Redeployment (9 page)

“Membership is increasing,” said Cindy. “A lot of the women’s husbands have been showing up and telling their friends they can get good advice and medicine.”

“I thought they were widows?”

Cindy shrugged and turned back to Google, occasionally blurting out fun facts like, “Nothin’ doin’ in chickens these days, not with the price of these Brazilian frozens.” I stared at the boxes of uniforms until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I left the office, slamming the flimsy wooden door behind me, and walked over to the Civil Affairs Company’s offices to talk to Major Zima again—this time about the water plant and the pipeline to the Sunni community. I found him in the midst of moving various files to new and seemingly random locations.

“That pipeline is still in construction,” Zima told me while shoving an overly large stack of paper into an overly small filing cabinet. He explained that before either of us had even gotten to Iraq, a provincial council had convinced the previous brigade’s Civil Affairs Company to build the pipeline. He’d inherited the project and thought it should continue.

“Most local water’s a mix of E. coli, heavy metals, and sulfuric acid,” Zima said. “I wouldn’t want to brush my teeth with that.”

I explained to him the Sunni-Shi’a difficulties. Then I tried to tell him about how the pipes were for the wrong water pressure. “Even if you finish it and the plant gets on line and the ministry somehow allows it to start operating,” I said, “the pipeline will pump water at such high pressure that all the toilets
and sinks and spigots west of Route Dover will simultaneously explode.”

“Really?” he said, looking up from the problematic filing cabinet.

“That’s what you’re building,” I said. “Or, what the Iraqi firm you’re hiring is.”

“They’re Jordanians,” he said. “There’s only one Iraqi.” He leaned back, lifted a leg, and kicked at the filing cabinet’s drawer. The thing closed, but with bits of paper sticking out the sides. Satisfied, he looked up and said, “I’ll handle it.” When I pressed him for his solution, though, he only smiled and told me to wait.

•   •   •

Having the uniforms
in the office meant I had to look at them all the time. It’s no surprise I snapped.

“Do you really want me to start a goddamn baseball team in Iraq?” I practically screamed into the phone. Chris Roper was not the sort of man you screamed at. With him, it tended to be the other way around. For a career diplomat, he was surprisingly undiplomatic. Too much time spent around the Army, probably.

“The fuck are you talking about?” he said. He had the slightest hint of a Brooklyn accent.

I told him what Major Zima had told me about the uniforms.

“Oh,” said Roper, “that. That doesn’t matter. I want to talk about the women’s business association.”

“The women’s business association is a scam,” I said. “Starting an Iraqi baseball league, though, is a joke.”

“Isn’t the Civil Affairs Company handling that?” Roper said. “I didn’t pony up for responsibility, that’s for sure.”

“You didn’t tell them about how ‘sports diplomacy’ was all the rage at the embassy?”

There was a long pause.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out, “it kind of is.”

“Jesus, Chris.”

“And you can’t cut the women’s business association.”

“Why not? It’s been going a year already and has yet to start a business. The last meeting, we rented a ‘conference and presentation room’ for fifteen thousand dollars which turned out to be an unused room in an abandoned school
we
built back in 2005.” I paused and took a breath. “Actually, ‘abandoned’ is the wrong word. No one ever used it.”

“Women’s empowerment is a huge mission goal for the embassy.”

“That’s why the women’s health clinic—”

“Women’s empowerment,” he said, “means jobs. Trust me when I tell you that was a key takeaway of the past ten meetings I’ve been to. The health clinic is not providing jobs.”

“It’s providing local women what they actually want and—”

“We’re sinking, what, sixty thousand into it?” he said.

“They’re not going to start—”

“There is a direct link,” Roper intoned, “between the oppression of women and extremism.”

There was brief silence.

“And it’s not like I don’t think it’s hard,” he continued. “All of this is hard. Doing anything in Iraq is hard.”

“The clinic—”

“Is not jobs,” he said. “Give me Rosie the Riveter. Not Suzie the Yeast Infected.”

“Suzie the Cured of Yeast Infection,” I said.

“Right now the business association is the only thing your ePRT has going for women’s empowerment,” he said. “That’s not good. Not good at all. And you want to shut that down? No. Fucking no. Keep it going. Use it better. Start some fucking jobs. Do you have anything, anything at all, even in planning, for women?”

I could hear him breathing heavy over the phone.

“Sure . . . ,” I said, racking my brains, “we’ve got things.”

“Like?”

There was an awkward silence. I looked around the office, as if I might find an answer hanging on the wall somewhere. And then my eyes settled on Bob’s desk.

“How much do you know about beekeeping?” I said.

“You’re going to have women beekeepers?” he said.

“Not just women,” I said. “Widows.”

There was another pause. He sighed.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice sounded resigned. “A lot of ePRTs are doing that one.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Do you . . . do you know this is bullshit?”

•   •   •

The e-mail popped up
as soon as I got off the phone. The subject was: IRAQ’S SOON TO BE NATIONAL PASTIME. The sender was: GOODWIN, GENE GABRIEL. I thought, Who gave this asshole my e-mail address? That was answered almost immediately.

Dear Nathan (I hope I can call you Nathan? Major Zima told me you were a very approachable guy),

I’m glad to get a hold of someone who’s finally willing to give this a shot. You won’t believe the amount of BS you’ve got to go through to get anything done with the US Army.

Here’s the idea: The Iraqi people want democracy, but it’s not taking. Why? They don’t have the INSTITUTIONS to support it. You can’t build anything with a rotten foundation, and Iraqi culture is, I’m sure, as rotten as it gets.

I know this sounds crazy, but there are few better institutions than the institution of BASEBALL. Look at the Japanese. They went from Emperor-loving fascists to baseball-playing democracy freaks faster than you can say, Sayonara, Hirohito!

What I’m saying is, you’ve got to change the CULTURE first. And what’s more AMERICAN than baseball, where one man takes a stand against the world, bat in hand, ready to make history, every moment a one-on-one competition. Batter versus pitcher. Runner versus first baseman. Runner versus second baseman. Third baseman. If he’s lucky, against the catcher himself. And yet! And YET!!! It’s a team sport! You’re nothing without the team!!!!

I guess they play soccer over there now. Figures. There’s a sport that teaches kids all the wrong lessons. “Pretend you’re hurt and the ref might help you out!” “You’ll never make it on your own, kick the ball to your friend!” And worst of all, nobody ever scores. It’s like, “Go ahead, kids, but don’t expect much! Even if you’re near the goal, you’re probably not gonna make it!” And they can’t use their hands. What the heck is that all about?

I know this probably sounds silly to you, but remember: Great ideas always sound silly. People told me my Grand Slam Discounts were silly too, but I went and did it and nobody calls me silly anymore. It’s like we say in the mattress business: SUCCESS = DRIVE + DETERMINATION + MATTRESSES. And here I’m supplying the materials. All I’m asking from you is a little effort to give these Iraqi kids a chance for the future.

Yours Truly,

GG Goodwin

Reading the e-mail was like getting an ice pick to the brain. I stared blankly at my computer, all higher mental functions short-circuited, and resisted the urge to punch the screen. This, I thought, was bullshit. I composed a terse note explaining that while we appreciated his generosity, baseball wasn’t likely to catch on, and while the kids would certainly make use of the uniforms, I couldn’t promise him they’d be playing baseball in them. Then I clicked “send.”

Within an hour, I found myself cc’d on an e-mail to none other than Representative Gordon. Also cc’d were a host of military and civilian personnel. Chris Roper. Some brigadier general. Major Zima.
And
the colonel in charge of the BCT I was attached to. The sight of his name alone was enough to let me know I’d seriously screwed up. I was new to the cc game, a game played with skill by staff officers throughout the military, but I knew enough to know that the more senior people you could comfortably cc on your e-mails, the more everyone had to put up with whatever bullshit your e-mails were actually about.

The message began, “I am continually amazed by the lack of
foresight I have found . . . ,” and got uglier from there. Within five minutes, I had a new e-mail in my in-box, this from Lieutenant Colonel Roux, the brigade XO. It was addressed not to me, but to Major Zima. Roux hadn’t been cc’d on the initial e-mail, but scanning down through the document, I saw the colonel had forwarded it with the terse message “Jim. Deal with this.”

Lieutenant Colonel Roux was not quite as laconic. His message read, “Can someone explain to me why the Colonel is getting cc’d on angry letters to members of Congress? I want this unfucked. Now.” Below that was his signature block: “Very Respectfully, LTC James E. Roux.”

I started sweating over a response e-mail to the XO. It seemed important to convey the sheer idiocy of G. G. Goodwin, and I wasn’t sure I had the skill to get it across. But before I’d even put down the first paragraph, Major Zima beat me to the punch with what was clearly the right reply. “Sir,” it read, “I’ll handle it immediately.”

Five minutes later came another e-mail, this also from Major Zima. Lieutenant Colonel Roux and I were cc’d, as was the congressman and the random brigadier general, but not the colonel.

“Sir,” it began. “There’s been a little miscommunication on our part. I actually just finished talking with a schoolteacher who would be glad to take the uniforms and teach the children baseball.”

That seemed highly unlikely, but Major Zima went on to give a rather dizzying account of all the logistical hoops he was jumping through to get the project fast-tracked.

The e-mail continued: “We talked about having the children write you thank-you notes, but unfortunately most children in our area of operations are illiterate.” Then Zima urged patience, using Gene Goodwin’s very own reference to Japan as an example. He explained how baseball was actually introduced in 1872 and took about fifteen years to become firmly entrenched in Japanese culture. This bit was surprisingly long and technical, which made sense, since it turned out Zima had simply copied and pasted the Wikipedia entry for “Baseball in Japan” right into the text to make it seem like he was as engaged with the sport as Gene himself.

A little later, another e-mail popped up, this one strictly from Zima to me, no one else cc’d.

“Hey, Nathan,” it read. “Maybe you should let me handle this guy. No need to kick the hornets’ nest.”

•   •   •

About two weeks later,
I ran into Major Zima doing push-ups in his cammies. Between grunts, he told me that if I wanted to start funding repairs for the water plant, the ministry wouldn’t go out of their way to roadblock us or steal more than the usual amount of reconstruction dollars.

“How many dollars are we talking?” I said. “Didn’t we already sink 1.5 million dollars into it?”

He stopped, put a cheerful grin on his face, and said, “Yep.”

“Where’d that money go?”

“I don’t know,” he said, dropping down for another push-up, “I wasn’t here then.”

I watched him for a bit. His torso was round enough that
even with his arms fully extended, his belly was still hovering less than an inch above the ground. He dropped down and used his stomach to trampoline back up. I said, “How’d you get them to agree?”

“Seventy-nine,”
he said.
“Ahhhhh. . . . Eighty!”

He collapsed to the ground. There was no way he’d done eighty push-ups. My guess was closer to twenty-five. He looked up.

“I told them what you told me,” he said between big breaths, lying belly down on the ground with one cheek in the dirt.

“What did I tell you?”

“That if we turned on the water, it’d make all the Sunnis’ toilets explode.” Zima slowly rolled onto his back. “Ahhhh,” he said.

“And that was enough?”

“No,” he said. “But they double-checked and it turns out you’re right. Those pipes are designed off the Nasiriyah Drainage Pump pipes, so they’ll push out twenty cubic meters a second. That’s way too much. There’s something that you need to reduce the pressure. I forget what it’s called.”

“A pressure reducer?” I said.

“Yeah, a pressure reducer,” he said. “We’re not building that.”

“You told them the United States would purposely destroy all the plumbing in a Sunni community in order to get the water plant on line.”

“Yep.”

“And they believed you?”

“I told them I get promoted for completing projects, which is sort of true, and that the plant wouldn’t be operational until
well after I was out of Iraq, which is definitely true, and that I wasn’t going to go through with the nine-hundred-thousand-dollar open-air market one of the ministry guys’ cousins is supposed to build for us if they keep cock-blocking us on water.”

I stared at the major in awe. Initially, I had thought the man stupid. Now, I wasn’t sure if Zima was brilliant or insane.

“But,” I said, “we can’t destroy a Sunni village. . . .”

“It’s okay,” he said. “For now, we keep moving forward. The Sunnis aren’t going to let overpressurized water destroy their homes. That’d be a silly thing to happen in the desert. They’ll keep track of it, even if we don’t.”

Zima’s confidence didn’t reassure me. “Do they know about the pressure?” I said.

“No,” he said. “But I put a reminder on my Outlook calendar for the week the BCT’s scheduled to leave Iraq. It says, ‘Tell Sheikh Abu Bakr that the pipes we built for him will make his house explode.’”