for Austin Tice (Winter 2014)
Black in the Rainbow, Bergdahl and the Whale (Summer 2014)
The Suleimani Photograph (Summer 2014)
Safe on the Southbank (Summer 2014)
No Friends but the Mountains (Autumn 2014)
Paradox (Autumn 2004)
What’s Buried in the Devil’s Mountain (Winter 2015)
My Last Movie Night (Spring 2011)
The Imitation Game at Tel Abyad (Summer 2015)
A Thousand Discords (Summer 2015)
A Swiss Wedding (Summer 2015)
Back to the City (Autumn 2016)
A Summary of Action (Epilogue)
Acknowledgments
About the Author
THE REVOLUTION IS OVER, OR THE MUSIC WILL LIVE FOREVER
AZAZ, KILIS
Prologue
Crowds in the streets, marches, songs. Those are finished now. The revolution is over. The war can begin. A column of smoke boils upward from Azaz, a hamlet along Syria’s northern border with Turkey. Beneath a blanket of slate clouds, the whip-crack of rifle fire comes at odd intervals: the Islamic State battles the Northern Storm, a brigade of the dissolving Free Syrian Army. The air is still, no wind. The smoke continues to climb, perfectly straight, building like an obelisk. A monument.
Azaz’s sister town is Kilis, a backwater tucked among the mossy low hills of Turkey’s southern border. Just after sunrise, a week ago, the journalist Steven Sotloff crossed here; that same afternoon he disappeared on the road to Aleppo. A year later the Islamic State will behead him. Today that group’s name means nothing. They are virtually unknown. Today a revolution is ending.
All I know is I have come to be close to something familiar. Standing along the roadside in Kilis, just next to the border crossing, everything is confusion, confusion and suitcases. The morning’s refugees don’t know what to do with themselves, so they move their suitcases from one side of the road to the other. They stack them by the bus stop, a single bench beneath an overhang, a schedule tacked to its side. They read the schedule; it has no meaning—the buses don’t come. They glance at their watches, checking the time, which also has no meaning—the hour and minute hands will never point out the answer of how long they must wait. A column of halted sixteen-wheelers also waits, stalled at the border. The cargo can go no further, but it can’t go back. Confusion is suitcases. Confusion is halted sixteen-wheelers. Confusion is waiting.
* * *
Farther from the road, where the morning’s refugees have yet to venture, there is a camp. Behind a chain-link fence, tents are neatly aligned, and between their rows children play simple games—hide-and-seek, hopscotch, tag—and women watch. The men pass quickly from one tent to another, staring at the ground, hiding their faces as if hiding all they’ve lost. Outside the camp’s entrance, a steel revolving door the same as a subway turnstile, an entrepreneurial Turk has built a café. It is simple: plastic chairs and tables, a propane stove for tea, a refrigerator for bottled water and soda, some packaged foods—potato chips and chocolates.
My companion on this trip, and for many months to follow, is Matt, a friend of a friend, who has spent the last six years living in northern Iraq and in downtown Kabul, teaching at the American university in both places. At the café, he orders a pot of tea and a plate of refreshments. Matt’s purpose at the border is more practical than mine—he wants to see if it is open. Only the week before, he incorporated the Syrian Research and Evaluation Organization, or SREO, or as he says it, sur-rey-oh, a start-up that will bid on contracts from international organizations, auditing their humanitarian relief programs or subcontracting their excess work. A boom of aid has flooded into this conflict, and that parallel economy gives Matt his ticket to ride.
One at a time, a cluster of men gathers around Matt, who comes to his feet, offering his hand and stopping the conversation to welcome each who joins this group. Matt rowed heavyweight crew at Boston University. His arms are enormous. No one stands taller than his chin, which is covered with a full, blond beard. His eyes are blue. When I come over, no one stands. I sit among the refugees and Matt. Our conversation is in Arabic, Turkish, broken English. We wrestle with language as we wrestle with our topic: Why would two rebel groups—the Islamic State and the Free Syrian Army—fight one another? Wasn’t the revolution about toppling President Bashar al-Assad? What is happening in Azaz? What has happened?
The revolution is over. The war is beginning.
The men tell us what we already know, about the fighting, about the politics. We stare at them, as if we might read their histories—the ones we want to understand, the ones they won’t likely share—in their faces, which express themselves mainly with anger, sadness, and occasionally humor when explaining some misfort
une that pierces the frontier between tragedy and comedy. We watch so closely that we don’t drink our tea and we don’t eat our food. And when they all stand we are startled. Our eyes follow theirs, and we see someone stumbling toward us.
He is young, in his twenties, and he walks like a man in need of a cane. He wears a black parka that is too heavy for an autumn day. His cheeks are hollow, his complexion tinged a poisonous green, a film of sickness trapped beneath his skin. His gaze rests on our group. He comes closer. His eyes fix on Matt’s, shifting to mine. They are bloodshot, a starburst of veins. The group moves aside, allowing him to step in front of us, the pair of Americans. He unzips his parka. Lifting his T-shirt, he winces at the pain. From sternum to waistband he has been flayed open. His scar runs straight as a rail track, and the holes of heavy, unthreaded stitches appear industrial, binding like steel ties. We’d searched the expressions of these other men for some knowledge of this place, one beyond politics and the meaningless movements of armies, but this young man with the serrated scar wears such knowledge across his stomach, so much so that what I might learn from his words seems incidental compared with what I might learn from looking at his body.
He pins his shirt up with his chin, tracing the length of his scar with the nubs of his index fingers, both of which have been snipped off. He is from Aleppo. He worked in a sugar refinery that was bombed during a regime offensive. This explains the scar. His amputated fingers remain a mystery. His six-year-old daughter was killed in the same offensive, at home with her mother. But he doesn’t tell me this—another man whispers it in my ear. Unconscious after the bombing, he was taken to a hospital, which, once the regime advanced, fell into their territory. Flitting in and out of consciousness, he waited in the hospital for a surgeon, or death. For days he waited. There was a counteroffensive. “Then the Daesh took the hospital,” he says. Incomprehension must read across my face, because a man, the same one who explained about his dead daughter and wife, points across the border, to the smoke, and he explains that Daesh is the Arabic enunciation of the acronym ISIS, al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham. “Because I was in a hospital held by the regime,” continues the man with missing fingers, “the Daesh assumed that I supported Assad. They believe that to pray to Mecca one needs fingers to point the way. If the soul wanders, they disfigure the body, as they believe the soul has already been disfigured, removing the index fingers so you cannot pray.” What miracle has brought him here, enabling his escape to the relative safety of this place? Matt asks, but no answer is given, and the man pulls down his T-shirt. It is purple with bold yellow letters printed across it, a proclamation in English: “The Music Will Live Forever.”
* * *
Some Gauloises are set on the table, and everyone takes from the same pack. The Syrians smoke aggressively, lighting one after another, as if by smoking their lives away they exercise some control over them. The conversation returns to the war’s strategy, the ever-shifting front lines, the seasons of offensive and counteroffensive. Matt scribbles in a notebook, alternating his stare between the pages, the men, and the distant border. Matt hadn’t fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as I had, but we’ve been affected in much the same way, as evidenced by the fact we’ve journeyed here, for a litany of reasons, but none greater than to take a look at another war. What we see across the border, in Azaz, is familiar enough, an urban battle waged in this part of the world, but we watch in a different context—this isn’t our war. The looks we take seem to be looks back—as if, watching the fight ahead of us, we might understand the one behind us, the violence we’d witnessed in the last decade.
Our conversation is interrupted when the steel turnstile from the camp clangs open. Another man, blond-haired and blue-eyed as Matt, strides toward us. His complexion is ruddy, his fair skin burnt a bright-even red from time in the sun. His camouflage army pants are of a Russian pattern, and holstered to his leg is a medical kit. Everyone stands, even the man with the scar, though he again grimaces at the pain. So Matt and I stand too. With an Eastern European accent, this doctor speaks Arabic. The man with the scar embraces him, the two touching temples together, an intimate sign of friendship. The doctor peels back the purple T-shirt, seeming to examine his recent work. We have been asking questions, but these Syrians look to the doctor as though he has answers. Another chair is brought over. The doctor once again glances at us, the pair of Americans. He works in the camp that we are just visiting—and in his look it seems as though he’d linger for some tea were it not for us. We excuse ourselves and wander toward the border checkpoint to speak with the Turkish gendarmes.
* * *
Next week, SREO opens for business. Matt’s hired a small staff of linguists and researchers—Americans, Canadians, Turks, Syrians—all of whom will live in a single villa in Gaziantep, a Turkish industrial city only a thirty-minute drive from this border crossing in Kilis. I will keep a room in the villa’s garret. Living in such proximity to the research staff, I will form close friendships with many of them, but one in particular: Abed, a Damascene activist from the revolution’s early days. The two of us will stay up late on the veranda, me smoking cigarettes, mulling over my failed wars, him sipping chai, mulling over his failed revolution. I will learn that the two of us—a former Marine and a former activist—are in many ways veterans of the same conflict, one in which democratic and high-minded ideals have bogged down in the quagmire of Islamist dogma and sectarian bloodshed. Understanding our commonality, we reckon with the destruction our causes left in their wake and consider how to move on from the wreckage of our experience.
Matt and I are walking toward the gendarmes at the border crossing. The tower of smoke climbs ever higher in front of us. We press our American passports to the plexiglass window of the guard booth. The gendarmes fasten their blue tunics. They come to the intercom. Due to the fighting, the border is closed. That morning I make a crossing nonetheless, embarking on a journey to understand the end of a revolution, the beginning of a war. Staring past the gates, past the concertina wire and then farther up the road, what I see is Syria. What doggedly looks back is the last decade in Iraq and Afghanistan: a reflection.
THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH
GHOUTA, MADRID,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
By the revolution’s second summer, an ever-strengthening chorus of voices calls for the West to intervene. That spring, when Senator John McCain slips across the border to visit Azaz, he meets with rebel commanders, to include General Salim Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. “We need American help,” Idris tells the press. “We are now in a very critical situation.” When the topic of Russian intervention comes up, McCain says, “I’ve been known to be an optimist . . . [but] the reality is that Putin will only abandon Assad when he thinks that Assad is losing. Right now, at worst it’s a stalemate. In the view of some, he is winning.”
“What do you think?” I ask Mike, a friend of mine and used-to-be Marine infantryman. We’re at a bar in Georgetown, it’s midsummer, and our faces are upturned to the television, which plays on mute, a ticker of closed captions running across the bottom of the screen. A news anchor shuffles his notes and stares into a distant teleprompter, asking curt questions so he might get to the next segment.
“If we send the First Marine Division into Syria,” Mike says, “I feel like I should put on my fatigue shirt with my medals and march on the Capitol, John Kerry style.” Mike fought in Afghanistan’s volatile Helmand Province. He now owns a coffee shop. “On the other hand,” he says, “someone’s got to stop what’s going on over there.” We continue to watch, sitting quietly for minutes at a time as we read the text on the split screen divided between pundits who argue for or against an intervention on behalf of the rebels. As we read, our silent mouths form the words of their arguments as if we are holding a debate with ourselves. Thus far, the great democracies of the West have adopted a policy of “wait and see,” perhaps better described as “see and
wait”: the West is watching, biding its time and hoping that Assad will topple along with his regime. He doesn’t. For years, he’s hung on.
Then Ghouta, and it seems the waiting will end.
* * *
At 2:00 a.m. on August 21, 2013, the weather at Damascus International Airport is clear, 23°C, with 69% humidity. A breeze blows at 11.1 kilometers per hour (6.9 mph) from the west-southwest. By 5:00 a.m., seven rockets, each containing two liters of sarin nerve agent, land in Ghouta, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus, and the temperature drops to 21°C. Then humidity increases to 83%, and the wind increases to a moderate breeze of 22.2 kilometers per hour (13.8 mph) from the southwest. The conditions are ideal: the sarin spreads. There is a full moon, which sets twelve minutes after the sun rises at exactly 6:00 a.m., when the light becomes adequate for hundreds of bodies to be videoed in the streets.
* * *
A painting hangs in the Prado. I saw it as a boy. It is a panorama by the sixteenth-century Dutch master Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Triumph of Death. Beneath a smoke-blackened sky, an army of skeletons pillages the land. In the foreground, an armored king felled by an arrow is disrobed by one skeleton while another plunders a barrel of his gold coins. A pair of skeletons ascends a tower, where they gleefully ring a bell signaling the end of days. Everywhere the ranks of the dead advance upon the living, who either fly in terror or fruitlessly try to fight back. Those who do fight back turn into a harvest of dead themselves, loaded on wagons to augment the skeleton army’s ranks. A ravenous dog gnaws at the face of a child. A clergyman is pushed to the edge of a precipice, helped to his fate by a skeleton who mockingly wears his scarlet cap. A dinner of nobles is broken up. With drawn swords they make a futile resistance. We see the remnants of their meal on the table, a few pallid rolls and, strangely, a severed skull. Mockingly, another skeleton brings them a dish of human bones to feast upon while yet another cinches his arms around a noblewoman’s waist, miming the sensuous effects of the dinner party’s wine, which has spilled across the table. Fires rage atop a distant hill, which leads to a sea whose shallows are awash with shipwrecks. Barren trees picket a land that is otherwise void of growth. Fish are putrefying on a shore strewn with bloated corpses. The earth is transformed into a blackened cinder, every corner of the landscape stripped of life.
Places and Names Page 1
