I, Who Did Not Die Read online

  I imagine the unsuspecting Arabs were fast asleep when the flood lifted them from the ground and swallowed them in its thirsty mouth. There probably wasn’t even time to scream for help before their tanks sank into the muck and their bunkers turned into watery tombs. By the time my Basij unit arrived, the whole field was a stinky swamp, full of flies and dead bodies.

  The medical assistants, because we were always given the grossest jobs, had to bury the dead in mass graves. I slogged through the mud, trying not to breathe through my nose or look down at the graying bodies that were splayed everywhere like zombies. Nearby, bulldozers took big bites out of the soupy earth, digging enormous pits. It was impossible to move a man by myself, so two of us, and sometimes three soldiers, rolled, pulled, and kicked one corpse at a time toward the holes. Sometimes it was easier to pile them up in the front bucket of the bulldozer and drop a bunch in at once. Whenever I started to think about what I was doing, I would bite the inside of my cheek to snap myself out of it. I forced my mind to wander to anything but the task at hand. I’d wonder what the dead man’s name was, or where he was from, or imagine him at work or playing with his kids before the war started.

  I should have felt victorious while I worked, but I felt sort of sorry for the dead guys. Mostafa had taught me to forgive people, and that everyone deserves a second chance. That sometimes a person isn’t bad but his circumstances force him to go against his true self. Maybe some of these Iraqis were in the war because they were running away from something, too. But then again, how could I forgive them for taking a city that didn’t belong to them? For blowing up my school and killing my friends? I didn’t think Mostafa meant I should forgive people like that. Murderers can’t be forgiven, right? My mind felt like a tennis ball, pinging back and forth.

  “Hey, are you going to help me or just stare off into space?”

  A medic next to me was tugging at the gold rings on a dead man’s swollen fingers. He tore his shirt open, looking for a necklace. It was disgraceful, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. I took a step away.

  “What? You don’t think they do the same to us?” he called toward my back.

  If they did, they wouldn’t find much. Our Supreme Leader said jewelry was showing off and distracted people from worshipping God, so we weren’t supposed to wear it. Which was a good thing, because none of the Basij I knew could afford gold anyway, which was probably why this guy wanted so badly to steal it. He was prying open the dead man’s mouth now, looking for gold teeth. He must have found what he was looking for, because he stood up and started kicking the corpse in the jaw. I kept walking, so I wouldn’t have to hear the crunching of his teeth breaking loose.

  The flood helped get us a little closer to Khorramshahr, but about 35,000 Iraqi troops still held the city, protecting it with land mines and tanks positioned behind dirt barriers. Our goal was to take their command post inside an old fertilizer plant on the northern edge of the port. Every once in a while, I got a whiff of burnt matches, and in the distance, I heard shelling, which meant we were getting closer to the front.

  According to the latest news, so far our secret Sacred House operation was working, and any day now we’d cut off all the roads leading into Khorramshahr, surround the city with double the number of soldiers the Iraqis had, and then press in on them so they couldn’t escape. Until then, we set up camp as thousands of soldiers from the Revolutionary Guard and the regular army joined us over the next few weeks, coming over pontoon bridges and parachuting out of helicopters. They wheeled rocket launchers into position and aimed them at the city. The plan, as usual, was to send the Basij in first, with our rifles and grenades, and the professional soldiers would follow, with their artillery and tanks. I would race from the front to the field hospital in an ambulance, plucking the wounded off the battlefield.

  To get ready, we sewed grenades into the backs of our collars, so if caught by the enemy we could pull the pin as we lifted our hands in surrender, killing our captors along with ourselves. To the Basij way of thinking, a captured soldier was worse than a dead one. A prisoner of war was nothing more than a failed martyr, an embarrassment to his family. With these hidden grenades, we would become martyrs-plus, because not only would we have died in battle, we would have gone down killing to the very end. I wasn’t sure about all that martyr stuff, but I did know that when I was going to be killed—and after what I had seen so far, I believed my time was coming—I just wanted to go instantly, like in an explosion, and not have to beg for my life or have my teeth kicked in by gold diggers.

  Finally, we were given orders to advance into Khorramshahr. As our men moved closer, Iraqi fighter pilots flew overhead and fired with machine guns, and we used surface-to-air missiles to knock them out of the sky. Bullets made snapping noises as I zigzagged the ambulance, driving with the accelerator all the way down as I followed behind the battle searching for wounded soldiers. I could hear the high whine of incoming mortars in the distance as I helped lift soldiers into the ambulance and raced them to the makeshift tent hospital back at camp. We delivered so many wounded soldiers to the hospital that I learned how to tell by sight whether we should drive toward a fallen man or whether he was already dead. If the wild dogs were at the body, that gave me all the information I needed. Our commanders kept saying we were making progress, yet I wondered how that could be when all I could see through the windshield was dying men—so many that I’d lost count.

  The battle raged all night, and on the second day, panicked Iraqis began streaming out of the underground bunkers and house basements with their hands up, waving their white undershirts in surrender and shouting “Ya Khomeini!” as if they were our long-lost friends. They would say anything so that we would spare their lives, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I saw one man emerge from a hole in the ground, cowering and holding a dinner plate over his head with the face of the Prophet Ali on it. Others dropped their weapons on the ground, ran, and jumped into the Shatt al-Arab to try to swim or float back to their country on makeshift rafts.

  “Shoot them,” our commander bellowed. “Don’t feel sorry for anybody. If you see my mother out there, you kill her. Got me? If someone out there feels bad about it, I will rip his heart out.”

  Many of the Iraqis who tried to flee were gunned down. The ones who surrendered were forced to sit on the ground in a big group, and sometimes they were killed and sometimes they were spared; I didn’t dare ask why. But some Iraqis wouldn’t give up and were taking shots at us from rooftops and lobbing grenades from behind courtyard walls. In the downtown area, it was utter chaos as gunfire ripped in all directions, and when an enemy showed his face, it was hard to tell who was giving up and who was charging you. We had no coordinated battle plan, and jumpy Basij were shooting at anything that moved, sometimes one another. In the confusion, arguments broke out between Revolutionary Guards over whether they should execute surrendering Iraqis or take them prisoner.

  By nightfall I was ordered to search the bunkers. I was to give medical aid to any wounded Persians I found and a bullet to any Iraqis. I had never killed anyone, and I really, really didn’t want to. My only weapon was a flashlight, but abandoned guns were strewn everywhere, so I picked up a rifle as I approached the first bunker on trembling legs. I felt my collar to make sure the grenade was still there. There could be groups of Iraqis inside, waiting for the right chance to make a run for it. They were most certainly armed, and they would most certainly blow my head off the second I walked in. I crouched at the entrance, turned off my flashlight, and waited for courage. This was suicide, the same as walking in the minefield, and again I had no choice. I took one step through the doorway and listened for breathing. It was still as a pond, yet the familiar scent of death—that mixture of shit, blood, and rot—let me know somebody was in there.

  “Come out!” I yelled, lowering my voice to sound like an adult.

  Nothing.

  My hands shook as I turned on my light. The beam cut across several
bodies sprawled on the dirt floor, collapsed in a pool of blood that was already starting to form a crust at the edges. These Iraqis had been dead for some time. I tightened my helmet strap, stepped out of the bunker, and continued my patrol.

  Up ahead, I thought I saw the dark line of a trench. Safety. I sprinted toward it as gunshots crackled from all directions. If I could just hide in the trench until the gunfire settled, I could continue searching the bunkers later. I jumped down into the trench, landing on top of a dead Iraqi soldier, curled in a fetal position. Helmets and ammunition boxes and combat boots were scattered everywhere. I shined my light toward one end of the trench and saw the door to a bunker. I approached slowly, through an S-shaped entrance that led to a large room with cement walls and floor, obviously built for high-ranking officers, five or six of whom were collapsed in a haystack of bodies. I poked them with the rifle but got no response. Just to be safe, I gathered all their weapons and piled them in the farthest corner, out of their grasp. I turned to go and then I heard a sound, a low “Unhhhh.” I whipped back around, and the man at the bottom of the pile was looking at me through half-lidded eyes. Instinctively, the medic in me pulled the corpses off him, and he gasped when the air rushed back into his lungs. I jumped back and hunched down, ready to spring on him if he tried to attack. But he just lay there, moaning and mumbling something. His tan desert fatigues were soaked red from his chest to his waist, and he had an open gash on his forehead and another on his arm. I hoped he would die on me, and those moans he was making were his last.

  Then he turned his head and looked directly at me and said something. I didn’t understand Arabic, but I think I caught one word of it: “Muslim.” It came out like “Moo-zime.”

  I stood and put my finger on the trigger, but my shaking hands made it impossible to fix on a point. Then he lifted his hand and weakly reached for his shirt pocket. This Arab was going to blow us both up! I dove to reach the grenade first, but my fingers touched paper instead, and I pulled out a pocket-sized Koran. I slumped onto the ground, now the one gasping with relief. Every Basij I knew carried a Koran into battle for protection, and I guess all the Iraqis did, too. I looked back at the wounded man to make sure he wasn’t reaching for anything else.

  “Muslim, Muslim,” he moaned.

  There was something hidden in the book. I suspected money, after watching the other soldiers pillage so many dead bodies. I’d learned that the Koran everyone carried doubled as a wallet. I held it open on my palm and the pages fluttered back to reveal a photograph tucked inside. I saw a woman with olive skin and dramatic eyebrows, holding an infant to her chest. The baby’s face was in profile, but it was so young that its skin was still bright red. The woman’s dark eyes cast a spell, like she could look straight into my secrets. There was something about her gaze, a sadness that made me want to hold her hand and tell her everything was going to be OK.

  I knew I was holding his family in my hands. These were the people who loved him, who would die inside if I killed him. She was so beautiful, like the kind of wife I would want someday, and it would be wrong to ruin her life, and even more evil to take away a baby’s father. This soldier had a life that wasn’t here, that wasn’t supposed to end with me shooting him in a bunker. Something had brought him to this war that was out of his control, because why else would he leave such a beautiful family behind?

  The Iraqi smiled weakly at me, and that’s when I noticed that we were the same. We both had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Why was I supposed to hate him? He had never harmed me. I had managed to get this far in the war without killing anyone, and I wasn’t going to start now. If I put a bullet in his temple to end his misery, then the guilt would haunt me forever. I could walk away, but letting him suffer was more inhumane than taking his life. Or I could be merciful.

  You must be good to people. Zahed, are you listening?

  I smelled diesel exhaust, and I was back in the truck with Mostafa, bouncing my hand against the hot wind through the open window. Mostafa was eating pistachios and telling me a story, the same one I’d heard before from my elementary-school teacher, so I was only half-listening. It was the one about a big storm that sent boulders down a mountain and onto some railroad tracks. The next day when the train was coming, a villager who lived nearby ran onto the tracks, took off all his clothes, set them on fire, and waved them in the air to stop the train. The conductor braked, screeching the train to a stop just inches from running him over. The villager became a hero for sacrificing himself to save the passengers, and when the Shah called him to the palace and tried to kiss his hand, the man wouldn’t let the king bow down like that. The villager refused to be called a hero, saying he did what any human being would do in the same situation.

  Now I was inside my own folktale, facing a big question of wrong and right. I could be killed for helping the enemy. But I could be killed every second of every day in this war. Iraqi, Iranian, so what? We were two human beings who had somehow fallen into the same hell. I put the rifle down.

  Blood was trickling from his forehead into his eyes. He was losing a lot of blood and would need more soon. The Iraqi was moaning louder now. I went to his side and reached under his neck to tilt his head back. His lips fell open, and I poured some water from my canteen into his mouth. He drank, and I felt the muscles in his neck slightly relax. I poured slowly, just the way Mostafa’s wife had done for me. I knew what it was like to feel helpless, and I felt sorry for this Iraqi. I didn’t even have a beard yet, and I was in total control of his fate. But just because I held all the power didn’t mean I had to hurt him with it.

  From inside my medical bag, I pulled out a syringe and injected him with a painkiller. He mumbled something in Arabic again and half-smiled. Then his eyes rolled back and his head lolled to one side.

  “Don’t die now,” I said.

  I could smell gunpowder, and bullets crackled nonstop. From underground, I heard muffled explosions. Iranian soldiers were tossing grenades into other bunkers where they found Iraqis hiding. They were going bunker to bunker, shooting the wounded, even the ones who looked dead, just to be sure. I had to hide him. I got on my knees and pushed the dead bodies into a corner, grunting and groaning as I pulled them into a sloppy pile, to form a low wall. If I stacked them like a log cabin, it would look suspicious. Then I grabbed the soldier’s feet and dragged him behind them so that if anyone else found this bunker, they might not see that there was one still alive.

  I wadded up a jacket and put it under his head. He seemed unconscious, but then his eyes flicked open in a second of pure clarity and he struggled to slip the watch from his wrist and, with a shaking hand, held it out to me.

  I took the gift and put it back in the side pocket of his pants. Then I leaned in close to his ear and put my finger to my lips.

  “Shhhh.”

  SIX

  THE PATIENT

  Where’d he go? Just a minute ago—or was it hours, days, or never?—an angel came to me. He poured water into my mouth and then gently took my hand to escort me to the other side. But then what happened? Where am I now?

  Think, Najah, think.

  My skull was being hammered from the inside, and I couldn’t move my right arm. It was dark. OK, three facts. That was good. I could make sense of three things. Keep going. What else? I was on the ground somewhere. It was smooth, not dirt. There was no wind. I must be indoors. Am I alone? There’s a faint noise that sounds like . . . chewing? That can’t be right.

  “Anyone there?” I whispered.

  I got no response, except from the flies that kept landing on my face. For some reason, my body didn’t move when my brain told it to. I couldn’t bat the flies away, so they crawled, crawled, crawled on me with their tickling footsteps. Am I already dead? Oh God, what if the angel took me to hell?

  There was a metallic taste of blood in my mouth, and no matter how much I swallowed, it wouldn’t go away. And it smelled in here, wherever I was. Like a goat that got run over days before. My eyelids w
ere sealed shut with something gooey, and when I finally forced my good arm to move, it felt like broken glass was being pressed into my abdomen. I yowled in pain as I rubbed the sticky blood from my eyes, and when I was able to open them, I could make out something wiggling a few feet away from me in the dark. I waited for my eyes to adjust, and then the grotesque shape registered: several dead men toppled on top of each other, with maggots swarming from their open wounds, coursing in streams, marching their insatiable way toward me. I gagged and tried to smash the insects with my feet, but that short circuit between my brain and body kept me a statue. I was waiting to be devoured. No doubt about it, I was in hell.

  Even from all the way down here in purgatory, I heard the whistle. It was a sharp blast, followed by two short ones. A military whistle. The sound slithered into my ear and then I sensed some rustling and shuffling as images started to sort themselves in my brain and line up chronologically. Like with Pavlov’s dog, the whistle shook my memory and told it what to do.

  Suddenly, I remembered:

  I had just come from the captain’s office—no, floated from the captain’s office—to break the news to the guys in my tent that in ten days’ time, Alyaa and I would be husband and wife. But as soon as I set foot inside, I sensed a nervous energy as my tent mates scurried to put gas masks and food rations into their rucksacks.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Someone leaked a telex. The enemy is planning a big attack. Tonight.”

  Our warplanes roared off the ground as I jogged to my tank, where my crew was already on board, loading up on fuel and ammunition. I crawled into the driver’s seat and pumped the purge pump and pressed the air bleeder button to get the air out of the fuel lines. Once they were cleared, I started the engine and then adjusted the throttle by pulling down a lever on the left wall. We stayed rumbling and ready, while more soldiers wheeled multi–rocket launchers into position that had the capacity to fire what looked like an enormous cigarette pack of missiles simultaneously. They fired a few times, a warning to the Iranians that we would not be taken by surprise. Armored trucks swarmed in, taking a defensive line behind hundreds of troops pouring into trenches with their machine guns and automatic rifles.