We were back at the mokeb. Cleric J had gotten an earful from the commander who was charged with flushing out the enemy on the escape routes past Wardiya. I did not know how to negotiate this man, how to write about him. There was no interiority to Cleric J. He carried his tasks of looking after the fighters as if he were possessed, pumped with supernatural drugs. The commanders gave him a talking-to each time and it made no difference. They needed him, so they didn’t berate him too much. When there was an especially dangerous mission, he was one of a handful of guys in Nineveh at the time who could rouse the fighters, bring them to a fever pitch. He could have said Imam Husayn was riding a white horse on the horizon, and yes, men would have braved the rockets to follow that imaginary white horse toward perdition. How could you scold a wild, lovable holy man like that?

Claude smiled. I didn’t know where it had started, but someone had called him the Father of the French, Abu Faranci, and the name had stuck. Abu Faranci had quickly become one of us. He spoke English with a deep, almost antiquated inflection and volunteered for everything. He was up before everyone cleaning the mokeb and at nights he cooked long into the evening and then washed the pots and pans. The men couldn’t communicate with him but they offered him genuine smiles. They came right up to his face and sang him the breathtakingly heroic and improvised Arab poetry of war and he grinned back and said, Allah, Allah! He was in his element here, like Cleric J. Our merry gang had needed an Abu Faranci to be complete and it got one.

Abu Faranci said, “Cleric J took us out there today to see if I didn’t mind getting killed. It was a test. Yes?”

“Everything is a test here. You could say yes. Yes.”

“So what else would you like to know?”

“I believe you have a few brain cells missing, like the rest of us in this mokeb. But I don’t believe your story that you just showed your journalist’s ID and managed to get as far as Tal Abta. Not on your own, anyway.”

“I paid someone in Baghdad to accompany me. A fixer.”

“All right, that’s something I can believe.”

“But you don’t ask me enough questions, Saleh. Why?”

“Because I already understand why you are here.”

“You mean why I have come all this way?”

“Yes. That.”

“Then please, do tell.”