To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  Yaghdan wanted to return to Baghdad to protect his business. He drove back north, leaving his father in Najaf.

  He and his business partner, Mohammad, reopened the computer store with zeal. Yes, there were looters and a breakdown of order in Baghdad, they reasoned, but the American troops would soon settle and take control. He found Americans everywhere in the streets and could tell when they were lost, offering them directions.

  There were plenty of reasons to be optimistic in June 2003. He had heard through a mutual friend that Haifa was safe and would return to Baghdad soon. His shop hadn’t been looted, and the fall of the regime meant the end of sanctions, allowing him to import new technology and computers without submitting to a review board. He and Mohammad talked with excitement about the coming year, when American companies would surely return to Iraq. He heard that the Bechtel Corporation was returning to build power plants and repair their infrastructure. They’d have better electricity, cleaner water, and a free economy. The Americans would leave in a year, he thought, just as they had after rebuilding Kuwait.

  On Sina’a Street, Baghdad’s high-tech boulevard, business was coming back. New technology flooded into Iraq, and suppliers ferried crates of computers and monitors down the street to vendors.

  At the end of the workday on his third Thursday back in Baghdad, Yaghdan and Mohammad locked the outer door to the shop. Yaghdan carried a white plastic bag stuffed with the week’s receipts, which he intended to tally up over the weekend.

  Mohammad started his car, a white Toyota Crown sedan, but it was sweltering inside, so he got back out and left the doors open to air it out. Yaghdan leaned against the hood of the car, the receipt bag around his wrist.

  With a wail of engines and screeching tires, a black BMW and another Toyota skidded up onto the curb alongside them. Their doors flew open and six men poured out. They carried weapons: four AK-47s and two 9 millimeters.

  Without exchanging a word, they began pummeling Mohammad, who lunged back into the car in a futile effort to escape. They dragged him out and told him to hand over the keys. Three men surrounded Yaghdan, who shouted, “Why are you doing this?” A gunman approached him. He was short, at least six inches shorter than Yaghdan. When he reached for the plastic bag, Yaghdan shoved him away.

  Yaghdan fell to the ground. Someone had shot him in the leg, right through his kneecap. The short gunman yanked the bag of worthless receipts from around his wrist, jumped into Mohammad’s sedan, and sped off.

  As he lay there, he thought he was a dead man. A bullet through the knee was not necessarily lethal, but everyone knew that the hospitals were in dire shape. In addition to being looted, they had run out of blood and medication from treating those wounded during the invasion. Doctors were scarce.

  The sun was unforgiving. Cars and trucks drove by. A neighboring shop owner raced out and saw a puddle of blood forming around Yaghdan, who lay there quietly.

  An ambulance arrived forty-five minutes later, and the pool of red had turned into a small pond. Medics hoisted him onto a stretcher and sped off. Soon someone came by with a bucket of water to wash his blood from the sidewalk.

  * * *

  Yaghdan found that he was not as patient as he liked to think. He still hadn’t seen Haifa, and wondered if she and her family were okay. Under strict orders from the surgeon not to move without his crutches, he sat in the corner of the living room in his home, tormented by boredom and heat, which made the skin under his cast itch.

  He didn’t know who had shot him, but didn’t even bother calling the police. There were none to call. He could hobble out and locate some American soldiers, but what would he tell them? What could they do?

  His impatience churned with frustration until he decided the surgeon must be wrong and it was okay for him to walk, just four weeks after his knee was shot to bits. He stood up without the crutch and felt something tear apart in his knee. He fell back into his chair and called an ambulance, which arrived after two hours to shuttle him back to the operating room.

  * * *

  Yaghdan’s cell phone rang loudly from the other room. Summer was easing into fall, and his knee was finally on the mend. He hobbled on his crutches to take the call from Mohammad, who updated him on business. He mentioned in passing that Haifa had come back to work, and Yaghdan’s mind raced happily. “I think I’ll try coming in soon,” he said, trying to mask the excitement in his voice.

  In the three months since he was shot, Iraq had fallen quite ill, stricken by an insurgency that seemed to be equal parts criminal enterprise (kidnapping for ransom, hijacking cargo trucks) and anti-American uprising, fueled by a widening furor over America’s inability to restore order.

  In the beginning of the war, he and his parents saw massive helicopters carrying tanks and Humvees—sometimes two Humvees suspended from a single helicopter. It was just a matter of time, they believed, before they would see generators hanging from the helicopters.

  But the summer passed, and the electricity was weaker than ever. Sewage pooled in the streets, which teemed with US soldiers who never had any answers for the Iraqis who came up to ask about the power and water.

  Even though it was September, the house was a furnace. He turned the faucet handle to splash some water on his face, but nothing came out. He didn’t care: today he would finally go back to work, to see her. He locked the house door behind him and hobbled past the garden that his mom once tended. There was little hope for the flowers this year, but still they sprouted, sickly but alive.

  He lowered himself into the Passat. He could still drive with his good right leg. There were several checkpoints that had sprung up between his house and Sina’a Street, one run by American soldiers, the others by Iraqis. What was once a fifteen-minute drive now took over an hour, but he would not be fazed. He smiled as he handed his identity card to the American soldier and said, “How are you today?” Startled, the soldier smiled, handed back his papers, and waved him through.

  He saw Haifa’s eyes flash with happiness when he walked into the shop. Yaghdan tried to make small talk with the other employees, but he spent most of his time with her. They made plans to see each other the next day.

  As thrilled as he was to see her, he wrestled with the realization that between the checkpoints and the throbbing pain in his leg, he was not yet ready to return to work.

  * * *

  An American organization, Creative Associates International, was looking for Iraqi employees. The recipient of a $62 million contract to revitalize Iraq’s schools, the company was hiring Iraqis to help on a range of projects. Millions of schoolbooks needed to be drained of Saddam and Ba’ath Party ideology and reprinted. Over a million schoolbags were filled with pencils, pads of paper, and calculators and given to every Iraqi child. Tens of thousands of teachers were trained.

  Suhair, a friend of Yaghdan’s from the university, had started working with Creative. She called Yaghdan and recruited him for a massive data-entry project compiling the results of a countrywide survey about the needs of Iraq’s schools. He planned to work for the Americans from home for a couple months until he could return to Sina’a Street to run the computer shop.

  But he soon began to see how his work was impacting the lives of his fellow Iraqis. He felt that he could do more good with the Americans than with his computer business, so what started as a temporary job became full-time. When he was well enough to walk without crutches, he began commuting to work at the Creative Associates compound in the Karrada neighborhood of Baghdad, just across the Tigris from the Green Zone.

  The well of Yaghdan’s optimism was filling once again. Although he walked with a slight limp, his knee had healed. Haifa was back in his life, and they had begun talking about marriage.

  He went to Haifa’s father and asked for his blessing. The wedding took place in January 2004. Haifa moved into his home on Street Number 2, and the pair lived happily alongside his parents.

  * * *

  Eight months later, in the fall of 20
04, officials at USAID, which oversaw the Creative Associates contract, noticed Yaghdan’s work. He accepted their offer of a job working directly for the US government at the agency’s compound in the heart of the Green Zone.

  3.

  Incoming

  EXCERPT FROM:

  A SHORT GUIDE TO IRAQ

  1943

  For use of Military Personnel Only. Not to be republished, in whole or in part, without the consent of the War Department. Prepared by: Special Service Division, United States Army

  You have been ordered to Iraq (i-rahk) as part of the world-wide offensive to beat Hitler.

  American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis (as the people are called) like American soldiers or not. It may not be quite that simple. But then again it could.

  The best way you can do this is by getting along with the Iraqis and making them your friends. And the best way to get along with any people is to understand them.

  That is what this guide is for. To help you understand the people and the country so that you can do the best and quickest job of sending Hitler back to where he came from.

  And, secondly, so that you as a human being will get the most out of an experience few Americans have been lucky enough to have. Years from now you’ll be telling your children and maybe your grandchildren stories beginning, “Now, when I was in Baghdad–.”

  MEET THE PEOPLE

  But don’t get discouraged. Most Americans and Europeans who have gone to Iraq didn’t like it at first. Might as well be frank about it. They thought it a harsh, hot, parched, dusty, and inhospitable land. But nearly all of these same people changed their minds after a few days or weeks, and largely on account of the Iraqi people they began to meet. So will you.

  The tall man in the flowing robe you are going to see soon, with the whiskers and the long hair, is a first-class fighting man, highly skilled in guerilla warfare. Few fighters in any country, in fact, excel him in that kind of situation. If he should happen to be your enemy—look out! Remember Lawrence of Arabia?

  Differences? Of course! Differences? Sure, there are differences. Difference of costume. Differences of food. Differences of manner and custom and religious beliefs. Different attitudes toward women. Differences galore.

  But what of it? You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of “live and let live.” Maybe that sounded like a lot of words to you at home. Now you have a chance to prove it to yourself and others. If you can, it’s going to be a better world to live in for all of us.

  Do you still want to go to Iraq?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Can you go in two weeks?”

  The phone call that finally came in December 2004 was brief but exhilarating. I stared down at the half-completed practice Law School Admission Test in front of me and grinned. Law school could wait.

  The job was with the US Agency for International Development, an entry-level position in the Baghdad mission as an information and public affairs officer. I knew little about what I’d be doing, but I had read that the agency was working with nearly $6 billion in reconstruction funds.

  First, I had to complete a two-week training, the Diplomatic Security Anti-terrorism Course, or DSAC. On a wintry December morning, my class of fellow aid workers and foreign service officers were shuttled to a government farm in West Virginia to undergo explosives training, which consisted of standing in an observation tower and watching demonstrations of various explosives: det. cord, C4, PETN. When the instructor asked for a volunteer to press a button on his remote control, I eagerly raised my hand and blew up a late-model Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. As a twenty-four-year-old male, I would have gladly paid for the first week of the course.

  I shredded a target with climbing bursts of fire from a sweltering AK-47 and grinned. Next to me, a plump forty-something woman named Doris, who was headed over to do secretarial work in the Republican Palace, struggled to lift her shotgun. She fired one shell, lost her grip in the kickback, and the shotgun fell dangerously to the ground. The instructor glared as he picked it up, and Doris fired no more.

  We drove around suburban Leesburg and Reston, Virginia, for hours in a Defense Department minivan and tried to determine which cars were tailing us (usually those with Pentagon parking decals affixed to their windshields). I couldn’t help but think that whoever developed this part of the program had seen a lot of bad spy movies and probably hadn’t been to Iraq. As I soon learned, you don’t really study who is tailing you when rolling around in a quarter-mile-long convoy of three up-armored Suburbans, two or three Humvees, and two Little Bird helicopters engorged with Blackwater gunmen protecting us from the sky. And if I ever found myself in a situation where the highly trained marines and mercenaries around me were killed, leaving it to me to pick up a Kalashnikov or M16, I’d have been better off pointing it at myself. At least I now knew how to find the safety on each rifle.

  We received emergency medical training. I learned not to patch a sucking chest wound with the plastic wrapper of a cigarette pack like they did in Vietnam: the cellophane had become thinner since then, thin enough to be sucked right into the chest.

  A hostage negotiator taught us that if we were going to be killed in captivity, it would almost certainly happen within the first ninety-six hours. If we survived the first four days, he told us, it was best to pass the time by writing a book or building a house in our head. If our captors ever made us sit in front of a camera and condemn the United States for a propaganda film, we should use our face as a map to point out clues as to where we thought we might be. Our forehead was north, our chin was south. Our nose was Baghdad.

  The second week of the course was designed to teach us about Iraqi history and culture and took place in a conference room at the Foreign Service Institute, a small redbrick campus in Arlington, Virginia. Although I had a degree in Middle Eastern history and Arabic and had already spent a lot of time in the region, I went into the second week without pretense, eager to learn what the US government considered the most essential information for its foreign service officers and aid workers.

  Entrusted with this duty was a brash woman with smoke-scarred vocal cords who introduced herself as Dr. Mansfield. She claimed expertise on Iraq and fluency in Arabic and was going to prepare us for the coming year of work, with an emphasis on interacting with Iraqis.

  She dove right into cultural differences between Iraqis and Americans. “Iraqi women who lose their virginity before marriage will tell a villager to go out and kill a pigeon on the day of their wedding,” she explained, before adding that the bird’s liver would be extracted, filled with pigeon blood, and inserted in her vagina shortly before the consummation.

  Wide-eyed at the absurdity and inaccuracy of the claim, which she presented as the cultural norm throughout Iraq, I looked around the room as my classmates shook their heads in disgust. Shotgun Doris blurted, “I’m sorry, but that is just gross!”

  Dr. Mansfield worked her way through Iraqi history: “You may not know this, but Baghdad used to be a great city until the Mongols took it over in 1258.”

  Doris: What important things happened there after 1258?

  Doctor Mansfield: Not a damn thing.

  Doris nodded slowly and wrote in her notebook, I imagine something like “Iraqi history, 1258–2004: nothing of importance.”

  Dr. Mansfield seemed to like me, offering advice such as “Grow a beard! Nobody over there will respect you because you’re young.” I smiled and wrote beard in my notebook.

  On the final day, Dr. Mansfield focused on gift giving. This knowledge would equip us, she said, to get the most out of our Iraqi employees. I had received Mansfield’s permission to record the class, under the pretense of being better prepared.

  “Can we get them clothing?” asked a classmate.

  “That’s a tough one. You probably shouldn’t, but you should congratulate them if they have a new shirt. Now, we
wouldn’t congratulate ourselves on having a new shirt; we know that, since we talked about this yesterday, ’cause we have clean clothes. Okay? But it can be a big deal for some people in the region to get a new item of clothing. Very big.”

  A British contractor who had just come back from a three-month stint in Baghdad jumped in: “Take a digital camera! They love photographs, printed. I’m trying to remember, we had one of these color laser copiers, and we went through something like—and I’m not kidding—fifteen hundred bucks’ worth of toner in a month! Somebody went ‘click’ and printed a picture. Every single Iraqi in the office had to have a copy of that picture.”

  Dr. Mansfield nodded. “Write that down. That is a great idea.”

  Doris wrote in her notebook.

  Leaning back with a smirk, the Brit exclaimed, “A color picture! A color picture—now, we’d think nothing of it, but they are thrilled with that sort of thing!”

  Doris: Do we use, like, regular paper or glossy paper?

  Brit: They were thrilled with ordinary paper!

  I had accepted the job offer only a week earlier: it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I’d be working alongside Iraqis at the agency, but to hear them characterized in such prehistoric terms was jarring. We were not a group of invading soldiers in need of desensitization training but civilians who would assume important positions in administering and rebuilding the country.

  Apart from beard, my notebook was empty. When classmates asked Dr. Mansfield how to ask “Can I take your picture?” in Arabic, her response was as confident as it was incorrect. I guessed that she might have had a year of Arabic lessons decades ago. I could find no record of her ever having received a doctorate.