by Scott Fisher
The area is supposedly safe, walled off from the rest of the country by U.S. soldiers, private security contractors and coalition forces. The night I leave however an incoming mortar cracks the silence. The infamous ‘Road of Death’ between central Baghdad and the airport is only a few hundred yards away, and incoming planes are regularly fired upon.
Walking across the dusty lot to the truck, a Toyota Land Cruiser of all things, taking me to camp I get my first glimpse of a ‘Rhino’. Built for ferrying U.S. and coalition diplomats, civilians and workers around the deadly, car bomb-laced streets, these hulking brutes bring home exactly what lies in wait outside the wall. To picture a Rhino, imagine a UPS truck bulked up with heavy armor and tiny, bulletproof windows, then add a couple of heavily armed men on lookout. Like nothing else, one look at a Rhino brought home exactly what everyone had just gotten into.
The Land Cruiser ferrying myself and others to base was not similarly armored however; forcing us to avoid the main roads and instead skirt from camp to camp inside the defended airport perimeter. It took nearly an hour to traverse the few miles to the dusty little camp of prefab trailers and leftover palaces that was to be my home, and the boundaries of my world, for the next two months.
November in Baghdad, surprisingly, wasn’t as ungodly hot or dusty as I expected. By Thanksgiving it would get downright pleasant – in the 40s at night and low 70s during the day. Media coverage had left me expecting a sand-blown sweatbox, but the winter months, far from being hot, got downright chilly. I even saw patches of ice one morning on my walk to work.
That first day though I didn’t care so much about the weather, I just wanted to figure out where I was living and what I was going to be doing. I had volunteered to go to Iraq, twice, and now that I was finally here I was anxious to see what I’d gotten myself into.
I stood in Baghdad’s desert-bright sun, big green Army bags slung over each shoulder, waiting to fill out the paperwork to get into my living quarters. The process bumbled along, papers flipped and jostled, got initialed here and there, until I was finally given a key and pointed into the heart of, “our trailer park.” I crossed the road and plunged into the type of trailer park that forms the backbone of ‘temporary’ base housing in Baghdad. Walking past run-down trailers toward my hootch in C Block, the two days of little sleep trying to catch the hop into Baghdad, plus the sandstorm-induced cold I’d gotten down in Qatar, had me half-delirious. It felt like wandering the set of a cheap movie.
“Welcome to Baghdad! First time here?” Marcos’ (all names have been changed in this account) booming, retired Marine-officer voice woke me from my half-dream.
I’d found my trailer, unlocked the door, and met my new neighbor.
“Yeah, first time. You been here a while?” And with that Marcos proceeded to fill me in on his months in camp, upcoming leave to the States, job as a contractor, and the living situation in our trailer. It was divided into four ‘rooms’, cubbyholes really, with an open hallway along the inside front of the trailer. Clever placement of lockers and blankets, plus the mini-walls that divided each section, allowed for a decent amount of privacy and quiet.
The beds were bunk beds, and some people even used the spare mattresses to further wall-in their section of the trailer, but Marcos advised against this. “They try to hit us with mortars and rockets pretty regularly and the roofs are unprotected. An extra mattress over your head won’t help if there’s a direct hit but might help with the shrapnel from a near miss.”
I’ve moved around a lot, and met plenty of new neighbors, but this was the first time my welcome chat included mortar advisories and tips on shrapnel protection. After that, and with a final, “let me know if you need anything,” Marcos went back to his section of the trailer.
After stowing my gear I paused for a minute and took a seat on the bed. I was a long way from my first axis of evil country, North Korea, and even further away from my main duty station at the Pentagon. This was going to be different and I needed a minute to collect my thoughts before heading off to work.
A couple of years before, after the North Korea trip, I’d gone back to grad school in South Korea full of fire for learning more about the North. By the time I finished my MA in Korean Studies the following year; my 10 years in Asia, Korean language ability, and writings on US-NK topics had gotten attention and job offers from various parts of the U.S. government. I’d finally settled on a ‘NE Asia Analyst’ position with the Department of Defense (DoD) in the Pentagon working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Unfortunately, after years of Korea-focused work and study, the DoD, in its infinite wisdom, assigned me to a China position. The decision-making seemed to involve some kind of ‘what the heck, how different can they be?’ line of reasoning. Sure, I’d visited China a few times, but it was like they assumed somebody who’d vacationed in Jamaica was qualified to analyze the politics, conflicts and militaries of the Caribbean. It rendered me useless and frustrated from the very first day of work.
My second frustration with the job was being deskbound. After years of work involving people, deals, and a fast, independent pace, the Pentagon desk-jockey gig was not a good fit. I knew when I started volunteering to take out the office garbage, just to get away from my desk for 30 minutes, that DC and I were not getting along. Six months in and I was climbing the walls, literally dying for a change.
Finally, at a morning meeting, a ticket out appeared. My boss at the Pentagon, clearly not expecting anyone to actually say yes, asked for volunteers to go to Iraq. Silence filled the cubicles. No one wanted any part of it, but my ears perked up. After the meeting, I followed the colonel back to her office, said I was interested, and within an hour was getting deluged in deployment forms.
The axis of evil tour, until now a bar joke with some friends, suddenly looked possible.
The damaged building is the former Baath party headquarters and the domed building next to it is a former palace now housing offices for American forces.
Palaces of Baghdad
Sitting on that bed in my hootch in Baghdad I was a different man than I’d been in North Korea. My life in DC had both matured and aged me. I’d worked for the Joint Chiefs and even helped write products presented to the President, but I’d lost the fire for life I feel when overseas. Now, back on the other side of the planet, far from friends and family, and for all I knew liable to be attacked at any moment, I found that fire coming back. It was good to return to the road – I was ready for a fresh start.
I picked myself up and headed to work. If nothing else the office promised to be interesting – it was in a palace built for hosting parties under the Husseins. The entire complex had been a walled-off sanctuary and R&R spot for Baath Party (Hussein’s political grouping) members and other big shots during the Hussein years. Now it was a giant camp for coalition forces. The closest palace loomed in the distance over a surrounding moat and nearby lake – walking to work every day toward a sun rising over a Middle Eastern palace certainly beat commuting on a jammed DC subway.
On the walk to the palace signs of being in a combat zone were everywhere: smoke from explosions was visible in the distance, the road through base used old tank treads as speed bumps (the U.S. military has a fear of speeding bordering on the lunatic, but more on that later) and nearly everyone was armed. Odd, to my newbie eyes anyway, postings were everywhere. One that caught my eye was, “Due to threat of indirect fire basketball court will close at 18:00 daily.” Though it felt kind of luxurious to have access to a basketball court amid all that was going on, the sign made me wonder why the people lobbing ordinance at us were kind enough to keep an evening-only schedule.
Once at the palace I showed my ID, got admitted, and was sent off on a round of DC-esque form filing. Unlike Washington, however, at the end of this red tape I came away with a sidearm and two clips of ammo – the government and taxpayers having been kind enough to treat me to several days of intensive weapons training in Texas before my deployment. After co
mpleting the paperwork, I finally found my new office and met the man I was replacing. Then he took me around the palace and introduced me to some of my new co-workers and bosses.
The office was impressive. Ornate chandeliers left over from the former regime hung everywhere, while paintings and intricately carved woodwork were interspersed with gun racks, cubicles and computers. My office was off the giant (it had once been a ballroom) main floor and featured floor-to-ceiling windows offering a memorable view of downtown Baghdad.
The bad point of that view became apparent a while later, when a concussion wave from an explosion struck the windows with such force I thought they’d shatter. The other people in the office didn’t even seem to notice – odd what you can get used to. When I asked about the dangers of shattered glass someone showed me the button controlling the metal blast shield that descended, garagedoor-like, to cover the windows and protect those inside. Cool, I’d never worked in a place with its own blast shield.
The man I was to replace, James (remember, all names have been changed), was rotating home after his sixth-month tour and had fortunately put together a handy training list of things I’d need to learn before he left. He was so happy to be getting out one of the first things he showed me was his spreadsheet, telling him down to the exact second, how much time he had left in country. The spreadsheet was also updated with rocket, mortar and other attacks so he could tell how many of those he’d been through as well. I soon found out that nearly everyone kept this same info on their computers, counting down daily and hourly until they could go home. People would constantly refer to this number. Even asking someone how they were doing would often elicit something like, “Shitty, but nothing six more weeks won’t fix.” Sometimes, especially for short-timers, you’d even get the number of hours left until they started feeling better. Early on, my lack of time in-country really seemed to brighten a lot of people’s days, “Poor bastard, I’ve still got two months left, but I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”
I’d somehow landed myself a pretty good position. Instead of being ‘the guy at the Pentagon who knew nothing about China, but was assigned to China’, here my extra round of volunteering while down in Qatar, plus some help from the roommate there who worked in admin, had landed me a position several levels above my pay grade.
I was placed in nominal charge of a small, 4-person office that was tasked with editing and processing reports for the Iraqi Survey Group (ISG), the international group in charge of searching for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (we also looked for unicorns, leprechauns, and pink polka dot pandas, but never found any of them either). Reports from the group destined for the outside world came through our office, while people back in DC, or anyplace else around the world, would contact our office trying to track down a report, a specific analyst, or anything else WMD-search related.
The ISG was due to disappear in December and I was sent there in November to cover the gap between when the person I was replacing finished his deployment and went home, and the functions of the Group actually concluded the following month. The temporary assignment, and hence my time in Iraq, was supposed to last four weeks but few figured it’d be that short.
Even after specifically volunteering for Iraq while working back in DC, I’d actually almost missed my chance to serve there. Fresh off the flight from the States, while staying overnight at the U.S. base in the small country of Qatar (a couple of hours south and about a million miles away from the Iraqi warzone), I’d expected to hop a morning flight north to my duty station in Iraq. The taxpayers had spent a lot of money giving me weapons training, evasive driving training, off-road driving training, plus equipping me with gear like a uniform and a gas mask for a war zone. As far as I knew, when I volunteered to go to Iraq, I’d been assigned to Iraq.
Imagine my surprise waking up that first Middle Eastern morning in Qatar and finding out from my ‘temporary’ roommate that I might be stuck there. He awoke, surprised to find someone had been assigned to his dorm-like little room in the middle of the night, and asked who I was and where I was going to be working. I said I expected to be shipping out for Iraq that day, but hadn’t gotten any flight info yet. He looked surprised and asked to see my orders, explaining he was in admin (personnel) and didn’t know of anyone from Qatar getting sent up to Baghdad. Two seconds after looking at my orders he pointed to one of the codes and said I was assigned here, to Qatar.
“What?!? Nobody told me anything about Qatar. I was told I was going to Iraq. I got training and everything to go up there.”
“That’s strange. Anyone in admin [back in DC] looking at this code should’ve known you’d been assigned to Qatar.”
That sentence pretty much sealed the deal for me and government employment. The China-instead-of-Korea thing had been ridiculous enough, but at this point I decided strike two was all I was willing to give. If I wanted to randomly visit odd little countries I could do that on my own.
“Could you show me the code and tell me what it means?”
He pointed to a set of numbers on the orders and went on to explain what they all meant, in a clearer and more matter-of-fact manner than any other I ever heard while working for America’s vast bureaucracy. The young contractor, fresh off a short stint in the Navy, was able to give me more information on my assignment and duty station in a few seconds than anyone back in DC had been able to give me over a period of weeks.
“Is there any way I can get up to Iraq? That’s where I thought I was going.” Here I was re-volunteering for something half the people I knew thought I was nuts for doing in the first place.
“There might be a temporary opening up there. You have to come into our office later for in-processing. I’ll check on the opening and let you know later when you come by.”
That lifted my spirits. I’d only talked to him for a few minutes but this guy really seemed on the ball. If he said I had a shot at actually getting up to Iraq, maybe I really did. At this point it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask about the job. It could’ve been cleaning shithouses for all I knew, but I hadn’t come all this way, and done all that training, to sit out the war shanghaid in Qatar.
After our depressing little talk I ventured out to find a latrine and showers. It had been night when we arrived, so I hadn’t seen much. Now I could see … brown. The warehouses housing all the barracks, brown. Every other building in sight, brown. The ground, brown. Of course, nearly everyone’s clothing, brown. Welcome to the desert.
This was also my first chance to walk outside and into another building to use a bathroom. Not that bad in warm Qatar, more of a pain on a cold December night in Baghdad. After getting cleaned up, I went back for another look at where I was bunking – one of dozens of small rooms set up inside a giant warehouse. Inside, the room actually looked more like a college dorm than anything military. A couple of beds, a couple of lockers, a couple of nightstands, and a TV that looked good, but didn’t really show much. Cramped quarters, but I wasn’t here for the rooms.
Armed with a map I’d been given the night before, I made my way across the base to start in-processing. Shuttle buses drove by, bringing people from one side of the base to the other – basically, from the brown warehouses with all of the rooms, to the brown warehouses with all of the offices. After spending 30-plus hours in transit, I decided to forgo a ride and take what turned out to be a short, 10-minute walk to admin.
Unfortunately, when I reached the office, the door I tried was locked. I started to go look for another entrance, but just then someone came out the first door. I grabbed it, and slipped in as a guy walked by, somewhat to his surprise. He didn’t say anything though, and I was soon inside and on my way down the hall. That’s when I realized I was no longer at the Pentagon – people there, and rightly so, are hyper-conscious about security badges and entry controls. Trying to slip in through an exit like that would’ve had armed guards on me in milliseconds.
I made my way to admin and met back up with my new roommate, plus a
few people I recognized from the previous day’s flight from DC. As soon as I walked in, my roommate pulled me aside and said Baghdad had been contacted, but the transfer was going to take at least a couple of days. Fortunately, one of his best friends was in Baghdad admin and they were working to make things happen. I just need to sit tight in Qatar for a few days until things got ironed out.
Ironically, I’d come into Qatar just as the Ramadan holiday was starting. The importance of Ramadan in the Muslim world is kind of like Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one – huge. To respect the local religious holiday, all U.S. and coalition forces assigned to Qatar were getting a three-day vacation. So, I’d arrived just in time for a day of orientation before a little break. I wasn’t happy about getting caught in Qatar, but the idea of a little vacation to get over my jetlag and get a feel for base wasn’t all bad.
I spent the first day in Qatar learning the job I would presumably be returning to once my time in Baghdad finished. Here, I’d mainly be working with a group of contractors. They turned out to be a great group of guys, including two Vietnam War vets, with stories spanning four decades of military and government service. I was able to spend the whole Ramadan break hanging out with them – by the end of which I was almost sad to leave for Iraq.
We spent the break visiting the few places where you could drink (a distinct rarity in the Middle East) and go to the beach in Qatar – with one of the drinking places, ironically, just down the street from the world headquarters of the Al Jazeera news network. In fact, aside from some truly earth-shattering snoring by my roommate, and getting caught driving in a dust storm so bad it was hard to breathe, let alone see or drive, my week in Qatar was excellent.
By the end of the break the transfer paperwork finally came through and I was cleared for Iraq. Unfortunately, a military hop into Iraq isn’t just making a reservation and showing up an hour before the flight. Instead, you take an early morning shuttle to a U.S. Air Force base located further out in the desert. Once there, you head into a slapdash wooden hut emblazoned with graffiti from the hundreds of units that have already passed through; ‘Devil Dawgs’, 82nd Airborne, etc.