I Lost My Love in Baghdad Read online

  Tapes is on the handheld Motorola radio used to communicate between the cars. He’s telling the drivers to slow down, speed up, don’t hold the radio too high above the window (if insurgents see a radio, they’ll know you’re guarding someone), avoid that bump, stay away from that car. He’s looking out the back window, out the front window. I stay quiet, though I do want a cigarette, staring at the ashtray in front of me.

  “You got to be fucking kidding me.”

  The car is stopped. A convoy. We are stuck in traffic. Twenty minutes pass before the car starts moving again.

  “You got to be fucking kidding me, mate.”

  Another American convoy, another twenty minutes. The car is getting hotter, Tapes is keeping up a steady rhythm of fucks and shits. I am sweating and I remember this thing I read a year ago by Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish journalist, about a trip he took to Azerbaijan. “Once you are in this kind of situation, you are in this kind of situation.” Or something like that.

  This is what I signed up for. Fucking Baghdad. I am finally here.

  In January 1992, when the U.S. went to war with Iraq for the first time, I sat with my father in the kitchen of our childhood home in Malone, New York, and watched the bombs fall on CNN. I was in fifth grade when the three-day ground war started, and I asked to be excused from phys ed class so I could see General Norman Schwarzkopf, Stormin’ Norman, give a live press conference from Riyadh. I asked my teacher, Sister Marilyn, to bring a television into the classroom so I could watch. I took notes on a small pad with a pencil.

  I’ve always been obsessed with the news. When I was six years old, I would wake up early before school to watch the newly founded CNN. But Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was news that went beyond the television. When the gulf war started, everyone in my class wore yellow ribbons and we all sang that song—I’m proud to be an American, because at least I know I’m free, and I won’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me. It was a very small Catholic school in a very small town. During recess, I talked about the war with my friends, the few kids who’d been as glued to the TV as I was.

  One day that winter, there was a special assembly in the gymnasium. A local actor was brought in as part of an educational initiative to explain the war to elementary school students. He got up on stage, carrying two rubber Halloween masks, one of President George Herbert Walker Bush and one of President Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. He played each role, switching back and forth behind a folding screen on stage, explaining American foreign policy in simple terms, bad guys versus good guys. It was entertaining. I remember raising my hand and asking, why don’t we just kill Saddam Hussein? The actor, prepared to improvise, put on the Bush mask and said something like: “Would you like it if they killed me, your president?” And I remember thinking, perhaps precociously, or perhaps I’d heard it somewhere, that the cost of one life is nothing if it could save so many others.

  Months later, there was another assembly. The war was over, and this time we listened to a returning veteran who couldn’t have been older than twenty. I raised my hand and asked him: Did you carry an M-16, and does an M-16 have automatic and semiautomatic fire? And if so, is there a switch on the gun? (Yes, it has both, and there is a switch.) He described trying to dig a foxhole in the desert, and how he went on a mission for two days, observing the enemy from a distance. I was riveted. It was like being in the presence of a celebrity—better, even, because this celebrity had been to war. I’d always been fascinated by the military. Throughout grade school, my favorite game involved hiding in the woods with cap guns and camouflage uniforms. Every month, I would ask my father to bring me to a nearby army/navy surplus store. When I was nine, he bought me a real Vietnam-era flak jacket that I had wanted.

  Throughout the nineties, I stayed focused on the news about Iraq. I read about the economic sanctions, how human rights groups estimated that over half a million Iraqi children had died due to the restrictions on imports, about the allegations of WMDs and the U.N. deployment of weapons inspectors, then Clinton’s bombing of over one hundred targets in Iraq in December 1998. I watched David O. Russell’s gulf war adventure filmThree Kings twice in the theaters and many more times on DVD. Saddam even made a cameo inThe Big Lebowski, another of my favorite movies, popping up in a dream sequence at a bowling alley.

  I moved to New York City to finish college in September 2000, taking classes in English literature and media studies at night and working part-time jobs during the day. It was an election year in which George W. Bush promised that America would do no more “nation-building.” The song “Bombs Over Baghdad” by Outkast became a hit. On September 11, 2001, my father called and woke me up and told me to turn on the TV. I headed downtown, under the blue skies, making it to Houston Street before being turned back at the first police barricade. I watched the towers burn from the roof of a friend’s apartment in the East Village. I turned twenty-two the next year, graduated, and got a summer internship atNewsweek. I started to report and write for the international edition of the magazine. I was hired at the end of the summer.

  That August, I listened to Vice President Cheney say we were going after Saddam. I remember my initial response was, what a crazy idea. What a crazy, crazy idea, flying thousands of miles with an invading army to topple a government. But as the debate began, I started to think, well, democracy, freedom, 9-11, WMDs, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Being a contrarian, I argued with my antiwar colleagues, taking on the neoconservative talking points just to see how they felt, even though the talk of mobile weapons labs all seemed like complete bullshit to me, like whoever drew up the diagrams of mobile weapons labs had watched too much G.I. Joe as a child and could only imagine some kind of fantastic weapon that C.O.B.R.A (the evil terrorist organization fighting to rule the world, as the theme song pointed out) used to attack the real American heroes. On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell posed on 1st Avenue in New York City with a vial of fake anthrax. On March 20, 2003, the war started. For the next forty-eight hours, I watched TV, nonstop it seemed, switching between live coverage of the invasion and Adult Videos on Demand, alone in my New York apartment, thinking, I want to be over there, I want to be in Iraq.

  Two years later here I am.

  The BMW is moving at a crawl. My body feels each bump in the road. My sweat has soaked through my shirt.

  “Okay, mate, you can get up now.”

  The car stops again. We are at the first checkpoint to enter the Green Zone. There are two lanes, divided by fifteen-foot-high concrete walls erected to contain the damage of suicide car bombs. One lane is “high priority” only American military personnel and Defense Department contractors allowed. The other is for Iraqis and foreigners without proper identification. A sign in front readsDEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED, in both English and Arabic. Follow the soldiers’ instructions or you will be shot, it advises. Cell phones must be turned off; no photos allowed, either. I take it all in after seeing nothing but the car floor and the ashtray for the last forty-five minutes on what should have been a ten-minute drive.

  There are palm trees. There are blast walls. A Bradley tank rolls past. Iraqi Army and American soldiers stand guard in front of a shack protected by sandbags. Water bottles and empty soda cans litter the ground. Dozens of beat-up cars are queued up, waiting in the sun to be searched. Their hoods and trunks are popped to check for explosives. A young American soldier watches from the shade of a blast wall as an Iraqi soldier lazily pats down the passengers in the car in front of us. The American spits chewing tobacco into an empty Gatorade bottle.

  Nothing seems to fit. I don’t know what it is. It may be the heat or it may be lack of sleep. Or it could just be the adrenaline coming down. I have this sensation that I am seeing too many parts that don’t quite go together—randomly scattered signs of America in this completely un-American place, sun-blasted and slow-moving. I take it all in.

  My first real look at Baghdad, and I remember my thought to the word.

  What the fuck were w
e thinking?

  CHAPTER2

  August–October 2005

  BAGHDAD

  Scott Johnson was sitting behind his desk on the second floor of theNewsweek bureau, a two-floor home inside the Green Zone, abandoned by its Iraqi owners and now rented to us. I walked into the office. He looked up and smiled.

  “I brought a bunch of new DVDs,” I said.

  “Cool, we’ll check them out later. Let’s go get your badges.”

  Badges, I would learn, were the key to the Green Zone. I needed two of them—one military press ID and another called the International Zone (the official name for the Green Zone, usually just called “the IZ”) badge. The IZ badges were color coded—red was the lowest (for most Iraqis), purple being the highest (for high-level government officials). The right badge could get you into the U.S. embassy; the right badge allowed you to walk freely in the IZ without an escort, got you priority access to the checkpoints outside the IZ. The right badge allowed you to carry firearms and not get searched.

  We walked outside the bureau. The house had a small lawn and garden out front, surrounded by a six-foot-high white wall. It was located on a quiet street guarded at both ends by a private security company called Edinburgh Risk.

  Scott got behind the wheel of the Mercedes. At thirty-one years old, he was the magazine’s youngest Baghdad bureau chief. In a few short years he’d gone from reporting in Paris to covering the war in Afghanistan, then to Iraq and from there to become the bureau chief in Mexico City. Now he was back in Baghdad with the top job. He backed out of the driveway, explaining the rules for moving around the IZ as he drove.

  Rule 1: Stay away from American, Iraqi, and private security convoys. They are authorized to shoot anyone who comes within one hundred meters of their cars.

  Rule 2: Stop at all checkpoints, whether on foot or in the car. Turn on your hazard lights and the inside car light at night. If you don’t turn the lights on, they might shoot you.

  That was basically it.

  I sat shotgun, cracking the three-inch-thick bulletproof window to smoke. The extra weight from the armor on the Mercedes made the car drive like a boat.

  We were on our way to the Iraqi parliament building, or the Convention Center, a five-minute drive from the house, where I could fill out all the necessary paperwork. At the first checkpoint, Scott made sure to hold his badge up against the windshield so the Iraqi guards working for Edinburgh Risk could see it. We then took a left, drove around the July 14th traffic circle—a dangerous intersection, Scott pointed out, because American patrols and private security convoys often came flying over the July 14th Bridge, returning from the city, still hyped up on adrenaline and more prone to shoot. The traffic circle flowed onto a wide four-lane road, with deep potholes and without lane markings, where no speed limit applied. After another traffic circle, we passed an area that was once the crown jewel of Baghdad’s government, well-manicured parks surrounding the massive seashell-like Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The parks were now off-limits and overgrown; across from the tomb stood the complex of Iraqi government buildings, including the prime minister’s office. The wide road narrowed down to two lanes, funneled in between blast walls, and abruptly ended in a parking lot for the Convention Center. At the end of the parking lot, there were twenty-foot-high barriers separating the Green Zone from the rest of Iraq.

  As we stepped out of the car, the sun pressed down on us, a dry heat so severe that it took a few seconds for my body to understand how hot it was. I inhaled and it felt like breathing the crisp air inside an oven. We walked down a palatial white sidewalk to the first checkpoint outside the Convention Center and Scott showed his badge to Georgian soldiers who guarded it. They were part of the Coalition of the Willing, and their job was to guard key installations inside the Green Zone, despite their inability to speak English or Arabic. On the roof of the Rasheed Hotel, across from the Convention Center, snipers watched over the area. The next checkpoint was manned by Gurkhas, private security guards from Nepal. One hundred and fifty feet beyond them was another one before the steps of the Convention Center, manned by Iraqi police officers sitting in a wooden guard box that looked like a telephone booth. At the top of the steps, we were searched individually by an Iraqi security guard in plainclothes before we emptied our pockets and proceeded through a metal detector and X-ray machine. Finally, we were in the Convention Center, a multifloored complex that resembled any oversized venue for corporate summits. There were rooms for press conferences, government offices, and on the second floor an open-air cafeteria for Iraqi parliament members and the assembly hall for the Iraqi government. We walked upstairs to the second floor, where the military’s public affairs offices were located, the Combined Press Information Center, or CPIC. Another Gurkha waiting in the hall checked our IDs again. I filled out the paperwork, handed to me by a sergeant working in public affairs, and grinned for the picture to get my ID. We left and drove back to the bureau. My first day in Iraq was over.

  I’d arrived two years, five months, and twenty-five days after the war started, and Baghdad was under siege. Gone were the days of journalists traveling freely throughout the country. The stories I’d hear of the wild parties at the Hamra Hotel (“You know her, from Egypt, she swam in her underwear!”), the morning drives to Ramadi and Fallujah, casually searching for stories on the streets of Sadr City, moving without two carloads of armed guards—all of that had disappeared. Now about half our time was spent moving from one protected compound to the next, reporting by phone and email, conducting interviews with Iraqis who were willing to come see us. The other half was spent out on embeds with the U.S. military.

  Most Westerners agreed that the good times ended in the spring of 2004. That April, the bodies of four Blackwater employees were strung up on a bridge in Fallujah. The next month Nicholas Berg, an American contractor, was beheaded on video, and the video was shown throughout the world. It was the month after that, they said, you could feel the change in the air. Things were going to get much worse. The war settled into a new pace. Brutality that had once captured headlines—three car bombs, over 115 dead—was now standard. The armed killers became better organized; there were more guns on the streets, more explosives, more suicide bombings. There were more suicide bombings in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 than in the entire world during the previous two decades. The improvised explosive device, or IED, evolved into a significantly more sophisticated and powerful weapon, the thing U.S. soldiers feared more than anything else. Death squads that had formed under the new Iraqi government, which was being propped up by the Americans, began launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the summer of ’05, many of the correspondents who had been covering the war from the beginning were leaving. A second and third wave of reporters was getting their chance at the story, but it was a much different story now, a much different time. Personally, I was just happy to be there. When I’d share my enthusiasm with the veteran correspondents, they’d tell me, “Just wait until you’ve been here a few times, you’ll see.”

  It was much quieter in the Green Zone than in the rest of Baghdad. Americans jogged on the streets; soldiers in PT gear rode bicycles with rifles slung across their shoulders. Men and women from Alabama and Arkansas drove shuttle buses filled with Filipino and Iraqi day laborers from one side of the zone to the other. Americans lived in trailer parks, and dressed as if they were going to a NASCAR race: tattoos, tank tops, goatees, bellies hanging out over their too tight Levi’s. Young black men wore baggy jeans, sported gold teeth and chains. Middle-aged white women with weathered faces wore push-up bras and cheap, stretchy, form-fitting pants. At any given time, some three thousand Americans and other foreigners resided in this ten-square-kilometer chunk of Baghdad, along with a few thousand Iraqis. It was the clearinghouse for the hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts, the Mecca of funds for “capacity building.” There were street addresses, but places were known by their compound’s corporate sponsor—the Lincoln Group house, the RTI compou
nd, Fleur, DynCorp, CRG Logistics, and the biggest of them all, KBR, or Kellogg Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary and civilian backbone for the American mission. The highest-ranking Iraqi leaders lived in a neighborhood of mansions called “Little Venice.” There was a bastardized Disneyland quality about the whole place—a destination vacation for careers, an escape for those whose real lives back home were falling apart. There were even tourist attractions, like Saddam’s Crossed Swords, the war monument with four giant sabers on a concrete parade ground, and the bombed-out Ministry of Information building.

  The Green Zone had its own mixed-up culture. It started with those who protected it. The guards, for the most part, were neither American nor Iraqi. There was the battalion of Georgian soldiers, peasants from the outskirts of Tbilisi, given the task of manning checkpoints inside the zone. They had the manners of East European pillagers, and I would often see them speeding around helmetless in their Humvees, apparently drunk on the vodka they scammed from stores inside the IZ. No one seemed to know why the Georgians had this particular mission—a fairly important one, protecting the home of the new Iraqi government—but everyone agreed they aggravated more than helped, the way they crudely eyed Iraqi and Western women and spoke only in grunts.

  Then there were the Gurkhas, Nepalese men with guns who spoke some English, having been trained in the Queen’s Army. The squat brown-faced fighters—tough and extremely well trained—reminded me of Willy Wonka’s Oompa Loompahs, snatched from a far-off land to go serve in a magical palace of the white man’s eccentricity. After a private security contract changed hands, checkpoints and key installations in the Green Zone started to be manned by Peruvians and others from Latin America. They were barely literate, spoke only Spanish, seemed fairly incompetent. Yet they were given the important task of guarding the U.S. embassy. They worked for a company called Triple Canopy, which, like Blackwater, was cashing in on the private security boom. These companies played a large part in the culture of the Green Zone, each of them employing groups of armed men, drawn from the ranks of retired soldiers across the world, though there was not much quality control. (Blackwater and Triple Canopy both had nicknames—Bongwater and Triple Comedy.) Along with the Nepalese and the Peruvians, the ranks of these companies included Americans, Britons, Frenchmen, Ecuadorians, Australians, Croatians, Fijians, and Senegalese, among others. An estimated twenty to thirty thousand private security guards—sometimes referred to as PSDs, for private security details, but also just called mercenaries—operated in Iraq. They held the jobs that the U.S. didn’t have the manpower or expertise to perform. (The American ambassador, for instance, was guarded by a Blackwater detail, and Senegalese guards manned checkpoints inside an American base near the airport.)