Capture the kids, and we capture the future
—Saddam Hussein, 1977
In the heart of Fallujah lies an amusement park. The paint on the rides in Jolan Park is faded and chipped away. There is an aquatic-themed whirly-go-round. A ten-foot-tall octopus the color of moldering lime looms at the hub of the ride, extending his swirling tentacles outward over the small cars, which are made to look like severed heads of fish. They scowl as they bake under the Fallujah sun. A motorless Ferris wheel slumbers nearby, a monument now, its bucket seats piling up with years of dust.
Before the marines came, the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi held sway over Fallujah, and his fighters reportedly repurposed a cluster of maintenance shacks within the park into torture cells. A grove of trees once shaded the rides, but Fallujans cut them down for firewood while the marines laid siege. Splintered foot-tall stumps remain, dusted pikes stabbing up through dead soil.
The fighting was fierce in the amusement park when the marines carved their way through. The dead were held in the potato storage facility on the eastern outskirts of town. During the siege, the Fallujans ploughed the children’s soccer field into a burial site. When that filled up, they decided to convert the amusement park into a cemetery.
We have to win this war in Fallujah
One neighborhood at a time.
We’re going to do it on our terms,
On our timeline, and it will be overwhelming.
—Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt
In Fallujah, we fought upon the war’s most miserable plateau, on terrain shaped not by the metrics of insurgents killed or jobs created or schools built but by the raw and rootlike emotions of our primitive selves. In these nine square miles just west of Abu Ghraib, we fought for honor, against terror, and for the upper hand. We would do anything necessary to lug our matériel and forces and barbed wire, no matter the cost in treasure or youth. Amid a berserker fever of absurdity shimmered an omen: if Fallujah—this city the size of a middling American suburb, which a few months prior was completely unknown to every American citizen—was allowed to remain “in insurgent hands,” then the entire war would be lost. It was a city to be lashed and crushed and retina-scanned into obedience, and in the heights of Fallujah, America fought a savage fight.
The true benefit of the high ground is often misunderstood: its value is not moral superiority but rather the strategic advantage it confers for attacking those beneath you. And determining who had the high ground in Fallujah depended mostly upon where in the whole gory timeline you started. If you started with the assassination and burning of four Blackwater mercenaries on March 31, 2004, you might feel that the reeking maw of evil had just opened wide, and no amount of artillery was too much to pound it shut. If you began your timeline on April 28, 2003, when nervous soldiers fired upon a throng of civilians protesting the military’s occupation of a school, you might feel that the Americans were up to no good in Fallujah and needed to be kept out. If you started with the angered confusion of an eighteen-year-old from Ohio wounded by an IED, you might feel resentment at such a reception from people you thought you’d just liberated. If you squinted all the way back to the day the first of an endless convoy of American trucks appeared, straining under the weight of sixteen-foot slabs of concrete, which were unloaded not far from your front door to direct your movement as though you were Iraqi water in American pipes, you might wonder with a little bit of anger about the true intentions of your liberators. But before all that was Saddam and the deceptive worry of a mushroom cloud. And before that, 9/11. And before that, sanctions. And the Gulf War before. And before that, the Iran-Iraq War. But who can remember that far back?
My arrival coincided with a shift in war strategies. At first the strategy was to topple Saddam and find the WMDs. When we didn’t find any weapons, the new strategy was to install some Iraqi exiles as leaders, rush the public to the polls for a quick election, and then celebrate as democracy and a free market bubbled forth. When that failed, in part by inadvertently forcing Iraqis to organize into sectarian voting blocs, the new strategy was to rebuild the infrastructure and institutions necessary for democracy and economic growth. When that failed due to corruption and an expanding insurgency, the new strategy was to build Iraq’s security forces so that “when they stand up, we can stand down,” so we dumped billions to quickly train and arm men against the militants. When that failed, in part as a result of those very militants infiltrating the hastily assembled security forces, the new strategy was called the “ink-spot” approach: rather than confront the problems on a national level, build teams of experts to “clear, hold, and build” areas on the local level. Clear, hold, and build enough of them, and the ink spots of security will grow in diameter, and one day the country will be covered in ink. I imagine it made for pretty PowerPoints in the Pentagon. My job was to help with the “build” portion of the Fallujah ink spot.
I was also sent to Fallujah to confront the pervasive opinion back in Washington that an unacceptably large gap had opened between the civilian and military efforts in Iraq. This gap was unacceptable for different reasons, which depended upon where you worked: those in uniform felt that the State Department and other agencies weren’t really in the fight but, rather, partying in the Green Zone. Those in State and USAID understood that the Pentagon was becoming the true driver of US foreign policy and that in Iraq and Afghanistan it played an increasingly dominant role in aid and development work, so it made vital sense to get as close to that source of power and funding as possible. A hand-in-glove relationship was the mantra of 2005. My presence as the agency’s first representative in Fallujah allowed USAID to claim that it was in the fight. “We have a man in Fallujah, after all.”
It was still warm at around two in the morning when I left the comfort of the Green Zone. The only activity was an occasional thump thump of a medic Blackhawk, swooping to gather the wounded and rush them back to the Combat Support Hospital. I looked around the pleasant home I’d lived in for the first half of the year, to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind. All I found was an Iraqi ant, dragging and struggling with a bit of a Doritos chip on the tile floor in the kitchen.
I was supposed to fly to Fallujah the previous evening, but a sandstorm had rolled in and turned the sky deep orange and the air too hot to breathe. The war paused on days like these; the helos couldn’t fly, and the insurgents couldn’t aim mortars or spot convoys. Everyone just stayed home and watched TV, resting until the sky cleared up enough to kill again.
By the next night, the sky had cleared. Luayy, an Iraqi friend in his midthirties, worked in the motor pool and was still awake when I radioed for a ride. I had a code name, “Viking,” that I was supposed to use for security purposes in case an insurgent was listening in on our radio network, but I never understood why “Viking” was any safer than saying “Kirk.” Luayy pulled up in the USAID van and helped me load two large bags, and we headed off in the direction of LZ Washington.
“Fallujah, man, you crazy? Why are you goin’ there?” His voice carried the concern of an older brother as we turned through the dead streets of the Green Zone. A lo-fi cassette of the Scorpions’ greatest hits warbled through the speakers. “You think I shouldn’t go?” I murmured.
Not that I would change my mind. In Fallujah, I would live with the Second Marine Expeditionary Force and oversee more than $20 million of aid as a new member of the agency’s senior staff. No more Iraq Daily Update or Green Zone grunt work: I was finally in a position where I might contribute something tangible. A couple weeks earlier, friends at the compound had thrown a twenty-fifth birthday party for me and joked in toast after toast that it might be my last.
We pulled into the LZ, a vast expanse of concrete the size of a Home Depot parking lot upon which helicopters would wobble and shiver down for a few minutes at a time before creaking upward. Luayy gave me a hug and drove off.
The marines mostly flew at night. I dragged my bags through the noise toward the droid-like crew member who beckoned with a flashing green light. My face felt like it was blowing away, and once I made it under the warmth of the rotor span, the marine grabbed my hand and pointed a flashlight at it. I opened it to show him the CF—Camp Fallujah—I had inked with a Sharpie over the creases of my palm, confirming the destination. He pointed the flashlight at the chopper, and another marine plucked my bags from me and threw them into the CH-46 Baby Chinook. Many of these birds did time in Vietnam. I crawled up the ramp in the backside and found a half dozen weary marines, some with downturned sleeping heads, others with chins on the butts of their M16s. I wondered how many of these my dad had flown in, as I settled into the gurney-like seats and fidgeted with the seat belt.
The Chinook lifted off and wind whipped in through its paneless windows. Down below, the Green Zone drifted from sight as we nosed westward over the knotted skein of dimly lit neighborhoods. In a few minutes, Baghdad was behind us and the Euphrates below us, reflecting moonlight like mercury, deserted fields unfurling from its banks. The bright lights of Abu Ghraib looked like a small city below us. Twenty-five minutes later, we touched down at Camp Fallujah.
Seven thirty, and already the sun sat up there like a deep bruise, faintly yellow at the core and melting into an ugly blue sky. I’d stupidly left the window open a crack my first night there, and a shadow of dust had crept in, lightly coating my cheek and chin and eyelids. My new home was in the BOQ—bachelor officers’ quarters—of a military base once home to the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, a militant Iranian opposition group cultivated by Saddam Hussein against the regime in Tehran. I was assigned to a room with four bunk beds and a couple roommates, a collapsible table, the fetor of unwashed bodies and clothes, and a strip of fly tape. I once saw an Iraqi fly land on it and pry itself loose in about three seconds, unfazed.
I was nervous as I got ready for my first day on the job. The word in my title, regional coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah, summoning my dread was not Fallujah but coordinator. I had spent enough time in the US government and drafted enough scraps of public affairs pabulum to know how potentially toothless the verb to coordinate could be.
Before my arrival, USAID had programmed roughly $15 million for projects throughout the city, which was still at about half of its prewar population level of a quarter million. I had been armed with an Excel spreadsheet that listed the projects, color-coded by the USAID sector (education, health, infrastructure), along with exact dollar amounts. I studied the language of the list warily. Primary and secondary schools were “rehabilitated,” the hospital and local clinics received “supplies,” the directorates of municipalities, communications, housing, and other local potentates received “support.” Furniture and Equipment for Mayor’s Office: $62,135. Fallujah Veterinary Clinic Rehabilitation Phase I: $98,000. Phase II: $70,000.
Since these projects were in the “restive city of Fallujah,” as the public affairs professionals were wont to label it, nobody from the agency had ever gone out to check on the work until now. The money was given to a contractor, who took a piece and gave the rest to an Iraqi or Kurdish subcontractor, who maybe used another subcontractor or maybe kept it. The Americans at the agency overseeing all of this were called CTOs—cognizant technical officers—who maintained their cognizance by reading one- or two-page reports periodically emailed into the Green Zone by the contractor, which sometimes included a picture of an Iraqi man holding a cardboard box, supposedly the veterinarian of Fallujah or a doctor at the hospital. Upon receiving the report, the CTO could then modify column N of the Excel sheet to reflect a status of “completed” instead of “in progress.” In my previous job, I would have then written up a paragraph for the Iraq Daily Update about the completed project and included the picture.
Most of the completed projects were carried out by the agency’s Health, Education, and Infrastructure Offices, which had an excruciatingly slow turnaround from conception to implementation. A school refurbishment project could take a year or longer, to the great impatience of both the Iraqis and the US military.
There was a separate office in the agency, though, called the Office of Transition Initiatives, which was fast moving and well funded. OTI could move millions of dollars in weeks, not months or years. Rubble removal was its darling and was categorized as “conflict mitigation.” On paper, conflict was mitigated by an assumption-weakened chain of assertions:
1. Iraqis were joining the insurgency because there was no work for them.
2. If they were given the choice between an honest day’s work and fighting against the Americans, they’d choose the former.
3. A make-work program to clear rubble, at the pay rate of about $7 a day, would
4. sap the insurgency of its strength,
5. clean up the city (dovetailing nicely with a $110,000 public awareness campaign run by USAID, in which a picture of a sleeping Iraqi baby was plastered on billboards with the caption “My dream is of a clean city”), and
6. stimulate economic growth, all at once.
If we could just get a shovel and a wheelbarrow into their grenade-prone hands, point them to any of the houses that had been reduced to abandoned fields of rubble, and dangle seven American dollars, we might start gaining the upper hand on the insurgency. At the very least, doing so would contribute to a new narrative, one that ran counter to the unpleasant metric of nearly 50 percent unemployment throughout vast swaths of the country. A simple spreadsheet presented month-to-month “progress”: forty thousand Iraqis hired in June, fifty-two thousand Iraqis in July. Someone in Washington would read these impressive figures and murmur, “Well, at least USAID’s got this covered!” Maybe a congressman would notice and appropriate more funds for USAID to build on this momentum! This line of thinking led to many tens of millions of wasted dollars.
After all, in the swamp of unemployment, the insurgency had nurtured an economy of its own. Some estimated that a third of all cargo trucks from Jordan passing into Iraq through Anbar Province were hijacked by insurgents. Oil and gasoline were smuggled, the children of wealthy Iraqis were kidnapped for ransom, and old-fashioned robbery kept their coffers swelling. In my first few days in Fallujah, a marine told me that the going rate for paying kids to plant an IED along the roadside was $50; $100 if he acted as a spotter for incoming American convoys; and $150 if he successfully detonated the IED as they passed. How would our $7 compete with this? I was doubtful, but I resisted forming any opinions until I had seen the projects under way.
I was equally unsettled by the fact that I didn’t have discretionary authority. I couldn’t write checks on behalf of USAID. If I wanted to fund any new initiative, I would need to win over the backing of my bosses in Baghdad. And most of the remaining millions allocated for Fallujah were already pledged to rubble removal.
In an attempt to orient myself during my first day, I copied out the Excel spreadsheet into a green canvas notebook and studied a satellite map of the city to identify their locations so that I could conduct a small audit of the projects listed as completed.
I never knew which half I represented in the hand-in-glove metaphor, but the skepticism of the marines I was now living with was evident as I walked around the base and introduced myself. Of the few that had even heard of USAID, most thought it was an NGO, not a federal agency. All they saw was a kid without a weapon whom they now had to protect, which was not part of their mission. So when a group of marines in the Civil Affairs Group, to which I’d be attached, made plans over lunch to head over to the firing range in Camp Fallujah, I blurted out that I’d like to join them.
At the range, a lance corporal called me over to fire the M240G machine gun, a twenty-five-pound weapon that can be mounted on tanks. I watched two teams fire at a plywood target in a syncopated rhythm, getting the guns to “talk to each other.” I got into a prone position, and a marine crawled halfway on top of me and said he was going to aim. I tensed up as the belt of a couple hundred 7.62 mm rounds was fitted into place. “Keep the shots below the berm,” someone behind me warned.
I squeezed the trigger, and my brain shut down. I released the trigger. A cloud of dust from behind the plywood was snaking into the air. I pulled the trigger again and let go again, trying to find the target in the sight. A lieutenant colonel shouted, “Kirk, this isn’t one of those types of guns! Your A-gunner is your sight. Just get it in the general area, pull the trigger, and hold it down!”
I pulled the trigger and held it. My head was a jarring mess. The marines yelled, “Go, go go!” while the marine on top of me pushed my shoulder to help aim the gun. The flaring red tracer shots struck the plywood, set fire to it, bored through it, and flailed around in the berm. A massive plume of powder rose from behind the target. I released the trigger, and they were clapping, stooping down to pat me on the back. I smiled, and didn’t realize until a few moments later that several of the scalding spent shell casings spat from the gun had landed on the exposed skin of my arm and were now melting their way in. I brushed them off with a grimace and could smell burned skin. “Great shooting, sir!” one of them said.
Later that afternoon, in a poorly lit room with satellite maps of every major city and town and base in Anbar Province, I met with Major General Stephen Johnson and told him of my plans to conduct an initial review of the projects USAID had already funded throughout the city. He nodded and said, “Just get yourself over to the CMOC to get started.”
Eight weary miles separate Camp Fallujah from the CMOC, the Civil Military Operations Center, in the center of the city. Before my first convoy run, the captain gathered everyone around to assign the PAX, passengers, to their vehicles. He extracted a laminated map from a pocket, handing a corner to a nearby marine to display a satellite image of the city. Running the group through the route, he outlined alternate routes and rally points in case of attack. Rules of engagement: hand motions, rocks, or water bottles (thrown in the direction of the approaching vehicle as a startling measure), a round in the ground, one in the grill, one in the hood, then shoot to eliminate. Any of these steps may be bypassed depending on the distance and speed of the approaching threat. He turned to me, the only civilian in the group, and asked, “Who are you, and why don’t you have a med pack?”
I nervously blurted out my name and USAID.
“Okay, I don’t know what that is, but whatever. Who has an extra med pack for Mr. Johnson?”
Someone lobbed over a small canvas sack that contained gauze and some packets of powder, which I assumed were for sterilizing an open wound. I climbed into the back of a “tub,” a Humvee with a pickup truck bed framed with armor plating. Beneath our feet ran a patchwork of heavy green fabric—essentially a blanket of flak jackets woven together to stop IED shrapnel from blasting up through the bottom of the bed.
As we approached the border of the camp, the convoy paused, and the cold sound of M16 clips snapping into place filled the air. I tugged at the straps of my helmet in futility. In the previous few days, two Iraqi boys had thrown grenades at marine convoys. One managed to get a “ringer,” as the captain put it: when it landed in the tub, its blast took with it several fingers and limbs and incinerated necks and palms.
“Johnson, you’re the swatter,” grunted a marine across from me, as the convoy lurched toward the city.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s simple. You see a grenade comin’, swat it back.”
I sat silent for a moment. He grinned a little. A lieutenant colonel chimed in, and said, “Look, if you miss it, just throw yourself over it to save us, okay?” At this, the other marines in the back of the tub burst out laughing. I smiled a bit and looked back at the first marine, whose grin had disappeared back into a blank face. “Seriously, though, if you see one, swat it back.”
I stared at my hands as the convoy emerged from the floury desert road and onto the hardball asphalt heading westward into Fallujah. As we passed below a pedestrian walkway, each Humvee in the convoy swerved violently, an evasive tactic to avoid any grenades dropped from above, jostling me against the marines on either side of me, who raised their rifles over the edge of the tub like the legs of a spider crawling from a drain.
In such moments, every Iraqi looks like a killer. We move at thirty miles per hour—any faster, and you wouldn’t be able to spot an IED or VBIED—over roads that have been renamed by the Americans. Route Michigan. Mobile. Huskie. Irish. Fran. Denver. The Arabic names were too difficult for them. Along with the marines, my eyes dart around in search of unusual piles of trash along the road that might conceal a bomb; bits of wire running up tree trunks that might lead to a bomb; unusual amounts of layers of clothing that might conceal a vest bomb; the direction of a car’s tires, which might suggest whether it’s about to accelerate a bomb into you. I glare at three Iraqi children, no more than eight years old, who stand alongside the road as we pass. One of them wears flip-flops and kneads a soccer ball back and forth under his foot.
The years of my life spent studying the language and living throughout the region drained swiftly from the tub that day. It meant nothing that I spoke Arabic or understood their history and religion. The only thing that mattered was that these kids stayed away from my vehicle and that they not make any quick movements when I passed by. They needed to freeze.
We snaked our way through the chicanes at the entrance of the CMOC, and I jumped from the Humvee with a heavy thud, armor tugging at my shoulders.
The citizens of Fallujah lined up outside the CMOC, the nexus of interaction with the Americans. It was previously a youth center where kids came for after-school sports, clubs, and tutoring. In the area where the marines guarding the center slept at night hung a funk of sweat and fatigue made worse by the fact that the windows were sealed shut. In a small courtyard in the middle of the CMOC loomed an elevated boxing ring, three ropes and all, with punishing wooden floorboards.
At the heart of the CMOC reigned a large theater with a stage that looked as though it was set for a performance of Stalag 17. Ten-foot-tall stacks of sandbags were piled in front of every window, all of which were lined with strips of duct tape, meant to minimize the shattering effect if a mortar hit. In the center of the stage was a large easel that displayed a four-by-four-foot satellite image of the city. Down in the auditorium section, a T-shaped array of collapsible tables and flimsy white stacking chairs hosted the daily proceedings between the Fallujah city council leaders and the marines. Very frequently, the two groups climbed up to the stage to point at a particular intersection on the map, arguing over a checkpoint here or there. Another easel nearby was papered with American-made posters touting the “heroes of Fallujah”: the nascent Fallujah police force. They looked the same as the insurgent posters that had plastered the city between April and November the previous year, using the same language of heroes, martyrs, defenders, lions of Fallujah, sons of Fallujah.
As winter approached and I settled into my job, I came into town for regular meetings at the CMOC. A week before Thanksgiving, I sat with a young marine by the boxing ring, smoking a cigarette and watching a gaunt turkey that had been picked up in some village outside of town. It strutted around the ring, pecking its beak inquisitively at cigarette butts and bits of trash left over from MRE packs. The marines assigned to the CMOC were planning to cook it for the holiday.
The city was on edge: a schoolboy had been killed the day before. An Iraqi sniper fired an errant round at a marine foot patrol, striking the boy instead. The Fallujans believed the marines had killed the child, and they were now keeping their children at home and out of school for fear of losing another.
“They’re accusing us? They probably already know who it was!” The young marine flicked his cigarette toward an ammunition case that someone had repurposed into an ashtray, which overflowed with hundreds upon hundreds of butts. It smoldered for a half minute before burning out. The turkey strolled by in another lap around the courtyard.
The marine had a rucksack by his feet, and after looking around, he gestured at me to take a look inside. With a boyish excitement, he flashed open its contents: large shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. A couple hundred thousand dollars’ worth, I guessed. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“Fuckin’ condolence payments.”
The institution of solatia and condolence payments had become systematized by the war’s second year: once a month, the Fallujans stood in line with their grievances. Someone’s husband was killed. Someone’s arm was shot off. Someone’s car had been shot up. Someone’s door had been kicked down in a night raid.
The rates were fixed:
• $2,500 for a dead Iraqi,
• $1,500 for a serious injury (“resulting in permanent disability or significant disfigurement”), and
• $200 for a minor injury.
Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli explained to National Public Radio that the practice “is common in this part of the world—it means a death payment; a death gratuity, so to speak—it is part of life over here.” A Government Accountability Office briefing to Congress on the practice offered a helpful explanatory scenario on slide 16: “Two members of the same family are killed in a car hit by US forces. The family could receive a maximum of $7,500 in . . . condolence payments ($2,500 for each death and up to $2,500 for vehicle damage).”
Not all life is valued equally by our bureaucracies: a dead Afghan ran only $2,336. A permanently disabled or disfigured Afghan cost only $467.
“Shit, I heard that the sniper team is a pair of fuckin’ kids, a twelve-year-old and his little bro!” The marine stood up and parted with his bag of money.
The sniper became an obsession for many of us. In November and well into December, at least a dozen marines were killed. The rumor about the young brothers swirled with other theories, including one in which an elite Chechen sniper had traveled all the way to Fallujah to kill Americans.
One night I hopped onto a midnight convoy running from Camp Fallujah to the CMOC and found myself sitting next to a mannequin. Several more were piled in the Humvee’s trunk, to be used by counter-sniper teams that were struggling to get a lock on the sniper’s location. The mannequins were positioned on various rooftops throughout the city and propped up with the hope of drawing fire and smoking out the sniper.
I thought back to journalist Nir Rosen’s reporting for the Asia Times during the interlude in fighting between May and November 2004, when the town was overrun by insurgents. A day after the marines pulled back in their first failed onslaught, the city held a poetry festival in which the “heroes of the resistance” sat onstage. One of them, a twelve-year-old named Saud, had apparently sniped several marines. Mohammed Khalil Kawkaz recited a poem condemning anyone from the city who had stepped forward to work with the Americans, called “The Fallujah Tragedy”:
She never accepts anybody touching her dates
She will shoot arrows into the eyes of those who try to taste her
This is Fallujah, your bride, O Euphrates!
She will never fall in love with anyone but you
America dug in the ground and pulled
Out the roots of the date palm
The earth hugs the destroyed houses
The women burned and the children suffered
Calling to the governing council
You are deaf and dumb, O governing council!
You found honor in meeting him who pillaged Fallujah.
O Euphrates, what happened to you, that you just lay down?
Get up and fight with your waves and swallow this country and the others,
Stand with Fallujah.
Since the poetry festival, we had razed large sections of the city. But maybe Saud the sniper boy was still in action. Because the sniper had once shot at marines in the expansive gravel field surrounding the CMOC, which was supposedly secure, we were instructed not to linger outside. The only time I ventured across the gravel was en route to the cluster of port-o-johns. In the first days and nights, I armored up, but I soon grew impatient and one day burst from the CMOC doors, running in a zigzag line as I juked my way to the bathroom. Its thin plastic doors offered about as much protection from a sniper round as a stick of butter. Once inside, I rocked back and forth, occasionally leaning forward with the absurd hope that this constant movement would reduce the odds of a sniper hitting me. I started wearing armor again and came to despise port-o-johns.
The Fallujans did not line up only for condolence payments. Many came to the CMOC with the names of their husbands or sons or fathers who had been detained as part of the counterinsurgency efforts. Getting PUC’d up, the marines called it: “person under control.” It was once standard operating procedure to arrest as many people as possible in the vicinity of an IED blast, with the hopes that the triggerman might be found among them.
Once detained, their eyeballs would be scanned and their names would be entered into BATS, the Biometrics Automated Toolset System, which was implemented in force in the city. One of my roommates back at Camp Fallujah was a defense contractor and lead support technician for the system. John had a pear-shaped belly and long, wiry hair that fell in a bowl-cut over his Coke-bottle glasses. He wore geek T-shirts: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.” Sometimes he peeled his T-shirt up toward his face and blew his nose into it. Sometimes he fell asleep in his bunk with his hand actually inside a bag of Nacho Cheesier Doritos, while a samurai movie played on his laptop. His salary likely topped $200,000.
BATS took retina scans and fingerprints of Iraqis and paired the biometrics with names, photographs, address, weight, height, and any additional information (whether or not said Iraqi was in “capture” or “kill” status). This information was then uploaded onto Toughbook laptops for marines in the field and also sent back to the Biometrics Fusion Center in West Virginia, a newly sprouted sapling in the post-9/11 forest of Defense Department agencies and programs.
The BATS system was a significant development. During the first phase of the war, the military relied on scattershot lists and databases, which were never centralized or complete. But what still bedeviled Americans, BATS or not, was the naming conventions used in the Arab world. Arabs don’t have middle names: they have a chain of names with patronymics that reflect the person’s heritage. US ignorance over this seemingly innocuous cultural distinction had Orwellian consequences.
Take, for example, the following name: 
Since Arabic is generally written without vowels, the presence of which are intuited both by grammatical rules as well as prolonged exposure to the language, there is no agreed-upon standard for transliterating Arabic into English. So the name could be written “Muhammad Hameed Al-Dulaimi.” Or it could just as properly be transliterated as “Mohamed Hamid Aldulaymy.”
The iterations and potential combinations are endless. Mohammad. Mohamad. Muhammad. Muhamad. Mohammed. Mohamed. Muhammed. Muhamed. Hamid. Hameed. Al-Dulaimy. Al-Dulaimi. Al-Dulaymy. Al-Dulaymi.
The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, the bible for all students of Arabic, is based on the transliteration standards of the 1936 Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. There are handfuls of competing systems, however, with computerish names such as SATTS, DIN-31635, and ISO/R 233.
Arcane as it is, the consequences of our ignorance of Arabic emerged as soon as we started arresting Iraqis and filling up prisons. Each arrest led to paperwork, which required transliteration. So eighteen-year-old soldiers and marines detailed to detainee intake, with no knowledge of the language, devised transliteration systems of their own.
As a result, , picked up thirty feet from an IED on Route Fran in Fallujah, tells his name to a marine, who types “Mohammed Hameed,” as a first and last name, leaving out the reference to his membership in the Dulaim tribe of Anbar. The marine next to him might have spelled the name entirely differently. Five months pass, and none of his family members has heard from him. Maybe Mohammed was found guilty, maybe he was being detained until more information could be located, or maybe he was innocent. Unless someone guessed the exact English spelling generated by the eighteen-year-old marine at the time of arrest, Mohammed Hameed Al-Dulaimi was lost in the system, another casualty of the war that Arabic and English waged upon each other.
Not a week passed in Fallujah where I did not witness women asking the whereabouts of family members. I once asked a woman to just tell me the name of a missing relative, and spent about ten minutes transliterating every different combination—over twenty in total. I handed it to a marine. He looked down at it, and, eyebrows raised, put it in his chest pocket and gave me a “Don’t expect much” glance.
Down the hallway, the marines hung the quote from T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom that proliferated on the walls of American power: “Better to let the Arabs do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself.”
“The most important thing you can do is just be here. Don’t disappear on us.” A lieutenant colonel in the Civil Affairs Group spoke quietly and locked eyes with me as we talked late into my first evening at the CMOC. The marines were tired of civilians dropping by Fallujah for a day and then leaving. A lot of them were coming just to say they had been there and to buy the Camp Fallujah T-shirt from the PX before they left. That would have been enough of a nuisance, but members of Congress and embassy officials had a tendency to meet with Fallujah city leaders at the CMOC, make lofty promises, and then disappear. The marines were stuck there, left to tamp down the volatile expectations of the Fallujans.
I tried to reassure him. “No, I’m here, at least until mid-06, and then we’ll see where we’re at.” It had taken about eight months to get out of the Green Zone to a place where I might finally do something useful. I knew that I would be only mildly relevant for the first couple months in Fallujah: the city leaders and marines needed to trust that I was there for the foreseeable future, and I needed to know how much I could expect from my own bosses in Baghdad.
For weeks after I arrived, I rode around Fallujah referencing my small map of rubble removal projects. I saw zero evidence that a single stone had been lifted, despite what I had been reading in progress reports and in the Iraq Daily Update, now written by the perky young public affairs officer who had replaced me. The marines who drove around on patrol each day hadn’t seen any signs of a program. The questions screamed in my brain. Where is the rubble being moved to? Who wrote these contracts? Why isn’t there even a simple mechanism to gauge results? How do we verify that the theoretical Iraqis hauling the rubble are even from Fallujah and not being trucked in from other provinces and creating more strife?
Even if the contractor or subcontractor had been out there to enforce the rubble removal, it was easy to imagine gaming the system. Why not just move the rubble to a vacant lot down the street and charge USAID another quarter million to move it again in a month?
When I was introduced to an Iraqi engineer with unparalleled knowledge of the city’s infrastructure (who called me il Masry—“the Egyptian”—on account of my dialect), I asked him about the rubble removal teams. He laughed and said, “What are you talking about? What teams?”
I wanted to end the program, to stop wasting the money. This would require crying foul, informing the USAID cognizant technical officers and management back in the Green Zone that their projects, which earned them a lot of favor with the Pentagon and were part of the whole hand-in-glove craze, were bullshit. And if a project didn’t exist, it meant that auditors in the Inspector General’s Office might catch on and start poking around in other parts of their work.
There was waste or fraud in nearly every project I looked at. For instance, $62,000 worth of furniture for the mayor’s office ended up in the marines’ rec room of the CMOC. A radio tower that had been sent to Camp Fallujah for delivery to the city, as part of an initiative to empower a new Iraqi media, never left the base.
Hoping to get a handle on what the city actually needed, I peppered the leaders of the Fallujah city council with questions. I didn’t know if any other Fallujans knew who they were, but they were known by us, and were the only men who came into the CMOC to talk. I wanted to be helpful but did not make any promises.
Just off Route Henry, the veterinarian of Fallujah was waiting for me with a proposal for where I might direct some aid money. A tall, hefty man of sixty, Dr. Nazar had a darkly creased face and gold-rimmed glasses that he pulled from a breast pocket before running through a list of supplies and equipment. He had prepared the list with the hope that I might direct USAID funding his way. He needed incubators, vaccines to combat diseases such as brucellosis, refrigerators for the vaccines, generators for the incubators and refrigerators, fuel for the generators. Syringes, gauze, everything. It sounded reasonable enough.
I wasn’t sure what information I’d need from the veterinarian, so I wrote down everything I could learn. How many head of cattle are there in Fallujah and the outlying villages? How many animals did he treat a week? What diseases were the most prevalent at the moment? What were the farmers doing without these vaccines? How many chickens are there in the city?
I wedged his list into my notebook and heaved my armored body back into the tub of the Humvee.
“Mr. Krik?” Dr. Nazar called out to me.
One of the marines gave a glance to signal that we needed to move on, so I answered the veterinarian brusquely. We never spent more than a few minutes in each place.
“Yes, Doctor, what? We are in a rush.”
“Fallujah needs a working slaughterhouse again!” he exclaimed. Just a couple blocks away, the marines were occupying the old slaughterhouse, which the veterinarian wanted to reopen. He needed a generator to keep it cool. He pointed to the ground at a startling rivulet of dark blood running along the curb, which was stained brown. The stream issued from the gullets of sheep and other small livestock being slaughtered twenty feet up the street. The flow stretched another fifteen feet down before it disappeared into a small heap of rubble and garbage.
“It’s not good; it’s not safe to handle meat this way,” Dr. Nazar pleaded.
The butchers stared at us, blade in one hand, the nape of wide-eyed livestock in another.
“Okay, we need to clear out,” a marine grunted, to my relief.
That night, I spent hours deciphering and translating my observations (I never studied the Arabic words for brucellosis or hypodermic or hoof) into a report with a recommendation for my bosses in Baghdad.
But my enthusiasm for helping out the veterinarian stalled when I searched through the database of “completed” projects and discovered that $98,000 in supplies had already been delivered to the city’s veterinary clinic. The happy veterinarian had then wheeled them down the street to his private clinic, where he charged much higher rates. I wasn’t going to win any battle in redirecting aid from the rubble removal program if my opening gambit was to buy more supplies for a corrupt veterinarian.
It was customary for Americans working in Iraq to react to all of this with a world-weary shrug and shoulder-patting bromides. “Welcome to Iraq.” “Hearts and minds, man, hearts and minds.” “Welcome to the world of international development.” “Just another day in Iraq.” “Welcome to USAID, buddy.”
But the sheer waste of the chimerical campaign to remove rubble became such a splinter in my mind that I made it the central focus of my first steps in Fallujah. I would absorb whatever wrath came my way from the functionaries in the Green Zone.
Before I could kill the program, I needed to have a replacement project ready. I didn’t have to search very long: everyone knew that Fallujah’s irrigation canals were choked. These waterways had once irrigated the Euphrates’s fields. The canals need clearing every year, or else the water flow diminishes, the soil becomes hypersalinated, and crops can’t thrive. I began to meet with sheikhs and city leaders to plan an ambitious new USAID initiative to hire thousands of Fallujans to hack out and hoist the years of weeds and reeds and trash that had clotted the canals since the beginning of the war.
I didn’t think that the canal clearing project would turn the city around, but it stood to make a much larger impact than a nonexistent program. I threw every idea I could at the initiative, wishing to be embarrassed at the outset by suggesting potentially stupid ideas rather than waste millions on another failure and blow my chances at future projects. I studied maps of the irrigation infrastructure with agricultural engineers from the area and tried to spread the project equitably across tribal lines. I asked the marines if they could task an observer drone to survey the state of the canals, since Google Earth satellite images were outdated.
By late December, I had succeeded in winning over the mission director’s initial approval for a shift in strategy away from rubble removal and into canal clearing. I had staked whatever credibility I had on the proposal and was excited to think that, after a year of frustration, I might start to fulfill some of the goals that had brought me to Iraq in the first place. No more taskers from Washington, no more public affairs spit-shining of crumbling projects. I had buy-in from key members of the city council, support from the marines, and the money to make something tangible happen.
A Christmas stocking from my mom arrived a week before the holiday. “We hope you’ll be able to take your R&R and join us!” The card was signed by my parents; my mom had sweetly forged my brothers’ signatures. There was a large family reunion coming up in the Dominican Republic, where my uncle and aunt run an orphanage, and I was the only one who hadn’t RSVP’d. I hung the stocking next to my bed on a plastic adhesive hook I’d bought from the PX.
Someone whose face I never saw had moved in and laid claim to the bunk above mine, and the mattress sagged like the hull of a submerged boat just a foot above my head. He annexed a corner of the desk next to the bed for his collection of Maxim magazines. Every night, a hirsute forearm would drop down like the claw game at an arcade to retrieve a ruffled issue, and the weary springs of the bunk would squeak for a couple minutes.
I was overdue for a vacation but wrestled with the idea of leaving. My push to kill the rubble program had angered the officers in charge of it, and I worried that the momentum I had mustered for clearing the canals could be quickly scuttled by its detractors. I was also mindful of burnout and knew that I still had at least another six months on my contract, which I had already resolved to extend.
But when I received an invitation to brief the incoming First Marine Expeditionary Force on USAID’s work in Anbar Province at Camp Pendleton in California at the beginning of January 2006, I decided to combine it with the family vacation. I packed light, logged out of my computer at my office in the civil affairs building, and left a small stack of my green notebooks into which I had scrawled months of thoughts and notes.
As a civilian, I could never guarantee a spot on a helo, since I flew space-A (as in “if space is available”). I pulled out two refrigerated bottles of Starbucks mocha Frappuccinos that I had snatched up in the PX, slid them into my backpack, and began the couple-mile hike at midnight through the labyrinth of Camp Fallujah’s cafeterias, laundry hooches, PX, gyms, officers’ quarters, intelligence buildings, and Humvee repair garages en route to the landing zone. When I stepped into the plywood hut that served as the LZ office, I told the lance corporal behind the desk that I was flying space-A to Baghdad and smiled as I handed him and his buddy the Frappuccinos. His tired eyes lit up as he said, “Okay, sir, we’ll make sure you get on.”
At about one o’clock in the morning, the helos arrived, and I jammed in some earplugs as I sprinted over to the marine waving a green glow stick. The next morning, Christmas Day, I finagled a ride from Camp Victory to the civilian terminal. The USAID charter flight was canceled due to a dust storm, but Iraqi Airways was still flying, so I pulled out a few hundred dollars and bought one of the last remaining tickets to Amman.
I sat in the terminal next to Iraqis biding their time before flights, and realized that after a year in Iraq, it was the first time I had been without body armor or mercenaries or marines nearby. The coil of stress that had been tightening with each convoy run, each missed mortar, tensed just a little. Suddenly my chest cavity seemed naked.
The dividing lines between us and them, white and brown, exposed and hidden guns, air-conditioning and sweltering heat, clean and dirty water, our knowledge that we’d be here only for a while longer but that they were stuck, began to vibrate and jostle in my mind. I didn’t drink water from the fountain because I knew how badly we had failed to provide clean water. I couldn’t find any relief in air-conditioning because the airport power was strong enough only to run a rickety oscillating fan that surely must have been pushing air around since the sixties.
I looked around at toddlers and smiled at them but encountered little warmth from my fellow travelers. My head hurt, so I shut my eyes for a moment, before thinking better of it. I opened them again and thought, Just wait a little longer, and you can relax in the Dominican Republic.