I Lost My Love in Baghdad (8 page)

“I am coming home, and I still want to be with you.”

She told me she had to go and hung up. I called back, but she didn't answer.

Fuck. Didn't she understand that I'd just come back from a fucking stressful two days?

That night, I took a helicopter back to Baghdad. Andi wasn't answering my calls, and I was worried and annoyed. If she couldn't handle this kind of minor setback, I thought, what chance did we have?

I finally got through to her when I was back at the
Newsweek
bureau. We talked for three hours. She told me that at the wedding, all she thought about was me. But she also told me that a guy there tried to kiss her.

“What? He tried to kiss you?”

“I ducked! I didn't kiss him.”

“What the fuck? Didn't you tell him you had a boyfriend?”

“I did. He asked if I loved you.”

“Who is this guy? What's he do?”

“He's an accountant in Boston.”

“An accountant? Jesus Christ, didn't you tell him you're dating a fucking war correspondent?”

She told me that she wasn't interested in him at all. She wanted to be with me, but she really was worried that I wasn't going to come back. I'm coming back, I said, in two weeks. I promise. And if that fucking accountant emails you, don't email him back.

Something about Fallujah, something about the Boston wedding, it all had a clarifying effect on our relationship. The day after our three-hour conversation, we instant-messaged with each other over Skype.

Andiparhamovich: It's hard for me to say it you know

Andiparhamovich: But I think I love you

Michaelmhastings: I think I love you too

BAGHDAD, DUBAI, NEW YORK

I am trying to leave Iraq, waiting nervously in the Baghdad International Airport, in another fucking line, my passport in hand. I slept two hours last night. It's a Monday, and there's a sandstorm.

I've spent the last two weeks in Mosul, the country's third-largest city, two hundred miles north of Baghdad. I was embedded with the 172nd Stryker Brigade, a three-thousand-man unit from Alaska that fought in a new kind of armored vehicle called the Stryker. It looked like something out of
Star Wars
—four massive wheels, its body painted metallic green. The Stryker could reach speeds up to seventy miles an hour, and had room inside for a squad of soldiers. The driver, crammed in the nose of the vehicle, used video screens to see the road. I was in Mosul to cover Iraq's constitutional referendum. The Iraqi government had finally agreed on a new constitution; now it was up to the citizens to vote. The Stryker Brigade's mission was to make the vote run smoothly—securing the polling stations, transporting ballot boxes and election officials around the city.

There were a few issues. Copies of the constitution weren't distributed properly across the country, so few voters actually had read it. That didn't stop them from voting. The referendum was on Saturday. That afternoon, I rode around on the roof of the Stryker, lying down next to a bag of soccer balls the soldiers were handing out, snapping photos and taking notes as I watched Iraqis come out by the thousands to cast their ballots. I wrote my story, just making deadline, saying the vote was a success—in that it actually happened, and there was not much violence.

On Sunday, I caught a flight in a C-130 cargo plane from Mosul to Camp Victory in Baghdad, got a ride in an SUV from an Estonian public affairs officer to a helicopter pad on the other side of the camp, where a pilot offered me a lift to the Green Zone. The trip took four hours and was amazingly smooth for military travel. On Monday, I drove to the Baghdad Airport. That's when things stopped going smoothly.

Besides the sandstorm, there is a bureaucratic problem—I don't have an exit visa. To leave Iraq as an American citizen not working for the government, you need the Iraqi government's permission. To get the exit visa, you pay a bribe ranging from $50 to $150 to an Iraqi official, which gets you a stamp on the passport allowing you to leave. Sometimes you can get by without it, but sometimes you can't. This is one of those times. At the first immigration check, the immigration official, a pudgy fellow with a mustache, hands my passport back to me.

“Why no stamp?” he says.

“The office to get the stamp has been closed for the last five days,” I tell him. “And the stamp is only good for five days, so I couldn't get it, and the flight was supposed to leave early this morning, so if I wanted to make my flight…”

Not even a shrug from the official. He doesn't like me.

“Why no stamp.”

I need to get permission to leave. My flight has already been canceled because of the sandstorm, so it looks like I'll have a few hours to try to work something out. I'm with my driver, who speaks English, and my Iraqi security guard, Uday. I send my driver to meet our office manager outside the first airport checkpoint. He has printed out a letter saying I am authorized to leave. It looks like an official letter—it's written on
Newsweek
letterhead. I give it to the customs official. He shakes his head and doesn't give me the letter back.

I ask my driver to try to bribe the official. That doesn't work, either, and the customs man dislikes me even more now.

I confer with my driver on what to do next. “Do you think we can get the visa stamped today?”

“Enshallah,” he says, “enshallah.”

God willing. I don't need God, I think, just get the stamp on the damn passport.

It looks like the flights to Amman are all going to be canceled, so there's a chance I might get stuck overnight at the airport. (It will be safer for me to stay at the airport for the night than to go up and down Airport Road again.) I give my passport to my driver, and he goes into downtown Baghdad to get the passport stamped with an exit visa.

I wait. I'm letting my nerves show. Now I don't even have a passport with me. I want to get out now. I want to leave. I want to see Andi. I promised her I would be home on Tuesday. I smoke freely, though the Muslim holiday of Ramadan has begun and smoking in public is forbidden and offensive to believers. I'm being culturally insensitive, but I don't really give a shit. I justify my smoking by telling myself the airport is basically American soil now anyway.

An announcement crackles in Arabic saying that all flights to Amman are canceled. I start to listen for other flights that might be leaving, flights going anywhere. Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Erbil, wherever, it doesn't matter. After keeping my shit together since I arrived in Baghdad in August, I feel like I'm about to lose it.

It's getting late in the afternoon; there are no civilian flights once the sun sets.

My driver returns with the exit visa stamp on the passport. A crowd has gathered at the immigration counter, pushing and shouting. A sweaty fat man stands there, calling out a destination. “Dubai,” he says, “Dubai.”

Unlike most airports in the world, where there is a generally organized schedule, the Baghdad Airport is a permanent clusterfuck. Little is computerized or modern despite the more than $150 million investment to refurbish the place. There is no working flight board listing arrivals and departures; there are about seven security checkpoints to get on a plane. Stranded passengers sometimes sleep in the terminal for days before their flights leave. Flight times are vague estimates at best; when you ask about a departure or arrival time, the answer from the airport staff is: It will fly when it flies, maybe in an hour, maybe in five hours, maybe tomorrow, enshallah.

The sweaty fat gentleman calling out Dubai works with a charter company.

“Ask him if there are still seats free to Dubai,” I tell my driver.

My driver asks.

“Yes, there are, but the flight is leaving now, four hundred dollars for a ticket.”

“Get me a ticket,” I say.

The sandstorm hasn't cleared; I look out the large glass windows in the terminal at the dull beige color in the air.

The fat man escorts me through the first customs and ticket check. I triumphantly show my exit visa to the customs official who hadn't let me through earlier.

I am screened again by a metal detector. A South African private security guard from a company called Global Security stops the fat man.

“You can't just keep bringing people on once the flight has been called.”

I look at the South African. “Dude, I need to get on this flight.”

He lets us through.

At an unmarked ticket counter, I pay a man $400. I search my pockets for the cash. I've divided up $1,000 in three different spots, including a roll of hundreds in my sock, and my hand is shaking as I pull out the notes.

There is no time to check baggage. I hurry through the terminal, past another metal detector, down a flight of stairs where a bus is waiting to take me out to the plane. I carry a large duffel bag, my large North Face backpack, and my laptop bag. I walk up the steps to the jet. I am the last one on. My bags bang against everyone as I walk down the narrow aisle. I hear shouts in Arabic directed at me, which I believe mean, “Watch your fucking bags, white boy,” but I don't care. I am happy. I am on the runway. I am going to see Andi.

The plane says Hungarian Airlines, flying under the name of the charter company, Jupiter Air. The flight staff is Hungarian, and the stewardess with her blond hair and heavy makeup looks like she could pass for a prostitute in her spare time. The flight is only half full.

I sit down and put on my iPod, a 1 gig Shuffle Andi gave me in July. She'd loaded up the songs, too, including “This Modern Love” from the soundtrack to
Wedding Crashers,
a movie we saw together three weeks before I left for Iraq.

I lean back in my seat.

The flight starts to take off. There is a draft coming from somewhere. The 737 is shaking more than it should. The wheels lift off the ground. I don't hear any loud noises. The music in my headphones plays. I smile. I smile in a way I haven't since the days before I got sober seven years ago. The addict in me is alive again and oh what a feeling. I survived. I made it. I didn't fuck up. Bliss.

I know now what they are talking about when they say “war junkies,” now I understand exactly what they mean. I've felt it before. I know the pull, the intoxication, the life-affirming chemicals released after seeing the abyss and coming back from it. When I was a teenager I used to snort cocaine and smoke crack and party all night and booze for months because I wanted to know what it was like to hit those highs and to feel those highs when they all came crashing down.

It feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from the war. Fucking Baghdad.

Two hours after takeoff, Dubai appears, and the feeling does not go away. The city's skyline is lit up, excessive amounts of electricity surging up skyscrapers, large ships rocking in the ports on the Persian Gulf. The airplane door opens, and I am out and then onto a pristinely clean bus that runs silently, almost magically fume-free, its temperature-controlled air so refreshing and cool. I had forgotten the finer things in life. I'd gotten used to a stew and rice for dinner, to mosquitoes and flies and bats and lizards, to nothing ever working right. Dubai is the opposite, a return to civilization, it is the Hong Kong of the Middle East, Las Vegas meets Islam, no open gambling but plenty of money laundering, row after row of towering buildings, an indoor ski hill, the only seven-star hotel in the world, a man-made island shaped like a palm tree.

Through the terminal—a giant duty-free shopping complex disguised as an airport—and into a taxi in under fifteen minutes. The cab is no smoking. I check in at the Hyatt Regency. Five Russian prostitutes hang out in the lobby, young girls, barely eighteen if that. I have dinner on the twenty-fifth floor, a revolving glass-windowed restaurant with a buffet of smoked salmon, shrimp, lobster tail, lo mein, steak, everything refrigerated and fresh.

The next day, I'm on an Emirates flight direct to New York, with a choice of movies from an entertainment console hidden in the armrest. The flight goes over the mountains of Iran, up toward Russia, and I follow it on the map on the color monitor, traveling over countries that I haven't yet set foot in, wondering what the future has in store. Flying through the night to see Andi, texting back and forth the entire way. I watch
Batman Begins,
and seeing Katie Holmes as the tough district attorney reminds me of Andi. Everything reminds me of her and that I haven't been with her in two and a half months. She would tell me later that she loved that movie, too, because at its heart it was about understanding evil and then fighting it.

Andi meets me at JFK. It is awkward at first. The car she has come out in can't find me. It's a cold October night, and I wait on the sidewalk until finally she pulls up. I jump in the backseat and grab her hand. The first thing she notices is that I've lost weight, the result of my last embed sitting inside armored vehicles for hours on end, sweating, sweating, sweating. She can see my bones, she tells me later. She could never be with someone skinnier than she is, she jokes. We go straight to my studio apartment on the Lower East Side. I don't remember now what we talked about. I remember her sitting next to me in the backseat, I remember holding her hand, driving over the bridge toward the Manhattan skyline at 10
P.M.
I remember the return to my apartment, dragging my bags up two flights of stairs, searching for my keys, finding them, opening the door then locking it behind us, click, then making love, and then her cell phone is ringing and the cab driver is saying we forgot to sign the credit card receipt. I go back out to the street, to New York in the fall, sign the receipt, and then I return to her.