While the List Project achieved far more than I ever imagined, I seem capable of focusing only on the Iraqis we left behind. The List Project continues to receive a steady stream of applications from those who remain in great danger in the new Iraq. A few weeks after the end of the war, a young man on my list received a jar of sulfuric acid from a militia, which ordered him to leave before he was bathed in acid. An Iraqi in Ramadi received a knock on his door and found a policeman who told him he had forty-eight hours to flee or else he would be assassinated. Others have been abducted and killed.
But my prediction of a Basrah-style public execution of our Iraqi allies was incorrect. Instead, the number of assassinations climbs in tiny increments—a decapitated man here and there—with never enough of a “signature” to summon outrage in Washington or the attention of the few remaining journalists in Iraq.
The Special Immigrant Visa program established by Senator Kennedy’s Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act is scheduled to expire in 2013. Nearly eighteen thousand slots remain unused. In February 2013, toward the end of a lengthy discussion with a recently retired senior Obama administration official who was involved in refugee affairs, I laid out the statistics and asked how he felt history would judge the United States on this dimension of the war. He sighed before saying, “Look, what do you want me to say? In terms of protecting Iraqis who stepped forward to help us, I think we did a crappy job. You’d have to put your head in the sand to say otherwise.”
Afghan interpreters, many of whom have written to me for help, appear even worse off than the Iraqis. Although 1,500 Special Immigrant Visas were designated for Afghans each year, the State Department took nearly two years to “ramp up” its program. No sooner had it become operational than Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador in Kabul at the time, sent a February 2010 cable asking the State Department to kill the program: “This act could drain this country of our very best civilian and military partners: our Afghan employees . . . if we are not careful, the SIV program will have a significant deleterious impact on staffing and morale . . . local staff are not easily replenished in a society at 28 percent literacy.” He proposed tightening the language of the legislation so that visas were issued only “in those rare instances where there is clear and convincing evidence of a serious threat.” The impact of the cable was immediate and lasting: with our withdrawal from Afghanistan looming, the average number of Afghan interpreters receiving visas each month is four. The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 is also set to expire with thousands of unused slots.
* * *
As the List Project struggled with successive administrations, it was impossible for me to evaluate our progress without considering the success of another organization that was launched around the same time. Operation Baghdad Pups, an initiative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded to resettle Iraqi dogs that had befriended our troops. Their website had a flashy banner proclaiming “No Buddy Gets Left Behind! . . . Abandoning Charlie in the war-ravaged country would have meant certain death for him.” In exchange for a $1,000 donation, the group would cut through the US government’s red tape in order to bring these pets to “freedom” in less than six months. Airlines donated free travel for the dogs. Crowds gathered at the airport, crying with joy when the animals arrived.
Mouayyad, Hayder’s best friend, who drove only American cars and dreamed of one day coming to America, was still struggling to make it through the visa application process as 2013 arrived. After years of waiting, he read an article in the Army Times about “Smoke,” a cigarette-eating Iraqi donkey from Anbar Province that had befriended the marines during their deployment. Marine colonel John Folsom told the reporter, “It didn’t seem right that Smoke was left behind,” so he and Operation Baghdad Pups raised $40,000 over thirty-seven days to evacuate the donkey to Omaha, Nebraska. In July 2012 CNN reported that nearly all of the $27 million donated by Americans to help Iraqi dogs (nearly fourteen times the amount the List Project was able to raise over the years) was used on direct-mail campaigns to raise more funds.
On January 2, 2013, President Obama signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which included an amendment to grant dogs working for the US military the status of “Canine Members of the Armed Forces.” Animal rights groups and major media outlets ran a series of articles describing a troubling situation: these dogs were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and were struggling to get treatment.
* * *
When I heard a woman call into a radio program on PTSD to declare that she had developed it after watching too many episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on television, I realized that the stigma surrounding the disorder had evaporated. If dogs were now susceptible, why not the TV-viewing public? In 2011, senior Pentagon officials even launched a campaign to drop the D for disorder from the diagnosis, rendering it simply post-traumatic stress. “This is a normal reaction to a very serious set of events in their life,” said Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, the army’s surgeon general.
The nightmares that patrolled my sleep in the year after the fall have departed, but my flesh and bones offer up daily reminders of the accident. My left wrist makes a snapping sound when I twist it, and I sometimes nick my chin when shaving because the nerve endings around the scars are dead. Whenever I bite into an apple, I wonder if my front teeth—cracked little tombstones that grow duskier each year—will finally break.
But although the accident and the ensuing trauma have become memories, I have given up on the tidy idea of “closure” and the expectation that the Iraq chapter of my life will one day close. A full quarter of my life has been tossed into the abyss of that war, and even though it’s over, I don’t know how to keep that quarter from becoming a third. When I go to dinner parties, I try my best not to say the words Iraq or refugees but usually fail, and feel embarrassed later for what seems like my impoliteness. When I get home, I find more emails from refugees throughout the world, pleading for visas. Those who have made it to America write and call every few days with new requests: a cousin just received a death threat, a brother is looking for work, a daughter is applying to college, a family needs money for rent. Could I help?
* * *
The time may come when all the tiny cracks in what remains of my idealism will combine to shatter it to bits. I’ll stop telling myself that next year will be the year the administration finally wakes up. Or that the same story won’t repeat itself as we withdraw from Afghanistan. I’ll stop believing in the power of a perfectly worded op-ed or that legislation and the intent of Congress still mean something. Or that bureaucracies shouldn’t be allowed to wield the moral compass of the nation.
I’ll leave the State Department alone. I’ll get a steady job and stop responding to Iraqis. I’ll sleep through the night and stop grinding down my teeth. I’ll stop talking about wars nobody remembers. I’ll click and post and retweet my outrage and feel content.
But until then, I’ll wonder: Is it too much to hope that the government creates an assistant secretary of state for protecting local allies, with equivalent secretaryships at Defense and Homeland Security? Is it so far-fetched to imagine appointing someone to start building a list on the first morning of the next war? Is it too naïve to propose that all future war authorizations be coupled with a minimum number of visa slots for those who step forward to help? Ten thousand per year?
Until then, the List Project will carry on. In the spring of 2013, I initiated talks with an Afghan woman to join the organization on a part-time basis to begin compiling a list of US-affiliated Afghans. Maybe the president will help them before it’s too late.
Americans
On the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Yaghdan and Haifa had their first child, a boy named Ali. Their son arrived two months premature and weighed less than four pounds, but he was born a citizen of the United States. For the first eight weeks of his life, Haifa and Yaghdan could only visit him in the intensive care ward of the Good Samaritan
Hospital in Downers Grove, Illinois, where a tiny feeding tube ran into his right nostril. I flew home and stood over his little hospital bed with his parents, who told me that Ali never would have lived had he been born in Baghdad so prematurely.
But Ali survived the challenges of his first weeks of life and grew quickly. A year later, Yaghdan graduated from DeVry University’s Keller School of Management with a degree in accounting. We all gathered at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago to attend the fourth Johnson brother’s commencement, crying and roaring with applause as he strode across the stage.
On October 19, 2012, almost six years to the day after receiving the death threat, Yaghdan and Haifa swore the oath of allegiance and became citizens of the United States of America. Ali looked on with large black eyes.
* * *
Zina, Tara, and their mother are thriving in Virginia. The sisters both work as translators for the State Department, interpreting for visiting dignitaries from the Middle East. Their father died in December 2012, but they were unable to return to Basrah for the burial.
Hayder, Dina, and Ali moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where Hayder took a job in a carpet factory. Then he found a job as a food prep at Isaac’s Mediterranean Restaurant on Memorial Avenue. His boss used to bring over other employees and say, “Look, he works harder than you, and he’s only got one leg!” Before long, he was put on the cook line, where his coworkers asked him questions such as “Why did America go over to Iraq again?” “What was it like getting shot?”
By the end of 2012, many Iraqis who had been resettled through the List Project began calling me to excitedly announce their new citizenship as Americans. Zina, Tara, Hayder, Dina, Ali, and hundreds more will take the oath in 2013.
Homeboy in Roanoke
Was this whole war in Iraq worth it? Me and you will say no, but the politicians will say it was worth it.
I always look back at that first day, when the 101st rolled into Baghdad. I ask myself why they didn’t do this. Or if they did this, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. Or why did I step forward? I ask myself these questions, but I always get the same answer: somebody had to do it.
Look, when I jumped in that day, I didn’t look at him as a soldier or as an American, I looked at him as a human. And if I saw an accident on the street over here, I would do the same thing, I wouldn’t hesitate. Although they tell me over here, I shouldn’t because maybe he’d file a lawsuit against me. But I don’t care, I’m gonna help, no matter what the law says.
To be honest with you, sometimes I drink at night to get over this stuff. I drink. Sometimes I remember, like flashbacks. And you know, these memories, although they hurt, they give me hope for the future. Because after they took my leg, a second part of my life began. “I have to reach America. I have to get out of Iraq and start my life all over again.” Doesn’t matter with one leg, with two legs.
Look, I love Iraq to death. I love America to death. If something happened here, I would stand up to help just as I did over there. But if I was born in America, I wouldn’t have the feelings I have today.
My son sounds like a Turk when he speaks Arabic. It’s funny! He is still too young to understand what happened to us. He sometimes doesn’t even know that he’s an Iraqi. Once, my neighbor asked him where he was born, and he said Jordan. I said, “No, you’re not a Jordanian, you’re Iraqi!” In school they asked him where Iraq is, and he said California. I asked him why he thought it was there, and he said, “Well, I heard all the Iraqis live there.” In the future, he’ll learn a few words of Arabic. But he’ll maintain an American life more than an Iraqi life. Dina and I try a lot, but we can’t change his life. I don’t mind if he marries a white girl. We know Ali, though, he’s gonna be a player for a long time! It’s in the genes.
I don’t make enough money to afford health care yet. I need a new leg, but you know how much they cost? Forty thousand dollars! I need a new silicone sleeve that helps connect my flesh to the leg, too. You’re supposed to get a new one every six months, but they’re eighteen hundred dollars, so I’ve just been wearing the same one for three years. It has some holes in it, and it’s a little painful sometimes, but it’s okay. These aren’t real problems.
I’m not looking for great wealth. I just wanted to show that all Iraqis are not terrorists. Muslim people are not terrorists. Most people think the same way when you talk to them. I am a human being. I have the right to live on this earth. I have the right to work. I like to try to fix what is wrong.
But there are some issues that are out of our hands, because they’re in the hands of people more powerful than we are. I’m just a little person, sitting in Roanoke, thinking about my future for me and my family.
Author’s Note
As of the summer of 2013, Iraq remains a profoundly dangerous place for Iraqis who once worked for the United States of America. Those who remain do so in hiding, fearful of the lethal stigma of “traitor” that continues to hound them. Those who have made it to America also tend to keep a low profile, worried that their new lives here may endanger extended family back in Iraq. (Many Iraqis have received death threats for the simple reason that a family member has lived or studied in America.)
For this reason, many of the names of the Iraqis in this book have been changed. After months of interviews with the primary characters, whom I have known for many years, I gave each of them the opportunity to change his or her name to protect their security. Some were adamant about telling their stories under their true names. Others opted to use a different name, most often providing the names they used while working for the Americans in their previous lives (many were given Western names or nicknames by young soldiers and marines who struggled with Arabic pronunciation).
For a story that covers such lengths of time, I had to rely on nearly a decade’s worth of emails, notebooks, and memos written during and immediately after key meetings and moments. (I often emerged from meetings with government officials and raced to a café in order to write down as many of the key comments and quotes as possible before they became muddled by memory.) Emails referenced within the book come either from my in-box or from the Iraqis themselves.
Where the dialogue is in quotation marks, it comes from the speaker, someone who was present when the remark was made, or from notes. Where dialogue is not in quotes, it is paraphrased due to a lack of certainty about the exact wording of the statement—but the nature of the comment remains unchanged.
Finally, I have changed the names but not the actions of low- and medium-level US government officials. Over eight years of sparring, I have come to realize that policies rest in the position, not in the individual holding that position. I did not want the reader to think that results would have been dramatically different if not for one particular midlevel bureaucrat sticking to the letter of his or her orders. For that reason, I have left unchanged the names of people at the top of the bureaucracies, for they surely could have done more.
Afterword
“Let’s be perfectly cold-blooded about it,” President Nixon mused to Henry Kissinger, “because I look at the tide of history out there. . . . South Vietnam is probably never gonna survive anyway.”
It was August 1972, and Nixon was worried about how the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam after a dozen years of war would affect his reelection bid. As soon as US forces withdrew, he knew the North Vietnamese would surely “gobble up” their neighbors to the south. Kissinger concurred: “We’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.”
This formula became known as the Decent Interval: a long-enough period of time after withdrawal for America’s war fatigue to give way to apathy and then amnesia. Twenty-eight months later, when Saigon fell, there was no chance that the American public would countenance military reengagement: indeed, congressional concerns over getting dragged back into the conflict even thre
atened efforts to address the spiraling refugee crisis.
Each war decomposes from memory in its own unique way, but it’s hard these days to escape the cold shadow of the Decent Interval. Twenty-six months have passed since our last troops departed Iraq. In the nine months since the publication of To Be a Friend Is Fatal, the tide of Iraq’s future has receded back into an ocean of violence. At the time of this writing, Mosul, Tal Afar, Fallujah, and other major cities have fallen to the Da’ash, an acronym for the Dawla al-Islamiyya f’il Iraq wa Sham, better known to Americans as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
ISIS was once just ISI, which was responsible for targeting many US-affiliated Iraqis. But as the civil war in Syria raged on (ejecting a staggering 6.5 million Syrians from their homes, the population-base equivalent of 80 million Americans), the group merged with Syrian fighters across the border, becoming ISIS. Charged with the delirious mission of restoring a Sunni caliphate, their coffers are estimated to hold over a billion dollars, the territory under their control is now the size of a small nation, and their forces are massing several dozen miles outside of Baghdad.
In some areas, they have joined forces with the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandiya Order, the Ba’athist militant group that issued a death threat to Omar’s brother. Since the book’s publication, the List Project and Mayer Brown successfully resettled Omar’s widow and young son, but his brother’s case was rejected by the State Department. Omar’s widow, who cannot speak English well, has struggled in America. She teeters on the poverty line, and has been tempted to give up and return to the inferno.
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