To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

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  More praise for

  TO BE A FRIEND IS FATAL

  “Kirk W. Johnson’s rage-inducing account of government indifference is a tale of lost innocence that, in our American twilight, feels devastatingly allegorical.”

  —Megan O’Grady, Vogue

  “From the ruins of the war in Iraq and his own broken body, Kirk Johnson made it his cause to redeem the one American promise to Iraqis that honor required us to keep. He tirelessly fought the political resistance and bureaucratic indifference of two administrations. His account is riveting, darkly funny, heroic, and shaming.”

  —George Packer, National Book Award–winning

  author of The Assassins’ Gate and The Unwinding

  “I have long been an admirer of Kirk Johnson—for his humanitarian advocacy on behalf of forgotten Iraqis and for his honest and poetic writing. . . . His is a story that arcs from charity to futility to pain to charity again, and how much he needs to tell it equals how much it deserves to be read.”

  —David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist

  and author of Thank You for Your Service

  “What is so intriguing about this beautifully written book is that while it is a scathing critique of America’s policy toward Iraq, it is not one of your usual policy books. To Be a Friend Is Fatal is a deeply personal and poignant story about how one young American’s passion and curiosity led him to a distant and troubled land, where his empathy and sense of justice prevent him from giving up on the people abandoned by the US government.”

  —Azar Nafisi, New York Times bestselling

  author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

  “Johnson makes sharp criticisms. . . . A well-written account of one man’s righteous quest to overcome government bureaucracy.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[This] well-written book—the author is an honest, engaging, and indomitable guide—warrants a special place in nonfiction shelves.”

  —John Kael Weston, The Daily Beast

  “This authentic patriot has written a must-read memoir.”

  —Trudy Rubin, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A poignant story . . . a fascinating and intimate look at the inner workings of military occupation and its effects.”

  —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Harrowing.”

  —Men’s Journal

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  1. Jesus and Basketball

  2. Yaghdan

  3. Incoming

  4. USGspeak

  5. Raise High the Blast Walls

  6. Fallujah

  7. Fugue State

  8. Human Rubble

  Part Two

  9. The Insurgent of West Chicago

  10. Homeboy

  11. The Dog’s Head

  Part Three

  12. Wake Up

  13. Bureaucrats

  14. Journalists

  15. The List Project

  16. Pod 23

  17. Waiting

  18. Politicians

  19. George W. Bush

  20. Barack H. Obama

  21. Past Is Prologue

  22. Game Over

  23. Subjective Fear

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary of USGspeak

  Further Reading

  To Help the List Project

  Reading Group Guide

  About Kirk W. Johnson

  Index

  When men fight, there is a continuum of war, rubble, and human flight. Sometimes the flight comes before the war. Sometimes the war persists even after all is made rubble. Sometimes the flight lasts longer than both the war and its rubble. But these immutable three come together, reliable as gravity.

  I made no war. I went to Iraq to turn rubble back into schools and power plants, and failed.

  But the third element is flight. I did help some flee. This is their story, and this book is dedicated to them.

  Prologue

  December 29, 2005

  Two fingers pressed firmly against my forehead. The hand they belonged to wore a pale blue surgical glove the color of oceans on maps, except for the spatter of wine-dark blood. I was lying on a table, writhing but unable to free myself. Other blue gloves pressed against my chest, waist, legs, ankles, arms. My eyes stung. I thrashed again and freed one arm. I heard shouting. More hands appeared, forcing down my bucking knees.

  “Motherfucker, how much longer?!”

  A needle entered my blurred frame of vision and burrowed itself into a laceration running between my eyes. My forehead numbed for a moment before the anesthetic seeped back out with the blood, useless.

  “Viente por ciento!” Loudly. Slowly.

  My face was splayed open, and my lunatic flesh needed tying down. A gash ran from my right eyebrow into my left eyebrow and stopped above the eyelid. A piece of my nose was missing from its bridge, leaving behind a divot. My front teeth, dangling from a shattered jaw, had trifurcated my upper lip. Drained of blood, it looked like a worm baking on the sidewalk. My chin appeared as though it were falling off.

  My brain was a captured wasp, thudding furiously against the glass walls of a jar, striking everywhere and nowhere. A suturing needle punctured through the cliff of flesh along my brow, ran a thread across the seeping ravine, before reversing course and knotting off where it started. A millimeter to the right, and repeat. After each suture, the surgeon pressed his thumb against the slowly forming rail of stitches, nudging the tracks in line, refashioning the putty of my face.

  They ignored my English cries for painkillers, so I pleaded in Arabic, “Dawa, biddy dawa!”

  Disconnected thoughts erupted with maniacal force: Twenty percent . . . teeth missing . . . Sheikh Kamal . . . blue gloves . . . beach . . . Fallujah . . . Mom . . . jaw . . . painkillers . . . Who are these people? . . . twenty percent.

  Adrenaline coursed through each limb and muscle until my mind, exhausted, finally relaxed. My legs followed; the flailing subsided. I no longer felt the slow-moving needle, my broken wrists, my crushed nose, my jaw, my bleeding toes. The lava stilled and cooled.

  The rubbery hands eased cautiously from my body. The room went quiet, save for an occasional instruction to an attending nurse and the sound of suturing needles clanking upon a steel tray.

  Ninety minutes later, my face was stitched shut.

  I was wheeled down the hallway on a gurney, bright ceiling lamps sweeping swiftly into my field of vision like rising and setting suns, one after another, lingering eclipse-like when I closed my eyes. The din of the waiting room hushed as orderlies pushed me through. In the operating room, the next team of doctors and assistants was preparing its tools. My jaw would need wiring, my arms would need fiberglass, my face would need masking. At last, they dosed me with general anesthesia, and I fell into a deep sleep.

  October 13, 2006

  The war was in its fourth autumn when Yaghdan’s future was swallowed up.

  Late on a Friday afternoon, Yaghdan checked the clock on his computer screen and sighed. A few cubicles away, an American grazed on a microwaved bag of popcorn, and the scent of butter and salt tugged at Yaghdan’s hunger. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan was in its final week, and the required fast, made brutal by the long hours and his proximity to nonfasting America
ns, was almost over. Yaghdan consoled himself with the thought that his wife, Haifa, was at that moment preparing an iftar feast far more sumptuous than American junk food.

  The walkie-talkie on his desk squelched, and a young male American voice warbled through the handset, “Dispatch, we need a pickup from the white house, please!”

  A few seconds passed, and an Iraqi driver in the motor pool replied flatly, “Okay, ten minutes.” The driver had probably only just returned from dropping off the American, Yaghdan thought. “White house” was their radio code word for the liquor store in the Green Zone. Through the thin blue walls of his cubicle in the massive bomb- and mortar-proof office building of the US Agency for International Development, Yaghdan sometimes overheard stories about the Americans’ parties. He had seen bottles strewn in the yards of the mortar-proof houses in the compound and recognized how a hangover sat on a face. He had no chance of seeing a party for himself, since Iraqis working for USAID were not allowed to stay overnight in the Green Zone.

  At five o’clock, Yaghdan powered down his computer. He nodded at the Nepalese security guards as he exited through the building’s doors, reinforced to repel bullets and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. He climbed into the Chevy Suburban idling out front, alongside other Iraqis who worked for the agency. The van snaked past demolished palaces and the sixteen-foot blast walls of the secretive compounds clotting the Green Zone. Yaghdan’s colleagues quietly removed their USAID badges and stuffed them into socks, brassieres, hidden pockets. His went into his shoe.

  This daily ritual made Yaghdan nervous, but nervousness had become a function as natural as breathing or eating. It had a use, keeping them vigilant. The women wrapped hijabs around their hair and donned sunglasses. The men removed their ties and donned shemaghs.

  The Suburban pulled up to the checkpoint known as the Assassins’ Gate and emptied its passengers. They stood on the edge of the Green Zone. Yaghdan smiled at a listless marine manning the US side of the checkpoint as he walked toward what Americans called the Red Zone, his country. The marine nodded slightly, his face expressionless.

  Yaghdan’s gait was unsteady. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, a 7.62 millimeter Kalashnikov round tore through his left leg, but that story belonged to a more hopeful era of his life that he didn’t like to think about anymore. He had spent six feverish months on his back, while tens of thousands of soldiers, marines, aid workers, diplomats, mercenaries, and contractors poured into his country and snarled barbed wire atop blast walls. When he could walk again, he took a job with the Americans to help rebuild Iraq.

  As he filed around the chicanes rimmed with menacing spindles of concertina wire, Yaghdan’s pace quickened. From this point forward, the Iraqi employees of America did not speak to one another. The 14th of July Bridge connected the Green and Red Zones, and the Iraqis trained their eyes on the ground as they crossed.

  Yaghdan felt the USAID badge shift uncomfortably under his sock. He saw a handful of men gathered on the other side of the bridge, and lowered his head. These were called alassas, slang deriving from the Arabic verb “to chew”: militiamen who hunted Iraqis like him by studying the faces of those who emerged from the gates of the Green Zone.

  For three years, Yaghdan had avoided the chewers by varying the entry and exit points he used to enter the Green Zone each day, never falling into a pattern. Most days, he switched taxis more than once, wore disguises, and was never dropped off directly in front of his home.

  * * *

  This day, exhausted and hungry, he slipped up.

  As he crossed the bridge, he heard a hoarse voice call out his name. “Yaghdan!” Before he could suppress the instinct, he looked up, and in that split second confirmed his identity. Realizing his mistake, he tried to avoid eye contact, but not before his eyes fell upon the familiar face of a neighbor from Street Number 2.

  His eyes locked with the menacing glower of his neighbor, and the adrenaline felt cold as it drained into Yaghdan’s gut. In any other country, in any other neighborhood, in any other decade, this would have been an unimportant event. He would have smiled and waved, said hello, shared a smoke, asked about work.

  But here, just after five o’clock on the twenty-first day of Ramadan in October 2006—1426 hijri on the Islamic calendar—the alassa opened his jaws wide and chewed him up.

  * * *

  Yaghdan woke early the next morning to the frantic drone of flies; the sound of a feeding frenzy. He opened his front door slowly. At his feet he found a sheet of paper, the kind used in the school workbooks that had been supplied through one of his education initiatives at USAID. He crouched down and picked up the note. Written in blue ink, just below the Date and Subject lines, he read:

  “We will cut off your heads, and throw them in the trash . . .”

  The buzzing of the flies seemed incomprehensibly loud. He looked up from the letter and settled his gaze on the delicate eye of a small dog. A fly was buzzing around its clouded cornea. Past the upturned ear, he saw the thick cake of blood around the creature’s severed neck.

  He walked back inside and set the letter on the table. Haifa was still sleeping. He called to wake her and sat down before the letter. She came in with a groggy smile, read the concern on his face, and then saw the letter. She started to cry. He told her not to open the door for anyone, not to call anyone, not to walk by the windows even once. He wrapped his arms around her, but there was no more comfort to be found in this home.

  Yaghdan took the letter and slipped out the front door. The air was foul from the scent of rotting flesh. He picked up the severed dog’s head and dropped it in a pale green trash can in the corner of the courtyard.

  He made his way back to the Green Zone. He would ask his American bosses for help. Surely after three years of distinguished service with the US government, they would do something.

  * * *

  Weeks later, in the Al-Mahata neighborhood of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, Yaghdan slinked into an Internet café crowded with other Iraqi refugees and drafted a desperate email to me.

  PART ONE

  * * *

  Photo © Ginger Johnson

  The Johnson brothers, fall 1984.

  1.

  Jesus and Basketball

  The Apology

  Every son writes the myth of his father’s greatness and weakness, revising and eliding according to the depth of his own generosity, insecurities, and pride. Mine begins not long after my fifth birthday, when my dad traded a chance at fulfilling his dream of becoming a United States congressman for an apology. My mom once called the apology, which came from the leaders of the Illinois Republican Party, his magic beans.

  My father is a man of stubborn principle, useful for nurturing a healthy pride but detrimental to a career in politics. He was not born with the thirst for power, and avoided the grease of Illinois machine politics. But when he was thirty-six, he and my mother sold a small, fallow plot of farmland in the nearby town of Addison to seed an upstart campaign for the Fourteenth Congressional District in the far western suburbs of Chicago. The land was my mom’s inheritance, and its soil carried the sadness of her father’s premature passing, felled at the age of fifty-six by a heart attack after a hard life in the garbage hauling business.

  Dad launched the campaign without the blessing of his Republican Party, which barely knew him. The party had its own handpicked man for the district. This was GOP country: take the primary, and you take the seat. Its man, John Grotberg, enjoyed the perks of outside money: campaign flyers glimmering with expensive ink and headquarters in rented office space.

  But Dad commanded an army of volunteers who were mostly new to the political process, and they fanned out far and wide. He knocked on door after door, walked up driveways long and short, across farm fields and industrial parking lots and subdivisions, talking with anyone who’d listen, sometimes carrying me piggyback. He was young, energetic, and owned by no party.

  In one of my first memories, people are chee
ring and clapping and jumping with excitement on election night 1984. The Citizens to Elect Tom Johnson had gathered at the Back Door, a restaurant connected to West Chicago’s local bowling alley.

  The night was joyous, until its final minutes. He led Grotberg all evening, and as the percentage of reported precincts inched its way closer to 100, a seat in Congress drew within reach of his young hands.

  But when the final numbers came in from Kendall County, it slipped away. Grotberg squeaked ahead and clinched the nomination by 662 votes, and the joy drained from the bowling alley restaurant and from many nights and months and years to come. My oldest brother, Soren, then nine, collapsed into tears beside my mom and asked, “How could God let this happen?”

  My dad dealt with the loss with stoicism and repression, traits honed and inherited from generations of Swedes. He had gambled a big piece of inheritance on his dream and came tantalizingly close—close enough for it to feel tangible. In the basement war room, he wedged a dolly under each of the filing cabinets, which were swollen from two years of campaign plans, volunteer lists, registration forms, buttons, bumper stickers, and brochures, and wheeled them across the field to the barn, where he stored them in a stall adjacent to the chicken coop. In the general election that fall, Grotberg sailed into office, and my dad returned to the one-story brick building that housed his small law practice and began to move on.

  And then, Grotberg suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma while receiving experimental treatment for cancer, knowledge of which was kept to his inner circle during the campaign. The GOP would hold a special election to fill Grotberg’s seat, and my dad was now the most prominent Republican in the district. The phone began to ring with his supporters, excitedly urging him to put his name on the ballot.