The first thing I saw inside was a toddler whose stomach had been blown open by shrapnel that hit his little belly crosswise, spilling his guts onto the ground. His mother was crouched over him, mechanically stuffing the intestines back into the dead child’s chest cavity. The kid’s eyes were open, looking upward, and he had a baseball cap on that read “Pay Me!” It was a fucked-up thing to see. We continued to clear the house, and in the first room to the right there was an old man whose left knee had been shattered so thoroughly the bottom of his leg was just hanging on by skin tissue. He was still alive, if you want to call it that, still conscious anyway, and choking on his own blood. I gave him morphine and he died minutes later. The rest of the family was huddled together, cut up by bits of debris and building material sent flying. I let Jefe and our terp tell the family what had happened to the old man and the little boy, and then watched as Jefe left to speak with the Rangers outside, who were celebrating their first kills as a unit. I wanted to bring them inside to look at the boy, to see what they’d done, but Jefe said it was a bad idea.
“They’re normal kids,” he said. “It’ll fuck them up.”
“Good,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Stuff like that doesn’t fuck people up the right way.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, because I hadn’t been to Afghanistan as part of a detachment yet, and hadn’t seen the ways people become cold. But I trusted Jefe, like we all did, and backed off.
After that incident, I tried to do the old soldier’s routine of lies and half-truths to the family back home. “We got some pretty evil guys the other day,” I told Natalia over the phone, speaking about the raid like I was delivering a press release. “Foreign fighters. Guys who came to Iraq because they wanted to kill innocent people.”
“What’s wrong?” she said. One thing I like about Natalia is that she sees through me. But I knew I probably had the wives’ network on my side, voices in her head telling her not to press too hard. Your soldier needs his space.
“Okay, okay,” I said, scrambling for what to say, how to deflect. “It’s nothing. Just a little strange, you know. Jefe says a soldier’s job isn’t to kill, but to protect life. It’s just that he protects life by killing.”
“What happened?” Natalia said, her voice firm.
A part of me wanted to tell her nothing. She’s not a soldier, she couldn’t understand. Or something like that. This part of me spoke in a stern, gruff, manly tone. She’s a pregnant woman, she can’t deal with it. Only guys like me can deal with this shit. Of course, I was really just terrified of what she’d think of me. And beyond that, terrified of what I’d think of myself if I started talking about it.
“We shot a kid,” I said. “I did what I could, but . . .”
I’m not sure if that was selfish or brave.
Things were slow after that, op-tempo at a crawl for two weeks and then—one final incident. It began with a photograph.
Jefe showed it to us in the old dining hall of one of Uday’s palaces, a place we’d taken over and turned into a briefing room. There was a giant, crystal chandelier, gilded molding around the walls, and a pile of debris from bombing damage. “This is courtesy of Fifth Group,” he said, and handed out a photo of an insurgent named Sufyan Arif at, of all things, his baby daughter’s first birthday party. In the photo, Arif was tall, dignified, holding on to his daughter with both hands as she perched uncertainly on, I kid you not, the back of a camel. The girl was in a shiny silk dress, Arif was in some fancy sheik getup, and neither was smiling.
“The girl,” Jefe deadpanned, “is not a target.”
And then he showed us a few more photos, these of flayed feet and severed heads.
“This guy is a real piece of shit,” Jefe told us. On the unit laptop he pulled up a grainy video of a masked Arif wielding a knife. In front of him was a weeping young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, and Arif put the blade to the kid’s neck and started cutting. An amazing amount of blood rushed out, but Arif wasn’t getting enough of a sawing action to sever the neck so he withdrew the knife and started hacking. It’s the kind of thing we’d all seen before. Most of these guys are pretty unimaginative when they’re filming their torture porn. There’s even something weirdly cartoonish about it, like it’s a low-budget horror film, not real life. Earlier in the deployment we’d hit a real, no-kidding torture house, and even that was only a bit shocking. On the one hand, we were face-to-face with actual, mutilated corpses. I forced myself to remember that once, these were bodies intertwined with souls and made in the image of God and so on. But after enough of that stuff . . . I forget who said it, that stepping over a single corpse is painful, but walking over a pile of corpses doesn’t bother you at all.
So the video didn’t bother us. If anything, it was gratifying. Most of us had been in enough murky war zones to lack the near-religious faith in democracy that the war was sold on. If you’d asked our team, “Tell me how this ends,” we probably would have answered, “Badly.” And though weapons of mass destruction remained a top PIR, and would stay that way through at least 2005, that was
