“What are my duties then?” I asked.
“You don’t have a wife? I’ll get you one in Diyala. Come back with me. Take a rest. We’ll come back here in three weeks. Don’t worry!”
“I can’t leave here for three weeks.”
“You have the bug of nabard, the thirst for combat. I can tell.”
“And Intel will force me to go home if I head back south with you.”
“They won’t. They came to see me. I told them that this man—you—has lost his mind. But in proper fashion. He desires martyrdom. And that you—meaning they—cannot deny you—meaning you—this.”
“What did they say?”
“Nothing. They went home. Or wherever it is those kinds of men go to at night.”
“So you’ll let me stay?”
“The mokeb is yours if you wish to stay. But you must not do it for the wrong reasons. If it’s martyrdom you seek, I am with you. But if you want to just stay here and mourn your friend Ali-Akbar, then you are acting spoiled and also dishonoring your friend’s perfectly adequate martyrdom, and so you must return to Diyala with me to find you a suitable wife.”
“I will, inshallah, see you in three weeks, ya sayedina.”
* * *
There was never time to mourn. The mokeb was always replenishing itself. Other mokeb crews came and went while Cleric J and his men were on leave. They came equipped to be generous, men who had fought at other times in the same places but now kept to the background and took pleasure in the art of feeding warriors. At night, as my eyesight went from bad to worse, we’d sit in the long room and trade stories. The Arabic was viscous with all the head-splitting variations of Mesopotamia, and after a while instead of better understanding what was said I withdrew into my near blindness and added deafness to the mix and kept stirring the rice, unfreezing the chicken, and chopping the onions. Without a cell phone for the time being, I was a man tethered only to God’s will.
Before long, Khaled took the heavy truck and went to join the government forces gathering outside Mosul. I could not blame him. Mosul was his home. The waiting here was like cultivating mold, and after Ali-Akbar’s premature death even martyrdom seemed questionable, though we never mentioned it. Then a man in charge of intelligence for the formidable Kataeb forces came up from Baghdad and ordered the rest of the Iranian sniper team, the Three Magi, to go south with him and then home. One dead Persian from a sniper squad was enough to put him through the ringer. He didn’t want more. This left me alone to my sealed-in circumstances. I smiled a lot at my revolving door of Iraqis who were especially enamored of this thing called Facebook and who watched me wide-eyed when I explained I did not yet have an account. Who knows if years from now the name will even ring a bell, but back then, in that geography, this virtual republic of Facebook was the river that connected the Arab warriors. They took pictures of themselves five minutes before dying. Then, three minutes before dying—if luck and bandwidth were with them—their smile was making the rounds on the Internet, immortalizing them just as they were about to leave the world. It was an odd, even batshit-crazy metastatement on the last thing that might be thought sacred: combat. We should have already known nothing was sacred. We were simulations. In another year or two tourists would probably be roaming this very ground where Ali-Akbar had stepped, stupidly, on a trip wire inside a school building while we took that village.