Free The Weight of a Mustard Seed by Wendell Steavenson Page A

bare brown crumbling rock. It was a desert, no animals, not even birds. On the lower slopes shepherds had led their flocks along the narrow sheep-worn contour tracks to graze the meager spring grass and camp in a cave called the Cave of Death. “It was grim and everyone hated it,” said Hamdani, “we lost so many soldiers there.”
    At the opening of the battle Hamdani, then a major, led an armored scout unit to discern the enemy’s position and line of communications. He found an old track to an abandoned Ottoman fort and observed the Iranians reinforcing their vanguard across a narrow pass. Then he drove to the nearest village, al-Maalla, the Iraqi staging point twenty kilometers away, to deliver his report.
    It was a wet dim gray January day. It would rain hard and then stop, rain hard again. Hamdani pulled the neck of his military sweater over his head, the rain soaked through his combat jacket. The Iranian shelling was heavy on the slopes, lighter on the outskirts of al-Maalla. In the village there was the mash of military confusion, a triage center had been set up in a surgical tent under red crescent flags; a thousand dead those first three days, maybe three thousand wounded. It was the first Iranian offensive of the war, the shelling was heavy, the mud was heavy, there was shock that the Iraqi garrison had been repulsed and there were so many wounded, shaken down the gravel roads over swollen rivulets in bloody muddy ambulances and overloaded groaning jeepfuls.
    The general in charge of the counterattacking 2nd Corps was General Latif, who Hamdani (and others) described as a courageous but bone-headed brutal man who thought that every battle should be fought as a head-on collision. Hamdani knew him from the 1974 war against the Kurds as a heavy drinker who would distribute beer to his men. (“It was permitted to drink then, but of course not on duty.”) Hamdani found his headquarters in a police station, from where two infantry brigades had been ordered up the mountain to assault the Iranians directly. Hamdani had seen the Iranian reinforcements go over the pass beneath the Ottoman fort at Joboura and he wanted to explain in his oral report that operations should be directed at choking this pass. But the atmosphere inside the headquarters was curled and mean. “Very bad.” Hamdani shook his head. A colonel and a captain and six soldiers had been accused of an unauthorized retreat and Latif had ordered their execution. The prisoners, handcuffed and blindfolded, were led outside into the yard, and a squad of soldiers were lined up in front of them. These soldiers were hesitant, cradling their guns in their hands, miserable and tense. Latif had a rifle in his hand and hescreamed at the execution squad, “If you will not shoot them I will shoot you and then I will shoot them myself.”
    Hamdani could not bear to watch. He went to Sharkashi’s deputy, a wise and sympathetic officer called Barhawi, and explained his plan for cutting off the pass. Barhawi was despondent. He said to him, “Yes, you are right, but what can I do with this man? All he will do is hit them with straight-on attacks.”
    Hamdani left the scene and drove farther back behind the lines to the town of Mendali where the Iraqi staff had set up headquarters and gave his oral report about the Joboura pass to his commanding officer. A little while later he was requested to deliver his report directly to more senior commanders and directed into an underground bunker.
    He walked down a few concrete steps and inside, smelling cigar smoke in the damp concrete room. Sitting around a table was Saddam Hussein, smoking a cigar, Adnan Khairallah, Saddam’s cousin and popular Minister of Defense, the head of the Istikhbarat, the military intelligence, and a bodyguard-aide. As Hamdani came in, Saddam was scolding the head of the Istikhbarat: “This is all happening because of your failures! We did not have the