I wanted to go to Baghdad and have a few shots of hard liquor. Anything would do. Then I would pick up Zahra the Beheader and take her with me to Tehran to give her new life. All she had done was the thing many of us would if we had the heart. I still see that North African boy lying on the ground of our mokeb. I tell the men to throw him in a room and tie him up. Cleric J will be back in a day or two and he’ll decide. But by morning the night shift had already gone to work on the kid and even filmed him, because this war, all of it, was on video. He admitted to having killed many of us. In combat and through executions of civilians. You name it, he’d done it. He admitted it all methodically, as if he were counting off from his grandfather’s abacus. I despised him for his truthfulness. He left zero room for mercy. Perhaps he thought that since lying would get him nowhere, which it wouldn’t, telling the truth to its last detail might. Where did he think he was? He was inside a mokeb of the Hashd forces; we did not forget, period.

The next afternoon Cleric J was back and handed me a Colt. “Saleh, he’s your charge. Do it! The men expect no less.”

“If I don’t?”

“This war is not a holiday, you know! You are not on vacation.”

He wasn’t angry with me. He had said it casually, matter-of-factly.

Twelve hours later, when we were serving tea at dawn to the first replacement convoys of the day heading for the sater, I saw that old Haji Yusuf was grinning.

“Your man went swimming late last night. He’s not coming back.”

“The North African?”

“Him.”

“Who carried it out?”

All of a sudden Haji Yusuf had never looked so sober. He might have been one of Lawrence of Arabia’s boon companions, laying charges on the railroad tracks of this land circa 1916 and singing ancient poems of the desert deep into the night.

A century had passed. Yet not a lot was different in this landscape. We were still fighting the same fight.

“I have had six sons and forty-two grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Out of those, I have lost two sons and two grandsons to two wars. So I thank you.”

“Thank me for what?”

“My satisfaction.”

* * *

It would not do to hang around for much longer. I had thought the end was close. But the enemy thought otherwise. They had nothing to lose now, so they fought like rabid dogs. Sometimes we’d find them dead, chained and locked to their weapons. Men speak of grudging respect for a capable enemy. I had none of that. Rather, I was irritated by their pluck and didn’t want to share my God with theirs. They needed to find another alphabet and say God’s name differently than us. Which was why whenever we smoked them out of their lairs and captured their black flag with Allah’s name on it, the first thing we did was to turn the flag upside down and take a picture. It was the ultimate insult, this. God’s name was turned on its head and it was no longer God but something else. Something foreign and unworthy of attention because it had been manufactured by men who knew neither God nor His Prophet.