They hit hard at first. It was around four p.m. I had my back against the entrance of Khaled’s old place and counted three rockets coming down just up the road where the sniper squad used to bunk. My pristine table of tea and sugar in plastic cups, waiting for the afternoon warriors en route toward the border, did a backflip and then everyone was running. We of the mokeb were just Friday fighters who happened to be here every day, and suddenly the town seemed unusually exposed. I was frozen. It was not that I was unable to move or that I was shitting in my pants. Nothing like that. It was a perfect freeze inside my body, as if I had swallowed a man-sized cylinder of ice. Now the coffee man came hobbling this way. His small, tribal coffee mokeb by that old snipers’ billet was dust. This much I was certain of. But as he passed me I was not sure if the next thing I saw was my imagination—he seemed to have only two dusty stumps for arms. His kaffiyeh blood-soaked and dangling barely off his neck.

My irrational anger of the moment had mostly to do with my ruined tea for the men. I saw stars and turned deaf. One of the several Muhammads from the mokeb was shaking me and screaming in my face and I swayed back and forth to the strength of his passion.

I was dumb. Frightened into a version of courage. We were running, in circles it seemed. And for a brief moment it appeared as if the attack was coming from every which way. It wasn’t. They were only in front of us. We were not flanked. There was not a bloody thing to flank anyway. There were no pickups or APCs, just men on foot, not more than two or three specters that popped in and out of buildings like paper targets at a gun range. It was outlandish, gamelike. Yet many of the men from the mokeb did not even possess weapons. Troop movement had been concentrating on the west for two days, toward the general direction of Deir ez-Zor in Syria where the enemy was making an all-out play for the city. There was fear they might blitz us too from that direction. I thought that absurd, because we all knew they could not spare the manpower to move back into Iraq. They were spent, the sons of bitches. They were trying to get out of Iraq, not back in it. But you could not argue this fine point with Friday commanders and fighting clerics who, after all, only meant well.