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in Baghdad when you could set your watch by the first firefights of the evening. Usually it was just a bunch of kids in a pickup hosing down the neighborhood with AKs. I didn’t mind the shooting so much. Shooting had a logic that I understood. Either you were in its way or you weren’t. My problem was with the bombs buried in the street. If you ran over a rigged 155 round, it didn’t matter how much you knew about the war, how patriotic or well-trained you were, or if you’d been the honor man at boot camp. The year before, I’d seen a three-ton Humvee blown right off a bridge and into a canal by a pair of 155 rounds that had been flawlessly cemented into the roadway. The Humvee bucked like a startled horse and landed facedown in the filthy water, and two men inside drowned. The rest of us fanned out in a circle, waiting for an ambush that never came. The war happened in collections of seconds, but the memories of it echoed forever.
    I shifted in my seat, the Humvee creaking like an old ship. The houses scrolled by. The occasional eucalyptus, the high gray walls, the mysterious chalk markings written in Arabic. The secret life of Iraq that no outsider could penetrate: the life of street soccer games, mullahs, the names of dead uncles. Moving my head left to right, I could make the image of the street bend and warp in the thick armored glass until it dissolved into blue nothingness at the edge of the window frame. It was like everything in Iraq: your perception of events depended on your angle of vision. Nothing was indisputable in Iraq except death and the heat. I tried to imagine the people who lived in the houses but could not, even though I’d spent months going out on patrols in streets just like this and drinking tea in the same sort of houses we drove past. Even the dogs seemed to view us with suspicion, watching us from under the bellies of burned-out cars as we passed.
    â€œTime,” the soldier next to me was saying. “What the fuck is time in a place like this?”
    His name was Jonah, but everyone called him Reaper, after his radio callsign. He wore a blue bandana that stuck out the back of his helmet, giving him a small ponytail. An American infantry platoon is a haven for characters. Even more than the military in general, it serves as a sort of laboratory for the creation of personalities: court jesters, field preachers, paranoids, grunt magicians, and blessed ne’er-do-wells. Reaper was the platoon philosopher.
    â€œTime,” he said, pausing melodramatically, “time is in the eye of the beholder. I go to sleep in May, I wake up in September. Okay, now it’s September. I go to sleep at nineteen-hundred. I wake up a month later, and it’s nineteen oh-one.”
    â€œHow long has it been this way?” I asked gamely.
    â€œAll day, sir.”
    Time was an issue with Reaper because he, along with the rest of the platoon, had been in Iraq for thirteen months, a virtual eternity in war. How long was thirteen months when even a second in Iraq could lose you in its vast expanse, its limits stretching outward beyond the grasp of imagination? And, as Reaper had explained to me the night before, the entire war was really just a battle between two different kinds of time. In huge swaths of Iraq, people patterned their lives around the ritual predawn prayers, sunup, sundown, spring, and summer. In America, we lived by the tick of the clock, by the drumbeat of capitalism, the forty-hour work week, the binary code of the internet. As if to reinforce his point, when we’d left the patrol base that morning, I’d spotted a plywood board bolted to a concrete barrier that announced the day’s theme, like the subject of a Sunday sermon back home. Painted on the plywood was a simple Godot-like assertion: EVERYDAY IS DAY ONE .
    â€œI think I might be a pacifist, sir.”
    â€œOh, really, how’s that working out for you?” I said.
    â€œOkay, not a