The Girl in Green Read online

  But those men did turn on them; those men who dressed like soldiers but acted like a gang or tribe were running an intercept course to keep the trio from reaching the American line.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Benton shouted to Arwood over the gunfire, the helicopter rotors, and the voices. So many voices — fewer and fewer, and yet somehow louder because of it.

  ‘I’m here to bring you back.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  ‘It’s what you do, man.’

  After only another minute, Arwood, Benton, and the girl slowed to a jog before stopping entirely. They had been surrounded. They were thirty metres from the ceasefire line. At least fifty US soldiers had their weapons trained on the Iraqis at that distance, but the Iraqis weren’t facing the Americans. They were facing Arwood, Benton, and the girl. The man who moved into the centre of the row, with a smile on his face, was the colonel.

  The colonel, like every other Baathist, sported a thick black moustache. He was tanned, not only because of his race but because he’d been spending some time outside doing the killing himself. Benton figured that to be this highly ranked and yet on a foot patrol meant he was ambitious and ruthless.

  And yet, those eyes. Like so many Arab men, his eyes were soft and brown like a doe’s. They were clear and gentle. One could be lulled into a sense of safety by such eyes. Unfortunately for the world as a whole, this man’s serenity was a product of his own inner acceptance of his actions; it was not an implied promise to act decently in the world itself.

  When the entire complement of soldiers came to rest, Arwood whipped out his Beretta 9mm, chambered a round, and pointed it directly at the forehead of the colonel. He held the weapon like a gangland killer. With a developed diplomatic style that would not change for the rest of his life, he said, ‘Apparently we didn’t kill enough of you fuckin’ douchebags during round one.’

  The colonel smiled at Arwood. He smiled because he was no mere foot soldier facing the Americans. He smiled because he was a colonel, and he knew that the ceasefire was in place and the Americans had no intention of shooting the Iraqis unless they were fired on themselves. He understood the deeper structures at play, and that all of them were on his side.

  ‘Looks like you’re lost,’ he said. ‘And yet you have found something that belongs to me.’ He turned to look at the girl, who was still holding Benton’s hand. Strangely, though, she did not look back at him. Instead, she was looking at Arwood as though he were an older brother or a close cousin — someone she could identify with and had learned to trust. And Arwood looked at her. Her body had straightened. She was on the balls of her feet, and she bounced gently.

  Benton looked between her and Arwood, and he knew that a kind of promise had passed between them. Arwood saw her not as a foreigner, or an Arab, or a Shiite, or a family member of a rebellious tribe, but as a young girl, a girl in junior high school he might have known in Portland, Maine, or Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or St. Louis, Missouri. She was a cute girl — a girl too young for him, obviously, but cute all the same — who might have smiled at him in the hallway while holding her maths books to her barely developed chest and then looked down quickly because she found him cute, too, but he was an upper-class man and so, later that day, she’d tell her friends about the guy she’d seen and had her first crush on. Whether or not any of this was true for her, Benton couldn’t say. It was Arwood’s mind — such as it was — that was easier to read. There was no denying, however, that these two young people somehow felt each other. For that moment, they may have been the only people in all of Iraq who looked into each other’s eyes across a divide and found themselves in the same place.

  Arwood looked away from the girl and back to the colonel. How he had such a presence of mind to talk like this, Benton would never know. Clearly, even then, Arwood had what people would later call ‘authority issues’.

  ‘Oh, you mean her? Naw, man. She’s my cousin. She’s an American. Cindy-Lou Who from Whoville. Wandered off after the movie was finished. Mum and Dad asked me to come and get her. Got to bring her home now. So get the fuck out of my way before I splatter your brains and follow the red-brick road all the way home.’

  The other soldiers looked confused. Based on his experience in Iraq, Benton was reasonably sure that at least some of them understood enough English to follow what Arwood was saying, but his language was so vernacular there may have been no understanding his meaning. They didn’t look as though they wanted this kind of trouble. Whatever else their nefarious plans for the day, facing down the sharp edge of Desert Storm was not on their to-do list. If Lieutenant Harvey Morgan hadn’t called out at just that moment, there was a chance Arwood’s gambit might have worked. The Iraqis might have let Arwood — being crazy — walk off with the girl in green. But he did intervene, and the Iraqis didn’t let them go.

  ‘Stand down, private!’ Morgan yelled. He was walking briskly toward their position. Behind him, like a phalanx, was the second cavalry, and they were ready to pounce. If Morgan had simply raised a finger, every Iraqi would have been obliterated, and every American would have been delighted to have done it. Rob Husseini probably would have been the first to fire. But Morgan did not give that order, because the paperwork on the subject was clear.

  The girl bounced on her toes. She no longer held Benton’s hand. Rather than stand down, Arwood stood closer to the colonel in the form of pressing his automatic to his forehead and physically pushing him back toward the American position. But that smile never left the colonel’s face.

  ‘See how easy it is to obey the man with the gun?’ Arwood said. Then he turned to the girl. ‘Come on, cuz. Mum and Dad are waiting for us at Checkpoint Zulu. We’re gonna have a big homecoming — cake, candy, Roman candles, the works.’

  Looking at Arwood, and only at Arwood, she started to walk. The colonel stepped to the side, Arwood’s automatic still against his forehead, Morgan still telling Arwood to stand down, and the US infantry still ready to pounce. They circled and changed positions. Arwood walked backward and the girl walked beside him, facing forward toward Checkpoint Zulu and the M60 machine gun Arwood had left behind. With his free hand, he took hers. And for a short eternity they were walking toward freedom. Then the colonel withdrew a Soviet-made 9mm Makarov from his belt, and shot the girl in the back. The girl fell to her knees. She did not look down to her body and her heart. She looked at Arwood. His eyes were the last of this world she would know.

  When it was over, as she lay dead at his feet, still looking up at him, Arwood did regain a place in the moment. Unlike earlier, when he had stood posturing with the weapon in one hand like a gangster in an American movie, now he put two hands on his weapon and raised it in the proper assault position, as he’d been trained to do.

  Half a second — more or less. That’s all Arwood needed to murder the colonel. But Benton took that time away from him: he placed his hand over Arwood’s outstretched arms and said, ‘We have to go.’

  5

  It was a short walk back to the safety of Checkpoint Zulu. Lieutenant Harvey Morgan took Arwood by the upper arm as though he were a schoolboy who’d been busted with contraband, and walked him back to the ceasefire line. Though it had been for only a few minutes, Arwood Hobbes had technically abandoned his post, abandoned his weapon, been absent without leave from the base, crossed the ceasefire line in violation of an international agreement and American policy, and then topped it off by pulling a weapon on a military officer from a country with whom the United States — and the entire UN coalition — had a ceasefire agreement.

  The ceasefire, Lieutenant Morgan reminded Arwood, was between Iraq and everyone else, not among the people in Iraq; that was their problem. Harvey, though he was only twenty-six, next launched a barrage of loosely affiliated words he’d collected over the past six months, sourced from the highest and lowest levels of political discussion:

  They were held together
with spit.

  Arwood wasn’t listening, and wouldn’t have given a damn in any case. He was walking back to base without his mind, body, or soul.

  Benton trailed behind them, escorted by other soldiers who didn’t talk to him.

  ‘None of this matters anyway,’ Morgan concluded. ‘Short of dropping chemical weapons, no one’s gonna do anything. I mean, really, what are we supposed to do? Occupy Baghdad? Teach these people how to run a town meeting like we’re in fuckin’ Vermont?’

  The moment they crossed the straight and imaginary line that separated one part of Iraq from another, Lieutenant Harvey Morgan stopped, waited for Thomas Benton to approach, and then poked him in the chest, saying, ‘You’re out of here. Tomorrow morning, you fuck directly off. I want you off this observation post.’ Then, as he took Arwood’s arm again, he shouted over his shoulder, ‘I hope it was worth it.’

  Arwood was taken to the mess hall. Lieutenant Harvey Morgan had decided to make an example of him, knowing that tensions were running high among his men and that this needed to be stopped. Lashing Arwood, in his view, would ensure that even the dumbest of his company would understand the consequences of doing anything remotely similar to what Arwood had done. And this example needed to be made because the events beyond the perimeter were continuing. The helicopters were still shooting. People were still dying. Men were still being lined up and executed in front of their children to make sure the rebels (if there were any rebels) ‘got the message,’ which they did.

  Lieutenant Morgan’s rant may have begun as a walk-and-talk lecture, but it did not end as one.

  ‘You are in the worst kind of shit you can possibly imagine,’ Harvey yelled in front of everyone. ‘You can’t even spell the kind of trouble you are in right now. I’m going to have to go home tonight and re-read the entire Uniform Code of Military Justice just to understand what the hell just happened here. Are you getting this, Hobbes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Arwood wasn’t paying attention. Lieutenant Morgan was speaking to the gallery. Arwood was merely a prop, and he knew it. He didn’t care. He was still looking at the girl who was looking at him.

  Besides, this man wasn’t going to take out a pistol and shoot him. This man wasn’t going to stare him down with a Makarov pistol on his belt, and mock him. This man wasn’t going to shoot a girl in the back. This man, whatever his faults, was not preternaturally evil, and there was nothing he could do to make himself matter in a moment like this compared to what Arwood had just experienced.

  Or so Arwood thought until Lieutenant Morgan proved him wrong by saying this: ‘And for what? For what? You did all that for what? For some fucking Arab bitch.’

  What struck Arwood in his gut, as a wordless pain that he could not articulate until much later, was a sudden understanding that the only thing worse than evil was deciding that evil didn’t matter.

  And for that reason, and that reason alone, Arwood Hobbes stood up in front of fifty other soldiers, without hesitation or regret, and beat the living shit out of Lieutenant Harvey Morgan.

  Arwood Hobbes was collected by the military police. Thomas Benton was sent to Harvey Morgan’s commanding offer, Major Alan Wilcox, and Wilcox told Benton calmly that he was to now consider himself persona non grata at Checkpoint Zulu. His credentials would be pulled, and he was to go away. Wilcox was a midwesterner, and did not raise his voice or use hysterical language or gestures. He communicated his decisions to Benton, and Benton said that he understood.

  ‘One thing, Major.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you court-martial Arwood Hobbes, I’ll make sure it’s covered in the press. I know people at the Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post — people who cover the Pentagon and the White House. They will ask questions publicly and on the record about why Arwood Hobbes is being prosecuted.’

  ‘The army does not have to answer those questions,’ Wilcox said. ‘We have procedures. I don’t know how it works in Britain, Mr Benton, but in the US those questions will be ignored for reasons of due process.’

  ‘No, Major. They won’t be answered. But they won’t be ignored. Because it won’t be the answers that’ll hurt the Bush administration — it’ll be the questions.’

  Later, when Lieutenant Harvey Morgan was sent to the infirmary for general care, stitches, and a cast, he was advised — very quietly and without any hysterical language or gestures — that it would be best for him not to file a report of the incident. The problem, Major Wilcox explained, was that a few days earlier, on the twenty-sixth, General Schwarzkopf had made a major political gaffe by telling David Frost on international news that the US had been ‘suckered’ into letting the Iraqis fly helicopters in the ceasefire agreement, and that in retrospect he thought the Iraqis had planned to use them against the rebellion the whole time. Now the White House was in full defensive mode over his comments, because every Iraqi civilian death suddenly seemed like America’s fault as a result of Stormin’ Norman having been hoodwinked by a bunch of carpet salesmen. This was tarnishing America’s victory, and was seriously annoying the White House.

  The simple fact was that there was no way to even describe, let alone explain, Hobbes’s actions without using the word ‘helicopter.’ And that was the word the White House didn’t want to hear from the press anymore.

  Lieutenant Harvey Morgan was purple and tender. He was also angry. ‘Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to take a public beating from Arwood fucking Hobbes just so the president doesn’t get embarrassed in a press conference?’

  ‘It is my experience that most promotions in the military are the result of making your commanding officers look good, or else keeping them from looking bad,’ Major Wilcox told Lieutenant Harvey Morgan.

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘So far as I know, and I’m a major.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do with him?’

  ‘Something will come up,’ said Major Wilcox.

  Something did come up, and it didn’t take long. Benton left as instructed, and opted for the first transport plane leaving the next morning for the north. Two days later he was in Erbil, Iraq. From there he turned around and followed everyone into the mountains when the Kurdish counterattacks against Saddam failed. Benton was now embedded again, but this time with the civilians.

  He was there almost a week, reporting, meeting people, and sending back stories, before — to his surprise — Arwood arrived. It was not a coincidence: it was poetic justice. The refugee crisis in Turkey was so dire that the UN passed a resolution calling it a ‘threat to international peace and security’, which opened the floodgates for thousands of American special forces and other troops to assist in the largest humanitarian relief effort since World War II without needing the permission of Iraq to do it. Major Wilcox told Lieutenant Harvey Morgan that this was exactly the sort of place Arwood should go. ‘If he wants to help the Arabs so much, then here’s his chance.’

  It didn’t bother either of them that the Kurds weren’t Arabs.

  Benton first saw him sitting on a rocky outcropping, his feet dangling like a child’s, in an area popular with reporters and staff at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Arwood acknowledged him, but at first said little. A press tent had been set up in a flat area at around 1,300 metres in altitude. It contained refreshments and desks, offered familiarity and free information, and so became a natural congregation and propaganda point.

  Arwood didn’t look well. He was thinner to the point of being malnourished. He carried no weapon, and, while still in uniform, seemed disconnected and aloof from the few other troops in the area. It seemed as though he wasn’t reporting to anyone, and no one had any particular job for him to do.

  Benton collected him, then led him into the tent and opened a can of cold Coke.

  ‘Drink,’ Benton said, and Arwood did.

  ‘I didn’t expect to
see you here,’ he said to Arwood.

  ‘Major Wilcox heard you were up here, filing stories. He thought it was fitting we be together. Harvey put me on the plane himself.’

  ‘You didn’t come find me when you got here. Why not?’

  ‘I haven’t been doing much of anything.’

  ‘Do you have an assignment, a mission, a CO?’

  ‘Harvey said they’re dropping aid to the refugees. I could catch it.’

  ‘What I mean is, who are you reporting to?’

  ‘No one. He told me to come up here, and that I couldn’t come back until they called me, which would be when my company ships off home.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing, Arwood.’

  ‘I’m starting to think we don’t hear about the weirdest stuff on this planet.’

  ‘I’m in touch with some of the aid agencies here. The Red Cross is here. The Turkish Red Crescent. The High Commissioner for Refugees. I want you to come with me. Get some food and rest. Tomorrow I’m doing an interview. I guess some of the first pallets are going to be dropped — frozen chickens, other sundries. We have equipment to lug around, and some questions for the staff. I’m sure you could be very helpful.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Arwood said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Did you know her name?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl in green. I guess you knew her, right?’

  ‘We’d been crouching behind the same truck. We ran together. I never learned her name.’

  ‘So we’ll never be able to tell her family what happened?’

  ‘Arwood,’ Benton said, ‘I don’t think you appreciate the enormity of the catastrophe that’s happening here. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, are dead. There are mass graves. Starvation. Exposure. The state of Iraq is ripping itself apart. America thinks the Shiites are backed by Iran, and they’re letting them die. And Turkey doesn’t want support flowing to the Kurds, lest they create a new Gaza Strip here. Everyone’s hoping for a palace coup in Iraq, and it isn’t happening. Saddam is trying to hold power by any means necessary that won’t draw in the coalition again. It’s hell on earth, Arwood.’