One night at the mokeb, while we prepared the morning breakfast for several men of the Ali-Akbar Brigade who’d asked for the favor of billeting them for a day or two, I dug into my notebook and recalled that I’d only copied one single line from the Frenchman: A book is a large cemetery where on most tombs one can no longer read the faded names. Now, as I write these words, I realize that there are so many lost names to a life that the best one can do is to simplify, to not fret the act of forgetting; the soldiers in a platoon might remember every tick and oddity that one of theirs carried, but a fellow in a mokeb is lucky to remember his own name after enough time has passed, let alone the names of the dead.

One of them I’ll remember, however, because the love we had was immediate—and he also happened to have the same name as the brigade we were hosting just then: Ali-Akbar.

He came in one day for tea, his hand-me-down shirt ridiculous and dangerous in its oversizedness for a crack sniper. He was rail thin and his buddies, like him, were Iranians. Volunteer dead guys. I had not spoken a word of Persian in weeks. Not even with the fighting cleric, Cleric J, who had taken me under his wing and brought me way up here to the last true front line left in Iraq. Those of us who wanted to fight on would have to move west, crossing the obsolete border back into Syria, and pretend we were still defending the holy places. We all knew it was no longer about that. It was about something else, something elemental having to do with adrenaline and revenge; I imagine hunters know something about it. We had been chased and, at times, humiliated. But now the tables had turned. Watch a man whom you’ve finally caught and whom you know has killed a few dozen people, mostly civilians, just because he could, because even as recently as one week ago he could afford to be judge and executioner, and because he’s a piece of shit, then examine his eyes as he does not even try to protest his innocence because he knows that you know—see the way he goes limp inside of himself—observe him carefully while the gone-insane among you, and maybe the odd sadist, turn up to beat the soles of this man’s feet before they shoot him, and you’ll also know never to dishonor a man beyond a certain edge. I don’t know what that edge is. And I don’t want to investigate it too deeply. I just want to tell this story without the encumbrance of all the names that I have forgotten already.

Because they’ll all die anyway.

I served Ali-Akbar and his three comrades—whom I’ll call the Three Magi—their tea, and we spoke long into the night. They were billeted less than half a klick away with an Iraqi sniper squad, but unlike the Iraqis they had some leisure to go AWOL now and then, stay out, even mess around with their ammo, leave stuff behind that the normal army structure would have chewed them alive for. Who else could do this but the Iranians who didn’t have to be here but came anyway, in order to “help” their brothers? So the Iranians were humored. The locals were grateful. Even at the mokeb they treated someone like me differently. “Saleh, do you seriously enjoy getting shot at? Go back to Tehran. It’s heaven there.”