A creepy silence had suddenly taken hold, as if it were just me and Moalem there while the entire town of Khan-T—sitting dumb and empty and destroyed somewhere in between the main cities of this broken country—watched us; two improbable “lions” who must take a dozen pills and eye drops between them just to be able to see and breathe from one day to the next.

At times like this irrational worries visit a man; I thought about the cell phone in my pocket and all the digital photographs on it. What if the enemy took the phone and found its pictures? I didn’t say to myself: So what! I’ll be dead by then and it won’t matter. Rather than pay careful attention to our surroundings, I fixated on this useless thought. Moalem, the old pro that he was, was already clearing the red building one floor at a time. He imagined I was doing my job too, which was to hover close to a slit in the concrete and watch for enemy movement.

The photographs in my phone were an unlikely combination of portraits of Kurdish female fighters from up north and highlighted pages with scribbled notes in the margins from a torn copy of a book I had found at another ruin called Ayn al-Hosan, the Eye of the Horse, in Iraq near the Syrian border. I want to linger for a little bit on this torn-up book, or portion of a book; it summarized not the futility of our predicament here, but the way it actually gave each man his purpose, a shape to a life that otherwise would be meaningless, toiling away at hollow jobs back home. We would all die here, sooner or later. It was what we did. I use “we” generously, however, and when I say it I don’t mean myself. I mean the fighters. They did not have to be here. Not one of them. They came voluntarily, even if they were paid, even if they knew Syria’s bad faith would eventually send them home—if they didn’t fall into enemy hands—in a casket.

It was a book entitled Remembrance of Things Past. What was it doing at the Eye of the Horse? It defied explanation. Could it have been a prank? But no: someone had traveled from Tehran to Iraq carrying an English translation of a Frenchman’s book in his pack. Why? I had an inkling: once I’d read an American writer who said that you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it. In this war, nothing—nothing at all—made sense. People appeared and disappeared, ancient animosities suddenly boiled over, heads were cut off with such fierce regularity that it made you doubt the proper digits of your century, and there were so many sides and fronts and realignments that when you managed to grab a sliver of reliable Internet long enough to read a foreign paper, where they referred to the simple men you marched alongside as men who committed atrocities, you began to doubt everything, especially yourself: Am I a part of some beastliness? Where is this inhumanity they point to? It’s not here, no. Not in Khan-T where Moalem and I are trying to hold onto a goddamn useless red building.