« Hadji »

« Hadji » is a soldiers’ catchall label for Iraqis that follows the narrator from the base perimeter into patrols, checkpoints, and scenes of injury and mourning. Applied to children, suspected gunmen, local security forces, and people caught in the violence, the term makes unlike situations sound interchangeable. The narrative’s details repeatedly complicate that flattening: those named by the label are civilians as well as possible threats, people in need as well as people carrying weapons, and individuals whose lives remain largely unknown to the soldiers who classify them.

Meaning and Military Use

The term appears as ordinary military slang rather than as a careful description of a person’s role or affiliation. After the unit arrives in December and takes over from the Mississippi Rifles, the narrator describes soldiers eager to be in the action. When mortar fire hits the battalion tactical operations center, soldiers attribute it to hadjis; the narrator’s section is close to the impact but cannot see it because buildings block their view. The label supplies a ready-made name for the attackers, while the scene also reveals the distance between wanting combat and actually witnessing it.

The word’s reach extends beyond combatants. On Route Carentan, children gather near a checkpoint at a damaged bridge to ask soldiers for combat rations. Most are described as thin and barefoot; among them is a little girl the soldiers call Pépite. Calling the children hadji kids places hungry civilians inside the same broad category used elsewhere for armed men. The concrete differences remain visible—the children’s age, hunger, and requests—even as the soldiers’ vocabulary groups them together.

Civilians, Suspects, and Local Partners

A nighttime roadblock shows how quickly the label can frame a person before the soldiers know what he has done. After the patrol becomes lost on the wrong side of the base, a white sedan appears on the narrow road. The soldiers block it, and two men stand with their hands raised while they are searched. The narrator describes their different builds and clothing; another soldier speculates that they are lovers, and a companion laughs that they nearly got themselves killed. The car contains nothing hidden. The scene offers no evidence that the men were plotting an attack, but the patrol’s armed suspicion has already made them potential targets.

The label also covers Iraqis whom the American soldiers are expected to support. In the city, the narrator says that neither the American forces nor the Iraqi Police control the streets; the Mahdi militia holds power, and a ceasefire prevents the soldiers from patrolling freely. A special-response group travels in a small pickup fitted with a machine gun and shows the Americans low-resolution videos of improvised bombs. The narrator says that the soldiers would gladly have killed the group, but orders require them to support it. The account thus places the generic label alongside a shifting set of relationships—uneasy cooperation, political restraint, and hostility—that the word itself does not distinguish.

The Wounded Man and the Work of Care

The sharpest contrast between the label and a person’s particular circumstances comes after a man flees and is shot. Sullivan spots him; Dallas, a newly arrived soldier, runs after him and crosses the narrator’s line of fire, so the narrator does not shoot. When the soldiers approach, the man is lying on his back, barefoot, with blood on his white undershirt. The narrator estimates that he is about twenty-five. He is referred to as a hadji, but the account gives no explanation of his identity or of what he had been doing before the chase.

The narrator’s role changes from armed patrol member to medic. He packs gauze into the apparent entrance wound, covers it with a plastic bag secured on three sides with tape, and asks Sullivan to hold the dressing while he searches for an exit wound. He finds none and cannot determine where the bullet has lodged. Looking back, he believes he should have used more gauze and packed the wound more completely; he also recognizes that he forgot to place the injured man on his wounded side. His recollection turns the category hadji into a particular body requiring urgent care, while preserving the narrator’s painful awareness that his treatment was inadequate.

Mourning and the Limits of the Category

After the man dies, the narrator places his naked body in a body bag. An older woman rushes out, tries to reach the bag, and is pushed back by soldiers. She falls to her knees, throws handfuls of dirt over her head, and strikes her face against the ground. A very pregnant young woman begins to mourn in the same way, while two young boys scream. As soldiers carry the bag away, the older woman follows and tries to seize it. The scene does not establish the family’s names or explain their lives; it does show the human cost gathered around a body the soldiers have handled as an enemy casualty.

Gunfire interrupts the removal, and the soldiers disperse into cover. The next evening they return to the area. Later, Sullivan tells the narrator that he saw the older woman struck by their own fire that morning. The narrator trusts Sullivan’s account. Here, hadji does not mark a verified combatant: the label sits within a sequence in which a dead man’s relatives mourn, friendly fire may kill one of them, and the soldiers return without the narration offering a clean resolution. Across these scenes, the word’s utility as shorthand is also its moral danger: it can make people legible to a patrol as a category while leaving their identities, relationships, and vulnerability unseen.