The Good Soldiers (23 page)

“Please, can we live in Jordan?” she had been asking him on his recent visits, usually on his last night, as the daughter who had been injured slept between them, which she had been doing since the apartment bombing. “Can we live in Syria? Can we run away? Can we escape?”

“We don’t have enough money,” he would tell her.

“I cannot handle this life,” she would say. “What kind of life is this?”

“Just be patient,” he would say. “You see me working hard.”

And then he would disappear until the next time he got the chance to go home, bringing with him the money he had been paid that month, minus what he had spent on gifts. He liked bringing his family things, though it was never very much. Whatever he brought had to fit neatly in a backpack, so that Iraqis who saw him walking along Route Pluto, or getting into a taxi once he was a mile or so away from the FOB, or getting out and tying his shoes until the taxi disappeared and then getting into a second taxi, or into a third taxi, or standing on a street near his home for a while smoking cigarettes as he decided whether he had been followed, would have no reason to be suspicious.

“I swear, every night I spend home, I can’t sleep, because I expect a knock on the door. ‘Come, sir.’ But anyway, this is our life, so we have to deal with it,” he said. He was walking to the PX now, to see what he could buy for his next trip home. He paused at the entrance so he could be patted down, and then, for $25.11, he bought three bottles of shampoo, a tube of cocoa butter lotion, two bags of Cheetos, a bag of Lifesavers Gummis, two packages of Starbursts, two bags of Hershey’s Kisses, one bag of Skittles, one Twix bar, and one bag of M&Ms.

He took it all back to his room and put it in his locker, next to what he had bought previously: pencils, hair bands, and some lotion for his daughter’s scars. There was a file folder in the locker as well, which contained recommendation letters that he hoped would get him and his family back to the United States, this time as refugees. It was the one promised benefit of being an interpreter, that if you lasted at least a year and had the right recommendation letters, you would be considered for refugee status. The requirement was for five recommendation letters. Izzy had collected nine so far, attesting to how, in one example, his “patriotism landed him in the hospital as he was beaten almost to death for trying to gather information about our area of operations.” The nine were all like that, but he wanted more. He wanted a dozen, if that would help. He wanted two dozen. The notion of escape to his wife might have meant Jordan or Syria, but he wanted the United States, even if it meant the bare-bones existence of a being a refugee. It didn’t matter. This, here, in Baghdad, was a bare-bones existence, and that, there, was the place he had lived for three years as a low-level diplomat and had kept in mind ever since.

His daughters had American names.

He had visited thirty-five states.

He still possessed his Pan American World Airways frequent-flier membership card.

He’d wanted to stay longer, but in 1992 the government brought him back to Baghdad for what they’d said would be a two-week review of the Iraqi mission, revoked his passport, called him, as he remembered it, “a fucking failure,” and told him that if his family asked for political asylum in the United States he would be killed. “Please pack up your things and come back,” he said on the phone to his wife, still in the United States, without elaborating, and of course she understood the meaning of that sentence and came back.

Seven years passed.

Now it was 1999, the daughter who would be injured in the car bombing had just been born, and Izzy was scooped off the street one day by government agents who wanted to know about his feelings toward the United States. They took his shoes, removed his belt, bound his hands, taped his eyes, beat him with electrical cables, kicked him when he fell to the ground, and left him tied-up, blindfolded, bleeding, and alone in a room without food or water. They continued to beat him for several more days, and then they moved him to a jail cell, where he remained for eight months, until his family was able to bribe a judge with money they got by selling their house, their car, and a little boat they would use sometimes on the Tigris River. Freed, unable to sleep, waiting for the middle-of-the-night visitors who would say, “Come, sir,” Izzy made his way to Syria and into Lebanon. His family tried to follow, but they were rounded up at the Syrian border and sent back to Baghdad.

Four years passed.

Now it was 2003. The war had begun. The Americans were in Baghdad, and Izzy, watching from Lebanon, realized he could go back. He took a train into Iraq, then a bus into Baghdad, and then began walking, searching for the right apartment building. There was no electricity. Buildings were on fire. There was shooting in the streets. He found the building and knocked on the door, and when it opened, there was his wife, lit by a few candles, peering into the dark hallway, trying to make out who was there, and then seeing him. Thanks to the American invasion, he was home.

Another four years passed.

Now it was October 26, 2007, and Izzy was thinking back to those first moments after the door opened. “I could not say any words,” he said as he sat in his room on the FOB. “Just kiss her. Hug her.” His older daughter, the one born in New York, ran to him. The younger one, whom he hadn’t seen since she was a newborn, remained in the room’s shadows. “Who’s this girl?” he said, moving toward her, reaching for her, but she had no idea who he was and didn’t yet know the tenderness of a father’s voice. She shrank from him, frightened. It took her a while to become the girl who would trust him so thoroughly that when she was being worked on in the FOB’s aid station, his hand would be the one she held, and now that he had that trust, the least he could do when he went home was to take her some candy and hair bands and American-made lotion.

He wondered every so often: What would American soldiers think if they came to his apartment in the middle of the night on a clearance operation? They would see very little furniture. They would see recently painted walls bruised with soot stains. They would see a refrigerator with a deep dent in it, and not know that it came from the flying glass produced by a bomb blast. They would see a young girl with a scar on the side of her head sleeping in the middle of her parents’ mattress. They would see that among the clothing they had piled in the middle of the floor was a pair of purple sandals, and for a fleeting moment a soldier might be reminded of home. Five minutes in, five minutes out. One more Iraqi family. That’s what they would probably think. And they would be right.

“I hate being alone,” Izzy said now, looking around his little room. “Believe me, this place is killing me.”

He turned on the TV and fiddled with a piece of wire he’d fashioned into an antenna until a picture appeared. He was hoping for soccer, but all he could get was a snowy image of four men in long beards wearing robes called
dishdashas
and talking to one another. They seemed angry. They were raising their voices. Jihadists, an American in need of an interpreter might think, but Izzy said they were just four Iraqi men reciting poetry.

“My life is like a bag of flour, thrown through wind and into thorn bushes,” he said, interpreting what one of them was saying.

“No, no. Like dust in the wind. My life is like dust in the wind,” he said, correcting himself.

“It’s like a hopeless man,” he explained.

“You know,” Kauzlarich said of Izzy, “if you put a monocle and a top hat on him, he’d look like Mr. Peanut.”

October 28 now. Kauzlarich’s birthday had arrived, and he, Izzy, and Brent Cummings were about to leave to see Colonel Qasim, who had continued to promise a big party.

“You boys ready?” Kauzlarich asked the soldiers in his security detail.

“Let’s do the damn thing,” one of the soldiers said.

“Not many getting hit lately,” said Staff Sergeant Barry Kitchen, who by his own count had been in twenty-five IED explosions and firefights in two deployments, the most recent explosion leaving him with a wrenched back and some minor burns.

“Shut up, man,” another soldier said.

Everyone had their doubts about this trip.

“I don’t think it’s gonna be much of a birthday, sir,” a soldier said. “I think it’s gonna be a bunch of complaining.”

Cummings, meanwhile, worried that they were being set up. A specific time, a specific place, a specific route—were they going to a party or an ambush? “That Qasim, he’s a great guy—I think,” he had said the night before, wondering.

And Izzy had his doubts, too, if only because while children had birthday parties in Iraq, adults did not. At least not the adults he knew.

“To be honest, we don’t even remember our birthdays,” he’d said one day when he was talking to another interpreter about Qasim’s promise to give Kauzlarich a party.

“When you pass twenty, no one cares about you,” the other interpreter had agreed.

“For our children, we do things,” Izzy had said. “But even wedding anniversaries, anything, no.” He had no idea even when he was born, he said. His documents gave a date of July 1, 1959, but for the men of his generation, birth dates were nothing more than a way for the government to divide the population for military service. Half of the men had birth dates of January 1, and the other half had birth dates of July 1, and the fact that his was July 1 meant only that he’d been born in the first half of the year. His mother had once told him that he’d been born during the spring harvest, while she was working in the fields, so he supposed he could isolate the date a little further, but what would be the point?

It was the same attitude he had about death: “We believe that God created us in one day, and God will take our life in one day. No matter if we are staying home, or doing work, by heart attack, by disease, by bullet, by IED—that’s it. One day you’re born, one day you’re going to die. No matter what you do, it’s destiny. That’s it. Nobody can go beyond his age or his destiny.”

And about the dangers of being an interpreter: “Yeah, I know. You can die any minute. You see, I’ll feel happy when I just get killed by a bullet in my head—because I expect worse than that. I expect they will put me in the back of a truck with two cats, hungry cats, to maybe scratch my face, eat pieces of my flesh, and then they will hang me on the walls, nails, like what happened to Jesus Christ, they will put a drill in my head, cut pieces, and then shoot me, torch me, and then throw me to the garbage to be eaten by dogs. It has happened before. So if I get killed, it would be very easy to die from one bullet.”

“So what day is his birthday?” the other interpreter asked Izzy of Kauzlarich.

“Actually, I don’t know,” Izzy said.

“So how are you going to celebrate it?” the other interpreter said.

How? When? Why? Izzy had no idea. But he did think Kauzlarich deserved some sort of tribute. “Cross my mother’s grave, I have never seen an American officer understand what he is doing like Colonel K,” he said. Colonel K was the rare one trying to learn some Arabic, he said. Colonel K handed out candy and soccer balls to children, something an Iraqi colonel would never do. A few weeks before, at the council building, when a woman in a broken wheelchair asked for help, Colonel K brought her a new wheelchair the following day. “Thank you,” the woman had said, overcome with surprise, and Izzy, interpreting, had felt very good about that.

His doubts were simply about whether anyone would know what to do.

“As-Salamu Alaykum,”
Kauzlarich said, walking into Qasim’s office.
“Shaku maku?”

Qasim rose to greet him. He was the only one there. The office was dark—not to obscure anything, such as people hiding behind a couch about to yell, “Surprise,” but because the electricity was out.

“Please. Sit. Down,” Qasim said in the English he had been trying to learn.

Kauzlarich sat. Izzy sat. Cummings sat. A few of the soldiers from the security detail sat. And that appeared to be it. A few minutes later, two of the people Kauzlarich often met with from Kamaliyah and Fedaliyah wandered in and sat. Izzy interpreted: they were complaining about someone they knew who had been detained the night before on suspicions that he was part of an EFP cell.

“Okay. I will release him today,” Kauzlarich said facetiously.

The two were surprised.

“I don’t think so,” Kauzlarich said, the facetiousness gone, and as the two resumed complaining, he felt himself being overtaken by a feeling of lonesomeness. It wasn’t the absence of a party. Some days just had a built-in feeling of rootlessness, or maybe it was yearning. Christmas. Thanksgiving. All the holidays, really, even though there’d be decorations in the DFAC. Cardboard cutouts of turkeys. Cardboard cutouts of fireworks. Maybe the cardboard cutouts made it worse. And birthdays, for which there were no decorations. Just before leaving, he had checked his e-mail and there’d been nothing new from Kansas, so this was what his birthday would be: this dark room and these oblivious strangers, none of whom would be in his life if there hadn’t been the surge.

The door opened, and in came one more, a member of Qasim’s National Police battalion, balancing a tray filled with cans of 7UP. In meeting after meeting, serving 7UPs was all he ever seemed to do. He was young and timid and so obviously unworldly that a few of Kauzlarich’s soldiers had taken on his maturation as a personal project, one day presenting him with a gift they had ordered for him online. It was a sex toy product called a “pocket pussy.” He had looked at it quizzically and then with some embarrassment, but since it was a gift from guests, he had accepted it graciously and never spoken of it since. Now, just as graciously, he went around the room serving cans of soda, and when he was done, he put the extra cans in a refrigerator in a corner of Qasim’s office.

The door opened again and in came Mr. Timimi with two more of the chronic complainers, both of whom took seats and started right in. There were two large windows on the far side of the room, and as sounds came through them of more men gathering, Cummings seemed to be looking at the drapes covering them, wondering perhaps if they would suppress a grenade.