To Be a Friend Is Fatal (20 page)

He ran out into the street to celebrate, and found others bashing windows and looting stores. The next day he saw an Iraqi shoot someone in the chest while the crowd continued to loot.

“Can I describe it? You can't laugh at me. It was like watching
Saving Private Ryan
. The convoy was like a mile long. I was watching a movie with American soldiers in it, and they were smoking, making jokes, and someone would say, ‘What the fuck?' and ‘Shit,' and I turned to Dina and said, ‘Is this real, or am I imagining it?' She used to tease me for liking the Americans and Brits so much. ‘Here are your people,' she said.”

Hayder was standing with Dina and his best friend, Mouayyad, when the first convoy of the 101st Airborne rolled in. Hayder approached the soldiers walking on foot, unsure if he wanted to say hi or thank you, but as he headed over, one of the soldiers raised his rifle and said, “If you come any closer, I will shoot you.” Hayder said, “Relax, you don't need to pull out your gun.”

The soldier lowered his rifle, shocked at the British-accented English. Hayder was surprised at the fear he saw in the young soldier's eyes. “I just wanted to say hi, guys. We're very happy that you came over.”

Dina wanted to move back into their home in Dora now that the
Americans had arrived. They were worried about the looting and didn't want their home ransacked. Hayder told her to wait behind while he surveyed the neighborhood, but she wouldn't listen and got into the car.

They crossed the bridge into Dora and into the gaze of a huge tank staring at them. Hayder got out slowly with his hands up and then Dina, who was due any week now. The tank's muzzle rotated away in deference, and the two got back into the car and drove on.

The house and water storage tank on the roof were punctured from shrapnel, but although the windows were broken, nobody had stolen anything. Hayder excitedly went out and bought a generator and supplies to ready his home for the arrival of their first child.

Dina whispered nervously to Hayder, who was still in bed. “Hayder, there are a lot of Americans in the front yard. I think they just knocked on the door!” He threw on a T-shirt and shorts and opened the door. They were standing out front, laughing at a joke someone must have just made. They turned to Hayder. He read derision in their faces, which to him seemed to say, “Here comes another Iraqi idiot who can't speak a word of English.” A soldier stepped forward and handed Hayder a sheet of paper, which had a few sentences in Arabic saying that they wanted to search the house. Hayder handed the paper back and said, “Gentlemen, I don't need this. How can I help you?”

“Holy shit, you speak English?”

“I'm pretty sure I was just speaking English. How can I help?”

Some bombs they had dropped hadn't yet exploded, they said, so they wanted to see if there were any in his yard or up on the roof. Hayder invited them inside, offering a Coke or some tea. The captain of the unit said, “We'd love to have some tea, but we're dirty and do not want to come inside and mess up your house. Maybe we could sit in the garden.”

Hayder pulled some plastic chairs from his garage and sat out back with the captain while the others searched for unexploded bombs in the garden. A citrus tree threw a shadow on the tomatoes climbing their wooden stakes, and cactus plants stood guard on the edge of the back
porch. They spoke about Iraq and the war and Saddam for nearly an hour. The captain shook his hand gratefully as he left.

Ten minutes later, a soldier named Izzy returned, knocking at the door. “Hayder, the cap'n wants you to come over. There's an Iraqi family telling us something, but we can't understand 'em. Can you come?” Hayder told Dina he'd be back in a few minutes; it was just a few houses down the street. He walked over with Izzy, translated the conversation, and walked back home.

Fifteen minutes later, Izzy was back at the door. “Hayder, can you help us again?” So he went back.

They kept coming for help. He went to twenty homes, throughout the day and into the evening. He was happy. He hadn't met a lot of his neighbors before that day; they seemed so grateful to him for his ability to translate.

The next morning, the captain knocked on his door at eight o'clock. Hayder was still sleeping and grumbled when Dina woke him up. “I'm sorry if we woke you, Hayder. But would you like to work for us?” Hayder was excited but said he needed to discuss it with his wife.

Dina knew Hayder would take the job but worried that it might not be safe. “Where's the risk?” he said. “Saddam's gone!” Everyone was thanking him for speaking English so well.

His friends told him, “Do it, man! You're gonna help us out a lot! Who is going to bring our voice to the Americans?”

They said, “You're gonna help out the neighborhood, bring back the electricity.”

Hayder demurred. “I'm not the mayor, I'm just going to be a translator.”

They said, “Yeah, but how will they know what we need unless somebody tells them?”

Five bucks a day, cash, that was the deal. Izzy always played Nelly's “Hot in Herre” in the Humvee and taught Hayder how to dance like him. Everywhere they went, Iraqi boys crowded around to look at and flirt with the few females in the company. Hayder felt like he was in the movies. He absorbed their slang and made them laugh.

“The fuck's your name again?” someone asked in the first few days.

“Hayder.”

“What kind of shitty name is Hayder?” They busted him like he was one of their own.

“Well, it's a local name.”

“Nah, that's too tough for us to remember. We're gonna give you a nickname.”

“Okay.”

“Let's call you Homeboy.” And everyone did.

Mouayyad was with Hayder when they saw the 101st enter Baghdad. They were best friends. When they were in high school, and Saddam was about to invade Kuwait, they worried they'd be trucked to the front lines to fight against Americans. “If that happens,” Mouayyad said, “we'll go to Kurdistan, and from there to Turkey. Then to Cuba. And then we'll smuggle ourselves into America.”

As soon as he could afford to buy his first car, Mouayyad bought a Chevrolet Caprice Classic. He was crazy about America. He used to kiss his Caprice each morning. “I'm not gonna buy Toyota shit!” Mouayyad said. “I'm buying American.”

So when the Americans came in, Mouayyad also stepped forward to help. His English wasn't as good, but he knew engines and machines, so they hired him to work on their bases as a generator repairman. He kept their ACs running and their bases lit. They called him Moe.

The troops that Hayder rode with were there to fight a war, not to become policemen. One evening on patrol, there were peals of gunfire. Hayder knew it was celebratory fire; that someone had just been married. But he could not stop the Americans from shooting back, and Iraqis were wounded.

Some units were less disciplined than others and kicked in front doors instead of knocking. They shouted as they came in, not giving the women of the homes time to cover their hair. Hayder heard them
curse the Americans as he translated the soldiers' demands to search their homes.

The people in his neighborhood came by every day with only one question, which they asked relentlessly: “Hayder, when is the power coming back?” He told them that the electricity wasn't controlled by a single button somewhere, but they weren't assuaged. Everyone talked about the massive generator that the Americans brought into Kuwait after the Gulf War. Why couldn't they do that here?

He communicated his neighbors' concerns to the Americans just as relentlessly, so much so that Izzy and the others would sigh, “Oh boy, here we go again. Here comes Homeboy, gonna ask us about the power.”

“Well, what's going on with the electricity?” he'd ask. Their answers were vague, and the higher the rank, the loftier the language—“We're going to set things up so that the Iraqi people take control over their own destiny”—and Hayder realized that they didn't have the training, the capacity, or a clue.

Before long, he was lying, and lying all the time. He wanted the Iraqis in his neighborhood to still have hope. He didn't want them to start hating Americans, even though he saw it germinating in the splinters of every kicked-in door, with each passing summer month without electricity. He couldn't fully explain it to himself, but he loved America and got angry whenever anyone spoke poorly of it or called the Americans liars. So when they asked, “Hayder, what did they say about the electricity?” he usually said he forgot to ask.

One evening he came back from work and found Dina's sister running from room to room. “She's in labor! Get your things together!” Hayder and Dina piled into their Malaysian Proton Wira and raced to the hospital, hoping that their doctor would make it there before the American-imposed curfew.

Ali was born around seven in the evening on May 29, 2003. Hayder scooped him up and kissed him as he cried. He felt sorry for his boy, because he was born at the wrong time. He whispered to Ali, “I'm going to protect you until you get big. I will do anything that needs to be done to keep you safe.” After a few days, Dina and Ali came back to the house, and they lived like a regular family. Some of the soldiers came by one day to say hi to Ali and take pictures.

There wasn't room for him in the Humvee as they rode through the neighborhood of Abu Dasheer, near Dora, so Hayder rode in the back of a commandeered ambulance with some other soldiers. The main street was always crowded because of the small stands on the median, where vendors sold vegetables, cell phones, and watermelons. The ambulance was stuck in pedestrian traffic when someone flung open the back door and tried to fire a revolver. The soldiers leaped on him before anyone was wounded, took the assailant to prison, and told the Iraqis on the street that nobody would be permitted to sell goods in the middle of the road anymore. To underscore their point, they drove their Humvees up onto the median and sent vendors running.

The war was still in its infancy, but things were deteriorating quickly. Hayder tried to help, sitting with the captain each day, discussing alternate routes, and assessing the quality of incoming tips from informants. He drafted a new letter in Arabic for the soldiers to present to Iraqis, which was much more polite. He stopped asking about the electricity, which seemed to relieve just about everyone in the unit.

But a slip of paper and conversations with the captain were just words. Once an RPG sailed past his Humvee and hit the median. Another time a car blew up in front of him. Soldiers in his unit were killed, sometimes by bullet, sometimes by bomb.

Hayder decided to quit. Ali was just a couple months old, and Hayder felt like he was breaking his promise to protect his son. He didn't sign up for this, he told the captain, and walked home.

The next morning, the Americans came by and said, “Homeboy, we can't do this shit without you. You're gonna have to come along with us.” They said, “Look, everyone's pissed off over here. You think we're having a good time?”

Hayder said, “Okay, let me grab my clothes.” He didn't want to go back, but he loved his unit, Charlie Company of the Eighty-Second Airborne. He was worried that something bad might happen to them or that they might mistakenly do something bad to his fellow Iraqis, so he went back to help, absorbing and interpreting the frustrations of both sides.

Charlie Company knew that Hayder was getting burned out and was starting to fear for his safety, so they started dropping him off at his front door to make sure he got home in one piece. He knew it wasn't convenient for them to turn a convoy of several Humvees up his narrow street, so one day he told them to just drop him on the main road by his house. They agreed but said that they would stay to watch him from there.

As he approached his home, a stranger, maybe twenty years old, was coming out the front door. Hayder sprinted toward him. The Americans in Charlie Company saw something amiss and scrambled over, just as Hayder had beaten the intruder into submission.

“Homeboy, ask him if there's anyone else inside.”

Hayder translated the soldier's question about his own home. Yes, there were two more inside.

“Are they armed?”

Yes, they were armed. “They're waiting to kill you,” the young man groaned to Hayder.

“Wait here,” said the captain, and they kicked in his door. Inside were two teenagers, who dropped their guns the moment they saw US military bearing down on them. Mercifully, Dina and Ali were visiting her sister that day.

During the interrogation, Hayder learned that one of his neighbors had informed the intruders about his work with the Americans. They called him an
ameel
, just like in grade school.

He wanted to leave, but where could he go? He owned a 9 millimeter pistol, but that wasn't much protection. Another friend of his, who worked as an interpreter and lived a few blocks over, was hanged in the neighborhood with a sign around his neck that read “This is what happens to those who work with Americans.”

Dina begged him to quit. Hayder wanted to, but he felt that he understood Americans better than the Iraqis ever would and understood
Iraqis better than the Americans ever could. He was the bridge, and even though things were getting bad, he had to continue.

It was a Thursday, the night of August 6, 2003. Hayder was killing time in the Eighty-Second Airborne's compound across the bridge from his home in Dora. While waiting for the captain to come in with their orders, he sat on a worn-out black sofa and played FIFA World Cup soccer on the PlayStation with a soldier named Brian Hellermann, a thirty-five-year-old Minnesota native with a wife and two young children back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The captain came in and said, “Homeboy, we're going out tonight.” They needed to go pay the salaries of the Iraqi police and then bring them along on a training mission to teach them how to patrol. Brian paused the game so that they could finish it later. Everyone armored up, except for Hayder, who didn't have any gear.