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had just brought Kauzlarich an orange soda when from the TV there came some kind of roar.
    “Tomorrow, you’re going to begin doing clearance operations?” Kauzlarich asked, ignoring the sound.
    “Yes,” said the Iraqi, shifting his eyes from Kauzlarich to the TV, where a movie was playing that showed American soldiers being shot.
    “What is your personal assessment of the attitude of the Iraqi people in Baghdad al-Jadida?” Kauzlarich continued.
    “Most of the people are from Sadr City,” the Iraqi said, as blood spurted in slow motion, guns blazed in slow motion, and the actor Mel Gibson moved in slow motion. “Every time the Americans put pressure on Sadr City, they run here.”
    “What area do you think we should clear next?” Kauzlarich asked, shifting his attention to the TV, too, and then falling silent as he realized the movie was about a famous battle in the Vietnam War that had taken place just a few weeks after he had been born. In so many ways, that was the war that had made him want to be a soldier in this war. It had been the background scenery of his childhood from the day he was born, on October 28, 1965, when the number of dead American troops was at 1,387, to the end of the war in April 1975, when 58,000 were dead and he was nine and a half years old and thinking he would like to be in the army. It wasn’t the deaths or politics that had affected him, but rather a boy’s romanticized visions of courage and duty, especially the scenes he had watched on TV of released POWs in the embrace of weeping families. But even more than those scenes was the Battle of Ia Drang, which began when an outnumbered army battalion was airdropped into the midst of two thousand North Vietnamese soldiers and ended up in a face-to-face fight to the death. Years later, in the army now and studying the mistakes of Vietnam, Kauzlarich had also studied the heroics of Ia Drang, and when the battle was memorialized in a book called We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young, he had a copy of it in hand when he one day met the commander of the battalion, Hal Moore, and asked him for advice. “Trust your instincts,” Moore had scribbled in the book. Ever since, Kauzlarich had tried to do just that, and now, how strange, here he was: a battalion commander just as Moore had been, in Iraq watching the movie version of the book about the battle that had helped turn him into what he had become.
    “This is one of my favorite movies,” he said to the Iraqi.
    “I like the way they fight,” the Iraqi said.
    “That’s how I fight,” Kauzlarich said.
    “What’s the name of the actor?” the Iraqi said.
    “That’s Mel Gibson,” Kauzlarich said.
    “He acts like a leader,” the Iraqi said.
    Now neither said anything, just watched until Gibson, the battle over, said inconsolably, “I’ll never forgive myself—that my men died, and I didn’t.”
    “Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said.
    “He’s very sad,” Kauzlarich said.
    “Tsk tsk,” the Iraqi said again.
    “He was the first guy to tell me to trust my instincts,” Kauzlarich said. “Hal Moore.”
    The Iraqi got up and returned with a vanilla ice-cream cone that Kauzlarich began licking as Gibson, home now, fell into the arms of his wife—at which point the electricity went out, the TV went dead, and the movie came to a sudden end.
    “Whoops,” Kauzlarich said.
    Both waited in vain for the electricity to come back.
    “So, how are we going to fix this?” Kauzlarich said, meaning the war.
    The Iraqi continued to look at the TV and shrugged.
    “How are we going to get this to stop?” Kauzlarich tried again.
    “We need God’s help,” the Iraqi said, and Kauzlarich nodded, finished his ice-cream cone, and after a while excused himself to return to the FOB.
    Hours later, as the sun set, the sky took on its nightly ominous feel. The moon, not quite full, rose dented and misshapen, and the aerostat, a gray shadow now rather than the bright white balloon it had been in