To Be a Friend Is Fatal (41 page)

My phone rang immediately. He was insistent that we meet, saying that he couldn't communicate what he needed to over the phone. “I served in Iraq,” he said, as if to give me a clue. He asked where I was staying.

“Okay, listen, if you walk toward the train station which heads into Geneva, there's a footbridge. Do you know which one I'm talking about?”

“Uh, yeah,” I mumbled.

“Okay, I'm gonna head out now. Go over to that bridge and wait beneath it. I'll be driving a dark sedan.”

“How will I know you?” I asked flatly.

“Oh, look for the sedan with a license plate ending in a nine.”

I waited by the bridge in the quiet still of early evening, studying license plates, wonder what could possibly require such cloak-and-dagger measures. I wondered why I had agreed to meet. The sedan finally approached. As I walked toward it, the passenger-side window slid down and club music pumped out into the sleepy lanes of Chambesy. “Kirk! Hop in!”

He drove us away from Geneva, making small talk but not yet explaining why he needed to meet me so urgently. After about a half hour, the sedan eased into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. I got out of the car warily and followed him inside.

We were ushered to a table, but as soon as I sat down, he wandered off. I watched as he worked his way around the restaurant, looking at the faces of the other diners. When he returned, I snapped at him.

“C'mon, what's the point of all this?”

He sat across the table from me, leaned in, and said, “I was just checking to make sure there wasn't anyone I recognized.”

“Why?”

“You kidding? My bosses aren't very happy with you right now.” He removed a folded slip of paper from his pocket and, adding to my exasperation over the faux-spy antics, placed it on the Lazy Susan in the middle of our table and rotated it toward me. I unfolded the paper and read the names of two Iraqis working for the embassy, both of whom had already been referred to me by another worried foreign service officer.

“They're already on the list,” I said impatiently. “Can we go back now?” I didn't have much of an appetite.

“Oh, thank God,” he sighed. “Are they going to be okay?”

A good man, going to absurd lengths to conceal an impulse to do the right thing.

This was not an isolated experience. It came in many shapes but was instantly recognizable, in the dingy Irish pubs in Washington with bureaucrats who were nervous to be spotted with me, in the worried emails from dummy accounts, in the knowing glances from the backbench during meetings with front-bench officials: insiders aware that the United States of America wasn't doing enough but patrolling the volume of their outrage nonetheless. Had I still been working for USAID, had I not fallen from the window, I imagine I might have done the same. Instead, in the government's new formulation of what constitutes a danger, I was one.

Seven years ago, a militant in Baghdad severed the head of a dog and lobbed it into Yaghdan's yard, the first link in an endless chain of
events. In the years that have passed since I wrote that op-ed in the
Los Angeles Times
, the end of the List Project has become unknowable. Throughout each of those years, I tried to break the chain, writing pieces, testifying, recruiting lawyers, lugging binders to the State Department. But the Iraqis kept writing, and the bureaucracy kept stalling.

The eight firms and hundreds of attorneys representing those on my list constitute, to my knowledge, the single largest pro bono effort on behalf of refugees in US history. In 2012, Chris Nugent, the attorney at Holland and Knight whose relentless advocacy saved hundreds of Iraqis, including Yaghdan, was stricken with multiple sclerosis. He can no longer practice law, but the results of his work continue to be felt. My Iraqi team—Tona, Amina, and Basma—still burn the phone lines each day to guide others through the process. Marcia Maack, the pro bono coordinator at Mayer Brown, continues to train new lawyers and wrestle against the government, managing scores of cases for the List Project. Since Yaghdan and Haifa's arrival in August 2007, more than 1,500 Iraqis on the list have made it through the gauntlet of the resettlement bureaucracy and now live in America.

While the List Project achieved far more than I ever imagined, I seem capable of focusing only on the Iraqis we left behind. The List Project continues to receive a steady stream of applications from those who remain in great danger in the new Iraq. A few weeks after the end of the war, a young man on my list received a jar of sulfuric acid from a militia, which ordered him to leave before he was bathed in acid. An Iraqi in Ramadi received a knock on his door and found a policeman who told him he had forty-eight hours to flee or else he would be assassinated. Others have been abducted and killed.

But my prediction of a Basrah-style public execution of our Iraqi allies was incorrect. Instead, the number of assassinations climbs in tiny increments—a decapitated man here and there—with never enough of a “signature” to summon outrage in Washington or the attention of the few remaining journalists in Iraq.

The Special Immigrant Visa program established by Senator Kennedy's Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act is scheduled to expire in 2013. Nearly eighteen thousand slots remain unused. In February 2013, toward the
end of a lengthy discussion with a recently retired senior Obama administration official who was involved in refugee affairs, I laid out the statistics and asked how he felt history would judge the United States on this dimension of the war. He sighed before saying, “Look, what do you want me to say? In terms of protecting Iraqis who stepped forward to help us, I think we did a crappy job. You'd have to put your head in the sand to say otherwise.”

Afghan interpreters, many of whom have written to me for help, appear even worse off than the Iraqis. Although 1,500 Special Immigrant Visas were designated for Afghans each year, the State Department took nearly two years to “ramp up” its program. No sooner had it become operational than Karl Eikenberry, our ambassador in Kabul at the time, sent a February 2010 cable asking the State Department to kill the program: “This act could drain this country of our very best civilian and military partners: our Afghan employees . . . if we are not careful, the SIV program will have a significant deleterious impact on staffing and morale . . . local staff are not easily replenished in a society at 28 percent literacy.” He proposed tightening the language of the legislation so that visas were issued only “in those rare instances where there is clear and convincing evidence of a serious threat.” The impact of the cable was immediate and lasting: with our withdrawal from Afghanistan looming, the average number of Afghan interpreters receiving visas each month is four. The Afghan Allies Protection Act of 2009 is also set to expire with thousands of unused slots.

As the List Project struggled with successive administrations, it was impossible for me to evaluate our progress without considering the success of another organization that was launched around the same time. Operation Baghdad Pups, an initiative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was founded to resettle Iraqi dogs that had befriended our troops. Their website had a flashy banner proclaiming “No Buddy Gets Left Behind! . . . Abandoning Charlie in the war-ravaged country would have meant certain death for him.” In exchange for a $1,000 donation, the group would cut through the US government's red tape in order to bring these pets to “freedom” in less than six
months. Airlines donated free travel for the dogs. Crowds gathered at the airport, crying with joy when the animals arrived.

Mouayyad, Hayder's best friend, who drove only American cars and dreamed of one day coming to America, was still struggling to make it through the visa application process as 2013 arrived. After years of waiting, he read an article in the
Army Times
about “Smoke,” a cigarette-eating Iraqi donkey from Anbar Province that had befriended the marines during their deployment. Marine colonel John Folsom told the reporter, “It didn't seem right that Smoke was left behind,” so he and Operation Baghdad Pups raised $40,000 over thirty-seven days to evacuate the donkey to Omaha, Nebraska. In July 2012 CNN reported that nearly all of the $27 million donated by Americans to help Iraqi dogs (nearly fourteen times the amount the List Project was able to raise over the years) was used on direct-mail campaigns to raise more funds.

On January 2, 2013, President Obama signed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, which included an amendment to grant dogs working for the US military the status of “Canine Members of the Armed Forces.” Animal rights groups and major media outlets ran a series of articles describing a troubling situation: these dogs were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and were struggling to get treatment.

When I heard a woman call into a radio program on PTSD to declare that she had developed it after watching too many episodes of
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
on television, I realized that the stigma surrounding the disorder had evaporated. If dogs were now susceptible, why not the TV-viewing public? In 2011, senior Pentagon officials even launched a campaign to drop the
D
for
disorder
from the diagnosis, rendering it simply post-traumatic stress. “This is a normal reaction to a very serious set of events in their life,” said Lieutenant General Eric Schoomaker, the army's surgeon general.

The nightmares that patrolled my sleep in the year after the fall have departed, but my flesh and bones offer up daily reminders of the accident. My left wrist makes a snapping sound when I twist it, and I sometimes nick my chin when shaving because the nerve endings around the scars are dead. Whenever I bite into an apple, I wonder if my front
teeth—cracked little tombstones that grow duskier each year—will finally break.

But although the accident and the ensuing trauma have become memories, I have given up on the tidy idea of “closure” and the expectation that the Iraq chapter of my life will one day close. A full quarter of my life has been tossed into the abyss of that war, and even though it's over, I don't know how to keep that quarter from becoming a third. When I go to dinner parties, I try my best not to say the words
Iraq
or
refugees
but usually fail, and feel embarrassed later for what seems like my impoliteness. When I get home, I find more emails from refugees throughout the world, pleading for visas. Those who have made it to America write and call every few days with new requests: a cousin just received a death threat, a brother is looking for work, a daughter is applying to college, a family needs money for rent. Could I help?

The time may come when all the tiny cracks in what remains of my idealism will combine to shatter it to bits. I'll stop telling myself that next year will be the year the administration finally wakes up. Or that the same story won't repeat itself as we withdraw from Afghanistan. I'll stop believing in the power of a perfectly worded op-ed or that legislation and the intent of Congress still mean something. Or that bureaucracies shouldn't be allowed to wield the moral compass of the nation.

I'll leave the State Department alone. I'll get a steady job and stop responding to Iraqis. I'll sleep through the night and stop grinding down my teeth. I'll stop talking about wars nobody remembers. I'll click and post and retweet my outrage and feel content.

But until then, I'll wonder: Is it too much to hope that the government creates an assistant secretary of state for protecting local allies, with equivalent secretaryships at Defense and Homeland Security? Is it so far-fetched to imagine appointing someone to start building a list on the first morning of the next war? Is it too naïve to propose that all future war authorizations be coupled with a minimum number of visa slots for those who step forward to help? Ten thousand per year?

Until then, the List Project will carry on. In the spring of 2013, I initiated talks with an Afghan woman to join the organization on a part-time
basis to begin compiling a list of US-affiliated Afghans. Maybe the president will help them before it's too late.

On the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Yaghdan and Haifa had their first child, a boy named Ali. Their son arrived two months premature and weighed less than four pounds, but he was born a citizen of the United States. For the first eight weeks of his life, Haifa and Yaghdan could only visit him in the intensive care ward of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Illinois, where a tiny feeding tube ran into his right nostril. I flew home and stood over his little hospital bed with his parents, who told me that Ali never would have lived had he been born in Baghdad so prematurely.

But Ali survived the challenges of his first weeks of life and grew quickly. A year later, Yaghdan graduated from DeVry University's Keller School of Management with a degree in accounting. We all gathered at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago to attend the fourth Johnson brother's commencement, crying and roaring with applause as he strode across the stage.

On October 19, 2012, almost six years to the day after receiving the death threat, Yaghdan and Haifa swore the oath of allegiance and became citizens of the United States of America. Ali looked on with large black eyes.

Zina, Tara, and their mother are thriving in Virginia. The sisters both work as translators for the State Department, interpreting for visiting dignitaries from the Middle East. Their father died in December 2012, but they were unable to return to Basrah for the burial.

Hayder, Dina, and Ali moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where Hayder took a job in a carpet factory. Then he found a job as a food prep at Isaac's Mediterranean Restaurant on Memorial Avenue. His boss used to bring over other employees and say, “Look, he works harder than you, and he's only got one leg!” Before long, he was put on the cook line, where his coworkers asked him questions such as “Why did America go over to Iraq again?” “What was it like getting shot?”