At least the Americans, for all their bluster and spine-chilling gunships, did not cram belief down anyone’s throat.

We did.

Or we tried.

* * *

Lately, the red house had been a favorite obsession for the enemy. By now the initial suspicion that the regulars had for me had settled into a stolid acceptance, even deference. The Iraqi Arabs who were there called me Doctor, the Iranians called me Professor, while the Afghans preferred Commander. None of this was said with irony. We were all getting shot at equally and dying at farcical rates; distrust under these circumstances doesn’t have a place and the mortars and DShK rounds make no distinction. Nasif had come a week before our night watch, asking for volunteers for the red house. The enemy was desperate to get it back, and there was something absurd about this desire of theirs. Even more absurd was their drive to get back the town of Khan-T in which the red house sat. Maybe they thought they could relink with the road to Aleppo from there and pause their recent losing streak. Whatever it was, they were dying for it, which suited us.

Nasif said, “The red house is empty.”

The rage in his voice was contained but icy. In that simple statement I saw all the strangeness of this war. What were we doing here? Vultures perched on Mesopotamia’s tired bones. I glimpsed Moalem, who was my age, a hardened veteran of the Iran-Iraq War of thirty-odd years earlier, wheezing and writing in his notebook. He couldn’t write a war diary if his mother’s life depended on it. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. More than anyone he’d warmed up to me, reminiscing about how the Karbala-4 battle of back in the day was the mother of all battles—though he should have said mother of all defeats. He lost two cousins and three dozen comrades in that bleak epic. Maybe it was there where he was gassed; I never asked him about it and he didn’t offer details. Moalem wheezed and gradually died over these thirty years, yet he kept at it. War for him was a kind of essence. He breathed it. Without it he ceased to be. Moalem too, like Nasif, would soon be dead. I would not be here at Khan-T when it happened. They’d bring me four of his notebooks filled with daily minutiae of war in Syria, tasking me to edit them into something comprehensible for publication. They were mostly banal observations about weapons: The 120 mortar. The 60. The lethal, unavoidable Kornet, which they said eventually killed him. Lot of scribbling about his faith and the faith of his companions in those pages. He wrote about fasting for days on end when there was not much else to do here, about going to Damascus to pay his respects at the Zaynab shrine. He wrote about martyrdom and never let up on that subject. Martyrdom was our shibboleth; we distinguished each other’s sincerity by the way someone talked too little or too much about it. We knew who was lying and who was telling the truth when they prayed for martyrdom. We were adept at intuiting when a guy was ready to leave this world. A certain light, a halo even, would surround him. He became extra kind. His prayers turned heroic. He cried a lot. This was not always the case and maybe not all of these things happened at the same time. But they happened enough times that my martyr radar was strong; I knew when a man was finally tired and felt like he’d done his share of protecting the holy places and was ready to leave this world.