We Meant Well (18 page)

Last briefing: Foreign Commercial Service will hold a “trade mission,” charging US companies $6,000 to meet Iraqi businesspeople. The $6,000 includes a personal security detachment (good value), but you'll need to stay at the al-Rasheed Hotel, an additional $300 a night, plus pay for your own meals, US cash only, please. Brochure has the word
business
misspelled, oops, pointed that out to the guy, he wasn't happy with me, says they already sent out two hundred copies. Brochure also does not list the dates of the trade mission, security concerns,
ssshhh,
in October. Foreign Commercial Service briefer admits he has not been outside the Green Zone but relies on an Iraqi New Zealander to make contacts.

Final notes: good conference overall, a lot to take back, not much to remember.

Spooky Dinner

While the Army buzzed with adolescent energy, the Agency was all about cool. Cool as in “we got this, it's all taken care of.” You didn't see much of them in Iraq, even though they were everywhere, as this wasn't really their war. Afghanistan was theirs at first, when a bunch of spooks with sat phones and blocks of greenbacks won the damn thing at least once, maybe twice, until what they call the GWOT (G-WOT, Global War on Terror) and the hunt for UBL (Usama bin Laden, always with a
U
—they knew bin Laden when you were still roller-discoing) were canceled midseason. That torqued the spooks off, because Afghanistan was their hood, their finest hour, where they had beaten the Red Motherfucking Army, without breaking a sweat, really, never mind that last bit about creating a worldwide armed, seasoned radical Muslim uprising; a bad bounce, for sure, but there was always some collateral. Hanging with these guys was a quick jolt of anticynicism medicine, steroids for the blackened soul, because they were all masculine confidence and certainty, brother, and it was infectious. Sure, the war may have been all about oil, but these dudes knew that a foreign policy based on fear—Japs, communism, terrorists—was what really kept the game alive.

It had been a long econ conference at the Embassy, a pep rally to make sure the ePRTs were with the program. Meanwhile, demonstrations protesting the lack of electricity had been popping up around Iraq. People had suffered in the swarming heat, 120 degrees if you could find a thermometer that went that high, without juice to run the AC or power to run the water pumps. The Embassy, living on corporate truth, was telling the world that power generation exceeded pre-2003 levels but that a rise in demand had resulted in a temporary gap that was most certainly not our fault. Of course, measuring life now against life pre-2003 had a tendency to downplay the billions spent for tiny gains, if any, and the thousands dead for nothing. The clever part was blaming the problem on demand (it's the damn Iraqis' fault). Truth inside the Green Zone: we're doing our job, power is up. Bottom line outside the Zone: two to six hours a day of power, delivered unpredictably. People dying, hospitals closing, and kids drinking river water, then spending a week horizontal, dehydrated from the runs. But check the PowerPoint and damn if it wasn't true, we
were
winning.

So why not celebrate? The Agency had arranged just the thing: a dinner at their compound. It was just like them not to list it on the schedule, OPSEC above all. Nobody was in the mood for more corporate culture that night, but secretly we all got off a little on the idea of hanging with the spooks on equal terms.

Despite our one-billion-dollar Embassy, with more security and walls around it than Mordor, the Agency had to set themselves up in a separate compound. They might have had some staff sleep in the Embassy apartments, maybe dump a few junior officers there as liaisons during the day, but when Daddy needs to do Daddy things, he can't be sharing the executive washroom with the Army or—God, no—even worse, State.

The Agency compound was a symbol for them of how this damn war was supposed to have worked out, taking control from the dictator in the most obvious way. The Agency grabbed for itself one of Saddam's primo palaces, in the Green Zone, of course, but separate from the Embassy and the Army. Saddam had palaces everywhere, practically one for everyone in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, before hangers-on like the Department of Agriculture, for Christ's sake, had come out to play. The Agency snatched up a good place and, with the balls they liked to believe they carried in wheelbarrows in front of them, had not altered it much. Outside they had thrown up T-walls and barriers and checkpoints and enough razor wire to encircle Folsom, perimeter security so that any yahoo driving past would know this was a serious place, not some random Army IT office or a goddamn State Department motor pool. No signs, of course, but hey, the real operators always know one another anyway.

The best parts were inside, where most of Saddam's I'm-on-crack decorating style had been left untouched. You could blink and think you were in a Macao sauna or Sinatra's Vegas for all the red velvet and brass, but the tacked-up strings of lights around the doorway and the big sign pointing to the bar as if you were in a frat house were giveaways for anyone who had been in any station anywhere. The pool with the winged griffin statues and red spotlights added to, but was not needed to complete, the scene. If you had ever gotten stoned as a kid, this was the vision you'd have wanted to stretch out your buzz.

But the Agency didn't do dope, it did booze. You would never imagine the Rat Pack with a hookah full of Panama Red, and you could not imagine anything but good whiskey and maybe some decent imported beer for this party. The Agency guys, used to being all hush-hush under the covers around State during daylight hours, loved these parties where they could (in their minds) blow our minds by introducing themselves by their actual titles. Of course, even in a large official community most people who cared pretty much knew who was who anyway, but certain things were not spoken out loud, so the titles were a big deal. You were supposed to feel that you were being given a peek behind the curtain and were meant to behave appreciatively. Most of us knew the protocol and things went smoothly.

I'd met one of the spook guys on another assignment and he was for real. Because we recognized each other and because this was a social affair, he was obliged to make a little conversation with me. Unlike some of his colleagues, who only looked cool around us until their moms called them home for dinner, this guy had been part of some of the big ops his Agency had run in the 1980s and 1990s. Tall and lanky, he had worked in Afghanistan—everyone of his generation had—but also in Mogadishu and some places I won't even type the names of. He could tell stories for hours but didn't, because in general your questions would be too damn stupid and he neither cared enough nor wanted to be nice to you. Yeah, sure, he'd say, that's how it was, like
Black Hawk Down
, but he said it in a way that let you know it was never like that. I asked what he was up to in Iraq just to see if he'd bother with a witty reply, but he didn't, just said, “You know, the usual.” If you're posted somewhere and he shows up, you should probably leave, it's that simple. You're in too deep whether you realize it or not (you won't realize it). Most people believe either that the United States has thousands of officers like this named Bourne or Bond or that they don't exist except in the movies. But they are real, though there are not many of them and yeah, you're glad they're probably on the same side as you.

The Agency was quiet in Iraq because, as I said, this wasn't their war. They had nailed their biggest coup early on, still said to be controlling most of the budget for Iraqi intelligence. To them, holding the money meant that they were running the Iraqis though, as we knew, spending money in Iraq did not always mean control and sometimes the project turned and ran
you
. Like us believing we were building democracy and capacity in Iraq, the spooks believed they had a handle on the intel. The chances were good we were both equally deceived, the difference being we sort of knew it, if we cared to look at our reconstruction projects, while the truth about the spooky ops might take a decade and some congressional hearings to come out.

But this evening was about current success, not future failure, and the highlight came early as the host announced that the china and the silver we were eating with had been Saddam's and the table we sat at had been Saddam's and the room we were in had been His. Saddam had been a badass, but we had taken him down and the proof was in front of us: we got his stuff. If the Station Chief had told us he was wearing Saddam's old clothes, we would have believed him. Now, a cynic might point out that years had passed since we'd nabbed Saddam and that we hanged him in 2006 about a mile from where we sat, but this wasn't the night for it and we all took a moment to marvel at the plates and ask the person next to us what, if the room could talk, he thought it might say. Had Saddam deflowered virgins here, planned the invasion of Kuwait, and maybe met with al Qaeda right at this table, who knew? It was, of course, equally possible that in this room Saddam had met his Agency handlers in 1983 to discuss the war against Iran or receive info from Don Rumsfeld about the new weapons he was getting from the United States to kill Persians and Kurds. But like I said, the evening was about success and we ate rare steak and sipped good whiskey and allowed ourselves to absorb a little bit of the freshly squeezed juice of faith.

The Day after a Day at the Embassy

We felt like hoboes, the four of us from the ePRT, walking around the Embassy compound after the economics conference. Almost everything was a contrast to the world we lived in. Nothing was dusty, nothing covered with the fine tan silt that defined our Iraq. The air-conditioning was silent and even—smooth, cool air that we sought to draw into our pores and take back to our FOB. The gleaming cafeteria always amazed us, from the sign apologizing for the Caesar salad station being temporarily closed to the surprisingly awkward, heavy feel of metal utensils (we used plastic, as if we were on a 365-day picnic) to the shock of a fruit-carving station stocked with fresh watermelon and papaya (we enjoyed those radioactive-orange-colored canned peaches in heavy syrup, more rumor than actual fruit). Unlike at the FOB, where the quality of the food made one thrifty about filling a plastic tray, we all loaded our china plates with fresh vegetables and crispy fries and ordered up Slurpees (choice of four flavors) and coffee drinks lush with real cream and sugar. It was all free, take as much as you wanted, here at Club Fed. The only surge in sight was in cholesterol.

At the Embassy, the men who held pointlessly long meetings with us sported bow ties and pressed linen pants, while the women wore earrings and perfume. No one was armed, civilians outnumbered uniformed military 20 to 1, there were water fountains in the hallways and marvelous real flush toilets that did not smell of the persons who used them before you. We rode an elevator for the only time in Iraq. We were like children raised by wolves, now among those who should have been our own kind yet weren't.

When you saw an American woman on the FOB, she was usually a soldier, dressed in military clothing designed to hide body shape better than any
hijab
—one size fits no one, never a sense of, say, the lines of a summer dress hinting at the presence of her body. At the Embassy, you saw women in high heels, women in pants so impossibly tight that you died a little inside just to look; an employee imported from one of our embassies in South America wore black jeans and a yellow knit top with a black demi bra that stood out in bas relief. It might have looked crude in some universe, but here it was poetry, Old Testament–style temptation. Her body would leave an impression on history. Religions had been founded on less. The four of us looked like sad, desperate travelers from Mars as we stared.

A key aspect of our Sharia lifestyle on the FOB was the absence of alcohol, ostensibly banned by the military so as not to offend our Muslim hosts. But the Embassy knew no such restriction and the convenience store sold shampoo, magazines, cleaning supplies, and acres and acres of booze. You pushed through the swinging door to cases of cheap Budweiser, crates of Heineken, and every kind of liquor, liqueur, spirit, wine, and hooch known to man. Four varieties of flavored Grey Goose, Johnnie Walker in every color (including a $150 bottle of Blue), and types of vodka and gin I never knew existed. We stood there in air-conditioned comfort and browsed until the mere sight of it all made us inebriated, and only then did we carry our choices to the cash register, where we paid by credit card. A credit card, here at war! The wonder of it all wore off quickly given humans' astonishing ability to adjust, so we had to grab at each sensation and catalog it before it became part of our new evolving normal, as ordinary soon as the Embassy's Pizza Hut, the Starbucks clone Green Bean, the indoor swimming pool, the sign advertising swing dance lessons on Tuesdays, the Wi-Fi in the lounge, the lounge, the bar, the magazines published within the last two months, the hair salon that did highlights, the misters spraying cool water into the air to allow people to sit comfortably outside, the tennis courts, the driving range—all dizzying reminders that we Americans were strangers, useless to the needs of the place.

At the helipad, waiting for our ride home, we sat around for ninety minutes until it got dark enough to take off. Even with GPS, a lot of helicopter navigation is done by eye as the pilots try to avoid wires and land on small pads at remote installations. The pilots can fly easily in the daylight, and easily in the dark with night-vision gear, but it is tricky in the in-between times.

Darkness had new meaning here. Unlike in the States, where there were almost always some lights on, in the desert, when the moon was not out, you could not see your own feet beneath you. To better use their night goggles, the pilots blacked out the helicopter and switched off their outside lights. Flying this way was oddly therapeutic, as there was nothing to see, there were no reference points, just the enveloping sound of the helo and the comforting sensation of motion. We flew in a UH-1, the Vietnam-era helicopter everyone knows from the movies, which had a tendency to slide through the air in a series of long, lazy curves. Finally, we saw the lights that marked our home helo pad. The lights were not bright airport beams but small ChemLight dots at the corners of the landing zone, almost invisible to the naked eye but nice and clear with night goggles.