Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  * * *

  After a few years as an infantryman, I’d migrated over to special operations, and the men under my command were no longer Marines but foreign soldiers like Mortaza and Sabir. These two couldn’t have been more different from each other, and yet, as is often the case, they were best friends. Mortaza was Pashtun, black-eyed with hawkish cheekbones and a wiry frame. Sabir was Tajik, eyes blue as new marbles, face like an anvil, built to absorb anything. The only physical similarity between them was their long hair and fierce, unkempt beards.

  Good for a joke or prank on even the worst days—and worst days were plenty around Shkin—Mortaza was an easy guy to get along with. The first time we met, he was sprawled across the sofa in our operations center, watching Bollywood dance videos on the same flat-screen television where we’d sometimes pipe in the live feed from drone strikes. After our introduction he draped his arm around my shoulder, welcoming me to the unit but also taping a piece of paper to my back. It read Khar, “Donkey.” Everyone laughed. Well versed in the dos and don’ts of locker room bravado by this point in my career, I took it with a smile, which made me okay in Mortaza’s book. My first meeting with Sabir was more somber. He’d just returned from the machine gun range, the forty guys in his platoon shuffling behind him in a dusty column. Standing at the gate to our firebase, I offered my hand and my name. Sabir offered neither, and only fixed his eyes on mine. He asked me how many men I’d killed.

  I was thirty-one years old then, and had collected as many dead friends as an eighty-one-year-old. My youthful desire to matter and make a difference had eroded, if it wasn’t gone altogether. So why did I keep deploying? Was I drawn back to war because I couldn’t find meaning outside it? I was tired and had begun to think about making this deployment my last. Having just had my first child, Coco, the pain of separation surprised me. Leaving on my first deployment since her birth, I stood in the departures terminal with Coco’s small arms looped around my neck in a goodbye hug; it felt selfish to pry myself loose from her grip. I had been thinking a lot about bonds as a new officer in Shkin, both those with my family but also those I needed to form with the Afghans. Among the troops, these grew as we watched out for one another’s lives on countless patrols. However, when it came to Mortaza and Sabir, I soon realized there was something they valued more than their lives: their hopes for their future—I guess you’d call these their dreams. And in the back glow of that Thursday night movie, this is what we usually discussed, their dreams as well as mine.

  Mortaza would talk about Europe—Copenhagen, for some reason. “I will go there and rent an apartment,” he’d say, “and not work for a while. I’ve saved money fighting; I’ll spend it on girls and the disco.” There were variations on this fantasy. Sometimes it’d be Stockholm, but always there were girls and a disco, and he would say this with his whole soul, his eyes piercing yours, making you believe that all the nobility of the free world resided in those two words.

  Sabir’s ambitions proved more conventional, not unlike mine. Both of us hoped to be good fathers despite the danger and long absences of our chosen profession. An ethnic Tajik, Sabir lived in the north of Afghanistan, in the Panjshir Valley, the epicenter of mujahideen resistance against the Soviets twenty-five years before. Living so far away, Sabir never used the ten days of leave the soldiers earned every two months. The trip would’ve taken him from our unit for weeks, the journey to the Panjshir being a long and difficult one. Despite the effect of his absence on his young son, just like me he’d set a pattern of putting his troopers ahead of his family.

  I shared my own fears and hopes, offering up details of my daughter’s earliest days: how she liked to sleep with the dog, the way she sometimes cried when she saw me on Skype with my own fierce beard, and, if we’d had enough to drink, my misgivings about a soldier’s life, my concern that after fighting these many years I’d find a “normal life” boring, even trivial. I have plenty of war stories about Mortaza and Sabir—the ambush at Mangritay, a certain long patrol south of Gomal—but when they return to me now, whether I’m sitting up with my daughter in the middle of the night or riding a crowded bus along the seaside road in Istanbul, what I remember are those conversations.

  * * *

  We’d been out on patrol for three days, scouting a hilltop outpost near the Afghan-Pakistan border. It was cold, late November; frost crusted our field jackets and the barrels of our machine guns. The night before, we’d slept huddled in our trucks, nearly a hundred of us spread in a column. As the first light of the rising sun cast shadows across the peaks, the Afghan troops gathered in twos and threes around small propane stoves, heating tea, gnawing on bits of frozen bread. I gathered with Mortaza and Sabir, who were deep in discussion.

  Sabir was planning to take leave when we returned from this patrol, his first since I’d known him. That night, a resupply helicopter was headed to our firebase. If Sabir got on it, he’d make it home days ahead of schedule. The two were debating the best route back, and Mortaza thought we should take a shortcut, one that ran across a plateau of hardpan desert, leaving us exposed to ambush by the Taliban but shaving hours off our return journey. “I’ve done it before,” Mortaza explained. “Aside from a few washes, the ground is completely flat.” When I looked at Sabir, I could see how much he wanted to be on that helicopter. I wanted to help him home, so I decided we should take the shortcut. Climbing into our trucks, I overheard Mortaza ask Sabir what he planned to do once he was with his son. Staring into his tea, then off to the mountains, then back into his tea, Sabir responded, “What did you do with your father as a boy?”

  Mortaza said nothing.

  We drove fast and hard, well into the afternoon. Here and there, our convoy of fifteen pickup trucks would dip into a wash, slowly crawling up the other side. Mortaza’s platoon led the way, him up front acting as our guide. My truck traveled in the back of our column, with Sabir’s platoon. We ate lunch on the move, never taking a break, all to get Sabir on his evening flight. By early evening, long shadows had spread from the ridgetops to the foothills. We’d make it, but only just. Dipping into a wash, our convoy bunched together. From its back, I strained up in my seat to see what the delay was; then my consciousness did a quick three-step: sight (huge clods of earth spilling up, like a fountain), thought (Fuck, no), sound (a thunderclap).

  The IED tore apart the front vehicle in our convoy, blasting its doors from the hinges, incinerating its engine block. Then our Taliban ambushers began to shoot at us from a distant ridgeline, its slope popping and flashing, wild as paparazzi. We shot back from all our trucks, except for one. Immediately ahead of me, I saw Sabir peel off the column. Despite the danger of another IED, he’d gone to look for his friend.

  * * *

  That night, the helicopter that was supposed to take Sabir to his family took Mortaza to his. Before it landed at our base, the local mullah had readied his body for burial, as well as the three dead troopers who’d also been in the truck. In the center of the firebase’s motor pool, we’d parked in a circle, our headlights shining in a ring, illumining the preparation of the dead while the mullah performed the ceremonial cleaning—sponges against skin and white linen wrapped around limbs, making the kafan, a burial shroud. As the mullah shaved Mortaza’s beard and hair, cleansing him for the next life, Sabir cradled his best friend’s head. Then he lowered Mortaza into his casket.

  As the helicopter made a final approach to our firebase, we turned off our trucks’ headlights so they wouldn’t blind the pilot. Now it was pitch-dark and cold. As soon as the helicopter touched down, small clusters of soldiers rushed forward with the coffins, loading them. Then the helicopter’s blades hacked at the dark sky, lifting the bodies away and pouring a surge of air from the engine over those of us who remained behind. That air, warm as breath, is my last memory of that night.

  A few days later, it was Thursday again. Despite Mortaza’s death, we hung up that sheet, filled our cups, picked a film. We
weren’t sure if the Afghans would show up, but they did, perhaps needing the escape this ritual provided. I found Sabir sitting on the foldout chairs in back. He was almost unrecognizable, having cut his beard and hair. I sat next to him. “You look young,” I said, pointing to his clean-shaven face.

  “I’ll make my way home tomorrow,” he said. Despite everything that had happened, I felt some solace—soon Sabir would see his son. But part of me wondered about his haircut. Had he got rid of his wild mane and beard so his child might recognize him, or was his haircut similar to Mortaza’s, the return home signaling a certain type of death? Unlike wars past, Afghanistan wouldn’t end but just seemed to drag on—no victory, no defeat—each of us having to declare a separate peace if we ever wished to return home. Mortaza’s death felt singular to me even though I’d seen plenty of similar deaths before. It’s just that I’d never seen them with the same eyes that looked at my daughter.

  Sitting next to Sabir, I wondered how much longer he’d stay in the war and whether he blamed me or himself for Mortaza’s death. I hoped even with Mortaza gone we might speak as we once had. But before I could say any of this, Sabir stood to refill his cup. When he came back he didn’t sit with me but went over to sit with the rest of the Afghans. Without Mortaza our conversation seemed to be over. The next morning, Sabir was gone. A month later, that same helicopter returned, taking me home after what I’d now decided would be my last tour.

  A week or so later, I sat in a barber’s chair just off Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. While my then-wife waited for me to trim my beard and tangled mop of hair into something manageable, Coco started to cry. She was nine months old now, and her mother took her and circled the block with the stroller while I sat in the barber’s chair, watching a transformation take place—one I felt uneasy about—in the mirror.

  * * *

  I don’t know if Sabir ever came back from leave. Perhaps he stayed in the Panjshir Valley with his son, deciding he’d had enough of the war. I often think of Mortaza too—how he’d do anything for a friend, his easy laugh, the disco and the girls. And that day getting my haircut became a memory I will always pair with those friends—the ritual of it, the letting go of one self for another. When the barber finished, he spun my chair around, then moved on to his next customer. Sitting alone, I waited for my daughter. I hoped she’d be satisfied with all that had been hidden beneath that beard and hair.

  THE IMITATION GAME AT TEL ABYAD

  SYRIAN BORDER

  Again the summer, and a fighting season: 2015. In the waning days of that winter, the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, dislodged the Islamic State from Kobane, denying them one of two key border crossings from northwestern Syria into Turkey. The other crossing, in the hardscrabble town of Tel Abyad, has just fallen to a coalition of YPG and Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters. Tel Abyad is the name given to the Syrian side of the border. Akçakale is the name given to the Turkish side. This is where Abed and I had baklava with Abu Hassar a year and a half before, just as the Islamic State had begun to traffic fighters and equipment through this crossing to their capital thirty miles south in Ar-Raqqah. Despite their defeat in Kobane, recent victories over the Iraqi army in Ramadi and the Syrian army in Palmyra have lent the Islamic State an air of invincibility, or at least momentum, so news of its impending defeat sends a flock of media to the border crossing abutting the town.

  Tuesday morning, I hitch a ride south with Matt, who after conducting a humanitarian needs assessment in Kobane plans to conduct a similar assessment in Tel Abyad, detailing the scope of the destruction and how much of the town will require rebuilding. The road is empty, not a car or truck on it, its centerline stabbing dead straight toward the horizon. Traffic, commercial and otherwise, has evaporated. One would be forgiven for thinking this evaporation was the work of the oppressive heat, but the real culprit is the fighting at the border. Matt has asked me to drive so he can make some calls. He scrolls through the contacts in his phone as I travel up the gearshift, holding us in fifth along the autobahn while the eastern sun holds in our faces. Matt’s chatting away and has leaned back in his seat, his foot crossed onto his knee, as he speaks to friends, to loose acquaintances, to anyone with access to Tel Abyad. He hopes to be put in touch with displaced residents who have recently fled and who can give him a sense of the destruction’s scope inside town. A few local fixers who are assisting journalists with their stories offer to help, if they can.

  Time for lunch, but we stop only for gas. I top off our Peugeot and buy some cigarettes, a Coke, and a few chocolates, which quickly melt when I set them on the dash. We continue on the road that parallels the border for another thirty minutes. Guard towers picketing either side of no-man’s-land appear with greater frequency. Coils of razor wire loop their pilings, layering in single, then double, then triple strands. Then the horizon gathers into forms: some low-slung buildings, a cluster of trees all shivering in the hot wind, finally Tel Abyad and Akçakale’s outskirts. Entering the town, I anticipate the chaos of a battle’s aftermath—refugees, wounded fighters, prisoners—but instead chaos manifests as news trucks, dozens of them, both regional and international, all painted white, with rooftop satellite dishes posturing skyward like a peacock’s plumage.

  Matt and I park the Peugeot on the shoulder, among the news vans. He swivels his head up and down the road, phone to ear, searching out a fixer he knows. I trail behind him and begin to mix among some of the correspondents, most of whom are packing up their things. News has been slow, they grumble. The day before, a handful of Islamic State fighters had crossed the border, surrendering to the Turkish authorities. Then, this morning, there had been some controversy as to whether the YPG, who, as Kurds, have long-standing grievances with Turkey, would be allowed to raise their flag over Tel Abyad. To the disappointment of the remaining correspondents, that controversy resolved itself anticlimactically when the YPG and FSA commanders decided that it would be best to avoid a provocation, and so chose to fly Free Syria’s flag.

  Little has happened, or so it seems, yet the story emerging across the media remains the defeat of the indomitable Islamic State. This is despite the particulars—likely fewer than a hundred Islamic State fighters killed, no reinforcements sent from Ar-Raqqah—suggesting that what we’ve witnessed is a strategic withdrawal in Tel Abyad, not a defeat. When the overarching narrative takes primacy over the actual events, the result is an imitation loop, in which the story informs the reality and vice versa. Telling a story about the apparent defeat of an adversary has real effects. It can increase support for the war abroad. It can help with recruitment. And it can affect the way soldiers conduct themselves on the battlefield, blurring the lines between combatant and actor—sometimes quite literally so.

  Just across the border, I’ve been following the case of Michael Enright, an actor who held minor parts in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Knight and Day. He is volunteering in the ranks of the YPG, and his situation reminds me of a saying we had in my platoon, during the Battle of Fallujah: “It’s your favorite war movie and you’re the star.” The joke arose because we would find ourselves unintentionally, and often in the middle of combat, uttering ridiculous clichés, bags of cherries imported from an Oliver Stone or Francis Ford Coppola film script. One afternoon, pinned down by machine gun fire in a building, we’d used explosives to blow a breach into a wall so that we could escape. As the smoke cleared and we climbed into the street, I found myself screaming “Everybody on me! Move out! Move out!” I remember feeling quite aware, as I said this, that it sounded absurd, like some terrible John Wayne trope, but in that moment, I really did need everyone to gather around me, and we really did need to move out.

  During that deployment to Iraq, many Marines I knew, guys in their late teens or early twenties, would behave as they thought Marines at war were supposed to behave: you smoke Marlboro Reds, you crisscross bandoliers of machine gun ammunition over your chest, yo
u tuck an ace of spades into your helmet band. These are learned poses, adopted mainly from the Vietnam war films we’d all grown up watching: Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Apocalypse Now. But our war was for real. Or was it? We were imitating a story. And when stories would be made from our war, first by the media and then by filmmakers, they would be stories rooted in the reality of our imitations.

  Standing just outside of Tel Abyad, among the news vans, satellite dishes, and skittering journalists, the desire on display to fit the details into a Hollywood-worthy story is palpable. What do these events mean to the larger arc of the conflict? Are we watching a turning point? Could Tel Abyad be the Islamic State’s Gettysburg or Stalingrad, the moment when the narrative of this long, grizzly war shifts toward some brighter future? Who knows, and I wonder at the consequences of seeking to play to a larger story.

  It isn’t long before Matt circles back to find me. As we begin to talk, a pack of kids swarm our legs, hawking bottled water like vendors at a rock concert. I ask if he’s been able to get any information on the conditions inside Tel Abyad. What humanitarian aid do the residents need? How much of the town will require rebuilding?

  Matt shakes his head.

  “All of the fixers I know have left,” he says. “The story’s gone elsewhere.”

  * * *

  Our stomachs tell us it is well into the afternoon. Walking back to the Peugeot, Matt suggests we stop for a snack on the return to Gaziantep. I open the driver’s door and the baking car heaves out a hot breath. I push and pull the door in an attempt to fan out the heat. Then we drive west with the windows down. As we rushed to Tel Abyad there was a stop I hadn’t had time to make, but with the day’s events resolved, I tell Matt that I want to find Abu Ali’s shop, which is on this road. I am hoping he can tell me what’s become of his brother, Abu Hassar.