I Lost My Love in Baghdad (3 page)

That August, I listened to Vice President Cheney say we were going after Saddam. I remember my initial response was, what a crazy idea. What a crazy, crazy idea, flying thousands of miles with an invading army to topple a government. But as the debate began, I started to think, well, democracy, freedom, 9-11, WMDs, maybe it's not such a bad idea. Being a contrarian, I argued with my antiwar colleagues, taking on the neoconservative talking points just to see how they felt, even though the talk of mobile weapons labs all seemed like complete bullshit to me, like whoever drew up the diagrams of mobile weapons labs had watched too much G.I. Joe as a child and could only imagine some kind of fantastic weapon that C.O.B.R.A (the evil terrorist organization fighting to rule the world, as the theme song pointed out) used to attack the real American heroes. On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell posed on 1st Avenue in New York City with a vial of fake anthrax. On March 20, 2003, the war started. For the next forty-eight hours, I watched TV, nonstop it seemed, switching between live coverage of the invasion and Adult Videos on Demand, alone in my New York apartment, thinking, I want to be over there, I want to be in Iraq.

Two years later here I am.

The BMW is moving at a crawl. My body feels each bump in the road. My sweat has soaked through my shirt.

“Okay, mate, you can get up now.”

The car stops again. We are at the first checkpoint to enter the Green Zone. There are two lanes, divided by fifteen-foot-high concrete walls erected to contain the damage of suicide car bombs. One lane is “high priority” only American military personnel and Defense Department contractors allowed. The other is for Iraqis and foreigners without proper identification. A sign in front reads
DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED,
in both English and Arabic. Follow the soldiers' instructions or you will be shot, it advises. Cell phones must be turned off; no photos allowed, either. I take it all in after seeing nothing but the car floor and the ashtray for the last forty-five minutes on what should have been a ten-minute drive.

There are palm trees. There are blast walls. A Bradley tank rolls past. Iraqi Army and American soldiers stand guard in front of a shack protected by sandbags. Water bottles and empty soda cans litter the ground. Dozens of beat-up cars are queued up, waiting in the sun to be searched. Their hoods and trunks are popped to check for explosives. A young American soldier watches from the shade of a blast wall as an Iraqi soldier lazily pats down the passengers in the car in front of us. The American spits chewing tobacco into an empty Gatorade bottle.

Nothing seems to fit. I don't know what it is. It may be the heat or it may be lack of sleep. Or it could just be the adrenaline coming down. I have this sensation that I am seeing too many parts that don't quite go together—randomly scattered signs of America in this completely un-American place, sun-blasted and slow-moving. I take it all in.

My first real look at Baghdad, and I remember my thought to the word.

What the fuck were we thinking?

BAGHDAD

Scott Johnson was sitting behind his desk on the second floor of the
Newsweek
bureau, a two-floor home inside the Green Zone, abandoned by its Iraqi owners and now rented to us. I walked into the office. He looked up and smiled.

“I brought a bunch of new DVDs,” I said.

“Cool, we'll check them out later. Let's go get your badges.”

Badges, I would learn, were the key to the Green Zone. I needed two of them—one military press ID and another called the International Zone (the official name for the Green Zone, usually just called “the IZ”) badge. The IZ badges were color coded—red was the lowest (for most Iraqis), purple being the highest (for high-level government officials). The right badge could get you into the U.S. embassy; the right badge allowed you to walk freely in the IZ without an escort, got you priority access to the checkpoints outside the IZ. The right badge allowed you to carry firearms and not get searched.

We walked outside the bureau. The house had a small lawn and garden out front, surrounded by a six-foot-high white wall. It was located on a quiet street guarded at both ends by a private security company called Edinburgh Risk.

Scott got behind the wheel of the Mercedes. At thirty-one years old, he was the magazine's youngest Baghdad bureau chief. In a few short years he'd gone from reporting in Paris to covering the war in Afghanistan, then to Iraq and from there to become the bureau chief in Mexico City. Now he was back in Baghdad with the top job. He backed out of the driveway, explaining the rules for moving around the IZ as he drove.

Rule 1: Stay away from American, Iraqi, and private security convoys. They are authorized to shoot anyone who comes within one hundred meters of their cars.

Rule 2: Stop at all checkpoints, whether on foot or in the car. Turn on your hazard lights and the inside car light at night. If you don't turn the lights on, they might shoot you.

That was basically it.

I sat shotgun, cracking the three-inch-thick bulletproof window to smoke. The extra weight from the armor on the Mercedes made the car drive like a boat.

We were on our way to the Iraqi parliament building, or the Convention Center, a five-minute drive from the house, where I could fill out all the necessary paperwork. At the first checkpoint, Scott made sure to hold his badge up against the windshield so the Iraqi guards working for Edinburgh Risk could see it. We then took a left, drove around the July 14th traffic circle—a dangerous intersection, Scott pointed out, because American patrols and private security convoys often came flying over the July 14th Bridge, returning from the city, still hyped up on adrenaline and more prone to shoot. The traffic circle flowed onto a wide four-lane road, with deep potholes and without lane markings, where no speed limit applied. After another traffic circle, we passed an area that was once the crown jewel of Baghdad's government, well-manicured parks surrounding the massive seashell-like Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The parks were now off-limits and overgrown; across from the tomb stood the complex of Iraqi government buildings, including the prime minister's office. The wide road narrowed down to two lanes, funneled in between blast walls, and abruptly ended in a parking lot for the Convention Center. At the end of the parking lot, there were twenty-foot-high barriers separating the Green Zone from the rest of Iraq.

As we stepped out of the car, the sun pressed down on us, a dry heat so severe that it took a few seconds for my body to understand how hot it was. I inhaled and it felt like breathing the crisp air inside an oven. We walked down a palatial white sidewalk to the first checkpoint outside the Convention Center and Scott showed his badge to Georgian soldiers who guarded it. They were part of the Coalition of the Willing, and their job was to guard key installations inside the Green Zone, despite their inability to speak English or Arabic. On the roof of the Rasheed Hotel, across from the Convention Center, snipers watched over the area. The next checkpoint was manned by Gurkhas, private security guards from Nepal. One hundred and fifty feet beyond them was another one before the steps of the Convention Center, manned by Iraqi police officers sitting in a wooden guard box that looked like a telephone booth. At the top of the steps, we were searched individually by an Iraqi security guard in plainclothes before we emptied our pockets and proceeded through a metal detector and X-ray machine. Finally, we were in the Convention Center, a multifloored complex that resembled any oversized venue for corporate summits. There were rooms for press conferences, government offices, and on the second floor an open-air cafeteria for Iraqi parliament members and the assembly hall for the Iraqi government. We walked upstairs to the second floor, where the military's public affairs offices were located, the Combined Press Information Center, or CPIC. Another Gurkha waiting in the hall checked our IDs again. I filled out the paperwork, handed to me by a sergeant working in public affairs, and grinned for the picture to get my ID. We left and drove back to the bureau. My first day in Iraq was over.

I'd arrived two years, five months, and twenty-five days after the war started, and Baghdad was under siege. Gone were the days of journalists traveling freely throughout the country. The stories I'd hear of the wild parties at the Hamra Hotel (“You know her, from Egypt, she swam in her underwear!”), the morning drives to Ramadi and Fallujah, casually searching for stories on the streets of Sadr City, moving without two carloads of armed guards—all of that had disappeared. Now about half our time was spent moving from one protected compound to the next, reporting by phone and email, conducting interviews with Iraqis who were willing to come see us. The other half was spent out on embeds with the U.S. military.

Most Westerners agreed that the good times ended in the spring of 2004. That April, the bodies of four Blackwater employees were strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. The next month Nicholas Berg, an American contractor, was beheaded on video, and the video was shown throughout the world. It was the month after that, they said, you could feel the change in the air. Things were going to get much worse. The war settled into a new pace. Brutality that had once captured headlines—three car bombs, over 115 dead—was now standard. The armed killers became better organized; there were more guns on the streets, more explosives, more suicide bombings. There were more suicide bombings in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 than in the entire world during the previous two decades. The improvised explosive device, or IED, evolved into a significantly more sophisticated and powerful weapon, the thing U.S. soldiers feared more than anything else. Death squads that had formed under the new Iraqi government, which was being propped up by the Americans, began launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the summer of '05, many of the correspondents who had been covering the war from the beginning were leaving. A second and third wave of reporters was getting their chance at the story, but it was a much different story now, a much different time. Personally, I was just happy to be there. When I'd share my enthusiasm with the veteran correspondents, they'd tell me, “Just wait until you've been here a few times, you'll see.”

It was much quieter in the Green Zone than in the rest of Baghdad. Americans jogged on the streets; soldiers in PT gear rode bicycles with rifles slung across their shoulders. Men and women from Alabama and Arkansas drove shuttle buses filled with Filipino and Iraqi day laborers from one side of the zone to the other. Americans lived in trailer parks, and dressed as if they were going to a NASCAR race: tattoos, tank tops, goatees, bellies hanging out over their too tight Levi's. Young black men wore baggy jeans, sported gold teeth and chains. Middle-aged white women with weathered faces wore push-up bras and cheap, stretchy, form-fitting pants. At any given time, some three thousand Americans and other foreigners resided in this ten-square-kilometer chunk of Baghdad, along with a few thousand Iraqis. It was the clearinghouse for the hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts, the Mecca of funds for “capacity building.” There were street addresses, but places were known by their compound's corporate sponsor—the Lincoln Group house, the RTI compound, Fleur, DynCorp, CRG Logistics, and the biggest of them all, KBR, or Kellogg Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary and civilian backbone for the American mission. The highest-ranking Iraqi leaders lived in a neighborhood of mansions called “Little Venice.” There was a bastardized Disneyland quality about the whole place—a destination vacation for careers, an escape for those whose real lives back home were falling apart. There were even tourist attractions, like Saddam's Crossed Swords, the war monument with four giant sabers on a concrete parade ground, and the bombed-out Ministry of Information building.

The Green Zone had its own mixed-up culture. It started with those who protected it. The guards, for the most part, were neither American nor Iraqi. There was the battalion of Georgian soldiers, peasants from the outskirts of Tbilisi, given the task of manning checkpoints inside the zone. They had the manners of East European pillagers, and I would often see them speeding around helmetless in their Humvees, apparently drunk on the vodka they scammed from stores inside the IZ. No one seemed to know why the Georgians had this particular mission—a fairly important one, protecting the home of the new Iraqi government—but everyone agreed they aggravated more than helped, the way they crudely eyed Iraqi and Western women and spoke only in grunts.

Then there were the Gurkhas, Nepalese men with guns who spoke some English, having been trained in the Queen's Army. The squat brown-faced fighters—tough and extremely well trained—reminded me of Willy Wonka's Oompa Loompahs, snatched from a far-off land to go serve in a magical palace of the white man's eccentricity. After a private security contract changed hands, checkpoints and key installations in the Green Zone started to be manned by Peruvians and others from Latin America. They were barely literate, spoke only Spanish, seemed fairly incompetent. Yet they were given the important task of guarding the U.S. embassy. They worked for a company called Triple Canopy, which, like Blackwater, was cashing in on the private security boom. These companies played a large part in the culture of the Green Zone, each of them employing groups of armed men, drawn from the ranks of retired soldiers across the world, though there was not much quality control. (Blackwater and Triple Canopy both had nicknames—Bongwater and Triple Comedy.) Along with the Nepalese and the Peruvians, the ranks of these companies included Americans, Britons, Frenchmen, Ecuadorians, Australians, Croatians, Fijians, and Senegalese, among others. An estimated twenty to thirty thousand private security guards—sometimes referred to as PSDs, for private security details, but also just called mercenaries—operated in Iraq. They held the jobs that the U.S. didn't have the manpower or expertise to perform. (The American ambassador, for instance, was guarded by a Blackwater detail, and Senegalese guards manned checkpoints inside an American base near the airport.)

The U.S. embassy was in Saddam's old palace, an imposing feat of architecture that showed off the vicious dictator's poor taste. It was now the brain center for the American occupation. Bureaucrats from every federal agency with an acronym (CIA, DIA, ATF, FBI, NSA, DOS, DOD, DOT, DOC, USAID, etc.) set up shop on the extravagant marble floors and relieved themselves in the palatial bathroom stalls that had been retrofitted by the Americans to include stand-up porcelain urinals. It was rare to see an Iraqi inside the embassy. The ambassador and the military commander of U.S forces in Iraq had their offices on the top floor. There was something telling and obscene about our being there. The gold fixtures and ostentatious chandeliers were the tacky choices of a brutal ruler flaunting his power, and it seemed even tackier for us to rule over the country from his former confines.

Not that I didn't like going to the place. It had a great, spacious lounge area, a former hall for imperial receptions where they had the best coffee shop in Iraq, the Green Bean, a Starbucks clone that served double lattes and vanilla smoothies twenty-four hours a day. The embassy also had a pool, where signs warned that no weapons were allowed while drinking. The American officials at the embassy worked in the palace, though they didn't live there. At the end of the day, they all went home to the KBR trailer parks and slept under flimsy ceilings that would do nothing against a direct hit from the regular insurgent attacks. (A new U.S. embassy is currently under construction in the Green Zone. The cost is an estimated $2 billion, and when complete, it will be the largest U.S. embassy in the world, about the size of the Vatican.)

To walk around the Green Zone, or even to get in, was impossible for most Iraqis—you needed that special IZ badge. Applying for a badge was a time-consuming, frustrating process that could take months. And once you received the badge, there was a chance the rules for badge applications would have changed, and you'd have to apply again. The badges became a fashion accessory displayed in pouches that everyone wore around their necks—they came in desert khaki, black, camouflage, and had embroidered inscriptions like
OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM
and
U.S. EMBASSY BAGHDAD.
According to the legend I heard, the first person to sell badge holders was Crazy Tony the German. Tony drove down to Baghdad from Europe in a minibus shortly after the invasion, and set up shop on the American bases, selling souvenirs and badge holders. (His most popular souvenir, which got banned by the Americans, was a coffee mug with Kenny from
South Park.
The
South Park
catchphrase—“You killed Kenny, you bastards!”—was altered to “You sent me to Iraq, you bastards!” Kenny was pictured with a bullet hole in his head.) Tony was known for driving a moped around town when most wouldn't trust an armored car. He was also a source of cash for Westerners. The cash was generated from his souvenir and badge holder sales, which were huge. He could drop off tens of thousands of dollars in brown shopping bags in exchange for wire transfers to an account he kept in Croatia.