“No,” al-Zawba’i screamed. “He is ill! He is ill!” His English had what sounded like a British accent, and was far clearer than any of the terps we worked with. He was a former intelligence officer in Saddam’s fedayeen, well educated, connected, and knee-deep in the more nationalist and less religious factions of the then-growing insurgency. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have said we should leave him alone and focus on the real crazies, but, you know, hindsight.
The son stopped in the middle of the room, wild-eyed and confused, then stepped toward me. I shifted my weight and slammed my buttstock into his stomach, sending him down hard. The father started shouting in Arabic, very fast and loud, as I zip-tied the son. I guess he was too emotional to reach for his polished English. Our terp, a young Yahzidi kid named Tahseen who within ten years would be murdered by ISIS along with his whole family, exchanged some rapid-fire talk with al-Zawba’i, and then filled us in.
“He was taken by the Angels of Death.”
We’d never heard of it. Yet another militia that’d basically named themselves like a heavy metal band.
“They are a Shi’a . . . maybe under Sadr . . . maybe . . . ummm . . . crime . . . they crime . . .”
“Gangsters,” al-Zawba’i said, irritated.
“Yes. Gangsters,” Tahseen said. “They took him and put electric cables to his head. Now he needs medicines.”
“He cannot help being this way,” al-Zawba’i said.
In an upstairs bedroom, decorated with stuffed animals and Monet prints, the ex-fedayeen’s seven-year-old daughter was cowering behind her bed. We brought her down and tried to calm her. She seemed to have some sort of disability, maybe a genetic disorder. Her left side didn’t function right. She was shaking with fear, and my friendly “Salaam aleikum” didn’t help. She’d seen a lot already, I suppose, in her short time on earth, and things weren’t about to get better. Her eyes were already puffy, she’d already been crying, but she burst out again.
“Where’s her mother?”
Our terp shook his head. Not alive, I guess.
“Is there a neighbor?” Jefe asked al-Zawba’i. “Someone we can call to look after your daughter and your son?”
He sat, stone-faced. Any name he gave us, that’d be a lead and he knew it. I shrugged. The house had three desktop computers, two laptops, and seven cell phones for the analysts. We’d have more leads soon anyway.
At one point, al-Zawba’i looked at Ocho and said, “Maybe not all of you, but some of you will die here.” He smiled.
Ocho laughed. “If I die here,” he said to al-Zawba’i, “I hope I die fucking your mom.”
We finished up, and as we prepared to leave, I asked Tahseen what he thought would happen to the little girl.
He looked her over slowly, considering the question, and then said, “She will marry a man who beats her, and have children who cannot read.”
• • •
I was a junior medic then, an 18 Delta new to Special Forces and a little out of place but getting away with it because medics are allowed to be weird. And I had a baby on the way. Natalia in her third trimester, me a soon-to-be new parent eight time zones away and still wrapping my head around the notion of childbirth, around what was happening to Natalia, and to me, that we were slowly becoming a family, or perhaps had already become a family, while I was over there, driving on endless boring patrols, playing Xbox, and, occasionally, killing people.
“Hey, try not to die, okay?” Natalia told me over the phone a few days after the al-Zawba’i raid. “I’d rather not raise this baby alone.”
“Well, in that case . . .” I said.
At the time if you’d asked me why I was over there, despite having a pregnant wife at home, due close enough to my redeployment date that I might miss the birth of my daughter, I would have said I was doing it for my family. That I was experiencing the violence and horror of this place so they didn’t have to experience the same things in Fayetteville, North Carolina. That I was behaving honorably. Being a good citizen. A good soldier. A good man. So my child could have a parent to look up to, to see as a role model. So my child could understand that anything good in this world requires sacrifice, real sacrifice, and pain. And I would have said the mission was worth it, that the men we were hunting were truly evil, and we had the videos to prove it. And on later deployments, back to Iraq, still with the CIF, when we were doing the same missions but also training up Iraqi special forces, it was gratifying in a different way. Ninety-day deployments, raid after raid after raid in Baghdad and in the belt of suburbs around the city, and the Iraqis getting a little better each time. You feel this huge sense of purpose. Like you’re really making a difference in the world. And I want my child to see what it’s like to have a parent who really puts his heart and soul into what he does, and gets back a sense of identity and value and meaning.
That’s what I would have said. The truth, though, is that I loved it. I couldn’t have even said why. At the time, I was so young I didn’t know what was going on. It was a blur. Before some raids—don’t laugh—but I’d have an OCB, which is the official DoD nomenclature for Out of Control Boner, and I’d be thinking, what’s with the goddamn chubby in my pants? I’m supposed to be thinking about my sector, about digging my corner, clearing the fatal funnel, but everybody’s going to see I’m popping a goddamn chubby! And if you’d asked me the first time I got shot at
