I am going to be doing something a little bit different at the site over the next couple of weeks. I am going to be serially publishing a novel I completed called The One Who Looked on the Deeps. This novel retells the story of Gilgamesh in the context of the Iraq War. With Memorial Day coming up, it seemed like an ideal time to share this story with the public . The first two chapters are below; the remaining will follow at intervals over the coming weeks. Enjoy!
I.
By his time, and in his age, man had experienced all there is to know. The hatred that consumes; the wastage of whole peoples for cause; the preparation of cities for the reign of flies and dogs; the tearing and the sundering of one limb from another, because they housed an infraternal mind– all of these evils he had come to know. And in this soldier’s twenty-eighth year, grown high-minded and pugnacious, his nation sent him out to experience it all again.
Never before had an empire extended such a world-diminishing grip. Consider the speed of its domain: how oceans dissipate at its will; how every thought on the earth is accessible to its rulers; how ancient, far-flung cities shiver under its bombs and its engines. Consider how wicked kings the world over fear her offense. Consider too the prodigious wealth that sails out of a thousand ports to infuse her coasts; how the delights of the globe flood into her sprawling, misshapen cities, enervating the gaudy citizens who teem in their streets. It was for their sake he flew to the desert, where he bled, and caused others to bleed.
They had decided there should be a war on the banks of that most venerable of rivers. Trembling beneath the detritus of two great, murdered towers, maddened to a general furor, they determined that someone, somewhere in the world should pay the price of their ruin. It was there, in the deserts, where they sent their armies to fight, where they rode forward to bestow a vengeful freedom, that the battles unfolded. The people in that land knew both their anger and their bounty.
Theirs was a country where seasons of empires had turned since forever. In the tracks of their vast, oblivious armies, he stalked his enemies in ambush, as they once did; struck wounds to the fatal heart of warriors, as they once did; cradled the last, hysterical heaves of comrades, just as they once did. He killed men more wicked than demons; stood in the bombed-out marketplace when viscera throbbed on the curbs; and ordered the disintegration of bodies. He saw death in many places, and tried his soul to understand it. He explored the origins of his own rites. He gathered history in his glance, and sifted it to see what he might find.
In the midst of the exhausted sands, he came to know all that a man might know.
II.
Undifferentiated world. Sky the color of dust. Buildings the color of dust. Roads the color of dust. Only carnage – crimson and nauseating – punctuated the tedious landscape when it appeared: a swollen corpse bobbing in the reeds, a dismembered shoe littering the roadside. That, and the dozen trash-fires licking the horizon with tongues of fetid smoke, congealing the air of the city with their rotten breath. Five thousand years men had dwelled in that place, and this is what they had made of it.
A crumbling berm provided an uncertain passage into the pauper’s quarters, extending above a canal that reeked with a still, tangible tide. There was an epoch in the story of the city when the waters tracing that course would have carried along with them all the life of the desert; when, at its lucid ministrations, the city, like a vital organism, would have quickened and been fructified. Now they were loaded with shit, and only did not pollute the urban environs with their stench because of how hopelessly filthy it already was. On the other side of the canal, a few sparse palm trees stooped over and hid their fronds, ashamed to flaunt their verdance amid such desiccation.
This was the passage Alpha Company traversed into the city. A Humvee in their lead and in their rear, both prickling with weaponry, and two parallel lines of beige, burdened infantry trundled over the uncertain causeway, while in their midst, terror, an involuntary specter, marched along beside them, pressing his hundred hands against the airways of every wary soldier. As they stepped off the berm, one by one, and inched forward between the squat abodes, the platoon could feel the sullen, inexpressive stares of the inhabitants probing through their armor. Even the windows of the homes seemed to be studying them; evaluating their strength, imagining their proneness to affliction. Humid and thick, the air clung close about them, as if the atmosphere was holding its breath in anticipation of something dreadful about to happen. Every prospect opening upon the vision of the soldiers – the littered alleyways beside them, the blazing horizon looming overhead – seemed to teeter on the lip of a fragile precipice, with all the world about to slip off and shatter and disappear forever. They swiveled their eyes this way and that, seeing no enemies or a thousand enemies - none could determine which – yet turning, and returning, time and again, to confide in the sight of Lieutenant Youngman, who strode powerfully in the middle of their formation.
They called him Fortress, because the broadness of his back and the thickness of his limbs conveyed the sense of a man unconquerable. He had been in fire-fights innumerable; wore scars of mortar and grenade shrapnel like other men wore tattoos; knew intimately the unhabituating wonder a soldier feels when he pulls on a trigger and watches another man collapse finally into the dirt without a twitch. They all adored him; they all put their lives in his hands. Not one of the men in that platoon but could recite the details of the day he rescued Allen’s squad; how a dozen insurgents pinned them down in a courtyard in Habbaniyah, sprinting out of the shadows to squeeze off frantic bursts, and walking mortar explosions closer, and perilously closer, to the walls; how two men of the squad hunched moaning over copious wounds, and the rest fired desperately from cover, the sergeant screaming into their radio for reinforcements, until Youngman, hearing their pleas, and far outrunning the rest of his men, stomped to the scene of the engagement and cut down two of the enemies servicing the mortar from behind, then pivoted and split the forehead of another insurgent with a burst, then rushed forward to the corner of the courtyard wall, took a knee, and picked off two more of the enemy who showed themselves in the street, keeping them at bay until a Bradley arrived on the scene and scoured the rest of the insurgents back into the shadows with its ponderous chain gun. That was the day the men of Alpha Company believed he was the man who would guide them home. In every battle, amid the tensile discipline of a firefight or an ambush; when bullet rounds chipped warnings over their heads and grenades exploded nearby and horrified pleas for a corpsman overwhelmed the channels, they would catch a glance of him resolutely leveling his M-16 upon the enemy, or prudently deploying his men over the terrain, and take heart from the vision. In the smoke and the agony of it all, his steadfast form was revealed as a type of the eternal warrior, the soul of a hero.
What passions actually contested for the mind of the man; what skepticisms balked his hands; what vague, amorphous hatred clogged his powers of decision – none of these could be known to his men, so necessary to the brittle frame of their sanity was the uncomplicated tale of his virtue. He had been entrusted with the completion of this mission, and this mission was his purpose, but what purpose was to be found in it he could not say, and his spirits greyed and lumbered under the doubt that there was none in at all; that purblind men had ordered their patrol out of some distant intention, utterly irrelevant to the hopelessness of their route, decreeing that the platoon make contact with a handful of insurgents, kill some, perhaps lose a man or two of their own, limp back, exhausted, to the base, and replenish themselves to wake and reengage with the same insurgents on the following morning. No territory changed hands; no decisive victory was attained, and of the slaughter and the lamentations there was no end. He could construct no adequate rationale for his actions; no nexus of motives that would satisfy him with his own motions. So instead, he placated his mind by straining to absorb himself in the minutest particularities of those motions; sensing, with willful consciousness, the rolling, gravel tread of his boots in the street, or the perspiring grip of his hand around his rifle. Since reason could not guide his steps, he allowed those steps to unfold by their own momentum, and in this manner went on, a denizen of two hostile worlds, whose irreclaimable deeds were not – could not be – the least expression of the thoughts that lived in him.
Among the impressions fracturing his attention were the inhabitants of the pauper’s quarter – their inscrutable gazes – huddled along either side of the roadway to make for an indifferent parade; rag-garbed, sun-scorched, death-numbed; scraggly and wizened and hardened by the desert winds; impoverished inside and out, and destitute beyond knowledge of their own destitution; tired of tyranny and freedom alike; wary of neighbor and invader both; fatalities of history, chattel of empire, children of an ironic god. A boy of no more than twelve, with a seared, ambiguous expression, caught Youngman’s eye, and conjured in him recollections of the youth who used to crowd around their Humvees when they first arrived in country, clamoring for sweets and soccer balls, which the sanguine soldiers could delude themselves into believing the symbols of an entire nation’s goodwill. This memory triggered others, like the weeks spent laboring with his men to return a decrepit sewage plant online, which they accomplished, and then, after the fanfare and the effusive proclamations from local sheiks, it was bombed back into disuse a few days later, some said with the connivance of those same sheiks, who resented the burgeoning influence of the Americans over their own people. He remembered the park they had cleared, the mountains of trash they had to haul away to make it possible, and then the children who flocked gleefully to chase one another over its unrooted sod, and how at least a dozen of those same children were annihilated by a suicide bomber sent to convince the people that there would be no form of cooperation with the invaders tolerated. And now, considering the face of that boy, Youngman marveled that he was ever disposed to do his people a kind turn, and when the shadows of those defeated sentiments awakened in him again – the old youthful idealism and charity – he was discomfited, and felt as though the memories of another man had insinuated themselves into his own mind; as though, when he reached back into his own past, he could clasp nothing but the remnants of some other life.
In an instant, the dissipating channels of these reveries were clogged as Youngman and his men observed the crowds ahead of them rise and depart in recognizable omen of an attack. Muscles tautened; knees relented; but before anyone could so much as holler a command for cover, the stupefying blast went off, canceling out the sight and hearing of the platoon, and sucking the breath out of every one of their lungs as they tumbled into the road. What was their world was annihilated; what was their new reality – the pain and confusion of it – enforced itself not gradually, but with a vicious instantaneity upon their staggered brains. What remained on the other side of unconsciousness was the will – the will to defy, the will to assert, the very will that drove Lieutenant Youngman to push himself speedily up out of the dirt and rush forward to the burning Humvee, where some of his soldiers were already dragging their flayed comrades out of the flames. Someone tugged on his sleeve and gesticulated wildly towards an alley, frantically trying to direct his attention there for some inaudible reason; another soldier directly behind him fired down that same alley as the bewildered sergeant screamed for him to stop. Heedless, Youngman pushed himself through some soldiers jamming the Humvee, and reached his hands into the burning debris, to find there the shredded fatigues of Jimenez, the driver, the one who always devised the best pranks in the platoon, who was being pulled out of the wreck, not jesting now, but shocked to a pallid, quivering ghost, and when he emerged, his legs were not there, having been torn away by the force of the bomb that exploded directly under him. A wave of revulsion passed over Youngman as he fumbled in his gear for his tourniquet, too late, as a comrade already applied his own to one of Jimenez’ purple shredded stumps; too late, as the facetious soldier’s eyes rolled other-ward and the corpsman, who just arrived, declared there was no pulse in him. The same soldier who had tugged on his sleeve before came running forward and thrust himself right in front of Youngman once again, seemingly indifferent to the man dying before his eyes, and began screaming and pointing at something which the lieutenant only gradually, and with labored attention, realized was meant to signify the location of the culpable insurgent. Not out of deliberation; not out of any judgment or strategic reckoning, but only because the welter of fury and revenge in him necessitated release lest it overcome him, he bulled down the alleyway with his rifle poised for action, and some of his men, the ones who were not tending to the wounded, came stamping after him, because they too must kill or be maddened.
Three of his privates, rifles at the ready, backs against a wall, flanking a dilapidated door still rocking on its hinges, indicated to him the place where the suspected insurgent had fled, so Youngman assumed the position closest to the door, and prepared to kick his way through, when he heard the soldiers on either side furiously contending with one another, the first one shouting, “That’s the one! That’s the bomber!” and the other responding, “He was just running away like the rest,” and the third, full of vehemence, “He had something in his hand! He’s the bomber!” He paused for the slightest of instants, taking in the purport of this exchange, but since nothing in it was relevant to his purposes, he proceeded to bull his way into the dwelling, peering with predatory lust down the sights of his shouldered M-16 into the shadows of the hallway, then the living space, then an unwindowed bedroom in the rear where a family of four clustered around a terrified young man, arching their bodies over him in a ludicrous, desperate attempt to hide him from the enraged intruder. With the left hand he had released from the stock of his rifle, Youngman began breaking the grips of the hysterical kin and tossing them to the side, first the father, then a younger sister of probably ten, then, most recalcitrant, most distraught, the keening mother of the boy. Each was seized and secured by the other soldiers who had followed the lieutenant into the room, and when they were all disposed of, Youngman grabbed the young man by the thin collar of his shirt and flung him up against the wall, poring over the contours of the features that protuberated through the humid murk of the room, as though there was something in the afflicted lineaments of his face that would speak candidly for the heart and the hands of this foreigner. What he looked for was not so much guilt, as the plausibility of guilt; the sufficiency for hatred; the adequacy to stand in for the causes of his own anguish; and the more his rancorous, rage-bleared eyes picked over the face of the young man, the more he grew convinced he had found there all he was searching for.
Against such determined anger, ravening on the taste of its own righteousness, what persuasion could live in the tempestuous pleas of the family, though they tumbled out of their throats with tears and with blood? Arwan, the translator, having hurried panting to the scene and catching the glint of malice scintillating from the lieutenant’s eyes, frantically started blurting out simulacra of the family’s meaning, in order to stem the impending bloodshed:
“He is no terrorist, they say. He has no murder in his heart. He has no hatred in his heart. His hands have never inflicted a wound upon another man, they say. They are no lovers of the insurgency. They are no lovers of Saddam. They welcome the Americans in their land. Their hearts are made glad by your presence. They curse the man who set off the bomb. They curse the men who are your enemies, they say.”
The words did nothing, and when he saw that they did nothing, the father of the boy lurched forward and freed himself from the grasp of the soldier restraining him, thrusting himself right beside Youngman, and spitting at him words full of imprudence; words wrung from years of indignity; words Arwan was all too reluctant to translate, until the lieutenant growled his demand to know their meaning:
“He asks what makes you think God will not punish you for these acts. He is a man, he says, like you are; loves his family and his home, like you do. He says, if chance has granted you power over him, it might very well have been otherwise. You are not better men for being more powerful, he says. Do not come and trample over their lives, like a bull. Respect the laws of heaven. Respect the laws of humanity. Do not be so arrogant that you forget your last end. You should fear the judgment at the end, he says. You should know there is such a thing as the vengeance of God.”
Youngman heard these things, and his fury accrued to an unbearable torment, because he had ridden for many months through the derelict city, observing every manner of villainy the human hand could manipulate; every mode of torture and murder it could inflict; had seen bodies charred and mutilated; good men gunned down in their driveways; mothers wailing over their dismantled toddlers, and him praying the whole time vainly for some hand to reach down from heaven and stem the slaughter, so to speak of God’s superintendence over such a world as this had in it an unmistakable tone of impertinence. He glared at the father, but barked at Arwan all his rage:
“Tell him the city is mine, not God’s. Tell him I am the king here, and decide what is the law. If I want to take his son away and punish him, I can do that. If I want to take his daughter there away from him, I can do that. No one here is going to stop me. God is not going to stop me. If He had any mind for the suffering of your people, we would not have had to come here. But since he has forsaken you, the judgement of the city is in my hands, not His.”
Thoughts of such arrogance and blasphemy did not readily suggest their symbols, and so Arwan froze on the verge of speech, silent and terrified, straining to retrieve any adequate language from the whirling commotion that was his mind, and when the boy perceived the other two poised on the edge of the soldier’s words, he took their distraction for an opportunity, and jerked himself away from Youngman’s grip. When this was spoken of later among the soldiers - in hushed, uncertain exchanges - some in the room insisted he was only rushing forward to comfort his mother, while others averred his clear intention to flee, while still others declared with certainty that he shrouded a weapon underneath his garments. Little matter what was true - where thousands die, no exacting motive is required to kill. He broke away, Youngman spun and aimed, and with a well-trained burst, tore open three or four fatal wounds in his thundering chest, snuffing out the sentience of the boy before he even smacked against the floor. Unearthly shrieks; demented lamentations, ripped from the family as they converged once more upon the gushing body of their kin, lavishing kisses and befouling embraces upon a flesh that could no longer know their kindness. But for the soldiers who stood by, who had not grown up with him; who did not know his particular virtues and his particular faults; who had never spoken together with him for an hour about the perplexities of life; the spectacle meant little, and so they only paused there for an instant watching it, before gathering the gear they had dropped in the melee, and departing in unwary haste from the afflicted house.
These were the deeds the sheiks came to decry the next morning, as they scurried out of their cars, dragging their authoritarian robes rapidly through the dust, lest they invite the bullet of some lurking assassin. At the gates of the base, looming like a row of sacramental pillars, the colonels awaited their presence, unbowed and unmoved by the searing radiance of the sun, with its material malignity - its random, momentary providence - accosting them from out of the unpeopled sky. Offering an unreverential kiss upon their hands, the sheiks entered their base, where, after some ritualized exchanges, they were invited to air their concerns. The eldest, labored and weary, rose from his place to speak for the mind of them all:
“It is a strange thing, Colonels, to find myself standing here amid the streets of my own city, remonstrating with men who come from a land I do not know; who speak a language I do not know; who comprehend the world in ways I do not know. It is enough to make me wonder about the sovereignty of God; but I must trust that even over such affairs as ours, his will presides. When the Americans arrived here, the people all rejoiced; they all felt hopeful in their hearts, because they knew that the Americans have no love of tyranny, and they believed you would at last bring justice to the land. But Colonels, I must say, we have seen little justice since you have taken command of our city. Young men are dragged away from their homes; there is no evidence for their guilt. They disappear in the middle of the night, and their mothers never hear from them again. Women are offended in their own homes; children are shoved around in their own homes. I myself was attacked by your men on the streets of my own city; they tied my hands behind my back, and covered my eyes with a blindfold, as though I were any common criminal. They did this in my own city. The people have grown frustrated; they wish the Americans gone. We struggle to pacify them, but I must tell you, Colonels, their rage increases by the day. Just yesterday, your men killed a boy who lived in Adhamiyah. They thought he was the one who set off the bomb that murdered one of your soldiers. What do the people of Adhamiyah have to do with murder? Its all foreigners who come here to set off the bombs. The soldier called Youngman was the one who killed him. He lords it over all of our people. He breaks into their homes at night and carries their sons away with him. He insults their daughters. If anyone tries to stand up to him, he beats them down with the stock of his rifle. Surely this is not how you wish your officers to rule over the city. Surely this is not the government you intend to establish over us. The people crowd the mosques, screaming out to God to come and take vengeance on this man. Act, and act soon, lest their indignation itself becomes the bomb, to tear apart the entire city.”
The colonels heard all this, and when the sheiks departed, they considered its meaning among themselves. They were not all-knowing; they were not impassive; they were not before all time. Their hearts ached at the tales of the torture and the slaughter; their minds reeled at the ineluctable momentum of it. They were stymied by the factions of the country, with their immemorial loathing, and they yearned for the accustomed dullness of their own homes, where their wives and their tear-sodden children, whom they had once pried from their legs, kept a daily vigil for their return. But for all that, they were the authors of the age; they were the notaries of its defects. What catastrophes were recorded therein would bear their names. So they argued in assembly about the proper recourse, and one of the colonels started pleading earnestly with the others:
“Can anyone tell me why we traversed half the globe, hauling a mountain of armor and ballistics, why we rode over oceans of sands to obliterate the structure of an entire nation, if only to oppress these people as cruelly as Saddam? Better to have left him in charge, and kept our souls clean of the outrage. We are supposed to be different; when we came, it was supposed to be different. The people looked to us to establish justice in the land. Tyranny they have had from a thousand kings; freedom they could only have from us. The men who have poured their blood out on the desert did not proffer that libation only so that power could follow after power. They departed for a higher cause. The flag that consecrated their terminal journey home was meant to assure the world that they had found what all men envy – a worthy and admirable death. But now Fortress has dishonored that flag and those deaths. His arrogance has undermined our cause. It infuriates me to hear the sheiks speak of his crimes, because all of us have fought here for the sake of these people, to deliver them from terror, and enable their children to run carefree in the marketplace. But Fortress has become a terror to them instead. It cannot go on. Strip him of his command; send him away; let him serve out his deployment in the rear with the planners and the bureaucrats. The city cannot endure his arrogance any longer.”
Another colonel who sat across the table heard these words and grew angry:
“Of all the wonders I have ever heard of, nothing is more amazing to me than the belief that men may lay aside their hatred in a day, and kiss the cheek this morning that only last night frowned upon them with murderous loathing. These people have been antagonists for centuries; they drink suspicion of Sunni and Shia at the breast of their mothers, and do not scruple to maim the bodies of children born to the rival sect. What power is in our flag to make them brothers? With what magic can it conjure away their immemorial vengeance? Fortress only rules them as they must be ruled – with implacable strength. Their rage demands it. If they were less ardent, this would not be so, but no man can rule justly over a city of murderers. No man can make pure in a day what eons have defiled. Leave Fortress alone; he knows what he is doing. The sheiks may protest his incursions, but there is not one of them who does not connive at the bombs and the slaughter; who could not reveal to us the hands that devise these things. The people themselves are satisfied to have such a fearless guardian watching over them, and whoever resents his force will have cause to lament - in copious, futile tears - the chaos of his abandonment.”
A third colonel, the chief of them all, sat listening to these irreconcilable words, but his mind was far away from them, wandering with the memories of his gorgeous wife as she came to their bed, half-robed, when the house was silent, and all the night was theirs. It was only with reluctance that he wrenched his attention back to the impossible situation at hand. He had no wisdom to make a salutary choice, but a choice was demanded of him all the same, so when the other ended his counsel, he sighed, and told the rest what he had determined:
“The people require strength, but they require hope as well. They must be kept in fear of our power, but they must have cause to be grateful for our magnanimity. I will not send Youngman away, but I will call in the 3/6, and let Lieutenant Wild carry out patrols beside him with Omega Company. He is every bit as brave, and every bit as fierce in a battle, and what is more, he goes in fear of God. He is scrupulously fair-minded in his dealings with these people, and they have come to respect and admire him. He will balance out the aggression of Youngman. He will mitigate his ferocity. Together, they will pacify the city, and make it whole again.”
This was what he said to the others, and after he had spoken, he called in one of his subordinates to convey the specifics of his order, so that what he decided should come to pass.
Well done, Mark. This first segment is provocative, intense, and heart-achingly beautiful. You captured the experience and environment perfectly. Do you have plans to publish?
Very cool that you’re doing this! I am working right now on a study guide for type Epic of Gilgamesh. You can check it out if you’d like: https://jacoballee.substack.com/p/the-epic-of-gilgamesh?r=1e1jhj&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct