We were, in other words, ornaments.

In the meantime, I kept trying to wrap my mind around that day of Ali-Akbar’s loss. Cleric J had been pushing the men forward toward the village with his “God is great” bravado while I stood back, camera in hand, marveling at his brilliant madness. Some Arab guy was doing a little victory dance with the AK raised over his head even before the village was fully secured. I didn’t know where Ali-Akbar and the Three Magi were. I imagined, being snipers, that they were far from the main action. Taking aim. Sealing escape paths. Cutting down stragglers. A half hour later, after I’d shoved a banana to each victorious brother, a dozen guys came out from the schoolhouse repeating the Koran verse, “To God we belong and to him we’ll return.” They carried a blanket from which only a leg stuck out. I’d trained the lens on that leg, Ali-Akbar’s leg, not realizing that that was him with a missing head and arms.

“Hu istashada. He’s martyred.”

It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been others. The martyrs in Syria, for starters. But somehow this was the one that really did me in. And Khaled too. To get taken down because you trip over a wire in a schoolhouse! What was he doing there in the first place? It was too close to the action. In fact, the schoolhouse was the action, and no sniper motherfucker should have been there. But he was. And therein lay the issue. Ali-Akbar was the war in all its stupidity. He’d left home, crossed the border, and come here for this?

I thought of that Hemingway saying again but tweaked it a little: In the fall peace was always near, but we did not go to it.

* * *

Then one day Saeed showed up at the mokeb. Alone.

Cleric J and his people were due back in a couple of days, but rumor had it that the enemy was planning a second reckless attack on the town. A week earlier they’d made a beeline for the center, which was us, because across the street behind where Khaled’s quarters had been there was a fuel depot. The fact that they didn’t blow it up, which would have been easy, but instead tried to take it over and escape with the fuel, showed desperation. The noose continued to tighten in the west, and to get to Syria they’d need that liquid which they were running out of. Their suicide mission made this obvious, which also told us all we had to do was hold ground.

We almost didn’t. There had been men with absurd, Akkadian-length beards shooting in broad daylight and strutting down the dusty thoroughfare, as if this was Main Avenue on a Friday afternoon, before they were finally brought down. I’d lain low inside the mokeb and mostly seen two of everything with my bad eye until the crisis was over.

A week later my eyes had settled a bit, and when Saeed came at me in the mokeb I saw, correctly, only one of him, and there was no mistaking what he was about to do. His first swing missed, and before he had time for a second swing four burly Iraqi men had him by the arms and wrestled him to the ground. He was screaming in Arabic, telling them to let go and that there was a score to settle.