Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack Page A

good government jobs went to members of the Baath, but Raheem refused to join. His truculence got him stuck in the army for ten years, eight slogging through the war with Iran. He saw other teachers, Baathists, get rushed through the army in a few months. It was a compromise his conscience would not let him make. He was out of the army and driving a taxi when he heard that Yemen needed teachers. He sent an application and wound up overseas for nine years, languishing in financial exile, teaching first in Yemen and later in Libya. He couldn’t afford to bring his wife and children along. He couldn’t even afford a house in Baghdad at first, so his family slept in a room at his brother-in-law’s place. He could only afford to see them every eleven months or so, but he couldn’t find another way to support them. Like most Iraqis, he did what he had to do.
    We traveled those first weeks with an American photographer I’ll call John. If Raheem was the East, John was the West. On long rides between southern towns, Raheem talked about the pilgrimage to Karbala, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the repressions under Saddam. John squinted at passing Iraqi women, shrouded from head to toe in black
abayas
and
hijab
, and said, “Look at those ninjas! That’s a lot of ninjas.”
    John had been embedded with the Marines during the invasion, and he made it known to us, day after day, that life with the soldiers had been infinitely preferable to the privations he was suffering in provincial Iraq. He also intimated that he’d never seen a land so devoid of redeeming value. One day he went on a tear in front of Raheem: “This country is so shitty. Everything is shitty. And everything is broken. And the people are just sitting around, doing nothing. Don’t they want to work? It just seems like they’re lazy. I think in the U.S., if we were in this situation, people would be working, trying to make things better. All they do here is sit around and complain.”Another time he claimed, also in front of Raheem, that Iraq had not produced a single attractive woman. “Show me one! You point out the next pretty woman you see. They all wear those head scarves. It makes them look like hawks. It looks terrible.”
    He griped about the dingy hotels. He complained about the food. He didn’t wander the marketplaces or explore the riverside villages. Unless we needed a photograph, he stayed in his room. He badgered us to find American soldiers to hit up for an MRE or “meal ready to eat,” the processed, dehydrated American food packets he preferred to the fresh-baked bread and spit-roasted chicken from Iraqi cafés. I wondered how Raheem was taking it all. He never said a word when the photographer complained. One day, when John had skulked off to his room, I looked at Raheem.
    “Well,” I ventured, “John doesn’t seem very happy.”
    “Mmm,” Raheem said in his ponderous way. “I think he is miserable.”
    He started to giggle. I did too. Then we both laughed so hard that I leaned against the wall and Raheem took off his glasses and pressed his fingers into his eyelids. After that, it became a joke.
    “Where’s John?”
    “We-ell,” Raheem drew it out, as if it were a dilemma of the ages, “I think, you know, he is in his room.” Snicker.
    In Baghdad I had felt a heaviness hanging on me, seen every scene painted in the obscenity and confusion of a nightmare. It was a bad feeling, deep and dark, the collapse of a capital. But in the south with Raheem, it was almost beautiful, sometimes. Quiet came up from the marshes when the light went down in Nasiriyah, soft ticks and screeches echoed from the swamp, and bats and white owls stirred the thick soup of spring sky. At night the heat let up and little boys crept out like crabs to play soccer in the street, skittering barefoot after the ball, their voices ringing down warm alleys. The ice-cream parlor served soft strawberry and vanilla in stale cones and we stood on the sidewalk,