© Copyright 2011 Lydia Nyx
In the summer of 2007 I shot an Iraqi insurgent on a stony, narrow road in Rashad, near a small farming village surrounded by arid sesame fields. He died. This was my job. He was also going to shoot me, and did, in the leg. The wound was barely superficial and I was back in action a week later. His fellow insurgents left his body to decompose quickly to sun-bleached bones in the simmering heat, no doubt fearful of crossing our patrols again. We didn’t move or bury him, because it wasn’t our job.
That’s where this story begins.
Really though, it began five months earlier, when I was a fresh new soldier just out of basic training—Private Cole Kessler, U.S. Army—when I stepped off a plane in Baghdad, chomping at the bit for an idea of freedom fed to me by men I had never met. I met Siraj Yahya two days later during a briefing at our base. I didn’t know what he was when I met him. I didn’t know where he came from. He looked like all the other dark eyed, dark haired, dusky men I’d seen in the streets, except he smiled at me and spoke perfect English with barely an accent.
Meeting Siraj was the real beginning.
Siraj was an American-born Iraqi. His parents had immigrated to Chicago a year before he was born, to escape the Iran-Iraq War. Though he grew up in a Shia Muslim household steeped in his parents’ culture, he also immersed himself in the American ideal of exposing and battling oppression. After going to college to study journalism, he landed a job with a newswire but aspired to be an international correspondent. He got his wish after 9/11.
With the situation so volatile in Iraq, the Iraqi people didn’t take kindly to journalists, correspondents, reporters, or whatever they liked to call themselves, especially not foreign ones. Siraj had an advantage, however; he was Iraqi and spoke fluent Arabic. He could blend in and easily hide his true purpose.
It took me several weeks to find out the intimate details of Siraj’s life. He was at my base a lot during that period, observing what it was like to be an American soldier in a hostile land. Six days of the month I had to take my turn at one of the outposts in Rashad and he came with me on my second rotation. I learned about his family back in Chicago. He had a sister three years younger than him. He got along well with his father but his mother didn’t approve of him putting himself in danger in Iraq. I also learned he smoked but he’d quit so he could breathe easier in the scorching climate. He didn’t like most traditional Iraqi food. His friends called him Ya.
Before I experienced Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the U.S. military, my life growing up in East Texas, with conservative parents and two brothers gone to the armed forces before me, was already Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I knew about my leanings from a young age. I also knew how to hide my true self. I couldn’t say why I decided to drop the act in the midst of a homophobic army, with a Muslim man, in a land where I could be executed for it.