Threatcon Delta by Andrew Britton Page A

that he had more to say.
    “Is that wrong?” she asked.
    “No,” he said behind an out-thrust lower lip. “Not conceptually.”
    “In practice?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She was flipping through notes. At least the cleric’s speech patterns and enunciation were getting back to some level of pre-Iraq confidence. “Have you been keeping a journal?”
    “That hasn’t been working for me.”
    “Why not?”
    The lanky Phair leaned into his lap and looked down. “The words just aren’t there.”
    “The words or the feelings?”
    “Oh, I feel a lot,” he said. “I just can’t seem to isolate one memory or reflection from another.”
    “How does this hodgepodge make you feel?”
    “The hodgepodge itself is frustrating because I feel like I’m stuck on flypaper,” he said. “I have this sense that I was ‘found’ while I was away and ‘lost’ now, though there wasn’t a day out there that I wasn’t scared.”
    “For some people, fear and chaos are a familiar and therefore natural and more comfortable state.”
    “If they’d lived with it before,” Phair said. “I hadn’t. I had a very stable life.”
    “Which you tossed away when you left your post to minister to the wounded Iraqis.”
    Major Phair remembered that he had told the psychologist that he had been intent on ministering to the spiritual needs of the Iraqis. He realized later, after he’d moved to Fort Jackson, that although he had gone to the Iraqis for their aid, it had really been more to assure himself that in the shadow of death, sectarian distinctions were nothing and spirituality was everything. He had to let the wounded men know—and himself, as well—that while men made war over fine religious print, that all vanished as one stood poised to turn himself over to the care of God.
    “Let’s talk about how life was simpler before you began your independent work in Iraq,” she suggested.
    “My ‘independent work,’ ” he smiled bitterly. “Some of my superiors have called it desertion.”
    “Their information is incomplete.”
    He gave her a long, searching look. “Are you helping to fill it in?”
    “I am not,” she replied. “I’m here for you.”
    Phair grinned a little. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There has been so much spin—that’s a new word I’ve learned since I’ve been here. Very useful.” He settled back. “Do you know that one of the commanders in Baghdad wanted to write my work up as a black-ops action?”
    “To help you?”
    “Are you kidding?” He shook his head. “It would have helped him, added to the tally of proactive maneuvers as opposed to defensive tactics.”
    “Do you believe it was desertion?” Major Dell asked.
    “No. I was compelled to do what I did out of love of God, not from a lack of patriotism.” He took a long, slow breath and looked at her with searching eyes. “But I will tell you this, Major Dell. My life was very much simpler before I left that hole in the ground.”
    Phair had already been on his way to the abandoned government office building, following the wounded Iraqis, when his unit began to withdraw. Intelligence had just been received that the insurgents were using the building as a base. The unit was pulled back and the American forces bombed the building. Since Phair knew the phone lines would be secure inside underground concrete conduits, and help could be summoned—which had been the point of taking the wounded there—Phair hid with several Iraqis in a bomb shelter, where he tended to the bodies and souls of two wounded Sunni fighters. They remained for more than a day, under attack from the air and from artillery fire. A subsequent sweep of the town failed to locate him or his young companions. In the small hours of the following night, Iraqi militiamen who knew of the fortified room dug them out. The assault left the clergyman frightened and disoriented, initially fearful of anyone except those who had gone through it with him. The Iraqis who