The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

was time for a photo shoot. He fixed his hair and checked his shirt, not, he wanted me to know, because he is vain but because “fashion is the language of our culture.” Fashion is evangelism. “We’re on a mission, always,” DawnCheré said. She spotted a lick of gelled hair breaking free and raised her hand, then pulled it back. “He never lets me touch his hair.”

In 2006 she deployed to Iraq. July of that year was the war’s deadliest month that far. The Baghdad Morgue alone received 1,855 corpses. Ashli’s commanding officers, reported The New York Times, still believed that Iraqis could be “tamed.” That year, five U.S. soldiers raped an Iraqi girl named Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Then they killed her and set fire to her body, and killed her mother, her father, and her little sister. At the end of the year, Saddam Hussein was hanged.