“The desire to tell people?”
“Yes,” she says. “But I’m done with that. I have a new life and I want to enjoy it. Some people, they look back too much. It eats them up, and does nobody any good. If God did not make us to enjoy our lives, why did he make us?”
I don’t know. This isn’t what I’d expected from Farah, and suddenly I feel terribly homesick. I miss Kabul, but more than that, I miss being out of Kabul, embedded with troops. I miss what my friend Kirstin calls the ISAF sound track: the rasp of the Velcro on magazine pouches opening, the crunch of dried mud yielding to the massive tires of heavy armored vehicles, the cough of a diesel engine, the roar of a passing Chinook, the excited shouts from a nearby soccer field, the chirping of birds.
If I take Bob’s advice and go to India, I won’t have that. A different adventure, I guess, though one disconnected from the type of reporting I’ve been doing. Working for a wire service is like being the boilerman for a steam-engine train—you never stop shoveling. In Afghanistan, every shovelful was composed of war. I wonder what stories I’d even cover in New Delhi. Last time I checked the news coming out of there, for some reason it was mostly legal stories—“INDIA BLOCKS 857 PORNOGRAPHY WEBSITES, DEFYING SUPREME COURT,” “INDIA INQUIRY INTO SCANDAL OVER TESTING SET TO EXPAND.”
“You’re very American these days,” I tell Farah. “Forward thinking. With a touch of pragmatic amnesia.”
“Amnesia?”
“Forgetfulness.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t forget anything. But it’s not good to talk too much about the things that happen in war.” She laughs. “And I don’t want to burden people with my nightmares.”
I tell her that if she ever changes her mind, she might be surprised to find out how many people were willing to listen to her nightmares.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s true, I have met that sort of person before.” And then she makes a little dismissive hand wave.
And that ends things, more or less. What is there left to tell her?
• • •
The last thing I do in New York is meet up with an old on-again, off-again guy I know from when I was covering New York City politics for the Daily News. We have drinks. He rants about Bill de Blasio. I know what he’s expecting after the dinner, it’s why I called him up, and I wonder abstractly whether I really want to go through with it. He’s a perfectly acceptable candidate—decent looking, relatively skillful in bed, unattached, and generally not a creep. It’s not like I’m dying with desire, but I wouldn’t mind resetting the “last time I got laid” clock so that I can stop hearing it ticking me closer to my grave. Plus, at this point it’d be more awkward than it’s worth to bow out. We end up going to his apartment and having what I think of as an “empty-calories fuck,” enjoyable but not quite enjoyable enough to be worth it.
I head back to my sublet feeling even further outside myself, and though I know I need to respond to Bob, put my name in the hat for New Delhi or let the opportunity slip, instead of calling him on Skype I decide to email Diego. I’m not sure why, so I leave the subject blank. I type his name, and then I remember Raul telling me to find another war, one we’re winning. So I type one sentence, “Are there any wars right now where we’re not losing?” And within fifteen minutes he responds with one word.
“Colombia.”
II
What good is a revolution if we’re counted among its casualties?
—Aria Dean
1
MASON 2004–2005
My father was a miner back when that was still a thing, back when you could be a miner and think that someday your son might be one, too. These days he walks with a stoop in his right shoulder, the gift of a rockfall in ’83. He’s got arthritis, and there’s a delicate way he gets up from chairs, navigating himself around the damage he’s done to his body. He has raging tempers. Bouts of deep depression. But doing hard work, physical work, he always told me, was the best way of quieting yourself and fastening your mind to God.
When I started out in the teams, I thought it wasn’t so different. The work a bridge between my father’s life and mine. You could see it in the way a man like Jefe, my team sergeant, prepared his kit. Not with love, not exactly. Not the way a gun enthusiast oils an AR, or a suburban dad fastens bits in his eight-hundred-dollar power drill. No. With a practiced, unconscious care. If you could see that care and then see the way my father prepared, bringing his gear in line—lamp battery, breathing canister, rock hammer—bringing himself in line, each limb, each finger a piece of equipment, then you’d see that connection. Men like us are always aware of the tools our lives hang on, their capabilities and weaknesses, just like we’re always aware of our bodies, of our pains and limitations—shot knees, shot backs. Sore muscles strung across rough bones.
Back then I believed my father’s work digging coal in the Pennsylvania hills and providing for his family really was a prayer, made not with words but with blood and sweat. And I believed my work was the same. But I was starting to be troubled by the occasional mission that made you question. Like the raid on Ammar al-Zawba’i.
• • •
Al-Zawba’i’s house was the nicest I ever raided. Not the wealthiest—we raided plenty of pimped-out palaces across Iraq—but it was classy. More books than I’ve ever seen in any house, American or Iraqi or otherwise. Some were in English. Mostly history books but also a worn old Huckleberry Finn. I won’t forget seeing that.
While we were flex-cuffing him,
