The rest of the day I sat on the roof of the mokeb’s longhouse watching convoy traffic outside and mokeb traffic inside. There was a lot of agitation. Three white-turbaned, AK-carrying younger clerics from one of the farther outposts came up and consulted with Cleric J. Their sater had been penetrated yesterday. The enemy had a thing for saddling their pickups with explosives and looking for weak spots in the line. Once they thought they’d found one, they came at it with a single-mindedness that made the toughest men holding the line pray for their mothers. It took only one guy getting over that hump and blowing himself up inside the trench to birth a dozen martyrs, if not more. The hump was everything; once you were over it there was not a thing anyone could do. The already-dead bastard was not there to use his weapon. His weapon was to blow himself up, which was next to impossible to stop.

Blame seemed to be going around today. Everyone drank their tea and said God’s name too many times. The Americans were always the object of derision in these conversations, their occasional air support for us questionable at best. On the surface we were fighting on the same side for a change, and against an enemy that wanted the earth itself to be gone. Over at places like Palmyra in Syria and Mosul down the road from us, the enemy had gone on orgies of destruction of all things ancient, afterward gloating in their sick cruelty over priceless historical stones that could not fight or talk back. No wonder then that in the mokeb, and up and down all the saters of the war, we quietly saw ourselves as the soldiers of civilization, even if no one else believed us or gave a shit. It was not something that was talked about. But it was there. In the air of every minor battle. And in the newscasts out of Iraq too. This was Nineveh, after all. The ancient capital of the Assyrians. The Nineveh of the Bible and the vast 2,700-year-old stone tablet library it had once held. We were certain we were fighting for something bigger than just Mesopotamia. And we were eating the bullets that the Americans, who despised our skin and our faces and our weapons, should have been eating right alongside us. The Americans saw us as rodents, and we saw them as a hollow Goliath. They laughed at our poetry and “queer” dancing in the middle of war, while we wept and held wakes after their friendly fires that killed our brothers. I wondered if anything, anything at all, could ever bridge these suspicions. I wondered if the so-called friendly fire that had killed the Three Magi had not only been the Americans but also thoroughly calculated.

Still, even if we were to find out the truth about the murder of our boys, what then? What could we do with that information?