I Lost My Love in Baghdad (10 page)

On Christmas morning, Andi handed out presents to us, an excessive amount of gifts piled around the tree, sliding smoothly into the ritual, one to Jeff, one to Jon, one to Brent, one to Molly, one to Grandma Ruth, one to me, and repeat, until the baked stuffed French toast and oyster stew were ready. For some reason my dad put on Mariah Carey's Christmas album and we all laughed at him, but no one turned it off. We played board games late into the evening, then we went to the guest bedroom (though for reasons of decorum I pretended to sleep on the living room couch), where Andi rested her head on my shoulder and I felt my white undershirt start to get wet.

“Baby, uh, are you crying?”

“No,” she said, sniffling.

“Why are you crying?”

No answer, but my shirt was getting wetter.

“Baby, you're ruining my shirt.”

“You're not very good at consoling.”

“Oh, look at your baby tears.”

“Baby tears,” she said. “Baby, baby tears.”

“There's no need to cry. I'm not leaving yet.”

“You're leaving in two days.”

“Exactly. We have two more days together. No need to get upset now.”

“You don't get it!”

“Get what?”

“You're leaving.”

“It's my job. It's what I do.”

She didn't say don't go, she didn't ask any questions. She told me that the last time I left she cried, too, but she hid it from me. This time she isn't hiding it. This time it was much more serious. We've met each other's parents, we've made plans for vacation in March.

“It's just two months,” I said. “Then we'll see each other.”

“You're not very good at consoling,” she repeated.

“I'm trying, I'm trying.”

I held her tight, and she held me, and we slept until the alarm on her BlackBerry beeped at 4:45
A.M.
and I sneaked back to the couch and pretended to wake up there, in time for our flight back to New York.

Forty-eight hours later I was in Amman.

EMAILS

 

 

To: andi parhamovich

From: [email protected]

Sent: dec 28, 2005, 4:11
A.M
.

Subject: letter from amman en route to baghdad

Dear Andi:

It's 3:20 am in Amman, Jordan, and I'm jetlagged. I woke up after five hours of sleep. The window of the hotel room is open so I can hear the cars on the highway. The noise reminds me of New York. Otherwise it would be too quiet. I tried to go back to sleep. It didn't work. I closed eyes for an hour. I thought of you, and what I wanted to write.

You have blonde hair, fine and real. You glow. It's your face that does it; partial dimples and October eyes, ethereal, angelic. Your body is perfect. Your skin is flawless, and for some reason your stomach always looks tan. Your figure is warm, soft, and when you wrap your legs around my chest like a lemur and rest your head on my collarbone, what we call the nook, there is perfection. It reminds me of the other day, during the game of Heroscape, and you were napping on the couch in Vermont while my army attacked its enemies. When the dog jumped up on you, and pressed against your legs, you looked so comfortable, and I was amazed at how well you fit in the living room, looking so pretty and peaceful and cute. You are funny and so extremely bright, too.

What about us, what about the last two months? The last seven months. I've told you that if I fail at loving you, I will have failed at love. I have had no reservations about our love, and this is a first for me. I am away again, and I realize that it's not easy. It's not easy, this love thing, and we both have dark corners in our hearts. Yours is dark in the places where you have been betrayed and abused; mine is cloudy and bruised near the left ventricle; self-destruction does haunt me, an old and nasty friend, a habit, because there was a long time in my life where I thought the only thing to do with my self was to destroy it. We are both guarded against happiness, and that's what we have found in each other. Like the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper from Ghostbusters, we keep waiting for the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man to appear and step on everything we have. Worse still is the pressure that comes from seeing our future; what it could be, how it could be. How we want it to be.

The crazy thing about us is that we fit. I want the best for you; I want to see your dreams work; I want to bring out the best in you; I want to do all this.

There's me in Iraq, and that's interesting, as I say. I have never written to anyone about the danger and fear of this enterprise. The life and death of it. The fact that there were times, perhaps one or two, when we were lying in your bed or on the cloud, and it was again late at night and I opened my eyes and thought what the fuck am I thinking going and risking getting killed when everything here is so good. And my heart would start to beat a little faster and my thoughts move quicker and I would say, jesus, what if. Perhaps I'm being overdramatic. I don't want you to worry.

Part II

Again it's 3:20, this time twenty-four hours later. The above is crude and not my best writing, it's a deadline situation though, and I wanted you to know that you can have faith in me. I want you to put your concerns about such and such out of your mind. I am stupid, very stupid, but not that stupid. I am interested in you, singular. Your love is startling, like when I am overwhelmed by your cuteness. Everything will be okay; we can work. There is no need to fight. We are difficult, but what's the point of life, in general, if there is no challenge.

So—

I'm getting on a plane in seven hours to go back to the country that has been with us since milkshakes. I want your support; i love your support. Cuddle bear! Pocket Sized! My little refugee, hair twirled just so, sleeping, awake, crying “fan,” peekaboo face peering up from the pillow. You are strong, beautiful, strong; independent too, otherwise this wouldn't have a chance. This is now much more than a chance; it is very real and I want it, and I want you.

—MH

p.s. if this letter is not satisfactory, I will try again.

To Michael Hastings

From andi parhamovich

Subject: re: a letter from amman en route to Baghdad

Sent: 12/31/05

Dear Newsie:

It's Friday, Dec. 30, the first Friday you haven't been with me, and my heart hurts and my mind is scrambling from all of the “thinking.” I keep rereading the letter you wrote me—my Hemingway letter—and I can't seem to get a grip on my emotions. I keep thinking about the nights we missed. You will probably think this is crazy, but I can remember the 12 or so days we didn't spend together these past few months. I remember them now because at the time I was thinking “I should be with him now, he will be gone soon.” I kept thinking I needed to soak up every minute—every spore—of our time together because when you are gone there is this void.

I wonder if you realize how much you have changed my life and how much I love you. I wonder if you realize that before you, I was strong but emotionally weak. I was independent but hoping for something more. I was always around people but always alone. And then you came along. I can still remember you charging into the room head first with your notepad in your back pocket. Your entrance was duly noted by about four or five interns, and I recall looking for an enemy and only finding a cute reporter with a Cheshire-cat smile. No one wanted me to talk to you that night and yet no one could pull me away from you. Even now, when I first see you, whether it's early in the morning after a 6 AM flight or late at night after we've both worked all day, there are times when I have to take a moment to catch my breath because I can't believe how much I love you and how deeply I love you.

I remember you telling me during milkshakes that you were going to Iraq and, at the time, I would have never guessed how much that country would play a role in our relationship. In some ways, it is the country that has kept us together and in other ways it is what has almost torn us apart. After reading your letter, I didn't think it was fair to have you put all that emotion out there without anything in return from me. So, this is my Hemingway letter to you.

I've learned that it is hard to live in the present when you have been abused in the past and the future is the light at the end of the tunnel. For awhile there, I blocked out what was happening to me in life, but then you came along and made me want to embrace the present, which is not an easy task when the past is so powerful. There were times I had to sleep with the light on for fear of what would happen, there were some nights I didn't sleep at all and locked my self in my room…

I can remember I had to lie to all of my friends and family to cover up the shame I had for allowing this to happen to me. It's hard for me to write this even now because I never thought I would find any kind of happiness as I was sitting there in that room with my books and hoping that tonight would be a “quiet night.” But finally, thankfully, one day I woke up, and I got my courage back and I left. It's true that I have many bruises from that time in my life that may never fully heal, but they have a shot at fading. I know that sometimes those bruises can make dealing with me difficult, but I want you to know, baby, that you, your loving me, has helped them fade, and I thank you for that.

You mentioned in your letter that we are both afraid of happiness. We both have demons to battle. There have been times when I've picked fights with you for no reason except that you were making me happy. Why do I do that? Why do I have to push away the one person who has shown me unequivocal love and happiness? I'm tired of the pushing. I'm ready to stop pushing.

I want you to know that I trust you, and I have faith in you. We've both been through traumatic experiences, but I believe we are each other's reward for overcoming them, and we have each other to help battle them in the future. I guess my point of this whole letter is that we don't have to go it alone anymore, and that feels good, and I love you.

I am so incredibly proud of you, baby, I really am.

I'm glad you're the one I get to leave the parties with.

Miss you. Hug.

asp

ps—I'm not a writer

BAGHDAD, NAJAF

I am flying on a Black Hawk helicopter in the middle of the night, en route to Najaf with my translator, Mohammed. We're sitting on jump seats facing the tail rotor. My helmet is strapped tightly to my chin, my camera hangs around my neck, my hands are jammed into my jacket pockets against the cold. Suddenly there's a bright flash, a golden burst I catch out of the corner of my eye, and I immediately think: Fuck me, the son of a bitch was right. We are going to crash.

I am surprisingly calm for the moment.

I've known Mohammed for six months. We've worked on half a dozen stories together and I've gotten to know him better than the other translators. I asked him to go with me to Najaf, the holy Shiite city in southern Iraq. I wanted to do a story on the fledgling Iraqi Army. Training and equipping a new Iraqi security force was the cornerstone of the U.S. military strategy. (The old Iraqi Army was disbanded by the United States after the invasion, and the unemployed soldiers almost immediately organized and joined the insurgency.) Once the new Iraqi Army was up on its feet—once it could restore stability to the country without American assistance—then the Americans could withdraw. A handover process would occur: Iraqis stand up, America stands down. Or so went the talking point. But the training had been slow and unsuccessful. Absentee rates for Iraqi Army units regularly ran as high as 50 percent; reports of Iraqi soldiers fleeing rather than fighting were still common. American troops talked of the “death blossom”—how under sudden attack an Iraqi soldier will open fire in every direction, spraying lethal petals of lead. It was now January 2006, almost three years in. According to the military only one Iraqi battalion of around 750 men out of the 130,000-strong Iraqi Army could operate without U.S. assistance. At least $3 billion had been spent on the training. I wanted to see how the American policy was progressing in southern Iraq, a more peaceful part of the country.

Mohammed doesn't trust American policies on Iraq. He has two kids; he doesn't tell them he works for
Newsweek.
Only his wife knows; his friends and extended family believe he is still working as an engineer, repairing air conditioners. It is a danger if even the children know, he once explained to me. His son came home from school one day, excited that his classmate had an American pen. An American pen? Yes, his son told him, his father works for the Americans. “I was glad then that my son did not know I worked for the
Newsweek,
” he says. Mohammed knew that if the wrong people had that information, his son's classmate's father could be killed. He makes the comparison to Saddam's day when children were taught to inform on their parents.

Mohammed is overweight, with a silver mustache and gray-streaked black hair that he parts carefully. He is pushing thirty-six. He has been my resource for most of my information about Iraq. He is not just a translator, but a cultural interpreter, bringing me to some kind of limited understanding of the country.

I'd done the required reading—
Understanding Iraq, The Arab Mind, Guest of the Sheik
—but a single conversation with him was more enlightening. He explained the complex history of Iraq's political parties, what life was like for Iraqis during the sanctions of the nineties, how if you were young and wore a suit and tie, Iraqis were more likely to take you seriously. He told me what I couldn't see. After interviews with Iraqis, he would always say, “What he really meant was…” His view of the war was a mixture of disappointment and disbelief, and now a rapidly diminishing hope. Did the Americans mean for this to happen? How could they not have a plan? He didn't care for the new line coming from Washington, which was basically: If Iraq is fucked, it's not America's fault. We gave them freedom, we toppled a dictator. The ball is in their court. They must stand up before we stand down.

“It's your country, my friend.”

Mohammed and I find that it makes for a hilarious punch line.

Accidentally blow up a house and kill four children?

“It's your country, my friend.”

Oops, we ended up arming Shiite death squads?

“Sorry, your country, my friend.”

Toppled a dictator?

“That's for you, my friend.”

Search your house, men over there, women over there, children crying, oh you say you're innocent, shut up, shut the fuck up, we're occupying you for your own good, lying motherfuckers, stand over there and shut the fuck up.

“It's your country, my friend. Democracy is on the march!”

Our journey to Najaf began early in the morning at LZ Washington in the Green Zone. Just across the street from the U.S. embassy, Landing Zone Washington looked like a concrete soccer field, a gray rectangle surrounded by high blast walls. We checked in for our flight at a trailer where the helicopter ground crew worked behind a wooden desk, marking down passenger names and Social Security numbers on clipboards with the flight manifests. We were “manifested” for a flight arriving sometime around 0800—exact times were never given out for security reasons—with our “show time,” as the military called it, 0700. That meant we had to be there by 7
A.M.
to get on a flight that would probably arrive around eight o'clock. Each flight had a mission name; we were supposed to be on the “Warhorse Express.”

A young black woman, rank of specialist, announced that the Warhorse Express was en route. About eight passengers gathered around her. She told us to follow her walking single file to the far end of the landing zone where the Black Hawks were touching down, their rotor blades kicking up dust. A Black Hawk crew member came out to meet her; she pointed at her clipboard and screamed into his ear. The helicopter blades were too noisy to hear their conversation, but she conveyed the result of the discussion by yelling, “There's no room on this flight for you.”

Mohammed and I walked back to the trailer.

There were three more false alarms throughout the day—three times we trudged out to the helicopters only to be turned away.

We passed the time inside the trailer on one of the two fake leather couches, keeping company with passed-out soldiers, their body armor and helmets sprawled on the floor. We watched the television set in the corner of the trailer—playing the Armed Forces Network—and one of the soldiers put on the
Team America
DVD by the creators of
South Park.
A sign taped up next to the television set said that if you were offended by anything playing on the TV because of its obscene nature you could complain to the desk.
Team America
certainly qualified—there was an explicit sex scene with puppets—but no one complained.

I napped on the couch, falling in and out of consciousness. Mohammed was too nervous to sleep. Today was the first time he had ever seen a helicopter up close. He believed they were dangerous. In fact, our entire Iraqi staff had told him he was crazy to go with me. It took some convincing.

“Those helicopters crash,” he told me. “Look, four of them crashed in the past two weeks.”

“Mohammed, we aren't going to crash. The helicopters are perfectly safe. The odds are very much with us. There are hundreds of flights a day, thousands a month, all across Iraq.”

Mohammed looked at me skeptically.

“We're not going to crash,” I said again. “The only reason for the crashes is the weather. More helicopters always go down in the winter in Iraq, those are the statistics.

“It will be fun,” I assured him. “Something you can someday tell the grandkids about.”

The last Warhorse Express for the day arrived at 8
P.M.
Finally, it seemed that we were going to get on it. I helped Mohammed get his body armor on, pulling the Velcro snap around his large waist to get it tight. It was the first time in his life he had worn that kind of equipment. We trudged out to the helicopters and climbed in the side, one large step up, difficult to do with armor and a backpack on. Mohammed stumbled and I gave him a push to help him up into the helicopter.

I smiled.

“See, isn't this fun,” I say, as we lift upward into the sky.

The Black Hawk is full. There's a passenger in each seat: three rows of four metal and canvas seats, one row in the front and two rows in the back facing across from each other. Behind the cockpit, two machine gunners in flight helmets, heavy gloves, and jumpsuits watch the ground, one on the left, the other on the right. It's dark inside, but there's just enough yellowish light for me to see the face of the man sitting across from me. He is an American contractor in his sixties wearing fatigues and a soft cap. He looks old; he closes his eyes. Green duffel bags are piled on the floor up to our knees. The few soldiers on the flight hold their rifles with the barrels pointed down for safety reasons. I squeeze my laptop bag between my legs, paranoid that if I let the pressure off it will go flying out the open door.

Mohammed sits next to me. It's darker outside as we move away from Baghdad, and I feel safer flying in the night—harder to see, harder to shoot—sailing above the twinkling generator-powered lights of Iraq, heading south.

We are buckled in, the three straps that meet at the middle of the chest clasped into a scratched buckle, pulled tightly. The two pieces of yellow foam in my ears—protection handed out by the flight crew to all passengers—dull the noise of the blades and the wind.

I am admiring the view, relieved to finally be on our way. It does all look peaceful at night from above.

Then there is the flash, a ball of fire only fifteen feet away.

My stomach jolts, my nerves freeze up, and then a moment later my mind clears.

We are going to crash. Mohammed was right.

There is a split second when my brain seems to take me somewhere else; a clear sensation of the unbelievable—falling from the sky when you aren't supposed to be falling from the sky—becoming believable.

And then I realize the helicopter is still moving normally. We are in fact not falling from the sky. Another part of my brain kicks in to interpret the flash—it is just the helicopter shooting off a flare.

I've see them shoot off flares all the time at night, sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes golden. They shoot them off for kicks, for illumination, out of caution because the helicopter sensors think they are being shot at. From below you watch the flares float down through the sky, slowly, sometimes setting things on fire on the ground.

I turn to Mohammed, he turns to me. We both had freaked out. I feel silly that I even thought I was going to crash. We start to laugh. I pat him on the shoulder.

“Fun, see?”

 

We got off at Forward Operating Base Kalsu, halfway between Najaf and Baghdad. We spent the night in a tent for transients near the FOB's landing zone. The next morning, we caught another flight to FOB Duke, the base twenty miles outside of Najaf. We were greeted by Lieutenant Colonel John McCarthy, the head of the American MiTT unit we were going to embed with. MiTT stands for military transition team; they are the units of American soldiers assigned to train the Iraqi Army and police. The program started in 2005. Lieutenant Colonel John McCarthy's unit was given to the Iraqi Army's Eighth Brigade, which was commanded by an Iraqi colonel named Saadi al-Maliki.

The MiTTs were supposed to serve as “training wheels,” to use the metaphor American officers favored. Colonel al-Maliki's training wheels were slowly coming off. He had just taken over a base that Americans used to occupy, called FOB Hotel, a few minutes outside of downtown Najaf. How were the Iraqis handling the new responsibility? The precedent wasn't promising: At the violent northern city of Tikrit, in the days after the Americans handed over a base in November 2005, the Iraqis had trashed it, according to a story in the
Washington Post,
looting the base of everything valuable.

McCarthy brought us to FOB Hotel to meet Colonel al-Maliki. We were pleasantly surprised. The base seemed to be fully functioning and clean, with laundry services, smart uniforms (a change from the usual ragtag outfits found on the Iraqi soldiers), a medical clinic, and a dirt soccer field. It wasn't the fucked-up mess I was expecting. Al-Maliki, too, appeared competent and professional. I worried that I didn't have a story—I was hoping for that fucked-up mess. It would have been great for me, if not for Iraq. But I started to see another story, perhaps one that would make it into the magazine because it was against the trend: Al-Maliki's unit looked like it was actually pretty good. I knew my editors in New York were also sick of the weekly “Iraq is going to shit” piece; they advised that I be on the lookout for new angles (like a story on American soldiers playing video games, or Iraqi artists) to give our readers a change of pace from the unrelenting bad news. Maybe this could be one of those stories; maybe Mohammed and I had stumbled on a good news story that had a chance to make it into the magazine.

Al-Maliki was very sure of his soldiers, and of the job he was doing to protect Najaf. He offered to take me on a tour of the town in his SUV. He was in charge of guarding the Imman Ali Mosque, one of Shia Islam's holiest shrines. I hopped in his Toyota Landcruiser, no body armor on (I didn't want to insult him), windows rolled down, and we drove down to the mosque. Two and a half years earlier, in September 2003, a bombing at the mosque had killed at least 125 people, including an influential Shiite leader. In August 2004, Moqtada al-Sadr's militia holed up in the mosque and fought U.S. forces until the Iraqi government brokered a last-minute ceasefire. Now it is safe, said al-Maliki, no problems except for the Iraqi police. They are infiltrated by militias, he explained, and can't be trusted. We drove past the largest cemetery in Iraq—not surprisingly, a Shiite cemetery. (The Shiite religion embraced death and martyrdom and had done so since
A.D.
680 when Hussein—the son of Ali who was the son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed—was killed along with seventy-two of his followers by the Sunnis.) “Take your pictures,” al-Maliki told me. “If you come back dressed like an Arab, you can walk around here safely.”