HUGH MARTIN is the author of the poetry collections In Country and The Stick Soldiers. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, GQ, and The Sun. He teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
In Jalawla, in eastern Iraq, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was an occupying American soldier, and the Iraqis watched me very closely. They watched all of us very closely. Whenever anyone in our platoon did something stupid, the Iraqis would laugh, while often trying to hide their amusement. On a summer day in 2004, their laughter came after we tried to kill a small black dog. This stray had made a kind of home in the shady brush near the Iraqi National Guard (ING) headquarters in Jalawla. When our platoons stopped there every day, our soldiers would feed and pet it. Stray dogs were everywhere. They wandered the streets, the desert hills. Many Iraqis we knew viewed them as unclean, nothing more than annoying pests that carried diseases. On multiple patrols, I watched Iraqi soldiers stand in pickup beds and throw rocks at dogs barking along the road. I remember feeling uneasy about it: sure, I wanted any vicious, dangerous dogs to get out of the way, but I alsobeing a typical American cynophile—didn’t want the dogs to get hurt. To worry, self-consciously, about the well-being of Iraq’s dogs was also a source of selfassurance: I’m such a good person.
We American soldiers rarely expressed anything but superiority to the Iraqi soldiers we dealt with. Yes, at least according to our mission, we were there to train them, but our general attitude toward the Iraqis was a mixture of condescension, prejudice, and hubris. Oddly, I felt this hubris most acutely at our worst moments, when we did something dumb enough to elicit Iraqi laughter. One day on a foot patrol, a tall guy in our platoon tripped and fell. He’d been carrying his M16, a pistol holstered on his leg, a shotgun slung across his back. When he went down, it sounded like someone had dropped a dozen cast-iron skillets across the pavement. I remember the Iraqis, including some children, poking their smiling heads out of windows or over courtyard walls to observe the disaster. I can only imagine their joy at seeing that an American soldier couldn’t even walk safely down a street. “Every white man’s life in the East,” George Orwell characterized his sendee in the Imperial Police Force in
