I go on for five hundred words. I don’t know what they are going to do with this, but I hit send, and it’s off to New York.
That night, ABC calls and asks if I can do an interview via satellite from the U.S. embassy. It is past ten o’clock. Lou sets it up for me. The studio is on the second floor of the embassy. An older man takes the lint and dandruff off my blue sweater with a piece of electrical tape. The lights in the studio are on me; the camera adjusted, the earpiece in. A voice from the ABC studio in New York tells me, “Don’t look at the camera, look off to the side, like you’re being interviewed in person.”
We’re rolling, questions coming into my earpiece.
I say that Andi is an angel; I speak of her as an angel, as a pure soul. I talk about plans for the engagement—she sent me specifications for the ring a week ago: DeBeers, princess cut, 1.5 karats, size six.
After the interview, another friend from the embassy pulls me aside.
“I have some information,” he tells me.
He has read a classified intelligence report on the attack. It was a setup, an attempted kidnapping. Andi was the likely target. Not a random target, not a target of opportunity. Andi, the girl from Ohio, blond hair and blue eyes, she was the target. The insurgents swarmed the car. They tried to open the doors, but couldn’t. And then everything got worse. They rolled grenades under the car, boom boom boom, the fuel tank exploded and the whole car went up in smoke.
“The pictures are bad,” my friend says. “The photographs are very, very bad. The driver of her car—he may have tried to run away.”
The insurgent group responsible, my source tells me, is Islamic jihadist with ties to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wannabes. He says this group is known for kidnapping Iraqi women. They are known for torturing and raping Iraqi women—pulling their fingernails out, beheading them. They are bad men; they are not the kind of insurgents who negotiate.
“It is better she was killed than kidnapped by these men,” he says.
I know this is true. I think I know.
It is becoming more apparent that the Iraqi Islamic Party, with their own contingent of armed guards a few hundred feet away, stood by and watched this happen. They did nothing to stop it.
I am sick of Iraq. I am sick at the thought that the people Andi was going to help had an active hand in setting her up. I am disturbed, too, that the Iraqi Islamic Party visited the Bush White House in December 2006. The IIP is considered a “moderate” Sunni political party. The head of the party, Tarek al-Hashemi, is one of Iraq’s three vice presidents. According to what NDI told me, and what my source confirmed, a person or persons within the organization likely played a role in killing her by tipping off the men who did it. The White House is entertaining people who have links to Islamic extremists? This is our war on terror?
I know all this. I know the Iraqi Islamic Party is shady. I know they are hypocrites. I know most political parties in Iraq are complicit in the killing that is taking place in the country—SCIRI, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, is America’s most important Shiite ally. Does the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose leaders lived for years in exile in Iran, sound like a moderate political party? Moqtada al-Sadr has thirty members in the Iraqi parliament; his Mehdi Army has death squads that attack Coalition forces regularly. The IIP is not much different. I know the IIP has ties to Sunni insurgent groups. I witnessed it myself in Baghdad in August 2006 with the 172nd Stryker Brigade. We searched an IIP branch office in the neighborhood of Ghazaliya and found an arsenal and IED-making materials. I even emailed Andi about the IIP in December, describing them as having known ties to “the honorable resistance.” This is not hidden knowledge. Why did I not put all of it together when Andi told me she was going to visit with the IIP days earlier? She told me she was going to the IIP headquarters. All I said was, Be careful.
I did not look at the map. If I had looked at the map I would have been horrified at the distance of the trip. The headquarters is miles away from her compound, on the other side of the city. I would have been horrified that the neighborhood was Yarmouk. A neighborhood thatNewsweek inquired about going to a week before this happened, and we were told within fifteen seconds by our security staff, “Are you crazy? There is no way you can go to Yarmouk, it is much too dangerous. Even Iraqis are afraid to go to Yarmouk.”
So I know all of this.
I know, I know, I know.
I know that after the attack, the Iraqi Islamic Party blamed the Americans. They told theNew York Times on the day Andi was killed that they had been asking the U.S. military for better security in the neighborhood. They did not publicly condemn the attack. It is not a popular position to be against the insurgents.
This is the Iraqi government. These are our allies, the moderates, the men we decided to work with, the men we have given billions of dollars to.
Fuck them all. Kill them all. Bomb this country and make one giant parking lot. Better yet, build a giant runway to go bomb every one of these other Arab countries off the face of the Earth.
Nuke everybody, put on protective antiradiation suits, take their goddamn oil.
Fuck all of them, these savages, this fucking criminal government. The birthplace of civilization, but there’s a reason that civilized people left, migrated, got the fuck out this shithole.
I don’t really mean that, I tell myself.
Do I?
I do at the moment, maybe, but there are good people here.
Are there?
And what are we doing here anyway?
We’re not evil like this. We’re not fucking savages.
Oh?
Stop, stop, stop. I wish a hundred more Hadithas on these fucks. Line them up—I will pull the trigger myself.
I have a change of heart on sectarian cleansing—let the Shiites wipe these Sunni fucks off the map. Let them kill them all, women and children. Let them pay.
I don’t really believe that, right?
I don’t think so.
Maybe sometimes.
Maybe not.
It is late Friday night. They have located her body. It has made it to the Army morgue at Camp Victory. The phone calls continue. Why didn’t I say anything? Why didn’t I stop her? You know Andi would have gone anyway; you know how she was; it was her job. She always told you not to go places and you didn’t listen. You went anyway. You cannot blame yourself, I am told. Yes I can. I can blame myself and I can blame everybody. Blame is easy. Blame is easier than living with this terrible sadness and despair.
CHAPTER21
January 20, 2007
BAGHDAD
It is Saturday. I learn the flight carrying Andi’s body is scheduled for tomorrow. I will be helicoptered out from the Green Zone to the airport on a Black Hawk. There will be a small ceremony there. Ambassador Khalilzad will attend.
This afternoon, a few security guards from NDI dropped off Andi’s belongings at theNewsweek bureau. Two large black trunks—the trunks I had brought to her two weeks earlier. Four suitcases. Two unopened cardboard care packages—they arrived on Thursday—FedEx boxes from her family and my family. Her laptop bag with her personal computer.
I move her things into my room and start to go through the trunks and bags. Her clothes, her perfume, her scent. I was planning to take the important things her family would want now, any of her writings and documents, with me on my flight.
In her laptop bag I find pictures of her and her two nieces. Folders from work. Letters that my father has written her. Gifts I have given her: a small gold Kurdistan pendant and a necklace I had bought for her from a woman in the West Bank, the digital camera I gave her for Christmas in Vermont. A few books:Marie Antoinette, Twain’sJoan of Arc, the biography of Empress Sisi I bought her when we were in Vienna. I open up the care packages, and inside are finger paintings from Kayla and Abby, her nieces, with yellow hearts saying LOVE ANDI.
I find her personal writings and her diary. She wrote about what she hoped the universe would
give her. She wrote about the readings she got from her psychic in Boston named Diana, whom she would call occasionally from Iraq. She liked to take notes on what Diana told her so she could compare it to what happened and prepare for what she should watch out for.
I find a note she wrote on stationery from the Amman Four Seasons in December. It says:
Dear Angels dear God dear universe
Please let me get this NDI job.
The NDI job will work out fine.
I am protected by light and love.
I open her diary, and my heart skips a beat as I read:
Don’t let MH find out about this, please forgive me, angels, please forgive me…
I read on. She had got access to my email account and sneaked a peek. I laugh for the first time in three days. I smile. I always wondered how she could guess who I was emailing—she always seemed to know! Part of it was her own intuition, of course, and knowing me so well, but it turns out she had had help, too. I don’t know how she figured out my password.
I find a note that says: “career, death card.” Another, dated January 12, says that she and I will “take the journey home together.” She had written her favorite quote from Milan Kundera’sImmortality on an index card: “Only obstacles, Paul thought, were capable of turning love into a love story.” The note was dated August 25, 2006, a week before she left for Iraq.
I take out her clothes—the blue sweatshirt of mine she liked to wear, my favorite top of hers, the white one she wore when she met me in Vienna, her blue scarf and mittens. I take her perfume.
God, this is like out of a movie. So people do this.
I also take her underwear and put it in my bag. I know she would not want customs or anyone else seeing something so personal. But it feels weird all the same.
I find a plastic bag of extra large men’s T-shirts, including one that saysTHE HUNGARIAN INTERNATIONAL SHOOTING CLUB. I assume it belongs to the dead Hungarian guard who was in Andi’s car.
Later that afternoon, the security manager from NDI calls.
“You don’t happen to have T-shirts, do you? Extra large? They belong to the bodyguard in the third car.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I’ll come by and pick them up,” he says. And then, “He’s agreed to meet with you if you want. He’s at the NDI compound in the IZ.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
A few hours later, I drive with X to meet him. His name is Jacob. He was one of the two survivors in the third car. He’s from a small town in Hungary. His English is okay. He was shot in the arm, but is doing fine.
NDI has three rows of trailers, next to three rows of IRI trailers, right next to the Blue Star restaurant. Not many people are at the restaurant. We walk down the row of trailers.
I’ve brought a notebook with me, though I don’t know if I’ll take notes.
Jacob opens the door to his trailer and we step in. He’s finishing up a Skype chat with his wife, back in Hungary.
I want to thank him for trying to save Andi, but I don’t really get a chance.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t do more,” he says, and then he starts talking, and I stare at him, listening.
He’s a thick six feet two with a square head and soft brown hair. He’s wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. He has a cut on his chin and what look like stitches. He seems a bit shaky.
“She wasn’t the only one who was killed, you know,” he says.
I nod.
“My friend Yonni, he was in her car. He died, too, he was like a brother to me. He has a wife and a two-year-old baby back in Hungary.”
I listen.
“They don’t give a shit, you know, a PSD from Hungary gets killed, then it is no big deal, but she wasn’t the only one who died.
“And you have to understand,” he says, in broken English, “that I am usually in the client car. For the past six months I have been in the client car. I was not in the client car, my friend Yonni was instead. Brother to me.”
So what happened?
He says he cannot answer all my questions—he would like to, but there is still an “ongoing investigation.” He could even get in trouble speaking with me now. It appears no one high up at the organization has cleared this conversation. The NDI security manager who set it up was doing me a favor; he wanted to help me get answers. But Jacob wants to talk, too, wants to see me, to explain what he can.
They were at the IIP compound for about an hour and a half. He says he has been there seven times. That the last trip there was a month ago. I have talked to people with post-traumatic stress disorder before, watched as they recounted their experiences in combat, and he gets the same look as he goes through the events of that day.
He is about fifteen meters behind her car. For whatever reason—it is unclear to him, or he can’t say—her car stops. Four or five men run at the car. At this point, there is a massive amount of shooting. Or maybe there is shooting before, too. The sequence of events, from his telling, is hard to pin down. There is an explosion. The car he is in crashes. Crashes into what? He can’t say. The car is receiving fire from all directions—above, to the sides, everywhere, from what he guesses has to be at least thirty shooters. The PSD team leader, a Croatian, is sitting shotgun in the third car. The Croatian steps out of the car to move toward Andi’s vehicle. It is unclear whether the explosion has happened yet, whether there still is a vehicle to move to. The team leader, says Jacob, is almost immediately killed. His boss, shot dead. Bullets are now pouring into his car. There is smoke everywhere. Jacob is in the backseat. The driver of his car, an Iraqi, has also been shot. Two hundred rounds hit our car, says Jacob, maybe more.
It is hazy, he says, foggy. He doesn’t really know what happens next. It sounds like he stays in the car, in the backseat. It seems like he does not return fire or make any attempt to move to Andi’s car. Maybe it is too late. Maybe he is in shock. Maybe the training does not kick in, and he is overwhelmed by what is going on. He hunkers down in the car and waits and at some point, he leaves the car to hide in a building with the wounded Iraqi driver of his car.
X has been listening carefully to the conversation. “There is tunnel vision,” he points out. “When shit like this happens, it’s hard to see everything.”
I ask if the guards from the Iraqi Islamic Party compound responded.
He smirks and shakes his head, no.
He tells me the second team of NDI guards arrived maybe twenty minutes after the ambush started.
“Twenty minutes is an eternity,” says X.
Jacob repeats his points.
“I am lucky to be alive,” he says. “He was a brother. I am sorry we couldn’t do more.”
I nod, yes, lucky.
I take down his email address and I thank him for his time.
I go back to the bureau, and think about what he told me, and I come to the harsh conclusion that he failed, he froze, he did not return fire. He hid in the backseat. He told me instead that he was fortunate to have survived. I agree, he might not have been that fortunate had he been doing the job he is paid to do, which is to protect his client, even if it costs him his life. That is why he gets paid. I am sympathetic to his own shock, his own trauma, and I am probably being unfair, but I don’t really give a shit that he lost a friend, another mercenary. I don’t give a shit that he is usually in the client’s car, and it was only the fate of switching with his friend that saved him. I care only that Andi is dead, murdered, and that she was not protected.
CHAPTER22
January 20–21, 2007
BAGHDAD
On Saturday night, I print out an email containing my travel orders: authorization for “Fiance of Andrea Suzanne Parhamovich to Accompany her Remains…The State Department requests that the Department of Defense authorize Michael Mahon Hastings…to accompany the remains of Ms. Parhamovich aboard U.S. military aircraft…” The document, on DoD letterhead, notes she was “killed by terrorists in Baghdad.”
The flight home w
ill be Sunday morning. There will be a ceremony at the Baghdad Airport, which the ambassador, representatives from the State Department, NDI, URG, and I will attend. I will be accompanied on the flight by Karen, the head of the political parties program at NDI and Andi’s direct supervisor in Iraq.
The first flight will take us from Baghdad to Kuwait. In Kuwait, we are scheduled to change planes then fly to a U.S. airbase in Germany. From Germany, we will make the last leg of the trip to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. We are scheduled to arrive in Dover late Sunday night or early Monday morning. If there are no foul-ups, it is about eighteen hours of flying. It is important to me that there are no delays. The longer it takes to get to Dover, where the U.S. military may take as long as a week to release her body, the longer Andi’s family has to wait to have a funeral for her.
The security guard who died in Andi’s car, Yonni from Hungary, will also be coming with us back to Dover for processing. The air force base in Delaware has the military’s largest morgue, and receives the bodies of almost all the American servicemen and women killed in Iraq, just over three thousand at this point.
That night, I pack my bags, just the essentials. My clothes, thrown into a Swiss Army duffel bag, are mixed with Andi’s clothes. I put her laptop in a backpack I’m carrying. I have her mobile phone and diary, her folders from work, her perfume. I put a stick of lipstick in my pocket, where I’ll keep it for the next few months. I’m also bringing body armor and a helmet for the helicopter ride to the airport and the C-130 flight out of the country. I fold up the printout of my DoD travel orders and slip it in my jacket.
Sunday morning is overcast and windy. “Show time” is 0700; the helicopter is supposed to take us to the airport for a flight around 0900. I get in the Mercedes, X drives. We leave the bureau, take a left from our house, pass the traffic circle, go underneath an arch from the Saddam era, then after a series of massive speed bumps we hang a left and are at the LZ Washington gate a few minutes before 7A.M. I am the first to arrive. The Peruvian guards at the gate say we are not allowed to drive in and try to send us across the street.
I Lost My Love in Baghdad Page 23