We Meant Well (10 page)

Outside, another group of kids were entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at a three-legged stray dog. You can tell the strays' age by their missing limbs, ears, and hunks of fur, like rings on tree stumps. The dog was trying to sleep, and every time the kids got close with the rocks, the dog would get up, move a little farther away, and flop down again. The kids never moved closer and never hit the dog. The dog never moved any farther than necessary. Each side accomplished nothing but the time did pass.

We went out another time to inspect one of the milk collection centers and ended up in the living room of the sheik who'd been given the facility to run. His house, modest by any international standard, was quite nice for rural Iraq. The house was concrete, two stories, squat, with the kind of thick walls you put up if you didn't have a PhD in engineering but wanted to make sure the thing lasted. As with every other building in Iraq, wind, weather, and time had beaten the stucco to a grayish tan. The floors were cool tile. The carpets were outside on the clothesline soaking up the day's sun. The building was old, and past lives clearly lingered.

The sheik casually wore his Glock in a Bond-like shoulder holster. I had read online that under long-established tradition, an Iraqi would not typically shoot you in his own home; in many years of traveling this was the first time I'd staked my life on a cultural convention from Wikipedia. An AK-47 (the law allowed every family to own one) with a full clip leaned against the wall in an adjacent room. I was weaponless but accompanied by seven heavily armed soldiers, who took up defensive positions inside, outside, and around the living room, after searching the house, of course.

The search had brought out the sheik's mother, who said she typically didn't leave the back room when male guests arrived. Since the soldiers had wandered in on her anyway and we were foreigners, she must have thought “Why not?” and sat on a chair at the edge of the room. The sheik's father, also armed, soon joined us and took a chair facing me. With the house searched and the group assembled, tea was served, scalding hot, 70 percent sugar, in tiny glasses with a metal spoon in each. I knew then that long after I left Iraq the sound of metal tinkling against glass would rip me out of wherever I found myself and return me to this country. The sound was as tied to a place as any image in my mind.

The father was animated, happy to have guests to whom he could relate the last hundred years or so of Iraqi history. From the others' reactions, I could tell that this was not the first time he had run through this overview, and I remembered my own grandfather's wandering stories around the Sunday dinner table. The father was a practiced storyteller who explained how the family had controlled the land we and our milk collection center sat on since the Ottoman Empire, having seized it from the previous owners in a bloody struggle. One nice thing the Ottomans did was to create the first codified land ownership system for the area since Hammurabi, and most property deeds today in Iraq date from Ottoman times. So thanks to them, the father said, for titling the land to his family.

He moved on to the British, who took control of Iraq from the Ottomans. His own father had not had much good to say about the British, but they had dug the large irrigation canals in the neighborhood, and so perhaps something positive came out of all that. This was interesting because the example always held out for us in the PRTs to emulate was the colonial British, who conquered the world with good administrators. Their officers were highly educated, committed, conscientious, hardworking, and conversant in the local language—regular
Flashman in the Great Game
characters. More tea was served. We skipped quickly through about forty years to Saddam. Two relatives had been killed in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The less said about Saddam, the old man muttered, the better, and we proceeded to the latest set of invaders—me, for all intents and purposes. He had good words to say (I was a guest), but he playfully added that his impression of America might be improved even more if we gave him a new generator for the house. Eyeing the weapons and fearful of having to drink more tea, I pretended to jot a note: next invasion, bring more generators.

At that point, the sheik himself started to explain how he had originally helped the “struggle” against the Americans, meaning planting roadside bombs and the like. Then, in 2007, he decided to participate in the so-called Awakening, a program through which we paid money to Sunni insurgents to stop killing us. The program worked and in many minds was the real key to the drop in violence that accompanied the Surge. The United States recharacterized the Sunni insurgents first as Orwellian “Concerned Local Citizens” and later, more poetically, as “Sons of Iraq” (SOI,
sahwa
in Arabic) and paid them monthly salaries to stand passively at checkpoints in the areas where they used to commit violence. This also worked, and the sheik pointed out that the skinny teenagers with rifles standing around roadside shacks on our way in were some of the 142 SOI fighters he still was responsible for. Our side never explored the similarity between what we were doing with the SOI and paying protection money to the Mob.

Iraq's Shiite government inherited the
sahwa
program because we got tired of funding it and because “transition” was a theme that month. The thought in Washington was that the faster we could transition our programs to the government of Iraq, the sooner we could go home. The sheik sadly reported that no one had paid his men for their forbearance since March, nor had the government provided them with full-time jobs as promised. He hoped I might pass a note to the Embassy to goose the Iraqi government into starting to pay his guys again, as they were getting solid offers from al Qaeda (nationwide, 50 percent of the SOI had not been paid in April and May 2010, while fewer than half had ever been offered government jobs).
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Nothing personal, he assured me by way of offering a blessing on my family, but a job was a job. These issues seemed much more on his mind than the milk collection center I had come to discuss. The center might employ half a dozen men, maybe a few more to drive trucks if trucks were ever bought. With 142 fighters to look after, these few jobs created at the cost of millions of dollars seemed sadly irrelevant.

After a lot of tea and with a bit of business now wrapped up, we all stood to exchange scratchy kisses, followed by warm, lingering handshakes, before making our way outside to continue our respective days. We forgot the problems of milk collection, or at least set them aside for now, as it was obvious that we had a long way to go before declaring victory.

A Torturous Lunch

In addition to burning up money with our projects, the ePRTs were often used by the Embassy to build relationships on the ground. This was partially because most Embassy big shots were scared to meet with thugs and killers and partially because we often handed project money to those thugs and killers and thus knew them pretty well. While we usually just shared pleasantries over a meal to keep in touch, every once in a while we got more for lunch than expected. A well-known Sons of Iraq (SOI) leader told us over dessert one sticky afternoon that he had been recently released from prison. He explained that the government had wanted him off the streets in the run-up to the election, so that he would not use his political pull to get in the way of a Shia victory. The prison that held him was a secret one, he said, under the control of some shadowy part of the Iraqi security forces.
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The SOI leader had been tortured. Masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside down. He said they did not ask him any questions or demand any information; they simply wanted to cause him pain. They whipped his testicles with a leather strap, then turned to beat the bottoms of his feet and his kidney area. They slapped and punched him. The bones in his right foot were broken with an iron rod, a rebar used to reinforce concrete. He said it was painful, but he had felt pain before. What hurt was the feeling of utter helplessness. A man like himself, he stated with an echo of pride, had never felt helpless. His strength was his ability to control things, to order men to their own deaths if necessary, to fight, to stand up to enemies. Now he could no longer sleep well at night, was less interested in life and activities, and felt little pleasure. It was possible that the SOI leader exaggerated his story, seeking our sympathy in his struggle against the government. This was likely the only reason he was bothering to tell us what happened to him. Exaggeration was not uncommon in these situations and you had to be cautious about believing everything you heard. Still, when he paused and looked across the room, you could almost see the movie running behind his eyes, replaying scenes he could not forget but did not want to remember. The man also showed us his blackened toenails, and the caved-in portion of his foot still bore a rodlike indentation with faint signs of metal grooves, like on an iron rod, the rebar used to reinforce concrete.

The 400,000 Iraq war documents published online in October 2010 included a number of US Army reports of torture and abuse by the government of Iraq against its own Sunni citizens, most of them ignored by the US Army as a consequence of Frago 242. A frago is a “fragmentary order” that summarizes a specific requirement based on a broader, earlier instruction. As published in June 2004, Frago 242 ordered Coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as torture, unless it directly involved Coalition troops. Where abuse was Iraqi on Iraqi, “only an initial report will be made.… No further investigation will be required unless directed.”
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The Iraqis knew of torture. FOB Loyalty, where I spent a week, had once been home to Saddam's secret police. I had walked around and seen torture cells there. Arabic graffiti covered the walls, most of it scratched directly into the stone. Metal rings were set into the floor and walls for chaining people down. The bunk was just more stone, and there was an open hole in one corner for a latrine. The story was that Saddam hired Chinese workers to build the place, then had them murdered so they would not tell anyone what was inside. Many US soldiers who passed through had their photo taken in one of the cells, sometimes lying on the bunk, but it was too creepy for me, too many shadows. Even the tough guys found reasons to avoid the place after dark. There were voices in those walls.

The other SOI men in the room chain-smoked awful cigarettes by the fistful and told us the recent murders of four Sunnis in Tarmiyah were probably tribal revenge killings stemming from the murder of a high-level SOI in the area the previous year. Three out of the four murdered were brothers and the fourth was a blood relative. Under tribal law, they explained, when compensation was not received in a timely manner, the other side had the right to kill the person who committed the murder plus three of his blood relatives.

As for national-level violence, they explained it was all the Iranians' fault, except for the parts the Americans did (“When will you close the door you opened in our country?”). Kind of hard to disagree with the last bit, but our US military colleague along for lunch tried pretty hard. He started out declaring himself “but a simple solider” and then wound up into a long speech about the American democratic experiment, states' rights, and the Articles of Confederation. I had no idea what he was saying. Our translator kept right up, however, mumbling something in Arabic, though who knows what was communicated across the space in that room. Our simple soldier hit his stride, raising his voice in volume while he lowered it in timbre, explaining how we all were now brothers fighting a common enemy. This was where I would have given a cornea to understand Arabic, because of course we had invaded Iraq and even our stalwart Iraqi translator was having a hard time figuring out who this common enemy was. After some side conversations, we figured out it was “the terrorists,” and each was left to define “terrorist” for himself. Considering the men in the room controlled militias and could order revenge killings, I guessed their definition and ours were different.

After what could only be described as a multilingual awkward pause, the search for common ground began. We finally stumbled onto something after an older SOI man discussed his recent trip to Iran. He described his dislike of the Persians, stretching back some three thousand years, but noted Iranian women were, well … sort of hot. He did not say “hot” in so many words, but as our hosts smiled and clicked their teeth and made eye gestures, it was all too obvious we had basically started talking about how attractive Iranian women were. I learned that one reason Iraqi men traveled to Iran was to enjoy the pleasures of a temporary marriage. With men free to marry multiple wives and Islam's handy oral divorce policy and lack of civic records, the prohibition against prostitution was sometimes circumvented through a quick (several hours) marriage and divorce. Iran was known for such things, and discreet as well, so what happened in an Iranian temp marriage stayed in Iran, baby. The mood lightened.

These meetings were supposed to increase our understanding of one another, give us a chance to resolve problems, make friends, and the like. Maybe we did so on occasion. To me, however, it was more like two sides agreeing to play a game together, but we played cards while they played dominoes, diplomacy by Calvinball rules. Unnamed assassins killed two of the men present in the next six weeks, along with their sons, victims of a string of assassinations of Sons of Iraq leaders. A week later someone murdered the man who had visited Iran. The SOI leader who claimed to have been tortured was left alive, wicked, hard, and doomed.

One Too Many Mornings

The smells first: fried something from the FOB chow hall, the sticky tang of chemicals in the latrines, cigarette smoke from the always present knots of soldiers smoking. The damp odor of mud if it rained overnight (like mushrooms, like an old basement) or if a pipe broke. My least favorite smell was rotted tobacco from the butts can, a steel ammunition box half filled with brown water and hundreds of cigarette butts molded into a gelatin. The smells did not mingle, they were layered, and I experienced them sequentially. Smell, the one sense that always seemed like a joke, gave you no rest. I could close my eyes or stuff something into my ears, but with smell I could only move away or put up with it.