Redeployment (7 page)

I tried to tell the story to the mechanic. I was very drunk, and the guy tried very hard to listen.

“Yeah,” he said softly, “yeah. It’s crazy.” I could tell he was searching for the right thing to say. “Look, I’m gonna tell you something.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I respect what you’ve been through,” he said.

I took a sip of my beer. “I don’t want you to respect what I’ve been through,” I said.

That confused him. “What do you want?” he said.

I didn’t know. We sat and drank beer for a bit.

“I want you to be disgusted,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“And,” I said, “you didn’t know that kid. So don’t pretend like you care. Everybody wants to feel like they’re some caring person.”

He didn’t say anything else, which was smart. I waited for him to say something wrong, to ask me about the war or the Marine that died or the rocks that G and me had kept with us, that I still had in my pocket that night at the bar. But he didn’t say another word, and neither did I. And that was that for me telling people stories.

I hung out in my parents’ house for another week, and then I went back to Twentynine Palms and the Marine Corps. I never saw Rachel again, but we’re Facebook friends. She got married while I was on my third deployment. She had her first kid while I was on my fourth.

EOD handled the bombs.
SSTP treated the wounds. PRP processed the bodies. The 08s fired DPICM. The MAW provided CAS. The 03s patrolled the MSRs. Me and PFC handled the money.

If a sheikh supported the ISF, we distributed CERP. If the ESB destroyed a building, we gave fair comp. If the 03s shot a civilian, we paid off the families. That meant leaving the FOB, where it’s safe, and driving the MSRs.

I never wanted to leave the FOB. I never wanted to drive the MSRs or roll with 03s. PFC did. But me, when I got 3400 in boot camp, I thought, Great. I’d work in an office, be a POG. Be the POG of POGs and then go to college for business. I didn’t need to get some, I needed to get the G.I. Bill. But when I was training at BSTS, they told me, You better learn this, 3400s go outside the wire. A few months later, I was strapped up, M4 in Condition 1, surrounded by 03s, backpack full of cash, twitchiest guy in Iraq.

I did twenty-four missions, some with Marine 03s, some with National Guardsmen from 2/136. My last mission was to AZD. A couple of Iraqis had driven up fast on a TCP. They ignored the EOF, the dazzlers and the warning shots, and died for it. I’d
been promoted to E4, so PFC was taking over consolation payments, but I went with him to give a left-seat right-seat on working off the FOB. PFC always needed his hand held. In the HMMWV it was me, PFC, PV2 Herrera, and SGT Green. Up in the turret on the 240G was SPC Jaegermeir-Schmidt, aka J-15.

There wasn’t a lot to look at on the MSR south of HB. We scanned for all the different types of IEDs AQI would throw at us. IEDs made of old 122 shells, or C4, or homemade explosives. Chlorine bombs mixed with HE. VBIEDs in burned-out cars. SVBIEDs driven by lunatics. IEDs in drainage ditches or dug into the middle of the road. Some in the bodies of dead camels. Others daisy-chained together—one in the open to make you stop, another to kill you where you stand. IEDs everywhere, but most missions, nothing. Even knowing how bad the MSRs were, knowing we could die, we got bored.

PFC said, “It’d be cool to get IED’d, ’long as no one got hurt.”

J-15 snapped, said, “That’s bad juju, that’s worse than eating the Charms in an MRE.”

Temp was 121, and I remember bitching about the AC. Then the IED hit.

PV2 swerved and the HMMWV rolled. It wasn’t like the HEAT trainer at Lejeune. JP-8 leaked and caught fire, burning through my MARPATs. Me and SGT Green got out, and then we pulled PV2 out by the straps of his PPE. But PV2 was unconscious, and I ran back for PFC, but he was on the side where the IED hit, and it was too late.

PFC’s Eye Pro cracked and warped in the heat. The plastic snaps on his PPE melted. And even though J-15 left his legs
behind, at least he got CASEVAC’d to the SSTP and died on the table. PRP had to wash PFC out with Simple Green and peroxide.

The MLG awarded me a NAM with a V. Don’t see too many 3400s got a NAM with a V. It’s up there next to my CAR and my Purple Heart and my GWOT Expeditionary and my Sea Service and my Good Cookie and my NDS. Even 03s show respect when they see it. But give me a NAM with a V, give me the Medal of Honor, it doesn’t change that I’m still breathing. And when people ask what the NAM is for, I say it’s so I don’t feel bad that I was too slow for PFC.

In boot camp, the DIs teach you Medal of Honor stories. Most recipients were KIA. Their families didn’t get a homecoming, they got a CACO knocking on their door. They got SGLI. They got a trip to Dover to see Marines lift the remains out of a C-130. They got a closed casket, because IEDs and SAF don’t leave pretty corpses. The DIs tell you these stories over and over, and even a POG like me knows what they mean.

So I tell my family, “I’m staying in—the G.I. Bill can wait.” And I tell my OIC, “Sir, I want to go to OEF. OEF’s where the fight is now.” And I tell my girlfriend, “Okay, leave me.” And I tell PFC, “I wish it’d been me,” even though I don’t mean it.

I’m going to OEF. As a 3400. As a POG, but a POG with experience. I’ll distribute CERP again. I’ll roll with 03s again. And maybe I’ll get IED’d again. But this time, out on the MSRs, I will be terrified.

I will remember the sounds PFC made. I will remember that I was his NCO, so he was my responsibility. And I will remember PFC himself as though I loved him. So I won’t really remember
PFC at all—not why I gave him low PRO/CONs, not why I told him he’d never make E4.

Instead I will remember that our HMMWV had 5 PX. That the SITREP was 2 KIA, 3 WIA. That KIA means they gave everything. That WIA means I didn’t.

Success was a matter of perspective.
In Iraq it had to be. There was no Omaha Beach, no Vicksburg Campaign, not even an Alamo to signal a clear defeat. The closest we’d come were those toppled Saddam statues, but that was years ago. I remember Condoleezza Rice declaring that civil administration and police functions had no part in a military campaign. “We don’t need to have the 82nd Airborne,” she said, “escorting kids to kindergarten.” In 2008, around the time I got there, the 82nd Airborne was building greenhouses near Tikrit. It was a brave new world, and as a Foreign Service Officer heading an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, I was right at the heart of it.

Touching down in Camp Taji, I was nervous, and not simply because of the danger. I wasn’t sure I belonged. I hadn’t believed in the war when it started, though I did believe in government service. I also knew my career would be helped by time in Iraq. The team I’d be leading had already been in country for a while. I was the only Foreign Service Officer of the group, but the sum total of my experience doing reconstruction consisted of a few college summers in Alabama working for Habitat for Humanity. I didn’t think it would help.

My colleagues had, theoretically, been hired for actual skills. As I exited the helicopter and headed toward a heavyset man holding a piece of paper with my name scrawled on it, I had the nagging impression that he would see through me to what I feared I was—a fraud and a war tourist.

It came as a surprise, then, when the man holding the sign—Bob, our ePRT’s one ex-military team member—cavalierly informed me that he’d signed up on a 3161 as a lark. He laughed about it, as though his lack of commitment were funny, while he escorted me to the Nissan pickup truck the ePRT used to get around base. “I never did anything like this before,” he said. “I never even figured I’d pass the physical. I’ve got a heart murmur. But there was no physical. There wasn’t even an interview. They called me up and told me I was hired, straight off the résumé.”

Bob, I quickly learned, had an existential view of the Iraq war. We were fighting in Iraq because we were fighting in Iraq. His was not to reason why, his was but to receive a $250,000 salary with three paid vacations and little expectation of tangible accomplishments.

“Cindy’s a true believer,” Bob said as he drove us to the ePRT office. “Fighting the fight of good versus evil. Democracy versus Islam. All that Sunday school shit. Careful with her.”

“What is she working on?”

“She’s our women’s initiative adviser,” said Bob. “She used to be on a local school board back in wherever the fuck she’s from. Kansas or Idaho or something. She handles our women’s business association, and she’s starting an agricultural project for widows.”

“She knows about farming?” I said hopefully.

“Nope, but I taught her how to Google.”

He parked the car outside a rickety hut made of plywood, which, he announced, was our office. Inside were two rooms, four desks, a long series of power strips, and a skinny little woman in her mid-fifties, peering intently at her computer screen.

“There’s two hundred fifty squirts in a gallon of milk!” she said.

Bob silently mouthed the word
Google
. Then he announced, “Cindy. Our fearless leader is here.”

“Oh my,” she said, springing out of her seat and walking over to shake my hand. “Sure glad to meet you!”

“I hear you’re working on an agricultural initiative,” I said.

“And a health clinic,” she said. “That’ll be tough, but it’s what the women tell me they need.”

I looked around the room.

“You can take either of the empty desks,” said Bob. “Steve won’t be using his.”

“Who’s Steve?” I said.

“The other contractor we were supposed to have,” said Cindy. She made a sad face. “He got pretty badly injured on his first day.”

“His first day?” I said. I looked over at the eerily empty desk in the back room. This was, I thought, a war zone. Death and disfigurement were possibilities for all of us.

“When he flew in to Taji,” Bob said, smirking, “he jumped out of the Black Hawk action-movie style, like he was gonna have to sprint through machine-gun fire to get to safety. Shattered his ankle with his very first step.”

•   •   •

After I’d settled in,
Bob oriented me to the AO, taking me to the large map hanging in our office and breaking down the region.

“Here’s us,” he said, pointing at Camp Taji. “To the east you’ve got the Tigris. There’s a few old palaces on the western banks, and the other side is farming. Fruit groves. Oranges. Lemons. That weird fruit. What’s it called?”

“Pomegranate?” I said.

“No. I like pomegranate. That stuff—” He waved his hands and grimaced, then pointed back to the east side of the Tigris on the map. “This section’s all Sunni, so during Saddam, they did all right. It’s less slummy.”

“Less slummy?” I said.

“Until the highway. Route Dover”—Bob pointed to a road running north and south—“that’s the dividing line. West of Dover, Sunnis. East of Dover, slums, shit land, a little farming irrigated by the canal.” He pointed to a thin blue line running out of the Tigris, forming the southern border of the map. “Above that there’s not much good farming. There’s a water treatment plant here”—he pointed to a black spot on the map unconnected to any marked roads—“there’s an oil refinery out to the east, and here’s JSS Istalquaal.”

“JSS,” I said. “That means there’s Iraqi units there.”

“National Police,” he said. “And two companies from the BCT. Sunni police stay on the Sunni side, Shi’a stay on the Shi’a side, but the National Police cross over.”

“What are the National Police like?” I said.

“They’re Shi’a death squads,” he said, smirking.

“Oh.”

“South of the canal is Sadr City. No one goes there except U.S. SpecOps looking to kill somebody. Istalquaal is the closest JSS in our AO to it.”

I looked up at the map. “USAID claims agriculture should be employing thirty percent of the population,” I said.

“Right,” said Bob, “but the whole system broke down after we trashed the state-run industries.”

“Fantastic,” I said.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Bob. “We remade the Ministry of Agriculture on free market principles, but the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs.”

“Okay,” I said, “but this region”—I pointed to the Shi’a areas—“needs water for irrigation.”

“West of Dover, too,” he said. “Irrigation systems need maintenance, and nobody’s been doing much of that.”

I tapped the dark spot he’d said was a water treatment plant. “Is this operational?”

Bob laughed. “We sunk about 1.5 million dollars’ worth of IRRF2 funds into it a couple years back.”

“What’d that buy us?”

“No idea,” Bob said. “But the chief engineer has been asking for a meeting.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Bob shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Look,” I said, “I know there’s a limit to what I can do. But if I can do one small thing—”

“Small?” said Bob. “A water treatment plant?”

“It’s probably the best thing we could—”

“I’ve been here longer than you,” said Bob.

“Okay.”

“If you want to succeed, don’t do big ambitious things. This is Iraq. Teach widows to raise bees.”

“Raise bees?” I said.

“Beekeep?” he said. “Whatever. Grow honey. Get five widows some beehives—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve got an Iraqi who can sell us the hives, and an Iraqi local council saying they’ll support the project—”

“Bob,” I said.

“Yes?” he said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“The embassy likes completed projects supporting Lines of Engagement.”

“Which has what to do with getting five widows beekeeping?”

Bob folded his arms and looked me over. He pointed to the opposite wall, where we had a poster outlining the LOEs. “Give someone a job. That’s economic improvement. Give women a job. That’s women’s empowerment. Give a widow a job. That’s aiding disenfranchised populations. Three LOEs in one project. Widow projects are gold. With the council supporting it, we can say it’s an Iraqi-led project. And it’ll cost under twenty-five thousand dollars, so the funding will sail through.”

“Five widows with beehives.”

“I think it’s called an apiary,” he said.

“Beekeeping,” I said, “is not going to help.”

“Help what?” said Bob. “This country is fucked whatever you do.”

“I’m going to focus on water,” I said. “Let’s get that plant running.”

“Okay,” he said. He shook his head, then looked up and smiled amiably. He seemed to have decided I could go to hell my own way. “Then we should get you to one of the companies at Istalquaal.”

“Istalquaal,” I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.

“I think that’s how you say it,” Bob said. “It means freedom. Or liberation. Something.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“They didn’t name it,” he said. “We did.”

•   •   •

It took six weeks
to get to the plant. Three weeks alone trying to get Kazemi, the chief engineer, on the phone. Another three trying to nail down the specifics. Kazemi had an annoying habit of answering questions about dates and times the way a Zen master answers questions about enlightenment. “Only the mountains do not meet,” he’d say, or, “The provisions for tomorrow belong to tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Cindy’s women’s health clinic took off. She set it up on the Sunni side of the highway, and the number of patients increased steadily each week. I didn’t have much to do on the water front, and sitting around waiting for Kazemi to get back to me was enough to drive me insane, so I decided to get myself personally involved in the clinic. I didn’t really trust Cindy with it. I thought she was too earnest to handle something important, and the more she told me, the more I thought the project was genuinely worthwhile.

In Iraq, it’s hard for women to see a doctor. They need a man’s permission, and even then a lot of hospitals and small
clinics won’t serve them. You’ll see signs reading, “Services for Men Only,” sort of like the old “Irish Need Not Apply” signs that my great-great-grandfather had to deal with.

Health services were the hook to draw people in, but key to the broader functioning of the clinic were Najdah, a dogged social worker, and her sister, the on-staff lawyer. Every woman who came in was interviewed first, ostensibly for the clinic to find out what health services they needed but actually to allow us to find out what broader services we could provide. The problems of women in our area went far beyond untreated urinary tract infections, though those were often quite severe—women’s problems were usually not sufficient pretext for a man to allow his wife or daughter or sister to go see the doctor, and health issues we think of as minor in the United States had a tendency to snowball. One woman’s UTI scarred her kidneys so badly, she was risking organ failure.

The clinic also helped women needing divorces, women suffering domestic violence, women not getting the public assistance they were entitled to, and women who wanted to file claims against Coalition Forces to get compensation for relatives they’d accidentally killed. One girl, a fourteen-year-old victim of gang rape, came in because her family planned to sell her to a local brothel. This wasn’t uncommon for girls whose rapes destroyed their marriage prospects. It was actually a kinder option than the honor killings that still sometimes happened.

Najdah and the staff lawyer would do their best to help these women out, occasionally raising their concerns with the local councils and power brokers. They didn’t try to “liberate” the Iraqi women—whatever that means—or turn them into entrepreneurs. Najdah and her staff listened to them and helped
them with their actual problems. In the case of the fourteen-year-old, Najdah had a friend on the police force raid the girl’s home as well as the brothel. The girl went to prison. For her, it was the best alternative.

I made a few trips out to the clinic and had started thinking about expanding the idea to other communities when Kazemi finally got back to us with concrete ideas for a meeting. I arranged things with him and then tried to set up a convoy with one of the units at Istalquaal.

“Nobody’s been that way in a long time,” one company commander told me over the phone. “There’s probably IEDs there from ’04. We have no idea what we might hit.”

That’s not something you want to hear from a hardened soldier. I’d already done a couple convoys by the time I got to Istalquaal, but the memory of that assessment and the wary nervousness of the soldiers there gave me what, in the military, they refer to as a “high pucker factor.” The platoon that eventually took me out had clearly drawn the last straw. They all knew it. “Let’s go get blown up,” I overheard one soldier saying to another. When we got on the road, my only comfort was the obvious boredom of my translator, a somewhat short and pudgy Sunni Muslim everybody referred to as “the Professor.”

“Why do they call you the Professor?” I asked him.

“Because I was a professor,” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them as if to emphasize the point, “before you came and destroyed this country.”

We were getting off to an awkward start. “You know,” I said, “when this all started I opposed the war. . . .”

“You have baked Iraq like a cake,” he said, “and given it to Iran to eat.”

He sniffed and folded his arms over his belly and closed his eyes. I pretended something on the side of the road had caught my eye. Most translators would never say anything like that to an American. We sat in silence for a while.

“Istalquaal,” I finally said, trying to draw him out. “Does it mean freedom, or liberation?”

He opened his eyes a crack and looked at me sidelong. “Istalquaal?
Istiqlal
means independence,” he said. “Istalquaal means nothing. It means Americans can’t speak Arabic.”

It was rumored the Professor had blood on his hands from the Saddam days. Whether that was true or not, he was our best interpreter. On the road, though, he wasn’t much company. He sat with his hands folded and his eyes closed, possibly sleeping, possibly avoiding conversation.