The e-mail popped up as soon as I got off the phone. The subject was: IRAQ’S SOON TO BE NATIONAL PASTIME. The sender was: GOODWIN, GENE GABRIEL. I thought, Who gave this asshole my e-mail address? That was answered almost immediately.
Dear Nathan (I hope I can call you Nathan? Major Zima told me you were a very approachable guy),
I’m glad to get a hold of someone who’s finally willing to give this a shot. You won’t believe the amount of BS you’ve got to go through to get anything done with the US Army.
Here’s the idea: The Iraqi people want democracy, but it’s not taking. Why? They don’t have the INSTITUTIONS to support it. You can’t build anything with a rotten foundation, and Iraqi culture is, I’m sure, as rotten as it gets.
I know this sounds crazy, but there are few better institutions than the institution of BASEBALL. Look at the Japanese. They went from Emperor-loving fascists to baseball-playing democracy freaks faster than you can say, Sayonara, Hirohito!
What I’m saying is, you’ve got to change the CULTURE first. And what’s more AMERICAN than baseball, where one man takes a stand against the world, bat in hand, ready to make history, every moment a one-on-one competition. Batter versus pitcher. Runner versus first baseman. Runner versus second baseman. Third baseman. If he’s lucky, against the catcher himself. And yet! And YET!!! It’s a team sport! You’re nothing without the team!!!!
I guess they play soccer over there now. Figures. There’s a sport that teaches kids all the wrong lessons. “Pretend you’re hurt and the ref might help you out!” “You’ll never make it on your own, kick the ball to your friend!” And worst of all, nobody ever scores. It’s like, “Go ahead, kids, but don’t expect much! Even if you’re near the goal, you’re probably not gonna make it!” And they can’t use their hands. What the heck is that all about?
I know this probably sounds silly to you, but remember: Great ideas always sound silly. People told me my Grand Slam Discounts were silly too, but I went and did it and nobody calls me silly anymore. It’s like we say in the mattress business: SUCCESS = DRIVE + DETERMINATION + MATTRESSES. And here I’m supplying the materials. All I’m asking from you is a little effort to give these Iraqi kids a chance for the future.
Yours Truly,
GG Goodwin
Reading the e-mail was like getting an ice pick to the brain. I stared blankly at my computer, all higher mental functions short-circuited, and resisted the urge to punch the screen. This, I thought, was bullshit. I composed a terse note explaining that while we appreciated his generosity, baseball wasn’t likely to catch on, and while the kids would certainly make use of the uniforms, I couldn’t promise him they’d be playing baseball in them. Then I clicked “send.”
Within an hour, I found myself cc’d on an e-mail to none other than Representative Gordon. Also cc’d were a host of military and civilian personnel. Chris Roper. Some brigadier general. Major Zima. And the colonel in charge of the BCT I was attached to. The sight of his name alone was enough to let me know I’d seriously screwed up. I was new to the cc game, a game played with skill by staff officers throughout the military, but I knew enough to know that the more senior people you could comfortably cc on your e-mails, the more everyone had to put up with whatever bullshit your e-mails were actually about.
The message began, “I am continually amazed by the lack of foresight I have found…,” and got uglier from there. Within five minutes, I had a new e-mail in my in-box, this from Lieutenant Colonel Roux, the brigade XO. It was addressed not to me, but to Major Zima. Roux hadn’t been cc’d on the initial e-mail, but scanning down through the document, I saw the colonel had forwarded it with the terse message “Jim. Deal with this.”
Lieutenant Colonel Roux was not quite as laconic. His message read, “Can someone explain to me why the Colonel is getting cc’d on angry letters to members of Congress? I want this unfucked. Now.” Below that was his signature block: “Very Respectfully, LTC James E. Roux.”
I started sweating over a response e-mail to the XO. It seemed important to convey the sheer idiocy of G. G. Goodwin, and I wasn’t sure I had the skill to get it across. But before I’d even put down the first paragraph, Major Zima beat me to the punch with what was clearly the right reply. “Sir,” it read, “I’ll handle it immediately.”
Five minutes later came another e-mail, this also from Major Zima. Lieutenant Colonel Roux and I were cc’d, as was the congressman and the random brigadier general, but not the colonel.
“Sir,” it began. “There’s been a little miscommunication on our part. I actually just finished talking with a schoolteacher who would be glad to take the uniforms and teach the children baseball.”
That seemed highly unlikely, but Major Zima went on to give a rather dizzying account of all the logistical hoops he was jumping through to get the project fast-tracked.
The e-mail continued: “We talked about having the children write you thank-you notes, but unfortunately most children in our area of operations are illiterate.” Then Zima urged patience, using Gene Goodwin’s very own reference to Japan as an example. He explained how baseball was actually introduced in 1872 and took about fifteen years to become firmly entrenched in Japanese culture. This bit was surprisingly long and technical, which made sense, since it turned out Zima had simply copied and pasted the Wikipedia entry for “Baseball in Japan” right into the text to make it seem like he was as engaged with the sport as Gene himself.
A little later, another e-mail popped up, this one strictly from Zima to me, no one else cc’d.
“Hey, Nathan,” it read. “Maybe you should let me handle this guy. No need to kick the hornets’ nest.”
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About two weeks later, I ran into Major Zima doing push-ups in his cammies. Between grunts, he told me that if I wanted to start funding repairs for the water plant, the ministry wouldn’t go out of their way to roadblock us or steal more than the usual amount of reconstruction dollars.
“How many dollars are we talking?” I said. “Didn’t we already sink 1.5 million dollars into it?”
He stopped, put a cheerful grin on his face, and said, “Yep.”
“Where’d that money go?”
“I don’t know,” he said, dropping down for another push-up, “I wasn’t here then.”
I watched him for a bit. His torso was round enough that even with his arms fully extended, his belly was still hovering less than an inch above the ground. He dropped down and used his stomach to trampoline back up. I said, “How’d you get them to agree?”
“Seventy-nine,” he said. “Ahhhhh… . Eighty!”
He collapsed to the ground. There was no way he’d done eighty push-ups. My guess was closer to twenty-five. He looked up.
“I told them what you told me,” he said between big breaths, lying belly down on the ground with one cheek in the dirt.
“What did I tell you?”
“That if we turned on the water, it’d make all the Sunnis’ toilets explode.” Zima slowly rolled onto his back. “Ahhhh,” he said.
“And that was enough?”
“No,” he said. “But they double-checked and it turns out you’re right. Those pipes are designed off the Nasiriyah Drainage Pump pipes, so they’ll push out twenty cubic meters a second. That’s way too much. There’s something that you need to reduce the pressure. I forget what it’s called.”
“A pressure reducer?” I said.
“Yeah, a pressure reducer,” he said. “We’re not building that.”
“You told them the United States would purposely destroy all the plumbing in a Sunni community in order to get the water plant on line.”
“Yep.”
“And they believed you?”
“I told them I get promoted for completing projects, which is sort of true, and that the plant wouldn’t be operational until well after I was out of Iraq, which is definitely true, and that I wasn’t going to go through with the nine-hundred-thousand-dollar open-air market one of the ministry guys’ cousins is supposed to build for us if they keep cock-blocking us on water.”
I stared at the major in awe. Initially, I had thought the man stupid. Now, I wasn’t sure if Zima was brilliant or insane.
“But,” I said, “we can’t destroy a Sunni village… .”
“It’s okay,” he said. “For now, we keep moving forward. The Sunnis aren’t going to let overpressurized water destroy their homes. That’d be a silly thing to happen in the desert. They’ll keep track of it, even if we don’t.”
Zima’s confidence didn’t reassure me. “Do they know about the pressure?” I said.
“No,” he said. “But I put a reminder on my Outlook calendar for the week the BCT’s scheduled to leave Iraq. It says, ‘Tell Sheikh Abu Bakr that the pipes we built for him will make his house explode.’”
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Sheikh Abu Bakr was, in addition to being an important item on Zima’s to-do list, a major player west of Route Dover. The first time I met him, the lieutenant commanding my convoy told me, “Sheikh Abu Bakr is, literally, Tina Turner from Mad Max.” Bob also claimed the sheikh was the man to see about widows, so a little after my water conversation with Zima, I headed out to try to get the beekeeping project off the ground. I needed to see Abu Bakr anyway, as we were shifting monetary support to the qada’a, or provincial council. Previously we’d given funds directly to him and he’d pay Iraqis to man security checkpoints instead of fight in the insurgency. Since Abu Bakr ran the qada’a, shifting payments to the council was somewhere between a shell game and a method of helping the Iraqis develop government institutions capable of managing budgets.
As we drove into town, I saw a couple of kids in baseball uniforms going through garbage on the side of the road. One kid was in gray, the other in blue. Blue had cut the leggings off to turn them into impromptu shorts.
“Stop the convoy,” I said. Nobody paid any attention, and I didn’t press the matter.
Given the squalor all around, I was always shocked coming to Abu Bakr’s home. It was an enormous estate, with five separate buildings and the only real lawn I’d seen in Iraq outside of the U.S. embassy. The creation of the embassy lawn had been ordered by the ambassador himself and had involved sod imported from Kuwait, armored convoys to bring in lawn supplies, intense efforts to keep birds away from the seed, and a casual disregard for the rules of nature. Estimates for the cost varied from two to five million taxpayer dollars. What Abu Bakr’s cost, I had no idea. Given the sheer number of pots he had his fingers in, it was likely U.S. taxpayer dollars had gone into his lawn as well.
When we arrived at his home, the U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi police and Iraqi army set up a defensive perimeter. There was a uniformed Iraqi police officer already there who was in the midst of detailing the car in the driveway, a black Lexus. We walked inside and were escorted through rooms filled with mahogany furniture, crystal vases, and the occasional flat-screen TV hooked up to an Xbox. Our guide brought us to a dining room where Abu Bakr was waiting. We exchanged pleasantries and sat down, and he had his men serve me, the Professor, the convoy commander, the police lieutenant, and a couple of the Iraqi army guys lamb and rice. They brought the lamb out in a big slimy pile on a large plate and set it down next to an equally large plate of rice. There was no silverware. One of the IA guys, thinking I didn’t know how to eat, elbowed me, smiled, and grabbed a bunch of lamb in his right hand, grease oozing through his fingers. He then slapped the lamb on the rice plate and mashed it up with his hand until he had a little ball of rice and lamb, which he picked up and dropped on my plate.
“Thanks,” I said.
He stared at me, smiling. Abu Bakr was looking at me, too. He seemed faintly amused. The Professor was openly amused. I took it and ate it. Hygiene questions aside, it was delicious.
With that, real discussion began. Abu Bakr was a fat, jovial man who claimed to have three bullets lodged in his torso. Doctors had told him it’d be more dangerous to take them out than to leave them in, but, he’d say, “every night I feel them worming closer to my heart.”
The Professor claimed that three years ago a Shi’a death squad had attempted to kidnap Abu Bakr. As they were pulling him to their vehicle, he saw that one of the gunmen had a pistol lodged in his belt. The sheikh pulled it out, shot two of his captors, and sustained two nonfatal gunshots himself. The final gunman was captured by his men. If you wanted to see what happened to that guy, you could apparently buy the torture tape at most kiosks in the area. I never had any interest.
The conversation shifted into a long discussion of the local nahiyas and provincial qada’as. Abu Bakr claimed it would be much easier to give him the money. I maintained they needed to learn how to manage the money themselves. After about an hour, we started talking widows.
“Yes,” said the Professor. “He can get them for you. Sheikh Umer will handle this matter.”
Sheikh Umer was considerably lower in the local hierarchy. No Lexus in his driveway. He was a player in one of the nahiyas.
“The widows will learn to grow bees if you provide the hives and training,” said the Professor, “but they also will need you to pay for their taxis to the training, as the area is very dangerous.”
“Taxis don’t cost a tenth of what he’s asking,” I said. “Tell him this would be a very personal favor.”
The Professor and Abu Bakr talked. I was certain that Abu Bakr spoke English. He always seemed to know what I was saying and would cut the Professor off sometimes before he could fully translate. But Abu Bakr never fully let on.
Eventually the Professor looked at me and said, “There are other fees he may not anticipate, but which may complicate this matter.” He paused and added, “It is as they say. A rug is never fully sold.”
“Tell him,” I said, “we want real widows this time. At the last women’s agricultural meeting, Cindy said she thought they were all married women.”
The Professor nodded, then spoke some more.
“This will not be a problem,” he said. “Iraq is short of many things, but not widows.”
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