To Be a Friend Is Fatal (15 page)

The loud nurse appeared every few hours and shouted something in my ear as though I were deaf and injected drugs into my legs. I hated her. I tried to glare whenever she came in, but glaring tugged painfully at the stitching between my eyebrows. She wouldn't have seen it underneath the mask anyhow.

I couldn't breathe through my nostrils, which were stuffed with cotton balls. Wooden Popsicle sticks were jammed up my nostrils to help anchor the mask to my face. I could breathe only through my mouth, and since I couldn't chew anything, this meant that I had to take a deep breath before my brothers or parents tilted a can of chalky-tasting Ensure into my mouth.

“I can't stand it here.”

It had been only a few days since my fall, but I begged my parents to get me back to West Chicago. If all I was doing was lying around, I'd rather do that back home.

I began a relentless campaign to get out of there, redirecting every conversation back to my wish to go home, until a surgeon strode into the room in military fatigues. He was a medic in the Dominican military but kept a practice at the hospital. He was going to get me ready for the trip to Chicago, he said, speaking through my brother. This meant
making some striations in the casts so that my arms wouldn't be crushed when they swelled in flight at thirty thousand feet.

But it also meant removing my mask. I hadn't seen my face in days and was horrified by how I might look. An assistant came in with a steel tray, which she held with white rubber gloves. My eyes flared as the surgeon asked my brother to leave the room. On the tray were two large syringes filled with a broth-colored fluid.

The doctor picked at the medical tape affixing the upper part of the mask to my forehead and tugged slowly. The tape ran directly over the gash between my eyebrows, and the stitches strained to hold it together. The woman with the tray stood there to my right without moving, and I stared at the syringes.

The tape removed, all that held the mask in place were the Popsicle sticks and cotton balls in my nostrils. The cotton had hardened after absorbing so much blood, so when the surgeon gave a gentle tug at the sticks, they didn't budge. I began to breathe heavily when I saw his hand gather one of the two syringes. He didn't say anything as he inserted the syringe and shot the hot briny solution into my right nostril, which loosened the cotton and freed the wooden stick. I roared, “
Motherfu—
” but the rest of the word turned into a choking gargle as the solution flooded into my mouth. With weeping eyes, I spat it out, and the doctor placed one of the two Popsicle sticks on the nurse's tray.

His cell phone rang. He unclipped it from the holster on his hip. After a brief conversation, he snapped it back, and I saw a large smear of my blood on it. His rubber-gloved hand reached for the second syringe, and I began to beg pitifully, “Please! No!
No más!
Please!” I braced for the second blast.

We flew back to West Chicago on January 1, 2006, exactly one year after I had left for Iraq. My dad pushed me through the airport in a wheelchair and pulled my US government official passport from my chest pocket for the Transportation Security Administration official, who stared at me for a second and mumbled “Welcome back” before waving us along. Kids stared at me until reproached by their parents. I tried to swallow a dose of antibiotics and painkillers, but the water
just trickled out of my mouth and into the tear across my chin. My dad wheeled me over to the baggage carousel, and I watched the bags loop in silence.

Heaves of snow lined the highway home. I hobbled across the icy driveway and directly upstairs to my bedroom. The door was shut. I tried but failed to turn the knob, which was a rubbery orange miniature basketball I had installed a decade earlier. In an unsteady voice, I called downstairs to ask my dad to come open the door for me. I crawled into bed, took another Vicodin, and fell asleep. I was home.

EXCERPT FROM:

INFO MEMO

FOR: SECRETARY OF DEFENSE [Donald Rumsfeld]

SUBJECT: “What Did Not Happen?” (U)

(C) You asked for a list of the things for which we planned in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM that did
not
happen.

• Iraq descends into anarchy.

• There is widespread vigilante justice.

• Shi'a holy sites are damaged or destroyed.

• There are large numbers of internally displaced people and international refugees.

• “Fortress Baghdad” holds out indefinitely.

• There are mass Iraqi casualties.

• Another state (e.g., North Korea) takes advantage of US focus on Iraq.

DECLASSIFIED

AUTHORITY EO 12958

Yaghdan and his colleagues besieged their American bosses for help, for special badges allowing them to drive into the Green Zone rather than wait in the dangerous checkpoint lines, for promises of emergency housing in case they were targeted by militias. Month after month, year after year, they asked for protection but received none. The Americans wore condolences on their faces while they said they were looking into things.

Yaghdan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He wished the Americans would buy better computer monitors. These were too small, and the resolution strained his eyes after hours of poring through row after row of the database of USAID projects, which would someday become an unimportant digital artifact of history. On the wall of his cubicle hung a picture of Mashael, a young woman beloved by her Iraqi colleagues who had been killed one morning a few months earlier when she stepped out on the balcony after breakfast. A black stripe to signify mourning cut diagonally across the corner of her picture. Nobody ever found out if it was a stray or targeted round.

It had been only a few months since he ran from the white Opel. There was no point looking back now, he thought. The catalog of if-then considerations were exhausting and unsatisfying: in the end, he had made the decision to help the Americans based on what he knew at the time. In his mind, he defended himself against the lethal stigma clouding those who worked for the United States by stressing that he worked for a civilian agency, and not the military, which he felt bore the responsibility for many of the shameful parts of the occupation. But his civilian employer was losing funding and drifting into the margins of relevance.

Down the alleyway of cubicles from him sat Tona and Amina, two young women who worked in the human resources office. They were best friends; they had attended high school and college together and had worked at USAID since its earliest days. Whenever Iraqis were hired, it was Amina who helped them get their badges; her name was on the back of scores of USAID badges as the “signing authority.” Whenever Americans were hired, it was Tona who took their pictures with a digital camera and uploaded them into the badging system. American badges were blue; Iraqi badges were yellow.

When an Iraqi colleague was killed, Tona took an empty tissue box from a shelf in her cubicle and collected money for the victim's family.

At the beginning of the month of Ramadan in 2005, Tona and Yaghdan and the other Iraqis working for the United States were invited to a luncheon at the embassy in their honor, hosted by the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. The executive officer called in the Iraqi staff for a meeting before the lunch. “Don't say anything to him,” she warned. “Just eat and come back.” She knew that anytime the Iraqis were able to get in front of a powerful American, they asked for protection from the militias waiting for them on the other side of the Green Zone's blast walls. “It's not a good time to talk about this. He's being nice to have you over for lunch.” So they went and stood quietly in a long line for a picture with a grinning Zal. None of them ever received a copy.

Not long afterward, Tona and Amina walked out of the Green Zone through the Qadisiyya checkpoint, which opens onto the airport road. They had just cleared the American gate when a young man in an Iraqi police uniform stepped toward them and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. As he took their picture, Amina sprinted at him and started to yell, asking him what he was doing. She snatched his phone and ran back to the American soldiers guarding the checkpoint. The cop boldly followed to retrieve his phone, which the Americans were now examining. In addition to a picture of Tona and Amina, they found a video clip of an insurgent attack on an American convoy. They arrested him, interrogated him, and then took him away, but it was no comfort. They had just gotten the cop arrested, but for how long? A day? A year? Surely he'd search for them when he was released.

As the sun climbed over the city of Samarra on the morning of February 22, 2006, seven heavily armed Sunni militants dressed in Iraqi Special Forces uniforms strode into the entrance of the golden-domed Al-Askari Shrine and tied up the security guards. Visited by Shi'a pilgrims since the year 944, the mosque was of irreducible importance to the Shi'ite community. They carried in a number of bombs, which were strewn throughout the building. Shortly before seven o'clock, the bombs went
off, bringing down the golden dome and any delusions that Iraq was not hurtling toward a civil war.

The response was miasmic. Militias laid claim to neighborhood after neighborhood, hoisting their flags over seized checkpoints, at which they checked IDs for Sunni or Shi'a names. In this manner, the once-mixed Sunni-Shi'a neighborhoods of Baghdad and other major cities were ethnically cleansed. More than a thousand bodies a month piled up at the Baghdad morgue alone. Before long, more than fifty thousand Iraqis were fleeing into Syria, Jordan, and other countries each month.

It was a midterm election year in America, so the news from Iraq filtered in a little differently. The only metric that counted in public opinion polling was the casualty rate of US forces, and since fifty-five Americans were killed in February 2006, and only thirty-one killed in March, what were all the war critics talking about? The thirty-one killed were twenty fewer than the number killed in March 2004, and still four fewer than the number killed in March 2005. Yes, there were seventy-six Americans killed in April 2006, but that was a far sight better than the 135 that were killed in April 2004.

Meanwhile, the refugee crisis became the fastest growing in the world, as nearly one in eight Iraqis was running from the violence: the equivalent of 38 million Americans flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders.

A couple days after the bombing of Samarra, Fox News ran a photograph of the destroyed Golden Dome with the caption “Upside to Civil War?” The subsequent caption: “All-out civil war in Iraq: could it be a good thing?” Later that year, the network's Stuart Varney spelled out the thinking more clearly: “Let me put out something positive about Iraq, if I may, for a second. Look, we took the fight to the enemy. We divided the enemy. The enemy is now fighting itself. America's interest is surely being well preserved and well protected. We are, in fact, in a way, winning and preserving our interests here, are we not?”

The Democrats also saw an opportunity to capitalize on the violence scorching through Iraq. A six-point plan was unveiled by the party, the first of which was entitled
Real Security: Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World
, which would “require the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own country.” They employed the same condescending
language as the neoconservatives I knew back in Baghdad. “We did our part; it's up to the Iraqis now to step up,” as if the civil war rending the country had nothing to do with us but, rather, resulted from a deficiency in the Iraqi character.

Several months after Samarra, with millions displaced, a controversy erupted when Brian Williams at NBC
Nightly News
declared a civil war under way in Iraq. Katie Couric of
CBS Evening News
could not bring herself to agree. The Bush administration's spokesman at the White House, Tony Snow, laughed at Williams's assertion. It was not a civil war, he claimed, because the “different forces” were not unified: “You have not yet had a situation where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power but for territory.” When pressed on the question at a later briefing on December 5, 2006, he continued: