To Be a Friend Is Fatal (11 page)

I was also sent to Fallujah to confront the pervasive opinion back in Washington that an unacceptably large gap had opened between the civilian and military efforts in Iraq. This gap was unacceptable for different reasons, which depended upon where you worked: those in uniform felt that the State Department and other agencies weren't really in the fight but, rather, partying in the Green Zone. Those in State and USAID understood that the Pentagon was becoming the true driver of US foreign policy and that in Iraq and Afghanistan it played an increasingly dominant role in aid and development work, so it made vital sense to get as close to that source of power and funding as possible. A hand-in-glove relationship was the mantra of 2005. My presence as the agency's first representative in Fallujah allowed USAID to claim that it was in the fight. “We have a man in Fallujah, after all.”

It was still warm at around two in the morning when I left the comfort of the Green Zone. The only activity was an occasional
thump thump
of a medic Blackhawk, swooping to gather the wounded and rush them
back to the Combat Support Hospital. I looked around the pleasant home I'd lived in for the first half of the year, to make sure I hadn't left anything behind. All I found was an Iraqi ant, dragging and struggling with a bit of a Doritos chip on the tile floor in the kitchen.

I was supposed to fly to Fallujah the previous evening, but a sandstorm had rolled in and turned the sky deep orange and the air too hot to breathe. The war paused on days like these; the helos couldn't fly, and the insurgents couldn't aim mortars or spot convoys. Everyone just stayed home and watched TV, resting until the sky cleared up enough to kill again.

By the next night, the sky had cleared. Luayy, an Iraqi friend in his midthirties, worked in the motor pool and was still awake when I radioed for a ride. I had a code name, “Viking,” that I was supposed to use for security purposes in case an insurgent was listening in on our radio network, but I never understood why “Viking” was any safer than saying “Kirk.” Luayy pulled up in the USAID van and helped me load two large bags, and we headed off in the direction of LZ Washington.

“Fallujah, man, you crazy? Why are you goin' there?” His voice carried the concern of an older brother as we turned through the dead streets of the Green Zone. A lo-fi cassette of the Scorpions' greatest hits warbled through the speakers. “You think I shouldn't go?” I murmured.

Not that I would change my mind. In Fallujah, I would live with the Second Marine Expeditionary Force and oversee more than $20 million of aid as a new member of the agency's senior staff. No more
Iraq Daily Update
or Green Zone grunt work: I was finally in a position where I might contribute something tangible. A couple weeks earlier, friends at the compound had thrown a twenty-fifth birthday party for me and joked in toast after toast that it might be my last.

We pulled into the LZ, a vast expanse of concrete the size of a Home Depot parking lot upon which helicopters would wobble and shiver down for a few minutes at a time before creaking upward. Luayy gave me a hug and drove off.

The marines mostly flew at night. I dragged my bags through the noise toward the droid-like crew member who beckoned with a flashing green light. My face felt like it was blowing away, and once I made it under the warmth of the rotor span, the marine grabbed my hand and pointed a
flashlight at it. I opened it to show him the
CF
—Camp Fallujah—I had inked with a Sharpie over the creases of my palm, confirming the destination. He pointed the flashlight at the chopper, and another marine plucked my bags from me and threw them into the CH-46 Baby Chinook. Many of these birds did time in Vietnam. I crawled up the ramp in the backside and found a half dozen weary marines, some with downturned sleeping heads, others with chins on the butts of their M16s. I wondered how many of these my dad had flown in, as I settled into the gurney-like seats and fidgeted with the seat belt.

The Chinook lifted off and wind whipped in through its paneless windows. Down below, the Green Zone drifted from sight as we nosed westward over the knotted skein of dimly lit neighborhoods. In a few minutes, Baghdad was behind us and the Euphrates below us, reflecting moonlight like mercury, deserted fields unfurling from its banks. The bright lights of Abu Ghraib looked like a small city below us. Twenty-five minutes later, we touched down at Camp Fallujah.

Seven thirty, and already the sun sat up there like a deep bruise, faintly yellow at the core and melting into an ugly blue sky. I'd stupidly left the window open a crack my first night there, and a shadow of dust had crept in, lightly coating my cheek and chin and eyelids. My new home was in the BOQ—bachelor officers' quarters—of a military base once home to the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a militant Iranian opposition group cultivated by Saddam Hussein against the regime in Tehran. I was assigned to a room with four bunk beds and a couple roommates, a collapsible table, the fetor of unwashed bodies and clothes, and a strip of fly tape. I once saw an Iraqi fly land on it and pry itself loose in about three seconds, unfazed.

I was nervous as I got ready for my first day on the job. The word in my title, regional coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah, summoning my dread was not
Fallujah
but
coordinator
. I had spent enough time in the US government and drafted enough scraps of public affairs pabulum to know how potentially toothless the verb
to coordinate
could be.

Before my arrival, USAID had programmed roughly $15 million for
projects throughout the city, which was still at about half of its prewar population level of a quarter million. I had been armed with an Excel spreadsheet that listed the projects, color-coded by the USAID sector (education, health, infrastructure), along with exact dollar amounts. I studied the language of the list warily. Primary and secondary schools were “rehabilitated,” the hospital and local clinics received “supplies,” the directorates of municipalities, communications, housing, and other local potentates received “support.” Furniture and Equipment for Mayor's Office: $62,135. Fallujah Veterinary Clinic Rehabilitation Phase I: $98,000. Phase II: $70,000.

Since these projects were in the “restive city of Fallujah,” as the public affairs professionals were wont to label it, nobody from the agency had ever gone out to check on the work until now. The money was given to a contractor, who took a piece and gave the rest to an Iraqi or Kurdish subcontractor, who maybe used another subcontractor or maybe kept it. The Americans at the agency overseeing all of this were called CTOs—cognizant technical officers—who maintained their cognizance by reading one- or two-page reports periodically emailed into the Green Zone by the contractor, which sometimes included a picture of an Iraqi man holding a cardboard box, supposedly the veterinarian of Fallujah or a doctor at the hospital. Upon receiving the report, the CTO could then modify column
N
of the Excel sheet to reflect a status of “completed” instead of “in progress.” In my previous job, I would have then written up a paragraph for the
Iraq Daily Update
about the completed project and included the picture.

Most of the completed projects were carried out by the agency's Health, Education, and Infrastructure Offices, which had an excruciatingly slow turnaround from conception to implementation. A school refurbishment project could take a year or longer, to the great impatience of both the Iraqis and the US military.

There was a separate office in the agency, though, called the Office of Transition Initiatives, which was fast moving and well funded. OTI could move millions of dollars in weeks, not months or years. Rubble removal was its darling and was categorized as “conflict mitigation.” On paper, conflict was mitigated by an assumption-weakened chain of assertions:

1. Iraqis were joining the insurgency because there was no work for them.

2. If they were given the choice between an honest day's work and fighting against the Americans, they'd choose the former.

3. A make-work program to clear rubble, at the pay rate of about $7 a day, would

4. sap the insurgency of its strength,

5. clean up the city (dovetailing nicely with a $110,000 public awareness campaign run by USAID, in which a picture of a sleeping Iraqi baby was plastered on billboards with the caption “My dream is of a clean city”), and

6. stimulate economic growth, all at once.

If we could just get a shovel and a wheelbarrow into their grenade-prone hands, point them to any of the houses that had been reduced to abandoned fields of rubble, and dangle seven American dollars, we might start gaining the upper hand on the insurgency. At the very least, doing so would contribute to a new narrative, one that ran counter to the unpleasant metric of nearly 50 percent unemployment throughout vast swaths of the country. A simple spreadsheet presented month-to-month “progress”: forty thousand Iraqis hired in June, fifty-two thousand Iraqis in July. Someone in Washington would read these impressive figures and murmur, “Well, at least USAID's got this covered!” Maybe a congressman would notice and appropriate more funds for USAID to
build on this momentum
! This line of thinking led to many tens of millions of wasted dollars.

After all, in the swamp of unemployment, the insurgency had nurtured an economy of its own. Some estimated that a third of all cargo trucks from Jordan passing into Iraq through Anbar Province were hijacked by insurgents. Oil and gasoline were smuggled, the children of wealthy Iraqis were kidnapped for ransom, and old-fashioned robbery kept their coffers swelling. In my first few days in Fallujah, a marine told me that the going rate for paying kids to plant an IED along the roadside was $50; $100 if he acted as a spotter for incoming American convoys; and $150 if he successfully detonated the IED as they passed. How would our $7 compete with this? I was doubtful,
but I resisted forming any opinions until I had seen the projects under way.

I was equally unsettled by the fact that I didn't have discretionary authority. I couldn't write checks on behalf of USAID. If I wanted to fund any new initiative, I would need to win over the backing of my bosses in Baghdad. And most of the remaining millions allocated for Fallujah were already pledged to rubble removal.

In an attempt to orient myself during my first day, I copied out the Excel spreadsheet into a green canvas notebook and studied a satellite map of the city to identify their locations so that I could conduct a small audit of the projects listed as completed.

I never knew which half I represented in the hand-in-glove metaphor, but the skepticism of the marines I was now living with was evident as I walked around the base and introduced myself. Of the few that had even heard of USAID, most thought it was an NGO, not a federal agency. All they saw was a kid without a weapon whom they now had to protect, which was not part of their mission. So when a group of marines in the Civil Affairs Group, to which I'd be attached, made plans over lunch to head over to the firing range in Camp Fallujah, I blurted out that I'd like to join them.

At the range, a lance corporal called me over to fire the M240G machine gun, a twenty-five-pound weapon that can be mounted on tanks. I watched two teams fire at a plywood target in a syncopated rhythm, getting the guns to “talk to each other.” I got into a prone position, and a marine crawled halfway on top of me and said he was going to aim. I tensed up as the belt of a couple hundred 7.62 mm rounds was fitted into place. “Keep the shots below the berm,” someone behind me warned.

I squeezed the trigger, and my brain shut down. I released the trigger. A cloud of dust from behind the plywood was snaking into the air. I pulled the trigger again and let go again, trying to find the target in the sight. A lieutenant colonel shouted, “Kirk, this isn't one of those types of guns! Your A-gunner is your sight. Just get it in the general area, pull the trigger, and hold it down!”

I pulled the trigger and held it. My head was a jarring mess. The marines yelled, “Go, go go!” while the marine on top of me pushed my shoulder to help aim the gun. The flaring red tracer shots struck the plywood, set fire to it, bored through it, and flailed around in the berm. A massive plume of powder rose from behind the target. I released the trigger, and they were clapping, stooping down to pat me on the back. I smiled, and didn't realize until a few moments later that several of the scalding spent shell casings spat from the gun had landed on the exposed skin of my arm and were now melting their way in. I brushed them off with a grimace and could smell burned skin. “Great shooting, sir!” one of them said.

Later that afternoon, in a poorly lit room with satellite maps of every major city and town and base in Anbar Province, I met with Major General Stephen Johnson and told him of my plans to conduct an initial review of the projects USAID had already funded throughout the city. He nodded and said, “Just get yourself over to the CMOC to get started.”

Eight weary miles separate Camp Fallujah from the CMOC, the Civil Military Operations Center, in the center of the city. Before my first convoy run, the captain gathered everyone around to assign the PAX, passengers, to their vehicles. He extracted a laminated map from a pocket, handing a corner to a nearby marine to display a satellite image of the city. Running the group through the route, he outlined alternate routes and rally points in case of attack. Rules of engagement: hand motions, rocks, or water bottles (thrown in the direction of the approaching vehicle as a startling measure), a round in the ground, one in the grill, one in the hood, then shoot to eliminate. Any of these steps may be bypassed depending on the distance and speed of the approaching threat. He turned to me, the only civilian in the group, and asked, “Who are you, and why don't you have a med pack?”