As we shuffled out of the briefing room, I looked at the photo Jefe had passed out. How strange it was to see the child of a man you were about to hunt down. You don’t think of the bad guys having children. You think of them having torture houses and hacksaws and stashes of porn, not daughters.
Please God, I prayed, no more kids.
We stepped out, made our way to the target, and ended up facing an unassuming apartment in a middle-class district of west Baghdad. It would have been unimpressive, deflating after all that prep, but part of the beauty of war is how it heightens your sense of the weight and reality of things.
Before you hit a target there’s a sharpening to every second, eyes and ears tensed, breath shallow, the vibration of your heart beating, drumming through your chest. Your mind stays calm, detached, registering the fear, the excitement, the small movements of the men you’ve trained with, each in their positions, as trained and executed time after time so you don’t have to see but feel Diego, Ocho, Jason, and the rest, and the fear building in your limbs radiates out to them. Radiating back, there’s this sense of control, of power, of yourself as part of a larger organism capable of covering every bloody angle of approach. You pray for something quick. Murderous. And in the long, drawn-out seconds of, well, is it joy? Awe? Something more? In those long, long seconds there are these quick rapid instants, between the blink of an eye, when your instincts, honed predator instincts, they give way to a different kind of alertness. To the alertness of prey. To the knowledge that the men you hunt are meat eaters, too. And that feeling, that sense of yourself and your own mortality and that of the men around you—it lends an aura of the sacred to the profane work to come.
We burst into his house, and the first person we encountered was not Arif himself, but his tiny, young, delicate-looking, and extremely pregnant wife. Who didn’t scream in terror. Who didn’t weep or shout curses at us in Arabic, like we’re accustomed to. Who merely clutched at the wall and started moaning, low, long, and sad. Noises like the ones from birthing videos I’d seen with Natalia before I left, and now here’s this tiny woman, tiny but huge with child, stomach heaving, stretched. I froze. I thought she was going into labor.
I helped her to the floor, pushed aside an end table. A vase with yellow flowers fell off and shattered. There were yellow flowers in every room of that house. It’s funny what you remember. Her eyes were deep brown, she had a long thin face and dark, dark eyebrows.
Ocho found a very young girl with big scared eyes hiding in a closet, the baby from the photo grown up a few more years, and when we brought her in to be with the mother she calmed a bit. Arif put up no fight, which is more common than you’d think. He was heavier than in the photo, more jowly, with a thicker mustache and thinner hair. He sat sullenly, not looking at us, not looking at his hugely pregnant wife, and I got so angry. Look at her. Apologize. This is all your fault.
We wrapped up quick. Nobody wanted to linger. Toward the end we helped his wife up and he shouted something at her, something beyond the Arabic of anybody in the room. It was the first time he seemed emotional, and as the words struck her she stiffened, went cold, refused to look us in the eye. I’ve always wondered what he said. It’s awkward, fighting a war in people’s homes.
Right after, I had all these feelings I couldn’t put a name to. Al-Zawba’i’s daughter kept popping into my head, and so did the dying toddler. I kept thinking of the noise Arif’s wife had made, and I had this fucked-up regret that she hadn’t really been going into labor, or, even more fucked up, that Arif hadn’t tried to pull a gun on us. It would have been something, to take a guy out and deliver his child on the same night.
I called Natalia on an MWR line, wanting to hear how her thirty-four-week appointment had gone.
“Everything is fine,” she said, “fine. Blood pressure’s a little high, baby’s growing a little less than they want, but she’s fine, we’re fine, it’s fine. Come home soon. You don’t want to miss her.”
“You should have Inez say a rosary,” I told her. A priest had told Natalia’s grandmother her prayers had special pull because of her devotion, and she’d never let anyone in the family forget it.
“I’m her favorite grandchild. She’s probably praying right now.”
I hesitated. There was a lot of turbulence in my head then. I thought of Arif’s snuff films, and they calmed me somewhat.
“We got a really evil motherfucker today,” I said.
“Oh.” I could tell Natalia was confused, to have me switching subjects. But the things were all muddled together in my mind.
“His wife was pregnant, and she freaked out when we hit his house.”
“Oh. Okay. That must have been . . . strange.”
“It was, it was.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nah.”
There was a pause, and then, to close things off, I
