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There is nothing farther away from Washington than the entire world.

–Arthur Miller

CONTENTS

Prologue

One Every Man in This Village Is a Liar

Two Chasing Ghosts

Three As Long as You Can Pay for It

Four Terrorism and Other Stories

Five Forgive Us Our Trespasses

Six The Living Martyr

Seven The Leader

Eight Sacrifice

Nine We Expected Something Better

Ten A Question of Cost

Eleven Loddi Doddi, We Likes to Party

Twelve A City Built on Garbage

Thirteen The Earthquake Nobody Felt

Fourteen All Things Light, and All Things Dark

Fifteen There Would Be Consequences

Sixteen Killing the Dead

Seventeen I Thought I Was a Salamander

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

This memory from childhood is still there: the voices of the adults bounce fretfully, eternally, in rooms that have since been sold or abandoned. Beirut, they said, never Lebanon. John was in Beirut. All meaning fit into those words. His barracks had been blown up, but he had survived.

John the drinker, the smoker, apprentice in three-card monte and hanger-out with New York street cons; his face cut by light, arms angled in salt air, his imprint lingers still in corners and amber edges. John was my father’s cousin, my godfather’s brother, our two Irish Catholic families braided together in city blocks, in the Bronx, by marriage and the crosshatches of godfathering. He was adrift between the generations of our family, too old to be a cousin and too young to be an uncle, but still unmistakably one of us, with us in churches and cramped living rooms and summers on the beach. In my earliest memories I waddle in his retreating shadow, arms in the air and begging, “Johnny! Uppy!” And then this skinny street hustler sweeps me into the air to swing on the rim of centrifugal force until the salty, sunny world swims.

Even then, John had endured the thing I feared most. His mother had died. He was feeling very badly, my mother said. You shouldn’t ask him about it. John got into a little trouble, and then into some more trouble, so they sent him to live with my grandparents to get him out of New York. And when that didn’t work, they signed the papers allowing him to enlist. He was only sixteen. The Marines sent him to Beirut. Hezbollah bombed the bunkers. Thank God he’s all right, the adults said. Nobody talked about Hezbollah then, not in our house. Hezbollah didn’t mean anything. It was a featureless enemy in a war that was real only insofar as it touched our household.

A bomb explodes and everything goes wrong. John lived, but he wasn’t all right. Three hundred and five people died around him. A few years later, he shot himself in the head. It was just before Thanksgiving. He was a father. He was young. We drove to New York for the funeral. They printed prayer cards and sewed his head back together for the open coffin. People stood around and whispered. It didn’t look as bad as you might think, but it didn’t look good, either.

For a long time, that was everything I knew—not just about Beirut, but about war: that it was dark and dangerous, that you could survive and not survive, both at the same time. I was twenty-five when I covered the war in Afghanistan. I wound up there by accident, rushed into foreign reporting by coincidence, because I was vacationing in Paris on September 11. Before that, I was a national correspondent in Houston. So I was a reporter who didn’t really know how to write about combat, covering America from outside its borders as it crashed zealously into war and occupation. This huge change came without warning, but it felt wholly natural. It would be my generation’s fate, it seemed, to be altered by September 11, so I would write about war, soldiers would fight, and Americans would rearrange the way they thought about things. Everything was negotiable; you couldn’t imagine what would happen next. I got excited and felt that I was living through important times and went rushing in, and years later I came away older, different, with damage that couldn’t be anticipated beforehand and can’t be counted