Tell My Sons: A Father's Last Letters (22 page)

On my way, I pass the PX food court where, if you’ve not managed to stuff your face enough with the free food, you can willy-nilly spend your bucks and gorge on Burger King or the Pizza Inn. I usually pick up a copy of the
Stars and Stripes
newspaper, and my “favorite” days are when there’s a story about Michael Jackson on the cover. (Not.)

Within minutes I am transported to what I like to call “the Wild” and things change dramatically. These guys [Iraqis] drink out of the same cups, drink water from the tap (which is not safe), take dumps without toilet paper, drive old vehicles that barely run, leave the safety of the Green Zone every afternoon, and then brave what’s called the “Assassins’ Gate” every morning on their way into work
.

Iraqis accept this dichotomy without much complaint—until they taste what we have. Let me tell you, they don’t need to be convinced that one is better than the other. Forget sports, entertainment, business, modern medicines, or material goods. They just want the basics. How basic? I’ll just give you one example that shook my senses:

Colonel Jamal, one of the Iraqi officers, told me last week that he needed some time off. He wanted two weeks, which was too long by any standard, especially for the position he held with Babakir. Plus, he always seemed distracted and a little scatterbrained. I thought it was laziness. I’m used to hearing lame excuses, so I was ready for a whopper when I finally asked, “Why do you need to go?” He said that he needed to go to Syria to get his family and bring them back to Baghdad now that he had secured a home in the Green Zone for them
.

I didn’t need to hear any more, but he continued the story and I listened. He had been in the Iraqi Army all of his life, but never in positions of great responsibility or command. He married and had three children, all of whom are still under the age of fourteen. He learned English by watching American movies, and speaks it well. When U.S. forces crossed into Iraq in March 2003, he was serving in Baghdad and clearly remembers when the bombs started falling. When the war ended and the army ceased to exist, he melted into the population like everyone else. Then he
received word that the coalition was looking for a “few good men.” His low rank, modest background, and English-speaking skills made him an easy pick
.

He and his family began receiving death threats immediately—two or three of them over several months. He ignored them. Then his neighbor and their entire family were killed. Jamal panicked. He immediately packed up his family and left Baghdad without telling anyone
.

Shortly after his arrival to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, an insurgent “checkpoint” stopped a group of a dozen or so vehicles. Everyone was brought to a small clearing and interrogated to see who worked for the coalition. One poor dude had some sort of coalition identification on him. (Jamal said that thankfully he did not.) The insurgents forced everyone to look at the young man, announced that what was about to happen would happen to them as well if they worked for the coalition, and then proceeded to cut the guy’s head off
.

Jamal explained, with a disturbing calm, that the man “shook like a chicken. And the blood, it shoot everywhere. Right in front of my kids, man,” he said with misty eyes
.

He immediately went home, packed up all his belongings, and moved his family to Syria, where they’ve been ever since. “I have no other family; I have no other reason to live. No mother, no father, no brothers or sisters, no aunts or uncles … my wife and kids, they are all I have, you know?” God, I can only imagine
.

In sharing this daily perspective about my observations of two different worlds, I want to be clear. This is not a “bash America and its ways” fest, or “this is why we need to be out of Iraq.”

I’m merely pointing out a personal struggle with perspective as I live in two very different places each day. Our sports and entertainment, as well as our business sense and preoccupation with material goods, are just so out-of-this-world different from this place. It’s hard to balance
.

And then there were other moments when the worlds seemed to come together as one. From my journal:

By the time I took my second trip to the Kurdish region of Iraq with Babakir, it became clear to me that he (and his family) considered me to be much more than just an American army officer. They bragged to everyone they knew that I was a Kurdish American. Babakir’s family prepared a feast that took several women three days to prepare.

All the men sat in a circle at the Kurdish kitchen table (the floor). When we sat, Babakir tapped the floor next to him and nodded for me to sit next to him. He treated me like one of his children, and I truly felt like one of them.

That evening, Babakir received a dozen guests into his living room, and I was invited to join them. I wore the traditional Kurdish dress of the Peshmerga soldier (the formal-looking pajamas I’d seen on Babakir six months prior), a gift that Babakir’s cousin Otto had made for me. The sight drew excitement and
surprise from the men, all of whom were dressed the same way, and giggles from the women, who sat separate from the men.

I took up a spot on the couch, and conversations sprang up all around. I felt very uncomfortable wearing their Peshmerga uniform. I hadn’t earned it. I suggested that perhaps I should change, and I was unanimously yelled at to sit down. They would not have it. I was Kurdish as far as they were concerned.

Babakir suddenly announced to the people in the room in Kurdish, “This man, he’s like a son to me.” He smiled longingly at me and then told the group some quick stories about our adventures in Baghdad and in Germany. I replied I was nothing more than a good-natured mule—and not always good-natured, which really was the truth. Babakir clicked his tongue and scolded me. “You are not mule,” he said in clear English. “And you are good man.”

More small talk broke out, but much of it focused on me, “the blue-eyed, blond-haired Kurdish Peshmerga,” many of them said as they laughed with pride. The women echoed the comment, saying I looked very handsome. I broke into conversation using my Kurdish, and the room just lit up.

Under Saddam Hussein, speaking Kurdish was against the law, which effectively made it a dying language—like a dialect of Native American Cherokee, it didn’t have much use outside the tribe. By speaking it, it seemed I was touching the very soul of every man and woman in the room, and they weren’t shy about telling me how much it meant to them.

Babakir again interrupted the group of men and asked me what color headdress I would decide to wear: red or black. I asked him what the difference was, and he told me red represented the tribes of the Barzani family, while black represented the tribes of his own Zibari family.

Babakir had taught me long before that the Barzani tribe initiated the insurrection against the Ottoman Empire in the early
1900s. And for more than thirty years, Mustafa Barzani was the political and military leader of the Kurdish revolution against successive Iraqi regimes in Baghdad. Although the Kurds were never able to establish a nation for themselves, Mustafa is widely considered the George Washington of the Kurdish people. In short, custom demanded deference to the Barzani family.

I had an idea, then, that the gathered men expected to hear me say “Barzani,” particularly if Babakir had taught me properly. But instead I answered with what I firmly believed, “I would wear the black, of course.” The men politely chuckled and whispered to one another. Babakir clicked his tongue and in a hushed voice said in clear English, “Nooo, Mark, nooo. Barzani is better.” He said it as if I had just ignorantly insulted him and everyone in the room.

The man sitting next to me asked in Kurdish with a smile,
“Zibari, boo?”
(“Why Zibari?”) I answered,
“Barzani? Ava boscha.”
(The word
boscha
means many things depending on the tone and context; in this case, it meant “better.”)

Every man in the room sighed with relief and tilted his head back,
“Ahh, boscha, boscha,”
they mumbled. Even Babakir smiled approvingly.

That’s when I set the hook and yelled loudly with a big smile on my face, “But
Zibari zur boscha!
” (“Zibari is much better!”) And I quickly explained,
“Babakir Zibari, Bobymin. Boo ch’nia Zibari?”
(“Babakir Zibari is my father. Why wouldn’t I pick Zibari?”)

The room erupted in laughter and slaps on the knee.

My reply was spontaneous, and it was somewhat taboo for a foreigner to say, but it just naturally occurred to me, after being with Babakir for so long, that if I was a Kurd at all, I was a
Zibari
Kurd.

Numerous Zibari family members later told me they thought it one of the most clever things someone could say in such a situation. What I had failed to do by custom, I more than made up
for in principle and character, and everyone seemed to respect that as much or more than tradition.

I heard Babakir tell that story a dozen times in the months that followed, and each time he told it he laughed, and his guests laughed with him. As casual as I thought that exchange had been, I think it defined our relationship.

Not long after, Babakir declared he was going to start calling me by a Kurdish name he had come up with for me: Sherzod Zibari: he said the first name meant “son of lion.” (My Aussie friends wasted no time in clarifying to our coalition comrades that
Sherzod
was actually a shorthand term of reference for the male genitals.)

*   *   *

When the time came for me to leave Iraq after twelve months, Babakir asked then–Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey if I could stay. Dempsey and I spoke, and I took a passive approach.

I didn’t think I was irreplaceable, but I did recognize the importance and practicality of staying. After all, General Casey’s aide had been with him for more than two years. The reason for that long relationship was obvious: they had a connection that was personal and preferred in the relative chaos of lraq.

Babakir and I shared the same relationship, and he naturally wanted to keep that. I respected that desire and said I would stay, but I wasn’t going to ask for it—not with my wife and you boys waiting for me at home.

Babakir wrote a letter explaining why he wanted to keep me:

He is aggressive in his work and he tells me hard truths, but he is also humble, his advice is diplomatic, and he is sensitive to culture. Mark has been like a son to me, and he is the first American officer that I know who has learned the Kurdish language.… All of these reasons
make him very, very effective, and these are the reasons why I do not want to lose him
.

When the decision was made to send me home, Babakir accepted it with grace and wrote an embarrassingly flattering letter recommending promotion, recognition, and the best evaluation Dempsey could write. Babakir wrote, in part, “There were so many officers who served with me who had higher ranks than Mark by many years, but … he was the best one among them.”

Babakir’s personal letters about my work with him are still more valuable to me than any military recognition I received from my year in Iraq.

He threw me a farewell feast fit for a king. Generals Dempsey and Chiarelli joined us for dinner, but even more impressive was the attendance of the Iraqi senior military command. They were all there: the chief of the Iraqi Army, General Abdul Qadir Obeidi; the chief of the Iraqi Air Force, General Kemal Barzanji; and Iraq’s deputy chief of defense, General Nasier Abadi.