style="font-size:15px;"> “Hell no,” I said. “I don’t want any muj watching me take a dump, dead or alive.” I chose the entrance on the left and walked into the room. The whole place felt like a haunted house with bad ju-ju. Only hours beforehand, this room held a weapons cache for the terrorists trying to keep a stronghold in the city. There weren’t any windows, so I clicked on my headlamp and cleared a place to squat. Bullet shells, hypodermic needles, and busted up chairs littered the floor. A rug lay in the corner, stained with blood. Holden waited for me on the other side of the door.
After a few minutes, I heard him light a cigarette.
“Freyer?” he said.
“What?”
“If we make it back, don’t tell Maria about the smoking, okay?” He meant if we make it back to Bozeman, where we’re both from. We still had two months.
“Man, she should just be happy you’re alive,” I said.
“Try telling her that,” he said. “It’s being pregnant. She’s fussy about my health now.”
I pulled my pants back up and joined him in the hallway. “In that case,” I said, “You’d better let me help you with those; for your health and all.”
He smiled and tossed me a smoke.
When we got back to the main room, most of the guys were asleep. I could hear Ruiz snoring, and right next to him lay Sergeant Fisher, twitching away in some sort of half sleep. It’s an odd thing, seeing your squad so vulnerable like that. They almost looked like strangers—my brothers, my fellow Marines—the way the moon cast a blue light across their bodies. It made them look holy. More than anything, it made them look dead.
Refugee
I took my family, and we did what we were told, leaving our house in Fallujah before the second U.S.-led assault. I paid all my money and one basket of food to a cab driver outside the city. He took us as far as our money would go, about seven miles from the al-Hadrha district of Bagdhad. We walked the rest of the way, my wife and two daughters, plus three satchels of belongings that I slung over my back and carried like a camel. I remember feeling the sun warm my shoulders and the taste of dust kicked up along the road. Some days, it felt as though those were the only things left untouched in Iraq: ceaseless heat and tiny particles of the past that could survive any method of warfare.
I heard Doctors Without Borders had set up a camp in al-Hadrha for families like ours. I didn’t know who they were or why they would come, but they took us in. We stayed in pole tents with thousands of others—all of this in a district already as crowded as a rug factory. Volunteers served small meals three times a day. Others showed us how to set up tents for families that kept coming. We raised walls, hammered stakes, and secured door flaps all without speaking each other’s language. It didn’t matter. The work needed doing. We did it together. The city sang around us—sometimes air raids, other times the ritual calls to prayer.
Within a week, my wife found sewing work in Bagdhad. During the daytime, tents were only for the sick or elderly so my daughters played outside. Without any schools, gangs of youth loitered between rows of tents. One afternoon, an elderly woman died, and a small crowd of orphan boys took her santoor to entertain themselves with music. They danced and clapped, unashamed of their thievery. Other times, the gangs grew restless and taunted each other or dared girls in no-good games. A crippled teen played on my daughters for sympathy, showing them the stump of his contorted left arm, the fleshy stub where his elbow should have been. When Salia came to find me, she said, “That place, father. He’s showing Mishar that place in his pants.” I found them in a partially collapsed tent, the cripple’s pants unzipped, and Mishar with her hands over her face, crying for what she had seen. I shoved the cripple and kicked the rest of the tent down, leaving him trapped to fend for himself.
Each night inside the tents, men and women wept openly. The wounded slept alongside the healthy. Families argued like bleating goats. One time, a man next to me pounded his fists into his cot repeatedly, refusing to stop. It took four of us to brace his arms behind his back. He looked old and failing, his breath hot and stale on my face. “Yalla! Yalla!” he kept shouting. He wanted to go back. He wanted to fight and protect his home. Didn’t we all?
Seven months later, families were allowed to go back. We rode together in a convoy of U.S. Marines. Those men looked indestructible, and yet I knew—we all knew—that the fight in our city had been their hardest yet. I worried for my fellow Fallujahns who stayed behind. We moved slowly along the road and part of me wondered if the convoy was a farce, if the Fallujah I had always known would be completely erased from the Earth.
It took almost fourteen hours to re-enter the city. A fence encircled the perimeter with only three secured gates for thousands of Fallujahns. But these were my people! I felt certain we could thrive again. In line together, we prayed for a new time of peace. I could hardly stand the waiting. I wanted to see my beloved city again, the city of mosques. I could almost taste our famous kabobs and hear vendors singing their prices into the streets. The only blessing while we waited was reuniting with friends we hadn’t seen since the invasion. Malik the butcher. Hakim the street vendor. Uday the chai boy. Little slices of our neighborhood returning home like so many migrating birds. Almost as many were missing: Mohammed, Jamail, Abida the barber with the funny Western moustache.
Finally, we neared the gate. I peered through a ticket window and spotted half a dozen soldiers and shelf after shelf of hardware. It sounded like a swarm of electronic flies, beeping and humming in a generator-powered cacophony. The Marines took our daughters first, and pressed their tiny fingertips onto a curious electronic pad. Then they took profile photos and bantered with a translator about our names and street address. Next, they scanned our eyes and turned the images into code. Finally, they led us, exhausted and thirsty, over to a waiting area along the fence. Already, elders fainted in the sun. When the Marines tried to help, their boss came out and hollered at them to stop.
Thirty minutes later, we received biometric badges. “Welcome to the 21st Century,” the Marine said. A translator repeated in Arabic. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. These identification cards can’t be misplaced. They’re your only pass for this gate. They give you permission to enter your neighborhood. You’re prohibited anywhere else. If you lose your cards, you’re suspect. If you disobey the boundaries, you’re considered hostile.”
I stuffed the cards into my breast pocket. The girls could hardly move, so I carried Salia on my back, her tiny brown legs flopping as we walked. When we got to our block, I knew immediately we should not have come. The wall surrounding our small apartment lay crushed into hunks of jagged concrete and stone. The entire roof had been cleanly peeled away, as though someone lifted jam off the top of a pastry. Crooked spires of rebar poked into the sky where our second story bedrooms used to be. I made my family wait in the street while I ducked beneath a crumbling archway and into the remains of our kitchen.
Alone amidst the rubble, I thought about the old man from the tents at al-Hadhra, the one who couldn’t be quieted. I curled my fists and pounded, till my knuckles bled into the stone. I would have to face my family empty-handed. To tell them we had nothing, that the tents at al-Hadrha offered more than our very own home. I thrashed and kicked, and the ID cards tumbled from my pocket onto the floor. They shone brightly against the dark rubble. I could still smell the fresh plastic lining each card, a toxic omen for the new Fallujah.
Into Pure Bronze
Now that schools are open again and there’s government and voting, we spend our
