The One Who Looked on the Deeps, Part 4 of 4
Over the last several weeks, I have been publishing a novel in serial format here at the site. Entitled “The One Who Looked on the Deeps,” it is a retelling of the Gilgamesh story in the context of the Iraq War. This is the concluding section. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 were all posted previously at the site. Enjoy!
VII.
The stern withdrew from the banks, and the engine churned the night waves to silver, and he thought of the king of Nineveh hooded in streams of sackcloth, grinding his tears in the ashes littered under his muralled atrocities, and how the sodden prophet paced here and there over that looming hillock, furious over a ruin repented in heaven. Over the bow, the modern city flashed and disappeared, the congeries of its precarious lighting weaving shadows over shadows; evil warrens of illuminescence through which murderers slinked away from headless bodies or left families shot in a heap, and not a single voice ranged over the waters, crying, “turn away from the evil, lest the anger of God consume us, and we perish.” And what would it matter anyway, he thought? What would it change? Of what consequence to his own time were prayers that had never stanched a drop of blood in the past? What would it mean to stand on that approaching shore, chanting archaic formulas in the very place where Assyrian and Abbasid and Kurd made devotions as prelude to their own slaughter? And he thought for a moment – in his fury, like the prophet – how it might have been better back then had the god of mercy reached his hand instead towards that abominable city, and leveled it even with the sands of the desert once and for all, and what tears, what horrid calamities, might have been spared the earth with its removal.
Suspended on tide and on time, he thus traversed those waters of death, till the little boat intruded through a stand of reeds skirting the far embankment where Abraham, who had steered blindly and dumbly that whole time, lifted the engine away from their thick encumbrance, and petered the boat’s long momentum to a bobbing halt. Youngman plunged over the gunwale into the black waters, all the way to his thighs, wading the remaining stretch of the journey to shore. He went alone, as the priest was reputed to speak some words of English, rendering the translator unneeded, while Abraham for his part did not wish to be spotted in the quarters towards which the soldier was bound. The church was only two blocks from the river, so after clambering up the sloped bank, he slid his side arm from its holster and resolutely, fearsomely, stalked the midnight avenue before him, wary of its covert dens and the terrorists plotting within them, intent to be more lethal to them than they could be to him. After a little while, he could sense shards of broken glass crunching under his boots, and then, after a few more paces, strangely fractured plywood and splinters of beams impeded his way, and then whole piles of refuse, lumped by the curb, and then, right before his steps: the darkened, the shattered temple. Black soot, more dingy than nighttime, clung to the cracked façade, a wicked ivy planted there by an explosion, and next to it, the door creaked forwards and backwards, no longer functioning to bar violence out of the sanctum, and then, in the narthex where now he entered, scattered over the broken tilework, the pages of hymnals and prayer books made low, sad susurrus with the vagaries of the wind. All was dust, all cataclysm, save the flicker of light he caught by the side of the altar – the remnant of an old lantern – revealing the outline of a priest at the foot of a persistent saint, stooped among the holy debris to scrub stains of massacre from the image. Youngman recognized him at once for the priest he sought, and yet, strange to say, there was no jubilance in his heart now that he had finally attained his presence; only resentment, annoyance, the feeling that this man and his office were a check on the urge of his spirit to commune immediately with the arcane lord of the temple, and that no language could be spoken there but what this man could interpret. For his part, the priest, detecting the dark approach of the soldier, showed no joy at his arrival, made no effort to rise and minister to his need, but kept right on scrubbing as the other made his way up the aisle, only muttering when he came near in a voice full of bitterness and reproach.
“You come too late,” he said, his eyes on his task, not Youngman, “the attack occurred last week,” to which the soldier answered, “I am not here to fight,” which in turn drew a contemptuous snort from the priest, and the sharp retort: “tell that to the terrorists.” By now the soldier was looming over him, and the priest did not desist from scrubbing even to gesture towards a greeting, but when he realized that the man had sought him out for some business – was not merely passing on patrol – and would not depart from him until that business was addressed, he grew angry, and raised himself on his knees to lash out at the expectant soldier.
“Is there not ruin enough here for you? Is there not death enough? Do you wish to make my church known to all the city as the haunt of the Americans? Look, look around you, and see what stains are left of my parishioners. Here is where a mother sat soothing her infant when the bomb went off; here an old lady, devotee in this temple for eighty years. Here was a family of seven, all obliterated. See the dismembered body of God. Most are dead, the rest have run away to the desert, and no one is left here to worship our Lord. See the fruits of your liberation.”
Now when Youngman heard these things, and looked at the pulverized stonework at his feet, where the cantankerous priest had indicated, and caught the blotches of brown carnage trailing up the back of the pew behind him, he felt as one in the presence of a visitation, and that the ghosts of those departed worshippers stood remonstrating with him in the flesh, demanding why they, and not him, had to die as the wages of his invasion. He stared, and he stared, at what he could not tell, until sadly, meekly, the question formed on his lips: “a baby too?” to which the priest, full of spite, full of rancor, did not answer softly, only barked right back at him: “What? Are the limbs of a baby too hard for a bomb? Do children escape from a war? Did the possibility of even one of these little ones maimed to the death intrude on the thoughts of your generals and secretaries when they sat envisioning the triumphant festoons to be hung at your arrival?”
The words were cruel, and intended to be cruel, but it was not their asperity, nor the evident malice with which they were spoken that drew a torrent of weeping out of the expansive chest of the soldier, the waves upon waves of convulsive grief erupting out of him for the lives disintegrated and the purposes annihilated and the suffering smeared across the cosmos eternally, but the incommensurability of his tears to any of it, the sense that he could cry in that very spot forever and not make mourning enough for the least of it, until it seemed his lamentations were not only for these recently massacred, but for the crimson record of the entire species, with all the wastage of war, and the blind thrusts of rage, and the wretched, wandering orphans that made up the whole of it, and then he thought of his hopeful friend, with his gun, who thought to bring an end to it all. It was not compassion, or the repentance of fellow feeling that abated the priest’s reproachful glance, or drew him towards the young soldier with a quizzical expression on his face to ask, “what makes you cry so?” but a fascination for this paradox of sorrow, for the tears of this warlike man.
Then Youngman burst out in the pain of his heart:
“Why shouldn’t I stand flooding this temple everlastingly for the aeons of death and of broken lives, seeing as time will never restore them, never amend the love it has spoiled, that always and forever the dust of its victims, in testament to despair, will rise clouding the sunlight they were deprived? Why shouldn’t I stand, hollow-cheeked and fainting, till the sun or my flesh fail first, and mourn the lost promise of man? Mothers have died, and fathers have died, and now my friend, who was so virtuous, who was like a brother to me, he also has died, and the pain of his absence looms like a helmeted warrior, besting me in my heart, because he did not fight as other men fight, not with rage or with lust in his chest, but to cure the city of its maladies, and save the people from the edge of their own wrath, though now, in his coffin, he lies and decays, all the same. He fought with the same heart in him as his most glorified ancestors, the ones who, fleeing old violence, plowed the forbidding Atlantic - pious in creed, pious in artifice, fashioning the forest for God, with every axe-stroke laid to its darkness, crying their zeal that “here, life will go differently,” till the land and its stubbornness obtruded their prayers and they found the old violence required again. So he – in love with his country, in love with the cause it endowed him – came furious with killers and torturers, as spotless as any bright hero, but the end of his motives, their cleanness from guile, was destruction and death all the same, and the more he opposed his love to their force - the more he hungered for justice in the land - the greater the mayhem and loss that ensued, the greater the rage, till the very last thought accosting his brain, when the bullet made night there, whispered him darkly, ‘it will never be cured; it will never go differently.’ Now I am left to finish his battle, to shoulder the flag of this last hope of man, and my courage is weak, my fidelity weak, because now I can see what it comes to at last, how every last cause to fight for was fought for, how every last word was said and was bled for, and the misery goes on, the bloodshed goes on, and goes on till the universe freezes and folds, and the thought of my death in the cycle repels me, of yielding my breath and nothing redeemed. We were born too late; we have come too late, after the meaningful strife on the earth, after the gods who reign over violence ascended to keep their counsel in heaven; so our bullets fly vainly, our jets sight vainly, our battles are nothing but battles henceforth, and when I am called again to the fray – once more to the strain of power over power – I fear to go vainly, bearing the agony even as they millenia past, with arrow and war-horse, clashed but for rule and perdurance of memory, heaped in this country meaningless dead.”
The priest stood stone-faced listening to the soldier’s entire outburst, but when he finished, he spoke no comforting phrases to him; he only frowned and admonished him for his words:
“How long will you Americans trouble the globe with your restless hearts? Will you never be satisfied? Will you never cease straining after dominance over the entire earth? Have you never paused to consider how rare are the circumstances history has reserved for you, or compared the felicity of your lot to the burden of any other nation? Do you not see how fortunate you are, with your teeming terrain, your fortress of oceans, the prudence and mildness of the laws you inherited? What is it that prevents you from dwelling quietly in your own country, clutching your loved ones to your body for the short, sweet duration afforded you? Why must you always try to take time in your hands, and shape it after your longing? Even after history appointed you the master of the age, and entrusted to you a greater reach over the earth than she had ever entrusted to a people before, saying, ‘rule over men from one horizon to the other,’ why could you not content yourselves with such an unprecedented station, with the lavish garments and the ample bellies you had of it, rather than loading wounds onto the bodies of your young men out of a restless, frantic terror that a few poor men scratching away at some bare acre on the other side of the world would not answer to your desires? It is because you are unmindful of your last end; it is because you think you will live forever. You erect vast settlements, and you contract for labor in far-flung continents, and you antagonize half the princes of the earth by your designs, as though you would inhabit your bodies forever, and yet all you do is scrounge one more day closer to death, as the even the humblest of animals must do. So when death does summon one of you, as with this, your noble friend, you scream tumultuous tears, as though the violence of your bereavement was anything that could recall an extinguished spirit back again to its clay. But this has been the lot of man since forever, waking to the marvel of his own strength and beauty, only to have it wrested from him at the very height of his delectation; peering joyously and full of wonder at all of the forms ambling through the gratuitous light, only to suffer instantly their dispersal into the besetting annihilation. Ever since the river has lugged down to the sea its shapeless sediments, it has carried on its surface the dead flies of the May; so death carries every one of us away to our nighttime, and no one is made aware when his hour is upon him, and no one returns. This being so, and known to be so, why not let time alone? Why not let it unfold its own calamitous way, and cherish at home the reprieve from darkness so miraculously granted to you, forswearing lust and avarice and the preference for your own notions, and resolving rather to rectify the manners of your own cities, and, in the precincts of your own houses, sanctified by the presence of your own dear progeny, to live humbly and quietly, to dwell?”
“But how can I return to my own country,” answered the soldier frantically, stunned and frustrated at the inadequacy of the priest’s admonition, how far short it seemed to fall of the harmonious wisdom he expected to ring on the tongue of the man of God, which he had braved murder and nightfall to come hear. “How can I sit meekly between the walls of my own room knowing as I know now, having gazed so long on the repulsive innards of human life? From the moment one of those negligible mayflies cast his gaze on his own reflection in the current, and knew the meaning of what he saw, from that moment we have never been able to cease from constant striving, or to mollify our hearts by knowing its justice. But now the tardiness of our lives, their emergence after all of the stories are broken, leaves us no other formula for that justice but what remains in your own lore, and that lore has grown tarnished and feeble and full of doubt, and my tongue will no longer confess it, but knows not what else to confess. Teach it to confess. Help my unbelief. Do not send me away from here convinced there are no words left to our age to lighten the way of mortality. Do not make me believe my hands can never again reach rightly into a realm of sin and death.”
The priest listened, and for an instant, the soldier, the American, evaporated from his bewildered vision - the careless destroyer of his parish - replaced by a man, just as he was a man, who questioned, and hungered, and feared the steel of the war, and he too, for an instant, ceased to be the resentful native, the vindicator of his home and church, and stood instead the minister to men who questioned, and hungered, and feared the sting of death. In that instant, his eyesight wavered and caught the design of a mural that had withstood the blasts plastered to the wall behind the soldier’s magnificent head, wherein the rains of God’s wrath beat down on a regretted world, while the remnant of the earth, walled up in an angular hull, endured the rising and the falling of its corrective torrents. Inspirited, eyes ajar, beckoning towards the mural, he interpreted the things he saw there:
“Listen! I will tell you of the mystery depicted in these images, about how God once angered as you now anger; about how he peered out of heaven upon the ways of man, whom he had authored out of such superfluous love, and saw how far they departed from his own ways; about how the blind imagination of man – its filthiness, its corruption – and his unending lust for domination had littered the face of the earth from end to end, till He grew sorry He had once formed him; about how the rain became his spear, the thunder his sword, to purge this error of his charity, and how a single man – an upright and a pious one – found grace in his furious gaze and was spared; about the half year of this good man’s immergence, the peace at the end of it, and the fruitful branch conveyed to him as the pledge of its permanence, as the pledge of the eternal forbearance man would have of his author ever after; and about how the good man lay that laden branch on the sudden altar he propped upon dry land, the myriad species of the earth pouring out around him, and the prayers of thanksgiving pouring out of his heart for the light of his eyes, the breath of his nostrils, and at last, about how the Lord God allowed for the faults of his flesh, how he repented the devastation he had conjured, and how he swore to refrain from proper judgement till time ran through, for the sake of that virtuous man, that flowering branch.”
Wonder, and the colors of that fortunate image, swam through the stare of the soldier, until finally, with a tongue not all his own, a mind not all his own, he pondered aloud, “what is the meaning of all this?” to which the priest, enamored of his own separate rapture, and only sensing the question in the way of an angelic inquiry, which blessed spirits answer for their purification, spoke aloud, though not to the mystified soldier – to the spheres in spheres of seraphim – saying, “what is good is so very, very good that what is evil cannot tarnish it, cannot nullify it, cannot cancel its presence from eternity, nor stand in comparison with it, nor rival its primacy,” and then, fixing the soldier with a sudden admonition in his eyes, he declared, “so my Lord taught; so he conquered death to prove.”
But it angered Youngman to hear this, and set him pacing over the fragments, in the way a challenged man will ready himself for a fight, because the creed of the priest provoked him; because he had seen too much to accept it; because to trust in the supremacy of good seemed a diminishment of evil. So he rounded on the man with the fury of an enemy, cheeks taut, eyes ablaze, spewing every separate reason that had hardened him to doubt:
“But the foolishness of it? the impossibility?” to which the priest answered, firmly, “it is known;” “and the prevalence of sin? its magnitude, its persistence?” to which he answered again, “that too is known;” “and the outlandishness of his code? its inapposite thrust to life?” and the priest answered again, “it is known;” “and the wickedness of your fraternity, their malign rule over the world and its oppression? the desperate, futile hopes men lodged in you, the shattering of those hopes, the perfect perdurance under your supremacy of hatred and connivance and blood?” to which the priest once more answered, “it is known; “and the cruelty that men perpetrate against one another from generation to generation, and the irrelevance of that victory to a single victim of it, and the hopelessness of its every being allayed by howsoever many recitations of his ascension;” and the priest answered again, “it is known;” “and the ravenous reign of war? its consumption of all the best men? the dumb oblation it lays out perpetually upon the earth, and the ineffectual sacrifice of it all?” to which he answered, “this too is known;” “and the mounds of the massacres and the pogroms and the camps, their heaping up of the soil forever, and the stink of it? their fetid, fleshless rotting over the face of the earth, and its perpetual indictment of the heavens, its never-ending testimony to its own irredemption?” and the priest said again, “this too is known;” “and the suffering and the death of the little ones, which goes on under the shade of the cross, and goes on, and goes on, and repudiates the faith – renders it an obscenity – that a decent God composed them, or had thought for them, or that in the tiny, lifeless limbs - the numbness of them – was waiting or manifesting the hope of salvation?” and the priest answered once more, “all of this is known.”
Now it was the priest who grew furious, who trembled with indignation, who put the other man to the question:
“What is the meaning of all this? What would you have me say? Do you think that God will break the earth again? Rend the shroud again? Do you think he will always and forever be assuming our stricken state, and manifesting the word? You have had your revelation. It is made. Henceforth, you may have salvation at the hand of my Lord, or you may make your peace with death, but no other god is going to come to save you.”
No other god, he thought; no other God but the derelict one; no other god would come and save him. Thus history spoke and determined - let him spurn and oppose as he would - and the long unwinding of his species’ self-awareness, their contemplation of their own abandonment to time, that sparked in the primal plain as a noting of the stars, then a naming of the stars, and then a devotion to the stars; troubled for eons the very sands on which he tread; and after many temples wrought and orisons chanted, settled on the cross as the key to their courses, so that now, in his latter days, he could kneel by its tottering frame, or he could flee into the outer darkness, but he could make obeisance at no other altars, say his prayers to no other god. Millenia compelled him, and there was succor in their domination, because he need not question, or wonder, or suffer the incisions of doubt any longer to be saved, but only submit to the ineluctable march of the spirit, in the same way he had surrendered himself to the momentum of the war. The gleam on the gold of the tabernacle caught his eye – it had not been damaged in the blasts – and the radiant proportions of its gilded aureole beckoned to him, stirred him at the fundaments of his spirit, and he knew as well as he could know anything else in the world that he would never set his eyes on any hope more lovely, more apposite to his soul, and that it was his to have at the very moment he willed it. He turned back towards the priest, still standing there in his blemished cassock, still fixing him with an angry glare, and beseeched him, with a gesture towards the tabernacle, saying, “let me partake of the sacrament,” but the priest was unwilling and shook his head, which made Youngman plead again, until the priest, in impatience lashed out at him again:
“What, so that you can sanctify your conflict? So you can go home and say, ‘once, when I was in Mosul, the man of God condoned my bullets?’ I would not let you partake of that bread if you sat here seven days and seven nights imploring me. I know you Americans. I know your hearts. I know how you will profess your love of God so long as His will seems amenable to your ambitions, to your self-love. But let any man declare your actions adverse to His will, and you will turn away from his word in an instant, because you prefer the ways of your own hearts to His ways.”
The rebuke was bitter to his soul, and bitter too the suddenly dawning knowledge that this god could alter nothing in his world; that his worship did not open the eyes of his countrymen to their folly at home, nor jerk their conscience in the least to wave him abroad; and that no matter how lovely, how enticing to his soul the song of that promise, it could but echo ineffectually beyond the clash and chaos and agonistic noise that was his era. Time had bequeathed to him a desolate heritage; an ancient estate which, possessing, he found a mausoleum, littered with beautiful forms that could not rise, nor minister to him, which he had as a birthright and a burden, beyond disclaimance, because there alone was his name inscribed. A ludicrous fancy stirred in him, as though time could start over with a better god - one who could speak amid an age forsaken, in a voice unclogged by the past – but the misprisions of history exhausted him, and the certainty of it all unfolding just as it had – just as bloody, just as futile – under any other sign, the viciousness and the ruthlessness and the fury of the species ensuring that – whatever god in heaven – it would never, ever be different. And for this, a terrible anger howled through his mind like a gale, as with tears that flung from his face, he rounded back on the tabernacle, accosting it:
“I wish that I never had heard of you, that the world had never recorded your coming. Then I could go and fight blindly, without hope of rest or salvation. Then I would die as one of those savages died, who fell once and for all in this country before your legend was rumored. But to know, and then doubt what is known, is the hardest agony of all.”
So he wailed, and because the whole of his grief was not discharged in the asperity of his words, he knelt weeping, holding his face in his hands, crying, “we have come too late; we have come too late,” though the shattered church diminished his sobs, and the wounded vault so far above him echoed lowly, “we have come too late.”
“Consider this man,” spoke the priest to his soul, as he stood watching these passions contest for the heart of the soldier, and repenting of the sharpness of his retorts to him, because in this man’s brokenness, in the stark, sterile agonies of death convulsing him, he resembled his master at the end. “Consider the hardships he has endured to journey here,” he thought, “the desperation of spirit that impelled him. There is a kind of faith in his desolation too.” And then, with concern for the immortal soul quivering and rent before him, he thought, “I cannot send him away with only a rebuke.” So he reached under the folds of his cassock, and retrieved a dusty rosary he had gathered off the floor, lifted from the hands of one of his congregants after they were slaughtered. Approaching the sobbing warrior, he knelt and presented it to him, saying:
“Soldier, take this with you when you return home. Sit often contemplating its form. Perhaps then the mystery of things will be lightened for you.”
Youngman composed himself, and accepting the relic from the merciful priest, he wound it through his massive hand, dangling it before his eyes to observe the crucifix hanging at the end of the beads, with its shattered and scarified body stretched obscenely over the wood. The crown of thorns had been wrought there so precisely that it seemed even now to prick his own fingers, and when he moved those fingers away, he found the smears of true blood staining the image, as a sign of the never ending sacrifice to God. His eyes remained transfixed on that image even as he leaned over the gunwale of the little boat, waiting for Abraham to start the engine and guide it out of the furtive patch of reeds where he had moored. The dawn was just beginning to ramify its earliest incandescence through the grey margin towards which they steered, and Youngman momentarily felt his heart lightened by both the approach of the day and the hope of the talisman, reveling in the brief exhilaration of thinking his search had come to fruition.
Then he thought of his beautiful friend. He leaned there, contemplating that ancient symbol, and he remembered how devoutly his friend had believed in its promise - with an elemental ardor, a conviction of the flesh - and believed all that to the death; and so believing, threw himself to the war, and there was wasted. With rage and resentment overwhelming all hope, Youngman flung the rosary into the murky current of the river, never wishing to see it surface again, never wishing to hear word of its promise again.
The tears for his friend, and the death revealed in him, sprang up again, and mystified all his sight, and in that state of torment he endured the greater part of his crossing, until nearing the opposite bank, he turned and caught the morning resplendent on the walls of the city - their stone more ancient than mind could imagine – and he thought of the children waking to its light at the nudge of their tender mothers, in chambers where those mothers themselves had been children, and how generation after generation had dwelt among its warrens, its masterful temples, partaking of all that life bestows on a man; raising and adorning the city as a lover adorns the body of his beloved, with gardens and with orchards and handsome plazas and houses of delicate brickwork, to make a home for themselves in the desert; and he thought of how lovely, how splendid with dignity, was the sight of the waking city, so that standing before it, with the light of the incipient dayspring dazzling its spires, and taking in the extent of its venerable structure, he felt in his soul how worthy a thing it was to live for; how worthy a thing to die for.
VIII.
They waited fretfully along the line of advance, expecting any moment to hear the faceless order that would send them lurching forward into that weird terrain, each man meanwhile wondering what separate destiny lurked for him on the far side of that margin. Some checked their equipment; some reformulated their plans; a few told foolish stories; all dallied under the nagging, burdensome awareness of a terrible rupture pending; of a near and violent dislocation into states of affliction they could not imagine, but only know for their inevitability. A light oppressive marred the sky, and veiled as much as darkness the way before them: the evil paths; the delved, ash-littered warrens turning here and there, leading each one to a grave.
Youngman among this biding lot peered with them off into the distance, vaguely recalling the rumors that had drawn his numbed battalion to that place: of the fanatic uprising, led by men exuberant with devotion to their god or desperate with the knowledge of their dispossession – who could tell – and how they came to rule in Nasiriyah, where their ancient martyr was laid to rest and where they were determined, in the streets and the alleyways girding his golden shrine, to enact a thousand reprisals of his sacrifice. He struggled to focus on the mission at hand, the confrontation with the black militia lurking in that vast cemetery before him, which they had converted into an arsenal and a stronghold, but the prospect of battle had little meaning for him now, and whether he drove them out with the discipline of his men or whether, repulsed, he added one more corpse to that assembly, it all had little relevance to the thoughts oppressing him at that moment. All of these were massed upon the flickering memory of his dear friend - the encompassing symbol of his dead beautiful face – that haunted him in the discomfiting languor of his lying down, when spreading his limbs across mounds of lethal equipment he waited – and even prayed a little – for the visitation of his departed spirit, and the pronouncement on his spectral lips of some ultimate formula. In the daytime, too, these pallid aspirations wore him, draining his resolve, and compelling him to thrust his attention back forcefully into the world, as on one occasion he took up his binoculars and spied a haggard party shuffling down one of the dusty files that made a road through that city of death, bearing a green-shrouded coffin to its last abode, when on closer look, he could make out the patterns of an eternal weariness etched over their faces and their bodies; the wear to the flesh and the spirit of tending to the departed day after day; of day after day washing and garbing and sanctifying the parodic human; of making the solemn trek through that silent kingdom – its centuries of bereavement – only to entrust one other remnant to its company, day after day after day. Then he put down the lenses, and sunk into his mind once more.
After several hours poised in that liminal state, the radios started crackling with an assortment of muffled, unearthly voices, signaling the moment of attack had arrived. Engines roared, officers shouted orders along the line, and as one great deadly animal, primed to carnage, the army advanced across the road. Three portals had been sculpted into the cemetery walls, back in that time before time when they were first erected, and through these entrances the separate units of the expedition roared, or they stalked. There, for the first time, they could lay their eyes on the inconceivable scene that was to serve as their battlefield: the vast plain of death, where networks of decrepit crypts and mausoleums extended to every horizon, crammed every foot with some other plaque or headstone – carved out of ochre mud, to memorialize a name none ever read - while underfoot, graves mounded over graves made eternal neighbors out of distant generations. Here and there, black stairways would fall down to lightless catacombs, where skeletons, indignant at the intrusion, turned in their beds from the weight of the foreign vehicles overhead. Far in the distance, the martyr’s green and gold-plated shrine loomed eerily, like the den of a dragon who had piled the remains of his victims into a bone-yard, to delight his heart at the ruin he had made.
The soldiers knew their steps for a desecration, which made some, from an anxiousness to preserve what mote of decency went unsquandered in nine months of slaughter, step lightly over the terrain, absurdly striding with respectful boots towards the positions where, with shell and bullet and bomb, they would dismantle other men. But their entry did not long remain discrete: when the columns were fully formed in the cemetery, a colonel at the front ordered the Bradley gunners to test their chain guns by disgorging a long volley down the lanes, and so to announce their robust presence to the enemy; the metal and the fire of it rumbled like the anger of the New World against the Old; like the scourging of history, its violent abnegation; like the concentrated, manifested fury of men outraged by time, and meaning to be revenged on it.
The army had not progressed more than a handful of meters down those lanes before they made contact with the enemy: black-wound devotees scurrying here and there among the jumble of tombstones, firing off a burst from their Kalashnikov before dissipating again into the shadows, or leaning from behind some crypt to direct an RPG’s screaming path towards the approaching tanks. Once more, out of blind habit, Youngman thrust himself into the barbed commotion, squinting targets over crumbling barriers, or disposing fire teams where lines of sight appeared most lethal, moving always as matter moves, from causes and from instincts: a captain without zeal, a hero questing into fabled chambers and finding all the treasure gone.
Small arms fire roared about him, and the rhythmic fatality of the M240’s stantioned on the Humvees, and the .50 calibers thumping on their armored platforms, while at irregular cadences, the dull crump of explosions caused by TOW’s and AT-4 missiles counterpointed the general roar, or the ominous whine of fighters swooping down upon their targets, which Youngman would stare at, wondering, until the mortar shells came walking up the road to his position, which forced him to go scuttling through the dust they pounded upwards – a dust which, mixed with the exhausted cordite of the rifles, fell like the air of Gehenna on the tongue and on the nose - and then to sprint under scarlet tracers arcing spontaneous networks across the plaza, in a manner any other context would have rendered lovely, until he tumbled against a shielded wall - panting, pondering his next order - and considered for an instant that this presence, this total incarnation, and the deliverance from knowledge won through its animal motions, was why he fought, and why men ever fought.
Now that contact had been made with the enemy, there was no front, no position or formation to dislodge, only a swarm of deadly shadows forming and disappearing at every angle, rising out of the scattered tombs like revenants, to curse and torment the living. Platoons dispersed by twos and threes, unable to maintain their shape through the cluttered battlespace, but following after carnage where it led, until nearly every squad found itself waging a separate war, with separate goals and separate pains. Among these, some wandered through decrepit alleyways, where bones crunched underfoot, and shelves on shelves of derisive skulls peered through the crumbling walls of sepulchers, haunting the soldiers with images of the pallid state which any fragment, any adventitious bullet, might consign them to in a second. Recurrently, unexpectedly, without pause for breath or parley, the black-wound zealots sprang and rushed and fired and gashed and slew and merged once more into the cemetery, leaving behind with the soldiers an impression of eyes eternally dizzy, the eyes of men rapt into inhuman certitudes, who forced upon the world their notion of the absolute, with no wonder or perplexity interposing, and so brought ruin on their nation. Once, leaning over some cover, Youngman caught that look in the eyes of an insurgent who was targeting his men, and a torrent of resentment burst from his heart, because he had pined for such certainty for so long, and with such a wounded mind, and to see his adversary possessed by it enraged him, so when he saw the insurgent flee back into the alleyways, Youngman set after him on foot, not even pausing to order his platoon to follow, until rounding a corner, he saw the man slip through the hanging door of a mausoleum, where simultaneously, three other enemy fighters ran frantically too. Youngman turned back, hollering into his radio for an artillery strike on the position, while warning his men away from the place; then he clambered onto the roof of an adjacent monument to watch the sudden detonation over the structure, and the blossoming dust-cloud of its annihilation. Grim pleasure tinged his heart for a moment, and the satisfaction of his unholy jealousy, even as the screams of the men inside and the shape of the smoke plume effervescing out of their dismemberment brought to mind the image of an hecatomb burning upon earth’s altar since forever, kindled by an inexhaustible store of hatred and treachery and blood, until a terror stirred in him, and the disconsolate insight seized him, that the God he had found in the desert was not the God he had come to seek.
In this haphazard way, the battle festered for the remainder of the afternoon, until the byways of the cemetery reeked with both the long and the newly dead, their remnants already putrefying under the immediate sun. As that sun began to evaporate into the purple margin, both sides disengaged, to rest and to consider how best to renew the slaughter at first light. In the dust of the ghastly terrain his platoon had helped to win, Youngman slumped down with his back against a raised sepulcher that had been constructed in the shape of a royal chest, to be laden with all desiccated things. He watched the commotion of respite transpiring about him, and ravaged his mind to find a single word to make sense of it all; to make sense of the outstanding men spread lifeless around his position, the extraordinary promise of their lives squandered forevermore; to make sense of the shock and the horror and the dreadful insight etched forevermore over faces that only yesterday shone juvenile. There was a word, he insisted to himself, for the stifled nausea inflating the cheeks of a medic as he lifted the head of a wounded soldier, and felt his fingers sinking into the ooze and shards of his escaping brain; for the panic spelled on a private bearing his dead friend across his shoulders, because he would not let him sleep forever among that alien dead; for the inhuman outrage of a sergeant who stalked sternly up to a mongrel lapping the blood of his platoon-mate and shot him dead with his pistol. There was a word, he was sure, for the things the men saw when, fainting for lack of water, they stared at the darkening desert sky and whispered to apparitions. There was a word for it all, he knew, but it would not come to his tongue, and all he had for an answer was the echo of his childish dreams, the voice of a boy enchanted with the beauty of the world, and baffled at its wounding, asking, wondering, with pain in his soul, “why must men be at war forever?”
In no time, the last bronze tendrils of daylight fell off, and the graves returned for a while to their accustomed silence, until a dull roar out of somewhere in the black sky revealed that an AC-130 had arrived on station, and was hovering lustfully over the battlespace, to spy out with its instruments the places where the insurgents were assembling and positioning their weapons for the morning. The spectral brilliance of the plane’s infrared beam glazed the cemetery till it glowed like a living city, and over the comms, the hectic jargon of JTAC’s beseeching its weapons bore a faint resemblance to invocations to an avenging spirit. They called it “Basher,” its codename, and pointed out to its pilots the malefactors hiding in the crypts, and when its rhythmic cannons opened up behind the clouds, disappearing the clandestine villains they ascertained, their hearts were warmed by a sense that justice had been meted out. Untraced, unspotted, known only by its effects, the warplane traversed the constellations all through the night, visiting a death in fire on insurgents, like a furious avatar ranging for vengeance across the heavens, though its power was a metal contrivance, directed by men not perfectly righteous, who flew and decided death from the very place in the skies where gods once castigated the earth.
Youngman fell to sleep to the noise of its lethal percussions, once more uttering voiceless prayers in his heart that his friend would return as he slept - would appear and speak wisely and kind – but his dreams were all empty, and restless the sleep that possessed him, until the shocks of an explosion nearby on the battlefield jolted his eyes ajar, and the very first streaks of morning dazed his mind with a summons to battle. All around him, he saw fellow soldiers likewise roused to the mission, painfully rising from their unrefreshing sleep, their uniforms stiff with the grime of yesterday’s sweat and dust, their armpits and crotches tortured by rashes that made each step an agony. They fell into formation and began advancing slowly over the ground before them, tentatively navigating the twisted, cluttered paths unwinding before them, surprised at the lack of resistance they met from the enemy, whose positions had been rendered untenable during the night by the air support, with only a handful of black-wound corpses confessing the ambush plotted for the morning. It was only when mortar and small-arms fire broke out on their right, far to their rear, where the 3/6 was beset by an ambush that managed to come off, that Youngman and his men realized how far into their own sector they had advanced without maintaining contact with their right flank, so Youngman barked out some orders to his men immediately, and the 2/5 turned to relieve their brethren, but there was no passable lane for the Bradlees nearby, and by the time the swearing officers identified a route that would serve, a separate crisis unfolded to the north. There, a Cobra gunship that came swooping over the coruscating towers of the shrine to support the assault was tagged by an RPG, lost airspeed and went vertical, flailing midair for an instant like a stricken eagle, before suddenly dropping out of the sky and into the cemetery, where a slowly billowing plume of brown smoke marked the place of its impact. So now Youngman averted his platoon to the crash site, skirting around tombstones and hurtling over debris in a frenetic dash to the defunct aircraft, before the merciless enemy fell on the pilots, or on their remains.
His soldiers were only meters from the crash site, and could spot the tail-blades still spinning futilely over the lids of some nearby tombs, when the impact of sniper bullets started chipping away at the mausoleum they were scurrying past, the marks of an invisible finger scribbling out a solemn destiny on the wall. They ducked, and scrambled on, not pausing to return fire, but determined to reach the helicopter, which they did once they cleared a last clutter of tombs, to find the copilot struggling to break free of his harness with one hand as, with the other, he pressed the gore back into his punctured cheek, while the pilot fumbled with a revolver he could not load for his bloody hands, at which point every soldier dropped to a knee and started delivering a suppressive fire in every direction they could muster, to echo the multiplied reports of AK’s in the surrounding graves, until the medics could scramble forward to tend to the wounded airmen, which they did in a flash, hauling them out of the wreck ungently, and out of the line of fire. Then a Humvee raced forward out of a hidden lane and with its .50 mm cannon rotating in a crescent, silenced the rifles of the insurgents, till some mortar shells started detonating near its position and the driver jolted it backwards into the shadows again, chased by a fighter lugging an RPG on his shoulder, who knelt, aimed, and was dropped by a bullet through the temple delivered from Youngman’s M-16, whose own exposed position was rendered safe by two of his soldiers eliminating an enemy fire team advancing upon him. Weapon replied to weapon; blast repeated blast; the noise of the battle amplified like the crescendo of some hideous symphony, or like a swarm of bees, when exiled, and rampant, and droning after the others, so the insurgents scattered over the sector came rushing towards the noise, anxious for murder, and the Americans hollering into the comms, in turn, summoned their baleful assets too to the fight, as a pilot passing by in his Harrier screamed, wept, into his radio, that the insurgents were too mixed with the soldiers to fire his missiles, that there was no one for him to kill. An escalating roar to the south hinted that an Abrams had answered the call of the officers, a fact confirmed by the concussion of its main gun firing on a two-story charnel house where an enemy sniper had ensconced himself, collapsing it over both him and the venerable skeletons who became his eternal grave-mates. As the turret of the tank rotated on another target, preparing to fire, an insurgent clambered up the armor sheathed over its rear component and, before any of the soldiers on the ground could react, fired his AK down the open hatch, slaughtering the commander and the loader who hunched beside him, at whose terminal yells the driver in a panic lurched the vehicle backwards into a mausoleum, which came crashing down over the turret – the insurgent having leapt from its top already – locking the tank into place in the rubble. Youngman was about to bark an order to his men to go and rescue the driver when he discovered that they were already scrambling to the vehicle; stung with shame, he hurried after them, dodging mortar rounds that spattered about him like a barbed rain, and ducking under the searing spray of their shrapnel, fighting for the first time in the war – for the first time in his life – with a premonition in his heart, with a sense of descending into some ghastly nether region, uncertain of ever obtaining the light again. When he made it to the tank, his men were all lined up, stooping, beside its right track, pinned down there by the continuous fire of insurgents gathered at three points, and no sooner did he throw himself down there beside them than the mortar shells began creeping up perilously close to their position. He could see they were trapped, that the shells would be upon them in a moment, shredding the muscular limbs of his soldiers, and the channels of life within them, unless the fire of the enemy could be stymied long enough for them to escape that lethal position. Just then, he happened to glance backwards at the faces of his men – of his invincible warriors – with the bloom and the beauty of boyhood still wavering over their manly hardness, the very same faces that had glowered beside him in Ramallah and Fallujah, heartening him for the charge into chaos; and it struck him just then, in the whirl of that terrible fighting, how wildly unjust was the destiny stalking them, how out of measure with their virtue; and the pain of an aboriginal love inflicted by this thought resolved him to dare anything – to endure anything – lest death should have these too.
So determined, he broke out and rushed through the gale of bullets raging about the space, leaping to the top of a sepulcher two insurgents were utilizing for cover, and cutting them down with a single, expert burst, though not before taking a bullet to his abdomen, under his armor, from one of the men he slew, a wound soon matched by two rounds piercing his left thigh, fired by an enemy opposite, which dropped him onto his face at the same time it exposed the position of that enemy, so with the strength endowed him by shock, he ripped a grenade off his gear and flung it at that position, eliminating the man and the threat he posed, relieving the pressure on his own men long enough to allow them to rush forward from their cover and overrun the third insurgent while the explosions of the shells rasped vainly against the tank’s armor in the place they escaped. Soon these too grew quiet, because the eye of an Apache pilot had spotted the culpable mortar tube nearby, with the insurgents working its mechanisms, and released three Hellfires onto their location, making them all cease to exist, which gave the soldiers a fleeting moment amid the violence to rush back to the tank and retrieve the crew still entrapped inside, all the while a bloodless voice over the radio dully warned of more insurgents converging upon their location. Two soldiers climbing the turret managed to shove off several large chunks of the mausoleum, and one of these men dropped down into the vehicle’s dark innards, passing up to the other the lifeless body of the commander and the loader, followed by the dazed, squinting form of the driver, who had been down in the bowels with death and now staggered upwards to exchange bewildered stares with the crowd of young men gathered, gawking reverently, to see one buried rise living out of the rubble of a tomb.
Meanwhile, a medic clambered up the increasingly scarlet lid of the sepulcher where Youngman sprawled bleeding, panting, wrestling with the pain and the knowledge that he had come to his final moment in life, with the certainty that in this place, so far and so different from home, he was to surrender his unconsummated spirit before it found an answer. The medic arched over him, probing his wounds and berating his waning consciousness with indecipherable questions, and as Youngman peered weakly into the young man’s urgent expression, the bright sky behind the youth grew dark, the head leaning over him bright, until straining his neck, straining his heavy lips, he raised himself slightly above the prostrate by clasping the medic’s sleeve, whispered, “thank you” with inadequate voice, and slumped back down to darkness. Then that proud, bewildered soldier, having vied with men and with demons; having shaken venerable tyrannies; having bled for the peace of the city, lay his helmeted head back on the slab of the tomb, never to lift it again. His vision and its objects dissipated to blackness; the concerns of his spirit slipped far away from the clatter of a battle now grown meaningless to him. At the end, before the last silence, the image of his precious friend at last visited him, just as he had long and ardently prayed for – a face without feature, a voice without sound, consoling his spirit on the cusp of its dreadful journey:
“Now the darkest hour of life is upon you, my friend.
Now the unequal struggle overtakes you.
You must have known such an end awaited you when you cradled my lifeless body;
You must have known, in arcane ways, since they cut the cord of the womb.
Now the solitary rest of all your forbears awaits you.
Now the dim dwelling of a thousand priests awaits you.
But do not curse our whole lives for the sake of this evil hour.
Remember the bond we shared when young and victorious.
Remember the country we fought for. Remember its glory.
Do not depart from the earth with your heart knotted in anger.”