The Americans were firm about us not going anywhere near Mosul. Behind the scenes, it was their play in that direction, and we let them. That city was going to be a goddamn dogfight anyway, and the Iraqi regulars could take the brunt. We stood to the west, by Syria, and bided our time, continuing to choke the escape routes out of Tal Afar, killing when we had to and feeding the hungry when we could. We’d meet every afternoon at Khaled’s place across from my mokeb and trade war gossip. That day I was serving tea in front of the mokeb at twilight while a herd of sheep scampered by, bleating with an irritated persistence which made you think they too were sick of it all and would sooner be eaten. Khaled came over. He smoked like a man possessed. And at that moment he was. A Turkmen out of Mosul who had lost everything to the enemy, he spent his days perusing military-grade Western satellite apps that you had to pay a small fortune to get and have security clearance for but which all of us in Iraq had for free because someone somewhere had cracked the code. Someone always cracks the code. Khaled would show me the very window to his house in Mosul, or what was left of it, and peer at the cracked screen of his cell phone with the hunger of a man who does not necessarily want revenge but simply to rebuild again. Nothing replaces home and no one exemplified its absence more than Khaled, who now gave me the most concerned look in all of Iraq just then (which is saying something), when he asked: “Weyn Ali-Akbar?”

“He’ll show up. Don’t worry.”

I watched him go at his cigarette like he might swallow the thing. Like a man who had survived a death patrol. I’ve only seen combat soldiers smoke this way. Them, and hopeless, beyond-the-pale drug addicts.

“But he is always at my place this time of day.”

“Maybe he got held up at the sater, in the trench.”

“He always lets me know.”

Khaled paced around the tea stand. A convoy of heavy guns thundered by, making the petulant sheep run every which way. Haji Yusuf, our septuagenarian inspiration, held up his AK inside the mokeb and let out a few rounds in honor of the convoy, his white hair dancing to the dust as Cleric J came hobbling out of his quarter without his one prosthetic leg and gave Haji Yusuf an earful for acting childishly inside a bustling mokeb. This, of course, only buoyed Haji Yusuf, and so he let out another spray of bullets and danced his southern Iraq tribal dance to the good cheer of the soldiers—he was a man from Kut, where the British had suffered their most humiliating defeat of WWI in the Turkish theater of war. This slight detail somehow seemed significant to me, though I wasn’t sure why.

Khaled smoked.

Then I felt cold sweat on my palms. The sky over northern Iraq just then was as holy as I’d seen above Damascus while saying my last goodbye. It was an orange to give your life for. And that’s what men did: they gave their lives for it.