Threatcon Delta by Andrew Britton Page B

rescued him would have killed him, but for the interference of the men who saw how he helped their comrades.
    “Do you ever think of your emergence from the cellar as a kind of rebirth?” Major Dell asked.
    “No,” he said thoughtfully. “It was more like mitosis. I split off a new me.”
    The sixteen years that Phair had stayed in Iraq, learning from Sunnis, Shiites, Yazidis, Nestorians, and other religions, he felt his devotion to Catholicism had been enhanced. He had affirmed that the goals of charity and good were fundamentally the same from group to group, as was the ultimate destination of a beatific afterlife.
    As was the desire to foster one faith over all others, often through violent means among the radical elements.
    While Phair found the rituals and hierarchies instructive and inspiring, he came to believe that no one group had a monopoly on the Way. Not even his own. It was no different than when he would watch the soldiers train in various martial arts disciplines. Judo was different from karate was different from kung fu. All were valid and the end result was the same: self-preservation. Understanding this, there had been no need to question his Catholic faith. It served and continued to serve as his unfaltering conduit to God.
    “This new you,” Major Dell said in a way that suggested a weighty preamble. “How much overlap does it have with the old you?”
    “In what respect?”
    “Any.”
    “Let me answer that bass-ackwards,” he suggested. “I can guess the reasons for these ongoing sessions. The DoD wants to know if I’ve been brainwashed, either by design or association. Correct?”
    “If that’s a concern, it’s not mine,” she answered semi-truthfully.
    “How does the military view me?”
    “I can’t speak for them,” she replied.
    “You know they debriefed me there,” he said.
    She nodded.
    “They prodded me to recall everything I’d seen and heard as what they wanted to call their ‘undercover observer. ’ They wanted to know about the unguarded lives of Iraqi citizens, what the black market was like, how often and in what way the Iraqis were bullied by insurgents or the police or the military and how they responded. I saw a lot of that. I told them what I could remember. That the people are afraid. Of insurgents, of local authorities, of Americans, of despots, of anyone from outside their villages. They shook my memory like they were panning for gold and frankly, I remembered things I had forgotten.”
    “Except for the first few weeks you were away from your unit,” Major Dell said.
    “That’s right.”
    “No dreams or fragments or déjà vu that might indicate what happened?”
    He shook his head.
    It bothered her superiors in the Army Medical Corps that Phair seemed to have been brought back from post-traumatic stress—literally shell shock, from the hammering he took in that cellar—by fraternizing with “a population that might include enemy sympathizers or activists.” Phair remembered coming out into dusty daylight from the shelter beneath the bombed building. He remembered hearing an argument among the Iraqis about sparing his life, but he recalled little else until three weeks later, when he was learning Nadji Arabic from a schoolteacher.
    The question that remained to be answered was: had he “gone native”? Had he begun to assume the prevailing view of Americans as invaders? He didn’t appear to have done so. By identifying with their spiritual rather than political needs, he regained his own center. Though he stayed in Iraq to educate himself and others, he remained fundamentally the same James Phair who was last seen running off during a firefight—but now his own twin, with a new set of experiences and influences.
    What would happen if he went back? That’s what the top brass wanted to know.
    “Are you having difficulty remembering aspects of your stay that used to be clear?” the psychologist inquired.
    “The details are still clear,” he