Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  After the speech, everyone walked back to the garages. Dan found me in the crowd. “The skipper discuss the backup plan with you?” he asked. I nodded, not really wanting to talk about it anymore. “What’d you think about the speech?” I asked him. Dan shrugged. “If a bunch of us are going to get killed, you’d think the sergeant major might say ass in front of the cameras.”

  * * *

  Our assault meets with silence. The Government Center has been abandoned. In the darkness our platoon clears its four buildings against no resistance. But the city awakes to gunfire. Between machine gun salvos, rockets, and grenades, the Marines snap pictures of each other with cheap disposable cameras. No one’s been hurt yet.

  Our platoon is spread between Mary-Kate and Ashley. The two rooftops are flat and rimmed with a chest-high wall. The steady whip-crack of rifle fire passes above our heads all morning. The sky is perfectly blue, and in front of us is Highway 10. Its four lanes bisect the city. Back in March, dozens of cheering Fallujans dragged the charred and dismembered remains of four Blackwater contractors down this highway. For three days their bodies hung from the crossbeams of the Euphrates Bridge.

  By around nine a.m., all hell is breaking loose. Rocket-propelled grenades sail overhead regularly, like trains passing through a station. One slams into a wall behind us. Everyone is okay. A piece of steel, jagged as a shark’s tooth, embeds into Pratt’s groin protector. Smoke rises from the Kevlar flap. Pratt waves it away. He’s fine. Ames takes a picture. We all laugh, sort of.

  Across the Government Center, on the roof of the high-rise, Cunningham and Dan set up their radios. They call in air strikes. Overhead, that perfect blue sky now swarms with attack helicopters and jets. Like herons taking fish from the sea, they swoop down and gulp whole buildings from the city. When their bombs drop close, we press ourselves against the roof’s wall and open our mouths so the overpressure won’t rupture our eardrums. Soon Cunningham announces they’re moving off the high-rise’s roof, and in the background of his transmission I can hear the buzz-snap of the rifle fire that’s forcing him down to the lower floors.

  Despite the November chill, I’ve sweat through my uniform completely. Even my boots are wet. I look at my watch: 0917. I decide to stop looking at my watch. I’ll never make it through the day if I do.

  Our building shakes on its foundation. Steel hits its side like the crack of a thousand bullwhips. I lose sight of the Marines around me. We disappear into a cloud of dust. When the dust clears, half the platoon have their mouths open. It’s too late, though, and my ears ring and hurt. Ames screams, “What the fuck was that, LT?”

  “Fucking Muj artillery!” says Pratt.

  “The Muj don’t have fucking artillery,” I say. “That’s ours.”

  I grab the radio’s handset and call Dan, who along with Cunningham is now off the high-rise’s roof and a couple of stories down. “I didn’t call that artillery in,” Dan says in his soft Virginia drawl.

  Before I can say Shit, who did? another salvo lands right in front of us. It tears open Highway 10, tossing surfboard-sized hunks of asphalt skyward. The air sucks out so hard, it feels like an open palm smacked across my cheek. Among the forty-six of us, I hear someone whimper. I crawl over to Ames. Broken glass and cement crunch beneath my palms and knees. I grab the radio again. We’re pressed together so closely, I can see every pimple on his nineteen-year-old face. Before I can scream at Dan, he tells me the artillery is coming from our regimental headquarters far outside of the city. And he says, calmly, “I’m headed to the roof to get it shifted off you.”

  I throw the handset back at Ames. I feel forty-six sets of eyes on me. There is a strange quiet. We’re pressed shoulder to shoulder. Some pigeons land on our rooftop, look at us, then quickly fly off. It’s as if we and the insurgents all anxiously await the next artillery salvo.

  Far away, I hear a single gunshot, an insignificant pop.

  Immediately, all hell breaks loose again, as if sound has suddenly refused to travel through time and decided to tear off wherever it pleases. We press into the wall, but our ears don’t hurt, no dust consumes us. I poke my head up. About a hundred yards away, the artillery impacts land among the insurgents’ positions.

  I grab the radio. “Nice shooting!” I tell Dan.

  Cunningham’s voice meets mine. “Get a corpsman to the high-rise.”

  Dan was the first one killed that day.

  I didn’t check my watch again until that night. It read 2350, and we’d crossed Highway 10, fighting almost 400 meters deeper into the city. Of the forty-six on the rooftop that morning, twenty-five were still on their feet. We didn’t know it then, but we’d fight in Fallujah for another month. And we would exceed 70 percent.

  * * *

  I wear a black steel bracelet on my wrist. It’s got Dan’s name on it, and the date November 10, 2004. I wear it for him, but for others too. Next to that bracelet is another, a plastic one threaded with pink hearts and blue stars that my three-year-old daughter made for me. If it weren’t for the steel bracelet, the plastic one wouldn’t exist.

  When I think about my wars, and what happened, I do sometimes ask myself if it was worth it. But I’m not thinking about Bush or Obama, or about Iraq or Afghanistan. I’m thinking about Pratt and Ames, and of course Dan, and unfortunately other friends like him. I wonder what they’d say. I hope they’d think what we did for each other was worth it.

  * * *

  After the holidays, Matt and his staff return to work—ginning up business, bidding on contracts, taking research trips to the border and the constellation of refugee camps that straddle it. In the evenings we eat cross-legged on a carpet in the living room, inside a concentric circle of space heaters. We all take turns cooking. Heather, a Turkish and Arabic speaker from the Pacific Northwest, proves adventurous in her tastes, picking dead bees from the whole honeycomb she buys at the market, or ordering fresh yogurt to our residence, delivered in a steel pail by a farmer she’s befriended. She endures bouts of food poisoning in good spirits. Kristine, a blonde from Minnesota who speaks Arabic so well it turns heads, subsists on a diet of salted popcorn. After dinner we all play Scrabble. Some nights we drink at local bars, neon-lit basement joints. One night at the Tuğcan Hotel, cloaked in a disco ball’s orbit of light, I sing karaoke: “Losing My Religion.”

  Across the border, the situation deteriorates further. The Islamic State seizes its new capital in Syria’s Ar-Raqqah governorate. The rapidity of these setbacks awes much of the international community. The Islamic State’s success can be attributed to many factors: the corruption and inefficacy of the Free Syrian Army, the Maliki government’s refusal to integrate Sunnis into the fabric of political life, and the lack of a residual US force in Iraq. Though fundamentally these factors can be reduced to one: a power vacuum.

  That extremists would step into a power vacuum is no surprise. It happened with the Taliban in the 1990s and with al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in the past decade. In this part of the world, extremism is not a fait accompli. It has been brought about by a certain set of conditions: lawlessness, sectarian violence, corruption. These create fertile ground for radical ideologies to take root. All these negative strains exist within Iraq and Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, fought against the United States in the Iraq War, rising to become the chief of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia in May 2010. In 2011, when Abed and other activists took to the streets across Syria, Abu Bakr’s organization appeared to be in its final throes. Then, in a collapsing Syria, it was offered the exact opportunity it needed. Just as the US invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime created a power vacuum to be filled by international jihadis, so, too, has the democratically minded Syrian revolution. For Abed and me, our wars each devolved into disasters for the same reason: by trying to unleash sweeping change in the region, we created the conditions for extremists to rise.

  A
t times, sitting out on the veranda after a meal, I hear him say that he regrets his revolution and he wishes that he—and, by implication, his generation—had never taken to the streets in protest. At other times, I hear him say he has no regrets: that the struggle isn’t over, and any chance to live in a free society is worth the suffering. He wrestles with the good and the bad, the duality within the defining political and emotional event of his life. After watching the Islamic State’s reemergence in Iraq, I now recognize the same duality in my experience.

  Like his uncle, Abed is a poet. After one such conversation, he shares “Take Me,” some verse he composed on December 9, 2011, the Friday of the Dignity Strike, one of a series of planned nonviolent protests during the heady, early days of the revolution:

  I’ve taken my decision, put my olives and bread in the baskets,

  and stay awake praying for me, Mother, as long as the moon is up.

  I am lost for words to express

  my overwhelming happiness to have an appointment with history

  while carrying with me water for the rebels.

  A few days later, I ask Abed more about this poem, what it meant to him, whether he still feels the same. “Back then, I was coordinating the protests in Damascus and the rebels were seizing ground in the countryside,” he says. “All of us were bound by this platonic love of freedom. We felt like we were making history.”

  “Do you think there’s some young member of the Islamic State marching to Baghdad now, glamorizing his appointment with history?” I ask.

  “Sadly,” he says, “it’s something we all have in common.”

  A PRAYER FOR AUSTIN TICE

  DAMASCUS, ISTANBUL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  She counts the Tuesdays. By the spring of 2014, her total creeps toward one hundred. To mark the weeks since she last heard from her son, she posts photos of him online. The final message before his Twitter feed went silent came on a Sunday: “Spent the day at an FSA pool party with music by @taylorswift13. They even brought me whiskey. Hands down, best birthday ever.”

  Achievement always marked his path: Eagle Scout, then the Marine Corps—Iraq and Afghanistan—then Georgetown Law. Then Syria. He’d decided to go there as a freelance journalist between his second and third years of law school. While classmates jockeyed for internships at firms, Austin Tice booked a flight to Istanbul. In May 2012, summer started and Austin packed a bag and a camera, then left.

  When he disappeared that August, a flurry of questions followed in the media and among Marines who’d known him or known of him. At first they were the obvious ones: Who’s holding him? Who saw him last? But then other, larger questions emerged, and eventually they distilled into one: Why’d he go?

  * * *

  Along the periphery of Syria’s civil war, I often meet veterans of the last decade’s wars, wanderers amidst the Arab Spring’s upheaval. Places like Tahrir, Aleppo, Tunis, and Taksim possess a new and yet familiar allure, promising to replace names we’ve let go: Ramadi, Helmand, Haditha, Khost. When we meet, we talk about the other things we’re doing: field researcher, writer, photojournalist, whatever. Our current “professions” are often described with a shrug of the shoulders, followed by a spell of silence, as if our true profession is the unspoken one—the one we left behind.

  When I first meet Vince, a Marine turned English teacher, in a bar off Istanbul’s Taksim Square, I ask him what type of certificate he needs to teach and what materials he uses with his students. He laughs at me. “You don’t need a certificate.” Then he leans in close, over the bottle of wine I’m splitting with him and his Cypriot girlfriend. “The guys are obsessed with Victoria’s Secret.” He explains how it’s the most compelling material he can find for his all-male students at their conservative religious school. “It’s all they want to talk about,” he tells me. “It is a conversation class.”

  While transiting Istanbul, I had received a message from Vince over Twitter, asking if I wanted to meet. His profile picture is of a gaunt twentysomething, unshaven, a shadow of stubble cast against his pale skin. He wears an old T-shirt with a stretched collar, and he sits on a Persian carpet, leaning against a bookshelf as he stares upward, toward what must be the ceiling light. But the photograph’s style implies that he is staring somewhere more profound. Perhaps I agree to meet him to see if this is true.

  As an infantryman, Vince fought in Ramadi between 2005 and 2007, some bloody years. Perched on my stool in the bar, I ask when he started coming to the Middle East. “The first thing I did when I got out of the Marines,” he says, “was to buy a ticket back here.” While we work through another bottle, Vince’s girlfriend grows bored of our conversation. She leans her head against the wall, shuts her eyes, and naps while Vince speaks passionately about his Syrian friends, many of whom he’s lost track of since the war started.

  He asks if I’ve ever been to Lebanon. I haven’t, but my old infantry battalion garrisoned the airport in Beirut when Hezbollah detonated a truck bomb at their barracks in 1983, killing 241 Marines, sailors, and soldiers. It was the Corps’ bloodiest single day since Iwo Jima. Vince nods when I tell him. “You were with one-eight,” he says, and it feels good to be speaking our common language.

  He starts another story, about a trip he took to a coastal town in southern Lebanon. “That’s Hezbollah country. And here I am, this jarhead walking around bare-chested and pasty white.” He pats his left shoulder. “I have a big eagle, globe, and anchor here.” He lifts his shirt. Inked onto his ribs is a single rifle bayoneted into the dirt, with names listed on a scroll: his dead friends. “I can’t remember the last time I felt as proud as I did walking down that beach.”

  Our waiter comes over. Vince nudges his girlfriend, asking her if she wants something to eat. She shakes her head, then leans it back against the wall and shuts her eyes again. The two of us order hamburgers.

  Then Vince tells me another story, about how in January 2011 he was back in the States, going to college in Chicago. On a Wednesday, as he came out of class, his Twitter feed exploded with news from friends in Cairo. An enormous protest was planned in Tahrir Square after midday prayers as part of what would later be known as the Friday of Rage. “This was the revolution,” he explains. “It was going to be the largest protest in Egypt’s history.” That night he bought a flight from O’Hare, and he landed in Cairo on Thursday. By Friday, he was in the square. “I had this idea that I’d live-tweet the entire thing,” says Vince. “Then they shut Twitter down, so I was just in it.” In the course of a day, Egyptian security services nearly arrested him for taking photos, and the Muslim Brotherhood nearly kidnapped him for being an American. “The whole time those guys held me, I kept telling them, ‘Egyptian people are good, Egyptian government is bad. American people are good, American government is bad.’” By Saturday, Vince had returned to the airport. He managed to get on an evacuation flight organized by the US State Department. By Tuesday, he was back in class.

  “It made me the coolest guy in my creative writing seminar,” he says, finishing his food. “But I had no business being there.”

  We settle the bill, and the three of us step outside for a smoke. The cool air brings a snap of sobriety, and I ask him, “Why are you here?”

  He looks back at me as if I should know. As if he should ask me the same.

  We stroll through Taksim Square. In June 2013, the previous summer, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered police to forcefully disperse a few dozen environmental activists who squatted in nearby Gezi Park protesting development plans for the public land. Long criticized for his autocratic style and Islamist tendencies, Erdoğan provoked tens of thousands of Turks to flood into Taksim, turning the barren square into a lake of protestors, chanting, singing, grinding Istanbul to a standstill that only eased beneath clouds of CS gas, which left behind a bitterness that lingered in the tight lanes and grottoes of the old city for days, wafting up now and again at the p
assing of a strange breeze.

  As we wander by Galatasaray Lisesi, a high school dating back to the fifteenth century and a congregation point for demonstrations, the police remain out in force. Their plastic riot shields lean against their legs, and they wear fiberglass breastplates similar to those worn by motocross riders, their batons slung at their sides. I ask Vince why he’s settled in Istanbul. He talks a bit about his job, the parts of the city he likes, the parts of other cities he doesn’t like. But in the end he settles on “To be close to it.”

  It’s the same it many of us need to be close to.

  This isn’t a cause, although it can be. This isn’t a particular war, but it’s often that too. If I were to describe it, I’d say it’s an experience so large that you shrink to insignificance in its presence. And that’s how you get lost in it.

  When Austin Tice was kidnapped, he was about as close as you can get to it.

  * * *

  That so many of us went to war in this part of the world, only to return, seems no surprise. For some of us, the wars have gone on so long that we lack context for a life outside of them. While home in the States that past January, I had met up with an old friend, a veteran special operator whom I’ve known since my early twenties. He’s still deploying and has been since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, so I’ll just call him Jack. With both of us back for the holidays, Jack and I reunited for a jog, as we customarily do. As we ran through Washington, D.C., past the monuments, through the gentrifying neighborhoods, we talked about PTSD and whether we have it or not. He asked if I ever had dreams. I told him no, but that I sometimes get very sad. An idea, a memory, will suddenly come to mind, stopping me cold. When this happens, life feels like a brutal Hallmark commercial played on a loop. I usually wind up crying.