I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  Al-Maliki was very sure of his soldiers, and of the job he was doing to protect Najaf. He offered to take me on a tour of the town in his SUV. He was in charge of guarding the Imman Ali Mosque, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines. I hopped in his Toyota Landcruiser, no body armor on (I didn’t want to insult him), windows rolled down, and we drove down to the mosque. Two and a half years earlier, in September 2003, a bombing at the mosque had killed at least 125 people, including an influential Shiite leader. In August 2004, Moqtada al-Sadr’s militia holed up in the mosque and fought U.S. forces until the Iraqi government brokered a last-minute ceasefire. Now it is safe, said al-Maliki, no problems except for the Iraqi police. They are infiltrated by militias, he explained, and can’t be trusted. We drove past the largest cemetery in Iraq—not surprisingly, a Shiite cemetery. (The Shiite religion embraced death and martyrdom and had done so sinceA.D. 680 when Hussein—the son of Ali who was the son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed—was killed along with seventy-two of his followers by the Sunnis.) “Take your pictures,” al-Maliki told me. “If you come back dressed like an Arab, you can walk around here safely.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” al-Maliki said, “you will be able to watch my men in action.” He and McCarthy had planned two simultaneous raids to capture insurgents—one raid in the center of Najaf, the other in Al Hayderiah, a rural area outside of the city. Al-Maliki claimed the insurgents were suspected members of the Mehdi Army—Shiites, in other words, who had been making IEDs to attack both the Americans and the Iraqi Army. Mohammed and I agreed to go along. We spent the night at FOB Hotel, where we were given a large room with at least ten beds. We had it all to ourselves. The room was decorated in bright colors, and the bed sheets were pink and blue.

  Mohammed and I discussed al-Maliki in our private barracks.

  “Mike, I am impressed,” Mohammed confided in me. “This is impressive, seeing this.”

  We leave for the raid before dawn. Lieutenant Colonel McCarthy and al-Maliki stay behind at FOB Hotel to command the operation.

  Mohammed and I are in a Humvee commanded by a young captain named Andrew Card, who is on his second tour in Iraq. He likes to keep up a steady chatter of humor over the intercom—“Fish heads fish heads, roly-poly fish heads, fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum…” To keep his men on their toes, he calls out, “Intelligence check,” and asks them a trivia question. He sends a text message to base over his FBCB2 onboard computer, spicing up the dull military language: 3 HMMWVs AND 15 PAX ENROUTE FROM FOB HOTEL, LOVE WAR HORSE 5.

  It’s raining and the sun isn’t up. There are three Humvees—HMMWVs, High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles—in our convoy along with a pack of Iraqi Army vehicles, five or so olive-green Nissan pickup trucks with plates of armor on the back and light machine guns bolted to the floor. We are in the countryside, and high grass and weeds are on both sides of a narrow dirt road. The road has steep banks, dropping off into marshlands. We park about a kilometer from the target houses, small farms hidden behind a row of trees.

  The gunshots off in the distance start as soon as Captain Card steps out of the Humvee. There is a light fog and drizzle. I try to take pictures but all that comes up on the screen are faceless images and out-of-focus bodies. The road is muddy, sucking my boots in deep on each step. Mohammed is wearing sandals and is having a more difficult time.

  We head toward the houses. Mohammed is falling behind. Card tells me we are going to meet up with the raiding party, one American platoon and a platoon of Iraqi Army soldiers. We can see them down the road, in front of a small boxlike farmhouse.

  There are more gunshots.

  This time, I can see them, the red tracers flashing a few hundred meters away and sailing overhead, coming from a small farmhouse.

  I stop. “Mohammed, you probably should stay back here. Interview some of the Iraqi soldiers. There’s no need for you to come up any farther.”

  He says, “No, it’s okay.”

  The next shots sound closer.

  “Look, there’s no point in you going up here, I don’t need a translator for this kind of stuff.”

  He smiles; those last shots were pretty close. “I’ll stay back,” he says.

  Card keeps moving. “It’s like rural Georgia,” he says. “Once the natives see a trespasser, they start shooting, then all the neighbors join in. They’re not shooting at us, they’re shooting above our heads.”

  We meet up with the raiding party. An American major has ducked behind a Humvee, yelling into the radio. He asks if the Iraqi soldiers have control of the situation and orders them to go to the house where the shots are coming from.

  Captain Card recommends that I move behind the Humvee as well.

  The firing increases in intensity.

  A group of Iraqi soldiers appears from the fog. They are pushing a line of five men in sweatpants and sandals, stumbling, hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners are not intimidating. They are all men, ranging from teenagers to a gray-haired and frail-looking farmer.

  The Iraqi soldiers have captured the insurgents.

  The firing stops, though the Iraqi soldiers do not go look for the people who were doing the shooting. They already have their prisoners.

  They’re proud of their capture and they move around the prisoners, posing, but they don’t look like professional soldiers and they are not wearing uniforms. One Iraqi soldier, a teenager, has on a black ski mask, a leather jacket, and carries a 9mm pistol. Another young man casually struts with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his shoulder.

  I take pictures, but the images are still blurry.

  “Have we searched all the houses?” the major asks.

  The Iraqi patrol leader, a lieutenant, says, “Yes, all the houses are searched. We have the prisoners.”

  “That was quick,” the major says. “Are you sure you searched all the houses?”

  “Yes, yes, we have searched all the houses.”

  Without saying it, the Iraqi leader seems to suggest the mission is over. Let’s go home and get out of the rain.

  We walk back to the Humvees. I join up with Mohammed.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Remember, Mike, last night, when I said I was impressed and things looked like they were going well?” he says. “I’ve changed my mind. This is why. How can a country have an army when its people can shoot at it and nothing happens to them? That is not authority. In Saddam’s time, that would not have happened. People respected the army.”

  “Good point,” I say. “But, you know…”

  I pause and he looks at me and smiles.

  “It’s your country, my friend,” we say.

  I talk to the major, asking what he thought of the Iraqi Army’s performance. “Good,” he says, “but they had trouble reading maps.”

  Mohammed and I head back to FOB Duke. I interview another American officer about the Iraqi Army. He says he is worried that we will equip Iraqis whom we will later have to fight. He tells me he doesn’t trust them, really. “We’re not teaching them everything we know,” he says. “Remember, it was U.S. forces that trained Adid in Somalia.” He’s referring to the warlord the U.S. soldiers had to fight in Mogadishu. This officer’s fears are not unfounded: Since 2003, the Americans have given hundreds of thousands of weapons to the Iraqi forces, and according to a U.S. government report, 30 percent of those weapons are unaccounted for. Are they in the hands of the bad guys, Sunni insurgents or Shiite militias? Probably. No one knows for sure. They are lost.

  Later that night, Mohammed and I go to the dining facility, the DFAC (pronounced Dee-fac). Mohammed is impressed at the setup. There is a sanitized hand-washing facility at the entrance, silver sinks and bright lights and antibacterial soap to wash away the germs. I point out the food options to Mohammed. It is a role reversal. For the first time, I understand the situation better than he does. We are in Iraq, but this is the American version. There is a Baskin Robbins ice cream bar, a taco bar, fried chicken, hamburgers, ch
eeseburgers, spaghetti, all the Gatorade and soda you can drink. The workers are Filipino and Indian, shipped in by KBR to feed the Americans. We fill up our plates and head back to our trailer to sleep on our two single beds, our firm mattresses and synthetic white pillows.

  The next morning we wait for another helicopter to bring us back to Baghdad. Mohammed has gotten his first inside look at the American military occupation, and he is surprisingly not bitter. He sees goodness in the Americans, and what they are trying to do. He did hate Saddam, but he struggles with the question of whether it is better to live in a world of totalitarian repression or maddening anarchy. He started working forUSA Today after the invasion, and we hired him in 2005. He did have fun on the trip, and in general, he’s taken to journalism. He’s making more money than he did during “Saddam time,” as it’s called. When he moved to a nicer house two years after the war started, the men he hired as movers were old Baathist officers whom Mohammed got to order around. But he found little pleasure in the irony.

  The helicopter is late. We are both very tired, and we’re running low on things to discuss.

  “How did you sleep?” Mohammed asks.

  “Okay,” I say. “I had a weird dream.”

  I tell him about my dream: I am driving in Baghdad, showing an editor around—my boss, Fareed Zakaria. But Baghdad is a large glass mall, a cluster of pyramids connected by futuristic railway cars. Everywhere I bring him there are men with guns. They don’t have feet, it appears, and they move too quickly, sliding on some preset pattern, leaving a vivid color trail like the motorcycles in the movieTron.

  “Ah, yes, insurgent dreams,” says Mohammed. “I have those.”

  I don’t think to ask him the obvious follow-up questions—what are insurgent dreams? What are his dreams?

  Mohammed tells me he has never seenTron, then he asks about other American movies. He asks about Tom Cruise. I tell him there’s a rumor that Tom Cruise is gay. “Tom Cruise a gay? No, I don’t believe it. A gay. Wow.”

  Mohammed is shocked when I tell him popcorn and a soda can cost ten dollars at an American movie theater, and that doesn’t even include ticket price.

  I should have asked him about his dreams, but it is only in the following year, long after our conversation, that I’ll come to really understand what he meant by insurgent dreams. One night, I’ll even dream of him and another translator, Ahmer, stuck on the side of a cliff in the middle of a blizzard. We were all at my old home in upstate New York sitting on snowmobiles, and then I send them out on a story without the proper clothing and with radios that are running low on batteries. The storm gets worse and the temperature drops quickly, and they freeze to death on the ledge of a mountain.

  There are other dreams: My mother is in Baghdad, but this time Baghdad looks like a college town, and she’s dropping me off to work at a twenty-four-hour convenience store. As we commute, I lie down in the backseat of the car (a ’92 Buick Park Avenue, the car I crashed drunk when I was nineteen). In another dream, Baghdad appears as a campus on a hill. A group of us—reporters, I think—take a walk to some kind of cultural center. There are a series of checkpoints, but the grass is green and there are maple trees so we aren’t worried. The insurgents don’t show themselves in such nice weather and ideal surroundings. In another, I am in a car with Scott and it looks like the real Baghdad now. “Why are we going this way?” he asks. “We should turn back.” And then I am driving a bus on a dirt road. A veteran correspondent, Rod Nordland, tells me to drive faster, there is a pickup truck following us. Head to the lake and the beach. I think the only safety is the lake. I jump in and start to swim. Insurgents can’t swim, can they? Yes, they can, and one comes after me, splashing me as he gets closer and then he kills me. I wake up in my bedroom in Baghdad and stare at the clicking ceiling fan. Something profound has changed in my thinking. Never before had I died in a dream. I usually woke up first.

  Mohammed and I take a flight back to Baghdad. I write the story of our Najaf trip at the bureau. I do a few follow-up interviews with other Iraqi Army officers. The story is headlined: “We Want Better Weapons.” The subheading: “American relationship with Iraqis marked by mistrust.” I was lucky the story made it into the magazine. I filed on a Saturday, the same day Vice President Cheney shot a man in the face with a shotgun. That news didn’t break until Sunday afternoon, after the magazine closed.

  CHAPTER10

  January 18, 2006

  AN INSTANT-MESSAGE EXCHANGE OVER SKYPE

  michaelmhastings 21:48:22

  baby

  Andi: 21:48:33

  newsie

  michaelmhastings: 21:48:43

  how are you?

  Andi: 21:48:52

  i’m good babe—how are you?

  michaelmhastings: 21:49:02

  very good

  Andi: 21:49:03

  i just wrote you like 3 paragraphs

  michaelmhastings: 21:49:05

  really?

  Andi: 21:49:10

  when you emailed me

  michaelmhastings: 21:49:11

  can you send them?

  Andi: 21:49:12

  yeah

  Andi: 21:49:14

  weird

  Andi: 21:49:27

  send anyway?

  michaelmhastings: 21:49:29

  well, we are in love

  Andi: 21:49:38

  yes we are

  Andi: 21:49:45

  but baby it was a diatribe

  michaelmhastings: 21:49:52

  against me?

  Andi: 21:49:56 NO michaelmhastings: 21:50:00

  ok, then send

  Andi: 21:50:04

  cap punishment

  Andi: 21:50:13

  about what you see over there

  Andi: 21:50:34

  and how I wish I could know what you see

  There was a new tension in our relationship—Andi wanted to understand what I was going through, and she wanted me to understand what it was like to be waiting on the other end.

  A little under a month had passed since Christmas in Vermont. We sent each other long, serious emails—what she called “the Hemingway letter”—or rapid notes just to let each other know we were there, and we stayed in as constant contact as we could by instant messaging. IMs were the medium of choice in Baghdad. Everyone—soldiers, journalists, contractors, diplomats—communicated by instant message. Andi would be at her desk in New York at Air America, and I’d be in the bureau in Baghdad and we would fire off telegraphic descriptions of our days. She felt like she was missing out sometimes. She would make jokes at first. What if I came to Iraq, if you saw your love on Airport Road? Then you’d know how I feel. “You live such a different life,” she would say. “How can I relate to that?” I protested. I want to hear about your days, your work, the crisis management you are constantly doing at Air America. She would tell me about those things, but our conversations usually turned back to Iraq.

  michaelmhastings: 21:51:28

  so here’s what happened—

  Andi: 21:51:34

  ok

  michaelmhastings: 21:52:20

  the baghdad central criminal court is this three floor complex, very futuristic looking, that straddles the green zone; one entrance is in the GZ, the other opens out onto a street in the red zone

  michaelmhastings: 21:52:55

  i went back today with mohammed

  The Central Criminal Court of Iraq, or the CCCI, or the Triple Cee Eye, was where Iraq’s terrorism cases were being tried on an almost daily basis. Insurgents and murderers and criminals of all ages from across the country got their day in court at the CCCI. Some of the criminals were those that the Americans arrested; others the Iraqi forces had detained. It seemed like a good place to find stories, so I went there with Mohammed to watch the trials. I didn’t expect to do a big story on the Iraqi justice system. After spending two days there I was left with a series of impressions about what was going on, if not a full understanding. You didn’t have
to be a constitutional scholar to figure out that the Iraqi justice system was deeply flawed.

  It was bizarre: Iraqi lawyers, American soldiers, and Iraqi prisoners in orange jumpsuits thrown into the same space. In one room, there was a televideo conference display, where an American soldier in Germany was giving testimony about an Iraqi insurgent he had detained the previous year. The American had left the country; they weren’t going to bring him back for a trial. So he stuttered out his testimony over a live video feed as military prosecutors and Iraqi lawyers huddled around a television screen, asking him questions over the linkup. (“Yes, sir, that’s right, there was, uh, there were sixteen 60mm mortars and those mortars were, uh, two hundred meters from the farmhouse, and when the detainee was questioned he said those mortars belonged to his, uh, brother, who we could not find and he told us the brother was, uh, killed, so we think the mortars definitely belonged to the detainee. There were no other houses around that area.”)

  The courtroom itself was a carpeted space with wooden benches for the three judges and a docket for the prisoners. One Iraqi prisoner after another filed in. Each of them went through the same ordeal: questions from the chief judge and brief statements from the defense attorney, the prosecutor, and sometimes a witness.

  One man, Omar Hamza, limped slowly in, his hands chained, his left leg dragging behind him.

  “My fingernails were pulled,” he told the judge. “Look, look at what they’ve done to me. I am not a terrorist. I am innocent.”