A fractal desert broken up by bongo trucks and the occasional donkey. Early morning. The sun lifts. Oppressive. What it is like.
schism.
Tears in the fabric where third-world poverty spills out like plasma. Paved roads surrounded by webs of dirt roads that meander into wet gullies. Lemongrass and currant tea, the sound of gilded porcelain teacups on saucers. Rank smell. Acrid carbon. The stench of burnt shit and old oil. Phosphorus.
a tree and garden with snakes and the naked man walking to it, across the map, it stretches, is not yet there. pulling. taut with gates open. a maze of truth encircling but leaving open. rushing currents, river of life,
I enter it slowly — stage left from the west — a place called Al-Anbar. I have been (almost) here before in a different existential plane of time and place called Jordan, on its eastern front where the signs read: 5 kilometers to Iraq. A long highway entrance into the western desert of Iraq, far from Baghdad’s principal politics.
Pockets of sulfur-dioxide. Eddying. I sweat heavily. The heat is couched beneath my body armor, immersed in salty fluid. Pores yield secretions. Also: the sound of rotors. Burning trash and the scent of combusted explosives shock my nostrils. ISR flies overhead — glinting shards of crystal in fat sun. We are all under surveillance.
unshod feet and she knows nothing of covering nakedness. she is consecrated, whole, still seeking a way, because we escape what is good, we transform: ascension. this is the way of spirits in bodies walking the Garden’s banks into
The desert is too flat for trees, so when I see them, they are just paper cutouts. There is one across the yard and it does not belong. Rendered meaningless by grotesque heat. This is a base named Al-Taqaddum, a storehouse for rolling stock. These are my first days. I spend them crossing large yards looking for LMTVs, HMMWVs, and MRAPs.
green leaves piled to chests and throats. her breasts hang: fruit from boughs: honeyed milk.
Base to base. We move in columns of armored vehicles. Security is the barrels of .50 caliber machine guns —pointed out — alternating teeth like a zipper. Barrels are oriented north and south as we drive eastward. Highway 1 is the artery that bisects Iraq. Operationally, it is designated MSR Mobile. We have renamed indigenous highways. They are ours now. My heart quickens. We cross the Euphrates. Bounded by the Tigris. This is the fertile crescent. Mesopotamia: birth of civilization. We arrive Camp Ramadi.
it hangs off the tree like an olive-colored noose because forked tongues offer choices. all of this, a world predicated upon free will. momentum.
How do you talk about Iraq without talking about its pestilence? Its war? Its casualties? In talking about naan bread, it does not flake off as its own predicate. Held hostage.
inertia hangs from the heavens, drips over the two of them. they embrace, make love and join flesh.
My next patrol outside the wire. On foot with forty men. My men. My forty soldiers. My platoon. Iraqis do not talk to us, save for the children who have not outgrown their humanity; they are middle people, half-solid, and in varying conditions of opacity, caught between the walls of two close but separate dimensions. Interstitial. What they want cannot be actualized, what we want cannot be actualized.
sounds of life on old earth — howls and chirps — tented in the before, a cry to Eden: take me back
Open air shops brim with slaughtered goat and chicken, and large iron bowls hold yellow rice flavored with jasmine. Fried sambusa is served, and kettled shorbeh is ladled out, but there is unspoken agreement between soldiers and citizens: This is not who we are unless this is private. I agree to make good on this contract.
to before the blemish: the sound of feet stepping carefully, unworried. free.
They do not work. I don’t think I’ve seen a working Iraqi yet. They subsist. They ache and burn and smoke millions of cigarettes. They bake bread and rarely bathe. They are knitted up in leather skin. They do not care about luxury because they care about shoes. In the desert truth changes. Fickleness morphs its definition. I learn something: it is easy to be magnanimous in America. It is hard to be giving in the desert.
lush forest. pillar of cloud makes rain, pours life.
Still. There is the Bedouin way. A man must give a traveler water, care, and shelter. This is the way of the desert. Labneh, naan, and zaytoun (olives). Precursor. I sit with elders and sheikhs. They have been working with Americans for many years. I am not the first. I am not even here. I’m an envoy. A figurehead for a concept they shrug their shoulders about. Democracy. Psychopathic demonstrations about nothing. This is not the way of them. They know violence and they adhere to it.
food in abundance, all things in abundance, community. hand-in-hand they walk to the hedges — outer wall — flaming sword makes the portal open: orchids.
We discuss their community, the bad men, and local projects. We talk about rebuilding. They tell me we are valued. Formality. They want the American pocketbook. They value material supplies. This is the way of it. We are polite. We lie to each other. We smile and drink shay.
birth and growth: transfiguration. transcension.
Relationships complicate when guns are brought to the table. Sometimes relationships elucidate. Now and again, they are the same thing. Trust is a shadow sitting close by, never speaking.
not alone, besides, like an acquaintance, waiting for a passing basket of bread to break into words. stone’s throw potentiality.
Iraqis have a different concept of work. It’s about society and rarely about productivity. There is no urgency in their culture. They will not discuss business with speed. They will ask about your family instead, they will name you Habibi, they will kiss you on the cheek. They are old, tired, and many of them are grateful.
violation. choices: [eyes — ] go black like mambas. gooseflesh and chills and tremors of cold for the first time. [ — opened] legs like confluence. others invited inside. venomous serpents.
Palm trees. Above them: circling UH-60s. The pilot gives a thumbs up. We are on patrol. It’s miserably hot. My 240 gunner takes a knee. His staff sergeant runs to him and stands him back up. Nearby, a small canal lined with reeds. Standing water. Our feet sweat. Smiling children run past us. They turn and flock to the head of the platoon. They are friendly — (but no one here is genuine) — the way we watch them is of guardians inspecting perpetrators. If they mean to harm us someone will die. Crowds make me nervous.
offered. accepted. bitten.
Many of the homes are surrounded by stone walls. Mudhif, and masonry, and wood. They take their privacy but join together in the streets. Iraqis enjoy community. They are poor and disadvantaged. The Iraqi officers and officials with access to Americans control the resources. They exploit it. They take what is meant for the community and harbor it for themselves. Humanitarian aid is devoured selfishly. Socked away like Somalian foodstuffs.
exit the labyrinth as it mellows into uric death. banished never to return. exile. the Garden: a lesson in geometric memory.
Wherever I venture: smiles and thinly veiled portent. Danger lurks, is written on faces, is containerized in bongo trucks, is embedded in the roads. This is ferocious Iraq, and shouting over all this are the cycling megaphones making call to prayer: Bismillah Rahman Rahim… Like a shroud it covers us, soaks us, this is the voice of all uncertainty, and the musjid might be a house of worship, or it might be a depot; and the minaret might be a tower for worship, or it might be a turret.
issolves. chimera. the [Iraq] Garden.
Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.
Roman, that is a stark and authentic portrayal of your journey in Iraq. You recreate the environment so effectively.
I have read many books on Vietnam as well as Africa. Mankind has always taken these paths it seems. It's as if we willfully ignore history to obtain resources for rich men or power and political capital for others.