To Be a Friend Is Fatal (24 page)

I flew down to Chattanooga, Tennessee, that morning for a long-planned weekend with some old friends from college. When I got off the plane, there was a voice mail from the Hastert staffer, notifying me that he'd sent an inquiry to the State Department on Yaghdan's behalf. Bobby Worth from the
New York Times
had also called to interview me for an article on the subject. I'd met him at an embassy function in Baghdad a year earlier but was surprised to get his voice mail. I returned his call, vented about the situation, and turned off my phone for the rest of the weekend.

I returned to Boston to find a dozen voice mails from journalists and Capitol Hill staffers whose names I had never heard before. I had no idea how everyone was getting my number. When I logged into my email account, I thought at first that my address had been sucked into some Middle Eastern spammer's list: three out of every four emails were in Arabic.

I saw a familiar name and opened the message. Ziad had always stood out in the USAID mission as someone with great ambition and an acidic sense of humor. His ambition had bested him, though: he was fired for trying to organize an informal union of the Iraqi employees to fight for better treatment and more protection. One day we noticed he was gone, and that was the end of Ziad, as far as we knew. He wrote to inform me that he was scheduled to flee within a couple days by way of a smuggler's network and might need my help.

I scanned for other familiar names. One by one, I read desperate messages from former colleagues who were either hiding inside Iraq or had fled to Syria and Jordan and points beyond. My op-ed had nicked a vein, which now gushed into my in-box. By the time I got to the scores of emails from Iraqis I didn't know—those who had worked for the State Department, the military, and US contractors—I was in a cold sweat. Many of the emails had been sent the morning of my op-ed, which I noticed at the bottom of most of the messages: it had been forwarded heavily throughout the diaspora. The subject lines all begged me for help.

Maryam worked for UNICEF on teacher training projects in Iraq that had been funded by USAID. Three months earlier, several Iraqis in police uniforms had knocked on her front door and asked her husband to come down to the station for questioning. She'd begged him not to go, but he smiled and told her he'd be back by nightfall. Since then, she had traveled to every police station, prison, and jail that she could find in Iraq, but her husband was gone. At the end of her search, she found an envelope resting on her front steps. Inside was a death threat and a Kalashnikov bullet soaked in blood.

A man sent photographs of his legs, mangled by a militant's power drill as retribution for his work with FedEx. The militia threw him out of a moving sedan in the middle of the desert and left him for dead, but he survived, fled, and found my email address.

A woman sent photographs that she had taken as she fled her neighborhood in southern Baghdad: dust-covered corpses and exploded vehicles.

Another sent me an email with a video clip attached. I stupidly double-clicked it and found myself staring into the resigned eyes of an Iraqi man about forty years old, hands bound behind him. He was forced to confess to his work with the Americans, after which a militant held his badge up to the lens, which began to blur. The camera lens shuttled back a bit and a US government-issued Green Zone access badge came into clear focus. The man offered no resistance when a balaclava-clad militiaman pushed him to his knees. I should have closed the video, but continued to stare as the muzzle of an AK-47 came to rest a few inches from the man's left temple. He was looking down at a crumbling sidewalk when it fired. He slumped forward.

These people were making a huge mistake. I was only twenty-six. I didn't have a job and couldn't afford my own apartment. I was stealing a Wi-Fi signal from the neighbors on a laptop that had six months of life left in it at most. I didn't have even the most basic answers for any of their questions about how to make it to safety. I had little knowledge of the refugee resettlement process and didn't have any useful contacts with the decision makers within the State Department. All I had done was write
an op-ed so that someone else, ideally in the government, would figure things out for them.

I closed my computer, threw on a coat, and stepped out into the frigid Brighton evening. I lit a cigarette and started walking. It felt as though I had just witnessed some kind of crime and had to decide whether to call the cops. I looked over my shoulder and could see the light of my room, where the laptop beckoned like a black hole.

I took a long drag, my heart already racing. What the hell was I supposed to do? I could write a blanket reply to all of them, telling them I couldn't do anything. I'd only been trying to help Yaghdan, after all. But how could I ignore Ziad? I had worked alongside nearly one hundred Iraqis at USAID. What about the rest?

On and on I walked, past Kiki's Kwik-Mart, where down-on-their-luck Brightoners frittered away paychecks on scratch-offs. Losing tickets littered the parking lot, clinging to the tires of departing cars for a few turns before slipping off into the snow. My smoke burned out, but my exhalations were still visible in the cold. After an hour of wandering, I became numb.

I made up my mind. Helping one hundred people was a ludicrous proposition. I was penniless and needed to focus on finishing law school applications. I would draw the line around my closest friends, like Yaghdan and Ziad. The rest were on their own. I could not help someone I didn't know; I didn't even know how I was going to help the ones I did.

Seven more emails from Iraqis had come in during my walk. Most of the subject lines were a variation on the theme of “Please help, Mr. Kirk!”

A guy my age wrote to say that he was holed up in his apartment with his wife and baby daughter. He had been an interpreter for the US Army, but his cover was blown. Someone kept calling his cell phone to say “We will find you, soon.” He estimated that he had one month's worth of canned food and rice inside his apartment, where he stood guard by the door with an AK-47. “I have only two clips for the Kalashnikov. We are waiting to die here, please help us Mr. Kirk.”

A Christian woman named May sent a long message from Amman. She had worked in the Coalition Provisional Authority under Bernie
Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who had overseen a disastrous early attempt at training Iraqi police, an effort that lasted just ninety days before he packed it up and went home.

May helped manage the TAPS program, an Iraqi version of 911, allowing ordinary citizens to call in anonymous tips about impending insurgent attacks. Shortly after Kerik left, May's fifteen-year-old son had been walking to school when a group of armed men leaped from a sedan, snatched him, and sped off. May's cell phone rang with the demand: $600,000 for the release of her son. Her husband divorced her in anger over the calamity caused by her work with the United States, and paid a large amount of money to the men who had taken their son.

May tried to continue her work with the US government but soon received her own death threat, whereupon she fled to Jordan and applied for resettlement as a refugee at the UNHCR. Her application had been stalled for over a year. Her email to me included scans of her ID badges and several commendation letters, including a note that Kerik had written, which concluded with: “Your courage to support the coalition forces has sent an irrefutable message: that terror will not rule, that liberty will triumph, and that the seeds of freedom will be planted into the great citizens of Iraq.”

I found another email from Ziad, recounting a memory about his former colleagues from his days at USAID:

I remember one day I was so upset when a group of Iraqis asked me about a TV report on Al Jazeera network showing the Vietnamese who worked for the US in Vietnam kicked out of aircrafts evacuating the employees from an American base in Vietnam and I assured them at that time that it was mere propaganda to make us stop working with the US to help our country, how stupid I was and now here I am facing what I lied about.

He signed his email with a quote: “Henry Kissinger once said, ‘To be an enemy to the US is a problem, but to be a friend is sometimes fatal.' ”

I stopped reading. It was three in the morning, but I was wide awake, with a throbbing headache. I squeezed my eyes shut and listened to the ringing of my ears. I thought about ignoring all of the emails. If I just
kept silent, they might stop writing. But I had to reply, if only to tell them that I'd try to find someone else to help them. I was embarrassed to be receiving pleas from sixty-year-old heads of families who told me that I was their only hope. I worried that they would find out how poorly suited I was to help them.

There were simply too many to track. I needed to impose some order on the mounting chaos of my in-box. I opened Microsoft Excel, and in the first field I typed in Yaghdan's full name. Below it, Haifa's. The third name was Ziad. I carefully inputted their emails and cell phone numbers, and created a column to briefly describe their situation.

Below their names, I typed in May's full name. Below hers, the man hiding in his apartment with an AK-47. Below that, the FedEx employee. Below him, Maryam, whose husband had been disappeared by men in Iraqi police uniforms. It became instantly clear that I would need the names of children, spouses, dates of birth, and more specific information about their threats and work history before I could figure out what to do with this list.

I sent scores of emails, telling them that I needed more details. I made no promises other than to say that I'd try to find someone else to help them.

When I woke, I had dozens of responses, laden with photographs of bullet-pierced arms and legs and torsos, death threat letters with Muqtada al-Sadr's rotund and scowling mug in the corner, and scans of US government ID badges. I studied the death threats and found three that were nearly identical, save for the name of the threatened. It was an odd thing to consider that seven thousand miles away some militia member was working away at his own computer, formatting death threats using a list of names supplied by the chewers that waited outside the checkpoints of the Green Zone.

With each round of emails I sent, my messages were forwarded to other Iraqis, who then wrote to me with their own stories. I kept asking for more—more information, more documents, more facts—and the list grew. If I was trying to draw a line around the extent of my involvement, I was doing a terrible job of it.

I stared at the names of a handful of former USAID colleagues on the list and knew that I needed to find out what had happened to the rest. I dug up a warden's list—the HR roster of all USAID Iraq employees, American and Iraqi—took a red pen, and placed checkmarks next to Yaghdan and Ziad. There were over ninety more. Within a few days, I reconnected with nearly all of them: in the eleven months since I'd left, more than half of USAID's Iraqi employees had fled or gone into hiding inside the country.

Within a couple weeks of the publication of the op-ed, I had all but forgotten about law school. I submitted some rushed applications and stuffed the LSAT prep books and personal statement drafts into a box in the basement. Every morning, I woke up and worked with a manic intensity on the list, which grew by a dozen names each day. I'd forget to eat at times, wading through the tragedy of my in-box before collapsing into bed with the following morning's work on my mind.

With each revision to the list, I took the old copy out to the front porch and burned it in an empty flowerpot. There was little risk of anyone in Brighton discovering the names, of course, but I didn't want to take any chances. Several Iraqis told me that a list of embassy employees had not been shredded but instead thrown into the trash, where it was discovered in a Baghdad landfill by a militia scouring American garbage for intelligence. Names of US-affiliated Iraqis soon appeared on the walls of neighborhood mosques under the title “Traitors.”

December 29 arrived, marking the first anniversary of the fugue state. I felt something resembling relief to be sleeping without pills or nightmares, to see the scars across my face slowly melting into flesh, to feel less brittle in bone and tooth.

But in the inventory of what might qualify as a return to normalcy, much was missing. An oral surgeon's assistant stunned me by asking me out after staring into the pulp chambers of my incisors and vacuuming up saliva during root canals. I went on my first postaccident date, but all we talked about were my teeth. I picked at the soft heart of a loaf of bread, still unable to chew or pick up a fork, and tried to muster a smile for her. Before my dwindling bank account evicted me from my tiny apartment in the South End of Boston, I'd lived in an apartment building full of gorgeous dental students who were fascinated
by the war zone of my teeth, but I felt too scarred and fractured to ask anyone out.

A full recovery from the fugue meant finding a job again and moving back into my own place. If I lucked into a spot in law school, I'd have about nine months to fill before classes started.

But as I peered into the coming year, all I saw were the names of Iraqis, rows upon rows of fathers and mothers and children and grandparents to whom I had made a vague promise. At some point, I'd have to bring the list to the State Department. Once I handed off the information I'd compiled—all of the names, cell phone numbers, email addresses, recommendation letters—I was hopeful that something would happen. Maybe Yaghdan and Haifa and the others would start getting phone calls and invitations to come to the embassy for visa interviews. They could stop running and start new lives, maybe even in America.

E
llen Sauerbrey was not a very gifted politician. After a stint in Maryland's state legislature, she ran twice for the governor's seat and lost twice. After that, she stopped running and started raising funds for George W. Bush. The sixty-eight-year-old's reward from the president was not a sinecure ambassadorship in some obscure Caribbean nation but the reins of the Department of State's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration as assistant secretary of state.