The Weight of a Mustard Seed by Wendell Steavenson Page A

first time he had been able to observe their soldiers up close. He saw how young they were and this surprised him for some reason. He also noticed the standard of their professionalism, their discipline, the way they always held their guns in the ready position with their index finger horizontal, flat above the trigger guard. He saw that not one of them took off their armor or their helmets, despite the heat. During the day he crept around in irrigation ditches to see more. At another intersection he found tanks. He saw that on each tank the razor wire was looped neatly and hung on a hook, that the jerrycans were stored in their own brackets, and that everything was kept neatly in its proper place. Two months earlier he had stopped two officers of the RepublicanGuard driving toward him on the barracks road, both had been bare-headed and he had berated them for leaving their berets off. “We have talked about this before and I gave you a photograph of an American soldier and an Iraqi soldier, the American was clean and tidy and the Iraqi was disheveled and holding his gun awry and I know you were both there when I showed these pictures and I asked you all then, which looks the more impressive soldier and most of you replied, the American.”
    After a few days a warrant officer brought him news that his family was safe at a relative’s house in Diala and that his son Osama was with them, but that his other son, Ahmed, was missing and there were rumors that he had been killed or wounded in the battle for the airport road. Hamdani put on a dishdasha and borrowed the ID card of a man who looked roughly like him and went to look in Baghdad.
    He hardly knew where to begin, everything was broken and in chaos. He searched in different areas. “Where can you look? But you are a father so you must look.” He walked the airport highway through the burnt tanks and Humvees and he wondered why the Americans had not imposed more control, why there was not even a curfew? The roads from the South were lined with makeshift graves, heaped earth or white sheets, each marked with a stake. The weather was hot and dusty and there were streams of poor people walking home. An American private, wilting and exhausted from the sun beating, held up a stretcher he had made into a sign painted with the word “Dead” so that the people walking would not step on the fresh graves. Hamdani saw every pathetic mound as his dead son, the American private holding up the sign in the heat and the dust, asking the herding people to go around, struck him as some surreal polite detail in all the mess.
    Finally after several days and relayed messages from thefamily in Diala, Hamdani got word that one of his relatives had found a note in the admissions book of a hospital in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad: “ Ahmed: 2nd Lt. Rep. Gd. ”
    Ahmed had taken three bullets on the airport road, two through his upper thigh and one through his bicep. He lay bleeding, unable to walk, next to a corporal who was slowly dying, when an American medic came up the road and crouched down to examine them. The dying corporal reached up a little and whispered for help, “I am a Christian like you!” and he fingered the gold cross around his neck. The American medic told him his name was David and said a few prayers as the corporal died. The medic said he would try to stay with Ahmed too, “Because you wear glasses and I wear glasses just like yours,” but soon his unit was moved forward and he went away. Then a Republican Guard officer came out of a hiding place and dragged Ahmed, hitching car to car, until they reached the hospital in Adhamiya. There a doctor cleaned his wounds but they had no bed for him, so the Republican Guard officer took Ahmed to his own house, which was nearby. A relative tracked him down and by the time Hamdani got back to his family in Diala, Ahmed was already there, splayed and pale, tended by a local nurse (they