eight forty-five every morning.
Today she was fifteen minutes early, and she sat on a concrete guard barrier in front of the hospital. She smiled and nodded to three other girls who chattered together in a tight group. They were cleaners at the base, from poor families in the Assyrian sector of Mosul. For them, the risk of attack was worth the steady salary. There were other employees who took the bus as well: civilian translators who worked with the Americans, some kitchen workers who washed dishes in the army mess hall, and the two Iraqi policemen who rode back and forth on the bus as protection.
The police would be useless against the normal mode of terrorist attack, the roadside bombs or the random spray of bullets. But appearances must be maintained, and the police stood in stolid discipline, checking the same identification cards of the same employees day in, day out. The police were both young men, fresh as cream, and they took their job seriously, never showing informality. As she boarded the bus that morning, Leila handed over the plastic laminated card with her picture, and her name and title written in both English and Arabic. As usual, the policeman took it, inspected it, checked her face against her picture, and handed back the card.
Leila sat toward the front of the bus, and she felt the vibration through the scuffed leather seat as the bus’s engines started up. The other familiar passengers boarded the bus just as the second hand on Leila’s watch marked a quarter to nine and the wheels started rolling. She smiled to herself. She had always heard the Germans were sticklers for punctuality, but the Americans? She supposed militaries everywhere were the same. They loved hours and minutes and numbers. In a war zone it must be a reassuring element of control to mark the time like that.
The journey took about twenty minutes, allowing for traffic and terrorist incidents. Leila stared out the window, past the buildings, at the green-brown emptiness of the hills beyond. She felt far away from the rest of the world. In her head, she replayed the rap music she’d listened to last night: Tupac Shakur, the dead American rapper. Judging by his lyrics, there was lawlessness even in the promised land.
As they drew closer to the base, anticipation grew in the pit of Leila’s stomach. It was dangerous business, and she lived with the constant threat of discovery by her father, but Leila loved her job. The American surgeons were professional and helpful in their advice to her, and the practical experience was a thousand times better than pill-counting in the Al-Razi pharmacy. Just last week Leila had assisted Dr. Peabody in a delicate surgical operation to repair an American soldier’s left lung that had been lacerated by shrapnel from an explosion. Their field hospital lacked the full facilities of a major trauma center, but they’d done their best to keep the soldier alive until he could be lifted off to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Leila later heard that he was in recovery, and she felt good about it.
It was beyond her required duties to help in surgery often, but the doctors with whom she worked, Whitaker and Peabody, allowed it whenever her translation skills weren’t needed. They were supportive of Leila’s medical ambitions.
Diamondback Road, the long straightaway to the airport and base, was bereft of traffic, aside from an outgoing patrol convoy of Humvees. The road was colored in flat tones of brown, the distance measured in bumps and rattles of the vehicle. During the journey Leila felt the weariness and the danger all at once…as though the terror were a thread woven into the fabric of time itself, a corrupt thread that was a shade darker than the clear blue sky and the bright sandy ground.
She clasped her hands in her lap as the bus slowed to go through the security checkpoint into the American base. This took almost twenty minutes, and bomb-sniffing dogs went all around the bus. Leila and the others stood and got out, walked through the metal detectors, and then segregated into two lines, men and women. Leila spread her arms wide for the female military police to pat her down. When the check was complete, they got back on the bus and continued through to the base.
Leila heard from one of the other women that security had not always been so tight. When the Americans first arrived, the base had been relatively open, even to the point of Turkish merchants gathering outside the gates, selling trinkets and fine carpets at a discount to the soldiers and contractors. It all changed on the twenty-first of December, two years ago, when a suicide bomber wearing a shrapnel IED exploded himself inside the mess hall at midday. Over twenty people had been killed, both soldiers and civilians. Leila had been in Cairo for her last year at the university at the time, but the other women said that relations with the Americans turned to high distrust after the bombing. Leila could not blame them.
The overall impression of Logistics Support Area Diamondback was that it was flat. There weren’t many bi-level structures; the buildings of size were the hangars and the mess hall, which was really a glorified tent shaped like a great sharp-ridged sand dune. The rest of the base hugged the ground like the interloper it was, trying and failing not to cause offense. Across the straight-edged road, Forward Operating Base Marez lurked, filled with soldiers.
After she got off the bus and showed her pass for a third time, Leila walked across the base to the hospital. The loose gravel crunched beneath her feet as she passed a row of white prefab trailers, squat and square. The wind, cool off the water of the adjacent Tigris River, threatened to steal her hijab. With one hand she held her scarf in place and kept walking past the residential trailers. Leila imagined they had once looked new and shiny, but now they were coated with an ever-present layer of thin dust. The odd one was pockmarked with tiny rusted brown holes from stray mortars. Between the exterior walls, wires were strung, floating with towels and brown T-shirts and socks that never quite got clean. Leila liked the miscellany because it reminded her of Mosul City itself; it reminded her that human beings occupied the base, not frightening and pristine robot soldiers.
After three weeks at work on the base, she’d learned what she always suspected: that Americans were not devils or supernatural tormentors or evil people. They became sick and injured just like anyone else, and in addition, most of them were nice. Polite. Smiling.
On the way past the Special Forces compound, however, Leila shivered; the concrete building was protected by rows of razor-wire fence and a sign outside that demanded NO PHOTOGRAPHY in stern red letters. A hand-painted skull-and-crossbones symbol also hung on the outermost fence, teeth bared, giving Leila the impression of a deadly clubhouse. She’d helped set a dislocated shoulder of one of the men of the 10th Special Forces the previous week; his name had been Nisson and he was of Asian descent, with cool black eyes and a hard demeanor.
At nine-thirty, Leila finally entered the hospital. She retrieved her lab coat from her own locker; the locker had her name written in black plastic block letters and she closed it with an authoritative clang. For a moment, Leila imagined herself as a doctor in an American hospital, safe and sound. Then she heard the dull thump of a mortar series from outside, and the illusion was shattered.
“Good morning, Leila!” said Dr. Peabody, the surgeon, when she walked into the main ward.
“Good morning, Doctor,” she said.
“How are you today?”
The Americans always asked her “how she was.” Leila smiled. “I am well,” she said.
“Busy day today,” said Peabody.
“Is it?” Leila said. There had been rumors about another gun battle in the city.
“Ah yes. There are two Iraqi detainees at the moment, and they’ve been pretty uncooperative. One has a leg injury, from which he’ll recover. The other has some nasty shrapnel embedded in the lungs; he was messing with his own IED when it happened. Both are in the visitors’ ward. You can start there today—just follow the smell,” Peabody said. And she did.
Hours later, among the trays of medical supplies, the ubiquitous IV drips and wall charts, the shining linoleum floor, Leila stood at the foot of one of the occupied beds in the ward. Two wounded insurgents lay at opposite ends of the room, each looking mutinous and resentful. Leila wrote fast on her clipboard.
From behind her, a man cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he said. His blue eyes were lowered out of courtesy, but as Leila glanced up she still recognized him. It was the soldier from the house raid at the Rasuls’ house two months