We Meant Well (21 page)

General Anxiety, a four-star Army General prominent enough in real life to be referred to only by one name (like Bogart or Depp), was scheduled to drop by our FOB. Knowing the key to success of a VIP visit was massive quantities of food, our officers tasked four lower-ranked Army men, who no doubt joined the military to learn a useful trade, with laying out two trays of “wraps,” along with significant donut assets. There was also a large plate of grayish hard-boiled eggs. Intel leaked that the General liked hard-boiled eggs, and so thirty eggs gave themselves up for hard-boiling. The Major in charge of refreshments ordered two soldiers to peel the eggs to spare the General the need to peel his own, wasting valuable General time. A large bowl with thirty peeled eggs was set in front of the General's seat. The Major decided that did not look right and ordered the soldiers to arrange the eggs on a plate. The soldiers tried to build a pyramid of hard-boiled eggs, failing repeatedly, until the Major ordered them to stop. The Major then determined that putting about ten eggs on the plate would be sufficient for the General's snacking needs, with the remainder of the eggs held in reserve. The men moved on to pile juice box after juice box on the table, such that each person faced about a gallon of artificial OJ, subdivided into tiny cartons. Of course, no one would touch any of the juice, in large part because the only way to drink it was through the attached straw, exactly as you did in fourth grade, and you looked like a dork. The Sergeant Major walked in to make sure everything was ready. Without saying a word, he moved the plate of peeled eggs off to a side table and replaced it with a carafe of coffee. He had heard the General liked coffee. He did not know about the eggs.

The General swept into the room like an unwelcome draft as everyone stood at attention behind their chairs. The General frowned and asked the Colonel to ask the Sergeant Major to ask the Corporal to ask the Private outside for a Diet Coke. The Colonel then pushed the coffee he usually drinks by the quart away and said he, too, would like a Diet Coke today. The Major in charge of refreshments went outside to organize this, not having anticipated two Diet Cokes in his snack plan. Nobody touched the eggs.

The briefing began as always, with PowerPoint. The value of PowerPoint to the military cannot be overstated; it is the only way many officers can communicate with one another. (Especially talented slide makers are known as PowerPoint Rangers, and in some shops you could buy a fake PowerPoint Ranger patch that mimicked the real Ranger tab earned with blood and sweat.) The history of using visual aids started back in the day with real photographic slides, then switched to viewgraphs in Vietnam until the 1990s, when PowerPoint arrived to save democracy. There were rules, of course. A military PowerPoint slide was not to include any white space. Something had to cover every micrometer of slide real estate, whether it was seven or eight fonts, star-spangled bullets, multiple underlining, type so small it's unreadable, layers of underexposed blurry photos, or, if you were in the company of pros, clip art. Assume, if the slide referred to a “soft landing,” you'd get a stick figure with a parachute and that “Road Ahead” slides would include a stock photo of a highway stretching to an infinity point. The impression was 1990s GeoCities Web site, leavened with touches of a first Mountain Dew–fueled teenage Myspace page.

The long-established tradition was that, for every slide, the VIP would ask one question or make one comment to earn his entitlement to the snacks. The question had to be easily anticipated. If the slide showed four bullet points, the VIP would be expected to ask for more detail on one of them (four soldiers would be in attendance, each prebriefed on one of the four items). Two or more questions meant the VIP was looking for a fight. Most questions, however, were things like “Everything going OK for you with that project?” (yes) or “Anything I need to do for you from my side?” (no). A well-prepared VIP would come armed with his own laser pointer to highlight some element of each slide, while a well-prepared Colonel would be ready to hand over his own pointer to a visitor who forgot his.

At least one of the VIP comments would include (a) a personal story from the old Army (father-figure type), (b) a modestly naughty word (soldier's soldier), or (c) a saying such as “Winners never quit, quitters never win” (leader of men). Extra points for a sports metaphor that involved being close to the goal line (an astonishing 99 percent of today's sports metaphors were football-related). A few VIPs attempted to comment in a humorous way, heavily telegraphed so that everyone was ready to laugh on cue.

To me, the lone civilian at these events, they always felt like Bring Your State Department Guy to Work Day. My role was to be awed by the grown-ups, to sit up straight, not to touch anything, and to speak only when spoken to. Almost every VIP felt the need to acknowledge me, somewhat surprised that a nonuniformed person was allowed in the room. They would say, “Are you getting all the support you need?” like I was a houseguest needing extra towels. I would answer yes. I could have added another sentence, but no one was listening, because the point was to ask the question, not to listen to the answer. I could have asked for a back rub and skateboards and no one would have noticed.

After the PowerPoint slides and a few questions, the important people rushed out to the next event while the rest of us stayed and ate donuts. The eggs smelled sulfury and the Major threw them away.

Every so often we'd have a visit from nonmilitary VIPs like the gaggle of “fellows” who flew in from a prominent national security think tank. These scholars wrote serious books important people read, they appeared on important Sunday morning talk shows, and they served as consultants to even more important people who made decisions about this war and others to come. One of them was on the staff of a General whose name was dropped more often than Jesus's at a Southern Baptist AA meeting. Another was coming back to Iraq as an adviser to the Embassy, having advised in the glory days of 2003.

One guy was a real live neoconservative. A quick Google of his work showed he strongly supported going to war in Iraq, wrote apology pieces after no one could find any weapons of mass destruction (“It was still the right thing to do”), and came back to see exactly how well democracy was working out for a paper he was writing to further justify the war. He liked military high tech; he used words like
awesome
,
superb
, and
extraordinary
(pronounced EXTRAordinary) without irony to describe tanks and guns. He said in reference to the Israeli Army, “they give me a hard-on.” Another fellow had a habit of bouncing his legs up and down while sitting. Strapped into the MRAP vehicle with the four-point harness that came up through his legs, he bounced and bounced, like something a dog did that embarrassed you when company came over. This guy basically advanced the thesis that anything that happened in Iraq before he started advising was a “fucking disaster” (it was so cool when academics used swear words) and whatever had happened after he started advising was “innovative.” He insisted on using the phrase
tipping point
to refer to just about everything, including lunch. He called people in the news by their first names (Barack, Joe, Meatloaf). He looked at his smartphone for messages a lot, even though we were several hundred years away from the right kind of cell phone coverage.

The best thing of all was that when these two fellows were together they did not talk about bands of brothers, Israeli wood, or Iraqi democracy, but instead, riding in an armored vehicle through the badlands outside of Baghdad, they compared book deals and literary agents and gossiped about people they both knew who were getting big advances on memoirs. It became clearer to me why this war had played out so well, with people like this intellectually backstopping the policy makers.

Waiting

Soldiers did a lot of waiting. They waited for orders, they waited for trucks to arrive, they waited for chow, they waited for someone to explain why they were waiting. Some of those waiting days were liquid. Like the plot of a bad Southern novel, the air started to feel heavy in the heat, and hours progressed immersed in thick sap. A lifetime passed between 11:42 and 11:57. Time was the main character in this story, because time was what we all had. Everyone had been here for so many days (newbies), weeks (didn't notice them so much), months (showoffs). Everyone had only so many days left (showoffs), weeks (too many to count down), or months (losers). You lived inside your calendar; you hated your calendar. Your time was owned by someone else. Not as bad as prisons, nursing homes, and shipwrecks, but it was an artificial way to live. Soldiers learned how to ingest time as if it were a physical thing. They became Zen masters of boredom, always waiting.

Everyone counted the days, almost from the beginning, when it seemed 365 steps away was forever (it was). I allowed myself to download a widget to count down how many days I had left in Iraq. Lots of people had one, but I had held off at first, hoping to mark time with my accomplishments, not just by scratching marks into the prison walls. My widget was a donut-shaped graph on my laptop, with time remaining in one color and time already spent in another. It seemed sad when I first installed it but I knew it would be cooler than hell by Day 298 (it was). One military contractor had a coffee cup he never washed, his way of counting. The cup went from stained brown to coated inside in brown goop. The owner claimed he could make passable coffee in the cup just by adding hot water.

Much of what separated the enlisted men and women from the officers was how much waiting they endured. The lower your rank, the earlier you had to show up for events and formations. Your waiting reduced the waiting an officer needed to do, like Jesus dying to take on someone else's sin. Waiting was worse for the many soldiers who never left the FOB, assigned to the hospital or the computer center. They spent their entire year in Iraq inside the walls, functioning in what could be considered a decent minimum-security prison or maybe low-rent assisted living, depending on how you viewed the quality of the food. Some Joes joked about video games, saying if
Call of Duty
wanted a truly realistic modern war experience, it would begin with a four-hour real-time wait in an airport followed by three days hanging around waiting for the paperwork to catch up with you before your character got assigned a boring desk job somewhere on base.

They waited, too, back home. We regularly had communications blackouts, when the Army cut off the Internet and the phones on the FOB. The blackouts lasted two or three days and were usually after a soldier was killed and the Army did not want anyone calling his or her family or the media or posting online until the next of kin had received official notification. For our spouses and children, panic set in when the e-mails and Skype stopped suddenly. They knew it meant someone had died, and they held their breath until they learned who. That was hard, so we usually figured out which one of us had a cell phone with international dialing that worked outside the Army system. There were a lot of ten-second calls to say the dearest words a soldier can utter to a waiting loved one, “Can't talk, but I'm OK.”

The more you had at home to miss, the worse the waiting was. With the exception of a few true blues who found their family in the service and some of the older guys divorced enough times to just not care anymore, everyone else had someone at home they missed. In the old movies, mail call was a set piece—the moment when the tough but kind Sergeant called names and everyone went off to read their letters. In our war, communication was omnivorous-present, and waiting was done at Internet speed. Facebook did not exist when this war started (war, March 2003; Facebook, February 2004), but it sure as hell was here now. Even in the smallest dirt hole there was a sat phone or some kind of Internet connectivity or someone with the right Jetsons iPhone that got a cell signal in a place that did not even get daylight some weeks.

It started off as a good thing. We don't have to wait for the mail! Hey, I can call you from the war! This is so cool, OMG txting U frm iRaQ LOL. Sometimes it
was
cool. But a lot of times it meant two worlds that had nothing in common but the soldier collided. Why the hell was she Skyping from home about a small problem with the backyard fence when I've just come in from six hours in 110 degrees looking for an arms cache site? What to do about the leak in the basement? You call a plumber, burn down the house, I don't care, we just took a mortar round and I'm going to miss my only hot meal of the day in five minutes.

Other times it was worse. No one picks up at 3:00 a.m. back home in a house that is supposed to contain a sleeping wife. Kids answer the phone, distracted by the Disney Channel, and have nothing to say. You worry that the substitution of a phone call for a birthday party grows old even for weary preschoolers. The attempt to reconcile a life out here with a life over there fails again and again and again, until you quit trying. Yeah, the lines were down, or I guess you weren't home when I called, or maybe I'll call in a week or so or fucking never, bitch. Sometimes after they'd hung up you watched guys unable to say it earlier whisper “I love you” to the phone.

Of course, many nights it was different and you wanted to sit with the phone to your ear and hear the voice at the other end talk about anything, nothing, forever, your world collapsing into the wire. You clung to a wife complaining about the dry cleaner because that represented somewhere better than where you were and today your head was screwed on tight enough to realize it. You had to store up the good stuff when you could get it because you couldn't count on its coming when you needed it. Like sleep, you wished there was a way to bank it.

The availability of communication sometimes forced on me more than I wanted to accept. I was waiting to go home, waiting to hear from my child, waiting for my turn to use the phone, and had no strength left to share everyone else's burden. I walked past a stranger on the phone in the calling center and heard him say “I want to lick your pussy” to a girl somewhere else. I saw a man listening to a six-year-old recite lines from a play seven thousand miles and a world away, using the speakerphone so he had both hands free to cover his eyes. It was too much to be plunged this deeply into the lives of people I didn't know, and I wished at those times that phones and e-mail and Facebook and Twitter would just go away. Outside the calling center I saw an orange dot poking a hole in the darkness and smelled cigarette smoke. I heard another guy crying in the latrine, buttoned up into some of the only privacy available. He couldn't pick the moment for his breakdown—technology thrust it onto him. That's when I knew it was bad. I stopped sleeping for a while and started just waiting for my own mornings to come.