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.