Hope this helps some and Thank You For Your Service.
Sarah Rios
33
15 March 2006
Night Flower—
I’m sorry I didn’t visit tonight. There was a mission on the other side of town and the Lieutenant insisted I go. I promise to make it up to you. We got some care packages today — would you prefer a Connect Four board game or a stuffed koala?
Just kidding. I’ll bring you both.
Have you calmed down? You dream of America, but staying here is best. We can have the life you see in the movies, here in Iraq, in Ashuriyah. The America you imagine no longer exists, if it ever did. You need to know that your father lives in more luxury than anyone from my hometown. Until I came to Iraq, until I met your father, I had never been in a house as large as yours. Or known a man who owned five Mercedes. Or seen a marble fountain, like the eagle in your driveway. Be careful what you ask for, Night Flower, that’s all I’m saying.
We will visit, of course. I will show you the monuments in New York and Washington, and take you to the California beaches. But Ashuriyah will be home. Our children will know the meaning of family, and be part of the new Iraq.
I know you’re laughing now. Yes, a new Iraq. They call me the “money man” for a reason. I can — and will — make your father the most important sheik in the province, much more important than just being in charge of Sahwa. We will build roads. We will build schools. We will build power stations and plants. We’re already planning the largest hospital in the country, bigger than anything in Baghdad, something that will make Ashuriyah one of the most important places in the Middle East.
If you still don’t understand, talk to your father. He knows. He believes.
Forty soldiers sleep around me now in the outpost, their minds far away, on everything that is typical. They are here to survive and endure, not to change. All they care about is getting home alive. I used to blame them for this, but that was unfair. I will get them home alive. But I won’t be going with them. I’m staying here. For you. For us.
I met your brother yesterday. I’ll tell you about it next time I visit.
Give your father my best. Good night, Night Flower, tomorrow awaits. Allah is One, the heart is one, and the heart only belongs to the One,
E.
BOOK III
34
None of the locals could remember a Ramadan like it, not even the elders. The summer heat was supposed to blow away in the wind, they said, not wash away in rain. If they thought it meant anything, though, they kept it to themselves.
I fasted through the holy month, alone among the occupiers. I didn’t quite feel cleansed by it, but it gave me something to talk about with Rana. She was a source now. Our source. We came on the days she said to, when her husband was away in Baghdad managing his concrete business. Her information wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either. She knew of some cache spots along the canal.
She didn’t speak much of the ghost who haunted her, though during our third meeting she let me read one of his love letters. When I handed it back, I searched her face for signs of sadness or reminiscence. I found neither. Instead, she was studying me behind her arrow nose, probing, considering. I swallowed away a blush. She folded up the letter, placing it in a hidden pocket of the gray cotton dress she always seemed to wear.
Snoop came to the hut with me at first, but eventually he stayed with the men in the vehicles outside. “To play cards,” he said. We were short-timers now. For the soldiers, home wasn’t just a thing we’d left anymore. It was a thing that awaited.
Out there, the war endured. A land of bullets and fatwas, out there assured only death. I understood that now. The desert had always meant death for strange infidels far from home, from Alexander the Great to Elijah Rios. There were no dust storms in the sheika’s hut, though, no scorpions or holy wars. It smelled of lush wildflowers, not hot trash. With her, I felt no headaches. We listened to the playful shouts of her boys, not the shrieks of mortar shells. The war existed beyond the hamlet. In the hut — in the hut was something else.
She spoke of the past with small, soft hands flitting toward the sky. I spoke of the present with anxious proclamations. I told her to smile more. She told me to find her reasons to.
One dreary afternoon, she asked how we’d come to find Shaba’s remains. I didn’t want to say, but she insisted.
I talked about the wake, about Haitham’s call, about the fatwa that relegated Ibrahim to Camp Independence, about all the tribal leaders who knew the bones were there but had pled ignorance. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get them. We’ll get them all.”
She stayed silent for many seconds.
“What?” I asked.
“Ashuriyah is hell,” she said, her face setting like flint. “How do you defeat the devil in his own home?”
35
The summer before I joined ROTC was California bright and filled with crystal skies. Will came home for a few weeks and kept talking about the time he’d called in an airstrike on the Taliban. Marissa and I decided to give it another try, at least until we went back to our respective campuses in the fall, spending our mornings at the lake and our evenings in friends’ basements.
Her sister Julie was to be married in August. Will, Mom, and I received invitations. Our dad didn’t live in our subdivision anymore, so he didn’t get one. There were rules in Granite Bay.
Julie and Will had never really gotten along, even though they’d gone to school together. Marissa and I liked to joke that the reason for the mutual distaste was their red-blooded lust for each other. “Our kids could be double cousins!” we said. Neither sibling ever laughed with us, but we didn’t care. We had each other.
Despite their history of antipathy, neither Will nor Julie considered themselves unreasonable, something that proved helpful when the groom, Richie Gomez, asked my brother to be a replacement groomsman — something about a Venezuelan cousin having visa issues. Richie and Will had played high school baseball together, so it made some sense, though I harbored cynical thoughts about the groom’s need to prove to the bride’s family that he wasn’t a Chavez-loving socialist, which meant trotting out Will’s dress uniform and shiny medals.
“You’re a fool,” my mom said when I brought that up.
“You’re an idiot,” Marissa said when I brought that up.
The week of the wedding, I stumbled into our kitchen, seeking out the pantry. Will was pacing the linoleum tile floor.
“Scumbag,” he said. “Creep. Coward.”
I asked who he was ranting about.
“Tomas Butkus,” he said. “He’s coming to the wedding.”
It was well-known in Millennial Granite Bay that Julie and Tomas had hooked up on a camping trip, months after she began dating Richie Gomez. Well-known to everyone but Richie. Gossip peddling being gossip peddling, and gossip peddlers being gossip peddlers, the story had swirled around Richie without reaching his ears.
“That was, like, a couple years ago,” I said. “And Julie and Tomas are friends. That’s who weddings are for.”
“No, Jack. You’re wrong.” My potato chip munching rose with his voice, and I took a seat behind the counter. “Weddings are for people who will love and support your marriage. Not just a collection of friends.”