From her mounted perch, she waved to some kids. As the weeks turned into months, the Iraqis’ mood still seemed welcoming, but when they approached Heather, it was usually to complain about the poor security, the lack of electricity, and the looting. At least the kids still waved, Heather thought. Children were always a bellwether of the public mood.
When they arrived, they found several families that had moved into the first building that needed clearing, the former headquarters of the Mukhabarat. After twenty minutes of cajoling and mild threatening, the old women and dirt-smudged children collected their few saucers and rags, and shuffled out of the house and down the street.
Heather sighed. “They are probably moving into the next empty building that we’ll be clearing tomorrow,” she said.
“No, I feel good about this mission,” Lieutenant Essiet said, taking a swig from her water bottle. Her face glistened with sweat. She had been working to get homeless families into refugee-style camps in the city. “We are making a difference, slowly.”
Heather looked away. A month earlier she might have gregariously agreed with Lieutenant Essiet, but lately she was having her doubts about whether they were making any kind of difference. Programs were implemented ad hoc, overseen by young soldiers with no direct experience, and not coordinated with any Iraqi ministry or local tribal leaders; they often didn’t work out as planned. So she and her unit had cleared the building for the day—so what? Heather saw herself returning to base that afternoon and typing up her daily memo. “We cleared the building for the advisory councils,” she would write. “But we don’t know where the squatters went, and they’ll probably return if we leave it empty for a couple days.”
No one was reading her meticulously thought-out memos, she complained to Lieutenant Essiet, who disagreed. The friends had driven past a looted bank earlier in the week, and had sent a memo requesting that electricity be restored to it. The lights were now back on.
“See,” Essiet said. “Someone read our memo.”
Heather shook her head. “No, it’s a coincidence. No one is listening to us.” Heather had heard other soldiers asking the same question: Where was the wave of expertise that was supposed to arrive on the heels of the soldiers and begin reconstructing the country? Once, recently, she had showed up at the Baghdad Museum to follow up on an assessment she had sent in weeks earlier, only to find another Civil Affairs unit doing its own assessment! Weren’t any of the commanders talking to one another? she wondered. And was anyone in the military coordinating with the civilian side in the palace?
BACK IN THE convoy, they checked their grids, their maps, and the GPS and mapped out the next mission. Heather stared out at the city. Baghdad felt ugly to her; like one big, low-class suburb of totalitarian architecture with an occasional tasteless monument or statue decorating a desolate traffic circle or public square. Instead of the paired, spiraling minarets attached to an open vaulted hall that she had so admired in Egypt, Baghdad’s minarets were bleakly phallic towers set next to a dome covered in tacky cheap tiles. She was disappointed even by the famed Tigris River, as Saddam had constructed artificial banks of ugly brick, making it look more like a canal than a body of water considered the source of life for the earliest of human civilizations.
Not surprisingly, her convoy hit a traffic jam on the approach to a bridge over a highway. The bridge had been bombed, and there were only two lanes open for cars. They were blocked by a nasty line of honking vehicles, facing each other.
It was a classic “prisoner’s dilemma,” which Heather had studied in her game theory classes at Bryn Mawr. If both sides of the bridge were to cooperate, everyone would get what they wanted, to get across. However, if each side assumed the other wouldn’t cooperate, they would both rush forward to be the first to get across, jamming the one lane. Both sides would lose.
“Oh, Lord,” Essiet said, staring at the mess. The soldiers turned to one another, and the same question was on everyone’s mind: Do we get involved? As they constantly told the Iraqis and themselves, traffic was not the military’s problem. Whether or not to intervene was a constant question.
Just the other week, their unit had driven past a dead man on the side of the road. Heather had opened her mouth to suggest they stop, but another soldier said, “Lieutenant Coyne, you stop, you own it.” Taking care of a dead body could suck up the day; they’d have to fill out reports and wait around at the morgue. Heather had heard that another unit had kept a dead body in the back of the Humvee for three days because they picked it up and didn’t know what to do with it.
Heather’s commander made the call to clear the bridge. They needed to cross, and if it could be done quickly, they’d gain some points from the locals for helping. They pulled over and drew a plan in the dust of the Humvee’s hood. Heather and two others were told to cross on foot to the other side of the bridge with radios and clear the trucks so cars could pass. “Let’s do it!” someone shouted. A few minutes later, a soldier radioed over to them. “Traffic’s cleared, exit’s ready. Send five cars over,” he said.
Heather pointed at the most inconveniently situated five cars and sent them over. But as soon as she stopped the sixth car, a minor riot ensued.
“Why can’t we go?” they demanded.
She struggled to explain in Arabic the logic of her traffic patterns, and as she was doing so, a driver scooted into the space she’d so carefully cleared for the oncoming traffic. She yelled at him, but the car behind him had already inched up so he couldn’t reverse. She had to walk far down the line of cars, and get each one to back up. No one wanted to go backward. Every time a space opened up, a car would rush into it.
As Heather stormed around telling drivers to back up, a group of pedestrians took her distraction as an opportunity to cross the bridge on the roadway, despite the open pedestrian walkways. Even more gawkers appeared, pooling in the open spaces and congesting the area, and trying to engage her in chitchat. Horns blared, dust rose, and a group of young men circled Heather and winked playfully at her. Ten minutes passed, then half an hour, and then an hour. She and Essiet alternated between yelling and pounding on hoods and smiling and thanking profusely anyone who helped. Heather tried to pick out the people who seemed to best understand the situation and assign them a task:
“You keep pedestrians off the bridge.
“You keep the bystanders out of the street.
“You tell that truck to back up.”
But they would enforce the task only once, and then return to the more interesting job of watching this female American soldier trying to organize their country. Gangs of men gathered, pointing and laughing at her. She couldn’t understand what they were saying.
“They’re not listening to us,” Essiet muttered. Heather’s frustration mounted. An elderly woman clad in black had been hanging on to her arm for twenty minutes, begging help for her sick husband, who was in one of the cars. A pregnant woman was also in the crowd. Heather drew a line in the sand with her heel, and instructed everyone to stand behind it.
“Miss, miss, the bus driver refused to go backward,” one of her helpers informed her.
Exasperated, she approached the bus and made a move for her weapon.
The driver backed up.
Finally, the road was clear enough to usher through a car with the sick old man. Essiet had just signaled the next bunch of cars to move when one huge truck sneaked forward onto the bridge, just in time to block the oncoming bunch in the middle of the bridge. Instantly, cars filled the lanes behind it as far as the eye could see.
Finally Heather clicked on her radio. She was sweaty, red-faced, and parched.
“Sir, it’s Coyne. We’ve had enough,” she said. “We can’t control this with the number of people and radios we have. We need barriers and guards a hundred meters down the street to channel the incoming traffic. We did our best, and some of these people know what needs to be done. We can’t stay here all day.”
The other soldier had come to the sam
e conclusion. Heather crossed the bridge. She spotted an Iraqi police car, and tried to recruit the officer. He threw up his hands. The other soldiers were furious. “Why the fuck don’t they get it?” one was muttering. The situation was a little embarrassing: If the all-powerful U.S. military can’t clear a bridge, how the hell will we run a country?
As they climbed into their Humvees, Heather looked back at the heaving, angry mob in exactly the same situation she’d found them in two hours earlier. One man called out to her, “Hey, you can’t leave. Where are you going?”
CHAPTER NINE
BEHIND THE CAMERA at the press conference, Zia rolled her eyes with exasperation. This American reporter was asking such irrelevant questions.
Since meeting with Captain Michaels six weeks earlier, Zia had landed a job with the Americans in the convention center. Her job was in a new Iraqi-American media company called Iraqi Media Network (IMN). It was run by the Pentagon, and was supposed to be Iraq’s first independent source for radio and TV, like an Iraqi BBC or PBS. “By Iraqis, for Iraqis” was the slogan.
Zia was hired as a translator, tasked with accompanying the mostly American reporters and doing any necessary Arabic translation. Today they were interviewing the American “senior adviser” to the Ministry of Finance, which was a misleading title: the Iraqi finance minister had disappeared and his ministry had been seized by the military, so this American was hardly an adviser—he was Iraq’s de facto minister of finance.
Zia paced impatiently as the IMN journalist threw him easy questions about how much progress was being made. She wanted to shout out, Hey, we’re desperate for real information here! Government workers like Mamina hadn’t received a dinar since before the war, Zia knew. Everyone was terrified by rumors that the Americans would change the currency and all their notes would be worthless. Banks were closing, people were exchanging their dinars for dollars. This reporter didn’t seem to have the first clue that there was panic in the streets. Zia couldn’t stay quiet another second.
“Many Iraqis haven’t received a salary in months,” she interrupted, ignoring the surprised look on the journalist’s face. “Tens of thousands of Iraqi government workers all want to know: Why haven’t you paid them yet?”
A hush fell over the small pack of journalists gathered to interview the American official.
He cleared his throat. “Ministries are going to start paying their employees tomorrow, and they’ll go two at a time.”
A murmur ran through the Iraqis in the crowd. This was big news—thanks to Zia’s question. That night, the broadcast would be shown on national television. She swelled with pride, but also wondered: Will I be fired tomorrow for interrupting? Under Saddam, such insubordination could lead to imprisonment.
Instead, when the IMN program manager, John, saw on camera what she had done, he promoted her. “Good job! You’re too talented to be translating,” he said. “You’re a reporter now.”
When Zia shared the news with her family, Baba was worried. “You will be moving around Baghdad a lot now. You must take care who sees you working with the Americans.”
But Mamina and Nunu drowned out his concerns. “You are rising so quickly!”
The three of them were all delighted by this new world in which independent thinking—even by a twenty-one-year-old young woman—was not punished but rewarded. Zia couldn’t stop smiling.
THE IMN CHANNEL had debuted in May 2003, two months after the first troops arrived, with the goal of spreading as much information as possible about the situation to the local Iraqis. It was a shoestring operation at first: broadcasting had begun out of a tent, with the whole project operated by just a handful of Americans. By the time Zia was hired as a translator in June, the staff had grown to 130 people and included a radio station and a newspaper. With her promotion she joined a team of twenty-five reporters.
Before she started the job, Zia’s expectations for the program, and for the Americans’ organization of it, were high. After all, the Americans flew invisible planes and had highly precise bombs and an endless supply of tanks, helicopters, and military gear. Amid the poverty of Iraq, U.S. troops carried tiny camcorders, iPods, laptops, and fancy sunglasses. She was stunned, therefore, to discover that IMN was a third-rate operation, nothing at all like the rich, modern, and organized one she had imagined. IMN headquarters in the Baghdad convention center was little more than a rank, disheveled room with cables snaking along the floors, where harried-looking Americans pushed past one another, shouting. Instead of being new and glossy, the technical supplies consisted of Saddam-era equipment brought over from the now-defunct Ministry of Information. Staff meetings were held on a stained king-size mattress in the middle of the room that no one had bothered to remove. The employees, she was disappointed to see, didn’t even have phones.
Still, what the Americans lacked in expertise, they made up for in enthusiasm. They were always talking excitedly about democracy and freedom and how they were creating the first-ever free and independent television channel in Iraq, one that would finally give the people access to real information about their country and their government, completely propaganda-free. They just needed time to get started, they said. Zia was eager to believe them.
They were also incredibly hard workers. They didn’t sit around at desks, stamping papers, filing, and waiting for instructions, the way you did in most Iraqi jobs. They worked thirteen-hour days and were always “on deadline,” racing in and out of the building, interviewing people in the palace, or driving around the city making reports. After a few painful days in her business suit and high heels, Zia gave up and switched to sneakers, T-shirts, and jeans—shockingly informal, she felt, but she reminded herself that the Americans cared only about getting the job done.
The chaotic environment created ideal opportunities for Zia to prove herself, though, and as time went on she did. IMN aired every evening, and producers were desperate for material to fill the airwaves, which meant that within weeks, Zia was making videos, interviewing subjects, reading the news, editing, and making judgments on what was or wasn’t suitable to broadcast. Despite the haphazard nature of the days, the job was fast-paced, high-profile, and packed with glamour. Zia had constant access to top American officials inside the palace, and a front-row seat to the Americans’ billion-dollar efforts to rebuild Iraq. Plus, it was fun. IMN flew Zia around the country in a helicopter to make reports on reconstruction projects, and she even got to cover the World Economic Forum in Jordan. The United States, the most powerful country in the world, had long loomed large in her imagination; she never dreamed she would be working alongside Americans for the good of her own beloved Iraq.
The more time she spent working on the broadcasts, though, the more clearly she saw how carefully the stories were picked and shaped for presentation. When visiting reporters expressed doubts about whether IMN was truly independent, Zia was carefully diplomatic. She was growing more skeptical about the rhetoric, but was ultimately willing to accept it for the greater good of seeing America’s plans in Iraq succeed.
One or two of her American colleagues complained about the CPA’s “message management” and the apparent lack of resources for better equipment. But, for the most part, they were fueling her dreams of a long-term career. “One day, we’ll all leave and you and the Iraqis will have to run IMN,” they told her. This vision of the future was intoxicating.
THERE WAS JUST one problem: she was no longer safe.
In the mornings, as Zia stepped cautiously beyond the courtyard gate to wait for the bus that would take her to work, Nunu watched quietly from the window as her sister glanced nervously up and down the street. Baba had been right: they had better not tell anyone about Zia’s glamorous job with the Americans. When she accepted the job back in May, she was the envy of all her girlfriends for landing employment inside the Green Zone. By late summer, the whole family had heard rumors that ex-Ba’athists had begun attacking Iraqis who worked with the Americans, accusing them of being �
��collaborators”; they were even harsher on the women who chose to work among the foreign men, in “shameful” defiance of most Iraqis’ social beliefs. It was too dangerous.
The secret was getting increasingly difficult to keep, though, especially since the Americans sent a bus to pick Zia up in the mornings. The Green Zone bus was the idea of IMN’s security personnel, who were inconvenienced by Iraqi staff getting held up at security checkpoints and employees missing work for lack of transportation. The bus was a simple solution for IMN management, but it made life very complicated for the Iraqi women trying to hide that they worked for the Americans. The Americans just didn’t get it.
It was impossible to keep secrets in Baghdad’s close-knit neighborhoods. When Nunu returned to campus that summer to finish the classes that had been interrupted by the invasion, she was besieged by young women all wanting to know, “Did your sister land a job with the Americans?” “Is she in the palace?” Some had brothers working in the palace who had seen Zia. Such jobs were coveted and controversial, and Nunu couldn’t help but brag about her daring big sister.
Though she longed to get out of the house and travel the way Zia did, what she wanted more than ever was simply to feel safe, and for life to be normal again. But it was starting to look as if that wasn’t going to happen for a while.
Sisters in War Page 8