Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [34]
We traveled those first weeks with an American photographer I’ll call John. If Raheem was the East, John was the West. On long rides between southern towns, Raheem talked about the pilgrimage to Karbala, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the repressions under Saddam. John squinted at passing Iraqi women, shrouded from head to toe in black abayas and hijab, and said, “Look at those ninjas! That’s a lot of ninjas.”
John had been embedded with the Marines during the invasion, and he made it known to us, day after day, that life with the soldiers had been infinitely preferable to the privations he was suffering in provincial Iraq. He also intimated that he’d never seen a land so devoid of redeeming value. One day he went on a tear in front of Raheem: “This country is so shitty. Everything is shitty. And everything is broken. And the people are just sitting around, doing nothing. Don’t they want to work? It just seems like they’re lazy. I think in the U.S., if we were in this situation, people would be working, trying to make things better. All they do here is sit around and complain.” Another time he claimed, also in front of Raheem, that Iraq had not produced a single attractive woman. “Show me one! You point out the next pretty woman you see. They all wear those head scarves. It makes them look like hawks. It looks terrible.”
He griped about the dingy hotels. He complained about the food. He didn’t wander the marketplaces or explore the riverside villages. Unless we needed a photograph, he stayed in his room. He badgered us to find American soldiers to hit up for an MRE or “meal ready to eat,” the processed, dehydrated American food packets he preferred to the fresh-baked bread and spit-roasted chicken from Iraqi cafés. I wondered how Raheem was taking it all. He never said a word when the photographer complained. One day, when John had skulked off to his room, I looked at Raheem.
“Well,” I ventured, “John doesn’t seem very happy.”
“Mmm,” Raheem said in his ponderous way. “I think he is miserable.”
He started to giggle. I did too. Then we both laughed so hard that I leaned against the wall and Raheem took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyelids. After that, it became a joke.
“Where’s John?”
“We-ell,” Raheem drew it out, as if it were a dilemma of the ages, “I think, you know, he is in his room.” Snicker.
In Baghdad I had felt a heaviness hanging on me, seen every scene painted in the obscenity and confusion of a nightmare. It was a bad feeling, deep and dark, the collapse of a capital. But in the south with Raheem, it was almost beautiful, sometimes. Quiet came up from the marshes when the light went down in Nasiriyah, soft ticks and screeches echoed from the swamp, and bats and white owls stirred the thick soup of spring sky. At night the heat let up and little boys crept out like crabs to play soccer in the street, skittering barefoot after the ball, their voices ringing down warm alleys. The ice-cream parlor served soft strawberry and vanilla in stale cones and we stood on the sidewalk, slurping at sweetness and watching the night settle. Raheem smiled quietly, saying nothing. It was in those moments, seeing scraps of Iraq the way Raheem saw them, that I felt the first traces of affection for the place, even that way, even broken.
As we drove deeper into the southern heartland, Raheem began to walk like the earth was soft beneath his feet. He had an air of quiet buoyancy, as if this war were a brave experiment that might just work. And I understood that he, for one, was willing to take the great mad gamble, because he’d concluded that any risk was better than Saddam Hussein. Why not try, said his posture and his quick,