Every day brings more refugees, more from Syria now than Iraq. I was worried it’d make the searching more difficult, but the Iraqis and Syrians keep clear of each other. “Like scorpions and camel spiders,” Qasim likes to say. I hate that joke.
I thought I’d found her last week. I was walking the ghettoes and spotted a young woman wearing a gray cotton dress. I pushed past people, then took off after her at a trot. She wore no face cover and her hair fell across her back in black waves. She turned a corner, and for a moment I saw a coffee stain of a birthmark and an arrow nose piercing out.
I ran around the corner shouting her name. But there was nothing there, just the faint echo of my own steps.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude to:
Parents Deborah and Dennis, brother Luke, and the Gallagher, Boisselle, Scott, and Steinle families;
Friends and colleagues Ted Janis and Phil Klay;
Friends and readers Elliot Ackerman, Nick Allen, Lea Carpenter, Eric Fair, Will Gehlen, Brian Hagen, Fahad Khan, Sanaë Lemoine, and Nick McDonell;
Friends and chiefs Brandon Willitts and Words After War and Paul Rieckhoff and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America;
Educators Loni Byloff and Mary Chrystal at Brookfield; Shelly Brewster and Hardy McNew at Bishop Manogue; Simone Caron and John McNally at Wake Forest; and David Ebershoff, Richard Ford, Lauren Grodstein, and Victor LaValle at Columbia;
The soldiers and interpreters of 2-14 Cavalry and 1-27 Infantry who served in Iraq from 2007–9;
Agent extraordinaire Amelia “Molly” Atlas and ICM Partners;
Atria editors Daniella Wexler and Peter Borland and Atria publisher Judith Curr, who believed in this book;
And, of course, fierce and lovely Anne.
To those I mentioned, and to the many others I didn’t—Sláinte.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATT GALLAGHER is a former US Army captain and the author of the acclaimed Iraq War memoir Kaboom, based on the popular and controversial blog he kept while he was deployed. He holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and Playboy, among others. He lives with his wife in Brooklyn.
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