To Be a Friend Is Fatal (16 page)

I spent a lot of time thinking about this last week, and I'm not sure you get any two people to agree . . . if you have as your definition of a civil war as something that involves the entire landmass—north, south, east, and west—doesn't apply. But some people think that the sectarian violence you've seen—centered largely around Baghdad, and you also have some terrorist activity in Anbar, a considerable amount—they think that is civil war. So it depends on which metrics you use for doing it. And frankly, I gave up on trying, because there are any number of people who have different measurements.

It was just another refugee problem, invisible to most Americans and journalists. Unlike other humanitarian crises, Iraqis who fled to Syria and Jordan in 2006 didn't gather in tent communities or cluster in recognizable refugee camps. They crammed into cheap apartments in overcrowded neighborhoods and waited for the civil war to pass or for the international community to act.

But Yaghdan stayed, unwilling to leave his country and the home in which he was raised, confident in his ability to always keep a step ahead of the militants who hunted America's Iraqis.

He who conquers a city is as nothing compared to he who conquers his own nature.

—David Mamet

I
t was pointless trying to sleep. I slip out of the hooch into the sprawling mess of Camp Fallujah. I walk in uncertain flip-flop steps over fields of smooth rocks meant to bury the powdery sand, which always found its way up with the faintest encouragement. I pick my way along the catwalk flanking the Cummins generator that churns an end-of-the-world grinding noise, using a small xenon flashlight to avoid waist-high coils of concertina wire. Was there ever a real threat of infiltration?

“Camp used to house some real tough mudders,” the marines said. “Saddam kept 'em on the outskirts of Fallujah to intimidate the city, keep it in line.”

Now it houses American marines, there to do the same. In clusters of brutalist one-story structures with blacked-out windows operate intelligence fusion centers and logistics teams and endless other functions of HQ. What little rain spatters onto their slopeless roofs steams off. On I wander, over fields of gravel, past an egg-shaped pond with water so dark that three feet looks like a dozen. A single swan glides ghostly across its oil-slick surface. The generator is far behind now; all I can hear is the
ship-ship
of my sandals. I pass through the camp's checkpoint and trudge past the boneyard and its acres of broken-down and half-exploded cars and trucks. The sun is peeking up over the dead fields as I approach the city.

The city wakes, and I hide behind the gnarled remains of a detonated sedan on Route Ethan, weaponless and American. A bowel-shuddering dread seeps in as I watch the darkened blood of a butchered lamb trickling along a nearby sidewalk, dusted with Anbari sand. I want to crawl into the car to hide, but it has been mangled beyond any degree of car-ness: there are no doors, no roof, no tires, only a thornbush of splintered and blackened steel and melted upholstery. I want to crawl under the car, but it grows from the pavement—there is no under. Nearby, a black blossom of char blooms in the middle of the road where the car exploded. The sun is climbing, an executioner's blade overhead, dropping hours of light before I can try to escape under cover of night back to Camp Fallujah.

An errant soccer ball rolls up, stopping at my feet. A Falluji kid races over, his laugh turning into a gasp as he spots me, and then an excited yell. Shoulders and heads appear, forming an ever-tightening clutch around me, their talk turning to shouts and hands grabbing for me.
Fuck. No. No!

The
No!
lurches me awake into West Chicago. The nightmare waits for me just on the other side of sleep, waiting to replay when I can no longer keep my body awake. There is a wretched pain emanating somewhere from my face, so eclipsing in its fullness that it takes some time to identify the source: I have thrashed my fiberglassed arms against the mob of my nightmare, clocking my broken jaw and severed lips in the process. More blood flows into my mouth and onto my tongue, and I am now irreversibly awake, as another night of potential sleep and recovery slinks from the room. I have wounds to tend, drugs to take. Once back in bed, I turn on the television and stare at infomercials until sunrise and the stirring of my parents downstairs.

In the beginning, despite it all, there was hope. I wanted to go back to Fallujah. I wasn't supposed to be home yet and did not call my friends to let them know I was back. There was no point getting comfortable:
I would heal up in a few weeks, I figured, and be back in Iraq to finish my work.

But I was a wreck. My legs, the last piece of me to hit concrete, were somehow spared, although several of my toes had split open at the tips like small lobster claws. I had to hoist my feet high to ensure I'd clear each step on the stairs, since my big toes were wrapped comically in a tennis-ball-sized mass of gauze. With my casted arms and railroad tracks of stitches across my face, I lurched through the house like a medicated Frankenstein.

It hurt to move. At the slightest movement, an ache would scramble through my arteries up to my head and pause in a menacing stance. If I kept going, it would twist and squeeze different parts of my brain without hesitation. I learned my place, that I could not best it, that I would listen to it, which meant that I did everything with great deliberation and delay. I wondered if this was what I had to look forward to if I ever grew old, which seemed unlikely considering my condition, when a good morning meant I hadn't sleepwalked out of bed.

During the first morning, I ambled down to the basement computer and wrote two emails. The first was to the First Marine Expeditionary Force to tell them that I would be unable to make it to the briefing in Camp Pendleton. Using my index fingers, I typed slowly and did not use any more words than absolutely necessary.

I wrote the second email to management at USAID in Baghdad. I didn't go into much detail about the accident, because I didn't know much. I said I'd need approximately eight weeks before I could get my casts cut off and return to my projects, and apologized for any complications that might be caused by my absence.

I wanted to write a checklist of the things that would need to happen before I could return to Iraq, but I couldn't hold a pen: the distance between my thumb, index finger, and middle finger had been set in fiberglass. No amount of contortions could make them touch, much less grip a pen.

In the basement, I found a roll of duct tape and climbed the twenty-two steps back up to my room like a mountain path, stopping to gather my breath and relieve the pressure in my brain.

I sat down at my desk and placed the duct tape next to a pen. I leaned over and scooped up a sock from the floor, and wrapped it clumsily around the shaft of the pen. It took ten agonizing minutes to free a corner of the tape without the use of opposable thumbs. Sweat beaded and trickled with a sting into my wounds, and I barked, “Goddamn it, does it have to be so hot in here?!” After great effort, I managed to tear off a foot-long piece of tape. Bit by bit, I crudely taped the sock to the pen, its point emerging from the now-thick grip. I lowered my right hand over the sock-pen, wedged it into the space between my thumb and index fingers, and lifted the pen in my hand with a faint smile. I looked at the clock. Thirty minutes had elapsed. My head was thumping, but I had regained the capacity to write.

I called for my mom, who hurried up the stairs, and explained that I needed a sock taped around a knife, fork, and spoon.

Later that afternoon, I wandered to the kitchen with my modified silverware and a faint appetite. I knocked a tinfoil-sealed container of Mott's applesauce from the fridge onto the floor and sat down with my legs crossed before it. The act of peeling off the foil was impossible, so I fitted the sock-knife into my cast, hovered it over the applesauce, and slammed it down, hoping to puncture the foil enough to snake a straw through. But the foil was too strong, and the knife popped out of my cast and onto the floor. Shadow, my cat, walked by and stared for a moment before sauntering over to the open can of tuna my mom had left out for her.

I refitted the sock-knife and tried again. Again. Again. The sweat stung. I figured out how to use my feet to hold the applesauce in place, rested the knife's point directly on the foil with my right hand, and this time bashed the blade through the foil using the cast on my left arm. A quarter of the applesauce slopped onto my feet and the floor. I gingerly pursed my torn lips around a straw and guided it past the foil to feed myself. A couple weeks earlier, I was coordinating tens of millions of dollars of aid. People called me sir.

I made a checklist:

Stop infection

Casts off

Unwire jaw

Root canals

Stitches out