We Meant Well (5 page)

I wouldn't sign, and it looked like things were at a stalemate. As I wondered how to get out of the room and maybe grab a taxi to, say, Paris, Ms. Sharon, our Iraqi American adviser, broke the silence by announcing I did not trust her. I'd never met her before and ten minutes into the relationship was too early to not trust her, or trust her. She began crying and ran out of the room. I asked Mel if he had drafted the project and, if so, why he did not seek multiple prices and resolve some of the issues. He said Ms. Sharon had done the work. Did Ms. Sharon have an agricultural background? Mel mumbled no, her only previous work experience was doing office work in Chicago.

My first real workday in Iraq was done. I flew back to FOB Hammer and went to bed fully expecting to be killed in my sleep by McBlazer. Unfortunately, I was not.

Tribes

A FOB was a village, populated by tribes who rarely intermingled except on business and who had little in common except for the fact that they were all at this same place at this same time in Iraq.

Soldiers

The largest tribe on any FOB were the soldiers. This was their war, and in a way they were the reason most every other tribe had migrated to Iraq. At first brush it was easy to sort the soldiers into clichés—redneck gun nuts, high school dropouts, tired Southern guys, the barracks intellectual, the kid from Brooklyn—every one of them a type for the next
Saving Private Ryan
. They dressed and walked alike and shaved their heads, allowing you to stop thinking at the first stereotype if you wanted to. The Army was a big place, and once you identified a type chances were there were more of him or her around. But after you were living on the FOB for a while you got to hear their stories. Ran away from an evil girlfriend, needed money for college, father said get a job or get out, that sort of thing. Each of them was proud to serve but each of them had at least another reason that they carried around for joining the military, their own little secret weight. Few Rambos at this level.

The soldier tribe distinguished itself with names and mascots that spoke to the odd feedback loop between Iraq war reality and American pop culture. Many units had names like Mighty Warriors or Spartans, with logos all clearly based on the movie
300
. Others liked death-inspired names such as Death Dealers, Gravediggers, Ghostriders, and the like, with logos ripped from the Eddie character on Iron Maiden album covers. A few old-timers clung to Indian names like Crazy Horse Platoon or Gunslingers, usually with flaming-skull logos that used to feature on biker jackets. The names were not creative and, when applied to nonmartial subunits like the finance office or the medical team, seemed out of place.

KBR White

KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root) conducted the backstage portion of this war. They hired people in the United States to come to Iraq and run the generators, fix the plumbing, and do all the maintenance and logistics stuff because there were nowhere near enough soldiers around to do those things. After the soldier tribe, these people were the largest group on the FOB. Not all contractors worked for KBR, as many were subcontractors and sub-subcontractors (over three hundred US companies had people in Iraq), but everyone referred to tribe members who were contractors simply as KBR. At the peak there were an estimated 150,000 contractors of various types in Iraq. They were almost uniformly white, male, and from the southern United States (or maybe they all just talked that way). Some who had been in the military, however briefly and inconsequentially, spoke of their former service constantly. This impressed the soldiers in exactly the same way a dropout who continued to hang around the school parking lot impressed high school juniors. These guys often referred to other men as “brother” and liked to dress in “tactical” clothing, made by the 5.11 company. You could tell 5.11 clothing by the vast number of unnecessary pockets all over the shirts and pants. I had a pair of such pants myself, with over a dozen pockets, each with Velcro and snaps and D rings and all sorts of accessories. If you filled all the pockets, you wouldn't be able to climb stairs. The KBR men imagined themselves as Chuck-Norris-the-young-martial-arts-killer but instead mimicked Chuck-Norris-the-aging-caricature. The six-figure salaries KBR paid them were augmented with free trips home and all sorts of benefits. These costs were of course passed on to the taxpayer and may have been part of the reason soldiers were paid only mediocre wages—even in the military there was only so much money to go around.

KBR Brown

What the KBR White personnel did not do was anything dirty, dark, or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, digging holes, unloading things, guarding places, or serving food. Exclusively young male workers imported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other Third World garden spots did those jobs. KBR paid them low wages by American standards but pretty good wages by Sri Lankan standards, which undoubtedly made those jobs more palatable. There were rumors of virtual slavery, always unconfirmed, of workers tricked by middlemen into becoming indentured for their travel costs and finishing their year in Iraq in a downward spiral of debt. KBR Brown people were mysterious. Almost none of them spoke more than a handful of English phrases (“closed now cleaning time, you wait, no use toilet broken”) and I never encountered them except behind the serving counter or cleaning things.

The servant assigned to the bank of latrines behind our office was there from morning until late at night. He had a small folding campstool that he sat on, sliding it leftward over the course of the day to keep within the shadow of the latrine bank as the sun moved. Seemingly from the near-constant scrubbing, his right arm was muscled while his left was thin. He was so thorough that our latrines were closed for cleaning a good part of the working day. He smiled at everyone but said nothing. I do not know where he used the latrine himself or if he was subjected to some sort of Dickensian regime where he had to use substandard facilities whilst laboring in ours. One day he was gone, replaced by a younger man who spoke so little English that we never knew if the replacement was a punishment or a promotion for our old guy. It all gave the place a last-days-of-the-Raj feel, when it did not give it a we-are-slave-owners feel.

KBR Green

The members of KBR Green were also white but they carried weapons and did security things on the FOB. Most were Americans, with a few exotic Brits and shady South Africans thrown in. Many used to work for Blackwater, which escaped accountability for its alleged evil actions by cleverly changing its name to Xe. Not to their face, most people would call these guys mercs, not contractors, in that they carried weapons on behalf of the US government, sometimes shot at Iraqis, but were not soldiers. This is what the military would look like without its senior NCOs—a frat house with guns. This tribe differentiated itself from the soldiers. They especially favored fingerless leather gloves—think biker gang or Insane Clown Posse fanboys. Popular was a clean-shaven head, no mustache, but a spiky goatee about four inches long teased straight out. You know the look from late-night convenience-store beer runs.

They walked around like Yosemite Sam, with their arms out as if their very biceps prevented them from standing straight. They were bullies, of course, flirting inappropriately with the women and posturing around the men. Count on them to wear the most expensive Oakley sunglasses and the most unnecessary gear (gold man bracelets, tactical hair gel), a bit like
Jersey Shore
rejects.

The tribe worked out in the gym a lot, as did the soldiers. The KBR Green guys, however, ended up huge, ripped, and strong while the soldiers just ended up strong, leading to whispered discussions about large-scale steroid use. Aggressive tattoos on all exposed skin seemed a condition of membership, especially wavy inked patterns around the biceps and on the neck. They all let on that they were former SEALs, Green Berets, SAS men, Legion of Doom members, but they could not talk about it. Nor did they disclose their last names (soldiers, however,
only
had last names, as in “Tell Smith to get on that”). Instead they tended to go by nicknames like Bulldog, Spider, Red Bull, Wolverine, Smitty, or Sully. Extra credit if you caught one using a nickname left over from
Top Gun
. If arrogance was contagious they'd all be sneezing. All Aryan, all dudely.

Other Contractors

This might have been the most distant, opaque, and self-enclosed tribe of all. There was a group of young Filipino men and women who ran the concessions on the FOB. No one knew how they got there or how they supported themselves with something like an embroidery shop on a military base. They did not engage in conversation for any reason, though all spoke English, perhaps because the women were hit on by the soldiers and contractors approximately ten million thousand times a day. The American military had always depended on a community of Filipinos to staff its bars and curio shops, so these workers may have been brought in just for tradition's sake.

In addition to the Filipinos, there was a contingent of very young men from the slums of Uganda who guarded most US military facilities. Paying Ugandans saved money because guard duty was boring until it became suddenly violent; then it was boring again for a long time. Americans did not want to do such work, and it cost a lot of money to get Americans to volunteer for the Army. Ugandans were cheap, they knew about weapons as former child soldiers, and for some reason the contracting company had a connection into Uganda. (The Embassy used a different contractor and so was guarded exclusively by Peruvians.) For the same reasons Mexicans cut your lawn at home and Hondurans cleaned your hotel rooms, your Army guards came from Uganda.

The Ugandans were a sad group. Manning the guard towers at night, they could sometimes be heard singing to one another, sweetly calling out to a fellow countryman two hundred meters downrange but even farther away from home than we were. The Ugandans spoke only a few words of English and just could not deal with the cold. In winter, the desert gets cold at night, and for months Iraq is semitemperate and often rainy. Guarding things tends to involve standing still or walking around outside, a bad mix for the Ugandans. As soon as the weather cooled off even a bit, they would break out an amazing collection of nonstandard colorful wool caps and heavy gear, to the point where one poor guard was wearing hockey gloves to keep warm.

I'd learned from one of the US citizen supervisors that a Ugandan guard might make $600 a month, with much of it owed back to the brokers and middlemen who helped him get from Africa to Mesopotamia. The Ugandan could also be fined by his supervisor up to $100 for lying, sleeping on duty, or some other infraction. A US citizen supervisor might make $20,000 a month, tax free, with benefits, while in Iraq.

Iraqis

Aside from the few local Iraqis who ran the small hajji shops and commuted in and out of the FOB, there were two other groups of Iraqis who worked with us, the Iraqi Army and our own imported Iraqi Americans.

The US Army units I embedded with sometimes trained the Iraqi Army, who were now our allies against the insurgents. The Iraqi Army did not live on the FOB but often hung around for meals and to buy things at the franchise shops. The training seemed a bit nonsensical at times, consisting of either rote simple drills or over-the-top complex vehicle maintenance lessons that were a struggle for the many nonliterate enlisted Iraqis. Training the Iraqis was clearly regarded by our side as among the worst duty in-country. The Iraqis were gleefully a Third World organization, in the opinion of the soldiers who worked with them, and were considered sloppy about discipline, casual with their weapons, and adamantly untrainable. As a token of our conquering them, the Iraqi name tags were in English and Arabic, which must have pissed them off every time they looked in the mirror. An Iraqi general who often visited always had his ten-year-old son with him, wearing an exact replica of Dad's uniform, right down to the gun in a holster. An American soldier who tried talking to the kid discovered that the gun was real—and loaded.

The Iraqi Americans were another tribe who worked primarily as translators. They had immigrated to the United States and become citizens years ago. Most were from Detroit or Chicago, recruited by subcontractors for their alleged language skills. Most of our Iraqi American translators were employees of an Alaskan Native–owned business. This business had one employee in the States, an Alaskan Native far away in Alaska, and subcontracted to some other business that recruited Iraqi Americans in Detroit and sent them to us in Baghdad. To help support minority businesses such as those owned by Alaskan Natives, the US government offered them an advantage in the otherwise competitive bidding process, a sort of contracting affirmative action, even as they subbed out 100 percent of the work. It seemed like a get-rich-quick Internet scam, but it was legal.

Like KBR White personnel, the Iraqi Americans had six-figure salaries, free trips home, and sweet benefits. Many of them had not lived in Iraq for years yet we used them as cultural advisers. Some had lived entirely within Iraqi American communities in the States and spoke poor English but served as translators nevertheless. Some were Kurdish and/or Christian, which no doubt impressed the Muslim Arabs we primarily interacted with. The supposed best of the bunch served as BBAs (bilingual and bicultural advisers), each with a specialty topic such as “agriculture” or “women's issues.” Many were nice folks but knew nothing about agriculture or women's issues. One BBA who worked with us was named a “women's program adviser” by sole virtue of her having lady parts; when we moved to another FOB, she became an agricultural adviser because we needed an ag adviser and she was there. No one will ever know how much of our failure in reconstructing Iraq was caused simply by bad translation and subject-matter ignorance, but it would be a decent percentage.