Sand Queen

by Helen Benedict

  In the beginning we thought the Americans would stop it. After all, they had their tanks and guns, their soldiers, and we had nothing since they had dismantled our army and police. But no. They lounged on their trucks in the sun, smoking and taking photographs while looters stripped our shops, our homes, our museums. Zaki could not go back to school for fear of being kidnapped or killed by criminals who would snatch anybody for ransom. (Our poor neighbor’s son, a little boy of twelve, was shot dead in the street for nothing but his CD player.) And I could not go to my classes at Baghdad Medical College for fear of the same, or of being raped. Many girls and women were being raped.

  “We can’t stay here any longer,” Papa told us one morning after we’d eaten what breakfast we could find, his thin face sad and gray. “Your mother and I have decided to go to your grandmother’s house. Umm Qasr has been badly bombed, but the Americans have moved on from there now and it’s more peaceful than this place. Pack up one bag each, only. We leave tomorrow at dawn.”

  “Tomorrow?” Zaki jumped up from the kitchen table, panic in his eyes. “But I haven’t said good-bye to Malik yet, or any of the others! Can’t we wait a few days?”

  “No, little one, it’s too risky.” Papa stood and took Zaki in his arms, patting his back and stooping to kiss the top of his head. “I spent all day yesterday waiting for petrol so we could leave,” he added in his quiet way. “We have no time to delay. Now go pack, children, and please, don’t fuss.”

  But I could hear the shame in Papa’s voice. I knew he thought it cowardly to run from Baghdad, even then; that he felt he was abandoning his city in her time of need.

  Some speak of how hard it is to choose among their possessions when they must flee their homes like this; it is an old refugee story. But for me, it was not hard. All I needed were a few clothes and my medical books so I could continue my studies. Photographs, ornaments, childhood souvenirs— what did these matter anymore? If I wanted memories, I had them in my head. I could have jumped in the car with nothing at all, so eager was I to escape the sight of my city being smashed and pillaged.

  No, the hardship for me was having to leave my friends, and most of all, my fiancé, Khalil. I telephoned him as soon as Papa finished telling us to pack and he ran right over to see me. We clung to each other in shock. “I’ll count every minute until we can be together again,” he said urgently, holding me tightly to his chest. “And as soon as the war ends and we’re reunited, inshallah, we will celebrate our new freedoms, our new Iraq, right, my love?”

  “Yes, God willing, yes,” I replied, weeping. But when Papa gently told Khalil that he must go, I could not watch him walk out the door. I had to turn and run into another room, for I was afraid. Already I sensed that even the deepest of loves and most earnest of promises can be crushed by war.

  For Mama, it was leaving our house itself that hurt the most. She had been raised in a simple village of farmers, steeped in the old peasant ways, so to her our Baghdad home and belongings were proof of how far she had come and she could not bear to let any of it go. All night long, she agonized over which tea set to bring, which scarves, which dishes and dresses and photographs and letters, until I was mad with impatience.

  Zaki was also distraught. He had spent years obsessively collecting souvenirs of his favorite musicians, and more years accumulating bootleg tapes and CDs and lovingly arranging them in categories on his shelves, as if building a nest to keep himself safe from the world. He wept frantically when Papa told him he must abandon these things, just as he wept at being separated from his friends. His only comfort was that when he appeared at his door, hugging his guitar to his chest as desperately as he had once hugged his baby blanket, not even Papa had the heart to make him leave it behind.

  At dawn the next morning, we climbed into our old red car to set off, Mama openly crying, Papa grim, his glasses already grimy with dust and sweat. Zaki huddled in the rear seat with me, clutching his guitar. “Don’t look back, Zaynab,” Papa said to our mother. “It will only hurt more. And when this is over, Allah willing, we will come home.”

  We knew not to count on this, but it was necessary to hope.

  The drive was long and hot and excruciatingly slow. Every corner brought a tangle of traffic and soldiers shouting and waving their incomprehensible signals, their faces livid and sunburned. Checkpoints, barricades or tanks blocked every road we needed to go down, or so it seemed. People were running this way and that, their mouths contorted in panic. Along the roads, trails of looters filed like ants, carrying or dragging their stolen trophies: plush red seats torn from theaters, restaurant tables, office cabinets, vases and televisions and statues. What use do they have for all this rubbish? I wondered. Why are we tearing apart our own city?

  The many roadblocks forced us in the wrong direction over and over, and once a soldier made us drive right into a market. Just as we got there, a military truck came roaring in, the gunner on top pointing his killing machine at the women selling their eggplants and melons. The soldiers were shouting and waving but we could not tell what they wanted. Stop? Turn around? Go to the left, to the right? Why did they not make themselves clear? The driver in front of us tried to turn and get out of the way, but he must have panicked and hit the accelerator instead of the brake because his car catapulted into a market stand, crushing two children and their mother. Then the soldiers began to shoot—why? People screaming, running, guns exploding, blood drenching the vegetables. Five people dead, among them a mother and her baby, the child’s pink dress matted with blood, her arm a ragged stump.

  Zaki put his head out of the window and vomited.

  Papa set his jaw—I could see it in the mirror. Slowly, he backed up, turned and wove the car like a needle around the market stalls and out the other side. He knocked nobody down, showing it was possible to do.

  It took us four hours to get out of Baghdad. Mama found her strength at last and stopped weeping. She sat forward, her slim back straining as she peered through the dust-covered windshield, on the lookout for the slightest sign of danger. Papa drove without a word, his jaw clenched, his hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel, his frail shoulders hunched with tension. Zaki huddled in my arms, trembling, the little man he so wished to be swept away by fear.

  I sat up straight and fierce. It would have to be my strength that would carry us through, I knew that then. Zaki was too young, my father too fragile and my mother too stunned by loss. It was up to me now, and me alone, to make sure that my family survived.

  [ KATE ]

  ONCE I’M BACK at the checkpoint with my hardearned water, I settle into the rest of the day’s work. It would help kill the long, dead hours ahead to have some kind of a conversation, but neither DJ nor Rickman, who’s finally at his post, seems to feel like talking. That’s normal for them, though. Whether it’s because they’re too damn tired or don’t like working with a girl, I don’t know, but most of the time they treat me like I’m not even here.

  DJ, whose real name is Derek Johnson, is our team leader—our team being me, him and Rickman. DJ’s this hunky black dude from Brooklyn who’s already married and a dad at twenty-three, and when he isn’t around Rickman or Kormick he can be okay. But the only member of my squad who really talks to me is Jimmy Donnell—that is, if he’s not out of reach in his guard tower. Jimmy grew up not far from me, in Slingerlands, a suburb just outside of Albany, and he looks like a lot of Irish around my hometown—tall and lanky, with black hair, a high-cheeked face and bright blue eyes behind his ugly-ass combat glasses. (His nickname is Teach ‘cause of those.) He told me he lives with his mom, who has mental problems, and his two younger brothers. He’s always saying he misses those little guys real bad, just like I’m always saying I miss Tyler.

  My team’s routine goes like this: Whenever a vehicle drives by the base, DJ waves at it to stop and makes all the people inside get out. Usually it’s some dented old rattletrap filled to bursting with families trying to get away from the war, but two of us pat
them down anyway, while the other one searches the car inside and underneath with a mirror on a stick. So far we haven’t found any bombs or grenades, but we have found plenty of AK-47s, which messes with our heads because we’ve got no way of knowing whether we’re dealing with a family that owns a weapon for protection or with a bunch of U.S.-hating insurgents. We’ve also found hoards of jewels and dinars, the Iraqi currency that isn’t worth much more than toilet paper by now. Sometimes we take the stuff, sometimes not. Then we either arrest the men or send them on their way, depending on how they behave and our moods.

  The reason I was given this MOS is because only females are allowed to search Iraqi women and I’m the only female in my squad. I’m practically the only female in my whole frigging platoon, for that matter. There’s me, Yvette Sanchez and Third Eye. Three of us and thirty-nine fire-breathing, ball-scratching males.

  This morning I search two women. The first is this teenager in baggy pants and a long shirt who giggles when I pat her down. But the second is a middle-aged mom in traditional dress with three kids in the backseat, and she’s scared shitless. I try to smile and act friendly, miming how I’m not going to grab her body or do anything gross, just use the backs of my hands, but I don’t really expect her to feel happy about it. After all, she still has to spread her legs, hold out her arms and put up with me touching her all over through her robe. And she still has to deal with the fact that I’m a soldier, and “friendly” is not what soldiers do. She could leave friendly little me one minute and get shot by someone who looks just like me the next. And then I’m pretty edgy myself, ’cause how am I to know whether one of these scared or giggling ladies will turn out to be some maniac ready to blow us into mincemeat? These people are capable of anything, or so we’ve been told: using babies as shields, smuggling weapons under pregnant women’s dresses. And the worse thing is we can’t tell from looking at them whether they’re innocent civilians or bad guys.

  After those two women, though, nothing happens for hours. A fly crawls up my arm. Another one tries to get in my ear. The sun dawdles across the sky. But finally an old van drives up. Inside are two men who look like father and son, the older one with the usual dumbass mustache, the younger one about sixteen. We make them climb out and they act so jittery we get suspicious right away. We might not be able to talk to these people but we’ve gotten real good at reading their body language and smelling their fear. DJ and Rickman pull them away from the van, make them hold out their arms and pat them down, while I poke around inside, hoping the damn thing isn’t booby-trapped. In the back I find a can of gas and a bunch of oily rags, which could be for cleaning the van or starting a fire, who the hell knows. Then I lift up the front passenger seat. Four Kalashnikovs.

  “DJ!” I call, holding one of them out like a flag. “They got four of these fuckers in here!”

  “Well, suck my balls,” he says, and in a flash he and Rickman shove the men against the van and cuff them. The boy begins to cry. A wet stain seeps through his trousers. It makes me wonder if Naema’s little brother pissed himself like that when he was arrested. He’s only thirteen, after all, if I’m to believe anything that girl said.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” DJ mutters in disgust. He pushes the men in front of him, his rifle at their backs, and marches them over to the shack to be delivered to the prison, leaving Rickman behind with me.

  Once that bit of excitement’s over, though, the rest of the day inches by slow as a slug. Just the desert sun blasting off the sand, roasting me from all directions like I’m a peanut. The sky hard and blue, a plastic lid clamped over the desert. Flies buzzing around my eyes and crusty lips. Those knitting needles still stabbing my head, made worse by the weight of my helmet. Mouth dry with a desert thirst no amount of water can quench. Stomach cramping with the Bucca bug. Itches along my spine and legs and crotch from heat rashes, dust, sand fleas and sheer, soul-shriveling boredom. And DJ and Rickman still aren’t talking.

  By somewhere around four in the afternoon, I’ve drunk so much water my bladder’s about to explode. It’s always like this out here—you’ve got to hydrate all the time ’cause of the heat (we don’t drink in the Army, we hydrate), but that means you need to piss all the time, too. I try to ignore my damn bladder as long as possible, but I know I’ll come down with another infection if I’m not careful. I’ve had two already from trying to avoid the four stinky Porta-Johns that are all my unit has in the way of bathrooms. It isn’t like there are any bushes or trees to squat behind, either, except for Marvin, and Marvin’s no wider than my leg. Anyhow, he’s beyond the wire, surrounded by toe poppers, for all I know, the landmines left over from the last war. But those infections are a bitch. They make you feel like you have to pee so bad you can’t think about anything else, but when you try nothing comes out, or if it does it burns like acid. If the infection goes on too long, you get a fever and start pissing blood.

  So I go up to DJ and ask permission to go. “Sure,” he says. “Take your sweet time. Ain’t nothing else to do in this shithole.”

  Walking far around Kormick and Boner this time, I slip behind the shack, cut off the top of one of my empty water bottles with my knife, unzip my pants and stick the bottle between my thighs. It’s messy but better than exposing my ass while I squat. When I’m done, I drop the piss bottle onto the ground and kick some sand over it. That’s how we females do it in the desert.

  Back at the checkpoint, DJ and Rickman are looking as worn out as me. Our faces are dry and shriveled from the wind and sun, and we’re covered in moondust, this white powder that lies on top of the desert and puffs up at your every step, getting into your lungs and nostrils and ears, and chafing you in all kinds of places it has no business being. The sweat’s pouring into my eyes, down my chest and back. My underwear’s a soggy sponge and my uniform feels like a sleeping bag drenched in hot water. Why the hell we can’t have some kind of shelter, I don’t know. Jimmy Donnell at least has a pathetic little roof on his plywood tower. But here on the ground we got nothing.

  I wish there was another girl at the checkpoint. I wish Tyler was with me. I wish I had somebody, anybody, to talk to.

  I wonder whether Tyler would understand if I tried to tell him what it’s like out here. I doubt it. He’d probably only say that I asked for it by enlisting because he was against me joining the Army all along. We used to argue about it a lot. He said that the military would take away the sweetness he loved in me, the part of me that was still tender as a kid. He never understood that’s exactly what I wanted. I was sick of being the kind of girl people patted on the head, the Goody Two-shoes who volunteered for bake sales and church bazaars—the girl everybody smiled at but nobody listened to. So when I heard the Army recruiter at school talking about how noble it is to serve your country, I thought it sounded perfect. I wanted to do something impressive like that, something that’d make people sit up and take notice. Anyhow, half the kids in my school were enlisting—the half who got the most respect.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Dad the day I made up my mind. He was always proud when I did stuff like a boy: joined the track team, ran hurdles or anything like that. So soon as I got off the school bus that day, I flew into the house shouting, “Dad, where are you?”

  “Shush,” Mom hissed, waddling her plump self into the front hallway, where I was kicking off my boots. “Stop that hollerin’. Your father’s just come in.”

  Dad has this routine when he comes home from work that we all have to follow before we’re allowed to speak to him. Even Mom. First, he takes off his holster and gun and locks them in the dining room sideboard. “Guns don’t belong in homes,” he likes to say. “Homes are for rest and prayer.” Then he stands, tall and lean in his gray uniform, straight-backed and silver-haired, crosses himself and leads us in grace over dinner—me, Mom and my little sister April repeating his every word: “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

  We’v
e been following this routine for as long as I can remember, but it’s never stopped me from being fascinated with that gun, whatever Dad says. Ever since I was small I wanted to sneak it out of the sideboard and hold it. Feel its power, its heft. Feel the respect it brought him.

  Once grace is done and my family sits down to eat, we have permission to talk, as long as we raise our hands first. “Dad?” I said when it was my turn. “Remember when I took the ASVAB test?”

  He nodded. “You got the results?”

  “Yeah! The recruiter said I did real good. He said the test showed I’d be just right for the military police. I want to do it, Dad. And if…”

  “Slow down, honey.” He turned to Mom, who was sitting at the other end of the table, her round face pink and glossy with too much makeup. “What do you think, Sally?”

  “Is Katie gonna be a policeman?” April blurted, her little blond head barely poking over the tabletop. April was only four back then.

  “No talking out of turn, sweetie-pie,” Mom said. “But no, your sister wants to be a soldier.” Mom looked at me, frowning. “Have you prayed for guidance, Kate? Have you consulted the Lord over this? Are you sure this is the path He has chosen for you?”

  “Yes, Mom. I’ve prayed a lot. I know this is right for me.”

  “Don’t rush it, Katie,” Dad said then. “It’s a big step. But if you do choose it, I think it’s a good idea. You’ll grow up in the Army.” This was back in March 2000, way before 9/11, so none of us was thinking about war.

  “So can I do it?”

  “If you mull it over real careful and you’re still sure, yes. But I’ll only agree if you join the reserves. You need to get an education first.”

  “I’m so proud of you wanting to serve your country, sweetie!” Mom crowed. “It shows you have a good Christian heart.”