Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man . . .
—Henry Adams
The Americans cared for the Green Zone like a prisoner tidies his cell. As the insurgency gathered force throughout 2005, the true enemy was not some inchoate militia but unpredictability. And so we did our best to make things predictable. We hired fleets of Iraqis to banish the dust each morning from our tiles, sheets, windows, and toilets, and then once again in the afternoon. Pizza Express and Burger King served up grease and cheese to absorb the hangover from the previous night. We hired a French chef who emailed the cafeteria menu each morning: potage Saint-Germain, grilled steak with herbs, batter-fried sole fillet, gratin potato dauphinoise. Iraqi chauffeurs drove us to and from the Bunker Bar, where the bartender was required to ask if you were packing before he poured. The embassy ran three-on-three basketball tournaments in the parking lot behind the palace and announced theme days to boost morale. This Friday: Talk Like a Pirate Day!
But every now and then, the war on the other side of the concrete would open its maw and spew forth some aged mortars or indirect AK-47 rounds and ruin a perfectly good party. So the blast walls grew taller, the parties moved indoors, and the checkpoints multiplied. We paid exorbitant sums to a security firm to produce a daily Safe Report, which lassoed the horrors outside—severed limbs, demolished convoys, exploded marketplaces—into neat charts analyzing thirty-day trend lines and forty-eight-hour “activity levels.” We learned that “the number of incidents in Baghdad yesterday fell slightly (from 15 to 14). There were only three VBIEDs, vehicle-borne IEDs, compared to four the day before. Yesterday’s activity accounted for 18% of the Iraq total (from 17% the day before).” We nodded knowingly, but we secretly knew nothing.
My friends and I found ways to make the Green Zone our own. Late at night on March 15, the eve of the first session of Iraq’s Transitional National Assembly—the precursor to its first parliament—several friends and I piled into a USAID van and headed over to the convention center on the edge of the Green Zone. I had heard rumors of a Steinway concert grand piano in the assembly hall where the TNA would meet, but my previous attempts to get in had been stymied by overzealous Gurkhas guarding the entrance. This time, though, I slipped a twenty into the guard’s palm, and he ushered us in. Inside, Iraqis were at work hanging a massive banner over the stage emblazoned with an excerpt from the Quran that extolled the virtues of consultation and cooperation. They shrugged when I asked nervously if I could play the piano, which was hiding behind the main stage curtain. My friends piled into the front-row seats designated for the prime minister and the president while I worked through blues and boogie standards by Fats Waller and Albert Ammons. On the way back to the compound, a friend likened the night to a group of Brits goofing around in Independence Hall in 1787, and I laughed guiltily. When CNN and Al-Jazeera gushed out reports on the opening session the following morning, the legs of the Steinway peeked from below the backdrop like a partly exposed secret.
Our world was gray and etiolating, domed with blast roofs and walled with concrete, made frigid by industrial air-conditioning, and in the alleys of our pale blue cubicles we pecked out reports for headquarters and called contractors who were sealed away in another compound a block over. On our computer desktops we kept our copy of the ubiquitous BaghdadDonut.xls file, in which a doughnut-shaped progress bar reflected how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds you’d been in Iraq and how many months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds before you could board the Rhino Runner, a steel-reinforced armored bus, back to the airport.
Yaghdan and I became friends, a friendship limited by his departure from the compound each day at five. We weren’t able to socialize after work; I didn’t know where he lived, and only knew Haifa’s name. But in the kiln of the summer heat, he often showed up an hour early to rest his eyes in USAID’s air-conditioned building. He had been working with the Americans for nearly a year, and his job brought him into the nerve center of the reconstruction efforts. In the chilled air of the cafeteria, he told me his work in the agency’s education office was fulfilling but that it felt peripheral to Iraq’s primary need, which was electricity.
Back in August 2003, when Yaghdan was recuperating from the gunshot wound, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s viceroy, Paul Bremer, broadcast a message to the people of Iraq: “About one year from now, for the first time in history, every Iraqi in every city, town, and village will have as much electricity as he or she can use; and he will have it twenty-four hours a day, every single day.” This was meant as a rebuke of the electricity policy of Saddam Hussein, in which power produced in the Kurdish north and the Shi’a south was routed to benefit the Sunni center of Baghdad; now everyone would be expected to share. But as soon as USAID engineers repaired the 400-kilovolt transmission line connecting the grid in the southern provinces to the Sunni heartland, Shi’a plant managers in the south dispatched employees to blow it up. So long as the line was inoperable, Basrah and other Shi’a cities couldn’t be asked to share and would enjoy the benefits of full power.
And so when the brutal summer of 2005 baked in, with temperatures consistently approaching 120 degrees, only a few hours of electricity flickered through Baghdad’s grid each day. No water flowed from the faucets, forcing many to dig crude wells in their backyards to drink and bathe in the fetid groundwater. Water-borne illness spread, along with infant mortality due to conditions such as diarrhea.
Our well-fueled arsenal of Green Zone generators kept our power steady and water pure, insulating us from the only metric that counted: the number of hours of electricity each day, the truest barometer of violence and insurgency. Without power, businesses couldn’t stay open past sundown, newborn babies couldn’t be incubated at hospitals, schoolchildren couldn’t find relief from the heat during class, and, most important, other essential services, such as water treatment plants, couldn’t operate. Throughout the country, local entrepreneurs purchased medium-sized generators and sold access to a meager current of electricity: enough for a small fan but not a refrigerator. Before long, messily bundled arteries of makeshift power lines were everywhere. I backbenched a meeting at the palace in which military officers pleaded for speedier progress on electrical projects: they were tired of sweeping up bodies each morning of Iraqis who had electrocuted themselves trying to tap into the informal grid of generators.
As the war trundled along, many Iraqis began to see the American failure to restore power as something deliberate, part of a plan. How else could one explain why the superpower’s helicopters never ferried in generators? The Iraqis’ disbelief turned to anger and a rapidly winnowing trust in the motives of the occupying American troops.
Soon after I arrived, I was invited to an ornate conference room in the palace for a weekly meeting with a council of public affairs “professionals” representing the State Department, the military, IRMO, PCO, USACE, and other acronyms I hadn’t yet deciphered. On the wall was a large indentation that once held a portrait of Saddam Hussein. In its place hung a satellite map of Fallujah.
The chair of the meeting, a State Department official, started with an exclamation: “Goddamit, we need to show the world that we are making progress on the power and water!”
The public affairs working group in the embassy wanted to deliver some good news about America’s progress in the power sector, and since USAID was in charge of nearly $3 billion dedicated to electrical generation under a contract with Bechtel, I needed to find a project to showcase. Back at the compound, I wandered into the Infrastructure Office in search of the tough but jovial Texan named Dick Dumford. He cleared some papers from a chair by his desk and swung it around for me. “Whaddya wanna know, kiddo?” he barked. Above his desk was a massive poster of a Siemens V94 turbine generator. I pointed to it and asked, “What’s that?”
“That’s MOAG!” he cried. “The Mother of All Generators!”
The V94 was purchased for around $50 million in 2003. With a weight of seven hundred tons, it could not be flown in by helicopter: the generator was so fragile that it could be transported only on a special 120-tire truck at a maximum rate of five miles per hour. When USAID purchased it, the V94 was at the Syrian port of Tartous, and plans were made to construct a $178 million power plant in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. A base camp was created, and a housing structure for MOAG and its transformers were installed. All that remained was the generator.
The generator truck reached the Tishrin Dam on a bend in the Euphrates east of Aleppo. When the US government imposed sanctions on the Syrian government, Damascus responded by refusing to let the generator cross the dam. USAID made the decision to reroute the V94 through Jordan and then through Iraq’s volatile Anbar Province, adding months of delays.
For most of 2004 and early 2005, the generator sat near the Jordan-Iraq border, costing USAID $20,000 each day to hire a security firm to protect it. In order to bring it to the base camp (which also cost USAID dearly to protect), the agency needed to transport the generator through the most violent geography of Iraq, but before that could happen, roads needed to be repaved and low-hanging power lines had to be cleared away. The steel girders sent out by the agency to reinforce a bridge were stolen before they could be affixed. A single Kalashnikov round could ruin the entire generator.
When the convoy finally moved, it was heralded as the single largest troop movement in Iraq since the invasion. Three hundred marines and private security contractors accompanied it, supported by Cobra attack helicopters. Weeks after it crossed into Iraq, two years behind schedule, and tens of millions of dollars over budget, the Mother of All Generators arrived in Kirkuk.
By one count, the amount of money spent on the security firm to protect it nearly equaled the cost of the generator itself. For the same amount, USAID could have purchased scores of smaller generators and had them inside Iraq within weeks, but these don’t provide as dramatic a ribbon-cutting ceremony. In the end, MOAG would theoretically add only 6 percent to Iraq’s battered and besieged electrical grid.
I flew up to Kirkuk with a handful of Iraqi and American journalists as part of the public affairs campaign to “create a new narrative” about the progress of the reconstruction. We swept low in our Blackhawk, slinking beneath telephone lines and scattering camels and sheep. There was no designated landing zone when we arrived, so the chopper hovered indecisively for a minute before setting down on the middle of a road a mile away. Gunners hopped out and raised their rifles at the cars now backed up in either direction.
Two armored SUVs hurtled out of the plant, churning up a wake of dust as they jostled across the field toward us. A short man in wraparound Oakley shades with a machine gun emerged from the passenger door of the lead car and shouted, “Which one of you is USAID?!” I raised my hand and was swiftly deposited into the back of the SUV with a protection security detail (PSD) team, which sped off, leaving the journalists behind on the baking road.
Mack the driver used his turn signal even though every car pulled off to the side of the road at the first sight of us. Riding shotgun with a Colt rifle, a South African sat nearly sideways in his seat with his weapon at the ready. Everything on the road elicited a warning over his mic to the backup vehicle trailing us.
“Parked. Five hundred meters.”
“Parked, door open. Three hundred meters.”
“Carcass. One hundred meters.”
“Two trucks merging left. Two hundred meters.”
“Donkey crossing upcoming bridge.”
We roared into the Kirkuk power plant. Before I could open the door, a private security detail materialized by the window. When I stepped out, he said, “Please stay close.” Four other mercenaries formed a circle around me. I stood there, confused. After a few beats, I started walking toward the rickety bus that had been dispatched to collect the angered journalists, and the covey of PSDs moved fluidly with me. “Pacing west,” I heard in the earpiece of the closest guard. When I stopped, they stopped. I tried to apologize to the journalists from within my protective halo but found it difficult with my guards’ rifles pointed at their kneecaps.
USAID’s manager of the Kirkuk power plant led the journalists on a tour like a carnival barker, reciting the dramatic story of MOAG’s journey. “Two hundred sixty megawatts! Seven hundred tons! Six hundred forty miles! Three hundred marines!” But the journalists, especially the Iraqis, knew that hardly any power came out of their outlets, MOAG or not.
What they didn’t know was that during the costly years of delay, nobody had bothered to train the Iraqi plant workers in the proper operation and maintenance of the state-of-the-art turbine. Within months of finally going online, the generator was broken. USAID quietly spent millions to bring in a Siemens repair team, which needed expensive private security while it worked on repairs.
A few puff pieces came out of the media junket, which surely cost the US government tens of thousands of dollars, factoring in the cost of mercenaries and the military’s Blackhawks. “Great stuff, guys, this is big!” the public affairs chief said excitedly in the next meeting at the embassy, holding up a printout of a short Washington Post article buried on page sixteen. My boss at USAID was thrilled with my work, and the mission director started to bring me along to high-level meetings.
The Iraqis on the other side of our blast walls didn’t appear to have read the article. The insurgency worsened as the power plants sputtered.
Yaghdan picked his way along the crumbling, trash-strewn sidewalks of his neighborhood, periodically stopping to take in the changes. Boarded-up windows, char marks, and rubble. The August sun ovened out molten light so intense that the frames of his glasses grew hot. For the first time, he thought seriously about quitting his job with the Americans.
In the beginning, Yaghdan thought that the world inside the Green Zone would eventually lose its blast walls and expand to cover all of Iraq. When he first set foot in the buzzing fortress of the Green Zone, Yaghdan thought, This is what American life looks like! This is what they want Iraq to look like. This is how comfortable it’s going to be if we continue working hard.
He and his colleagues made the decision to work for USAID during the innocent early days of the war, when those who stepped forward as informal interpreters were thanked by their neighbors who had no other means of communicating with the Americans. Back then, their sense of optimism allowed them to overlook the daily indignities of working beneath the Americans. In his first week on the job, a mortar traced a parabola into the USAID compound as Yaghdan and his boss walked toward the cafeteria. They both dove to the ground; only she was wearing armor. That made him uncomfortable, but the work was too important to make a fuss over a helmet and a flak jacket. Yasser, a brilliant Iraqi in the procurement office who was prone to quoting Shakespeare if anyone bothered to talk with him, spent hours each week scouring dangerous neighborhoods in search of a particular type of low-fat strawberry yogurt for his American boss, who disliked the cafeteria brand that was trucked in from Kuwait by KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary managing billions of dollars’ worth of contracts for logistics support for the US military. Tara, an Iraqi woman from Sadr City working to help USAID refurbish health care clinics, was too polite to register her disgust when a semiferal Iraqi cat taken in by her boss would jump up on her lap while she worked at her desk.
In April 2004, 60 Minutes II ran a report detailing the extensive use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. By the end of the first year of the occupation, whatever goodwill America had earned by toppling Saddam Hussein had been squandered on a spree of endless checkpoints, wrongful detention, incompetent reconstruction efforts, and now torture. Before long, a stigma germinated and surrounded the Iraqi “traitors” who worked alongside the Americans.
Instead of spreading across Iraq as Yaghdan once dreamt, the Green Zone contracted, a prison into which he and the others sneaked each morning. By 2005, their optimism was tattered. They were trapped: there was no hope of finding a job elsewhere if it ever became known they’d worked for the Americans.
But as their countrymen came to see them as traitors, we came to see them as possible insurgents. As the insurgency developed, American civilians ventured outside of the blast walls of the Green Zone less and less. The only part of the Red Zone that appeared each day, other than an occasional mortar, were Iraqis like Yaghdan, who looked more and more dangerous to the bunkered-in eyes of American civilians.
At some point in 2005, someone in the embassy filled out a requisition form for polygraph examination machines. Then someone drafted a policy memorandum requiring all Iraqis working for the United States in the Green Zone to submit to lie detector tests. Then somebody filled out a requisition form for a bomb residue spectrometer, which came with little fortune-cookie-sized slips of white paper that the Nepalese mercenaries guarding the AID compound rubbed on Yaghdan’s arms once he had finally made it past the militiamen searching for traitors like him at the outer checkpoints. The paper was fed into a slot in the machine, and a smiling man with a rifle stood in Yaghdan’s way until the large green light blinked.
Three months into his job, he emerged from a Green Zone checkpoint and found a white Opel idling, with two bearded men watching him. As he walked, it shifted into gear and trailed him. He sprinted up a narrow alley, hoping to lose the Opel, which had earned a reputation as an assassin’s car. He ran through his own streets like a fugitive, and then realized that his safest option was to return to the Green Zone, so he bolted down another alley toward the Assassins’ Gate and flashed his USAID badge at the guard. He emerged from another exit an hour later and sneaked home to Haifa.
He was promoted and assigned to the cubicle next to mine, managing a contract for the agency that examined USAID projects throughout the country and ensured quality. This gave him access to a sensitive database that listed the GPS coordinates of thousands of projects, an insurgent’s dream. He was proud of his position. He had reached a higher level of responsibility than all of his Iraqi colleagues and even some of the Americans. He felt valued, trusted by the agency.
Still, the indignities mounted. In the first week of his new position, he stepped outside the front gate of the USAID compound for about thirty seconds to greet and escort two American contractors who were reporting to him. They were waved through, while the guards rubbed the paper slips on his clothing to feed into the bomb residue machine; he had never stepped out of their sight. Frustrated though he was, he enjoyed the new job too much to resign over it.
Yaghdan left for work earlier and earlier each morning. He and other Iraqis like him were called spies by their countrymen during Friday sermons at mosques throughout Iraq, in newspaper editorials, and on television. Now, in order to get to work on time each morning, they had to act like spies. He carried a bag with different articles of clothing: a shemagh to wrap around his head, a hat, a light jacket, sunglasses. He changed his shape, wearing baggy clothes, grew and then shaved his beard, and hid his USAID and Green Zone access badges in his shoes. Although it would normally take only twenty minutes to head directly to the Green Zone, he took a bus in the opposite direction. And then another bus to a different neighborhood. And then a taxi, and another taxi. Every day, a different route: sometimes from his home in the Jihad neighborhood to Baya, and then from Baya to Bab al-Sharji, where he entered through the gate on the bridge. Or from Jihad to Nafaq Shurta, and then a bus to Allawi, and from Allawi to the Assassins’ Gate entrance.
But when the lie detector machine arrived in the compound, he’d had enough. Iraqis who had worked for the agency for years, since the first hours and days of the war, through mission director after mission director, through countless arrivals and departures of Americans, were summoned into a room with a polygraph machine and asked about their loyalties. Sometimes they were asked if they had ever had an affair or slept with someone of the same sex. One long-serving Iraqi emerged from the test with an armed guard behind him. He wasn’t permitted to gather his belongings at his desk before he was escorted out. Others resigned before submitting to the test. The security officers saw this as a confirmation of the polygraph machine’s value: it was weeding out untrustworthy Iraqis. Why else would they resign?
Even though he wanted to quit, Yaghdan knew he was bound by a contract that was inescapable and unalterable, penned in American English and signed at another time in another Iraq, one that was now at the bottom of a swamp of insurgency, wrongful detention, errant targeting, and an unholy marriage of mistrust and codependence. Despite the polygraphs, the bomb machines, the lack of body armor, the attempted assassinations of his Iraqi colleagues, he was wed to America and knew that it was not a marriage of equals. His unease climbed whenever the executive officer or someone else in management called him Mohammad.
In July 2005 Suhair, the friend who’d helped Yaghdan find the temporary job when he was recuperating from the shooting, hurried into the USAID compound and asked for a meeting with the mission director. She and her two sisters worked for the agency. The night before, someone pulled up to their home in a black BMW and unloaded several AK-47 clips, raking the walls and doors and windows with gunfire. Suhair and her family had been visiting friends, so when the armed men jumped over the fence and shot open the front door, they found no one inside. She came home to bullet slugs lodged in the walls of her living room and bedroom.
The mission director and the executive officer said there was nothing they could do to protect Suhair and her husband, who also worked for the agency. When she pushed them, they told her, “Your safety is not our responsibility.” She fled the country a few days later, and her sisters moved into different neighborhoods. Not long afterward, the home of another Iraqi, named Talal, was fired upon. Yaghdan never told Haifa about the Opel or Suhair or Talal or any of the other dangers. He didn’t want to scare her.
These dangers were known to US government officials. Iraqi employees requested special access badges which would allow them to enter the Green Zone more quickly, rather than waiting in long lines which were routinely sniped at by militants. Request denied. They asked for permission to move into the Green Zone so that they would have some security. Request denied.
In the fall of 2005, an internal State Department cable about the worsening situation for the LES—USGspeak for Locally Engaged Staff—was leaked to Al Kamen of the Washington Post: “Two of our LES employees have been gunned down in execution-style murders, and two others barely escaped a similar fate in August. Our LES employees live in fear of being identified with the Embassy of the U.S. . . . The reality is that the embassy can offer them little protection outside the International Zone (IZ) and is not in a position to grant their repeated requests to house them and their families within the IZ.”
Rather than divert any of the massive resources flooding the largest American embassy in the world to provide even a basic level of protection for its Iraqi employees, the US government came up with a different solution: hire Jordanians to do the Iraqis’ jobs. The complications with housing our Iraqi colleagues in the Green Zone did not apply to these new hires, as Jordanians, under the classification of Third Country Nationals, were permitted to live in the Green Zone.
I heard about the attack on Suhair’s house the morning she requested help from the mission director. We all gossiped about it in the cafeteria that day, and that was the end of it. I had an uneasy feeling about how the Iraqis were treated in the compound, but the news of her flight filtered into my mind in macro terms: Iraq was going to hell, and we weren’t doing a lot to stop its descent. I didn’t think much about what her situation meant in personal terms. Could USAID have done more to help her? How would she get to where she was going? After a few weeks, someone else had replaced her, and apart from an email bounced from her now-defunct agency address, her service faded from memory.
Four months into my work, my boss was fired. He had chased enough mortars with whiskey and slipped up, allowing T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times to poke around an unfinished water treatment plant without doing any advance work. (Such is the term for a public affairs officer’s scouting of a place to anticipate any potential scandals.) Miller found millions of dollars of unused parts and most of the plant absent or asleep. An embarrassing but accurate report about the total lack of operations and maintenance training that had contributed to MOAG’s swift demise appeared in April 2005, prompting a flurry of meetings within the agency with the pointless goal of damage control.
Management waited until my boss took a one-week R&R to Cairo to fire him. He didn’t find out until he arrived at the regional airport in Jordan and was told by the airline that he was no longer cleared to fly into Iraq. Iraqi maintenance workers were dispatched to his house in the compound with cardboard boxes, which were filled and shipped back to the United States. Someone tacked -ed onto his last name, which was then used as a verb for the act of firing someone while he’s on vacation, a much more clinical approach than a messy confrontation. Three months later, his replacement—my new boss—suffered the same fate, and his name became the new verb for a Baghdad-style termination. All of us were uneasy when scheduling our vacations.
People came and went. Some were fired, some simply finished their year. Some started to slip mentally from the stress of the workload or the environment and were allowed to return home. Every week, there was a hail-and-farewell party to welcome in the fresh blood and send off the old. Iraqis came and went, oftentimes without our knowledge. I shuffled around old Iraq Daily Updates and helped the mission director respond to taskers from Washington: “Urgent: the Administrator has a lunch with the Chaldean American Chamber of Commerce tomorrow. Please tell us how many Chaldean Christians have been helped by USAID projects, and describe the projects.” We dropped everything to write a response, a sentence of which would be lifted for a speech in front of grazing Chaldean businessmen. The mission director left, and another one came in. Nothing was permanent, just a flurry of booze and paperwork.
I had fun, made a lot of friends and threw a lot of parties. But after six months, a gnawing guilt settled in. Nothing I was doing resulted in anything of value. If I disappeared from the compound, another body would be assigned to my desk and move into my house within two weeks.
General George Casey, commanding general of all forces in Iraq, was coming to the USAID compound for a meeting. For weeks leading up to it, I was in charge of assembling the PowerPoint presentation that our mission director would deliver. In addition to providing an overview of the agency’s work in Iraq, the presentation had a not-so-subtle appeal for the general’s help with securing new funding for USAID, either from Congress or from the DOD’s own massive well of money. We had conference calls with Washington, debated and consulted and conferred on verb choice for a particular slide, and ran mock presentations. I spent bleary hours over many days tweaking the PowerPoint animations of sliding arrows that reflected the potential of “dramatically increased impacts” if further funding was received. I half believed the charts: maybe Sadr City really was just a hundred million dollars’ worth of projects away from raising American flags in appreciation.
In a planning meeting, the USAID management began to speak about the need to seek sustained funding for education programs. “You think the kids are bad now, wait and see how the insurgency looks after another decade of sporadic access to schooling!” I diligently took notes but then stared down at what I had written: “In ten years, more kids in insurgency.” My face clouded. We were supposed to be the good guys, and here we were casting five-year-olds as future insurgents and terrorists as a way to secure new funds.
A week later, General Casey walked into the newly constructed USAID building’s conference room, which doubled as our panic room. (In the event that the compound was overrun by insurgents, all Americans were to run into the conference room, which had a bombproof vault door that could not be opened from the outside. There wasn’t enough room for all of the Iraqi employees.) He was surprisingly short and traveled without a retinue; just a young soldier who sat next to him. He opened up a small day planner, the kind on sale at Staples, said, “Shoot!” and the mission director began her presentation. As rehearsed, I pressed the space bar to advance the slides and their animations. He scribbled a couple notes into his planner.
“This is great stuff, guys. Really impressive.” After the bromides, he volunteered an explanation of how he thought the situation in Iraq would play out. He drew a couple lines on a dry-erase board, reflecting troop levels and violence. He shook our hands and then left, and that was the last anyone in USAID heard from George Casey or his pot of money.
I had lost forty pounds within a few months of arriving, heading to the small gym in the compound most nights to try to burn off some of the stress, but it was no use. I wanted to leave.
“I’m having a bit of an existential crisis.”
I was sitting in the living room of the mission director’s home late one evening after the presentation to General Casey. I had sent an urgent note asking for a meeting.
“Oh yeah? What’s going on, Kirk?”
“Well, I’m not doing what I came here to do. I don’t want to be in the Green Zone anymore.”
I paused, and then said the line I had practiced on the way over: “I need to be out in the field, in one of the provinces, or else I’m going to head back to the States.”
She nodded and scoured my face for a few seconds before responding.
“Uh-huh. How’d you like to go to Fallujah?”
I blurted out, “Yeah, that sounds perfect,” without thinking or hesitating. She poured two glasses of wine. “Well, I don’t want an answer yet. This is a decision you need to sleep on. Tell me tomorrow.” We clinked our glasses.