Not a week passed in Fallujah where I did not witness women asking the whereabouts of family members. I once asked a woman to just tell me the name of a missing relative, and spent about ten minutes transliterating every different combination—over twenty in total. I handed it to a marine. He looked down at it, and, eyebrows raised, put it in his chest pocket and gave me a “Don’t expect much” glance.
Down the hallway, the marines hung the quote from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that proliferated on the walls of American power: “Better to let the Arabs do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself.”
Clearing the Canals
“The most important thing you can do is just be here. Don’t disappear on us.” A lieutenant colonel in the Civil Affairs Group spoke quietly and locked eyes with me as we talked late into my first evening at the CMOC. The marines were tired of civilians dropping by Fallujah for a day and then leaving. A lot of them were coming just to say they had been there and to buy the Camp Fallujah T-shirt from the PX before they left. That would have been enough of a nuisance, but members of Congress and embassy officials had a tendency to meet with Fallujah city leaders at the CMOC, make lofty promises, and then disappear. The marines were stuck there, left to tamp down the volatile expectations of the Fallujans.
I tried to reassure him. “No, I’m here, at least until mid-06, and then we’ll see where we’re at.” It had taken about eight months to get out of the Green Zone to a place where I might finally do something useful. I knew that I would be only mildly relevant for the first couple months in Fallujah: the city leaders and marines needed to trust that I was there for the foreseeable future, and I needed to know how much I could expect from my own bosses in Baghdad.
For weeks after I arrived, I rode around Fallujah referencing my small map of rubble removal projects. I saw zero evidence that a single stone had been lifted, despite what I had been reading in progress reports and in the Iraq Daily Update, now written by the perky young public affairs officer who had replaced me. The marines who drove around on patrol each day hadn’t seen any signs of a program. The questions screamed in my brain. Where is the rubble being moved to? Who wrote these contracts? Why isn’t there even a simple mechanism to gauge results? How do we verify that the theoretical Iraqis hauling the rubble are even from Fallujah and not being trucked in from other provinces and creating more strife?
Even if the contractor or subcontractor had been out there to enforce the rubble removal, it was easy to imagine gaming the system. Why not just move the rubble to a vacant lot down the street and charge USAID another quarter million to move it again in a month?
When I was introduced to an Iraqi engineer with unparalleled knowledge of the city’s infrastructure (who called me il Masry—“the Egyptian”—on account of my dialect), I asked him about the rubble removal teams. He laughed and said, “What are you talking about? What teams?”
I wanted to end the program, to stop wasting the money. This would require crying foul, informing the USAID cognizant technical officers and management back in the Green Zone that their projects, which earned them a lot of favor with the Pentagon and were part of the whole hand-in-glove craze, were bullshit. And if a project didn’t exist, it meant that auditors in the Inspector General’s Office might catch on and start poking around in other parts of their work.
* * *
There was waste or fraud in nearly every project I looked at. For instance, $62,000 worth of furniture for the mayor’s office ended up in the marines’ rec room of the CMOC. A radio tower that had been sent to Camp Fallujah for delivery to the city, as part of an initiative to empower a new Iraqi media, never left the base.
Hoping to get a handle on what the city actually needed, I peppered the leaders of the Fallujah city council with questions. I didn’t know if any other Fallujans knew who they were, but they were known by us, and were the only men who came into the CMOC to talk. I wanted to be helpful but did not make any promises.
Just off Route Henry, the veterinarian of Fallujah was waiting for me with a proposal for where I might direct some aid money. A tall, hefty man of sixty, Dr. Nazar had a darkly creased face and gold-rimmed glasses that he pulled from a breast pocket before running through a list of supplies and equipment. He had prepared the list with the hope that I might direct USAID funding his way. He needed incubators, vaccines to combat diseases such as brucellosis, refrigerators for the vaccines, generators for the incubators and refrigerators, fuel for the generators. Syringes, gauze, everything. It sounded reasonable enough.
I wasn’t sure what information I’d need from the veterinarian, so I wrote down everything I could learn. How many head of cattle are there in Fallujah and the outlying villages? How many animals did he treat a week? What diseases were the most prevalent at the moment? What were the farmers doing without these vaccines? How many chickens are there in the city?
I wedged his list into my notebook and heaved my armored body back into the tub of the Humvee.
“Mr. Krik?” Dr. Nazar called out to me.
One of the marines gave a glance to signal that we needed to move on, so I answered the veterinarian brusquely. We never spent more than a few minutes in each place.
“Yes, Doctor, what? We are in a rush.”
“Fallujah needs a working slaughterhouse again!” he exclaimed. Just a couple blocks away, the marines were occupying the old slaughterhouse, which the veterinarian wanted to reopen. He needed a generator to keep it cool. He pointed to the ground at a startling rivulet of dark blood running along the curb, which was stained brown. The stream issued from the gullets of sheep and other small livestock being slaughtered twenty feet up the street. The flow stretched another fifteen feet down before it disappeared into a small heap of rubble and garbage.
“It’s not good; it’s not safe to handle meat this way,” Dr. Nazar pleaded.
The butchers stared at us, blade in one hand, the nape of wide-eyed livestock in another.
“Okay, we need to clear out,” a marine grunted, to my relief.
That night, I spent hours deciphering and translating my observations (I never studied the Arabic words for brucellosis or hypodermic or hoof) into a report with a recommendation for my bosses in Baghdad.
But my enthusiasm for helping out the veterinarian stalled when I searched through the database of “completed” projects and discovered that $98,000 in supplies had already been delivered to the city’s veterinary clinic. The happy veterinarian had then wheeled them down the street to his private clinic, where he charged much higher rates. I wasn’t going to win any battle in redirecting aid from the rubble removal program if my opening gambit was to buy more supplies for a corrupt veterinarian.
It was customary for Americans working in Iraq to react to all of this with a world-weary shrug and shoulder-patting bromides. “Welcome to Iraq.” “Hearts and minds, man, hearts and minds.” “Welcome to the world of international development.” “Just another day in Iraq.” “Welcome to USAID, buddy.”
But the sheer waste of the chimerical campaign to remove rubble became such a splinter in my mind that I made it the central focus of my first steps in Fallujah. I would absorb whatever wrath came my way from the functionaries in the Green Zone.
Before I could kill the program, I needed to have a replacement project ready. I didn’t have to search very long: everyone knew that Fallujah’s irrigation canals were choked. These waterways had once irrigated the Euphrates’s fields. The canals need clearing every year, or else the water flow diminishes, the soil becomes hypersalinated, and crops can’t thrive. I began to meet with sheikhs and city leaders to plan an ambitious new USAID initiative to hire thousands of Fallujans to hack out and hoist the years of weeds and reeds and trash that had clotted the canals since the beginning of the war.
I didn’t think that the canal clearing project would turn the city around, but it stood to make a much larger impact than a nonexistent program. I threw every idea I could at the initiative, wishin
g to be embarrassed at the outset by suggesting potentially stupid ideas rather than waste millions on another failure and blow my chances at future projects. I studied maps of the irrigation infrastructure with agricultural engineers from the area and tried to spread the project equitably across tribal lines. I asked the marines if they could task an observer drone to survey the state of the canals, since Google Earth satellite images were outdated.
A Quick Vacation in the Caribbean
By late December, I had succeeded in winning over the mission director’s initial approval for a shift in strategy away from rubble removal and into canal clearing. I had staked whatever credibility I had on the proposal and was excited to think that, after a year of frustration, I might start to fulfill some of the goals that had brought me to Iraq in the first place. No more taskers from Washington, no more public affairs spit-shining of crumbling projects. I had buy-in from key members of the city council, support from the marines, and the money to make something tangible happen.
A Christmas stocking from my mom arrived a week before the holiday. “We hope you’ll be able to take your R&R and join us!” The card was signed by my parents; my mom had sweetly forged my brothers’ signatures. There was a large family reunion coming up in the Dominican Republic, where my uncle and aunt run an orphanage, and I was the only one who hadn’t RSVP’d. I hung the stocking next to my bed on a plastic adhesive hook I’d bought from the PX.
Someone whose face I never saw had moved in and laid claim to the bunk above mine, and the mattress sagged like the hull of a submerged boat just a foot above my head. He annexed a corner of the desk next to the bed for his collection of Maxim magazines. Every night, a hirsute forearm would drop down like the claw game at an arcade to retrieve a ruffled issue, and the weary springs of the bunk would squeak for a couple minutes.
I was overdue for a vacation but wrestled with the idea of leaving. My push to kill the rubble program had angered the officers in charge of it, and I worried that the momentum I had mustered for clearing the canals could be quickly scuttled by its detractors. I was also mindful of burnout and knew that I still had at least another six months on my contract, which I had already resolved to extend.
But when I received an invitation to brief the incoming First Marine Expeditionary Force on USAID’s work in Anbar Province at Camp Pendleton in California at the beginning of January 2006, I decided to combine it with the family vacation. I packed light, logged out of my computer at my office in the civil affairs building, and left a small stack of my green notebooks into which I had scrawled months of thoughts and notes.
As a civilian, I could never guarantee a spot on a helo, since I flew space-A (as in “if space is available”). I pulled out two refrigerated bottles of Starbucks mocha Frappuccinos that I had snatched up in the PX, slid them into my backpack, and began the couple-mile hike at midnight through the labyrinth of Camp Fallujah’s cafeterias, laundry hooches, PX, gyms, officers’ quarters, intelligence buildings, and Humvee repair garages en route to the landing zone. When I stepped into the plywood hut that served as the LZ office, I told the lance corporal behind the desk that I was flying space-A to Baghdad and smiled as I handed him and his buddy the Frappuccinos. His tired eyes lit up as he said, “Okay, sir, we’ll make sure you get on.”
At about one o’clock in the morning, the helos arrived, and I jammed in some earplugs as I sprinted over to the marine waving a green glow stick. The next morning, Christmas Day, I finagled a ride from Camp Victory to the civilian terminal. The USAID charter flight was canceled due to a dust storm, but Iraqi Airways was still flying, so I pulled out a few hundred dollars and bought one of the last remaining tickets to Amman.
I sat in the terminal next to Iraqis biding their time before flights, and realized that after a year in Iraq, it was the first time I had been without body armor or mercenaries or marines nearby. The coil of stress that had been tightening with each convoy run, each missed mortar, tensed just a little. Suddenly my chest cavity seemed naked.
The dividing lines between us and them, white and brown, exposed and hidden guns, air-conditioning and sweltering heat, clean and dirty water, our knowledge that we’d be here only for a while longer but that they were stuck, began to vibrate and jostle in my mind. I didn’t drink water from the fountain because I knew how badly we had failed to provide clean water. I couldn’t find any relief in air-conditioning because the airport power was strong enough only to run a rickety oscillating fan that surely must have been pushing air around since the sixties.
I looked around at toddlers and smiled at them but encountered little warmth from my fellow travelers. My head hurt, so I shut my eyes for a moment, before thinking better of it. I opened them again and thought, Just wait a little longer, and you can relax in the Dominican Republic.
7.
Fugue State
Sweetie, you’ve lost so much weight!” My mom cried as she hugged me, and everyone gathered close with shocked airport eyes. After over two days of travel—from Camp Fallujah to Camp Victory by the Baghdad Airport; to Amman; to Madrid; to San Juan, Puerto Rico; to Puerto Plata on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic—I was exhausted, but I stayed up late into the first night, talking with my brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles who were filtering in for the reunion. When I finally made it to bed, I stared at the ceiling fan and waited for sleep.
At three in the morning, I got out of bed and walked past the window of my hotel room. Outside, across a small, rocky field of dirt, loomed a dust-colored apartment complex. It was unfinished, with dark openings where the windows should be. My eyes darted down at my body. No armor. “Shit!” I yelled, and dropped quickly to my knees. I peered out the window from just above the sill and wondered how I could be so stupid as to walk past a window without my gear when the sniper of Fallujah was still at large.
I then realized where I was—in the Caribbean—and a shroud of embarrassment dropped over me in the quiet of the room. Had my cry woken up my family? I never swore around them. Nobody seemed to be moving around in the other rooms.
I crawled warily back into bed, and embarrassment gave way to confusion. “What the hell was that?” I muttered to myself, as a great dissonance clanged through my mind. I didn’t remember getting out of bed. I had never before been mistaken as to what country I was in.
* * *
I woke up a few hours later. Nobody was awake, so I threw on some sneakers and set out for a jog along the beach. I was alone and ran for miles along the coastline. I tried to ignore it, but what had happened the previous night was too strange to repress, and I ran faster and faster until my energy was spent. The shifting sand made my calves ache.
After breakfast, we all went down to the water. I held my baby nephew and ate Goldfish with my niece. Dad emerged from the resort with a football, and my brothers and I raced down to the surf to toss it around with him. I lunged for an overthrown pass, and as I caught it, I felt the ring on my right hand slide off into the ocean.
“No!” I yelled.
It had been my grandfather’s wedding ring, an heirloom of nearly a hundred years, now lost in the ocean. My brothers waded over, and we peered into the water but could see nothing. The grief was mounting when the undertow lodged something in between my toes. My eyes bulged as I carefully reached down and retrieved the ring. My dad shot me a look of relief, and we stopped throwing around the football. A bright red helicopter heavy with tourists droned overhead. That night, all the branches of the family gathered for lobster.
Before I got into bed, I folded my jeans and placed my watch on the nightstand. Its date read 12 29 05.
* * *
Just after four thirty in the morning, Primitivo, a bald and spindly Haitian working the night shift, started his rounds. When he walked past my window, I yelled something and startled him. He didn’t understand what I said, but he looked up and found me perched on the ledge of the window. He pointed a flashlight up at me and shouted, “¡Peligroso!” I shouted back in a lan
guage he didn’t know. He began to run around to the front of the building to ring the bell and wake my family, and heard the sound of my fall. I don’t know what it sounded like, my body falling to the concrete; I was still asleep.
He ran back and found me kneeling in a pool of my blood. He tried to help me up, but I swung at him and wouldn’t let him near. I stumbled to the back door of the condo, but there were iron gates over it and I couldn’t get inside. I raised my hand to the window and began tapping my grandfather’s ring against it.
A light came on, and the curtain on the other side of the window rose. My dad stared into my face, splayed and pulping blood, and thought I had just been shot. My son! He saw Primitivo behind me and roared a primal paternal warning to “get back; get away from my son!” Primitivo spoke no English, but he retreated. My dad raced around the house, which was now waking up from the sound of the commotion. He gathered me, throwing an arm under my shoulders to help me into the kitchen of the condo. Still I was asleep.
* * *
My memory began fifteen minutes after I fell headfirst seventeen feet from my window to concrete. Faintly, I began to make out the contours of the room around me, which got brighter and brighter as my eyes adjusted. My dad, my brother Derek, and his wife, Carolyn, were in a panicked half circle around me. Their words sounded like they were underwater. I looked down. I was sitting in a chair and wearing only my boxers, which had been gray the previous night but were now red. As I stared down at them in confusion, I saw a stream of something spigoting from my forehead and splashing in a crimson puddle on my lap.
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 10