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To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: July 5, 2003 at 1:12 AM
Subject:
Laura!!
Happy Fourth of July! I’m juts home now from the green zone party! It was so American but I loved it so much because it love this country so much, I really do. They had it at the swimming poot to raise morale or something and Haaya taght me to Muslim dance, but I cant remember the name of it! It’s so hot again, everyone young was swimming all day and they shipped in barbeuqe which made me think of home. I have to tell you Laura I love our country I do. I know we mess up invading and every thing but we are just a bunch of guys trying to share democracy around the world is all it comes down to. You don’t see americns blowing up planes do yoU?!? Look, I love you so much Laura I know I’m not suppost to say that but I thought about you and don’t worry really I’m ok here, very safe etc. You should have heard the air force singing the national anthem . . . that’s how it should be sung, I know it. This one man—he started crying when he heard it, this one old man who had all the badges from Vietnam he started crying when he heard that cong.
I’m so sleepy I’m about to sleep literally but I thought to send this so you know I’m thinking about you. Write me back I read your letters a hundred timse when you write me back.
Will
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To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: July 19, 2003 at 10:23 PM
Subject: last two weeks
Laura—
I’m sorry I didn’t write you sooner but things have been crazy around here. I’m sure you’ve seen it all on the news (the media’s eating it up) but I’ll tell you the story sans public opinion concerns. The insurgent truck crashed through the defense and into the Canal Hotel at around 4:30. I was outside (about a half mile away) but every window on Yafa Street shattered in unison. Everyone heard it. I guess curiosity killed precaution because the streets started flowing with smoky, squinting eyes. It’s messed up, but people were relieved when they found out it was only UN headquarters. 22 are dead but they got it wrong about the wounded—more like 200 than CNN’s 125. With their High Commissioner for Human Rights (ironically) suffocated in rubble—rumor has it that the UN’s going to be out of here by August. I wouldn’t be surprised.
I started carrying my gun again. It’s stupid, but I do it anyway. There was this woman, Laura, and her arm was literally hanging to her body. She was supporting it with her other hand and just walking. Walking away from the hotel, wide-eyed and stricken dumb. She was walking, Laura! Not running, not screaming, just pacing her way down Yafa like the slow-moving cars. I go to sleep seeing that woman’s arm and then I wake up and strap my M-9 to my belt. Deep down I know I’m just being stupid. It’s not like a gun can stop a car from blowing up.
Everyone’s on edge. I caught Wolf reading the CPA safety booklet at lunch and Michael keeps jerking his head into stillness like he’s heard some unheard bomb. Haaya’s the only one who seems unfazed. (“This is a war.”) We’ve been spending more time in fieldwork and less time in the office. We finally finished screening and documenting the peasants who poured into the Green Zone apartments in the aftermath of occupation. Groups of fourteen and fifteen are crammed into two-bedroom units, but in-zone space is sacred compared to the slums outside the walls. Problem is, now everyone’s suspicious of anyone and everyone whose skin isn’t pale. The new housing we’ve been fixing was ready for move-in the day of the crash—but Bremer pushed us back three weeks. It’s probably for the best, anyway. People are teeming to get inside the walls and background checks have half the office with headaches.
There’s more bad news. Reports of Sunni massacres have started leaking in via civilian slums. Apparently the Iraqi police are behind it. (DO NOT share this information with anyone.) This is why we need to redistrict! If we concentrate the Sunnis we can get the GIs into effective patrols—the CPA notion that desegregation will “address the crisis at its roots” is an ignorant pipedream. This isn’t goddamn Jim Crow, it’s 1400 years of holy war! It’s Sunni men, pillowcased and shot by the Tigris at four am! The Iraqi police patrol by day and ride with the Mahdi army once they finish evening prayer. With access to residence rolls by block, their work is practically done for them—(even I can tell Sunni from Shi’a by last name).
Haaya and I watched the helipad again last night. The orange groves behind the palace have become a routine for us. The days are starting to blend together and it’s these moments that get me out of bed. The winds come at night and if we focus we can smell salt from the Caspian. Haaya’s been teaching me Arabic. Burtuqal, orange. Nakhla, palm tree. Jundi cheb, boy soldier. Every night, more and more troops fly in and ship out. We watch the lines and line up our peels on the grass. She told me about her family’s death for real on Wednesday and I told her about Kyle’s overdose and the time I almost dropped out of school. Companionship is everything, Laura. (The heat seems to foster clichés, but it’s true.) Wolf and Michael started bunking together, they don’t talk much, but they play those combat games on their laptops when they can’t sleep.
I miss New Hampshire, Laura. Real trees and fish and hammock chairs. How’s the city? Have you seen Shakespeare in the Park yet? I tried to explain this to Haaya by comparing it to pre-Ottoman mosques. I wish you’d tell me more in your messages. Hearing from you really breaks up my day.
—Will
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To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: Aug 2, 2003 at 1:11 AM
Subject: hello
We got news from outside today. (A CPA officer got authorized to meet with an imam who couldn’t come inside the Zone.) He was walking down a crowded sidewalk in the central city when an old man carrying two bags of groceries was accosted by a young guy, demanding his food and money at knife-point. Pedestrians stopped to watch, regarding the interaction with normalcy. The old man reached into his pocket, but instead of withdrawing his wallet, he took out his gun, switched off the safety, and shot the man straight in the chest. Some of the pedestrians cheered, others spat, and the old man picked up his groceries and continued home. There’s Iraq for you.
Haaya suggested we work separately today. I had office work to do and she wanted to speak to some men in the slums outside the new housing. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea, but she insisted. I’ve been a mess all day—distracted, exhausted (writing e-mails when I should be working). I suppose I’ve come to rely on her more than I thought.
I know it’s been a while since I’ve written, but I did get your other messages and I’m sorry I didn’t respond sooner. It’s hard to turn my thoughts into words these days. (For once you don’t have to forgive me my poetic verbosity.) But the beauty of this place is haunting me now. The date palms bloomed and everything seems overgrown and excessively lush. No one’s been contracted to trim the palace gardens or wildflowers, so the greens by the blast walls and rivers are (beautifully) unkempt. But we hear firefights now. Firefights and sirens and tiny pops from the city. The city I’ve lived in for months but never really seen.
How’s work?
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To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: Aug 10, 2003 at 12:35 AM
Subject: hi!
Laura,
Again, sorry it’s been so long. My work is starting to consume me and when Haaya and I aren’t in the office, we’re usually asleep. Finding these moments alone with my laptop is getting harder.
Mostly I’ve been distracted by the news on the Sunnis. The buzz about the massacres is all over the Zone. It’s practically common knowledge that Iraqi police forces are behind the operations—but the CPA is still unwilling to acknowledge that the men they’re training are doubling as Mahdi executioners at night. I spent three evenings in a row combing newspapers, but not even the liberals are editorializing about it yet. Haaya thinks the CPA simply doesn’t give a shit. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
Personally, that mindset disgusts me. We have the GIs patrolling, we just need to start stationing them at checkpoints so trucks full of civilians don’t get carted off and shot in the mountains. It’s not that hard!!! We’re talking about sixty people a week, Laura! This isn’t some token shooting or car bomb.
There’s this man who’s started standing outside the palace every day. An old guy, leathered and yellow eyed. He barrages the staff as we walk up the marble steps, screaming for his dead Sunni family and praying in desperate repetitions. Everyone in the office calls him the “crazy sheikh,” but no one seems to know whose department is responsible for dealing with it. We just walk by. Walk by with our bush hats and M-9’s to push paper in this damn castle.
Haaya and I have been trying to gather some information when we do our housing rounds. We figure if we can get enough legitimate sources maybe someone in the press corps will pick it up and do a story. According to a woman in the market, the Mahdis are starting to take children. Now I picture a kid’s head getting blown off every time I hear one of the tiny pops outside the walls. I didn’t come here for this, Laura. I thought I’d be making a contribution. I thought I’d be helping the world, not ignoring it.
I’m exhausted. I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write something beautiful for you. I bet New York’s a dream right now. August was always my favorite month in the city.
Hang in there. Will
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To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: Aug 16, 2003 at 1:06 AM
Subject: delete this when you’re done
I’m sending this to you from my childhood address—as the CPA can read our company accounts.
I have news. Haaya has a plan to curb the district targeting of Sunnis but it’s not exactly on policy (hence soccerstar73). When we worked alone last week, she met a slum man who got talking about the Mahdis. He knew about the massacres—and claimed to know about the men. When she came back around sunset, she seemed obsessed with the man; the smoothness of his voice, the green of his eyes. He told her they couldn’t talk on the street and brought her into the back room of a café on Yafa. (There’s no denying her nerve.)
She told me he knows about art, about music, about the irony of the architecture gilding the walls. A university man living in the slums was suspicious to me, but to Haaya, he was a martyr. They ate mangoes and talked every day for five days. Each day I insisted on coming and each day she forbade me to come. (She was trying to gain his confidence, his Arabic was too thick to translate, a foreigner could give “the wrong impression.”) I was suspicious, but I trust Haaya, and Haaya trusts him. Apparently, he knows which men in the Iraqi army are involved with the Mahdis. Apparently, he could make a list of them if he had to. A list, Haaya repeated to me as we stretched out beneath our fruit trees. Trust me, she said. Trust me.
I had to. Haaya knows the language and the culture better than I do and we’re talking about ten to twenty casualties per night. The deal is this: he wants In-Zone housing for his extended family—the waitlists are huge and even so, he doesn’t think they’ll pass the background check. Haaya paused when she told me this next part—making sure I was looking in her eyes. His brother used to be affiliated with Al Qaeda—but after 9/11 he pulled back to pockets of moderate Islamists, shameful, confused, and scared shitless. Ta’ib, Ta’ib, he repeated. Reform, Reform, my brother’s reformed. I imagine Haaya has sympathy for such men. (Her own father retreated from the Iraqi Ba’ath party during the First Gulf War.)
CPA policy obviously forbids Al Qaeda affiliates (reformed or not) from setting up shop inside the Green Zone Walls—let alone cutting the line of hundreds of translators, embassy workers, journalists, and doctors. Haaya talked of utilitarianism during her pitch. Talked of saving hundreds of Sunni lives, expediting withdrawal, reforming the districts and Iraqi police from within. How many names, I kept repeating. (More for myself than to hear the answer.) Fifty names. Fifty undercover Mahdi names. I counted fifty men, one by one, as they took form, lining the Helipad’s east rim. Then I counted fifty men marching to the overnight base, packed inside the inflated dome where they’d sweat through their camo and write home to their moms.
I agreed to do it. My department runs the files on backgrounds and waitlists, and, well, I run my department. Mr. Abdul Aziz Makin will hand Haaya a list of fifty names, which we’ll verify before returning with his residency papers. I’m nervous, Laura. But if this works, we have the potential to save thousands of lives. Besides, practically every Shi’a in Baghdad has some sort of former affiliation with Al Qaeda, so it’s not like we’re actually making some huge exception here. Every time I hear a gunshot from the city I’m more and more assured that this is the right thing to do. Once we clear the Mahdis out of the police, we might finally be able to make some progress in this wasteland.
I’ve started praying. I’m sure your raging atheism finds this amusing. It’s something about this place. The flowers, the marble, the people who don’t go more than four hours without stretching towards Mecca. I don’t know what God my mind keeps consulting—but I’m hoping it’s one who doesn’t believe in Jihad.
I still think of you. I know I seem distracted, but it’s true. I don’t know why you haven’t written me in a while, Laura, but I’m guessing you’re probably just busy with work or your friends. Let me know how you are.
Your lost soldier CPA officer,
W