An excerpt from Nick McDonell’s first book of nonfiction, The End of Major Combat Operations, published by McSweeney’s.
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Ricky was an interpreter who chain-smoked and always carried several packs of cigarettes. He was generous with his smokes, would shake one out for you each time you reached for your pack. His hands shook when he offered you one, though; Ricky seemed sometimes like he wanted something back. The guys he rode with liked him. He was a source of fun because of his nerves, but he played along with the jokes.
The strangest thing about Ricky was the way he perspired. The guys in the truck agreed that they had never seen anything like it. Ricky dripped. His hair was always damp. When he turned his head quickly, the saltwater sprayed off him. The canvas of his seat in the MRAP was always stained.
Ricky, like most terps, rotated between his company’s platoons, but recently everyone in the 1-12’s Bull company had been seeing more of him than usual. He had moved onto the FOB full time. In fact, he was living on a cot outside one of the lieutenant’s rooms. This particular LT, Drew Masone, was a broad twenty-three-year-old from Levittown, Long Island, distinguished most clearly by his tolerant nature. He only shook his head about Ricky, didn’t say that he was stinking up the hallway even though he was, lying on his cot in his undershirt whenever he wasn’t standing outside, smoking, saying hello too many times.
Most terps went home every couple of weeks. There was, sometimes, joking between them and the soldiers about how the terps could go home and get laid and have a beer up in Kurdistan. The platoons rotated the fortnightly “terp drop,” a boring and simple mission. The terps left their camo behind and piled into the back of the MRAP, often with a small refrigerator or television set or bag of clothes that they had procured in the previous two weeks of patrols. Then the patrol mounted up and drove north to a deserted stretch of road in Kurdistan where a couple of beat-up sedans idled. The terps would quickly dismount and load their stuff into the sedans and speed off down the road. Terp drop was easy and tedious for the GIs, but for the terps it was more important than almost anything else. It was transit between worlds. What if the wrong person saw them? What if they were followed? What if they brought the mayhem and killing back home?
Ricky, though, told me he wasn’t afraid of dying. Maybe living on the base was the final move in his private cosmology of courage. He said he hated Saddam, and he was frank about his very Kurdish attitude toward the United States, which was if you were going to fight a war you should join the side that’s going to win.
His brother felt the same way; he was a member of the Asayesh, the Kurdish Intelligence and Security force. The Asayesh had fought Saddam even before he’d killed close to one hundred thousand Kurds in the Al-Anfal Campaign of 1987 and ’88, before George Herbert Walker Bush’s administration suggested that America would support the revolution from the air in 1991. Before the gas that came when we didn’t.
The Asayesh has itself been condemned by Amnesty International for human rights abuses, occasionally. If Ricky had mixed feelings about his brother’s organization, he didn’t let on. He only pulled up his damp shirt and showed me the ugly pink scars on his arms, and his back, and his neck.
“Saddam’s army tortured me because my brother was Asayesh,” he told me on our first afternoon together, in the back of an MRAP. This was news to the guys we were riding with that day, Ricky’s platoon.
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Nick McDonell will be reading from this book tonight (April 29) in San Francisco at Book Passage in the Ferry Building at 6pm. He will be joined by McSweeney’s 34 contributors Tom Barbash and Peter Orner. There are more details here and you can purchase the book here.
