One September Morning by Rosalind Noonan Page B

files stored in the thumb-size drive that he shared with his brother. All of Noah’s files are titled with the initials NS, while John’s begin with JS.
    Got ’em. Noah’s nostrils flare as he savors the victory. They had taken away John’s physical possessions, but he had access to his brother’s written legacy.
    The need to view these files swelled inside him as he was scrubbing blood from his combat boots, worrying about the army’s wiping all memory and details of his brother clean. His brother’s body was barely cold when Colonel Waters’s goons were already in the quarters, confiscating John’s possessions, taking his photo of Abby, his letters from Ma. Christ, they even took the bottle opener Maddy gave him with the personalized “J-Dawg” nametag she’d made for him. The army’s voracious claim over all-things-John heightened Noah’s sense of loss and injustice. He wanted to tear John’s journal out of the M.P.’s hands, but then reason descended upon him.
    You may own his body, his possessions, Noah thought, but you cannot own his thoughts. And John’s rational arguments for peace would not be articulated in the chicken scratch of his journal; the polished debates would be on the computer.
    They could hold John up as a hero, but in reality he was a vocal opponent of the way this war developed, an adversary of violence, an advocate of peace. Noah knows his brother wrote extensively to this effect, and he wants to have a copy of John’s writings—no matter how polished or rough they might be—so that no one can remake his brother into a dutiful soldier who followed blindly. He opens one of John’s files and finds a journal entry that might also be considered a call for peace.
    I spoke at length to a man in the marketplace today. He doesn’t understand why the American soldiers are here, and I had to agree with him. I told him we’d come to free the Iraqi people from the rule of a tyrant, but he told me things were much better before we came. The women and children are afraid to leave their homes, fearful of the big American soldiers. And since the Americans arrived, the people have no electricity, no water, no gasoline. “When will you be going?” he asked me.
    Of course, I had no answer. When will we leave these people to rebuild their society the way they want it? Yes, things are chaotic here, but conflicts among the Sunni and the Shiite Muslims and the Kurds predate Saddam Hussein. Our armed forces will never have the power to bludgeon these people into peace.
     
    John should have told Noah what to do with his essays, but then no one had ever guessed things could turn out this way. They’d had such high hopes when they’d signed up. To end terrorism by fighting Osama Bin Laden’s terrorists. To maintain peace by defusing Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
    Only they got to this desert to find that there were no WMDs, only mortar rounds exploding in marketplaces and schools, homes and city streets. He and John came to stop death but landed in a world of fireballs and shrapnel and screams.
    More death than Noah had ever imagined.
    It wasn’t supposed to be this way; John wasn’t supposed to die. He wasn’t supposed to cut out and leave Noah alone here, fighting in a war he had never believed in.
    Contempt burns in the back of Noah’s throat, contempt for the unseen war planners in the top brass, the strategists sitting in a command center somewhere who send down futile, meaningless orders for guys like him. Mission objective: break down doors of dark homes and apprehend insurgents. But no one tells you what an insurgent looks like, and no one can prepare you for the frightened faces of women and children huddled in windowless rooms, their eyes glowing in the green illumination of your NOD.
    Or there’s always the order to “secure the perimeter,” another useless request.
    “Orders from Oz,” John always used to joke. “The wizard wants us to reclaim the city