The first finder or finders of this letter are kindly requested to deliver its contents in whatever way possible to the family of "Saad Abd al-Jabbar,” a member of the 23rd Battalion of the Special Republican Guard Forces of Iraq; the letter is from the forces under control of the Third Army of Basra.

Esteemed Family of Soldier Saad:

Greetings,

I don’t know whether writing and sending this letter is the right thing to do or even proper under the circumstances; but whatever the case, it seemed necessary in my view to write the letter and entrust it to your son, and in this unorthodox way have it reach you.  The letter is about the mysterious circumstances under which I became acquainted with your son.  Eleven years have passed, and this odd acquaintance of ours has to be explained somehow to you; I feel compelled, then, in order to eliminate any doubt or misunderstanding on your part as regards the lamentable incident, to write you an exact and detailed account of how your son and I met and the facts surrounding our meeting.

Right now your son Saad is beside me and no doubt is waiting for me to finish the letter so he can be the bearer of the facts to you.

This is the last time we will see each other, and certainly it will be our last goodbye!  I know that it would be best to be brief and get to the point.

The incident began around ten years ago: the morning of 28 September 1981, to be exact.  That was the first time I saw your son.  During the morning of that day, I was returning from the banks of the Karun River to our back lines.  Major operations had taken place in the sector the night before.  The operations were intended to break the siege of our city.  By morning we had fought our way to the area around the river. 

This was the first time during the one-year siege of the city that our forces were able to recapture that sector.  Delighted to take part in these pivotal operations and wanting to make a record of my participation, I had brought with me an expensive camera, but the intensity of the fighting prevented me from using it.

Until this moment everything that could have happened took place as they did in other operations; under the leaden skies of pre-dawn, fresh forces took the place of the tired fighters and everyone but me took advantage of the cover of night to return.  I had the urge to tour the newly liberated areas to see what had befallen the region.  Having by-passed the minefield, I came upon the road made with packed sand that the Iraqis had constructed to join up with the asphalt road.  I followed the sand road until it came to the intersection of the two roads.  I was now face to face with the causeway that I had been longing to reach for a year, so I could use it to go on leave.

The road still hadn’t been cleared of mines, booby traps, and barbed wire; nevertheless it was like a freeway to me.

I have a clear recollection that the sun was rising as I walked along the thoroughfare.  I shouted for joy a few times and, without paying attention to the surroundings, started to prance around, waving my weapon ecstatically. I was very happy.  I was sixteen at the time, about two years younger than your son the first time we met.

This marked the beginning of the actual incident.  I didn’t know what had hit me, but for a moment I turned and was suddenly stunned, and, without thinking, I took a defensive position, diving quickly to the ground.  I must admit I was terrified; I realized that the whole time I was walking along the asphalt road, an Iraqi soldier had been sitting there, watching me from behind, and I had been completely unaware of him.

In less than a second, I scrambled behind the raised shoulder of the road and released the safety on my weapon.  All the while I was wondering why he hadn’t taken aim at me from his position.  This was the context for the consoling thought that he was totally alone having been left behind by his own troops in the newly liberated territory and now wanted to surrender.

The sum of these thoughts gave me the nerve to try to out-flank him.  After hesitating briefly, I ran to the other side of the hill and was about to shout “Hands up!” in Persian.  Now that you have the letter, of course, everything will be somewhat obvious.

That’s right: I came face to face with your son’s corpse, which had been put on the ground in a kneeling position; his neck and both wrists had been tied from behind to the signpost marking the crossroads with the kind of telephone wire used in the desert.  There was a pool of blood by his feet.

It was at this point that the weapon went limp in my hands; as I got closer I noticed that someone had tied your son to the post so that the wounds on his neck and wrists would be displayed in the most horrible way possible. After the shock of seeing him like that had worn off, I began to hear the sounds of the exploding shells and mortar rounds that rained down steadily on our sector.

I looked at his innocent face; his eyes were wide open and he had a startled expression.  I don’t know why it occurred to me to take a picture of your son’s face, but I took it.  Maybe it was just because I wanted to use the camera. As I was putting the camera back in my pack, the sound of explosions receded into the distance as did the barking of the stray dogs behind the Baathist lines; these dogs generally would whine every night in anticipation of the operations.  This made me wonder what would happen to your son’s corpse if it remained out there without burial.

I looked into your son’s open eyes, and, to escape a nagging conscience, I said to him, “I know, but I swear to God if I had a shovel I would definitely bury you”—just like anybody else who finds an excuse for not doing something.

Then I started moving, trying to escape the explosions, which were increasing by the minute.  You wouldn’t believe it, but I hadn’t gone a hundred meters when I saw a large shovel handle sticking out of a pile of dirt next to a bunker!  I stopped for a moment deeply conflicted, but, having made an solemn promise to your son, I had no choice.  I reluctantly yanked the shovel out of the ground and returned to the place where he was.  Raising the shovel, I said, “Here it is,” and began digging a hole in front of him, digging so close to his body that blood near it began to trickle into the hole.  As I dug, I kept one eye on your son and one eye on the stream of blood, and moved the shovel around so that my boots would not get bloodstained.  I also began to con-verse with your son, but to keep this letter short I won’t set down everything we said in it; besides the subjects are no doubt unworthy of your consideration.

Briefly then: when the job was nearly over, it occurred to me to wonder—given my short career as a gravedigger—whether I had oriented the grave properly, that is according to the direction of prayer or not.  But suddenly there was this immense explosion and the next thing I knew I was laying in the grave with your son Saad on top of me.  I must admit that I was so terrified that it beggars description.  Here I was in a sector without any of our troops in it, in a grave face to face with a corpse.   I used all my might to push your son away and climb out of the grave.  I realized that the explosion had been from behind and had thrown your son on top of me.  When I looked more closely, I noticed that there was a stream of fresh blood flowing down his overcoat, and I realized that he had taken several pieces of shrapnel in the head.  He had been positioned precisely between me and the explosion or, to put it more directly, between me and death.

It was at this point that my affection for your son increased several times over.  I quickly finished digging the grave and was about to put Saad in it, when I it occurred to me that I shouldn’t allow the earth to touch his face; so I took off his long coat and wrapped his head in it.  As I was doing so, I noticed that four spent cartridges had been inserted into his mouth, but there was no time to waste. Having wound his head in the coat, I found his ID card and a letter in his pocket.  There was nothing else in the pocket.  I untied his hands and began to shovel dirt on him.  But as I shoveled it occurred to me that this alien being, who was far from his family,would be buried in a grave over which no one would recite the Qor’an; but there was nothing I could do but shovel earth on him.

Anyway, having marked the grave with the signpost, I es-caped as fast as I could.  Later on, during my first leave away from the front, I had the picture I had taken of his face developed, and I put it in my photo album.  From time to time, when leafing through the album, I would think of him as the corpse that had saved my life, and despite the fact that I knew his name was Saad from the ID card, I still thought of him as “the Iraqi soldier.”

Years passed and the incident remained a vague memory in my mind until a minor incident occurred.  I had gotten to know some fellow countrymen whose job it was to exchange the bodies of Iraqi soldiers for those of our own dead.  The exchanges took place on the border between the two countries.  I brought up the subject of Saad with them, and today, as I am writing this, was the day we had arranged for me to show them his grave.

When we were at the site, I realized that the signpost was not a reliable marker of the grave, but the crossroads would be of some help in locating it.  After two attempts, we managed to dig up your son; possibly in the same condition that you will observe him when this letter reaches you.  But the real reason why I writing you this letter, in fact, has nothing to do with these matters, but relates to the discovery we made when we were digging him up.

After the excavators had unwound the overcoat wrapped around his head, they looked at one another knowingly and said, “Another deserter!” “What was that?” I asked.

With the head was completely uncovered, their experience told them that Saad was a deserter because the Iraqis would first execute them, then clamp their jaws shut by inserting four bullets in their teeth to serve as a warning to others.  After I explained the way in which Saad had been kneeling on the ground to them, they said that, before execution, he had definitely been shot in the knees. An examination of his knees confirmed the truth of what they said, which his clothing and flesh had kept hidden from me for eleven years.  I know that you’ll find these details brutally upsetting, especially since they concern your child.  But the effect they have had on my emotions and psychology is no less upsetting to me.  Over the last eleven years, I have traveled that road out of town again and again, and even when I reached the crossroads, it never crossed my mind to say a prayer for your son, for which I hope that God will forgive me.

Because I never had thought I would be composing such a letter as this, I used the back of the forms describing the particulars of the corpse as writing paper.  If I had been prepared, I would have included another letter and the picture that I had taken of your son.  Perhaps what one of the disinterment fellows said is right: that it is better to let the truth remain buried under the ground; that way I would not be the cause of so much pain and suffering to you.  There is also the added risk that the letter might fall into the wrong hands, which would prevent you from even taking possession of your son’s body.  But as you will see I have used an unorthodox method of sending you the letter and thereby decreased, to some extent, the chances that it will be detected.

I have written my address at the bottom of the letter so that you can contact me in any way you see fit, and I’ll send you the picture of Saad and his last letter.  I don’t know how you’ll feel about my hiding the letter in the shattered bone of your son’s leg.  But this method of concealment perhaps might cause the original owners, his superiors, not to notice it, and the letter and Saad will be buried together, preventing the truth from reaching you, his respected family. Am I still conflicted about why I am writing this?  It’s only in these last lines that I will be able to express why.  Ten years ago the thought of writing such a letter would never have crossed my mind; but now that I have a child of my own, I can see that it is the absolute right of every family to know how their child spent his last minutes on earth.

The time for saying my last goodbyes to your son Saad have come.  I know that in the future whenever I leave the city and pass the crossroads, as I stare at his empty grave my heart again will feel that anguish, the familiar ache of an eleven-year acquaintance, which now has but a few hours to go.

The fellows are complaining again about how long I’m taking to write this.  I entrust you and Saad to that same God who caused me to take a different path that day, who allowed me to see Saad and find a shovel, and now to discover an eleven-year-old secret.  And, maybe, that same God will allow this letter to reach you.