The Assassins' Gate (35 page)

According to the brigade's original calendar, Baghdad's infrastructure would be rebuilt in August, elections would take place in early September, and the soldiers would leave the city in October. This brisk forecast was soon abandoned, of course. Prior and his soldiers weren't able to start serious work in their permanent location until early July. Because of the confused planning, it wasn't until August—four months after the Americans arrived in Baghdad—that Charlie Company's activities began to yield tangible benefits for Iraqis. And there was no time to lose. Throughout the summer, electric power operated sporadically, violence of all kinds kept rising, and Iraqis who could have been won over to the American side were steadily lost.

One morning in early August, I sat in the base-camp canteen with Prior, First Sergeant Lahan, and their translator, Numan al-Nima, a gray-haired former engineer with Iraqi Airways. Prior opened a coalition map of Baghdad's security zones and showed me the piece of the city he “owned”—a rectangle of Zafaraniya, a largely Shiite slum in south Baghdad. Roughly 250,000 people lived in the area. In addition to being charged with security, Prior chaired the neighborhood council and oversaw small reconstruction projects such as renovating schools. He was also responsible for sewage and trash in his battalion's entire zone, which contained half a million people.

“Infrastructure is the key now,” Prior said more than once. “If these people have electricity, water, food, the basics of life, they're less likely to attack.” Sewage, he realized, was the front line of nation building. When I met him, he was trying to get two hundred thousand dollars into the hands of Iraqi contractors as fast as he could.

“This is the answer,” the translator urged Prior. “Show us something. People are hungry, starving. They don't believe they got rid of Saddam. If they got rid of Saddam, give me something to eat. That's why people hate Americans. We don't hate them because they are Americans. It is because they are the superpower, but where is the super power? Show it to us.”

I looked at Prior. “So it's all on you.”

He said, “We've known that the whole time.”

We went out into the streets of Zafaraniya in the usual two-Humvee convoy, complete with gunners manning the heavy .50-caliber machine guns. When Prior's jug-handle ears and boyish haircut disappeared under a U.S. Army helmet, his face underwent an instant transformation into a seasoned soldier's. His mission this morning was to visit nine pumping stations, which directed the district's untreated sewage into the Tigris and the Diala rivers. Iraqi poverty, in such sharp contrast to the grandiosity of Saddam's palaces and monuments, made a deep impression on soldiers from small towns in Indiana and Oklahoma, and for many of them the desire to help was the only impulse that argued in favor of their prolonged deployments. To tour a Shiite slum through its sewage was to understand that Saddam reduced those parts of Iraq he didn't favor to the level of Kinshasa or Manila. Green ponds of raw waste, eighteen inches deep, blocked the roads between apartment houses where children played. The open ditches that were the area's drainage system were overflowing.

“How foolish of me not to realize that the open sludge flowing past the children is the way the system is supposed to work,” Prior remarked. A complete overhaul of the system was not his immediate priority. “I'm going to support their open-sewage sludge line and get it flowing.” The heat rose, the streets stank, and Prior moved in battle gear at such a businesslike pace that two engineers from another battalion struggled to keep up. Each of the pumping stations, in various states of disrepair, was maintained and guarded by an Iraqi family that lived in a hovel on the premises, tended a lush vegetable garden, and kept an AK-47. Prior had never studied civil engineering—and he reminded me that his unit contained no former city planners—but he already seemed to have mastered the workings of the Zafaraniya sewer system. Lahan, a veteran of the Gulf War, told me, “People have said the Army's done this before, in '45 with Japan and Germany. Unfortunately, none of those people are in the Army anymore, so we have to figure it out ourselves.”

With Prior there were no earnest attempts to win hearts and minds over multiple cups of tea. He was all brisk practicality, and the Iraqis he worked with, who always had more to say than Prior gave them time for, seemed to respect him. “I will get you the money,” he told a grizzled old man who was explaining at length that his pump was broken. “Six thousand U.S.? Yeah, yeah, great. Get started, get started.”

Later, we visited Zafaraniya's gas station, another of Prior's responsibilities. Initially, he had devoted his energy to getting customers to wait in orderly lines. “In a lot of ways, you're trying to teach them a new way of doing things,” he said. “‘Teach' might be the wrong word—they're capable, competent, intelligent people. We're just giving them a different way to solve certain problems.”

Prior's mission was to settle a price dispute between the gas station managers and the community, represented by several neighborhood council members. A meeting took place in the managers' cramped back office, equipped with an underperforming air conditioner. The council members wanted three hundred liters of diesel set aside every week for neighborhood generators. The managers wanted written permission from the Ministry of Oil. The council members pulled out authorizations signed by various American officers. Prior tried to move the discussion along, but the Iraqis kept arguing, until it became clear that the problem went beyond a dispute over diesel. One of the most hierarchical, top-down state systems on earth had been wiped out almost overnight, and no new system had yet taken its place. The neighborhood councils were imperfect embryos of local government. Confused, frustrated Iraqis, who had never before been allowed to take any initiative, turned to the Americans, who seemed to have all the power and money; the Americans, who didn't see themselves as occupiers, tried to force the Iraqis to work within their own institutions, but the institutions had been largely dismantled.

Flies were landing on Prior's brush cut. “Guys, we've been talking about this for twenty minutes,” he said to the council members. “Do what I say. Go to the Oil Ministry. Just do it—just be done with it. Then you won't have to have slips of paper and we won't have to have this conversation.”

Everyone was getting irritated. One of the neighborhood council members told Prior that other Iraqis suspected them of making millions of dinars off public service. They were considered collaborators; their lives had been threatened.

Prior changed his tone and lowered the pressure. “I would tell all of you candidly that you have a very tough job,” he said. “We are not paying you, your people are angry and frustrated, and I know they take out their anger on you, and I really thank you for what you're doing. They may not understand or appreciate it now, but I'm telling you, your efforts, they're what are going to transform this country.”

There was a commotion outside the office—loud, accusatory voices. Prior put on his helmet and flak vest, grabbed his rifle, and went out to the pumps. Customers waiting in the long line had left their vehicles, a crowd had formed, and it was getting ugly enough that the soldiers who had been standing by the Humvees were trying to intervene. Amid the shouting, Prior established that an employee of the Oil Ministry had come to collect diesel samples from each of the pumps for routine testing. One of the council members was accusing him of stealing benzene.

“No accusations,” Prior declared. “Let's go see.”

The crowd followed him under the blinding sun to the ministry employee's truck. Five metal jerricans stood in back. Prior opened the first can with the air of making a point and sniffed: “Diesel.” He opened the second: “Diesel.” As he unscrewed the cap on the third jerrican and bent over to smell it, hot diesel fuel sprayed in his face.

Everyone fell silent. Prior stood motionless with the effort to control himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed them with his fingers. The fuel was on his helmet, his flak vest. A sergeant rushed over with bottled water. Then the chorus of shouts rose again.

“Everybody shut up!” Prior yelled. “I'm going to solve this. What is the problem? No accusations.” His face wet, he began to interrogate the accusing council member, who now looked sheepish. “Go get the pump operator who sold him the benzene.”

“I could only catch the guy who gave him the diesel.”

“So how do you know someone gave him benzene? This is a great object lesson, everybody!” Prior was speaking to the crowd now, as his translator frantically rendered the lesson in Arabic. “You came out here and said this guy's a thief, and everybody's angry and he's going to get fired—and now you're backing down.”

“It wasn't just an accusation,” the council member said. “The guy drove up on the wrong side—”

“But what proof do you have that he did it? Wait! Hold on! I'm trying to make a point here. How would you like it if my soldiers broke into your house because your neighbors said you have RPGs, and I didn't see them but I broke into your house—how would you feel? Stop accusing people, for the love of God!”

“I caught him red-handed,” the council member insisted.

“No, you didn't.”

“Okay, no problem.”

Prior wasn't letting it go. “There
is
a problem. The problem is that you people accuse each other without proof.
That's
the problem.”

Prior's treatise on evidence gathering and due process ended. The crowd dispersed, and the meeting resumed inside. Prior tried to laugh off the incident and spare the accuser a complete loss of face. “Who doesn't like diesel in their eyes? I mean, everybody does.” Later, he told me, “I wish I hadn't lost my temper. It wasn't the diesel—it was the way they kept bickering.”

That afternoon, two of the council members, Ahmad Ogali and Abdul-Jabbar Doweich, invited me for lunch. Both men were poor, and neither had a house he wanted to bring me back to, so we ate in the living room of Ogali's brother-in-law, sitting on cushions. Before it became too risky for both them and me, I was invited to take meals in the homes of a number of Iraqis, and the famous hospitality of the Arabs always meant that we would sit for several hours sweating our way through multiple courses of hummus and flat bread, cold appetizers, bean soup, chicken and rice, sweets, tea, and Pepsis (these last had been unavailable under Saddam and were points of domestic pride). Far more was prepared by the invisible women of the house than anyone could eat, and huge quantities of food were thrown out.

Toward the end of the meal, Ogali, a thirty-three-year-old gym teacher who was the council chairman, said, “It's a good thing John Prior lost his temper. Today was a small problem. If I told you about our problems, you wouldn't believe it. They exhaust us.” The council members were working without pay—they couldn't even get cell phones or travel money from the CPA. The house of another member had been half destroyed (and six of his neighbors killed) by an errant missile that American soldiers, disposing of unexploded Iraqi ordnance, had set off by mistake; his efforts to get compensation had been checked at every turn. “Prior is doing more than his best,” Ogali said. “But he's also controlled by his leaders.”

Doweich, an unemployed father of four, had spent eight years in prison under Saddam for belonging to an Islamist political party (where he had met Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi and heard him preach the system of rule by the clerics). Though it wasn't possible yet, he still hoped for an Islamic state in the future—as did 80 percent of Iraqis, he added.

“That's his personal opinion,” Ogali said. “It's not eighty percent.”

For now, Doweich saw working with Captain Prior on the neighborhood council as the best way to serve his country. The expectations of Iraqis were falling on the council members' heads, and Doweich believed that at levels well above Prior, American officials had no interest in solving problems.

“The people are watching,” Ogali said. “When I come back at night, they're waiting. They want to know what we're doing. Last week, I told them about the schools, the sewer projects. They were happy—but these are very old projects, they were promised for a long time.”

Doweich suggested that the Americans give a hundred dollars to every Iraqi family. That would take the edge off people's frustration. “I can't say why the Americans don't do these things,” he said. “Iraqis have trouble understanding Americans.”

Nor, said Ogali, did Americans understand Iraqis very well. “The Americans didn't come here to understand the people. They came here to do a job, and that's what they'll do. Iraqis work closely with them, but they don't try to understand us.” As a result, Ogali said, the Americans' accomplishments in Iraq would be limited.

*   *   *

AMERICAN SOLDIERS
had a phrase for the Iraqis' habit of turning one another in. Prior once used it: “These people dime each other out like there's no tomorrow.” With these betrayals, Iraqis played on soldiers' fears and ignorance, pulling them into private feuds that the Americans had no way of navigating.

The night after the meeting at the gas station, Prior and a couple dozen soldiers from Charlie Company went out in two Humvees (lacking armor and even, in one case, doors) and two Bradleys to look for a suspected Fedayeen militiaman. For such missions, Prior used a different translator: Instead of the fatherly Iraqi Airways engineer, whose cultural insights were invaluable during daytime meetings, the nighttime translator was a strapping young guy with an aggressive manner. I expected to see the rougher side of Prior and Charlie Company that night—these were soldiers, after all, not civil engineers.

The suspect happened to be named Saddam Hussein, and he was High Value Target No. 497. It would be the Americans' second visit to his house. The tip had come from an informant Prior called Operative Chunky Love, whose picture showed a plump young man posing in a tuxedo against a studio backdrop of pink hearts. Chunky Love's intelligence had already rolled up three men in the neighborhood, including his brother-in-law. Tonight, Chunky Love was supposed to show up at his sister's house, near Saddam Hussein's, in an orange garbage truck loaded with weapons—a sting operation. Lahan warned me, “Out of a hundred tips we've gotten from Iraqi intelligence, one has worked out.”