Redeployment(30)

“Where has he been?” I said.

The Professor asked him, and Kazemi smiled, looked at me, and said, “Ee-ran.”

Everyone knew that word. The American soldiers with me had looked tense from the outset; now they looked murderous. Iran was the major importer of EFPs, a particularly lethal IED that sends a hot liquid metal bullet crashing through the sides of even the most heavily armored vehicles, spraying everybody inside. One EOD tech told me that even if the metal didn’t get you, the change in pressure caused by the sheer speed of the thing would.

Kazemi continued speaking. Occasionally the Professor would frown and say something back. At one point he took his glasses off and rubbed them while shaking his head.

“Ah,” said the Professor. “He went to get marriages.”

“Marriages?” I said. I turned to Kazemi. “Congratulations.” I put my hand over my heart. I was smiling in spite of myself. The soldiers behind me all looked relieved.

“Iranian women are very beautiful,” said the Professor.

Kazemi pulled out a cell phone. He fiddled with it for a bit, then showed it to me. On the screen was a picture of a pretty young woman’s face.

“Madame,” said Kazemi.

“Very lovely,” I said.

He pushed a button and flipped to another picture of another woman, then flipped to another, and another, and another. “Madame. Madame. Madame. Madame,” he said.

“Why is her face bruised?” I said.

The Professor shrugged, and Kazemi kept flipping through pictures.

We talked more about Iranian women and their beauty, I congratulated him on his marriages again, and then another forty minutes of discussion left us with the agreement that I’d figure out a security solution for Kazemi if he’d figure out what it’d take to get the plant on line.

On the drive back, the Professor explained the marriages to me in the tone you’d use to speak with a mentally deficient golden retriever.

“Nikah mut’ah,” he said. “Shi’a allow temporary marriages. Shi’a marry a woman for an hour, the next day marry another.”

“Oh,” I said. “Prostitution.”

“Prostitution is illegal under Islam,” said the Professor.





? ? ?


Two days later, I got back to Taji. As I turned down the road toward the plywood hut we called our office, I saw Major Jason Zima and one of his CAT teams unloading a bunch of boxes from the pickup truck they used to drive around the FOB. I immediately had the sick and certain realization that whatever was in those boxes, it was going to be my problem.

“Sir!” said Major Zima, smiling. “Just the man I wanted to see.”

Zima ran the brigade’s Civil Affairs Company and was thus my closest U.S. military counterpart. He was a stocky man with a bizarrely spherical head that he shaved to a smooth shine each morning. It gave him the appearance, in bright Iraqi sunshine, of a lovingly polished bowling ball resting on a sack of grain. With no hair on his head and eyebrows so fair they were invisible, Zima had no discernible age markers and could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty-five, his cherubic smile making him seem the former and his what-the-hell-is-this-civilian-telling-me frown the latter. In all my interactions with him thus far, he had projected an idiocy so pure it boggled the mind.

“What’s this?” I said.

Major Zima dropped his box to the ground, sending up a dust cloud. Then, waving his right hand with a magician’s flourish, he pulled a Leatherman out of his pocket, bent down, and proceeded to cut open the box.

“Baseball uniforms!” he said, pulling one out to show me. “Fifty of them. Some blue, some gray—like the Union and Confederacy in the Civil War.”

I was still wearing my flak jacket and helmet. I took the helmet off. It felt like I’d need the maximum amount of blood circulation to my brain to make sense of this.

“They’re for you,” Zima said. “Somebody dropped them off with Civil Affairs by accident.”

“What the hell do we need these for?” I said.

He smiled one of his stupidly beatific smiles at me. “They’re for the Iraqis to play baseball in,” he said.

“Iraqis don’t play baseball,” I said.

Zima frowned, as though this complication had just occurred to him. Then, as he looked at the uniform in his hand, his face lit up in a grin.

“Then they can play soccer in them!” he said. “They’ll love it. They play on dirt fields anyway. The leggings will protect them.”