I Lost My Love in Baghdad (21 page)

X actually had told them we would have substantial luggage, but somewhere there was miscommunication.

I tell X goodbye and wave to my guards, who are standing around the Chevy. I'll call them in the morning.

“This is quite the spectacle, hunh? Always a production.”

“Let's get inside,” Andi says. I can tell she's embarrassed by all the fuss we've caused. Three cars. Eight guards standing around. Two black trunks, now being sniffed by guard dogs.

We walk up to her room on the fourth floor, and finally, once we're behind the closed door, we embrace. She's been five miles away from me, but I haven't seen her in person since Amman, almost a month earlier.

One of NDI's security managers, dragging the trunks behind him, plods down the hallway to Andi's room.

“Oh, no, this is so bad,” she says.

“What?”

“They brought up the trunks! We should have done that! They're going to think I'm high maintenance!”

“Well, you are!”

“What! Take that back!”

“I'm kidding.”

She opens the trunks and I hand her another bag of supplies.

“No cookies?”

Fuck, I forgot the cookies. She didn't ask for cookies, but I knew she would want them and I forgot to pick them up at the PX.

“I got you chips and jam and peanut butter and Ocean Spray!” I say. “It's huckleberry jam!”

“Why did you get huckleberry jam?” She thinks for a second. “Wait, didn't you get this for Christmas? Didn't your parents send you huckleberry jam and pancake mix?”

“Well, I'm giving it to you!”

“You're regifting!”

We wait for things to calm down outside, for X and my security convoy to leave the compound. I plug in my cell phone chargers and settle in.

“This is a pretty nice room. You finally got your wish, you're living in a hotel.”

“I had them take out one of the beds, for my yoga mat.”

“Hah.”

I hand her a stack of DVDs.

“Here you go, these are for you.”

She looks through them:
Black Dahlia, Borat, Casino Royale,
and other new releases.

“Did you get
Babel
?”

Babel.
We'd tried to watch it together in Jerusalem, but the bootleg copy was so bad we stopped.

“No, I couldn't find it at the Rashid.”

“Did you actually look for it?”

Hmm. A trick question. I actually hadn't looked for it. I'd picked up the DVDs from the bureau's collection.

“Of course I looked for it!”

“You're lying, I can tell.”

I sighed and lay down on the bed.

“You're right—I didn't look for
Babel.
I don't want to see that movie! What we did see of it was kind of depressing.”

“Selfish!”

We make love. We order room service. French fries, chicken tikka, hummus, coffee, tea. We decide to watch a movie on the laptop. We start with
Little Miss Sunshine
—“I knew you'd like this one,” I say—but she's already seen it. Then we try
Blood Diamond
, but the copy is in horrible condition; you can't really make out what DiCaprio is saying, and the frame has an odd distorted shape to it. We lie down on the single bed. I twirl her hair.

“You're going to have to send me another pregnancy test,” she says.

“Baby, you always think you're pregnant. I've gotten you like five of those tests.”

“Well, it's your fault.”

“Okay, okay, I'll get the test for you.”

She pauses. I can feel a trick question coming.

“If I was pregnant and giving birth to our child would you leave work to come see me?”

“Yes, I would leave work to come see you.”

“You wouldn't file first?”

“No, I would not file first.”

“Okay. Just checking.”

We talk more—about Iraq, about the projects she's been working on, about the friends she's making at NDI, about how she's adjusting to being back in Baghdad, about my story on Saddam, about
Newsweek
's Palestinian fixer, Nuha, whom we had spent time with in Jerusalem. Andi tells me she likes the idea of working in Jerusalem. We discuss our next vacation—I've made reservations in Paris for Valentine's Day. We were aiming for that date, hoping we could both get out at the same time. We drift off to sleep.

At around 7
A.M.
a loud explosion wakes me.

Andi opens her eyes.

“Did you hear that?” I ask.

“Yes, every morning.”

“You can hear the booms pretty good from here.”

We order coffee. I pack up my gear. X calls. They're on their way. We embrace for a long time, for minutes, it seems, and then we walk downstairs and wait. She says hello to the hotel workers.

X pulls up with the same cars and guards, and I leave Andi at the compound.

At 11
A.M.
, I'm on a quick helicopter flight with a handful of other journalists out to Camp Victory near the airport, to witness a TOA, pronounced “Toe-Ah,” a transfer of authority ceremony. Lieutenant General Ray Ordierno is taking over daily operations in Iraq from Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli. It marks the completion of Chiarelli's second Iraq tour. There are a lot of flags and a band, lots of saluting. The military loves their uniforms and flags and salutes. Chiarelli, along with his superior, General George Casey, has presided over a year in Iraq in which the violence has spiraled completely out of control. The attempt to restore security to Baghdad during the summer and fall has failed.

In his farewell address, Chiarelli quotes Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or whether the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust…who errs and comes short again and again…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly…”

As he speaks, you can hear gunfire and helicopters in the distance.

Chiarelli said he and General Casey had often discussed that quote. I try to figure out if any of the two hundred or so soldiers in the crowd, or any of the other journalists at the ceremony, notice this remark.

This was our military's attitude behind our Iraq policy? It's better to have tried and failed daringly than not to have tried at all? Maybe if you're playing football, but in war?

I fly back to the Green Zone and look up the Roosevelt quote on the Internet. It was a speech he'd given at the Sorbonne, in 1910, called “Citizen of the Republic.” He delivered it two years after he'd left the White House. It was a complex, nuanced treatise on his views on citizenship. The passage Chiarelli quoted didn't quite apply to TR's views on war.

I speak to Andi that night. “Baby, you should have heard what he said—better to have tried and failed?”

Andi sends me an email Sunday night. “Just wanted to thank you for coming to visit me and risking your life to do it! I want there to be a time when we welcome each other home after work and kiss each other goodbye before work. Do you think we'll ever have that?”

BAGHDAD

Andi came over to the bureau Thursday at noon. She had had a meeting with an Iraqi politician at the parliament in the morning, then her security guards dropped her off at the house. We wouldn't have much time together. I was scheduled to go on embed that afternoon to cover a battle that had broken out on Haifa Street, a main avenue in walking distance of the Green Zone.

I'd first heard about the fighting over the weekend, and by Tuesday Apache attack helicopters were flying overhead, F-15 fighter jets thundering above. If you went on a drive to the edge of Green Zone, you could hear the steady shots from rifles and heavy machine guns. The battle picked up, and so did the body count. No Americans killed yet, but eleven soldiers from the Iraqi Army and a reported fifty insurgents were dead. I requested an embed with a unit that was involved in the fighting. I wanted to get to Haifa Street, what was being called “an insurgent stronghold.” It took two days to process the request.

Andi and I were sitting at my desk in the bureau. Everything was going well until I was about to leave her alone in the office to get her tea. I got worried she would check my email on the screen of my computer.

“I have to close my email account…”

“Why, what are you hiding?”

“Nothing. But I know if you see the name of any girl you'll get upset.”

She didn't like this. I started in on a series of apologies that lasted for about fifteen minutes before we went to my bedroom.

This time she forgave me quickly. She seemed to have gotten upset only because that was what was expected, the role we were so used to having her play. I say something stupid, or do something stupid, she gets angry at me, I beg and apologize, tell her she is the love of my life, and we make up.

We lay down for about an hour or so. We didn't have sex. It was the middle of the day, and she didn't want the other correspondent in the house or any of the security guards to get the wrong idea. There wasn't much privacy anyway. My bedroom window looked out to a lot on the side of the house where we parked our cars and the guards roamed. So we held each other on the bed and talked. I was sick, too, running a fever and coughing. She put her head on my shoulder. I had a radio interview to do at two o'clock. Andi sat on the bed as I talked about the war over a satellite phone to a radio station in New York, the
Armstrong Williams Radio Show.
Heavy fighting, I told the host, open fighting in the streets.

She had to go back to her compound before it got too late. I walked her to the house gate, where her private security guard, a Fijian, was waiting for her in an SUV. I hugged her before we opened the gate, and kissed her lightly. Once we were in public, I knew a display of affection would make her uncomfortable. It was one of her quirks, she liked her privacy. She got in the car and I watched it disappear down the street.

I went back inside to pack for my thirteenth embed. Body armor, blue, with
O POSITIVE
blood type written on silver masking tape, weight about ten pounds. Two plates front and back. Can stop a 7.62 round, with the material along the sides able to repulse a 9mm bullet. Helmet, black and scratched, big enough for my head, the one I always used. The helmet had been to Najaf, Fallujah, and Mosul. Wiley X Ballistic eye protection. Two mobile phones: my Iraqna and my international cell phone, a T-Mobile, with a 212 New York area code, running a three-dollar-a-minute roaming charge for an average monthly bill of about $5,000. A Thuraya satellite phone, a long string of numbers starting with +863 to be used in case the Iraqi network went down. I packed my Sony Vaio laptop that I never cleaned, which still had dust on it from Najaf, and a BGAN satellite modem. There was a subscription fee and charges based on data transferred. The record in one month for the bureau was $30,000 for thirty days of uninterrupted use. A blue Ethernet cord for the BGAN. A Sony digital camera, seven megapixels with video function. Power chargers and cords for everything—laptop, mobile phones, sat phone, BGAN, camera. A cheap power bar imported from China. A silver and red sleeping bag, a towel, cleanup kit. Tylenol, high-powered decongestion bought earlier from an Iraqi drugstore, the antibiotic Cipro given to me by Andi, and a rubber tourniquet my security manager had handed to me to stop massive blood loss in case of injury. A pair of Old Navy khakis with lots of pockets, a pair of jeans, a sweater. A Motorola radio to communicate with the
Newsweek
bureau. Lightweight hiking boots, which I had bought eighteen months earlier in New York, while shopping with Andi, on the recommendation of a salesman who had been in Iraq for the invasion with the 82nd Airborne Division. You want these for the desert, he said. Two packs of cigarettes, Marlboro Lights. Lighter. Two packs of Wrigley's Extra Professional chewing gum, the brand sold in the Amman, Jordan, airport duty-free shop. Sony digital tape recorder with USB connector, twelve hours of recording time, two fresh notebooks and three notebooks filled up with information from other stories I might have to respond to while away from the bureau. Five pens, stuffed in pockets. Wallet, about two hundred U.S. dollars. Flashlight. Identification, two pieces, one military press ID issued CPIC. One gigabyte thumb drive. All packed into my black Victornox laptop bag and a silver Welty hiking pack, a gift from Andi a year earlier. Together, the bags weighed about thirty-five pounds. I set the bags next to each other in the living room, resting the body armor and helmet up against them, and told my security manager I was ready to be dropped off near the Iraqi parliament building for a pickup by the public affairs officer for the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry.

It is January 2007, three and half years into the war. At this moment, there are over 120,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq, close to 14,000 in Baghdad. Over 3,000 American military personnel have been killed since the invasion; the previous months had been among the most deadly—112 killed in December, 70 in November, and 106 in October. Estimates vary on the number of Iraqi civilians killed, ranging from 50,000 to over 100,000. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 771 foreign civilian contractors have been killed in Iraq. Ninety-five journalists and thirty-seven members of their staffs have been killed. At least 80 aid workers—working for international relief organizations, the United Nations, and NGOs—have been killed. Another 20,000 U.S. troops are on the way as part of the latest security offensive to secure the capital city of Baghdad, home to 8 million Iraqis. It is being dubbed the start of “the surge,” of which Haifa Street is a part, a “last-ditch” attempt to “win,” another “turning point” in a war that I'd seen go in only one direction, down.

I am on the embed.

We drive to Forward Operating Base Prosperity, inside the Green Zone. I am introduced to an American advisory team, the unit that was in the first fight on Haifa Street a week earlier. Their headquarters is in a guest residence in one of Saddam's palace complexes. I meet Lieutenant Colonel Steven Duke, a forty-two-year-old from Tennessee with a bald head and blue eyes. He asks what I want to talk about. Haifa Street, I say. He laughs along with his men, a kind of absurd laugh. Like of course, what else would I want to know about except the fight.

He sips a coffee standing in front of a map of Baghdad and indicates his “AO,” or area of operations, which until recently, he tells me, included Haifa Street. No longer, he says.

I am somewhat disappointed but don't say anything. I wanted to get to the unit that was fighting now, getting shot at now, patrolling that street now, but as often happens with the military, you never get exactly what you request. But then he starts talking. He says his unit commander, a patriotic Sunni general, was removed by people in the prime minister's office and replaced by a Shiite commander only twenty-four hours after the fighting started.

This is news.

I know instantly that this is the story. The Haifa Street operation was being called a model for how the war was now going to be fought, and the new model had come with promises that there wouldn't be sectarian and political interference from the Shiite government—that the prime minister wouldn't care if a policeman, a soldier, or a citizen was a Sunni or Shiite, only that he or she was an Iraqi.

Already it appeared the Iraqi government was going back on its promise.

Lieutenant Colonel Duke tells me about the fight. It started over twenty-seven dead bodies. The twenty-seven were found executed, all members of the family of a local Iraqi police chief. The men, women, children, and teenage boys had been dumped in an empty lot. Duke's unit tried to remove them from the lot. Everyone else—the Iraqi police, the locals, the Iraqi Army—was too afraid to touch them.

The fighting starts, a “big shitfight,” Duke calls it. I see the digital pictures tacked up on the wall—the insurgents with sandbagged positions in the alleyways, the vacant lot with the dead bodies, a new kind of armor-piercing round they discovered that can penetrate the armor on the Humvees.

He starts saying things that I have never heard said so bluntly—what observers and critics and analysts have worried about, what those in the military have been privately thinking, what I assumed was happening, but that he, an active duty lieutenant colonel in Baghdad, is saying on the record. (Sometimes reporting is finding out what you don't know, sometimes it's hearing something said that everyone knows, but that no one has had the guts to say, because they aren't supposed to say it.)

“I get it,” he says, talking about the battle and the crack of bullets and having soldiers killed. “I get it, okay? I've been here three months now, and I get it, I understand, that's enough for me, no need to stay for the other nine.” He laughs.

Duke says he thinks the Shiite Iraqi government wants the Americans to move out of the cities so they can “pull back the red curtain, do their business, and say, you guys don't need to see this.” That business is killing Sunnis. Eliminating them. Ethnic cleansing, or as an Iraqi politician called it a few days earlier, “sectarian cleansing.” Every war gets new words to describe it, new and improved terminology, though in practical terms not very much changes. One group killing the other. Block by block, street by street, bedroom by bedroom. Name by name. At midnight or in broad daylight, it doesn't matter. Us versus them, so we better get them before they get us.

Duke says he thinks we're doing the Shiite militias' work for them, that they are “sitting on the fifty-yard line, eating popcorn,” while we go after the Sunnis. If I was a Sunni, he says, I would feel fairly besieged. He points to the map of the Green Zone and notes that it is now surrounded by Ministry of Interior forces and Iraqi police, who all likely have militia affiliations. The less sectarian-minded Iraqi Army unit, the nearest to the Green Zone at least, is undermanned and underequipped.

What the fuck is this shit? I've seen it and heard it all before. Death squads. Shots to the head. Drill to the kneecaps. Mass graves and body dumps and bullshit. I've spent a year and half writing about it, quoting numbers from official reports—one hundred dead Iraqis per day says the U.N.; 2.2 American soldiers killed a day, according to the DoD. The statistics keep saying the same thing but nothing gets better.

“If you looked at a map of South Vietnam and Saigon in late 1967,” Duke says, “you would have seen that the city was surrounded by Vietcong.” Nobody saw it, he says, only in hindsight did the pattern become clear. Why did no one see that coming? “Look at this map. The Green Zone is surrounded and no one sees it. The Green Zone could be overrun. It's just my conspiracy theory,” he says.

“Our enemies are attacking us with impunity,” he points out. “We got rocketed the other day—knocked me on my ass. We know where the rockets are coming from, our antiartillery technology tells us, but we don't do anything about it. We didn't respond. Not allowed to.”

Duke also tells me about the mission I was supposed to go on tomorrow. A raid with American and Iraqi forces. It has been canceled. Why is that? The raid appeared to have sectarian motivations. Duke's soldiers suspect the new Shiite commander is targeting the office of a Sunni political party without evidence. Well, there is some evidence the Shiite commander has pointed to, but it's fairly inconclusive—an Iraqi patrol was fired on by men who fled in the general direction of that office. The new Iraqi commander has intentionally kept the Americans out of the loop. They are planning the mission on their own, “taking the lead,” as the military likes to say. Duke suspects the lead they are taking involves illegal detentions and executions, perhaps some torture. One soldier jokes about it bluntly: “If it's raining tomorrow, they'll probably cancel it themselves. Who likes to commit a war crime in the rain?”

I know that the canceled mission does not matter at all. One mission cannot make a difference. So how many more missions and patrols would it take to make a difference? Is there a number? Does anyone know it? How many missions have been done already? Tens of thousands? And what a difference they have fucking made! Why go out at all? You can make as much of a difference by doing nothing, right?

I have a cot to sleep on under the map at Duke's headquarters. The map is a satellite printout of Baghdad, all grids and multicolored lines showing the main routes, each part of the city divided by unit. I am still feverish and sick. I make a phone call to the bureau chief, Babak. I smoke cigarettes with the soldiers. I talk to an officer who also has a girlfriend stationed in Baghdad, a nurse at a medical unit whom he sees about once a month for a few hours. We commiserate on the difficulties of relationships in Baghdad.

It's all about logistics. We're all under stress. It's not easy. The officer says he tries to get missions where he has an excuse to take a helicopter to her base, but she has more opportunities to come to the Green Zone. Same here, I say, it's easier for her to come see me than the other way around.