We Meant Well

by Peter Van Buren

  It had been a long econ conference at the Embassy, a pep rally to make sure the ePRTs were with the program. Meanwhile, demonstrations protesting the lack of electricity had been popping up around Iraq. People had suffered in the swarming heat, 120 degrees if you could find a thermometer that went that high, without juice to run the AC or power to run the water pumps. The Embassy, living on corporate truth, was telling the world that power generation exceeded pre-2003 levels but that a rise in demand had resulted in a temporary gap that was most certainly not our fault. Of course, measuring life now against life pre-2003 had a tendency to downplay the billions spent for tiny gains, if any, and the thousands dead for nothing. The clever part was blaming the problem on demand (it’s the damn Iraqis’ fault). Truth inside the Green Zone: we’re doing our job, power is up. Bottom line outside the Zone: two to six hours a day of power, delivered unpredictably. People dying, hospitals closing, and kids drinking river water, then spending a week horizontal, dehydrated from the runs. But check the PowerPoint and damn if it wasn’t true, we were winning.

  So why not celebrate? The Agency had arranged just the thing: a dinner at their compound. It was just like them not to list it on the schedule, OPSEC above all. Nobody was in the mood for more corporate culture that night, but secretly we all got off a little on the idea of hanging with the spooks on equal terms.

  Despite our one-billion-dollar Embassy, with more security and walls around it than Mordor, the Agency had to set themselves up in a separate compound. They might have had some staff sleep in the Embassy apartments, maybe dump a few junior officers there as liaisons during the day, but when Daddy needs to do Daddy things, he can’t be sharing the executive washroom with the Army or—God, no—even worse, State.

  The Agency compound was a symbol for them of how this damn war was supposed to have worked out, taking control from the dictator in the most obvious way. The Agency grabbed for itself one of Saddam’s primo palaces, in the Green Zone, of course, but separate from the Embassy and the Army. Saddam had palaces everywhere, practically one for everyone in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, before hangers-on like the Department of Agriculture, for Christ’s sake, had come out to play. The Agency snatched up a good place and, with the balls they liked to believe they carried in wheelbarrows in front of them, had not altered it much. Outside they had thrown up T-walls and barriers and checkpoints and enough razor wire to encircle Folsom, perimeter security so that any yahoo driving past would know this was a serious place, not some random Army IT office or a goddamn State Department motor pool. No signs, of course, but hey, the real operators always know one another anyway.

  The best parts were inside, where most of Saddam’s I’m-on-crack decorating style had been left untouched. You could blink and think you were in a Macao sauna or Sinatra’s Vegas for all the red velvet and brass, but the tacked-up strings of lights around the doorway and the big sign pointing to the bar as if you were in a frat house were giveaways for anyone who had been in any station anywhere. The pool with the winged griffin statues and red spotlights added to, but was not needed to complete, the scene. If you had ever gotten stoned as a kid, this was the vision you’d have wanted to stretch out your buzz.

  But the Agency didn’t do dope, it did booze. You would never imagine the Rat Pack with a hookah full of Panama Red, and you could not imagine anything but good whiskey and maybe some decent imported beer for this party. The Agency guys, used to being all hush-hush under the covers around State during daylight hours, loved these parties where they could (in their minds) blow our minds by introducing themselves by their actual titles. Of course, even in a large official community most people who cared pretty much knew who was who anyway, but certain things were not spoken out loud, so the titles were a big deal. You were supposed to feel that you were being given a peek behind the curtain and were meant to behave appreciatively. Most of us knew the protocol and things went smoothly.

  I’d met one of the spook guys on another assignment and he was for real. Because we recognized each other and because this was a social affair, he was obliged to make a little conversation with me. Unlike some of his colleagues, who only looked cool around us until their moms called them home for dinner, this guy had been part of some of the big ops his Agency had run in the 1980s and 1990s. Tall and lanky, he had worked in Afghanistan—everyone of his generation had—but also in Mogadishu and some places I won’t even type the names of. He could tell stories for hours but didn’t, because in general your questions would be too damn stupid and he neither cared enough nor wanted to be nice to you. Yeah, sure, he’d say, that’s how it was, like Black Hawk Down, but he said it in a way that let you know it was never like that. I asked what he was up to in Iraq just to see if he’d bother with a witty reply, but he didn’t, just said, “You know, the usual.” If you’re posted somewhere and he shows up, you should probably leave, it’s that simple. You’re in too deep whether you realize it or not (you won’t realize it). Most people believe either that the United States has thousands of officers like this named Bourne or Bond or that they don’t exist except in the movies. But they are real, though there are not many of them and yeah, you’re glad they’re probably on the same side as you.

  The Agency was quiet in Iraq because, as I said, this wasn’t their war. They had nailed their biggest coup early on, still said to be controlling most of the budget for Iraqi intelligence. To them, holding the money meant that they were running the Iraqis though, as we knew, spending money in Iraq did not always mean control and sometimes the project turned and ran you. Like us believing we were building democracy and capacity in Iraq, the spooks believed they had a handle on the intel. The chances were good we were both equally deceived, the difference being we sort of knew it, if we cared to look at our reconstruction projects, while the truth about the spooky ops might take a decade and some congressional hearings to come out.

  But this evening was about current success, not future failure, and the highlight came early as the host announced that the china and the silver we were eating with had been Saddam’s and the table we sat at had been Saddam’s and the room we were in had been His. Saddam had been a badass, but we had taken him down and the proof was in front of us: we got his stuff. If the Station Chief had told us he was wearing Saddam’s old clothes, we would have believed him. Now, a cynic might point out that years had passed since we’d nabbed Saddam and that we hanged him in 2006 about a mile from where we sat, but this wasn’t the night for it and we all took a moment to marvel at the plates and ask the person next to us what, if the room could talk, he thought it might say. Had Saddam deflowered virgins here, planned the invasion of Kuwait, and maybe met with al Qaeda right at this table, who knew? It was, of course, equally possible that in this room Saddam had met his Agency handlers in 1983 to discuss the war against Iran or receive info from Don Rumsfeld about the new weapons he was getting from the United States to kill Persians and Kurds. But like I said, the evening was about success and we ate rare steak and sipped good whiskey and allowed ourselves to absorb a little bit of the freshly squeezed juice of faith.

  The Day after a Day at the Embassy

  We felt like hoboes, the four of us from the ePRT, walking around the Embassy compound after the economics conference. Almost everything was a contrast to the world we lived in. Nothing was dusty, nothing covered with the fine tan silt that defined our Iraq. The air-conditioning was silent and even—smooth, cool air that we sought to draw into our pores and take back to our FOB. The gleaming cafeteria always amazed us, from the sign apologizing for the Caesar salad station being temporarily closed to the surprisingly awkward, heavy feel of metal utensils (we used plastic, as if we were on a 365-day picnic) to the shock of a fruit-carving station stocked with fresh watermelon and papaya (we enjoyed those radioactive-orange-colored canned peaches in heavy syrup, more rumor than actual fruit). Unlike at the FOB, where the quality of the food made one thrifty about filling a plastic tray, we all loaded our china plates with fresh
vegetables and crispy fries and ordered up Slurpees (choice of four flavors) and coffee drinks lush with real cream and sugar. It was all free, take as much as you wanted, here at Club Fed. The only surge in sight was in cholesterol.

  At the Embassy, the men who held pointlessly long meetings with us sported bow ties and pressed linen pants, while the women wore earrings and perfume. No one was armed, civilians outnumbered uniformed military 20 to 1, there were water fountains in the hallways and marvelous real flush toilets that did not smell of the persons who used them before you. We rode an elevator for the only time in Iraq. We were like children raised by wolves, now among those who should have been our own kind yet weren’t.

  When you saw an American woman on the FOB, she was usually a soldier, dressed in military clothing designed to hide body shape better than any hijab—one size fits no one, never a sense of, say, the lines of a summer dress hinting at the presence of her body. At the Embassy, you saw women in high heels, women in pants so impossibly tight that you died a little inside just to look; an employee imported from one of our embassies in South America wore black jeans and a yellow knit top with a black demi bra that stood out in bas relief. It might have looked crude in some universe, but here it was poetry, Old Testament–style temptation. Her body would leave an impression on history. Religions had been founded on less. The four of us looked like sad, desperate travelers from Mars as we stared.

  A key aspect of our Sharia lifestyle on the FOB was the absence of alcohol, ostensibly banned by the military so as not to offend our Muslim hosts. But the Embassy knew no such restriction and the convenience store sold shampoo, magazines, cleaning supplies, and acres and acres of booze. You pushed through the swinging door to cases of cheap Budweiser, crates of Heineken, and every kind of liquor, liqueur, spirit, wine, and hooch known to man. Four varieties of flavored Grey Goose, Johnnie Walker in every color (including a $150 bottle of Blue), and types of vodka and gin I never knew existed. We stood there in air-conditioned comfort and browsed until the mere sight of it all made us inebriated, and only then did we carry our choices to the cash register, where we paid by credit card. A credit card, here at war! The wonder of it all wore off quickly given humans’ astonishing ability to adjust, so we had to grab at each sensation and catalog it before it became part of our new evolving normal, as ordinary soon as the Embassy’s Pizza Hut, the Starbucks clone Green Bean, the indoor swimming pool, the sign advertising swing dance lessons on Tuesdays, the Wi-Fi in the lounge, the lounge, the bar, the magazines published within the last two months, the hair salon that did highlights, the misters spraying cool water into the air to allow people to sit comfortably outside, the tennis courts, the driving range—all dizzying reminders that we Americans were strangers, useless to the needs of the place.

  At the helipad, waiting for our ride home, we sat around for ninety minutes until it got dark enough to take off. Even with GPS, a lot of helicopter navigation is done by eye as the pilots try to avoid wires and land on small pads at remote installations. The pilots can fly easily in the daylight, and easily in the dark with night-vision gear, but it is tricky in the in-between times.

  Darkness had new meaning here. Unlike in the States, where there were almost always some lights on, in the desert, when the moon was not out, you could not see your own feet beneath you. To better use their night goggles, the pilots blacked out the helicopter and switched off their outside lights. Flying this way was oddly therapeutic, as there was nothing to see, there were no reference points, just the enveloping sound of the helo and the comforting sensation of motion. We flew in a UH-1, the Vietnam-era helicopter everyone knows from the movies, which had a tendency to slide through the air in a series of long, lazy curves. Finally, we saw the lights that marked our home helo pad. The lights were not bright airport beams but small ChemLight dots at the corners of the landing zone, almost invisible to the naked eye but nice and clear with night goggles.

  We had to move by feel once on the ground. Vulnerable to mortar attack, the pilot was in a hurry to get airborne again. I got out of the helo and the crew chief, whose job it was to load and unload us, also jumped out to make sure I walked away properly. Because it was so dark, it was easy to get disoriented, and walking into the spinning tail rotor blades was death. The crew chief had night goggles and usually gave everyone a push from behind to get them moving in the right direction. Somebody eventually flashed a dim light to guide you. Not so easy, but you got used to it. This time the crew chief sent my colleagues off the LZ but held me by the shoulder and shouted that I was to wait for a soldier with a lot of gear to get out and then help him carry the load.

  Suddenly the helicopter engine engaged and the crew chief grabbed me by the jacket sleeve and jerked me backward onto the ground as the helo took off. The tail rotor spun over our heads and the bird disappeared with a roar into the black sky. There was no quiet like the hole left when a helo departed, the noise so powerful suddenly withdrawn. We were flat on the ground, with stuff spread all over by the downward blast of the rotors. Had the crew chief not flung me and himself down, we would have been killed. Dead without knowing it, just like that, dear Mrs. Van Buren, the Department of State regrets to inform you …

  It was a rough way to break free from the Embassy cocoon, where their ignorant eagerness for things as they wanted them to be ran head-on into our thoughts about things as they were. We had not always gotten along, the four of us from the ePRT, arguing over the right thing to do, the best way to spend our money and get through our year. Still, though I was a bit in shock from the helo incident and scared after the fact, I was happy to be back with my teammates in the more familiar world of the FOB. Regrouped, we moved gracelessly to a small patio near our office outlined by a Conex shipping container on one side, a sloppy brick wall standing because it was too lazy to fall on a second, and the remnants of another building on the third. Usually when we came back with our secreted beer from the Embassy, we parceled the cans out in ones and twos, trying to make the stash last longer, like teens in our parents’ basement. A can tonight, maybe two on Friday, and a couple of cases could pass the time for weeks. Tonight something unspoken made us greedy. We chugged cans, we popped the tops of the ever-warmer brew (room temperature was 104 degrees), and slurped the foam like Vikings on a New World bender. One of the benefits of not drinking often was that your body dried out, and so even a little alcohol thrown down that dry hole kicked your ass. A lot of alcohol drunk purposely under these conditions sent four adults into drunkenness marvelously rich and fine. It tasted of a high school June.

  With a lot of dust in the air and only a toenail-clipping-shaped moon out, the darkness was complete as we sat drinking the last beers. A light would have embarrassed us. Seen in a photo, we could have been anywhere; there were no clues for an outsider to decode. We four felt closer to this place, and to one another, than we ever had.

  The long days at the Embassy, where we had been laughed at as Muggles, unworthy, the warm beer, and the blanket of the dark led to stories. With the exception of a long, wandering tale that had something to do with a tree, the Germans, and a lawsuit, we had all heard the drunken stories before. The two divorces, a daughter who did not write, the woman whose name had been forgotten even as the teller spent ten minutes describing how her shoes looked next to his bed—the stories all poured out in equal measure to the booze we poured down our throats. Some were bitter (the sum of our ages totaled over two hundred), most more matter-of-fact. A lifetime of experiences, a thousand autumns, all tied up in those voices.

  We realized, maybe for the first time, that we had more in common than we had differences. Like every dog year equaling seven human ones, time spent together in Iraq fast-forwarded how you felt about the people sharing it with you. Nobody cursed Iraq—on the contrary, though none of us could walk a straight line to save his life, we were sharply aware that it was only because we were in Iraq that we could share what we were sharing. There was little talk of the routines of home that used
to govern our lives: mortgages, Saturday morning chores and errands. That happened only at the beginning of your time, when you could still smell home on your shirt, or at the end of a tour, when you had to will yourself to remember so you could fit back in. The talk instead was about people, friends, lovers, girlfriends, wives, dads—what we did not have here and for whom we all accepted one another as surrogates. Maybe because we were drunk, we recognized we cared about one another, our differences not resolved but perhaps less vital. We hoped it would all end better than it probably would.

  The next morning I awoke with a vicious headache and the realization that someday I would come to miss being with those men as much as I now missed the smell of pillows on my bed at home or kissing my wife when we both tasted of coffee. It was already over 100 degrees, a Thursday.