War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

“Right, the Tigris bends around it a few klicks to the west. Baghdad University’s over there. It’s out of our AO, but I’ve rolled through there a few times. Relatively peaceful, though apparently some student group has been terrorizing people and making all the women wear burkas and shit. Anyway, Routine Search traffic comes in westbound on Karada Dahil. Drivers only, though. Passengers have to get out, go through the Ped Search bunker, and rejoin their vehicles on the bridge. That’s how we do it, anyway. Just made it up as we went along, so you’ll probably figure out what works for you. It got more complex after the city started getting explody. So, Priority Search is on River Road, a block to the north. That’s for the top two tiers of Iraqi government workers and contractors. No gun towers over it, but BOB provides overwatch.”

  Montauk wiped the sweat off his brow. He should have been taking notes. He was, after all, going to be living and breathing the operations of Checkpoint 11. But it was hard to concentrate on procedural minutiae while he was consumed with curiosity and anxiety about attacks on the checkpoint. There was a crater just outside the command post, a gouge in the pavement about the size and shape of a bed frame. He’d been wanting to ask about it since he walked in. “Who’s Bob?” he asked instead.

  “The Bradley On the Bridge. BOB. It’s parked in the middle, where it can be a backstop for any vehicle that somehow manages to bum-rush through the entire checkpoint. We park it so that it can also cover River Road to the east with optics and the twenty-five.”

  Montauk pictured one of the old-model BMWs he’d seen on Karada Dahil getting shredded by 25 mm chain-gun fire. “Has it ever come to that?” he asked.

  “Not yet, fingers crossed. But we did get a VBIED a few weeks ago.”

  “We heard about that,” Captain Byrd said.

  The LT treated Montauk and Byrd to the rundown on the bombing: a silver Kia had driven slowly up to the command post, where two soldiers stopped it to check the driver’s ID and search for contraband or weapons. As one of the soldiers approached, a stack of artillery shells wired together in the trunk detonated, cratering the ground and blowing him right into the wall of the CP.

  “Jesus,” Montauk said.

  “Yeah,” said Watts. “PFC Klay. It was one of those concussion deaths where all your blood vessels burst and you bleed out internally. Klay was kind of prim, so I guess we used to pick on him a lot. Everyone felt bad.”

  Watts fell silent for a moment, and neither Byrd nor Montauk attempted a response. “One of our tower guys thought he heard the driver do the Allahu Akhbar thing before blowing up,” Watts said. “Anyway, we got five men on each entrance lane now. One who checks the driver’s ID, then if he waves it in, two to search the trunk, passenger compartment, and undercarriage while two more provide overwatch with a machine gun from the bunker.”

  One-Six, Routine Search.

  “It’s working so far,” Watts said, reaching for his radio.

  Routine Search, One-Six, what’s up?

  One-Six, Routine Search, we got a lady over here freaking out about her ID.

  Roger, en route.

  “Sir, you wanna come down and check it out?” Watts asked Captain Byrd.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” said Byrd. He and the rest of the platoon had arrived that morning, a few days after Montauk.

  They walked down the lane toward Routine Search, their path corralled by long, curving lines of six-foot-high concrete T-walls.

  “Did you guys put these barriers up?” Montauk asked.

  “Yeah, the idea is, if you wall off the lanes and stretch them out, and you put only two or three troops at any given point, they know there’s no way they’re getting into the Green Zone with a bomb and that they can only take one or two of us, max, if they decide to go see Allah. So it’s not worth it to hit us when they can go to the local police station and kill like twenty or thirty guys.”

  They walked past a middle-aged man getting a pat-down from Ant, with a Charlie soldier supervising. Montauk gave him a nod of approval.

  “And the assumption is that suicide bombers are going to make a rational decision like that?” Captain Byrd said.

  “Yes, sir. I mean, they’ve only got so many suicide bombers, so they got to make them count, right?”

  Up ahead, an Iraqi about Montauk’s age was talking with two of Watts’s squad leaders. Near them, seated at the foot of a T-wall, was a late-middle-aged woman in a black hijab clutching a purse. The Iraqi waved to them.

  “That’s Aladdin,” said Watts. “He’s maybe our best translator, or at least I like him best. I worry about him sometimes, though. It’s getting more dangerous for these guys.”

  Aladdin was dressed nicer than the Average Alis in line to enter the checkpoint; they seemed to prefer loose trousers and sandals. He looked more like the young Roman guys Montauk and Corderoy had met in Trastevere: cheapo stonewashed “designer” jeans with a fitted polo, slip-on shoes, and Gucci-type shades.

  “Hey, Aladdin, I want you to meet some people. This is my replacement, Lieutenant Montauk. He’s the platoon leader. That’s his boss, Captain Byrd.”

  “Okay, nice to meet you, sih!”

  “How’s it going?” Montauk said. Aladdin shook his hand in the exact sort of low slap-shake Corderoy would use. Montauk liked him immediately.

  They approached the squad leaders and Watts asked about the situation.

  “Sir, she says she lives in the Green Zone,” his sergeant said.

  “But she’s got no ID. Like, none at all,” said the other Charlie soldier.

  “What does she say about it?” Watts asked.

  They looked to Aladdin.

  “She say she left it at her home, sih,” Aladdin said, giving a half-smile and holding his hands out expansively.

  “Yeah, you guys believe her?”

  Aladdin shrugged.

  “What would you do, Montauk?” Byrd asked.

  “I don’t know, sir. I guess let her in?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “Sir, I’d give her a good search, maybe take her picture so she knows we’re serious, and then let her in. I mean, what are we worried about?”

  “No ID at all, you’d let her in?”

  “Hooah, sir, that would be my call.” Montauk had already changed his mind, but that hooah, Army slang for anything and everything except no, had the stamp of finality. Being indecisive was Original Sin in the officer corps, for good reason. Whether Byrd actually disagreed or was just testing his mettle, Montauk couldn’t back down now.

  Captain Byrd looked to Watts. “What do you say, LT?”

  “Yeah, I think it could go either way, sir. They’re supposed to have IDs, but there’s a lot of gaps, and the IDs are such crap. I’m inclined to let her in.”

  Everyone looked at Captain Byrd, who’d been at the checkpoint for all of ten minutes but who outranked everyone there. “Hooah,” Byrd said.

  “Okay, Sergeant,” said Watts. “Tell Pedestrian Search to take her picture and let her in.”

  The sergeant nodded at Aladdin, who began translating.

  “I’ve got to get back,” Byrd said to Montauk. “Be prepared to brief me tomorrow on your checkpoint SOP.”

  “Hooah, sir.” Byrd walked back up the lane, and Montauk keyed his hand mike and arranged for two of his guys to take the commander back to the FOB. Aladdin walked up to Montauk as Watts talked to his sergeants. Montauk was packing a tin of Kodiak.

  “Oh, you dip, sih?”

  “Yeah,” Montauk said. “Want some?”

  “Oh, thank you, sih.”

  He handed the tin to Aladdin, who took a pinch and stuck it under his lip like a person who’d been doing it only a few weeks. Passing for a grunt, just like Montauk himself was doing. Montauk smiled, threw in a plug of the pungent dip, and popped the tin back into his compass pouch.

&nb
sp; “I think that was a good thing, sih.”

  “What, the woman?”

  “Yeah.” Aladdin put his finger to his lip to push the dip farther in. “I don’t think she is mujahideen, you know. And it is not safe for her out here.”

  “Tell me about it. It’s like Mad Max out here.”

  “Mel Gibson,” Aladdin said.

  “You like Mel Gibson?”

  “No, sih. I like Bruce Willis. Die Hard. Five Element.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You look like young Bruce Willis,” Aladdin said. “When your hair falls out, then you look just like him.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Montauk said.

  “No one can tell the difference then. And you will take me to fancy Hollywood parties. Lots of girls.” Aladdin elbowed Montauk in the ribs.

  Montauk laughed. “Hey, man, if I can get in, you’ll be the first on my guest list.”

  • • •

  Watts found them and took another half hour showing Montauk the ropes, then they hopped into a flatbed Humvee that had its doors torn off and a makeshift gun turret welded on. One of Watts’s soldiers got in the driver’s seat, and the other jumped behind the gun. The sun was low in the sky, and the Humvee’s headlights revealed a small cloud of dust that dispersed as the truck started forward and headed back across 14 July Bridge to the FOB. Chow time. Finally.

  The entrance to the dining facility was inlaid with a tiled picture of George H. W. Bush surrounded by an American flag. The confusion of it all struck Montauk as he stepped on Bush’s nose. Nobody had bothered changing the flooring because the insult of walking on your enemy’s face was lost in translation. He looked at the Charlie guys and wondered if they knew what it signified. Or did they think the mosaic was installed after the invasion by us? Among the civilian contractors, there might be some who got the insult emotionally, like the Iraqis did, but who happily walked on the flag and Bush. Montauk thought of Corderoy.

  Dinner was chicken cordon bleu of the middlebrow Southern-US buffet variety, courtesy of Kellogg, Brown, and Root. The buffet line attendants appeared to be Pakistani. The tableware was high-quality disposable. There were six kinds of dessert. There were paper doilies on the table. The Charlie guys made easy conversation, but a sadness descended over Montauk as he ate, the kind of callow but real sadness he used to experience as a teenager when he saw a person eating alone in a restaurant without even a book. He viewed this scene like a museum diorama, perhaps that dusty and curiously flat scene of the Pilgrims meeting the Indians in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

  “You think they think we’re fools?” Montauk said. “The Iraqi staff. For walking in dirty boots on that mosaic out there, tramping on our own flag.”

  “Probably,” Watts said.

  If that was true, if the Iraqi elevator attendant in the lobby—who had worked around Americans for months now—still thought we were fools, then it meant he didn’t really understand the freedom we were trying to give the Iraqis. That’s what it felt like, walking on that mosaic: an exercise of freedom. Though Montauk didn’t know if he meant freedom with a hipster wink or some other, earlier kind of freedom. The freedom to burn your own flag.

  That evening, Montauk closed his eyes and fell into a not quite dream state full of visions of his parents, and of Mani and Corderoy, and of the light moving across the walls of his childhood bedroom as troops around him woke and took up their arms and left into the night, and as others returned, removed their sweat-stained armor and boots, and lay down to sleep or read or gaze up at the ceiling.

  21

  * * *

  Montauk used an elaborate sequence of facial movements to pack the Kodiak more deeply between his gums and teeth, then spit a stream of tangy brown fluid into the dust on 14 July Street. He regarded the end of the checkpoint’s exit lane, where the last section in a row of T-wall was knocked askew. It looked like some concrete-eating shark had taken a large bite out of it. Bits of rebar poked out of the wound. Tanks. They tended to leave a trail. Montauk watched when they rolled through his checkpoint with the kind of friendly trepidation a rose gardener would feel toward the neighbor’s dog.

  “Are they driving like idiots, or is this lane actually difficult to get out of?” Montauk said.

  “Both,” Olaf said. “The tanks are pretty wide, but they’re also being driven by eighteen-year-olds.”

  “Why do they even take tanks out into the city? It’s not like they can use the main gun.”

  “They’re tankers, sir. That’s what they do.”

  They gazed down 14 July Street like Marlboro Men. On the south side were rows of boarded-up storefronts that betrayed small hints of former prosperity, like the chandeliers hung in the unlit display of the furniture shop. There had been no signs of life from within since Montauk had been at the checkpoint, but no one had looted it, either. A little farther down was a ten-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower affixed to the sidewalk, a piece of flair that a realtor might point to when describing the neighborhood as funky. Montauk considered asking Aladdin about it when he returned. He’d just left to buy a Mountain Dew, his favorite American soda. The decay of the neighborhood surrounding the checkpoint and the uneasiness of its inhabitants gave Montauk a sense of displaced guilt, like that of a suburban environmentalist regarding a landfill.

  He spat again. “How busy was this street? Before the invasion,” he asked rhetorically.

  “You could ask those guys,” Olaf said, gesturing to a trio of oldsters seated at a plastic table halfway down the block. They wore keffiyehs and looked like they had a shisha set up on the table. Olaf waved, and one of them waved back. “Wanna go say hi?” he asked.

  Montauk saw Aladdin returning. He radioed the west gun tower to tell them that the three of them were going a hundred meters down the road to talk to the locals.

  “You know these old dudes?” Montauk asked Aladdin.

  “Do not worry about them, sih.” Aladdin took a swig of his Mountain Dew, then made a loud purposeful “Ahhhh” and held the bottle up next to his face with two hands, smiling like an actor in a television commercial from the fifties. The sun filtered through the nuclear-green liquid. Montauk couldn’t help but chuckle at the goofy translator.

  “I’m not worried about them,” he said. “I just want to ask them some questions.”

  Aladdin screwed the cap back on with twitchy fingers. “What questions?”

  “You know, the kind of questions you ask old-timers. Like what was this neighborhood like thirty years ago?”

  Aladdin laughed. “I think you are too late, sih. They are too old to remember yesterday!”

  Olaf gave Montauk a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Let’s find out.” He started walking down the street.

  Aladdin’s smirk congealed. He hurried after Montauk. “I don’t think it is best idea, sih.”

  “Aww, c’mon. They look friendly,” Montauk said. They walked the rest of the way in silence, Aladdin at the rear.

  Montauk removed his helmet and lifted his ballistic eye protection onto his forehead. This was in direct violation of brigade policy, but Olaf followed suit. The old-timers sat around a small plastic table; they wore loose white dishdashas and sandals and had steel-wool beards and crazy teeth. A slight breeze made a moving mosaic of the shade cast by the date palm above them. Montauk asked if anyone spoke English and was met with grave head rotations. Olaf cracked an amused smile.

  “That’s why we’ve got Aladdin here,” Montauk said. “Can you tell them we’d like to ask a few questions. About this neighborhood. What it was like when they were growing up?”

  Aladdin translated, and the oldster with the shortest beard, sitting on the right, said something that had the word Iraqi in it, and the other two chortled. The one on the left had the longest beard, which meant he was likely the Chief Oldster. It took all of
Montauk’s concentration to stay on top of these cultural cues.

  “Well, what’d he say?” Montauk asked Aladdin.

  “He makes a stupid joke. That’s all,” Aladdin said.

  The Chief Oldster squinted at Aladdin and muttered a string of phlegmy syllables. Whatever Aladdin said back, it couldn’t have been nice, for the Oldster shook his head disapprovingly.

  “I’m sorry, sih. I should have said before. I know this man. He is like uncle to me. He says I try to be American. He does not like my job.”

  “Why’s that?” Montauk asked.

  “If it is okay, sih, I meet you at the CP?”

  “Sure,” Montauk said. “Just give us a few minutes.”

  Montauk watched Aladdin give the oldsters a curt good-bye and walk off.

  “Sir,” Olaf said. He nodded toward the oldsters. “They want us to smoke with them.”

  The Chief Oldster was offering Olaf the hookah pipe. Why wasn’t he offering it to Montauk? “Go ahead,” Montauk said. Olaf took a drag, said, “Shukran,” and passed it to Montauk. He inhaled, causing the glass to bubble gently, which sent vibrations back up the hose to the brass mouthpiece. “Shukran,” Montauk said, handing the hose back.

  The short-bearded wiseacre bent down to a pewter tray on the ground and produced three glasses. He set one in front of the Chief Oldster and placed the two others on the table in front of Montauk and Olaf. Gunshots. A rapid burst. Montauk swung his head in their direction like a startled bird. Olaf remained impassive, as did the Iraqis, except for Wiseacre, who opened into a yellowed grin. Montauk sensed that he’d somehow made a fool of himself. The black plastic radio handset clipped to his vest broadcast the estimated distance and direction of the small arms fire in the bored voice of Staff Sergeant Jackson. Some jerk shooting the sky with his AK.

  The tea was poured slowly, with an anachronistic elegance that somehow did not seem out of place at the small plastic table. Olaf’s was filled first, and it was now obvious to Montauk that Wiseacre had gotten their ranks backward. But he didn’t understand why.I