by Nafisa Haji
“So—you’re glad w—they came?” I asked.
“Of course! I used to give thanks for Mr. Bush every day, in my prayers.”
“Used to?”
“Yes, sister. Not anymore. Now, it is clear why they came. With all their promises. They came for oil, they came for their own purposes. They knocked Saddam off of his throne, out of his palaces. And now they live there themselves. No one is fooled. It is long past time for them to leave. Thank you very much, Mr. Bush. Yalla. Now, go.”
In Baghdad, on patrol, we get out on foot and walk the streets of the neighborhoods where Iraqis live. Sometimes, people come up to us and want to shake our hands. Some of them speak English. They say thank you. For getting rid of the tyrant. Some of them ask us how long we’re staying. Not everyone smiles at us. I get it. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to, either.
When we got to Karbala, I was a bystander. I watched the others, participating when I had to, trying my best to blend in with the waves of black, billowing fabric of the women of our group. The sound of somber prayers and melodies, in Arabic, blaring out from street-corner speakers, alternated with more mundane program announcements, following us everywhere. As we elbowed our way through clumps of people, more private recitations, hard to hear over the PA system, reached out to our ears, swerving from Arabic to Urdu to Farsi and even English.
The entrances for all the shrines were different for men and women. “That is something new,” Sadiq said. “Before the war, women and men came to the shrine together.”
To get in to each one, we had to pass through four, five, sometimes six checkpoints, each of us frisked and wanded each time. It was all very organized. We checked our shoes in before entering. Everything around the shrine and inside of it was clean and grand and beautiful, the marble floors covered with richly woven rugs. Our hotel, the Baitul Salaam, the House of Peace, was right across the street from the grounds of the main shrine, the one with the golden dome, which was Imam Husain’s.
Sadiq said, “This is a new hotel. There are lots of new buildings, lots of development. At least in the vicinity of the shrines. Before, you can’t imagine how much poverty there was. I was overwhelmed by it. Though I come from Pakistan and am no stranger to the kind of poverty that is, well, distressing. There were children with outstretched hands everywhere you looked. And adults, too. I’m not speaking of homeless people and beggars. I mean our translators and guides and taxi drivers. The level of need, because of the shortage of goods from years of sanctions and also because Saddam deliberately kept these areas downtrodden, was obscene.”
We pass out candy to the kids. They’re cute. But some of them are dirty. They crowd around us when we go on foot patrol. They rip off the wrappers first thing and eat it up like they’re starving. I gave away my stash of Hershey’s bars. They were all warped and melted, anyway. I’m sticking to hard candy from now on. Gotta ask Mom to send me more. One of the other platoons, the one we call the Hard Ass Platoon, doesn’t like it when we give the kids candy. They don’t like them running up to ’em. To tell the truth, Sgt. Dixon doesn’t like it much, either. He carries hand sanitizer around, rubbing his own hands with it, offering it to everyone around him, too, whenever the kids reach out and touch us, ’cause he thinks the kids carry germs that are gonna make us all sick. But at least he’s not mean to the kids, like the Hard Asses are. I remember going to Africa with Jo and Grandma Faith. Washing those kids’ feet. Don’t think the sarge would make a very good missionary.
Speaking of which, some of the guys and I found out about an orphanage run by nuns—Iraqi Christians—in Baghdad. So, we’ve been trying to go once a week. Most of the kids there are disabled and abandoned. It’s nice to just play with little people who don’t look at you like you’re an alien.
For the three days that we stayed in Karbala, we woke before dawn and made our way to Imam Husain’s shrine for morning prayers. We entered the inner courtyard of the shrine through the gates of the exterior walls, geometrically adorned, accented in a shade of green that was dull compared to the brilliant blue borders of the main building inside the square. I followed what everyone else did—for the morning prayer and all the others—standing shoulder-to-shoulder in neat rows of black, bowing, touching my head to the ground, in my heart saying the Sinner’s Prayer the way I had in church at Garden Hill, instead of the verses of the Quran and the prayers that everyone else was reciting. My ears pricked up at one of the prayers recited everywhere we went, a kind of salutation that had familiar names in it—Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Jesus—whose title was the Spirit of God. After morning prayers, we’d come back to the hotel for breakfast and make our way to other shrines around town, the most important of which was the one for Abbas, Imam Husain’s brother. There were smaller shrines to visit, too, the markers for where each martyr of Karbala was killed. Returning to the hotel at lunchtime, most people would pray after lunch, nap, and then wake up again for all the evening prayers, making another round of the shrines, now beautifully lit up against the dark of the night sky.
Inside of the shrines, the sarcophagi were penned in with silver and golden screens, which the pilgrims went around, touching and kissing, rubbing them with cloth that they would take home with them as spiritual souvenirs.
By the actual day of Chehlum, or Arbaeen, the city was packed. Going outside of the hotel was like getting onto a six-lane highway, packed with bumper-to-bumper human traffic. The day started with the sound of loud drums beating through the streets, right after the dawn prayer, signaling the beginning of a day full of processions.
“They’re different, in some ways, from the processions in Pakistan,” said Sadiq. “Here, they do reenactments of the battles, too.”
Accompanied by the drums, I saw the fake sword play in the reenactments, the men beating themselves with their hands, with chains, with knives—real ones. It was pretty gruesome. I understood why Sadiq had fainted when he was a little boy. The people in our group just stood on the sides, next to the palm trees, and watched it all like tourists—taking in a river of people instead of fish, black and white schools streaming, speckled with brilliant flashes of red and green, the colors of the flags and banners held high against the sand-colored brick that most of the buildings in Iraq seemed to be built of. I watched the blood flowing in the streets, not wanting to, but unable to turn my eyes away from the sight.
“Are you going to do that?” I asked Sadiq.
He shook his head. “I don’t. Not anymore. I give blood instead. Like a good, enlightened grown-up.”
Deena leaned close and whispered in my ear, “Are you all right, Jo? With all of this?” She waved her hand around. “It must be very—strange! To say the least. I find it to be so. I can’t imagine what you must be thinking and feeling.”
“It is strange. But I’m all right. I’m—I’m open. You know what I mean?”
She nodded.
As I spoke to her, my eyes followed the path of the blood on the pavement, saw the men who came to wash it up with hoses when the procession ended, getting the street ready for the next round.
We were patrolling the streets in the Dora neighborhood, on foot again, when it happened.
Such a stupid, stupid mistake. It’s one of those things you shouldn’t even have to think about—that you don’t slam the cover on a live weapon. But Foley did. His M-16 discharged, hitting a kid who’d been playing in the street in front of his house. Foley was with Sgt. Dixon, way behind. Me and Phillips were on the other side of the street from where the kid was, watching him as he ran into the street, in our direction, probably wanting candy. He must have been eight, nine years old. Doc ran up and got down on the ground, took the kid’s head in his lap, and tried to do what he could. The boy’s dad came running out of the gate right after he heard the shot. He saw Doc working on his son, and stood there, shouting, “Allah! Allah!”
Then a woman came out of the house across the street, a bag in her hand. “I’m a doctor,” she said, in English.
She got down on the ground next to Doc, who looked at her and shook his head. When he pulled his hand away, I didn’t have to be a doctor to see why. Some of the boy’s brains were spilling out of the back of his head, sticky with blood, some of it stuck to Doc’s hand. The woman closed the boy’s eyes and stood up and spoke to his father in Arabic. He started screaming and yelling and sobbing. She put her hand on his shoulder and kept talking, her own eyes streaming. Sgt. Dixon called in for our captain to come.
After the first procession that morning, the women in our group gathered together in the dining room of our hotel to do a special prayer. Deena said, “This is the prayer of Ashura. It’s like a regular prayer, but with some extra movements.”
At the end of the prayer, we stepped forward as we said, Innalillahi, wa inaa ilayhi rajiuna bi-qaz’aa-ihee, wa tasleeman li-amrihee. Which means, “We belong to God and unto God we will return; we are happy with the will of God and carry out the command of God.” Then we walked backward again, back to where we started. We did this, back and forth, seven times.
“That is what Imam Husain said, over and over again, on that day when he lost his sons, his nephews, his brother. The last one he lost, before his own death, was his baby, Ali Asghar, who he carried, backwards and forwards, like this, already dead in his arms, unable to face the child’s mother,” Deena whispered to me.
The father of the boy pulled himself together, all of a sudden, and picked up his boy in his arms. He started walking back into the front gate of his house, then stopped, touched his forehead to his boy’s, and shook his head, crying softly. The woman, the doctor, was still beside him, her hand on his shoulder. He took another few steps. And then stopped again. More steps. More stops. I didn’t have to understand Arabic to know what was happening. He didn’t know how he was going to do it. How was he going to take the boy back inside the house to show to his mother?
We stayed there, outside of the home of that dead boy, for a few hours. The captain came, he went in and talked to the family. When the captain came back out, the doctor woman from across the street was with him. She’d been translating between him and the family, which was a good thing, because we didn’t have a translator with us. She told the captain that the boy’s father wanted us all to come for the funeral the next day.
The captain didn’t know what to say. Nobody did. This whole time, Foley was sitting on the side of the road. At first, he had his head in his hands. I’d gone over and sat down beside him for a while. Later, someone gave him a pack of cigarettes, which he smoked, one after another, until he made himself puke. Now, he looked up and around, but his eyes were dead. Like he wasn’t with us anymore. The doctor lady said the father appreciated that it was an accident. He saw how we’d tried to help. And that we hadn’t run away from what had happened. He wanted us to come to the funeral.
Our next stop was Najaf. We stayed there for three days, following much the same routine of prayers and shrine-hopping that we’d done in Karbala. In Karbala and in Najaf, in between visits to shrines, some people in the group went shopping, buying things like prayer beads and prayer rugs. There were food stalls running up and down every street. Business was booming in Najaf, as it had been in Karbala. The sheer number of pilgrims had a lot to do with that. We stopped in at a kabab restaurant a couple of times, for dinner, just me and Deena and Sadiq. It was a place recommended by one of the translators. His name was Qasim. The food was delicious.
Foley didn’t go to the funeral. I did, with the captain and Sgt. Dixon. Some of the guys thought it was a bad idea. That the people there would be too hostile and that it could be a trap. But they were wrong. It was just a funeral. There were only men in the front room of the house. But we could hear the women in the back, crying. We figured the loudest of those cries must be coming from the mother of the dead boy. We’d tried to get a translator, but no one was available.
After a little while, the doctor lady who lived across the street came out from the back to translate for us. Through her, the captain told the family how sorry we were for what had happened. When we got up to leave, the doctor came outside with us, along with two men, one older, who I guessed was her husband, and another one who looked like he might be eighteen or nineteen, Foley’s age. With them there was also a little girl, who hid her face in the doctor’s skirt, and another boy, about the same age as the boy Foley’d killed.
The doctor told us her name was Sana and introduced us to her husband, Ali, whose English wasn’t as good as hers. “My husband owns a kabab restaurant in Mansur. The Khalil Restaurant. This is our son, Ali Asghar. Our younger son, Uthman. And our daughter, Ayesha.”
We all shook hands. Then Sana said, “Your friend didn’t come? The other soldier? The one responsible?”
I waited for the captain to say something. But he was looking at me. I said, “He was unfortunately unable to come.”
The woman sighed and shook her head, her ponytail swinging side to side. “What a pity. The boy is dead. Nothing can bring him back. But your friend was given a rare gift by the boy’s father. To be invited to the funeral of someone he is responsible for killing. I am not sure I could have done the same in his place. Could you? He should have come. And shed a tear for the boy and his family. He should have come to say sorry. For his own good. Now, instead, he will carry the pain he caused home with him, a stain on his soul that he will bear for the rest of his life.”
We all shuffled our feet, not knowing what to say.
Before we left, the captain said, “Again. We are very sorry for what happened. We’ll be here again. To help the family fill out an application for some kind of compensation.”
Most of the people in our group didn’t stay for the last leg of our trip, in Baghdad. We would be staying in the Kadhimiya suburb of Baghdad, around the shrines of the seventh and ninth imams. Sadiq had spent a lot of time planning for this part of the trip, the end of it, which we had agreed would be the best time to pursue what I had specifically come for in connection with Chris. To do that, he had enlisted the help of the translator we’d spent the most time with, Qasim, who lived in Kadhimiya, near the hotel we would stay in. Qasim arranged for the car that would take us to the neighborhood of Mansur, where I wanted to go, where I hoped to find the address I needed.
“The neighborhood where we are going has become a dangerous one,” Qasim said. “All of Baghdad is dangerous. Who you are can get you killed. Mansur is where the big shots live. And all the foreigners and journalists.” Qasim shook his head. “I used to live in another area before. Until they drove us out, threatening to kill us. Because we are Shia. The same is true for Sunnis living in Shia neighborhoods. It’s jungle law, now, in the great city of Baghdad.”
We’re scared all the time, now, when we go out on patrol. Especially after we lost Phillips. He always sang along with me whenever I did. His favorite was “Amazing Grace,” but he liked “Onward Christian Soldiers,” too, the Christian March version. He was from Missouri and used to joke about moving to San Diego and joining the band when we got home. He said he was really good on bass.
We don’t go to the orphanage anymore. No one does. We feel too much like sitting ducks.
Every day, we hear about more guys getting blown up. Car bombs and IEDs planted by insurgents, there’s no way to fight against them.
At night, we go on house raids. I hate it. Breaking down doors in the middle of the night, sometimes blowing them open with explosives, we burst in on people in their pajamas. Everyone screams. We round up the men. At first, it didn’t feel so bad, ’cause we thought we were going after the guys who’re trying to blow us up. That was when we still trusted the intel. But I don’t anymore. We’ve torn up hundreds of houses and we never find anything. The men get treated rough, especially if they try to argue with us. Then we arrest all the men in the house and leave the women and kids behind, screaming and crying and begging us, on their knees, to let their sons, their husbands, their brothers, go.
The other night, Sgt. Dixon went t
oo far. Not that anyone seems to give a crap. He beat up this old man with the butt of his rifle, because he wouldn’t let go of his grandson, who we were arresting. I’ll never forget the look in the old man’s eyes. From the moment we entered his house. Terror. I looked at us from his point of view. A bunch of men in armored uniforms, with M-16s waving, busting in his door, terrifying his family. And him, helpless to save anybody. From us. We found out it wasn’t even the house we were looking for. But there was a gun in the house and Sgt. Dixon wasn’t in a good mood. So we took the grandson. I don’t even think he was fourteen. We’re not supposed to take kids younger than fourteen.
In the day, on patrol, the few people who come up to us only do it to complain. On the days we go out with a translator—our favorite is an Iraqi we call Slick Sam—we get an earful. About all the stuff that doesn’t work. Power, water, sewage. We don’t see any women anymore. When we first got to Baghdad, they were everywhere, a lot of them dressed in regular clothes, not like the ones we’d seen in the small towns and villages on the way into Baghdad. Now, the women in the city are all covered up, too. Slick Sam says it’s ’cause it’s not safe for women anymore. He says his sister used to go out shopping in jeans and skirts, but now he won’t let her.
Things here are going crazy. Getting much, much worse. For the Iraqis. And for us, too. I can’t wait to go home.
The Khalil Restaurant was still open. When we went in, we asked to see the owner. The waiters shook their heads and shrugged. Then, the cook came out from the back and asked us what we wanted. I spoke through Qasim. For some reason, Sadiq wanted me to keep my Arabic a secret. He said it might draw unnecessary attention. I told Qasim to ask about the owner named Ali.
