Free Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack Page B

desert bloom, that they are the only democracy in the Middle East, a humane land that is sometimes forced to behave inhumanely, and we Americans tell ourselves that we are fighting tyranny and toppling dictators. And we say this word,
terrorism
, because it has become the best excuse of all. We push into other lands, we chase the ghosts of a concept, because it is too hard to admit that evil is already in our own hearts and blood is on our hands.
    * “Adeeb” is a pseudonym.

FIVE
FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
    Quite a few things happen only because we’ve written them up first. This is what modern journalism is all about. I know you don’t want to stand in the way of our being modern.
    —Orhan Pamuk
    A nd then the war came that would tangle America in time and blood, and make us forget, for a time, the other wars, Afghanistan and Israel. In the corpus of the Arab world, Iraq is a nerve center and a soul. Baghdad was magnificent at a time when Arabs were glorious and powerful, and so it is a place that still matters; its history and legends are cherished by millions. The ancient Babylonians developed mathematics and split the day into twenty-four hours centuries before Christ; the Abbasids built their round city in the eighth century; the Shiite scholars at Najaf still interpret Islam for millions of followers. If you invaded Iraq, you invaded all of the history and meaning, too—you plunged into the heart of how a people sees itself, its complexes of defeat and dictatorship, the whiff of dissipated, dusted-over greatness. The United States was determined to take Baghdad, and they did it fast. Just twenty days after the war began, American tanks had churned into Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s statue was off the pedestal, and the dictator himself had fled.
    I would leave Amman in the middle of the night to reach Iraq at first light. The hotel phone screeched and the driver announced inbroken English that he had come to take me to Baghdad. Night was coming unspooled in the lobby. Wilting wedding guests dragged themselves over the floors, old men muttered into cigarettes, and late-night playboys in dark suits chased their own laughter into the darkness. I walked into the cold night and climbed into the backseat of an SUV. The bellhops in their monkey suits slid the door shut behind me. I was being escorted off to war.
    “Okay?” the driver asked.
    “Okay.”
    The hours flew past like billboards on the black, dull road east. The driver slurped at a thermos of hot tea. A truck stop, the sharp smell of diesel, the drone of cassette-tape Koran. More darkness then, drawing close to the border. A hand takes my passport and melts into night. We inch along, from one administrative building to the next, out of Jordan and into Iraq. The border offices loom frozen in the dimness, painted against the velvet screen of a coming dawn. A figure materializes from the night and swings himself into the passenger seat.
    “My cousin,” the driver says.
    “Okay.” This wasn’t part of the deal.
    “Hello,” says the cousin, twisting around. Street lamps on their stalks waver in his pupils.
    “Hello.” He is a young man and suddenly I want him there. He looks too healthy to get hurt.
    Darkness thinned and faded as we rolled through the desert of western Iraq, desperately awake. Delivered into something we could not control, we hurtled along in a machine; wheels ate the highway, and I was comfortable knowing that I was just a passenger, I was not responsible for what might come. I closed my eyes and watched waking dreams like movies. The road disappeared behind us. We spat it out and hurtled forward.
    A hot dawn came, the air in the car tight and edged with body smells. The dust storm smelled, too, stirring in the yellow sky. In the desert you learn that dust has a smell, a little like washed cotton sheets or baking bread with the texture of scratchy silk in the back of the throat. Arab springs always bring winds and the smell of dust. We