I figured that Nasif, who had bought himself a counterfeit Afghan identity and practiced the accent to pass muster, was now in his element here in nowhereland, ready to die and have a street or a traffic circle named after him back home.

And die, he would. Very soon. Yet he would never be graced with the glory of a thoroughfare dedicated in his real name, or even the fake one. Nasif’s calculations were wrong; he would not become a celebrated martyr.

In the meantime, while he was still alive, I questioned his sanity.

And my own.

The enemy was so close now I could hear them breathe God is great even before they said it; sometimes you actually hear a man say Allahu akbar before the utterance. You can feel the fear in him; he’s pumping himself up, charging every fiber of his wasted life, knowing the chances that he’ll get to you are not very good. Because you are almost as determined as he is. Almost. You feel him and hate him. There were men here who said this particular enemy was just misled, deluded. They said, “Kill them because you have to, but don’t hate them. They are, after all, fellow believers who only went astray.” But being evenhanded is not an easy thing. I hated a lot of things. I hated not being here more than I hated being here.

This was a dilemma.

But the bigger dilemma was our makeup, ours and the enemy’s. They had descended like locusts on this land to establish God’s rule while carrying out suicide attacks on civilians just about everywhere else. They were unforgiving in both pursuits, and they came from every continent. From day one they possessed a fearsome arsenal that seemed to have materialized out of thin air, and they went by a variety of names. Western news agencies mostly just called them the Islamic State. I’ll stick to enemy.

Enemy spoke a Babel of languages. We, on the other hand, who were there to stop them, mostly just spoke Arabic and Persian. The Afghans among us were formidable warriors, maybe by virtue of how much fighting they’d known since the beginning of time. But they were hired hands in the end. They did not get dreamy-eyed about martyrdom like the Iranians did. The Iranians, us, who hired the Afghans for the job and shared the wistful and fragile sounds of Persian with them, did get dreamy-eyed. In fact, there was a degree of dreaminess about the Iranians that sometimes made you think the world would go to sleep one day and simply forget to wake up.

We were also hitting outside of our comfort zone. Syria and Iraq were deep Arab lands that may have needed us just then to stop the enemy. But they didn’t want us. They didn’t love us. Yet we were there, equipped with some bullshit reason about protecting the holy sites of Mesopotamia from the desecrations of the common enemy. This made us suspect, even to ourselves. And often I wondered if our pretense was not worse than that of the Americans, who variously dropped bombs on the enemy and on us and put it all down to saving civilization.