by Claire Fron
Plastic Boy is at the window again. Late at night when I’m trying to watch TV in my apartment, he sometimes shows up on the patio and taps his thin fingers on the sliding glass door, trying to get my attention. The blueish-green glow of the TV illuminates his face, making the whites of his bulging, unblinking eyes even more prominent. He taps on the glass slowly, softly, and whenever I dare to look over at him, he sticks his tongue out and presses it against the glass like a dog begging to be let inside. As always, I ignore his haunting visage and look back to the television, but I can still see him out of the corner of my eye, watching me.
I first encountered Plastic Boy while out on a four-hour patrol in the middle of Baghdad, Iraq, one hot summer evening in August, 2005. We’d spent several hours rolling through the streets after curfew in up-armored Humvees, blasting the interior of the vehicle with crappy air conditioning and music from a portable radio/CD player that someone had brought along for the ride. “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees, “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers, and a slew of songs by AC/DC were the evening’s soundtrack of choice.
Three hours into the uneventful patrol, it was time for a break. We pulled the three Humvees to the curb in a designated safe zone, a part of the city that had been and was continually cleared of hostile forces. The U.S. military had “won the hearts and minds” of the locals in this area, and they were thus, in theory, on “our side.” Mayda’s Ice Cream shop was located on one of the streets within the safe zone and was popular with both the locals and occupying forces alike. It was also one of the few ice cream shops in the area that was still open at 1a.m.
There was a small gathering of five local men outside the shop as we exited the vehicles. Some of the men recognized some of the U.S. soldiers in our patrol and gave polite nods, but as their eyes shifted over to me and my battle buddy, Seargeant Kritikos, as we removed our Kevlar helmets, they simply stared. Sergeant Kritikos and I did not take offence to this; we could be one of the few if not the first female U.S. soldiers these men had ever seen in person.
Sergeant Kritikos and I weren’t supposed to be here. Our commander didn’t even know we were here, outside the wire in the middle of Baghdad on a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) patrol, playing “Army guys” like children, only the war was real. Sergeant Kritikos and I were part of a U.S. Army postal operations unit, and we’d been cooped up on base for the past six months, sorting mail for other Army units while dodging incoming mortar rounds every dawn and dusk and generally feeling useless and imprisoned inside the wire. We’re not having a genuine war experience we would tell each other while simultaneously hiding in a bunker as mortars shook the ground under our feet on a regular basis. We need to do the real thing.
I have a vivid memory of Sergeant Kritikos sitting in her bunk, watching a bootleg copy of the TV series “Over There” on her portable DVD player, a show about U.S. Army Soldiers in Iraq. I am standing in the open doorway to our two-man trailer, the sounds of actual gunfire reaching my right ear while the gunfire from the TV show reaches my left. I had to laugh at Sergeant Kritikos and point out the fact that she might be the only soldier to ever watch “Over There” while simultaneously actually being “over there.” She mutters back a reply that she might as well watch it—a depiction of Operation Iraqi Freedom on a tiny portable DVD screen—because this is the only action she’s ever going to see in this war even though she’s literally living it. They did not allow women to serve in ground combat positions back then, and Sergeant Kritikos and I had spent many hours together fantasizing about which jobs we would have selected the day we signed our lives away to the U.S. Army Reserve if they had allowed it—she would have been in field artillery, while I would have wanted to become an armored crewman (“tanker”). We were like-minded in that when the Iraq War kicked off in 2003, we both felt compelled to go. We had, in fact, both volunteered to reclass from our original military occupational specialties in unit supply to postal operations just so we could get over there and experience it. To us, war was like the Super Bowl of your time spent in the military; if you haven’t played in the “big game,” have you even really played at all? How can we go back home and call ourselves war veterans if all we did was sort packages and stamp letters for a year? We cannot imagine being able to live with ourselves under such circumstances, it would be like living a lie, using a title we felt we didn’t deserve.
Sergeant Kritikos is far more outgoing and personable than I am, and she eventually found a way for us to get outside the wire. She befriended Soldiers from a platoon in a National Guard unit that had been tasked with running QRF patrols in Baghdad, and that’s how we managed to get out. One night, after working at the post office all day, we snuck out of our trailer with our gear, weapons, and ammo, and rendezvoused with the National Guard soldiers at a selected point on base. They picked us up in their Humvees, handed us loaded M4 assault rifles (we had only been issued 9mm pistols), and off we went, around the concrete barriers, between the rolls of concertina wire, and past the guard posts that had held us captive for the past six months. Just like that, we were free. Now we were doing the real thing.
As Sergeant Kritikos and the National Guard soldiers headed inside the ice cream shop, I opted to remain outside and light up a cigarette. The area we had stopped in was made up of a mix of retail and residential buildings, none of them very tall by American standards, interspersed with piles of chunks of concrete, rusting rebar, and twisted metal, all that remained of those buildings that did not survive the initial invasion by U.S. forces in 2003. There was electricity—the ice cream shop was lit up like a beacon, with a colorful sign and bright, white lightbars arranged in a slanted row across the front of the building—but the rest of the area was poorly lit, the few street lamps that lined the road flickering and threatening to die at any moment. There was dust and debris and trash everywhere. There was no garbage collection service, so the locals would throw their trash into a pile and set it on fire when the pile got too big. Everything in the area, both outside the wire and back on base, always smelled like burning.
It was through the rubble and trash and shadows that I first noticed Plastic Boy walking towards me—an Iraqi child, possibly nine or ten years old. I noticed the whites of his wide, unblinking eyes first as he approached, his gaunt face looked blue from the glow of the ice cream shop’s sign behind me. As he neared, I was able to make out the color of his clothes, a red t-shirt and pants that may have once been white, but they, like the rest of the boy, were covered in dust and filth, so I wasn’t sure. He walked as though in a trance, dragging his feet like a zombie, but every few steps he stopped and glanced down at the ground. Twice on his path toward me, he picked something up and examined it closely. I could not really see what he was grabbing until he was about twenty feet from me, and that’s when I noticed that he’d been picking up trash, specifically the white plastic cups that Mayda’s Ice Cream shop served their ice cream in. But all the cups Plastic Boy picked up were empty, having been discarded on the dusty street after their contents were consumed. Each time he grabbed a cup, he would bring it to his mouth and run his tongue along the inside of it, no doubt tasting the sweetness of any remnants of the ice cream left behind. He gave the cup a few licks, then tucked it into the clear plastic bag I now noticed he had clutched in his left hand. The bag was filled with different colored pieces of plastic trash he’d been collecting.
Plastic Boy worked his way towards me and the ice cream shop, performing this trash picking and licking ritual the entire way. I glanced back at the five Iraqi men gathered outside the shop, wondering if this child belonged to one of them, but none of them took ownership or seemed to even acknowledge the kid existed. By the time I looked back, Plastic Boy was less than eight feet from me, boring holes into me with his wide-eyed stare while his tongue darted around another white plastic cup. He was silent for a few more seconds before he spoke, or tried to speak. The sound that issued from his throat was more of a guttural moan, long and drawn out. I didn’t understand or speak Arabic, but I knew he wasn’t speaking it, either. It was just noise as, apparently, that was all he was capable of. His long moan shortened to a few quick clips of sound, then he moved on from me as he stuffed the plastic cup into his bag and shuffled away to find another.
I turned back to the ice cream shop to see that Sergeant Kritikos and the other soldiers were now exiting the building. Sergeant Kritikos walked over and sat down beside me on the block of concrete that has been serving as my bench, and I pointed Plastic Boy out to her. We spent several minutes discussing what, if anything, we should do about this young child that was clearly hungry and wandering around Baghdad at nearly 2 a.m. in some sort of stupor or traumatized state. If this was America, we would have scooped him up and called the police, but we were so far flung from American societal norms in the moment, and we were not two concerned women just then, we were two soldiers and members of an occupying force in this country. And the local men didn’t seem to care, and the ice cream shop owner, his head now hanging out the window as he surveyed the scene outside his store, didn’t seem to care, and the National Guard soldiers, our gracious hosts, didn’t seem to care either. Everyone was standing around in groups, chatting and smoking and eating ice cream while Plastic Boy scavenged around them and occasionally emitted another, almost-animalistic sound. Where are his parents? Something isn’t right with him. What horrors has this child seen? Why is nobody as alarmed by his presence as we are? I was not and never have been partial to children, but this scene was enough to concern even my barely-discernible maternal instincts.
Sergeant Kritikos and I didn’t have anything to give him, but within a few minutes of our conversation, we saw one of the other soldiers offer his half-eaten cup of ice cream to Plastic Boy, who dropped everything in his hands to grab it and gulp it down in just a few bites. Another soldier offered him a bottle of water, but he ignored it, as he was too consumed by licking every last drop of melted ice cream out of the cup he’d been given. The local men and the shop owner did not approve of these gifts and started to make a fuss in Arabic while making dismissive gestures. The interpreter we had with us explained that Plastic Boy frequented the area regularly, and by giving him food and water, he would come to expect it and start coming around even more. They did not want him hanging around the shop, it was bad for business. Where are his parents? we ask through the interpreter. No one knows. Where does he live? No one knows that, either. Is anyone responsible for him? The locals just shrug.
Through the course of this interpreted discussion, Plastic Boy had tucked the now-empty plastic cup into his bag and foraged from the trash in the street a torn piece of cardboard. From his pocket, he produced a pen. He handed both items to the soldier who gave him the ice cream and motioned with his hands while grunting out noises that he wanted him to draw something. The soldier complied and handed both items back, and then Plastic Boy took them to the next soldier, then the next, and the next. By the time the pen and cardboard got to me, everyone had given up taking the time to try and draw pictures and had simply written their first name instead. I took the sticky pen, added my first name to the collection on the piece of cardboard, and handed it back. For one second, Plastic Boy smiled through the melted ice cream and dust that was all over his face, then he moved on to the next soldier.
Then it was time to go, and we geared back up before getting into the vehicles. We could not take Plastic Boy with us—U.S. soldiers snatching children off the streets of Baghdad in the middle of the night is bad for U.S Army business, even if done out of compassion—so we left him behind with his piece of cardboard and bag of dirty plastic.
I do not know what became of him, though he occasionally comes to visit me in a reocurring dream: It’s late at night, and I’m trying to watch TV in my apartment when he suddenly shows up outside on the patio. He taps his slender, dirty fingers on the glass door to get my attention, and when I finally look over, he sticks his tongue out and presses it against the glass. His face and wide, unblinking eyes appear ghoulish, tinged blueish-green by the glow of the TV set. I can only make eye contact for a second before I have to look away as I try my best to ignore him, but I can always see him in my peripheral vision, watching me.
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Claire Fron served in the U.S. Army Reserve and was deployed to Iraq under Operation Iraqi Freedom from ’05-’06. She lives in Massachusetts.
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