We Meant Well (4 page)

Our area of responsibility was the Maadain, a loosely defined rural area that used to be Iraq's breadbasket but was now a Sunni-Shia battleground centered on the town of Salman Pak. My ePRT teammates had abandoned FOB Hammer long before I arrived as being too distant from where they were running most of our projects. One teammate hung on alone at another FOB while the others moved into Cache South. Named after a hospital that was no longer there, Cache South actually sat on top of the former Iraqi nuclear reactor site, the one bombed by the Israelis in the 1980s even before the United States began its own wars against Iraq. Cache South was simply a bunch of hooches stuck between giant sand berms that originally protected the nuke site against everything but Israeli airplanes overhead. Fewer than one hundred soldiers, plus my teammates, lived at South. It was a helicopter ride away, and I was scheduled to visit it in the very near future. I planned to look there for laptop power adapters and printer cartridges.

With the offices, shops, and living areas clustered in the center, FOB Hammer had a lot of open spaces around the inside of its perimeter. The extra land was to allow for future expansion or just to create more of a security buffer between the exterior walls and where most of the people were. Way out on the edge of FOB Hammer were several small hills, lumps of raised dirt on the otherwise frying-pan-flat desert. These were “tells,” ancient garbage dumps and fallen buildings. Thousands of years ago, people in this area used sun-dried bricks to build homes and walls. The sun-dried bricks lasted about twenty years before crumbling, at which point the people rebuilt on top of the old foundation. After a couple of rounds, the buildings sat on a small hill. There had been so much erosion over the years, along with the digging the Army had done, that an entire area two football fields in size was covered with pottery shards. In a few minutes of wandering around, I found pieces commingled that were handworked (old), spun on a wheel with grooves (less old), and glazed with blue color (newest). People said that when the Army first built the FOB and dug up truckloads of dirt, they found skulls and long bones. You could sometimes spot very old bones in the dirt inside the Hesco barriers. (The Army used one ancient hill for artillery practice, blowing off most of the top. As one soldier said, “If it's old and already broken, why does it matter if we shoot at it?”) The Army digging also exposed an old village perimeter wall, short-lasting sun-dried bricks on the bottom with a row or two of longer-lasting kiln-dried bricks on top for sturdiness. There was little wood in the desert for kilns, so the inhabitants could not build the whole wall out of the sturdier brick. There was still a large brick factory in the area, a few miles from the FOB, that made bricks with local mud. With only a little water added, the mud turned thick and sticky, bad for walking, great for bricks.

Some ten thousand tells are scattered all over the Middle East. You could see them in the desert from the helicopter, especially in the late afternoon when the sun was low, as they were the only things that cast a significant shadow. An ancient river once flowed through this area, with the village adjacent. A band of greenery marked where the river had been, suggesting there was still water deep underneath. Some of the pottery and bricks were likely Sumerian. It was possible the dust I dug out of my ears at night might have been part of an ancient wall around a Sumerian city. At night the tell area was very dark so as to avoid giving the insurgents an easy aiming point, and you could imagine how the earliest inhabitants of what was now FOB Hammer must have seen the night sky. It was a reminder that we were not the first to move into Iraq from afar, and a promise across time that someone might sit atop our own ruins and wonder whatever happened to the Americans.

Not all bases were conjured up out of nothing, appearing one day fully formed in the middle of the desert. The second place I lived, embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division, was FOB Falcon. Located on the edge of urban Baghdad, Falcon was convenient to our area of responsibility in what used to be called the “Sunni Triangle of Death” (Army and Embassy PR people ordered the term embargoed once they wanted us to seem like we were winning). Starting with the southern border of Baghdad city proper, the area spread like spilled paint east into Rasheed and Doura and south toward Mahmudiyah. FOB Falcon was a cement factory before the Army arrived uninvited in 2003. They took it because they needed it, and they had won the war that month. They sometimes forgot that the things they appropriated had belonged to someone else, to the point where the Army held elaborate ceremonies to “gift” the places back to ungrateful Iraqis after they were done with them.

FOB Falcon was something from a
Mad Max
movie, run-down, apocalyptic. Next door was a vast open field five times the size of a Walmart parking lot, filled with rusted old vehicles. The contractors hired to haul away our American garbage had a quicker turnaround when they dumped it nearby, and so these flats outside the wire were covered in trash, picked over by the Iraqis, who fought with feral dogs and scavenger birds for the good stuff. The assembled houses of the Iraqis were funny-sad caricatures of us, with Hesco baskets framing walls and large discarded placards reading “Deadly Force Authorized” as roofs. Old office chairs lined up around many of the houses and corrugated tin walls corralled tired goats and mean dogs.

On the FOB itself, the Army cleaned things up like teenagers tidied their rooms, pushing refuse aside only enough to make room for new stuff. They always seemed to leave pieces from the previous life of the place to remind you that it used to be something else, and in the case of Falcon it was a garish flagpole base in turquoise tile with faux gold trim, in the style of designer excess that the Iraqi elite seemed to favor. Otherwise, the cement factory warehouse became the Army warehouse, the cement factory office became the Army office, and so forth. Though it was more urban and smaller than Hammer, Falcon and every other FOB in Iraq was really just more of the same, the LSA, the hooches, the DFAC, all the same stuff, as if the FOBs were built as franchises.

Three things distinguished FOB Falcon. One was that it had its own unmanned observation blimp, a huge blob that floated overhead festooned with cameras and electronics and sensors to allow it to monitor the base and the surrounding area. With the appropriate clearance, you could watch the video feed from your desktop computer as the soldier in charge zoomed in on patches of real life outside our walls. In the odd way that soldiers entertained themselves, dogs going at it were always worth zooming in on, and one troop claimed to have a night-vision-enhanced video clip that will never make WikiLeaks, showing a man in close carnality with a donkey. The eye in the sky blimp caught the morning and evening light turning pink, red, and purple at different times and adding something almost aesthetic to the neighborhood.

Falcon also had decent cable TV, only $25 a month, provided by local Iraqis. They supplied pirated CNN, BBC, and a bunch of channels ripped off from Dubai satellites that played American TV shows (
Survivor
reruns in English and
The Simpsons
in Arabic). Installation involved the guys punching a hole in your hooch wall with a sharpened screwdriver and dropping the cable through to mate with your TV. Cable was run from hooch to hooch, so if a neighbor pulled out the wire everyone downstream of him went black.

Falcon's other distinguishing feature was a serious mud-brick wall wrapped around its perimeter, left over from when the same wall protected the cement factory. Rather than tearing the wall down or fixing it up, the Army just strung razor wire along the top while building another wall inside, with towers and standing places that would not have looked odd to the Sumerian archers who had once most certainly populated this area, their remains still being dug up in the desert.

Unexpected Blows: Day One with My Team

If this were a movie, the opening scenes would present me as a somewhat bright-eyed, wisecracking, reasonably enthusiastic war agnostic ready to go to work in Iraq. By act two I would start to see the cracks in our approach in Iraq, only to end the film bitter and disillusioned. The reality for me in Iraq was more like falling off a cliff. In perhaps a slightly different context, though still in our neighborhood, the prophet Isaiah quotes Allah as saying “their words are meaningless, and their hearts are somewhere else.… So I will startle them with one unexpected blow after another.” Helicoptering out of Hammer to meet my teammates at their even more austere location at Cache South, I was off to my first day of work with my ePRT. The unexpected blows came one after another.

The morning started with a staff postmortem on a previous week's conference for local area NGOs. Held at a Green Zone hotel, the conference had devolved into a shouting match between Kurdish sympathizers and everyone else present. The conference organizer, an Iraqi nicknamed McBlazer because he had adopted the State Department “field uniform” of blue blazer with khakis, now sought an additional $3,250 because supposedly more people showed up than anticipated. My brand-new coworkers Mel, Robert, James, and Michael asked me if I would approve the extra money for McBlazer. I said no, as he had agreed to a contract. McBlazer's original bid had included an outrageous $52 a head for printing. Robert explained that because of funding restrictions on meals, McBlazer had hidden some of the food costs in the printing costs. This was “normal.” No one could explain the odd discrepancies between the number of guests and the costs (on the bid sheets 280 guests cost more than 300 guests). Worse, McBlazer insisted there had in fact been 280 guests even though the official count was only 206. McBlazer's request for additional money made no sense, except as a shakedown.

This sparked an animated discussion, during which James accused me of calling everyone dishonest for hiding meal costs inside fake printing receipts. James spat that relationships were the most important thing in Iraq and if I muddied them my time as ePRT team leader would not last long. Mel protested that McBlazer was an important partner we had to “take care of” and admonished me not to make our first interaction a problematic one by being honest. Robert barked that I needed to learn to work well with others before pounding that table. Michael worried that without McBlazer we would not be able to hold future conferences and that McBlazer had threatened to withdraw his services from other ePRTs at a time when the Embassy was gung ho on big conferences. I would be responsible for an Iraq-wide breakdown on my first day. McBlazer, Mel whispered, had married into a powerful Kurdish political family, and we needed to pay him off for our safety.

If I were describing this experience in a novel, the sky would turn purple at this point, the wind would whip up, and the livestock would start acting weird. I had never met these people before. I don't know why I expected them to know what they were doing. The short phone brief I had received from my boss should have given me pause. I had among my teammates a retired guy who was imagined as our elections expert, a washed-out juicer who slept late most days, and a former Army turret gunner who was hired for no apparent reason to oversee sewage and water programs and whose most significant contribution to the effort was a decent FarmVille score. Another teammate was a former Army MP now in charge of small business development in a country the
Economist
characterized as one of the hardest to start a small business in. Another two were agriculturalists for real, albeit specializing in hogs (in a Muslim country) and large-scale agribusiness, respectively, woefully out of their lanes in Iraq. As a gang they matched well with the SIGIR warning that some PRT staff were “generally able,” some were “somewhat able,” many were “less able,” and a few were “generally unable” to carry out their missions. I learned only later that there had already been seven team leaders for this group in the last twelve months and that my personnel were a disparate mix of people with reasonable skill sets, a number with incomplete skill sets, and some who weren't any good at their jobs. The programs they had initiated reflected months of constantly changing guidance from the Embassy. The team liked to soothe over the horrors of war with whiskey and conveniently kept in the filing cabinet a bottle of some horrific Missouri rotgut. The team members' expectations, I came to know, were variously for blind support, for unconditional appreciation, or for me to pretty much leave them alone. To me, these were by and large people aggressively devoted to mediocrity, often achieving it.

But all that perspective would come later. Next up was a meeting to discuss the purchase of pregnant sheep for a small number of local widows. For $25,000 we'd buy the widows pregnant lambs to raise. They'd then sell the offspring. It seemed like a good enough idea, helping widows, so I asked the team how they had determined the cost of a pregnant ewe. My colleagues had asked one local sheik for a price. I asked why they hadn't sought several prices to compare; they said that would have been inconvenient. They implored me to sign off on the idea “to make things easier.” Like the extra cash for McBlazer, this was “normal.”

I asked how many lambs a ewe could be expected to produce in a year (the correct verb is “to lamb,” as in “The ewe is ready to lamb now”), what the going price was for a lamb, and what a decent income was for a widow in Iraq. No one knew the answers. How would the widows be selected? The sheik selling us the animals would select the recipients from his extended family. He would also teach the widows sheep raising but would take from them the first healthy lamb in return. How would the widows get by if they would not be able to keep the firstborn lamb? Not our problem. We needed only to sit back and tell the Embassy how well the project was going. The team claimed they had never been held accountable for money spent. They explained that previous leaders would sign everything without question, like a high school substitute teacher.