At the end of my tour, I still had forty-six calendars made by Iraqi kids in a dusty pile in my office. The media blitz over for that project, no one wanted them. We left the calendars behind when we closed the office and moved on.
Exhaling: Leaving Iraq
“Tell me how this ends,” General David Petraeus famously asked a reporter during the early days of the Iraqi invasion. I know, Dave—it ends when we leave.
We left via an unfamiliar road out of Falcon, varying our route to avoid the increasing number of IEDs set at the few choke points near the FOB’s exits. Nobody wanted to be blown up ever, but being hit on your way home wasn’t allowed to happen, except in bad war movies. This was a bad movie for sure, but not that ending this time. The area we transited outside the FOB was still a mess, a place where we dumped our garbage and sewage amid displaced Iraqis who lived off the picked-through refuse. Their homes were made of our discarded junk. The sewage puddles stood out as the only moisture, orange if chemical, gray-green if sewage, all eye-watering in the heat. Yet despite the filth, the kids still waved at our trucks, their bright clothing standing out from the monotone world around them, and the Army drivers would always wave back. The Iraqi adults never looked up. There was no value in their waving, for even gestures were saved for the work of picking a life out of whatever the Americans chose to leave for them.
Surprises lurked even in the familiar wasteland, and the driver marked my trip home by saying, “Sir, are those fucking horses?” We stopped for a moment, well against the regs, to stare at two horses walking slowly between puddles of shit. Two other horses lay in the muck, maybe cooling off as the temperature nudged past 100 degrees on this last morning in Iraq. We had seen many things in our time, but horses wandering this landscape were a first for us all. The gunner, on top in the turret, called for the ’terp to yell out to the old guy watching us. We learned that the swamp was once a horseracing track, built by Saddam and bombed away in all but the old guy’s memory during the liberation in 2003. The horses had survived and now lived wild in the area, freedom at last brought by the Americans. The old guy told us there used to be more horses around, but what with urgent hunger in the worst of the postwar years, well, horses were what they had. It was a bad thing, the guy said, but the times were bad and nobody was happy about what bad times pushed you to do. We had stopped for too long, not safe, and the Truck Commander ordered us to drive on. The old man did not wave as we drove off.
The US had built Baghdad Airport back in the 1960s through some long-forgotten foreign-aid project that predated even Saddam. Now it was ours again; there was just too much irony around. The airport was part of a massive complex called Victory Base, bigger in land mass and in population than my hometown. Victory was a collection of subbases so numerous that I doubt anyone even knew the count anymore. The routing signs along the way offered some clue to where you were, telling you to turn left for the DynCorp compound, next right for retail gas, or directing you to “Ali’s Hollywood,” an Iraqi-run shop that sold illegal DVDs, porn if you asked the right way, and the iPod batteries that kept the war’s soundtrack running. You saw a British flag on one compound, an Australian flag on another, likely small Special Forces enclaves, and lots of cryptically marked minifortresses the soldiers believed were encampments for our own Delta and SEALs—the whole menu of operators who kept the game alive.
Victory Base was so big that it had swallowed up what used to be islands in the archipelago of Saddam’s palaces, dotted around the large lake that formed the center of the base. There were fish in the lake, big carp, and guys used to make poles and throw hooks in, baited with American cheese taken from lunch. Because of a rumor that Saddam used the lake as a dumping ground for his enemies’ bodies, nobody actually ate the fish, fearing they had grown fat on Iraqi flesh. The Army expropriated all the palaces as offices for big shots, and even from the exteriors you could tell the interiors made Vegas look like Muji. The soldiers who drove me were eager tour guides, each with a more fantastic story to tell. Most of Saddam’s palaces, they said as we drove, were part of an endless empire of whorehouses. One soldier insisted that Saddam was a pedophile and that a building we passed once held his harem of little boys. Another said no, that palace had been full of the female virgins Saddam enjoyed and had a tiger cage where those unwilling to give up their maidenhead were eaten alive (so the fish dined only on nonvirgins). Whether a tribute to US anti-Saddam propaganda or the imaginations of our troops, the stories made the long slog of a drive pass quickly, replacing the images of sad wild horses.
Every airport is purgatory, but BIAP—Baghdad International Airport—was one of the oddest places in-country. Most everywhere else folks were segregated, new guys from old guys, civilians from the Joes, that kind of thing. But BIAP was where all the wires crossed and you saw the inside of the war exposed. Everyone had to pass through the same set of doors to board something—a helo, a medevac, a C-130—to take them deeper into or farther from their war. You could tell by what people were wearing, new or old, and what they were carrying, a lot or almost nothing, who was coming in and who was already gone, gone, gone. A year ago I had passed through this place but I was damned if I could remember ever being here.
I was dropped off at the big central square where everyone waited outside the few buildings that constituted the terminal. I joined the troops already assembled in rows of chairs. They were watching soccer on a big TV, some unknown country versus another unknown country in a game they barely understood. But it was movement and that was close enough to entertainment, and when the team in green scored a goal the guys made themselves laugh by chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” The troops drank Rip Its and ate packaged donuts, looking deep into their twenties, trying to make BIAP feel like home, absent the warm beer and the high school girls, the fast food and the cars. So close to the exit, it was OK to allow yourself to think of those things again.
It was hot, really hot, and the heat accumulated around us one last time the same way snow would soon pile up back home. A lot of soldiers lay flat on the ground where they could find shade, heads propped on rucks, arms akimbo as their dreams got a head start on the flights to come. They were content if not comfortable, sprawled out on the ground with eyes closed and helmets off, but still it was a hard image to process when you’d seen the same thing bloody on roadsides. I shook my head; this was a place and time to start to let go, not to look back.
Waiting in line, we all agreed that the engineer who provided only four johns for the entire waiting area deserved to die upside down in one of them. Inside, at one of the basins, a soldier stood stripped to the waist, shaving. His face was well lathered and he was slowly moving the blue plastic razor over his chin and neck. His back was covered with angry scars, old scars, maybe from Iraq, maybe from a gang back home, but he had a stay-the-fuck-away-from-me aura and everyone gave him his distance. He made no eye contact, either with us or with himself in the mirror. Nobody broke the zone around him even though there were not enough sinks, and goddamn, did you want to wash your hands in this place.
Just before you entered the terminal from the waiting area there was a large cardboard box with a sign that asked you to donate unneeded toiletries for distribution to needy Iraqis. The box was empty and more than one guy looked at the sign and said “fuck that” as he walked past. The USO was giving away toiletries just nearby, single packs of tampons, minirolls of toilet paper, and three-ounce sticks of deodorant, so this was as absurd as anything else we’d seen on our tour.
We were all here, soldiers of every type, contractors, Southeast Asians waiting to be shipped to some distant FOB to wash dishes for us. The Asians looked scared, maybe in part because they were kitted with the oldest, cheapest body armor and helmets that seemed designed to not fit properly. We saw them as one group but the Sri Lankans couldn’t talk to the Bangladeshis and only the Filipinos could speak any English anyway. I knew these people now: the contractors with Harley-Davidson T-shirts, blue jeans, and big belt buc
kles, every man packing a set of keys like they were the superintendents of the war; the Embassy people, always easy to spot, in insanely out-of-place getups like white pants and Panama hats or in Banana Republic safari gear with big black GPS/calendar/videocam/chai-latte-making watches, $120 sunglasses, and freakish headgear like they were off to hunt elephant with Teddy Roosevelt. One of the Embassy guys had an American Tourister travel bag on his lap. American Tourister? I had flashes of the same man boarding a Pan Am flight back when you had to climb up those stairs on the outside of the plane, the stewardesses all wore miniskirts, and everybody drank gin and tonics. He was in the wrong war by about forty years.
Inside the terminal was another step toward home, cool and dark. Though most everyone was armed, we passed our bags through an X-ray anyway, manned in this case by a Ugandan contract security guard who could not be bothered even to look up at the monitor. He had mastered that Third World art of looking at nothing—safer that way, less likely to offend. We walked through the metal detector, every weapon and big Texas belt buckle making the buzzer scream. We kept our shoes on, unlike in any US airport, because everyone wore lace-up boots and it would have taken a hundred years to get them all on and off, and nobody was going to wait that long. In a rewind of my trip in, we got counted and recounted, our names on one clipboard, the last four digits of our social security number on another, and we recited our blood types for a long list of people who needed to record the information on yet more clipboards. No one complained about paying this price to move closer to the exit. The incomers didn’t complain, because this was all new, and the outgoers knew complaining meant nothing but waiting another sentence to have to do it anyway. From time to time someone would appear and scream, “Chrome 18” or “Chrome 24,” “chrome” being the code word for each flight. They could have said “Flight 18” or “18,” but these people could have been nicer in many ways but preferred not to be. They never asked for respect, knowing none had been earned.
A lifetime later someone shouted “Chrome 19” and my leg twitched in memory that that was mine. “Chrome 19,” not good-bye, or thanks, or anything else would be the last thing anyone would say to me in Iraq. We walked into the belly of a C-130, a cargo plane fitted with web seats. I was sandwiched between two equally sweaty people directly across from a tiny round window. Unlike everyone else aboard, who had only the noises of the engines and the vibrations below them to judge when the plane was moving, I could see out the window.
Airborne, the pilot dipped his right wing to turn and I saw the ground, Iraq, for the last time. I would be lying if I said I could see below me the wastelands I now knew were home to wild horses. I wanted to think I could make eye contact with one of the horses. She might look up and notice the plane overhead, the sun midway down the horizon, the smoke rising to the left where something had again gone terribly wrong in this sad place. She might have had in her thoughts the same vision that I held at that moment, colors that seemed to generate light, an image that, if the beast could think, she would have held in her mind forever. The horse had been there before I arrived, and I hoped she would go on a long, long time after I had left.
Notes
1. http://iraq-prt.usembassy.gov/20100804baghdad3.html.
2. Office of the White House Press Secretary, “Fact Sheet: Expanded Provincial Reconstruction Teams Speed the Transition to Self-Reliance,” July 13, 2007.
3. http://iraq-prt.usembassy.gov/about-us.html.
4. http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/18/chris_hill_s_farewell_tour.
5. http://michellemalkin.com/2007/11/07/a-diplomat-scolds-state-department-weenies/.
6. http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/140420.pdf.
7. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/05/iraq_war_ledger.html.
8. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100728/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iraq.
9. United States Government Accountability Office, Iraqi-U.S. Cost-Sharing: Iraq Has a Cumulative Budget Surplus, Offering the Potential for Further Cost-Sharing, September 2010.
10. MP 6743. MP and MG numbers refer to Department of State QRF projects.
11. TEC 103–6428.
12. Transparency International, Corruption Perceptions Index 2010, October 26, 2010.
13. Michael Schwartz, War without End: The Iraq War in Context, Haymarket Books, 2008.
14. Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, Estimated Breakdown of Funding Flows for Iraq’s Reconstruction: How Are the Funds Being Spent? Center for Strategic and International Studies: Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project, December 2004, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/events/041201_iraq_funds.pdf.
15. Curt Tarnoff, Iraq Reconstruction Assistance, Congressional Research Service, March 12, 2009.
16. Brookings Institution, Iraq Index: Tracking Variables of Reconstruction and Security in Post-Saddam Iraq, http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/Iraq/index20060530.pdf.
17. Rebuilding Iraq: Stabilization, Reconstruction, and Financing Challenges, GAO Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, GAO-06-428T, February 8, 2006, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/gao/d06428t.pdf.
18. SIGIR, Report to Congress, April 30, 2007, http://www.sigir.mil.
19. SIGIR, Report to Congress, July 30, 2008, http://www.sigir.mil.
20. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-reconstruction-20100829,0,1409733,full.story.
21. Curt Tarnoff, Iraq Reconstruction Assistance, Congressional Research Service, March 12, 2009.
22. http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2010/08/continued-problems-integrating-sons-of.html.
23. http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/04/27/iraq-detainees-describe-torture-secret-jail.
24. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-detainee-abuse-torture-saddam.
25. http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69339.
26. http://www.usf-iraq.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=15315&Itemid=128.
27. http://article.nationalreview.com/349857/a-neighborhood-reborn/pete-hegseth.
28. http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/310127.aspx.
29. http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/05/21/39590-local-art-show-paints-bright-picture-for-iraqs-future/.
30. http://aidwatchers.com/2010/03/how-is-the-aid-industry-like-a-piano-recital/.
31. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129119290.
32. http://blogs.mcclatchydc.com/iraq/2010/04/great-news-for-softball-and-baseball-iraqi-national-teams.html.
33. http://www.tac.usace.army.mil/deploymentcenter/tac_docs/GO-1B%20Policy.pdf.
34. http://katieandchadwade.blogspot.com/.
35. MG 104–6465.
36. MP 133–7490.
37. MP 124–7279.
38. MG 112–6700.
39. MP 54–3936.
40. MP 38–2914.
41. MP 31–2458.
42. http://www.usf-iraq.com/?option=com_content&task=view&id=28175&Itemid=128; http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=195401703528.
43. http://www.sigir.mil/files/audits/11-009.pdf#view=fit.
44. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-reconstruction-20100829,0,1409733,full.story.
45. http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/archive/2007/03/01.
46. http://www.hsus.org/animals_in_research/animals_in_research_news/military_uses_pigs.html.
47. http://www.congress.org/news/2011/01/24/more_troops_lost_to_suicide.
48. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38267520.
49. http://www.brookings.edu/saban/iraq-index.aspx.
50. Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, Metropolitan Books, 2010, p. 86.
51. http://www.usip.org/files/file/resources/collections/histories/iraq_prt/45.pdf, p. 2.
52. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/04/smoke-and-mirrors/5849/.
53. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-reconstruction-20100829,0,1409733,full.story.
54. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/
navy/art5-w98.htm.
55. http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/06/.
56. http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf.
57. http://en.aswataliraq.info/?p=132514.
58. http://www.niqash.org/content.php?contentTypeID=28&id=2660&lang=0.
59. http://www.sigir.mil/files/quarterlyreports/April2010/Report_-_April_2010.pdf#view=fit.
60. http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/fullmaps_sa.nsf/luFullMap/41BA4475787A02B1852576470058C3FD/$File/map.pdf?.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks and more to my readers Lisa Ehrle, Mari Nakamura, Abby and Sarah Van Buren. Thanks also to Laurie Russo for the initial proofreading, Torie Partridge for the author photo, and to Raeka Safai for good counsel with a sense of humor.
My heartfelt gratitude to all the wonderful people at Metropolitan Books and the American Empire Project who worked to bring this story to daylight. In particular I am grateful to Sara Bershtel, Riva Hocherman, Steve Fraser, Tom Engelhardt, Jason Ng, and Roslyn Schloss.
Great thanks go to the men and women of the Third Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, the First Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, and especially the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division for their patience, time, and willingness to educate me during my year in Iraq. I came home safe because of your dedication and skill. Respect to my long-suffering Army S-9 partners Major Jason Conner, Major Geno Hwangbo, Captain Tom Eddy, and Mobile Max Ranger Minton, all good men who demonstrated professionalism while swimming upstream.
My thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Mike Davies and Lieutenant Colonel Mike Laabs, with whom I shared my fiftieth birthday, sipping whiskey from paper cups in the desert.
A shout-out to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manazares, who helped inspire me.
We Meant Well Page 21