Chapter 1: Ur

"What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes?"

— Winston Churchill

"Have the past struggles succeeded? What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature? Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary."

— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

First Position

The sky was vast and featureless, stretching over the terrain below and vanishing into the unseen above, the boundary between barely perceptible. She balanced low to the ground, her seat resting on the heel of one foot, weight settled on the bent knee beneath her. Her other leg stretched into a lunge, forearms resting across both thighs. She held her center of gravity between the two halves of her body—one open, one closed. Her spine stayed straight, holding her head aloft. Eyes scanned the horizon, unconsciously calculating and refining her position. It was a crouched but comfortable stance—one she could hold through a conversation or contemplation. A posture of rest, charged with potential energy, ready to spring into motion.

The air around her was ruddy—not from water or sunlight, but from the grit of constantly shifting desert sand. In the distance, she thought she could just make out Nasiriyah. But like a mirage, it could’ve been conjured by her brain, knowing it lay somewhere beyond. The Euphrates was also out there, only seven miles northeast. That life-giving river had once circled nearer to the temple beneath her feet. Even though she couldn’t see the town or its people, she felt their presence in the semi-frequent, unpredictable-but-expected rocket attacks. Sitting atop the red stones of the pyramid—an ancient and familiar shape across time—she wanted to see the town, to give it structure, to understand it. And so she did: a faint outline on the horizon that might have been real. Nearer to the great temple, built under Ur-Nammu, a Sumerian king who ruled when the nearby river made this land green, she could see farmsteads: courtyards, livestock shelters, vehicles—but no motion. All the structures of life, without life. No children playing soccer, no chickens scratching at the dirt, no voices carrying through the air. Only the wind and the occasional Blackhawk overhead. In this moment, she was alone.

An hour earlier, she had signed out one of the aging Suburbans they were allowed to use on base. It was the only way to visit this place—the City of Ur. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure why she had waited so long. She'd been told Jacob’s ladder began here, and that Father Abraham was born at its base. But she wasn’t sure if any of it was true. As she followed the ruins westward with her gaze—toward the transport base where she was stationed—she had no context for the origin of those stories. Four thousand years ago, this plain looked different. Ur-Nammu’s father-in-law had defeated the Gutians, mountain invaders from the east, who sought to destroy the thousand-year-old Assyrian civilization of canals and agriculture fed by the wetlands here.

The Assyrians had seized control, developing urban centers, administration, and rulers—at the heart of the so-called Cradle of Civilization. The Gutians lived in the rugged Zagros, with no political structure. Family bands, perhaps cohesive enough to be called tribes, had no written language, just one tool of influence: brutality. They used violence to terrorize the Assyrians, disrupt trade, and halt progress, until they swept down in numbers and occupied the lowlands.

But they had no plan beyond looting. Without order, the canals silted in, crops went unplanted, and people starved. Eventually, the people could endure no more. Utu-Heggel, Ur-Nammu’s father-in-law, led the charge to push back the Gutians and returned Mesopotamia to a path of stability and improvement—measured by individual safety and happiness. He died before implementing many of the reforms he may have envisioned. Ur-Nammu carried forward the legacy, building the Ziggurat as an homage to the liberator.

In her few moments of freedom, part of a modern, largely ignorant occupying force, she didn’t know this history. Nor that she owed her daily comforts—writing, cities, government, law—to these Sumerians. She took a few photos from above. One pointed back to the airbase, where the outlines of the ancient village were still traced on the ground. A thin green treeline marked the edge of the original city—likely fed by a seasonal stream. Another shot captured the eastern desert, toward Nasiriyah. She had meant to show its scale, but without reference, the vastness couldn’t be captured by her small camera.

She stood now and let the wind push against her, tugging her trousers tight and pressing her shirt to her body. If she relaxed, it felt like she might be lifted backward, up and away from the pyramid. But she didn’t relax. She started down the stairs, for the first time since leaving base thinking about her return—and considering other options. She could take the same highway the convoys used, those endless trucks hauling supplies from Kuwait to Baghdad. Maybe she could head south, find work with one of the multinational oil firms. There were no real options north. Baghdad and its surroundings weren’t safe. Soon, though she didn’t know it yet, the U.S. would launch The Surge—ushering in an even more dangerous phase. She had no food, no water, no money. She would have to go back.

The black SUV, dusty and old, waited at the Ziggurat’s base. She climbed in, turned the ignition, and saw a Humvee approach—soldiers coming to do what she’d just done. She passed them slowly, reached the road in a few hundred feet, and turned right—back to Talil. Mid-afternoon, the day was quiet. She showed her ID at the gate. The guard lifted the barrier arm. She drove through the maze of fifteen-foot concrete T-walls that shielded housing, gyms, dining halls, and every other sand-colored container needed to fuel a war.

Not ready to return to her office, she turned up the radio and veered left, driving the perimeter before surrendering the keys to her brief escape.

“How You Remind Me,” by Nickelback, played on the radio. She drove with the windows down, singing along.

Routine Impact

The blast of cool air as she opened the door to trailer C-12 shocked away any lingering thought of another place and era. The transition was jolting, but this was the ability to project force in the 21st century. Modular buildings, AC that could shut out the 120-degree heat of the desert, airplane hangar-sized dining facilities known as DFACs with Surf & Turf on Fridays and all variety of fare throughout the week, vector control, and every service of planning and maintenance that would have been familiar in a small town back in the States. Anything and everything a military could need for support and sustenance in a country half a world away. Tallil Air Base, and its counterpart Camp Adder on the other side of the highway, were large truck stops. The Iraq version of Buc-ee’s in Texas, or Wawa in Florida, but in a war zone, set halfway between Kuwait and Baghdad. This was the main land-based logistical supply line of the invasion. Every business, including war, needs a port of entry, which was Kuwait on the Persian Gulf, and like a heart pumping life-giving oxygen, trucks were the blood supply that dispersed all manner of goods to the destinations where they were needed.

"How was Ur?" the blonde woman sitting at the third desk from the door asked without looking up from her computer.

"It was surreal." She kept her response short, even though she wanted to explain that it was transcendent. That it was the kind of place she had learned about as a child in books and descriptions, but that its reality was so much more than what the texts had conveyed. That it was a place that gave her a perspective she never expected and a longing to comprehend some unfathomed reality she couldn’t quite put form to. But instead of explaining the ebullience she felt, she sat down and logged into her own computer. War, as it turned out, was a lot of paperwork.

At the moment, she was working on a contract management clean-up project.

When you move as fast as the US Army and Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) did when they entered Iraq in 2003, you write a profusion of contracts and sign an endless series of agreements. Then everyone forgets the details of who signed what and the specific terms of delivery and payment as the flurry of building and doing proceeds unabated.

The work was not particularly cerebral, but it was a bit of a puzzle to piece together the players and their obligations. She tried to focus on that aspect of the work, as well as learning the legal language that bound the tangible outputs. It reminded her of the first time she read Dickens, or Shakespeare. She thought she understood what they were saying, but she wasn’t quite sure.

It wasn’t the kind of work that the American people and Congress thought about when they considered what was happening here, but it was the reality—the bureaucratic, messy, uninteresting reality.

In 2006 there was no SAP or other enterprise resource planning software to help with organization of the contracts, and Microsoft wouldn’t launch OneDrive, which gave you the ability to manage documents both electronically and in the Cloud, until 2007, with wide adoption following many years later. Entire buildings were filled with three-ring binders of contracts—paper copies, sometimes accompanied by Word or Excel versions for analysis. , sometimes with versions of documents in Word or Excel to support their analysis. Ur used stone tablets and cuneiform to keep track of their goods, sales, and agreements, but she didn’t feel like this system was much better.

As challenging as managing the work of contract analysis was, her relationships with her colleagues were more so. Delineating responsibilities and assignments with the constant rotation of people arriving, departing, taking R&R, and jockeying for position, often meant bruised egos, incomplete efforts, and unpredictably inheriting tasks. Her current struggle was managing delivery of assignments alongside Rhonda, the lady who spoke to her when she entered the building. Rhonda was tall, maybe six feet, with naturally white-blonde hair. She was also substantial, or what might be referred to as corn-fed. Maybe because she was female, with a stature that would intimidate most full-grown men, Rhonda’s personality matched her physique. She didn’t talk a lot, had no desire to work cooperatively, and relied on the fact that her father, who also worked in Tallil, rode roughshod over anyone who irritated her.

"Rhonda," she turned in her chair to face the Nordic genetic benefactor.

"Did you work on that binder yet?"

She made a motion to the X-large black three-ring binder on the cabinet that bordered their desks against the wall.

Rhonda glanced over, "I haven’t touched those but I will do them next." Rhonda looked around until her eyes rested on a different set of binders,

"You can work on those." She nodded her head at the pile of binders on a bookshelf against the wall of the trailer. Before returning to her keyboard, Rhonda looked at her and asked clearly, "It’s nice to walk off base for a few minutes, isn’t it?"

She contemplated whether there was any subtext to the comment and, after determining there wasn’t, answered Rhonda’s query. "Yes it is." It was as close to a personal question as Rhonda had asked her in the three months she had been at Tallil.

Rhonda went back to work, while she grabbed the green binder on top of the bookshelf and turned back to her desk.

When she first arrived, no one had given her any guidance. Someone—though she couldn’t remember who—had given her a vague description of what they did here and what she would be doing. In many ways this was like all government budgeting. The company had to fill slots that had been defined as necessary to fulfill their contractual obligations so that they didn’t risk losing the funding for those positions. Even if bodies weren’t doing much, they had been budgeted in the plan, recruited, and traveled in-country. By the time someone arrives, they might not even be needed anymore, but for the sake of funding you try to find work for them. Systems are innately wasteful; throw an unlimited budget at one and it’s incentivized to be so.

Most people were content to draw a decent paycheck in relative safety—even by war zone standards—and do whatever mundane tasks were asked. For her, though, the newness had worn off. The novelty of being a stranger in a strange land had faded, and now she wanted something to do—something that would challenge her. But for today, she returned to her computer and the stack of contracts in the green binder.

Just as she was settling in, the sirens began to sound. No one had mentioned a drill, so she assumed it was real. She and Rhonda stood calmly, pulling their Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from beneath their desks. Rhonda slipped on her metal-plated vest with ease. In contrast, she struggled to lift the thirty-pound vest and plates over her head. It sat heavy and oversized on her body—far larger than her frame. With the vest on, she placed her helmet atop her head and walked behind Rhonda to the shelter that was next to their building. Everyone else across the base took the same steps.

The cement bunker was lined with KBR employees, mostly quiet, mostly bored. This was a routine they carried out once or twice a week. Fortunately, it was usually in the day and made for a welcome break from the twelve-hour shifts of near nothingness. The coolness of the trailer AC vanished almost immediately, and within minutes she was sweating beneath the heavy vest. She nodded off for a minute. When she roused herself, the siren had stopped, but no one had come to give them the all-clear. Instead, they waited for more than twenty minutes. Rhonda was talking to one of the construction leads about a water line that had to be repaired. Other employees sat quietly, rested, or spoke in hushed tones in groups of two or three. Eventually an Army officer came to the end of the bunker.

"Okay everyone, you're clear to go back to your offices." He moved off as quickly as he appeared.

As they walked out, they could see the cause of their delay. A rocket had hit within about fifty feet of the bunker. It hadn’t exploded. It sat at the bottom of the crater it had carved, but someone had decided it was safe enough—to peer into, and to go back to work. Nasiriyah had their range dialed in today and she wondered if she should be concerned—because she didn’t have the slightest bit of worry or fear. It wasn’t the last close call. There would be much closer. And it wasn’t the last time she would lack a sense of self-preservation.

Undercurrent

Early morning was her favorite time on base. Despite the military’s reputation for early risers, there wasn’t much movement before 6 a.m. KBR shifts were normally 7 to 7, with a half hour buffer to grab breakfast before and dinner after. But she roused herself around 5 each morning so she could be part of the stillness. So that she was the one who disturbed it. She jogged down the main road between the hootches and the runway area alone, the pounding of blood in her ears and her breathing the only sounds she registered. The dust was quietest in the morning too, though the air was never cool. It was thick and hot, even in the dark.

There were a few different gyms on base, and there were several sectors that housed military personnel from other countries. While she was stationed at Tallil, Japanese troops were located to the south. She saw them a few times in the DFAC parking lot—their large red circle unmistakable as both symbol of empire and emblem of civility. Australians were also there, part of the persistent Anglo alliance. If Americans were present, it seemed there would always be Brits and Aussies—if only because that genetic need to fight someone hadn’t yet been bred out of them. Italians were also on base. They were known for having wine, even in a dry theater of war, which made them extremely popular with the others.

Each international zone had its own smaller gym, but KBR employees were permitted access to any U.S. facility. After all, KBR had built them. The main Army gym was larger and more trafficked, so she preferred the Air Force gym, which—true to form—was usually devoid of Air Force personnel. That didn’t mean it was empty. She never saw another KBR worker, but a small, dedicated group of men trained there early every morning. Not many. But enough.

She didn’t know who they were. Only that they were grown men—tall, built, intimidating, and quiet. They worked with intent and didn’t speak much. No grunting, no weight slamming, just focus. And, perhaps most importantly, they didn’t bother her. They didn’t stare. They didn’t posture. They simply let her work. That mattered. Her quiet could persist just a bit longer, even in the company of other people. That wasn’t something easily found—in a war zone or anywhere else.

This morning she entered the gym still soaked from her run, towel in hand. She passed the rows of benches and free weights and continued to the back room with mats for stretching and ab work. She laid down her towel and started: thighs and hamstrings, push-ups and crunches. She had lifted weights since she was young. As an eight-year-old swimmer, she had started using the gym before practice—pull-downs with no weight, light shoulder work. She had grown up around gym equipment.

But she wasn’t particularly strong. Though she stayed in decent shape, she couldn’t do a strict pull-up. She lifted to stay mobile and capable—not to build muscle for the sake of power. Not to move bodies or carry men or equipment through brute strength. That was the domain of the men who trained around her. Their mass was meant for survival in any scenario. They weren’t designed for passive interaction. Theirs was an active role. You could tell by looking at them. They didn’t sit in offices. They didn’t sit in planes. They didn’t sit in command posts.

After her mat work, she walked to the free weights. She always felt a flicker of self-consciousness there, but she swallowed it. She picked up a pair of dumbbells for shoulder presses. She never tried to show off, and in this gym, she was limited by what she could handle. Dumbbells lighter than 15 pounds didn’t exist, so she was always starting at the bottom.

It was an upper body day. That meant bench presses. The rule for men was to bench your own body weight, but she had never come close. Her frame was 135 pounds. The bar alone, 45, was often enough. She started there. It felt easy. She added fives—still easy. She swapped them for tens—still manageable. Another set of tens. Three warm-up sets completed. Feeling bold, she added 25s. That brought her to 95 pounds.

The first set went well—eight reps. She rested a bit longer. The second set was a struggle, but she made seven. On the third, she got to six. Then the bar stalled, six inches off her chest. It wouldn’t move.

A shape stepped in behind her and lifted the bar just enough to help her finish. She was embarrassed but tried to hide it. She sat up, pivoted on the bench, and looked up.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” The dark-haired man smiled slightly. “Everyone needs a spot sometimes.”

He turned to walk back to the squat rack but paused. “I’m Hawk,” he said, a little sheepishly.

She smiled, almost reflexively. “Is that your stripper name?”

His face lit up. “Yeah. Something like that.”

He walked back to his teammates, added another 45-pound plate, and began lifting more weight than his frame suggested possible. He was another version of corn-fed—dense, efficient, built for purpose. None of his teammates laughed or made any of the juvenile comments she’d come to expect from all-male spaces. They all returned to their sets, focused.

She decided she’d done enough. It was a good time to go. She stepped into the dark morning, warm even before sunrise, and headed for her hootch. Light was starting to filter through the eastern sky. Movement was beginning around her, though she still hadn’t crossed paths with another person.

Another day of empire-building—through paperwork, logistics, and the weight of routine. As she opened the door to her trailer, she wondered how Hawk spent his days.

Then she dismissed the thought.

She didn’t think of him again that day.