Andi introduced me to Springer. I asked him about five questions. To my disappointment, he didn’t say a single controversial or outrageous thing.
After the interview, I spoke with Andi for about fifteen more minutes. Her coworkers watched in horror as she talked to “the gossip guy.” I made sure to mention that I was really aNewsweek guy, and that this gossip thing was just for fun. “Real news only,” I told her. “Most of the time, at least.”
“That’s quite a notebook you’re carrying,” she said.
It was a classic reporter’s notebook, spiral bound, sticking out of my back pocket.
“Do you think you’re covering World War II or something? I mean, it’s like you think you’re in the movie, Newsie. Did you leave your fedora at home?”
There was an edge to the flirting. I could tell she thought I was full of myself, and she wanted to take me down a peg.
I looked at her face, at her blond hair falling below her chin, her turned-up nose and blue eyes, and near freckles. I thought, Here is a girl who would make a great girlfriend. That’s how she looked to me, instantly.
I asked her for her card. She said she didn’t have one—a lie—because she didn’t want her name to show up on the gossip website. Before leaving, I tried to impress her by mentioning I was headed to a going-away party for a friend whom I’d gone to security training with, who was on her way to Iraq.
I transcribed the Springer interview and sent in the piece. There wasn’t much to work with, and beyond that I was no longer in the mood for the casual pettiness the gossip site required. I’d been working with them for a few months, and I’d lost interest in writing about topics that I felt were essentially meaningless. The Springer interview was probably the most boring and harmless item the website ever published. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it was by accident, but her colleagues at Air America would say that it was a “Valentine to Andi.”
I got an email from Andi the day the Springer piece ran, saying she was glad to meet me. I responded with a question: What, no comment on the Springer story? She accused me of fishing for compliments. I said she was right, and that we should have lunch.
The day before our first date, I got a phone call from Scott Johnson in Baghdad.
“Hi, Mike, this is Scott.”
“Hey, Scott, how’s it going?”
There was a time lag, partly due to the satellite phone connection, partly due to the fact that Scott always spoke so laid-back and slow.
“Did you get my email?”
“What email?”
“Are you free to come to Baghdad this summer?”
I tried to sound as relaxed about it as he did.
“Sure, I can do that, no problem.”
I hung up the phone in disbelief. It was happening. I needed to say it out loud. I got up from my cubicle and walked into my friend Jack’s office. “Dude, they’re sending me to Iraq.”
I call it our first date, but it was always debatable—I had asked Andi to come up for lunch at the Brooklyn Diner, across fromNewsweek, to discuss Air America. She finally agreed, thinking it was work related, though I had very little intention of discussing business. In fact, I’d already eaten lunch that day.
She was coming out the door of the diner when I arrived.
“Sorry, I’m running late.”
“I was just about to leave.”
We sat in the corner booth. I told Andi I’d already eaten lunch, and she looked at me like I was an idiot. “Who goes to lunch after they’ve already eaten lunch?” I didn’t have a good answer, so I told her the milkshakes were really good. I ordered a vanilla shake, she ordered chocolate. I told myself to play it cool, to not tell her I was going to Baghdad until at least midway through the lunch.
About five seconds later, I said, “I’m going to Baghdad.”
She didn’t seem particularly impressed. Next month, she said, she was going to a concert in England, Live 8. “You don’t know what Live 8 is, do you?”
“Of course I do,” I lied.
She listed the bands that would be there: Coldplay, Snow Patrol, U2.
“Snow Patrol,” I said, “the Irish indie band.” I knew this only because a stringer had pitched an item about them for the international magazine a few weeks earlier.
“They’re not Irish. They’re Scottish.”
“I bet you they’re Irish.”
We shook on the bet.
Lunch lasted about two hours, and in that time I managed to invite myself to her birthday party, which, coincidentally, happened to be right down the street from my apartment on the Lower East Side. I learned she was raised in Perry, Ohio, home to a nuclear power plant that Andi claimed made the whole town sick, though she had no hard evidence. I guessed she was a middle child—yes, she said, so she knew injustice well—and then I somehow guessed, on my second try, that her middle name was Suzanne. I learned she hated George W. Bush with an impressive passion and had a soft spot for conspiracies. “Bush went to Iraq to get revenge for his father,” she said, fully convinced. I nodded sympathetically; her convictions were strong, but her politics were a little simplistic. In her world there was good and evil, the corrupt and the pure, and her role, she believed, was to be an advocate for the good.
She asked me who I voted for.
“Me? To quote Canadian Prime Minister Diefenbaker, ‘Dear sir, what I do in the ballot box is between myself and my god.’”
“Oh, God. Are you a Republican?” she asked. “Who did you vote for in 2004 when Bush, yet again, stole the election? He stole it in Ohio, you know.”
She reported back to her friends, I reported back to mine. One of her friends said: “Oh, don’t let him pull that ‘Pearl Harbor I’m going off to war’ stuff on you.”
There are two pictures from her birthday party. One, she called the Vader picture—I’m smirking in it, as if the darker side of my personality is winning out. In the other she has her arms wrapped around me, her head on my shoulder. Another guy at the party asked me if she was my girlfriend. I told him no. “She acts like it,” he said.
I called her the next day and asked her when we were going to have dinner.
“Dinner?”
“You promised me a dinner at your birthday party.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you don’t remember? You did have a lot to drink, and I know you rarely drink.” (There was never any mention of dinner, but I had figured her memory wouldn’t be a hundred percent, and gambled that a promised-dinner gambit might work.)
We had dinner on Sunday night on the Lower East Side. The restaurant was Alias, on the corner of Clinton and Rivington. When we got inside, she immediately said:
“This is your date restaurant, isn’t it? This is where you bring all the girls?”
“What girls? Of course not.”
She was right, though. I’d brought three previous dates there.
The Lower East Side in those days was becoming gentrified, overrun with hipster bars and nightlife lasting until 5A.M. After midnight, the streets outside my apartment on Allen Street were always loud with breaking glass and drunken yells and crowds of men and women in tight black jeans and stylishly mussed hair, doing drugs, drinking, and doing more drugs.
I convinced her to go back to my place after dinner. The NBA Finals were on, and I knew she liked sports. I told her I’d been dabbling in online sports gambling, and that I was down about two hundred bucks. She followed me to my apartment. I had a futon bed, and a table piled with junk mail and change, my computer, one other chair, and a wide-screen television. I turned on one of the floor lamps, partly dimmed, and I lit a scented candle, then I turned on the game. She looked at me, perplexed.
“You can sit on the futon,” I said. I sat on the futon.
She didn’t move.
“Come here, you can sit next to me.”
She stepped toward me, hesitating. She sat down on the bed. I attempted to reach my arm around her shoulder.
She jumped up from the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Uh, I’m trying to kiss you. What do you think I’m doing?”
“You think you can just kiss me?”
“You came back to my apartment.”
“You said we were going to watch the game.”
“Fine, watch the game.”
“No, I’m leaving right now.”
“You’re leaving? Jesus Christ. So you come to my apartment, I try to kiss you, and you’re shocked?”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“Whatever. Leave, then.”
“Is this what you do? You bring girls back here, and they just start making out with you?”
“Yeah, that’s the idea of a date, you know.”
I was pissed off and embarrassed. I expected to hook up, and her virtuousness made me somewhat ashamed. I felt stupid, so I covered it up with swagger.
“So you’re rejecting me? You better leave then.”
She sat down on the futon.
“This is the first date. Who does this on the first date?”
“Well, it’s more like the third date—we got milkshakes, your birthday party.”
“This is the first date.”
“I thought you were leaving?”
“You want me to leave?”
“Do what you want. But obviously I don’t want you to leave.”
The game was on.
“I think I’m going to lose another twenty bucks,” I said.
She looked at me.
Eventually, our emotions settled. I started saying things, talking in a soothing prattle, finally moving next to her on the futon. I rubbed her hand and spoke softly, and told her that if she was uncomfortable, I wouldn’t be angry if she left, that I understood wanting to take things slow, so please, if you don’t want to be here, I understand.
Then I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back.
CHAPTER4
June–August 2005
NEW YORK CITY
We were in love before we said it; we said it only after we were far apart, when I was six thousand miles away and eight hours ahead. Later, she would ask me, “When was the moment, when was the momentyou knew ?” I’d say, “When I saw your face at the Jerry Springer party I knew.” Or, “When we went out to dinner at Shelley’s on 57th, when I convinced you to try an oyster, which you had refused to try in the previous twenty-six years of your life, that face you made, I knew then.” On a night in July in my bed, near climax, I told her I loved her. I whispered it. I don’t know if she heard. I was worried she might have heard. It just slipped out, in passion, and then I rolled over on the futon, the bed she made me get rid of, and wondered if she heard and if she loved me back.
Andi would say she hugged me at her birthday party for a reason. She would say she really knew, yes, at Shelley’s, when we looked at each other across the table. When she went to London for the Live 8 concert, she did not stop thinking about me, she said. She lost interest in the guy she was supposed to visit, standing in a crowd of two hundred thousand at Hyde Park, when Snow Patrol came onstage; she thought of me. They told the crowd they were from Ireland. I’d won the bet and she wanted to call me up right then and tell me, but she didn’t. She told me she was certain when we went to the double feature ofWedding Crashers andWilly Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and I bought her popcorn and peanut M&M’s, and kept feeding them to her until she started slightly choking, then spit up a piece in my hand. She knew when she was supposed to fly home to Ohio, and her plane kept getting delayed because of the weather, so instead she came to my apartment, and we made a weekend out of it, getting left field seats that Saturday at a Mets game. She knew from the moment she refused to give me her business card.
Neither of us let on, though. All our friends were advising us to stay away—it doesn’t make any sense, so went the counsel. He’s going to Baghdad in two months. How is that going to work?
It didn’t make sense to us, either, really. Why would she choose to get involved with a man who, by the nature of his profession, was always leaving? But my deployment to Baghdad gave urgency to our relationship. Every night, every dinner, was one day closer to the day I was leaving.
On the night we first made love, we ate dinner at a Greek restaurant in midtown. It was a Saturday evening. I was coming from work. We sat down at the table, and she told me my apartment was making her sick.
“I have a fever. I’m in a daze.”
“You’ve only been there once,” I said. “And look, I’m fine.”
“No, I think it’s your apartment. There’s some kind of superflu virus breeding in there.”
She looked at the menu and frowned. “There’s a lot of lamb,” she said.
She didn’t touch her food; I ate an appetizer, an entrée, and had a coffee.
“It’s good you’re enjoying the meal,” she said.
I’d assumed we would go to her place after dinner. She lived on Central Park West, about five blocks away. She told me that was out of the question; she had a roommate and it wouldn’t be appropriate. She said she would go downtown, despite the health hazards of my studio. We argued about it. I told her I would have gotten a voucher for aNewsweek car service, if I’d known, and now we had to flag down a cab, and that was such a hassle around here.
“We should have just gone to your place,” I said.
“Why are you freaking out? You okay? You’re going a bit odd on the voucher.”
Finally, I waved down a cab, and we went to my apartment.
“When was the last time you cleaned your sheets?” she asked.
The minute we were alone, though, the argument over the voucher seemed ridiculous. I asked her how she was feeling. “Better,” she said, “but you really need to clean your apartment.” I kissed her. She was so soft, her head resting on my old pillow with itsReturn of the Jedi pillowcase. We fell asleep. But when I awoke in the middle of the night, she was putting her clothes on. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m leaving,” she said, “I need to get home.” “Don’t leave—there’s no need.” “No, I don’t want to stay,” she said. If she left, she would explain to me later, she couldn’t get hurt. She’d be leaving me before I could leave her.
Toward the end of July, Andi helped me shop for Iraq. She also gave me a gift basket of gum and other travel items, souvenirs, and books to remember her by. On my last night in New York, we went back to Alias, where we had gone on our first official date. In every way, it was more awkward than that first night. We fought; there were too many feelings to do otherwise. I said I’d like to stay longer in Iraq than the two months I was scheduled. This hurt her feelings. She said she was convinced I wouldn’t come back. Our conversation was so intense, the negative vibe so palpable, that the waitress didn’t even ask us if we wanted dessert—she just brought us the check as soon as she could to get us out of the restaurant. By the time we got back to my apartment, there was too little time left to stay angry. We forgave each other and made promises—we would stay together.
I gave her a book, Hunter S. Thompson’sRum Diary.
“Where did you get this book?” she asked.
“Oh, I bought it.”
“You bought it? Isn’t this the book that has been on your floor for the last month?”
“Yes, it is.”
“So when did you buy this gift for me?”
“Well, I think I bought that book a couple of years ago.”
“So, you’re giving me something you found on your floor?”
“If you put it like that, it sounds bad, sure. But I’m giving it to you. Just read what it says.”
On the inside flap, I’d written:I don’t miss, but I’ll miss you, mh.
The next morning, a Saturday, I lugged my bags down the stairs and flagged a cab. I had to go in to work for the day. I would leave from the office to the airport in the afternoon. We both got out on 57th Street. She held in her feelings when we said goodbye. I tried to kiss her, but she pulled away and walked around t
he corner. That evening, I got on an eleven-hour direct flight from JFK to Amman. For a while, I wondered if Andi and I would actually be able to make it. Would she wait for me? Was I capable of keeping my commitment to her? And then I started thinking about Iraq.
CHAPTER5
August–September 2005
BAGHDAD, AL KARMA, CAMP FALLUJAH
American soldiers usually asked me the same three questions during an embed.
Question 1: Do you carry a gun, sir?
No, no, I don’t.
That’s fucked up. I wouldn’t go anywhere in this country without a gun.
Question 2: So you must get paid a lot of money to be here?
Not really, not as much as you think.
Question 3: Why don’t you reporters ever report the good news?
I learned not to answer this one honestly—saying I hadn’t found any good news didn’t win friends.
Fuck it. You gonna put me on the cover of your magazine?
I went on four embeds on my first trip to Iraq. To spend time with American soldiers was to experience Iraq framed by the square bulletproof Humvee windows and behind “combat locked” doors; Iraq from three thousand feet in a Black Hawk helicopter; Iraq through the scope of an M-4 rifle. It was a world with its own language and geography. Divisions, brigades, battalions, companies, platoons. 4th ID, 3rd ID, 10th Mountain, Two-One Marines, Three Fourteen, 256th Field Artillery Regiment, First Cav. Roger. Outstanding. What the fuck over. It was a world that could be described almost entirely by acronyms. MNFI, MNSTICI, MEF, TOC, AWOC, DFAC, TCPs, OPs, TTPs, HMWWW, CHUs, MiTTs, SPITTs, BEPs, MEPs, PFCs, LTs, PAX, PX, LZ, CPATT, MSRs, IBAs, AOs, LN, TCNs, BOLO, AIF, LSAs EJKs, GOI, SPs. Multi-National Force Iraq is MNFI. A TOC is a tactical operations center. An LSA is a life support area or a logistics support area. AIF stands for Anti-Iraqi Forces, the enemy. LN is a local national, an Iraqi. GOI is government of Iraq. Iraqi street names were usually irrelevant; routes were named after things soldiers could easily remember. Route Green Bay, Route Wolverine, Route Blue, Route Orange County, Main Supply Route (or MSR) Tampa. Each AO, or area of operations, had its own hotspots: RPG Alley, IED Alley. Iraqi town names were interchangeable with the military bases that were now located near them, the forward operating bases. FOB Justice, FOB Duke, FOB Prosperity, FOB Victory, Liberty, Slayer, Striker.
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