We Meant Well (27 page)

We grasped that military action could take us only so far, but we failed to understand the next stage. Historian Bernard Fall, writing in 1965 about our efforts in Vietnam, said that counterinsurgency wars are won “not through military action … but through an extremely well-conceived civic action program and, of course, a good leader.… Civic action is not the construction of privies or the distribution of antimalaria sprays. One can't fight an ideology; one can't fight a militant doctrine with better privies.”
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Another writer, blogging haiku-style in 2010 about Afghanistan, expressed the idea even more succinctly:

Effective Leaders

Control the Population

Allow us to leave
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As both writers noted, a key element in counterinsurgency is establishing a local government that can stand on its own because the people believe in their leaders. Field Manual 3-24, General Petraeus's best-selling doctrine for counterinsurgency operations, argued, “The primary objective of any counterinsurgency operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.”
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In Iraq, we never held local elections and never pressured the Iraqis to hold them. At a national level, Iraq went most of a year after the March 2010 elections with no one in charge.

Corruption was endemic. In 2010, a Baghdad newspaper reported the salaries of key government people. The highest paid was Jalal Talabani, who the paper claimed made close to $700,000 a year. The Prime Minister, his boss, pulled in $360,000, and two underlings made $170,000 each. The salaries were a small part of overall compensation, with allowances of $15,000 a month for transportation and $30,000 for entertainment.
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Members of Parliament made $129,000 a year, with similar allowances and a hefty 80 percent pension for life waiting for them after only four years of service.
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Meanwhile, 25 percent of Iraqis lived below the poverty line, set at $60 a month.
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The United Nations in 2009 estimated 57 percent of all Iraqis lived in slums. In the worst areas, such as Maysan and Diyala, over 80 percent lived in slums. Pre-2003, the average number of slum dwellers was 20 percent.
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We controlled the moment the war started, but we couldn't control when it ended except by walking away. After years of seeking a military solution, followed by years of building ineffective privies through our ePRTs, we simply declared victory and started to pack up. As one sheik told me, “You dug a deep hole in 2003 and now are walking away leaving it empty.” America sneezed and Iraq caught the cold.

We meant well, most of us really did. Hubris stalked us; we suffered from arrogance and we embraced ignorance. Hew Francis Anthony Strachan, in volume 1 of his
First World War
, wrote, “Courage takes two forms in war. Courage in the face of personal danger, a requirement for tactical success … and courage to take responsibility, a requirement for strategic success.” In our reconstruction efforts there was no question about our courage in the face of personal danger, but we lacked the courage to be responsible. It was almost as if a new word were needed,
disresponsible
, a step beyond irresponsible, meaning you should have been the one to take responsibility but shucked it off.

At the end of my tour, I still had forty-six calendars made by Iraqi kids in a dusty pile in my office. The media blitz over for that project, no one wanted them. We left the calendars behind when we closed the office and moved on.

Exhaling: Leaving Iraq

“Tell me how this ends,” General David Petraeus famously asked a reporter during the early days of the Iraqi invasion. I know, Dave—it ends when we leave.

We left via an unfamiliar road out of Falcon, varying our route to avoid the increasing number of IEDs set at the few choke points near the FOB's exits. Nobody wanted to be blown up ever, but being hit on your way home wasn't allowed to happen, except in bad war movies. This was a bad movie for sure, but not that ending this time. The area we transited outside the FOB was still a mess, a place where we dumped our garbage and sewage amid displaced Iraqis who lived off the picked-through refuse. Their homes were made of our discarded junk. The sewage puddles stood out as the only moisture, orange if chemical, gray-green if sewage, all eye-watering in the heat. Yet despite the filth, the kids still waved at our trucks, their bright clothing standing out from the monotone world around them, and the Army drivers would always wave back. The Iraqi adults never looked up. There was no value in their waving, for even gestures were saved for the work of picking a life out of whatever the Americans chose to leave for them.

Surprises lurked even in the familiar wasteland, and the driver marked my trip home by saying, “Sir, are those fucking horses?” We stopped for a moment, well against the regs, to stare at two horses walking slowly between puddles of shit. Two other horses lay in the muck, maybe cooling off as the temperature nudged past 100 degrees on this last morning in Iraq. We had seen many things in our time, but horses wandering this landscape were a first for us all. The gunner, on top in the turret, called for the 'terp to yell out to the old guy watching us. We learned that the swamp was once a horseracing track, built by Saddam and bombed away in all but the old guy's memory during the liberation in 2003. The horses had survived and now lived wild in the area, freedom at last brought by the Americans. The old guy told us there used to be more horses around, but what with urgent hunger in the worst of the postwar years, well, horses were what they had. It was a bad thing, the guy said, but the times were bad and nobody was happy about what bad times pushed you to do. We had stopped for too long, not safe, and the Truck Commander ordered us to drive on. The old man did not wave as we drove off.

The US had built Baghdad Airport back in the 1960s through some long-forgotten foreign-aid project that predated even Saddam. Now it was ours again; there was just too much irony around. The airport was part of a massive complex called Victory Base, bigger in land mass and in population than my hometown. Victory was a collection of subbases so numerous that I doubt anyone even knew the count anymore. The routing signs along the way offered some clue to where you were, telling you to turn left for the DynCorp compound, next right for retail gas, or directing you to “Ali's Hollywood,” an Iraqi-run shop that sold illegal DVDs, porn if you asked the right way, and the iPod batteries that kept the war's soundtrack running. You saw a British flag on one compound, an Australian flag on another, likely small Special Forces enclaves, and lots of cryptically marked minifortresses the soldiers believed were encampments for our own Delta and SEALs—the whole menu of operators who kept the game alive.

Victory Base was so big that it had swallowed up what used to be islands in the archipelago of Saddam's palaces, dotted around the large lake that formed the center of the base. There were fish in the lake, big carp, and guys used to make poles and throw hooks in, baited with American cheese taken from lunch. Because of a rumor that Saddam used the lake as a dumping ground for his enemies' bodies, nobody actually ate the fish, fearing they had grown fat on Iraqi flesh. The Army expropriated all the palaces as offices for big shots, and even from the exteriors you could tell the interiors made Vegas look like Muji. The soldiers who drove me were eager tour guides, each with a more fantastic story to tell. Most of Saddam's palaces, they said as we drove, were part of an endless empire of whorehouses. One soldier insisted that Saddam was a pedophile and that a building we passed once held his harem of little boys. Another said no, that palace had been full of the female virgins Saddam enjoyed and had a tiger cage where those unwilling to give up their maidenhead were eaten alive (so the fish dined only on nonvirgins). Whether a tribute to US anti-Saddam propaganda or the imaginations of our troops, the stories made the long slog of a drive pass quickly, replacing the images of sad wild horses.

Every airport is purgatory, but BIAP—Baghdad International Airport—was one of the oddest places in-country. Most everywhere else folks were segregated, new guys from old guys, civilians from the Joes, that kind of thing. But BIAP was where all the wires crossed and you saw the inside of the war exposed. Everyone had to pass through the same set of doors to board something—a helo, a medevac, a C-130—to take them deeper into or farther from their war. You could tell by what people were wearing, new or old, and what they were carrying, a lot or almost nothing, who was coming in and who was already gone, gone, gone. A year ago I had passed through this place but I was damned if I could remember ever being here.

I was dropped off at the big central square where everyone waited outside the few buildings that constituted the terminal. I joined the troops already assembled in rows of chairs. They were watching soccer on a big TV, some unknown country versus another unknown country in a game they barely understood. But it was movement and that was close enough to entertainment, and when the team in green scored a goal the guys made themselves laugh by chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” The troops drank Rip Its and ate packaged donuts, looking deep into their twenties, trying to make BIAP feel like home, absent the warm beer and the high school girls, the fast food and the cars. So close to the exit, it was OK to allow yourself to think of those things again.

It was hot, really hot, and the heat accumulated around us one last time the same way snow would soon pile up back home. A lot of soldiers lay flat on the ground where they could find shade, heads propped on rucks, arms akimbo as their dreams got a head start on the flights to come. They were content if not comfortable, sprawled out on the ground with eyes closed and helmets off, but still it was a hard image to process when you'd seen the same thing bloody on roadsides. I shook my head; this was a place and time to start to let go, not to look back.

Waiting in line, we all agreed that the engineer who provided only four johns for the entire waiting area deserved to die upside down in one of them. Inside, at one of the basins, a soldier stood stripped to the waist, shaving. His face was well lathered and he was slowly moving the blue plastic razor over his chin and neck. His back was covered with angry scars, old scars, maybe from Iraq, maybe from a gang back home, but he had a stay-the-fuck-away-from-me aura and everyone gave him his distance. He made no eye contact, either with us or with himself in the mirror. Nobody broke the zone around him even though there were not enough sinks, and goddamn, did you want to wash your hands in this place.

Just before you entered the terminal from the waiting area there was a large cardboard box with a sign that asked you to donate unneeded toiletries for distribution to needy Iraqis. The box was empty and more than one guy looked at the sign and said “fuck that” as he walked past. The USO was giving away toiletries just nearby, single packs of tampons, minirolls of toilet paper, and three-ounce sticks of deodorant, so this was as absurd as anything else we'd seen on our tour.

We were all here, soldiers of every type, contractors, Southeast Asians waiting to be shipped to some distant FOB to wash dishes for us. The Asians looked scared, maybe in part because they were kitted with the oldest, cheapest body armor and helmets that seemed designed to not fit properly. We saw them as one group but the Sri Lankans couldn't talk to the Bangladeshis and only the Filipinos could speak any English anyway. I knew these people now: the contractors with Harley-Davidson T-shirts, blue jeans, and big belt buckles, every man packing a set of keys like they were the superintendents of the war; the Embassy people, always easy to spot, in insanely out-of-place getups like white pants and Panama hats or in Banana Republic safari gear with big black GPS/calendar/videocam/chai-latte-making watches, $120 sunglasses, and freakish headgear like they were off to hunt elephant with Teddy Roosevelt. One of the Embassy guys had an American Tourister travel bag on his lap. American Tourister? I had flashes of the same man boarding a Pan Am flight back when you had to climb up those stairs on the outside of the plane, the stewardesses all wore miniskirts, and everybody drank gin and tonics. He was in the wrong war by about forty years.

Inside the terminal was another step toward home, cool and dark. Though most everyone was armed, we passed our bags through an X-ray anyway, manned in this case by a Ugandan contract security guard who could not be bothered even to look up at the monitor. He had mastered that Third World art of looking at nothing—safer that way, less likely to offend. We walked through the metal detector, every weapon and big Texas belt buckle making the buzzer scream. We kept our shoes on, unlike in any US airport, because everyone wore lace-up boots and it would have taken a hundred years to get them all on and off, and nobody was going to wait that long. In a rewind of my trip in, we got counted and recounted, our names on one clipboard, the last four digits of our social security number on another, and we recited our blood types for a long list of people who needed to record the information on yet more clipboards. No one complained about paying this price to move closer to the exit. The incomers didn't complain, because this was all new, and the outgoers knew complaining meant nothing but waiting another sentence to have to do it anyway. From time to time someone would appear and scream, “Chrome 18” or “Chrome 24,” “chrome” being the code word for each flight. They could have said “Flight 18” or “18,” but these people could have been nicer in many ways but preferred not to be. They never asked for respect, knowing none had been earned.

A lifetime later someone shouted “Chrome 19” and my leg twitched in memory that that was mine. “Chrome 19,” not good-bye, or thanks, or anything else would be the last thing anyone would say to me in Iraq. We walked into the belly of a C-130, a cargo plane fitted with web seats. I was sandwiched between two equally sweaty people directly across from a tiny round window. Unlike everyone else aboard, who had only the noises of the engines and the vibrations below them to judge when the plane was moving, I could see out the window.