Read The Evil Hours for Free Online

even now brings a sense of regret. I served in no war, took part in no raid launched under the cover of darkness. Most of my time in uniform was spent in garrison, staging mock patrols into the hills of Camp Pendleton and the jungles of Okinawa; occasionally we rappelled out of helicopters, as if to remind ourselves what real danger felt like. We called this training, but really we were just waiting, waiting for the call that never came. After four years, I left the service feeling vaguely disappointed, incomplete, as if some secret in me had been left unrevealed.
    I was an unpromising lieutenant, not the worst, but a slacker. Most of my peers wanted to command, to lead Marines in combat. They believed, as others had before them, that their lives would be freed forever from the trivial and the mundane once the bullets started flying. The idea of “leadership,” the endless posing and pretending, the trading of steely-eyed glances, bored me. Military leadership is a solemn responsibility, but in peacetime it can seem ridiculous, an exercise in fascism. Twenty-three and fresh out of college, I didn’t want responsibility, I wanted adventure—adventure and the stories that came out of it. I think of one story an old sniper in my rifle company told about being in Beirut in the eighties. From a position inside the city, he had held Yasir Arafat in his crosshairs for several minutes as the PLO leader made his way through a refugee camp. Following Arafat through his scope, he began to cycle through his breathing drill, beginning to imagine the shot, the shot that would change history. He never pulled the trigger, of course, but having the man in his sights for a few moments had given him an almost erotic sense of power. It was a feeling I never forgot.
    Looking back, I can see that what I really wanted, as much as the adventure or experience or medals, was something far less noble: I wanted to be like that sniper. Not a killer, really, but a man with a history. I wanted to make other people envious. Envious of my experience. Envious of what I had seen. Envious of the stories I could tell. There were other desires, to be sure, some more honorable than that, but what I coveted more than anything was the power of a certain kind of silence, the silence that fell over a room when a veteran launched into a story that began, “Back in the Mekong . . .”
    This desire clings to me still and was even stronger during my first years out of the Marine Corps. I was finishing graduate school, still dreaming of faraway places, when the towers fell. Like everyone else, I woke on September 12 and saw a different world. I had begun working tentatively as a writer, and it was the writer in me, not the Marine, that sensed an opportunity. The world was at war, and I saw that the logical thing to do was to become a war correspondent. It would be a way of revising my past, correcting an oversight in my record; without having to don a uniform or suffer any orders, I could collect the experiences I’d hungered for as a young man. I would be in a war, but on my own terms. It felt like I’d discovered a trapdoor in time.
    Now it was October 2007, the height of the surge. I was out with some soldiers from the First Infantry Division, patrolling a Baghdad neighborhood west of the river that I’d never been to before, even though I’d been coming to Iraq for three years. Saydia had been Sunni for as long as anyone could remember, but it was being taken over by the Shia, block by block, in a process that the
New York Times
had referred to as “slow-motion ethnic cleansing.”This larger narrative of the war, the distinction between Sunni and Shia, the politics of the surge, was of little interest to the soldiers. The real reason behind their presence here seemed beyond them; they were here simply to make sure that their part of the city didn’t explode completely and that was all.
    It was one of those seasons