To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  Later that afternoon, I rode to the outskirts of Washington to Fort Belvoir, where my dad was once stationed, to be photographed for a Defense Department Common Access Card, which would get me in and out of bases and helicopters.

  * * *

  I flew back home to Chicago for Christmas. The suburbs were cold and blustery, and in the freighted days before my departure, my brothers and I reverted to young boys again. Derek and I set up lights around the pond, which Soren and I had shoveled to form a hockey rink. Mom brought us popcorn and hot chocolate, and we watched the steam wend its way from our lungs in between goals. Dad appeared at the pond’s edge for a few moments, exhaling Borkum Riff bourbon-flavored pipe tobacco and surveying the game quietly. We stayed away from the deep end that Derek had fallen through when we were little. Splayed down on the ice, Soren had fed him a hockey stick to pluck him from the terror below. I scrambled up the steps two a time, looking over my shoulder and screaming, “Dad! Dad, Mom! Dad!”

  My dad and I meandered through a shopping mall, making last-minute purchases. Where mom wore her worry on her face, he wore excitement. He once told me, when I was home from college, that he had hoped I’d join one of the services to develop a sense of discipline. I didn’t talk to him for months. Now, as I prepared to go over as a civilian employee of USAID, he indulged in what appeared to be a mild fantasy about my job.

  I picked out a pair of gray convertible pants. “You guys don’t wear that color over there.”

  “You got any special deals for my son?” he asked the high school girl working the register. “He’s off to Iraq next week! Here, Kirk, let me pay for your gear.” Embarrassed, I dumped my “gear” onto the conveyor. Spotting a pair of green Carhartt jeans, he jabbed a finger into them and said, “Army issue!”

  He found an old army rucksack in the basement for me to use, but I told him the canvas was too worn out.

  Although I can scarcely remember him rushing to answer the phone when I was younger, now he seemed to want to talk with everyone who called. “Yeah, well, you know our son Kirk is off to Baghdad next week, so we’re all trying to spend as much time with him as possible. What’s that? No, it’s a ten-month tour.”

  I was stuffing my Arabic dictionary into a suitcase when he wandered in and asked, “Where do you think you’ll take your R&R? I did mine in Hong Kong. That was right after the Tet Offensive.”

  He ignored my attempts to correct his terminology. “Are you going to deploy with anyone else in your same unit?”

  “Aid workers don’t deploy, and we don’t have units,” I told him. “I’m flying over alone. They bumped me to first-class sleeper the whole way; should be nice.”

  Later that night, he walked into my bedroom with a legal pad, closed the door behind him, and said that he needed to ask a few questions for my living will. I was twenty-four, and hadn’t given any thought to how I’d want my vegetative body handled. An hour later, he came back up with a typed version for my signature.

  * * *

  “Sit on the left side of the plane if you want a good view coming in. Only if you don’t get airsick, though,” an attractive young woman working for USAID volunteered encouragingly. Below us swirled pillars of dust, ten stories high and dancing across the desert expanse. The props felt as though they might choke as the tiny Embraer EMB Brasilia twin turboprop plane chartered by the agency to shuttle incoming AID workers climbed through the clouds. I fidgeted with my MP3 player and settled on Radiohead’s “I Will.” The pitch of the turbines settled, and the plane nosed onward.

  It was hot on the plane. There was no door to the pilot’s deck. The sun glared, and the glass faceplates of the instrumentation systems flashed light like watch faces. A small pink Energizer bunny twirled on a string tied to an unused switch. As Thom Yorke’s voice cooed about lying down in an underground bunker, I realized I had picked a lousy song for the moment. The copilot turned around and announced we were one hundred kilometers from Baghdad International Airport.

  The clouds broke, and the Euphrates ribboned darkly below. Weary-looking farms unfurled from its banks, and sand piled over the edges of the fields. We hurtled toward the dusty pall of Baghdad, and the song looped. The plane banked left abruptly and jammed its nose downward. In a frantic approach, the turboprop corkscrewed its way down as though swirling toward a drain, hoping to avoid rocket-propelled grenades. The emergency system began to blare, but the pilots ignored it as the engines clamored and the Energizer bunny circled furiously. At the last possible moment, they straightened the wings and the plane smacked into the runway, bouncing a few times as the copilot welcomed us to Iraq.

  Inside the customs hall, I smiled at the bored-looking Iraqi official inspecting my official passport, but he didn’t bother looking up as he thudded my entry stamp. A stocky man in his late twenties wearing a faded Metallica T-shirt hurried over once I cleared passport control. He was the first Iraqi employee of USAID I would meet, and he introduced himself to me as Kirk. I stared in blank confusion.

  “No,” I said, “my name is Kirk. What’s yours?”

  “Kirk! Well, it’s Muhanad, but that’s too hard for the Americans, so I use Kirk. As in, Hammett? Metallica, dude!”

  In Arabic, I told him it was too weird to call him Kirk, and that I’d call him by his real name, if that was okay by him. He beamed his assent.

  Black smoke columned upward from sputtering power plants and IED blasts as the Blackhawk ferrying us from the airport into the Green Zone swooped low over the city. The former ministry buildings were charred and collapsed from the JDAM bombs of Shock and Awe. The Republican Palace was soon below us, and we touched down at Landing Zone Washington. I clambered out of the Blackhawk and followed the woman from the airplane toward a white unarmored van. An Iraqi driver working for USAID drove us the final stretch to the gates of the agency’s compound, where Nepalese Gurkhas patted him down and rubbed paper on him to test for explosive residue. Bomb dogs sniffed around his legs as we waited in the van.

  Sprinklers spattered tiny eight-by-ten lawns in between rows of gray mortar-proof houses. An Iraqi in a golf cart gathered my belongings, depositing me in the corner of the compound at my assigned house in row A, block 2, unit 4.

  I flopped on the couch and felt my exhaustion for the first time that day. The house was surprisingly comfortable, with a separate bedroom, a well-equipped kitchen, a satellite TV, and a DVD player. I wandered into the bedroom and began unpacking. Opening the bed stand drawer, I found a folded wad of papers. I spread them open to discover a receipt and schemata for a penis enlargement system, left behind by the previous occupant. I crawled into bed and slept.

  4.

  USGspeak

  As the drone flies, the USAID compound was situated upon four scabby acres on the dorsum of the nose-shaped Green Zone, its eastern edge carved by the quiet waters of the Tigris. After the fall of Baghdad, when the embassy and the Pentagon split up the opulent Republican Palace, and the properties of the Green Zone were divvied up by various agencies and contractors, USAID laid claim to the former headquarters of the motorcycle division of the Republican Guard and built some of the finest living quarters around. Our bombproof homes lined the northern half of the compound; sardine-can trailers serving as offices clotted the southern half. A massive structure was emerging from the ground in the northeastern corner, built by Iraqi day laborers who were bussed in to pour concrete and stack bricks. AID workers called it the NOB, short for New Office Building, and we eagerly awaited its completion so that we could work in mortar-proof peace.

  At nine o’clock on my first morning there, January 3, 2005, I wandered over to the Public Affairs Office and found my new boss in the middle of a tense phone conversation. Doug’s hair was disheveled, his clothes rumpled, his right shoe untied. He peered through thick lenses at me, nodded, and pointed at my cubicle, just beside his. I sat down and waited nervously.

  “I don’t care how Washington went, you’re scheduled for Basrah tomorrow!”

  Th
rough the phone’s handset, I heard the voice of a young woman yelling back at him.

  Doug took a sip from a white Styrofoam cup and sighed, and the odor of whiskey crept out into the morning air. The woman’s voice was still shouting through the phone as he hung up on her. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “Are you Kirk?”

  I shot to my feet and extended a hand. “Yes, happy to meet you.”

  “You, too. Look, you gotta go to Basrah tomorrow to show a Times reporter our projects down there.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The girl who was supposed to do it is refusing to go, and I can’t do it.”

  “But I don’t know anything about our projects down there. Don’t I need body armor and stuff?”

  He thought for a moment, then reached for his cup.

  “Yeah. Go down to the warehouse and get your armor.”

  I raced out of the office in search of the warehouse, a barn-sized building in the far corner of the compound formerly used to repair the Republican Guard’s motorcycles. A team of Iraqis issued my body armor, a helmet, a cell phone, and a walkie-talkie. As soon as I turned it on, it squawked with the sound of an American requesting an Iraqi from the maintenance department to fix a problem with her air conditioner. A mess of sweat and fine dust, I slung the armor over my shoulder and hurried back to the office, wondering how to get to Basrah and what I was supposed to do there. I walked in just as my new boss was getting ready to leave, a scowl on his flushed face. “Forget it. I’m going now. Just get yourself set up here, and we’ll talk when I get back in a few days.”

  The Hierarchy of Armor

  “Oh, their names are so tricky and hard to remember! Just call them Ahmed or Mohammad, that’s what I do, and it sure seems to do the trick.”

  Sandy, the USAID executive officer, a plump woman in her fifties with sausage fingers and turkey jowls, answered a question about Iraqis in her welcome briefing to orient the half-dozen Americans who had arrived in the previous week. Sandy was the third-highest-ranked American in the mission and supervised the ninety Iraqis who worked for the agency in its Green Zone compound. Of them, only three were named Mohammad or Ahmed.

  By the end of the first week, I struggled against an impression taking root that life in the USAID compound and the Green Zone was more high school than front lines. The cliques were recognizable within days: jocks, overachievers, bad boys, the jaded and embittered, the excluded. The jocks were now armed mercenaries, ’roided up on drugs ordered from a Cyprus-based website and lumbering around in a first-person-shooter video game fantasyland. Young professionals were skipping rungs on the career ladder by volunteering for service in Baghdad; they wore crisp button-ups and ties and kept the dust from their shoes and the booze at a minimum. Down-on-their-luck types came for the danger pay, hoping to chip away at debt back home. Still others escaped midlife crises, running to Iraq from crumbling or ruined marriages.

  It was clear who was at the bottom of the heap. As I walked into the dining facility, the scene summoned another unpleasant memory from my high school, where whites and Latinos sat in separate sections with little mixing. None of the Americans were sitting with the Iraqi employees. On the second day, I sat with some of them, and a few Americans at the next table over stared at me. Over American food prepared by Nepalese employees of a Halliburton-KBR subsidiary, I eagerly copied out Iraqi slang and vocabulary into a small black notebook.

  The war was nearing its third year when I arrived in the first days of 2005, a few weeks before Iraq’s first parliamentary elections. The delusions and optimisms of a quick victory in 2003 were now distant memories, abraded by the rise of the insurgency and our torturous response in 2004. By 2005, the violence was fixed in a seemingly permanent state of escalation, each month rivaling its predecessor and challenging its successor. The threat of incoming rockets and small arms fire was high enough that the US Regional Security Office (RSO) issued a directive in January requiring Americans to wear their body armor and helmets at all times inside the Green Zone. Ordinarily, AID workers didn’t wear armor to walk the hundred yards from their homes to the cafeteria or the office within the security of the compound, but the security office anticipated a spike in mortar and indirect small arms fire.

  During one of my first mornings there, a series of mortars landed in quick succession near the compound, followed by the Voice of God, a loudspeaker broadcasting a recording of a 1950s-sounding American newsreel telling us to “duck. And cover. Duck. And cover.” Across the walkway, a woman screamed. “And cover. Duck.” The sky was soon freckled with scrambling Blackhawk and Cobra helicopters. In the next office over, separated from ours by a thin piece of corrugated metal, a percussive marching melody erupted: “My eyes . . . have seen . . . the glory of . . . the coming . . . of the Lord.” The lieutenant colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers kept the CD spinning in his computer’s drive for such occasions. If he was going to go, it’d be with his own soundtrack.

  Then the mortars stopped and the Voice of God and “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” disappeared, and the computer dinged with a new email from Washington.

  The RSO emailed its directive about the body armor the following morning as I was getting ready to leave the house, so I suited up. As soon as I stepped outside, I came across an Iraqi maintenance worker, adjusting the sprinkler out front. Another Iraqi pushed a broom, sweeping the dust from the alleyways between the houses. Neither wore a vest or helmet. “Where’s your armor?” I asked in Arabic, and they just smiled and shrugged.

  The armor and helmet suddenly felt like a clown costume. As I walked to the office, I saw protected Americans milling about among unprotected Iraqis. At lunch, I quietly asked an Iraqi across the table whether or not he had any armor, and he laughed. “No, of course not! USAID said they do not have any for us.”

  I stopped wearing the armor after lunch, more out of shame than any principled stand. When the head of security for the compound saw me, he reprimanded me for ignoring the directive. I asked why the Iraqis didn’t have any, and he snapped, “Do you have any idea how expensive these vests are?”

  * * *

  Americans were king of the compound, but within the broader Green Zone, USAID staffers nursed badly wounded egos, damaged by their increasing marginalization in the efforts to rebuild Iraq.

  In the first weeks of the war, USAID’s administrator, Andrew Natsios, had confidently told an astonished Ted Koppel on Nightline that the postwar reconstruction would cost America only $1.7 billion, at which point Iraq’s oil would pay for the rest.

  Natsios: This doesn’t even compare remotely with the size of the Marshall Plan.

  Koppel: The Marshall Plan was $97 billion.

  Natsios: This is $1.7 billion.

  Koppel: All right, this is the first. I mean, when you talk about 1.7, you’re not suggesting that the rebuilding of Iraq is gonna be done for $1.7 billion?

  Natsios: Well, in terms of the American taxpayers’ contribution, I do. This is it for the US . . .

  When it soon became clear that the true costs would run into the tens of billions, constituting the largest aid program since the Marshall Plan rebuilt postwar Europe, the public affairs team deleted the transcript of the interview from USAID’s website.

  Despite this, I assumed that USAID would lead the efforts to rebuild Iraq. Created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as a way of consolidating America’s various aid programs into one federal agency, USAID had decades of experience, with missions in scores of countries throughout the world.

  Of the initial $20 billion, though, only a quarter went to USAID, while the rest went to a newly created Projects and Contracting Office, or PCO, which operated out of the embassy. Another tranche of funds was managed directly by the Department of Defense, which had limited experience of its own in reconstruction work. Another entity was created at the State Department to “coordinate” these competing efforts, called the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office, or IRMO. Senior USAID o
fficials sat castrated in embassy meetings with State Department contractors and soldiers who had little prior experience but now operated with greater funding and authority. Back at the compound, they spoke wistfully about an indeterminate point in the future when the military would withdraw, State would return its focus to matters of diplomacy, and USAID would have the true lead on reconstruction efforts. One mission director, upset with what she perceived as insufficient status, spent roughly $250,000 each on a small fleet of armored luxury Mercedes-Benz SUVs to shuttle her ostentatiously through the half mile of secured Green Zone to the State Department’s palace. Because of their top-heavy design, they were determined unsafe for use outside the Green Zone, which itself did not require up-armored vehicles.

  But USAID’s identity crisis in Iraq was not entirely the result of losing a bureaucratic turf war. In the 1980s and 1990s, the agency had undergone seismic changes, riding the privatization wave that swept through the Pentagon and countless other federal agencies, leaving employees to focus more on the management of contracts and grants rather than on actual fieldwork. The fuel for career advancement was no longer mastery of a region or a country and its development needs but of the minutiae and paperwork required by a swamp of regulations and directives found in government binders with names such as the Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Acquisition Regulation, and USAID Acquisition Regulation.

  USAID thus became more of an administrative agency than a development agency. Its energies turned to assessing which contractors were capable of delivering what type of deliverable, the time frame for said deliverables, the projected impacts of said deliverables, the mechanisms for contract close-out or early termination, the format and clearance process for issuing requests for proposals, the point systems for grading proposals, the format and clearance process for listing new positions, the point systems for grading candidates for new positions, the timeline for requesting, reviewing, and replying to reports generated by contractors and implementing partners, the schedule and guidelines for conducting performance evaluation reviews of subordinates, the guidelines for . . .