Or at least the sandy waves lapping at the highway seemed tranquil, until one of the many sedans on the highway decided to exit. We watched a BMW speed through the exit and hit the desert without ever slowing down. Driving at sixty miles per hour, the driver slammed on his brakes when he arrived at a small trailer called home, which was lit by fluorescent lights. What appeared to be regular overhead office lighting stood vertically along fences and trailer frames. Across the desert landscape, the blinking stars were matched in number and intensity by this fluorescent lighting that marked the campgrounds of the Kuwaiti families who make their living herding camels and surround themselves with these barriers of light to mark their territory.
From a glimpse, it was abundantly clear to me that a number of Kuwaitis still dwelled outside the modern high-rise buildings of Kuwait City, but the Bedouin life is no longer as T. E. Lawrence described it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Modern Bedouins may still trade in camels, but they live in Airstream trailers and drive modern sedans. Nonetheless, some aspects of their ancient identity had not changed. Every so often, a car would drive by close enough for me to observe the driver’s face. In these moments, I could catch an unforgettable look that was neither menacing nor disappointed. It was a general look of repugnance toward Americans that permeated Kuwaiti life. I had also seen this expression on the faces of the guards who stood by and watched us enter the air-conditioned holding area, while they stood outside. Our presence and influence in their tiny country offended their sense of honor, not only because of the continued use of their country as a staging area to attack Iraq, but also because of the disruptive influence that this use entails. Although Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1991, a sense of Arab solidarity persisted. Our presence created a constant hum of political backlash and focused regional animosity on the Kuwaitis who harbored us. I empathized with the Kuwaitis, whose most practical complaint was that the invasion was disrupting their lives. After all, I had just traded the sandy shores of a Caribbean island for the dusty desert of a Middle East commercial hub. Sunglasses notwithstanding, this was not how I thought I would enjoy my twenty-seventh birthday. The contrast of change and tradition is the norm here, and all of Kuwait seemed a little confused as to how to deal with it, myself included.
Miles later, a bright spot of light began to glow in the distance. With the austerity of a rising sun, the light on the horizon slowly grew and came into sharper focus. After a few minutes, the individual floodlights become visible, lining the perimeter of the staging area in a severe flood of halogen and belligerence. The lights shone sternly onto rows of barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, each one sandbagged and foreboding. Abruptly, the smooth sound of the tires on concrete gave way to a jarring transition to sand and gravel as the buses wheeled off the road and toward our staging area. Gliding to a stop in the sand parking lot, they came to rest in the center of Camp New York. Splayed out in a wheel, its headquarters and dining facility formed the hub, and the tents, each of which housed one hundred soldiers, curved around a circular perimeter.
The temperature change was stark during the few hours since we had touched down—a fifty-degree drop. We reached for our jackets. Wearily, we grabbed our hundred-pound duffel bags and began to slog through the sand toward a distant row of tents.
The massive tents presented an optical illusion to tired eyes and strained limbs. Their size made them seem relatively close, but in reality they were a hard ten-minute walk from our buses. The intentionally dispersed pattern served as an implicit reminder that somewhere in the other side of the night, nefarious forces schemed for our demise, and the military hedged the effects of a direct attack through dispersion. Of course, the trailers housing Subway and Burger King restaurants made it hard to believe the army was at war. The juxtaposition of soldiers dressed in battle dress uniforms they had just received, carrying bags of equipment from the Vietnam War era past a row of trailers of American fast-food vendors, more closely brought to mind a carnival than a combat zone. As I stepped into the tent and looked at the cots laid out from one end to the other, the smell of canvas and army surplus items took me right back to my days as an Eagle Scout camping in the hills of Central Texas.
Exhausted soldiers flung their gear onto the cots. Soon there would be work for everyone, but now there were a few precious moments to settle in. I eagerly reached for my sleeping bag and my books: Once a Warrior King, the Vietnam War memoir of army lieutenant David Donovan; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and an army-issued Arabic phrase book. When I packed the books, I had no idea that they would represent the most applicable tools for the challenge that lay ahead of me.
I stretched my sleeping bag across the length of my cot and placed the books neatly under the zipped hood. Nearby, the soldiers were piecing together a makeshift command center to track the arrival and transport of our equipment from the port of Kuwait. For twelve hours a day during the next few weeks, our equipment trickled in, concluding its three-week sea voyage aboard the massive container ships onto which it had been loaded. Ironically, it was watching these same ships leave Beaumont during the first Gulf War that had first gotten me excited about joining the army. Now, once again the ships were connecting my home state to the Middle East, but this time I was on the receiving end, not a spectator on the send-off.
Nightly update meetings took place in the corner of our tent. We were given status reports about equipment and scheduling routines for soldiers undergoing intensive urban-warfare training. As an armor unit, we were not trained for urban combat, but these weeks in Kuwait were filled with days of training to convert our specializations. Over and over, we practiced storming mock-ups of Iraqi houses and attended countless meetings on the Iraqi threat. Interestingly, these briefings never mentioned improvised explosive devices. Instead, they focused on hypothetical Saddam loyalist holdouts. It would turn out that the Saddam loyalists formed the most insignificant and simple portion of the threats that we faced. At any rate, we moved through the training sequences and became more and more specialized in our roles by the day.
As I mentioned earlier, the equipment that we brought from the United States was largely Vietnam vintage. Now, in large warehouses, retailers from Nike to Camelback offered mountains of new equipment to us. For each duffle bag we carried into Kuwait, we added at least two more that were full of these modern goods. Their quality was infinitely better than that of our old gear, and within minutes of issue soldiers could be seen donning North Face parkas and REI gloves. The contractors were pleased to see the soldiers embrace their products, because it no doubt secured them additional contracts with the U.S. government.
Characteristically, the army made this whole process unnecessarily bothersome. Interspersed within the practical training sessions and equipment issues, there were hours of surreal debate over standardization of the new equipment. Even as it prepared for a real combat mission, the army obsessed over its image. A hot-button issue was the logos of the corporate companies sewn onto the army gear. The most memorable was that of Camelback, the hydration system company. The army decreed that all soldiers would use a black marker to cross out any name that could be read. The blackout attempted to obscure the fact that the army had been ill-equipped to fight this war and had recovered its position only with the help of last-minute contracting, which didn’t allow for the creation of standard army versions. Yet filling army shortfalls with contracting became a theme of the deployment, from the commercial airplanes that dropped us off to the rented tour buses and now the bounty of new gear. Soldiers were in dining facilities provided by KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root, at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton) when they weren’t queuing at Subway or Burger King. The MCI phone trailer was by far the most popular attraction.
While the soldiers stood in lines waiting for their ten-minute calls home, the officers made phone calls of their own to Baghdad via a secure phone to receive the nightly update. The leadership huddled over the secure radio and listened to the briefing from the unit we were to replace in Baghdad. Inte
rmittent squabbles, punctuated with code names and places that lacked context, bubbled over the airwaves. At the conclusion of each session, my commander would address his thoughts and establish priorities.
Frequently, these meetings ended up in strategy sessions about our first steps once we arrived in Baghdad. Most questions, such as where to draw the boundaries of our areas of responsibility or how to name the neighborhoods, could be answered by maps or satellite imagery. Little by little, plans for governance and economic development entered our discussions. These discussions and briefings took place over a map of southern Baghdad that was divided neatly into color-coded neighborhoods. These divisions formed the building blocks of our plan and would help shape the criteria against which we would measure success. The neighborhood people, with their religious affiliations and their willingness to trust in a new system, would also hold the key to my role as governance officer.
Over the weeks, I had learned that I was to take charge of supervising ten neighborhood councils, which had been recently formed to represent the seeds of a democratic government. They were designed to be inclusive and consisted of three types of Iraqi leaders: sheiks, imams, and secular politicians. The sheiks, who were the traditional leaders of the tribes, represented a cultural legacy of authority. They were endowed with absolute power inside the tribal system. Arbitrating disputes, blessing marriages, and employing members of their tribe were all part of their duties. The imams were the religious leaders. Under Saddam, their influence had been checked by an oppressive state, but they had found a new voice since the invasion. Mosques had sprung up on every corner, and legions of new faithful who were free to express themselves and to seek a source of hope flocked to the newly opened gates. Finally, the secular politicians mostly represented business interests. They were self-admitted agents of change, who saw the chance to put Iraq on the road to modernity and to prosper along the way. Collectively, they accounted for all of the forms of power that were available to rebuild the country: traditional, religious, and secular progressive.
Sitting in a tent in Kuwait and writing down Arabic words and phrases phonetically as they crackled from the radio, I could not attach any context or relevance to them. To say that I was woefully unprepared would be an understatement. I spoke no Arabic, did not know any of the characteristics of Islam, and had few references for my role. The chain of command did not seem overly focused on local governance, because the Iraqis had welcomed us as liberators and the ongoing fighting was considered a mere “mopping-up operation.”
Still, being a governance officer seemed like an organizational challenge and one that demanded at least a modicum of cultural awareness. If I was to be successful in my role, I would have to determine the structure of Iraqi society, find the leaders who wielded influence, and co-opt them before their will had time to harden against us and their patience for the American system faltered. The invasion had been stunningly swift, yet there were already fledgling groups organizing against the occupation.
As the lights in the tent were turned off and my fellow soldiers drifted into sleep, I switched on a reading lamp and rode the desert with Lawrence and walked the swamps of Vietnam with Donovan, seeking to put a form to this shapeless problem before me. The literature on waging insurgency was rich. Che Guevara, for one, provided instruction on repelling imperial forces, as did the websites that linked disgruntled Iraqis to the lessons learned by the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Yet there was precious little information on how to structure a successful outcome from the perspective of the occupiers. Nonetheless, I read and reread my books, coupled with the cartoonish Iraqi phrase books, determined to do my part to bring change and prosperity to Iraq. After all, I thought that was what the Iraqis wanted.
Each day I practiced for my new role. I imagined conversations and thought about the principles of local governance. The Arabic phrase guide became an extension of my hand, and I became confident in my ability to at least communicate on a rudimentary level. Unfortunately, I lacked a broader understanding of the region. One evening, as if to underscore how little I knew of the Middle East, I attempted to practice a few Arabic phrases with some of the people working in the kitchen. I had never been exposed to the idea of employing “third-country nationals,” and I assumed that the people working in our camp were Kuwaiti. In all of my previous deployments to Latin America, the local staff was exactly as the name implies—local. To my surprise, my Arabic phrases were met with quizzical looks. Sensing that the problem must have been with my pronunciation, I tried several more times with no success. I returned to my book, more confused than I had been, and wondered what I was missing. I mentioned my frustration to one of the civilian logistics employees nearby, who laughed. The people working in the camp were not Kuwaiti—they were not even Arabs. They were Sri Lankan, for the most part, and had been brought in to work by American defense contractors. I was supposed to assume a role dealing with subtle differences in the agendas of various Iraqi tribes and sects, and I could not even distinguish between Arabs and Sri Lankans!
My inexperience left me feeling as vulnerable and embarrassed as a kid on the first day in a new school, yet things quickly turned worse. First, the sky darkened from the north and the wind began to pick up, blowing debris and sand playfully around the campsite. People scurried to their tents. At first I thought maybe a rainstorm was brewing, but it was much more ominous. It was the dreaded shamed—the northwesterly wind frequently accompanied by blinding, suffocating sandstorms that bury roads and drive grinding bits of sand into the most airtight quarters. The clouds moved slowly, languidly stretching their arms around the horizons. Black tendrils flicked forth to grab the sprawling dunes. Rolling closer, ever unsated, the sandstorm consumed the daylight. Tents, buildings, and trailers vanished beneath the ominous shadow.
I cowered inside the tent for close to an hour, awed by the shamal as it slowly reshaped the desert floor. While the storm beat outside, I turned the pages of a book on Iraqi history. I could not help but feel a sense of futility. If the people of this country routinely weather such fearsome, awe-inspiring events, certainly they would have developed a stalwart character that would resist an American occupation. Between the lines in every chapter of Iraqi history lay the open secret that foreign armies never occupied Baghdad for long. The people of Iraq, like the shamal, would sweep aside the influences that did not belong and reshape the territory to their own design.
In the following days, convoys began to move toward Baghdad, as the units that had arrived with us started to receive their orders. The movement happened in two parts. The first group, consisting of a group of select individuals called the “torch party,” would leave via an air force plane. The second group would travel via convoy and arrive three days later. Owing to the peculiar nature of my job, I was with the torch party. My boss thought it would be a good idea for me to maximize my time with the person I was replacing.
I had grown tired of the monotonous routine in the desert, but the influx of seasoned soldiers and the reality that this was to be more than a summer camp immediately combined to amplify my growing sense of hesitancy. Nonetheless, I dozed off and on as we drove to the airbase. Our flight was not until the late afternoon, but army planning requires you to be there six to eight hours early—the culture of “hurry up and wait” that is so famous in army humor.
After sitting around all day under a shaded awning, weighed down like turtles by our gear, we were motioned onto a waiting aircraft. The C-130, a propeller-driven cargo plane, held approximately a hundred soldiers, and we struggled to cram together tight enough to fit. Soldier after soldier piled into its yawning mouth as the air grew thick with worry and determination. I listened intently to the flight chief give his instructions, as the sweltering heat joined with the vibration of the aircraft to sedate us. As more and more heads began to nod, the flight chief concluded his speech with a stern warning.
“Check your buddy,” he said. “As we fly low, it is possible for stray bullets to enter the
plane and kill soldiers. You would never even know it and may think that they are just sleeping. So make sure they are asleep, not dead.”
Great, I thought. Now I did not know whether to sit on my Kevlar vest or wear it. But I couldn’t stand up to take it off, and its tight fit made it impossible for me to wiggle it down so I could sit on it. My heart lurched, and I gulped with each swoop and turn of the plane. The forty-five-minute journey, a roller-coaster ride of evasive maneuvers, buckled my resolve and started my insides moving in an uneasy churn. Like a bad paper airplane, we suddenly fell from the sky, plummeted, swung left, and hit the ground hard. A textbook “hot” landing.
Three
LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS
MUFFLED EXPLOSIONS THUMPED in the night. They differed fundamentally from the controlled pops and booms I was accustomed to hearing during our training. These were real, and they sounded more dangerous.
Seconds slowed to a crawl, dragging each echoing explosion through the warm, jet fuel—soaked air of the Baghdad airport. Fear and panic paralyzed my limbs with indecision. My vision blurred in the blinding whir of the chaos. My ears struggled to process the distorted sounds of fading explosions, yelling voices, thumping helicopters, and soldiers clambering for cover. I froze half-crouched like an awkwardly confused statue behind a pile of wooden crates draped in sand-colored camouflage netting.
After a few moments that seemed like hours, I turned my head slowly to the left to see a row of soldiers fresh from the airplane clinging to the webbing that wrapped the cargo piled outside. It was clear from their white knuckles and pale faces that panic had also immobilized them. We more closely resembled the end of a playground game of “freeze” than a group of professional soldiers reacting to enemy fire.
As the last sounds of sporadic explosions bounced into the night, I slowly stood up, unclenched my fists, and looked around sheepishly. My last shred of bravado had evaporated into the steamy night air, and I attempted to regain my composure and dignity as best I could. Compulsory jokes and chuckles rippled from our group. We had just exposed ourselves as the novice fighters we truly were. The comments were addressed to no one in particular, and each soldier studiously avoided eye contact while seeking to affirm his own courage under fire. Dusting myself off, I grabbed my backpack and my rifle and casually re-slung each over my shoulder with a false nonchalance. So far, I was even more unprepared than I’d thought I would be.
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