I Lost My Love in Baghdad (16 page)

During the first week of August, Mohammed and I go to interview Abdel Aziz al-Hakim. Al-Hakim is an influential Iraqi leader, and head of a large Shiite political party called SCIRI. SCIRI stands for “The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.” Al-Hakim is considered an American ally; U.S. diplomats call him “a moderate.” This is despite, as the name of his party suggests, he advocates an Islamic fundamentalist government similar to Iran's. In fact, al-Hakim spent much of the past twenty years in Iran, where SCIRI was formed with Iranian backing. His party also controls a militia called the Badr Brigade, which is accused of organizing the first Shiite death squads within the Ministry of Interior. American officials are counting on al-Hakim and his political allies to help stop the sectarian violence.

The interview with al-Hakim is at the SCIRI compound, a three-minute drive outside the Green Zone. It used to be the home of a high-ranking Baathist official. After making us wait a half hour, al-Hakim sweeps into his marble chamber, wearing brown robes and a black turban, and takes a seat on a red and gold chair. His teeth are yellowing; he's known for chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Mohammed interprets. Al-Hakim says he doesn't think there is sectarian violence, but if there is, it is probably justified. The interview lasts fifteen minutes.

After the interview, Mohammed and I head back to the Green Zone. I'm in the backseat of the Mercedes. At the first traffic circle a small gunfight breaks out. I don't see who's shooting, or what they are shooting at. I just hear the shots. We keep driving.

At the bureau, we get tea and sit outside on the lawn at a white plastic picnic table. It is the first time I've seen Mohammed since getting back to Baghdad this week. He looks much older and more tired now. I've noticed he sighs more. He could say the same thing about me: When I get my Green Zone badge this time I need to get a new picture taken. The other military press ID I wear around my neck has the photo that was taken on my first day in Iraq, a year ago. I cringe at the side-by-side comparison. In the old photo I'm grinning; my hair is short, my face is flush. I look young. In the new photo, I'm tired, bloated, and pale. I'm not smiling. We compare notes on the al-Hakim interview.

“Asshole?” I ask.

“Asshole,” Mohammed agrees.

“He didn't fucking say anything,” I complain.

We talk for a half hour.

“Mike, I don't trust anyone anymore,” he tells me.

There is desperation in his voice. He goes through a list of grievances that is familiar to all Iraqis living in Baghdad. He only gets one to four hours of electricity every day; there is no clean drinking water flowing from the taps; it takes at least fifteen hours of waiting in line at a gas station to fill up.

He tells me he is doing everything he can to try to leave. He's applied for the Fulbright, he's taken GREs for grad school, he's practicing his English. He tells me the risks of working for the magazine are becoming greater. A few months earlier, he was visiting a mosque for a story, and was detained by a militia and accused of being a spy. He feels very lucky that he was finally released.

Mohammed's predicament is not unusual. Tens of thousands more, like him, are trying to get out of the country. The refugee crisis will continue to grow throughout the rest of the year. Camps for internally displaced people start popping up in and around Baghdad; neighborhoods in the city are increasingly divided along ethnic lines. In total, an estimated two million Iraqis will have left the country by the end of 2006, and two million more will be displaced within its fractured borders.

To quote the State Department report: The country's “social fabric remains under intense strain.”

To quote Mohammed, the situation is “fucking shit.”

BAGHDAD

I step outside to take her phone call.

“Hi, baby.”

“Hi, Cub.”

“I have news.”

“Tell me.”

“I got the job.”

What I feel first is pride. To give up a prestigious public relations job in New York to come to Iraq to help fix this mistake, to help this country function, to work for democratic ideals and women's rights and to work for half the pay. I am immensely impressed with Andi, and proud. This is what I tell her in that first conversation, and I believe it. I am excited that she is coming. She will be working at the International Republican Institute's Baghdad office. Her job description is media development, working with Iraqi leaders and their parliament to set up a public affairs office, with the larger goal of getting Iraq to establish a free and independent press. I love her bravery and her guts. We discuss the logistics: when she's going to get here, what kind of training she has to do, when she will go to D.C. to meet with IRI for orientation. We agree this is a great opportunity. There are a lot of great opportunities if you're young and willing to risk your life, I tell her, quoting a friend who told me the same thing. You'll get to experience something most people won't experience. You'll get to work in what is the most challenging and difficult environment you can imagine. If you can work in Baghdad, you can work anywhere. If you like it, you can go other places overseas, places much nicer than here. Or you can move from this job to work on one of the campaigns, and you'll probably have more foreign policy experience than the candidate you work for. You'll enjoy it, being in the center of things, where history is being made. (“Center of things falling apart,” she jokes.)

“It doesn't make you uncomfortable that I'm coming?”

“No, honestly, I'm excited for you. But this a very bad and dangerous place. It's a real shithole. And I'll worry…”

“You don't worry.”

“I'll worry. You're not going to like a lot of things about this place—and like I've said before, being a woman here will be hard. Women aren't treated well here by anyone, and you'll get more unwanted attention than you ever have gotten before. But I'm honestly excited for you. I'll support you, whatever you want to do.”

Was I totally okay with it? No. I don't think it's possible to be completely comfortable with the notion that someone you care about is in a war zone. It's just something you learn to accept. I knew from the moment she told me she was coming that it would be tough, a real shock for us. So I tried to focus on the positives. She really wanted to do this, and I wanted her to have confidence that she was making the right choice. She was going into an unknown. I knew it would be extremely stressful for her—I'd been through it myself—and it would be extremely stressful for me. What if she didn't like it? What if she was miserable? Just being in Iraq is stressful in ways you don't even realize. And going to Baghdad at the start of one of the most violent periods of the war, in the fall of 2006, couldn't be a truly good idea for anyone, but that never stopped those of us who wanted to go from going.

Andi began to prepare for Iraq. She packed up her apartment in New York; her mom picked her up and drove her back to Ohio to put her boxes in storage. Her family was very worried about her going, but they knew, too, that once Andi decided to do something, she was going to do it. She headed to D.C. for orientation with IRI, got all of her necessary ID cards, and found out she'd be staying in the Green Zone, near the Blue Star restaurant, just five minutes away from my house.

While Andi was closing up her life in New York, I was getting more deeply involved in the “Battle of Baghdad.” American military officials came up with the name—a pitch to get the media interested, and to let those back in Washington know they were serious about stopping “sectarian violence.” It was the first major American operation explicitly aimed at stopping the civil war. (Though, according to the military, it still wasn't a civil war; just a number of different factions in the same country fighting against the government.) Sunni insurgents would be targeted, as would Shiite militias (or as the military now preferred to call all of them, “illegally armed groups”).

The plan, dubbed Operation Together Forward Phase II, called for sending an additional 6,000 Iraqi soldiers and police to Baghdad, along with 5,500 more American troops. The strategy was “to clear, hold, and build.” To “clear” meant going into neighborhoods in Baghdad to find the insurgents; the Americans would act as backup to the Iraqi forces. Once the neighborhoods were cleared, the Americans and the Iraqis would try to establish a more permanent presence, to “hold” the area. The final step, “build,” involved $650 million worth of initiatives like new job programs and fixing electricity and sewage.

The “clear, hold, build” strategy had failed when it was tried in 2005, and at other times during the war. The Americans cleared the neighborhoods fine (often because the insurgents, knowing of the operation, had already “melted away,” as military intelligence officials would say, to other parts of the country), but there were never enough soldiers to hold on to the neighborhoods for the months—or probably years—required to truly pacify them. And after the Americans exited the neighborhoods, leaving them in the hands of the Iraqi security forces, the violence would start up again, which prevented the U.S. from ever really getting around to the “build” part.

This time around, the U.S. wanted to make sure there were enough troops. But where were they going to get them? The army was already feeling the strain from the “high operational tempo” of fighting the war for five years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operation Together Forward Phase II was a last-minute plan drawn up in July, a desperate attempt to slow down the violence that had been let loose by the Samarra mosque bombing in February. There just weren't any more troops ready to go. So what to do?

The answer: Don't let the 172nd Stryker Brigade go home.

I'd spent time with 172nd Stryker Brigade in Mosul in October 2005, embedding with them on the second month of their deployment in Iraq. Ten months later, in August, they were scheduled to complete their one-year tour and go back to Fort Lewis and Fort Richardson in Alaska, where they were stationed. But when the army looked around for more troops to send to Baghdad for the security crackdown, the Stryker Brigade was picked—and the 172nd got extended for three more months. I put in a request for an embed.

On August 10, 2006, I took a helicopter out to Camp Striker, one of the five or so bases surrounding the Baghdad Airport. I was going to hook up with the same battalion I'd covered in Mosul, the 4-23 Tomahawks, whose motto was “Unleash Hell.” It was late in the evening when I stumbled into 4-23's makeshift tactical operations center—lots of bare plywood, without even a coffeepot set up yet. They had just arrived in Baghdad from Mosul a few days earlier.

Lieutenant Colonel John Norris, the battalion commander, greeted me warmly. It was good to see him. I'd followed the forty-one-year-old commander around Mosul when I was embedded with the 4-23 and had written a profile of him for the
Newsweek
website. He was a blunt, five-foot-eight, no-bullshit, crew-cut leader who went out on the ground with the troops almost every day. His officers had a nickname for him—RPG Magnet, a title he received after a firefight the previous September. He had started his military career in the early eighties as a marine, then he switched over to the army, became an officer, and rose through the ranks. He assumed command of the Stryker battalion in 2003. He embodied the American military ethos at its best—he liked to kick ass, but in an intelligent way. He considered his time in Mosul a success. The Iraqi police force and army were functioning at a higher level than when he arrived, and violence had been kept relatively low. I had a great deal of respect for him.

Norris told me there was a mission going out first thing in the morning, around 4
A.M.
I said I was going to get some sleep.

“Where's the XO?” I asked him, referring to his executive officer, whom I'd met last year.

Norris grinned. “Major Hammond went home to Alaska two weeks ago, but he's on his way back here now.”

The extension was such a last-minute decision that a third of the 3,500-strong Stryker Brigade had already returned to Alaska, and another third was waiting in Kuwait to go home. The soldiers who'd returned to Alaska were greeted with
WELCOME HOME
banners and had settled in with their families for a few days when they heard the news—that they would have to return to Baghdad. They'd already sent back equipment, given away spare parts to the unit that relieved them in Mosul, and shipped out their personal belongings, including extra uniforms. Most of the men in 4-23 had only one uniform left with them.

I went to the tent where I'd be sleeping. I saw Captain John Grauer, the 4-23's chaplain. I knew him from Mosul, too. He had an athletic, mountain climber's build and was an optimist by nature. When I first met him, he was newly arrived and hopeful. He told me in October 2005 about how he would go out on raids with the troops and try to make life just a little bit better for the Iraqi children that the soldiers had to roust from bed in the middle of the night. He'd give them candy, he said, and try in whatever small way possible to ease their pain. The intervening year had changed him. His nickname now was the “combat chaplain.” Seven different Humvees he'd been riding in had been hit by IEDs.

I asked him how the men were taking the extension.

“Traumatized,” he said. “I think we're all still in shock.”

Many of the soldiers first learned about the extension from their families back in Alaska, who'd seen the news on CNN and frantically begun emailing and instant-messaging their loved ones still in Iraq.
Is it true? Are you really not coming home?

Grauer told me he'd already worked on at least ten Red Cross letters, requests from soldiers who needed to get back to the States to deal with family emergencies. “There was a rush of soldiers trying to get on the phone to call home. Some literally threw up when they heard the news. Some were extremely angry. Some went to sleep for a couple of days, hoping maybe it was all just a bad dream.” Even Grauer, the eternal optimist, now questioned the mission's purpose—what were they doing here?

And something else was weighing on Grauer's mind, a worry shared by others in the 4-23. Miraculously, after a year in Iraq, no one in the seven-hundred-man battalion had been killed. There'd been plenty of close calls—Captain Benjamin Nagy, nicknamed Ox, got IED'd fifteen times—but not a single soldier had been killed in action. When they started to ship out to Alaska, there was a collective sigh of relief and disbelief that they'd beaten the odds. Now they had three more months in Baghdad.

It wasn't even the three months that bothered them. Professional soldiers are used to putting up with a lot of crap; it comes with the job. The soldiers knew it was much worse for their families in Alaska who'd been waiting, for those wives, kids, and girlfriends who'd been counting the days. It wasn't the delayed vacation plans—the battalion surgeon had already lined up a hard-to-obtain moose-hunting permit, and now he'd have to miss the season; Specialist Mott's wedding invitations had already been sent out, and now had to be recalled. What they struggled to deal with was their sense of betrayal. They had done their tour; they had served their time. And now, because of poor planning and a lack of foresight on the part of the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon and the top military commanders (it's not like Baghdad just suddenly got worse; the U.S. leadership simply preferred not to recognize it until now), they were being yanked back at the last minute to the war they'd survived. “If we lose anyone, the blood will be on the hands of Bush and Rumsfeld,” the battalion surgeon told me.

For the next three weeks, I stayed embedded with the 4-23. My editors were interested in the story of the 4-23's extension. It showed how strained the army was to meet the demands of this war, it underscored the emotional burden on military families, and it illustrated how the Battle for Baghdad, an operation that General Casey called yet another “critical point,” never had a chance of success.

 

Day One. At 3:30
A.M.
, the alarm on my cell phone goes off. I grab my cleanup kit and walk in a daze down an avenue of blast walls and endless tents to a trailer of showers. I shower, but don't have time to drink or eat anything, and I forget there is no coffee in the TOC.

This is the first day of the operation. The plan is to clear a neighborhood in Baghdad. It is very hot out, even before the sun comes up. By 7
A.M.
, I am sweating and smoking; by noon I am sweating more than I ever have before and I'm chugging two-liter bottles of water to no effect; by 4
P.M.
, as we head back to base, I am sitting inside the Stryker trying not to pass out or puke. Finally, we are there, we make it back. I made it. Oops, not quite. We took a wrong turn. We are at Camp Liberty, not Camp Striker. I'm dizzy. “Shit,” I say to anyone who's listening. “Can you pass me a bag or something?”

I throw up in a canvas bag. I am dehydrated. They try to give me an IV at the TOC, but it doesn't stick; the needle won't stay in my arm, so eventually we give up and I drink more water and vow that tomorrow I'm going to take rehydration tablets.

Five soldiers ask me that night: “So you're the reporter who threw up in the vehicle commander's bag?”

Week One. The neighborhood the 4-23 is clearing is called Ghazaliya. During Saddam's time, it was a wealthy, Sunni area, a prestigious place to live in the western part of the city. Over the past six months, the neighborhood has turned into a battleground.

I'm in Lieutenant Colonel Norris's vehicle. We arrive at the starting point for the operation, a road running parallel to a train track on the edge of the neighborhood. More than fifteen Stryker vehicles rumble to a stop, dust rising in the pink sun. The Strykers are massive, multiton green machines that remind me of the kind of vehicle I'd want to be riding in during an alien invasion. It is the first time in the war the Strykers, a relatively new vehicle, are being used in Baghdad. The Stryker armor is better than Humvee armor. Eight men can sit inside the troop compartment; the driver is in the nose; there are four portholes in the roof; two “air guards” in the back, where soldiers stand guard, their bodies half exposed; the other two portholes are for the vehicle commander and the machine gunner; the machine gun can also be operated by joystick from inside the vehicle.