I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  Later at the bureau, Lucian has a few beers. He has taken some of the best-known pictures of the war, including photos from the battle of Fallujah and of the Haditha massacre. “Of all the pictures I’ve taken,” he says, “the only ones that matter are dead people. The rest are bullshit.”

  I know that Norris is not going to like the story when he reads it. Much of my material on the soldiers, detailing the day-to-day missions, was cut, leaving the focus on how difficult the extension has been for the 4-23 and their families. It also contains criticism, from his men, of the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld. I feel uneasy, because I have respect for Norris, and I want him to like it. I know he won’t like it, though. But I know most of the soldiers will.

  The story runs. Norris is not happy with it. He sends me an email and says I betrayed his trust and asks if my magazine is pushing a liberal media agenda. I say my story is based on interviews with dozens of soldiers over a month and it is accurate. It’s just not very good news.

  CHAPTER15

  September 2006

  BAGHDAD

  “Is it weird seeing me here?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “This is awkward.”

  “It’s always awkward, isn’t it?”

  “It is. It is.”

  “Did you think it wasn’t going to be awkward?”

  “No, I knew it was going to be awkward.”

  “Well, it’s great to see you.”

  We’d last seen each other in New York six weeks earlier, hours before I got on a plane, wondering when we would see each other next. When would I get her a ring? Was our love strong enough to make it through a year apart? Now we were together again, in totally weird circumstances, trying to process our emotions over a dinner at the best restaurant in the Green Zone—which wasn’t saying much. We were sitting at a white plastic table on the patio of the Blue Star, the restaurant that replaced the Green Zone Café after it was destroyed by two suicide bombers in October 2004. It was one of two restaurants in the IZ—the other was called the Baghdad Country Club. The food was decent—chicken tikka, soggy French fries, hummus, grilled tomatoes—and guests could order hookahs with apple-scented tobacco and other flavors. It had a simple layout, a patio area with a dozen tables out front, and inside a very plain, overly lit dining room. Military personnel and embassy staffers were not allowed to eat there—it was considered unsanitary by U.S. government health regulations—but most I knew broke the rule and ate there anyway. We’d chosen a table in the back of the patio where it was private and the light was dim. Under the table, we held hands. We didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves.

  It was a cool night. Helicopters flew in pairs overhead. The restaurant sat directly beneath the flight path to LZ Washington, and the gusts of air from Black Hawks passing over forced patrons to clamp down on their napkins and pita bread in red plastic baskets.

  There was a flash of green; a flare dropped, illuminating our table for a moment and making me jump and look up. Andi wasn’t fazed.

  “This is what I hear every night,” she said. “It shakes the roof of my trailer.”

  Andi had arrived in Baghdad three days earlier on September 16. I wasn’t in the city that day; I didn’t get back until the nineteenth. After my embed with the 172nd, I’d taken an Iraqi Airways flight to Kurdistan to do a story on Kurdish rebel groups that were regularly attacking Turkey and Iran from the mountains on Iraq’s northern border. While I was in Kurdistan, Andi was in Amman, spending the first two weeks of September at a conference for Iraqi politicians hosted by the International Republican Institute. We communicated by phone, me calling via satellite to her hotel room. She told me she was enjoying her time in Jordan, her first experience with the Middle East. As a blond, she was something of a novelty, and the politicians asked to pose with her for a digital picture. She received more than one impulsive marriage proposal. (“No, thank you,” she told the three Arab men who asked her to marry them. “I’m already engaged.”When are you going to get me the ring, she’d IM me.) She helped organize the event—and she had that instant observation all Americans have when they start working in the Middle East:Does anything happen on time? It’s like herding cats to get these guys to do anything . She learned about eating goat and hummus from communal plates with her hands. (“I mean, I had a plate of hummus, and this fat man in a dishdasha started eating off it!”) She took it all in stride, enjoying the culture clash, the new experience. She found it particularly amusing that one of the Iraqi leaders who spoke at the conference began his remarks by denouncing the Americans and the American occupation, even though it was an American organization that had footed the bill for this gentleman’s airfare and accommodations, and, more important, given him an excuse not to be in Baghdad.

  Her arrival in Baghdad was uneventful, the airport run smooth, except that she was too small and so there was no body armor that fit her. IRI had to special-order one for her size. She learned her meals would be mostly in the military dining facility (the DFAC; I sympathized) or at the Blue Star, where she kept to a strict diet of French fries and hummus, or she’d eat Zone bars and cereal and oatmeal in her trailer.

  As predicted, she got a lot of attention around the Green Zone, more than she expected. “Welcome to Baghdad,” I said. The population of the Green Zone was overwhelmingly male—something like 70 percent. The lack of women and the high level of testosterone in the air—combined with some jobs that required little work—made some men tend toward the barbaric, gaping at and trying to pick up any woman that crossed their path. (Fraternizing with local Iraqi women was very much frowned upon. Iraqi men didn’t appreciate it, for reasons of pride and culture, and it could get the man or the woman killed.) So it wasn’t a shock that Andi received that much attention. It annoyed me, even stressed me out, for sure, more than I was willing to admit. (As one of my friends remarked, when he learned she was coming, “Andi’s pretty even in New York,” a comment that left me ill at ease.) I would tell her, “You’re the most beautiful girl in Baghdad,” and she would respond, “Oh, stop it!” I wasn’t proud of how jealous and possessive I sometimes felt, but I trusted her, and in my heart I knew I had nothing to worry about except her safety.

  After we ate dinner, Andi showed me her new home. It was a trailer, or CHU—pronounced “chew”—for containable housing unit. She had already made her modifications. The sink, which was just part of the living room, now had a curtain (a “sink shield,” she called it, because she couldn’t stand looking at a bare sink in a living room), and she had rigged her air conditioner with sheets of fabric softener that blew a fresh, lemon-scented breeze and overpowered the vague smell of sewage in her unit. She had a single bed with brand-new sheets, a TV with a satellite hookup, and a desk where she worked on her laptop, using the wireless Internet access when it wasn’t down.

  “Nice accommodations,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”

  “You live in a house. With a cook.”

  “Yes, I have it pretty good here,” I admitted, just to annoy her.

  “I just want to kick you.”

  And she walked over and kicked me with the instep of her small sneakered foot.

  We spent time together in her room. There wasn’t much privacy, and I couldn’t spend the night. I wanted to, but it wouldn’t have been good for me to be away from the bureau for too long in case anything happened, and like a high school student borrowing his parents’ car, I couldn’t keep the Mercedes out all night. As a woman, Andi knew she needed to be taken seriously, and she felt it wouldn’t have made a good impression on her supervisors if I was already sleeping over. For security reasons, she wasn’t allowed to spend the night in theNewsweek bureau—IRI’s policy required her to have two Blackwater security guards with her wherever she went outside her compound. It was another challenge of having a relationship in Baghdad; we were both there to work, and having a job in Baghdad is a twenty-four-hour occupation.

  I left after our first date, passing through the ch
eckpoints manned by Iraqis, and then Georgians, getting into the Mercedes I’d parked in the gravel lot behind her compound. I drove home and texted her when I arrived—even though it was only a few minutes away—to tell her I got there safely.

  For the next month, while she lived in the IRI compound, I went to see her three or four times a week. She’d also visit the bureau when she had a chance in the evening. Her security guards would drop her off for a few hours, then pick her up and bring her back to her trailer for IRI’s midnight curfew.

  Andi fell into her routine. She worked at the Iraqi parliament—the Convention Center—during the day trying to build a media center for the Iraqi press. Her predecessor had started the project a year earlier but it still wasn’t even close to being complete. She encountered the common frustration in Iraq—it took forever to get even the smallest things done. The media center was held up because one of the Iraqi spokespeople did not want to give up his large corner office, an office that the other parliamentarians agreed would make a perfect media center. Then, when they finally settled on a floor space for the center, on the second floor, and mapped out where computers and dividers would be put up, the Speaker of the House decided to temporarily ban all press from the parliament. Still, Andi got to know Iraqi leaders and helped them send out press releases, set up press conferences, and trained them how to deal with the media. She worked out in the mornings, even finding a yoga class to attend called Baghdad Yoga. She described her days to me as if she were Alice in a disturbed Wonderland, where every conversation took on the air of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I’d laugh and say what I’d come to say a lot to her: “Welcome to Iraq.”

  On the evening of October 10, I was sitting at my desk in the bureau’s office when I heard what sounded like a mortar land nearby. I ignored it and kept typing up a story I was working on. Less than a minute passed, and there was another explosion; the windows shook. In the next five minutes, there were a series of seven or eight more blasts. It sounded like someone was shelling the hell out of the Green Zone.

  I was the only correspondent at the bureau that night. The other person in the house was a Scottish private security manager who was filling in for a few days for a friend of his. He walked into the office and he suggested we move into the living room, the designated safe area. I brought my computer with me, and then my phone rang—it was our Iraqi office manager. He told me he thought there was heavy fighting in his neighborhood; in fact, he said, he hadn’t heard these kinds of explosions since the bombing of Baghdad in 2003.

  I sent a text message to Andi, asking if she was okay.

  Then I went up to the third-floor roof of the bureau with the security manager. In the distance, off in the city, we could see the red glow of a large fire, lighting up the dark skyline in a rhythm of pink blasts. I called New York and filed an audio report on the scene for the website: “Mysterious explosions, like a fireworks show, there goes another one, sounds like heavy fighting, nobody knows what it is…”

  Andi hadn’t texted me back, and I started to get concerned.

  After fifteen minutes of watching the explosions, I went back inside. The TV news was covering it, and the military had just issued a press release: There had been an insurgent mortar attack on one of the U.S. bases in Baghdad, FOB Falcon, and the mortar had landed on an ammo depot, starting a fire and setting off the explosions that were being felt across the city. I called New York again to tell them that it wasn’t heavy fighting after all. I felt a bit silly, thinking I had jumped the gun a little.

  I called Andi and she picked up.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you respond to me? You can’t do that—you have to text me back you’re okay.”

  Andi ignored what I said and explained she’d been at the Blue Star with colleagues. They’d all laughed off the explosions at first and continued with their dinner, but after about five minutes, her boss started to get worried. He’d been in Iraq for two years, and these were the worst explosions he’d heard. So they all moved to shelter in one of IRI’s houses.

  “You could see the glow of the explosions on my face,” she told me.

  I let go of my annoyance, and told her about going up on the roof. We were both still excited over what had happened, though Andi sensed some disappointment in my voice.

  “Oh, my Newsie, you were hoping the Green Zone was under attack, so you’d have a big story!”

  Five days later, I was scheduled to leave Iraq—yet another unique stress that came with having a relationship in Baghdad. American civilians working in Iraq—journalists, State Department officials, U.N. workers, contractors, aid workers—were all on a rotating schedule. For mental health reasons, most organizations didn’t want their staff staying in Iraq for long periods at a time. A few months in, a few weeks out.Newsweek didn’t like it when correspondents stayed more than two months, and by the middle of October, I was approaching ten weeks. Another reporter had already been slated to relieve me, but my schedule wasn’t yet aligned with Andi’s. She wouldn’t be due for an out until the end of November.

  I went over to see her on my last night. Our dinner at the Blue Star was strained. Together in her trailer, we had a repeat of the same conversation we’d had many times over the last year, only in reverse. I was heading to Dubai, where I promised her I was going to look at diamond rings.

  “Dubai,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “I know a guy there who just a got a diamond ring for his fiancée, and he told me he’d hook me up.”

  “I don’t know if I trust you getting a diamond ring in Dubai, Newsie,” she said.

  “Don’t worry, I can trust this guy. I’ll see what he has to offer.”

  We kept the lights off in her trailer.

  “How are you going to handle it now that I’m in Baghdad and you’re not?”

  “I’ll worry. I see what you mean. It’s not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot.”

  “You don’t worry.”

  “I do, I do. Just promise me you’ll be careful.”

  I left for the airport at 6:30 the next morning, then got stuck there all day and night. I hung out with a friend I met there named Ahmed, who was nineteen and worked at the airport. He lived there with his father in an office on the second floor that they’d converted to a bedroom because it was too dangerous for him to go back and forth from his neighborhood every day. His cousin had been killed, he told me, and his mother and sister had fled the country to Syria. So he stayed at the airport, sleeping and eating there, picking up odd jobs, while his father ran airport security for the Ministry of Defense. We listened to his iPod on my laptop—he had many more songs than I did—and chilled out watchingScrubs on satellite TV. At night we wandered the airport corridors. For me it was a strange sense of freedom, being able to walk anywhere in the airport, through customs and back, into the departure gate, down to where lost luggage was kept, with no one stopping us. I felt like a child running in the halls of his parent’s office on a Saturday. There were over a hundred stranded passengers sleeping on the floor and on the sticky gray couches at the departure gate—mostly Arab businessmen, but also women on the way to Saudi Arabia for the hajj who had been stuck there five days. Sitting back in his room, which had a view of the airport parking lot, Ahmed quizzed me on how hard it was to get into the U.S. from Mexico. I said it probably wasn’t too hard. He shook his head. Neither of us said it, but I could see the despair of his position—wanting to leave every day, wanting to escape, and being in the one place in Iraq where each day everyone around him was leaving, going, getting the hell out.

  I spoke to Andi from the airport, telling her I was stuck but okay.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “I miss you already.”

  The next morning, Ahmed and his father told the security I was a VIP. (I was wearing a blue blazer with flannels, after all, having realized before that if I wore that outfit I wouldn’t get searched as
much.) Ahmed escorted me to the front of the line. I got on the plane. There was not much of an adrenaline rush, no thrill like I’d felt a year ago. I was just leaving—and for the first time, Andi would be in Baghdad without me.

  CHAPTER16

  November 2006–January 1, 2007

  DUBAI, SAIGON, JERUSALEM, AMMAN

  After leaving Baghdad, I spent a few days of downtime in Dubai. I checked in with my friend about his diamond connection—he showed me the ring he’d bought his fiancée. It looked nice, but I wanted to wait before I made the purchase. I knew Andi had very specific tastes, and I wanted to take my time and get it right.

  The week before I left Iraq, I’d planned a trip to Vietnam to write a piece comparing the two wars. After a week in Vietnam, I was supposed to head to Cairo to set up an apartment, where I thought I’d be staying when not in Baghdad. But before I left for Vietnam, I got a phone call from Scott, who was in Mexico at the time. He was planning the upcoming rotation schedule for reporters, he said, and he wantedNewsweek ’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Kevin Peraino, to go to Baghdad in November. Would I be interested in covering Israel for the month Kevin was in Iraq? I said yes, and discussed it with Andi, who started making plans to visit me in Israel on her break.

  I arrived in Vietnam at the end of October. I spent a few days in Ho Chi Minh City, staying at the Continental Hotel, made famous inThe Quiet American . It was where Fowler first met the idealistic Pyle, on Rue Catinat (changed to Freedom Street when the Americans took over the city, renamed Dong Khoi by the Vietnamese after the U.S. left). The hotel, which had once been a haven for spies, diplomats, and journalists, still maintained its French colonial design. I visited old battlefields in the jungle, crawled through the tunnels of Cu Chi that the Vietcong had dug. I looked at exhibits of the booby traps and equipment the guerrillas had used: punji sticks, punji pits, grenades set to invisible trip wires, rubber-soled sandals, black pajamas. I took a sampan down to the Mekong Delta. I ate dinner atop the Rex Hotel, looking out over a peaceful city where thirty-five years earlier American military officials and journalists watched the war get closer and closer to Saigon, closer and closer to the end. I stopped next in Hanoi, where I reported a story about Vietnam’s economic recovery, pegged to President George W. Bush’s scheduled November visit to the city for a regional economic summit, which would make him the second American president to have set foot in Vietnam since 1975.