Photograph courtesy Elliot Ackerman

After fighting in two wars with no front lines, in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wanted to see one, so I drove for several days from Gaziantep, a city in southern Turkey, to Makmour, a town just outside Erbil, in northern Iraq. After some coördination with the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Peshmerga, I arranged an audience with Staff Colonel Salim Surche. His headquarters were in Makmour’s youth-sports center, a modern three-story complex of steel and glass, its front drizzled with small-calibre bullet holes, as if someone had attacked it with a hole puncher. His unit, the Erbil Battalion, reclaimed Makmour after the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had seized and held the town, on September 14th, for three days. Billeted in the complex, the peshmerga slept between shifts, burrowed beneath fleece blankets. Excited to see an American, a few of them eagerly took me to a room upstairs, its windows shattered, dried blood crusting the tiled floor. They had killed two ISIS militants here a few weeks ago and never bothered to clean up the mess.

Over cigarettes and cups of spiced ginger tea in his office, Colonel Surche explained how ISIS captured Makmour, driving into town with eight armored Humvees. When I told him that this didn’t seem like a particularly large force to take an entire town, he leaned back in his chair, staring at me intently. “Perhaps if we had better weapons, this would be true, but what do we have? Only light machine guns. Our bullets bounce off their vehicles.” He went on to explain how ISIS has proved especially effective in regions with a Sunni Arab majority. “In these places,” Colonel Surche said, “the population rises up with the militants, fighting alongside them.” He then told me to go see for myself, offering a HiLux pickup truck and six of his troopers as an escort.

Arriving at the Erbil Battalion’s forward-most positions with ISIS, I crouched behind a sandbagged berm and stared south across nearly two kilometres of desert, at a cement factory, its cinderblocks pockmarked by gunfire. Sergeant Farhad Karzan, who was leading the eight other peshmerga fighters manning this position, handed me his binoculars. “If you watch long enough, you’ll see them moving on the roof,” he told me. “But my binoculars don’t work so well.”

I leaned against the parapet, my knees in the dirt. The right lens barely held focus, and the left was cracked. Unable to see any movement along the front, I waited.

After a couple of minutes, one of the soldiers wandered over, apparently interested in me, their visitor. The soldier carried an M-16A2, an old model that the U.S. military hadn’t used widely for more than a decade. I rested the binoculars on the parapet, asking if I could see his rifle. He handed it to me, and I opened the breech, sticking my pinky inside the firing chamber. It was immaculate, kept cleaner than I had ever kept my rifle when I was serving in the Marine Corps. Seeing that I knew how to lock back the bolt on an M-16A2 and inspect its mechanisms, Sergeant Karzan gave me a suspicious look, and I explained that I had fought here a decade earlier. Then his entire face lit up. Reaching into his pants pocket, he removed a weathered I.D. card from the long defunct Iraqi National Guard, dated back to 2004.

“Do you know my friend, Captain Luke?” he asked me. “We were in Mosul together.” On the American-issued I.D., a much younger version of Sergeant Karzan stared back at me, his head shaved, his face without its salt and pepper stubble.

I shook my head, no.

How could Sergeant Karzan think that I would know one American captain out of the thousands that had served in that eight-year war? But staring across the front, standing among the eight men at his position, the war seemed a local, very personal affair. He then took me over to a single PKM, a light machine gun of Soviet design. It rested on the parapet’s corner, oriented toward the cement factory held by ISIS. “Aside from a few rifles, this is all we have to hold them back.” Two cans of belted ammunition rested next to the gun, their links rusted. “Over there,” said Sergeant Karzan, pointing to a smudge of upturned earth on the horizon, “is our other position. They have a machine gun, too.”

Rusted ammunition, eight peshmerga fighters, a tired old sergeant: this was the front line. An American carrier battle group flew sorties from the Persian Gulf. Drones orbited, unseen. But, less than two kilometres from ISIS, it all evaporated—to nothing. Whether these peshmerga would stop ISIS’s advance farther into Iraq depends on that machine gun, I thought. And I remembered the William Carlos Williams poem that I, and so many other children, memorized in grammar school:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Sergeant Karzan offered me tea, but the escort that Colonel Surche had provided seemed ready to go. So we piled into their HiLux and said our goodbyes. Tearing down the road toward the Erbil Battalion’s headquarters, I kept thinking about the gun pointed at the cement factory, and about that poem. This new war in Iraq would be decided as all wars were, by the smallest of things: a few men, a few guns, luck. Before visiting Sergeant Karzan’s position, I had asked Colonel Surche what his orders were. He had told me he had none but that if the Ministry of Peshmerga ordered him to attack, he would, and they’d try to push ISIS back once more, until Kurdish forces reclaimed all the land that they had lost over the summer and the fall.

When I got back to my hotel in Erbil that night, I looked at a photograph I had taken of Sergeant Karzan’s machine gun, and the expanse of desert stretching between his position and ISIS. I transcribed a few notes then went to bed, the unrelenting traffic on Sixty Meter Road shuttling past my window, the drivers seemingly oblivious to the front line only thirty minutes away.

Early the next morning, a story came out from the wires. At first light, the Erbil Battalion had attacked, advancing from their positions and taking the cement factory. I wondered how Sergeant Karzan and his eight men—and that one machine gun—had fared.