“What time is it?” asked Zeyad as he walked into the building in Rabia where American soldiers were checking travelers who were crossing into Iraq from Syria.
“It’s 12:15,” said Ricky. He was sitting in a room with computers, cameras, and a scanner for fingerprinting. Like Zeyad, he was a Yezidi interpreter.
“Fifteen minutes until we switch shifts,” said Zeyad, whose code name was “Robert Deniro.”
“Robert,” said Ricky. “I’m regretting that I came to work this week. I just got married and came back to the base.”
A few minutes later, a man walked into the building and detonated his vest. Pieces of bodies were flung everywhere. Ricky died that day.
“When I look on myself, I don’t see any blood,” recalls Zeyad. “I felt I was lucky and there’s a guardian angel protecting me from this explosion. It was a really strong explosion—it collapsed the entire building.”
Zeyad’s sergeant gave him permission to take a few days off. But when he got into a secure car to be driven home, he couldn’t remember where he lived.
***
Today, Zeyad lives with short-term memory loss. He forgets lots of little things and some big things, like who his friends are and that he got married in 2006, two years before the explosion. A doctor in the U.S. prescribed him medication that he doesn’t like to take. He never saw a doctor in Iraq because that would mean that outsiders could find out he was working with American soldiers, putting his life in great danger.
For a time, he worked as a scale operator at a large meat plant in Nebraska, weighing flesh and entering the data into a computer. It was how he supported his wife and three children, including “Bryan,” a baby boy named after the hospital in Nebraska where he was born.
Life in America is very different than it was in Shingal, the northern part of Iraq where Zeyad lived in a small unit of a concrete complex. It was home for 27 years. “I have a lot of memories there,” he says. “My son and daughter were born in the house. I got married in that house. I lost my mom in that house. I used to study in that house and I have a lot of notes on the wall.”
Everybody around him was poor, he said. But “it was a humble life, an easy life, it was not frustrated like America. I enjoyed every moment there.”
Zeyad was so poor that when the rains turned the ground into mud, he would borrow his brother’s shoes to go out. He was ten years old the first time he sat in a classroom, after telling his mother, “I want to go to school just like everybody else.”
He loved school and dreamed of one day being a doctor. But he had to drop out after his family moved during farming season because they needed another set of hands. He returned to school a few years later, but then his mother got sick.
The family couldn’t afford her medical bills so people in their Yezidi community lent them money. None of it was enough to save her. After she died, “I was looking at my family when we were gathering together in the city,” says Zeyad. “We didn’t have enough food to eat and none of them can work. So I stepped on my feelings and convinced myself to drop school.”
To pay off the family’s debts, he became an interpreter for the U.S. Army. The five-year stint took him to Tel Afar, Rabia, and Mosul. Through it all, he told himself, “I’ll stay, I’ll stay, I’ll stay,” because the money was better than what most people with diplomas in Shingal could earn. And he tried to take classes at night.
He made it to the 7th grade.
***
Zeyad moved to the United States in October 2013—less than a year before ISIS invaded his village in Shingal. He says he’s busy: earning enough money to support his family, helping friends apply to jobs, and sometimes spending 40 minutes on the phone with Health and Human Services to help other refugees get food stamps.
He says his dream of being a doctor is impossible now. But he has faith that someday he’ll be able to finish school. And at the moment, Zeyad says, “I find my happiness [in] helping other people. You don’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a president to help.”
Sometimes, he finds a little time in his day to work on a Turkish-style tambor he is repairing. He strums a friend’s instrument and sings old Yezidi folk songs. He thinks his voice changed when he came to the United States. “When I was in Iraq, I used to sing with more joy,” he says. “I had a strong voice in Iraq.”