To Be a Friend Is Fatal (2 page)

Yaghdan felt the USAID badge shift uncomfortably under his sock. He saw a handful of men gathered on the other side of the bridge, and lowered his head. These were called
alassas
, slang deriving from the Arabic verb “to chew”: militiamen who hunted Iraqis like him by studying the faces of those who emerged from the gates of the Green Zone.

For three years, Yaghdan had avoided the chewers by varying the entry and exit points he used to enter the Green Zone each day, never falling into a pattern. Most days, he switched taxis more than once, wore disguises, and was never dropped off directly in front of his home.

This day, exhausted and hungry, he slipped up.

As he crossed the bridge, he heard a hoarse voice call out his name. “Yaghdan!” Before he could suppress the instinct, he looked up, and in that split second confirmed his identity. Realizing his mistake, he tried to avoid eye contact, but not before his eyes fell upon the familiar face of a neighbor from Street Number 2.

His eyes locked with the menacing glower of his neighbor, and the adrenaline felt cold as it drained into Yaghdan's gut. In any other country, in any other neighborhood, in any other decade, this would have been an unimportant event. He would have smiled and waved, said hello, shared a smoke, asked about work.

But here, just after five o'clock on the twenty-first day of Ramadan in October 2006—1426
hijri
on the Islamic calendar—the
alassa
opened his jaws wide and chewed him up.

Yaghdan woke early the next morning to the frantic drone of flies; the sound of a feeding frenzy. He opened his front door slowly. At his feet he found a sheet of paper, the kind used in the school workbooks that had been supplied through one of his education initiatives at USAID. He crouched down and picked up the note. Written in blue ink, just below the Date and Subject lines, he read:

“We will cut off your heads, and throw them in the trash . . .”

The buzzing of the flies seemed incomprehensibly loud. He looked up from the letter and settled his gaze on the delicate eye of a small dog. A fly was buzzing around its clouded cornea. Past the upturned ear, he saw the thick cake of blood around the creature's severed neck.

He walked back inside and set the letter on the table. Haifa was still sleeping. He called to wake her and sat down before the letter. She came in with a groggy smile, read the concern on his face, and then saw the letter. She started to cry. He told her not to open the door for anyone, not to call anyone, not to walk by the windows even once. He wrapped his arms around her, but there was no more comfort to be found in this home.

Yaghdan took the letter and slipped out the front door. The air was foul from the scent of rotting flesh. He picked up the severed dog's head and dropped it in a pale green trash can in the corner of the courtyard.

He made his way back to the Green Zone. He would ask his American bosses for help. Surely after three years of distinguished service with the US government, they would do something.

Weeks later, in the Al-Mahata neighborhood of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, Yaghdan slinked into an Internet café crowded with other Iraqi refugees and drafted a desperate email to me.

The Apology

E
very son writes the myth of his father's greatness and weakness, revising and eliding according to the depth of his own generosity, insecurities, and pride. Mine begins not long after my fifth birthday, when my dad traded a chance at fulfilling his dream of becoming a United States congressman for an apology. My mom once called the apology, which came from the leaders of the Illinois Republican Party, his magic beans.

My father is a man of stubborn principle, useful for nurturing a healthy pride but detrimental to a career in politics. He was not born with the thirst for power, and avoided the grease of Illinois machine politics. But when he was thirty-six, he and my mother sold a small, fallow plot of farmland in the nearby town of Addison to seed an upstart campaign for the Fourteenth Congressional District in the far western suburbs of Chicago. The land was my mom's inheritance, and its soil carried the sadness of her father's premature passing, felled at the age of fifty-six by a heart attack after a hard life in the garbage hauling business.

Dad launched the campaign without the blessing of his Republican Party, which barely knew him. The party had its own handpicked man for the district. This was GOP country: take the primary, and you take the seat. Its man, John Grotberg, enjoyed the perks of outside money: campaign flyers glimmering with expensive ink and headquarters in rented office space.

But Dad commanded an army of volunteers who were mostly new to the political process, and they fanned out far and wide. He knocked on door after door, walked up driveways long and short, across farm fields and industrial parking lots and subdivisions, talking with anyone who'd listen, sometimes carrying me piggyback. He was young, energetic, and owned by no party.

In one of my first memories, people are cheering and clapping and jumping with excitement on election night 1984. The Citizens to Elect Tom Johnson had gathered at the Back Door, a restaurant connected to West Chicago's local bowling alley.

The night was joyous, until its final minutes. He led Grotberg all evening, and as the percentage of reported precincts inched its way closer to 100, a seat in Congress drew within reach of his young hands.

But when the final numbers came in from Kendall County, it slipped away. Grotberg squeaked ahead and clinched the nomination by 662 votes, and the joy drained from the bowling alley restaurant and from many nights and months and years to come. My oldest brother, Soren, then nine, collapsed into tears beside my mom and asked, “How could God let this happen?”

My dad dealt with the loss with stoicism and repression, traits honed and inherited from generations of Swedes. He had gambled a big piece of inheritance on his dream and came tantalizingly close—close enough for it to feel tangible. In the basement war room, he wedged a dolly under each of the filing cabinets, which were swollen from two years of campaign plans, volunteer lists, registration forms, buttons, bumper stickers, and brochures, and wheeled them across the field to the barn, where he stored them in a stall adjacent to the chicken coop. In the general election that fall, Grotberg sailed into office, and my dad returned to the one-story brick building that housed his small law practice and began to move on.

And then, Grotberg suffered a heart attack and slipped into a coma while receiving experimental treatment for cancer, knowledge of which was kept to his inner circle during the campaign. The GOP would hold a special election to fill Grotberg's seat, and my dad was now the most prominent Republican in the district. The phone began to ring with his supporters, excitedly urging him to put his name on the ballot.

But the Republicans were wary of my dad. He had never taken any money or favors from them and therefore owed them nothing, which granted him an intolerable independence. As the family legend goes, the party convinced Grotberg's wife to keep him on life support long enough to move their new man into the district. Their new man's name was Dennis Hastert, a state representative from another district.

My dad's political organization was reactivated, ready for a race. The filing cabinets were wheeled back into the house, which again buzzed with enthusiastic young volunteers.

But this time the buttons and brochures were worthless. The electorate for a special election was composed not of farmers and the families he had won over in the previous campaign, but of party insiders. A handful of county chairmen, committeemen, and other assorted Republicans held the key to his election—a number even smaller than the narrow margin by which he'd lost to Grotberg.

The Republicans of the Land of Lincoln scorched my father from the field. Their tactic was as simple as it was ancient: they set fire to his reputation, calling my parents John Birchers, far-right loons who were secret members of a secret cult. They whispered that he and my mom had attacked abortion clinics.

The party leadership made it clear that Hastert was its man. In a brief meeting with a senior staffer to Governor Big Jim Thompson, my dad was told, “Tom, forget it. You're out. It's never going to happen.” My dad had only one thing that they wanted: his name. They wanted him to withdraw from the ballot, suspend his political operation, and give Hastert his endorsement.

He drove home and told my mom. An anonymous committeeman had just called to ask if she was really a cult member. “Only if the Protestant Evangelical church is a cult!” she cried before hanging up and bursting into tears.

“What are you going to do?” she asked my father.

“The game is fixed, and we're not the winners.”

The GOP was offering a judgeship and all manner of sinecure if he endorsed, but he had only one demand. In exchange for his withdrawal from the race and endorsement of Hastert, the senior Republican state senator, Pate Philip, and each of the party chairmen had to publicly
apologize for the lies that had been spread about him. They would also have to sign a letter to the same effect.

The apology letter was issued. The local newspaper ran a short piece. My dad clipped it out and put it in the filing cabinet. Hastert sailed into office and went on to become the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House in American history. Pate Philip became president of the Illinois Senate. The others who apologized each went on to control the levers of the party for decades.

The black vines of depression wrapped around my father in the ensuing years, but he held on to his pride, however faintly it burned.

I grew up on a dead-end street that has never seen a tank and never will. We were surrounded by animals, tamed and wild, oftentimes obliged to keep the two apart. We had a small barn in which my older brothers and I tended to the chickens and kept Joe the horse fed and made sure the water in his trough didn't freeze during winter. When Pepe the goat chewed free from his tether to head-butt the neighbor kids, we had him dehorned and replaced his rope with chain. To fill the coop, we ordered Rhode Island Reds and White Giants and Barred Rocks through the Murray McMurray Hatchery catalog, along with a rooster that my oldest brother named Clucker. The post office called when the chicks arrived, and we brought the large and peeping box home. As they grew, Soren, Derek, and I slept summer nights in the loft above the coop, a BB gun at hand to shoot at groundhogs that burrowed in to steal their feed, or at the fox that shimmied through the groundhog tunnel to feast on the chickens. Soren rigged up a black-and-white TV, and we watched
The Twilight Zone
while the birds slept.

I was too young to comprehend the impact of the campaign on our family. What I knew of the world's badness was limited to the snapper turtle lurking in the muck of the pond out back. In the excited company of a brace of White Pekin ducks, my brothers and I paddled around in tiny square boats sawed and hammered and caulked together by our dad, while the fowl gorged on duckweed algae multiplying across the pond's dark surface. After losing a race one muggy afternoon around the
egg-shaped perimeter, I drifted toward the ducks just as one disappeared from the surface with a horrific squeal, dragged to the bottom in the prehistoric jaws of the snapper. The others swam on blithely.

Later that summer, as the sun disappeared behind the towering four-hundred-year-old oak, we spotted the snapper crawling across the yard and ran to get Dad and his rifle. From a great distance, he fired a bullet into the turtle's jaw. We approached it tentatively and saw blood seeping from a bullet-shaped opening in its carapace. We asked him to show us his marksmanship badge, still pinned to his Vietnam uniform.

We knew that Dad had been in Vietnam, but he kept those years sealed off from us. He never went to the VFW. I heard that before his deployment, he and his antiwar brother bled each other in fistfights over Vietnam, but not much more. Once, when I was eight, he put on his uniform, and mom dug out her wedding dress, and they posed for a picture on their twentieth anniversary.

In a dim hallway in the basement, there's a picture of him in a Huey helicopter. He's skinny and smiling. I always thought that he was a helicopter pilot, and imagined harrowing missions over Vietnamese jungles and rivers borrowed from
Apocalypse Now
, burned-out cigarette wedged at the corner of his swearing mouth.

I didn't bother asking him about the war when I was young. The picture said enough, and he wasn't offering up any more.

In the nineties, West Chicago was news. Our little railroad town was aglow in radiation, our bodies sick. For decades, from the 1930s until the 1970s, the Lindsay Light and Chemical Company maintained a Rare Earths Facility on Ann Street in the center of town. My high school was a football toss from its gate.