We Meant Well (3 page)

After what seemed like a week but was only two hours, we were led again through an obstacle course of counters and clipboards and onto a bus. Eventually we got to a runway and marched into the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft fitted with facing rows of canvas sling seats as if to pretend we weren't really just more cargo. The aircraft warming up was noisy, while the aircrew shouted silently, their voices drowned out. We sat with our legs interwoven, helmets and body armor on, in near-complete darkness as the plane took off.

I must have fallen asleep, because the thump as the plane landed woke me from a warm bed far away. A crew member said simply, “Baghdad.” Outside I looked at the concrete and smelled the aviation fuel, trying to have a significant moment, until someone pushed me and I joined a long line that led to another line, where I showed more people the same ID card. By the time my wife was ready to give birth, after a thousand examinations, she'd simply stopped caring who saw her naked, and I now felt the same way, waving my card at complete strangers on the assumption that they wanted to see it. We wrote our names on lists and more lists. There must be a thousand clipboards at the Baghdad airport. I did not know why I was getting on another bus or where I was going. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to get rid of my luggage, and I wanted to ask so many questions.

The bus was sucked down tunnels made of concrete T-walls. Everything was brightly lit with the uncaring orange glow you see on the interstate late at night. We did the ID mambo again and again, even onboard until someone said to get off the bus. I asked everyone I could where we were and got multiple answers. It turned out we were (by summation) in Iraq, Baghdad, Victory Base Complex, Camp Stryker, at the Rhino Stables. The Stables were filled with old furniture and a million paperbacks left by others—this was a place for serious waiting. One of our legacies in Iraq will be the mountains of murder mystery, sci-fi, romance, and fantasy paperbacks left behind to confound future archaeologists. There was a TV with CNN and another with sports, the sound turned off on both, Anderson Cooper as mime. Handwritten signs were everywhere: take one, replace one, eat what you take, no feet on couches, no smoking, check your weapon, official calls only, one per customer, keep quiet when others are sleeping, no sleeping on couches. It felt temporarily permanent, a place that was never meant to exist for too long but that had accepted its new fate without even a feint at grace. I asked at the desk what I was waiting for, and the person there, with yellow-brown teeth chronicling a lifetime of unfiltered Camels, told me I was waiting for the Rhino, so sit down. If I could have, I would have willed myself to spontaneously combust and be done with all this. If anyone had said, “We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” I would have torn off his limbs and beaten his torso to a pulp with a leg.

At some point late in the night, time ceased to matter. A worker yelled that the Rhino had arrived. A soldier tore the duct tape off my vest without asking, saying it made me look “new,” and I hated and thanked him at the same time. The Rhino turned out to be an armored bus, with thick windows and a Thunderdome feel. Inside it felt darker than the night because the windows were tinted. The guard onboard told us to put on our helmets because “we're gonna enter Iraq soon.” I was scared, and I was suddenly very, very awake. My neck started to sweat even though the bus was cold. I wanted to be anywhere else. I was willing to go back to the La-Z-Boys in Kuwait. I stayed hyperalert the entire one-hour ride, aware of every bump and turn. My vision blurred and my mouth was cotton-dry. I had no control, I felt stupid being frightened, I wanted to go home.

It was unclear to me in my state when exactly we left Iraq and entered the Green Zone and, soon after that, the Embassy compound. Someone handed me a key and pointed me toward a dorm door, told me to be outside at 8:00 a.m., and left. I found my room, my clothing soaked clean through in frigid sweat. I had to get up in a few hours to be helicoptered to my new home in the desert. Unable to sleep, I turned on the TV. The first channel to pop up showed a
Seinfeld
rerun in English and I watched that until three. I hate that bass-riff thing
Seinfeld
uses to bridge between scenes, but no one was around to listen or care.

A Home in the Desert

From high up in the air my new home looked like a ship, a speck floating in the sea of Iraq, affected by it but not part of it. For the next six months, I would live at this place, FOB Hammer, embedded first with the 82nd Airborne Division, followed by the 10th Mountain Division, two of the Army's proudest can-do units. FOB Hammer was purpose-built in 2007 for the Surge, and it sat out in the literal middle of nowhere. I say literal, literally, because there was no town or feature, man-made or natural, to mark it or lend it a name. It was its own kingdom, built entirely by the US Army to house the US Army. They simply picked a flat piece of ground and moved in, with the squatter's rights a successful invasion granted. FOB Hammer was physically huge, twelve miles around its perimeter, and surrounded by rings of ubiquitous T-walls, cast concrete twelve feet high with a wide base so they could stand on their own. T-walls were as iconic to our war as Betty Grable was to that other, better war. The walls kept us in our ship and they kept Iraq out. As a hint there was something more out there, I smelled wood fires burning as we landed. Someone explained Iraqis used scraps of palm wood for fuel. It was a very old thing to do. There was not much fuel in the desert, and people throughout the Middle East had burned palm wood for millennia. Jesus smelled palm wood burning.

The FOB was subdivided into parts of town where one spent a lot of time and parts where one did not venture, all populated by about four hundred troops. A few places, like where the helicopters touched down or the single land gate in and out, were necessary stops but otherwise to be avoided. The landing zone (LZ) was way out on the edge of the FOB, presumably for safety (if a helo crashed it was better somewhere unpopulated). People went to the LZ to get on and off birds; there were a lot of cigarette butts on the ground but otherwise it was distant, noisy, dangerous, and without amenities.

The gate was a bad place to hang out because you could be shot. The gate was not a front door like at Fort Apache but rather a series of stages that transitioned you from outside to inside. The journey in started with the dirt road that led to Hammer. The road acquired barbed wire as it approached the FOB, followed by concrete barriers that forced vehicles to slow down and execute a series of S-turns, followed by the first line of Hesco barriers. (Made by the Hesco company, whose stock you should have bought in 2002, these gigantic wire baskets, taller than a person, were lined with waterproof cardboard and filled with dirt to make thick walls.) A flat area, the “kill zone,” filled with razor wire and watched over by contracted guards in medieval-looking concrete towers, was the final defense. Unless you were going out on patrol, people tended to fly in and out of the FOB for safety and because it was so damn far away from the world. The twenty-first century did not bring me a personal portable jetpack or a hoverboard, but I did get to travel a lot by helicopter while in Iraq.

Once past the gate and another series of S-turns designed to slow down suicide bombers and piss off tired soldiers, the road in brought you to the center part of the FOB, where almost all of us lived amid a series of abbreviations and acronyms. Despite wildly varying rank, duties, and salary, everyone shared the same life. Soldiers, contractors, and I all lived in the same trailers, ate the same food, used the same showers. The military term for this zone was LSA (life support area), which translated to air-conditioned trailers (called CHUs, for containerized housing units) and a chow hall called a DFAC (dining facility), a gym (GYM), an MWR (morale, welfare, and recreation) Internet room with VoIP phones (Voice over Internet Protocol) and satellite AFN TV (Armed Forces Network), a tiny PX (post exchange), and maybe a fast-food trailer. A proper LSA was an outpost of the homeland. It affirmed morale. Even the postboxes were blue and imported from the States. It was supposed to look like home and it sort of did, if home was a trailer park and Taco Bell was a night out.

The CHUs where we all lived were steel containers modified to become little rooms. Most people insisted on calling them hooches, invoking the 'Nam slang term, but it was hard for me to think of my steel box as anything as exotic as what the term
hooch
called up. The box was as long as a single bed plus three feet and just wider than my extended arms. Inside you had one or two beds, one or two IKEA-like freestanding closets, and as much junk as you and your roommate could cram in. During the times when I was lucky enough to live alone I kept the place fairly empty, but some soldiers acquired a frightening amount of what was technically known as crap, piling Xboxes (the value of video games to the war should not be undersold; troops would finish work patrolling the streets of 2010 Iraq to play
Call of Duty
, patrolling the streets of 1945 Berlin), cheap TVs, hundreds of DVDs, boom boxes, exercise gear, and stolen snack foods, pyramided from floor to ceiling. Everybody had to cram in their weapons and ammunition. The soldiers also had to deploy with all their issued gear, needed or not, so their hooches would also be piled high with cold-weather gear, bulky rubber chemical-protection suits, and arctic sleeping bags. There'd be regular inspections for forbidden drugs, booze, and any temporary cohabiting, and those rude checkups when everything was tossed around kept most hooches in a state of near collapse.

Like most everything else on the FOB, our offices were temporary things. The Army had built a large building, about the size of a high school gym, and created within it a warren of rooms and cubicles and dead ends without cheese, all made out of plywood sheets. It was meant to be temporary (we're not occupiers, you know!) but like a Big Mac left on a shelf it never rotted away. Nothing was painted, because paint was an enhancement, not a requirement, and so we had no paint inside. Outside rocks were painted white to make moving around at night easier, so there paint was a necessity and permitted. My office was decorated only by giant maps of Iraq and by dust.

I had two old laptops, one for classified and one for unclassified. Unfortunately, I had only one power adapter, and so throughout the day I had to switch the power between machines as one battery or the other faded out. There was no legitimate method to procure a second power adapter, so I had to either buy one myself and wait eight weeks for it to arrive by military mail from Dell or steal one when someone transferred off the FOB. Furniture was a similar problem. Sometime before I arrived in Iraq, the ePRT had been relocated from FOB Loyalty to FOB Hammer. All of our office furniture had been lost in the move. State insisted that under some obscure memorandum of understanding the Army was responsible for furnishing our office. After doing so, the Army felt that even if it then stole the furniture for its own use, it was under no obligation to give us new furniture. While this was worked out at high levels, we used sheets of plywood for desks and sat on crates. The same problem came up with printer cartridges; State said they were a DOD responsibility and DOD said State should pay. For a while we couldn't print anything in our office and had to beg permission to print from neighbors until an unnamed person stole some printer cartridges from the Embassy for us.

The few Iraqis allowed on the FOB ran shops, created as part of a long-forgotten program to nurture small business in Iraq. The soldiers to a man and woman called these “hajji shops,” misappropriating the formal Islamic term for a devout Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Hajji
used in this fashion was this war's kraut, Jap, and gook. The shops sold mostly office supplies (but not printer cartridges) and illegal DVDs. The office supplies were popular because the Army supply chain could be slow and seemed always to be out of what you needed. It was easier to buy yellow stickies for a few dollars than to order them through the Army. We believed many of the office supplies in the hajji shops were stolen from the Army, which was one reason the Army was usually out of what you needed.

Illegal DVDs constituted about 90 percent of the hajji shops' inventory and close to 100 percent of their profits. The DVDs were an encyclopedic collection of action, adventure, and car-chase movies from the birth of cinema to the most recent
Fast and Furious
. The DVDs all came from China. One can only imagine the reverse Silk Road journey these movies made from a back-alley copying operation in Guangzhou to a hajji shop at the FOB. All that and you could get a movie for three bucks. After oil, it seemed like illegal DVD sales made up the other half of the Iraqi economy. Some soldiers had collections of hundreds.

Near the semiofficial hajji shops were the official franchises, sponsored by the Army and Air Forces Exchange Service (AAFES). These shops existed on almost every FOB of decent size. They included a barbershop, an out-of-place embroidery shop (almost all name tapes and rank badges were now stuck on uniforms with Velcro), and a fake fast-food stand (sign says Pizza Hut, food says generic frozen). Then there was the PX, a cross between a general store and a gas station convenience shop. It didn't have much but it had the necessities. Soldiers could buy toiletries, three-month-old magazines, batteries, a few music CDs (the rack would have three rap artists, three country artists, and three heavy metal groups, all about a year out of style, to displease everyone equally), and lonely full-price versions of some of the same DVDs the hajji shops sold.

The bad side of town was the semianonymous area where the Ugandan contract guards and Third World servants who cleaned the latrines and served the food stayed. They lived in tents while we lived in trailers, and their tents were one of the places on the FOB where you did not go. I envisioned the area as a dust bowl hobo camp. They were so removed from us that if someone told me the FOB had secret utilidoor tunnels underneath like Disney World, I would have believed it too. At the Embassy, I knew they lived crammed into unsafe shipping containers, with all sorts of fire hazards.
6
We often wondered what their lives were like, if they ever did things for fun, and how many hours they worked. There were rumors, too, about the Ugandan camp, that drugs were available and that two rapes had occurred there. No one knew what was true, but we all kept away.