When the program started, with Mafiha reading a poem that began with “Peace has a price,” I shut his bullshit out and focused a little more on the faces of those veterans. I was sure they were men who’d known combat maybe as recently as last week. But without their weapons they were ordinary civilians who did not know what to do with their hands. They were childlike and their vanity had been crushed. Yet their faces betrayed a knowingness devoid of the zest that ran like blood in the civilian audience’s impenetrable wall of smiles. It was then that I saw Shorty, one of the snipers of Three Magi fame who would soon be dead, alongside his comrades.

Shorty’s nose was in a book that looked to have been borrowed from the photography section.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

He didn’t seem surprised. “Saleh! We’re on our way to jebhe.”

When a man says to you that he’s headed for the front, you enter another region with him. It is as if everything you say to him or hear from him no longer quite belongs to the realm of life. I could not have known that soon Shorty would be dead from friendly fire inside some industrial barrel on the Syria-Iraq border. And like most of those deaths, his death too would have little to no color for me, because I would not be close enough to witness it. It was like being cheated out of real lamentation. One minute you are making rice at the mokeb and the next minute somebody comes up to you with the familiar words: Something has happened.

“Your boys are with you?” I asked Shorty.

He put the book away, a collection of war photographs from the 1980s. “No. I came alone. They advertised this thing tonight in Nights of Damascus.”

Nights of Damascus was an online group that all the Defenders of the Holy Places veterans subscribed to on their cell phones. Mostly pictures of martyrs on the Syrian front, but not Iraq. It made me guess that Shorty and the others were soon headed much farther west than Tal Afar.

“Well?”

“Well what, brother Saleh?”

“This event. What do you think of it?”

He looked genuinely perplexed by the question. “Nothing. That Dodonge guy, he is a fake. The other guy, I don’t know him. He doesn’t look right either.”