IRAQI SONGBIRDS

We got shipped North out of Basra on Christmas day. "Some present," Gary said. He had been hoping Bush would fly out and deliver us a ham. Instead, we all drove up into the countryside to take care of some business.

Gangs of Iraqi criminals had drilled holes in the oil pipeline up near Amarah, siphoning truckloads of crude and selling them on the black market in Kuwait. The military was angry enough at the lack oil even without the gangs' interference, so we were supposed to stop the bandits.

We traveled up to the Tigris and Euphrates intersection by Amarah. I can't get too specific about the details, but we ended up stationed near a refugee camp outside the Iraqi Marshlands.

We expected the refugees to hate us, like the rest of the country. In Basra, they were rioting and angry, and the sight of an American soldier made them even angrier. But surprisingly, the refugees just a little ways North were very tolerant and even kind of friendly. When we first got here, I was surprised, but Gary told me about how the political dissidents hid out in the marshes, and Saddam Hussein drained them and made them unliveable. That's why the marsh people were forced to live in the camps. They were overjoyed that we'd gotten Hussein out of power.

"It's like if we went to Stalinist Russia, arrested him, and shut down all the castor oil factories," Gary said.

Where we were camped, the ground was sturdy enough, but the real marshlands, which you needed small boats to get around in, were about a mile away. As you went East closer to the marshes, the ground got spongy and wet, and if you stood in one place too long it pooled around your feet and got in your boots.

It had been raining since we arrived. Gary had a deck of waterproof playing cards, and so we spent a lot of time in the tents playing poker or bridge. When Gary got tired of playing cards, he played chess with the refugees from the marshes or took his binoculars and went birdwatching.

We spent probably a couple hours every day patrolling up and down the pipeline looking for gangs of oil thieves, but we never even found any holes. Everyone was under strict gas rationing and so we couldn't spend much time driving around. We spent most of our time at the camp. No one was complaining. We'd rather be there than getting killed in Baghdad or Tikrit or Fallujah, where we'd just spent some time. Most of us had been there at least a year, so we were happy to take some downtime.

It really was a lot like a vacation. I didn't see a single dead Iraqi. I didn't see a single corpse at all, for that matter. I still wore my helmet and body armor, though. No point in taking chances.

The longer we stayed, the more we started to recognize individual refugees. I can't speak Arabic at all, and my phrasebook wasn't any good because they all spoke this weird dialect. Gary was better at language stuff than I was, and so he made friends with some of them and sometimes they even played chess with him. I mostly sat and watched. I suck at chess. I don't have the patience for it.

In March, the birds that had flown away for the winter flew back to the marshlands. They twittered and sang and for a while it felt like I was back in the states.

A day or two after they came back, a kid came out of the marshes. He was pretty young, maybe ten or so. The birds just swarmed around this kid. I'd never seen anything like it. He would walk around the camp and they would be on his shoulders, flying around his head, singing and twittering the whole time. His shirt was covered with birdshit, but he was always smiling this huge smile.

After a few days, I asked Gary to ask someone what the kid's story was. I watched him talk to an old toothless guy. There were lots of hand gestures.

"He says the kid lives in the marshes."

"I thought no one could live in the marshes. The water is too septic."

"Yeah, yeah, but they take him water and food. And he's good at living on what he can find in there."

"What's the story with the birds? Why do they follow him like that?" I asked.

Gary turned back to the refugee and asked him. The refugee said something, his voice strong, and moved his arm horizontally. No.

"That's weird," Gary said. "He won't talk any more about the kid."

"Why not?"

Gary turned back to the refugee and said something. Without a word, the old man got up off the canvas chair and walked away.

"Huh," Gary said, and started gathering up the pieces. "Just as well. I was going to lose."

I started keeping an eye out for the kid. It wasn't very hard; you could always tell whenever he came out of the marshes and into the camp because all of a sudden the tweets and chirps got a lot louder.

The other refugees acted weird whenever the kid was around. Whenever they walked near him, they walked very slowly and kind of bowed their heads. The kid didn't give a damn, though, or if he did he didn't show it. He just kept walking, smiling that smile, birds all over him.

My mom sent me a padded envelope with a letter and three chocolate bars in it. She said that the farm was okay and that my little brother was covering for me. They hoped that I'd be home soon. My dad made a joke about how I'd better go to college on the army's nickel after being over here for so long. I opened up one of the bars of chocolate and it was all misshapen and white like it had melted and re-solidified a couple times, but it still tasted pretty good.

While I was eating it, the birdsong got louder and then a little while later I saw the kid walking towards the camp.

"Hey, kid!" I called out to him, but he didn't seem to hear. "Kid! Hey! Come here!" He still didn't pay me any attention, so I stood up and walked over to where he was and knelt down in front of him. He stopped and looked at me. He had blue eyes.

When the kid stopped, I noticed that all the refugees had stopped whatever they were doing and were staring at us. The kid was looking down at me and smiling. The birds were everywhere.

"Hey, kid," I said. I suddenly felt really stupid. I fumbled the wrapper off of the chocolate bar and handed the rest of it to him. He took it and he had no idea what to do with it, which was weird, because in Basra little kids would run alongside the tanks yelling for chocolate. I mean, you can buy chocolate in Basra; everyone knows what it is.

So I reached up and broke off a piece and ate it, and smiled and went mmm. The kid lifted the chocolate, which was melting all over his hands, and sniffed it, and then all of a sudden the whole thing was gone and he was sucking the melty parts off his fingertips.

He grinned that grin at me, and there was chocolate all over his teeth, and he looked so much like my little brother that I wanted to cry.

I put my hands to my chest and said, "Paul."He didn't do anything so I said, "I'm Paul," and tapped my chest.

The kid opened his mouth. It seemed like there was no sound coming out, so I leaned forward to hear better and realized that bird sounds were coming out of his mouth. He wasn't moving his lips or his tongue or anything, he was just breathing and all these chirps and coos were streaming from his throat. I just knelt there with my mouth open until the kid walked away.

When I walked back to the tent, this guy Aaron was standing there with Gary.

"What was that all about?" Aaron asked.

"Gave him some chocolate," I said.

He was immediately suspicious. "Where'd you get chocolate?"

"Mom sent it to me," I said.

"And you gave it to a little Iraqi bastard?"

I shrugged. "I don't really like chocolate anyway."

Aaron snorted. "Give it to me then." He walked away from the tent.

"Man, that guy's a dick," said Gary.

The next day, when I was walking to the truck to start pipeline patrol, a refugee woman walked up to me.

"Ibrahim," she said.

I looked at her like, what?

She reached out and tapped my chest. "Paul," she said, like poll. She folded her thumbs together and made a flapping motion like a bird. "Ibrahim."

"Ahhh," I said, and nodded.

She stood there for a minute like she was thinking. Then she made the flapping-bird gesture, then bent down and held her hand a little bit above the ground. He is very small. I nodded. She held out her arms and grimaced, lumbering forward. She wrapped her hand into a fist, and then mimed a punch to her throat, then a look of surprise. She opened her mouth again, then mimed a flapping bird landing on her shoulder.

I was slowly nodding through the whole thing.

"C'mon, man," Aaron yelled from behind me. "We gotta go!"

I smiled and waved to the woman, then hopped aboard and we drove off to patrol the pipeline.

we were driving, Aaron asked me what she was saying. "I'm not really positive," I said. "It looked to me like she was saying that the kid with all the birds, when he was really small, someone punched him in the throat. And now when he breathes all that comes out are bird noises. And that's why all the birds flock to him."

"What?" Aaron scrunched up his face. "That's bullshit, man."

"Well, I dunno," I said. "I can't be sure but I think that's what she was saying. And the other day when I got close to him, it did sound to me like birdcalls."

Aaron stared back at the camp from the back of the truck until the tents were specks on the horizon. We patrolled, found neither drill holes nor gangs, and got back to camp as the moon was rising.

The next morning, I woke up to the sound of birdsong and distant gunfire. Gary had already gotten out of his cot and was scrambling for his glasses. I rolled out and lifted up the tent flap. The gunshots were coming from the East. I looked back in at Gary, who was hurriedly getting dressed.

"What do you think it is?" I asked.

"Probably Aaron being an asshole," he said. He lifted up the flap and walked out of the tent.

I pulled on my uniform and ran to catch up with Gary. The closer we got to the marshes, the louder the shots got. There was a flock of birds in the air. When we got closer we saw that Aaron was standing in a skeet shooter's stance below the flock, picking off birds.

Gary took off running at a full sprint when he saw Aaron shooting the birds. "Stop it!  Stop!"

Aaron turned around and lowered his gun. "Hey, guys!" he said. "Just doing a little target practice!"

The ground around him was littered with birds. Some of them were small, like little brown sparrows, more blood and bone than feathers. There were black birds with very long necks and iridescent red feathers. There were little gray birds with black raccoon masks. All the birds were blown to pieces at his feet.

I didn't notice at first, but ten feet in front of him, curled up into a ball and crying, was Ibrahim. The few living birds that were left covered him. I walked over to him and knelt. He was dripping with sweat.

"My good luck charm," Aaron said. "It was better when he was running around. Stupid birds chasing after him. Moving targets. It was a little harder."

"You son of a bitch," Gary said.

Aaron snorted. "Why do you care?"

I picked the little boy. He was crying and shaking in my arms. I started to carry him back to the refugee camp.

"Just throw him back into the marshes," said Aaron. That's when Gary punched him in the face and knocked him down.

We put the kid on a cot and gave him water. His eyes were pretty much all the way rolled back in his head and he kept sweating like crazy.

We decided to take turns keeping an eye on him and sleeping through the night. Gary kept an eye on him and read for a little while, then woke me up and we switched places. At one point I was afraid I would fall asleep, so I decided to walk around the camp for a minute to stay awake. When I came back, Ibrahim was gone from his cot.

I woke Gary. We looked for the kid for hours but he wasn't anywhere on the camp. "I'll bet he went back into the marshes," said Gary.

"Should we go in after him?"

"What, are you crazy? He knows those marshes way better than either of us. If he's gone, he's gone."

He stayed gone, and with him went all of the birds.

It started to get really hot in the camp, and after a few days all of the bird carcasses started to stink and attract lots of insects. Most of the insects could fly, and most of them wanted to sting or bite us. All of Ibrahim's birds, which might have eaten them, were gone.

Aaron got saddled with the duty to gather up all the corpses and burn them. Our CO knew that he had shot them all, and made him clean up his mess. He took a shovel out to where he had massacred them and started to gather them up.

Gary and I took out a couple of portable chairs and thermoses full of water and sat down to watch him.

"Fuck you guys," Aaron said. He started to scoop all the corpses into a pile when he slipped on one of the rotting black birds and toppled backwards. His shovel got tangled up with his legs and made a snapping sound. Aaron collapsed, screaming, into the stinking pile of feathers and maggots.

"I'll get you another shovel," said Gary.

"My leg, you assholes!" screamed Aaron. "I broke my leg!"

Gary and I ran to get a stretcher.

Aaron shipped out back to a hospital in the states the next day. With him gone, the bird clean-up fell onto our shoulders. We trudged out by the marshes and started to gather up all the little clumps of feathers.

"All these birds," I said. "It's too bad."

"You don't know the half of it," said Gary. He reached out to the pile and picked up a small lump of brown feathers. "This was a Basra Reed Warbler. It's endangered. Those little gray ones are Grey Hypocolius, also endangered. That son of a bitch wiped out a sizable chunk of the marshland's bird population."

We waited until the sun had gone down before we doused the pile of birds with gasoline and set it on fire.

The refugees were bitter and silent after Ibrahim fled into the marshlands. They stopped playing chess with Gary, and they stopped smiling at me. We kept patrolling the pipeline fruitlessly. The camp was silent with all the birds gone.

After another week of silence and pointless pipeline searches, we got pulled out of the refugee camp. Some of the guys were going back to Basra, but I had been in Iraq so long that they were finally sending me home.

We broke camp and got everything ready to go. Everyone piled into trucks and the convoy started to drive south. I stared out the back of the truck and saw some of the refugees looking towards the marshes. Something was floating above the reeds at the edge of the marshlands; a swarm of insects, or a flock of birds.

Keith Rutledge is a librarian-in-training living in Houston, Texas. He has never been to Iraq, and he has never been punched in the throat. He likes birds, and his website can be found at www.keef.org.

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