After I’d settled in, Bob oriented me to the AO, taking me to the large map hanging in our office and breaking down the region.
“Here’s us,” he said, pointing at Camp Taji. “To the east you’ve got the Tigris. There’s a few old palaces on the western banks, and the other side is farming. Fruit groves. Oranges. Lemons. That weird fruit. What’s it called?”
“Pomegranate?” I said.
“No. I like pomegranate. That stuff—” He waved his hands and grimaced, then pointed back to the east side of the Tigris on the map. “This section’s all Sunni, so during Saddam, they did all right. It’s less slummy.”
“Less slummy?” I said.
“Until the highway. Route Dover”—Bob pointed to a road running north and south—“that’s the dividing line. West of Dover, Sunnis. East of Dover, slums, shit land, a little farming irrigated by the canal.” He pointed to a thin blue line running out of the Tigris, forming the southern border of the map. “Above that there’s not much good farming. There’s a water treatment plant here”—he pointed to a black spot on the map unconnected to any marked roads—“there’s an oil refinery out to the east, and here’s JSS Istalquaal.”
“JSS,” I said. “That means there’s Iraqi units there.”
“National Police,” he said. “And two companies from the BCT. Sunni police stay on the Sunni side, Shi’a stay on the Shi’a side, but the National Police cross over.”
“What are the National Police like?” I said.
“They’re Shi’a death squads,” he said, smirking.
“Oh.”
“South of the canal is Sadr City. No one goes there except U.S. SpecOps looking to kill somebody. Istalquaal is the closest JSS in our AO to it.”
I looked up at the map. “USAID claims agriculture should be employing thirty percent of the population,” I said.
“Right,” said Bob, “but the whole system broke down after we trashed the state-run industries.”
“Fantastic,” I said.
“It wasn’t my idea,” said Bob. “We remade the Ministry of Agriculture on free market principles, but the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs.”
“Okay,” I said, “but this region”—I pointed to the Shi’a areas—“needs water for irrigation.”
“West of Dover, too,” he said. “Irrigation systems need maintenance, and nobody’s been doing much of that.”
I tapped the dark spot he’d said was a water treatment plant. “Is this operational?”
Bob laughed. “We sunk about 1.5 million dollars’ worth of IRRF2 funds into it a couple years back.”
“What’d that buy us?”
“No idea,” Bob said. “But the chief engineer has been asking for a meeting.”
“Great,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
Bob shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“Look,” I said, “I know there’s a limit to what I can do. But if I can do one small thing—”
“Small?” said Bob. “A water treatment plant?”
“It’s probably the best thing we could—”
“I’ve been here longer than you,” said Bob.
“Okay.”
“If you want to succeed, don’t do big ambitious things. This is Iraq. Teach widows to raise bees.”
“Raise bees?” I said.
“Beekeep?” he said. “Whatever. Grow honey. Get five widows some beehives—”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got an Iraqi who can sell us the hives, and an Iraqi local council saying they’ll support the project—”
“Bob,” I said.
“Yes?” he said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The embassy likes completed projects supporting Lines of Engagement.”
“Which has what to do with getting five widows beekeeping?”
Bob folded his arms and looked me over. He pointed to the opposite wall, where we had a poster outlining the LOEs. “Give someone a job. That’s economic improvement. Give women a job. That’s women’s empowerment. Give a widow a job. That’s aiding disenfranchised populations. Three LOEs in one project. Widow projects are gold. With the council supporting it, we can say it’s an Iraqi-led project. And it’ll cost under twenty-five thousand dollars, so the funding will sail through.”
“Five widows with beehives.”
“I think it’s called an apiary,” he said.
“Beekeeping,” I said, “is not going to help.”
“Help what?” said Bob. “This country is fucked whatever you do.”
“I’m going to focus on water,” I said. “Let’s get that plant running.”
“Okay,” he said. He shook his head, then looked up and smiled amiably. He seemed to have decided I could go to hell my own way. “Then we should get you to one of the companies at Istalquaal.”
“Istalquaal,” I said, trying out the sound of the word, eager to get it right.
“I think that’s how you say it,” Bob said. “It means freedom. Or liberation. Something.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“They didn’t name it,” he said. “We did.”
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It took six weeks to get to the plant. Three weeks alone trying to get Kazemi, the chief engineer, on the phone. Another three trying to nail down the specifics. Kazemi had an annoying habit of answering questions about dates and times the way a Zen master answers questions about enlightenment. “Only the mountains do not meet,” he’d say, or, “The provisions for tomorrow belong to tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, Cindy’s women’s health clinic took off. She set it up on the Sunni side of the highway, and the number of patients increased steadily each week. I didn’t have much to do on the water front, and sitting around waiting for Kazemi to get back to me was enough to drive me insane, so I decided to get myself personally involved in the clinic. I didn’t really trust Cindy with it. I thought she was too earnest to handle something important, and the more she told me, the more I thought the project was genuinely worthwhile.
In Iraq, it’s hard for women to see a doctor. They need a man’s permission, and even then a lot of hospitals and small clinics won’t serve them. You’ll see signs reading, “Services for Men Only,” sort of like the old “Irish Need Not Apply” signs that my great-great-grandfather had to deal with.
Health services were the hook to draw people in, but key to the broader functioning of the clinic were Najdah, a dogged social worker, and her sister, the on-staff lawyer. Every woman who came in was interviewed first, ostensibly for the clinic to find out what health services they needed but actually to allow us to find out what broader services we could provide. The problems of women in our area went far beyond untreated urinary tract infections, though those were often quite severe—women’s problems were usually not sufficient pretext for a man to allow his wife or daughter or sister to go see the doctor, and health issues we think of as minor in the United States had a tendency to snowball. One woman’s UTI scarred her kidneys so badly, she was risking organ failure.
The clinic also helped women needing divorces, women suffering domestic violence, women not getting the public assistance they were entitled to, and women who wanted to file claims against Coalition Forces to get compensation for relatives they’d accidentally killed. One girl, a fourteen-year-old victim of gang rape, came in because her family planned to sell her to a local brothel. This wasn’t uncommon for girls whose rapes destroyed their marriage prospects. It was actually a kinder option than the honor killings that still sometimes happened.
Najdah and the staff lawyer would do their best to help these women out, occasionally raising their concerns with the local councils and power brokers. They didn’t try to “liberate” the Iraqi women—whatever that means—or turn them into entrepreneurs. Najdah and her staff listened to them and helped them with their actual problems. In the case of the fourteen-year-old, Najdah had a friend on the police force raid the girl’s home as well as the brothel. The girl went to prison. For her, it was the best alternative.
I made a few trips out to the clinic and had started thinking about expanding the idea to other communities when Kazemi finally got back to us with concrete ideas for a meeting. I arranged things with him and then tried to set up a convoy with one of the units at Istalquaal.
“Nobody’s been that way in a long time,” one company commander told me over the phone. “There’s probably IEDs there from ’04. We have no idea what we might hit.”
That’s not something you want to hear from a hardened soldier. I’d already done a couple convoys by the time I got to Istalquaal, but the memory of that assessment and the wary nervousness of the soldiers there gave me what, in the military, they refer to as a “high pucker factor.” The platoon that eventually took me out had clearly drawn the last straw. They all knew it. “Let’s go get blown up,” I overheard one soldier saying to another. When we got on the road, my only comfort was the obvious boredom of my translator, a somewhat short and pudgy Sunni Muslim everybody referred to as “the Professor.”
“Why do they call you the Professor?” I asked him.
“Because I was a professor,” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them as if to emphasize the point, “before you came and destroyed this country.”
We were getting off to an awkward start. “You know,” I said, “when this all started I opposed the war… .”
“You have baked Iraq like a cake,” he said, “and given it to Iran to eat.”
He sniffed and folded his arms over his belly and closed his eyes. I pretended something on the side of the road had caught my eye. Most translators would never say anything like that to an American. We sat in silence for a while.
“Istalquaal,” I finally said, trying to draw him out. “Does it mean freedom, or liberation?”
He opened his eyes a crack and looked at me sidelong. “Istalquaal? Istiqlal means independence,” he said. “Istalquaal means nothing. It means Americans can’t speak Arabic.”
It was rumored the Professor had blood on his hands from the Saddam days. Whether that was true or not, he was our best interpreter. On the road, though, he wasn’t much company. He sat with his hands folded and his eyes closed, possibly sleeping, possibly avoiding conversation.
The landscape out there was desolate. No trees, no animals, no plants, no water—nothing. Often, when people try to describe Iraq, you hear a lot of references to Mad Max, the postapocalyptic film trilogy where biker gangs in S&M gear drive across the desert, killing one another for gasoline. I’ve never found the description particularly apt. Aside from that weird Shi’a festival where everybody beats themselves with chains, you won’t find much fetish gear in country. And out there, not seeing a single living thing, I’d have welcomed the sight of other humans, even a biker gang in leather face masks and assless chaps. But war, unfortunately, is not like the movies.
Kazemi wasn’t there when we got to the plant, a large, blockish structure with a row of enormous concrete cylinders topped by metal pipes. We went to the main building, but when we tried to get inside and out of the sun, we couldn’t open the front door. It was large, metal, and so rusted that it wouldn’t budge.
“Here, sir,” said a burly Army sergeant. He smiled at his fellow soldiers, no doubt thinking he’d show them how much stronger and better at door opening the Army was than the State Department. He pushed at it. Nothing. Still smiling, with the eyes of most of the soldiers on him, the sergeant backed up a step and launched himself into the door. The primary effect was a loud booming noise. Now red-faced, he started cursing, and with everybody, even the Professor, watching him, he backed up about fifteen feet and then ran into the door at full speed. The crash of his body armor against the steel was enormous, and the door opened with a screaming metallic creak. A few soldiers cheered.
Inside was dark and rusty.
“I don’t think anyone’s been here in a while, sir,” said the sergeant.
I looked back at the convoy of soldiers. I’d risked all their lives bringing them here.
“Professor,” I said, “we need to get Kazemi on the phone. Now.”
While he called, I daydreamed about beekeeping. Images floated through my head of Iraqi Widow Honey in U.S. supermarkets, of Donald Rumsfeld helping out by doing TV ads: “Try the sweet taste of Iraqi freedom.” After about thirty phone calls, the Professor assured me Kazemi was en route.
The Iraqis arrived from the south in a small convoy of pickup trucks. Chief Engineer Kazemi, a thin little Iraqi with a bushy mustache, waved and spoke in Arabic for about ten minutes. The Professor nodded and nodded and didn’t translate a word until the end.
“He greets you, and wants to take you to his office,” he said.
I agreed, and we followed Kazemi through the dark hallways of the plant. This entailed a lot of backtracking.
“He would like you to believe,” the Professor said after our ninth or tenth wrong turn, “that he normally comes in through another door and that is why he is not knowing where to go.”
When we got to the office, one of the police officers with Kazemi made tea that he served in a dusty cup with a sludge of sugar congealed at the bottom. I tried, while drinking it, to come to the point in my best American manner.
“What do we need to get this plant operating?” I said.
The Professor reiterated the question, and Kazemi smiled and started fumbling under the desk. He mumbled something, and the Professor looked concerned and asked what sounded like a few sharp questions.
“What are you telling him?” I said.
The Professor ignored me. After a minute or so, Kazemi pulled something from under the desk, dislodging papers and spilling office supplies all over the floor.
“I do not think this man is very intelligent,” said the Professor.
Kazemi held a large box in his hands. He placed it on top of the desk, opened it, and carefully pulled out a scale model of the water treatment plant, constructed of cardboard and toothpicks. At the four corners of the plant, though, were thin cardboard towers. Kazemi pointed to one of these.
“Mah-sheen gaans,” he said.
Then he smiled and cradled his hands as though holding a weapon.
“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat,” he said, shooting the imaginary gun. Then came another stream of Arabic.
“Your military,” the Professor said after a pause, “failed to approve funds for the construction of machine-gun towers. They are not standard on U.S. water plants.”
Kazemi said something else.
“Also, your military built the wrong pipes,” said the Professor.
“What does he mean, the wrong pipes?” I said.
This time the discussion went on for some time, the Professor getting increasingly curt. He seemed to be berating Kazemi.
“Your military built pipes for the wrong water pressure,” said the Professor, “and they built them across the highway.”
“Is there a way to deal with the water pressure—”
“The water pressure is not the problem,” said the Professor. “The ministry is Jaish al-Mahdi.”
I looked at him blankly. “But water would be good for—”
“They will not turn on water for Sunnis.” His accusing stare suggested that, somehow, this was my fault. Of course, given that the United States had split Iraqi ministries between political parties at the outset of the war, allowing the various factions to expel the old Baathist technocrats in favor of party hacks who carved the country up between them, it sort of was.
Kazemi spoke again.
“I am sure of it,” said the Professor. “This man is not intelligent.”
“What does he say?”
“He would like to pump water,” said the Professor. “He has had this job for many years without pumping any water and he wants to see what it is like.”
“If some of the water is going to Sunnis,” I said, “he will need machine guns?”
“He will need them anyway,” said the Professor.
“Okay,” I said.
“He will get himself killed,” said the Professor.
“Ask him what it will take to get the plant working,” I said, “aside from machine guns.”
They spoke in Arabic. I stared at the wall. When they were finished, the Professor turned to me and said, “He will have to assess. He has not been here in many weeks.”
“Where has he been?” I said.
The Professor asked him, and Kazemi smiled, looked at me, and said, “Ee-ran.”
Everyone knew that word. The American soldiers with me had looked tense from the outset; now they looked murderous. Iran was the major importer of EFPs, a particularly lethal IED that sends a hot liquid metal bullet crashing through the sides of even the most heavily armored vehicles, spraying everybody inside. One EOD tech told me that even if the metal didn’t get you, the change in pressure caused by the sheer speed of the thing would.
Kazemi continued speaking. Occasionally the Professor would frown and say something back. At one point he took his glasses off and rubbed them while shaking his head.
“Ah,” said the Professor. “He went to get marriages.”
“Marriages?” I said. I turned to Kazemi. “Congratulations.” I put my hand over my heart. I was smiling in spite of myself. The soldiers behind me all looked relieved.
“Iranian women are very beautiful,” said the Professor.
Kazemi pulled out a cell phone. He fiddled with it for a bit, then showed it to me. On the screen was a picture of a pretty young woman’s face.
“Madame,” said Kazemi.
“Very lovely,” I said.
He pushed a button and flipped to another picture of another woman, then flipped to another, and another, and another. “Madame. Madame. Madame. Madame,” he said.
“Why is her face bruised?” I said.
The Professor shrugged, and Kazemi kept flipping through pictures.
We talked more about Iranian women and their beauty, I congratulated him on his marriages again, and then another forty minutes of discussion left us with the agreement that I’d figure out a security solution for Kazemi if he’d figure out what it’d take to get the plant on line.
On the drive back, the Professor explained the marriages to me in the tone you’d use to speak with a mentally deficient golden retriever.
“Nikah mut’ah,” he said. “Shi’a allow temporary marriages. Shi’a marry a woman for an hour, the next day marry another.”
“Oh,” I said. “Prostitution.”
“Prostitution is illegal under Islam,” said the Professor.
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