To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  Ten minutes later, a soldier named Izzy returned, knocking at the door. “Hayder, the cap’n wants you to come over. There’s an Iraqi family telling us something, but we can’t understand ’em. Can you come?” Hayder told Dina he’d be back in a few minutes; it was just a few houses down the street. He walked over with Izzy, translated the conversation, and walked back home.

  Fifteen minutes later, Izzy was back at the door. “Hayder, can you help us again?” So he went back.

  They kept coming for help. He went to twenty homes, throughout the day and into the evening. He was happy. He hadn’t met a lot of his neighbors before that day; they seemed so grateful to him for his ability to translate.

  The next morning, the captain knocked on his door at eight o’clock. Hayder was still sleeping and grumbled when Dina woke him up. “I’m sorry if we woke you, Hayder. But would you like to work for us?” Hayder was excited but said he needed to discuss it with his wife.

  Dina knew Hayder would take the job but worried that it might not be safe. “Where’s the risk?” he said. “Saddam’s gone!” Everyone was thanking him for speaking English so well.

  His friends told him, “Do it, man! You’re gonna help us out a lot! Who is going to bring our voice to the Americans?”

  They said, “You’re gonna help out the neighborhood, bring back the electricity.”

  Hayder demurred. “I’m not the mayor, I’m just going to be a translator.”

  They said, “Yeah, but how will they know what we need unless somebody tells them?”

  * * *

  Five bucks a day, cash, that was the deal. Izzy always played Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” in the Humvee and taught Hayder how to dance like him. Everywhere they went, Iraqi boys crowded around to look at and flirt with the few females in the company. Hayder felt like he was in the movies. He absorbed their slang and made them laugh.

  “The fuck’s your name again?” someone asked in the first few days.

  “Hayder.”

  “What kind of shitty name is Hayder?” They busted him like he was one of their own.

  “Well, it’s a local name.”

  “Nah, that’s too tough for us to remember. We’re gonna give you a nickname.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s call you Homeboy.” And everyone did.

  * * *

  Mouayyad was with Hayder when they saw the 101st enter Baghdad. They were best friends. When they were in high school, and Saddam was about to invade Kuwait, they worried they’d be trucked to the front lines to fight against Americans. “If that happens,” Mouayyad said, “we’ll go to Kurdistan, and from there to Turkey. Then to Cuba. And then we’ll smuggle ourselves into America.”

  As soon as he could afford to buy his first car, Mouayyad bought a Chevrolet Caprice Classic. He was crazy about America. He used to kiss his Caprice each morning. “I’m not gonna buy Toyota shit!” Mouayyad said. “I’m buying American.”

  So when the Americans came in, Mouayyad also stepped forward to help. His English wasn’t as good, but he knew engines and machines, so they hired him to work on their bases as a generator repairman. He kept their ACs running and their bases lit. They called him Moe.

  * * *

  The troops that Hayder rode with were there to fight a war, not to become policemen. One evening on patrol, there were peals of gunfire. Hayder knew it was celebratory fire; that someone had just been married. But he could not stop the Americans from shooting back, and Iraqis were wounded.

  Some units were less disciplined than others and kicked in front doors instead of knocking. They shouted as they came in, not giving the women of the homes time to cover their hair. Hayder heard them curse the Americans as he translated the soldiers’ demands to search their homes.

  The people in his neighborhood came by every day with only one question, which they asked relentlessly: “Hayder, when is the power coming back?” He told them that the electricity wasn’t controlled by a single button somewhere, but they weren’t assuaged. Everyone talked about the massive generator that the Americans brought into Kuwait after the Gulf War. Why couldn’t they do that here?

  He communicated his neighbors’ concerns to the Americans just as relentlessly, so much so that Izzy and the others would sigh, “Oh boy, here we go again. Here comes Homeboy, gonna ask us about the power.”

  “Well, what’s going on with the electricity?” he’d ask. Their answers were vague, and the higher the rank, the loftier the language—“We’re going to set things up so that the Iraqi people take control over their own destiny”—and Hayder realized that they didn’t have the training, the capacity, or a clue.

  Before long, he was lying, and lying all the time. He wanted the Iraqis in his neighborhood to still have hope. He didn’t want them to start hating Americans, even though he saw it germinating in the splinters of every kicked-in door, with each passing summer month without electricity. He couldn’t fully explain it to himself, but he loved America and got angry whenever anyone spoke poorly of it or called the Americans liars. So when they asked, “Hayder, what did they say about the electricity?” he usually said he forgot to ask.

  One evening he came back from work and found Dina’s sister running from room to room. “She’s in labor! Get your things together!” Hayder and Dina piled into their Malaysian Proton Wira and raced to the hospital, hoping that their doctor would make it there before the American-imposed curfew.

  Ali was born around seven in the evening on May 29, 2003. Hayder scooped him up and kissed him as he cried. He felt sorry for his boy, because he was born at the wrong time. He whispered to Ali, “I’m going to protect you until you get big. I will do anything that needs to be done to keep you safe.” After a few days, Dina and Ali came back to the house, and they lived like a regular family. Some of the soldiers came by one day to say hi to Ali and take pictures.

  Quitting

  There wasn’t room for him in the Humvee as they rode through the neighborhood of Abu Dasheer, near Dora, so Hayder rode in the back of a commandeered ambulance with some other soldiers. The main street was always crowded because of the small stands on the median, where vendors sold vegetables, cell phones, and watermelons. The ambulance was stuck in pedestrian traffic when someone flung open the back door and tried to fire a revolver. The soldiers leaped on him before anyone was wounded, took the assailant to prison, and told the Iraqis on the street that nobody would be permitted to sell goods in the middle of the road anymore. To underscore their point, they drove their Humvees up onto the median and sent vendors running.

  The war was still in its infancy, but things were deteriorating quickly. Hayder tried to help, sitting with the captain each day, discussing alternate routes, and assessing the quality of incoming tips from informants. He drafted a new letter in Arabic for the soldiers to present to Iraqis, which was much more polite. He stopped asking about the electricity, which seemed to relieve just about everyone in the unit.

  But a slip of paper and conversations with the captain were just words. Once an RPG sailed past his Humvee and hit the median. Another time a car blew up in front of him. Soldiers in his unit were killed, sometimes by bullet, sometimes by bomb.

  Hayder decided to quit. Ali was just a couple months old, and Hayder felt like he was breaking his promise to protect his son. He didn’t sign up for this, he told the captain, and walked home.

  The next morning, the Americans came by and said, “Homeboy, we can’t do this shit without you. You’re gonna have to come along with us.” They said, “Look, everyone’s pissed off over here. You think we’re having a good time?”

  Hayder said, “Okay, let me grab my clothes.” He didn’t want to go back, but he loved his unit, Charlie Company of the Eighty-Second Airborne. He was worried that something bad might happen to them or that they might mistakenly do something bad to his fellow Iraqis, so he went back to help, absorbing and interpreting the frustrations of both sides.

  * * *

  Charlie Company knew that Hay
der was getting burned out and was starting to fear for his safety, so they started dropping him off at his front door to make sure he got home in one piece. He knew it wasn’t convenient for them to turn a convoy of several Humvees up his narrow street, so one day he told them to just drop him on the main road by his house. They agreed but said that they would stay to watch him from there.

  As he approached his home, a stranger, maybe twenty years old, was coming out the front door. Hayder sprinted toward him. The Americans in Charlie Company saw something amiss and scrambled over, just as Hayder had beaten the intruder into submission.

  “Homeboy, ask him if there’s anyone else inside.”

  Hayder translated the soldier’s question about his own home. Yes, there were two more inside.

  “Are they armed?”

  Yes, they were armed. “They’re waiting to kill you,” the young man groaned to Hayder.

  “Wait here,” said the captain, and they kicked in his door. Inside were two teenagers, who dropped their guns the moment they saw US military bearing down on them. Mercifully, Dina and Ali were visiting her sister that day.

  During the interrogation, Hayder learned that one of his neighbors had informed the intruders about his work with the Americans. They called him an ameel, just like in grade school.

  * * *

  He wanted to leave, but where could he go? He owned a 9 millimeter pistol, but that wasn’t much protection. Another friend of his, who worked as an interpreter and lived a few blocks over, was hanged in the neighborhood with a sign around his neck that read “This is what happens to those who work with Americans.”

  Dina begged him to quit. Hayder wanted to, but he felt that he understood Americans better than the Iraqis ever would and understood Iraqis better than the Americans ever could. He was the bridge, and even though things were getting bad, he had to continue.

  It was a Thursday, the night of August 6, 2003. Hayder was killing time in the Eighty-Second Airborne’s compound across the bridge from his home in Dora. While waiting for the captain to come in with their orders, he sat on a worn-out black sofa and played FIFA World Cup soccer on the PlayStation with a soldier named Brian Hellermann, a thirty-five-year-old Minnesota native with a wife and two young children back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  The captain came in and said, “Homeboy, we’re going out tonight.” They needed to go pay the salaries of the Iraqi police and then bring them along on a training mission to teach them how to patrol. Brian paused the game so that they could finish it later. Everyone armored up, except for Hayder, who didn’t have any gear.

  As soon as they left the compound, at around seven in the evening, a car swerved in front of them and blew up. They set up a perimeter and waited for backup to come and investigate the wreckage.

  When backup arrived, Hayder and the guys piled back into the Humvees and resumed their primary mission, heading to the police station. A few minutes later, another car sped up alongside them on the highway, coming closer and closer. “Pull over!” the soldiers shouted before firing at the hood of the car, which stopped quickly.

  “Weird fuckin’ night, huh?” Hayder said to the captain, who grunted his assent.

  They paid the Iraqi cops and started their night patrol. Around a quarter to one in the morning, they pulled off onto the shoulder of Highway 8, alongside a middle-aged Iraqi standing beside his car. “Hayder, go over there and tell that guy he’s gotta move his car because curfew’s about to start.” Hayder translated for the man, who said the car wasn’t starting.

  “Well, he can’t stay here, or else some other unit might detain him. Ask him where he lives. If it’s close, we’ll drop him off at home.”

  The bullets blazed in just as Hayder began to translate. The Americans were screaming to get to cover as they fired back. Hayder stood in shock for a moment, wondering where the bullets were coming from.

  He needed to run. His Humvee was directly in the field of fire, so running there was foolish. He looked around. He spotted a white Toyota 4x4 pickup truck and bolted toward it. He heard bullets flying past his ears and slapping into the side of the truck.

  Something blew up, maybe an RPG. He didn’t know what. He was thrown onto the ground, and above the gunfire he heard the captain shouting orders to take cover and shoot back, but Hayder didn’t have a weapon and wasn’t a soldier.

  He was lying there when he saw Brian Hellermann fall to the ground. He knew Brian was shot but didn’t know where. Brian’s face was turned down toward the pavement, and his radio was on and squawking. He was only five feet away and still in danger. Those were the only thoughts that formed in Hayder’s head. He got to his feet and bolted over to drag Brian back to shelter in the lee of the truck.

  He made it over to Brian and started to pull him but fell to the ground. Hayder looked down at his body and saw that his right leg was missing. Then another round tore into his left leg. Hayder turned and saw the assailant crouched in a nearby field, spraying sparking shots along the pavement. He looked over at Brian and saw that he was dead.

  “Oh my God. What have I done?” Hayder lay on the pavement of a street not two miles away from his home. He wanted to hold his son. “Ali just came into my life, and now he’s going to live without a dad? Dina’s going to have to go through all of this alone.” He looked up at the sky as the fight roared around him. He wasn’t religious, but he said, “Hey, Allah, just try to save me here, make this go by as quick as possible.”

  Someone ran through the fire and grabbed them both, dragging them off to the side.

  * * *

  It was quiet. Someone was carrying Hayder. He looked down and saw that his leg was still hanging by a husk of flesh. They put him in the back of a Humvee tub next to Brian, whose face was purple; a large-caliber round had pierced the Kevlar of his helmet. They piled dead bodies next to Hayder, and then more bodies on top of him. Though he was barely conscious, he realized that they didn’t know that he was still alive. His throat was full of fluid, so he couldn’t make much noise. As the Humvee raced back to the base, the blood of men above seeped down onto him, and he drifted in and out of consciousness.

  The Humvee came to a halt. Someone shouted, “Hey! Homeboy’s alive, get him outta there!” Hayder was extracted from among the corpses. A medic appeared, wrapped strong elastic bands around Hayder’s legs, and said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Just stay here. Homeboy! Stay here.”

  When his throat cleared, he shouted and thrashed around. The medic placed a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Homeboy, you need to calm down, you’re bleeding a lot.”

  In the Combat Support Hospital, they laid him out and cut off his jeans and T-shirt and boxers and began to clean him. Someone stood at the side of the table with a defibrillator, just in case. A doctor came over to Hayder and gently took hold of his hand. “Son, can I pray for you in the name of the Lord Jesus?” Hayder said, “Yes sir.” He didn’t care; he’d take any kind of hope. He passed out as the doctors strapped on their surgical masks.

  When he woke up, he wanted water, and someone brought it to him. He looked around the room, and on a nearby gurney there lay a soldier whose face was shelled, torn up by gunfire and the blast. When he saw that Hayder was awake, he said, “The others are dead. You and me are the only ones who made it.”

  The captain came in and smiled a pained smile. “Homeboy, we came to visit you in the middle of the night, and you were a little delirious. We asked you to go to work, and you know what you said? You said, ‘Sir, I’m a bit tired. Is it all right if I go out tomorrow?’ ”

  For the first time since he’d woken up, Hayder looked down at his body, but there was a blanket draped over it. He lifted it up slowly and saw both legs there. My God, he thought, they saved it! There were steel bars and rods sticking out of his right leg, and his left leg was heavily bandaged. He was overjoyed, certain that he would be able to walk with both legs, and thanked Allah and Jesus and anyone else who might have saved him.

  He was tire
d and overwhelmed and went back to sleep. For the next five days, they wheeled him back and forth to the operating room to perform more surgeries. He was heavily medicated, and hallucinated so fiercely that the orderlies were forced to strap him to the bed. He slept for two days continuously while the surgeons worked on his legs.

  But they were swelling, growing bigger and bigger despite the operations. One night nearly a week after the attack, the surgeon woke up Hayder and said, “Look, Homeboy, we did our best, but we have to amputate now. You’ve got gangrene going up your leg, and if I don’t take it off tonight, you might wake up dead.”

  Hayder said, “Okay, let’s do it.”

  When he woke up, the blanket was again draped over him, but this time he lifted it up and the leg was gone.

  * * *

  Dina had not heard from Hayder in a week. She thought he was dead, until another interpreter in Hayder’s group paid a visit to pass along the news that he was still alive. They did not believe him or the Americans anymore, though, and were convinced that it was a lie. After two days, Hayder’s dad walked up to the military compound where Hayder’s unit in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division operated and shouted, “Just give us his body so we can bury him!” The captain said, “No, no, I promise he’s alive. We’re gonna bring him home soon.”

  * * *

  It had been only a hundred days since it started, since the day Hayder watched the 101st Airborne stream into Baghdad like a strip of movie film. Since his neighbors surely knew about his work with the Americans by now, he rented a secret home a few blocks over and hobbled into it after nightfall. There was no prosthetic leg, just a stump, some wooden crutches, and a bag of drugs. Dina’s brother brought in a crate of whiskey and slept on the couch with a pistol.