Without a word, Dominguez walked over to the Iraqi soldiers, shaking the nearest one by the collar, and gestured for them to follow him. They did, though the one whose collar had been violated spoke with ire to Dominguez’s back.
While Dominguez took the soldiers and jundis into the house to search cabinets and upturn mattresses, Chambers, Snoop, and I met with the family and Fat Mukhtar in the courtyard. It made for a crowded space, and I kept having to push a fern out of my face to make eye contact with anyone. A man with cracked skin and a gray worm for a mustache glared at me while his wife, covered in an abaya, yelled at Snoop and wagged a finger in his face. Chambers stepped to the side to play with two girls and their Barbies, which were Arab in appearance and had various face veils as accessories. Then the woman turned her finger toward me. Even though the top of her head barely cleared my sternum, I took a step back and used the fern as a shield.
“We’re being gentle!” I told Snoop, rifle slung, hands raised. A sniper on the Strip was hypothetical. This lady was not. I took off my lenses, helmet, and gloves and tried to look as boyish as possible. “Tell her that.”
My charms had little effect. She kept yelling, and her husband kept glaring. Fat Mukhtar tried yelling back, which just angered her more.
“Azhar!” I said, trying another approach. “Azzzz-harrrr.”
That flipped a switch. She bowed her head and spoke to Snoop. I strained to understand, but quickly gave up.
“What news do you bring of their son?” he translated.
Neither of us had much to share. The husband confirmed what Fat Mukhtar had said about their disowning Dead Tooth, though that decision seemed to be a source of marital tension. I asked about the older brother, and he said he was at his Sahwa post. He asked if Azhar was to be killed. I said capturing their son alive was our goal, so if they knew anything at all, it’d be wise to tell us. They said nothing. I asked how their dead cousin’s mother was doing, remembering her wails and pleas. They said she was grieving, but Insha’Allah, she would find peace soon. The husband asked if we’d stay for chai after the search. Ibrahim appeared in the doorway, ducking under the frame. He asked me to follow him inside.
“Wait until you see this,” he said.
We walked through a living room covered in sleeping mats and blankets; during the summer, Iraqis sleep in large, airy rooms or on the roof. A ceiling fan spun creakily from above. Over a kitchen of stainless steel, a staircase rose, angling into wooden beams that held the balcony. Upstairs, there was a small bureau in the hallway. Next to it hung a religious streamer, green with a yellow rim. On the bureau was a picture frame. I picked it up. Two Iraqi boys smiled for the camera, dirt field and palm trees behind them. They both had long faces and mop-tops, their resemblance to one another uncanny, arms draped around each other’s shoulders to show they were good brothers. They wore matching jerseys, and the elder held a soccer ball. The younger stuck out his bottom row of teeth like a mule to show off a recently displaced tooth: Dead Tooth when he’d been Baby Tooth. I set down the photo and followed Ibrahim into a corner room that smelled of ammonia.
One step in, a smirking Dominguez handed me a placard. A crease ran down its center like a fault line. “A jundi found it,” he said. “Folded up in the family Koran.”
Opening it, I was greeted by an oversized face of an imam frothing orders. The artist had even added the spit coming from his mouth, which was a nice touch. The imam wore a white dishdasha and a black headband, and his chin fell off the image in a cascade of beard. Behind him, toy men in masks held rockets and guns, facing an unseen, encroaching enemy. A hollow sun marked the top of the placard, jagged Arabic slicing through it.
Back downstairs, Snoop explained that the face belonged to a Wahhabi, the most radical of Sunnis, who called on true Muslims to destroy Shi’a and American dogs alike.
“It doesn’t say al-Qaeda on this,” Snoop said, holding it up. “But it’s theirs.”
The family swore they’d no idea where the placard had come from. One of the little girls started crying when she saw it, and the husband insisted it must’ve been Azhar’s. Without any way to disprove that, I left them the outpost’s phone number, saying to call if they heard from their son and wanted him to live.
I put my helmet back on, then my gloves, then my lenses. As we turned to leave the courtyard, Dead Tooth’s mother spoke, to no one and everyone at once. After a long silence, Snoop translated. “She say this is our fault,” he said. “Azhar was a good boy before the Collapse.”
• • •
We walked back into the simoom. I watched a dust cyclone of plastic bags whip around a pair of soldiers, who poked at it with their rifles. As we moved west down the Strip, I asked Fat Mukhtar why the family had been so hostile.
He shrugged and adjusted his headdress in the wind, a world-weary blueberry in a tracksuit.
“It’s not easy seeing your country occupied by foreigners,” Snoop translated. “The mukhtar has a good point.”
I wanted to ask Fat Mukhtar about Shaba again, or if he knew anything about civilian murders in the past, but Chambers was only steps behind. The two men hadn’t seemed to recognize each other, or have any interest in each other, for that matter. One had seen plenty of brawny American sergeants before, while the other had met plenty of outlandish Arab chieftains.
“Tell me how this ends,” I muttered.
No one else knew, either.
Fat Mukhtar stopped at a tin shack. It bore the message YOUSEF’S: BEST FALAFEL IN ALL IRAK! in English on a doorway sign, a gift from some previous American unit. At Fat Mukhtar’s suggestion, we ordered a late lunch. A young shop boy ran into the shack to deliver our order. While we waited, the mukhtar told us he was getting a bear from Syria for his zoo.
I laughed. “A bear in the Middle East? Sure.”
“He say it’s true, LT. The Syrian brown bear. A cousin of your grizzly.”
I pulled out my pad and made a note to google this later, to prove Fat Mukhtar wrong. Bears didn’t come from Syria. They needed trees.
The sense of being observed returned. I looked around. Inside the falafel shop, behind a thick screen door, stood an old man with crossed arms. I recognized him, but couldn’t place from where, and that bothered me. I didn’t forget people. I waved, long and wide. He waved back.
“Yousef,” Fat Mukhtar said through Snoop. “Just a falafel man, but a good falafel man. Many morals.”
A group of children delivered the falafels to our patrol. Soldiers and jundis strewn across the Sunni Strip greeted the children with pats on the head and shiny coins as tips. My falafel was handed over by a girl in a purple head scarf who had black gemstones for eyes and a gaping red void for a nose. I looked closer and realized it was actually two red voids, one for each missing nostril. Burns covered much of her upper body. The skin on her arms was like paper, and when she cupped her hands to ask for a tip, I could see the bones in her fingers flexing. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and folded it into her tiny palms. Her smile burned through us all.
I swallowed away the lump in my throat while Fat Mukhtar bit his bottom lip. Only Snoop found words. “Allah protect her,” he said. “If you’re up there, fuckclown, You protect her.”
I wasn’t really hungry anymore, but forced myself to eat. The falafel tasted like desert — dry dough, chickpea, and tangy yogurt, all soaked in cucumber juice and olive oil. Fat Mukhtar said we should try Yousef’s lamb, too, but through chewed food I said we needed to go.