Each warm October day that came and went
Saw fortunes rising for insurgency
As Sheikh Janabi’s clique watched checks roll in
From contracts laundered through their bogus fronts
To bilk the doleful doling US slush
And from the fledgling kidnap racket schemes
Spun up by their associates due east
In fat Baghdad, where gunmen swarmed and pounced
And planted bombs that terrorized the corps
Of Western diplomats who sprawled like slugs
Across the center of the metropole.
An urgency was felt across the land
As time ticked t’ward that high month, Ramadan,
When hadith said the Devil would be chained
And gates of Paradise would open wide
For anyone who fell in righteous act
Of disassem’bling Satan’s handiwork.
The understanding that this holy month
Would be a vessel for a greater surge
Of violence through weeks of daily fast
That kept insurgents mean from dawn to dusk
And doubled their commitment to Allah
Did not require muj’ communiqué
To be picked up as doctrine by the cells
Who’d sprung up all across the rebel land
And now had grown their roots in depth and breadth
Sufficient to support each other’s aims
And meet as friends in dirty alleyways.
The calling was implicit, faith presumed,
With cash and arms shared freely for the cause,
And, for Janabi, it was like the whole
Of God’s great riches landed in his lap.

The blight of blights for jittery imam
As Ramadan came close and pavement baked
Was Drinkwine, who was still not in the ground
And taunted him by waking every day.
To end this New York man for good, imam
Brought lone Hadid into their secret rooms
Behind his gilded, guil’some downtown mosque
And told him he had one last full-force chance
To kill the Panther boss by any means
Available before the month was through.
Hadid, who doubted the utility
Of focusing on Drinkwine doggedly,
Was moments from rebutting wealthy sheikh
When two things came at once into his mind:
The first, that sheikh, now changed by shabu’s spell,
Was not a man who’d ever cede his ground
In face of rational and cold critique,
And second, that since Drinkwine was inclined
To stroll the town in preening cock display
With dozens of his soldiers in a mass
And sheikh was, right now, promising carte blanche,
A better tack than arguing was just
To lev’rage rich sheikh’s passion and devise
An operation that would doub’ly serve
To take out the meand’ring Panther boss
And also wreak destruction at great scale
Across a whole platoon of infantry
To dampen the domestic US zeal
In manner that gave lone Hadid a rush
Of ting’ling glee just at the very thought.

For this grand ambush, rich sheikh then procured
Two men to serve as aides and officers
Of cold Hadid, who also was assigned
The brute Muftaris as his number two.
The first of these new aides was Mahadaai,
A brigadier who used to serve Saddam
And held a PhD in rocketry
He now employed at each and every chance
To build his new employers better bombs
And mortars that could pepper US troops.
The second, younger, fresh-faced, from Baghdad
Was calm Shammari, recent graduate
Cum laude with a history BA,
Who’d simply driven over late last night
And asked around, “Where can I join jihad?”
Until a congregant at the Great Mosque
Had pointed him to Sheikh Janabi’s halls.
The rocketeer, the elder, clearly stewed
With indignation when imam had said
He must be stooge to some mechanic’s word
When he himself had led two thousand men
A year ago with regimental pride.
Hadid’s proficiency, though, soon was clear,
As was his relative sobriety
In abstinence from harbinger’s supply
Of meth that flowed like candy through the mosque,
And so the brigadier became convinced,
At least for now, to listen to Hadid,
And in return Hadid restrained himself
With efforts t’ward a forced humility
As he reluctantly admitted he
Had much to learn from Doctor Mahadaai.

At last, when the attack was fully planned,
With documents and bomb materials
In spades throughout Janabi’s secret stores,
Hadid convened his officers and said
The only thing left now was to decide
The best place to entrap the Panther force.
“Excuse me, sir,” young, fresh Shammari asked
With hand raised like a student in a class,
A Russian rocket launcher at his side,
“What do we call our cell? What is our name?”
And gruff commander from the auto shop
Said, “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you want.
The point is not to be known. It’s to kill,
And, in our killing, drive out Hulagu.”

Surviving the attempt against his life,
The hockey goalie Panther from New York
Refused to shrink to safe Volturno’s walls,
Instead arranging thorough foot patrols
In which he’d walk alongside his platoons,
To share in daily dangers that they faced
And so draw out his coward enemy
To face him on the asphalt like a man
And get this dumb aggression put to rest
The way he would have out there on the rink.

Janabi, though, preferred to keep concealed
And rule his mosque with jittered, blazing speech
That lured Nazzal’s young congregants away
With promises of glory, guns, and cash.
For purposes of gunning Drinkwine down
With more success than teen Mahmud had had,
The sheikh had let Hadid, the soberest
And least entranced by shabu of their gang,
Recruit new muj’ with promised greenback wads
To serve him in his sundry lethal schemes,
Thus making him lieutenant in their ranks
With dedicated wide-eyed underlings.
Hadid, for his part, quickly realized
With sharpness that was then beyond compare
How meth could be God’s gift or be a vice
Depending on the user’s strength of will
In dosing it and spurning its false charms.
With this assessment, lone Hadid then chose
To keep his intake low and monitored
And do the same for all his junior men
So they could keep their sanity intact—
With rare exceptions made for those young few
Elected to get blitzed and give their lives
In one great blaze of fearless, amped jihad.

One sunny afternoon, on Eastside streets
Where vendors had all boarded up their shops
At sight of Drinkwine’s full-force foot patrol,
The Panther boss took in the midday air
And watched the town mutts trotting past his squad,
Their bellies full of scraps and eyes alight,
Not yet familiar with human flesh
They’d taste before the coming year was through.
With handsome Dudin at his khakied side,
The Panther asked his man for any news
About the shooter from the downtown square
And Dudin said, “Yeah, intel just got word
The kid would go and listen to Nazzal,
The old guy at the Great Mosque, the imam.
I guess Nazzal’s been talking ’bout jihad.”
And Drinkwine, who had loathed the very thought
Of grabbing an imam for questioning,
Now held his forehead, dust plumes in his eyes,
And grumbled, “It’s the damn mosques, isn’t it?
The one place that we’ve said we’ll leave alone.
Of course that’s where the muj’ are gonna hide,”
At which point some new gunman from a mosque,
Near interchangeable in face and aim,
Sprang forth with shabu foolishness to kill.

The new assassin’s AK shots cracked loud
As they whipped by, except for one sole hit
That blew a smoke grenade on one man’s chest
And otherwise had no effect at all.
Then, like the rest, he fell in bloody chunks
To bullets from the stalwart Panther guards
With screams that reared as meth pumped through his veins
And darkness, spurned, refused to shroud his eyes.

“All right,” relenting Drinkwine said at last
To Dudin, who had stayed right at his side
As Airborne rushed to keep their leader safe
From any further shooters at the scene,
“You get our guys and wiretap that mosque.
The big one. ’Kay? Forget the little fish
Like that Janabi. They all serve the boss.
They’re mafia. Sopranos. Like you said.
So tap this dude Nazzal, he’s our Capone.
Get proof in hand that he’s been causing grief.
And then that’s leverage I can go and use
To say, hey”—to the corpse—“you knock this off.”

Oblivious to hopped-up psychic hate
Janabi was now casting t’ward his post,
The Panther Drinkwine rose to greet the day
And take one plodding, trudging step ahead
Toward what Sanchez told him would be peace
If he could just unfuck the baleful town
Where he had worked for months with nothing gained.
Without the guidance of the CIA,
Who’d gone west to Ramadi to assist
With rounding up the troublemakers there,
Broad Drinkwine stared a hole straight through his map
And said one morning to his weary staff,
“There’s just no way these damn IPs don’t know
Who’s planting IEDs near every night.
If I was back home and you told me, ‘Go
And figure out who’s, you know, bombing stuff,
It’s probably your neighbor or their friend,’
It wouldn’t take me seven fuckin’ months
To figure this stuff out. You get my drift?”
They did, and so a meeting was arranged
Where Drinkwine would himself go into town,
In contrast to DiSalvo’s base-kept ways,
And really try to bust the mayor’s chops
About the situation he’d allowed.

The whole ride into town, ’neath clear blue sky,
The Panther’s mind went back and forth between
His wife and newborn daughter back at Bragg
And all those dead men in the pickup truck
Gunned down by his platoon that awful night.
“Why didn’t we get light bars to the cops?”
He asked his right hand, Dudin, who sat close
Beside him in a Humvee cab’s hot rear.
“They said they’d asked DiSalvo weeks ago.”
And handsome Dudin, a Jordanian
Of fluent charm, a US citizen
Who’d moved to California as a teen
And joined the Army as an officer
Because he found Bin Laden and his cause
Revolting and in need of taking down,
Said back to his commander, “It’s because
We can’t procure from local vendors here.
Congressional directive. Everything
We buy, no matter if it’s for the cops,
Has got to be put forward for a bid
For US military contractors
To make, and then they ship it over here,
Assuming Baghdad gives us the okay.”
“To hell with that,” said Drinkwine, now incensed.
“Now, this is just to stay between us guys,
But I know for a fact some officers
Are going over Jordan way to get
The stuff they need and skipping all the crap.
When we get back, I’m gonna give you cash,
And you make sure the IPs are equipped
However you see fit to get that done.”

In Taha’s office, Drinkwine groaned and sat
In tan garb and a helmet in a chair
That faced the man behind the oaken desk
And did his best to get him to confess
The name of who’d been threatening his staff.
“Janabi,” Taha whispered, eyes adart,
As if the specter could be in the hall.
“The preacher?” Drinkwine asked, confused and terse.
“We can’t arrest imams. That’s from the top.
Unless you have some proof he’s making bombs.
And no, we can’t search mosques, so please don’t ask.
That’s your job, Taha. Your job. Your police.
If you know this guy’s bad then send IPs
And get the dirt, and then my squads can act.
Or, better yet, take care of it yourselves.
That’s what I told Issawi weeks ago,
And yes, I know some things have gone awry,
But we’re grown men. We get back on the horse.”

This pep talk only served to put a chill
Through Taha, all his worst fears now confirmed,
As he faced Death, a cold, abyssal maw,
And realized the US troops, at best,
Would only act to serve their own blunt needs
And, at worst, would keep slaughtering his men
In lethal, unaccountable attacks.

When Drinkwine left, he went downstairs and found
A group of influential businessmen
Had gathered to entreat the Panther boss
To put their favored man, Ra’ad, in charge
In place of Taha, whom they did not trust.
In truth, these sheikhs saw Taha as a blight
For all the reasons he was valu’ble
To Drinkwine and the Airborne infantry:
He was intransigent, a stubborn wall
Against both bribes and barbed jihadi threats,
And thus caused problems for the business types
Who wanted to appease the muj’hideen
So they could keep collecting US checks
For services unrendered in the town
Without the din of ugly firefights
Between the muj’ and hardline local cops.
In making their appeal to Drinkwine, though,
They simply said that Taha didn’t fit
And, in abrasiveness, was causing grief
That someone like Ra’ad, a pleasant man,
Could surely soothe if he were put in charge.
To stress the point, the richest, Barakat,
Who had a townhouse compound down the street
Resplendent as the Hanging Gardens’ heights,
Said then to tense-necked Drinkwine, “Your last man,
That Wesley, he refused to hear us out.”
“Why’s that?” the Panther leader asked the sheikh,
Who said back, “He said there must be a vote,”
At which point Drinkwine, ruminating there,
A big and tow’ring soldier, circled tight
By men who seemed to treat him with respect,
Said, “Look, I’ll make him city manager.
It’s clear that Mayor Taha’s overworked.
I’m sure Ra’ad could help him bear the load.”
And so, although they thanked the Panther well,
The businessmen retreated still aggrieved
That their selected people-pleasing schmuck
Would be subordinate to Taha’s desk
As Taha stood against the black-flag tide
That all could tell was rising in the street.

Returning to his Humvee in the square,
The Panther walked, his mind on other things,
As one tall orphan, glittering with zeal,
Strode out without the slightest hint of fear
And, in the glow of shabu’s guiding light,
Cried out, “Allah above all!” and let fly
An unaimed, rattled hip-barrage of lead
From his AK Janabi had procured
Toward the Panther leader and his guards.

A claw of Airborne infantry, guns prepped
For just such an attack there on the street,
Swung up their M4s with a sober flow
Smooth-drilled by months of training back at Bragg
And let a volley ring out in return
Toward the teen insurgent and the crowd
Of passersby behind him in the street.
The teen, Mahmud, went down with heightened screams,
His body torn, his ammunition spent,
The shabu giving sharpness to his pain,
And, though he was punched through with bullet holes
That should have caused sweet Death to halt his cries,
The methamphetamine kept him alive
In torture, shrouds not reaching his doomed eyes
For far too long, until his blood was spent
And his pale heart had nothing left to pump.

In light of his impassioned public speech
That upstaged old Nazzal as those two cops
Were lowered to their final rotting place
Janabi had received a surge of love
From people seeking faith in hard, tough times
Who soon came to his mosque to hear his word
In such high numbers that the gathered throng
Of faithful spilled out onto sidewalk rugs
And would have raised the local cops’ concern,
Except the blues were too weak, scattered thin,
To bother with controlling local crowds.

With stronger, blacker coffee and more smokes
Janabi filled his triple-duty role
As preacher, as a hearer of concerns,
And, nightly, as the leader of his cell
As they churned out pernicious roadside bombs
With regularity that made the troops
Afraid to venture out or make their rounds
And thus gave these muj’ ample space and time
To plan their kidnap racket and recruit.

On one such busy Friday, in the fall,
With sermons finished and the faithful gone,
That Hashim, some poor man of no renown,
Came in with grievances familial
And told Imam Janabi how his son
Who’d been recruited as a janitor
To go and work down at Baharia
Among the infidels and clean their filth
Had sneaked a whiskey bottle to their home
And been imbibing nightly in his room,
A practice most detested by Allah,
And, in this act, had marred his father’s name.
Next, Hashim then explained, in prayer hall light,
As harbinger Urduni lurked in wait,
That, lacking faith the cops would intervene,
He’d first gone to Nazzal with his complaint
To seek an honored, strict Islamic hand
To discipline his son with proper force.
Nazzal, however, had been too remiss
To do his duty as a cleric should
In handing out a sentence to the boy
And, with a weak voice, told the man to go
And simply tell his son to keep the faith.

This story was relayed with angered scorn
By Hashim, who sought Sheikh Janabi’s aid.
Janabi, pupil of Urduni now,
Spoke up with confidence to calm the man.
“Bring this lost son of yours to me next week
And I assure you, as a man of God,
I’ll discipline him in the proper way
Right here, in this mosque’s courtyard. I won’t flinch
As we endeavor to correct the faith
That suffered for so long beneath the boot
Of wretch Saddam, who sold us all the lie
That any code of man can take the place
Of God, the only giver of true law.”

So, satisfied, the father went his way
And harbinger Urduni uttered hence
To spent Janabi, when they were alone,
“The boy gets forty lashes for his crime.
By your hand, after prayers, with audience.
The congregants will see and understand
Salafiyya is not just empty words,
And for each one who watches justice served
A hundred more out there will fall in line
As all Fallujah comes to understand
It’s you and not Nazzal whom they should seek
In matters of Sharia and of war.”

Emboldened by Urduni, wealthy sheikh
Then carried out the lashing in the square
As his bound subject pleaded to be spared
And Hashim, watching with regret, was told
By brute Muftaris, with him in the crowd,
That he must never, ever show remorse
Or speak against Janabi for this act.

That same night, old Nazzal, his face a frown,
Came tottering from his palatial home
To Sheikh Janabi’s mosque, which he’d not seen,
Despite it siphoning his congregants
As this mob-boss-turned-preacher had become
The buzziest of all the town imams.
“Janabi. I have heard you whipped a boy.
You aren’t a qadi. You are not a judge.
You can’t call these proceedings of the faith
And you can’t sidestep me as jurist here.”

“It’s that last point that really gets you, hm?”
Janabi asked the old man, sitting tall
At folding tables in his mosque’s back rooms,
A stunning flip of power from the time
He first went as a supplicant to pray
Beside the riverbank in Great Mosque cool.
“That there is now a preacher in this town
So clear of sight in reading holy words
That he will take it to the great extreme
Of purity you fear to comprehend.”
And then, before the bitter spat could steep,
Urduni came in from a nighttime jaunt
With lone Hadid and brute Muftaris close
And, from his bag, presented to the sheikh
A bag of crystal methamphetamine.

“Our Chechen brothers use this in jihad,”
The cool Jordanian spoke to his charge,
Janabi, who was seated with Nazzal,
And said with his strange accent to them both,
“The Americans have their NVGs
And tanks and armor to do Satan’s will.
We don’t have those, but we have shabu’s strength
To let us serve Allah in awesome ways
Without sleep, minds like razors, lacking fear.
This is the gift that God has granted us.”

And, with indignant ire, old Nazzal
Grew louder than he had in many years
And said to rich Janabi and his cell,
“You hypocrites. You petty crooks. You fiends.
You have just scarred a local boy for life
With senseless, thuggish violence for an act
Against Allah which you now shamelessly
Repeat much worse inside a holy mosque.”

Then, rising, Sheikh Janabi calmly spoke
With poison in his words that made it clear
Nazzal was not a friend to his new clique.
“The Prophet has forbade consumption of
The things that cloud one’s mind because they leave
A man confused and weak, like you, imam.
But this is not a khamr. Not a vice.
It makes a man like us. It makes him strong.
And that is all I have to say to you,
Wise sheikh whom I admire, I revere.
Go now and don’t concern yourself with us.”

And in that midnight hour, loose and free,
When old Nazzal had tucked tail and gone home,
Janabi tried his first electric taste
Of this gift from Allah, this shabu meth
Urduni and Muftaris had acquir’d,
And felt his mind expand with shining glee
And mesmerizing, captivating awe
At all the glory their jihad could bring.

The more entranced by shabu he became,
The more it drove him mad that countless men
Who’d serve him in a heartbeat languished still
In jail, subsisting under slothful guard
Of Chief Issawi and his dolt police
Who’d been reduced to wisps of their old strength
And still, despite their uselessness, would not
Renounce allegiance to the mayor’s desk.

Janabi raged and kicked and screamed each time
Hadid’s devices were disarmed before
Their payloads could ignite and smite the foe
And focused on the infidel brigade
With such unsleeping, curdled, pointed wrath
That he became convinced he could detect,
Through astral vision, Drinkwine in his bed,
And felt, if this crusader could be felled,
The mayor would at last be made to see
That Satan was not infinite in strength
And then, at last, release the rich sheikh’s mooks.
With this idea in his burning mind,
Janabi kept an ear out at his mosque
For new recruits at noon prayers every day
And, when he found a man he thought seemed right,
He’d usher him into the backroom dark
To school him on the planting of the gifts,
Or, in the case of orphan teen Mahmud,
The shooting of the evil Panther boss
With one God-blessed AK and magazine
And crystal meth provided by Allah.

As dawn broke, cold and silent, Zulfiqar
Returned home smelling like exhaust and blood
To scared Samira and Amir, who rose
And held him tight as he walked in the door,
Relieved beyond words that he was alive.
“I don’t know what to do,” he told his wife
That evening, when he’d slept and bathed at last.
“It’s like we’re getting squeezed on every side.
Not squeezed, crushed. Crushed to death inside the gears.”

The only celebrations on the twelfth
Were deep inside Janabi’s gilded mosque
Where his collection of jihadist types,
Urduni and Muftaris and Hadid
And half a dozen other loyal mooks
Selected from his fiercest congregants,
Recounted their impressions of the night
In gleeful laughs and waves of chuckled jokes
About how God had made their villains fools.
In light of the success of the events,
Far greater than what he had planned or dreamed,
Janabi had let brute Muftaris slide
In striking him and acting as a rogue,
And, in return, Muftaris let the sheikh
Conceal how terrified he’d been that night.
Despite his failure to deploy a bomb
And brush with capture out there on the road,
Hadid was thrilled with everything he’d seen,
And now held this Muftaris in esteem
As someone who could play the sacred game
Of turning chaos into blood ballet.

“You’ve sown good strife,” Urduni told the group,
“But by the ledger and the score you’re stalled.
We must get Taha off our backs for good.
We must get the authorities to fold.”

“I have three dozen men right here in jail,”
Janabi told the harbinger, smoke-tinged.
“Good men. In local PD custody.
And surely, after all the men he lost,
The mayor will relinquish them to me.”
So he went north again, to Taha’s perch,
Which had a breeze now, due to the attack,
And glinted with the shards of broken glass
That still were strewn across the mayor’s floor,
And said in glum, gray daylight to the man,
“Dear Mayor, you must realize by now
That serving the Great Satan means your end.
Not by my hand. No, not at all. By theirs.
Your only path is through Sharia law.
Serve God, and make way for divine jihad.”

“Do what you will, Janabi. Do your worst,”
The mayor growled, seated in his chair.
“Go fight the US forces man for man.
But do it in the desert. Please. Not here.
Just let us nurse our wounds and serve the town.”

“Well, that, at least, is less of an affront
Than what you said before,” Janabi sneered.
“Now there is one thing I must have you do,
And on this point I cannot compromise.
I have a list of men trapped in your jail
For crimes of which they’re innocent, I know.
Release them and they’ll join me in my task
And I’ll do as you ask and leave you be.”

At this, the mayor gave a weary sigh
And shook his head and said that he could not
As his remaining Green Bands, few and bruised,
Appeared to walk Janabi back outside.
“You’ll come to rue this,” Sheikh Janabi warned.
And Mayor Taha said, “That might be so,
But, certainly, the sting will be far less
Than if I were to let you win today,
Janabi, wretched cur-spawn that you are.
Begone and do not show your face again,
Or else you will indeed get what you seek
And reunite with all your prison friends,
Though not quite in the manner that you like.
I promise you. I am not eas’ly beat.”

Defanged by the eleventh’s fatal end,
The Green Bands were too weak and wounded now
To chase mujahideen across the night
And chose to pack in close like sharpened quills
That safe the unpretentious porcupine
Around their threatened mayor and his staff
While rich Janabi, likewise, took great care
To make it known to Taha and his men
That any fool’s attempt to bring him in
Or pass his name to Panther leadership
Would lead to brutal leadstorms in response
Against the Green Bands and their families.

Issawi, rattled chief, meanwhile, shrank
As quickly as he’d swelled from dreams of fame
And made clear to his marred, embittered cops
That they were not to risk their necks again
Until the situation had improved.
Amid all this, a funeral was held
For all the slaughtered Green Bands and police
In furious procession through downtown
That brought out thousands, citizens, enraged,
And gave Salafi preachers ample chance
To go before the masses, megaphoned,
And pray for these young men, now dead and cold,
As if they were brave martyrs of Islam.
As Zulfiqar, Mazir, and all the blues
Saw Khalid and Iyad in caskets, laid
In deep clay pits, their East Fallujah graves,
The civil servants, silent, heard the roars
Of hatred t’ward the US from the crowd
And realized they teetered on the edge
Of being either heroes to the town
Or jeered and lynched for being Bush’s dogs.

It was with little shock, then, that next dawn
Saw Zulfiqar behold the locker room
Inside the station where he’d spent ten years
And see most every locker blank and stripped
Not just because of all the recent dead
But also on account of all who’d quit
For safety, for their families, in light
Of how exposed the cops now seemed to be
And all the threats toward them, whispered harsh
In streams of gossip springing from the mosques.
With heavy head, he donned his belt and gun
And once again prepared to face the day,
No longer full of vigor to pursue
Hadid and his insurgent network ties.
With cigarettes and coffee and Mazir,
He sat behind the Hilux steering wheel,
Its belt repaired and engine running strong,
And tried to show his partner confidence
As they set out together on patrol
For reasons that seemed almost farcical:
Reporting vandalism, catching dogs,
And helping out with traffic jams and scrapes
As if it was an ordinary day,
An ordinary beat, a quiet town,
While life descended in a freefall tear
Toward an unknown bottom, unknown fate,
With nothing he could do to slow its fall
And no authority he could respect.

A half a mile north of this grim scene,
A spectacled Jordanian base guard,
Ajlouni, captain of the nighttime watch,
Was on alert down at the hospital
Because of scattered, unconfirmed reports
Of unknown fire down on Highway Ten.
In camouflage fatigues, his rifle prepped,
The gentleman Jordanian peered out
At flashes in the dark, all indistinct,
And told his men to ready just in case
Some local terror group tried an attack.

This call to arms from deft Ajlouni came
Right as the brute Muftaris, on the hill,
In maddened glee from all the Hell he’d wrought,
Let off a second burst from his MG
That whizzed and hit the ground around the troops
Who’d gone up to assist the Green Band men
They’d just shot up on haunted Highway Ten.

Right as the PKM barrage rang out,
The Quick Reaction Force for the platoon
Arrived with Humvee revs from Drinkwine’s base
To reinforce against the enemy.
“These guys are friendly,” slight Lazatin told
His loyal sergeant, Walton, Humvee-borne,
“But we’ve got fire on us from up north,
From there, that compound.” And he let his hand
Fall like a chop toward the quiet grounds
That housed the king of Jordan’s hospital.

With charging force, Lazatin and his team
Of Humvee-driving quick reaction grunts
Rolled out toward the hospital’s south face,
Machine guns lighting up in constant bursts
Directed t’ward the armed men on its roof.

“We’re under fire!” countless king’s men cried
To spectacled Ajlouni as the rounds
From the advancing QRF blew through
The windows, curtains, walls, and OR doors.
“Get all the patients to the northern side!”
The captain ordered, hurrying the staff.
“You men, with me. If you’re armed, hold the line.
We need to buy the doctors extra time.
Against this wall. Lay fire down. Come on!”

In this way, at a distance, in the night,
The US and Jordanians maintained
A pointless, heavy, volleyed firefight
That shredded the dark hospital’s insides
As one small, noble guard team, low on rounds,
Crouched down amid the concrete and prepared
To face whatever enemy advanced.

“Should we breach?” Walton asked Lazatin when
They’d emptied half their mags out on the place,
Still ignorant of what the building was,
And his slight, shaken, scared lieutenant said,
“No. Pump the whole thing clear with your grenades
Before you put a single man inside.
No reason taking pointless risks out here.
God, first week in Iraq. Gah, fuck me, dude.”

At Highway Ten, a US team arrived
To hold the site and cart away the dead
As Zulfiqar knelt, shellshocked, on the ground
With Green Bands and his colleagues inside out
And Humvees pulling up on every side.
The US medics tended to Mazir
And Arkan, both of whom were only grazed,
As Sergeant Asem stood in numb despair
Amid the carnage of the leading truck
Where Khalid and Iyad, his junior cops,
Had now succumbed to blood loss and their wounds.

Amid these new Volturno personnel
Came Drinkwine, personally, broad and tall,
And when the Panther leader saw the scene
His face fell slack with horrified dismay.
His body racked with anger, Zulfiqar
Looked up and recognized this pale, clipped soul
And shouted, “You killed good men! Why? God! Why?”
And rose and beat his fists against the chest
Of Drinkwine, who then gripped him by the arms
And shouted back with what resembled tears,
“Why didn’t you identify yourselves?
Bullhorn, or light bar. Call us. Anything!”

“You promised them! And then they never came!”
Mazir joined in, his voice a wounded wail.
“You promise, and you tell us to be brave
And then you kill these men. You gun us down.
Fallujah’s bleeding. Her heart has been torn.
What justice will there be for this, hm? None!
Not one court-martial for those fucking fools.”

With this lament, Mazir threw his hand north
Toward the place the QRF had gone
And both he and his partner realized
A volley of their veh’cle-launched grenades
Was being shot into the compound site
Where spectacled Ajlouni and his men
Had, in the line of duty, gone to God,
Or maybe just the ceiling, in thick shreds,
Obliterated by the US hail.

“What are you people doing?” Zulfiqar
Raged now and gripped broad Drinkwine by his shirt
With such force that a Panther Airborne guard
Stepped in and threw the tall cop to the ground.

“That’s where the shots were coming from,” explained
An aide of Drinkwine, watching flames ignite,
“Some building full of armed men. We engaged.”
And Zulfiqar, with no strength left for rage,
Just murmured through his spit and asphalt grime
And said, “Those are Jordanian armed guards.
Those are your allies. That’s their hospital.”

Inside the Beamer, brute Muftaris drove
With unrelenting force, his knuckles white,
As passenger Janabi begged the man
To pull aside and let him bribe the cops.
“We can’t just run all night!” the rich sheikh yelled
And tried to stop Muftaris with a jab,
At which point this Baghdad brute hit him hard,
Hot PKM still lying ’cross their laps.
“I can’t go back to prison,” brute declared,
Refusing to let off the black car’s gas
As Highway Ten snaked onward out of town
Toward Volturno and Baghdad beyond.
At this point, still pursued by two white trucks
And one small Hyundai nipping at his heels,
The sheikh was seized with new and sudden fright
On realizing that the road ahead
Was dotted with a US foot patrol.
“Stop! By Allah’s good grace! Muftaris! Stop!”
He shouted as the startled US troops
Glanced over, white light shining from their guns,
And brute ignored him, bearing harder down
As helmeted Americans ahead
Made lurching, scattered efforts to get clear.
Amid this new calamity, the sheikh
Saw time drag out before his very eyes
As US guns were raised, a warning flash,
And brute Muftaris clicked the headlights off
To make the German car a manta ray,
Unlit and black, careening blindly forth
Miraculously through the US troops
Without a single soldier being hit
Or any rifle fire ringing out.

“He’s dark!” Mazir cried out as Zulfiqar
Blazed past the soldiers, following the sheikh.
“He’s driving without headlights! That’s insane!”
And right behind them both white trucks kept pace.
For one more minute, Zulfiqar maintained
His high speed on the highway to Baghdad
But soon admitted that they’d lost the perp
In darkness to the German engine’s strength.
With pulsing bitterness, the driving cop
Slowed down, and so the Green Bands slowed as well
As Sergeant Asem in the back spoke up.
“Let’s go and tell those troops back down the road
And they can put the word out. They can help.”

In witching hour shroud, the black sedan
Had not continued down the highway’s run
But, near-blind from its lack of headlight glow,
Turned off and rattled up a dusty trail
That scaled a hilltop north of where the troops
Were standing, baffled, searching for Hadid.

Concealed at last, Muftaris hushed the car
As shaking sheikh sat wet-legged at his side.
With metal flexing in the nighttime cool
And cops and Green Bands floundering below,
The brute assessed their vantage, out of sight,
His Beamer nose aimed straight at Highway Ten,
His back now to the makeshift hospital
Where Jordan’s troops looked after Anbar’s ill.

With signals out his window, Zulfiqar
Had told the Green Band men to turn around,
And thus they were now headed back up west
With trucks in front and Hyundai in the rear
At cruising speed, bound for the US troops.

At this point, slight Lazatin was confused
And agitated, leading his platoon.
The bomber they’d been hunting had escaped,
And unidentified irregulars
With AKs and a mounted truck bed gun
Had blazed by in a baffling display
That could have easily run down his men.
Exposed in highway moonlight, he now turned
To Baghdad and, with dread, beheld the sight
Of six Iraqi headlights coming fast
Toward his vexed, unsheltered infantry.
“Don’t fire. Flash ’em,” stressed Lazatin warned,
By which he meant to use the weapon lights
To signal that the vehicles should halt,
As specified in their engagement rules.
As such, Acosta, sergeant in the squad,
Phoenician, raised in Arizonan scorch,
Stepped out onto the highway, weapon aimed,
And held a hand up with an open palm
That, to Americans, would signal stop
But to Iraqis only meant hello.

From on high, giddy brute Muftaris saw
This powder-keg encounter playing out,
A train-set diorama down below,
And, though it would expose him to more risk,
He could not help but steal this precious chance
To once again pull out the PKM
And, exiting the car, take careful aim
With his machine gun at the infantry.
Before the sheikh, still terrified, could shout
A word to stop the man and his new scheme,
The heavy squeezed the trigger, hard and true,
And cast new, glowing spit of searing lead
In vicious arcs toward the green platoon.

It was, then, at this moment, that a shot
Came blowing through Acosta’s brittle shin
From quagmi’r darkness with an evil zing
And sent the sergeant, screaming, to the ground.

In panic, facing headlights, Panther whelp
Lazatin gave a stunned cry. “Light ’em up!”
And this assembled litany of guys
With average GPAs and average lives
Who’d signed up for acclaim, or to do good,
Or maybe just to learn some discipline
And get their future school tuition paid
Unloaded their M4s without delay
At two white trucks and one sedan, unmarked,
Three hundred yards away from where they stood.

The cracking fire cut like white-hot knives
Through metal skin of that first pickup truck
As Officer Murrawi, tall and kind,
Swerved to the left, to break off his approach
And so presented his full bed of men
Directly to the broad US barrage.
With gory, merciless, and pounding hail
The Army bullets pulverized the men
Who gripped their AKs, green bands on their arms,
Destroying hips and lungs and hearts and bones
Of volunteers who now could draw two lots:
The first, the better, quick and painless death;
The second, slow and agonizing pain
As US troops stared daftly at the mess,
Not rend’ring aid or making any move
To get the gut-shot men to proper care.

This second fate was what awaited both
Iyad and Khalid, those liaison cops
Who’d long teased young Mazir for all his quirks
In good fun, and who’d volunteered that night
To help Murrawi’s Green Bands in the hunt
For anyone who wished the mayor ill.
Now, dying, frightened Khalid clutched his side
And screamed, “Mazir! Come help me! Help me! Please!”
And so Mazir, in Zulfiqar’s stopped car,
Jumped out against his partner’s stern command
And saw Lazatin’s men, the infantry
Let fly another volley of despair.

Mazir, caught in the shoulder, hit the dirt
As Zulfiqar crouched down behind the wheel
And prayed to God like never in his life
While bullets cracked the Hyundai window glass,
Embedding in his sergeant and the scout,
Young Arkan, who had first seen that black car
And now was taking bullets through the arm
In Zulfiqar’s backseat as passenger.

“They’re IPs!” someone in the infantry
Then shouted after several more were shot,
Identifying them as local cops
And passing this to stunned Lazatin’s ears.
With trembling, dissociative fright,
Lazatin crept toward the smoking smear
Of riddled trucks and dying Green Band men
And croaked, “Let’s get the medics up here. Now.”

A mile south and east, outside the town,
Hadid had made his way with heavy packs
By moonlight’s glow across the fertile scrub
To where a crooked bend lay in the road
That ran straight north up from Volturno’s gate
Toward Fallujah’s northern urban edge
Where outskirt buildings had, since spring, become
A temporary army hospital
Maintained by a Jordanian brigade.
With those men to his north, Volturno south,
And yawning black of midnight to the east,
Hadid took a position on the road,
His bags beside him, shovel in his hands,
And worked with hurried passion to create
A hole that could conceal his lethal gift.

As lone Hadid had crept out in the night,
Brave Zulfiqar was flooring his sedan
With his three fellow cops all shouting, “Go!”
As he raced onward, chasing Beamer lights
Through winding and deserted downtown streets.
“He’s heading for the highway!” young Mazir
Cried out correctly, gobsmacked by the chase
As Arkam and the sergeant, Asem, bounced
And held on through each jolting, crunching swerve.
With all the horses Hyundai pistons gave,
Brave Zulfiqar pursued the fleeing car
Out onto six-lane, black-paved Highway Ten
Where he, in shock, veered tightly to avoid
A maddened, screeching heavy pickup truck
At top speed, with a gun mount in its bed,
That sprang out from the dark to intercept
The Beamer, and thus join the rabid chase.
“Ya satar!” stunned Mazir cried out. “Oh shit!”
As he took in this new, triumphant bear,
A double-cab with torque for days and days
With Green Band boss Murrawi at the wheel
And eight of his best guys inside the bed
With AKs loaded, ready to kick ass.
“Oh shit!” he cried again as they drew close
Beside the Hyundai, joining the pursuit,
And he saw Khalid and Iyad, the cops
Who’d been his teasing buddies now for years,
In uniform, packed in with these Green Bands
As oversight liaisons from the force.
“They’re running now!” Iyad laughed, barely heard
As downtown lights whooshed by in southbound blurs,
And young Mazir threw up a gleeful wave
As one more Green Band pickup joined the gang
Of three official vehicles packed close
Behind the taillights of the scared sheikh’s ride.

At north Volturno’s barb-laced edge that night,
Upon a guard post that had served Saddam,
A rooftop observation post was staged
And manned by paratrooper Panther teams.
The lead observer, kneeling on the roof,
Was Rios, Juárez-born and Fort Bragg-trained,
And as he scanned, binoculars gripped tight,
He caught a glimpse of hurried, lone Hadid
Against the night, up roadside, digging fast.
“One pax emplacing on the northern road,”
The Panther Rios dutifully spoke
Into his handset for the comp’ny net.
“Civilian dress. Grown man. No weapons seen.
He’s got a shovel and some kind of pack.”

In hearing this, stern Drinkwine made the call
To send a night platoon of Airborne troops
On foot due north, proceeding past the gate,
To apprehend the shovel-bearing man
Before he could blow anybody up.
This duty fell upon an officer
Of Filipino stock, from Florida,
Lazatin, a small, cautious Airborne man,
Who kept his jaw squeezed tight as he was told
He’d need to take his men out in the dark
On full moon Nine-Eleven, of all days,
To go without his Humvees and arrest
A man who in all likelihood was armed
And possibly had ambushers in wait.
Despite the dour nature of the task,
Lazatin mustered, clean-cut, duty-bound,
And got his mass of Army infantry
To don their gear and head out in the dark
Where TV, CDs, books, and letters home
Were suddenly replaced by haunting black
Of earthy and indiff’rent Babylon
That shook them with a clear and chilling sense
They were not welcome in this ancient place.

His digging in the dry ground was a chore
That tired lone Hadid in rapid time
As he felt Death’s hand close upon his hip
Where he imagined sniper shots could fly.
With one foot dug and one more foot to go,
A cloud of dirt now pluming ’round his legs,
Hadid caught sight of new, electric glows
That made the dust light up like fireflies
As panning sweeps from Airborne flashlight mounts
That sat beneath black M4 barrels passed
Across the roadside where the digger stooped
And, for an instant, grazed his aching arm.

With sudden fright, Hadid knew he was made,
Too smart to fool himself and call it chance,
And, dropping everything, the bomber ran
Due west and tumbled down into a ditch.
The Panther troops were closing quickly now,
Not running, but advancing with intent,
In armed and lighted lines of searching men
Who’d be upon him in a minute’s time
And, what’s more, surely shoot him if he ran
Out from the ditch that could become his grave.

With borrowed breath, the lone mechanic cursed
And prayed, and wished he hadn’t left the bomb,
And wondered whether it would now be best
To die or to be dragged from here alive,
His glory doomed and stillborn either way.
“We found the bag and shovel, check this out,”
He heard a soldier yell in ugly tones,
And grimaced as a searing gun-mount light
Passed once again across the crumb’ling ditch.
Then, from the dark, from nearby Highway Ten,
He heard a new and percolating sound
That he, with eyes shut, instantly could clock:
A BMW, some high-end trim,
Hightailing it down asphalt in a tear
With two big pickups and some plain sedan
With pedals flattened giving roaring chase.
As this new chaos system neared the site
Where he was hidden, close to Highway Ten,
A grin emerged on trapped Hadid’s sly face
And new chance for survival reared its head.

Due east of Chief Issawi’s station house,
In secret rooms behind Janabi’s mosque,
Hadid would linger nightly, hushed and cold,
To tinker with his lethal instruments
And listen to Urduni as he taught
Janabi how to think Zarqawi’s way.
September the Eleventh of oh-three,
A fitting day for throwing off old chains,
Saw this repeating scene play out once more
At kitchen tables in the mosque’s backrooms,
Unwindowed, orange-flushed with candle flames,
Until, at last, Urduni went to bed
And left the two Iraqi men alone
To formulate their schemes in silent stride.

New footsteps echoed forth, approaching fast,
And did not seem to scare the wealthy sheikh
Who lone Hadid could sense had prior planned
For some unscrupulous new hand to come
Replenish his diminished retinue,
A henchman to assist their bloody work.
Indeed, as this man came, Janabi rose
And clasped the hands of the arriving brute
Who shared a dead-eyed sharpness with Hadid
But had a shorter, stronger stance and build.
Then rich Janabi, knowing this brute well
From scurrilous joint ventures of years past,
Presented him to wary, stern Hadid
As kin, Muftaris, now back from Baghdad.

The brute Muftaris settled in a chair
Mere feet from the mechanic’s private notes
There at the table, bearing a great case
That quick Hadid soon recognized had come
From some Iraqi special forces cache.
Unsettled by the brute, Hadid gave up
On trying to complete a diagram
And stared at him, at which point the imam
Came over with his hands out, making peace.
“Hadid, you are a man of many gifts.
Quite literally, and you give them well.
But I must deal tonight with politics,
And so employ a certain kind of force
More animal than what you can provide.
Muftaris, come. I’ll show you to my car
And when the night is darker we’ll begin.”

So those two went alone to the garage
And left Hadid alone with books and charts
Where, fuming from abandonment, the man
Resolved to take the opportunity
Provided by whatever they had planned,
Which surely would distract the US troops,
To go himself and plant a roadside bomb
Out at a place he’d saved for such a night
Where he could hit a fat, tan tanker truck
Before the coming of the next day’s dawn
And send a few Americans to Hell.

That night, brave Zulfiqar was keeping watch
As ordered, working Taha’s guard detail
With restless, small Mazir close at his side
Inside a Hyundai from the motor pool
That they had pulled to stake out city hall
And watch the mayor’s office window glow
As midnight ticked e’er closer on the dash
And trashy Western pop played on repeat
From some new US station that Mazir
Had found broadcasting nightly from Baghdad.
“I miss the Hilux system,” said Mazir
As 50 Cent began a fuzzy verse.
“This Hyundai has no bass. You know? Bass. ‘Boom.’”
And Zulfiqar explained to spry Mazir
That he had been convinced their faithful truck
Was due to snap a belt before too long
And so he’d turned it in for shop repairs
Conducted by their in-house auto guy.
“It’s better anyway, Mazir. This car.
It’s better for a stakeout. More discreet.”
Then small Mazir turned down the stereo,
Not hearing him, concerned now with the sight
Of some tall, strapping man in local clothes
Approaching them, an AK in his hands,
With all the ease of going for a stroll.
Beneath a yellow streetlight’s shine, the man
Put up a palm toward them, saying hi,
And as brave Zulfiqar then sat up straight
To roll his hand-crank Hyundai window down
He saw a green band on the man’s right arm,
A designation that he did not know.

Approaching Zulfiqar, who quickly tensed,
The AK man put forth a hand to shake
And greeted both the blues with earnest cheer
As Officer Murrawi, newly tapped
By Taha, with a dozen other men,
To serve as his Green Band protection force,
A pro-American militia group
Permitted to be armed inside the town
And help the cops with keeping Taha safe
And generally scaring off the muj’.

“Well. Glad to meet you,” said calmed Zulfiqar.
“Let’s hope deterrence is the best defense
And we won’t need to shoot at all tonight.
Especially not right here in downtown
Where any stray could hit somebody’s home.”
“My thoughts too,” Officer Murrawi said,
And Zulfiqar could see he was sincere.
“We don’t want firefights. We don’t want blood.
We want the muj’ in cuffs and in your jail.
So keep your watch, the both of you. Stay sharp.
And, if you need us, our boys won’t be far.”

When this Murrawi strolled back out of sight,
Mazir, who’d just been silent, gave a laugh
Of great disdain at what had just occurred.
“We don’t need help,” he grumbled to the night.
And Zulfiqar replied, “Oh yes we do.
You’ll sing a different tune when you hear shots
And muj’hideen are up there on the roof.
You’ll wish you had a whole brigade of help.
I just hope these Green Bands are worth their salt.”

Two blocks away, a shining black sedan
Of German make, a BMW,
Pulled into inky shadows, engine warm,
With sharp-eyed brute Muftaris at the wheel
And his rich boss, its owner, at his side.
The car in park, Muftaris worked with speed
To unlock that big special forces crate
That weighed on Sheikh Janabi’s narrow lap
And pull out what lay waiting, cased in foam:
A black MG, a Russian PKM.
Assembling the lengthy, weighty gun
That lay across both men’s laps once unpacked,
Muftaris turned to that sly sheikh he served
And said, “Okay. Let’s go and make our point.”

This pausing in the darkness was observed
By Arkan, a patrol cop, twenty-three,
Who’d cleverly decided to stake out
Two blocks from Zulfiqar, just to the east,
In case the muj’ crept near to plan a strike
Against the mayor and his civil staff.
On seeing this sedan’s odd, skulking path
He left his post, for lack of radio,
And jogged down sidewalk concrete to the place
Where Zulfiqar had parked near city hall.
“Black BMW,” the breathless cop
Reported through the window to Mazir
And Zulfiqar as soon as he arrived.
“No plates. Dark tint. I think this might be it.”

A second after Arkan said the words,
The stated car rolled by at cruising speed
And all at once the dark became a roar.
With blazing heat and murderhammer hail,
The PKM, clenched by Muftaris now
As he released the wheel and aimed the gun,
Unloaded like a god’s fist on the place
Where Taha worked unceasing at his desk.
The building glass exploded, pulverized,
And chunks of stone came off its humble face
As brute, not slowing, passed the three shocked cops
And turned to make his exit to the south.

In deafened disbelief, the cops then saw
Their sergeant, Asem, running from the place
Toward them, unhurt, rubble underfoot
And fury on his outraged, mustached face.
“Is Taha up there?” scared Mazir yelled out.
“He’s fine! They’re fine!” tough Asem shouted back
As he advanced toward the Hyundai’s rear.
“Let’s go. Don’t let that whore’s son get away.”
With red blood racing in the four blue hearts,
Both he and Arkan piled in the back
And told brave Zulfiqar to floor the thing
As German taillights fled to Highway Ten.

Soon after Drinkwine’s thesis made its rounds
A clamor swept across the town’s police
Who’d gathered late at night with nervous laughs
Imbued with giddy tones of cowboy grit.
They’d gathered at their downtown station house
Per secret all-hands memos from the chief
That said to meet inside the briefing room
And, what’s more, to bring AKs for each man.
Among these cops, of course, was Zulfiqar,
The soberest by temperament that night,
Who didn’t care to speculate about
What new directive they would undertake
And spent his waiting time just making sure
His peers’ AKs were oiled and maintained.

In contrast, young Mazir was riding high,
Not only on account of packing heat
But also from the vibrant laptop screen
That shined on his composite briefing desk
And blared with shaky handheld video
Acquired on some file-sharing site
Of some blonde Western woman, barely dressed
On stage before a massive, cheering crowd
Engaged in hip gyrations as she sang
And ran her hand across her shining abs.
“Christina Aguilera,” said Mazir
As he presented her to all around,
“I’m gonna get a wife like that someday
And never want for anything again.”

“A hooker?” teasing Khalid asked Mazir,
His voice low, almost looking for a scrap.
“Just go down to Baghdad. That’s half the girls.
You’d find a polar bear before a veil
In some of those disgusting neighborhoods.”

“We’re not all hicks like you,” Mazir shot back.
“I wouldn’t care if my wife didn’t veil.
Get with the times. We’re democratic now.
Fallujah, Paris, Amsterdam. You know?”

“Forget about if she’s a whore or not,”
Their electronics specialist, Iyad,
Chimed in, his arm around Mazir, his friend.
“That woman makes a million bucks a year
And you’re a short, provincial city cop
From somewhere she would never set a foot.
How are you gonna find a wife like that?”

For this, Mazir already had a plan
And gleefully expounded for the boys
While they all waited for their chief to come.
“I’ll bravely take a hit, or, just a graze,
Like Rambo, with my AK, from a fight
Where I mow through some filthy bandit slime.”
He punctuated this with pantomime
Of fi’ring his Kalashnikov full-spray
And made the mouth noise for the full effect
As Zulfiqar looked on with groans and smirks.
“And they’ll say, ‘Oh, Mazir! You saved our lives!’
The US troops, that is. When they see me.
And then they’ll take me to Baharia
Where they’ve got the massage room all transformed
To be a hospital for wounded men.
And, US doctors, they’re all hot blonde chicks,
I’ve seen it on TV, I swear it’s true,
And one’ll take my shirt and dress my wound
And look into my eyes, and she’ll be charmed,
And then she’ll marry me and come live here
And I’ll become a very wealthy man
By opening a chain of Pizza Huts
And have five children who will go to school
At Harvard, and have servants, and a pool.”

The specificities of this cop’s plan
Were cut short by Issawi’s tardy shout,
“Look sharp! You are police. Not high school boys,”
As he came to the lectern from the hall.
With clipboard in his hands, the harried chief
Addressed his full room of Iraqi blues
Who sat with some small shred of discipline
And wood-stocked, oiled AKs on their laps.
“I just spoke to the mayor. Here’s the deal.
The civil service has been getting threats
From idiots who want to start jihad
And kill every Fallujan they can find
Who goes along with the Americans.
We are the thin blue line here in Iraq.
We serve the mayor, and we serve the town,
And at this moment we must do two things.
The first is we must safeguard Taha’s life.
The man is pulling eighty hour weeks
Holed up there in his office down the street
Just keeping the utilities online.
The second is we must root out these thugs
And sweep away the mafioso filth
That seems to be mutating day by day
Into a darker, crazier new beast.
For these jobs I will split you into teams
And, in addition to your normal beats,
You’ll take shifts on these special, secret tasks.
As wolves, you’ll hunt in packs, and hunt at night.”

“But Chief,” Mazir then asked, a hand outstretched,
With Aguilera dancing on his screen,
“I thought you said we shouldn’t get involved
Because the US troops were doing raids
And we don’t want to get caught up in that
And risk creating problems. So what changed?”

Then, in response, the chief relayed more news
That came to all assembled as a shock.
“This morning, the Americans and I
Went down in big trucks to Baharia
And I met Drinkwine, who is their new boss,
And Drinkwine said to me, ‘Issawi, sir,
The past commanders who were stationed here
Did not make proper use of your police.
They treated you like children, cast aside
And only fit for stopping petty crime.
But I know you are warriors at heart
And I know you can take the city back,
And I want to empower you, wise Chief,
To let your men kick ass and take some names.’”

At this, there was a proper cowboy whoop
From all the men inside the briefing room,
And even Zulfiqar joined in the cheer,
Enamored with the trust and the prestige.

For lack of any other troops on hand,
The Baghdad Texan, Sanchez, made the call
To send the Airborne infantry once more
To go relieve the Spartans in the task
Of putting rough Fallujah on the path
Toward a democratic government
By way of raids, patrols, and martial law.
The new battalion chosen for the job
Were Panthers, and these Panthers came, a claw
With packs and carbines, in their Humvee lines,
A broken record, bright, amnesiac,
To start afresh the circus of the damned.

In watching these new Airborne troop patrols
Waste time in meetings with conniving sheikhs
Who had no sway or relevance in town
And whom the Spartans had dismissed as quacks
Already, under Wesley’s prior stint,
Janabi got the liberating sense
The Panthers had to start their work from scratch
And thus could, for the most part, be ignored
While they engaged in plodding, endless work
Of locating and clearing IEDs
Hadid was churning out with fervent speed
And handing off to new jihadi mooks
Collected from the mosque and marketplace
With promises of cash and brotherhood
If they could plant these gifts along the road.

As such, the wealthy sheikh, excited now,
Took frequent meetings deep inside his mosque
With his Jordanian liaison-guide
Who taught him prison rules for power plays
And schooled him in an ideology
More merciless than simple swindling.
The strong and clueless, stern Urduni taught,
Must be avoided in most every case,
While, meanwhile, the weak and powerful
Must be presented with two clear-cut paths:
Remain a figurehead but cede control,
Or else be violently cut to size.
Awash with this Zarqawi thought, the sheikh,
Inside the furnace of September’s heat,
Emerged from his domain of thugs and bribes
To visit with the mayor face to face.

At city hall, near shuttered Baathist doors
That briefly sheltered Nantz and now hung limp,
The mayor, Taha, buried in complaints
Re: water, power, and the lack thereof,
Rose up to face Janabi eye to eye
And, with a handshake over desktop mess,
Prepared to hear what this man had to say.

“Dear Mayor. You have served this city well
And I know you’ll continue to secure
Resources for Fallujah’s residents
Through that most, ah, unenviable grind
Extracting money from Americans.
It’s true, some would declare you an affront
To God for working with the infidels,
But I’m a pragmatist and understand
You’re only striving for the people’s health.
Now, Mayor, there is one small, sticky piece
To bring to your attention, and it’s this:
In taking money from the US troops
You can’t unwittingly become their stooge.
There is an upsurge of mujahideen
Occurring all around us in this town.
It’s crucial that their budding, sacred work
Be left alone by all of your police.
If this is something you can promise me,
Then I, as your true friend, can go and preach
In my capacity as an imam
That your administration is of God
And should be given distance and respect.
I come concerned, for you, dear Taha. See?”
And so he raised his hands in deference.
“I would not want a friend to come to harm
Through tragic miscommunication here.”

A silence passed between the disp’rate men,
And Sheikh Janabi truly could not tell
What mustached, hamstrung Taha would say now.
Then, with a shaking head, the mayor laughed
And scornfully replied, “You idiot.
If you’re a preacher, I’m the Prince of Wales.
This zealot business wouldn’t fool a stone.
But if you really want to serve Allah
Go donate to the food bank at the school.
A little charity might do you good.
I’m busy, Sheikh. I’m doing honest work.
And so are my police, as best they can.
Flirtations with jihad will serve you ill.
Grow up and look around. We don’t need war.”

The fuming sheikh then left with hot-eared rage
To tell Urduni of this great offense
And Taha, though he’d worn a cocky face,
Now wiped the sweat of terror from his brow
And felt himself compacted in a vise,
Like many all across Iraq that fall,
Between the US and mujahideen,
With both sides squeezing tighter at each turn.

The man who led the Panther infantry
Was Drinkwine, hockey goalie from New York,
Now senior after fifteen solid years
Of officer’s commissions, rank by rank.
Though in the meetings with DiSalvo’s team,
The Panther heavy had remained polite,
He could not shake the bitter, looming sense
The Spartans had been woefully inert
While terrorism spread like a disease
Beneath their noses, mounting day by day,
Compounding from some scattered dissidents
To what command now called insurgency.
“We have to take the kid gloves off out here.
Not just with PUCs, but with our allies too.
These guys can’t just be sitting ’round the desk
Down at the po-po station while some clown
Ten blocks away is building IEDs,”
The new commander, Drinkwine, told his team
Inside a hot Volturno meeting hall
As soon as all the Spartans had gone home
And his troops, trusting him, agreed in full.
This sentiment, declared, became their creed
And so it filtered down in layered steps
To captains, to lieutenants, to each man
Who told himself a firm hand would prevail.

An irritating stalemate fell across
Fallujah in the next weeks following
Hadid’s new, lethal matinee debut.
The convoys were rerouted, and the troops
Became so cautious in their day patrols
That numerous explosives were defused
Before they could be used in an attack
Because they’d been too obviously placed
In trap-like spots, dead cars and heaps of trash,
Along the streets where US soldiers drove.
All this came to a head at August’s end
When, vexed and irritated by the stall,
Hadid sent three men up, Janabi’s guys,
To plant an IED on Highway Ten,
Just off the asphalt where the Humvees cruised
In transit to and from Baharia.

This plan would have succeeded, were it not
For vigilant US surveillance sweeps
That spotted clustered men through NVGs
And intercepted them, caught in the act
With no Fallujah alleyways around
To hide them in a maze of bust’ling shops
And no will in their sober, fearful hearts
To detonate the bomb with martyrs’ cries
As US infantry jumped from their rigs
To seize the three and carry them away
To stygian unknowns of no return,
That black hole base of Anbar, Mercury.

With baleful spite, rich sheikh Janabi raged
At lone Hadid, who’d planned the whole affair,
And, though his blood was hot enough to kill,
Hadid just stood stock-still and took his licks
In evening swelter in Janabi’s mosque
As his new patron wore his anger out
Lamenting rueful capture of his men.
As this chiaroscuro dressing down
Unfolded in the candlelit recess
Of Sheikh Janabi’s mosque, long after dark,
Enshrouded by a lasting blackout wave,
A thud from the unlatching of a door
Made Sheikh Janabi stop his speech mid-word
As both he and his new vizier of bombs
Turned, wide-eyed, in near unison toward
The labyrinthine stone-walled corridors
Where strange new footsteps rapidly advanced.
“We are in private session, sir!” the sheikh
Announced to this new sound as it drew near.
“Go see Nazzal if you need counsel. Go.
Go now. Your presence is not welcome here.”

And with soft-padded steps of shoeless feet
The figure came into the candlelight,
A white dishdasha worn from neck to foot,
A skullcap on his wild-bearded head,
Accompanied by gusts of scorching air
That swept across the region from the east
And hinted summer would grow hotter yet
Before the blackout season ran its course.
“Imam Janabi,” he said to the sheikh,
Quite formal, in a voice that showed respect
But still sat on a harsh and foreign bed
Of years spent in the depths of Jordan’s jails
Where miracles of faith transform the damned
To disciplined disciples of Allah.
“Peace be upon you. Please. Please, be at ease.
I am Urduni. I have traveled far
To come to you tonight on the behalf
Of master whom I serve, a pious man
Who wishes to correct the troubled faith
That clung to life beneath the Baathist boot.
If you would be so kind as to permit
This traveler to quarter in your mosque
I will endeavor to convey the ways
My master, in his earthly years, has learned
To satisfy pecuniary needs
That serve to stoke the fire of jihad.”

The mention of a lucrative new scheme
Was not lost on the profit-minded sheikh
Whose face then briefly flashed with greenback lust
Before returning to a tightened purse
Appropriate for men discussing God.
“Who is your secret master?” he then asked,
His mind aflash with possibilities,
And harbinger Urduni spoke the name,
“Zarqawi,” slaughterer, bane of the peace,
Jordanian drug trafficker and pimp
Imprisoned by his king in squalid pits
Where he had taken on the zealous cause
Of fomenting against all nation-states
The brutal birth of a new caliphate
That recognizes only laws of God
Interpreted the hardline Sunni way
With funding the Salafiyya arch-fiend
From Saudi wealth, Bin Laden, had supplied.

“Jihad must be an engine,” said the man
In words Hadid could quickly comprehend.
“You must use arms and soldiers of the faith
To kidnap cowards lapping up the cash
That Bush supplies for local guides and serfs
Who sacrifice their honor as the dogs
Supporting the American machine.
The US will not risk their soldiers’ lives
To rescue an Iraqi supplicant,
So it is simple business to extract
A ransom fee from loved ones of the men
You capture off the highways and the streets.”

Hadid, who saw Urduni was like he,
Chimed in, “If we can stay alive, we win.
If ransom money flows in as the fuel
To fund attacks against the US troops,
Each death we cause will grind their patience down
And in their anger they’ll retaliate
Against the sheeplike masses of Iraq
Until the heat and pressure reach a point
Where mass resistance forces them to flee
Just as they did before in Vietnam.”

Unsettled by the pitter-pat rapport
Emerging under his own gilded roof
Between this stranger covered in tattoos
And lone Hadid, who’d just enraged the sheikh,
Janabi forcibly asserted rank
And said, “Yes. This is true. But we can well
Achieve these things ourselves. We are not weak.
Why should I let a man I do not know
Who serves a master I have never met
Insert himself, on my dime, in my mosque
And oversee my hometown, my domain?”

Then harbinger Urduni said the words
No one had deigned to tell the sheikh before.
“You’re right. It is your hometown. Your lifeblood.
But who controls its Great Mosque? It’s not you.
Nazzal the jurist still commands the crowd
And preaches, in his dotage, pithy whines,
Not sharp enough to do what must be done.
My master is the key, the sacred blade
Of action so extreme it can defeat
The strongest army in the modern world.
Use him. Become Zarqawi’s partner here
And with him, in due time, you will become
The high imam of Anbar. This I know.”

So, with the sheikh now swayed by this sweet song
And summer patchworked with a muggy gray,
The Spartan watch rolled flatly to its end
With handfuls of unfortunate male PUCs
In languishing, indef’nite custody
But little else to show for three months’ time
And, certainly, no hint of coming peace.

Hadid was then, a chosen starlet, cast
With greater force and flurry than he’d felt
In all ten years at his small auto shop
Into a world that ran Janabi’s way
And in which he was met with charmed respect.
He’d figured he’d been scouted for a team
On which he’d play a key but junior role
But, due to Baathist vets’ recalcitrance
To join in new Salafist-led jihad,
He soon saw that the rich sheikh had a dearth
Of anyone trained in the ways of war.
Discerning this, the bomb man then gave up
On asking things like where he should attack
Because the answers from Janabi’s men,
All mobsters, lunks, and smugglers by trade,
Were only mumbled guesswork, nothing more,
And so, in summer heat, he realized
He might as well just do it all himself.

The US convoys took some basic steps
To circumvent lone partisan attacks
Like changing their routine from time to time
And switching up their routes each time they came.
The rippling and wide Euphrates, though,
Presented a solution to the bind
That stymied the mechanic’s bombing plans
Because there were just two paths ’cross its span
With bridges rated for a heavy load
And one, because it lay so far up north,
Was never taken by the US troops.
With this discovered, firebrand Hadid
Arranged for trucks and men to stage at night
And, in the hour just before the dawn,
Transport him and his gift for younger Bush
To where he’d plant it at the bridge’s end.

On site, he worried little as he worked
About the notion of the passersby
Alerting the Americans or cops
Because, he figured, he was muj’hideen,
Defender of the land and of Islam,
And they would either see him with respect
Or otherwise stay silent out of fear
That organized reprisals may ensue
If they let out a word of what they saw.
Machiavellian, he kept his calm
As he connected wires one by one
There in the morning dark, the air still fresh
And not yet pounding with its midday scorch,
And said aloud, “This is a good, strong job
With pay and honor, difficult and fun,
And for a good cause, too, atop it all.
How lucky to be born in time for this.”

When Aya, in her strongest summer blaze,
Arose with hot, red passion from the east,
The convoy trucks were already en route
And lone Hadid’s new, careful handiwork
Was neatly tucked and hidden out of sight
Behind a barrel, just beside the bridge.

As he had figured from the city maps,
The convoy did indeed come rolling forth
With what struck him as stupid, doglike speed,
Not slow nor fast, just ignorant and daft.
In watching from Janabi’s henchmen’s car,
Hadid was overcome with a thrilled rush
And glee that pounded in him with such force
He squirmed and squeezed his own leg, filled with joy,
And by the time he saw the leading truck
Approach the site where he had laid his trap
He could not take the buildup anymore
And jammed his thumb down on the toggle—‘ON.’

The Humvee at the caravan’s blunt nose
Had little armor in its metal skin
And even less beneath the carriage base
That held the bright-faced driver and his team
As they approached the river that had birthed
All civ’lization on her gentle banks.
Too fast for anyone to comprehend,
The planted bomb went off beside the wheel
With force like an artillery barrage
And tossed the Humvee up into the air.
The driver was Bertoldie, who had come
From autumn-kissed Missouri, where the leaves
Fell dancing on the sidewalks by his church
Near fairgrounds he had walked with his new wife
And planned to visit his blithe infant son,
Sights he would never get to see again.
Thrown out and clear of his bombed Humvee’s cab
With violence too great for a man to stand
Bertoldie landed on the river’s bank
And darkness came and fell upon his eyes.

That day, Issawi, jolly station chief,
Had planned to meet with Wesley once again
And brought a pastry spread for the affair
With sweetbread, coffee, tea, and cigarettes.
Mere minutes after Wesley showed his face,
The word came through about the convoy strike
In shaky tones from Army PSYOP staff
Who’d been in town to speak to local crowds
And thus been closest, first to reach the site
Where soldiers groaned in bloodied, tattered shreds.
Alarmed, staunch Wesley turned and left the chief
And ran into Mazir, who’d been convinced
To stress an ask to Wesley, when he could,
About some new equipment for the force.
Mustached Mazir, a head below the man,
Spoke animatedly about the need
For lightbars, radios, and bullhorn mounts
To retrofit their aging Hiluxes
So they could better come in and assist
With crowd control when protestors appeared,
As Wesley had been asking them to do.
Surprised, as if now broken from a trance,
Pale Wesley, Yorba Linda-born, looked down
At this small cop, the friend of Zulfiqar,
And mustered all he could, a haunted, “Yeah,”
Which pleased Mazir took as a word that meant
His ask had been accepted now in full,
And so he went with head high to the guys
And bragged all day about what he’d secured.

In looking through the subsequent reports
Of one dead and three wounded at the bridge,
DiSalvo, Spartan leader, felt new knots
Twist tight around his stomach at the thought
That those who killed his specialist were there
Across the plain, inside the town, still free
With no one coming forth to turn them in.
What’s more, at least a dozen cars had passed
The improvised explosive, the device,
And surely must have seen something amiss
But carried on, right past the IED,
And never thought to warn the convoy off.

Each day, Baharia’s new Army base
Looked less like some posh, villa-laden beach
And more like an array of drab machines
As military engineers put up
Defensive berms of dirt and staging grounds
For howitzers and early unmanned planes,
Uprooting fields and landscaping in turn.
Inside a meeting room, there at the base,
DiSalvo and his XO, Wesley, fumed
And laid out a new course in which they’d put
The city of Fallujah on time-out
With curfews, cordons, sweeps, and veh’cle checks
Designed to both root out the terrorists
And make the average people keenly feel
The inconvenience bombings can bring on.

Some nights thereafter, while Fallujah slept,
Dahham, that debonair, rich young imam,
Was hard at work inside a secret room
At his own mosque near South Fallujah Square
Where he had gathered all the chemicals
And wiring components he requir’d
To finish up what men, with whispered pride,
Referred to most times simply as the gift.
With slow and halting hands that seemed to know
That pressing mortal danger lay ahead,
Dahham reviewed his guidebook one last time
And clipped the metal prongs onto the nodes—

Blast roars and snapping, hard concussive waves
Came so fast that a frame-by-frame review
Would only see the mosque, at first, intact
And, next frame, gone, replaced with dust and smoke.
Then holy brick, blown high to smithereens,
Stopped mid-air, short of Heaven in its flight,
And, spent of short-lived zeal, fell back to Earth
Like cutting hail across the city block.

As pieces fell in parabolic arcs
Hadid lay still, awakened by the boom
In bed, his eyes affixed on ceiling cracks,
Unseeing, for he had no need for sight,
And focused only on the rich, clear sounds
Parading into his capacious mind.
In waking, he had instantly surmised
The cause, and grinned just like a baby boy
In peaceful, well-fed, bassinet-safed rest
As he heard long-aggrieving young Dahham
Fall gently as the rain across his roof.

In this hot moment, lying still, he knew
The nettles of unworthy men are not
A stinging that must simply be endured
As teachers back in school had said to him.
“Hadid. Be calm. You cannot make him change.”
No, they were wrong, too small in their meek whines
To see the truth, like math, as plain as God:
A problem can, in fact, just be erased
And never more let out a wretched laugh.

This thought contented him, and there alone
He shut his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

The gossip network in Fallujah ran
Much faster than the infantry patrols,
And by the time staunch Wesley had arrived
Downtown for his first meeting with a sheikh
A railing crowd had already appeared
To swarm him and cry out with loud complaints
That US bombing runs had hit a mosque
In some small neighborhood where children slept
And killed a holy man of high regard,
A murderous attack without a cause
That showed the bloodlust of the infidels
And rightfully should outrage all the world.
“Volturno Main, uh, Spartan Six out here.
Did we have any air or indirect
Strikes in the sector authorized last night?”
“Wait one, Six.” Locals pressed close. “Negative.
No authorized kinetics in AO
In last one hundred hours. Can confirm.”
“Aight, copy. Out,” said Wesley, who was pinned
By angry men, some showing scabby scrapes
They’d suffered from the falling concrete hail
As they encroached and yelled and yelled that some
Invisible American aircraft
Had come and killed some dude they called Dahham.
The jock, now behind schedule, raised his voice
In anger for the first time since he’d come
To this dry place he’d hoped would welcome him
And, without realizing, started down
The path the Falcons trod some months before
From high and jovial noblesse oblige
Down steep steps to Gehenna’s fraught despair.
“We do not have invisible aircraft!
We did not bomb your mosque. Back up. Back up.”
“You killed a man of God.” “Back up. Back up!”
And Wesley’s words, like teachers’ barks, fell flat
Until, as he’d been taught back in Baghdad,
He left his M4 sitting with his squad
And in its stead unholstered his M9
Beretta, which he knew would harken back
To decades of Saddam’s bloodthirsty mooks
Dispatching anyone they didn’t like
With pistols, never rifles, on the street.
“Back, motherfucker!” And the jock got through
To meet an old and wealthy local man.

As minutes passed and cigarette smoke swirled
The antsy jock discovered with a groan
This sheikh, like all the rest, was little help
And only had one feeble ask in mind:
“Please make me mayor, sir, when Taha fails.”
“We don’t do things that way, bud. Go get votes.
Man. Fucking waste of time. ’Kay, let’s roll out!”

That evening, the frail mother of Hadid
Knocked gently on his bolted bedroom door
With, “Son. A man has come to visit you.
Please, Sheikh, come in. I’m sorry it’s a mess.”
Dressed well, since he had sensed this might occur,
Hadid walked barefoot past his bed and desk
And ThinkPad and his textbooks and his notes
To gently open his plain chamber door
And bow to this grand vulture who had come.
“Great Sheikh, sir. It’s an honor,” said Hadid,
With formal pleasantry he’d prepped by rote
For just such a contingency as this,
And rich Janabi seemed to take it well.
Polite, the sheikh dismissed Hadid’s frail mom
And, with the man’s permission, stepped inside
His bare-kept room, where, in plain sight, there was
A prototype explosive charge remote
Of new, compact, and wholly novel make.
“It seems,” Janabi said, regarding it,
“You’ve got exactly what I came here for.
But how can I be reassured it works?”

“Because I tell you,” said Hadid, confused.
“It’s not Toshiba. There’s no warranty.
So if you want to know the thing won’t fail
You have to either trust me or go learn
Enough about the principles at play
That when I talk you through each choice of part
You’re smart enough to catch design mistakes,
Which, seeing that the late Dahham could not,
With his four years of engineering school,
I’d say is probably a waste of time
Because the Mongol horde’s already here.”

From almost any other working man,
Such words would have enraged the wealthy sheikh
And sent him scheming with his bruiser lunks
To formulate a plan to shut him down,
Or run him out of town, or break his legs,
But, there, in quiet, staring down Hadid,
Janabi felt awash with a new sense
That this mechanic had been sent to him
As God’s own gift, his stubborn words and all.
“Ah, what I mean to say,” the sheikh explained,
“Is that I can’t afford to lose a man
Or three to accidental...accident.”

Hadid then chuffed. “What if I do a few?
At first, to put your operatives at ease.
I’ll need explosives from you, for each one.
I figure you could rent a hidden space,
A storage unit, under some false name.
Whatever seems secure, even a mosque.
Just, not yours. That would be too close to home.
And, obviously, we need targets, too.
Each bomb we build has fixed investment costs
In inputs, time and labor, and so on,
So, thus, we want to maximize returns.
Like commerce. Right? Of course you understand.”

For every point Hadid had just laid out,
The sheikh was still hung up on number one,
And asked, “You’d really plant the things yourself?”

“Well, yes. At night. Why not? I mean, they work.”

In two days’ time, two fated paths entwined
Once more before the deluge, there in town,
When Zulfiqar, again without Mazir,
For fear of his young partner acting rash,
Rolled slowly down the four-lane boulevard
With business parks on either sprawling side
That ran sure-shot to South Fallujah Square
Where lone Hadid’s small auto shop sat squat
With guts of Nissans and Peugeots wide-strewn
And left to rust when they were not of use.

With one smooth, swooping turn into the lot
He slowed to idle and held up a hand
In reassurance t’ward the working man
Who’d pulled his head out from a Volvo hood
To see what he’d identified by sound
As probably a Hilux and a cop.
“G’morning,” Zulfiqar said as he stood
And stretched his legs, approaching lone Hadid.
“Good morning,” said Hadid, a wrench in hand
And not a hint of kindness to be seen.
Then Zulfiqar turned back toward his truck
And said, “It’s had some issues shifting gears.
Was wondering if you could take a look,”
With expectation that this would requi’r
Hadid to take it for a highway spin.
Brusque, difficult to read, Hadid advanced
And, with permission, opened up the hood
Wherein he took such tender, focused time
That Zulfiqar began to strangely feel
The Hilux and mechanic shared a bond
That its own driver could not ever know.
“Transmission should be fine, it’s very new,
Just try to use a lighter touch out there,”
Hadid reported simply from a look,
“But one of those main belts is going to break
A thousand-ish kilometers from now.
I used to try and fix these things before
They snapped, but I got tired of complaints
From people who thought I was telling lies
To try to drum up business for the shop.
These days, I simply say, ‘Go out and drive,
And when you hear it break, you’ll know it’s time.’”
Then Zulfiqar, much broader than the man,
Took two steps closer on the concrete lot
And said, “It must be hard to be accused
Of lying just for having a good eye.”

Hadid, uncomf’rtable, did not withdraw,
And did not seem to know how to respond,
Then said back, “Are you here to sniff me out?
I heard that all you cops swore oaths to Bush.
If true, that’s fine, so be it, but be straight.
To lie’s a sin. Even for heretics.”
“Sniff out for what?” calm Zulfiqar then asked,
Unsure how his own faith had been revealed,
And in response Hadid just came in close,
Wrench still in hand, now pointing to the chest
Of this tall cop who stood in uniform.
“They’ll leave here someday. Just remember that.
America will leave, and we’ll remain.
The rest, as preachers say, is up to God.”

When Zulfiqar returned home late that night,
Exhausted from a series of arrests
Of more and more emboldened petty thieves
Who still were unemployed and saw no hope
Of finding work in standstill Anbar now,
He kissed his wife, Samira, in the den
And told her he feared things would soon get worse.
Samira shushed him and caressed his head
And said, “You are just one man, Zulfiqar.
You do not need to save Iraq tonight.”
And so he said, “But we, as people, do
And that means each of us must do his part,”
And, though the words were noble, they fell flat
Against what both Iraqis felt at heart
Was coming like a rotten, gnawing tide,
A sandstorm or the plague in days of old,
Toward the town where they had spent their lives
To feed on it and leave it ash and bone.

The uproar that ensued in morning light
The first day that Fallujah realized
That dove Jumaili had been dragged away
Was seized upon by all the usuals
Who stood to profit from the public’s rage,
Including old Nazzal and his new friend,
Janabi, who had quickly forged a bond
Between the jurist and his own slick mosque
Where, channeling the tragedy, the sheikh
Gave sermons that made dove Jumaili sound
Like he had been not just a treasured friend
But also a close ally of jihad,
Jihad that all must henceforth carry out
To set him and the others like him free.

“Allah has called for action. Not just words.
We must be brave in service of Islam.
To light that path, I want to introduce
A young imam from a Salafi mosque
Not far from here, in South Fallujah Square,
Who studied engineering and knows all
The ways a crafty enemy can fight
When too outgunned to lead an open charge.”
On this cue, the young man, Dahham, appeared
Inside Janabi’s gilded downtown mosque
With modest, smiling affect and a wave
That sent a pang of hate up through the gut
Of one who stood there watching—lone Hadid.

For years, Hadid had known Dahham’s rich tribe
As smarmy braggarts with no dignity
Who’d often try to stiff him on the bill
Or falsely claim he’d sabotaged their cars
When they brought in their BMWs
To toiling young Hadid’s mechanic shop.
Dahham, Hadid had heard some years ago,
Had dropped out of his university,
And certainly did not have expertise
On how to foment a guerrilla war.
Despite this, young Dahham, like his rich host,
Was born with that inscrutable sixth sense
Of how to charm the masses with a grin
That had, since birth, eluded poor Hadid.
With bitterness, Hadid stood still and watched
As young Dahham pulled out and passed around
A detonation system he had built
To rig a high explosive to remotes
So it could be ignited from afar
When US troops passed by its hiding place.
Among the dozens there, only Hadid
Had any background with which to assess
The system that the smug imam had built
And now was showing off with braggart’s glee.
“It’s too unstable,” harsh Hadid announced
When it was his turn to behold the rig.
“This is a stupid system. It could fail
And blow up in your face when it’s first armed.”
These words were all he’d spoken since he’d come,
And, in his speaking, he could tell the crowd
Was turning with a glower to take sight
Of who was disrespecting the imam.
This treatment was not shocking to Hadid,
Who frequently received such sullen stares
When he tried to communicate a fact
Without the proper softening of phrase,
And so he merely stood, device in hand,
To see if young Dahham would now engage
Not at the level of a petty spat
But, peer to peer, as fellow men of craft.

“Three sheikhs of greater training than myself
Have all inspected it, and they’re impressed.
I promise, brother, it will do its job.
That’s Satan talking through you. It’s just fear.”
These words were said across the gilded span
Of Sheikh Janabi’s tacky, gaudy mosque
With such a saccharine and cloying tone
By young Dahham, dismissive from the start,
That lone Hadid was overcome with rage
That filled his body, brimming to his eyes
Until it took the loner great restraint
To not attack the preacher where he stood.
Instead, with forced decorum, he just smil’d
And nodded in a bow to both imams
And then, before he passed along the rig,
With hands too nimble for the men to see,
Uncrossed a fraying wire in a way
That quick Hadid, in expertise, knew well
Would cause the amateur device to fail
Exactly in the way that he had warned
And detonate as soon as it was armed
With any serious explosive charge.

Mere minutes after this deft sabotage,
Hadid departed from Janabi’s mosque,
Not out of any fear of getting caught
But simply so his boiling rage could cool
And he could go back to his daily world
Of jacks and spark plugs, things he understood.
He would have slipped out totally unseen
Except for one small, complicating fact:
Brave Zulfiqar had overheard in prayer
The warning that Jumaili had received
From Sheikh Janabi at Nazzal’s Great Mosque
And, in turn, had decided to stake out
Janabi’s mosque to see what he could see.
A longtime resident and watchful cop,
Brave Zulfiqar knew old Fallujah well,
And, with a sharpened eye, could place Hadid
With one brief glance through his own windshield pane
As that one gruff mechanic from South Square
Who’d been the target of a few complaints
About bad service at his auto shop
Mazir had said were only tribal gripes
The claimants never could substantiate.
His swift departure from Janabi’s mosque
Caught Zulfiqar’s attention as quite odd,
Not only on account of his rushed gait
But also for the reason that the sheikh
Was not the kind of person to extend
His hospitality to grease-stained men
Unless they served some purpose in his schemes.

With coffee on the dash, the cop demurred
And took a bite of his falafel wrap
As he let lone Hadid continue on
For now, to disappear in the Jolan.

The first week of the Spartan teams’ patrols
Saw Zulfiqar and small Mazir both stunned
At just how well the whole thing seemed to go
In light of how exposed the soldiers were
And all the people that might want them dead.
Staunch Wesley, whom they figured was the boss
Because of how he rode around the town
For meetings with the mayor and the sheikhs
While his CO, DiSalvo, stayed on base,
Was at his core a water polo jock
And people person, California-raised,
Who always cracked a genuine, bright grin
To put the folks in front of him at ease.
Each day, he added Humvees for patrols,
These ones being correctly colored tan,
Which differentiated them from those
Green Falcon trucks that left so many dead.
A few times, Wesley came to meet the chief
At downtown’s station house where cops killed time
And held their detainees and stowed their gear
And kept their fleet of Hiluxes maintained
As best they could with little cash to spare.
Though Zulfiqar could never listen in
On Wesley’s meetings with the jolly chief
He always heard the same thing in their wake:
“Hey, Zulfiqar! Mazir! Go do your jobs.
And no, I don’t mean kicking hornets’ nests.
These Coalition troops can handle that.
Just go and get a cat down from a tree
Or something, make the people like us more.
I’m tired of the glares I always get
From all those weirdo guys down at the mosque
When I walk over to the bakery.”
“Yes, Chief.” “Of course, Chief.” And the two would go
Back out to root out trouble once again.

This summer patter went on day by day
With something that could almost be called hope
As Wesley and his men enjoyed downtown
And frequently stopped in at a famed grill,
Haji Hussein, to order lamb kebab
And chat about Iraq with Western press
Who came in little flits up from Baghdad
And gave the two beat cops the stunning sense
That for the first time in their adult lives
Iraq was turning cosmopolitan.

The night, though, was the shadows’ sole domain,
And when Fallujah tucked itself in bed
Beneath Mesopotamia’s faint stars
The bou-bous would slip silently inside,
So named by children of the neighborhoods
Where they crept in and did their secret raids
Because they acted like the boogeyman
And only showed up in the dark of night.
All hand-selected Spartans, highly trained,
They worked in teams with low-light goggles on
And moved up inky streets in single lines
To reach the place where their next target slept.
In early June, they set upon a home
At downtown’s plaza, opposite the school,
Where they’d been given photos and the name
Of one their brief called terrorist, Bilal,
Who’d fired on the Falcons from his house
And egged on their great volley of Death’s hail.

Look! See the noiseless feet and silken aim
Despite the fact their hearts are in their throats
Tha-thudding as they spread apart in groups
Like magnets, headed for their given marks
Just as they’d planned and drilled that afternoon
In secreted Volturno briefing rooms.
Staff Sergeant watches from the asphalt street,
A radio within his clenching grip,
While two from first squad stalk the house’s rear
In case Bilal or anyone takes flight
When they commence their loud, alarming work.
A specialist, a sledgehammer in hand,
Advances while the riflemen all wait
To storm in vested lines with M4s aimed
As soon as he takes down the locked front door.
Swing! Smash it hard! Bring Mjolnir metal down.
One hit digs deep, a crashing in the night.
The second, like a boar in springtime rage,
Embeds the hammer head inside the door,
Each passing second giving extra time
For unknown villains in the home to grab
Saddamist AKs from beneath their beds
And meet the raid team with a lethal spray.
The third strike breaks the hardened townhouse lock
And in the door flies, kicked down with a bang.
Breach. “US Army! Get down! On the ground!”
The wife is crying like they always do.
“My husband is a good man. Innocent.”
“If that’s the case, ma’am, we’ll release him soon.”
“When soon? When soon?” she shouts with shoving blows
Until she’s forced into her children’s room
To wait with them and chew the bitter fact
That taken husbands are not seen again.

The target has been flex-cuffed on the floor
Of his own bedroom, hands behind his back,
Black beard against the carpet, mouth a frown,
With wild, black eyes glowing in the light
Of NVG green like the man before
And all the ones who will come after, too.

In this way, rat Bilal was caught and caged,
A black bag tugged tight over his gaunt head,
Inside a Spartan Humvee hauling ass
With fishtail dust plumes spewing in its wake.
They took the bumps and turns so hard that he,
Despite his efforts, hit his head six times
Against the backseat door as he lay tied,
An M4 barrel pressed into his cheek
By some young rifleman he could not see.
“Fuck it. Let’s just stop here and kill the dude,”
the sergeant in the shotgun seat announced,
Deliberately using simple words
That even a scared rat could understand,
And so the tan rig pulled off in a field
That had seen crops for some three thousand years,
The tires making deep marks through tilled rows
As bou-bou Spartan Humvees one and three
Hung back to shine their blinding headlights hence
At Humvee two, wherein lay bruised Bilal
Until Staff Sergeant dragged him by the arms
And roughly tossed him, still blind, to his knees
On damp and fragrant soil in the night.

The US had been bound since ’thirty-two
To rules signed in Geneva that ensured
That nations would afford all prisoners
Fair treatment if made captive through a war,
Including proper food and ample rest
And freedom from all torture or distress
Inflicted on the body or the mind.
But Bush the Younger had no interest now
In tying his troops’ hands with such restraint
And thus, with tricks of wording as a shield,
Like Hulagu when sworn to ne’er draw blood,
He’d called them Persons Under his Control,
A differentiated legal class
From treaty-covered prisoners of war,
And so made clear these sorry, sorry PUCs
Could suffer anything his soldiers pleased.

The Humvee beams shined bright against Bilal,
The bag removed now from his nervous head
And tossed beside him there on farmland ground.
Then, for a captive audience of one,
A play was put on by the raid team men,
With two, like Vladimir and Estragon,
Debating what to do with captured prey.
“I think he might have contacts we could use.
We’re better off just bringing him to base.”
“No”—with a rifle jab to punctuate—
“He don’t know shit. Let’s waste him and go home.”
At this skit’s end, the cruel-toned latter man
Seemed poised to win and blow the captive’s brains
From his thin skull, to scatter ’cross the dirt
For vultures and the flies to later find.
He pressed his M4 barrel ’gainst the skin,
And, seeing there was nothing left to lose,
Bilal began to blurt, “I’ll tell you names!”
Which, though he did not know it, was his line,
Delivered on cue in this three-man act.

Now, even facing death, Bilal was smart
And faithful to Allah in every act,
And thus, in sweating terror, still contrived
A story that had truth enough to fly
And yet still send the mongrel infidels
Blood-nosing down the trail of that dove sheikh
Who’d long opposed divine Salafiyya.
“Jumaili. The imam. The one downtown.
The tall one who just lost his treasured son.
He organized both protests. It was him.
He tells us we should instigate against
The occupiers with a great jihad.”
“Great jihad?” said the second Army man
Who was now, without knowing, on a stage
Of rat Bilal’s construction, not his own,
Devised through practiced, swift taqiyyah speech,
The Muslim art of lies to infidels
Permitted only under great duress.
“Imam,” the second soldier said to first,
Not acting now but with an honest tone.
“We’d need command approval. Whatcha think?”
And so the first spat dip into the dirt.
“I think jihad means PUC material.
Add this mofo Jumaili to the list.
We’ll see if Mercury can make him talk.”

Two miles to Fallujah’s east, a lake
Created by Iraqi engineers
In decades past to serve as a retreat
For Baathist loyalists of high prestige
Lay shimmering, an azure reservoir.
Upon this lake, Saddam had ordered built
An isolated, lush, palm-lined resort
Of villas, gardens, banquet halls, and rides
Like roller coasters there along the shore.
Inside its walls, the place, Baharia,
Had been a rare chance for the Baath elite
To intermix and lounge in Western mode
And even swim together in the lake
In ways that would have scandalized the proles
Who worked in swelt’ring factories nearby
In dense Fallujah’s heavy industry.
The past ten years had seen the place decline
As old Saddam, returning to the throes
Of Muslim custom in recession depths,
Had banned all liquor from the public sphere
And started to encourage tamer life
Among his grov’ling, supplicant regime.
Now, in its next act, with the tourists gone,
Baharia was christened with the name
Volturno by the Army and transformed
With hundreds upon hundreds of hot tents
That covered its once-verdant hotel grounds
Into a noisy, dusty US base
From which suppressing Anbar would ensue.

“We know our mission here. We know our job.
And we are men and women who perform
With dignity, with wisdom, and respect.
It’s not our goal out here to make new friends,
But we do need to show Fallujah how
We’re working to improve their lives each day.
Imagine someone comes into your home
And you don’t know if he’s a thug or what,
And you don’t really trust him near your wife,
And he shouts things that you don’t understand.
That’s us in their eyes when we’re on patrol.
The terrorists are out there running loose.
The cavalry took fire every day.
So when you’re on patrol, you’ve got two jobs:
You keep your squadmates safe, and stay on guard,
And at the same time try to find the grace
To not get rough with locals who get pissed
And give you attitude in ignorance
Because they don’t get yet that we’re all here
To free them from Saddam and then go home.
It’s hard, I know it’s really, really hard,
But that’s why they sent Spartans for the job.
I’ve watched you train, I know you, and I know
We’re gonna go out each day and perform
In ways befitting of the infantry
Of our great nation. Thank you for your time.”

This speech was given at Baharia,
Out on a landing leading to a pool,
By Spartan head DiSalvo, even-keeled.
Like most Americans in field command,
DiSalvo had since boyhood studied war
As merely a historical account
For lack of major conflict in his time
With which to whet his skills in proper course.
As such, from years of academic work,
And also just by temperament from birth,
The modest Spartan leader had an air
More like a focused, sober college dean
Than infantry berserker on a tear.
All day, as fifteen hundred troops unpacked,
He’d milled about the tan enlisted tents
While his own villa he had been assigned
Was combed for bugs and bombs by staff who’d learned
The place had previously been one home
Of many purchased by the eldest son
Of sly Saddam, lech Uday, former heir
Deprived of crown-prince status on account
Of injuries sustained in ’ninety-six
From sudden Shiite militant attack
That left him weak with nerve pain and enraged
That Father took away his future reign.

At last, when Uday’s villa came up clean
In swabs and scans by Army engineers,
DiSalvo walked alone into the house
Where all his bags had been deposited
To take in this plush sanctum of his foe
And, from it, possibly derive some hint
Of Baathist thought that could be used to win
Against dead-ender remnants that, to him,
Were surely fighting for their great Saddam.
As he pored over Uday’s dusty shelves
Where he’d expected books and art to lie
He heard a knock that he identified
At once as Wesley, his staunch right-hand man,
A systems guy who’d memorized each piece,
Each mechanism, each brigade device
That made up their computerized defense
In that strange era where, each week, there was
Some new advancement dreamed up in a lab
That turned a job of muscle, blood, and sweat
To deadly games for wonkish engineers.
DiSalvo, who had studied leadership
At length, believed in delegation’s strengths,
And thus had placed in his like-mind XO
A trust befitting brothers, man to man.

“Coffee?” “No thanks, I never touch the stuff.”
And Wesley nodded, drinking his alone.
“Why not? If you don’t mind me asking, sir.”
“Just never had much interest in a high.
Wes, I read the reports from Colonel Bray.
We’re up to our necks in dead-enders here.
It’s not like in the South, where I just heard
The Shiites had a big mayoral vote
In one town and they wanted to elect
Their garrison commander for the job.
Up here we’re on a bad foot, and I won’t
Allow another massacre. Good God.
So, we’ll just start with what we know can work
And do the Brad patrols like Fox Troop did
And slowly figure out the right approach
To pacify these Baathist loyalists
Who get their kicks from shooting at our guys.”

With coffee in his grip, the XO watched
His pensive boss perusing Uday’s things
And then remarked, upon remembering,
“They killed him and his brother, both the heirs.
Them and their families, up in Mosul.
They shot a TOW right through the damn front door
And there goes ol’ Saddam’s whole fam’ly line.”
Imagining the scene with sentiment,
DiSalvo frowned and took a ling’ring pause
As he realiz’d he stood inside the home
Of someone who was now among the dead.
And then, beside a television set,
Investigating as his thoughts rolled on,
He opened up a wooden cabinet
And found a row of home-shot VHS
Cassettes with labels marked in cracking ink,
“Sumaya,” “Nadia,” “Basma,” and more
Iraqi women’s names in sloppy hand.

“I wouldn’t,” Wesley warned his puzzled boss,
When he took out one tape to try and play,
And told the story of Uday, the heir
Who’d terrorized the people of Iraq.
With each long minute, grave DiSalvo stood
In silence, his blood cold in midday heat,
And heard about the prince’s appetite
For liquor and for any passing girl
Who ever caught his leering wastrel eye.
Meek Wesley spoke with awkward, dodging words,
Quite typical for his chaste Christian ilk,
Imparting how whenever lech Uday
Would visit Baghdad University
The girls would hide and cry in bathroom stalls
Because they knew that anyone he chose
Would be scooped up by his armed bodyguards
To spend a night with him without complaint
As prostitute, deflowered for a price
And killed thereafter if she showed a sign
Of possibly complaining to Saddam
About what had transpired with his son.
In detail, Wesley then continued on
With stories of more torture, pain, and lust
Collected from a number of accounts
Across the decades of Saddam’s regime
And did not stop until DiSalvo seemed
Relieved of all his sentimental guilt
About the death of Uday, spoiled waste,
And Qusay, mild brother, favorite son
Who’d run a wicked torture racket, too.

Returning Uday’s blue tape to its shelf,
DiSalvo turned with anguish to the west
Where he could see Fallujah ’cross the plain
And said out loud, “We freed them all from Hell
And now we’re spending millions on repairs
And all they do is sulk and shoot. For what?”
And Wesley said, “You said it out there, sir.
They don’t know who we are. They don’t like change.
The Greatest Generation had their war,
And it took four years to defeat the krauts.
We took Iraq in three weeks, but I think
The big push now for Generation X
Will be securing freedom on the ground.
If our men get this right, I promise you
Our names will last across the ages here
And one day kids of yours might take a trip
To see Fallujah’s own DiSalvo Square.”
DiSalvo, no more comforted by this,
Turned back to stalwart Wesley with a frown
And said, “We have three months before we’re gone.
That’s gonna go by faster than a blink.
Let’s put the parks and glory to the side
And make it our sole mission to hand off
A happy, safe Fallujah to the next
Battalion that comes in at summer’s end.
You’ve been a good friend. I know you’ll do fine.
Dismissed, and thank you. I’ll get settled in.”

That evening, stressed DiSalvo sat alone
At Uday’s dining table in the dim
With books on long-gone Babylon in hand
That he’d been reading at the staging ground
And now, in light of deep and recent woe,
Seemed like a tacky trifle to indulge
When he could be instead devising plans
To make his case to sheikhs and gruff imams
Who lived and worked in dense Fallujah’s streets
And, in DiSalvo’s mind, could be convinced
With just a touch of tact to side with him.
So deep in thought was he on that still night
That he did not detect the entry clicks
Of a dark shade who slipped inside the home
And then appeared, near-supernatural,
Before him in the bareness of the night.
Unarmed and stunned, DiSalvo sat up straight,
Beholding cutting eyes and white beard hair
And local clothes without insignia
As this dark shade stood silent as the grave.
“Who are you?” pale DiSalvo asked, unsure
If these were his last moments on the Earth,
And in response the man revealed a badge
That showed his shrouded origins: CIA.

“I could have shot you,” Spartan scolded, tense,
To shake off all the fright that gripped his neck.
“Well, not without a gun,” shade grumbled back,
And laid out his designs in plain, blunt words.
“DiSalvo, you’re not fighting Baathists now.
They’re gone. They’re toast. And Bush made sure of that
When he let Bremer go and ban ’em all
From ever holding any high-up post.
The guys out there with AKs raising hell
Are bums mainlining crazy Sunni rants
About jihad from preachers in those mosques
That SOP says you can’t even touch.
Now, luckily for you, these guys have homes
And you’ve got top-grade NODs, and they do not.
So you’re gonna keep doing day patrols
And tossing candy out like trick or treat
And then at night I’m gonna give you names
And addresses from off my naughty list
And you go do your job and bag the fucks
And bring ’em here and let us do our work.”

“So trust your intel blind?” DiSalvo asked,
Unsure of how to handle this demand.
“No, blindness is what happens if you don’t,”
Said shade, and vanished silent whence he came.

In May light, Zulfiqar and a cold crowd
Stood silent on the roadside and observed
The Foxes rolling in in one short line
Of treaded, heavy, squat-built fighting Brads
Designed to transport infantry in war.
They’d ended up so overbuilt and strange
Because of Pentagon committee spats
About their proper purpose and their aims
That, on the field, the thick rigs looked full well
Like what a commoner would call a tank.
No faces could be seen within the steel
As they squeaked past the market stalls and homes
And no one ever seemed to leave the cab
And show a human face out on patrols.
So stark was this new absence of the troops,
Replaced by rolling hunks of numbered steel,
That Zulfiqar and small Mazir remarked
It seemed that sly Saddam had been usurped
By mindless rolling robots from the stars.

In talking to Issawi, his stout chief,
The brave Iraqi beat cop Zulfiqar
Had been told plainly that he should ignore
The dust-ups that involved the US troops
And let the occupier take the lead.
Despite this, ling’ring worry haunted him
And, on one morning when those AK shots
That often pinged the unresponsive Brads
From rooftops downtown once again rang out,
Brave Zulfiqar departed from his home
In caref’lly chosen plain civilian clothes
To say his midday prayers, now, for a change
And do it at the Great Mosque of Nazzal.
With ritual he still remembered well
Despite his lapse in sticking to his faith
The Shiite cleansed himself and stepped inside
To pray within the hall as river air
Rolled in from the Euphrates, cool and kind.
As he knelt down upon the mat, he thought
It might be better to perform the prayer
In Sunni fashion, hands across his chest,
Since none of it meant very much to him
Beyond the pretense needed to intrude
On what he now suspected was the place
Where deals were being made to buy up arms
And gen’rally harass the Brad patrols.
However, as he settled in and knelt,
A feeling touched him that he had not felt
Since long before his parents both had passed
And, following its guidance, Zulfiqar
Committed to the Shiite form of prayer,
His arms aside and forehead pressed against
His turbah stone for contact with the Earth.

Just then, within the largely empty mosque,
The dove imam, Jumaili, came again
To speak to old Nazzal in shiv’ring grief
And figure out why this man’s congregants
Had agitated at the protest march
Where his son had been killed before his eyes.
The mourning father, tall above Nazzal,
Took only passing notice of the man
Beside them praying in the Shiite form
As he laid out his charges, one and all,
And asked Nazzal to change his costly ways.
At some point in his heartfelt plea, a group
Of harsh-faced Sunni men returned inside
From smoking on the gentle water’s edge
And filled in like an entourage behind
The hunchback, old Nazzal, to listen in.
Among them was Janabi, wealthy sheikh
Whom tall Jumaili held in disrepute
As not just an impostor but lech slime
Who used Salafiyya as an excuse
To stuff his bed with wives and find young men
To do his thuggish bidding in the streets.
These new men, silent, formed a crescent shape
That kept Jumaili up against the wall,
Not pinned, but not free, either, as Nazzal
Responded to the dove imam’s demand.
“My brother,” said Nazzal, “it was not I
Who killed your son in cold blood on the street.
I see your anger and your pain. Keep faith.
We’ll need soft hearts like you among our ranks
To comfort all the wounded and afraid
As we continue on this troubled path
Of freeing all Iraq from her new chains.”
Now cornered by Nazzal’s ill-gathered crew,
Jumaili swallowed, silent as his son,
And said he’d take his leave, and nodded once,
Then swiftly left the Great Fallujah Mosque
To hide away and let the rough men win.

The Bradleys of the Foxes were a plug
That Bray, so anguished, grasped for in a pinch
To stop the leak of Anbar’s scarce goodwill
And minimize the chance of incidents.
The few weeks they had lasted, taking hits
That barely registered against their hulls,
The swift Salafists built mycel’ial roots
Through every outraged, fervent Sunni mosque
And cannib’lized Iraqi Army wares
With threats of force against the former troops
Combined with promised brotherhood in arms
If they applied their training to the cause
Of fomenting a tide of new jihad.

Then on one morning at the end of May
The Foxes rolled out and, in their dry wake
Came fifteen hundred US infantry
Called Spartans, from a disciplined brigade,
From Army base Volturno outside town
Where they would nightly sleep, and then, by day,
Begin the whole ballet of grief anew.

Inside the Baathist office, mournful Bray
First heard the clamor on the radio
While in a meeting with defensive Nantz
And ran outside the building in despair
To see Jordan’ian ambulances scream
Across the square, filled up with agony.
“No. Lord. Oh, no,” said Bray, a wide-spread hand
Against the side of his bald, sweat-soaked head,
And Nantz could only stand with silent fear
Both for the injured and his own command.
“I’m cycling you out,” Bray said that night
In private to the strained battalion head,
And so declared the Falcons would depart
As soon as their replacement troops arrived.
“Right now? For who?” embittered Nantz then asked
And Bray explained two hundred cavalry
In armored Bradley fighting vehicles
From Fox Troop, up from Texas, from Fort Hood,
Would come relieve the fifteen hundred men
Of five full Falcon companies on site.
“Respectfully, I’d call this a mistake,”
Nantz said through gritted teeth to bitter Bray,
“A dozen Brads cannot secure this town.
They’ll end up doing next to nothing, sir.”
Then Bray exploded with a pent-up rage
That sent the Falcon leader shrinking fast:
“And next to nothing will be vastly more
Than all the bad that you’ve done in this town.
You’re soft, Nantz, like your teddy bears. You’re weak.
In weakness you have made your infantry
Undisciplined and jumpy in the field,
And in Fallujah that gets people killed.
You wanted my appraisal? Here it is.
For every local we gun down out there,
No matter if he’s picking up a rock
Or walking an old lady ’cross the street,
A hundred new Iraqis gonna say
Their lives were better underneath Saddam.”
“Sir, I can fix this,” Nantz retorted, meek,
“I studied al-Fallujah for six months.
No other team’s prepared to do this job.
We get this wrong, and terrorism comes
Up like a goddamn zombie hand to grab
This whole town by the throat and turn it bad.”
Bray nodded. “I agree, and this is why
I’m real pissed off to have to pull you out,
But something’s wrong inside your rifle squads
That should have been corrected back at Bragg
And now we’re out here with the bases full
And you’ve got two strikes. We can’t risk a third.”

At this stark condemnation, Nantz was poised
To speak against his better judgment when,
Beneath their feet, both men felt a huge boom
That knocked them halfway to the ground and left
A skull-ache of concussive force behind.
Unflinching, both the officers ran down
With swift-sure focus in their rapid gait
To check upon the wounded and the dead
And saw their seven Falcon office guards
In varied states of pummeled, groaning haze.
In rage at that day’s shooting, a young rogue,
Iraqi-born, hormonal and incensed,
Without a future prospect or betrothed,
An archetype that ever would recur
Thereafter in Fallujah’s sickened fall,
Had gone to rich Janabi for advice
And, in the prayer hall, promised the imam
That, taking Sheikh Janabi’s greenback dole,
He’d buy a hand grenade in the Jolan,
The labyrinth of downtown market stalls
Where now-dissolved armed forces’ goods were sold
By former Baathist soldiers out of work,
To toss inside of Nantz’s new HQ
And try to kill the US troops inside.
Though he had not succeeded, he had stunned
And wounded plenty, who now choked and gasped
And shouted, “I can’t hear!” as shudd’ring Nantz
Looked down upon the gash-faced men he loved
And realized that, in this case, Bray was right
That too much bad blood festered now between
The Falcons and Fallujans to go on.