The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (16 page)

Sheik Sha-lan Debon invited us in for tea. Inside his tent there were two sitting rugs, a small ring of raised clay for a fire, plastic containers of water, and a pile of dry branches. The camp is moved every five days. The camels they raise sell for between 400,000 and 500,000 dinar in Najaf. There was government land for grazing during the regime, but now it's all privatized and he has to pay rent. His herd is shrinking every year. “The old map should be honored,” he said. When I asked if he had a copy of it, he said, “Of course.” I asked if I could see it, excited by the discovery of the elusive tribal map of the desert, but he just smiled and pointed to his head. A cousin handed me a cup of tea. They have a saying: “Drink your tea and all will be fine.”

Debon said he is in charge of a thousand men. I asked how many women, and he scoffed. “I don't know. Women come and go in the tribe. Men stay.” The tribe is spread over hundreds of miles, from Basra to Babylon, and he coordinates all of it by cell phone. He has no radio, television, or Internet. “Everything is by speaking.” He takes his flag to funerals or has it taken in his name. A sword and a crescent. He just went to a funeral in Ramadi, where a Sunni rebellion was taking form. I asked whom the tribe sides with now. “We have no enemies,” he said.

He was disappointed by the end of reliable food rations. During Saddam there were monthly allotments of flour, sugar, oil, milk, tea, and beans, but now there is only flour. “If the Americans had stayed or had not come it would be better,” he said. Six of his family members have recently tried to join the police. No success. They participated heavily in the military and police forces during Saddam's regime. “Without family in government we have no connection to it. We are not represented with anyone we can trust. So we have no government. No state.” The Bedouins had always been considered stateless, but now they longed for one. They voted for Governor Talal. He visited them in their tent and in Jassan but they haven't been able to see him since the campaign. “A good man, maybe only for election. Ten years electing people and we get nothing.” He said they join no parties. Anyone who does gets fired from the tribe. He's had to fire some.

Criminals are also expelled. If guilty of murder they are exposed to the judicial system, but traditional law runs parallel to state law—tribes meet and blood money is paid or people are forced to move. It is most important for the tribe to go to the person bringing the charges and try to handle it out of court. Just yesterday he had to negotiate such a dispute. “Najaf people's car hit one of our tribe—killed. Ten million dinar if someone kills on purpose, but this was accident. My tribe asked for nothing.” I thought of Nassir. The American military generally paid $2,500 to families for civilian deaths caused by military operations in 2003. It was considered a small fortune then.

“Once, everything here moved by camel. Bedouins were first in society. Now we are the poor and soon camels will only be in zoos. Where will we go when all the land is owned?”

One of Debon's family members invited us to his house by the brick factory. Khalif Milbus is married with 15 children, and his elderly mother lives with him, too. No government support, and the area is off the electrical grid. “Since always there has been a problem with power,” he said.

“Electrical power or political power?” I asked. He smiled.

“Yes.”

Regular blackouts continue throughout Iraq, towns darkening and then flickering back as private generators are tricked on. I heard the same two words everywhere in 2003:
Maqqu kaharlabbah
(We have no power). It is slang born from decades of corruption and savaged or inadequate infrastructure.

Milbus's sons did not see herding as their future. Zaid wanted to be a teacher; Aneed, a doctor. His eldest son left school to work in the brick factory. He didn't mention his daughters. They will marry one day. Milbus served in the military “from 1988 until Bush the Son released us.” He was paid no salary, so he had to escape service to earn for his family. If he had money he would buy a tanker, a truck, a tent, and camels. “I would not stay in this prison house.” He would “travel Iraq as a true Bedouin” again. I asked whether he fears the Bedouin way will end in Iraq. “Yes. It is almost destroyed. Not much left. Someday men will not know the sun or the land. Only roads.”

At the brick factory, a kiln the size of a warehouse was filled with ruined bricks. The fuel supply was inconsistent, and they didn't bake properly. Weeks of labor and 260,000 bricks lost. The tall stack blew smoke in a trail thick enough to cast a shadow on us. I stood on the hot roof of the kiln looking through the heat at the burned land. Boys ran, kicking a soccer ball, their lungs filling with soot.

Beside the factory is a settlement constructed of discarded bricks. There were women there, and I was cautioned not to take any photographs. They were all squatters who worked at the factory, dead poor, a sewage trench the color of oil running past their homes. I asked Milbus whether he had any family living there. He replied with scorn that he would “never allow his women to live like this.”

When we got to Jassan it was almost unrecognizable. A new colony of 100 two-story brick homes had been built along the road. In 2003 the entire village was on a hill. It was ovular, organic, interdependent, and defensive in its construction. Its dirt walls had been kept smooth for 1,000 years by the vitality of dense occupation. Now it was beginning to wear down, roofs collapsing and spring rains washing the mud away as families resettled in the brick buildings on the plain. The spreading construction was gridded, edged, and fragmentary, suburban seeds of a new order. They seemed to belong to a different people, the tight rural community broken apart into solitary satellites.

While waiting to meet with the town councilmen on the new central street, I asked a policeman why so many people were moving to Jassan and building houses. “Loans,” he said. “Ministry of Financing and Housing gives them now. Thirty million dinar. Free for a while, then monthly payments. No new people moving here. Everyone is from the hill.” It seemed improbable that there could be so many, but the population in the old catacomb of homes on the hill had always been impossible to guess from the outside.

We were invited to meet in the city manager's office, recently built across the street from the old city council building and jail my unit had restored in 2003. They looked old and smaller now in comparison with the new buildings, diminished in scale. Mr. El-Timmimy Hawas, district manager, greeted us and then worried how his tie looked when he saw my camera. He said there were no problems with the Americans, just disappointment. “When coalition forces came, Iraqis heard they would get whiskey with the rations, but all they brought were blades.” He said the Georgian troops who were last stationed here were all right also. “They stayed to themselves, which was best.” Ukrainians before them had caused some trouble when they restored a clinic and painted their flag over the entire exterior. “We didn't want another flag on us.”

Their problems were few in comparison with those of the cities. A drought had dropped the level of the Tigris, and the pipe that drew from the river could no longer reach it. The lack of rain had also stressed herds and palm orchards, but the farmers were still keeping them irrigated. They have three clinics but no doctors or surgical wards. Pregnant women and serious injuries must go 31 miles to Kut. They had asked the Provincial Council for aid to expand, but the budgets are based on population, and Jassan, despite administering eight other little desert villages, has only 12,000 people. With an annual budget of about $1.7 million (around $140 a person), they can do only so much. Turkey is contracted to build them a new water pipeline from the Tigris, and a water-purification plant is being built right across the highway from town. They also won a Japanese grant to upgrade the aging Soviet pumping stations.

We headed over to meet Ali Talib Muhammed, a councilman from the original 2003 city council who has kept his post since. He is an exceptionally solemn man. We had met many times while I was stationed in Jassan, but now he didn't recognize me. With a beard, a pen, clothing from the street in Baghdad, and 10 years, I was transformed, detached from their memory of who I had been when I wore a pistol and a rank.

Muhammed recounted the village's response to our invasion. Saed Khalum was the most respected man in Jassan in 2003, and on his own, he had assembled a council before coalition forces had even arrived. I met them on April 29, 13 days after their first town meeting, when my unit moved up from its position farther south along the Iranian border. Two years later, on May 30, 2005, the Provincial Council officially acknowledged them as the city council, and they received their first salary. By then I was on my second deployment fighting Syrians and Sunni extremists in the city of Ramadi on the other side of Iraq. While in Jassan this time, I met 9 of the original 11 councilmen.

Muhammed said the town has been stable: “There are no strangers living among us in Jassan. Everyone is related or known, so troubles are solved by families.” I asked whether dividing Iraq into three states—Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish—would bring peace. He said no. “I'm from Zubaidi tribe, all over Iraq. We have seen other countries divided and see how much trouble they have.” I asked whether he met with any U.S. forces. “They came to ask some questions, like you do now. Didn't achieve anything.”

I asked whether he remembered the night the council voted to close an illegal water pipe that irrigated a farm owned by Saddam's wife Sajida. It was their first recorded vote as a governing body. He said, “Yes. Major Busch.” I wrote my name as if it were unknown to me, but I was pleased to hear it. The night of the vote, a child walked up to the front of the room and handed over a note from the Fedayeen Saddam that promised my death. I had driven off after that meeting sick with a high fever. The desert became a hallucinatory space as I struggled to stand, my night-vision goggles creating a claustrophobic depiction of the open land, the darkness shrinking the view, and my pyretic blood throbbing in my eyes. I don't remember falling into my tent a few miles away or being worried about snipers, but I do remember walking out of the building with hundreds of men chanting, “Good Busch.” Through my illness it still felt like the only triumph of the war. I thought the new country would be all right. For one night I was sure of it.

Muhammed said Iraq was failing now because state officials are not qualified for their jobs. During the regime, officials had college degrees for their positions. He saw this problem all the way up the Iraqi government. “But Jassan is apart from Iraq.” He felt that the village has always governed itself, drifting in the country rather than anchored to it. “We had the first election in Iraq, and we have been working ever since. No one else in Iraq did this,” he said.

Saad Kareem Izbar, another original councilman, said, “We never agreed with any ruler. Iraq is always against its government (and all foreigners). There wasn't much of that under Saddam, but he ruled with an iron fist. You can fix anything, but not the man himself. Saddam said that if he was going to turn over Iraq to anyone, he would turn it over as dirt.” I looked out at the desert and said, “And so he did.”

We visited Muhammed's childhood home on the hill. The house had almost no decoration at all, high ceilings, bare walls of mud and straw painted white. It was cool and felt like an underground chamber. His family were all born here. Now he rents it to a relative and has built a new brick house. He showed me an original door made of slabs cut from a date-palm trunk. It looked ancient, worn, and dust-dried. He opened it with true pride, a museum artifact still at work in a dying town. It was the first time I had been inside a home in Jassan. As a Marine I always stayed outside.

We left the hill and went to meet the new council chairman, Abu Hassan, at a tiny café whose interior was painted a flat pink. We sat with five of the original councilmen on a ledge padded by single sheets of cardboard. I asked what had changed since Saddam. They seemed most upset about the awarding of government posts to Maliki's friends and allies. “Before the new government, the old employees of the ministries worked very hard and serious, not watching our watches. Now they just wait for salary and holiday.”

I passed around pictures from the “military records,” photographs I had taken myself in 2003, and they were thrilled. They called out the names of people and handed them back and forth. A man smiled at one and said, “Major Busch.” The picture he held did not have me in it. I asked him to explain. “Only Major Busch could have taken this picture. He carried a camera and visited my house.” “Did he go inside for tea?” I asked. “No. He went inside no homes. He allowed no raids in Jassan.” “Did you ever invite him inside?” “No. Our women were there. Only we invited him for tea.” At this, a councilman told my story.

“Major Busch had tea with us on the hill and asked why we poured our tea into our saucers. We told him it cools it quicker. Busch asked why we didn't just wait for it to cool off. We all laughed and said if we waited we would never form any agreements.” The councilmen all laughed again together. What they remembered so well of me and found so extraordinary, I did not remember at all. I would be told this story again from two other men in Jassan. There was something pleasant in hearing stories about myself, like being present at my own funeral. They did not recall the message declaring my imminent assassination. They recalled only that I was there. Drink your tea and all will be fine.

I asked how they felt about people moving off the hill. “The new houses are better, of course. Life on the hill was harder. But I miss the old way. We were all close. Everyone lived together. The doctor lived beside the herder and the farmer. Now we just pass sometimes.”

Abu Hassan took us up the slope again, into old Jassan. The curved passages through the town are all too narrow for cars, so supplies are carried from door to door by donkey. I could hear children playing behind the earthen walls.