I Lost My Love in Baghdad (23 page)

BAGHDAD

There are more phone calls, more ringing phones, more discussions on what to do next. I feel the need to get to Ohio to see her family. My younger brother, Jeff, the infantry platoon leader, happens to be home in Vermont on a two-week leave. I talk to him. “I can't believe it, man, I can't fucking believe it. This is so fucked up.”

“I know, dude, I know,” he says.

My mother calls again. She is calm now, her voice steady, her priority now is getting me home safely.

“This phone call,” she says. “It could have been Andi on the phone calling about you, it could have been you calling about Jeff, it could have been Jeff calling about you.”

But it wasn't. It was Andi. It was me calling about her.

I tell whoever I am talking to that this should not have happened. I say it should have been me. I would trade anything for it to have been me. I'm the one who is supposed to take those kinds of risks; I'm the one who is supposed to pay for them with my life. At 5
A.M.
, I lie down on my bed. She gave me a stuffed panda bear that I keep at my bedside, or in my bag when traveling. I hold the panda. A brain-dead sleep comes for two hours.

I wake up at 7
A.M.
, put on sweatpants, a navy blue hoodie that she hated, a red Washington Nationals baseball cap that she gave me, and sunglasses. It is Thursday.

I'm told by NDI that they don't actually know where Andi's body is right now. After the attack, a U.S. patrol secured the scene. They recovered the car her body was in. NDI tells me the military has apparently misplaced it. This is not too surprising to me.

I talk to X.

“Find out where she is, man, find out where she is.”

X goes to the CASH, the Combat Army Support Hospital in the Green Zone. No word of her there, though he is given the name of the person who will eventually receive her body, if her body shows up. He gets the DSN number for him. DSN, defense switched network, the phone system only the military has access to.

NDI is trying to get an answer from the military, with no luck.

I want to go home with her, on her plane. The idea is floated. What needs to be done to make that happen? NDI is working on it. I have little faith in them, so I work it, too.

I call the U.S. embassy spokesperson, Lou Fintor. Lou is very good at his job and he is a friend. He arrived in Baghdad six months ago after serving two years in Afghanistan. “Is there any way to make that happen?” Lou says he will bring it to the attention of the ambassador. He'll make it happen.

I also start working an alternative plan of escape. If the military flight falls through,
Newsweek
's contact in Amman, Ranya Khadri, has gotten me a seat on any Royal Jordanian flight I want. She spoke directly to the president of RJ.

“The Iraqis,” she says to me over the phone. “Iraq.”

The question is whether I wait to go home with her body or, if that seems like it will take too long, leave on an RJ flight.

It is still unclear where her body is, when we will fly home. Later that night, Lou Fintor tells me it could be as early as tomorrow, Friday, which in militaryspeak probably means Sunday. A seventy-two-hour window of hurry up and wait.

Another embassy official tells me that I may or may not be able to get on the plane with her. “We don't reserve seats like that,” he says. “You can fly Space A”—space available. He tells me he is very busy, and under a lot of pressure. I say I understand, but I am angry. I don't want space fucking available, I want a seat on the flight. I call Lou back. Lou says Ambassador Khalilzad has personally said to make this top priority, to get me on the flight. The embassy also issues a statement written by Lou. He tells me it is one of the most strongly worded statements on a civilian attack: “We vow to honor the memory of those killed by finding and bringing to justice all those who committed and assisted in these senseless and cowardly acts of murder. We will work with the Government of Iraq to relentlessly pursue those responsible.”

Her killers also put out a press release. It is from the Islamic State of Iraq, the name of a jihadist umbrella group, affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq. They are claiming responsibility. “Oh Allah land of three rivers we have killed the Zionist occupiers,” they say of Andi and the three guards, in a statement distributed online and translated by the SITE institute. I receive that in my in-box.

Andi's body is still missing, as Thursday night comes to a close. Her name has been released to the press. Her photograph is released, too. I want to talk to the press about it. I don't want Andi to be a one-day story. I don't want her to be just a headline on the wires. I call a friend at the
Los Angeles Times
. I tell her why I loved Andi; I try to explain who Andi was, what she believed in. It is the first of ten interviews I do on her death. The headline in the
L.A. Times
on Friday reads: “American Woman Follows Heart, Ideals, to Baghdad.” The
New York Times
also calls; it is their guy from Cleveland.

So this happened today, right? he asks.

No, yesterday.

There is so much to say, so much anger that I am keeping in check. I want to kill someone and I want to scream at someone and I want to die and I want revenge.

A man from NDI calls; we talk about the media strategy. He requests that I speak only about Andi, that I keep the stories focused on her, on what great things she was doing, not on NDI, not on what NDI was doing. Security reasons, of course.

I hold my tongue. It is difficult not to say what is obvious to anyone who looks at this situation: NDI and its security company, Unity Resources Group, failed to protect their staff member. A catastrophic failure. The first thing out of the mouth of anyone I talk to—Iraqis, my journalist friends, my military contacts, the security personnel—is how could this trip to such a dangerous place have been approved? It seems like a clear fuckup. No American civilian should have been approved to go to the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in Yarmouk. Yarmouk is considered one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad. There was no need to meet members of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a party known to have ties with insurgent groups, at their headquarters. Bad things happened at their headquarters. Two Iraqi journalists were killed while leaving a press conference there—kidnapped and executed—six months ago. Eight months earlier, Jill Carroll's kidnappers released her to the Iraqi Islamic Party. The IIP asked her to make a videotaped statement, saying they had had nothing to do with it. They assured her it would not be broadcast, then showed the interview on their own TV station. The last Western journalist I knew who had visited the compound had gone there in May 2006, against the advice of his translator, and he didn't tell the IIP the time he was coming, he just showed up.

I start looking into Unity Resources Group. They're based out of Dubai and Australia. Why had the URG failed to accurately assess the threat level in the area, or in Baghdad itself, approving the trip without hesitation? The situation in Baghdad was extremely volatile. There was open fighting on Haifa Street only the week before. There had been three reported attacks in and around Yarmouk in the previous five days. On the day she was killed, there were sixty attacks in Baghdad alone. It was likely a setup. Her attackers probably knew well in advance the day and time she was coming. Enough time to get together a team of insurgents, to identify the target, to plot an attack. Everyone working in Baghdad knows you never give a set time for arrival when going to such a high-risk spot.

Yeah, don't worry, I'll keep it focused on Andi. The anger and blame is everywhere—myself, the insurgents, NDI, IIP, myself again. Yes, it's a war, yes, these things happen, yes, hindsight is twenty-twenty, but shouldn't security be the number one priority? What happened to security that day?

Will I ever get these answers? No, I probably won't get the answers, and I won't be satisfied if I do, and none of it is going to change a fucking thing.

Another phone call from NDI on Thursday night. I get the most detailed account of events so far. She is at the IIP compound for an hour and a half. She leaves the compound around noon. She is traveling in a convoy of three sedans. She is in a BMW. The first car leaves the compound; in it are an Iraqi driver and a security guard from Ireland. The first car is allowed to pass down the street. She is in the second car. Her car pulls out of the compound. About 150 to 300 meters from the entrance, the car is “disabled”—perhaps by heavy machine-gun fire with armor-piercing rounds. The third car is behind it. There is an explosion. The second car disappears in smoke. The third car takes heavy fire, from thirty to fifty men. They are shooting from all directions, it seems. The private security detail team leader in the third car is killed, the driver wounded, the other security guard shot. The first car radios for help and turns around. A gun battle ensues; they get a few of the insurgents. A second team of NDI security guards arrives fifteen minutes later. They are engaged in a gunfight. Forty-five minutes later the U.S. Army arrives on scene, the quick reaction force, or QRF. The insurgents are gone; two cars have been destroyed; everyone in the second car, which included a Hungarian PSD and an Iraqi driver and Andi, is dead.

It is unclear why the second car stopped; it is still unclear what happened. An FBI investigation is under way, I am told. The FBI investigates murders of American civilians overseas. The incident is being classified as a terrorism case. The survivors of the attack are being interviewed.

I need to get my own answers, launch my own investigation. This is what I do, I am a reporter. And NDI knows this, I think.

Calls from NBC, CBS. They want to talk to me about Andi.

The CBS crew comes to the
Newsweek
bureau in the Green Zone. We set a chair outside in front of sandbags blocking the office window. It is a sunny day.

I talk to the producer before the interview, offscreen.

“I'm still in shock, to be honest. I don't know how the fuck I'm supposed to be acting.”

He nods, and chats, sympathetic.

The microphone is put on me, and I start talking. I sit down. The camera is on, the questions come.

I say things, most good, some angry. I talk about Andi.

“My brother's a soldier and he told me not to cry on camera,” I say.

I say, “Ask whatever you need to ask, I know the deal, I've been on the other side of the questions, too.” It's odd. As a journalist, I'd regularly talk to people after tragedies in their lives; after the worst moments, after deaths and killings, I would try to ask as politely as possible, How do you feel? I wondered sometimes how and why they would talk to me. I understand now. Getting people to pay attention makes you feel less helpless.

NBC, same thing. We go inside, I show them pictures of Andi and me on my laptop. That morning, I made a folder of pictures of us.

The Associated Press, Knight Ridder…I repeat myself. I want her story to be front-page news everywhere. I want people to know what kind of woman has been killed in this war. My editor asks me to send my thoughts about Andi for the “Editor's Note,” the page at the front of the magazine. I write them down in between interviews. I say that if there was such a thing as love at first sight, this was it. I say that she hated the suffering she saw in Iraq, that she wanted to fix the mistake her country had made. I say she was the best and brightest of her generation. I say she was the best face America could offer to the world.

I go on for five hundred words. I don't know what they are going to do with this, but I hit send, and it's off to New York.

That night, ABC calls and asks if I can do an interview via satellite from the U.S. embassy. It is past ten o'clock. Lou sets it up for me. The studio is on the second floor of the embassy. An older man takes the lint and dandruff off my blue sweater with a piece of electrical tape. The lights in the studio are on me; the camera adjusted, the earpiece in. A voice from the ABC studio in New York tells me, “Don't look at the camera, look off to the side, like you're being interviewed in person.”

We're rolling, questions coming into my earpiece.

I say that Andi is an angel; I speak of her as an angel, as a pure soul. I talk about plans for the engagement—she sent me specifications for the ring a week ago: DeBeers, princess cut, 1.5 karats, size six.

After the interview, another friend from the embassy pulls me aside.

“I have some information,” he tells me.

He has read a classified intelligence report on the attack. It was a setup, an attempted kidnapping. Andi was the likely target. Not a random target, not a target of opportunity. Andi, the girl from Ohio, blond hair and blue eyes, she was the target. The insurgents swarmed the car. They tried to open the doors, but couldn't. And then everything got worse. They rolled grenades under the car, boom boom boom, the fuel tank exploded and the whole car went up in smoke.

“The pictures are bad,” my friend says. “The photographs are very, very bad. The driver of her car—he may have tried to run away.”

The insurgent group responsible, my source tells me, is Islamic jihadist with ties to Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda wannabes. He says this group is known for kidnapping Iraqi women. They are known for torturing and raping Iraqi women—pulling their fingernails out, beheading them. They are bad men; they are not the kind of insurgents who negotiate.

“It is better she was killed than kidnapped by these men,” he says.

I know this is true. I think I know.

It is becoming more apparent that the Iraqi Islamic Party, with their own contingent of armed guards a few hundred feet away, stood by and watched this happen. They did nothing to stop it.

I am sick of Iraq. I am sick at the thought that the people Andi was going to help had an active hand in setting her up. I am disturbed, too, that the Iraqi Islamic Party visited the Bush White House in December 2006. The IIP is considered a “moderate” Sunni political party. The head of the party, Tarek al-Hashemi, is one of Iraq's three vice presidents. According to what NDI told me, and what my source confirmed, a person or persons within the organization likely played a role in killing her by tipping off the men who did it. The White House is entertaining people who have links to Islamic extremists? This is our war on terror?