times he’d give me packages just so I’d have something to open. My wife eventually did send me some things, but in those first critical weeks when I was stumbling into my disillusionment with our mission in Iraq, I felt especially lonely and isolated. When a former member of Alpha Company who worked in the Stryker detention center told me how he’d returned the tomato farmer to his family and gotten the middle finger, I wondered if this was the kind of thanks we’d always get. I could accept leaving my wife without a husband and my children fatherless, as long as it was for a higher purpose. I’d signed the paperwork. But would I waste my life on this absurd duty where nothing was ever brought closer to a genuine resolution? We’d drive around and around in the darkness, hoping to avoid being shredded by an IED, never confronting the “enemy,” the amorphous evil that threatened our lives on a daily basis. We weren’t establishing a democracy, we were just providing a target for people who hated us. Even though our presence in Iraq often did little more than hassle and oppress the daily lives of Iraqis, leaving them resentful and sometimes dead as they tried to go about their business, many soldiers that I came into contact with never seemed to give it a thought. Though we nearly shot some random tomato farmer, they regarded it as a joke, something amusing, forgotten by the following day. It was only some incident with a “Hajji” (“Hajji” is military slang for Middle-Easterners, either from the traditional Muslim pilgrimage called the Hajj, or perhaps the Indian character in the Johnny Quest cartoon). In my frustration, I began to look for some kind of guidance in dealing with my feelings and experiences. One day, after coming in from an eight hour patrol, putting down my gear, and taking a shower, I found myself sitting on my bunk, looking at the books I’d brought. There was the Iliad, the Koran, a couple books on Middle-Eastern history, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Looking at their spines, I thought, I just don’t have the energy. Then I recognized Turning the Mind into an Ally.
Chapter One Curfew and Cucumbers
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