I nodded. That was a valid point, given the information that I had just given her. I tore off a corner of my sandwich and wolfed it down. “Good question, but there’s more. The tattoo isn’t just the three words. There’s a line and three dots on top of it. What my guy was really excited about was the line and the three dots. The words are interesting, the line and three dots put it over the edge. They signify tribe and clan affiliation. And our guy was from the same clan and tribe as Saddam Hussein.”

She whistled. “Old-school ruling class.”

“Hard core Saddam guy.”

“So why is a hard core Saddam loyalist now a dead Afghan asylum seeker in France?”

“We don’t know, but if the dead guy was Iraqi ruling class, penny to a dollar he’ll feature in a US military database.”

We ate the sandwiches. I got us coffee and brownies from another guy in a truck. Brought them back and sat down again.

I said, “I wonder though, about the body in the morgue.”

“How so?”

“Let me give you some context.”

“Go for it.”

“Alright. I got to Iraq for the first time in 2006, and stayed there, for a couple of years. Back in 06 we were dealing with what they called ‘the insurgency’, basically patriotic Iraqis who didn’t want us there, saw us as occupiers or whatever and wanted to kill any American they could find. Pretty much how I would be if the whole thing was flipped around. So our job was to take them out, which we did. One at a time or many at the same time, didn’t matter."

“It was war.”

“But it wasn’t easy to know who was who, and what they were doing before or after the US invasion. So we cast a wide net, took thousands of them in for interrogation, which sometimes lasted years. Top of the list, the first guys we looked at, were Iraqi ex-military and Ba’ath party members. You ever hear of a place called Abu Ghraib?”

“Nope.”

“Notorious prison in Iraq. Saddam had fifteen thousand political prisoners in there at the height of his dictatorship. There was routine torture and weekly executions. When we threw Saddam out, we took over the prison. First thing we did was kick every Ba’ath party member we could find out of the military. Then, like I said, we put them into jail.

“A lot of them stayed there for years. Some of them ended up establishing this little club called ISIS that you may have heard of. They called Abu Ghraib a terrorist university. It didn’t help that our prison guards were torturing the inmates.