You Know When the Men Are Gone (8 page)

Everything at home annoyed him and he knew it was irrational and misplaced, but did Marissa really need to watch
Extra!
every night to catch up on Jessica Simpson’s latest breakup? Did one missing woman in Missouri—sure, she was pretty, a wife and the mother of three—really need to be the headlining story on every single news program when there were American soldiers, mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, dying in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why weren’t Larry King and Barbara Walters interviewing their grieving families or telling their intricate life stories?

He tried, he really did, he tried to care when Marissa told him about her second-graders with their video games and peanut allergies, or when his mother complained about gas prices, or when his father had a lousy day of golf. Something was wrong with him, some part of him was still keyed into Baghdad, into his Humvee, his night-vision goggles, his men riding down streets not knowing what was at the end of them, and everything that he thought would make him happy here at home suddenly seemed so inconsequential. He couldn’t even go for a run anymore on old 9W—past the stone Episcopal church with its early-nineteenth-century cemetery, the governor’s white house half hidden by shady trees, down to the Garrison train tracks to glimpse the Bear Mountain Bridge sparkling over the water, the route he always took when he visited his parents—because one of their neighbors, an obese, fifty-five-year-old banker in a Yankees cap, might be riding his mower,
riding a mower
for a quarter-of-an-acre plot of water-sprinkled and coiffed Technicolor-green grass, and every time Moge saw his smug, fat face he wanted to jump over the guy’s white picket fence and beat the living shit out of him.

He had to get back to Baghdad soon.

Of course, when he did get back, he told everybody what they wanted to hear. That the food had never been better, filet mignon and fried calamari that melted in his mouth, beer so cold it stung his tongue, gin tonics and vodka martinis and screwing his girlfriend at least three times a day.

His runny nose immediately dried up and he felt alert again, awake at dawn to the call to prayer that reverberated around the base. It was as if his body had grown dependent on the 120-degree days and the 40-degree nights, the longsleeved camouflage uniform and the heavy lace-up boots, the weight of the helmet and the forty-pound Kevlar vest, the tinny water fed into his mouth by a warm tube from the CamelBak slung over his shoulder, the churned-out high-calorie but tasteless eggs at the chow hall in the morning, the dried-out MRE bagged meals in the afternoon, sleep-deprived nights of helicopters landing or mortars ringing with the usual bad aim against the perimeter of the base. His body thrived in the desert; his Moge thrived while the weak little David crawled deeper into hibernation. And Moge was seized with a terrible thought: What if, after all of his longing to get out and get on with his life, in his comfortable middle age he would look back at this time and realize that his years in the army were the most vivid, the most startlingly real, of his entire life?

Maybe he should not be getting out after all.

Raneen smiled when she saw him, the first time he had ever seen her teeth, small and white but slightly crooked in front; she suddenly looked like a kid with those funny front teeth, and it made something in his stomach go soft.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked, squinting into the sun.

“The girls’ school received a generator,” she replied. Moge had overheard the first sergeant and company commander bitching about the Rangers and Special Forces guys coming in and taking over one of their high-value targets and he wondered if maybe the Dora IED factory had been it.

“Good work,” he said, and Raneen blushed a high red over her sharp cheekbones. Moge had to look at the sun again, letting it blind him for a moment so he wouldn’t blush, too.

Their next mission was not a humanitarian effort in any way. Their battalion had been relying on an informant for the past few months, Yasin Mustafa, a rich merchant who had a concrete compound and armed bodyguards. He had helped them catch a few members of Jaish al-Medi, but recently Mustafa’s information had brought the battalion under sniper fire. The first time the battalion commander thought Jaish al-Medi had been lucky, that they just happened to have a sniper in the building across the street, but when it happened again and an American soldier died during a raid, they knew that Mustafa was no longer trustworthy. So Moge and a platoon of Iraqi soldiers were going into Mustafa’s compound in the middle of the night to bring him back to the base for questioning.

Raneen sat steely-faced in the Humvee; she usually didn’t do the night missions and Moge wished that another terp had been chosen. But Mustafa had four wives and many children and Raneen would talk to them, would perhaps find out in a few hours what military intelligence would never find out from Mustafa.

There were no shots fired. The bodyguards shouted and waved their AKs but when they saw how outnumbered they were, they suddenly shrugged and smiled and started sharing cigarettes with the Iraqi soldiers who accompanied the Americans. Mustafa himself came out with his arms open and invited everyone in for tea and dates, and agreed, with only a slight narrowing of his eyes, to return to the base.

“I bring a lawyer, yes? Like on American television. Miranda rights?” And he laughed with such confidence that Moge knew he would be free by morning no matter how many U.S. soldiers may have died because of his double dealing. They didn’t even need to cuff him.

Raneen emerged from his house a few minutes later, her face tilted down, and Moge assumed she hadn’t had any luck either. The ride back was quiet, none of the usual high fives and whoops of delight from a mission accomplished, as if every soldier knew that tonight had been a waste of time, that they may have gotten the bad guy, but in the end the bad guy had gotten one over on them.

“So the women didn’t give anything up?” Moge asked Raneen.

She turned toward him, her eyes full of pupil and fear. “His second wife said she knew me,” she whispered. “That I am an infidel and will die an infidel’s death.”

Moge tried to smile. “I hear that all the time.”

Raneen shook her head. “She knew I am a widow. That my husband was a professor. She knew me.”

Moge wiped sweat from his face—he didn’t know Raneen was a widow. “Maybe you ought to live on Camp Liberty for a while; you’d be safe and could even sleep in in the morning.”

But she looked away. “I have a daughter.”

Moge swallowed—he didn’t know that either. He had assumed Raneen was in her twenties but now in the dim light from the Humvee controls she looked older, early thirties, perhaps, with lines around her mouth.

“Maybe just for a little while,” he said. “I don’t think there are any other women terps right now so you’d get your own quarters. You could visit your daughter on your days off.”

Raneen nodded, tears in her eyes, and Moge looked away in embarrassment. This is why there aren’t any women in the infantry, he thought to himself, but his stomach went soft again and he was relieved that Raneen would be close by.

Moge’s once-weekly calls to Marissa became more haphazard. He started thinking that maybe she was too young for him. She was only twenty-four to Moge’s twenty-nine years, which had always seemed like a bonus: if she was younger she’d be less likely to want to get married anytime soon; her friends were single and she still took trips with them to Cancún or Las Vegas; she seemed content to live at home with her parents and never even asked if she and Moge should move in together; and her maternal clock, as much as she loved her students, had yet to kick in. But suddenly Moge thought she was too childish, too vain, too blond, and there were long silences during their conversations. He was glad when the static became thick enough for him to hang up without having to say,
I love you
.

“Hey,” he said, spotting Raneen at a corner table of the mess hall one night just as he was leaving. He stood holding his dirty tray, uncertain if he should move on. She grinned up at him and nudged her tray so there was room for him to sit.

“I have been wanting to tell you of my gratitude,” she said. She crossed her hands primly in front of her and Moge thought how right Dupont had been when he called her a schoolteacher. “Staying on base has been a very good idea.”

Moge felt the eyes of soldiers glancing off of him and he fiddled with his empty cup of 7UP. “That’s great.”

She leaned toward him. “It is how I imagine an American university to be. When we interpreters get back late and are not tired, we play checkers or dominoes and tell stories. Of course I worry about my daughter, but it is very free to not be frightened every morning and every evening, traveling to my home, worrying someone will follow and murder myself and my family. Even with the helicopters I sleep very soundly. I am thankful to you, Sergeant Mogeson.”

He squirmed. He never had any trouble talking to Raneen in a Humvee, but suddenly he couldn’t think of anything to say.