The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  “I don’t see us changing hundreds of years of religion,” Brigham said, “and I don’t see us bringing democracy to the region. I just don’t. We might be here ten years—depends on the casualties, the body bags coming home.”

  Weydemuller said, “We’re really spreading ourselves thin. I don’t think they anticipated any of this. Iraqis were thinking we were going to come here and put up homes and pick up the trash, and a year later the trash is everywhere and nothing’s changed.”

  Murphy said, “I think that’s what this country needs, is a big civil war. There’s so many religions—we need to leave and let them work it out themselves.”

  “I think we might have did it too fast,” Plumley said.

  “I love our democracy,” Brigham said, “but we can’t impose it.”

  “I would hate if we did pull out,” Plumley told him. “That would be very selfish for our country. We done messed it up.”

  Brigham said, “I don’t think we’re going to be here long enough. The insurgency’s going to get worse. We can’t stop it. There’s always going to be more of them.”

  I asked them about the meaning of Kurt’s death. Plumley, who had missed sitting in Kurt’s seat by the accident of losing the race to the Humvee, said that there was a reason why he was alive instead of Kurt, but he didn’t know what it was.

  Weydemuller, the older man, who had been in the second Humvee, said, “The more when I reflect on what happened—not only him, but a lot of people—was it worth it? Would you do something different? Some missions can wait till the next morning.”

  Brigham remembered Kurt arriving at basic out of shape and beating him by two minutes in the two mile. But Kurt had worked as hard as anyone to become a soldier.

  “I never seen him in a bad mood,” Plumley said.

  “I think about Fro every day,” Brigham said. “Once every day at least.”

  Plumley was smiling, remembering his friend. He had been the speaker at the Veterans Day memorial who couldn’t hold back his tears, and for the first few days he had felt terribly down. “Then I thought: How would Fro want me to be if he could see me? Every time I don’t want to do something, think it’s stupid—would he think that? No. So he gives me a lot of drive.”

  They were all quiet. Then they asked how Kurt’s family was doing.

  * * *

  FOR CHRIS FROSHEISER, Iraq was an unanswered question about his son and his country. He didn’t need to be proved right; he needed to find out what was right, which he defined as honoring Kurt and the other soldiers. The war that had taken his son became one of his essential connections to his son, and he wanted to feel a connection to the soldiers with whom Kurt had served and the country where he had died, too. Nothing irritated Frosheiser more than when someone urged him to get on with his life. His search through poems, song fragments, magazines (he read not just The New Republic but the left-wing In These Times and the right-wing American Enterprise), Army documents, e-mails, the First Armored Division Web site, American history books, tomes on just-war theory, Kurt’s belongings, and his own memories was obsessive and a little frantic. “What was my son involved in? Was it right?” he asked. “I’m looking for an account of it that can sit well in my mind and in my heart. I’m proud of Kurt’s service. But the whole thing—were these guys misused? And for what?” He never made it easy for himself.

  My correspondence with Frosheiser was rare and welcome. He wrote not just as a father but also as a citizen, as if he were cut from some older cloth that you didn’t find much anymore. But e-mail didn’t prepare me for the raw grief that was waiting in Des Moines when I went out to see him over Memorial Day weekend 2004. Within minutes of picking me up at the airport, Frosheiser was in tears, he was in tears when I left his apartment two days later, and in between there were tears, too. His narrow blue eyes were always red rimmed behind glasses, his fair skin raw with faint lines etched in his cheeks, his nose stuffed up. His voice was thick with Chicago roots and emotion; a sentence could erupt with a nervous laugh that broke into a sob and then came under control again to its end.

  We drove a few miles east of Des Moines to the new development of Altoona, where there was a cookout in the driveway of his daughter’s neighbors (it was the kind of place where they continued bringing over food and taking out her trash months after the funeral). Erin smiled when she saw her father’s condition. “Not already, Dad.” After dinner, we went to Erin and her husband Mike’s house and sat around the dining room table, where there was a spread of Kurt’s younger photos, his graduation portrait from Fort Knox standing in uniform in front of a Bradley, his combat patches, his “Killed in Action” banner framed in red, his Purple Heart and Bronze Star, and his tricornered funeral flag in a wooden frame.

  Erin, a woman in her early thirties with a direct blue-eyed gaze, was having trouble explaining things to her small children. Her five-year-old son, Colin, kept asking, “Why didn’t he shoot them? Why are they there?” Her younger child, Madelyn, wouldn’t remember Kurt. Erin had been trying hard to picture Iraq, the lives of Iraqi mothers, the dangers they lived with. “I have trouble imagining anyone’s life but mine. Does that sound selfish?” she said. “Sometimes I fear it’s going to keep going until we blow up the world. And I wish we had a better plan.” When she first saw the photos from Abu Ghraib, she said, “I thought: They blew up my brother—more power to them. Then more rational thoughts came up: We’re trying to win them over, and this humiliation isn’t helping our cause.” She supported the war, but on a bad day in April when twelve Americans were killed, she thought: “We’ve got to get out. I don’t want other families to go through what we went through. But what do you accomplish? Because we lost Kurt for nothing then.”

  For her father, the great challenge was simply to keep going. “This one-day-at-a-time thing works for me. I get in trouble when I start thinking: How am I going to get through these days and weeks and seasons?”

  “Most days I just pretend like it didn’t happen,” Erin said.

  “Me, too. Sometimes I think it didn’t happen—just for a minute. Then I know it did.”

  The alarm on Kurt’s watch went off.

  “Tomorrow should be painless,” Frosheiser said.

  “I think they’re just going to read off the names.”

  Frosheiser and I drove back to Des Moines. His apartment felt smaller than it was, because it lacked natural light and had become the cluttered repository for all of Kurt’s things, his clothes and sports gear, his CDs stacked next to his father’s old records and books, his memorial spurs, plaques, medals, flags. Frosheiser had been sleeping on the living room couch, as if keeping a vigil, since the day he left for basic training. I slept in Kurt’s room. A dust-covered black U.S. Army shaving kit was on the toilet tank; in the closet, desert and jungle fatigues hung above desert combat boots, winter-weather boots, and a guitar. It was a long time before I fell asleep.

  * * *

  THE GRAVE WAS A PATCH of dark earth and green grass, surrounded by the graves of veterans of earlier wars, little Memorial Day flags planted in each of them and fluttering in the breeze of a beautiful Midwestern spring morning. Frosheiser, in nylon blue sweats, saluted. “Hey, buddy,” he said, kneeling to run his hand over the stone marker, which was engraved with a cross and the words

  * * *

  KURT RUSSELL FROSHEISER

  PV2 US ARMY

  IRAQ

  JUL 10 1981 NOV 8 2003

  PURPLE HEART

  * * *

  “It was hard to keep the snow off it because it kind of built up all winter. When the dirt was soft, you could press it and leave your handprints. That was a good thing.” He was talking to the grave now. “It’s less painful trying to forget it, but you have to keep remembering. Random thing, just a random thing. Kurt said, ‘Live your life, old man,’ and that could mean I’d be a bitter son of a gun, and I don’t want that. That could very easily happen.” He was adjusting the long-life candle under blue glass. “We know
that people live on in our hearts, but do they live on in another way? We just don’t know the answer to that.” He slowly got to his feet, and we walked back to the car. “What does it all mean? It means nothing. How we respond is what it means.”

  The ceremony in the park next to the state capitol was attended by a small crowd, including a number of old men in veterans’ caps. The woman from the organizing committee recognized Frosheiser and escorted him over to a row of folding chairs, where he exchanged awkward greetings with his ex-wife. Jeanie was wearing a jacket with an image of the American flag and the words “These Colors Don’t Run,” but her face was crumpled with grief. A politician gave a short speech, and then the names of the fourteen Iowans killed in Iraq were read out. Frosheiser stood in line to place a rose beneath an M-16 stuck bayonet-first into the ground with a helmet perched on top, as at the service in Baghdad.

  We drove across the state to his ex-wife’s niece’s high school graduation party in a small town toward the Illinois border (he wanted to keep family relationships as strong as possible, especially now). We passed lush rolling green hills, grain silos, seed factories, fields of early corn and baled hay, with the shadows of fleecy white clouds that raced across a blue sky. The dream landscape and the freedom of the road seemed to set Frosheiser’s thoughts loose a little ways from the morning’s burdens. He was reading a book called Paris 1919, about the aftermath of the First World War, when Iraq was created at Versailles by T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, and others. Sir Arnold Wilson, the first colonial commissioner of Iraq, disagreed with his assistant Bell about a number of things, but he kept her on in Baghdad and valued her knowledge. “So when I hear this Tom Warrick was totally excluded from the process—what?” Frosheiser said. “Why? We need all the information we can get. When you’re talking about sending Kurt Frosheiser to Iraq, a piece of metal goes through his head into his brain, and you’ve got his parents back here in Des Moines, Iowa—by God, you’d better go in with the best information you’ve got.”

  He began musing about the large ideas that had been nowhere near his mind during the memorial ceremony. “I wonder what Bush in private thinks about being against nation building, and now he’s waist-deep in it. What is that—paradox or irony?” Since America was extending itself so deeply into other countries, he wanted us to be as shrewd and skillful as we were powerful, with a whole cadre of Gertrude Bells educated in the humanities and capable of working overseas. “I was thinking of that song the other day, ‘Ain’t Gonna Study War No More.’ Maybe we should study it. Otherwise, we’re going to screw it up. Because it’s going to be our kids and grandkids doing it.” He had heard the new Bush foreign policy described as Wilsonian, an inspiring term. “There’s this phrase, ‘America the great and the just.’ Reagan used to talk about ‘the city on the hill.’ The first time I heard Condi Rice talking about democracy in Iraq, I got chills up my back. But then you ask, ‘How do you do it? Is it necessary?’” Frosheiser drove in silence for a while, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter. “That’s where I kind of run up against a wall with regard to Kurt.”

  I asked what he meant.

  “Kurt’s life—was he worth that? I’d say no. He was more important than that. So I pull back.”

  That night, back at his apartment in Des Moines, we were watching CNN—thirteen deaths in Iraq over the holiday weekend—when the phone rang. It was Matt Van Buren, the driver of Kurt’s Humvee, calling from Germany, where he was still recovering from his shrapnel wounds. Frosheiser muted the TV sound and sat up in his rocking chair. The stress of the day had left him with a headache. “I’m not sure what I can ask you,” he said. “Let me know if I go too far.” On the other end, Van Buren was describing that night. “He got whacked on the head pretty good, he never had much of a chance,” Frosheiser said. “I understand that. He got hit in the wrong place. He wasn’t able to talk after he was hit, was he?” Listening, he broke into a sob. “But he was trying? Yeah, that sounds like him. He was a good guy. We’re proud of him. They had nothing better to do so they went out? I believe it. Yeah, I believe it.”

  In the morning I would stop intruding, fly home, and leave Chris Frosheiser to get through another day of relics and memories and impossible questions. But just now, I was watching his muted television: terror attacks in Saudi Arabia, gun battles outside Najaf, Special Forces operations in Afghanistan, Memorial Day ceremonies in America. Without sound, these felt like scenes from a war that had already receded into history.

  Frosheiser hung up the phone. “Van Buren says he tried to talk but couldn’t. He fought hard to keep alive.” Frosheiser had never heard this before, and he seemed unsure whether or not to believe it, whether or not to welcome it. He called Erin with the news, but she’d had enough emotion for one day and quickly got off the phone. Frosheiser sat back in his rocking chair. “I can’t think about this too much,” he said, “but if Kurt had made it through that night, he would be alive today.”

  12

  SIMPLE CITIZENS

  ALMOST A YEAR AFTER first meeting Dr. Baher Butti, the psychiatrist in Baghdad, I visited his tidy middle-class house in Dora, a neighborhood south of the Tigris that was dominated by the four smokestacks of a power plant and that had become an insurgent stronghold. We sat in the living room, and while their daughter watched Arabic monster cartoons on TV, Butti and his wife, Balsam, told me that they were thinking about leaving Iraq. Many people they knew, especially Christians like them, had taken their children abroad. Butti had a brother in the United Arab Emirates who could help them settle there. Kidnappings of professional people had grown into an epidemic, but the problem was also more basic, more quotidian, than that. Balsam had been told by the director of the primary health center where she worked as a doctor to stop wearing a tight red dress to work. Their neighbor, a Shiite music teacher, had been instructed by her boss to put on a veil. Butti had been obliged to ask a Shiite friend to mediate a dispute after Butti had cut the salary of a corrupt employee at the long-term-care hospital. The employee had threatened Butti, and Butti’s friend, who was a tribal sheikh, had entered negotiations with a sheikh from the employee’s tribe. Butti had no sheikh of his own—he was a Christian—so he had to go to a Shiite for protection. These were things that foreigners seldom knew, but they were daily life for Iraqis like Dr. Butti and his wife.

  In this atmosphere, Butti was turning for support to his own tribe, an organization of Iraqi Christians called the Chaldo-Assyrian Council. He had never before embraced his religious identity, but now he had nowhere else to go. Just to get a few cans of beer for our evening together, we had stopped by a Christian private club where he knew and trusted people, since most of the liquor stores in Baghdad had shut down after firebombings and shootings. His ideas for the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking and other civic organizations had come to nothing. After a day of work and three hours in traffic, he was too exhausted to follow through on a notion of setting up a local block watch. “It’s also a sort of selfishness that came in the last ten years of Saddam,” he said. Everyone was focused on survival, on his own private struggle. New political parties and civic groups soon broke up over arguments and personal conflicts, or collapsed for lack of energy. Iraq’s “technocrats,” Butti said, were powerless, and the Americans, with bigger problems on their hands, had forgotten them.

  Toward the end of 2004, it became almost impossible to work the way I always had in Iraq. Long meals in private houses were out; most home visits of any kind were out. Wandering around neighborhoods was out, as was any travel that wasn’t carefully planned, targeted, and short. Conversations with strangers on the street or in a hospital or at a university were out. I was as dangerous to them as they were to me.

  The media strategy of the insurgency eluded me. Like the CPA’s Iraq Media Network, it failed at the level of understanding its audience. Since the ultimate arbiter of a guerrilla war was the public in both countries, and since the American public’s willingness to tolerate the carnage
in Iraq declined throughout the year 2004, why intimidate those best able to bring the story of that carnage back to the country of the occupier until they had no choice but to leave Iraq, as more and more journalists were doing? I once asked an Iraqi businessman with ties to the insurgency about this. He agreed that it was a bad policy to kidnap and behead journalists. “We are trying our best to moderate people, to keep them from extremes,” he said, sounding like a man who had his hands full with unreliable business partners. Perhaps the insurgents wanted to maintain a siege mentality among the press corps in Baghdad, knowing that reporters tended to see the bigger picture in darker tones when their own security was threatened. (Paul Wolfowitz once criticized the press for being too scared to go out and find all the positive stories, the only statement about Iraq for which he ever apologized.) Or perhaps the intimidation was explained by the jihadis’ sheer indiscriminate hatred of all infidels, and by the larger failure of the insurgency to arrive at a political strategy more coherent than fear.

  The result was that foreigners were cut off from Iraqis. The bright light switched on by the fall of the regime seemed to be dimming by the day, with Iraq receding back into the shadows where Saddam had kept it for decades. If you were honest about it, you had to admit that you knew less and less about the thinking of Iraqis and the circumstances of their lives. “No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq,” wrote Rory Stewart, a former British CPA official and Arabic speaker. “I certainly don’t know what is going on in Iraq.” Even the Iraqis on whom foreigners relied to explain the country to them—politicians, translators, those who could leave and come back—might have little idea about their compatriots living in the rural areas and slums, where the only security forces were insurgents or militias.

  But this was exactly where the drama that mattered was being played out: in the minds of ordinary people. As the American faces in power gave way to Iraqi ones, how would the Iraqis respond? Would they begin to see the government as something that belonged to them and had to answer to them? Would they dare support it, even participate in it, or hang back out of their old instinct for survival?