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various outlying villages were the community leaders and sheiks. Between tribal rivalries and the always-tense association between Sunnis and Shias, the township’s relationships—from the leaders all the way down to their pipe swingers—were complicated and forever morphing, with most of the details getting lost in translation. Geographically speaking, Saba al-Bor was a Sunni donut, with a jelly Shia center—all of the town hubs and markets were located in the Shia ghettos near the combat outpost, while the slightly less poor and better educated Sunni population enveloped the village itself and the rural outskirts in all four cardinal directions.
    To borrow a failed strategy from a previous war in the American history books, the neo-counterinsurgency taught us that we may never win the local populace’s hearts and minds, but securing their pocketbooks could be enough. Money—the type of money that this Saba al-Bor had never seen before—flowed in from our side as well as from our enemies’, and it was up to the local leaders to figure out which offer(s) best suited their purposes. By the time our unit arrived, most of them had already decided we presented the better means to an end. What that end was, exactly, varied from tribe to tribe, neighborhood to neighborhood, and person to person.
    The sheiks’ men—referred to by us as the Sons of Iraq and by the locals as the Sahwa—enforced the whims and desires of their leadership, while proving that employment is the bedrock of any nation’s stability. Most of the Sons of Iraq manned checkpoints at various intersections throughout Saba al-Bor and throughout Iraq; the American taxpayer had bought these men’s loyalties for a stipend of $300 per month each and probably didn’t even know it. The Sahwa’s elite became bodyguards, moving like the arms of an octopus, protectively shielding their respective sheiks with tentacles bearing the ultimate peasant weapon, the AK-47, while never straying too far from their secure coral reef of up-armored SUVs. We were new to their protracted guerilla war, but they were not. A litany of hard stares, prison tattoos, and deep scars were the corporeal representations of such. I doubt still that there was a man we worked with who didn’t have blood of some sort on his hands, and some of that was undoubtedly American blood. If the mass media was to be believed—a notion very few military officers subscribed to in this post-Vietnam era, as distrust for journalism was rampant and practically institutionalized in the culture—over 100,000 Sahwa members had now manacled themselves to the reconciliation process across the nation of Iraq.

    The Sunni reconciliation with the Iraqi republic and Coalition forces was in full throttle in Saba al-Bor, and the Shias had decided to hop on the bandwagon while there was still room. Muqtadah al-Sadr’s proclamation in the summer of 2007 that JAM elements would cease attacks on Coalition forces certainly helped, too. The Sons of Iraq program, more so than the surge, had changed the direction of this war and this country in general, and both the Sunni and the Shia leaders understood the importance of participating in the power shift. While being an American soldier in Iraq in early 2008 often meant playing the role of beat cop and counterguerilla in a land of roving gangs, our mission hinged on fostering working relationships with men who may have shot at us during the invasion in 2003 or emplaced IEDs during the throes of the insurgency in 2005 and 2006. Some of my NCOs struggled with this reality, and I probably would have too, had this not been my first deployment.
    No description of Saba al-Bor would be complete without mention of Mojo, the mayor’s young son. He claimed to be fifteen years old, although he didn’t look a day over eight. While the lack of a proper nutritional diet probably contributed to his runtlike stature, he