S.O.L.

Somewhere in my fourth and fifth week in Iraq, things slowed down. I had left Anbar province, where I spent three weeks hopping from one unit to another every day or two. I was excited by the stories but weary of the schedule. The moving was tiring, the accommodations uncertain. The places I stayed were stark at best – no mess hall, no portable latrines, no place to walk around. Still, there was air conditioning, Internet, and I was treated like royalty. An officer invariably would give up his quarters for me; the guys would schedule time for me to shower. They were kind and friendly and at least one officer made decent coffee. After three weeks, though, their politeness wore on me, an awful but honest confession. I felt like if one more person asked me where I was from, how long I’d been a reporter, how long I’d been in Iraq, why was it that I live in Tokyo -- I would scream. I wasn’t tired of working, I was tired of having the same conversation repeated. It was a selfish feeling and I tried to keep it hidden. After all, these soldiers and Marines were so accommodating and excited to have Stars and Stripes along. Mostly, they just wanted someone new to talk to. The least I could do was fake it.

Baghdad saved me. I went back there at the beginning of week three and ended up moving into Camp Liberty for a few days with an artillery regiment. I had stayed at Liberty two years ago, and it looked exactly the same, except with more T-barriers. I could shower and sleep on my own schedule, and I knew where the ice cream was in the chow hall. After losing at least five pounds in the first three weeks, I celebrated with cookies ‘n’ cream. Most importantly, I got to hang out with a group of guys for four days. They let me work in their headquarters, invited me to eat lunch and dinner with them, shared their inside jokes with me. It was fun and relaxing. We got past the 20 questions and had real conversations. I learned one of the sergeants has a poetic knack for expressing anger, and a great affinity for smashing hand-held radios when things get inane (which is usually about every nine minutes). When his stream of complaints came across the radio one morning, I was in the headquarters office. “Is that Comfort?” I asked. Knowing heads nodded. The last night I was there, I listened to a major recite a major portion of “The Cat in the Hat.” He had read it so often to his kids, he had memorized it. He was also trying to learn German; the unit is stationed in Germany and most of their families live there. I asked him if he could do “Cat in the Hat” in German. “No, he’s only mildly autistic,” another officer answered.

I was disappointed to leave these guys, but my time was up. I was an outsider and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, an easy thing to do in Iraq.

I headed down south, to Iskan and the power plant. After four days there, I moved further south to Hillah. Here, the U.S. Embassy has a compound on which Army soldiers live. The State Department, with its Colombian military guards and hired security, run the place. There is a hotel, alcohol, and a pool. I skipped all three. Because I’m the press, I needed an escort at all times to visit the Embassy side of the base. It proved tiresome, because the Embassy side had the food, the PX and the Internet café.

It also proved fortunate, because I was forced to stay on the smaller Army side and hang out with a group of about 20 officers and soldiers. These men worked on yet another military transition team, a group of advisors for Iraqi Army soldiers and officers. They, too, gave me complete access to their headquarters office, their conversations, their jokes. I set up my computer in their office and worked most mornings. Sometimes we watched movies, sometimes we just listened to the radio communications. One day, we were waiting for a demonstration to happen in Hillah; it never did. A couple of days later, we listened to medical reports from an explosion on Highway 1, the main north/south route that links Kuwait to Baghdad. The insurgents had dropped a massive highway overpass; we knew there were dead and wounded, and we watched the panicked messages come up on the screen. It was about 25 kilometers away from us, a world away. It was another unit, another patrol area. It was them, not us. Any justification works to put distance between the varying realities in Iraq. We were about to go eat dinner. Out there, soldiers were about to work into the evening and night to figure out how to recover bodies from a collapsed bridge. We went to dinner. They didn’t.

I had been invited to Hillah by the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, who wanted me to cover an operation that Sunday called Babylon Sweep. The operation was a continual one; every week or so, the American and Iraqi armies plan a search of a certain area of Hillah. Over time, these operations have grown more complex, with the search for bad guys followed up by free water and goodies for the residents. As I entered the picture, the plans had grown as layered as Paris Hilton’s rap sheet. Before dawn, one group of provincial soldiers was supposed to search for specific bad guys. Next, another group of Iraqi soldiers were supposed to lockdown a neighborhood and sweep through each house, asking questions and looking for illegal weapons. Then, the Iraqi soldiers and the local government were supposed to hand out water, medical supplies, and paint for the residents. Trash and sewage trucks were supposed to round out the morning, going through the narrow alleys and sweeping up the piles of muck that served as the neighborhood’s trash bins.

I wrote a story about how things unraveled slowly in the morning, then faster as noon approached. The officers I was with, whom I had come to know in the past few days, grew frustrated with the lack of attention by the Iraqi troops. The house searches were abandoned, the cleanup effort uncoordinated. Some of the residents did get a quick check by an Iraqi doctor, a bag of toiletries. I watched a front-loader clear one trash dump, filling two trucks’ worth of stink and refuse. In the end, though, the American soldiers were stuck escorting a sewage truck through the neighborhood. I never in my life thought anyone would need to go looking for standing sewage in Iraq. Yet here we were. The U.S. soldiers didn’t hold back their anger and their humor when we got back to base. At lunch, they cracked jokes about the missteps of the mission, in front of me and their commander. They let me sit in on their after-action briefing and saw me taking notes. When it ended, I asked for their names, ages and hometowns, the identifiers we use when quoting a soldier.

The story ran late last week, a few days after I’d left the advising team. I’d grown to like them and their routine. I knew who ate lunch early, who went around 1 p.m. I knew when they worked out, when they turned on the movie channel, when they rotated shifts so they could take naps. The commander let me in on it all, and he asked when my stories would run. I had let him know as best I could. I also knew the story would run after I’d moved on. I knew I wouldn’t wear out my welcome until after I had left.

I haven’t heard from any of them sense the story ran, but I have heard the commander wasn’t pleased. I expected it. A story of frustration is something the younger soldiers usually like, but something the brass worries about. This is no different. Honest stories generate honest responses, and I’m used to people accusing me of writing nothing but “bad stories.” The best was when a military officer a couple of years ago accused me of writing nothing but “gotcha journalism.” It was a story that ultimately resulted in a four-star general reversing a policy that had attracted accusations of him overreaching his authority. Nothing tricky there.

But being embedded at war creates another layer of complication when recording people’s stories in the newspaper. Covering a beat is one thing. But living inside the beat, inside the camp where outside the camp people die, is another. I wrote this story that I knew would draw criticism while sitting inside their offices, using their electricity, eating their M&Ms and Redvines. I didn’t hesitate or doubt the story for a minute; it actually is my favorite I’ve written because I think it best captures the true state of the pressures to train an army that doesn’t always want to be trained. It’s also the one I’m still most worried about. There were no fact errors. But I wonder if any of the soldiers, officers or commander got yelled at for their comments. I wonder if they think I was tricking them, a spy in their office. I wonder what they wonder at all.

Living on the grid

Flying from Baghdad to Iskandariyah about a week ago proved to be a pretty uneventful trip. It was night, in a Blackhawk, and we were flying blackout – no lights in or outside the bird. At one point we stopped to pick up more passengers, and my sleeping bag got pushed out of the helo. It was a true moment of panic, but luckily the soldier working the helo grabbed it for me. I clung to it the rest of the way.

I was going to FOB Iskan. To get there, you go south from Kalsu, another military base, across the city of Iskandariyah, then to Iskan. A wide field of farms and palm trees separate the two bases, a patch of darkness common throughout Iraq. I’ve flown at night more often than during daylight in the past few weeks, and the most startling aspect of the view are the lights down below. I don’t remember flying at night that much last time, but I also don’t remember any city lights down below. This time, whole sections of land glow. Some of these homes run on generators, though what little power the government can offer usually comes at night. We were tacking across the dark fields between the Kalsu and Iskandariyah military bases when about a quarter of the city of Iskandariyah went black. No more grid for them, though within a few seconds, houses started reappearing as families switched on their generators.

Power is elusive in Iraq in every way imaginable. In the literal sense, the lack of electricity after four years of war is a constant complaint from residents and a constant struggle for the Americans, who are trying to stand up the grid in the face of random violence and a fledging, chaotic government. Iraq has plenty of oil, so fueling the grid isn’t the problem. The central government also has plenty of liquid cash, though it’s unclear why it isn’t spending the money in what we would consider a normal way. Part of the problem lies with government officials who are unfamiliar with running a country on a budget system – additions and subtractions from the general ledger that are planned and should, in theory, achieve both services and some sort of financial balance. Part of the problem is paranoia and greed. Controlling millions of dollars in the wake of controlling none makes for shady dealing. Part of the problem comes from the infrastructure. There are power plants, both water- and fuel-run. But they are aging, with no real system of maintenance. Existing plants throughout the country send energy to Baghdad, an over-centralized system that Saddam built to control the on and off switches to different cities. Many of those massive lines have been ripped apart.

So I was surprised to look down from the helicopter and see that FOB Iskan has its own power plant. The four stacks were smoking against the dark sky when we landed. I’d never seen a plant that close before. I’d find out in coming days that the plant is producing almost half of what it could. If it could run at full capacity, it would push out more than 10 percent of what Iraq needs to turn on its lights. The crippled plant’s problems are simple and monumental. First, two of the main power lines that take power from Iskan to Baghdad are down. Second, the 20-year-old plant is suffering for basic maintenance. Before the invasion, it ran at about three-quarters of its maximum. But four years of retooling broken parts have proved difficult. Most amazing to me is that the Iskan plant – inside the U.S. compound – employs hundreds of Iraqi workers. They come through the gates each day after being searched twice. A few of the power plant workers even share office space in a building that holds the base’s military headquarters.

The plant’s combined power – both the electricity it creates and the jobs it supplies – make FOB Iskan a haven. The Madhi Army, the bad guys in the area, never shoots mortars or rockets into the base. Most of the plant’s workers live in a nearby company village, rows of trailers that have near permanent electrical power fed directly from the plant. They, too, feel safe, unless they have to go to town.

The nearest city to FOB Iskan isn’t Iskandiriyah, but Musayyib. There, the Madhi Army rules, according to the soldiers. The town council is full of the Shia, Madhi members. The head of the council is akin to the town’s godfather, and he rides around in a white, washed Jeep Cherokee. The Iraqi police are ineffective against the ruling party, which operates much like an East Coast mafia. They are either members, or they spare their own lives by letting the Madhi have their way. An officer I was with, a captain, started out his tour in the area going to city council meetings. After three, he was asked not to return to the Saturday meetings. The Saturday I was with him, we set out from base to make a surprise visit to the municipal meeting. We found the building dark and empty, and a nearby police officer said the council meets whenever it wants, randomly, and usually in the privacy of homes.

Musayyib was the first place I’ve been where the insurgents – Sunni and Shia – actively target Coalition Forces. The warring sects still fire at each other, but they agree that the Americans are the collective enemy. The day before I arrived, a 38-year-old military police officer was killed by a single bullet from a sniper. I attended his memorial service three days later, where officers and soldiers openly wept and stood around, leaning on each other. In a memorial service for a fallen soldier, a pair of empty boots, a rifle, a portrait, and dog tags stand at the front of the gathering, a sort of alter for people to pay their respects. More than a 100 people passed by in formation. The service lasted more than an hour.

The day before, I had watched a civil affairs team negotiate contracts with Iraqis. These soldiers use U.S. money to hire Iraqi contractors to do various work: road repair, canal clearing, school renovations, water treatment plant improvements. They were trying to get sell a new contract, one for repairing a road heavily torn by road-side bombs. It’s a dangerous area, and the military won’t provide security for privately hired crews. The contractors can write security costs into their proposed bids, but it’s unclear what kind of security they could muster for themselves. In the end, two contractors offered incomplete bids, but most said they didn’t want the work. It was too dangerous, they said.

There is some progress at FOB Iskan, though that too is slow to come to fruition. The State Department is working to complete a natural gas power plant, one that will produce about what the Iskan plant produces now. The officer I was with tells me it’s almost done. My colleague wrote a story last September that said the same thing. It’s hard to know when the plant will be on-line.

School Days

Within four days I went to two renovated elementary schools. The school system in Iraq operates at roughly the same pace as in the states, so most schools are holding final exams now and preparing to let out for the summer. The schools are typically a collection of buildings in a horseshoe, with a courtyard or bare space in the middle. The classrooms have windows and ceiling fans, bench-style desks and white-boards at the front of the room. Boys and girls go to school together through the sixth grade, though the schools often have only one bathroom. They let out around noon, so there’s no cafeteria.

Like at the hospital, military commanders can spend money on refurbishing these schools. They write a contract that calls for fresh paint, new lighting fixtures, curtains, flooring tiles, furniture and even computer equipment. Commanders love to show off school projects to the press as a glowing sign of progress. The renovations can’t hurt. The projects employ local workers and improve the school grounds. It’s hard to know, however, how long the progress will last. It’s also hard to understand the timing. The commanders try to spend the money as fast as they can. But it means the schools are left full of new equipment and school supplies at the end of the year. At one school, I saw more than $20,000 in computers, screens, printers and speakers piled high in their boxes. It’s hard to believe that it will still be there three months from now.

Even the smaller gifts go to storage for the summer. A school east of Baghdad city, in the Abu Ghraib area, held its ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday. The man in charge of the project cut the ribbon in honor of his brother, who was killed because he won the contract from the Americans. Two military units and a community leader had brought cases of school supplies, toys and backpacks. A feast was laid out for the ceremony, with two cakes, fruit, sodas, jars of candy, baklava and another Iraqi treat made from yeast-dough, then fried and dipped in sugar syrup. The men and the soldiers ate the treats. The children stayed in their classrooms. One group of first-graders sang for the visitors, songs about being in the first grade and learning to read and write. The kids who snuck out of their classes snatched food and drinks from the table. As school began to let out, closer to 11 a.m., the children stopped at an outside spigot for a drink of water before walking home.

The woman who runs the school signed for the school supplies. She said they would be put into storage for the next school year. One boy managed to pilfer a soccer ball before the men locked up the trunks. Another finished off a Pepsi, then tossed his can into the clean courtyard. I later asked the commander I was with whether he thought the supplies would be there in the fall. He said he thought they would. But, he said, if a kid brings a backpack home full of pens and paper and the mother decides to sell the supplies at the market for $5, what can he do? At least the donations would make it that far, I said.

We finished the day at the home of the leading sheik in the area, a Shia leader who has family members who are Sunni. The beef in this tiny, rural area of Baghdad is more about turf and money, less about religion. “It’s like the Sopranos,” the commander said of recent murders in the area. Two Sunni men were killed in the early morning; a Shia-response brought the total number dead to three. The commander met with this sheik to talk about the killings and about finding the killers. They all know who did all three murders, and the sheik says he’s helping to find the retaliator. It’s an unusual move, a man turning in a member of his own tribe.

This sheik also has won many of the reconstruction projects in town, and he’s helping to hand out contracts to other members of his family, both Sunni and Shia. The commander who has the purse strings is all for it. The busiest the men are, the more money they make, the less likely they’ll be to kill each other and U.S. forces, the commander says. “Am I buying them off? No,” he says. “But I’d give every person $100 if I could just to keep the peace.” In the midst current war budget, he says, it would be money well spent.

The next day, I went out with a group of Minnesota Guardsmen to the same area. They had to go by a farmhouse to give a man a special rebate card for damage done by soldiers to his property. The exchanges are common. In this case, a flare shot by soldiers ended up in his field and burned some of his crop. The Army documented the case, admitted it, and gave the man the proper paper work to go to a nearby local office and request for reimbursement. He’ll probably get a couple hundred dollars.

As we were leaving the farmer’s house, a group of kids gathered to pester the soldiers for soccer balls, chocolate, whatever. Then the shouted in Arabic: the teachers stole our backpacks. The translator explained, and I told the lieutenant I was with about the previous day’s grand opening. Later, I told the commander about the exchange. The teachers didn’t steal the backpacks, he said. I figure, flip a coin. Lots of people in Iraq exaggerate, especially the kids. Still, three months till next school year is a long way away.

Take two aspirin

My first three weeks here were long. After a good run in Ramadi, I landed in Fallujah with a sore throat. By the next day it worsened into a sniffling head cold until I finally had to call in sick to the Marines. It’s a little embarrassing telling the Marines you’re sick and can’t work, but it was all I could do. I postponed an embed and stayed in my trailer at Camp Fallujah for a couple of days, blowing my nose, eating three squares a day and drinking water, and getting caught up on stories. The trailer even had internet service, so all things considered, it was a good place to convalesce.

Then I moved westward, spending a few days in Habbaniyah before flying further out to Al Asad, a huge air base in the middle of nowhere. Bases like Al Asad are flight hubs, and I was to connect to another helicopter that would take me toward the Syrian border. On the way to the flight line (a journey that usually involves a long, long walk carrying all my gear) I twisted my ankle twice. The flight ended up being cancelled, and after my dinner that night, I could barely put weight on my foot. There was no swelling or bruising, so I figured a night of rest would help. It was a setback, though. If I can’t carry my own gear, I can’t work. I can’t make it someone else’s responsibility to make sure I can climb into the helo. I limped to the medic station to get a couple of ice packs. They checked me out, sent me off with a bandage for support and instructions to take ibuprofen and keep it elevated. The doctor on duty even came in for a minute to oversee the medic’s check. I slept with my foot propped on a pillow and tossed and turned most of the night, both from the throbbing and from worrying about whether I would be able to move around the next day.

As I figured, the pain subsided quickly. My foot was still tender, but I could walk without worry. I made it back to the flight terminal only to find out the day’s journey was cancelled again. All this cancelling and waiting is normal, especially when it comes to flights to remote areas, like the western border. The weather and maintenance problems play havoc with schedules, and the guys around me had been waiting four days to get to the same place as me. I decided to cut my losses and head back to Baghdad, where the weather was better and flights are more common. It was a good decision. About 16 hours later I was back at the press center in the Green Zone, lightening speed by military travel standards. And I heard a few days later that people in Al Asad were still waiting for a flight out to the border.

I arrived in Baghdad about 2:30 a.m. last Friday, nearly a week ago. The travel mishaps meant I missed a couple of days reporting out west, and the early journey to Baghdad meant bad timing for my push down south, the second part of my assignment here. That meant waiting around at the press center in Baghdad for a few days, just about the worse situation that can befall a journalist here. As one command sergeant major told me, journalists at the press center are like construction workers who stand in Home Depot parking lots before 7 a.m. You need a roofer? I’ll go. You going on patrol? I’ll go. He’s right: We’ll take any assignment to get out of the room. It pays off, cause that’s how I got to cover the boxing tournament my first weekend in country. Luckily, they liked the story and adopted me for a couple more days. They showed me their patrol area, which includes the Baghdad zoo and a former Baathist neighborhood just outside the government-heavy Green Zone. They also took me to Yarmouk Hospital.

The hospital is a collection of buildings and dormitories that serves the Sunni-dominated neighborhood. No hospital is a luxury in Iraq, but this one is doubly tragic. They believe they have been purposefully slighted by the Shia-led government and the hospital’s ability to treat people has dwindled to almost nothing. The patients are also scared to seek treatment there, because they feel it’s a target for Shia insurgents. Whether their fears are justified or exaggerated almost doesn’t matter. The reality is that people who finally come to Yarmouk Hospital are desperate. “You come here, you come to die,” the military interpreter said. The emergency room is an empty room with beds and curtains and open windows, flies buzzing around. It looks almost exactly the same as the critical care unit, except there it’s quieter. The patients are beyond talking. No where did I see even the simplest medical tool, not an intravenous drip in sight. The hospital has some power from generators, but none from the grid. We were there on Sunday, when the entire neighborhood had been without running water for three days. “It’s better than it was,” the battalion commander I was with said. “What’s better?” I asked. “It just is,” he said, and I believed him.

Even in death, there is no relief at Yarmouk. There is no morgue refrigerator, so bodies wait in the backyard for their families to come. On Sunday it was at least 110 degrees, and four families were due for pickups. The Army unit I was with just got responsibility for the hospital and its neighborhood about six weeks ago, and they’re starting to steer some money there. Their first mission includes getting a refrigerator and an incinerator to dispose of hospital waste. The battalion commander has discretionary money to spend on projects like these, and he thought he’d be able to get the fridge in a couple of weeks. It doesn’t need to be terribly big. In Iraq, tradition requires that families bury their dead before sundown on the day they die. It’s a great sign of disrespect to miss that deadline. It’s one of the reasons the numbers of people killed at market bombings vary so much. Families take away their kin before the police or army can count the bodies. The U.S. military is sensitive to the tradition too, and do their best to collect evidence and turnover what’s left of suicide bombers to their families.

Outside the hospital, there was more life. The small market included a couple of vegetable stands, also teeming with flies, a man selling sheep, two bakeries, and a simple hardware store. One man was bricking up an empty storefront. As he mixed the mortar, the commander stopped as asked him what kind of store he would run. He said, quite happily, that he plans to sell ice cream.

Of puppies and picnics

Last weekend, I wrapped up my tour in Habbaniyah, a Euphrates River city between Fallujah and Ramadi. As with all my stops so far, the area is relatively calm, which means nothing terribly big has exploded in the past three to four weeks. That ended yesterday with a sheik’s assassination and car bombing in Fallujah. But by then, I was already on my way back to Baghdad, where I’m typing now.

The short stay proved a bit bizarre. I was spending the weekend with a group of MiTT guys, Marines who are part of a military transition team who are helping to advise a battalion of Iraqi Army soldiers. The Marines live on the Iraqi base, though they still set their own night watches and have their own supplies stocked in their tiny corner. Their life there is small. Nineteen guys live, work and eat in one building and one patio area. They have Internet in their own rooms, a gym, showers, and a grill. They use the bathroom in a closet that has a plastic toilet with no bottom and a box full of wag bags, special garbage bags that stretch across the missing bowl. The Marines are always relieved when I say I don't need a lesson on wagging the bag. Needless to say, I figured it out myself.

Earlier in the day, Saturday, I had already tackled an Iraqi feast. I covered an Iraqi soldier graduation and afterward attended the graduation luncheon, which did not include the graduates but did include a couple of generals and the 500-member class’s trainers. Each diner got two trays of food – rice pilaf, red beans, flat bread, an orange, an apple, juice, soda, water, stewed lamb, a quarter chicken and sliced tomato and onions. Then, during dinner, the men came around and piled more lamb on each person’s plate. I tried to refuse, but it was as pointless as explaining what a woman was doing eating with all those men.

At the lunch, I had eaten next to a doctor, an Iraqi Army colonel who spoke English and is one of two local physicians in town. He is an orthopedist, though these days he practices whatever comes his way. The local residents have turned the Iraqi Army on-base medical facility into their emergency room, and any manner of sicknesses or problems come through the door. They also hold clinics out in town with the Marines. One the week before had attracted 1,000 people. I asked him about supplies. He said the main drug warehouse in Baghdad was bombed recently, so getting medicine has been difficult. The doctor is from Basra, but he has been assigned to Habbaniyah. I asked him why he has not left. If we all leave this country, we can never be a strong country, he said.

The Marines I spent last weekend with also do much of their own cooking. Mostly they reheat frozen pizzas and hot pockets, and occasionally they go to a nearby U.S. base for real chow. They’d rather stay in their own world, with their three adopted dogs whose care has made it into the rotation of chores. The person who cleans the patio each day also changes the water bowl and replenishes the food. In their small kitchen, bags of doggie treats sit next to the creamer. On Saturday, the major, the team commander, bathed the three-month-old puppy who is suffering from a skin disease. They’ve given the dogs worming pills, and the puppy wears a flea collar, but that’s about all they can do as far as preventive care. The baby eats puppy chow, but the two older ones don’t much like dog food. They grew up on trash. A couple of weeks ago, the bitch named Tits had a litter – it was not her first, hence her name – and the Marines had to impose a little after-the-fact birth control. It was sad but necessary in such a small community. Three dogs are plenty. They do their own part, too. Because the Americans feed them, they now have a home they protect. They bark anytime any Iraqi soldier or officer approaches the American building, a comfort even among allies.

The Marines eat with the Iraqi officers daily, usually at supper time, and I got invited on Saturday night.I was still full from lunch, so I was glad to hear to was a light meal. My plate included skewered lamb kebobs, some cardamom flavored meat patties, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, fried hashed potatoes, fresh cooked bread (not flat bread, but a whiter fluffier version that resembles flat, mini-Nerf footballs) and watermelon for desert. As always, it was good, homecooked food and far too much for me to eat.

On Sunday, the guys take the day off, meaning they do chores around the camp but don’t have to patrol with the Iraqis. They were building an Internet and entertainment room off the back, and one guy was grilling about 20 steaks for dinner. I was looking forward to the party. Then a nearby U.S. commander decided he wanted to take me on a story. I grew irritated; I didn’t know this guy, didn’t like him co-opting me just to get his unit in the paper. But I went along. All I was missing was a barbecue and a self-led prayer service with the MiTT team. I couldn’t really justify pitching a fit when I didn’t know what I was refusing to cover.

I ended up leaving one Iraqi afternoon party for another. The commander took me to a neighborhood watch meeting, one of the more surreal scenes I’ve seen in my short jaunts here. It actually was a gathering at the headquarters of a self-directed, self-appointed police force that patrols several smaller districts of Habbaniyah. These men walk around with guns and run their own highway check points with no official authority. The Iraqi battalion commander doesn’t like it. The Marine commander I was with does. Violence in the area has decreased dramatically, and he credits this home guard with the change. He also calls them the “good bad guys,” and it’s hard to argue with the predicament.

The scene was serene. We sat in the yard, a small patch of green grass, in plastic lawn chairs. The men smoked and talked, comparing names for Venus as the planet and crescent moon rose. The birds went to bed and the tea came round. The man who leads the group held his motorala radio all night, listening for action out in town. He described his former career as a security position with the government and left it at that. They were kind and welcoming to me, but I couldn't help wondering about who they are arresting in town.

The next morning my original MiTT picked me up for a tour of their coverage area. Literally, it was a tour, and I didn’t like it. The Iraqis and Marines had geared up to show me their district. They were proud of the safety and relative cleanliness of the city streets, and took me on a short junket to prove it. They were trying to be hospitable. I kept thinking, if something goes boom right now I’ll have a hard time getting over it.

After a tour of the city streets, we drove south on a dirt road to Landor, a lakeside village on Lake Habbaniyah. Yes, there are lakes in Iraq, though I had a hard time discovering their history and whether they were saline or fresh. One woman in the village said yes it was salty, yes it was dirty, yes it was fresh. Safe to say, it’s dirty, and while they skim it for fish they refuse any of its other possible uses. On the way, we passed through an Iraqi police checkpoint that mans the only road to and from Landor. The police were real police, which means they've been through a 10-week training. The commander of the post wore a uniform, though not everyone did. He used a Snow White notebook to record the drivers and car on the road. Each page was a different category – residents, visitors, strangers. He kept detailed notes handwritten between wide, grammar-school lines.

This Landor was a group of about 400 people. There are other Landors that dot the shore line, which means the name must provide some simple description for a community on the lake, but that, too, was beyond our translator’s ability. The houses in Landor are a mix of concrete and homemade concrete, spaced out in a communal arrangement at least a kilometer from the shore. There are no roads, no fences, only each family’s notch in the sand. Many of the husbands here have multiple wives, and their families are enormous. The children are not all healthy. One boy, 17, was shorter than I and has a very developed murmur that swished his heart. A 3-month-old baby in the same family has the same problem, and he lay lethargic in his brother’s arms as the Navy medic checked him out. The major offered to have the family come the next time there’s a medical clinic in Habbaniyah. But everyone knows they both need surgery, and no one knows when that will be. The major I was with has a son with the same problem that has been cured.

The people have not been touched by the violence of war, or of little else in the past few centuries. They have cars and a school and satellites and some electricity, but it more resembled a set of dioramas created for tourists like me rather than a 21st century village. One of the houses we visited looked like those in bigger cities, with actual floors. Another used an outlying kitchen – three worn pieces of concrete leaning together like Pi with an in-ground oven in the middle – to bake bread.

But the war has touched them in other ways. The food and fuel and water rations they received under Saddam have been gone for four years, and nothing has replaced them. I don’t know how they make money. One family I talked with had enough fuel to drive to town every day, a 20-minute ride. Perhaps they bartered fish. Perhaps they barter other things. It seems unlikely, though, that they would be making a living by harboring insurgents. The bad guys tend to drag violence with them where they go, and they believe in punishing their employees who don’t tow the line. None of that has happened in Landor.

One woman offered us a taste of her flat bread, which the younger women in the family had just baked. I’m sure young women in Landor rarely see other men, so they hid in the kitchen cave while the Marines and Iraqi soldiers approached. The bread was on a platter on the ground. It had seared and pulled apart when baking, like pizza dough rolled too thin, so it was crisper than other flatbreads I’d tried. The woman said it was because of the poor quality of the flour they use. But the taste was also richer than other breads, a yeasty sourness of unprocessed grain and a tiny bit of spice, cinnamon maybe, or perhaps just the flavors of the earth seeping out of the sides of the oven.

The tour was done and we headed home. I’m still not sure what to write about the village for the paper. There was no real patrol by Marines or Iraqi soldiers. Another Stripes reporter covered that village, or maybe one of its twins, in the past two months, so I don’t have much to add. It was a great experience, but one too staged for the newspaper. I feel guilty; they showed off their towns with pride but it probably will remain in my notebook.

Back at the MiTT’s home, the Marines can glimpse the lake from their patio. The ground stretches pale and knobby for miles, and the sky, even on clear days, has a white-hot haze. In the middle is a thin wash of blue. One sergeant, an 18-year veteran who played football at Texas, said he’d like to cast a line out there. I hope he gets to.

Upside down

Just sitting down to dinner is sometimes an upended feat.

I was invited to dinner Monday night at Omar’s house. Omar is an Iraqi man who lives in Saqlawriya, a small town west of Fallujah. His house is next to a former college dormitory that the Marines have turned into a forward operating base. At the base, the Marines “cook” their own meals by super-heating pre-cooked, frozen packets of chicken, pork chops, whatever, then dumping them into a serving tray much like preparing large vats of Lean Cuisine dinners. They have a big-screen television with movies and a new X-Box, courtesy of a Navy corpsman whose sister mailed it last week. They have a weight room and air conditioning and showers. There’s no Internet and not much else.

Omar’s house is new, built in the year since the same company of Marines lived at the same dormitory a year ago. The Marines, Fox Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, were in Saqlawriya a year ago on a seven-month tour. They’re back in the same area again, another seven months that is set to end in August. They could get extended for 90 days, but it seems unlikely, they say. The battalion is supposed to stay home through this fall, six months of time off, before heading back to Iraq again. In the past few months, the company’s captain, a 31-year-old from Meterie, La., has made friends with his neighbor and has an open invitation to dinner. If too much time passes between visits, Omar sends food over to the camp. When we walked over Monday night – after 8:30 p.m. in the cover of darkness – we brought back a stack of plates from the last gift of food. Omar’s wife has been known to slip fresh baked flat bread through the barriers that surround the base to Humvees passing by, giving the Marines a snack on their way to patrol.

The darkness was to protect Omar, not the Marines. Earlier in the day, the captain and Omar had seen each other on the town’s main street. They barely made eye contact. Omar is a landlord for some of the small businesses in town, and he’s a general contractor. He’s helping his tenants rebuild after a car bomb last month destroyed part of the main market. Monday afternoon, the captain was walking around and listening to complaints about how a closed bridge in the city was suffocating business. He was planning to reopen it on Tuesday. The vendors are resilient. Since the April bombing they’ve cleaned and continued to sell vegetables, sew clothes, run money exchanges. One man’s stand held sacks of lentils, fava beans, cinnamon, rice and some brown crunchy nuggets that no one could quite translate. They are from Italy, the translator explained, so very expensive and they put them in soup and one kilo sells for $25 or more. The dogs must find them. “Truffles!” I said. “White truffles.” Yes, they agreed, while I looked at the bag that would sell at Whole Foods for hundreds of dollars.

In between Fox Company’s past deployment and now, Omar has finished his house. It’s at least two stories, probably three, with a patio roof that Iraqi use for sleeping during the summer months. I wasn’t invited upstairs. Nor was I invited in the kitchen, the domain of women in the family. We entered the main family room, empty save for a sink in one corner and a television and plastic chairs in another. To the right was the dining room, a space lined with mats and surrounded by cushions and pillows against three walls. A hutch in the corner held the family’s valuables – dusty tea cups, stuffed animals, drinking glasses, ashtrays, all decorated with a vine of yellow, plastic flowers. Beside it was a press-board computer desk with a hard drive and screen. The room, at mealtime, is reserved for men, and I was invited inside.

Omar is the eldest in his family, and he as such he served his guests. His wife, dressed in a sea green dress and head scarf, looked wonderfully fresh after cooking all day. We were filthy, sweaty and worn from an afternoon walking the streets in full gear. We took our boots off and sat. The air conditioner in the window blew tepid, stale air. No one seemed to mind. Omar invited his two friends, two engineers, to dinner as well. One man brought his family, a wife and twin daughters. Along with Omar’s son and daughter, the children came in one by one to shake hands with their visitors. For the rest of the night they giggled between a Tom and Jerry video and our doorway, where they looked at me and whispered.

Omar opened the bottled water, poured it into wine glasses, and served them from a silver tray. We waited about 15 or 20 minutes for the meal. One of the engineers spoke English, and he asked how I liked Saqlawriya. It’s like a small American town? He asked. Yes, I said, where everybody knows everybody. It’s no exaggeration. If there were a small-town paper here, people would turn to the obits and police blotter first to see who died and who caught trouble. That’s what the Marines are counting on. Fox Company has been here since February, and they are just starting to gain enough trust from locals to get anonymous tips on people who are harboring and perpetuating the violence. The tips must come under the guise of some other communication – a complaint about water service, a request for reimbursement for damage caused by Marines – to protect the informer from the ones who want to kill.

Omar, too, walks that line. In the privacy of his own house he tells the captain what’s going on in town, who is stealing water from the town pipes, what a fair price is for repaving the streets. The engineers do the same. They explained how the man who owns the car wash has pretended to dig a well to rinse away suds. In reality, he’s tapped into the water system that already is too weak to serve all ends of town.

The wife brought dinner to the door, and Omar retrieved it and put it on the floor. First there were pickles, okra, hot peppers, cucumbers, sour and spicy. Then, bowls of lamb and tomato and okra soup. Finally Omar brought in the upside down and gingerly set the giant tray in the middle of the picnic. It was a tureen of sort, with a foundation of steamed rice in turmeric, then crowned with layers of chicken, potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes. It stood like timbale, the Italian delicacy made in “Big Night” full of pasta and meats and cooked slowly in a drum of pastry casing. But this had no case, just yellow rice and rich chicken and roasted eggplant all held together by their own juices. The dish is called, simply, upside down, and I have no idea how she made it hold together.

The last item food handed through the door was a foot-high stack of freshly baked bread. It’s like Indian naan, but more pliable and chewier and about twice as large. Each diner takes a disc and tears at it through the meal, using the pieces to soak up soup and grab parts of the upside down as it starts to fall apart. Omar was thoughtful enough to pass out plates and spoons, but they were an afterthought. Like my presence, no one seemed to mind that I kept eating with my left hand.

After dinner, Omar cleared the floor. He brought out the ashtrays and served the chai, strong hot tea filled with sugar that makes southern sweet tea tart by comparison. The talk grew more serious. The city council hasn’t met since last year, and they’re scared to turn to the Marines openly. They want the tunnels under the train tracks blocked to further limit travel to and from the city. The reopening of the bridge in town is good for business, but also good for car bombers. They want the local police to be more confident, to come out and settle neighborly disputes like real cops. They are worried that the police are corrupt. As the conversation went on, Omar’s daughter brought in a flash light. The lights at Omar’s house are fueled by a grid that switches off at night. It was 10:30 p.m., and it would soon be lights out.

The engineer turned to me again. Before you go back to America, he said, tell them this. We cannot do it alone. We need your help. You cannot leave us here. We want to do great things. “Without your help, we can’t do it.” I nodded and took notes.

We left Omar’s about 11 p.m. The kids were still up, anxious to get on the computer once the grown-ups left the room. One Marine let Omar’s son practice holding his body armor. The boy couldn’t lift the vest on his own. The daughter asked if my armor was as strong as the Marines. Not as heavy, I said, but as strong. The men shook my hand. We said thank you and good-bye. Omar’s wife was not in sight. We left and crossed the field between his house and the Marine base in the darkness. Omar’s lights were still on.

Ramadi, Ramadi, where you been so long?

Let me just start by saying that my first great move upon landing in Ramadi was to fall down on my way out the helicopter ramp. My knee and a six-and-a-half-foot tall Marine caught me, and I didn’t drop the bag with about $10,000 worth of computer and camera gear, so all’s well. Then the soldier who was supposed to meet me at the landing pad didn’t show, so I waited an hour or so before someone at the terminal office took pity on me and drove me into base. By then, it was nearly 3 a.m. The Marines only fly at night, one of the reasons you hear more about Army helicopters going down and less about Marine crashes. All in all, I like traveling with the Marines.

Camp Ramadi is the main base in a cluster of Army and Marine encampments outside of Ramadi, the capital of Al Anbar province. No doubt you’ve heard of Anbar and Ramadi, the city on the southern side of the Euphrates River where Al Qaeda claimed to have set up its own government inside Iraq, according to the Army commander here. Ramadi sits between Baghdad to the east and a whole bunch of nothing to the west until you get to the Iranian and Syrian borders. Nearly all residents are Sunni, Saddam’s sect of Islam that has felt disenfranchised as the new Iraqi government emerges. In many ways, their anger and paranoia is understandable. Shiites were the weak ones before the war, under Saddam. Now they and their Persian, rather than Iraqi, heritage are in charge and the Sunnis are pissed. Many more complications lie beneath this simple explanation, but bad blood spread across a country is something I understand. Consider reconstruction after our own civil war. Losers don’t warm to instruction on how to lose, and they can hold it against anyone more vulnerable for a very long time. Winners have a more ethical dilemma. They can try to correct history and hate, or they can give up and begin to call that struggle somebody else’s problem.

In Ramadi, disenfranchisement and jealousy apparently go only so far. Last fall, the bad guys – whoever they are – were using Ramadi as its defacto capital in Iraq, the military commanders tell me. They ruled the city, and as long as regular folks let the insurgents make their bombs, bury their bombs, blow up their bombs, then ordinary citizens avoided torture and murder. The catch, or course, is that bombs and mortar attacks are inexact work, and the regular folks and children shopping at the markets and driving in their cars got blown away.

So the sheiks and leaders in town decided to take their town back. They joined the police department, shot rifles from their own homes, and, with much trepidation I’m sure, began to work with the U.S. military. The Marines and soldiers, working with this new band of local police, spent last winter going through the town street by street, almost house by house, pushing the insurgency out. They detained more than 600 people, found car-bomb making factories, uncovered piles and piles or weapons. The military entrenched a few local police stations in town and moved soldiers and Marines into them permanently. By April, attacks in the city have dropped to nearly nothing.

I went for a walk through this new Ramadi Thursday evening. The neighborhood stroll was through Ramadi’s upper middle class, far from the train tracks and a closed ceramic factory at the city’s south end, and closer to a university and the river at the north. The houses had courtyards and yards. The children wore clothes without holes, many had shoes. One little girl ran out of her house, waving, wrapped in a sparkly headdress and carrying an evening bag with a gold clasp, as if the Marines had interrupted her night of playing dressup. One man was working on the electrical wiring to a mosque. Another was washing his car. One group had strung a volleyball net in a lot between two houses and were marking out a court. There were about 15 people standing around, on both sides of the net. I never saw a ball.

Each person, house and family was its own microcosm. The volleyball court itself was cleared of trash; a blink away, rotting garbage and animal carcasses filled a lot. Mufflers, plastic bags and bottles, paper, rebar, broken glass, raw sewage and animal shit covered most of the streets. Many houses were intact and run off generators. Most have broken windows. The buildings in between are half-dead, crumbling and knocked about as if God kicked them. It smelled like soured lettuce and marijuana. We walked past a man sitting in the road, smoking from a yard-tall hookah.

Then we rounded a corner and I saw something I’ve never seen in Iraq: a clean street. It took a minute to register. The captain I was with asked if I noticed. “See how clean it is?” Two streets joined at a corner with a mosque blaring the evening prayer. No one minded the call to kneel. Kids eating orange ice cream pestered the Marines for candy and men watched and smoked from their chairs. Fresh paint covered one strip of stores, which were covered by an orange awning not yet brown from the sand. Shoes, belts, fruits, cigarettes, coffee thermoses, grain for animals were for sale. One Marine bought a carton of French cigarettes for $10. Filth, for the moment, was gone from this small intersection. The residents themselves had cleaned it, the captain said, in a project called “Day Labor.” The Iraqi police organize the community cleanups, and the military provides the pay, $10 for picking up the trash. On Thursday night, even the dirt road looked combed.

But cleanliness and safety are relative, in Ramadi of all places. On Monday, just outside the city, two car bombs killed 16 people, half Iraqi police and half civilians. Ramadi’s city neighborhoods may feel safer, but it’s only because the violence has moved to the countryside. The military is chasing the bad guys, whoever they are, past the city borders into the fields. (The commander says it’s al Qaeda; a front-line captain I was with said it was local shitheads.) They are setting up the same Iraqi police/military outposts out there as well. They are making more arrests, finding more weapons stockpiles. And there, too, the violence is abating.

We got back to base at about 10 p.m. Thursday. A wind had picked up, and it’s still blowing this morning. The sun at 7 a.m. today was covered, like a grey Syracuse day. Here clouds don’t cover the sky. Desert sand does. I had forgotten how it gets into everything: your nose, your sleeping bag, the keys of your laptop. Some soldiers try their best, sweeping their offices every few hours. Some just let it build. I’ve been here a week, and my black daypack has become gray.

That orange awning will turn brown. There’s not enough water in the city to wash it. The military thinks it’ll be two to three months before the electricity is back on, the key to revving up the sewage treatment plants, the factories, nearly everything. The captain I walked around with has enough discretionary money to fix potholes, move generators, pay for neighborhood cleaning days. Big money to power the grid can come from America, but it’s supposed to come from the Iraqi government. On the ground in Ramadi, the military officers and the local government leaders are creating the bureaucracy to request, then move, that money from the Ministry of the Interior down into cities’ infrastructures.

So colors will fade, dust will collect on the new paint. Heat and drought are inevitable. Violence is more random. Two years ago, I walked Haifa Street in Baghdad, a notorious street miraculously turned better because the Iraqi Army moved in and drove out the bad guys. The Americans watched from behind the scenes, hopeful at the reopened tea houses. Then, a year ago, murder returned to Haifa Street. Now, as I’m back, I hear it’s passable again. It’s hard to look at Ramadi, at the depth of poverty and need among the people, and not wonder when they might break again the other way and take a payoff from someone who wants to stash a few mortars in their backyard. It’s hard to look at the Iraqi police, driving around in their F-350s, and wonder if they’ll keep up the pace. It’s easy to wonder, as their police power grows, how they will use that power over time.

The Marines are optimistic, and I don’t blame them. Some were hear a year ago in the midst of hell, some are brand new. Either way, they want to do their job, get it over with, and avoid coming back. They want their time here to matter here, and in order to get out of bed every day and put on your body armor, you’ve got to drink a little of the Kool-aid – “we really are helping” – just to stay sane. They also are realistic and expect that a new wave of bad guys are about to move back in. After Thursday’s walk, one Marine mentioned that a man had a few tanks of fuel stacked outside his home on the corner. The Marine said those tanks are at an intersection that might attract IED attacks. And I can’t recall now whether he said if, or when.

"I know Marcia Weaver"

The world is small, but never so much when you're riding in an uparmored bus on the way to Camp Victory in Baghdad and you begin talking Mississippi politics.

Maj. Vince Mitchell was my escort, and it took all of about 20 minutes to discover we grew up about 15 miles from each other. A 1982 graduate of Clinton High School, it only took a couple more minutes to find out he's a political junkie and he remembers my mom on the Jackson City Council.

"Marcia Weaver! I know Marcia Weaver," he laughed, and then we began to explain to the Esquire reporter the latest antics of Jackson, which involve the mayor's recent indictment and trial. (I understand he was found not guilty; the charges involved his use of teenagers to employ axes to break into a suspected drug house, among other things.)

I also slept with eight men last night. I'm not making any of this up.

So far Iraq has proved a slow start, which is fine. I've been inside the Green Zone mostly. Actually, I've been inside the press lounge mostly, which is a fancy name for a room with two folding tables, Internet access, bunk beds and army cots. When I went to sleep at 8 p.m. last night I had four other roommates; by dawn, the number had doubled.

Things will change tonight. I'm scheduled for a flight to Ramadi, a pit stop on my way to Fallujah. I'll be in Ramadi for a couple of days, writing a quite update on the "big picture" in the city. Things have improved there in recent weeks, though improvement, like acquittals, can be relative. By the end of next week, I should be in Fallujah.

I'm off to a press conference now. I'll write again after I move westward.

Back to Basics

The difference between 32 and nine is 23, an equation I’ve been a little obsessed with in the past few days. Twenty-three has no terrible significance. It’s a prime number, but not much more; it’s neither showy, nor round, has no promise of baked goods, no yardstick by which other achievements or anniversaries are measured. Perhaps the only memory for me involves noting my grandmother’s birthday as the 23rd of each September on many calendars. But those celebrations have passed, and the mini-diaries probably lie in a shoebox in the bottom of some closet back home.

I’m on my way to Iraq again, as soon as today if the military’s air traffic allows. I’m writing from Darmstadt, Germany, and about to get in a car to drive to Ramstein. There, I’ll wait for about four or five hours to see if I get a seat on a cargo flight into Balad, Iraq. I was in Balad two years ago, waiting for a flight in the opposite direction. I expect I’ll get onto the base in the early morning, crawl into a sleeping tent, and rest for a few hours before catching a helicopter into the Green Zone in Baghdad. Once in the Green Zone, I’ll check in with the military’s central press office. By the end of the weekend, I’ll likely be on my way to Fallujah.

The Marines are in Fallujah. Like the Army in Baghdad, the Marines are surging into the city to set up small bases in an effort to rout out the bad guys one block at a time. The Marines run at a different rate than the Army. Here’s one example – they go to Iraq on six-month rotations, then go home for six months. Some are likely on their seventh or eighth tour. Here’s another – Marines make up 14 percent of the deployments so far, and they account for 28 percent of the causalities.

In my perverse, journalistic way, I’m excited to go back. It took a while to feel that way. Two years ago, I was thrilled at the challenge of doing something I’d never done before: cover a war. This time ‘round, I had mixed feelings. Mostly, I felt, why bother. Surge or no surge, budget or no budget, the fights in Congress and on Haifa Street drag on for endless rounds without a sane referee to declare an end. I grew bored with most of the news and found it hard to find any inspiration about going back to war.

Then a twig snapped at home. In one morning, 32 kids and their professors were shot to death. Those who skipped class and jumped out windows lived. Those who had no escape died. It was awful and unimaginable. America and the world turned toward a beaucolic college town to make sense of the violence, somehow made worse for the calculations and randomness carried out at the same time.

Within hours, the Washington Post had 75 people working the story, CNN over 200. Within a day, journalists had written profiles of the fallen, aided by randomly e-mailed comments from friends and family. Within a week, dorms at Virginia Tech posted signs asking the media to stay away. The students had exhausted their patience and ability to answer for the impossible.

That same day in Baghdad, 177 people died in car bombings. The U.S. media covered the news but not the people. I understand why. Knocking on doors in Baghdad can’t be compared with knocking on doors in Blacksburg, so telling the victims’ stories for Western journalists becomes a near impossibility. I hope there are stories on Arabic media and blogs about some of those losses, but I’ve looked, and I don’t have the language skills to find them. Still, I can look at the 32 faces and try, at least, to imagine it multiplied by five. On the Asian side of the world, the Virginia Tech shootings happened on April 17, the anniversary of the beginning of the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. I cannot imagine multiplying 32 into two million.

Then last week I found a number I could rap my head and outrage around. Nine soldiers died in Iraq in a single explosion. No flags dropped to half-mast, no scores of journalists rushed to inundate their hometowns. Five were college age. Some were from towns called Otis, Browersville, Phoenix, Bad Axe. None of them had the choice to skip the convoy and sleep in that morning, avoiding the random and calculated terror waiting for them.

Grief has no rules, nor should it. We are touched and maddened by events we can feel and taste, those that comprise our identity. Millions of people in America can glimpse the surprising horror of packing a kid or spouse off to college only to learn their classrooms became a murder scene. Fewer know the smells and grit of a convoy ride. A painful handful know the reality of returning from work with fewer friends than when they left, then face the next day knowing it could happen again.

If the nine in Iraq had been 32, would the world have turned? It’s doubtful. It’s even understandable. But it doesn’t make it right. For my part, I remember how the truck fumes smell in the Iraqi summer, and the before and after of convoy rides. Those are stories I can tell.