Rehan

I see here waking and sleeping. Her smile takes the place of every piece of pain and each misstep I have made here. The image alone forgives and becomes more than forgiveness; it is reason in print; the meaning of everything for everyone. Rehan has become for me all of that. In Al-Hillah we lived at the gate to the ruins of Babylon. Our team went out every day for operational and administrative missions, and Rehan’s family lived just outside the gate guarded by anxious Marines. We first met her on top of an empty ziggurat; we were coming back from town and just decided to finally drive up and see what was there. When we got to the top she was there with her brother, and they had run up the side of the four hundred foot man-made mountain just to see us. The children spoke to us through our translator. They just wanted some cookies from our MRE’s. We gave them what we had and asked them if they wanted a ride down the hill in our humvees; Rehan sat on SSG Otero’s lap and ate her cookie on the way down. At the bottom of the hill we drove through the axle deep moon dust out onto the paved road, where we let Rehan and her brother out to go home. She ran across the road and brought her big sister (photo) who begged us through our translator to come to her house for dinner. We agreed to come back the next day.

On the next trip past Rehan’s house we saw her sister outside and stopped to say hi. She ran to the house and brought out her mother and father. They asked us to come that evening for a chicken dinner. We can’t stay out after dark so made plans to come back the next day for lunch. Rehan jumped up into SSG Otero’s lap and the smile on her face and Otero sitting there like the displaced father for all of us and the light in her face and the camera in my hand went off like an anti-depression grenade piercing our body armor and mending our hearts with nothing but the image of that smiling happy innocent child of everyone’s dream which fixed and transfixed us; killed us and baptized us and we came up out of the water the next day at their house for lunch.

She became for me all of this; the good, the bad, the hard, the soft, the heat and wind smoking our cigarettes for us; she was Iraq. She was (and is) what keeps me from the slow spiral down into the depression that could grip anyone here if they really thought about the job we have to do. It’s nothing, really. Just turn around a country which runs on fear like a train down a hill on greased track. Just grab on and stop it; turn it around in the right direction; push it up the hill to the switch and set everything right.

Rehan’s million-kilowatt smile turns me into superman; I grab onto the train of life here, put my head down, and push. We all do. Everybody has there own reason. My reason is Rehan.

©Tom Kinton, 2003