IN ABU DISHER, A POOR Shi’a slum in Al Dora, a sparse collection of houses and the sewage-strewn streets stood in stark contrast to the well-lit American base across the street. Inside the wall, Americans had running water and a working sewage system. Within a few months, KBR had delivered all of the amenities of home to the Americans, while the Iraqis were told to be patient. Convoys loaded with food and appliances such as hot water heaters and generators streamed into the FOB nightly, barrelling their way through the small market stands selling rotten fruit just beyond the FOB wall where the inhabitants of Abu Disher scraped out a living.
Our predecessors assured us that, despite this disparity in quality of life, the neighborhood remained one of the most pro-American in Baghdad and that they never had any trouble there. The old women carrying plastic sacks to the market and the laundry draped from the windows of each building did not seem ominous. In fact, I regarded the people as genuinely industrious. The roadside market always heaved and bustled. Hustlers and blackmarketeers sold a variety of strangely out-of-place goods from beneath the sun shades. Computers, for example, taken from ministry buildings, were readily available, although most of them were probably unusable, and few people in the market, if any, knew how to operate them. The pricing, as I later learned, reflected this reality, with keyboards selling for almost ten times the amount for a monitor. The reason? The keyboard had keys.
The practical challenges were considerable. Aside from the bewildering collection of odds and ends in the market, two desperate community needs struck me, both almost literally, each time I passed through. The stench of burning trash and the untreated sewage created a noxious, almost tangible cloud that hung in the streets. Just behind the market, an area of no fewer than ten acres smoldered as mound upon mound of trash sat rotting and burning in the open air. For years, this dumping ground had provided a shortcut for Baghdad trash haulers who were not going all the way to the city dump. The richer neighborhoods simply dumped their trash in the poorer neighborhoods, and this was the poorest.
Similarly, the sewage treatment plant and the associated city sewer routed Baghdad’s entire flow of human waste through these poorer neighborhoods. When the plant had been converted to a clandestine oil storage facility at the beginning of the invasion, the sewage simply ran to this neighborhood and stopped. This problem was exacerbated by the chronic electricity shortage in Shi’a neighborhoods that had been deliberately un-derwired. The pumps seldom worked, even when they were present, and in this case they had been removed by looters months ago. The resulting large and growing pools of sewage reduced parts of Abu Disher to islands of dry land. In between these dry spots, makeshift bridges of cardboard boxes and closely stacked trash bags futilely tried to ward off the rising tide and provide necessary, but precarious, passage for the locals.
It would be a challenge to convince the Iraqis that a change toward democratic governance was a better option for them than a transition to a theocratic regime. Each day of bureaucratic process pushed these families further away from the American Dream. Nightly, the men of Abu Disher sat in their homes without electricity surrounded by hungry family members. They did not have much left, save their pride. Watching the Americans bask in the glow of electricity and satellite television placed a high toll on what remained of that pride. For this reason, Muqtada Al-Sadr’s populist messages resonated well here. The sermons at the mosque across from the FOB, led by one of Sadr’s lieutenants, were well attended. With the transition of American forces, the men of Abu Disher had an opportunity to assert themselves, make their situation known, and demand respect. The time to lash out was now.
Blissfully secure in our base, however, we had no idea that Abu Disher had stepped to the edge of open hostility. Our counterparts had left, save a few stragglers. We conducted our own meeting and planned out our first night on our own. The meeting went well, with our commander reinforcing the values that we intended to abide by, cautioning us against the rough tactics used by our predecessors, and stressing our own sets of objectives along the lines of reconstruction. As committed as we were to these principles, our faith in a cooperative reception from the Iraqis evaporated as quickly as a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) can launch.
Ssssssssss—BANG!
The explosion that rattled our headquarters sounded impossibly close. Within seconds, the radios inside the tactical command center came alive. Routine chatter was displaced by urgent calls from one of our units. Everyone from the headquarters immediately glued himself to the radio, frantically looking at the map. Grid coordinates and street names came flowing through the speakers as radio operators scrambled to record the unfamiliar phrases. After a few minutes, our commander finally said what we all wanted to hear: “Let’s just get over there.”
There was a mad rush to the door, with guys grabbing weapons and vests. We ran toward the Humvees; we were the cavalry coming to the aid of our fellow soldiers. Had we really known what to expect, we would have been scared, but there was no time for those thoughts. The air was thick now with the sound of machine-gun fire, punctuated occasionally by the authoritative bang of an RPG. At reckless speeds, we tore from the FOB, driving straight into the teeth of the firefight.
It was a short drive to the scene of the firefight, barely a half mile. The streets were dark. Even the usually well-lit mosque had gone ominously black. We parked at the first intersection and dismounted, waiting for a report from the soldiers involved. They and the insurgents were in the narrow streets beyond the remaining streetlights, their presence marked by an occasional burst of small-arms fire.
We fanned out and looked helplessly into the dark. We had still not remedied the night-vision shortage. Nor had we really done much to augment the ammunition scarcity. Once again, I found myself thinking this was not the army commercial that had enticed me to join. I missed my tank.
“Whizz, whizz, whizz”—a sound like hornets flying by.
“Hmm, those sound like bullets,” I casually thought, still not quite ready to accept the fact that people were shooting at us.
“Whizz, whizz, plunk.” One hit the wall nearby.
“GET DOWN!” someone yelled, just as the hail of bullets intensified.
I found myself standing behind a metal trailer, listening intently to the bullets. They buzzed nearby in thick swarms. The noises came from everywhere, but there were no muzzle flashes to guide us to the source of this attack. It was if the night itself was spitting daggers. And quite accurately, too.
Holes began to appear near my head in the rusted steel trailer. Unlike in childhood games, it mattered what material you were standing behind, and my current hiding spot was not stopping any bullets. I looked around for new cover. I saw a sand pile and a group of cinder blocks. Either one seemed like a better option than my increasingly perforated container. I made a quick dive for the cinder blocks. The bullets followed closely. Whoever was doing the shooting had seen me run. A flurry of smacks hit the cinder blocks as I slid into place.
Crouching there, I realized I had not yet fired a round. Few of us had. What were we supposed to shoot at? In training, it was always really clear. The little human-shaped target “presented” itself in a predictable fashion. These live “targets” had no such intention. While we remained pinned down, another portion of our unit swept through the streets looking for insurgents to engage. They had as much luck as I did. Within an hour or so, the gunfire began to dissipate.
The radio reports trickled in. There were no casualties and no confirmed or even suspected kills. The whole engagement consisted of shots into, and back from, the darkness. The relief at being in one piece overwhelmed any feelings of frustration or disappointment. For the most part, everyone just felt glad to have experienced life at the end of a real attack. It had been terrifying. I felt woefully unprepared. As we turned back into the base, the mosques lit back up.
Living through my first ambush forced me to reconsider the probability of success against an enemy so determined. These Iraqis were destitute, which meant that they had nothing to lose. We had little to offer them in the way of immediate material change. At present, there was a lot of talk about ideology and political systems, but this was going to be a war to provide opportunity today. Whoever could inject tangible hope into the daily lives of these people could use the resulting leverage to co-opt them. It was a fact that the religious leaders knew well.
The next morning there was a council meeting with the leaders of the neighborhood in which the attack had occurred. I am not sure whether the attack itself was a staged precursor to the meeting or if it was simply a scheduling coincidence. Coincidences of this nature happened more often than one might expect in Iraq. The battalion command sergeant major had assembled my personal security team from a miscellaneous group of soldiers and equipment taken from the battalion headquarters. Our trucks, from the recently retrofitted fleet, lacked the the enhanced firepower of our predecessors vehicles. Because of the ad hoc nature of our little group and its piecemeal composition, the soldiers had decided to call themselves the “Misfits.” The soldiers had even spray-painted a small insignia bearing the new name onto the tan roofs and the rusted doors of each Humvee. Neither man nor machine appeared altogether prepared for the task ahead.
We arrived at the DAC building in the same way that the unit before us had. Our Humvees parked in the same spots. The soldiers executed the search of the building and commanded the roof as if they had done it for years. The only person who seemed unsure of his role was me. I held my outward demeanor as confidently as I could, but my commander had issued me the strict order to confront the council members about the aggression and to try to gain as much information as possible. I did not know how to do that.
As I entered the DAC hall, Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad were already seated, as were five men who looked distinctly different from those who had attended the previous meeting with my counterpart and me. In the earlier meeting, the council members had been dressed in Western-style suits. Poorly made and ill-fitting, but suits nonetheless. Here, for the first time, I was confronted by a group of men in typical conservative Arab dress. Each of them wore the white dishdasha robe, sharply contrasting with his dark skin. Their heads were shrouded in the black-and-white kiffeyeh headdress and crowned with a ropelike ring.
They remained impassive as I entered, save for a few muttered “Salaam melekums,” said more as a habit than as a true offering of peace. During introductory remarks, I studied their faces for the first time, comparing them to a sheet with each person’s name and photo. Their emotions remained folded inside their heavily creased faces, creating an aura of silent defiance and steadfast resistance.
These council members were decidedly more religious. Each member obsessively twirled a small beaded rope, akin to the Catholic rosary, with each of the ninety-nine beads meant to represent a different name of Allah. The subah, flicked from wrists and twirled between fingers, created a constant whir of subconscious prayer just above the table. Further signifying their religious orientation, each subah was trimmed in green, the favorite color of the Prophet Muhammad and a sign of the Shi’a faith. We had entered the holy month of Arba’een, and Muqtada Al-Sadr was constantly urging the Shi’a people to assert themselves after years of repression under Saddam. His calls to action contrasted starkly with those of an older, much more senior Shi’a leader, Ayatollah Sistani. Sistani had adopted a more moderate tone, issuing declarations from the holy city of Najaf to be patient and let negotiations with the new government and the Americans run their course. The council members all openly claimed to support Sistani, but the marked increase of Al-Sadr posters in and around the DAC building revealed an inclination to more martial action. One could hardly enter a Shi’a neighborhood without seeing the snarling face of Sadr or the stylized montage of burning Humvees and insurgent fighters that rallied the Shi’a faithful to action.
I paid close attention to the man who seemed to command the most respect from the rest of the council. It was not Sami, the lawyer elected as the chairman, although he was the only formally educated man among them. It was the one referred to as “Sheik” and reverently addressed even in moments of dissension. With a raised eyebrow, he could silence an argument or use a simple hand gesture to start heads bobbing in accord. He was an obvious power broker, precisely because he lacked both education and a government title. Said Mallek, alternately Sheik Mallek, would never have been considered by the Green Zone an important person, but here in the streets, he was royalty. Somehow, I would need to learn from him and look for opportunities to gain his trust.
After a few minutes of remaining silent, I began the meeting with an account of last night’s ambush and the number of anti-American posters that were springing up in their neighborhood. Studiously, several of the council members asserted the absurd statement that they had not noticed the posters or even heard the firefight. Simultaneously, others began to explain why the people felt this animosity. They had ideas for remedies, carefully calculated around the military rotation. No doubt, some of these ideas had been previously ignored by our predecessors, but now was the time to ask again.
Their demands, peppered between hollow apologies and self-effacing comments, concentrated on three specific plans of action: security, social services, and employment. The first and most important item was security. They wanted to hire “neighborhood watchmen,” Iraqi men from the neighborhood, who would be authorized to carry AK-47s to “guard” the neighborhood against incursions from other Iraqis and insurgents. Second, they requested that the military fund a social-service program to remove the trash and take action to restore and improve the sewer system, because the poisonous air from smoldering trash and standing sewage made them sick. Finally, they each had a contractor, often a relative, who would be perfect for any of the aforementioned jobs. By hiring local contractors who employed local labor, the joblessness and listlessness now plaguing the population would dissipate. According to the council members, this would leave fewer people with sufficient frustration to answer the calls to violence and resistance.
These projects would be opportunities for us to distinguish ourselves from Saddam. We could show an equality of effort with respect to social services that had not existed previously. The mechanism, of course, would be the contracts flowing from the CERP money. During the transition, I had learned that we would have approval to grant projects up to $5,000 with only my commander’s signature, and considerably higher sums were possible with a higher level of authority. My commander decided that in order to be most efficient with his time and to give me some true negotiating power, I would decide which projects were worthy and which were not by using the council to offer ideas and contractors for consideration. This seemed like an arbitrary process, and it certainly was. The quality of the work was almost irrelevant. What carried greater weight was the effect on the community and the credit it gave us for addressing a perceived social injustice.
The council members were well aware of these criteria. While these pleas came flying in, the interpreters worked nonstop, sometimes translating directly, other times holding side conversations. I suspected in these moments that the interpreters negotiated a piece of the contract for themselves. I had little say in these sidebars and justified my nonparticipation by assessing the body language of the council members and the interpreters. Invariably, the conversation turned back toward me when there was a pressing need that I could address. In this meeting, the need was the same as it had been for my counterpart.
“They want to know about weapon cards,” Ali said.
The change in military regime necessitated an updating of the identification badges and the weapon registrations for DAC members. The council members keenly anticipated a new badge with the First Cavalry Division emblem and my signature. My commander had ordered our soldiers to disregard the older badges from a hodgepodge of units that had passed through prior to us. At a maximum, the units before us had spent six months in the area, leaving a littered trail of authorizations and paperwork that was impossible for us to decipher, but that the Iraqis prized as much as a certificate from Saddam himself. In some ways, their expectations and opinions with respect to the paperwork and the badging illustrated the degree to which government preference played a large role in the previous regime. A letter, a badge, or a token from Saddam represented being part of a chosen class. It meant immunity from civil law and boosted one’s social stature. Although our badges did not mean much, even to us they connoted a certain faith by the badge-holder in the ruling American regime.
“The new badges will be out in a week or so,” I answered, really just guessing.
There was no central authority for this process. As long as I could find a computer printer that worked, I could make all of the badges they wanted. To me, the process seemed like a waste of time, printing and distributing paper that carried only sentimental power. Yet watching these members clamor about the possibility of receiving new badges, especially in contrast to their otherwise stoic demeanor, I began to see the possibilities. Napoleon, who was as masterful as anyone at identifying what drives humans to action, allegedly once said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Indeed, the U.S. Army was adept at imbuing certificates with authority and meaning and urging people to act in accordance with the promise of a colored ribbon or two. Saddam had done likewise, investing little money in the trinkets that people saw as omnipotent. Now it was my turn. With a Microsoft program and a digital camera, I could begin to establish a social hierarchy in a society that had become atomized.
“And the pistols?”
The two went hand in hand, badges and pistols. Like my counterpart, I had access to a number of weapons that could be dispensed for any reason. At the moment, I did not have any reason to give one out, although I had a Russian-made AK-47 that would be a handsome gift. I had already decided to give it to Said Mallek as a conversation starter.
I answered their eager questions with a planned air of agitation and impatience: “I will think about it.”
The meeting had already gone on for an hour, and my only accomplishment had been listening to a laundry list of projects that would make everyone’s life better. I still had not received any real information from the council members about the previous night’s attack. This was not the forum for threats, but I could sense after an hour that real business would not be conducted here. This meeting was for show and for the encouraging reports to my superiors that Iraqis believed in this system. This circle of Iraqi cooperation represented a wishing well where council members showed up and deposited their wishes, and sometimes a benevolent spirit, in the form of myself, considered the offer or bestowed a gift on them.
I mentioned to Ali to grab Said Mallek on the way out and take him somewhere private, and then I asked everyone else to leave. He and Said Mallek left together, while the remainder of the council members clustered with Sa’ad and Ammar, ostensibly trying to gather more information about this new authority figure in their lives. Who was this Captain Jason Whiteley, and what did he mean to them? I know this was the most pressing question because it was the one I kept asking myself.
Through the clusters of postmeeting huddles, I walked briskly to the Humvee to retrieve the Russian AK-47. To the uninitiated, all of these iconic assault rifles look the same, but there is a wide variance in quality. There are versions manufactured by most of the former Soviet satellite countries and China, but the Russian model remains the most reliable, the best built, and, it is important to note, the most expensive. In Baghdad, ordinary AK-47s were sold in the market for $50, but a Russian model would command upward of $150. My presenting the rifle to Said Mallek, whether he kept it or sold it, would essentially give him a vote of support that would indicate his relative value to his peers.
As I removed the weapon from the Humvee, the guards and a few loitering council members descended on me like wolves on a wounded rabbit. Even from forty yards away, they could tell that this was a Russian model. A lifetime of observing and handling these weapons gave them a keen eye for the details that even I lacked. Within seconds, outstretched hands surrounded me, voices tangled together in competing pleas of excitement and desire. I had never seen grown men so worked up. This scene was more typical of a Christmas Day toy giveaway than a conclusion of a council meeting. Immediately, I put the weapon back in the Humvee, hardly silencing the crowd.
Ammar was pushing his way to my side, swearing and shoving council members. Slowly, the situation returned to normal, as I repeatedly assured them that the rifle was not for sale, that it was for my personal use, and that there were more to come later. These were all lies. On this first day, I had not yet realized the power that I could wield by blatantly displaying my prejudice toward one council member or another. I still lacked the personal confidence to assert myself so arbitrarily; I somehow valued the more American inclination to objectivity. That would not last long. Even as I pushed my way back toward the DAC building, I could sense a certain level of agitation and helplessness. They wanted too much. They did not want to help themselves and were always demanding. I felt like a parent, watching over dozens of bratty children. I began to understand the clichéd parental reasoning of “because I said so,” and I could sense the attraction of a paternalistic government. In these times, the government of “I said so” definitely had more appeal than the government of “What would you like?”
Back in the DAC, I found Said Mallek and Ali in the mosque room, quietly talking.
“Hello,” Said Mallek said in English, momentarily stunning me.
“You speak English?” I asked incredulously.
There was obviously more complexity to this man than I had suspected. With his eyes twinkling, Said Mallek did not answer the question directly but rather began what almost sounded like a rehearsed speech. His points each hammered home the fundamental weaknesses of the current American governance approach. In an even voice, he explained the challenges that the Iraqi people now faced and the barriers to American “success” now and in the future, but his best points were the ones well known in tea houses throughout the Middle East. The coalition forces had raced to Baghdad with stunning ease. The air campaign—“shock and awe”—had relentlessly touted its efficiency at preserving some buildings and destroying others. The facts of Iraq’s infrastructure scheme, down to the locations of gas stations and power plants, had even been broadcast by Western news media. Yet six months after the invasion, people were still without water, electricity, sanitation services, and civil police. Looters had destroyed precious artifacts, and street gangs now terrorized formerly safe neighborhoods. From the Iraqi perspective, the state of affairs had been much better under Saddam. Less free, perhaps, but if freedom meant a daily struggle to survive, then stability and security would be preferred. At least Saddam provided that.
The more damaging observation was the perception that America and the U.S. military knew all of this and had allowed it to happen. Said Mallek referenced a hurricane hitting Miami as an example of the typical American response to an unplanned disaster. He illustrated the difference. Without knowing the magnitude of damage to expect from the hurricane or even its precise land fall, the United States had the capability to restore essential services within days, efficiently importing generators and potable water machines to fill the gap, while the city regained its footing. If the United States knew everything about Iraq before the invasion, then why not bring more generators, more water machines? Why did Americans disband the army and the police, only to watch the city descend into lawlessness? In short, how could we say we knew everything about Iraq, on the one hand, and that we did not expect any of these things, on the other?
The AK-47 resting in my truck seemed insignificant in the face of this withering dissertation on the perception of the American occupation. For months I had repeatedly read words like “liberation,” “freedom,” and “democracy” and believed that there was at last some truth to those words, some substance to those ideals. Those thoughts washed away within minutes, as I processed what Said Mallek said. While I did not agree with his assessment of everything—namely, that the consequences of the invasion had been intentional—I definitely saw his point. I understood immediately that this message—this version of reality—would move the population to action. This was an easier sell than the current calls from the American interim government for patience and the lofty goals that this long, painful birthing promised to deliver. The Iraqi people did not want to wait for these ideals handed down from an interim occupier that had demonstrated such little competency to date. They wanted accountability and results.
My face must have reflected my revelation because I think I caught a slight smile on Said Mallek’s lips as he turned to leave. No doubt, he was masterful at persuading people and turning them to his cause. I was more resolved than ever to learn this way of thinking and prove that the American presence here could deliver results. I hurriedly went after him and stopped him just short of the Humvee. I thanked him for his time and reached into the Humvee to hand over the AK-47. Without even extending a hand, he rejected the offer.
“I have enough of those,” he said plainly, in English. Then he added, “Bye-bye.”
My pride was more than a little hurt. I felt as if I had misplayed my hand and telegraphed that I already respected him too much. Ali appeared and eagerly took the weapon. As he examined it, I asked what I should do.
“Wait,” he said. “Things happen slower here, and the timing is not right yet to do anything.”
I sank back into the Humvee, and the soldiers filed back into their respective trucks. I thought about the meeting and the subsequent conversations. In one moment I knew what I had to do, and then I didn’t know anything. I was so lost in these thoughts that I did not even notice until we were leaving the gate that Ali had walked off with the AK-47. From the rearview mirror, I saw him showing it to another guard and then handing it over.
“He probably just sold it,” I thought, caring a lot less than I thought I would. All in all, my first day in charge had left me feeling fully exploited, and I had nothing to show for it. This was not a very auspicious beginning to my grand plan.
The month of March passed quickly into chaos. In late April the council meetings were suspended while Arba’een rituals and processions took place. The height of this religious zeal, which included pilgrims marching through the streets and beating themselves until they bled, coincided with a Coalition Provisional Authority decision to reexamine the power distribution in the provisional government. Early promises of a simple majority rule to the Shi’a were being overturned by a more complex system of vetoes and minority overrides that were difficult to explain to the layperson and signaled an additional obstruction to their accumulation of political power. This perceived reversal of an American promise reverberated through the Shi’a community, which was already riled up from the commemoration of centuries-old injustices.
My relationship with the Shi’a council members had improved more quickly than my relationship with their Sunni counterparts did. I keenly empathized with the Shi’a struggle to balance their potential for righting ancient wrongs with a more equitable approach to a power-sharing government. For the most part, the Sunni council members saw all of this as a defeat. Their power had been absolute prior to the invasion, and any agreement, whether it was simple majority rule or a more complex system of vetoes that preserved minority interests, meant ceding bundles of rights that they had previously enjoyed. The Sunni meetings were sullen and unenthusiastic. Their allegiance remained with the previous regime, and they were not willing to even entertain the idea that the American occupation was anything other than transitory—a passing blemish on decades of Sunni dominance.
During the previous weeks, I had grown more keenly aware of this division and found myself focusing on areas where my efforts were best received. Feeling pretty good about how I could perceive the events unfolding around me and growing confident about my ability to see around corners, I walked nonchalantly into the office of the battalion’s executive officer, a major I had known for years.
“If you do that again, you will be court-martialed,” the major said succinctly.
“Sir, I do not understand.”
Both of us being West Point graduates, I had defaulted into one of the four authorized responses for underclassmen at the Military Academy: “Yes, sir”; “No, sir”; “No excuse, sir”; and “Sir, I do not understand.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“If you contact your ex-wife again via e-mail, phone, or any other means, you will be court-martialed for violating a direct order. Do you understand?” His voice was as hard as stone.
I stared blankly back at him. We had known each other for years; we had hunted together, and our wives were friends. I could sense that he felt some empathy, but he had no choice. When we arrived in Iraq, he had ordered me to cease all contact, but I had sent an e-mail asking whether she was okay. I guess she must have told his wife.
“Yes, sir. No excuse, sir.”
Two more automatic responses flew from my lips without a second’s hesitation. But there is an excuse, a voice screamed inside me. Every day I saw people destitute and risked my life to make their lives marginally better. Was I not entitled to at least reach out to my exwife, in these moments of gratitude for the life I had, and express my feelings of reconciliation? I could negotiate on behalf of the United States for projects that fundamentally affected the daily lives of thousands of people, but could I not negotiate on my own behalf with a woman to whom I had been married a few months earlier?
I was not alone in this situation. Each night the trailer that housed a bank of free phones to call the United States filled with soldiers waiting to call home. From the open booths, you could hear the longing, the fighting, the pleading, and the despair as families struggled to remain intact amid a ferocious uncertainty. The tears shed into those phones in the middle of a combat zone did more damage to the morale of the soldiers than anything the insurgency could muster. Each night these soldiers came together to be alone with their loved ones, in the company of others sharing the same pain. It was a pain of loss and sorrow that we all shared, but this never made the heaviness feel any lighter.
That evening I climbed to the roof of our headquarters building and settled myself among the forest of antennae to watch the sunset. The building, like the people in the surrounding neighborhood, had spent much of its earlier life serving as part of the Iraqi army. The peeling paint and the rotting sandbags still held painted remnants of Iraqi heraldry, although our own soldiers were applying new paint and our own symbols at a rapid clip. Like a complicated game of “capture the flag,” the former Iraqi base rapidly turned from a Saddam-themed red, white, and black to a patriotic American red, white, and blue. The new colors underscored that the victor was in residence, although the underlying structure still sagged with a certain sadness.
Next door, the heavy breath of the forklift’s diesel engine burped and sputtered constantly, as an endless flow of contractors and fatigued soldiers futilely worked to empty an ever-replenished warehouse. Convoys of tractor-trailers circled the base like mother birds waiting to vomit their contents to the swarming mass of squawking workmen before returning to find more goods at the port. The army, long ridiculed for equipping soldiers with outdated materiel, was currently diverting attention from media reports of armor shortages with these warehouses of excess equipment. The construction of new dormitories and dining facilities was nonstop. Newly built plywood and cinder-block buildings sprung up daily. Phone centers, recreation rooms, and hot food all served as markers of American logistical triumph. Holes were pounded into walls to make room for additional generators and equipment, while every building grew new annexes and additions to accommodate the comforts freshly imported from America.
The aged buildings groaned their reluctance to be part of the torrent of transformation. The straining beams, the creaking floors, and the bulging walls, fresh paint and all, threatened to collapse on the ambitious renovation. The slap of metal drills into concrete walls sent shivers throughout the building with the same metallic rasp that issued from the rounds chambering in the machine guns on the watchtowers.
Beyond the towers, cars sped past the outer wall of the base, using the dirt on either side of the two-lane highway to their advantage. Racing and weaving through the chaotic exodus that left the city before dark, the writhing mass of machines and people more closely resembled a flight for survival than an evening commute. These were the “moderate Arabs,” as the United States had stridently assured us during our training. Iraqis had been described, in the sparse training pamphlets and during the country overviews given by various intelligence agencies, as being well educated but in desperate need of a liberalizing influence. Iraqis were also heralded as “modern,” another label that Americans used so frequently that it became meaningless.
With the same gusto that was currently being applied to renovating our base, the American plan for Iraq included programs to put women in school and establish civic organizations. A myriad of programs were designed to encourage broad social participation in the new government. There were promises of elections, of new power grids that would deliver electricity to everyone twenty-four hours a day, and of schools that had computers. Above all, there was talk of “the freedom.” Any time these plans for progress became mired in details or slid off schedule, the reason was always that the pursuit of “the freedom” can take a long time. Iraqis had no experience with freedom, but they had come to appreciate the efficiency and routine that Saddam provided. This current move, chaotic as it was, did not suit them, regardless of the freedom that it symbolized. Nonetheless, the American bureaucrats were minting new plans by the minute for Iraq, and the makeover of the Iraqi populace was under way. Beyond closed doors, the triumphant American vision defaulted to an answer that was more paternalistic than progressive. Whether they wanted it or not, the buildings and the people would suffer the American vision and become “modern.”
At this time in spring 2004, the army and the politicians still believed that the insurgents were a passing phenomenon or remnants of Saddam’s loyalists. It would be months before they realized how widespread the insurgency was and how embedded in the population the distrust of the occupation was in these early days. The negativity from the Iraqi people flowed from their reaction to our heavy-handed attempt to “modernize” their society. There was also a basic human aversion to the disruption in their daily routines, which brought them to a state of rage with greater frequency than anything ideological could. Left in complete social upheaval, with little or no sense of order, Iraqi society had rapidly devolved to a more basic existence. The civic void left people gasping for answers and looking for any vestige of their old ways and their cultural identity. People clung to anything that reminded them of a more stable past. Flailing against the tide of change and drowning in the wave of new development, many Iraqis crashed back into the one pillar of stability that they still had and that they still knew: the mosque.
The daily trek to the call of the city’s numerous minarets was one of the few routines left intact, and that sense of permanence pulled in increasing numbers of disgruntled followers. Certainly, being thrust into an unknown and unstable world may prompt humankind to seek a higher being for guidance and relief. That much I understood. If many Iraqis had been secular when we invaded, they were fervently religious now. Yet my question had always been why this happens.
The answer seemed obvious, as I dwelled on the realization that I was powerless to control even my own emotions. Like most humans, I relied on a certain order that is deeply embedded in our culture. From the rhythmic beating of our hearts to the precise keeping of birth and death records, our society memorializes patterns and abhors disruption. The mere completion of an arbitrary time interval, such as a birthday or an anniversary, is celebrated with abandon and enshrined as a successful passage of time. Time circumscribes and defines the human experience. Almost universally, prisoners in solitary confinement, soldiers on deployment, and homesick college freshmen record their days away from normalcy with hard-scratched hash marks on cell walls, pencil marks on duffel bags, or reminders in Microsoft Outlook. Human beings constantly seek routines based on our past, and no place is a safe refuge from these thoughts. Even the latrines in the headquarters had a running tally of days until the next unit would arrive, and we would go home. Our awareness of time and our ability to divide it and measure it separate us from animals and make us masters of our fate. Clocks, calendars, and church bells all serve as monuments to mankind’s triumphant rise above the arbitrary chaos of nature.
The invasion had taken that control away from the Iraqis in the same way that I had just been summarily stripped of my power to express my feelings. There were no more jobs, the Iraqi army had been disbanded, and martial law arbitrarily declared curfews and closed stores. American and coalition checkpoints whimsically sprouted up between Iraqis and their homes with no notice, sometimes forcing people to stay away from their families while their homes were searched.
In this whirlwind of uncertainty, the one voice that was constant sang from the minarets, which stood as sentinels observing and ensuring that the passage of time was properly brought to the forefront of the Baghdad con sciousness. I, too, watched and listened and found myself comforted by the muezzins’ call to prayer. It was one of the few remnants of order in post-invasion Baghdad society. The mosque watched patiently as society disintegrated around it. After all, it was only a matter of time until the Iraqi people, with their lives torn apart, would look up in desperation and find a new compass. Even as a non-Muslim, I found it comforting to look at the towers and imagine that they truly represented a gateway to redemption.
From my sandbagged perch among a forest of radio antennae and satellite dishes, I sat listening to the evening call to prayer. Although at first the sounds had struck me as guttural, an almost painful cry, I now found a peace in the cadence and punctuality of the ritual summons. I relished the calls with the same eagerness that I had once waiting for the chime of my family’s grandfather clock. At first, the bells routinely disrupted my sleep in quarter-hour intervals. Eventually, I took comfort in their predictability and stability and would wake from a sound sleep if they failed to ring at an appointed time. My subconscious mind and, I think, that of almost everyone, seems to crave the order and predictability of a routine, especially if the routine promises a chance to assert control over one’s own life.