To Be a Friend Is Fatal (21 page)

As soon as they left the compound, at around seven in the evening, a car swerved in front of them and blew up. They set up a perimeter and waited for backup to come and investigate the wreckage.

When backup arrived, Hayder and the guys piled back into the Humvees and resumed their primary mission, heading to the police station. A few minutes later, another car sped up alongside them on the highway, coming closer and closer. “Pull over!” the soldiers shouted before firing at the hood of the car, which stopped quickly.

“Weird fuckin' night, huh?” Hayder said to the captain, who grunted his assent.

They paid the Iraqi cops and started their night patrol. Around a quarter to one in the morning, they pulled off onto the shoulder of Highway 8, alongside a middle-aged Iraqi standing beside his car. “Hayder, go over there and tell that guy he's gotta move his car because curfew's about to start.” Hayder translated for the man, who said the car wasn't starting.

“Well, he can't stay here, or else some other unit might detain him. Ask him where he lives. If it's close, we'll drop him off at home.”

The bullets blazed in just as Hayder began to translate. The Americans were screaming to get to cover as they fired back. Hayder stood in shock for a moment, wondering where the bullets were coming from.

He needed to run. His Humvee was directly in the field of fire, so running there was foolish. He looked around. He spotted a white Toyota 4x4 pickup truck and bolted toward it. He heard bullets flying past his ears and slapping into the side of the truck.

Something blew up, maybe an RPG. He didn't know what. He was thrown onto the ground, and above the gunfire he heard the captain shouting orders to take cover and shoot back, but Hayder didn't have a weapon and wasn't a soldier.

He was lying there when he saw Brian Hellermann fall to the ground. He knew Brian was shot but didn't know where. Brian's face was turned down toward the pavement, and his radio was on and squawking. He was only five feet away and still in danger. Those were the only thoughts that formed in Hayder's head. He got to his feet and bolted over to drag Brian back to shelter in the lee of the truck.

He made it over to Brian and started to pull him but fell to the ground. Hayder looked down at his body and saw that his right leg was missing. Then another round tore into his left leg. Hayder turned and saw the assailant crouched in a nearby field, spraying sparking shots along the pavement. He looked over at Brian and saw that he was dead.

“Oh my God. What have I done?” Hayder lay on the pavement of a street not two miles away from his home. He wanted to hold his son. “Ali just came into my life, and now he's going to live without a dad? Dina's going to have to go through all of this alone.” He looked up at the sky as the fight roared around him. He wasn't religious, but he said, “Hey, Allah, just try to save me here, make this go by as quick as possible.”

Someone ran through the fire and grabbed them both, dragging them off to the side.

It was quiet. Someone was carrying Hayder. He looked down and saw that his leg was still hanging by a husk of flesh. They put him in the back of a Humvee tub next to Brian, whose face was purple; a large-caliber round had pierced the Kevlar of his helmet. They piled dead bodies next to Hayder, and then more bodies on top of him. Though he was barely
conscious, he realized that they didn't know that he was still alive. His throat was full of fluid, so he couldn't make much noise. As the Humvee raced back to the base, the blood of men above seeped down onto him, and he drifted in and out of consciousness.

The Humvee came to a halt. Someone shouted, “Hey! Homeboy's alive, get him outta there!” Hayder was extracted from among the corpses. A medic appeared, wrapped strong elastic bands around Hayder's legs, and said, “Don't worry. Don't worry. Just stay here. Homeboy! Stay here.”

When his throat cleared, he shouted and thrashed around. The medic placed a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Homeboy, you need to calm down, you're bleeding a lot.”

In the Combat Support Hospital, they laid him out and cut off his jeans and T-shirt and boxers and began to clean him. Someone stood at the side of the table with a defibrillator, just in case. A doctor came over to Hayder and gently took hold of his hand. “Son, can I pray for you in the name of the Lord Jesus?” Hayder said, “Yes sir.” He didn't care; he'd take any kind of hope. He passed out as the doctors strapped on their surgical masks.

When he woke up, he wanted water, and someone brought it to him. He looked around the room, and on a nearby gurney there lay a soldier whose face was shelled, torn up by gunfire and the blast. When he saw that Hayder was awake, he said, “The others are dead. You and me are the only ones who made it.”

The captain came in and smiled a pained smile. “Homeboy, we came to visit you in the middle of the night, and you were a little delirious. We asked you to go to work, and you know what you said? You said, ‘Sir, I'm a bit tired. Is it all right if I go out tomorrow?' ”

For the first time since he'd woken up, Hayder looked down at his body, but there was a blanket draped over it. He lifted it up slowly and saw both legs there.
My God
, he thought,
they saved it!
There were steel bars and rods sticking out of his right leg, and his left leg was heavily bandaged. He was overjoyed, certain that he would be able to walk with both legs, and thanked Allah and Jesus and anyone else who might have saved him.

He was tired and overwhelmed and went back to sleep. For the next
five days, they wheeled him back and forth to the operating room to perform more surgeries. He was heavily medicated, and hallucinated so fiercely that the orderlies were forced to strap him to the bed. He slept for two days continuously while the surgeons worked on his legs.

But they were swelling, growing bigger and bigger despite the operations. One night nearly a week after the attack, the surgeon woke up Hayder and said, “Look, Homeboy, we did our best, but we have to amputate now. You've got gangrene going up your leg, and if I don't take it off tonight, you might wake up dead.”

Hayder said, “Okay, let's do it.”

When he woke up, the blanket was again draped over him, but this time he lifted it up and the leg was gone.

Dina had not heard from Hayder in a week. She thought he was dead, until another interpreter in Hayder's group paid a visit to pass along the news that he was still alive. They did not believe him or the Americans anymore, though, and were convinced that it was a lie. After two days, Hayder's dad walked up to the military compound where Hayder's unit in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division operated and shouted, “Just give us his body so we can bury him!” The captain said, “No, no, I promise he's alive. We're gonna bring him home soon.”

It had been only a hundred days since it started, since the day Hayder watched the 101st Airborne stream into Baghdad like a strip of movie film. Since his neighbors surely knew about his work with the Americans by now, he rented a secret home a few blocks over and hobbled into it after nightfall. There was no prosthetic leg, just a stump, some wooden crutches, and a bag of drugs. Dina's brother brought in a crate of whiskey and slept on the couch with a pistol.

The first three nights, Hayder didn't sleep. He watched three sunrises and thought he was losing his mind. He kept the door locked and watched television and played video games—Tomb Raider, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike—with his brother-in-law. He drank heavily.

The summer heat was peaking. Since there was no electricity, his neighbors would sit out in the garden for a bit of breeze, but that was too risky for Hayder. He didn't want someone to jump over the fence and kill him, so he bought a generator, installed it in the garden, and stayed indoors. Eventually word spread that a one-legged man was living there, and his neighbors realized it was the same Hayder who tried to save an American, so someone tossed a grenade over the garden wall and blew up the generator.

His father was working in the new Ministry of Transportation and met regularly with American officials. Paul Bremer was in charge of the country and had given the transportation portfolio to a lawyer named Ronald Dwight.

Mr. Dwight noticed a deep despondency in Hayder's father during a meeting one afternoon and asked him privately what was troubling him. He learned about Hayder's situation and said he wanted to help.

There was little left in Hayder's reservoir of hope, but he began to correspond with Mr. Dwight. He was so worried about his spotty dial-up Internet connection that he hobbled out and bought a small pile of dial-up cards and bribed the telephone serviceman in the neighborhood to ensure that he always had a line to the outside world.

Mr. Dwight knew T. Christian Miller, the investigative reporter from the
Los Angeles Times
who had tormented USAID with his exposés on bungled reconstruction projects. T. had the unusual beat of covering reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and he knew the fine print that led to so much corruption and inefficiency in the war efforts. His articles were not about massive car bombs in marketplaces but about sputtering power plants, and they did a lot more to explain the root causes of the major problems rending the country. Dwight introduced Hayder to T., who dropped by quietly for a visit.

T. left with a sheaf of documents and contracts. Hayder had been paid through a San Diego–based defense contractor called Titan Corporation, which received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to find interpreters, whose average pay was a few dollars an hour.
Hayder didn't really understand the contracts, which were freighted with legalese. After he lost his leg, he had called his bosses at Titan, but all they ever told him was “Yeah, we'd love to help you, Homeboy, but we can't get you out of Iraq.” One day they told him to get a passport, and they'd give him treatment in Kuwait. But as soon as he got one, they said they couldn't. When they said they were going to bring him to Qatar, Hayder excitedly packed his bags, but on the scheduled day, they told him they couldn't help him after all.

Holed up in his hiding place, Hayder entered the Internet access codes from the cards he had bought and waited for something to happen. Miller wrote a front-page article about him, demonstrating that Titan had done nothing to help, and suddenly Hayder's boss called to say the company had finally decided to help. His father loaded him into the car and drove him to a small clinic in Amman, Jordan, where Titan would finally provide for a prosthetic leg and treatment.

The first place Hayder walked to with his new prosthetic leg was the Embassy of the United States of America in Jordan. He had brought along a couple letters of support from his unit, along with a certificate of appreciation: “Thank you for your dedicated service to Coalition Forces and the paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Your tireless efforts have contributed to a brighter future for Iraq. We could not have done it without you. Best of luck in all you do. C Company 2-325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.”

He spoke to a young consular officer through the thick windowpane and said, “I am an Iraqi interpreter, and I would like to apply for asylum in America.” He thought there would be a form to fill out, but there wasn't. The officer said, “Oh, you need to go over to the UNHCR and register.” So Hayder walked to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and registered his family. It was early 2004.

Dina and Ali came to Amman, and the family moved into a small apartment in the Seventh Circle neighborhood. Titan told them that they would have a monthly stipend of $600. One month later, a representative of Titan visited to inform them that the next month would be
the last, delivering an ultimatum: “This is the last of the money we can give you. You can either go back to Iraq and work for us or quit, but this is it.”

Hayder knew he couldn't go back. The burning of the Americans on the bridge in Fallujah was looping on all of the news stations. He called his dad and said, “The house is yours. Do what you want with it, sell it, burn it, give it away, I don't care. I'm not coming back.” Dina sold the jewelry that she had inherited and their computer and television, cobbling together about $2,000.

Hayder couldn't work. He was in Jordan illegally, and if a cop stopped him, he could be deported. There are few protections for refugees in the Middle East. None of the countries has signed the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international agreement according certain protections, chief among them
non-refoulement
: the principle that refugees cannot be forced to return to the country from which they fled. In Jordan, Hayder was nothing and could become nothing, hobbling through a precarious state of limbo.

The two-month stipend from Titan evaporated, and the money made from selling Dina's jewelry was fast running out. Amman was expensive, and the only plan Hayder had was to hope that his refugee petition would get the family to safety in America before they were broke or deported.

T. Miller called Hayder and said there was an American lawyer who'd read the article in the
Los Angeles Times
and wanted to help him sue American International Group (AIG), the insurance giant that had received more than $1.5 billion in premiums from US taxpayers to provide insurance coverage under the Defense Base Act. The act, a World War II–era law, required all contractors working for the US government to provide insurance to their employees, Iraqi interpreters included. But the Iraqis were rarely informed about this right, and Titan, AIG, and other companies didn't remind them. Worse, representatives sent to Jordan pressured gravely wounded interpreters into accepting a onetime payout and signing a waiver of all future coverage. Some were told that they would be sent back to Iraq if they refused to sign.

Hayder was patched into the Houston courtroom during the lawsuit by telephone. The judge asked him questions. AIG fought hard against the lawyer representing Hayder but was ordered to compensate Hayder for the loss of his leg. This was valued at the rate of an American leg: $21,000.