It was a small, dusty town of no more than ten thousand people, set on the banks of the Euphrates River. Close to al-Habbaniyah, there was a village named Khaldia. In this book, when I write about events in al-Habbaniyah, I mean the area including it and Khaldia. We spent the next six weeks there raiding houses and patrolling streets and guarding munitions depots as well as our own compound. The Bible says that the Euphrates River was one of four flowing out of the Garden of Eden. I wish we had found peace by the calm waters bordering the town, but by this time tensions in Iraq had escalated so much that we were under regular attack from fighters we could never see. As a group of soldiers, if we stopped in any one place and stayed more than twenty minutes, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades would start raining on us. When I found myself alive at the end of a dangerous day, I sometimes imagined that, just like a cat, I had been granted nine lives.
What do You think about The Deserter's Tale (2012)?
