The whiz of bullets split the air, sometimes so close they were whispers an inch away. This had been going on for an hour and I was bored at last. And uncomfortable. The ground was mud; detritus from weeks and months of stasis was rolled into the landscape, making it resemble some kind of death-paste. The Kurds stayed at Bartella and bided their time. There was an unspoken border between us and it wasn’t really unspoken. In the middle sat Mosul, waiting.

Cleric J was in his element when he was getting shot at. Tranquility graced his face. He looked at you with clinical eyes, as if to say: Watch, because if this is my last moment, I want you to know and tell everyone I gave it my all. I will go with a smile on my face. I envied him that. I’d left Miss Homa down south in Najaf and told her I’d be back in a few days. A week had gone by, and the enemy’s reinforcements were suddenly like genies out of thin air. It made us wonder if the Americans were not playing us. Maybe they had an entire army of these men under lock and key and were dispensing them in paces just to test our will and kill us in easy-to-deny numbers. Whatever it was, it worked. Men got tired and jumpy. This corner of the war should have been over. I’d come back after three months and not only had we not budged, but now they were raining rockets on our positions. The Kurds, God bless their grit and spirit, occupied the heights and were not unhappy to see us softened a little. There would be reckoning later.

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.