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  “Well, sir, this guy”—Specialist Haitian Sensation pointed at the Sahwa member in khaki—“says that his group already went through, and he was late, so he just tried to get his paycheck. These other guys”—he now pointed at Boss Johnson II’s crew—“they stopped him from cutting and told him they’d slice open his mother’s throat or something if he got paid before they did. That’s the juice of it, ya feel me?”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I got you,” I said. “Thanks. He’s right. Banana-Hands finished up already. You”—I pointed at the Sahwa in khaki—“you stay here.” I pointed at the ground and then at Boss Johnson II. Turning to Boss Johnson II, I continued, “Tell Boss Johnson II here that I’m considering him responsible for this man’s getting paid now.” I grabbed the hands of the two men who had been arguing and raised them in triumph, like a boxing referee. “Today, you get paid together, or you don’t get paid at all! Sunni and Shias, unite!”

  The Bulldozer laughed with delight at my solution but assured me it would work. “They be friends for money,” he said. “For now.” He and Specialist Haitian Sensation stayed with Boss Johnson II and the men, ensuring such.

  I took a deep breath and assessed the progress of the line. It wrapped itself all of the way out of the entryway and into the concrete courtyard that led to the main ECP. As I debated whether to sneak back upstairs quietly and let this debacle sort itself out, I spotted the terp Super Mario, Mojo, Mojo’s father, Rahdi, and Abu Adnan in the open courtyard. Abu Adnan, dressed in a mud-stained grey dishdasha, yelled passionately at Rahdi, who kept trying to speak in rebuttal to no avail. Figuring Saba al-Bor’s mayor could use some assistance, I walked up to their circle.

  Abu Adnan was a sheik and Sahwa leader of one of Saba al-Bor’s eastern villages, just northeast and over a ravine from Haydar’s village. Unlike Haydar, though, Abu Adnan had facilitated AQI movement and operations in his village throughout the Iraq War, and many Shia leaders still held blood grudges against him for unknown sins committed in years past. Four of his brothers were locked away at Camp Bucca for extortion, kidnapping, murder, and an RPG attack on an American tank, respectively. Like a mutating cockroach, though, Abu Adnan simply refused to go away, somehow managing to avoid his own detainment by continually promising Coalition forces valuable intelligence and his personal loyalty. Although he was a weak leader prone to blaming others for his own failures, his tribe was large, well connected, and absolutely vital to the reconciliation—an inconvenient truth that undoubtedly played a role in Higher’s decision to keep him around.

  “What’s up?” I asked Super Mario.

  “Abu Adnan, he says that Saba al-Bor Nahia [the local council] fuck him out of trash-trucks contract. Mayor Rahdi, he says that trash-trucks contract decided by Taji Qada [the provincial council]. But Abu Adnan, he’s no good at listening. He just keeps yelling and saying Rahdi fuck him out of contract.”

  The two Arabs suddenly noticed my presence, and I shook both of their hands. Taking advantage of Super Mario’s presence, I interjected into their conversation.

  “Why are you giving Rahdi a hard time, Abu Adnan? You know if he says something is at the Qada, that’s where it is at. You gotta trust your mayor.”

  “Yes, yes, but of course,” the young sheik said, smiling guardedly. Abu Adnan was one of the youngest sheiks in our area, along with Haydar. “But, Lieutenant, where is Captain Whiteback? I must speak with him.”

  Secrets don’t make friends, Sheik, I thought to myself. But instead of vocalizing this sarcasm, I said, “He’s busy right now, Abu Adnan. I know he wants to talk to you though. We’ve been hearing a lot of rumors.”

  “They are rumors, untrue rumors!” Maybe I shouldn’t have hinted at his untoward liaisons in front of Rahdi and Mojo, but Abu Adnan’s reputation did not qualify as shocking news to anyone. “My men are good men. The Shias are trying to discredit me!”

  I could sense both Rahdi’s and Mojo’s discomfort, as they were both Shias. “Don’t worry about that now, just show up to Captain Whiteback’s security meeting next week, and you can talk to him then. For now, concentrate on keeping your men in line, and tell them to wait their turn to get paid.”

  I turned to leave, but the sheik grabbed my shoulder. “Yes, well, some of my men are not on your lists.”

  Jesus, I thought. We’d been over this how many times already with the Sahwa leaders? If I let this go unchecked, Skerk might strangle Abu Adnan by the time he and his men made it to the front of the line. I had to make the correction.

  “Then they won’t get paid,” I said. “You know the rules. All of the lists are approved at the beginning of the month by you and the security council, and that’s the list we use at the end of the month for payment.”

  The sheik spoke again, and I saw Super Mario straighten his back in surprise and bite down on his lip. “Translate what he said,” I instructed the terp. “Word for word.”

  “He say that you are liar because Americans always have more money and that you won’t give it to him because of his brothers at Bucca.”

  I felt the red rise instantly. “Dude, do not ever claim I’m lying,” I shouted at the sheik, purposefully getting as uncomfortably close to his face as possible. My Irish temper had caught fire, but I still managed to resist the urge to strike him with a left cross. Already, he had broken eye contact and was skulking away from me. I continued yelling. “Take it up with Skerk if you don’t believe me. But they aren’t getting paid if they aren’t on that fucking list.” I paused, took a deep breath, and continued speaking. I hated these petty Arab alpha-male games. Really, I did. They offended my idealistic liberal sensibilities.

  “That’s the way it works, Sheik. If you don’t like it, I’m sure we can find someone else willing to run the Sahwa contract for your village.”

  Super Mario translated my rant, and Abu Adnan quickly sputtered out an apology, bowing his head toward me respectfully. He also left shortly thereafter, under the pretense of checking on his men in line. Rahdi patted me on the shoulder and thanked me for my help. Mojo poked me in the stomach.

  “Want some cigarettes?” he asked. His green eyes sparkled with eagerness.

  “I’m good,” I said. “I still have some left from the last pack I bought from you.”

  “What about some Boom-Booms? Wild Tigers? Some Iraqi porn?”

  I closed my eyes, smirking, and tried to ignore the headache coming on. My temples pounded, and I was dehydrated. “No, thanks, Mojo. I’ll let you know when I do, though.”

  I walked into the Internet room five minutes later. Across from me, Private Smitty showed Phoenix how to set up an e-mail account on Google and patiently explained the purpose of a password hint. I sat down, plugged my headphones in to listen to music, and logged on to my blog. I thought about where all of the men downstairs, currently employed by the Iraqi government and the U.S. Army, had been one year ago, before the reconciliation. Before the Sahwa. I was fairly certain they had been caked in gunpowder and dripping with American blood. I trusted that some of the sheiks truly believed in freedom, if not for their country then at least for their neighborhoods and their people. Did their pipe swingers? Did these paramilitants believe in anything beyond the promise of a monthly stipend, and should they even have to? Could someone with a full stomach and a warm bed ever rightfully doubt the intentions and ideals of those without, who sought the same thing through whatever means presented themselves?

  I didn’t know the answers to these questions. So I began to type what I did know.

  DEAR JOHN

  The first came in a MySpace message. The second came during a phone call, initiated after some postmission e-mail hackings. The third arrived in a care package in the form of divorce papers, tucked carefully between a jumbo can of Slim Jim beef snacks and ten logs of smokeless tobacco. The fourth was indirectly expressed, when the recipient wasn’t picked up at the airport for leave.

  Those were just the Dear John letters we knew about while in Iraq. Things got worse once we
redeployed back to Hawaii.

  Dear Johns were as old as war itself. In them, wives and girlfriends explained to their deployed soldier why they no longer loved them, and why Jody—the nonmilitary guy back in America who led a simple, soft life—made her happy. Some were filled with excuses, others with guilt, but all conveyed the message plain as day that their sender wasn’t willing to wait. Human beings have always been fickle, needy creatures, and all the gravities of war and the dependence on loved ones it spawned for the soldiers fighting them did not change that.

  Before we left, it all sounded so simple, so banal—like a relic of past wars, ones that didn’t have instant communication tools like the Internet. No one believed it could happen to him. At least, not at first. Not until it kept happening. Not until we realized that it really was that simple, and that when we departed the civilized world to fight a war no one cared about, let alone understood, emotional vacuums ripped open, and, now, things weren’t just uncivilized where we were. We became slaves to circumstance.

  Upon returning home from a previous deployment, one of my NCOs discovered his young bride had run off with Jody. Shortly thereafter, he put Jody in the hospital for six weeks, permanently crushing the guy’s nasal cavity in the process. He consequently spent some time in jail for assault, but law and justice have never been the same thing.

  That was the warrior’s fantasy and, conversely, also his nightmare. Give us something to love, and we’d kill for it. Give us something to hate, and we had no choice.

  This NCO’s forearms were covered in tattoos that read “Trust No Bitch” in Latin. He explained that the phrase wasn’t just referring to women. His horror story was not rare—certainly not rare enough. Every military base across the world was saturated with Dear John tales, gnawing at the underbelly of our continental consciousness. Not that anyone cared. After all, these things happened. It was the military. It was war. It was life.

  Our soldiers were not saints, and in many cases, they weren’t the greatest husbands or boyfriends either. But that was beside the point. Soldiers were trained to be loyal, and the type of loyalty we learned in Iraq could not be conveyed to those back home, whether they stayed true or not. We relied on one another to survive, trusting each other with our very lives, under the most trying of circumstances. That was not something even the most eloquent of us could explain to civilians, no matter how hard we tried.

  Dear Johns crushed men of otherwise unquestionable strength and total resoluteness. In the time they most needed something right and theirs, it was taken away from them. It wasn’t like getting dumped—it had a far more resounding impact on the soldier. He became rougher, harsher, crueler. With his ties to home cut, he more fully embraced the Iraq environment, as he had no choice but to do so. Truthfully, it usually made him a better soldier, but he lost some vital slivers of his humanity in the process. The lost pieces were scattered in the desert of a far away land and would not be coming home with the rest of his body when the tour ended. Every man deserved to hide away his own hopes in his cave before the big hunt. Not every man returned to his cave to find them still there.

  As the physical manifestation of every soldier’s worst fears, Dear Johns didn’t just impact the recipient. They affected the psyches of teams, sections, platoons, and troops, bringing home to everyone the recognition that the same thing could happen to them and forcing them to wonder if it was going to. Or if it already had and they just didn’t know about it yet. This mind fuck was the worst part for many. Fifteen months was a long time to be left alone with our own thoughts, and all of this only compounded the normal stresses on relationships trying to survive a fifteen-month combat deployment.

  In the mean time, we waged a counterinsurgency.

  My Dear Johned soldiers said they got over things. It took time, of course, and a lot of talking and venting and even some crying, but they all said they were better off because of the experience.

  That was what they said.

  DOMINOES

  “Days like this, I think to myself, Self, Iraq ain’t so bad!”

  Staff Sergeant Bulldog laughed uproariously at his own statement, which caused Staff Sergeant Boondock and Doc to join in, caught up in the good cheer. The Sons of Iraq gathered around the table with us gazed on in confusion. Suge, seated directly to my left, yelled at a small boy, who ran off toward a nearby hut. I wiped some beads of sweat from my hair with my hand as my Kevlar helmet lay at my side. We had all taken our helmets off.

  “More chai is coming!” Suge yelled. “Time for a new game!”

  After a grueling burst of patrolling, when we had been out on Route Tampa for sixteen to eighteen hours a day for a solid week hunting vehicle-borne IEDs (VBIEDs), which was really just a fancy way of saying car bomb, I directed our platoon’s area reconnaissance mission on this lazy March morning to the southwestern outreaches of Saba al-Bor. The solace of spring permeated the countryside, complete with idle greenery, plenty of shade, and slow, meandering streams. We needed a break, and our troubles, resentments, and angers blew away here, like leaves in the wind. A few soldiers and I had dismounted to talk with the local Sahwa at their shed and subsequently struck up a game of dominoes, or as Staff Sergeant Bulldog called it, bones. Our four Strykers were parked in a tight coil twenty feet to our north, where the gunners provided security overwatch and the rest of the platoon slept. We had been out in sector for three hours, and I had no intention of bringing us back to the combat outpost for at least a few more. We needed this. More importantly, we deserved this.

  The sight of American Strykers and the presence of razor concertina wire were norms for locals in this pocket of Iraq.

  “Suge, how’d you get so good at bones?” Doc asked, as he lit our terp’s cigarette.

  “Oh, I have played the dominoes very much,” Suge said, pleased that his victories had not gone unnoticed. “I remember this one game, in youth, when a Syrian tried to knife at me for beating him so good!” He blew smoke from his mouth, retrospectively cursing in Arabic about the stabbing Syrian, and stroked his grey moustache. “Syrians, they are crazy, you know,” he finally said. “Craziest of the Arabs, those fucking Syrians.”

  My two section sergeants just stared at Suge, waiting for his rambling to stop, before they interjected. Staff Sergeant Boondock arched an eyebrow my way, as if I were somehow responsible for our interpreter’s lunacy.

  “I don’t know nuthin’ about no Syrians, but I do know me and my Iraqi partner here, we’s gonna smoke this round of bones for sure,” Staff Sergeant Bulldog said, adding a grunt at the end for emphasis. The teams were me and Staff Sergeant Boondock, Suge and Doc, Staff Sergeant Bulldog and a teenage Sahwa who kept staring at him wide-eyed in wonder, and a duo of thirty-something Sons of Iraq. So far, Suge’s team and Staff Sergeant Bulldog’s team had alternated winning, mainly due to the domino prowess of those two.

  Just as a small Iraqi boy returned to our table with a tray full of chai, my dismounted radio buzzed, coming in as clear as God on Judgment Day. “White 1, this is Bounty Hunter 6.” It was Captain Whiteback.

  “Nooooo!” Staff Sergeant Boondock bellowed. “Don’t answer it, sir! For the love of God, don’t answer it!” He grabbed Staff Sergeant Bulldog’s partner by the shoulders and pressed his face next to his own. “Think of the children!”

  We all knew what this meant—it meant a frago; more importantly, it meant an abrupt end to our separate peace. I sighed and responded, ignoring Staff Sergeant Boondock’s plea. “This is White 1.”

  “White 1, Bounty Hunter 6. Frago follows.” Our commander paused. “It’s Task Force Cobra related.”

  This caused Staff Sergeant Boondock to break into an inaudible wail. Task Force Cobra1 consisted of special operations personnel and Ranger Regiment soldiers whose sole mission was to conduct raids on high-level enemy targets. Although based in Baghdad proper, they occasionally came up our way, following their targets. They were clearly the best of the best, and their successes were well known and well docum
ented; as a result, most regular army soldiers were awestruck when they saw Task Force Cobra soldiers operating. Like us, Task Force Cobra wore the American urban camouflage uniform. Unlike us, however, they weren’t beholden to counterinsurgency doctrine and were infamous across our brigade for destroying houses and terrifying locals, then leaving the mess for the landowning unit to clean up. Back in the winter, they destroyed a house in eastern Saba al-Bor with 105-mm artillery shells dropped from an AC-130 Spectre Gunship. They believed the house was wired to blow up, but it turned out to be abandoned. The Iraqi neighborhood was understandably irate. Task Force Cobra consisted of professionals and experts certainly, but they only had to focus on the raid itself. Nothing else mattered in their line of work.

  “Two brothers got detained last night,” Captain Whiteback continued. “IED makers for AQI. They rigged up a suicide vest for their cousin last year that blew up in Ramadi, killing ten people in a market. I need you guys to go check out the damage Task Force Cobra did to the neighborhood during the detainment process.” Anticipating my reaction, or perhaps arguing with himself out loud, he continued, “Their job isn’t to worry about second- and third-order effects. As the landowners that’s our responsibility.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  “They’re at a farm east of your current location. Oh, and take pictures. Lots. Squadron needs them for the PowerPoint slides. You know how it is, something didn’t happen unless there’s a PowerPoint slide to prove it.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  “Sorry to end the game, but duty calls.”

  I stared at the radio in disbelief. Everyone else was already heading back to the vehicles. Had he really hinted about knowing about the dominoes game?