Hayder leaned toward the mirror and ran a comb through his jet-black hair. He hummed a melody as he shaved. The pitch was a little off, but he didn’t notice and wouldn’t mind much anyway if he did. His eyes were deerlike, deep and black and wet. He was good-looking, one of the most handsome guys in his neighborhood, and he knew it.
He never had a problem landing dates. He dressed smartly, and though he was five foot nine, he sauntered through the Tunis quarter of Baghdad’s Suleikh neighborhood as though he were six two. He was on his way out for the night, and in a good mood.
The Tunis quarter was once a lousy place to him. He was born there, but when he was four, his father was admitted to a program in international law in Wales, so the family moved to Cardiff. When his dad graduated, he took an important job with Lloyd’s of London, the British shipping insurance colossus, so they stayed in Britain.
Hayder was twelve and happy in England, barely spoke any Arabic, and didn’t remember anything about Iraq, but two forces beyond his comprehension summoned the family back home. The first was unchallengeable and came from Saddam Hussein’s government: when the war with Iran started, the regime ordered all Iraqis studying abroad to come home to serve the country. Although Hayder’s father was worried about returning with his family—they had developed habits and customs that might be problematic back in Baghdad—there was little choice in the matter. He was conscripted into the Iraqi Ministry of Transportation. He tried to make the best of the situation and told Hayder, “I want you to know who you are and where you come from. You have a proud history there.”
The second force summoning them back was just as unyielding but altogether hidden from Hayder. His mother, in her early forties, was ravaged with breast cancer and was going home to die.
Hayder was miserable. Gone were the green streets of Cardiff and his friends at St. David’s Primary. Now he lived in a city that had enemies, rocketed regularly by Iranians. He used to listen to the music program Top of the Pops on the BBC, and Duran Duran, and even knew a few break-dance moves. He hated Iraqi music. He didn’t know what they were saying and certainly couldn’t dance to it. He wore shorts, and the other kids on the street made fun of him and said he was gay. They stared at his BMX bike, which his father had shipped from England, as though it were a Rolls-Royce. He sat in school and couldn’t understand more than three or four Arabic words. The kids taunted him for living in Britain, calling him ameel, ameel il-ingleez. When he asked his mom what it meant, she told him to ignore them. She had heard the same thing when she was growing up: her father served as a military officer on the staff of King Faisal, who had been installed by the Brits.
One day his mom told him to take care of his brother and sister and to be good. His thirteenth birthday wasn’t far off. He didn’t know what she meant. That night, his uncle came to gather Hayder and his siblings for a sleepover that lasted for days. When Hayder returned home, his mother was already in the ground, buried at the Karkh Cemetery on the western outskirts of Baghdad.
Not long after, his father was injured by a bomb blast down south in Muhammara, and Hayder’s first year back in Iraq came to a close.
Over time, Hayder adapted. He learned Arabic and found new friends who liked Madonna and Michael Jackson. They traded cassettes, posters for their rooms, and VHS tapes of American movies like Rambo and the James Bond series. One of his friends even had a porno on VHS.
Hayder made the Tunis quarter his own. After he graduated from the Oil Training Institute of Baghdad, he found a job as a translator for international companies that came into Iraq to sell products under the UN’s oil-for-food program in the 1990s. Russian, French, and Indian companies, they all spoke English and liked Hayder. He made about $5 a day, which wasn’t great, but it was work. He spent it on cigarettes and on his dates.
When his little sister was married, his father threw a huge party in their home. After the bride and groom signed the contract in the katb kitaab ceremony, he took Hayder aside into the storage room of the house and said, “Look, son, I’ve invited all of my friends. They’re going to bring their daughters with them. I wish you’d pick one, because I want to see my oldest son get married.”
Hayder didn’t want to get married. “I’m getting married every night to a different girl!” he said to himself, smiling at his joke.
“Son, I want to hug my grandchildren before I die.” Hayder bristled a bit and said, “Dad, okay, I’ll look.”
He walked back into the living room. The ceremony had given way to celebration and feasting and Iraqi pop music. He saw Dina and within minutes made plans to take her out for a date.
There weren’t any nightclubs in Baghdad. They went out to smoke narghile by riverbank restaurants such as Qamr al-Zaman and Al-Saha, where they ate kebabs and fish. Dina liked to smoke cigarettes but couldn’t in public, so they mostly relaxed at home with his family.
In less than a year, they were married, on March 1, 2001. Hayder was twenty-seven.
Hayder and Dina moved into a small home in Dora, on the south side of Baghdad. There was a large refinery nearby and stretches of empty fields. They had a happy year, young and married, and by the middle of 2002, Dina was pregnant. They decorated their home with Louis XV furniture, gaudy and gold, and hung kharze zarqas—lapis lazuli–colored amulets meant to ward off the evil eye—on each wall.
When the regime’s official television channels switched over to Al-Jazeera on 9/11, Hayder sensed the approach of another war. Even though Hayder found no Iraqis in the list of terrorists who had hijacked the airplanes, he worried that it would be used as an excuse to attack Saddam. They used to be able to listen to Amrika al-yawm—America Today—on the radio, but the regime cut the frequencies as American forces gathered in the Persian Gulf. They knew that George W. Bush had said Iraq was part of an “axis of evil,” along with their enemy Iran, but it was hard to know more than that.
Hayder’s brother-in-law managed to buy a satellite dish, though it was illegal. When nighttime came, they sneaked onto the rooftop with the Nilesat dish and pointed it up at the sky until the signal from the outside world poured in. They stacked some crates to conceal it and hurried back down to watch CNN, as though they were eavesdropping on a conversation about themselves. American flags always flapped in the corner of the television screen. Before the sun climbed back up, Hayder and his brother-in-law would slip back onto the roof to remove the dish.
For months they gathered to watch the secret news, until it was 2003 and not much of a secret anymore. They saw Iraqi soldiers scampering along the roof of the local grade school, and antiaircraft batteries were soon visible. Hayder and Dina watched as tanks rumbled through the fields of Dora, followed by massive trailers carrying helicopters and aircraft parts. The soldiers were everywhere, blocking bridges, digging ditches in nearby gardens.
Hayder was convinced there would be a massacre. Saddam would never surrender. Turkey had decided against letting American troops invade from the north, so the invasion would surely come from the south, with Dora as the southern entry point. Dina was swelling; the baby was due in seven weeks. He was afraid to move the family in her state.
On the first night of the war, at around five thirty in the morning, their home shivered from an explosion. Hayder ran to the roof to watch the bombers come but never saw them. They flew far overhead and disappeared before the bombs landed.
The ground forces were coming. Hoping to avoid being caught in the cross fire in Dora, Hayder and Dina moved in with her family in a different neighborhood. The regime broadcast a message saying that Baghdad would be an American graveyard and that there were soldiers on every street corner, ready to defend their city.
But the soldiers disappeared. Hayder and Dina were packed alongside five families into one home, where they watched the news without rest. A couple weeks in, Al-Jazeera broadcast the American troops crossing a bridge that was only a block away, and Hayder cried out, “They’re here!”
He found it difficult to contain his emotions. The fear that had patrolled most of his life in Iraq surrendered its weapons without a fight. He was overjoyed. The Americans would come, bringing in the best administrators to run the country. They would have democracy, they could start selling their oil again, they would have Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King and nightclubs. Microsoft would come to Iraq.
He ran out into the street to celebrate, and found others bashing windows and looting stores. The next day he saw an Iraqi shoot someone in the chest while the crowd continued to loot.
“Can I describe it? You can’t laugh at me. It was like watching Saving Private Ryan. The convoy was like a mile long. I was watching a movie with American soldiers in it, and they were smoking, making jokes, and someone would say, ‘What the fuck?’ and ‘Shit,’ and I turned to Dina and said, ‘Is this real, or am I imagining it?’ She used to tease me for liking the Americans and Brits so much. ‘Here are your people,’ she said.”
Hayder was standing with Dina and his best friend, Mouayyad, when the first convoy of the 101st Airborne rolled in. Hayder approached the soldiers walking on foot, unsure if he wanted to say hi or thank you, but as he headed over, one of the soldiers raised his rifle and said, “If you come any closer, I will shoot you.” Hayder said, “Relax, you don’t need to pull out your gun.”
The soldier lowered his rifle, shocked at the British-accented English. Hayder was surprised at the fear he saw in the young soldier’s eyes. “I just wanted to say hi, guys. We’re very happy that you came over.”
Dina wanted to move back into their home in Dora now that the Americans had arrived. They were worried about the looting and didn’t want their home ransacked. Hayder told her to wait behind while he surveyed the neighborhood, but she wouldn’t listen and got into the car.
They crossed the bridge into Dora and into the gaze of a huge tank staring at them. Hayder got out slowly with his hands up and then Dina, who was due any week now. The tank’s muzzle rotated away in deference, and the two got back into the car and drove on.
The house and water storage tank on the roof were punctured from shrapnel, but although the windows were broken, nobody had stolen anything. Hayder excitedly went out and bought a generator and supplies to ready his home for the arrival of their first child.
Dina whispered nervously to Hayder, who was still in bed. “Hayder, there are a lot of Americans in the front yard. I think they just knocked on the door!” He threw on a T-shirt and shorts and opened the door. They were standing out front, laughing at a joke someone must have just made. They turned to Hayder. He read derision in their faces, which to him seemed to say, “Here comes another Iraqi idiot who can’t speak a word of English.” A soldier stepped forward and handed Hayder a sheet of paper, which had a few sentences in Arabic saying that they wanted to search the house. Hayder handed the paper back and said, “Gentlemen, I don’t need this. How can I help you?”
“Holy shit, you speak English?”
“I’m pretty sure I was just speaking English. How can I help?”
Some bombs they had dropped hadn’t yet exploded, they said, so they wanted to see if there were any in his yard or up on the roof. Hayder invited them inside, offering a Coke or some tea. The captain of the unit said, “We’d love to have some tea, but we’re dirty and do not want to come inside and mess up your house. Maybe we could sit in the garden.”
Hayder pulled some plastic chairs from his garage and sat out back with the captain while the others searched for unexploded bombs in the garden. A citrus tree threw a shadow on the tomatoes climbing their wooden stakes, and cactus plants stood guard on the edge of the back porch. They spoke about Iraq and the war and Saddam for nearly an hour. The captain shook his hand gratefully as he left.
Ten minutes later, a soldier named Izzy returned, knocking at the door. “Hayder, the cap’n wants you to come over. There’s an Iraqi family telling us something, but we can’t understand ’em. Can you come?” Hayder told Dina he’d be back in a few minutes; it was just a few houses down the street. He walked over with Izzy, translated the conversation, and walked back home.
Fifteen minutes later, Izzy was back at the door. “Hayder, can you help us again?” So he went back.
They kept coming for help. He went to twenty homes, throughout the day and into the evening. He was happy. He hadn’t met a lot of his neighbors before that day; they seemed so grateful to him for his ability to translate.
The next morning, the captain knocked on his door at eight o’clock. Hayder was still sleeping and grumbled when Dina woke him up. “I’m sorry if we woke you, Hayder. But would you like to work for us?” Hayder was excited but said he needed to discuss it with his wife.
Dina knew Hayder would take the job but worried that it might not be safe. “Where’s the risk?” he said. “Saddam’s gone!” Everyone was thanking him for speaking English so well.
His friends told him, “Do it, man! You’re gonna help us out a lot! Who is going to bring our voice to the Americans?”
They said, “You’re gonna help out the neighborhood, bring back the electricity.”
Hayder demurred. “I’m not the mayor, I’m just going to be a translator.”
They said, “Yeah, but how will they know what we need unless somebody tells them?”
Five bucks a day, cash, that was the deal. Izzy always played Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” in the Humvee and taught Hayder how to dance like him. Everywhere they went, Iraqi boys crowded around to look at and flirt with the few females in the company. Hayder felt like he was in the movies. He absorbed their slang and made them laugh.
“The fuck’s your name again?” someone asked in the first few days.
“Hayder.”
“What kind of shitty name is Hayder?” They busted him like he was one of their own.
“Well, it’s a local name.”
“Nah, that’s too tough for us to remember. We’re gonna give you a nickname.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s call you Homeboy.” And everyone did.
Mouayyad was with Hayder when they saw the 101st enter Baghdad. They were best friends. When they were in high school, and Saddam was about to invade Kuwait, they worried they’d be trucked to the front lines to fight against Americans. “If that happens,” Mouayyad said, “we’ll go to Kurdistan, and from there to Turkey. Then to Cuba. And then we’ll smuggle ourselves into America.”
As soon as he could afford to buy his first car, Mouayyad bought a Chevrolet Caprice Classic. He was crazy about America. He used to kiss his Caprice each morning. “I’m not gonna buy Toyota shit!” Mouayyad said. “I’m buying American.”
So when the Americans came in, Mouayyad also stepped forward to help. His English wasn’t as good, but he knew engines and machines, so they hired him to work on their bases as a generator repairman. He kept their ACs running and their bases lit. They called him Moe.
The troops that Hayder rode with were there to fight a war, not to become policemen. One evening on patrol, there were peals of gunfire. Hayder knew it was celebratory fire; that someone had just been married. But he could not stop the Americans from shooting back, and Iraqis were wounded.
Some units were less disciplined than others and kicked in front doors instead of knocking. They shouted as they came in, not giving the women of the homes time to cover their hair. Hayder heard them curse the Americans as he translated the soldiers’ demands to search their homes.
The people in his neighborhood came by every day with only one question, which they asked relentlessly: “Hayder, when is the power coming back?” He told them that the electricity wasn’t controlled by a single button somewhere, but they weren’t assuaged. Everyone talked about the massive generator that the Americans brought into Kuwait after the Gulf War. Why couldn’t they do that here?
He communicated his neighbors’ concerns to the Americans just as relentlessly, so much so that Izzy and the others would sigh, “Oh boy, here we go again. Here comes Homeboy, gonna ask us about the power.”
“Well, what’s going on with the electricity?” he’d ask. Their answers were vague, and the higher the rank, the loftier the language—“We’re going to set things up so that the Iraqi people take control over their own destiny”—and Hayder realized that they didn’t have the training, the capacity, or a clue.
Before long, he was lying, and lying all the time. He wanted the Iraqis in his neighborhood to still have hope. He didn’t want them to start hating Americans, even though he saw it germinating in the splinters of every kicked-in door, with each passing summer month without electricity. He couldn’t fully explain it to himself, but he loved America and got angry whenever anyone spoke poorly of it or called the Americans liars. So when they asked, “Hayder, what did they say about the electricity?” he usually said he forgot to ask.
One evening he came back from work and found Dina’s sister running from room to room. “She’s in labor! Get your things together!” Hayder and Dina piled into their Malaysian Proton Wira and raced to the hospital, hoping that their doctor would make it there before the American-imposed curfew.
Ali was born around seven in the evening on May 29, 2003. Hayder scooped him up and kissed him as he cried. He felt sorry for his boy, because he was born at the wrong time. He whispered to Ali, “I’m going to protect you until you get big. I will do anything that needs to be done to keep you safe.” After a few days, Dina and Ali came back to the house, and they lived like a regular family. Some of the soldiers came by one day to say hi to Ali and take pictures.
There wasn’t room for him in the Humvee as they rode through the neighborhood of Abu Dasheer, near Dora, so Hayder rode in the back of a commandeered ambulance with some other soldiers. The main street was always crowded because of the small stands on the median, where vendors sold vegetables, cell phones, and watermelons. The ambulance was stuck in pedestrian traffic when someone flung open the back door and tried to fire a revolver. The soldiers leaped on him before anyone was wounded, took the assailant to prison, and told the Iraqis on the street that nobody would be permitted to sell goods in the middle of the road anymore. To underscore their point, they drove their Humvees up onto the median and sent vendors running.
The war was still in its infancy, but things were deteriorating quickly. Hayder tried to help, sitting with the captain each day, discussing alternate routes, and assessing the quality of incoming tips from informants. He drafted a new letter in Arabic for the soldiers to present to Iraqis, which was much more polite. He stopped asking about the electricity, which seemed to relieve just about everyone in the unit.
But a slip of paper and conversations with the captain were just words. Once an RPG sailed past his Humvee and hit the median. Another time a car blew up in front of him. Soldiers in his unit were killed, sometimes by bullet, sometimes by bomb.
Hayder decided to quit. Ali was just a couple months old, and Hayder felt like he was breaking his promise to protect his son. He didn’t sign up for this, he told the captain, and walked home.
The next morning, the Americans came by and said, “Homeboy, we can’t do this shit without you. You’re gonna have to come along with us.” They said, “Look, everyone’s pissed off over here. You think we’re having a good time?”
Hayder said, “Okay, let me grab my clothes.” He didn’t want to go back, but he loved his unit, Charlie Company of the Eighty-Second Airborne. He was worried that something bad might happen to them or that they might mistakenly do something bad to his fellow Iraqis, so he went back to help, absorbing and interpreting the frustrations of both sides.
Charlie Company knew that Hayder was getting burned out and was starting to fear for his safety, so they started dropping him off at his front door to make sure he got home in one piece. He knew it wasn’t convenient for them to turn a convoy of several Humvees up his narrow street, so one day he told them to just drop him on the main road by his house. They agreed but said that they would stay to watch him from there.
As he approached his home, a stranger, maybe twenty years old, was coming out the front door. Hayder sprinted toward him. The Americans in Charlie Company saw something amiss and scrambled over, just as Hayder had beaten the intruder into submission.
“Homeboy, ask him if there’s anyone else inside.”
Hayder translated the soldier’s question about his own home. Yes, there were two more inside.
“Are they armed?”
Yes, they were armed. “They’re waiting to kill you,” the young man groaned to Hayder.
“Wait here,” said the captain, and they kicked in his door. Inside were two teenagers, who dropped their guns the moment they saw US military bearing down on them. Mercifully, Dina and Ali were visiting her sister that day.
During the interrogation, Hayder learned that one of his neighbors had informed the intruders about his work with the Americans. They called him an ameel, just like in grade school.
He wanted to leave, but where could he go? He owned a 9 millimeter pistol, but that wasn’t much protection. Another friend of his, who worked as an interpreter and lived a few blocks over, was hanged in the neighborhood with a sign around his neck that read “This is what happens to those who work with Americans.”
Dina begged him to quit. Hayder wanted to, but he felt that he understood Americans better than the Iraqis ever would and understood Iraqis better than the Americans ever could. He was the bridge, and even though things were getting bad, he had to continue.
It was a Thursday, the night of August 6, 2003. Hayder was killing time in the Eighty-Second Airborne’s compound across the bridge from his home in Dora. While waiting for the captain to come in with their orders, he sat on a worn-out black sofa and played FIFA World Cup soccer on the PlayStation with a soldier named Brian Hellermann, a thirty-five-year-old Minnesota native with a wife and two young children back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The captain came in and said, “Homeboy, we’re going out tonight.” They needed to go pay the salaries of the Iraqi police and then bring them along on a training mission to teach them how to patrol. Brian paused the game so that they could finish it later. Everyone armored up, except for Hayder, who didn’t have any gear.
As soon as they left the compound, at around seven in the evening, a car swerved in front of them and blew up. They set up a perimeter and waited for backup to come and investigate the wreckage.
When backup arrived, Hayder and the guys piled back into the Humvees and resumed their primary mission, heading to the police station. A few minutes later, another car sped up alongside them on the highway, coming closer and closer. “Pull over!” the soldiers shouted before firing at the hood of the car, which stopped quickly.
“Weird fuckin’ night, huh?” Hayder said to the captain, who grunted his assent.
They paid the Iraqi cops and started their night patrol. Around a quarter to one in the morning, they pulled off onto the shoulder of Highway 8, alongside a middle-aged Iraqi standing beside his car. “Hayder, go over there and tell that guy he’s gotta move his car because curfew’s about to start.” Hayder translated for the man, who said the car wasn’t starting.
“Well, he can’t stay here, or else some other unit might detain him. Ask him where he lives. If it’s close, we’ll drop him off at home.”
The bullets blazed in just as Hayder began to translate. The Americans were screaming to get to cover as they fired back. Hayder stood in shock for a moment, wondering where the bullets were coming from.
He needed to run. His Humvee was directly in the field of fire, so running there was foolish. He looked around. He spotted a white Toyota 4x4 pickup truck and bolted toward it. He heard bullets flying past his ears and slapping into the side of the truck.
Something blew up, maybe an RPG. He didn’t know what. He was thrown onto the ground, and above the gunfire he heard the captain shouting orders to take cover and shoot back, but Hayder didn’t have a weapon and wasn’t a soldier.
He was lying there when he saw Brian Hellermann fall to the ground. He knew Brian was shot but didn’t know where. Brian’s face was turned down toward the pavement, and his radio was on and squawking. He was only five feet away and still in danger. Those were the only thoughts that formed in Hayder’s head. He got to his feet and bolted over to drag Brian back to shelter in the lee of the truck.
He made it over to Brian and started to pull him but fell to the ground. Hayder looked down at his body and saw that his right leg was missing. Then another round tore into his left leg. Hayder turned and saw the assailant crouched in a nearby field, spraying sparking shots along the pavement. He looked over at Brian and saw that he was dead.
“Oh my God. What have I done?” Hayder lay on the pavement of a street not two miles away from his home. He wanted to hold his son. “Ali just came into my life, and now he’s going to live without a dad? Dina’s going to have to go through all of this alone.” He looked up at the sky as the fight roared around him. He wasn’t religious, but he said, “Hey, Allah, just try to save me here, make this go by as quick as possible.”
Someone ran through the fire and grabbed them both, dragging them off to the side.
It was quiet. Someone was carrying Hayder. He looked down and saw that his leg was still hanging by a husk of flesh. They put him in the back of a Humvee tub next to Brian, whose face was purple; a large-caliber round had pierced the Kevlar of his helmet. They piled dead bodies next to Hayder, and then more bodies on top of him. Though he was barely conscious, he realized that they didn’t know that he was still alive. His throat was full of fluid, so he couldn’t make much noise. As the Humvee raced back to the base, the blood of men above seeped down onto him, and he drifted in and out of consciousness.
The Humvee came to a halt. Someone shouted, “Hey! Homeboy’s alive, get him outta there!” Hayder was extracted from among the corpses. A medic appeared, wrapped strong elastic bands around Hayder’s legs, and said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Just stay here. Homeboy! Stay here.”
When his throat cleared, he shouted and thrashed around. The medic placed a firm hand on his shoulder and said, “Homeboy, you need to calm down, you’re bleeding a lot.”
In the Combat Support Hospital, they laid him out and cut off his jeans and T-shirt and boxers and began to clean him. Someone stood at the side of the table with a defibrillator, just in case. A doctor came over to Hayder and gently took hold of his hand. “Son, can I pray for you in the name of the Lord Jesus?” Hayder said, “Yes sir.” He didn’t care; he’d take any kind of hope. He passed out as the doctors strapped on their surgical masks.
When he woke up, he wanted water, and someone brought it to him. He looked around the room, and on a nearby gurney there lay a soldier whose face was shelled, torn up by gunfire and the blast. When he saw that Hayder was awake, he said, “The others are dead. You and me are the only ones who made it.”
The captain came in and smiled a pained smile. “Homeboy, we came to visit you in the middle of the night, and you were a little delirious. We asked you to go to work, and you know what you said? You said, ‘Sir, I’m a bit tired. Is it all right if I go out tomorrow?’ ”
For the first time since he’d woken up, Hayder looked down at his body, but there was a blanket draped over it. He lifted it up slowly and saw both legs there. My God, he thought, they saved it! There were steel bars and rods sticking out of his right leg, and his left leg was heavily bandaged. He was overjoyed, certain that he would be able to walk with both legs, and thanked Allah and Jesus and anyone else who might have saved him.
He was tired and overwhelmed and went back to sleep. For the next five days, they wheeled him back and forth to the operating room to perform more surgeries. He was heavily medicated, and hallucinated so fiercely that the orderlies were forced to strap him to the bed. He slept for two days continuously while the surgeons worked on his legs.
But they were swelling, growing bigger and bigger despite the operations. One night nearly a week after the attack, the surgeon woke up Hayder and said, “Look, Homeboy, we did our best, but we have to amputate now. You’ve got gangrene going up your leg, and if I don’t take it off tonight, you might wake up dead.”
Hayder said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
When he woke up, the blanket was again draped over him, but this time he lifted it up and the leg was gone.
Dina had not heard from Hayder in a week. She thought he was dead, until another interpreter in Hayder’s group paid a visit to pass along the news that he was still alive. They did not believe him or the Americans anymore, though, and were convinced that it was a lie. After two days, Hayder’s dad walked up to the military compound where Hayder’s unit in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division operated and shouted, “Just give us his body so we can bury him!” The captain said, “No, no, I promise he’s alive. We’re gonna bring him home soon.”
It had been only a hundred days since it started, since the day Hayder watched the 101st Airborne stream into Baghdad like a strip of movie film. Since his neighbors surely knew about his work with the Americans by now, he rented a secret home a few blocks over and hobbled into it after nightfall. There was no prosthetic leg, just a stump, some wooden crutches, and a bag of drugs. Dina’s brother brought in a crate of whiskey and slept on the couch with a pistol.
The first three nights, Hayder didn’t sleep. He watched three sunrises and thought he was losing his mind. He kept the door locked and watched television and played video games—Tomb Raider, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike—with his brother-in-law. He drank heavily.
The summer heat was peaking. Since there was no electricity, his neighbors would sit out in the garden for a bit of breeze, but that was too risky for Hayder. He didn’t want someone to jump over the fence and kill him, so he bought a generator, installed it in the garden, and stayed indoors. Eventually word spread that a one-legged man was living there, and his neighbors realized it was the same Hayder who tried to save an American, so someone tossed a grenade over the garden wall and blew up the generator.
His father was working in the new Ministry of Transportation and met regularly with American officials. Paul Bremer was in charge of the country and had given the transportation portfolio to a lawyer named Ronald Dwight.
Mr. Dwight noticed a deep despondency in Hayder’s father during a meeting one afternoon and asked him privately what was troubling him. He learned about Hayder’s situation and said he wanted to help.
There was little left in Hayder’s reservoir of hope, but he began to correspond with Mr. Dwight. He was so worried about his spotty dial-up Internet connection that he hobbled out and bought a small pile of dial-up cards and bribed the telephone serviceman in the neighborhood to ensure that he always had a line to the outside world.
Mr. Dwight knew T. Christian Miller, the investigative reporter from the Los Angeles Times who had tormented USAID with his exposés on bungled reconstruction projects. T. had the unusual beat of covering reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and he knew the fine print that led to so much corruption and inefficiency in the war efforts. His articles were not about massive car bombs in marketplaces but about sputtering power plants, and they did a lot more to explain the root causes of the major problems rending the country. Dwight introduced Hayder to T., who dropped by quietly for a visit.
T. left with a sheaf of documents and contracts. Hayder had been paid through a San Diego–based defense contractor called Titan Corporation, which received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to find interpreters, whose average pay was a few dollars an hour. Hayder didn’t really understand the contracts, which were freighted with legalese. After he lost his leg, he had called his bosses at Titan, but all they ever told him was “Yeah, we’d love to help you, Homeboy, but we can’t get you out of Iraq.” One day they told him to get a passport, and they’d give him treatment in Kuwait. But as soon as he got one, they said they couldn’t. When they said they were going to bring him to Qatar, Hayder excitedly packed his bags, but on the scheduled day, they told him they couldn’t help him after all.
Holed up in his hiding place, Hayder entered the Internet access codes from the cards he had bought and waited for something to happen. Miller wrote a front-page article about him, demonstrating that Titan had done nothing to help, and suddenly Hayder’s boss called to say the company had finally decided to help. His father loaded him into the car and drove him to a small clinic in Amman, Jordan, where Titan would finally provide for a prosthetic leg and treatment.
The first place Hayder walked to with his new prosthetic leg was the Embassy of the United States of America in Jordan. He had brought along a couple letters of support from his unit, along with a certificate of appreciation: “Thank you for your dedicated service to Coalition Forces and the paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division. Your tireless efforts have contributed to a brighter future for Iraq. We could not have done it without you. Best of luck in all you do. C Company 2-325th Airborne Infantry Regiment.”
He spoke to a young consular officer through the thick windowpane and said, “I am an Iraqi interpreter, and I would like to apply for asylum in America.” He thought there would be a form to fill out, but there wasn’t. The officer said, “Oh, you need to go over to the UNHCR and register.” So Hayder walked to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and registered his family. It was early 2004.
Dina and Ali came to Amman, and the family moved into a small apartment in the Seventh Circle neighborhood. Titan told them that they would have a monthly stipend of $600. One month later, a representative of Titan visited to inform them that the next month would be the last, delivering an ultimatum: “This is the last of the money we can give you. You can either go back to Iraq and work for us or quit, but this is it.”
Hayder knew he couldn’t go back. The burning of the Americans on the bridge in Fallujah was looping on all of the news stations. He called his dad and said, “The house is yours. Do what you want with it, sell it, burn it, give it away, I don’t care. I’m not coming back.” Dina sold the jewelry that she had inherited and their computer and television, cobbling together about $2,000.
Hayder couldn’t work. He was in Jordan illegally, and if a cop stopped him, he could be deported. There are few protections for refugees in the Middle East. None of the countries has signed the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international agreement according certain protections, chief among them non-refoulement: the principle that refugees cannot be forced to return to the country from which they fled. In Jordan, Hayder was nothing and could become nothing, hobbling through a precarious state of limbo.
The two-month stipend from Titan evaporated, and the money made from selling Dina’s jewelry was fast running out. Amman was expensive, and the only plan Hayder had was to hope that his refugee petition would get the family to safety in America before they were broke or deported.
T. Miller called Hayder and said there was an American lawyer who’d read the article in the Los Angeles Times and wanted to help him sue American International Group (AIG), the insurance giant that had received more than $1.5 billion in premiums from US taxpayers to provide insurance coverage under the Defense Base Act. The act, a World War II–era law, required all contractors working for the US government to provide insurance to their employees, Iraqi interpreters included. But the Iraqis were rarely informed about this right, and Titan, AIG, and other companies didn’t remind them. Worse, representatives sent to Jordan pressured gravely wounded interpreters into accepting a onetime payout and signing a waiver of all future coverage. Some were told that they would be sent back to Iraq if they refused to sign.
Hayder was patched into the Houston courtroom during the lawsuit by telephone. The judge asked him questions. AIG fought hard against the lawyer representing Hayder but was ordered to compensate Hayder for the loss of his leg. This was valued at the rate of an American leg: $21,000.
When the bank called to inform Hayder that the wire had arrived, he woke up Dina with excitement. “This will get us started in America!” he said. All that remained was the visa.