Wars often end with an iconic image—Lee and Grant at Appomattox Court House, the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, a helicopter lifting off of the C.I.A. station’s roof in Saigon. With the Iraq War flaring up again, I’ve found myself looking at the photo that marked its beginning, for me, and wondering whether another photo might mark its end.
The picture that I have from the war’s start was taken in late May, 2003, on the day I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. It shows me with my friend and mentor Douglas Zembiec, the Marine major who ran my special-operations training. The two of us are in Boston, standing on the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the U.S. Navy. We’re wearing our dress blues, with their antiquated high collars and brass buttons. Doug has just pinned my bars on my epaulettes. We’re both smiling. I look proud; he looks proud of me.
The photo was taken just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq had concluded. We’d missed the initial combat, but within the next eighteen months Doug would fight in the First Battle of Fallujah and I would fight in the Second. Both of us would be wounded. Doug was decorated for his valor, and a much-circulated profile of him ran in the Los Angeles Times, headlined “The Unapologetic Warrior.” When he was asked about the intense fighting he’d seen in April, 2004, he replied with characteristic bombast. “I’ve told [my troops] that killing is not wrong if it’s for a purpose, if it’s to keep your nation free or to protect your buddy,” he said. “One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy.” Doug often said things like that, and he believed them. I’d anchored myself in his mentorship because of his unshakable faith in being a Marine. Combat made more sense when you held to those kinds of precepts, and when they felt true.
Doug returned from Iraq to Camp Pendleton, California, that fall. While he was home, his first child, a daughter, was born. He was eventually detailed to the C.I.A., which deployed him to Baghdad as an adviser to an Iraqi counterterrorism unit. The Quds Force, a special-forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, was extremely active in Iraq at the time, providing guidance and equipment to the Shiite insurgency there. The head of the Quds Force, General Qassem Suleimani, was orchestrating a proxy war against the U.S. and Iraqi governments using several Shiite militias as surrogates.
On the night of May 11, 2007, Doug led an Iraqi squad on a raid against the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia operating in Sadr City. As he went down an alley, with several soldiers behind him, he was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire and instantly killed. The Iraqi soldiers evacuated his body, calling over the radio, “five wounded and one martyred.”
The word “martyred” implies sacrifice for a purpose; it recalls for me Doug’s words in the Los Angeles Times. Accounts from that night describe Doug spotting militia fighters as they set up a machine gun, then pushing several of his men out of the way, saving their lives. For years, when I remembered Doug, his act had seemed purpose enough, and the Marine Corps honored him for the sacrifice, too. His funeral, at the Naval Academy Chapel, in Annapolis, was Homeric in scale, and the Corps named buildings and awards after him. At Baghdad International Airport, in 2008, General David Petraeus, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq at the time, dedicated a helicopter landing zone to him.
I’ve often felt the urge, looking at the picture of the two of us from 2003, to pair it with another one, as if to bookend the war and that time in my life. If, during a time when wars seem to lack a defined end, I couldn’t have Lee at Appomattox or a surrender on the deck of a battleship, I’d make some separate peace. Two weeks ago, I saw the photo I was after.
This picture, which appears to have been first posted online by Digital Resistance, an alternative-news Web site, was taken outside of Amerli, a city in northern Iraq. After spending more than a month under siege by Sunni fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Kurdish peshmerga soldiers and Iranian-backed Shiite militias, such as the Badr Corps and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, had liberated the city with the aid of U.S. air strikes. In the center of the frame, wearing brown pants, a beige baseball cap, and a keffiyeh, stood a man I recognized as Suleimani. He wasn’t quite smiling, but he looked pleased. Flanking him was an unidentified Iraqi soldier wearing a green T-shirt with “ARMY” printed on it and carrying an American-issue M-4 carbine rifle slung across his chest. With their Iranian advisers and matériel, and even some surveillance drones launched from Baghdad International Airport, the Shiite militias had achieved a significant victory in Amerli.
When I look at the photo, I can’t help but think that Suleimani would recognize the irony that his victory was due in part to the very U.S. air power that his surrogates had once dodged in Sadr City, where Doug was killed. I doubt he would be aware of a further irony—that his surveillance drones were taking off right next to Zembiec Landing Zone. Given that America’s wars are no longer punctuated by clear declarations of victory or defeat, the photo seemed an appropriate bookend to my memory of the conflict in Iraq. With American planes once again flying sorties there, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff speculating about the deployment of ground troops, it may also mark, for someone else, a beginning.
