To Be a Friend Is Fatal (6 page)

The job was with the US Agency for International Development, an entry-level position in the Baghdad mission as an information and public affairs officer. I knew little about what I'd be doing, but I had read that the agency was working with nearly $6 billion in reconstruction funds.

First, I had to complete a two-week training, the Diplomatic Security Anti-terrorism Course, or DSAC. On a wintry December morning, my class of fellow aid workers and foreign service officers were shuttled to a government farm in West Virginia to undergo explosives training, which consisted of standing in an observation tower and watching demonstrations of various explosives: det. cord, C4, PETN. When the instructor asked for a volunteer to press a button on his remote control, I eagerly raised my hand and blew up a late-model Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. As a twenty-four-year-old male, I would have gladly paid for the first week of the course.

I shredded a target with climbing bursts of fire from a sweltering AK-47 and grinned. Next to me, a plump forty-something woman named Doris, who was headed over to do secretarial work in the Republican Palace, struggled to lift her shotgun. She fired one shell, lost her grip in the kickback, and the shotgun fell dangerously to the ground. The instructor glared as he picked it up, and Doris fired no more.

We drove around suburban Leesburg and Reston, Virginia, for hours in a Defense Department minivan and tried to determine which cars were tailing us (usually those with Pentagon parking decals affixed to their windshields). I couldn't help but think that whoever developed this part of the program had seen a lot of bad spy movies and probably
hadn't been to Iraq. As I soon learned, you don't really study who is tailing you when rolling around in a quarter-mile-long convoy of three up-armored Suburbans, two or three Humvees, and two Little Bird helicopters engorged with Blackwater gunmen protecting us from the sky. And if I ever found myself in a situation where the highly trained marines and mercenaries around me were killed, leaving it to me to pick up a Kalashnikov or M16, I'd have been better off pointing it at myself. At least I now knew how to find the safety on each rifle.

We received emergency medical training. I learned not to patch a sucking chest wound with the plastic wrapper of a cigarette pack like they did in Vietnam: the cellophane had become thinner since then, thin enough to be sucked right into the chest.

A hostage negotiator taught us that if we were going to be killed in captivity, it would almost certainly happen within the first ninety-six hours. If we survived the first four days, he told us, it was best to pass the time by writing a book or building a house in our head. If our captors ever made us sit in front of a camera and condemn the United States for a propaganda film, we should use our face as a map to point out clues as to where we thought we might be. Our forehead was north, our chin was south. Our nose was Baghdad.

The second week of the course was designed to teach us about Iraqi history and culture and took place in a conference room at the Foreign Service Institute, a small redbrick campus in Arlington, Virginia. Although I had a degree in Middle Eastern history and Arabic and had already spent a lot of time in the region, I went into the second week without pretense, eager to learn what the US government considered the most essential information for its foreign service officers and aid workers.

Entrusted with this duty was a brash woman with smoke-scarred vocal cords who introduced herself as Dr. Mansfield. She claimed expertise on Iraq and fluency in Arabic and was going to prepare us for the coming year of work, with an emphasis on interacting with Iraqis.

She dove right into cultural differences between Iraqis and Americans. “Iraqi women who lose their virginity before marriage will tell a villager to go out and kill a pigeon on the day of their wedding,” she explained, before adding that the bird's liver would be extracted, filled
with pigeon blood, and inserted in her vagina shortly before the consummation.

Wide-eyed at the absurdity and inaccuracy of the claim, which she presented as the cultural norm throughout Iraq, I looked around the room as my classmates shook their heads in disgust. Shotgun Doris blurted, “I'm sorry, but that is just gross!”

Dr. Mansfield worked her way through Iraqi history: “You may not know this, but Baghdad used to be a great city until the Mongols took it over in 1258.”

Doris: What important things happened there after 1258?

Doctor Mansfield: Not a damn thing.

Doris nodded slowly and wrote in her notebook, I imagine something like “Iraqi history, 1258–2004: nothing of importance.”

Dr. Mansfield seemed to like me, offering advice such as “Grow a beard! Nobody over there will respect you because you're young.” I smiled and wrote
beard
in my notebook.

On the final day, Dr. Mansfield focused on gift giving. This knowledge would equip us, she said, to get the most out of our Iraqi employees. I had received Mansfield's permission to record the class, under the pretense of being better prepared.

“Can we get them clothing?” asked a classmate.

“That's a tough one. You probably shouldn't, but you should congratulate them if they have a new shirt. Now, we wouldn't congratulate ourselves on having a new shirt; we know that, since we talked about this yesterday, 'cause we have clean clothes. Okay? But it can be a big deal for some people in the region to get a new item of clothing. Very big.”

A British contractor who had just come back from a three-month stint in Baghdad jumped in: “Take a digital camera! They
love
photographs, printed. I'm trying to remember, we had one of these color laser copiers, and we went through something like—and I'm not kidding—fifteen hundred bucks' worth of toner in a month! Somebody went ‘click' and printed a picture. Every single Iraqi in the office had to have a copy of that picture.”

Dr. Mansfield nodded. “Write that down. That is a great idea.”

Doris wrote in her notebook.

Leaning back with a smirk, the Brit exclaimed, “A color picture! A color picture—now, we'd think nothing of it, but they are thrilled with that sort of thing!”

Doris: Do we use, like, regular paper or glossy paper?

Brit: They were
thrilled
with ordinary paper!

I had accepted the job offer only a week earlier: it hadn't yet occurred to me that I'd be working alongside Iraqis at the agency, but to hear them characterized in such prehistoric terms was jarring. We were not a group of invading soldiers in need of desensitization training but civilians who would assume important positions in administering and rebuilding the country.

Apart from
beard
, my notebook was empty. When classmates asked Dr. Mansfield how to ask “Can I take your picture?” in Arabic, her response was as confident as it was incorrect. I guessed that she might have had a year of Arabic lessons decades ago. I could find no record of her ever having received a doctorate.

Later that afternoon, I rode to the outskirts of Washington to Fort Belvoir, where my dad was once stationed, to be photographed for a Defense Department Common Access Card, which would get me in and out of bases and helicopters.

I flew back home to Chicago for Christmas. The suburbs were cold and blustery, and in the freighted days before my departure, my brothers and I reverted to young boys again. Derek and I set up lights around the pond, which Soren and I had shoveled to form a hockey rink. Mom brought us popcorn and hot chocolate, and we watched the steam wend its way from our lungs in between goals. Dad appeared at the pond's edge for a few moments, exhaling Borkum Riff bourbon-flavored pipe tobacco and surveying the game quietly. We stayed away from the deep end that Derek had fallen through when we were little. Splayed down on the ice, Soren had fed him a hockey stick to pluck him from the
terror below. I scrambled up the steps two a time, looking over my shoulder and screaming, “
Dad! Dad, Mom! Dad!
”

My dad and I meandered through a shopping mall, making last-minute purchases. Where mom wore her worry on her face, he wore excitement. He once told me, when I was home from college, that he had hoped I'd join one of the services to develop a sense of discipline. I didn't talk to him for months. Now, as I prepared to go over as a civilian employee of USAID, he indulged in what appeared to be a mild fantasy about my job.

I picked out a pair of gray convertible pants. “You guys don't wear that color over there.”

“You got any special deals for my son?” he asked the high school girl working the register. “He's off to Iraq next week! Here, Kirk, let me pay for your gear.” Embarrassed, I dumped my “gear” onto the conveyor. Spotting a pair of green Carhartt jeans, he jabbed a finger into them and said, “Army issue!”

He found an old army rucksack in the basement for me to use, but I told him the canvas was too worn out.

Although I can scarcely remember him rushing to answer the phone when I was younger, now he seemed to
want
to talk with everyone who called. “Yeah, well, you know our son Kirk is off to Baghdad next week, so we're all trying to spend as much time with him as possible. What's that? No, it's a ten-month tour.”

I was stuffing my Arabic dictionary into a suitcase when he wandered in and asked, “Where do you think you'll take your R&R? I did mine in Hong Kong. That was right after the Tet Offensive.”

He ignored my attempts to correct his terminology. “Are you going to deploy with anyone else in your same unit?”

“Aid workers don't deploy, and we don't have units,” I told him. “I'm flying over alone. They bumped me to first-class sleeper the whole way; should be nice.”

Later that night, he walked into my bedroom with a legal pad, closed the door behind him, and said that he needed to ask a few questions for my living will. I was twenty-four, and hadn't given any thought to how I'd want my vegetative body handled. An hour later, he came back up with a typed version for my signature.

“Sit on the left side of the plane if you want a good view coming in. Only if you don't get airsick, though,” an attractive young woman working for USAID volunteered encouragingly. Below us swirled pillars of dust, ten stories high and dancing across the desert expanse. The props felt as though they might choke as the tiny Embraer EMB Brasilia twin turboprop plane chartered by the agency to shuttle incoming AID workers climbed through the clouds. I fidgeted with my MP3 player and settled on Radiohead's “I Will.” The pitch of the turbines settled, and the plane nosed onward.

It was hot on the plane. There was no door to the pilot's deck. The sun glared, and the glass faceplates of the instrumentation systems flashed light like watch faces. A small pink Energizer bunny twirled on a string tied to an unused switch. As Thom Yorke's voice cooed about lying down in an underground bunker, I realized I had picked a lousy song for the moment. The copilot turned around and announced we were one hundred kilometers from Baghdad International Airport.

The clouds broke, and the Euphrates ribboned darkly below. Weary-looking farms unfurled from its banks, and sand piled over the edges of the fields. We hurtled toward the dusty pall of Baghdad, and the song looped. The plane banked left abruptly and jammed its nose downward. In a frantic approach, the turboprop corkscrewed its way down as though swirling toward a drain, hoping to avoid rocket-propelled grenades. The emergency system began to blare, but the pilots ignored it as the engines clamored and the Energizer bunny circled furiously. At the last possible moment, they straightened the wings and the plane smacked into the runway, bouncing a few times as the copilot welcomed us to Iraq.

Inside the customs hall, I smiled at the bored-looking Iraqi official inspecting my official passport, but he didn't bother looking up as he thudded my entry stamp. A stocky man in his late twenties wearing a faded Metallica T-shirt hurried over once I cleared passport control. He was the first Iraqi employee of USAID I would meet, and he introduced himself to me as Kirk. I stared in blank confusion.

“No,” I said, “my name is Kirk. What's yours?”

“Kirk! Well, it's Muhanad, but that's too hard for the Americans, so I use Kirk. As in, Hammett? Metallica, dude!”

In Arabic, I told him it was too weird to call him Kirk, and that I'd call him by his real name, if that was okay by him. He beamed his assent.

Black smoke columned upward from sputtering power plants and IED blasts as the Blackhawk ferrying us from the airport into the Green Zone swooped low over the city. The former ministry buildings were charred and collapsed from the JDAM bombs of Shock and Awe. The Republican Palace was soon below us, and we touched down at Landing Zone Washington. I clambered out of the Blackhawk and followed the woman from the airplane toward a white unarmored van. An Iraqi driver working for USAID drove us the final stretch to the gates of the agency's compound, where Nepalese Gurkhas patted him down and rubbed paper on him to test for explosive residue. Bomb dogs sniffed around his legs as we waited in the van.

Sprinklers spattered tiny eight-by-ten lawns in between rows of gray mortar-proof houses. An Iraqi in a golf cart gathered my belongings, depositing me in the corner of the compound at my assigned house in row A, block 2, unit 4.

I flopped on the couch and felt my exhaustion for the first time that day. The house was surprisingly comfortable, with a separate bedroom, a well-equipped kitchen, a satellite TV, and a DVD player. I wandered into the bedroom and began unpacking. Opening the bed stand drawer, I found a folded wad of papers. I spread them open to discover a receipt and schemata for a penis enlargement system, left behind by the previous occupant. I crawled into bed and slept.

A
s the drone flies, the USAID compound was situated upon four scabby acres on the dorsum of the nose-shaped Green Zone, its eastern edge carved by the quiet waters of the Tigris. After the fall of Baghdad, when the embassy and the Pentagon split up the opulent Republican Palace, and the properties of the Green Zone were divvied up by various agencies and contractors, USAID laid claim to the former headquarters of the motorcycle division of the Republican Guard and built some of the finest living quarters around. Our bombproof homes lined the northern half of the compound; sardine-can trailers serving as offices clotted the southern half. A massive structure was emerging from the ground in the northeastern corner, built by Iraqi day laborers who were bussed in to pour concrete and stack bricks. AID workers called it the NOB, short for New Office Building, and we eagerly awaited its completion so that we could work in mortar-proof peace.