The Deserter
“Tomorrow I’d be sent to the front lines. Then I noticed my missing leg had sent me a letter.”
JULY 16, 2024
I sat in the teahouse, settling back into a chair, to rest a while. All of a sudden, I realized: I’d left my right leg back at the base.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me; all my life, I’d never forgotten my leg anywhere. As I stood up to leave, I shocked the waiter, a dark-skinned Arab man from the south of Iraq.
“You walked!” he shouted.
“Yes, but still!” I said.
“What?”
“I left my right leg back at the base.”
At that, the waiter laughed. “How many years have you been a soldier?”
“Just a couple months.”
“Well, that makes sense. You’ll get used to it.”
I searched the armory high and low but couldn’t find my missing leg. I felt so bereft, I thought I might split in two.
So, lame and limping on my one leg, I made it back to the base. After a while waiting outside our officer’s quarters, they called me in. Out of breath, I saluted our officer and said, “Sir, I’m sorry, I have forgotten my right leg in the training area.”
The officer, irate, bellowed, “Don’t bother me with this shit. Go see your corporal.”
I went to our corporal. I said the same; he did the same: “Go see your sergeant.”
Our sergeant’s full name was Rob M. Blind, but everyone just called him Sergeant Blind. He was as polished a man as you can imagine. He took me to a massive armory, dark and full of human hands and legs, heads and noses and ears, thighs and backs, even fingers, and said, “Have a look.”
I searched the armory high and low but couldn’t find my missing leg. I felt so bereft, I thought I might split in two. “What now?” I asked.
“You must not have left it in the training area,” he said.
“No. This afternoon, before we began training, I had it.”
“No,” he insisted sternly, “you didn’t leave it on the base.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Don’t lie. You must have lost it somewhere else.”
Locking the armory, he said, “Go home for the night. Tomorrow, we’ll track it down.”
Tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, I searched and found no trace of it. And so, for nine days, I reported for duty, looked for my leg and refused to choose a stranger’s. On the tenth day, they said, “In southern Iraq, we’re fighting off our enemy’s new major offensive; you deploy tomorrow.”
“But I can’t go. I don’t have a right leg.”
“Never mind. We’ll get you a leg.”
Sergeant Blind came with me once again to the dark armory. He pulled a leg out from among a heap of human hands and legs and chests and thighs. He handed it to me and said, “Here! Try it on.”
I tried the leg on. It was so short. I said, “This leg isn’t for me, sir! It’s too short.”
He got out another leg, dark-skinned, long, and hairy. He handed it to me, saying, “How’s this one?”
I glanced at it. “Sir, this leg is entirely too long, it won’t fit me.”
This time he hauled out another leg — bloodied and riddled with bullet holes — that had rotted black. “Here,” he said, “This one!”
Hoping to use my missing leg as an excuse to keep me from the trenches, I said, “Sir! This leg is rank and perforated with bullet holes.”
At this, the sergeant finally lost his temper. He plucked his own head off his shoulders, slammed it down on the table in front of him, and said, “Look! Me, even my head is not my own. But tomorrow, like you, I must report to the trenches.’’
Then he grabbed his head and shoved it back in place. He elaborated, aggravated, and angered, “You’re only missing your right leg, yet in war, you see only conscription, not service.”
Taking in his diatribe, I felt for the sergeant. I suddenly couldn’t bear to face him. I didn’t know what to say. He continued, complaining as if to a friend, and I found myself listening intently, “All you Kurds are like this. Always holding yourself apart from us Arabs.”
His words made me blush. In my gut, I knew: It was shame to let him think I was using my missing leg as an excuse to avoid battle, to let him perceive Kurds as cowards, to let him believe we fear fighting. So I said, “Sir, take heart!” I forced myself to hold out my hand for a leg. “Forget it. Just give me a leg!”
Tomorrow I’d be sent to the front lines. Then I noticed my missing leg had sent me a letter.
“Which one?”
“Any one.”
When I got home, I went to pack my clothes and gear. Tomorrow I’d be sent to the front lines. Then I noticed my missing leg had sent me a letter. Bewildered and so happy I was downright giddy, I opened the letter.
My missing right leg wrote that some days ago, in the city’s bazaar, police asked him for id; because he was unable to produce any papers, the cops thought him a deserter and decided, since he was a deserting Kurd, they would send him straight to the front lines. He seized his chance to evade custody, fled the cops, and lost them, dodging and racing through the bazaar. He didn’t stop until he got to Baghdad where he obtained a fake ID, went to the Kindi Terminal and then, by bus, returned to Hawler.
My missing right leg, with his hurried letter, shocked me, body and soul. I wondered how my lone, hamstrung leg had such courage, how he had gotten himself back to Hawler. Most shocking of all: In the letter, my leg asked me to desert, as he had, and join him back in Hawler. In a cramped, unruly hand, he wrote: “I’m begging: Come back. I can’t live without you. As soon as possible, desert and come back to Hawler! Together, here, we’ll figure something out: We can go to Iran or Turkey, and from there we can reach Europe. From then on, together, in Europe, we’ll live well, we’ll finally be content . . . ”
Come back . . . as soon as possible . . . I can’t live without you . . .
The letter’s words reverberated inside my skull.
A cold sweat gripped my entire body. I sat in my room, head as heavy as if two skulls hung in my hands, legions of weary thoughts tramping around inside my mind.
Come back . . . as soon as possible . . . we can reach Europe!
I kept thinking; I, my soul, my head, my very skull were all beyond tired, too tired to desert, to have the courage to go through Turkey and from there make it to Europe. I, with my brief twenty-nine years, I had this thought: “So, maybe I’ll lose my life and future in this disastrous, absurd war, but why risk them on some other barren gambit of inevitable grief?” I sat down on a chair in my room, took out a paper and pen, and started writing a letter to my lovely right leg. My heart heavy with desire, melancholy, and nostalgia, my eyes blurred with tears, I wrote:
“O, my lovely right leg! Forgive me; my soul is spent. Perhaps you know this well: I constantly desert my own life and any sense of the future. Always, I desert myself. I have run out of courage. I can’t enjoy life’s delights or beauty anymore, not at home, not in Europe. My generation and I — desperate, ill-fated youth — we are the sacrifice of our time, the sacrifice that these idiots and asses we call leaders today make to the filthy gods of war. I’m just so tired, so very, very tired. If you do take off for Europe, go, Godspeed! I wish youonly the best and every happiness . . . ”
This is an excerpt from The Potato Eaters published by Deep Vellum.
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
