To Be a Friend Is Fatal
Page 8
“Well, I’m not doing what I came here to do. I don’t want to be in the Green Zone anymore.”
I paused, and then said the line I had practiced on the way over: “I need to be out in the field, in one of the provinces, or else I’m going to head back to the States.”
She nodded and scoured my face for a few seconds before responding.
“Uh-huh. How’d you like to go to Fallujah?”
I blurted out, “Yeah, that sounds perfect,” without thinking or hesitating. She poured two glasses of wine. “Well, I don’t want an answer yet. This is a decision you need to sleep on. Tell me tomorrow.” We clinked our glasses.
6.
Fallujah
There is a Viking saga about a wise lawyer named Njáll Thorgeirsson, who lives in the hinterlands with his wife, Bergthora. In a story about honor, he is one of Iceland’s most honorable, endowed with the gift of forspar, which allows him to see into the future. The counsel and predictions given by such men are unbreakable.
Njáll shares with his dear friend Gunnar a forest, from which each periodically logs timber without discord, until one of Njáll’s loggers is slain in a dispute with one of Gunnar’s men. Life and limbs were valuated by the Scandinavians according to the rank and measure of the man, and Njáll’s lowly logger is valued at twelve ounces of silver. Gunnar pays gladly to keep the peace.
But the silver does not quiet the dispute for long. One of Njáll’s men, acting without his knowledge, thrusts a vengeful spear into the belly of the man who had slain the logger. Njáll returns the twelve ounces of silver to Gunnar, and the peace is restored for a season. Discord rings once again when the killer of the killer is killed, and the price for peace rises to a hundred ounces of silver.
With obsessively detailed attention to gore—an ax into the collarbone, a hand cut off midswing, a shield cleaved by a sword—the saga recounts an ever-expanding battle claiming sons, husbands, cousins, tribes, regions. Peace conferences stall the war for short periods, but the conflict grows with a logic and will of its own. At the peak of the bloodshed, the war spills across Scandinavia and into mainland Europe, but nobody remembers why they’re fighting, other than to avenge the most recent offense. In the end, an army of men lay siege to Njáll’s home and deal him the fate most horrid to the Vikings, setting fire to his walls and doors and burning him alive.
“The Saga of Njáll Burned Alive” ends with a dark portent, in which the promise of peace has been obliterated by endless war. In the village of Caithness, a man named Daurrud comes upon a cottage late at night. He dismounts from his horse and peers through the slit of a window to find wraithlike women at work on a demonic loom: men’s heads used in place of weights, intestines as the weft and warp, a sword as the shuttle. They sing a song as they weave the fate of man:
See! Warp is stretched
For warriors’ fall,
Lo! The weft in loom
Is wet with blood;
Now fight foreboding
Our grey cloth waxeth
With war’s alarms,
Our warp bloodred
The cloth is woven
With entrails of men
The warp is hardweighted
With heads of the slain
Spears blood-besprinkled
For spindles we use
With swords for our shuttles
This war-cloth we work;
So weave we, Valkyries,
Our warwinning cloth
Capture the kids, and we capture the future
—Saddam Hussein, 1977
In the heart of Fallujah lies an amusement park. The paint on the rides in Jolan Park is faded and chipped away. There is an aquatic-themed whirly-go-round. A ten-foot-tall octopus the color of moldering lime looms at the hub of the ride, extending his swirling tentacles outward over the small cars, which are made to look like severed heads of fish. They scowl as they bake under the Fallujah sun. A motorless Ferris wheel slumbers nearby, a monument now, its bucket seats piling up with years of dust.
Before the marines came, the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi held sway over Fallujah, and his fighters reportedly repurposed a cluster of maintenance shacks within the park into torture cells. A grove of trees once shaded the rides, but Fallujans cut them down for firewood while the marines laid siege. Splintered foot-tall stumps remain, dusted pikes stabbing up through dead soil.
The fighting was fierce in the amusement park when the marines carved their way through. The dead were held in the potato storage facility on the eastern outskirts of town. During the siege, the Fallujans ploughed the children’s soccer field into a burial site. When that filled up, they decided to convert the amusement park into a cemetery.
We have to win this war in Fallujah
One neighborhood at a time.
We’re going to do it on our terms,
On our timeline, and it will be overwhelming.
—Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt
In Fallujah, we fought upon the war’s most miserable plateau, on terrain shaped not by the metrics of insurgents killed or jobs created or schools built but by the raw and rootlike emotions of our primitive selves. In these nine square miles just west of Abu Ghraib, we fought for honor, against terror, and for the upper hand. We would do anything necessary to lug our matériel and forces and barbed wire, no matter the cost in treasure or youth. Amid a berserker fever of absurdity shimmered an omen: if Fallujah—this city the size of a middling American suburb, which a few months prior was completely unknown to every American citizen—was allowed to remain “in insurgent hands,” then the entire war would be lost. It was a city to be lashed and crushed and retina-scanned into obedience, and in the heights of Fallujah, America fought a savage fight.
The true benefit of the high ground is often misunderstood: its value is not moral superiority but rather the strategic advantage it confers for attacking those beneath you. And determining who had the high ground in Fallujah depended mostly upon where in the whole gory timeline you started. If you started with the assassination and burning of four Blackwater mercenaries on March 31, 2004, you might feel that the reeking maw of evil had just opened wide, and no amount of artillery was too much to pound it shut. If you began your timeline on April 28, 2003, when nervous soldiers fired upon a throng of civilians protesting the military’s occupation of a school, you might feel that the Americans were up to no good in Fallujah and needed to be kept out. If you started with the angered confusion of an eighteen-year-old from Ohio wounded by an IED, you might feel resentment at such a reception from people you thought you’d just liberated. If you squinted all the way back to the day the first of an endless convoy of American trucks appeared, straining under the weight of sixteen-foot slabs of concrete, which were unloaded not far from your front door to direct your movement as though you were Iraqi water in American pipes, you might wonder with a little bit of anger about the true intentions of your liberators. But before all that was Saddam and the deceptive worry of a mushroom cloud. And before that, 9/11. And before that, sanctions. And the Gulf War before. And before that, the Iran-Iraq War. But who can remember that far back?
Of Course We Have a Strategy
My arrival coincided with a shift in war strategies. At first the strategy was to topple Saddam and find the WMDs. When we didn’t find any weapons, the new strategy was to install some Iraqi exiles as leaders, rush the public to the polls for a quick election, and then celebrate as democracy and a free market bubbled forth. When that failed, in part by inadvertently forcing Iraqis to organize into sectarian voting blocs, the new strategy was to rebuild the infrastructure and institutions necessary for democracy and economic growth. When that failed due to corruption and an expanding insurgency, the new strategy was to build Iraq’s security forces so that “when they stand up, we can stand down,” so we dumped billions to quickly train and arm men against the militants. When that failed, in part as a result of those very militants infiltrating the hastily assembled security forces, the
new strategy was called the “ink-spot” approach: rather than confront the problems on a national level, build teams of experts to “clear, hold, and build” areas on the local level. Clear, hold, and build enough of them, and the ink spots of security will grow in diameter, and one day the country will be covered in ink. I imagine it made for pretty PowerPoints in the Pentagon. My job was to help with the “build” portion of the Fallujah ink spot.
I was also sent to Fallujah to confront the pervasive opinion back in Washington that an unacceptably large gap had opened between the civilian and military efforts in Iraq. This gap was unacceptable for different reasons, which depended upon where you worked: those in uniform felt that the State Department and other agencies weren’t really in the fight but, rather, partying in the Green Zone. Those in State and USAID understood that the Pentagon was becoming the true driver of US foreign policy and that in Iraq and Afghanistan it played an increasingly dominant role in aid and development work, so it made vital sense to get as close to that source of power and funding as possible. A hand-in-glove relationship was the mantra of 2005. My presence as the agency’s first representative in Fallujah allowed USAID to claim that it was in the fight. “We have a man in Fallujah, after all.”
It was still warm at around two in the morning when I left the comfort of the Green Zone. The only activity was an occasional thump thump of a medic Blackhawk, swooping to gather the wounded and rush them back to the Combat Support Hospital. I looked around the pleasant home I’d lived in for the first half of the year, to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind. All I found was an Iraqi ant, dragging and struggling with a bit of a Doritos chip on the tile floor in the kitchen.
I was supposed to fly to Fallujah the previous evening, but a sandstorm had rolled in and turned the sky deep orange and the air too hot to breathe. The war paused on days like these; the helos couldn’t fly, and the insurgents couldn’t aim mortars or spot convoys. Everyone just stayed home and watched TV, resting until the sky cleared up enough to kill again.
By the next night, the sky had cleared. Luayy, an Iraqi friend in his midthirties, worked in the motor pool and was still awake when I radioed for a ride. I had a code name, “Viking,” that I was supposed to use for security purposes in case an insurgent was listening in on our radio network, but I never understood why “Viking” was any safer than saying “Kirk.” Luayy pulled up in the USAID van and helped me load two large bags, and we headed off in the direction of LZ Washington.
“Fallujah, man, you crazy? Why are you goin’ there?” His voice carried the concern of an older brother as we turned through the dead streets of the Green Zone. A lo-fi cassette of the Scorpions’ greatest hits warbled through the speakers. “You think I shouldn’t go?” I murmured.
Not that I would change my mind. In Fallujah, I would live with the Second Marine Expeditionary Force and oversee more than $20 million of aid as a new member of the agency’s senior staff. No more Iraq Daily Update or Green Zone grunt work: I was finally in a position where I might contribute something tangible. A couple weeks earlier, friends at the compound had thrown a twenty-fifth birthday party for me and joked in toast after toast that it might be my last.
We pulled into the LZ, a vast expanse of concrete the size of a Home Depot parking lot upon which helicopters would wobble and shiver down for a few minutes at a time before creaking upward. Luayy gave me a hug and drove off.
The marines mostly flew at night. I dragged my bags through the noise toward the droid-like crew member who beckoned with a flashing green light. My face felt like it was blowing away, and once I made it under the warmth of the rotor span, the marine grabbed my hand and pointed a flashlight at it. I opened it to show him the CF—Camp Fallujah—I had inked with a Sharpie over the creases of my palm, confirming the destination. He pointed the flashlight at the chopper, and another marine plucked my bags from me and threw them into the CH-46 Baby Chinook. Many of these birds did time in Vietnam. I crawled up the ramp in the backside and found a half dozen weary marines, some with downturned sleeping heads, others with chins on the butts of their M16s. I wondered how many of these my dad had flown in, as I settled into the gurney-like seats and fidgeted with the seat belt.
The Chinook lifted off and wind whipped in through its paneless windows. Down below, the Green Zone drifted from sight as we nosed westward over the knotted skein of dimly lit neighborhoods. In a few minutes, Baghdad was behind us and the Euphrates below us, reflecting moonlight like mercury, deserted fields unfurling from its banks. The bright lights of Abu Ghraib looked like a small city below us. Twenty-five minutes later, we touched down at Camp Fallujah.
Removing Rubble
Seven thirty, and already the sun sat up there like a deep bruise, faintly yellow at the core and melting into an ugly blue sky. I’d stupidly left the window open a crack my first night there, and a shadow of dust had crept in, lightly coating my cheek and chin and eyelids. My new home was in the BOQ—bachelor officers’ quarters—of a military base once home to the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a militant Iranian opposition group cultivated by Saddam Hussein against the regime in Tehran. I was assigned to a room with four bunk beds and a couple roommates, a collapsible table, the fetor of unwashed bodies and clothes, and a strip of fly tape. I once saw an Iraqi fly land on it and pry itself loose in about three seconds, unfazed.
I was nervous as I got ready for my first day on the job. The word in my title, regional coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah, summoning my dread was not Fallujah but coordinator. I had spent enough time in the US government and drafted enough scraps of public affairs pabulum to know how potentially toothless the verb to coordinate could be.
Before my arrival, USAID had programmed roughly $15 million for projects throughout the city, which was still at about half of its prewar population level of a quarter million. I had been armed with an Excel spreadsheet that listed the projects, color-coded by the USAID sector (education, health, infrastructure), along with exact dollar amounts. I studied the language of the list warily. Primary and secondary schools were “rehabilitated,” the hospital and local clinics received “supplies,” the directorates of municipalities, communications, housing, and other local potentates received “support.” Furniture and Equipment for Mayor’s Office: $62,135. Fallujah Veterinary Clinic Rehabilitation Phase I: $98,000. Phase II: $70,000.
Since these projects were in the “restive city of Fallujah,” as the public affairs professionals were wont to label it, nobody from the agency had ever gone out to check on the work until now. The money was given to a contractor, who took a piece and gave the rest to an Iraqi or Kurdish subcontractor, who maybe used another subcontractor or maybe kept it. The Americans at the agency overseeing all of this were called CTOs—cognizant technical officers—who maintained their cognizance by reading one- or two-page reports periodically emailed into the Green Zone by the contractor, which sometimes included a picture of an Iraqi man holding a cardboard box, supposedly the veterinarian of Fallujah or a doctor at the hospital. Upon receiving the report, the CTO could then modify column N of the Excel sheet to reflect a status of “completed” instead of “in progress.” In my previous job, I would have then written up a paragraph for the Iraq Daily Update about the completed project and included the picture.
Most of the completed projects were carried out by the agency’s Health, Education, and Infrastructure Offices, which had an excruciatingly slow turnaround from conception to implementation. A school refurbishment project could take a year or longer, to the great impatience of both the Iraqis and the US military.
There was a separate office in the agency, though, called the Office of Transition Initiatives, which was fast moving and well funded. OTI could move millions of dollars in weeks, not months or years. Rubble removal was its darling and was categorized as “conflict mitigation.” On paper, conflict was mitigated by an assumption-weakened chain of assertions:
1. Iraqis were joining the insurgency because there was no work for them.
2. If they were given the choice between an honest day’s work and fighting against the Americans, they’d choose the former.
3. A make-work program to clear rubble, at the pay rate of about $7 a day, would
4. sap the insurgency of its strength,
5. clean up the city (dovetailing nicely with a $110,000 public awareness campaign run by USAID, in which a picture of a sleeping Iraqi baby was plastered on billboards with the caption “My dream is of a clean city”), and
6. stimulate economic growth, all at once.
If we could just get a shovel and a wheelbarrow into their grenade-prone hands, point them to any of the houses that had been reduced to abandoned fields of rubble, and dangle seven American dollars, we might start gaining the upper hand on the insurgency. At the very least, doing so would contribute to a new narrative, one that ran counter to the unpleasant metric of nearly 50 percent unemployment throughout vast swaths of the country. A simple spreadsheet presented month-to-month “progress”: forty thousand Iraqis hired in June, fifty-two thousand Iraqis in July. Someone in Washington would read these impressive figures and murmur, “Well, at least USAID’s got this covered!” Maybe a congressman would notice and appropriate more funds for USAID to build on this momentum! This line of thinking led to many tens of millions of wasted dollars.
After all, in the swamp of unemployment, the insurgency had nurtured an economy of its own. Some estimated that a third of all cargo trucks from Jordan passing into Iraq through Anbar Province were hijacked by insurgents. Oil and gasoline were smuggled, the children of wealthy Iraqis were kidnapped for ransom, and old-fashioned robbery kept their coffers swelling. In my first few days in Fallujah, a marine told me that the going rate for paying kids to plant an IED along the roadside was $50; $100 if he acted as a spotter for incoming American convoys; and $150 if he successfully detonated the IED as they passed. How would our $7 compete with this? I was doubtful, but I resisted forming any opinions until I had seen the projects under way.