My Son Wanted a Notebook
How can I tell you this? My son Anoosah worked in a sweatshop weaving rugs. This was during the good time—after the Taliban but before everything got worse again. He worked ten hours, six days a week. His small, brown fingertips looked as blistered and cracked as the streets of downtown Kabul. Still, each day he came home. He kissed my cheeks. He played the games that young boys play, and when he ran, he moved as freely as a cloud.
Anoosah earned two dollars a month. We bought barley and figs. We could only do this sometimes. Other times, I stole from the farmers at the bazaar, stuffing corn and cucumbers into my clothing. Once, Anoosah tried to pillage a nearby hen house. The owner found him sitting on the floor, coddling the hens, their warm, ruffled feathers like nothing he had ever felt. The man took pity and gave Anoosah some eggs, but only after he earned them by cleaning out the coop. “Like silk,” Anoosah told me later. “Holding those hens felt like holding bags of silk.”
My husband’s feet were crushed in the rubble from an American missile in the early attacks. The same people who hurt him later helped him, and so he lived. He uses crutches while we wait for his prosthesis. It’s been four months. He sleeps all day. He survived, but the only part that’s still alive is his anger. He says his country is nothing if he cannot feel the earth beneath his feet.
A new school opened for women. There were business classes, driving instructions, and lessons on self-care. I got permission to attend and walked there every day. We tried lipstick. Learned basic English. They even gave us lunch. One of the teachers fitted me for eyeglasses, and my handwriting improved.
I told Anoosah everything so he could learn as well. He wanted a notebook of his very own—a small luxury—so I sent him to the shops. I had a voucher from the school for just these kinds of things. He ran out the door, stuffing the voucher into his pockets. He would be able to tell stories and let me write them down for him. He could make sketches of the hills and show them to his father. “Get the biggest one you can,” I said. “We’ll fill every page!”
The explosion happened a few blocks from the store. I heard it from our home and didn’t worry. These things still happened sometimes, though this one was loud and close. My husband pushed himself out of bed and crawled across the kitchen to our front door. “Anoosah,” he said and grabbed his crutches and lifted himself up. There was no way to do this quickly, and he wouldn’t let me help. He wrangled out the door and onto the street. He hadn’t been outside in months. First one crutch, then the other, a sort of hop-heaving motion from one rubber tip of the crutches to the next. I walked next to him as he teetered, a building with no foundation. One block later he collapsed. That’s when we saw it.
The car bomb must have gone off at the wrong time, because the driver was a smoking statue, one foot still on the brake, the other sticking out the open door and touching the sidewalk in mock escape. His burning hand looked glued to the door handle. Limp bodies encircled the flaming car like petals around the center of a flower. How can I tell you this? My son wanted a notebook. He wanted a notebook, and he was killed.
Poo Mission
1st Squad was bedded down in a firm house inside Fallujah. Our worst day of fighting and more casualties than we even knew at that point. But the block was secure, and we had men on watch from rooftop to sidewalk. I had to take a dump, and the only safe place was the building we were sleeping in.
I elbowed my buddy on the floor next to me. “Yo, Holden, you awake?”
“I’m either awake, or I’m dead.”
“I gotta take a shit.”
Right away, Holden made a big deal of the whole thing. “Freyer’s on a poo mission,” he announced. Most of the guys were awake anyway, a chorus of chuckles erupting from the moonlit room.
Ruiz said, “He’s droppin’ the kids off at the pool!”
Caldwell said, “He’s takin’ the Browns to the Super Bowl!”
Fitz said, “He’s unleashing the bomb on Hiroshima!”
“Yeah, and all your moms can’t wait to watch me do it,” I told them.
We got up and Holden followed me down the dark hallway, broken glass and busted rocks crunching beneath our boots. My ears were ringing, but other than that, the city sounded eerily quiet. I didn’t like it one bit. We reached the end of the hall and saw three doors, all shot up.
“Go in the middle one,” Holden said. “That’s where the dead muj is. I dare you to shit on his face.”
“Hell no,” I said. “I don’t want any muj watching me take a dump, dead or alive.” I chose the entrance on the left and walked into the room. The whole place felt like a haunted house with bad ju-ju. Only hours beforehand, this room held a weapons cache for the terrorists trying to keep a stronghold in the city. There weren’t any windows, so I clicked on my headlamp and cleared a place to squat. Bullet shells, hypodermic needles, and busted up chairs littered the floor. A rug lay in the corner, stained with blood. Holden waited for me on the other side of the door.
After a few minutes, I heard him light a cigarette.
“Freyer?” he said.
“What?”
“If we make it back, don’t tell Maria about the smoking, okay?” He meant if we make it back to Bozeman, where we’re both from. We still had two months.
“Man, she should just be happy you’re alive,” I said.
“Try telling her that,” he said. “It’s being pregnant. She’s fussy about my health now.”
I pulled my pants back up and joined him in the hallway. “In that case,” I said, “You’d better let me help you with those; for your health and all.”
He smiled and tossed me a smoke.
When we got back to the main room, most of the guys were asleep. I could hear Ruiz snoring, and right next to him lay Sergeant Fisher, twitching away in some sort of half sleep. It’s an odd thing, seeing your squad so vulnerable like that. They almost looked like strangers—my brothers, my fellow Marines—the way the moon cast a blue light across their bodies. It made them look holy. More than anything, it made them look dead.
Refugee
I took my family, and we did what we were told, leaving our house in Fallujah before the second U.S.-led assault. I paid all my money and one basket of food to a cab driver outside the city. He took us as far as our money would go, about seven miles from the al-Hadrha district of Bagdhad. We walked the rest of the way, my wife and two daughters, plus three satchels of belongings that I slung over my back and carried like a camel. I remember feeling the sun warm my shoulders and the taste of dust kicked up along the road. Some days, it felt as though those were the only things left untouched in Iraq: ceaseless heat and tiny particles of the past that could survive any method of warfare.
I heard Doctors Without Borders had set up a camp in al-Hadrha for families like ours. I didn’t know who they were or why they would come, but they took us in. We stayed in pole tents with thousands of others—all of this in a district already as crowded as a rug factory. Volunteers served small meals three times a day. Others showed us how to set up tents for families that kept coming. We raised walls, hammered stakes, and secured door flaps all without speaking each other’s language. It didn’t matter. The work needed doing. We did it together. The city sang around us—sometimes air raids, other times the ritual calls to prayer.
Within a week, my wife found sewing work in Bagdhad. During the daytime, tents were only for the sick or elderly so my daughters played outside. Without any schools, gangs of youth loitered between rows of tents. One afternoon, an elderly woman died, and a small crowd of orphan boys took her santoor to entertain themselves with music. They danced and clapped, unashamed of their thievery. Other times, the gangs grew restless and taunted each other or dared girls in no-good games. A crippled teen played on my daughters for sympathy,