Redeployment (10 page)

•   •   •

Sheikh Abu Bakr was,
in addition to being an important item on Zima’s to-do list, a major player west of Route Dover. The first time I met him, the lieutenant commanding my convoy told me, “Sheikh Abu Bakr is, literally, Tina Turner from
Mad Max
.” Bob also claimed the sheikh was the man to see about widows, so a little after my water conversation with Zima, I headed out to try to get the beekeeping project off the ground. I needed to see Abu Bakr anyway, as we were shifting monetary support to the
qada’a,
or provincial council. Previously we’d given funds directly to him and he’d pay Iraqis to man security
checkpoints instead of fight in the insurgency. Since Abu Bakr ran the
qada’a,
shifting payments to the council was somewhere between a shell game and a method of helping the Iraqis develop government institutions capable of managing budgets.

As we drove into town, I saw a couple of kids in baseball uniforms going through garbage on the side of the road. One kid was in gray, the other in blue. Blue had cut the leggings off to turn them into impromptu shorts.

“Stop the convoy,” I said. Nobody paid any attention, and I didn’t press the matter.

Given the squalor all around, I was always shocked coming to Abu Bakr’s home. It was an enormous estate, with five separate buildings and the only real lawn I’d seen in Iraq outside of the U.S. embassy. The creation of the embassy lawn had been ordered by the ambassador himself and had involved sod imported from Kuwait, armored convoys to bring in lawn supplies, intense efforts to keep birds away from the seed, and a casual disregard for the rules of nature. Estimates for the cost varied from two to five million taxpayer dollars. What Abu Bakr’s cost, I had no idea. Given the sheer number of pots he had his fingers in, it was likely U.S. taxpayer dollars had gone into his lawn as well.

When we arrived at his home, the U.S. soldiers and the Iraqi police and Iraqi army set up a defensive perimeter. There was a uniformed Iraqi police officer already there who was in the midst of detailing the car in the driveway, a black Lexus. We walked inside and were escorted through rooms filled with mahogany furniture, crystal vases, and the occasional flat-screen TV hooked up to an Xbox. Our guide brought us to a dining room where Abu Bakr was waiting. We exchanged pleasantries
and sat down, and he had his men serve me, the Professor, the convoy commander, the police lieutenant, and a couple of the Iraqi army guys lamb and rice. They brought the lamb out in a big slimy pile on a large plate and set it down next to an equally large plate of rice. There was no silverware. One of the IA guys, thinking I didn’t know how to eat, elbowed me, smiled, and grabbed a bunch of lamb in his right hand, grease oozing through his fingers. He then slapped the lamb on the rice plate and mashed it up with his hand until he had a little ball of rice and lamb, which he picked up and dropped on my plate.

“Thanks,” I said.

He stared at me, smiling. Abu Bakr was looking at me, too. He seemed faintly amused. The Professor was openly amused. I took it and ate it. Hygiene questions aside, it was delicious.

With that, real discussion began. Abu Bakr was a fat, jovial man who claimed to have three bullets lodged in his torso. Doctors had told him it’d be more dangerous to take them out than to leave them in, but, he’d say, “every night I feel them worming closer to my heart.”

The Professor claimed that three years ago a Shi’a death squad had attempted to kidnap Abu Bakr. As they were pulling him to their vehicle, he saw that one of the gunmen had a pistol lodged in his belt. The sheikh pulled it out, shot two of his captors, and sustained two nonfatal gunshots himself. The final gunman was captured by his men. If you wanted to see what happened to that guy, you could apparently buy the torture tape at most kiosks in the area. I never had any interest.

The conversation shifted into a long discussion of the local
nahiyas
and provincial
qada’as
. Abu Bakr claimed it would be much easier to give him the money. I maintained they needed to learn how to manage the money themselves. After about an hour, we started talking widows.

“Yes,” said the Professor. “He can get them for you. Sheikh Umer will handle this matter.”

Sheikh Umer was considerably lower in the local hierarchy. No Lexus in his driveway. He was a player in one of the
nahiyas
.

“The widows will learn to grow bees if you provide the hives and training,” said the Professor, “but they also will need you to pay for their taxis to the training, as the area is very dangerous.”

“Taxis don’t cost a tenth of what he’s asking,” I said. “Tell him this would be a very personal favor.”

The Professor and Abu Bakr talked. I was certain that Abu Bakr spoke English. He always seemed to know what I was saying and would cut the Professor off sometimes before he could fully translate. But Abu Bakr never fully let on.

Eventually the Professor looked at me and said, “There are other fees he may not anticipate, but which may complicate this matter.” He paused and added, “It is as they say. A rug is never fully sold.”

“Tell him,” I said, “we want real widows this time. At the last women’s agricultural meeting, Cindy said she thought they were all married women.”

The Professor nodded, then spoke some more.

“This will not be a problem,” he said. “Iraq is short of many things, but not widows.”

•   •   •

The baseball bats
and mitts arrived not long after the Abu Bakr meeting.

“I’ll take care of these, too,” said Major Zima.

“Don’t just dump the bats like you did the uniforms,” I said.

“I would never!” he said.

“Every time I go outside the wire,” I said, “I see different kids in the uniforms, but I have yet to see a baseball game.”

“Of course not,” said Major Zima, “they don’t have bats yet.”

“I don’t want to see U.S.-supplied equipment in a torture video,” I said.

“Too late for that,” said Major Zima. “Besides, if there’s one thing I’ve learned doing Civil Affairs in Iraq, it’s that it’s hard to come in and change people’s culture.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Right now,” he said, “the Shi’a are pretty set in their ways of drilling people to death. And the Sunnis like to cut off heads. I don’t think we’ll manage to change that with baseball bats.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Too late,” said Major Zima, frowning, “you’re here.”

•   •   •

The next day,
I visited the women’s health clinic for what I feared would be the last time. I didn’t look forward to telling Najdah, the social worker there, that I’d failed her again.

“I am Iraqi,” she’d said on my previous visit. “I am used to promises that are good but not real.”

Visiting the women’s clinic was always odd, since I wasn’t
allowed inside. I’d meet Najdah in a building across the street, and she’d tell me what was going on.

The clinic was, perhaps, the thing I felt most proud of. That and the farming education program, though the farming stuff was mostly Cindy’s work. Najdah seemed to know what the clinic meant to me, and she’d always push me hard for more help whenever I showed up. She also thought I was somewhat crazy.

“Jobs?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Is there any way we could use this as a platform for starting businesses?”

“Platform?”

“Or maybe we could have a bakery attached to the clinic, and women could . . .”

She looked so puzzled, I stopped.

“My English is not so good, I think,” she said.

“Never mind,” I said. “It’s a bad idea anyway.”

“Will our funding be continued?”

I looked out at the clinic across the street, the love I had for it feeling like a weight in my chest. Two women walked in, followed by a group of children, one of them wearing a blue baseball shirt with sleeves longer than the child’s arms.

“Inshallah,” I said.

•   •   •

I made another trip
out to JSS Istalquaal with the intent of meeting with Kazemi, but as soon as I arrived the mission was canceled. Kazemi, I was told, was dead.

“Suicide bomber on a motorcycle,” said the S2 over the phone.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “All he wanted to do was pump water.”

“For what it’s worth,” said the S2, “I don’t think he was the target. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The S2 didn’t know when the funeral would be, and he strongly suggested that it would be unwise to attend in any case. There was nothing to do but try to get on a convoy back to Taji. I arranged for travel in a sort of haze. I ate a Pop-Tarts and muffins dinner. I waited.

At one point, I called my ex-wife on an MWR line. She didn’t pick up, which was probably a good thing but didn’t feel like it at the time. Then I went outside and sat down in a smoke pit with a staff sergeant. His body, with armor on, formed an almost perfect cube. I wondered how much time, as a career military man, he must have spent here already.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you here, risking your life?”

He looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. “Why are you?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“That’s a shame,” he said. He dropped his cigarette, which was only halfway done, and ground it out.

•   •   •

Major Zima was doing jumping jacks
when I got back to Taji, his belly bouncing in counterpoint to the rest of his body. He would go down and the belly would stay up, then his feet would leave the ground and his stomach would come crashing down. I’d never seen a man work out so much and achieve so little.

“How’re things?” he said breathlessly.

“They’re breaking my heart,” I said. And then, because Bob didn’t care, and Cindy was outside the wire, and there was no one else to talk to, I told Major Zima what was happening. He already knew about Kazemi. It was old news at this point. But he hadn’t heard about the clinic’s funding. He stood and smiled at me, nodding encouragingly, a look of pure idiocy on his face. It was like confessing your sins to Daffy Duck.

“How,” I said at the end, “how do you deal with it? The bullshit?”

Major Zima shook his head sadly. “There is no bullshit.”

“No bullshit?” I said. “In Iraq?” I cracked the sort of cynical smile Bob was always shooting in Cindy’s direction.

Zima kept shaking his head. “There’s a reason for everything,” he said, sounding almost spiritual. “Maybe we can’t see it. But if you were here two years ago . . .” His face was blank.

“If I was here two years ago what?”

“It was madness,” he said. Zima wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at anything. “Things are getting better. What you’re dealing with, it isn’t madness.”

I looked away, and we stood there in silence until I couldn’t put off going to work any longer. I went to the ePRT office, he went back to jumping jacks. When I got to my computer, I sat and stared at it, unsettled. It felt as though Zima’s mask had slipped and given me a glimpse of some incomprehensible sadness, the sadness you saw all around you every time you left the FOB. This country had a history that didn’t reset when a new unit rotated in. This time, these problems, they were an improvement.

•   •   •

Two days later,
Major Zima strolled into our office, whistling. He had a large green bag in one hand and a blank piece of paper in the other. He put the paper on my desk, pulled up a chair, and sat down.

He said, “I’m not really sure how you State boys write these things up, but here goes.”

Then he pulled out a pen with a flourish, hunched over the paper, and started writing, reading aloud what he put down.

“Our women’s business association,” he said, “has proved highly successful—”

“No, it hasn’t,” I said.

“Highly successful in sparking entrepreneurship among our AO’s disenfranchised population.”

Bob looked over, an eyebrow arched. Zima kept going, “In fact,” he said, scribbling illegibly with great speed, “due to its growing membership and the increasingly key place it has taken within community power structures, it has, on its own initiative, begun expanding its operations to encompass—” He looked up. “That’s a good word, right?
Encompass
?”

“
Encompass
is a great word,” I said, curious.

“To encompass a more holistic approach.”

“Have they now?” I said, smiling in spite of myself.

“Several promising businesses have failed, despite substantial opportunities for female employment, due to a lack of adequate child care and medical facilities. Providing these services is a prerequisite to a flourishing free market and represents a business opportunity in its own right.”

“Oh,” I said, getting it. “Very nice.”

Bob scowled.

“We are still collecting broader metrics, but two projects have been hamstrung by a lack of health care. One female bakery closed after two workers, both widows, stopped coming due to complications from untreated yeast infections.”

“There’s no way that’s true,” I said.

“Maybe someone gave me bad information,” the major conceded, “but I can’t be held responsible for that. We get bad information all the time.”

“I,” said Bob, standing up, “am going outside for a smoke break.”

“You don’t smoke,” I said. He ignored me.

“Statistics show,” Zima continued as Bob walked out, “that countries which improve health care do a better job improving their economies than countries which focus exclusively on business development.”

“Is that true?”

Major Zima put on his shocked face. “Of course it’s true,” he said. “I deal only in truth-hood.” After a moment he added, “I saw it in a TED Talk.”

“Okay,” I said. I looked down at the paper. “Can you get me the name of the speaker? Let’s see if we can do this.”

“Good,” said the major. “Glad we can work together on this. You know, I think I can even convince the colonel to throw in some CERP funds. . . .”

“That would be amazing,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “and I was wondering. Could you help me with something?”