The Weight of a Mustard Seed by Wendell Steavenson

rang in his house he would pick it up and find a recorded message talking to him: “There is no way to oppose the United States!” “Stay in your home where you will be safe!” He hung up. The Mukhabarat, the intelligence service, were certainly listening, and in any case it was an obvious piece of psyops.
    He planned to fight for as long as possible. He thought the Iraqi army might be able to hold out for two or three months at best.
    The American F16s bombed his division to smithereens. After only a few days his troops were smashed and he found himself without a single vehicle—not a jeep, not even a commandeered taxi; everything had been destroyed—in a band of thirty-odd survivors. He split the men into groups and told them to disperse, traveling by foot on the dirt back-roads through the farmlands south of Baghdad. He made his way to the house of a cousin in Youssifiya. He liked this cousin, whohad given up his government post as an engineer and taken a second wife and gone to live in the countryside. It was an odd sort of life for an educated man, but Hamdani respected his desire for independence. The cousin welcomed him and gave him the use of a shepherd’s hut on the edge of his land; it was safer than in the main house where he might be seen.
    Hamdani felt himself grateful, empty and exhausted. His face and arms were scratched from the blasting bombs, he had a pebble of shrapnel in one calf, his limbs ached from walking. He took off his uniform and folded it carefully and hid it with his Kalashnikov in a duffel bag and put on a borrowed pair of trousers and a flannel shirt. One of the wives brought him food, one of the small sons brought him a pen and writing paper and he began to rewrite the diary that had been burned when his jeep had been hit. The small sons watched him write and shook their heads: “Is he studying for his exams or something?”
    Baghdad fell on 9 April and the Americans toppled Saddam’s statue. Hamdani was sitting in his cousin’s guest room with a few of his cousin’s friends when he heard the news. There was no electricity and the kerosene lamps made small pools of yellow light. Hamdani described his mood as almost “dying from grief.” He could not eat. He thought about his cousin’s life, how he had teased him about his big family and the two wives—unusual for an educated man, and living so far out on a farm in some kind of oblivion; his cousin had laughed at his jibes and said he was happier: “I can start my own tribe!” Hamdani had chided him for favoring one of his sons above the other: “Be careful or they will end up like the story of Jacob!” Now he remembered his own sons, both of whom had been deployed with the Republican Guard and who were now, like most of the army, and himself, missing.
    One of his cousin’s relatives was very happy Saddam was finished. “Thank God we got rid of Saddam and the Americans are here! Soon they will rebuild everything.”
    Hamdani told him he thought this was a very naïve view. “We won’t have the power and authority that has ruled this country and there will be a vacuum and this will be very dangerous.”
    â€œSo if you know all this and you are so clever why didn’t you organize a coup against Saddam? You are a high commander!”
    â€œThis is another naïve view,” Hamdani replied quietly. “You don’t understand the complexities. If there is no power to equal the power that has just been removed then there is no one to take control and this could end in civil war.”
    The happy optimistic man said, “Well, I am betting on the Americans, we’ll meet again in the future and you will see that I was right!”
    The following day Hamdani hid near a brush fence and watched two American armored Bradlee vehicles position themselves at the village crossroads. He had fought the Americans in two wars, but this was the