Redeployment(37)

“My English is not so good, I think,” she said.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s a bad idea anyway.”

“Will our funding be continued?”

I looked out at the clinic across the street, the love I had for it feeling like a weight in my chest. Two women walked in, followed by a group of children, one of them wearing a blue baseball shirt with sleeves longer than the child’s arms.

“Inshallah,” I said.





? ? ?


I made another trip out to JSS Istalquaal with the intent of meeting with Kazemi, but as soon as I arrived the mission was canceled. Kazemi, I was told, was dead.

“Suicide bomber on a motorcycle,” said the S2 over the phone.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “All he wanted to do was pump water.”

“For what it’s worth,” said the S2, “I don’t think he was the target. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The S2 didn’t know when the funeral would be, and he strongly suggested that it would be unwise to attend in any case. There was nothing to do but try to get on a convoy back to Taji. I arranged for travel in a sort of haze. I ate a Pop-Tarts and muffins dinner. I waited.

At one point, I called my ex-wife on an MWR line. She didn’t pick up, which was probably a good thing but didn’t feel like it at the time. Then I went outside and sat down in a smoke pit with a staff sergeant. His body, with armor on, formed an almost perfect cube. I wondered how much time, as a career military man, he must have spent here already.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you here, risking your life?”

He looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. “Why are you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s a shame,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, which was only halfway done, and ground it out.





? ? ?


Major Zima was doing jumping jacks when I got back to Taji, his belly bouncing in counterpoint to the rest of his body. He would go down and the belly would stay up, then his feet would leave the ground and his stomach would come crashing down. I’d never seen a man work out so much and achieve so little.

“How’re things?” he said breathlessly.

“They’re breaking my heart,” I said. And then, because Bob didn’t care, and Cindy was outside the wire, and there was no one else to talk to, I told Major Zima what was happening. He already knew about Kazemi. It was old news at this point. But he hadn’t heard about the clinic’s funding. He stood and smiled at me, nodding encouragingly, a look of pure idiocy on his face. It was like confessing your sins to Daffy Duck.

“How,” I said at the end, “how do you deal with it? The bullshit?”

Major Zima shook his head sadly. “There is no bullshit.”

“No bullshit?” I said. “In Iraq?” I cracked the sort of cynical smile Bob was always shooting in Cindy’s direction.

Zima kept shaking his head. “There’s a reason for everything,” he said, sounding almost spiritual. “Maybe we can’t see it. But if you were here two years ago…” His face was blank.

“If I was here two years ago what?”

“It was madness,” he said. Zima wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anything. “Things are getting better. What you’re dealing with, it isn’t madness.”

I looked away, and we stood there in silence until I couldn’t put off going to work any longer. I went to the ePRT office, he went back to jumping jacks. When I got to my computer, I sat and stared at it, unsettled. It felt as though Zima’s mask had slipped and given me a glimpse of some incomprehensible sadness, the sadness you saw all around you every time you left the FOB. This country had a history that didn’t reset when a new unit rotated in. This time, these problems, they were an improvement.





? ? ?


Two days later, Major Zima strolled into our office, whistling. He had a large green bag in one hand and a blank piece of paper in the other. He put the paper on my desk, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

He said, “I’m not really sure how you State boys write these things up, but here goes.”

Then he pulled out a pen with a flourish, hunched over the paper, and started writing, reading aloud what he put down.

“Our women’s business association,” he said, “has proved highly successful—”