MY JOURNEY INTO THE PERSONALITY of Abu Floos began in earnest with my arrival in Kuwait in March 2004, although the route had not been direct. Like the flight to Kuwait, I had stopped and started several times as I bounced along a turbulent path to the Middle East. It had taken me almost two years of fitful spurts to get this point. The plane ride, at least, had taken only twenty-four hours, but it felt like an eternity with each stop seemingly a needless waypoint further prolonging my arrival. After leaving Texas on a cold March morning, the airplane, filled to capacity with soldiers and equipment, had stopped in Maine and Germany to refuel before finally touching down in Kuwait.
I had been back at Fort Hood for only a week when we left. I had spent the previous six months in Honduras for reasons that seemed quite rational at the time. Actually, for two years I had been seeking a way to involve myself with the proclaimed war on terror. I had been close several times but always seemed to find myself watching the world’s events unfold on television. My initial hope of answering the nation’s call had died a torturously slow death during the course of several months of hand-wringing and false alarms. It started, as did almost everything associated with the war on terror, on September 11, 2001.
At that time I had been an executive officer, or second in command, of an M1A2 tank company training at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. In the middle of this desert, the army conducts intensive month-long training to hone its prowess in high-intensity combat. Although slight changes involving rogue actors and chemical attacks had been instituted prior to our rotation, it remained largely a vestige of the Cold War. For thirty days, we maneuvered against forces following Soviet doctrine and using Soviet equipment. Completion of this training sequence is the threshold requirement for an army armor unit to be “trained” and hence “deployable.” These were the sought-after descriptors that allowed a unit to be listed in the vanguard of American units available in contingencies. The goal of every soldier, from the highest-ranking general to the newest recruit, is to be the first weapon the nation reaches for when there is trouble. Soldiers train for months at a time, sometimes years, to prepare themselves for the contingency that they may be needed to defend our country.
By no means do I imply that anyone prays for war. In fact, it is the opposite. The U.S. Army is composed of professional soldiers with loving families, who are proud and want to serve their country, but they pray nightly that they never get the opportunity. It is a paradox that exists in few professions and one that the American public struggles to truly understand. It is the paradox of being an American soldier.
On September 11, 2001, we loaded our tanks onto the rail cars that would transfer them back to Fort Hood. Rumors swept up and down the rail line as we listened to updates and analyses about the attacks on the single radio that could receive a decent FM signal. We had little doubt that a consequence of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington would be military action requiring the deployment of my unit. Credible military sources indicated that our tanks would be going directly to the port of Beaumont, Texas—near my hometown—instead of Fort Hood, to be loaded onto ships and sent to deliver America’s military answer abroad. Only hours into the aftermath of 9/11, none of us knew of al Qaeda or Afghanistan, so we only talked of invading Iraq. There was no reason to direct our anger toward Iraq, other than the previous Iraq invasion and the unspoken sense that we would invade Iraq again someday. Why else would we spend a month in the California desert each year practicing for a large-scale invasion if not to eventually finish an old war?
Despite the heightened speculation about deploying immediately, the tanks and soldiers returned to Fort Hood and did not go directly to the port of Beaumont. Nonetheless, the First Cavalry Division has a long legacy as one of the army’s premiere war-fighting units, and seemed assured of a place in the eventual deployment force. Rumors and orders to “be prepared” swirled throughout the unit for weeks. We were an armored unit, so the deployment to mountainous Afghanistan never seemed to include us, but the talk of Iraq never subsided. We continued to prepare to deploy at a frenetic pace for the next sixteen months.
In February 2003, I grimaced alongside my colleagues as we watched Secretary of State Colin Powell make the American case at the United Nations. I shook my head as the proud warrior pitched the pitiful intelligence about Iraq with a speculative, cartoonish PowerPoint presentation. The lackluster presentation eroded my hope that there was a real, justifiable need for our services. For weeks afterwards, nightly alert phone calls kept me driving back and forth to the base, practicing to deploy, but my faith in the urgency faded. There would be an Iraq invasion, but my unit would not be part of the initial force. The Fourth Infantry Division was selected to deploy from Fort Hood, while the First Cavalry Division would remain behind.
There were a few weeks of hope that we would deploy through Turkey, but as more of our equipment shipped away as reserve components and spare parts, the reality set in. After over a year of waiting, we were getting left behind. In a brave effort to support morale and maintain relevance, the alert drills continued. The collective loss of enthusiasm and envy toward the soldiers chosen to deploy were open subjects around the headquarters, particularly during the early mornings we spent loading the other soldiers and their gear onto planes.
In order to compensate for the emotional letdown while still maniacally clinging to the hope that we would be chosen to deploy and save the day, the division leadership busied itself with ordering a series of tasks that only gave the appearance of maintaining its focus. There were endless trainings and qualifications, all events that made the units look more cohesive and lethal on paper. Meanwhile, the soldiers openly talked of their disappointment. Many of them, like a lot of their officers, firmly believed that their unit was the best unit in the army, and they could not understand how they had been left behind. It was a feeling that I understood well.
My own sense of purpose drifted by the month, and I began looking for different ways to spend my remaining time in the army. By May 2004 I would have served my five-year obligation and would presumably leave the army. In order to pass the time, I volunteered to leave Fort Hood for Honduras for a six-month tour, which coincided with my last six months in the army. I knew there was nothing more that I could do from Fort Hood. At least in Honduras, there was still a “war on drugs.”
In Honduras, my daily routine as a staff officer carried me through the days and the weeks. I had almost forgotten there was a war in Iraq. Moreover, I did not care. It had become increasingly clear that weapons of mass destruction were not going to be found in Iraq. The reasons for going to war seemed to be evaporating by the day. Like many in America, I had followed our triumphant race to Baghdad, then had become bored with the day-today updates. There were no headline events for months or at least none big enough to make me take notice in Honduras. I had also applied to and was accepted by Georgetown Law and planned to enroll in the fall of 2004. I resolved myself to life outside the army, and I looked forward to the transition.
One day, as I was reviewing the housing options for incoming law students at Georgetown, I received a call from Fort Hood. It was not an official phone call but rather one from my former West Point roommate, letting me know “unofficially” that my unit had been alerted for an immediate deployment to Iraq. He had seen the list of people to be involuntarily extended by the army, and my name was on it. He said I should get a letter in the next day or so, and that was all he knew. I thanked him, hung up the receiver, and took a deep breath. I was at once excited and resentful. I would finally deploy to Iraq but would not be entering law school as planned. This was disruptive enough, but the frustrating aspect of the timing was that I was no longer of the same mind-set I had been six months ago.
I set out for a run to clear my head. Winding down a dirt trail, surrounded by the ficus groves and the wide-ranging hibiscus plants that clung to the weathered collections of hooches, I headed toward the base’s perimeter fence. I contemplated the impact of the recent deployment order to Iraq against the current situation in Central America. During the last several months of 2003, I had become increasingly convinced that the situation in Iraq was going to develop away from our collective expectations. Central America was a touchstone for popular revolution, and the images, slogans, and ideology of leftist rebels are always painted on walls in old town squares. It seemed appropriate, as I turned onto the six-mile perimeter that defined the area formerly known as Palmerola Air Base, to consider what I was about to undertake by first taking in my surroundings.
On my left, now abandoned, was a cluster of buildings that once housed five thousand U.S. troops, part of the American effort against the contra guerrillas in El Salvador. The wind blowing through the barracks’ broken windows whistled warnings about the difficulties of fighting guerrilla wars. On my right, beyond an eight-foot fence duly patrolled by Honduran soldiers, I could see collections of houses clustered together. Jumbles of cinder blocks with palm roofs supported by roughly hewn logs, they sheltered both animals and humans. The older people, with their parched brown skin and cast-off American T-shirts, stared listlessly back at me, their eyes conveying a mixture of envy and sadness. The children were curious and playful. They frolicked alongside the fence, stride for stride with me, laughing and yelling. They were too young to realize they would have very few days to run and laugh but would instead spend the rest of their lives calculating ways to survive. Living in the shadows of the former American base made them relatively better off than their peers, but the tall fence demarcated more than a property boundary—it neatly sliced the world into “haves” and “have nots.” I would later see the same division and social stratification in Baghdad and learn that the strength and size of the wall do not matter. Societal attempts to starkly and artificially cordon and separate humans into a class structure based on an arbitrary variable are unsustainable. I picked up my pace and headed back to my hooch, still thinking about how I needed to prepare myself, mentally and physically. For all of those miles I’d spent running, I was no closer to understanding what was in front of me.
By ordering me to involuntarily stay in the army and join the effort in Iraq, the Department of the Army told me to set aside both the warning signs of history and the festering doubts I had begun to nurture about the outcome. True to design, I packed for my flight back to Fort Hood in the mechanical, robotic way that the army instills. Two large green duffle bags consumed my belongings in the precise reverse order that they had belched them out six months ago. My whole life or, more precisely, the army-issued portion of it, lay neatly contained in two canvas bags. The other portion, my feelings, still lay strewn about as thoughts spilled forth in streams of anxiety and worry. I knew I had a duty to which I was dedicated, but my doubts continued.
The finality of one career ending and a new career beginning had made sense to me. Now there was the question of delaying law school for an indeterminate period. Afterward, who knows what direction my life would take? In the end, I was happy to have a year in Iraq to sort out what my life meant and see whether it might go in a different direction. Along the way, maybe I could find myself as well.
My time to start figuring out my new life began on the flight to Kuwait. First, I needed to reacquaint myself with my fellow soldiers. I knew most of them from the previous four and a half years I had served in the battalion, although there had been some significant changes. Most important, the battalion had undergone a leadership change while I was gone. In place of an erudite, professorial commander with whom I had a professional rapport, I now had a new rough-hewn commander who had little time for theoretical discussions. Our first meeting occurred just prior to takeoff. I was seated behind him, which was part intentional and part providence. I had hoped for an opportunity to press him about what my role would be in the battalion, because I had just returned and did not have an assigned job. It was highly unusual for this to happen, because the army is often short of officers, but we seemed to have a surplus of one.
I did not have to wait long for an insight into the new commander’s persona. When the “fasten seat belt” video came on, it was presented in English, Spanish, and French. When the French sentences rolled across, the new commander looked back at me and accusingly asked whether I was smart. I responded affirmatively, albeit a bit sheepishly, and he told me to translate the French sentence. As I began, he cut me off and said it was good that I spoke a “bunch of languages,” because I was going to be the “governance officer.” He then turned back to the movie that was beginning and left me to wonder what a governance officer and a working French vocabulary had in common. Moreover, what did a governance officer do, and what specifically could a position like that do in an armor battalion, whose sole purpose was combat?
The plane began its transatlantic hopscotch, arcing through the eastern sky. I stared out into the perpetual pre-dawn twilight. The orange corona of the rising sun teased the clouds, threatening to rise and illuminate the sky. Each time, we would land on a darkened runway, wait a few hours, and take off again into a slowly warming horizon. I spent those hours thinking about the possibilities in Iraq and about the radical way in which my life had changed in a few short weeks. For the past six months, I had been in single-minded pursuit of leaving the army. Now, the clarity and surety that previously defined my plans had receded, leaving me floating through the deep sky above the Atlantic.
A sudden touchdown jarred me from a remarkably deep sleep. With the same irritation and purpose of a domestic civilian flight, soldiers rummaged through overhead compartments and under seats before shuffling toward the exit door. Stepping through it, I paused, stunned by the blinding brightness of the Kuwaiti sun. My knees buckled. After spending almost twenty-four hours in the cool, dark cabin of the airplane, I was not prepared for the assault on my senses by the Kuwaiti environment. The disorienting blindness rendered me momentarily helpless, like a newborn gasping and grasping his way into a strange new world.
My first tentative steps after the cramped hours of flight brought me wobbling into the desert heat, already well above 100 degrees. It bounced from the black-streaked tarmac, sizzled against the aluminum American Airlines logo on the plane’s fuselage, and buried itself into my new desert uniform. The sand-colored uniform, which was designed to reflect the heat, wilted within seconds. Dark, salty bands of moisture appeared almost instantly around my neck and under my arms as rivulets of sweat wicked their way through the starched fabric. My eyes struggled to find contrast from behind my sunglasses. Everywhere I looked, a brilliant monochromatic glare obscured my sight.
Grasping the handrail to steady myself, I slowly made my way down the stairway from the airplane. Only a few short steps into my descent, I was gasping for air. A heady mixture of jet fuel fumes and melting rubber wafted across the runway and quickly consumed the air-conditioned cabin air. The heat undulated over rainbow-spotted pools of engine oil forming below the engines and across patches of oozing asphalt before burning itself into my lungs. I choked down the suffocation, longing for a breath of cool air and cursing everything about the phrase “dry heat.”
Still clutching the handrail, I began to make out the expansive airfield. Passenger airplanes lined up like taxis at a downtown hotel waiting to shuttle soldiers to and from the United States. Jet engines roared intermittently, and tires squealed as planes landed and took off at quick intervals. Kuwait’s robust runway complex and modern, capacious port system, which provided a dedicated system to move U.S. forces into desert staging areas near the Iraq border, screamed, “Thank you for Desert Storm!”
Completely disoriented, I followed the winding trail of soldiers from the plane to an assembly area just beyond the airstrips. Every few feet, other soldiers, mostly reservists wearing reflective vests and gesturing deliberately, guided our ant trail safely into the assembly area. They were unarmed but took themselves quite seriously. Their dour dispositions and the generally pedestrian feel of the whole affair made it seem more like a school field trip than entry into a combat zone.
Grand tour buses with heavily tinted windows and thick felt window shades pulled into the parking lot, one after the other. Each bus bore distinctive logos advertising its incorporation as a “tour service provider.” It was as if the buses had discharged hundreds of tourists in Kuwait City and returned to the airport to pick up a new load. After waiting in a holding area for hours, alternately napping and cursing at the long wait, I finally boarded an idling bus, settled into one of the plush seats by the window, and felt the low rumbling as the buses hummed along the concrete highway, whisking us in air-conditioned cocoons, complete with television screens, toward our staging area. Eventually, the glowing metropolis of Kuwait City faded quickly into the inky black desert night. Street lamps whizzed by, illuminating signs that pointed not to other highways but to a one-word destination: “desert.” Every few miles, the cloverleaf exit ramps ended abruptly in the Kuwaiti sand. I almost felt as if I was on the verge of modernity looking out my window at a prehistoric time when things were much simpler. The sudden disappearance of the highway beneath the sand almost beckoned me off the road and into a more tranquil place.
Or at least the sandy waves lapping at the highway seemed tranquil, until one of the many sedans on the highway decided to exit. We watched a BMW speed through the exit and hit the desert without ever slowing down. Driving at sixty miles per hour, the driver slammed on his brakes when he arrived at a small trailer called home, which was lit by fluorescent lights. What appeared to be regular overhead office lighting stood vertically along fences and trailer frames. Across the desert landscape, the blinking stars were matched in number and intensity by this fluorescent lighting that marked the campgrounds of the Kuwaiti families who make their living herding camels and surround themselves with these barriers of light to mark their territory.
From a glimpse, it was abundantly clear to me that a number of Kuwaitis still dwelled outside the modern high-rise buildings of Kuwait City, but the Bedouin life is no longer as T. E. Lawrence described it in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Modern Bedouins may still trade in camels, but they live in Airstream trailers and drive modern sedans. Nonetheless, some aspects of their ancient identity had not changed. Every so often, a car would drive by close enough for me to observe the driver’s face. In these moments, I could catch an unforgettable look that was neither menacing nor disappointed. It was a general look of repugnance toward Americans that permeated Kuwaiti life. I had also seen this expression on the faces of the guards who stood by and watched us enter the air-conditioned holding area, while they stood outside. Our presence and influence in their tiny country offended their sense of honor, not only because of the continued use of their country as a staging area to attack Iraq, but also because of the disruptive influence that this use entails. Although Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1991, a sense of Arab solidarity persisted. Our presence created a constant hum of political backlash and focused regional animosity on the Kuwaitis who harbored us. I empathized with the Kuwaitis, whose most practical complaint was that the invasion was disrupting their lives. After all, I had just traded the sandy shores of a Caribbean island for the dusty desert of a Middle East commercial hub. Sunglasses notwithstanding, this was not how I thought I would enjoy my twenty-seventh birthday. The contrast of change and tradition is the norm here, and all of Kuwait seemed a little confused as to how to deal with it, myself included.
Miles later, a bright spot of light began to glow in the distance. With the austerity of a rising sun, the light on the horizon slowly grew and came into sharper focus. After a few minutes, the individual floodlights become visible, lining the perimeter of the staging area in a severe flood of halogen and belligerence. The lights shone sternly onto rows of barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, each one sandbagged and foreboding. Abruptly, the smooth sound of the tires on concrete gave way to a jarring transition to sand and gravel as the buses wheeled off the road and toward our staging area. Gliding to a stop in the sand parking lot, they came to rest in the center of Camp New York. Splayed out in a wheel, its headquarters and dining facility formed the hub, and the tents, each of which housed one hundred soldiers, curved around a circular perimeter.
The temperature change was stark during the few hours since we had touched down—a fifty-degree drop. We reached for our jackets. Wearily, we grabbed our hundred-pound duffel bags and began to slog through the sand toward a distant row of tents.
The massive tents presented an optical illusion to tired eyes and strained limbs. Their size made them seem relatively close, but in reality they were a hard ten-minute walk from our buses. The intentionally dispersed pattern served as an implicit reminder that somewhere in the other side of the night, nefarious forces schemed for our demise, and the military hedged the effects of a direct attack through dispersion. Of course, the trailers housing Subway and Burger King restaurants made it hard to believe the army was at war. The juxtaposition of soldiers dressed in battle dress uniforms they had just received, carrying bags of equipment from the Vietnam War era past a row of trailers of American fast-food vendors, more closely brought to mind a carnival than a combat zone. As I stepped into the tent and looked at the cots laid out from one end to the other, the smell of canvas and army surplus items took me right back to my days as an Eagle Scout camping in the hills of Central Texas.
Exhausted soldiers flung their gear onto the cots. Soon there would be work for everyone, but now there were a few precious moments to settle in. I eagerly reached for my sleeping bag and my books: Once a Warrior King, the Vietnam War memoir of army lieutenant David Donovan; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; and an army-issued Arabic phrase book. When I packed the books, I had no idea that they would represent the most applicable tools for the challenge that lay ahead of me.
I stretched my sleeping bag across the length of my cot and placed the books neatly under the zipped hood. Nearby, the soldiers were piecing together a makeshift command center to track the arrival and transport of our equipment from the port of Kuwait. For twelve hours a day during the next few weeks, our equipment trickled in, concluding its three-week sea voyage aboard the massive container ships onto which it had been loaded. Ironically, it was watching these same ships leave Beaumont during the first Gulf War that had first gotten me excited about joining the army. Now, once again the ships were connecting my home state to the Middle East, but this time I was on the receiving end, not a spectator on the send-off.
Nightly update meetings took place in the corner of our tent. We were given status reports about equipment and scheduling routines for soldiers undergoing intensive urban-warfare training. As an armor unit, we were not trained for urban combat, but these weeks in Kuwait were filled with days of training to convert our specializations. Over and over, we practiced storming mock-ups of Iraqi houses and attended countless meetings on the Iraqi threat. Interestingly, these briefings never mentioned improvised explosive devices. Instead, they focused on hypothetical Saddam loyalist holdouts. It would turn out that the Saddam loyalists formed the most insignificant and simple portion of the threats that we faced. At any rate, we moved through the training sequences and became more and more specialized in our roles by the day.
As I mentioned earlier, the equipment that we brought from the United States was largely Vietnam vintage. Now, in large warehouses, retailers from Nike to Camelback offered mountains of new equipment to us. For each duffle bag we carried into Kuwait, we added at least two more that were full of these modern goods. Their quality was infinitely better than that of our old gear, and within minutes of issue soldiers could be seen donning North Face parkas and REI gloves. The contractors were pleased to see the soldiers embrace their products, because it no doubt secured them additional contracts with the U.S. government.
Characteristically, the army made this whole process unnecessarily bothersome. Interspersed within the practical training sessions and equipment issues, there were hours of surreal debate over standardization of the new equipment. Even as it prepared for a real combat mission, the army obsessed over its image. A hot-button issue was the logos of the corporate companies sewn onto the army gear. The most memorable was that of Camelback, the hydration system company. The army decreed that all soldiers would use a black marker to cross out any name that could be read. The blackout attempted to obscure the fact that the army had been ill-equipped to fight this war and had recovered its position only with the help of last-minute contracting, which didn’t allow for the creation of standard army versions. Yet filling army shortfalls with contracting became a theme of the deployment, from the commercial airplanes that dropped us off to the rented tour buses and now the bounty of new gear. Soldiers were in dining facilities provided by KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root, at the time a subsidiary of Halliburton) when they weren’t queuing at Subway or Burger King. The MCI phone trailer was by far the most popular attraction.
While the soldiers stood in lines waiting for their ten-minute calls home, the officers made phone calls of their own to Baghdad via a secure phone to receive the nightly update. The leadership huddled over the secure radio and listened to the briefing from the unit we were to replace in Baghdad. Intermittent squabbles, punctuated with code names and places that lacked context, bubbled over the airwaves. At the conclusion of each session, my commander would address his thoughts and establish priorities.
Frequently, these meetings ended up in strategy sessions about our first steps once we arrived in Baghdad. Most questions, such as where to draw the boundaries of our areas of responsibility or how to name the neighborhoods, could be answered by maps or satellite imagery. Little by little, plans for governance and economic development entered our discussions. These discussions and briefings took place over a map of southern Baghdad that was divided neatly into color-coded neighborhoods. These divisions formed the building blocks of our plan and would help shape the criteria against which we would measure success. The neighborhood people, with their religious affiliations and their willingness to trust in a new system, would also hold the key to my role as governance officer.
Over the weeks, I had learned that I was to take charge of supervising ten neighborhood councils, which had been recently formed to represent the seeds of a democratic government. They were designed to be inclusive and consisted of three types of Iraqi leaders: sheiks, imams, and secular politicians. The sheiks, who were the traditional leaders of the tribes, represented a cultural legacy of authority. They were endowed with absolute power inside the tribal system. Arbitrating disputes, blessing marriages, and employing members of their tribe were all part of their duties. The imams were the religious leaders. Under Saddam, their influence had been checked by an oppressive state, but they had found a new voice since the invasion. Mosques had sprung up on every corner, and legions of new faithful who were free to express themselves and to seek a source of hope flocked to the newly opened gates. Finally, the secular politicians mostly represented business interests. They were self-admitted agents of change, who saw the chance to put Iraq on the road to modernity and to prosper along the way. Collectively, they accounted for all of the forms of power that were available to rebuild the country: traditional, religious, and secular progressive.
Sitting in a tent in Kuwait and writing down Arabic words and phrases phonetically as they crackled from the radio, I could not attach any context or relevance to them. To say that I was woefully unprepared would be an understatement. I spoke no Arabic, did not know any of the characteristics of Islam, and had few references for my role. The chain of command did not seem overly focused on local governance, because the Iraqis had welcomed us as liberators and the ongoing fighting was considered a mere “mopping-up operation.”
Still, being a governance officer seemed like an organizational challenge and one that demanded at least a modicum of cultural awareness. If I was to be successful in my role, I would have to determine the structure of Iraqi society, find the leaders who wielded influence, and co-opt them before their will had time to harden against us and their patience for the American system faltered. The invasion had been stunningly swift, yet there were already fledgling groups organizing against the occupation.
As the lights in the tent were turned off and my fellow soldiers drifted into sleep, I switched on a reading lamp and rode the desert with Lawrence and walked the swamps of Vietnam with Donovan, seeking to put a form to this shapeless problem before me. The literature on waging insurgency was rich. Che Guevara, for one, provided instruction on repelling imperial forces, as did the websites that linked disgruntled Iraqis to the lessons learned by the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Yet there was precious little information on how to structure a successful outcome from the perspective of the occupiers. Nonetheless, I read and reread my books, coupled with the cartoonish Iraqi phrase books, determined to do my part to bring change and prosperity to Iraq. After all, I thought that was what the Iraqis wanted.
Each day I practiced for my new role. I imagined conversations and thought about the principles of local governance. The Arabic phrase guide became an extension of my hand, and I became confident in my ability to at least communicate on a rudimentary level. Unfortunately, I lacked a broader understanding of the region. One evening, as if to underscore how little I knew of the Middle East, I attempted to practice a few Arabic phrases with some of the people working in the kitchen. I had never been exposed to the idea of employing “third-country nationals,” and I assumed that the people working in our camp were Kuwaiti. In all of my previous deployments to Latin America, the local staff was exactly as the name implies—local. To my surprise, my Arabic phrases were met with quizzical looks. Sensing that the problem must have been with my pronunciation, I tried several more times with no success. I returned to my book, more confused than I had been, and wondered what I was missing. I mentioned my frustration to one of the civilian logistics employees nearby, who laughed. The people working in the camp were not Kuwaiti—they were not even Arabs. They were Sri Lankan, for the most part, and had been brought in to work by American defense contractors. I was supposed to assume a role dealing with subtle differences in the agendas of various Iraqi tribes and sects, and I could not even distinguish between Arabs and Sri Lankans!
My inexperience left me feeling as vulnerable and embarrassed as a kid on the first day in a new school, yet things quickly turned worse. First, the sky darkened from the north and the wind began to pick up, blowing debris and sand playfully around the campsite. People scurried to their tents. At first I thought maybe a rainstorm was brewing, but it was much more ominous. It was the dreaded shamed—the northwesterly wind frequently accompanied by blinding, suffocating sandstorms that bury roads and drive grinding bits of sand into the most airtight quarters. The clouds moved slowly, languidly stretching their arms around the horizons. Black tendrils flicked forth to grab the sprawling dunes. Rolling closer, ever unsated, the sandstorm consumed the daylight. Tents, buildings, and trailers vanished beneath the ominous shadow.
I cowered inside the tent for close to an hour, awed by the shamal as it slowly reshaped the desert floor. While the storm beat outside, I turned the pages of a book on Iraqi history. I could not help but feel a sense of futility. If the people of this country routinely weather such fearsome, awe-inspiring events, certainly they would have developed a stalwart character that would resist an American occupation. Between the lines in every chapter of Iraqi history lay the open secret that foreign armies never occupied Baghdad for long. The people of Iraq, like the shamal, would sweep aside the influences that did not belong and reshape the territory to their own design.
In the following days, convoys began to move toward Baghdad, as the units that had arrived with us started to receive their orders. The movement happened in two parts. The first group, consisting of a group of select individuals called the “torch party,” would leave via an air force plane. The second group would travel via convoy and arrive three days later. Owing to the peculiar nature of my job, I was with the torch party. My boss thought it would be a good idea for me to maximize my time with the person I was replacing.
I had grown tired of the monotonous routine in the desert, but the influx of seasoned soldiers and the reality that this was to be more than a summer camp immediately combined to amplify my growing sense of hesitancy. Nonetheless, I dozed off and on as we drove to the airbase. Our flight was not until the late afternoon, but army planning requires you to be there six to eight hours early—the culture of “hurry up and wait” that is so famous in army humor.
After sitting around all day under a shaded awning, weighed down like turtles by our gear, we were motioned onto a waiting aircraft. The C-130, a propeller-driven cargo plane, held approximately a hundred soldiers, and we struggled to cram together tight enough to fit. Soldier after soldier piled into its yawning mouth as the air grew thick with worry and determination. I listened intently to the flight chief give his instructions, as the sweltering heat joined with the vibration of the aircraft to sedate us. As more and more heads began to nod, the flight chief concluded his speech with a stern warning.
“Check your buddy,” he said. “As we fly low, it is possible for stray bullets to enter the plane and kill soldiers. You would never even know it and may think that they are just sleeping. So make sure they are asleep, not dead.”
Great, I thought. Now I did not know whether to sit on my Kevlar vest or wear it. But I couldn’t stand up to take it off, and its tight fit made it impossible for me to wiggle it down so I could sit on it. My heart lurched, and I gulped with each swoop and turn of the plane. The forty-five-minute journey, a roller-coaster ride of evasive maneuvers, buckled my resolve and started my insides moving in an uneasy churn. Like a bad paper airplane, we suddenly fell from the sky, plummeted, swung left, and hit the ground hard. A textbook “hot” landing.