The Dreams that Come Between Us

Last night I saw four foxes
flashing in the highbeams of a gun truck,
dashing across those cratered
highways of northern Iraq
into the dark desert.

I dreamed of chasing fox tails.
I dreamed thin fingers and piano keys
and an empty violin case.

I dreamed dust-quiet songs
falling on the tongues of forgotten shoes.

My Sweetest Friend

The desert was cold tonight.

A thin, orange moon
tilted on the western horizon,
and to the east, beneath Cassiopeia,
a satellite’s iridium flare
streaked southward.

I remembered
the smell of cocoa butter
and thought of your hair
bleached by a northern sun.

The compass you gave me
points always to Ultima Thule.

And I feel just like Jesus' son

What Became of the Likely Lads

This cloudless night has opened vast arms
and released the stifling day.

An Army convoy crawls a dark road
like a sparkling centipede.

Where do bad folks go when they die,
sings the turret gunner in the scout vehicle.

They don't go to heaven
where the angels fly,
he sings into the headset mic.
They go to a lake of fire and fry.

We'll see 'em again on the fourth of July.

What the Lieutenant Dreamed

Winter arrives in the night desert
with rain and silent sheet lightning.

The Lieutenant keeps
wiping the windshield
but the mud is on the other side.

The convoy rolls along a pocked road,
and someone sees white-bellied frogs
leaping in rain-shimmered headlights.

The Lieutenant keeps
thinking of a song by The Libertines,
What Became of the Likely Lads.

Someone says
I saw this on the Natchez Trace,
the frogs and the falling Live Oaks.

The Lieutenant keeps
three dusty carpets and his heart
rolled in a cardboard box
that he plans on sending home for the holidays.

The Lieutenant keeps wiping the windshield.

Raymond Chandler in the Desert

A dead man is heavier than a broken heart
is what he said, and the big sleep
is only a lullaby away.

Beyond a hill, an old man chanted
the call to prayer.

A dry wind tugged
the lapel of his wrinkled suit
and sprinkled sand in his glass of whiskey.

I know a guy who sells Turkish carpets
cheap, I said. Just say the word.

Jen @ 17

There is Jen at 17,
standing alone on a Lake Michigan dune,
listening to the hush and mumble of waves.

The slightest breath of June
teases her long, dark hair,
and the sun settles
a score with Wisconsin.

She presses her palms together,
then opens them.

This is when she releases 37 seconds--
soft & quiet as cottonwood fleece
drifting from light to shadow.

This is when she sings a song
that won't be written for 20 years.

There is Jen at 17,
dune dancing and last-chancing youth.

One by one,
the street lights of Lake Shore Drive
begin to bloom.

Thank you, Raymond Chandler.

The main hallway in the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

(The Big Sleep, 1939)

My Last Dance

She sang the forty-four madrigals of night
and the forty-four canzonettas of day.
She played a mean violin.

She said
twice is more than we deserve.
She said it twice.

She bought my shadow for a kiss.

She bought my shadow
and poured it in the river at St. Louis,
and I waited under the Vicksburg bridge
where the pylons rise like Solomon's pillars.

I bare-hand fished my shadow from the shallows,
and it fought me like a channel cat,
my fist in its throat. I wrestled my shadow,
and she played her cat gut violin on the muddy shore.

She cut on those strings and sang
the forty-four canzonettas of day,
the forty-four madrigals of night.

Into the White

Snow was falling on the city

like a language we didn’t speak.

We stood alone on a bridge

watching ice knuckle the pylons.

This life is bound to happen, she said,

and I don't want to know your name.

This life is bound to happen,

and there's a hole, a hole,

a white hole in heaven.

She said.

She saw singed feathers

falling from heaven.

She said God’s an angry father

who won't keep.

He won't keep his hands.

He won't keep his hands to himself.

She caught snowflakes on her tongue

and in her upturned palms.

She was praying.

Her hands were folded wings.

God's a handsome debaser, she said.

He debases the finest nights with his grin.

This life is bound to happen,

and this monkey's gone to heaven.

The Habur Gate Run

Battle Rhythm of a Convoy Security Company

Up north here, the dust
twisters race across the base
every afternoon, three tall sisters
leaning forward as they run.

The aerostat balloon tugs its tether.

Ring-necked pigeons
circle the chow hall and land,
circle and land.

The convoys leave and return.
They leave and return and the days
have no names.

I stab the desert with my knife
once a night to measure time.

I carry a fist of filthy air
that I am waiting to release
when my knife hits bone.

Grad School Morning

When Richard Sings the Blues

I saw the fallen

hero of his own story

take a journey down the tracks.

I saw him by the trestle

waving his untucked shirt tail

and kissing his shoes goodbye.

He had places to go.

The sun leaned over

his left shoulder.

Twin dust sisters danced

for him and him alone.

This ain't no long gone

and low down walk-about, he said.

He said it twice.

The Yellow Dog hollered down the tracks.

The Yellow Dog hollered down the tracks,

and he ain't looking back.

Doc Mo knows the distance between Heaven & Hell

Dr. Muhammed Ismail Ahmed is a village shaikh and tribal liaison for more than 50 other rural villages surrounding Contingency Operating Base Q-West, a political and religious leader on whom the Coalition Forces have grown to depend. He lives in the small hamlet of Jedallah Sofia, a general practitioner with a medical degree from the University of Mosul who no longer practices medicine.

I met him about a month after my battalion arrived, when he paid an introductory visit to Lt. Col. William B. Smith, Jr., the mayor of Q-West, essentially a municipal position. Every sizable base has a Mayor Cell to oversee basic life-support—billeting, public works, business operations, recreation—as opposed to the forces that attend to base defense and off-base operations, such as presence patrols, convoy security, and so on. I serve as Smith’s Director of Operations, something of a deputy mayor.

So, as I am the “deputy mayor,” Dr. Muhammed introduced himself. Everybody, it seems, knows him, and the Americans call him “Doc Mo.” I asked him once how he felt about the nickname, and he replied in his characteristically philosophical manner.

They call me “Doc Mo.” It’s okay. In Iraq, we do this, too. Families will honor a favored son with a nickname, a shorter name of affection. “Doc Mo” is like that—a name that comes from family. My good friends call me this.

Be that as it may, few seem to know his full name. When I first met him, I transcribed it from his identification card, which all civilians must wear in plain view when on post. I have seen him mentioned, for instance, in official dispatches simply as Doc Mo. He doesn’t seem to mind, but then Dr. Muhammed plays his game close to the chest. He doesn’t show his cards.

Clean-shaven but for a trimmed mustache that nonetheless manages to droop, Dr. Muhammed embodies the fine balance of tradition and change that characterizes Iraqi professionals—ancient tribal memory contending with contemporary ideas. He is spokesman for an impoverished, rural, and under-educated population. However, he possesses a subdued cosmopolitan air, sporting, for instance, an expensive gold wristwatch, an quartz crystal Omax, the face of which bares not numbers, only thin dashes on the hour.

(I made the mistake of admiring his watch the last time we sat down to chat on the foyer couch at the Mayor Cell. Now he intends to give me one just like it the next time we meet. I should have known better than to admire a possession of a respected shaikh. I learned during pre-deployment cultural training that, as a point of honor, a host will give to a guest an object overly admired. If I do not accept it, I will dishonor him, but if I do accept it, I will be in his debt. I will deny his gift, of course, to avoid more obvious conflicts of interest. However, what if I accepted it and, in the fashion of Maude in Harold and Maude, promptly threw it in the Tigris—so as never to forget where I put it?)

Dr. Muhammed exudes contradictions. On the day I first met him, he had donned an ankle-length, loose-fitting dishdasha, the traditional, shirt-like garment of Iraqi men, but his was gray-green rather than the typically summer white, and it bore the faintest pinstripes, suggesting the shrewd business man that he is.

(He stopped practicing medicine in 2005, he told me, having become more and more active as a tribal leader in the province. He receives a small stipend for his work with Coalition Forces, but hardly enough to support his wife and three young sons. He also owns a modest earth-moving operation, trucks, track-hoes, and dozers that cost more to operate and maintain than he expected. )

On his head, he wore a kaffiyeh, a long, white scarf folded into a triangle and held with the plated-cord of a tribal leader. Occasionally, when listening intently, he swept the right hand folds of the scarf up and draped them behind, revealing his short, black hair flecked with gray.

With his large-lens glasses and left-breast pocket stuffed with pens, notepad, identification card, and wallet, Dr. Muhammed brought to mind the owl-eyed, bookish medical student he must have been in the 1980s when he attended the University of Mosul’s Medical College, where English is the language of instruction.

Dr. Muhammed is the key figure in any discussion with the local communities, especially those animated conversations about water. I have mentioned the importance of water variously in previous postings because it is the central issue in this desert country—not oil, which bubbles from flatlands and oozes from ridgelines, not even the ongoing insurgency or the continued presence of Coalition Forces.

“Iraq, which is in its fourth consecutive year of drought, is facing its lowest harvest in a decade this year,” says Jane Arraf, correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, in an August 11 story, “Turkey offers water for Iraqi crackdown on Kurdish rebels”. The title suggests the geo-political importance of water in Iraq, a country that relies on the two great rivers of ancient Mesopotamia—the Euphrates, which meanders from Turkey through Syria, and the Tigris, which flows straight down from Turkey.

Turkish hydroelectric dams have reduced the flow of water in recent years, requiring treaties governing minimum volumes of water released south. Turkey leverages this need to gain Iraqi cooperation with its own insurgency. “If water is Iraq's biggest bilateral issue, the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) is Turkey’s,” says Arraf.

Iraqi military and civil authorities—the Army and the Police, mainly—struggle for control of water as a source of power and revenue. Where does Dr. Muhammed stand? Many say he stands with General Abaas and the Army. Others think he sides with the mayor and police chief of Qayyarah, the name from which COB Q-West gets its “Q,” being west of the city. Those who can say one way or another know more than I, and it’s beyond my purpose to draw such conclusions.

Some accuse him of corruption, benefiting from American largess by pocketing money and supplies meant for the impoverished communities he represents. If that is true, it is neither excusable nore surprising. A culture of corruption exists in Iraq that sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.

The dream of the United States was that Iraq would become a democracy. We scattered the seeds of democracy in a desert and hoped they would germinate, and perhaps they have or will. For a democracy to bloom, the government and all its institutions must submit to the people’s just consent, yet the people still have little conception of the power of democracy, of the people’s voice.

This is a country where the Army and Police are notoriously corrupt, where people take for granted extortion at highway checkpoints, where those who control the water pipelines to communities—whoever they are—often sell that water, though public taxes had already paid for it.

Many communities in Ninewa Province along the Tigris River have their own lift station pumps—bought and installed mostly by Coalition Forces—but these pumps often lie idle. Dr. Muhammed believes that they may be left unused to keep them in good shape (after all, why wear out a good pump when a convenient and free water source flows under the eaves of the police station?) or left silent because someone has sold on the black market the diesel fuel meant to run it. The problem lies with the people, too, for they often refuse to follow their own laws. For instance, they tap illegally into the 16-inch water pipeline that feeds Q-West rather than using the 12-inch pipeline that supplies water to the city of Qayyarah.

Most frustrating for Coalition Forces stationed at Q-West is that the people will not obey the share-the-water policy. This policy allows Iraqis to tap the 16-inch water pipeline feeding Q-West for 12 hours (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and during the other 12 hours they close their taps, allowing the base to replenish its reservoirs. The Iraqi authorities, however, seem unprepared or unwilling to enforce this law.

Under Saddam, people obeyed laws because disobedience resulted in severe punishment, which is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Not surprisingly, when the dictatorship crumbled, lawlessness spread like a dust in the desert. We all recall news reports of widespread Iraqi looting in the weeks and months following the defeat of the Iraqi Army, pillaging of municipal, retail, and industrial centers and, more devastating to the nation, the looting of cultural centers such as museums, libraries, archeological sites. Some other entity had to impose stability, and with the collapse of civil and military authorities that onerous task fell to Coalition Forces. Since the June 30 Agreement, Iraqi authorities have been pondering that responsibility.

"The challenge of our government is to gain legitimacy," Dr. Muhammed told me. "Iraqis must solve Iraqi problems without Coalition support."

As far as Dr. Muhammed being corrupt, as I said, I do not know. Most of what I know about him—such as his full name—I learned from him. Beyond that, I know what I have observed, that he is an important figure in Ninewa Province, one to whom all sides seem to listen, even if they don’t always like or trust what he says. This is a pattern in his life, at least since the invasion.

He told me once that, in the days following the 2003 collapse of the Ba’athist government, Iraqi civilians and Coalition Forces didn’t know how to deal with one another.

“For ten days we just looked at each other,” he said. “Finally, I stepped forward to make a connection. I will never forget the first American soldier I met, Maj. Frederick Wellman. He is like a brother to me, even to this day.”

In the spring of 2003, Wellman was an operations officer with 6th Battalion, 101st Aviation of the 101^st Airborne Division, says Sgt. Rachel Brune in a December 31, 2005, article still available online at the Digital Video & Imagery Distribution System. (Brune wrote a nicely textured story, a fine balance of narrative, dialogue, and description that shows a writer who loves the craft. Check it out: “Doctor Mohammed's Perseverance Pays Off.”)

In her lead and bridge paragraphs—the first and second of news stories, generally one sentence each—Brune describes Dr. Muhammed’s initial effort to make a connection.

In late April 2003, an elder from the small farming village of Jedallah Sofia appeared at the gates of Q-West Base Complex with a handwritten request.

Sent by Dr. Mohammed, the local physician, the note asked for help in stopping random shots landing in the village and solving a water shortage.

Next to protection of life and limb, Dr. Muhammed was concerned with the chronically short water supply, even scarcer because of war.

From this small gesture, Dr. Muhammed built a lasting relationship. Conditions improved. Water reached the villages and presence patrols improved security. Coalition Forces stationed at Q-West built roads and employed most of the working population on the base. They built a clinic in his village, supplying him with medication, which he said he dispensed free to the people.

He told Sgt. Brune that the Coalition Forces were “doing great things here.” He told her that people in his village “still talk about improvements to the roads the British forces made when they occupied the country in World War I as part of the offensive against the Ottoman Empire.”

“For many generations, the people will talk about these projects as the actions of the coalition forces, said Mohammed.”

This is classic Dr. Muhammed talking, educated and culturally aware, a man with a vision of the past and the future.

Dr. Muhammed walks a thin line between cultures and classes, between languages and religions, between nations and tribes. His challenge is to speak in behalf of numerous sides of a many-sided conversation, and he has suffered for this. Indeed, Dr. Muhammed walks unsteadily with aluminum, forearm crutches, the crippling result of an improvised explosive devise targeted to kill him.

He seems to have been born into this difficult role, inheriting his political-religious leadership in the ancient patriarchal tradition, and he is among those on whom this fledgling democracy depends.

“It is a tradition in my family to build bonds with different tribes. My grandfather was a shaikh who owned 1,000 sheep, 1,000 goats—and built strong relationships with the tribes 80 or 90 years ago, and so did my father in his day. The Americans are to me like another tribe. They are different, with different customs and religions, but they are here and we must work together,” said Dr. Muhammed.