Sand Queen

by Helen Benedict

  “Don’t hurt them!” I pleaded. “Please don’t hurt them!”

  “Why have they done this?” Mama cried, clutching her head as they drove away. “Why?”

  And that is when I felt the anger grow over me like a skin. That is when I became merciless and numb.

  So this morning, as I walk the four kilometers from Granny’s village to the American prison, I am determined to do whatever it takes to find out what has happened to our men— both my own and those of my companions. Poor Umm Ibrahim, her face drooping and mournful, whose husband was arrested and killed by Saddam—she tells me her three sons have been swallowed by this prison now, leaving her with nobody. Little Abu Rayya and his wife, who have already lost two children to the Iran war—they were forced to watch their remaining boy and only comfort being beaten and snatched in the night, just like Papa and Zaki. And Granny’s friend, old widow Fatima, who has been making this walk every day for three weeks already—her brother and sole support is also incarcerated there.

  “Do they tell you anything at the prison?” I ask this widow on the way. “Is your brother all right?”

  “I do not know, little daughter,” she replies, shaking her old head. “They tell us nothing. All we can do is wait.”

  When we reach the prison at last—and the walk is long and frightening, with soldiers roaring down the road in their tanks and trucks—we see that many other families are already there, standing in a crowd beside the coils of wire that block the prison entrance. So we go to stand with them, burning under the sun and buffeted by the wind, ready to endure the same wait as any who have been beaten into passivity by war and history.

  While we stand hour after hour, most of us silent, some of us murmuring thin assurances to one another, I look through the pitiless wire to the prison beyond. The British and Americans are in such a hurry to incarcerate us that they have not even taken the time to build a real prison. It is nothing but tents. Row upon row of them pegged to the sand, their olive sides already bleaching in the sun, the air between them thick with dust, the coiled wire around them bristling with a million sharpened blades. And as I look, it occurs to me that, to the soldiers, this is not a prison but a protection. They have barricaded themselves in here, safe and blind behind their wire and checkpoints, while the rest of us, sisters and daughters, parents and grandparents, are out here in the real world, suffering the real world’s suffering.

  We stand, my sad companions and I, until the sun has crept from the horizon almost to the top of the sky, and finally I see a tiny soldier plod up to the fence where we are waiting. He looks as though he can hardly walk under all he carries, with his helmet like an upside-down soup bowl and his sunglasses absurdly large on his little face. He looks like a child in his father’s clothes. But of course he is no child. He is a killer and an occupier.

  I watch him approach, shouting and waving his silly little arms, and I feel such hatred bloom in my heart I do not know myself. Then I notice there is something odd about him, something wrong. I look again.

  It is a girl.

  I would laugh out loud if there were any laughter left in me. How desperate the Americans must be to send their girls to war.

  As soon as the people around me also see this soldier is only a girl, and out here all alone with us, they grow bold. “You have killed our sons!” they shout, closing in around her. “You’re lying to us, bitch!”

  I step forward to curse her, too, but then I stop. This behavior is futile. Better to wait for the chance to offer my English to this creature of destruction, for perhaps, God willing, in return she will tell us what she and her kind have done with our men.

  [ KATE ]

  I’M GETTING FREAKED. No matter how much I yell and try to shoo away the wrinkly old couple and the rest of these damn locals, they won’t budge. They just keep on crowding around me, yelling in Arabic and pushing their fucking photos into my chest. I’m just about to poke one of them with my rifle, hard, when a female voice calls out from the crowd, “I speak English—do you need help?”

  Startled, I look around. An Iraqi girl about my own age separates herself from the mob, walks right up to me and stares into my face with no fear at all.

  “You really speak English?” I ask, amazed.

  She studies me without answering. She’s wearing a long, coffee-colored sack of a dress and a sky-blue headscarf wrapped tight around her neck and forehead. Her face is narrow, pale brown and pretty, except for her mouth, which is clamped into a thin, schoolmarmy line. And her eyes, which are huge and greenish-gold, look suspicious as hell.

  “Yes,” she finally says in a low voice. “I am able to translate, if you would like.”

  “You would? Cool. Okay then, tell your friends here that we’re putting together a list of the prisoners and we’ll give it to them soon. But right now they gotta go.”

  “I will. But first, please, I need to ask a question. We want to know, these people and I, when our men will be released.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, eyeing her warily. “But tell them not to worry, we treat the prisoners well. Now get them to leave.”

  The girl studies me again. She’s half a head taller than me, but that’s not saying much, since I’m only five-three. “This is the truth, you swear?” she says. “Because my father and brother, you have locked them up in here and they are innocent.”

  Yeah, right. So’s everybody in this whole friggin’ sandbox, according to you people. But out loud I only say, “Of course it’s true. Now, tell these folks about the list and make them go. ’Cause this situation is getting dangerous for all of us. You included.”

  She gazes at me a second longer, then turns to the crowd and calls out something in Arabic. But instead of making the people leave, it only makes them more excited than ever, talking and shouting all at once. Fuck. I look around again for my squad. Sergeant Kormick and Boner are inside the shack, where they can’t see anything. Rickman’s over there, too, standing in the sand like a cactus, probably dreaming about his first grope or something, he’s such a kid. Jimmy Donnell’s up in the guard tower with his M-60. And DJ’s out on the road, searching cars. Nobody’s near me, nobody’s paying attention, which is against all the goddamn rules. Double fuck.

  The girl turns back to me. “They say they will go, but not until they know when you will have this list of our men.”

  “Soon. Now tell them to scat!” I lift my rifle to my chest, barrel up.

  She sweeps her eyes over my face, her expression cold. “And what are you doing with the children? The little boys you arrested? My brother you took, he is only thirteen.”

  “We keep the boys safe in a separate compound. Now leave!”

  “You mean he is not with my father?” She looks upset a moment, her cold manner gone. But then she clamps her mouth back into its schoolmarm seam. “My brother, his name is Zaki,” she goes on. “Look,” and she hands me a photo, just like the old couple did.

  The last thing I need to do right now is admire some Iraqi chick’s family snapshots, but I do it to keep her cooperating. The photo shows a skinny boy sitting on a rug, grinning up at the camera with just the kind of goofy expression my friends use on MySpace. His black hair flops into his eyes, which are the same green-gold as his sister’s, and he’s got one of those long, bony faces that’ll probably look good once he grows into it but right now seems all wrong, like the head of a grownup stuck onto a kid’s body. Next to him, leaning forward in a chair with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, is a clean-shaven, middle-aged man with short gray hair, thick glasses and the same long face, but a real sad smile.

  It’s always so strange to look at photos of people before bad things happen to them. When they don’t know yet. When they’re so unsuspecting.

  “That is my father,” the girl says. “He is fifty-four. His heart is weak—he has had two heart attacks already. This is why I am so worried about him. He is not well enough to live in this place with hundreds of other men, he has not the strength. My father
was put in prison by Saddam, tortured by him! My brother, he is a child! And you Americans arrest them? You understand nothing!”

  I don’t need to hear this crap, shouldn’t even be listening to it, but I might as well be polite. “Listen,” I say, “I’m sorry about your situation, but we’ve got thousands of prisoners in here. Thanks for your help, though. Really.” I hold out my hand. “My name’s Kate. Kate Brady. As-salaam aleikum.” Three months in Iraq have at least taught me how to say that. Kind of.

  She glances down at my hand without touching it. “I am Naema Jassim. Keep the photograph. It will help you recognize them.” She pauses and looks at me intently, like she’s trying to see into my brain. “Miss Brady… Kate, I have a suggestion. If you will promise to look for my brother and father, I will come back every morning and translate for you, yes? These people here, they are angry. You need me to help keep control, I think.” She leans forward and points at the photograph. “My father here, his name is Halim Mohanammad al-Jubur. And my little brother sitting there on the floor, he is Zaki Jassim. You will look for them, please?”

  I’ll never remember those weird Arab names. In one ear, out the other. “Tell me that again?”

  “I will write them down, if you like.”

  “Okay, but hurry.” I take out a pen from my utility vest and she scribbles the names on the back of the photo.

  “You will look for them if I translate?” she asks again.

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll do my best.” I tuck the photo and pen into one of my pockets. I’m not about to tell her that I never see the prisoners, except when they’re driven in on the backs of trucks, and then they’re all zip-cuffed and hooded anyway, so all I ever see is bodies with a sack on top. I’m not going to tell her this because she’s right. I do need her.

  Just then some woman squeezes between us and shoves a baby into my chest. It’s limp and gray, and skinny as a chicken. I think it’s a girl but I can’t really tell. Pus-filled sores ooze all over its face and arms. I back away, disgusted, but she won’t stop pressing the horrible thing right up against me—these people never do stuff like this to the male soldiers. I’m afraid it’ll fall if I don’t take it, though, so I grab it and hold it as far away from me as I can. It stinks. A sickly-sweet stink, like a dead rat trapped in a basement.

  I glance down at it. The baby isn’t even moving. It just lies there in its little dress, draped over my arms like a rag, while its mother stares at me with desperate eyes. I know what she wants. She wants a doctor and medicine. She wants me to take her baby to a hospital. But we don’t have a doctor. We don’t have medicine. And we sure don’t have a fucking hospital.

  I push the baby back into her arms and try to make her understand that I can’t do anything for her. “Go home!” I keep telling her. “Go!” She won’t move. I look around for Naema, hoping she can help me out here like she promised. But Naema’s gone.

  By the time I finally get the mother to take her baby and leave, along with all the other civilians, it’s eleven in the morning and the sun’s burning a hole in the sky. When my unit first arrived back in March, the heat wasn’t this bad yet—we froze our asses at night, in fact. But now it’s June, and the last time I saw a cloud I was so amazed that I took a picture of it. It must be a hundred and thirty degrees out here today, I’m not kidding. Imagine putting your oven on that high to heat up a pizza, then climb in, shut the door and lock it so you can never get out. That’s what it feels like.

  I drain my bottle of water—piss-temperature, plastictasting—but it isn’t enough. My head already feels like somebody’s stabbing it with a knitting needle, the inside of my mouth’s like a dustball and I’ve got nine more hours to go on my shift. I need more water, which means I have to walk over to the shack, where we keep the bottles in a cooler. But Sergeant Kormick’s still in the shack and even though he doesn’t give a fuck whether or not Rickman does his job right, his rules are different for me. If he sees me leave my post, I’ll never hear the end of it.

  I pull a tube of hand sanitizer out of my vest pocket and rub it on, hoping to wash away the pus from that sad-ass baby. I use the stuff so often the skin on my palms is peeling like sunburn, but it doesn’t seem to help much. I’ve dropped twelve pounds since I arrived in this sandpit and my period has stopped. My fingernails have turned weird, too, all weak and flabby. They keep lifting off my nail beds and flaking away like old scabs. And my hair’s falling out by the handful. But then, all of us are sick one way or the other. We like to joke that you spend the first six months of your deployment pooping your guts out, the second six months puking your guts out, and then you go home and puke and poop till you’re redeployed. Some say it’s sandfly fever, some say it’s contaminated water. We call it the Bucca bug.

  That’s where we are, by the way: Camp Bucca, the biggest U.S. prison in Iraq. It’s located way down south near the Kuwait border, in the poorest, bleakest part of the desert. Address: The Middle of Fucking Nowhere. It’s so poor and bleak that on our way here from Kuwait, children in bare feet kept running up to our convoy, cupping their little hands to their mouths to beg for food and water, even jumping up on our trucks till we had to push them off, right into the road. Some of those kids were no more than two years old, their eyes big and black in their teeny faces. Skinny and ragged but cute as chipmunks. But when we tried to give them water, the convoy commander said we had to stop because those babies might be carrying bombs.

  I’m going to collapse if I don’t get some water myself, whatever Kormick says, so I take a deep breath and head over to the shack, ready to face more crap.

  “Hey, Tits!” Boner calls out before I even get close. I sigh and walk up to the shack door, where he’s now standing guard. He blocks my way with his rifle, grinning like the dickwad he is. Boner’s called that for obvious reasons, but also because he’s short and stocky, with a bony bald head like a knee. He’s fresh out of high school but he acts like his brain froze back in fifth grade.

  “Let me by, Bonehead. I need water. Bad.”

  He runs his eyes over me, making a big deal of staring at my chest. This is a popular theme among the guys in my platoon—me having big boobs—but it’s all a dumb joke. I was a runner back in high school, track and long distance, and runners don’t have big boobs. They’re tight and lean, and that’s how I’m built, only skinnier than ever now. Nothing but a scrawny little soldier, orange freckles popping out by the dozen under the desert sun.

  “Gimme a squeeze,” Boner says then, leering. I know he doesn’t mean it, just has to try it on like the fifth grader he is. But I’m not in the mood for his bullshit.

  “Let me by, mini-dick. I’m dehydrated.”

  He shakes his head. “Come on. One little quicky?”

  “Look, I just had a dying baby in my arms. Leave me the fuck alone.”

  Boner just stands there grinning, still barring my way. I can see Kormick inside the shack, eating Skittles and reading some girly magazine. I’d like to avoid all this hassle and leave, but I’ll faint if I don’t get some water soon. I know this because it’s happened to me three times already. My ears start ringing, I black out, and then I wake up with one of the guys shoving an IV in my arm to rehydrate me. After which Kormick gets on my case yet again for being nothing but a useless pussy.

  “Sergeant?” I call. “Tell Boner to let me by, please. I’m about to pass out from thirst here.”

  “Let her by, Boner,” he says in a bored voice. He doesn’t even bother to look up.

  Inside the shack, I grab a couple bottles and chug a long slide of water right there.

  “Okay, get back out where you belong,” Kormick says then. He looks up at me. “And Tits? No more leaving your post, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “THAT’S GOOD, HONEY-pie. You look just fine now, all cleaned up and smellin’ sweet. Sit down here and I’ll go get your young man.”

  The soldier slumps on the edge of the bed and stares at the hands quaking in her lap.
White and puffy. Underwater hands.

  What young man?

  Something beeps in a corner. The ceiling light glares. White everywhere: The raised bed. The window blinds. The walls and the floor and the ceiling. Her swollen feet. Shivering hands.

  A giant clock face on the TV ticks one second. Two.

  “Katie?” A tall man steps into the room.

  The soldier flinches.

  “Don’t be scared. It’s only me.” The man’s voice wobbles.

  The soldier scoots to the far side of the bed, pulls her self to her feet and backs up against the wall. Only then does she really look at him. The man is pale and young and long-haired.

  “You do know who I am, don’t you?” he says.

  The man seems to be crying.

  [ NAEMA ]

  IT WAS THE looting that finally drove my family from Baghdad. During the bombing in March, we stayed, enduring the explosions that shattered windows and cracked open the earth, that left corpses rotting in the streets and poisoned the air with the stench of burning flesh. After each attack, Papa and Mama, Zaki and I would climb to the roof, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths, to survey the damage. The house across the street, where we used to watch five little sisters play, was now nothing but dust and bricks, every one of those children dead. The café where I would buy my tea on the way to classes had been turned into a mound of smashed stone and twisted wire. Baghdad’s ancient buildings, mosques and markets, her elegant avenues of bright palm trees—all this we saw reduced to rubble and blood. Yet we were no more able to leave our beloved Baghdad than if she were our dying mother.

  At the end of May, though, when the streets were swarming with thieves and thugs and the desperate and angry poor from Sadr City, released by war like wasps from a broken nest—this we could not endure.