Part 4 – The Boy Named Omar
Russell Cain didn’t sleep that night.
He’d taken the usual pills for his joints—two tablets of whatever generic stuff the VA had given him that month.
They dulled the edge, but not the kind of ache that lived deeper than bone.
He lay back in the recliner, Dusty’s letter clutched in one hand, a folded map in the other.
“Al-Qasr,” he whispered into the dark.
It tasted like sand in his throat.
The town had barely existed in 1991.
Just a cluster of block homes and an old stone well.
They’d stopped there once. Dusty had sniffed the perimeter while Russell leaned against the Humvee, trying to rub the stiffness out of his bad leg.
He’d seen a child there—a boy no older than ten—chasing a half-starved goat through the brush.
No shoes. No fear. Just legs like wire and a mouth full of song.
Could that have been him?
At sunrise, Russell turned on the computer he barely knew how to use.
A gift from his niece. Said it was time to “get online.”
He’d used it mostly for ordering heating pads and arguing with customer service about late prescription refills.
Now, he typed with two fingers:
“Al-Qasr Iraq” + “Omar” + “Desert Storm survivor”
The results were a desert in themselves.
Articles about oil. Satellite maps. A blog post from a young soldier who had visited the area in 2015.
No mention of a boy. No sign of Dusty.
He tried searching in Arabic.
Copy-pasted words from the letter into the search bar.
Nothing.
Later that morning, he drove into town, wincing every time he pressed the brake pedal.
The pain had crept up into his lower back now—one long flame from his hip to his spine.
He parked outside a strip mall with a Middle Eastern market and a dusty hookah bar.
The air smelled like cardamom and car repair.
Inside the shop, the woman behind the counter was in her thirties, wearing a soft brown hijab and a curious smile.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Russell reached into his coat, pulling out the note from Omar, folded neatly in plastic.
“Can you read Arabic?”
She nodded slowly.
“A little. Why?”
“This letter came to me from Iraq,” he said, voice low. “It says someone named Omar had a dog. My dog.”
She glanced at the paper, then looked back at him with a new softness in her eyes.
“Would you like me to read it aloud?”
Russell nodded.
Her voice was gentle as she translated. The same message he had already read—line by line. But when she reached the signature, she paused.
“There’s something written here that wasn’t translated on your copy.”
She leaned closer, squinting.
“It says: From the boy by the well. I never forgot her eyes.”
Russell sat down hard on a wooden bench near the spice rack.
“It was him,” he whispered. “The kid I saw in Al-Qasr.”
The woman offered to help him search further. Said she had a cousin who worked with refugee outreach and still had ties in Mosul and Basra.
Russell wrote his name and number on a receipt.
She promised to call if anything came up.
He limped back to the truck with the plastic bag of tea and tahini she had insisted he take.
He never liked tea.
But that night, he drank every drop of it.
Days passed.
He found himself drifting through old photographs—military group shots, faded letters from his late wife, a patch of Dusty’s fur kept now in a mason jar beside his chair.
The pain in his joints was sharper in the mornings.
Some days he stayed in the recliner until noon, waiting for the pills to soften things enough so he could stand without swearing.
But each evening, when the pain dulled just enough, he wrote in a little notebook.
Questions.
- How did Dusty survive the fire?
- Did Omar hide her? Feed her?
- How did she know to stay with him?
- Why now, after 25 years?
And always the same question circled back:
Why didn’t she come back to me?
One morning, the phone rang.
It was the woman from the market.
Her name was Leila. Her cousin had responded.
There was a man named Omar Al-Fahd, working with a demining organization in Northern Iraq.
He often told a story about a dog who had saved his life as a child—dragged him from a buried explosive near Al-Qasr, years ago.
He still walked with a limp.
Leila said she could send an email on Russell’s behalf, but he shook his head.
“No more letters.”
“Then what would you like me to do?”
“I want to see him.”
“Sir… it’s a long flight. And the area isn’t stable. You’re not well—”
“Leila,” he said gently, “I need to go before my legs give out for good. I’ve got one trip left in me. Just one.”
She was quiet. Then sighed.
“I’ll help. But we do this right. Passport, interpreter, medical notes. No cowboy stuff.”
Russell smiled.
“That dog wasn’t a cowboy. She was a soldier.”
That night, he packed for the first time in years.
He folded Dusty’s old collar and placed it in a velvet pouch.
He picked out a worn photo of them together.
And in a tin box marked “Cain Family Recipes,” he placed a handwritten note:
“If I don’t make it back, let them know—
She lived. She saved me.
And I had to see her one last time.”
He closed the box and reached down to massage his swollen knee.
It felt like stone now.
But he smiled anyway, looking out at the pale desert moon rising over Tucson.
“Hold on, Dusty. I’m coming.”
Continue Reading Part 5 – The Clue Beneath the Words