I Lost My Love in Baghdad (15 page)

“Not on Fox,” she says.

I don't remember who came up with the next idea, but we stop talking about Fox News and agree that the thing we need to do is go look at engagement rings at Tiffany. It sounds almost like a dare.

We browse the rings on the second floor for thirty minutes. We don't actually talk much, we just look. When we walk back outside, we both seem to be thinking, this is a serious thing, this looking at rings. Are we really ready to do this?

We stroll back toward her apartment in silence.

A homeless man walks by us.

“What a beautiful couple,” he says.

She stops at the next block, Columbus Circle. “That was a sign,” she says. “Okay, this can work. But when you do get me a ring, make sure you get the right one. I don't trust you going by yourself.”

We talk about moving in together and start looking at new apartments. The magazine still hasn't told me how often I will be going to Iraq in the future, so it looks like my home base will still be in New York. A few months in Iraq, a few months back at the office. The plan is that we'll move in together once my lease finishes at the end of July.

And then in June,
Newsweek
offers me the job of permanent Baghdad correspondent. This means I'll go for another year in Iraq, and I'll be based overseas in Cairo. The rotation works out to be ten weeks in Baghdad, four weeks in Cairo.

I tell Andi. As soon as she takes in the news, I tell her, too, that I want us to stay together.

“But how can we stay together if you're gone a year?”

“We'll see each other. We'll meet in Europe or Asia.” I try to explain to her how important this is to me, what a great opportunity it is, and how she knows and I know I have to take it. But it's hard—I am happy and excited about it, and she's not, she can't be.

“You want to take it.”

“Of course I do. But it will work out. It will be a rough year, but we can make it, I'm sure.”

“You're lucky,” she says. “Not everyone is as lucky as you. You know exactly what you want to do. You know what your dreams are, and for whatever reason, your dreams do come true. You get what you want. I don't. I don't know what my path is. I need to find my path, too.”

“But you do know what your path is. You're successful and brilliant and young. You know you want to get into politics, eventually, and that's going to happen.”

“Well, I have always wanted to go overseas,” she says. “And maybe now is the time…”

Andi was outgrowing her job at Air America. She was used to change, used to jumping around. She'd held four big jobs in the past seven years—including writing speeches for a Massachusetts governor and working for Harvey Weinstein's publicity department at Miramax—before signing on with Air America where she thought she could help spread the progressive Democratic message. But lately she'd been thinking of joining a presidential campaign if she could find a candidate she believed in. In July, she met with people who worked on Democratic campaigns, and during one of those meetings, the subject of Baghdad came up. Would she be interested in going over there? Yes, she said, going overseas had always interested her. We're not hiring for the campaign right now, but time in Baghdad would give you great foreign policy experience. And when you got back, you could work for the campaign.

We discussed this—what do you think about Iraq?

“I think you'd thrive once you started working there. I think it will be difficult and challenging and how they treat women will be quite a shock, but I think you'd like it.”

“I'm going to apply for jobs at IRI and NDI.”

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute were two nongovernmental organizations that had over 140 offices in countries across the world. Their most important operations were currently in Iraq. Both worked in countries that were trying to develop democratic institutions and practices, funded by grants from the U.S. State Department and private donations. The chairman of IRI was Senator John McCain, while NDI was chaired by Madeleine Albright. (IRI was founded by Ronald Reagan; NDI's first chairman was President Jimmy Carter.) They were in the Ukraine, in Sierra Leone, in Afghanistan; in 2003 they established programs in Baghdad.

“Okay,” I said, “let me know if I can help.”

“Are you uncomfortable with me going to Iraq? You think it's weird, right?”

We talk about it at length, every day. I support her desire to go. If I have one worry, it's that she might get to Baghdad and not like her new job and be unhappy. I'm actually not worried about the danger. Or if I do worry, it's in an abstract way, and pushed very far back in my mind. Aid workers and State Department officials had been killed there occasionally, but so had journalists. Iraq was demystified for me. It was still a big deal to go, but it also wasn't. It was part of my life; it didn't seem unnatural. I'd been going there, my brother was on his way there, and so Andi would be in Baghdad, as well. My friends and colleagues worked in Iraq, and to work effectively, you couldn't spend much time worrying. Bad things happened, but the odds were that the bad things usually happened to someone else. I don't even know if I went that far in my thinking—bad things were a possibility I couldn't entertain.

For Memorial Day weekend, we flew to Puerto Rico (she wanted to go to Savannah to stay in a bed-and-breakfast with a
Gone With the Wind
–themed room, her favorite book; I wanted to go to Puerto Rico so I could gamble and get sunburned). I gambled for a few hours; she watched over my shoulder. When are you going to lose all your chips so we can go to the beach? she asked. The point is to get more chips, not lose them, I told her.

For her birthday in June, I surprised her with a suite at the Four Seasons and a dinner in Tudor City. We took pictures of each other that night. She wore white summer clothes. I have this memory of filming her on the digital camera I got her for Christmas, but I don't know where that video is now, and I don't remember what she said, sitting on the windowsill, looking out over the city.

BAGHDAD

Baghdad life is no longer new to me, it is just the routine. Wake up in the morning, feel your bed shake slightly, hear the windows rattle, a boom in the distance. Did I dream it? Close your eyes, back to sleep. The house shakes again. No, that's a car bomb. It's 8:15
A.M.
, I don't need to get up for another half hour.

Munib brings an omelet and toast with a glass of unidentifiable juice and Happy Cow cheese wrapped in colorful tinfoil.

“Boom cars this morning,” he says. “Boom car” is his translation for car bomb.

Scott, whose room is on the second floor, comes downstairs.

“Did you hear the explosion this morning?” I ask, sipping coffee.

“Yeah, it was a big one.”

“Woke me up, that's for sure. Beats any alarm clock.”

We hear machine-gun fire, probably from one of the ranges set up nearby to train the Iraqi security forces.

I take a shower. There is a bare lightbulb and a red-tiled floor, damp though it's over 115 degrees outside. The mirror is cracked. The toothpaste is some local brand—Sino—and it feels like it burns away the enamel; the tap water is dirty so you swig and spit from the two-liter plastic bottle and the bottle top tastes like stale toothpaste, left over from last night when you brushed your teeth before going to bed. The shower water is either hot or burning hot; steam fills the room; the shower curtain won't close properly and the water splashes out on the floor; a cockroach runs out of the drain and I step on it with my flip-flops—exterminate the brutes. There is surprisingly decent water pressure, all other things considered. It's not an exaggeration to say that even after your hair dries and your Gillette Arctic Fresh deodorant is on you still don't feel clean.

I put on what I wear around the house: baggy brown cargo shorts and a white T-shirt, keeping my flip-flops on.

It's 9:30
A.M.
I talk to Scott about reporting, or we talk about sleep.

“Did you sleep well last night?”

“Mosquitoes again. They ate me alive. I had to sleep in my hoodie with the hood up and at 4
A.M.
I decided to fuck it and turn the light on and hunt the bastard down.”

Mosquitoes always find their way inside the house, like we're living in a swamp and not the desert. The only explanation I can figure is that we are in walking distance of the Tigris River. Various other insects live in the house and faded green lizards sneak in through gaps and crawl up the walls to hide in plain view on the ceiling. At night, bats whip through the darkness.

Mosquitoes, lizards, bats. Extreme heat in the summer, air on your face like a blow-dryer switched to high. Noisy ceiling fans, dust everywhere, nasal-clogging sandstorms. Bad food washed down with unidentifiable juice. Boom cars. More people blowing themselves up in Iraq than at any other point in modern history. Baghdad is the deadliest city on earth.

What is it that Ranya, our fixer in Amman, said? She said she can't stand Iraqis. She said her grandmother blamed the Tigris. When they are children they drink from the Tigris and it makes them savages. Look what they did in 1990 to Kuwait, how brutal they were when they invaded, and look what they are doing to themselves now.

Our British security manager stands in the kitchen discussing his great annoyance with Iraqi soccer. Every time the Iraqi national team wins, there is celebratory gunfire all around us. The Iraqi national team is on a roll; they finished second in the Asian Games in 2006. It is a bright spot for the country, a source of pride. Our security manager hates it. After each match the city comes alive with AK-47s aimed to the sky, and he has to tell us to stay inside while he paces in the kitchen and keeps saying under his breath, these fucking savages, these bloody savages.

What's wrong with this place? What's wrong with these people?

Is it Islam? Is it the climate? The culture?

Is it us?

I start asking these questions and then I think back to Graham Greene's 1955 novel
The Quiet American
when old Fowler chastises the naive Pyle about his views on the Vietnamese people Pyle claims to have come to help: “Is that what you've learned in a few months? You'll be calling them childlike next.”

Robert Byron arrives in a muddy Baghdad in 1933 and writes of the city: “For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal and leaves a scar.”

In Tim O'Brien's 1969 memoir
If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,
an American captain criticizes a local Vietnamese soldier for skipping a mission. “Now damn it,” the captain said. “This is your goddamn war. I'm here to fight it with you and to help you, and I'll do it. But you have to sacrifice too. Tell me how this war's gonna be won when you and others like you are running off when things get tight? How?…If I come over here and bust my balls, well, shouldn't you take the shit with everyone else?” The Vietnamese soldier responds, “You are here for one year. I've been in war for many billion years. Many billion years to go.”

Even as Scott and I speak, sitting at our computers and finishing up our omelets, dozens of people are being killed or are about to be killed in this city. Could be a day when it's over a hundred. The violence is unbelievable, unimaginable, incomprehensible.

Those words are inadequate. It should be easy for us to believe, imagine, and comprehend because it happens all the time. Maybe “unfeelable” is a better word, though it's not even a real one. You can't let yourself feel it.

Time to start reporting. I sit down behind my desk in the dining room, converted into our office, my back facing a picture window that is covered by a blast blanket. I begin to send emails, arrange interviews, plan trips. I send orders to the Iraqi staff over Skype: Can you please call this Iraqi guy now? It is frustrating to try to get them to do anything. What do they do all day but sit on their asses and whine and watch porn on the satellite TV? They haven't worked in over a week, I complain to Scott.

The cell phone network is down; it always goes down. Iraqna, the country's largest service provider, was given an operating license after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Its cell phone towers are targeted by insurgents; its engineers are kidnapped from time to time. Perhaps the signal is getting interrupted by jamming frequencies sent out from U.S. military convoys to stop IEDs from detonating. Or perhaps it's the weather, or the network is overloaded with calls—a record number of Iraqis, more than five million, are new mobile phone subscribers. Iraqna, a subsidiary of the Egyptian-based Orascom Telecommunications, is posting annual revenues of over $250 million. (The most reliable phone network in Iraq is not available to civilians; it's a network set up by MCI for American and Iraqi officials—the phones come with the Westchester County 914 area code.)

The Internet goes down. The Iraqi man whom we get our service from runs his server from a power generator, and he tells our office manager that his generator has run out of gas. He can't get more gas right now because he hasn't been able to leave his house since the most recent curfew.

The cell phone network is back up. Rarely does a call go through on the first try. Call five times. Six times. The seventh time there is a response, but it's a bad connection.

“Allo?”

“Hello, yes, can I please speak to Mr. al-Dabagh?” Or Mr. Mashandani or Maliki or Abdul or whatever.

“Allo?”

“Hello?”

“Allo?”

“Hi, yes, hello. This is Michael.”

“Allo?”

The connection gets better.

“Yes, Mr. al-Dabagh? This is Michael Hastings from
Newsweek.
”

The connection gets worse.

“Yes, Mr. al-Dabagh—this is…from…magazine…”

“Yes, yes. What can I do for you?”

Now I am practically shouting into the phone. My colleague in the office looks at me severely. I grab a notebook and take the call outside, where I can pace and speak at high volume.

The connection goes dead.

I call back.

“Allo?”

“Hello?”

“Yes, I just called…”

By now at least twenty minutes have passed for one phone call. Maybe an interview is set up. Maybe there's a quote. Maybe the person I'm trying to reach is out of the country, or in a meeting, or doesn't want to talk to me, or will talk to me only in person because he thinks the phone lines are tapped. There is usually some kind of resolution and sometimes it is satisfying just to have someone pick up. And then the call is over.

“Thank you,
shukrun.
Goodbye, allo, allo.”

Allo, allo, what you say in Iraq at the beginning and end of a conversation. I think it was Rod, the former bureau chief, who said Iraq is where hello means goodbye.

The news cycle catches up with me. There is a new “security crackdown.” Operation Together Forward Phase II, which begins on August 8, 2006. Things are happening. They're calling it the Battle of Baghdad in press statements. This could be a story.

I start getting excited. Something different is happening. Something other than car bombs and death squads. The attention of the world media is turning back toward Iraq.

My interpreter calls. He has finally reached the important Iraqi guy I've been wanting to interview for a week. The guy agrees to meet with me in person tomorrow at his compound.

Progress, a rush knowing there is an exciting trip to take the next day.

A mortar falls nearby, a whistling shriek while I am outside smoking. Munib comes running inside—did he shut the gate to the driveway? I take cover in the living room.

CNN is always on. I stop and take another phone call or five of them and I send more emails and plan more trips and the sun has gone down and I eat dinner and call New York and call Washington, and Washington has heard such and such and what do I think about that—does it jibe with what I'm hearing on the ground—crash, and the blast blanket hanging on the window actually sways. Scott just found a piece of olive-green shrapnel in the driveway from a rocket that hit three doors down—it blew out the kitchen window, knocked our security manager down, he spilled his tea. Scott shows the chunk of shrapnel to me—he'll keep it in his top desk drawer—then I drink some tea or some instant coffee and I start talking to my colleagues about stories and big ideas and what's going on. The images on CNN and the BBC are the images that I see right outside my own window. The next day the FedEx shipment arrives via the U.S. embassy with copies of the magazine with my stories from two weeks ago, and there's my name, and there are the pictures to prove I was there, but I don't have time to read because it's Thursday or Friday and I am on deadline again and I'm awake for twenty-four hours or forty-eight hours or it feels like that or it's Tuesday and I'm writing a story for the website and then it's the next week.

There's a great joke going around.

Sarah, another magazine correspondent, tells it to me. She heard it from her interpreter. It's about a death squad. An Iraqi man who runs a hardware store in Baghdad is targeted at his workplace. (Let's say he was a Sunni, death squad was Shiite, though it could be the other way around.) It's time to torture and kill him and the death squad leader looks around. “We forgot our tools! You idiot, you didn't bring the drill! How can we do our job without our tools?” The lightbulb in the death squad leader's head flickers on (it's running on generator power, hah). Oh, right, they are in a hardware store. There is a drill and a saw right there. They pin the Sunni man down and use brand-new tools off the shelf to drill his kneecaps. Then they kill him. They leave the body in the store and steal the tools.

Sarah first heard this with other reporters, and they all started laughing before the story was finished. They were laughing because of course an Iraqi death squad would forget the tools. It's hard to stop laughing at something like that.

Time here does not move like it does in the rest of the world. It has its own laws. You wake up and start to work and hear the bombs and it's 5
P.M.
so quickly and nothing has really been accomplished. The days blur together. You leave and come back a few months later and nothing has changed, except that you know it is somehow worse this time. You can see it in the eyes of the Iraqis who work for you. You have been gone a few months, back to “real life,” and they have been stuck here. It is real life for them, and it shows in the way they talk and in their faces that are not even frightened but resigned, numb, as if they know their name is on a list somewhere marking them for dead. Are they the same men I knew a few months ago? How long have I really been gone? Am I remembering them correctly? Have they aged in years, not months?

I call home. “I've only been back here a week, baby, can you believe it?”

It is August 2006. The situation has drastically deteriorated since June when the new Iraqi government took over under Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. It is the fourth new Iraqi government in four years. The government is barely functioning; on most days it is nonexistent. Parliamentary sessions are regularly canceled because less than half the 275 members show up for work. The U.S. military is scrambling to contain the rising sectarian violence and is promising to restore law and order to Baghdad. No one I talk to who knows what's going on—Iraqis, reporters, diplomats, soldiers—believes that it's possible to do that. The next five months will cap off the deadliest year for Iraqi civilians since the war began. In October, a record 3,709 Iraqis will be killed. Record high levels of American soldiers are going to start dying again soon. The situation, according to an official 2006 State Department report, includes a “pervasive climate of violence” and “arbitrary deprivation of life” and “misappropriation of official authority.” The insurgency and the militias continue to gain strength. Average daily attacks across the country will rise from a hundred per day in June when the government took over to 185 per day in December.