Caravan of Thieves by David Rich

on Sundays, one Baptist and one Presbyterian, andMarion the Bitch tried it out a few times. Of course, I wanted to get out of there, but I didn’t hate it completely. I enjoyed watching people there. For kids, church was destructive, just a way to control them, and for about half the adults it was just a phony thing they did to hide who they really were, but for the other half it was a good thing. I could see they needed to be there, and the connection and the prayers and the sermon made them feel less like the louses they knew they were and that maybe there was some way to hope the world was not going to end soon.
    Muslims pray enough for everybody. Five times a day. So religion has to be all about the afterlife because even they can see they’re not getting a big payoff in this world. It was easy to find a mullah to instruct me. I just told him I wanted to get my head right at last, and I had some money to pay him.
    They make a big deal of the idea of being clean before you pray, but that’s a relative kind of clean. You have to be cleaner than you were before you started. The physical part is precise; the verbal part gives you some options. It starts with facing the Ka’aba in Mecca and stating your intention, as in “I’m going to say the noontime prayer.” Then you put up your hands, palms out, thumbs touching ears, and say “Allahu Akbar” which means god is great. Next you hold your left wrist with your right hand and recite the first chapter of the Koran. It’s short and easy to learn, but if you can’t learn it, they give you something else to say. Then you have to bow and say some more short praises of god before you get down on your knees on some kind of a rug or anything that isn’t the dirt road. When you kneel, the drill is palms down, forehead down, bottom of the toes down, heels up, elbows away from the body, abdomen away from the thighs. More praise of god. You sit up, andyour left foot gets tucked under, right foot stays out with the sole showing, hands on knees, fingers spread out. Depending on the time of day, you repeat this a number of times. And you finish by looking right, at the angel in charge of your good deeds, then left at you know who, and you tell them both to go with god and then sort of wipe your face with your hands and you’re done for a few hours. It reminds me of tai chi mixed with yoga and a chant. Very peaceful.
    I crossed the border into Pakistan without problems. My passport passed muster and no one thought to pay too much attention to me. I guess by then I smelled right. Karachi is huge and spread out, biggest city I had ever been in. They say Karachi is the most convenient port for us to land supplies, which must be military talk for Karachi is the only port because it’s completely inconvenient and it brings Pakistanis into the stew, which already has too many ingredients. The work is done by Pakistanis and Afghans and supervised by Americans and other NATO troops.
    I worked my way down to the port, past some of the magnificent buildings constructed by the Brits when Karachi was in India and the sun never set. For a moment, I almost understood why we are chasing all this so hard. It’s all still grand, exactly the way empire is supposed to look. The muscle shows in every slab. And if you are king of the world, it must seem logical to want to show your muscle, too. Kind of like rich people who have their kids tested to see if they’re geniuses; the next stage after having lots of money is proving you’re special. But in books, the pain is buried beneath glory and nostalgia. We have resurrected the pain, but I do not see us leaving behind the structures, or enjoying the conquest.
    My contact was a short, smiling Pakistani man, Jaffar, in a warehouse office filled with men shouting, begging, eating, sleeping,arguing, coughing, praying, everything but fucking. I was posing as an Afghan, and for about ten paces I felt slick until it occurred to me that half of them were