Chapter 2

Contractors

As I climb off the helicopter that has ferried me deep into Iraq, one of the first sights that greet me is the throng of contractors. They are everywhere, and they come in all shapes and sizes, all walks of life, and all nationalities. They are overweight, middle-aged men. They are young women sporting cell-phone earpieces and conspicuously unmmilitary clothing. And they are third-country nationals, or TCNs—mostly Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans. They provide instruction on new communications systems. They troubleshoot satellite links. They manage the legions of contracted interpreters. They also make food, cut hair, man the desks at Internet cafés, and do laundry (with a pride rarely seen anywhere in the United States).

Looking around at any of a number of forward operating bases (FOBs) throughout Iraq, I realize that the contractors often seem to outnumber the frontline combat troops. The Americans among them roam the FOBs clad in some unwritten, universal dress code of contractors: polo shirts, hiking boots, and cargo trousers. I analyze the necessary services they provide, and I wonder how any war in the past was ever won without them.

But then I think about the war I entered five years ago, and I try to remember if I ever saw any contractors back then at the beginning. All I can remember is filthy, sweating Marines and sailors to my left and right. There was no chow hall staffed by TCNs subcontracted by Kellogg Brown & Root. Instead, we dined on meals ready to eat (MREs), if any were available from the overtaxed supply lines, and when we couldn’t eat we chainsmoked cigarettes and chewed tobacco to suppress our hunger. No Internet cafés were strategically placed along the highway to Baghdad, nor were any phones available to call loved ones after returning from patrols. If you were lucky you befriended an embedded journalist who occasionally let you use his satellite phone. If you were unlucky—like me—the only reason you got to call home was to deal with the aftermath of one of your Marines having been killed.

Walking around one FOB I notice a sign advertising step aerobics for all interested parties on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At another FOB the TCN at the gym makes me show my identification card and sign in. I have no cause to complain; he is following the rules he has been forced to memorize. But then a rear-echelon first sergeant brusquely informs one of my Marines that his physical training uniform does not conform to the gym’s standards. As the offending Marine storms away, pissed off at the pogue first sergeant and the contractor and whoever wrote the rules, I remember that there was no gym when we invaded this country. The only exercise for me was pulling apart the heavy feeder assembly of my LAV’s (light armored vehicle’s) main gun, or changing a tire shredded from the razorlike splinters of artillery shrapnel that littered the highways, or lifting onto a stretcher the heavy deadweight of one of my wounded Marines. I didn’t gain muscle back then—I lost it. It melted off my body from the sauna of my chemical suit like butter in a frying pan. One day I looked in a mirror and didn’t recognize the filthy, emaciated stranger staring back at me.

One of our contracted interpreters mouths off to my Marines and refuses to participate in the daily grunt work that the team doesn’t even seem to think about anymore. When I order him to participate with the team, he casually informs me that he is not a Marine. And then I realize that no, he is not a Marine, and that simple fact angers me that much more, because I realize he is not here in Iraq for the same reasons my Marines are. He is not here because of a calling to serve his country. He is not here to rebuild and return security to the country that we leveled five years ago. He is not here because he knows his fellow Marines are sacrificing themselves and he in turn wants to sacrifice himself as well. He is here in Iraq for one simple reason, the same reason why most of the other contractors have made their way to Iraq: money. He gets paid more than most of my Marines, and suddenly I am glad that my pay is a pittance, because I know that one thing I am not is a mercenary.

But then, frustrated by what I see transpiring around me, I log in to the Internet, turn on the webcam, and suddenly my wife and two daughters are looking at me, and I am looking at them. My daughters are sprouting like weeds while I am gone, but because of the contracted Internet service I can watch them grow in my absence. I think back to the time five years ago when the only picture I had of my wife was a wrinkled, sweat-stained snapshot that I had laminated to protect it from the elements. But now I don’t need that picture to remind me of her—I can see her beauty and hear her laugh in real time as I chat on the Internet. I see my family, I talk to them, and then I thank God for the contractors who provide the Internet and the satellite dishes.

I realize for the hundredth time that this is not the conflict I lost myself in half a decade ago. It is, literally, a different war. And, despite my frequent distaste for the contractors, despite my frustration at the self-licking ice cream cones that the FOBs have become, I realize that we could not fight and win this new Long War without the contractors. They sustain the force, they elevate morale, they free Marines to fight. They serve a purpose, and my experience here would be very different without them.

My thoughts turn to a future war that we may fight, and I wonder if the contractors will be there for that one as well. I wonder if my Marines and I have grown too accustomed to their presence and the services they provide. I wonder if my Marines will be able to fight again as we did five years ago—shivering in the mud-rain of a desert aajaaz (sandstorm), not showering for weeks on end, subsisting on survival rations, nicotine, and caffeine, cut off from all communications with family. But then I watch my men return from a patrol outside the wire. I study their faces, dirty and burned from the desert sun. My eyes follow them as they shoulder their gear back to their huts and begin to clean their weapons. They are smiling. Their jokes and gestures confirm their love for hardship; through their actions they demonstrate that they have not grown too soft. I realize that the Marines will continue to fight with or without the contractors. But, more important, I realize that they will continue to win. They are, after all, Marines.