The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  Saad Kareem Izbar, another original councilman, said, “We never agreed with any ruler. Iraq is always against its government (and all foreigners). There wasn’t much of that under Saddam, but he ruled with an iron fist. You can fix anything, but not the man himself. Saddam said that if he was going to turn over Iraq to anyone, he would turn it over as dirt.” I looked out at the desert and said, “And so he did.”

  We visited Muhammed’s childhood home on the hill. The house had almost no decoration at all, high ceilings, bare walls of mud and straw painted white. It was cool and felt like an underground chamber. His family were all born here. Now he rents it to a relative and has built a new brick house. He showed me an original door made of slabs cut from a date-palm trunk. It looked ancient, worn, and dust-dried. He opened it with true pride, a museum artifact still at work in a dying town. It was the first time I had been inside a home in Jassan. As a Marine I always stayed outside.

  We left the hill and went to meet the new council chairman, Abu Hassan, at a tiny café whose interior was painted a flat pink. We sat with five of the original councilmen on a ledge padded by single sheets of cardboard. I asked what had changed since Saddam. They seemed most upset about the awarding of government posts to Maliki’s friends and allies. “Before the new government, the old employees of the ministries worked very hard and serious, not watching our watches. Now they just wait for salary and holiday.”

  I passed around pictures from the “military records,” photographs I had taken myself in 2003, and they were thrilled. They called out the names of people and handed them back and forth. A man smiled at one and said, “Major Busch.” The picture he held did not have me in it. I asked him to explain. “Only Major Busch could have taken this picture. He carried a camera and visited my house.” “Did he go inside for tea?” I asked. “No. He went inside no homes. He allowed no raids in Jassan.” “Did you ever invite him inside?” “No. Our women were there. Only we invited him for tea.” At this, a councilman told my story.

  “Major Busch had tea with us on the hill and asked why we poured our tea into our saucers. We told him it cools it quicker. Busch asked why we didn’t just wait for it to cool off. We all laughed and said if we waited we would never form any agreements.” The councilmen all laughed again together. What they remembered so well of me and found so extraordinary, I did not remember at all. I would be told this story again from two other men in Jassan. There was something pleasant in hearing stories about myself, like being present at my own funeral. They did not recall the message declaring my imminent assassination. They recalled only that I was there. Drink your tea and all will be fine.

  I asked how they felt about people moving off the hill. “The new houses are better, of course. Life on the hill was harder. But I miss the old way. We were all close. Everyone lived together. The doctor lived beside the herder and the farmer. Now we just pass sometimes.”

  Abu Hassan took us up the slope again, into old Jassan. The curved passages through the town are all too narrow for cars, so supplies are carried from door to door by donkey. I could hear children playing behind the earthen walls.

  The tour followed the same route as the one I had been given in 2003 and Hassan repeated the same anecdotes. He showed us the house that was bombed during the war with Iran—rebuilt by a local Iraqi army commander with his own money. “Two women were killed,” he said. I asked whether the soil was contaminated. “Only artillery and air bombs here. Not chemical attack. Soil is fine.” He estimated that 80,000 palm trees were destroyed by the Iraqi army during the war. So far they have planted only a few replacements.

  Here in the center of the old village was the original meeting house, an empty room with quartered palm trunks as ceiling beams and woven reed mats to hold the clay roof. No one maintained it anymore, and a corner had opened as if hit by a bomb. Sunlight came in through the hole now, but it must have been completely dark when it was intact, everyone inside lit only by fire. It had fallen into use as a manger, the floor spongy with an uneven depth of sheep manure, a few handmade rugs sinking into the filth. An old man wandered up and spoke with reverence in the space, telling of when the British governor met with the village elders in the 1920s. “He had tea right here,” he said. “This is a historical site, and the government should preserve it.” They have asked, but no one cares. “Soon this will be gone,” he said. “All the stories will have no home.” It will just be an empty square on the hill, like the British cemetery in Kut.

  The exterior wall around the settlement was giving way in places, revealing empty rooms and exposing the town’s mysterious interior, so long concealed. “Every year there are more like this,” Abu Hassan said. “If the roof is not maintained before the rains, in two years a house will fall.” An elder added his suspicion: “This is part of a plan to thin the blood of the village. These loans are chains to the government. Always we lived without debt on the hill. Now we live in brick houses . . . but we don’t own them. We leave the place of our fathers and accept a home that can be taken from us. What will our sons have? Not even memories.” But he has moved off the hill, too. “We used to watch the sun set on the land. Now we watch the TV.”

  And then there I was again, in the middle of a sentence about the past, Major Busch drinking tea with the grandson of the man who drank tea here with the British governor in 1920—neither of us remembered as enemies, but neither of us remembered for anything more than having been here once. It could have been centuries ago, the old men telling brief stories of our brief presence. We’ll all have to hope there were children in the room to hear them or we will finally, truly be gone.

  We headed back down to the market. It was the feast of Ashura, and about 300 people had assembled for qimah, a dish made from ground lamb, chickpeas, tomato sauce, and spices, which was served from large aluminum pots. We spoke with Jabir Surman Daoud, who was captured on May 6, 1982, during the war with Iran, and released nine years later in a prisoner exchange. He said life as a captive was good. He had a job at the post office before the war, when Jassan was peaceful. When he returned, the area was crowded with the Iraqi military. He felt like he was returning home to a prison. He resented being away but didn’t blame that on Iran. “We were forced to fight, like against America. We were not volunteers.” I asked what he dreamed of when he was young. “Saddam could see our dreams, so we did not have any.”

  I spoke with Jaoudit Abdul Settar as he waited in line for food. Settar was two days into the six-day walk to Karbala from Kazania, his hometown. He had been a carpenter, but all furniture is imported now. “Kazania is also built on a hill. It’s doing the same as Jassan: loans, new houses, everyone leaving the hill. Saddam destroyed our town once before because he accused us of helping Iranian troops. Now we are destroying it.”

  As we left, Khalil said, “Jassan is a dead town. Tourists bypass and they have no real product except some farming.” It was a cold assessment of a place that appeared to be well managed and progressing in a country that was largely broken. But he wasn’t wrong.

  After three days in Jassan, we drove to the town of Badra, the last Iraqi settlement before the Iranian border. The old section of the village was leveled during the war with Iran and is nothing but low earthen ruins now, a worn maze where rooms had been. Saddam had built some new concrete apartments and government offices there, but, like Jassan, brick houses are rising on the outskirts, making the pre-invasion buildings look dilapidated by comparison. We visited the border with the city manager, Jafar Abdul Jabar Muhammed, who had salt-and-pepper stubble and wore a tidy checked blazer. Like so many government managers, he was gracious with his time and guarded in his answers, but as we traveled with him he began to open up. “Our problem is water,” he said. “There is drought, and our farms take from the Badra River.” We crossed a bridge over the wide, dry bed. The river flows from Iran, but the Iranians built a dam and cut it off, he said. “I can’t imagine my childhood without the river. I tell kids the stories, but they see only stone
s.” The area had been known for its date palms, but we drove past dead orchards, hundreds of tall, bare trunks standing beside living groves that had been kept irrigated. It takes about eight years for a palm to begin producing date crops. It takes one bad year for it to die. It was not only the water, though. Some families have moved away for work in the cities, neglecting their plots of palms. “Before America came, everyone stayed.”

  On the approach to the border checkpoint, we saw several lifeless miles of empty cargo trucks either returning to Iran or waiting to load Iranian exports. There were no trucks of Iraqi products. We also saw parking lots full of buses for Iranian passengers traveling to Karbala. The government in Kut has allocated billions of dinar to build a welcome center here to encourage more tourism from Iran. Nearby is the new Badra Oil Field, which is being drilled by the Russian energy company Gazprom Neft. It is a joint venture with oil companies from South Korea, Malaysia, and Turkey. The well is now producing 15,000 barrels a day. Half of the jobs are contracted to be local, which Jabar Muhammed believes will solve all of Badra’s unemployment problems. There were no American oil companies here, and he said Americans didn’t even bother to bid on the project. I was the first one he’d seen in six years. The border follows a rise in the land, and, like most boundaries that aren’t defined by a shore, it is an arbitrary division of uninhabited space. In 2003 we were told to keep our distance because the placement of the line was still contested, our maps only an estimation. Now it seemed like the end of nothing and the beginning of nothing else, Wasit Province a territory with customs stations on both sides, one for Iran and one for the other fragments of the former Iraqi state.

  (“They’re trying to change the maps,” a merchant in Kut’s souk told me. “They are always moving the borders here, since Nebuchadnezzar. All these dead empires from outside. Why here? They’re drawing lines in water.”)

  Now the borders we watched so carefully, a vigilance we inherited from Saddam Hussein himself, have almost dissolved. Sunni militants have captured Iraqi cities and declared the territory part of their caliphate. The government in Baghdad has called out for American military aid while cursing us, and we have begun bombing campaigns again. Two battalions of Iranian troops, known to have been employed in attacks on U.S. forces during the occupation, have been welcomed into Iraq.

  On the route back to Kut we passed the site of the mass grave I saw in 2003. The dead were revolutionaries America had encouraged to rise against Saddam during our first invasion of Iraq. Our withdrawal had left the rebellion unsupported, its members identified and executed. After our invasion, families came to take the bodies for proper burial. They dug the bones and lifted them out of the pit; the arms were still bound with wire and the skulls still blindfolded with strips of cloth. For 12 years they had been in the soil here, unmarked, and now their empty graves were filling in like the trenches along the border.

  My tactical maps were all lost when I went home. All I have left is an evasion chart I never used. On it is a tiny square representing the former Iraqi army base where my unit had been stationed. Years ago, I stood in the courtyard of a military training school here as Iraqi maps from the war with Iran blew all around me. Nothing but pulverized bricks and a few concrete bunkers were left now. The bunker entrances still had graffiti from Saddam’s army scratched into them along the stairs descending underground, the interior now used as a shelter for herds of sheep. It felt like an ancient tomb inside, the floor soft with dung and the dead carried off. In 2003 the footprints of Iraqi soldiers were still fresh in the dried mud.

  Back in Kut we watched the news. Cloying coverage of Nelson Mandela’s death, riots beginning to push over police barricades in Ukraine, fighting in Syria. Nothing yet about Iraq. As we waited for a cab to Baghdad, there was a brief notice that Peter O’Toole had died, Lawrence of Arabia dead again as the Middle East began to redraw his map. I finally told Khalil that I was Major Busch. “Holy shit!” he said, extending a hand to shake as if I had performed a magic trick. His face was lit up for the first time in our eight days together. “They didn’t know you.”

  We spent our occupation complimenting Iraq on its sovereignty, its bravery, never believing it. What was most surprising, seeing our total disappearance, was that 1.5 million Americans served in Iraq. We were 5 percent of the country’s population averaged over a decade; 4,486 of us died there; none of us are buried there.

  I have now seen Jassan’s old walls falling, its children eternally standing there only in my photographs. Jassan will continue to exist, its name still on maps exactly where it was, but it will not be the place the elders remember. It will not resemble their stories of it. I am already unrecognizable to the people there, part of Jassan’s past life and not part of it at all. Why should I have expected us to be real to Iraq, to be lasting, when Iraq is starting over again every day without us?

  We sought for years to define the Iraqi people, give their nation one cogent label that would allow us to administer a cure. But Iraq has every disease there is; its mind is deranged with too many voices, its organs corrupted, its limbs only long enough to tear at its own body. “It was religion that did this,” one man I met shortly after I arrived told me. “It is religion fighting. Iraqis aren’t themselves. They were an invention by the British. Me, I’m Sumerian.” I asked how he knew. “I just do.” When I asked whether he favored Iraq’s division, he said, “No. That won’t help. The three parts would be ruled by the outside countries, and they would fight.” Several men I met said they were proud to be Shia, but they didn’t think Iraq meant anything anymore. “It is just a place. Since Babylon it has just been a place.”

  The Iraq I knew already seems to be underground, the new situation piling up on top of it, the people lamenting its burial but unwilling to dig. The land around Kut is filled with the unmarked graves of foreigners, the removal of the tombstones in the official graveyard just the natural urge of the desert to be blank. The mass grave we exhumed near Badra is filling in, the loose bones and clothing moved and buried again out of order, mud villages slowly reduced to mounds, images of Saddam destroyed, museums looted and the Americans gone, all the footsteps from all the patrols rubbed off by the wind.

  On the way back to Baghdad our cab went 100 miles per hour and smelled of gasoline. The windshield had a crack, and my view of everything was split by a bright line. Unlike the village, where the past was being abandoned, Baghdad looked like a place preserving the war, its wreckage kept on display. How many times has Baghdad fallen? This was the land believed to have been the location of Eden, Adam and Eve expelled for taking the advice of a snake.

  The main route to the airport was closed to allow Shia pilgrims to walk without the threat of car bombs, so we had to take the long way around to the south and then head west. As we passed a sign that said RAMADI, FALLUJAH, AND ABU GHRAIB, I was reminded that I was crossing an invisible line between religious sects and into a part of Iraq where most stories about Americans are grim. On the long road to the terminal, a single word appeared in polished silver letters raised on a curve of concrete: GOODBYE. It was in English, without translation into any other language. No one else is bid farewell from Baghdad. We probably paid to have the sign installed, wishing ourselves away.

  Back home in the quiet snow of Michigan, I saw a one-line report about an explosion in the Karada district and wrote to check on Khalil. A few days later he wrote back:

  Dear Sir,

  Thank you for asking the explosion by booby-trapped car was near my apartment all the window glasses were flown up every were thanks god my both daughters were safe, my wife almost got killed by it, but she is safe.

  Best regards,

  Khalil

  Baghdad is preparing for another invasion. ISIL is executing young Shia men from the surrendered Iraqi army, their bodies displayed in bloody ditches, mothers and fathers looking for their children in the grainy videos being posted by terrorists. I imagine families peering into those glowing frames, trying to know for
certain that their son is dead. My father used to study the news reports during my deployments, scanning the troops walking behind journalists for men who might be me. The nameless announcements of casualties became his child every day until he had proof that it wasn’t. He was far from the war, but Iraq also seems a place far from itself now, its own ruins mostly distant, Iraqis in the east viewing Mosul and Ramadi as foreign places few have ever seen, the desert separating everything with sunlight. ISIL has gotten to within a few miles of the capital. They drive American military vehicles and they carry American weapons. Some now wear our uniforms. We have sent troops to guard our embassy and the Baghdad airport. The embassy is the last piece of ground we own, kept out of touch with Iraq in the International Zone, and the airport is the only way out. We are defending the silver sign that says goodbye.

  MADELINE DREXLER

  The Happiness Metric

  FROM Tricycle

  ON FRIDAY EVENINGS in Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan, men, women, and children throng the main street, flowing together in a slow dance. Swaggering teenage boys, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, speak in surprisingly gentle voices. Stray dogs assertively cohabit the city. One often hears singing—on sidewalks, pouring out of windows, on construction sites. The melodies persist in the undulating countryside, where men engaged in matches of archery or darts break into congratulatory chants when the other side scores.

  Article 9 of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Bhutan says, “The State shall strive to promote those circumstances that will enable the successful pursuit of Gross National Happiness.” In the fall of 2012, I traveled to this simple, complicated, lavishly lovely place to find out how GNH, as the policy is known, plays out in real life. My intention was to glean what makes for happiness in a fast-changing society where Buddhism is deeply rooted but where the temptations and collateral damage of affluence are rising. Bhutanese have practiced happiness, reflected upon it, debated it, dissected it, and legislated it—and they seemed to me, on the whole, happier than Americans. But if for no other reason than the nature of impermanence, that may soon change.