Deployment

Finally, in late March 2003, within days of the US invasion and with industrial-strength lipstick and Irish passport in hand, I was deployed to Iraq by way of Kuwait, which had become the staging area for the US and Coalition forces and aid groups. Direct flights—in fact, most flights—to Kuwait had been cancelled due to the threat of bombings. I flew first to London and from there to Dubai, where the flight information screen described my final flight to Kuwait as “Cancelled.” When I approached the airline desk to ask about it, I was asked for my ticket and passport, and then I was quietly informed the flight would actually be departing on time. The “Cancelled” notice was a ruse to trick would-be terrorists into thinking the flight was off. I spent the last hour there wandering around until I found an Irish pub. There wasn’t time enough for that just then, but I filed it away for my return flight. Final boarding was announced at the very last minute, and I raced to make my connection.

Kuwait City is a modern desert city with paved streets and lush green lawns, the last made possible by the desalination of ocean water and its distribution throughout this wealthy desert land. The streets were populated with luxury cars, and the homes in the city center were more palace than house, each more ostentatious than the next. The workers here were not Kuwaiti; they were imported from dirt-poor countries like the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

This IRC team had gathered from around the world. Adam, the field coordinator, was from Australia; he had a chiseled, tanned face, an easy wit, a soft, honeyed accent, and he was relentless in his expectations of all of us. Phil was a member of the headquarters staff in New York but had been deployed to Iraq as a member of the initial team to provide communications expertise and leadership for this vital project. Phil, tall and distinguished looking, had a dry, sarcastic humor. The team consisted of me for health and Jason, another American, who lived in Bulgaria, for water and sanitation services. Considering that we had come together as perfect strangers, we became a perfect team, the best of friends in the worst of times. Although others would come and go, this was the core team with whom I would work.

Adam was responsible for logistics—getting our equipment ready to go once we were settled. Jason would do the water and sanitation assessments. Without the electricity that powered the water pumps, clean water was already an issue. I would be responsible for health assessments, proposal and grant development, and program start-up. I’d always been involved in providing care in well-developed programs with systems for medicines, equipment, and staff already in place. This time, I would be the person responsible for doing the assessment, writing the proposals, and designing the programs. We’d already done the research. We just needed to get into Iraq to see the situation firsthand.

We lived in an apartment/hotel in Kuwait City. Many other aid groups were living here as well, all of us waiting for the signal that we could move into Iraq. The hotel was an impromptu meeting place, where we could collaborate on programs and goals. The IRC team members were all housed on the same floor, and we kept our doors open so that we could yell to one another across the hall. We had kitchen facilities, television, electricity, and though there was a small restaurant on the first floor, none of us could afford to eat there every day. I wasn’t a cook, so I bought eggs, peanut butter, bread and fruit, and wished for a glass of wine to wash it down. But this was another Muslim post—no wine, no beer, no whiskey, though there were always rumors that the French, or maybe the British, or was it the Swedes? had access to alcohol. It’s true that the things you can’t have are the things you always crave, including not just wine but freedom. I was required to stay covered again, all of this in the dreadful, sweltering heat of an Arab desert. I had brought clothes for a cooler climate; I seemed destined to never get it right.

Every morning we attended a briefing at the HACC (Humanitarian Assistance Coordination Center). The HACC was an effort by the Coalition forces and Kuwaiti government to keep the NGOs informed about the situation in Iraq and to allow us to keep them informed about our plans. The briefings were run by the British Army with input from US forces. These daily meetings were held in one of many large classrooms in a Kuwait City school that the Kuwaiti government had taken over for the war. When I first arrived in Kuwait, there was plenty of space in the meeting room and more than enough seats for the attendees, but within days, the room was crowded and we were all squeezed in.

Each morning, I slid into my seat and took copious notes, including in-depth security data that told us where the fierce fighting still raged, along with detailed information on land mines—where they were and what areas we should avoid (the whole country, I supposed, if we really wanted to be safe). Maps with meticulous coordinates of suspected land mine sites were just too detailed to make sense of, so we planned to do what we do around the world—stay on established roads, stay away from the shoulder of the road, avoid shortcuts and untraveled roads, and, finally, always look first. We all knew that countless victims followed all the rules until they stepped right onto a land mine. There are sometimes telltale signs—the shiny edge of a buried mine, disturbed ruts of earth, rocks arranged just so—but in the end there may be no signs at all. Luck is often the best we can hope for, and that extends to missile attacks as well.

Our daily briefings were sometimes interrupted by the screech of air-raid sirens signaling a missile attack. Everyone scurried to don their protective gear and gas masks. Ours hadn’t arrived yet, and we moved quickly as we were herded into a “safe room” and waited for the all clear. Within days, the siren seemed more of a nuisance than a need to move quickly. Some missiles landed, most did not, and none landed near us. Just as some of us began to ignore the siren’s wail, the attacks stopped. The invasion was well underway, and the Iraqi forces likely had more on their minds than vexing those of us hunkered down in Kuwait. And there were plenty of us to vex.

NGOs and humanitarian aid groups from around the world, some as small as the US Salvation Army and a Danish church group, along with all of the larger groups—IRC, MSF, GOAL, Mercy Corps, IMC—had shown up in Kuwait. The US government bureaucrats were here in the fullest force imaginable. The USAID DART teams (United States Agency for International Development Disaster Assistance Response Team), along with the newly appointed administrators of ORHA (the US Department of Defense Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance) were so well represented, they could have filled the room by themselves. The USAID DART teams were here to assess the Iraq situation for themselves. As the branch of the US State Department that provided grants and money to the NGOs for their emergency interventions here, they were keenly interested in everything that was happening and in everything that we were doing. They came in full force to the meetings. Adorned in their DART bulletproof vests with gas masks and chemical suits at the ready, they stood out.

The ORHA representatives were presidential appointees and would administer the various sectors of the Iraqi government and run the country once the war was over. These, mostly men, were stationed in Kuwait along with all of the NGOs waiting to move into Iraq. Jay Garner, a retired general, was to head ORHA until a new Iraqi government was in place. He had been handpicked by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, in large part due to his leadership of Operation Provide Comfort, the US military humanitarian mission in Kurdistan after the 1991 Gulf War.

The ORHA officials that I encountered in Kuwait were surely capable and seemed to have the best expertise for the specific responsibilities they would manage. The physician who would be the interim director of health in Iraq was a well-respected, accomplished, and outspoken doctor with years of international experience under his belt. He, too, had been involved in Operation Provide Comfort. He was a forceful, highly regarded physician who could assess a crisis efficiently and determine quickly what interventions would be needed. His was an appointment that gave all of us faith that this situation would be well managed.

USAID and ORHA representatives were booked into the Kuwait Hilton, an ostentatious, overpriced icon of excess in this country of excess. I went there occasionally for meetings and was horrified that our tax dollars were being spent there. After one meeting, a USAID team member asked if I had brought a bathing suit so that I could swim.

I rolled my eyes. “Nah, I never pack swimsuits when I travel to active war zones,” I replied dryly.

“Oh,” she said, somewhat surprised, “you should.”

I take my war zones seriously, I thought, but I didn’t have the courage to say it out loud. (Well, I do take my lipstick, but that’s another story.)