The beauty of all this, and also its silliness, was that the distances were a tease and I could still check my e-mail through the Iran data plan on my brand-new phone. And so I did. A mortar round fell to the right and Maysam cursed again. In fact it wasn’t a curse at all but something with God in it. It wasn’t quite prayer either.

The talk from other dugouts reached us in spurts:

“Why can’t they call a gunship? It’s a lone position.”

“Because they’re all busy with Tal Afar.”

“My brother is getting married after Muharram.”

“I can’t afford to get married. They haven’t paid us in two months.”

“I’m not coming to the war anymore if they do us this way.”

“It’s that thief, Abu—they say he has friends in high places in Baghdad.”

Someone moaned. Shrapnel.

“Professor, do you have pain pills?”

I looked into my pack and saw cold medicine. I tossed it over. “Take two.”

“Who just said he is not coming back to fight? We’re not here for money . . .”

“Li beyk ya Husayn!”

“Li beyk ya Husayn, li beyk ya Husayn!” we all shouted back.

Sometime later two rattling armored vehicles went right up to the enemy nest and blew it to pieces. The whole thing was so anticlimactic and unheroic that I didn’t bother to go over for a look while everyone went on shouting Li beyk ya Husayn. But as I continued to scroll through useless e-mails on the cell, a text message came from H.

H: O Channel says you haven’t sent anything in the past week for the Abbas show.

Me: A little busy at the moment.

Maysam was shouting for everyone to come over to where the nest had been. We all got up and walked dutifully that way. We were tired of the enemy. Tired of their clever bunkers and their tenacity. Most of our Hashd forces could have been home this evening for dinner. Instead they were here in this camel’s ass of a no-man’s-land trying to smoke out remnants of a dwindling war. Maysam pointed to a hole in the ground where the enemy had scuttled back and forth over the past few weeks. Cleric J was on the phone, hearing it again from a commander—exactly what was the reason that the people of the mokeb had to be out here engaging the enemy? Cleric J gave his usual beautiful and dubious lecture about the burden of those who were living, and that we’d really come so far out because we’d heard there were villages that needed feeding. It was untrue, of course—no villages here. Cleric J had been itching for a fight and the men at the mokeb were depressed from the previous two days and nights of rain. Nothing like getting shot at to remind you of the blood running through your veins. Cleric J was a therapist at heart.

H: Are you still there?

Me: Please transmit the following to O Channel: Abbas falls in love.