The first three nights, Hayder didn’t sleep. He watched three sunrises and thought he was losing his mind. He kept the door locked and watched television and played video games—Tomb Raider, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike—with his brother-in-law. He drank heavily.
The summer heat was peaking. Since there was no electricity, his neighbors would sit out in the garden for a bit of breeze, but that was too risky for Hayder. He didn’t want someone to jump over the fence and kill him, so he bought a generator, installed it in the garden, and stayed indoors. Eventually word spread that a one-legged man was living there, and his neighbors realized it was the same Hayder who tried to save an American, so someone tossed a grenade over the garden wall and blew up the generator.
* * *
His father was working in the new Ministry of Transportation and met regularly with American officials. Paul Bremer was in charge of the country and had given the transportation portfolio to a lawyer named Ronald Dwight.
Mr. Dwight noticed a deep despondency in Hayder’s father during a meeting one afternoon and asked him privately what was troubling him. He learned about Hayder’s situation and said he wanted to help.
There was little left in Hayder’s reservoir of hope, but he began to correspond with Mr. Dwight. He was so worried about his spotty dial-up Internet connection that he hobbled out and bought a small pile of dial-up cards and bribed the telephone serviceman in the neighborhood to ensure that he always had a line to the outside world.
Mr. Dwight knew T. Christian Miller, the investigative reporter from the Los Angeles Times who had tormented USAID with his exposés on bungled reconstruction projects. T. had the unusual beat of covering reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and he knew the fine print that led to so much corruption and inefficiency in the war efforts. His articles were not about massive car bombs in marketplaces but about sputtering power plants, and they did a lot more to explain the root causes of the major problems rending the country. Dwight introduced Hayder to T., who dropped by quietly for a visit.
T. left with a sheaf of documents and contracts. Hayder had been paid through a San Diego–based defense contractor called Titan Corporation, which received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to find interpreters, whose average pay was a few dollars an hour. Hayder didn’t really understand the contracts, which were freighted with legalese. After he lost his leg, he had called his bosses at Titan, but all they ever told him was “Yeah, we’d love to help you, Homeboy, but we can’t get you out of Iraq.” One day they told him to get a passport, and they’d give him treatment in Kuwait. But as soon as he got one, they said they couldn’t. When they said they were going to bring him to Qatar, Hayder excitedly packed his bags, but on the scheduled day, they told him they couldn’t help him after all.
Holed up in his hiding place, Hayder entered the Internet access codes from the cards he had bought and waited for something to happen. Miller wrote a front-page article about him, demonstrating that Titan had done nothing to help, and suddenly Hayder’s boss called to say the company had finally decided to help. His father loaded him into the car and drove him to a small clinic in Amman, Jordan, where Titan would finally provide for a prosthetic leg and treatment.
* * *
The first place Hayder walked to with his new prosthetic leg was the Embassy of the United States of America in Jordan. He had brought along a couple letters of support from his unit, along with a certificate of appreciation: “Thank you for your dedicated service to Coalition Forces and the paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Your tireless efforts have contributed to a brighter future for Iraq. We could not have done it without you. Best of luck in all you do. C Company 2-325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.”
He spoke to a young consular officer through the thick windowpane and said, “I am an Iraqi interpreter, and I would like to apply for asylum in America.” He thought there would be a form to fill out, but there wasn’t. The officer said, “Oh, you need to go over to the UNHCR and register.” So Hayder walked to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and registered his family. It was early 2004.
Dina and Ali came to Amman, and the family moved into a small apartment in the Seventh Circle neighborhood. Titan told them that they would have a monthly stipend of $600. One month later, a representative of Titan visited to inform them that the next month would be the last, delivering an ultimatum: “This is the last of the money we can give you. You can either go back to Iraq and work for us or quit, but this is it.”
Hayder knew he couldn’t go back. The burning of the Americans on the bridge in Fallujah was looping on all of the news stations. He called his dad and said, “The house is yours. Do what you want with it, sell it, burn it, give it away, I don’t care. I’m not coming back.” Dina sold the jewelry that she had inherited and their computer and television, cobbling together about $2,000.
Hayder couldn’t work. He was in Jordan illegally, and if a cop stopped him, he could be deported. There are few protections for refugees in the Middle East. None of the countries has signed the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international agreement according certain protections, chief among them non-refoulement: the principle that refugees cannot be forced to return to the country from which they fled. In Jordan, Hayder was nothing and could become nothing, hobbling through a precarious state of limbo.
The two-month stipend from Titan evaporated, and the money made from selling Dina’s jewelry was fast running out. Amman was expensive, and the only plan Hayder had was to hope that his refugee petition would get the family to safety in America before they were broke or deported.
* * *
T. Miller called Hayder and said there was an American lawyer who’d read the article in the Los Angeles Times and wanted to help him sue American International Group (AIG), the insurance giant that had received more than $1.5 billion in premiums from US taxpayers to provide insurance coverage under the Defense Base Act. The act, a World War II–era law, required all contractors working for the US government to provide insurance to their employees, Iraqi interpreters included. But the Iraqis were rarely informed about this right, and Titan, AIG, and other companies didn’t remind them. Worse, representatives sent to Jordan pressured gravely wounded interpreters into accepting a onetime payout and signing a waiver of all future coverage. Some were told that they would be sent back to Iraq if they refused to sign.
Hayder was patched into the Houston courtroom during the lawsuit by telephone. The judge asked him questions. AIG fought hard against the lawyer representing Hayder but was ordered to compensate Hayder for the loss of his leg. This was valued at the rate of an American leg: $21,000.
When the bank called to inform Hayder that the wire had arrived, he woke up Dina with excitement. “This will get us started in America!” he said. All that remained was the visa.
11.
The Dog’s Head
As soon as my arms were cut loose from their casts, I left West Chicago and drove to Boston with the hare-brained idea that I could work for Samantha Power, the Pulitzer-winning author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and the director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. A year earlier, when I was still in Iraq, a student of hers had emailed me to see if I was interested in providing research assistance for a book she was writing that examined America’s foreign policy “amnesia,” since I had once edited a blog called American Amnesia on the same topic. Now that I was unemployed and sufficiently healed, I wrote to Power to offer my services, and found a cheap apartment on Massachusetts Avenue in the South End of Boston.
It was a flimsy lead, but it served as sufficient justification to leave home. My parents had put up with enough of my mania, and I needed to be alone, in a place of my own. Power never replied to my email. In my haste to head east, I didn’t realize that she was on leave as Senator Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor. I sent my résumé to Obama’s DC office, and that was the end of
that.
I had buried Iraq from sight and avoided the news. Whenever someone new asked what I did, I said I was getting ready for law school. The nightmare of being abandoned in Fallujah visited only once a week now. Apart from visits to the orthodontist, my life was free of hospitals and clinics. When a reference to or memory from the war fluttered past my ramparts, I shooed it away and reset the drill clock to take another LSAT practice test. I tore a photo of Alfred Hitchcock out of an old issue of the New Yorker and taped it over the only mirror in the apartment so that the scars on my face wouldn’t remind me of the fall. I sealed away whatever triggers I found, repressing a tumorous sense of failure.
Denny
Dennis Hastert has a large frame and tiny, Luxembourgish eyes. When I walked into the Speaker’s chambers, he ambled over and shook my hand as though we were close friends. I thought of my father as my hand disappeared into the large grip of the man who had sealed my dad’s political fate.
“Sit down, Kirk!” he said jovially, gesturing at a small conference table.
I didn’t really know what I was doing there. Hastert had run into my mom at a Fourth of July parade in West Chicago a few weeks earlier and told her that he wanted me to come in for a visit. I received an invitation from his office a week later and rode the Chinatown bus down to Washington.
“So. You’re back. Tell me about your time there.”
I had done my best to lock them away over the past seven months, but a herd of emotions and experiences and opinions still brayed and clambered inside. Sitting across the table from the Speaker, a man from whom I wanted nothing, I flung open the gates and gave an unvarnished critique of everything wrong I’d witnessed back in Iraq. Hastert nodded throughout, as his foreign policy advisor took notes.
After forty-five minutes, I felt embarrassed for the time I had spent talking, so I stood up and thanked him for inviting me in. We posed for a picture between flags of America and Illinois, next to a display of his collection of model trains, model cars, and model tractors. I smirked, trying not to reveal the shiny braces in my mouth. I caught the next bus up to Boston.
Forty-eight hours later, I received an email marked “Time Sensitive” from a staffer in his office, requesting that I return to Washington.
Hastert was sitting at his desk when I returned a few days later. A muted television broadcast footage of marines evacuating US citizens from Beirut, due to the war that had broken out between Israel and Hezbollah. I hadn’t been able to iron the only suit I owned, and felt sheepish. Hastert smiled slightly as he got up to greet me. He put his arm on my shoulder and got in close: “Listen, I want you to sit behind me and just listen. If anything seems really off to you, just lean forward and whisper in my ear. ’Kay?”
“Okay, Mr. Speaker.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
He guided me to a door in the corner of the office, which was opened by an aide as we approached. The camera flashes were momentarily blinding, so it took a moment for my eyes to make out the dour face of Nouri al-Maliki, who had just become the prime minister of Iraq.
A dining table was set in the middle of the small room. As we walked in, Senators Ted Stevens, Dick Durbin, and Harry Reid and Congressman John Boehner were chatting in a corner with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. I felt like Forrest Gump as I took my seat behind the Speaker, directly across from the prime minister. The media were dismissed from the room as a light breakfast of smoked salmon and fruit was brought in.
Hastert initiated the breakfast with an affirmation of the US-Iraqi relationship and introduced each of the senior leaders in the room. Al-Maliki’s interpreter translated the bromides into the prime minister’s ear in a quiet, unobtrusive tone. The conversation then turned to each member’s pet issues. Stevens spoke bluntly about the difficulty he would have in appropriating significant funds for any new initiatives. Durbin wanted Al-Maliki to condemn Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. The congressmen spoke more to each other than to the Iraqi prime minister.
Nobody mentioned the reconstruction. Nobody talked about the civil war. Nobody brought up the growing problem of refugees fleeing Iraq. I took notes but didn’t lean forward to whisper anything in Hastert’s ear. What could I say?
After an hour, the Speaker stood, prompting everyone else in the room to rise and then clear out. He came over to me: “Stick around. I’d like you to hear his address, and I want to introduce you to some friends.”
An aide walked me down to an ornate Victorian room and told me to sit there until someone came for me. I walked around the small room, taking in the pale green walls and elaborate inlaid marble, and sat on a couch. I had no idea where, exactly, I was and what in the world was happening.
I was staring at my notes from the breakfast when the door opened and Nouri al-Maliki wandered in. An aide trailing him quickly sized me up. I shot to my feet and said, “as-salaamu ‘alaykum ya ra’is,” as I backed away and yielded the couch with a gesture. His eyes were forlorn, always fixed on the ground a few feet in front of him. They finally lifted up and fixed on mine. “W’alaikum as-salaam . . .” he mumbled, his voice trailing off with uncertainty as to who I was.
We stared at each other for a few seconds. I smiled, flashing my braces at him, and didn’t know what to say. It felt as though he were looking through my eyes into the back of my skull.
The room filled with American and Iraqi aides, who prepped him for his imminent speech to Congress. A foreign-policy aide to Hastert came over and whispered, “What are they saying?” She nodded as I translated mundane snippets of their conversation about last-second changes to the speech.
In the scrum, Hastert put his hand on my shoulder. “Come over with me, Kirk.” We walked out of the small room. I looked to my right and saw Dick Cheney walking up the hallway toward us. The members of the House and Senate rose as Hastert and the vice president walked in, followed by al-Maliki. Applause. Once in the chamber, Hastert pointed to the left of the dais and said, “Just find a place and stay there. I’ll come for you afterward.”
As al-Maliki worked through his speech, a large black fly harassed his face and forehead. He brushed it away with his hand with an unchanging face, but the fly persisted. I stopped listening to his boilerplate speech and followed the insect, which flew away from the prime minister in drunken curlicues over Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Up it flew, and my eyes scanned the dozens of relief portraits of famous lawmakers throughout history hanging near the ceiling, settling on a profile of Hammurabi, lawgiver of ancient Mesopotamia. I remembered an Iraq Daily Update I’d written about a USAID and State Department initiative to train Iraqis in the rule of law. As the civil war spread, sectarian militias were now implementing extrajudicial court systems, imposing their own rule of law across huge swaths of the country, and judges were fleeing.
Someone in the gallery began to scream.
Protester: Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now! Iraqis want the troops to leave! Bring them home now!
Hastert: If our honored guest will suspend for the moment, the chair notes disturbance in the gallery. The sergeant at arms will secure order by removing those engaging in disruption.
[Applause.]
Protester: Bring them home now!
Hastert: The gentleman may resume.
Al-Maliki [through translator]: Hope over fear, liberty over oppression, dignity over submission, democracy over dictatorship, federalism over a centralist state.
[Applause.]
Al-Maliki enjoyed a standing ovation. Hastert waved me over to introduce me to Representative Peter Hoekstra from Michigan, the Republican chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Talk to him about Iraq like you talked to me.” Overloaded with input, I blankly shook his hand and followed Hoekstra into a conference room at the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
My thoughts flitted barn swallow–like as I listened to Hoekstra detail
a recent three-day trip to Baghdad. He and Senator Rick Santorum had eagerly summoned a press conference a month earlier to announce to the world that weapons of mass destruction had finally been found in Iraq, suggesting that the controversial decision to invade had been decisively vindicated. They minimized the fact that the sarin and mustard gas canisters were relics of the Iran-Iraq war, rusted-out carcasses decaying for decades in the desert. They peddled this scrap metal for all it was worth until the Pentagon stepped in to repudiate the significance of the find. I smiled at Hoekstra but just wanted to get out of the Capitol and onto a train.
I was about twenty minutes north of DC on the Amtrak when my phone rang. “Mr. Johnson, we have the Speaker on the line for you.” A baby was crying a few rows behind me, so I got up and made my way to the snack car. I sat on a stool while a small line of Amtrakkers ordered Heinekens and White Castle–grade cheeseburgers. Hastert’s voice cut through the din: “Didja talk with Pete?”
“I did.”
“Yeah. Good. Well, listen, I’m not gonna twist your arm. You’re gonna do your own thing, but you know, the intel committee’s a great job. Think you should come and work for us. That committee’s a real sweet position; you could keep your eyes on Iraq, y’know?”
“Boy, I—”
“And y’know, Pete’s a sharp guy.”
“Okay, well, thank you for that, Mr. Speaker. I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing next, but I really appreciate the chance to talk with you guys. I need to mull it over for a bit.”
“Yeah, like I said, you gotta do what you gotta do. I’m not gonna twist your arm, but think it over. This could be a real nice opportunity for you. And you know, I could always use you, too.”
To Be a Friend Is Fatal Page 16