To Be a Friend Is Fatal (10 page)

Management waited until my boss took a one-week R&R to Cairo to fire him. He didn't find out until he arrived at the regional airport in Jordan and was told by the airline that he was no longer cleared to fly into Iraq. Iraqi maintenance workers were dispatched to his house in the compound with cardboard boxes, which were filled and shipped back to the United States. Someone tacked
-ed
onto his last name, which was then used as a verb for the act of firing someone while he's on vacation, a much more clinical approach than a messy confrontation. Three
months later, his replacement—my new boss—suffered the same fate, and his name became the new verb for a Baghdad-style termination. All of us were uneasy when scheduling our vacations.

People came and went. Some were fired, some simply finished their year. Some started to slip mentally from the stress of the workload or the environment and were allowed to return home. Every week, there was a hail-and-farewell party to welcome in the fresh blood and send off the old. Iraqis came and went, oftentimes without our knowledge. I shuffled around old
Iraq Daily Update
s and helped the mission director respond to taskers from Washington: “Urgent: the Administrator has a lunch with the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce tomorrow. Please tell us how many Chaldean Christians have been helped by USAID projects, and describe the projects.” We dropped everything to write a response, a sentence of which would be lifted for a speech in front of grazing Chaldean businessmen. The mission director left, and another one came in. Nothing was permanent, just a flurry of booze and paperwork.

I had fun, made a lot of friends and threw a lot of parties. But after six months, a gnawing guilt settled in. Nothing I was doing resulted in anything of value. If I disappeared from the compound, another body would be assigned to my desk and move into my house within two weeks.

General George Casey, commanding general of all forces in Iraq, was coming to the USAID compound for a meeting. For weeks leading up to it, I was in charge of assembling the PowerPoint presentation that our mission director would deliver. In addition to providing an overview of the agency's work in Iraq, the presentation had a not-so-subtle appeal for the general's help with securing new funding for USAID, either from Congress or from the DOD's own massive well of money. We had conference calls with Washington, debated and consulted and conferred on verb choice for a particular slide, and ran mock presentations. I spent bleary hours over many days tweaking the PowerPoint animations of sliding arrows that reflected the potential of “dramatically increased impacts” if further funding was received. I half believed the
charts: maybe Sadr City really was just a hundred million dollars' worth of projects away from raising American flags in appreciation.

In a planning meeting, the USAID management began to speak about the need to seek sustained funding for education programs. “You think the kids are bad now, wait and see how the insurgency looks after another decade of sporadic access to schooling!” I diligently took notes but then stared down at what I had written: “In ten years, more kids in insurgency.” My face clouded. We were supposed to be the good guys, and here we were casting five-year-olds as future insurgents and terrorists as a way to secure new funds.

A week later, General Casey walked into the newly constructed USAID building's conference room, which doubled as our panic room. (In the event that the compound was overrun by insurgents, all Americans were to run into the conference room, which had a bombproof vault door that could not be opened from the outside. There wasn't enough room for all of the Iraqi employees.) He was surprisingly short and traveled without a retinue; just a young soldier who sat next to him. He opened up a small day planner, the kind on sale at Staples, said, “Shoot!” and the mission director began her presentation. As rehearsed, I pressed the space bar to advance the slides and their animations. He scribbled a couple notes into his planner.

“This is great stuff, guys. Really impressive.” After the bromides, he volunteered an explanation of how he thought the situation in Iraq would play out. He drew a couple lines on a dry-erase board, reflecting troop levels and violence. He shook our hands and then left, and that was the last anyone in USAID heard from George Casey or his pot of money.

I had lost forty pounds within a few months of arriving, heading to the small gym in the compound most nights to try to burn off some of the stress, but it was no use. I wanted to leave.

“I'm having a bit of an existential crisis.”

I was sitting in the living room of the mission director's home late one evening after the presentation to General Casey. I had sent an urgent note asking for a meeting.

“Oh yeah? What's going on, Kirk?”

“Well, I'm not doing what I came here to do. I don't want to be in the Green Zone anymore.”

I paused, and then said the line I had practiced on the way over: “I need to be out in the field, in one of the provinces, or else I'm going to head back to the States.”

She nodded and scoured my face for a few seconds before responding.

“Uh-huh. How'd you like to go to Fallujah?”

I blurted out, “Yeah, that sounds perfect,” without thinking or hesitating. She poured two glasses of wine. “Well, I don't want an answer yet. This is a decision you need to sleep on. Tell me tomorrow.” We clinked our glasses.

T
here is a Viking saga about a wise lawyer named Njáll Thorgeirsson, who lives in the hinterlands with his wife, Bergthora. In a story about honor, he is one of Iceland's most honorable, endowed with the gift of
forspar
, which allows him to see into the future. The counsel and predictions given by such men are unbreakable.

Njáll shares with his dear friend Gunnar a forest, from which each periodically logs timber without discord, until one of Njáll's loggers is slain in a dispute with one of Gunnar's men. Life and limbs were valuated by the Scandinavians according to the rank and measure of the man, and Njáll's lowly logger is valued at twelve ounces of silver. Gunnar pays gladly to keep the peace.

But the silver does not quiet the dispute for long. One of Njáll's men, acting without his knowledge, thrusts a vengeful spear into the belly of the man who had slain the logger. Njáll returns the twelve ounces of silver to Gunnar, and the peace is restored for a season. Discord rings once again when the killer of the killer is killed, and the price for peace rises to a hundred ounces of silver.

With obsessively detailed attention to gore—an ax into the collarbone, a hand cut off midswing, a shield cleaved by a sword—the saga recounts an ever-expanding battle claiming sons, husbands, cousins, tribes, regions. Peace conferences stall the war for short periods, but the conflict grows with a logic and will of its own. At the peak of the bloodshed, the war spills across Scandinavia and into mainland Europe, but
nobody remembers why they're fighting, other than to avenge the most recent offense. In the end, an army of men lay siege to Njáll's home and deal him the fate most horrid to the Vikings, setting fire to his walls and doors and burning him alive.

“The Saga of Njáll Burned Alive” ends with a dark portent, in which the promise of peace has been obliterated by endless war. In the village of Caithness, a man named Daurrud comes upon a cottage late at night. He dismounts from his horse and peers through the slit of a window to find wraithlike women at work on a demonic loom: men's heads used in place of weights, intestines as the weft and warp, a sword as the shuttle. They sing a song as they weave the fate of man:

See! Warp is stretched

For warriors' fall,

Lo! The weft in loom

Is wet with blood;

Now fight foreboding

Our grey cloth waxeth

With war's alarms,

Our warp bloodred

The cloth is woven

With entrails of men

The warp is hardweighted

With heads of the slain

Spears blood-besprinkled

For spindles we use

With swords for our shuttles

This war-cloth we work;

So weave we, Valkyries,

Our warwinning cloth

Capture the kids, and we capture the future

—Saddam Hussein, 1977

In the heart of Fallujah lies an amusement park. The paint on the rides in Jolan Park is faded and chipped away. There is an aquatic-themed whirly-go-round. A ten-foot-tall octopus the color of moldering lime looms at the hub of the ride, extending his swirling tentacles outward over the small cars, which are made to look like severed heads of fish. They scowl as they bake under the Fallujah sun. A motorless Ferris wheel slumbers nearby, a monument now, its bucket seats piling up with years of dust.

Before the marines came, the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi held sway over Fallujah, and his fighters reportedly repurposed a cluster of maintenance shacks within the park into torture cells. A grove of trees once shaded the rides, but Fallujans cut them down for firewood while the marines laid siege. Splintered foot-tall stumps remain, dusted pikes stabbing up through dead soil.

The fighting was fierce in the amusement park when the marines carved their way through. The dead were held in the potato storage facility on the eastern outskirts of town. During the siege, the Fallujans ploughed the children's soccer field into a burial site. When that filled up, they decided to convert the amusement park into a cemetery.

We have to win this war in Fallujah

One neighborhood at a time.

We're going to do it on our terms,

On our timeline, and it will be overwhelming.

—Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt

In Fallujah, we fought upon the war's most miserable plateau, on terrain shaped not by the metrics of insurgents killed or jobs created or schools built but by the raw and rootlike emotions of our primitive selves. In these nine square miles just west of Abu Ghraib, we fought for
honor
, against
terror
, and for the
upper hand
. We would do anything necessary to lug our matériel and forces and barbed wire, no matter the cost in treasure or youth. Amid a berserker fever of absurdity shimmered an omen: if Fallujah—this city the size of a middling American suburb, which a few months prior was completely unknown to every American citizen—was allowed to remain “in insurgent hands,” then the entire war would be lost. It was a city to be lashed and crushed and retina-scanned into obedience, and in the heights of Fallujah, America fought a savage fight.

The true benefit of the high ground is often misunderstood: its value is not moral superiority but rather the strategic advantage it confers for attacking those beneath you. And determining who had the high ground in Fallujah depended mostly upon where in the whole gory timeline you started. If you started with the assassination and burning of four Blackwater mercenaries on March 31, 2004, you might feel that the reeking maw of evil had just opened wide, and no amount of artillery was too much to pound it shut. If you began your timeline on April 28, 2003, when nervous soldiers fired upon a throng of civilians protesting the military's occupation of a school, you might feel that the Americans were up to no good in Fallujah and needed to be kept out. If you started with the angered confusion of an eighteen-year-old from Ohio wounded by an IED, you might feel resentment at such a reception from people you thought you'd just liberated. If you squinted all the way back to the day the first of an endless convoy of American trucks appeared, straining under the weight of sixteen-foot slabs of concrete, which were unloaded not far from your front door to direct your movement as though you were Iraqi water in American pipes, you might wonder with a little bit of anger about the true intentions of your liberators. But before all that was Saddam and the deceptive worry of a mushroom cloud. And before that, 9/11. And before that, sanctions. And the Gulf War before. And before that, the Iran-Iraq War. But who can remember that far back?

My arrival coincided with a shift in war strategies. At first the strategy was to topple Saddam and find the WMDs. When we didn't find any weapons, the new strategy was to install some Iraqi exiles as leaders, rush the public to the polls for a quick election, and then celebrate as democracy and a free market bubbled forth. When that failed, in part by inadvertently forcing Iraqis to organize into sectarian voting blocs, the new strategy was to rebuild the infrastructure and institutions necessary for democracy and economic growth. When that failed due to corruption and an expanding insurgency, the new strategy was to build Iraq's security forces so that “when they stand up, we can stand down,” so we dumped billions to quickly train and arm men against the militants. When that failed, in part as a result of those very militants infiltrating the hastily assembled security forces, the new strategy was called the “ink-spot” approach: rather than confront the problems on a national level, build teams of experts to “clear, hold, and build” areas on the local level. Clear, hold, and build enough of them, and the ink spots of security will grow in diameter, and one day the country will be covered in ink. I imagine it made for pretty PowerPoints in the Pentagon. My job was to help with the “build” portion of the Fallujah ink spot.