When a sand storm's coming the wind blows out of the south. It's hot. You get that antsy feeling like something's gonna happen, even here in the Green Zone. The palm fronds shake. You can hear them rattle. The sky turns yellow, copper, rust. Grit gets in your clothes, in your ears, in your mouth, in your nose.

This jail is built by the best prison builders in the world. It smells like fresh paint. The walls are concrete blocks, painted cream colored. There are two bunks bolted to the wall, just steel pans really, like biscuit pans. Each one has a pad for a mattress with a mattress cover and an army blanket. At the end of the bunks there's a combination toilet/sink, no seat on the toilet. There is a window, skinny as my arm, made out of Plexiglas. I can only see other buildings and a little patch of sky through it. High on the wall the two air vents whisper like they're telling secrets. Somewhere, somebody's yelling, screaming. Crazy? Hurting? I don't know.

I'm Private Kelsie S. Lassiter. I'm 21, five feet, three inches, one hundred five pounds. Which is really five pounds too much 'cause I've got too much butt—but not enough boobs. I have dirty blond hair, blue eyes. I have white spots on my fingernails. Back home they used to say people got white spots on their fingernails from telling lies. But I have told no lies, and I will not lie now.

I'm from Mineral Springs, Kentucky. I'm a member of the 231st M.P. Company, Army National Guard. I joined the guard a year ago. I couldn't get a job, so I decided to serve my country, and like, you know, see the world.

Mama has pictures, me sitting on my daddy's lap in front of the trailer. I don't remember him. I knew my granddaddy. I used to play checkers with him. I had curls then, long hair. Blond, lighter than now. There's another picture with Granny before she died. Granny used to twist a rag up and soak it in sugar water and give it to me, a sugar tit. I guess that's why I've always liked sweets, which wasn't good for my teeth. That is one of the good things about the army, the dentist.

When spring comes, lots of kids go barefoot there. It feels good, the dirt cool and damp under your toes. Your feet are tender, but they toughen up.

When I was 10, I started getting boobs. I walked hunched over to hide them. All that changed when I met Sonny Lambright when I was 14. Sonny liked to play the pinball machine, fish, drink, and smoke dope and mess around. Just a pretty normal type of guy. We got to where we'd go fishing on Shawnee Creek, which is nearly a river. The water's usually pretty brown and muddy, 'cause there's mine tailings in it. But it's peaceful there. There's a patch of loblolly pines, green, sweet smelling and fresh. Next to the creek there are willows, their branches hanging down like they're grieving over something. In the gully leading down to the creek people throw stuff away. You might find a kid's wagon that you could still use cause the kid'd grown up; radiators from old cars, broke-down washers, TV's with round-cornered screens, limbs off trees, scrap lumber too short to be any good, smoothed-out tires, kitchen garbage. Rats love it there. So did I.

Know what? We never caught a fish. We didn't care, laughing and talking about everything. We'd smoke a little dope when we could get it, but mostly we were lucky to get a few of beers. There was an old mattress in the gully. We pulled it out, and…you know, we'd get it on. Then Mama said I couldn't go out with Sonny any more, 'cause I came in so late and he was two years older.

I went right out the window. Stayed out all night. Mama said no daughter of hers was going to whore around like that. She got the preacher to talk to me. He's this skinny, rawboned old man, forehead bulging like a beetle's, hair like a spider web stirring in the breeze. "You must repent, Kelsie," he said. "If you get in a car wreck and die before you repent, you'll go to Hell."

I just sat there saying unhuh, unhuh, not looking at him.

Listen! You think you can't love somebody when you're 14? You can love somebody then more than you ever can again 'cause you don't know any better. You can love somebody so much then that you want to live in the same skin. Die in the same skin too if that's what it takes. So much it makes your heart swell up just to think about them and so much they can make that same heart hurt like a toothache. You'll do whatever they want; die for them and die smiling though you know you're going to Hell, just like the preacher said. That's how I loved Sonny. White hot love. But when you get older, you can't do that. Your heart hardens, like your feet getting tough when you go barefoot in the spring.

Right before the end of senior year, I went with Sonny to Ashland and got married. I graduated anyway. He didn't but he got a job. Pole man on a survey crew. Then he lost that from going 'coon hunting all night with his buddies, drinking, not showing up the next day at work. He lost one job after another; flag man on a road crew, then delivering pizzas. The car broke down on the second day and he lost that. Then he started working at Shop 'n Save at night. Cleaning up, putting up stock on the shelves, and in his pickets, bringing home Spam and stuff to keep us going.

I got pregnant. He didn't like that. I lost the baby. He didn't like that either. He said, "I know you been sneaking around, drinking and smoking, and that's why you my baby, is dead." He slapped me so hard my teeth rattled. Then he cried and promised he wouldn't any more, said he was sorry. I took him back. Then it happened again. I took him back again. The he blacked both my eyes. I moved back to Mama's. Mama had the preacher come by again. The preacher said marriage is a sacrament ordained of God. It is till death do us part. Well, I may be dead if I go back, I said, me or Sonny one. Sometimes it was good again with Sonny, just for a little while. Then he'd get mean again. So I started going out with other guys. I mean, like, I wasn't dead. Sonny was doing what he wanted to, and that was OK. He started coming around in the middle of the night, following me around. I got a divorce. Then I joined the army.

I went to recruit training at Fort Jackson, in South Carolina. I mostly did good there. The cadre, Sgt. LeFeu, helped. I mean, when I had to do the physical training qualifications, like getting over the wall, he put his hand under my butt, just to help, I mean, and pushed. I passed. Sgt. LeFeu was from Louisiana. He was black as midnight, but I liked him anyway.

When I finished boot camp flags were snapping in the breeze. The band played the "Star Spangled Banner" first, then "I'm Proud to be an American." The colonel ordered, "PASS IN REVIEW!" Sergeant LeFeu snapped off a salute, did an about face and called out, "FAH…WAD, MARCH!" The band played "The Bridge Over the River Kwai." I was in the back of the platoon, 'cause I was the shortest.

"EYES...RIGHT!"

They were playing the caisson song as we marched by the reviewing stand. I was crying so hard by then my nose was snotty. Then I was happy. Then I was proud.

This place; you just sort of keep your head down and do what they tell you. I want to sleep all the time. Sometimes I feel like I've already been in that car wreck the preacher talked about. I'm already dead; these walls are my coffin, this jail is my grave. The Green Zone is Hell. I dream when I sleep. I'm going fishing with Sonny again. And there's a baby, there's always the baby. Then maybe I'm at Fort Jackson, and Sgt. LeFeu is there. We're marching along, then I realize I'm naked. Or I'm on the tower, The Skyscraper you rappel off of, but I'm falling off, and I know I'm gonna be hurt bad.

I used to think when I was an MP at the prison, of ways I'd become a hero. Of how I'd make some terr confess about a plan to use the nukes that made us have to come here to blow up something in the homeland. I'd wring it out of him. It was always Sgt. LeFeu pinning my medal on.

When I was a newbie prison guard, I'd ask the prisoner, where are the WMDs? Tell me about the plans' to attack the US. The detainees just stared at me. Finally Specialist Lovegood said, "Lassiter, cut that shit out." I said why? He said, "He's a fucking Baghdad cab driver. He doesn't know shit about WMDs!"

***

My lawyer, Captain Lambert, said, "Tell me what happened." I told him sometimes the terrs dropped mortar shells on the prison. Some of the guys and some of the detainees got hurt. I admit I was scared. They all hate us, you know. Which is odd because we liberated them. That's why they are free now, except for a 100,000 or so we have to keep in prison. I told him how soldiers guarding the prisoners get wound tight, waiting for those people that were supposed to welcome us with flowers to blow us into smithereens.

MI, military intelligence, was there, like, in the cellblocks of the prison. MI said soften the prisoners up. Sometimes MI would put them in solitary. No clothes, their shriveled up dicks hanging out, which was kind of funny. We left them there until they talked. Some of the cells air conditioning was turned down so they were refrigerators. Sometimes we wouldn't feed detainees for a few days. We'd call them rag heads, sand niggers, towel heads. They especially didn't like being called queers. Understandable. Everybody hates a queer. When we'd do the simulated drowning thing, they'd say, Allah, Allah, which is their word for God. They don't worship the same God that we do. The chaplain told us that when we first came here. I told my lawyer about putting their food in the toilet and making them get it out and eat it. Making them drink alcohol, which I'm quick to add was really only beer. Or we'd make them say, Jesus is Lord!

My lawyer said, "Why did you take pictures of all this?" Some of the guys took the pictures for souvenirs, like guys back home would have pictures taken of an eight point buck they'd killed or a big fish they'd caught. They told the detainees they were going to send the pictures to their families.

It is the middle of the night. I here footsteps coming down the hall. I know it is Captain Lambert. He unlocks the cell door and comes in. He is in a civilian suit. He comes in, and I am lying there, waiting on him, already naked. He gets undressed. We do it. After, we are just lying there, he tells me everything's OK, it's over, the court martial and all is just a big mistake. Then I wake up.

They gave us a lecture when we got here; how and why people blow themselves up. Like the terrs who flew the planes into the World Trade Center, which is also a big part of the reason we're in Iraq. Sometimes now I think about how easy it'd be, to do that, to put plastic explosives under my clothes, or maybe in a field pack, then go out and detonate it. You'd never know what hit you.

My lawyer asks, "How many detainees died?" Not many, I tell him.

"What about the prisoner on ice; the one in the picture?" He was mouthy, so somebody hit him and laid him out on the shower floor. Then when we took his hood off, he was dead. He had already been hurt, his face all bruised, but we didn't know it. He was iced down with bags of ice to buy time 'cause we hadn't decided what to do with him. Specialist Kostner said, good fuckin' riddance.

"What sort of things," my lawyer asked, "did the detainees tell you?" One told me he was Osama bin Ladan. I said you fucking queer, you're not more than fourteen. He said, I'm in disguise. Specialist Kostner came over and slapped the living shit out of him.

***

The specifications were read to the court by a major:

Specification 1: Conspiracy to maltreat prisoners. Battery, assault, abuse, cruelty of detainees. To wit, ordering the detainees into a pile and jumping on them. Forcing detainees to simulate performing oral and anal sex on each other. Forced the detainees to publicly masturbate...

The major kept on reading for a long time.

My lawyer got up and told the court martial board that detainees were held outside of the purview of the Geneva conventions pursuant to policy promulgated by the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. The entire chain of command was part and parcel of these acts, he said. The colonel in charge of the court martial didn't look at him, just sat there looking down at the table. Captain Lambert read from some papers from the Justice Department and the White House lawyers that said what we were doing wasn't torture. He said the general who was the expert on softening up prisoners was transferred to Iraq to help, and he'd like to call that general and a bunch of others, including the Secretary of Defense as witnesses. Request denied! But sir, Captain Lambert begins, these are materials crucial to the defense of my client. They clearly show that she did not act purely of her own volition. Denied!

Captain Lambert tried again, saying everything in a different way. The Officer in Charge said, Captain Lambert, for the final time, you are out of order. I would like to also point out that the Pentagon has consistently denied the unfounded and irresponsible allegations you are making. My lawyer wasn't giving up. He produced something called the KUBARK Counter-Intelligence Interrogation Manual and one called Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. He said that they documented the techniques we used, like the one called The Vietnam, where you put a hood, which is really a sandbag, over the prisoner's head, and stand him up on a table or a chair or something, and wrap electric wires around his dick and arms and legs and tell him he's going to be electrocuted if he moves. The pamphlet called it No-Touch torture.

The Colonel turned red, stood up, started shouting for Captain Lambert to sit down. He said, The President of the United State and the secretary of defense are not on trial, Captain! Private Lassiter is, and no one else.

They asked me if I fooled around, you know, did it, with one of the guys in front of the prisoners. I told them they said it would help soften the prisoners up. Besides, after a while, I had a thing for Specialist Kostner. The officers on the court marital panel, some of them, seemed more worried about this fooling around than in hitting prisoners or prisoners dying or anything else. I guess I understand this now. It is a war, a war on terror. People always die in a war, but doing sex is prejudicial to good order and discipline.

Outside the wind howls around the corner of the building. Sand rattles against the Plexiglas of the window. The sky is dark. The air coming through the vents whispers it secrets. I know I am responsible 'cause I wanted, like, to be something bigger, better, I guess, than I was meant to be. I disregarded His decrees. I do not know what else to say.