I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  He starts saying things that I have never heard said so bluntly—what observers and critics and analysts have worried about, what those in the military have been privately thinking, what I assumed was happening, but that he, an active duty lieutenant colonel in Baghdad, is saying on the record. (Sometimes reporting is finding out what you don’t know, sometimes it’s hearing something said that everyone knows, but that no one has had the guts to say, because they aren’t supposed to say it.)

  “I get it,” he says, talking about the battle and the crack of bullets and having soldiers killed. “I get it, okay? I’ve been here three months now, and I get it, I understand, that’s enough for me, no need to stay for the other nine.” He laughs.

  Duke says he thinks the Shiite Iraqi government wants the Americans to move out of the cities so they can “pull back the red curtain, do their business, and say, you guys don’t need to see this.” That business is killing Sunnis. Eliminating them. Ethnic cleansing, or as an Iraqi politician called it a few days earlier, “sectarian cleansing.” Every war gets new words to describe it, new and improved terminology, though in practical terms not very much changes. One group killing the other. Block by block, street by street, bedroom by bedroom. Name by name. At midnight or in broad daylight, it doesn’t matter. Us versus them, so we better get them before they get us.

  Duke says he thinks we’re doing the Shiite militias’ work for them, that they are “sitting on the fifty-yard line, eating popcorn,” while we go after the Sunnis. If I was a Sunni, he says, I would feel fairly besieged. He points to the map of the Green Zone and notes that it is now surrounded by Ministry of Interior forces and Iraqi police, who all likely have militia affiliations. The less sectarian-minded Iraqi Army unit, the nearest to the Green Zone at least, is undermanned and underequipped.

  What the fuck is this shit? I’ve seen it and heard it all before. Death squads. Shots to the head. Drill to the kneecaps. Mass graves and body dumps and bullshit. I’ve spent a year and half writing about it, quoting numbers from official reports—one hundred dead Iraqis per day says the U.N.; 2.2 American soldiers killed a day, according to the DoD. The statistics keep saying the same thing but nothing gets better.

  “If you looked at a map of South Vietnam and Saigon in late 1967,” Duke says, “you would have seen that the city was surrounded by Vietcong.” Nobody saw it, he says, only in hindsight did the pattern become clear. Why did no one see that coming? “Look at this map. The Green Zone is surrounded and no one sees it. The Green Zone could be overrun. It’s just my conspiracy theory,” he says.

  “Our enemies are attacking us with impunity,” he points out. “We got rocketed the other day—knocked me on my ass. We know where the rockets are coming from, our antiartillery technology tells us, but we don’t do anything about it. We didn’t respond. Not allowed to.”

  Duke also tells me about the mission I was supposed to go on tomorrow. A raid with American and Iraqi forces. It has been canceled. Why is that? The raid appeared to have sectarian motivations. Duke’s soldiers suspect the new Shiite commander is targeting the office of a Sunni political party without evidence. Well, there is some evidence the Shiite commander has pointed to, but it’s fairly inconclusive—an Iraqi patrol was fired on by men who fled in the general direction of that office. The new Iraqi commander has intentionally kept the Americans out of the loop. They are planning the mission on their own, “taking the lead,” as the military likes to say. Duke suspects the lead they are taking involves illegal detentions and executions, perhaps some torture. One soldier jokes about it bluntly: “If it’s raining tomorrow, they’ll probably cancel it themselves. Who likes to commit a war crime in the rain?”

  I know that the canceled mission does not matter at all. One mission cannot make a difference. So how many more missions and patrols would it take to make a difference? Is there a number? Does anyone know it? How many missions have been done already? Tens of thousands? And what a difference they have fucking made! Why go out at all? You can make as much of a difference by doing nothing, right?

  I have a cot to sleep on under the map at Duke’s headquarters. The map is a satellite printout of Baghdad, all grids and multicolored lines showing the main routes, each part of the city divided by unit. I am still feverish and sick. I make a phone call to the bureau chief, Babak. I smoke cigarettes with the soldiers. I talk to an officer who also has a girlfriend stationed in Baghdad, a nurse at a medical unit whom he sees about once a month for a few hours. We commiserate on the difficulties of relationships in Baghdad.

  It’s all about logistics. We’re all under stress. It’s not easy. The officer says he tries to get missions where he has an excuse to take a helicopter to her base, but she has more opportunities to come to the Green Zone. Same here, I say, it’s easier for her to come see me than the other way around.

  I call Andi. The conversation is pleasant. She is happy.

  After two weeks readjusting to Baghdad and her new job, she is making friends. She tells me about a girl named Anne; another blond from the Midwest, also dating a reporter, who shares Andi’s interests in spirituality. Magic stones and whatnot. I smile when I hear this. She is excited because she ran into a reporter fromThe New Yorker, George Packer, in the lobby of her hotel compound. She says she wished I could have been there, because she knows how much I like his work.

  “Who runs into George Packer in Baghdad?” she asks.

  “I suppose that is the place to run into him,” I say.

  I have to go. She says she is going to talk more to Packer. I smoke more cigarettes. I call back a half hour later and we talk again.

  She is happy. I am happy she is happy.

  The next morning I go out on a patrol with Lieutenant Xeon Simpson, a soft-spoken black kid from the Bronx. He’s twenty-four years old; graduated from Fordham. I hook up with him at the Muthanna Airfield, in the vicinity of Haifa Street, where his team works with an Iraqi Army company.

  It is raining and muddy. All the buildings are cold, the same Iraqi industrial-style buildings with small offices, all with beds and ashtrays for officers, spotty electricity, and the occasional overflowing toilet. The white squat kind, a black hole in between two muddy grooves for your feet.

  There are gray pillars looming in the fog on the base, hundreds of them with metal poles sticking upright, the leftovers of a mosque that Saddam Hussein wanted to construct. The ruins appear not to have been touched since the first bombs started to fall on the city almost four years earlier.

  I am pushing to get to Haifa Street, and I am promised that Simpson’s platoon will take me there. We drive in a three-Humvee convoy through the neighborhoods around Haifa Street. We stop outside the Karkh Children’s Teaching Hospital. We are warned about a sniper who killed a man there earlier in the week. He was sitting across the street on the top floor of a school.

  The platoon leader demands that the hospital guards take down a poster supporting Moqtada al-Sadr, the popular Shiite militia and religious leader whose father was killed by Saddam. I take pictures. How to describe all this, I think to myself, and all I come up with is:

  It looks like Baghdad.

  The ink on my notebook runs in the rain. Al-Sadr propaganda is everywhere. He always gets described as an anti-American cleric, though that doesn’t do him justice; his Mehdi Army has killed Americans; his Medhi Army fires rockets into the Green Zone with impunity; his Mehdi Army is now part of the new Iraqi government, a cornerstone.

  The hospital guard refuses at first, saying he is being watched and he will be killed if he takes the poster down.

  “Being watched by who?” the young lieutenant asks. “I thought you didn’t know who hung up the poster?”

  The guard shrugs and finally takes the poster down.

  The patrol continues.

  It’s Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, so there is a curfew and the streets are clear. The curfew is to keep young men from causing trouble after they go to the mosques; “Fighting Friday’s,” the sol
diers call them. An hour passes, and we start heading back to the Muthanna base. We haven’t gone to Haifa Street. I don’t say anything, though I am nervous I won’t get the story I wanted. Simpson, sitting in front of me in the Humvee, reads my mind.

  “I’m not comfortable with bringing my men to Haifa Street right now,” he says.

  It’s not in his AO and he doesn’t know the area.

  “Maybe the major can bring you when he takes you back to the Green Zone?”

  Five minutes later, we return to the base. As if on cue, machine-gun fire starts. Loud. Nearby. Just over the blast walls of the compound. All coming from Haifa Street. It doesn’t stop. We move behind the Humvees. Insurgents regularly fire over the walls at the base, aiming at anything, including the power generators ten feet away.

  We all laugh, me and the soldiers, thinking that had we gone to Haifa Street those machine guns would have been trained on us.

  That night, I file a story for the website about the patrol, using a computer in Duke’s headquarters. I answer emails from my editors in New York about the cover story we are working on, called “The Next Jihadists,” about Iraq’s lost and disfigured youth growing up on revenge, death, and hatred. I get a call fromNewsweek ’s foreign affairs columnist and international editor, Fareed Zakaria, who has seen my email advisory about what Duke told me. He says he’d like to use some of the material in his column. I say no problem, and send a file with Duke’s quotes to him. I tell Fareed I tried to get down to Haifa Street, but could only get so close. He reminds me to stay safe: “Hastings, you got ninety percent of the story, don’t get killed trying to get the other ten percent.”

  I text Andi. I can’t talk because I am on deadline.

  I am up until 3 or 4A.M. answering emails. I am nervous because I want to stay another day, and the story will be up on the website. If the unit doesn’t like what they read, they’ll get angry and stop talking. I’m anxious about this all the next day, when I go out on patrol again. It is uneventful. Rainy still. One neighborhood after the other with another young lieutenant, who happens to know my younger brother, Jeff. He went to officer candidate school with him.

  We check on things like winter clothing for the Iraqi soldiers, if a space heater is working right, do they have enough bullets, have they received orders for the upcoming operation. You need to find a good patrol base. You need to figure out how to get food there. Bathrooms. Blast walls. The nuts and bolts of war, the unglamorous day-to-day work.

  We go out on patrol to talk to the residents of Baghdad. To get “atmospherics,” what the people are feeling, the intangibles.

  The residents we talk to in each neighborhood all say basically the same thing. It is dangerous, yes.

  This is the same response I’ve heard on nearly every patrol I have been on with Americans in Iraq when they “engage the local population.”

  Where does the danger come from?

  The danger comes from over there, the other neighborhood, other people, other countries.

  We are not involved in anything, it is someone else.

  There are no militia members here. There are no insurgents here.

  There are conspiracies.

  There are outsiders, strangers, foreigners, spies, takfiris, sawafis, agents, Iranians, Saudis, Syrians, Algerians, Egyptians, Israelis, Kurds, Kuwaitis, Sunnis or Shiites. Jaish Omar. Jaish Mehdi. Zarqawi. Al Qaeda. Ali babas. Criminals.

  The response to the Americans is always the same. We don’t know who is doing this. We just know it is not us.

  We know the danger is over there.

  After forty-eight hours, my embed is over. An SUV driven by Army Public Affairs brings me back to the bureau.

  It is Saturday night. I am still feverish and tired. I eat dinner, email, then put on episode eleven, season two ofThe Wire . I’ve been toldThe Wire is probably the best show on TV—a cop drama set in Baltimore—but it has taken me a few tries to get into the narrative. I watched the first four episodes on my last tour a few months earlier, and picked up where I’d left off when I got back in December. The season finale is one episode away. I stretch out on the couch in the living room. The DVD player, a generic model with the brand name Super General, is acting up, so I have to get up and eject the DVD and put it back in. I finally get comfortable on the couch.

  My cell phone starts beeping and vibrating, a text message.

  “I’m scared.”

  The message is from Andi. I know she’s at her hotel in the NDI compound. I press pause on the DVD player remote control.

  I pick up my cheap black and gray Nokia phone resting on the small table next to the couch and push the button to reply.

  I text back:

  “Why?”

  The phone works, saying the message has been sent to Andi.

  I feel like watching TV, not talking.

  The Wirefinishes twenty minutes later. I take my Iraqna from the table and step outside on the driveway where the reception is better. It is still cold and damp. I light a cigarette and call her.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  “You texted me ‘I’m scared.’ What’s happening?”

  “It’s fine now.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “No, you’re in a bad mood.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m not going to tell you. You have an attitude.”

  “I am tired and sick and I just got back from an embed.”

  “Did I interrupt something?”

  “No.”

  “You want to go watch TV? Are you watchingLost ?”

  “Just tell me what happened. Why are you scared? You’ve never sent me a message like that before—it’s not like you. So why are you sending me a message saying you are scared? Then you won’t tell me? Was it bombs? Was it shooting? If you texted and said, ‘There’s shooting outside,’ I would call. If you said, ‘Car bomb just went off,’ I would call. But you say ‘I’m scared,’ what kind of bullshit is that? It’s like you’re trying to manipulate me into calling you. Crying fucking wolf.”

  “Oh my god oh my god. I can’t talk to you right now. You are accusing me of being a horrible person. I’m hanging up.”

  “Don’t fucking hang up. I want to know. I am concerned, I do worry. I got shot at today, too, you know.”

  “Are you done lecturing me?”

  “I’m not lecturing you, but you can’t say you’re scared and not tell me what happened. Was there shooting or explosions or what?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Stop lecturing me.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  She hangs up. She never hangs up, or very rarely. I call back and apologize. I’m sorry to have snapped. I am stressed and tired. I am not feeling well.

  And I think to myself, yes, you’re scared, I’m scared, we’re scared. We should be.

  I go to sleep. I wake up at 8A.M. from a nightmare. In the dream it is all black, but I see Andi, a blond color, a Lego version of a person, and there is green, a vague impression. She is in a car; something happens. I reach over to my Iraqna and send her a text message. I have never sent a text message like this before. The text message reads: hi cubbi had dream you were kidnapped are you okay call me.

  She doesn’t call. She’s still somewhat upset with me. I send more text messages and apologetic emails throughout the day. The usual pattern.

  The evening of Sunday, January 14, she finally picks up the phone when I call again. We talk.

  She is happy, I am happy.

  Monday night. We talk. We plan for the future. I think I could get a job working with the Palestinians in Jerusalem if you were assigned to Israel, she says. Or maybe the presidential campaign—she has been looking into making the jump. She likes Barack Obama. She doesn’t know, though, she is enjoying the work overseas. We discuss Paris again—I say I have confirmed the reservations. She sends me an email with specifications for a diamond ring
from DeBeers. Ring size six, princess cut, platinum band. She says I better propose to her in a romantic location. I say, how about on a train? She tells me to come up with a better idea. We say good night.

  Tuesday, January 16, we are busy. We don’t talk. We text.

  Love you.

  Hug.

  CHAPTER19

  January 17, 2007

  BAGHDAD

  I wake from a nap. My laptop is next to me on my bed, along with my two mobile phones. I’ve been sleeping for about twenty minutes, resting up before starting to write a story about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. That afternoon, the Shiite leader held a rare press conference for the Western press that I attended. I’m wearing gray sweatpants and a sweater. It’s a damp and dark Baghdad winter night. It’s 7:40P.M. and the sun is gone.

  My phone beeps, my international number, the T-Mobile. There are three new voice mails and three missed calls. I don’t know when I missed those calls or when the voice mails arrived. It’s a little odd; most of my phone calls are on the Iraqna, unless it is New York calling, a radio or television interview, or occasionally my family.

  I check email from my bed. I see there are two emails, both unusual. One is from a man whose name is unfamiliar, Tom Ramsay. Subject line: Please call. It says: “Dear Michael, could you call me at one of the numbers below? Thanks, Tom.” His signer says he is the country director for NDI’s Iraq Program. Another is from a woman in the publicity department atNewsweek, subject heading: National Democratic Institute. The email says that someone at NDI called the magazine and wants to speak with me. “The matter is urgent,” the email says.

  I carry the laptop into the office. I hit reply.

  “Thanks, did they say what it was about?”

  A response comes four minutes later.

  “No, they didn’t say.”

  I call Andi on my Iraqna.

  It rings, rings again, and then goes to the familiar message, in Arabic then English—“The subscriber you are trying to reach is either switched off or out of the coverage area.”