Redeployment(66)

“The circumstances,” she said, “being a war. Where the Army was going to go kill all those people you’ve been mistaken for. And you get to watch.”

I rolled my eyes, though I was angrier than I let on. So I took the hookah and smoked for a while in silence. The benefit of hookah is that those moments aren’t dead space. You can blow smoke rings. You can perform and not say anything. You can think.

She didn’t seem to realize how this conversation was different from class, where we bullshitted over political theory. This mattered. And every time she contradicted me with her smug little assumptions about who I was and why I did what I’d done, it grated. It made me want to shut my mouth and hate her. Hate her for her ignorance when she was wrong, and hate her for her arrogance when she was right. But if you’re going to be understood, you have to keep talking. And that was the mission. Make her understand me.

“When I graduated from basic,” I said, “my father was prouder of me than he’d ever been. By this point, he was listening to Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Hannity nonstop, and my mother had a standing rule that he wasn’t allowed to talk politics in the house. Afghanistan, back then, felt like it’d been a complete success, and Bush was making the case for Iraq.”

Zara said, “I remember.” I put down the pipe and she picked it up.

“I’d been at Fort Benning,” I said, “getting the shit beat out of me. It’d been hot and awful and I’d been screamed at and PT’d half to death. I hadn’t seen my dad in months. But images of Saddam were everywhere. TV. Newspapers.” I took a breath. “And then there he was. The same face. The same build. He even walked with that cocky f*cking strut. And there was that mustache.”

“So you saw him,” she said.

“And I saw Saddam.” I took a breath. “I mean, my dad, too. But everybody, my platoon, the DIs, they all knew what he looked like.”

Zara blew smoke. “You saw him through their eyes.”

“Through my own.”

“But how they saw him,” she said. “Maybe part of how they saw you, too?”

“I wonder if he knew,” I said. “We don’t really talk, but, I wonder. I mean, the man is an *. It’s just who he is. But I wonder if deep down, beyond the politics, if the mustache was a giant ‘f*ck you.’ Maybe not to America, but to Americans, you know? All those God-fearing *s who talk Jesus but don’t know that true Christianity is the Coptic Church.”

“My father’s a deacon,” she said. “But he’s not a very good man. It took me a long time to realize that… .”

“And I… I was there because of him. When he hugged me and told me how proud he was of me—which he didn’t even do at my high school graduation—I took it in. Graduation from basic’s a big deal. All this pageantry. Uniforms and flags and everybody telling everybody over and over how brave we were, how patriotic, and what great Americans we were. You can’t resist hundreds of people feeling proud of you. You can’t. And then my dad, like it was just an offhand comment, he asks me, ‘So, when you signed up, why didn’t you pick infantry?’ and the feeling popped like a bubble.”

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing. I was in the Army now. I went to training. I got care packages from my mom and patriotic e-mails from my dad. He’d send me PowerPoints with pictures of soldiers, or jokes and speeches about ‘the troops’ that talked about them like they shat gold. I was eighteen, I ate it up. But I was also learning how to do propaganda in our classes, and it felt pretty f*cking weird.

“We had one instructor,” I said, “who spent a class telling us about all the advertisement that went into us joining the Army and how dumb we were to fall for it. He’d say, ‘I love the Army. But how bullshit are those commercials?’ He was all about getting us to recognize the propaganda in civilian life so we could use the same techniques in war. He’d say, ‘Real life doesn’t fit on bumper stickers, so remember: If you tell too much truth, nobody will believe you.’”

“I don’t think that’s a good way to think about it.”

“Yeah, well, he’s right. In Iraq, we told a lot of truth and a lot of bullshit to the Iraqis. Some of the bullshit worked really well.”

“It’s strange to think of somebody doing that for a living,” she said. “You hear the word propaganda, it makes you think of those World War Two posters. Or Stalinist Russia. Something from another time, before we got sophisticated.”