We Meant Well (12 page)

The DFAC tried to celebrate most major holidays, with special meals like steak (Wednesday's pot roast served horizontal). Best of all, twice a year, on the Army's June 14 birthday and on Super Bowl Monday (the game was live at 4:00 a.m. Monday owing to the time difference), soldiers were permitted one can of beer. This was a big, big deal. To get your can of beer, step one was to go to a room off the cafeteria, show your ID card, and have your name checked against a list of soldiers. The line was as long as the four hundred troops inhabiting the FOB. You then had to demonstrate that your weapon was safe and unloaded and place it in a holding rack. This seemed silly until you realized that most of the soldiers had not had any alcohol for months, and even this one beer was going to do some damage. An armed senior NCO with his game face on handed you your beer, which you were required to open in front of him (no hoarding allowed). You stood—no chairs inside the room—drank your beer, and left. You couldn't trade, give away, or otherwise transfer your beer, and you couldn't drink it outside the room. I waited in line over an hour the first time to find that as a nonsoldier I was not on the list and thus I got no beer. For perhaps the first time in my life I was officially the most sober person in the room. The incident underscored our situation: if the occasional mortar rounds at night, IEDs on the roads, and sniper shots did not remind you your life was not in your control, the inability to secure a can of beer as an adult drove it home. It is always the little things.

On Thanksgiving, I participated in the military tradition of officers serving the troops, standing with the Commander and dishing out boiled-to-its-death corn from a can. The Commander ladled out brown sludge gravy, also from a can. The meal was a traditional Thanksgiving, with replicas of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and all the Norman Rockwell rest. We wore paper Pilgrim hats, as did the befuddled Sri Lankans who worked beside us. No one had explained to them what was going on, and they just did what they were told, like every other night. Many frozen turkeys were flown in and cooked to within an inch of liquefaction. Nobody seemed happy, but everyone did get a lot of food, though like our reports of success, much was ladled out while little was swallowed. The experience felt nothing like home, and I think everyone was glad when it turned to Friday.

Lunch the next day reverted to business as usual, with the featured item chicken-fried steak with gravy. The steak was a piece of old, tough beef breaded and deep-fried, then covered in grayish, glutinous gravy. The alternative selection was ravioli requiring no mastication to consume; you could suck it through a straw but wouldn't want to. To save time, many soldiers just carried it to the latrine and threw it in whole to save the trouble of processing it through their intestines. Then they ate Pop-Tarts and drank Red Bulls until no one could feel their limbs. What was the difference between roasted chicken and chicken enchiladas? Usually about a week. Cafeteria recycling was obvious as we went from chicken breasts to chicken nuggets to chicken salad until someone just finished the damn chicken.

If you were at one of the more remote locations, there was a lower region of food hell. At places too small for a proper DFAC, the meals came in large foil trays, kind of a Stouffer's frozen dinner for thirty. The Army called them T rations, of course shortened to “T rats.” One was labeled “main,” one “starch,” and one “vegetable,” and inside everything was parboiled to the point that, once it was reheated, you could play three-card monte with the trays and never know the difference. Even then the gods showed no mercy because typically one meal a day was not from a tray but from a bag. This was the bottom of the food ladder, the infamous MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, also known as Meals Rejected by Everyone or, less politically correct, Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. This was field food, stuffed into freeze-dried foil pouches. Supposedly with a nod toward the growing ethnic diversity of the military, the meals included “Chinese fried rice” and “Mexican tacos” alongside “traditional meatloaf in gravy” and “hearty beef stew,” but they all tasted alike, they were too salty, and the sachets were hard to tear open. There was usually a packet of instant coffee and I saw soldiers pour the crystals onto their tongues and let them dissolve in their mouths. You did get a treat inside each MRE bag, usually a slab of “pound cake” and some candy, plus a cute little bottle of hot sauce. MREs took the idea of food as a fuel to its limits, as a full bag contained some 3,000 calories, with a cold-weather version racking up more than double that. MREs do not promote healthy digestion, and many of the older soldiers complemented them with nuts or other fiber to avoid inglorious defeat at the hands of the enemy. Each MRE retained its optimism by including an amenity kit, with a tiny bit of “Paper, Toilet Type.”

There was nothing more humbling than being completely sick to your stomach with only public latrines available. The unit where I lost my last shreds of dignity was a coed trailer with ten stalls and ten sinks flushing into a communal tank emptied by our Sri Lankan slave force twice daily, Gurkhas of the port-o-john. In between the flushes and heaves of my apocalypse, a soldier threw a package of Imodium over the stall door without a word being said. At various points in my life friends have shared beer, shared food, and shared a blanket, but I can't think of a dearer gesture than the one made that day.

Basketball

On evenings when I'd get tired of reading the self-congratulatory e-mails and press releases coming from the Embassy, I'd go out to watch the nightly basketball game. We had brought a backboard and regulation hoop all the way from the States, and the soldiers played as the air cooled off. The game was three-on-three. The soldiers played in a tight, disciplined way, not moving much but just enough, aikido-like, using the smallest of muscles in the slightest of ways to make the ball go where they wanted it.

The youngest of the players was not yet nineteen. He'd been eleven years old when this war started, just a little older than the kids to whom Bush read
My Pet Goat
while New York burned. WMDs, 9/11, Colin Powell at the UN, Mission Accomplished, and torture at Abu Ghraib were events in history, like the tariffs and the Stamp Act he and the others probably tuned out in school. To them, we might as well have been standing at Sharpsburg or Gettysburg. The chances were good that this time last year at least one of the players was in high school, numbing his teachers with insistent pleas of “Why do we have to learn this? When are we ever going to use it in real life?”

I doubt any of the soldiers thought much about their high school days. What mattered now was what the Army had taught them about how to fight and of course what they already knew about playing basketball. In this place, a fortresslike home in the middle of a war in Iraq, where things existed not to be beautiful, only necessary, they were the beautiful. The way they moved, the sweat on their arms, the grace in their exertion, the failing sun behind them were all beautiful, and even the most prosaic soul would not say anything different. The Iraqis spoke incessantly about seeing God's hand at work, and watching this you could almost believe it.

The sun was dropping fast, as it does in the desert. There were no floodlights to give away our location to the insurgents who some nights still lobbed mortar shells our way. That was what made this different from a million pickup games in driveways and high school parking lots and inner-city cages: the possibility of sudden death. It gave an edge to the game. Chances were good that many of the insurgents were no older than the boys on the court. Like the players, they had grown up with this war as a fact, their daily life. The Americans had always been here and the place where we were standing had never been anything but a FOB. People had inhabited this part of the world for millennia—this was Mesopotamia, the biblical Eden—yet nothing mattered but this moment.

The light had gone, but the darkness did not seem to bother the boys on the court. They had established a rhythm and they apparently knew one another well enough that the occasional bump or muttered “motherfucker” was all they needed to keep the game going. For me, though, another day had ended. This war had been going on for years now, many years plus one more day.

Humanitarian Assistance

Being embedded with the Army was more than a way to live. I worked alongside the soldiers and was expected to carry the State Department's vision of reconstruction with me. The Army excelled at a lot of things, but planning remains its strongest skill set. Nothing is done by chance, nothing that can be planned ahead of time is ever left to last-minute improvisation. Planning occurred in stages and it was only after I stumbled into this knowledge that I got the chance to get a word in edgewise.

The military planning cycle began with an order, wish, vision, hallucination, or good idea from the Colonel. Sometimes this was specific, as in “Find a way to make Route Tampa safer by interdicting the insurgents' supply routes.” Other times it was general, such as “How can we get the Iraqis to rat out al Qaeda sympathizers to us?” Occasionally the ideas fell from on high, such as “Improve conditions for women in your area.” The officers tasked would get together and brainstorm, produce a document for a predecision brief with the Deputy Commander, and then refine that for a decision brief for the Colonel. Targets were designated as lethal (the supply cache they'd blow up) or nonlethal (the people they'd hope to befriend). To avoid any trouble, “challenges and issues” were sorted out at the early stages so that by the time you got to the decision brief the main thrust was pretty much set in concrete.

Without this knowledge, I'd often show up alongside the Colonel for the final decision brief, ready to add my points to the discussion. Everyone would take careful notes, nod attentively, and sometimes even ask me a question or two. They'd then go on with the brief, receive the Colonel's go-ahead, and ignore everything I had said. The first time I was bewildered, the second a little pissed, and by the seventh or eighth time I finally figured out how the system worked.

Over the course of my year I was able to intercede early to make a few helpful points, deliver the Embassy's messages, and otherwise participate in the planning and decision making. As the new guy, I couldn't be too forceful in my opinions. Still, I had learned a lot through the projects that had been dumped on me when the Army moved on. I became familiar with the larger State-DOD issues played out in miniature, the clashes between easier feel-good projects and harder long-term development. In these clashes, the Colonel and I often had to agree to disagree. I remembered the abandoned promises scattered across the landscape while the Colonel forced himself to look only forward. To him, easy projects still held the allure of a quick victory and happy PR. Every Colonel wanted to make General, and you did not do that sitting on your hands listening to the State Department tell you what you should be doing.

One of the Army's favorite feel-good projects on which we differed was a “humanitarian assistance” (HA) drive. This had very little to do with reconstruction and was always a sore point between State and the military and between me and my Colonels. Here's how it worked: The Army contracted an Iraqi vendor to assemble ten thousand bags, all made of cheap plastic and mysteriously decorated with badly rendered images of Barbie, Disney princesses, and Japanese cartoon characters, as if the bags had been left over from something else. Inside was a package of dry beans, a bottle of water, a tin of halal beef, canned vegetables, and some macaroni. The food might make one or two meals for a family of four. Soldiers would drive around looking for places to conduct a “drop,” pulling up to the chosen villages and handing out HA bags to whoever showed up to take them. Everybody liked free stuff, and so a crowd usually developed. At one drop, the crowd got a bit out of hand, and the Iraqi police beat them with sticks until a US Sergeant Major waded in and broke up the melee. Sometimes the Army handed out blankets, wheelchairs, or toys bought with US government money, sometimes school supplies or other things sent by a now dwindling group of churches and schools located near US military bases in Georgia and Texas. These boxes, along with cartons of Girl Scout cookies and toiletries, used to arrive in massive quantities in the early days of the war. By 2010 they dribbled in once a week at best, usually through the chaplain's office.

The soldiers smiled at the HA drops, which were always well attended by US Army media and PR people. The events made for terrific photos—a soldier holding a kid in his arms, a soldier smiling at a hijab-clad woman. The handouts would then commence. PR would fire off hundreds of frames of the same shot, of a smiling Joe handing a Transformer toy to a beaming Iraqi kid. If the photographers had zoomed out a bit they'd have seen the Iraqi faces grow more sullen the older the recipient. For every three-year-old smiling over a Snickers bar, there was a gray-haired mother accepting a blanket without making eye contact. You rarely saw older Iraqi men accepting giveaways. If they showed up at all, they usually stood toward the back of the crowd, smoking, their faces hard and blank.

The soldiers knew what to say around their officers and the Army media: best thing about being in Iraq, great to see these kids happy, just doing our job, glad we could help. What they said afterward, spitting Skoal into an empty Gatorade bottle, was fuck these people, we give 'em all this shit and they just fucking try to blow us up.

Resorting to gifts to seem popular was quick and easy but, like most quick solutions, really didn't help. Once you started down the path of easy answers, your methods tended to sabotage later efforts to try the harder way. In a counterinsurgency campaign, there were several ways to make friends, most of them slow and difficult, like building relationships within the local community based on trust earned and respect freely given. Each iteration of handouts caused you to lose respect from a proud group of people forced into an uneven relationship. Iraq was not the Sudan or Haiti, and while pockets of people were malnourished, overall few were starving. Even if they were, a bag with one or two meals in it was not going to make any difference. The Colonel who ordered these HA drops thought that they made him friends among the locals. He waited in vain for the groundswell of happiness set in motion to cause local people to start turning over to us info about the insurgents in their midst.