Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [125]
When peace came I drove out of Lebanon the same way I’d come, crawling along that bomb-wrecked road to the Syrian border, past the burned-out cars and craters of a blasted landscape. The refugees poured in the other way, rumbling homeward again. They grinned and hung from their cars, flashing victory signs, waving Hezbollah flags and pictures of Nasrallah. The scorched road was a party of honking and kissing and blaring stereos. They believed they had won; they believed that Israel had lost. And I was limping away, scattered and shaking.
It was a festival night in Amman. Fireworks exploded into the sky because the war in Lebanon had ended, because it was summer, because there were weddings. My boyfriend, Tom, came from Iraq and met me there, in the city destined to be passed through on the way to someplace else. We went to a cigar lounge and sat out on a limestone terrace in the summer night. Jordan spread out like a jewelry box laid open, its velvet darkness studded with dusky lights. We smoked and watched the night. The heat pressed our skin. I smelled like a shower, like soaps and creams. Clean clothes lay soft as flower petals on hardened skin. I felt like a reptile, dressed up. Underneath the cleanness of the non-war, I was still not there. I had survived, I was alive. The shadow of death had passed over my body. But I had left myself there, in the salt and blood and crazy sunlight. I was stuck there and I didn’t know what to make of pasteurized Jordan, dark and lush and humane, the whisper and tinkle of a summer terrace. Sparks and blasts burst up from the horizon, fireworks set off by laughing men on dark hilltops, fading even as they bloomed, their crashes ringing in the valleys, up to the stars. Each explosion shook my heart like a bomb, every crash brought the war back around me, and then I felt tears on my face. Tom looked at me and I sat there crying. “Let’s get the check. Please.” We crossed Jordan in a taxi and I locked myself back into the sterilized womb of a hotel, with smooth sheets and satellite television and thick robes, with the heavy door that kept the world away. Clean and removed, like a little piece of America. I stayed there all night, until morning came.
This is the first thing I learned about war. Remember?
You can survive and not survive, both at the same time.
EPILOGUE
I don’t want to write this last part with any decorations or adornment. I don’t really want to write it at all. By now I have given up on pulling poetry out of war.
Raheem’s son got killed. U.S. soldiers shot him in the chest.
His name was Mohammed, and he was twenty years old. It happened on a Tuesday at noon, April 2007, out on his block in Baghdad.
The soldiers were rumbling in a convoy on an overpass leading to the Green Zone. The overpass ran alongside Raheem’s street. One of the armored vehicles hit a homemade bomb. The soldiers shot into the streets below.
Mohammed had gone to the neighborhood store to buy ice cream for his younger brother. The store was six doors down. He was on the street at the wrong time. They shot him in the chest.
He crawled over to a door and banged on it. He was bleeding badly. At first the people hiding inside didn’t move. The soldiers were still shooting in the street; they were too scared. Mohammed lay there bleeding until the shooting stopped. When quiet came the neighbors dragged him inside the shop and called his mother. She appeared and washed his face and sat with him. She tried to talk with him, but he couldn’t speak.
It took Mohammed two hours to die. The soldiers had sealed off the neighborhood and closed all the roads. Nobody could take him to the hospital. They said later that if he’d gotten to the hospital, they could have saved him. But movement was impossible, and so he bled to death in a convenience shop.
Two more months, and he would have finished high school. He wanted to study physical education. He wasn’t much of