Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War by Megan K. Stack

up the rose gardens to make room for the nameless dead, and tacked a list of identified corpses to the door. Families crowded forth, looking for missing sons, for young army recruits who’d gone off to do their duty in the twilight hours of a cracked and collapsing regime. Some had been killed. Some were taken prisoner. There were no cell phones, no landlines—no way to know anything. The Iraqis could only drag themselves around the city, find one person after the next, and ask. We were all stripped of technology, reduced to our ancient selves, to faces found and words spoken in person.
    A man stopped me at the gate. He had driven with his brothers all the way from the southern city of Karbala. His eyes were rimmed with red, his mustache sagged. They were looking for their twenty-nine-year-old brother, who had deserted the army in southern Iraq and caught a ride to Baghdad with a buddy. His brother talked to me slowly, carefully, staring into my face as if I might conjure the truth if only he got all the details straight.
    “My brother was seen somewhere around Baghdad on the fifth or seventh, but he never returned home,” he said quietly. “If he was a prisoner, where would he be?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “God willing he’s a prisoner of war, rather than a dead body,” the man muttered. His eyes skimmed on, probing the hospital yard. The three brothers spread out, moved slowly around the fresh mounds,stepped around the empty holes, squatted to read the descriptions tacked up on stakes. If this were still a garden, the hand-scrawled placards would list a variety of rose or thyme. Instead, the cards announced the kind of body that had been planted:
    “Republican Guard,” one of them read. “Tattoos on hand: ‘Ahmed, you are my brother,’ ‘You’re my life, Haidar.’”
    “Unknown soldier. White trousers and brown checked shirt.”
    “Girl, 2–3 years. Wearing yellow and red dress, white vest.”
    The bodies came and went fast. At first the staff had segregated the Muslims from the Christians; the Iraqis from the other Arabs. But it had gotten too complicated; by now, the dead were jumbled.
    A group of men hoisted a body into a crude wooden crate and headed for the road with the makeshift coffin on their shoulders. “There is no God but God,” they chanted. Their blank eyes betrayed only fatigue.
    “We try to reduce the fear and shock out of them, to ease the shock when they find the bodies,” one of the volunteers, a slight young man in a white coat, told me. “We don’t break bad news to them right away. We remind them to have some faith, he might be alive. Even if we know he’s dead, we don’t tell them straight off.”
    “That sounds cruel,” I blurted.
    “We are dealing with thousands of families,” he bit off the words. “We couldn’t even walk into the freezers, they were so packed with bodies.”
    The desire to get out of Iraq broke over me like hunger. I felt revolted. The story line of the news reports—a dictator toppled; the hunt for weapons of mass destruction; the officials in Washington wearing suits and uniforms and congratulating themselves on Operation Enduring Freedom—what did any of that have to do with the waste of these families, trawling in the chaos for one particular person? The invasion was a nasty, impersonal force, and people had been walloped. And me, pretending I could encapsulate it all in a few paragraphs, grabbing a quote from this victim or that, scribbling scraps of description.
    The families were still coming, pushing for a better look at the handwritten inventory:
    “Man wearing khaki trousers and shirt.”
    “Age 50–60. Balding.”
    “Wristwatch in reception for identification.”
    The driver swerved through the clots of Baghdad traffic, pressing toward the Catholic church. Sunday is a working day in Muslim countries, and the streets clanged with heat, dust, and machines. But this was Easter Sunday, and I was going to Mass. I stepped into