In the midst of all this wreckage, we were approached by a local women’s group looking for a way to help. What women lacked, they said, was even the most basic medical care. Facilities were sparse, and even those designed as full-spectrum medical centers failed the needs of female patients. Most women in Iraq could not see a regular doctor without the permission of a husband or father or older brother, and permission was often denied for “woman problems.” It was often difficult to ensure an appointment with a female medical professional. Many hospitals and especially smaller clinics posted signs reading “Services for Men Only.” We gave $84,000 to the local women’s group, and the grantee opened the Al-Zafraniyah Women’s Support Center.
The goal of the center was to do a small, good thing: provide a women-only option for medical care right in the community, along with creating a place where women could meet and talk about their lives. The area women were clear that they liked their veils and they liked raising their kids, and they worked hard to make sure their daughters grew up the same way. Few of our efforts acknowledged this, and many times we proceeded into failure believing the Iraqis wanted to be like us, sustained in our vision by locals who had learned that goodies would flow if they said the things we wanted to hear.
At our center, a social worker was on-site five days a week. She was available for one-on-one counseling sessions and she also met with groups of five or six women to discuss shared problems. Her meetings addressed such issues as displacement, lost and damaged property, child rearing, and the once taboo topic of domestic violence. Two lawyers on staff offered free legal advice and presented cases to local councils or courts. A legal assistant helped women collect documentation for claims and provided other administrative support as they sought to secure public assistance. The cases primarily involved obtaining social benefits from the government and the transference of pensions from deceased relatives (typically husbands killed in post-2003 violence) to the client. One woman wanted a divorce (a few years earlier, she had married a relative who had two children by his first wife; shortly after she gave birth to a daughter, the husband returned to his first wife), and another needed to legitimize her four children from an unregistered relationship, the father now dead, so that they could attend school, should schools ever reopen in the area. Another woman, fired from her job because of her political affiliation, hoped for redress from the Ministry of Industry.
A female medical doctor came to our center twice a week to see patients. She also taught first aid and led health workshops. One session covered breast cancer awareness, infections, and hygiene. The doctor began with a question-and-answer session in which some participants spoke openly for perhaps the first time about family members who were victims of breast cancer. At the end of the session, the doctor examined women by request, referred some who could afford it to hospitals, and provided limited amounts of free medicine to others.
In a typical week the doctor saw several instances of emaciation, delayed growth, and hair loss in children—all signs of malnutrition. Most of the clients were from low-income families. And because women were afraid or unable to get medical attention, small things like minor urinary infections often were not treated until they became quite serious. A typical roster:
Age 28, urinary tract infection
Age 40, untreated old tonsillitis
Age 38, kidney stone
Age 19, urinary tract infection
Age 43, arthritis
Age 43, urinary tract infection
Age 38, emaciation
Age 42, hypertension
Age 40, hypertension
Age 28, emaciation
Age 11, emaciation
Age 13, growth retardation
Age 21, delayed puberty and hair loss
Age 60, breathing difficulty
Age 60, old untreated burns affecting movement
Age 18, urinary tract infection
Age 36, lipoma in the thigh
Age 55, old untreated bone fracture
More than a hundred women and girls visited the center in its first month, though concerns about security no doubt kept many away. The project, at least, delivered on its promise, helping women in genuine need. Nevertheless, it was closed down after six months. The initial funding had run out, and US priorities had moved on to flashier economic targets. Women’s centers, the Embassy announced, were not a “prudent investment.”
Dairy Carey
Given the scope of the problems we confronted in Iraq, one person really could not make a big difference, though it was still possible that one person could make a small difference, and that was often worth the effort. With the slow-motion failure of our expensive milk-collection facilities on our minds, we decided that one path toward a solution lay in increasing the amount of milk farmers produced. This would give them an incentive to sell to our centers without having to abandon the existing system of selling just in the neighborhood. As luck would have it, a sister PRT was trying to get rid of someone they labeled a bit of a troublemaker, Dairy Carey. She had made up the nickname herself, having been raised plain old Carey on a dairy farm. Carey was over sixty years old, a grandma back home, and a retired employee of the US Department of Agriculture. She was rumored to not be able to stick to a plan, often balking at what she felt were dumb ideas that fell from the Green Zone and angering her team leader.
We worked with the people we could get, not the people we might have wanted in Iraq, and so, troublemaker or not, Dairy Carey was our newest ePRT team member. Despite the importance of dairy farming to the one million people in our province, we would have to make do with this single employee. She knew she could not directly reach many farmers, so Dairy Carey’s plan was to train other trainers. The classes would teach them how to take better care of cows, and our new experts would then go forth and preach their knowledge. Grateful cows would in turn produce more and better milk, which the farmer could sell. Everyone would do better economically and folks would have no reason to become terrorists. We would select only female farmers as potential trainers, to secure easy funding. Eight years into the war our success now depended on cow happiness.
The problems started right as we walked in the door on the first day of class. The room was full of women, aged seventeen to about fifty-five, and only a few claimed to have ever tended to a cow. There were also lots of men milling about. While it all seemed a bit odd, a quick roll call made things worse when it turned out almost none of the “students” were the female farmers we had been told would be there. It seemed the local sheik had taken it upon himself to substitute the wives and daughters of the men in the room, all of whom were related to the sheik, in an effort to skim off a bit of the $200 salary we were going to pay those who completed the course. An attempt to generate a roster by passing around a sheet of paper demonstrated that five of the twelve students could not read or write.
Dairy Carey waded in, shooing the men out of the room and pairing each illiterate woman with one who could read and write. With the chaos sorted out, our teacher started with what seemed like some pretty commonsense tips: feed the cows better quality food and give them lots of water and you’ll get more milk. Easy for us to say. For thousands of years, the handful of actual women farmers present told Dairy Carey, Iraqis had fed their cows stale bread. It was cheap to buy and bulky enough that the cows did not eat much of it. The farmers could keep feed costs low, and the bakers were happy to have a place to dump old bread. Water was a problem, too. It was hard to find and heavy to carry, and so the cows generally got water only twice a day. The cows adapted by lying around and not producing much milk. But that was all right with the people in the room, as they were not interested in getting more milk. They had no cars or trucks to transport it, no pool of employees outside the family to take on more work, and no refrigeration, and so whatever milk was produced each day was drunk at home or sold next door. Our American goal, to help Iraqis produce more milk, was irrelevant. They had a system in place that predated our idea by approx
imately five thousand years. More was not better.
Our agricultural grandma was undeterred. What about quality? Iraq, sadly, led the world in the transfer of tuberculosis from animals to people via unpasteurized milk. The local technique of throwing feed on the ground for the cow ensured each meal would be contaminated by the usual Jackson Pollock–like splatter of animal urine and manure. Thus Iraq also led the world in cow diseases. Some udder infections were so bad that pus came out of the teat instead of sweet creamy milk.
Ah ha! The crowd sat up. Ready to throw us out the door for proposing to increase their milk yield, they were definitely interested in producing milk that was not deadly. Dairy Carey explained that simple tests for bacteria (similar to home pregnancy kits) could detect bad milk slightly less savagely than feeding it to babies and seeing if they lived. She gave a quick overview of germ theory, segueing smoothly into a brief history of pasteurization, followed by some slides showing basic vet tools for keeping cows healthy. In the span of minutes she had this group in rural Iraq enthralled. The rising noise level brought the men, almost all of whom were farmers, back into the room. There weren’t enough chairs and from the back of the space I lost sight of Dairy Carey, surrounded now by energized men and women.
With the ice broken, the Iraqis all started talking at once about cow stomach issues. Cows eat all sorts of junk off the ground, including bits and pieces of metal that can then tear through their multiple stomachs with fatal results. Lacking the science and tech to perform surgery, the Iraqis instead forced the cow to swallow a strong magnet. The magnet attracted and held the loose metal in one part of the cow’s tummy, so the cow was not shredded internally. Bovine bloat, gargantuan gas, was a huge issue. Without access to medication, the farmers poured soda down the cow’s throat, which made the cows belch in a horrific way but cured the bloat. While missing some steps in modern science like germ theory and pasteurization, the locals had nailed large portions of folk medicine. One exception: some problems were still resolved by tying a written prayer from the imam onto the cow’s tail. Dairy Carey stood on a chair to direct the conversation, acknowledging the folk cures while explaining what the modern vet tools and limited medicines we could provide would do to help make better milk. Quantity was thrown out in favor of quality, a first for our ePRT, maybe for any PRT.
Dairy Carey did indeed make some waves, sometimes even getting a little wet, but in our case she jettisoned a well-written plan that would have failed anyway to give people something they needed, something they could see would help. In Iraq, we were faced regularly with such frustrations and such cynicism that when something, anything, seemed to work, it was a special day.
4-H Club Comes to Iraq
When we tried to grow oaks from acorns overnight, it didn’t work. But our agriculture team’s modest attempt to set up a 4-H club in Mahmudiyah set down tender, delicious roots, Dairy Carey at work again. 4-H is a well-known agricultural club for kids, a kind of Boy Scouts for little farmers. In the United States, 4-H (the four Hs stand for head, heart, hands, and health) teaches farm things, like how to raise animals, and also citizenship, manners, getting along—that kind of stuff. Even though 4-H was new to Iraq, approximately twenty-four children showed up. The children introduced themselves and we had a short discussion about the donated computers (old laptops from our office scheduled for the trash, or more likely the black market by way of the trash). We talked about the election of officers, the upcoming pen pal program with a 4-H club in Montana, and the care of lambs donated to the club by a well-to-do local farmer. The club would teach the kids how to raise the lambs.
“Design a Clover,” as the 4-H symbol is a four-leaf clover, was the last activity. The kids wrote out their goals, one on each leaf. Most of them wanted to learn how to use computers and a few hoped to play better soccer or learn to swim. One veiled twelve-year-old girl was crying, so we pulled her aside to see what the problem was. Her parents had never sent her to school; in Iraq’s male-dominated society only her brother had received an education. She could not read or write and thus, of course, could not write a goal on her paper clover. We helped her laboriously write out “I want to read” and invited her back. We’d try to teach her to read a little.
Nothing breeds incest among PRTs better than success, and buoyed by our photos of the kids, other PRTs started their own 4-H clubs. Our club idea even threatened to dethrone widows from their position atop the PRT project ziggurat. Unfortunately, our success also attracted attention at the Embassy, feeding its desire for some media.
Real good news was hard to find, so when it happened we tended to overdo it. Even worse was when we manufactured the illusion of good news and beat the hell out of that. Look at the story of Operation Little Yasser. A sister PRT singled out an orphan and built a whole phony project around him, something about bringing a greenhouse to an orphanage so the kids could heal by growing squash. The kid, Yasser, was just a prop for the media to write stories about, describing him as a “sweet, fragile child, whose soulful eyes reveal some of the heartbreak he’s endured.” The kid did not get anything out of his exploitation, kids rarely do, but the Embassy sure got some major PR miles. Who knows if the orphanage ever got the greenhouse?
For our 4-H club, the Embassy lined up several local reporters paid by—er, supportive of—the United States for the trip out to our kids. Because the room we used for meetings was singularly unphotogenic, we had to cajole a local sheik with promises of a new well to open his house for us. The guy rose to the challenge, throwing in for the cameras both an impassioned defense of the American invasion and a strong push for a well on his property. The Embassy handlers’ request for shots of kids together with their animals failed when one of the critters, left roped to a pole in the sun too long, passed out. Nonetheless, the kids made some cute remarks on camera, and a Washington Post stringer later picked up the story. I, too, was interviewed, having first been reminded by the Embassy team to give most of the credit to my boss. At least everyone was excited to see themselves on TV that night.
We had once again stumbled blindly onto a winning formula. The Iraqi parents who sat in on our first sessions took control of the club, without our paying them to do it. They organized a visit to a local dentist’s office and all the kids got free cleanings, the first dental care many had ever received. Eager to help further, the dentist scheduled appointments for a few kids with obvious cavities before enrolling his own children in 4-H. Not to be outdone, the farmer who donated the lambs now wanted to donate other animals for the kids to raise. The adults organized a trip to a local civic hall, where another group we had not paid displayed their paintings. Civic leaders who wanted in on the club bought hats for the kids.
After almost a year in Iraq for this ePRT, the 4-H club was still our most successful project, maybe our only genuinely successful one. We spent almost no money on it, empowered no local thugs, did not distort the local economy, turned it over as soon as possible to the local Iraqis, and got out of the way. The kids’ selection of officers for the club was their first experience of grassroots democracy. The powerful sheik’s son went home crying because he lost the race for the presidency to a farmer’s kid, and the sheik did not have anyone’s throat slit in retaliation. The things the club had to look forward to, pen pals in Montana and more animals, were real and could be done without any money from outside. There remained the tiniest possibility here, where in most everything else we had done there was none, that a year later there would still be a 4-H club in Iraq.
The morning after one meeting, an IED detonated at the Mahmudiyah local government building, just across the street from where the 4-H club met. The city council chairperson was slightly injured, along with two others. The explosion happened within eyesight of the building guards, who saw nothing, of course. None of the 4-H kids were around, but we all thought the same thing: twenty-four hours earlier, what would have happened?
This was what tore you apart in Iraq, that every small step forward seemed fo
llowed by some tragedy. If I were religious I would have asked why God fucked with these people, and if I was me I would try to believe the sum of karma, the weight of good on one side and bad on the other, would someday, somehow balance, even though I could not for the life of me imagine what that process would be. Much as we tried to stick a finger in the dike to block the cynicism that otherwise washed over us, we ended up most nights drinking hard, cursing the darkness.
Checkpoints
A SIGACT is milspeak for a “significant action.” Some things were always significant, such as the death of a soldier, while other things, like destruction of a campaign poster, might be significant in the run-up to an election and not important at all a month later. The bases kept logs of SIGACTs and, following whatever criteria their boss set, soldiers would add things to the log as required. Often the log was updated right from the field via a satellite communications system called Blue Force Tracker. Given the combination of a lame on-screen keyboard and a Vehicle Commander typing in a moving truck, these SIGACT entries were often terse, full of acronyms, quickly classified under a default setting, and then forgotten. The locations were usually expressed in the form of a grid, a series of numbers that referred to classified maps. The more numbers, the more specific the location (8734961230 was a place your friend died). You needed an interpreter to read a SIGACT entry.
AT 2036, (_____) WAS ATTACKED BY IDF IVO BALAD. RADAR ACQUIRED THE POO VIC (_____) CONDUCTED CF WITH 6×155MM HE. NO INJ/DAMAGE.
Translation: At 8:36 at night, location (____) was hit by indirect fire from the vicinity of Balad, a nearby town. Our radar located the point of origin in the vicinity of (____). We fired back with six shots of 155mm high-explosive artillery. There were no injuries or damage on our side.
We Meant Well Page 18