Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  “My children also put the gray in my beard,” I reply.

  Abu Hassar nods. “Yes,” he says. “It is a funny thing: what you love and what you hate both make you old. And I feel old, but am still just thirty-three.”

  “I’m also thirty-three,” I say.

  Abed excuses himself and goes to the restroom out back. Abu Hassar and I sit next to each other on the same side of the table. Without our interpreter the space between us becomes awkward. I open my notebook to a clean page. I begin to draw. First, I sketch out a long, oscillating ribbon running from the top left to the bottom right of the page: the Euphrates. Abu Hassar quickly recognizes this. He takes the pencil from my hand and draws the straight borderline between Iraq and Syria, one that cuts through a tabletop of hardpan desert. Along the border he’s made, I write a single name: al-Qaim.

  Next to that name, Abu Hassar writes, 06.2005. I nod back and write, 09.2004. I travel farther down the Euphrates and write another name and another date. Our hands now chase each other’s around the map, mimicking the way we’d once chased each other around this country. Haditha: 07.2004 / 02.2005. Hit: 10.2004 / 11.2006. On it goes. Only the dates and place names matter. These are a common language to us, one not even Abed can translate. Had I understood Arabic or had Abu Hassar understood English, I don’t think we would’ve spoken. The small log we make on these two notebook pages contains the truth of our experience. Soon we’ve filled most of the map. Between us one thing is missing: we have many places that overlap, nearly all of them, but we don’t have a single date that does. Abu Hassar looks at me for a moment. I think he’s noticed this too. Neither of us says, or tries to say, anything about it. But I think we are both grateful, or at least I am. Abed comes back from the restroom. I turn my notebook to a clean page.

  Before we can resume our conversation, the waiter brings out a large silver tray with our lunch. He lays down three different types of lamb kebab, two plates of kibbe, flatbread, and salads. Then another server comes behind him, carrying a pitcher of ayran, a yogurt drink. He pours this into three ornate chalices that look like Turkish knockoffs of the Wimbledon Cup. The cold ayran froths as it is poured. As I look down my nose at it, Abu Hassar says, “Remember the Prophet’s wisdom: perfume, a good pillow, and yogurt cannot be refused!” He takes a tremendous sip from his cup, the froth sticking to his mustache. Abed drinks too, but before he does, he looks at me and smiles. I take a drink, knowing I have to, and thinking of Cipro.

  We eat with our hands, and Abu Hassar asks, “When were you the most afraid in Iraq?”

  His question stops me. I’ve been asked what was the worst thing I’d seen in Iraq (cats eating people), I’ve been asked what was the bravest thing I’d seen in Iraq (everything Marines do for wounded Marines), I’ve even been asked by an elderly society lady if I’d killed anyone in Iraq (if I did, you paid me to), but no one has ever asked me when I was the most afraid. I put down my food. It doesn’t take long for me to find the answer.

  “Getting lost,” I say.

  Abu Hassar gives me a confused look; so does Abed.

  “As an officer,” I explain, “I was always leading patrols. Sometimes we’d be in the middle of nowhere, just our column of Humvees and nothing but desert. Even with a GPS, it was easy to get disoriented in a wadi, or to mistake one trail for another. Getting on the radio, telling everyone to stop and turn around because I was lost—the shame of that was my greatest fear.”

  Abu Hassar and Abed both give me sympathetic looks, as if they recognize some lost part of me in the way I tell this story now. There are other things I could’ve told them: the time my platoon got cut off and surrounded in a house in Fallujah, or when a truck of Afghan soldiers was torn apart in front of me by a rocket-propelled grenade—all of this had scared me. But if fear is like a disease, these incidents were the twenty-four-hour flu: quick, unpleasant, but passing. The great fears are chronic, never abating, threatening to wear you down. I’m still afraid of getting lost. You should see the map software in my phone.

  “God put this fear into you,” says Abu Hassar. “You fought in a country that wasn’t yours. You were already lost.”

  “When were you the most afraid?” I ask him.

  Abu Hassar explains how at times he’d helped transport al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia field commanders from the border to Damascus. “Some of these men I knew; most I did not. Their work was dangerous; few survived long. I would receive orders from the border emir, the commander who was responsible for smuggling operations. On one occasion, I was given a minivan to transport six operatives to the busy Sarouja neighborhood of Damascus. When I met these operatives at the border, I didn’t speak much with them. They were tired, and spent most of our journey sleeping in the back of the minivan. For security purposes, I was told little about what I was doing. I would drive one leg of the journey, call the border emir, and receive instructions for the next. I drove most of that day and that evening; upon arriving at our destination, I called the border emir. He told me to collect ‘the equipment’ from the operatives. He wouldn’t say more than this. We were parked on a busy street. I went to the back of the van and told these men that I needed to collect whatever equipment they had with them. They looked at each other, uncertain what to do. Then one of them stepped from the minivan and into the crowded street. He began to unbutton his shirt. Beneath it, he wore a suicide vest. A couple of the others stepped out of the van too. They also wore suicide vests and also began to strip off their shirts. Before I could tell them to get back in the van, the six men began to argue about whether or not they should have to give up their vests; these operatives had likely worn them for weeks or even months. For that long, they’d been ready to die.”

  “Did they give up the vests?” I ask.

  “I left them arguing in Sarouja.”

  “That whole ride from the border, any one of them could’ve blown himself up and killed you.”

  Abu Hassar gives me a quick, confused look. “No, that’s not what I was afraid of. These were good men.”

  Now I am the one with the confused look.

  “What I was afraid of,” says Abu Hassar, “was getting arrested right there. When you fought, you only had to worry about living or dying. I also had to worry about disappearing into the belly of some prison. This was my greatest fear. And like all great fears, it happened.”

  My great fear never happened: after five deployments, I never once got lost on patrol. But I’ve since thought about what Abu Hassar said, and coming home from the wars, I’ve learned there are other ways to get lost.

  “What was prison like?” I ask.

  Abu Hassar’s hands become restless. He plays with a fork on the table. “There isn’t too much to tell. I spent three years there, most of it in solitary confinement.”

  “Why were you arrested? I thought the regime left you alone.”

  Abu Hassar puts the fork down. “They always did, but at the time I was arrested there was a great controversy in my group. Some of the commanders in Iraq had discovered that the border emir I worked for had been taking money from the regime’s mukhabarat. They wanted the border emir killed for this. When I smuggled men to and from Iraq, I received messages from some of these commanders telling me I needed to execute the border emir. I didn’t know what to do. Then, one night, before I’d chosen to do anything, the mukhabarat came to my house in Deir ez-Zor and arrested me.”

  “And your family?” I ask.

  “My wife was pregnant. She was left at home with my daughter and son. No one knew where I’d been taken. A few weeks later, my brother finally went to the local police station to ask about me. They beat him with canes. For three years I was like a ghost; I’d disappeared. They moved me from prison to prison: Sednaya, Far’ Falastin, Adra—I spent time in each. The war in Iraq was winding down. We jihadists, once useful to the regime, no longer were. We were arrested in greater and greater numbers. Assad wished
to improve his reputation internationally. Soon the prisons were filled with men I’d fought alongside. The other prisoners were thieves and rapists, but we jihadists were treated worst of all. We were beaten and electrocuted. Torture was part of our life. Some of us died; others went crazy.”

  Abu Hassar starts playing with the fork again, pricking his thumb against it.

  “How long was your sentence?” I ask.

  His forehead knots. “There was no sentence,” he answers. “I was only released because of him.” He points at Abed. “His revolution freed me.”

  Abed seems at pains to translate this fact. The jihadists within Syria would never have ascended if it weren’t for the initial success of the secular- and democratic-minded revolution. As the revolution gained momentum, Assad opened his prisons, unleashing the jihadists on himself.

  Abed looks at Abu Hassar, but speaks to me: “At times, I regret my revolution.”

  Before I can reply, Abu Hassar begins his story again. “When we were released, the fighters I’d known from the Iraq War did just as Assad wanted. They organized against him. My old friends formed Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, but I refused to join.”

  “Were you tired of fighting?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. Assad wouldn’t release these men without ensuring his informers were in place among them. I knew how that would end for me. I have three children. I won’t go back to prison, so I came here.”

  “And do you miss it—the fighting, the excitement?”

  Of all the questions I ask, this is the only one Abu Hassar never answers.

  “I have something to ask you,” he says, changing the subject. “With all your warplanes, and your aircraft carriers, and tanks, and your laser-guided bombs, with all this—”

  I interrupt him. “I think I know your question.”

  Abu Hassar shakes his head. “With all these things, how is it that you couldn’t win in Iraq?”

  “The type of war we chose was complicated,” I say. “We’d lost before we even started fighting. For us, success meant winning. For you, the insurgents, success meant not losing. Those are two very different things.”

  Abu Hassar looks at me as if I am trying to take something from him, as if my analysis robs him of some honors of combat. “We defeated you with nothing,” he says. “With explosives in plastic jugs on the roadside and old rifles. Imagine if we’d had your tanks or your planes.”

  “The Afghan insurgents say, ‘You Americans have the watches, but we have the time.’ It’s the same here. That’s why you won.”

  Abu Hassar’s face tenses, his eyebrows nearly touching, as if unable to understand what I am talking about: Watches and time? Who has which? “Just imagine if we had weapons like yours now. Assad would be dead within a few weeks. If Obama armed the Islamists, he wouldn’t have to worry about Putin and Khamenei’s games.”

  Right in his face, I laugh.

  “You think it’s funny, but it’s the truth,” says Abu Hassar.

  It has often been said that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in thought at the same time while still retaining the ability to function. Based on that criteria, the way most Syrian jihadists and activists think about the United States makes them some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Like most in the Arab world, they are deeply suspicious of American interventions in the region—the invasion of Iraq was criminal to them. But held in opposition to this outrage, those same voices now clamor for a similar intervention in Syria.

  “And why shouldn’t you arm the Islamists? You know firsthand what good fighters we are,” says Abu Hassar. From ear to ear, he grins at me.

  He is egging me on, as if he’s outfoxed me at a game of checkers and wishes to hustle another round. “No one would accept this idea,” I say. “It’d be rejected outright. You’re not being serious.”

  “I don’t think we jihadists would have a problem receiving our weapons from the US,” he replies.

  “It’s we Americans who would never accept it! We were fighting each other just two years ago in Iraq.”

  Now it is Abu Hassar who laughs right in my face. “For your government, it’s no worse a position than the one they’re in now. We used to be friends, remember—in Afghanistan, in the eighties. If we went from being allies to enemies, that means we can go from being enemies to allies.”

  “Okay, so how does that end?” I ask. “My government arms the Islamists. Tell me how that ends.”

  “You really want to know?”

  I nod.

  “The Prophet predicted all of this,” begins Abu Hassar, as if from some place of deep personal knowledge. “He said it starts with the boys, writing and speaking messages of a new future in the streets.” Abu Hassar stops and looks at Abed for a moment. By that look, it seems Abed and the Arab Spring’s democratic activists were the boys Abu Hassar refers to. “The messages spread, breeding outrage and a war fought by the men. This is what we see now. In that war, an Islamist army rises, uniting to destroy all others. Then a tyrant is killed. This is Assad. His army will fall. Afterward, among the Islamists, there will be many pretenders. The fighting among them will go on.”

  Abu Hassar glances at my notepad. I haven’t been writing anything down. This seems to bother him. “You know all this?” he asks.

  “It’s all happening right now,” I say. “The infighting, the rise of the Islamists. How does that end?”

  “The Syrian people thirst for an Islamic state,” says Abu Hassar. “After so much war, they want justice. After Assad falls and when there is fighting among the pretenders, a man will come. He is a common man, but he will have a vision. In that vision, God will tell him how to destroy His enemies and bring peace to all peoples. That man is the Mahdi.”

  I write down the word Mahdi, a heavy and dissatisfied dot above the i.

  “You don’t believe me?” says Abu Hassar.

  I stare back at him, saying nothing.

  “You think, as poorly armed as we are, we can’t defeat Assad and his backers?”

  “It’s not that,” I say.

  Abu Hassar continues. “Our weapons don’t matter as much as you think. Even Albert Einstein predicted what’s happening now. He said that the Third War would be a nuclear war, but that the Fourth War would be fought with sticks and stones. That’s how we beat you in Iraq: with sticks and stones. Whether we are helped or not, this is how we will create our Islamic state, even with the superpowers of the world against us.”

  “So the plan is to wait for the Mahdi?”

  “He walks among us now, a simple man of the people, the true redeemer.”

  I shut my notebook. Our waiter is lurking across the room. I catch his eye and make a motion with my hand, as if I am scribbling out the bill for our lunch. He disappears into the back of the restaurant.

  “What will you do if this is true?” Abu Hassar asks me.

  “If the Mahdi returns?”

  He nods.

  “That means there will be a peaceful and just Islamic state?”

  Again, he nods.

  “Then I’ll come visit you with my family.”

  “And you will be welcome,” says Abu Hassar, grinning his wide, ear-to-ear grin and resting his heavy hand on my shoulder.

  We’ve been sitting for hours, and it is early afternoon. Abu Hassar excuses himself to take the day’s fourth prayer in a quiet corner of the restaurant. Abed, seemingly exhausted from translating, stands stiffly and goes to use the bathroom. I sit by myself, the empty plates of our lunch spread in front of me.

  Our waiter wanders over. “Syrie?” he asks, pointing to where Abu Hassar and Abed had been sitting.

  I nod.

  Then he strokes his face as if he has a thick and imaginary beard, one like Abu Hassar’s. “Jabhat al-Nusra,” he says.

  I shrug.

/>   “Amerikee?” he asks, pointing at me, seemingly confused as to why an American would spend so much time sitting with two Syrians, especially one Islamist.

  “New York,” I say.

  He shakes his head knowingly, as if to intone the words New York is to intone a universal spirit of anything goes.

  I hand over the money for lunch. Abed and Abu Hassar return and we leave the restaurant. Outside, the gray morning rain is now gray afternoon rain. The cafés are still full of people sitting on green Astroturf lawns, sipping tea that steams at their lips. Nothing has changed.

  We pile into the black Peugeot and return to the road. For a while, we don’t speak. We are tired of our own voices. There is just the noise of the broken wiper in front of me, stuttering across the windshield. Above us, the overcast sky loses its light. Below, Akçakale camp spreads in all directions, as gray as a second sky. Something heavy and sad comes over Abu Hassar, and the heaviness of that thing comes over me. He and I have spent the day somewhere else, in a different time. Now he’ll go back to the camp and I’ll go back to the road.

  But we aren’t there yet. With about a mile left to go, Abu Hassar puts his hand on my shoulder. “So you will come visit when the war is over?”

  “Of course,” I say. “If it’s safe for someone like me.”

  “It would have to be. You would never pass for a Muslim.” He points at me and speaks to Abed: “He is such a Christian, he even looks like Jesus!”

  I glance at myself in the rearview mirror. I haven’t shaved in a couple of weeks. My face is a bit gaunt, my kinked hair a bit unkempt. “Maybe I look like Einstein?”

  As we pull over by his brother’s shop, Abu Hassar and I are still laughing.

  “If I look like Jesus,” I say, “you look like the Prophet Muhammad.”

  Abu Hassar shakes his head. “No, I don’t look like the Prophet, peace be upon him.” He opens his door and a cold breeze fills our car. I can feel the rain outside hitting my neck. Abu Hassar grabs my shoulder with his thick and powerful hands. He pushes his face close to mine. Again he is grinning.