To all who shall see these presents, yo digo nsala malekun Kongo, malekun va kuenda nsala. Abrikuto warindinga, ‘cucha cuento que yo emboa. It was during the Second Battle of Fallujah in November of ’04, when we first got introduced to the Palo religion by Corporal of Marines Pancho Abreu…

To snatch an nfumbe from the Just Beyond and stickum in a cauldron, you need something deeply personal to them, like bones. The very marrow of their poor souls. …

When the Second Battle of Fallujah was over the civilians trickled back in from the desert country and found their homes like beehives from the bullet holes. The alibaba had been bested. Our unit went back to the Rear, which is a base the Marine Corps built in the desert…

Around early February of ’05 we started seeing the first private military patrols. Outfits like Triple Canopy and Blackwater had guys driving around Downtown Fallujah in up-armored Benzes and Cadillacs with tinted windows and air conditioning, and the guys had long hair and beards and fancy hi-speed gear and always…

After our shift ended the sun went down and the muezzin started calling Allah hu-akbar, all the chants overlapping and syncopating with each other from the loudspeakers on the minarets. We ran back into the compound with our hyper new puppies nipping at our combat boots. We went straight to…

The next three months were maybe the happiest of our lives. The insurgency was still inactive in the city after we crushed them in the Battle, tho reports were beginning to come in of alibaba activity in other places like Ramadi. …

Changó oba nikosó The day after we saw the river I had the morning shift at the entrance to the compound, where me and Flaco had met the mercenaries when we first got the puppies. I had Changó with me. I’d stayed up all night gaming so I was dead…

In the cueva nganga we had to do a ton of religious work. We also had to do a bunch of annoying red tape shit like calling the brass in the Rear on the comm, writing up reports, and helping Fat Bob write his own report in English. Colonel Müller…

To find the sniper we decided to grease the mini-economy of Downtown Fallujah. All those merchants and haji civilians were harboring him, or they knew who was harboring him. We had to get someone to go full-blown Judas. We had Pancho’s dad send most of the $80k he was holding…