Father of Money

by Jason Whiteley

  During the previous weeks, I had grown more keenly aware of this division and found myself focusing on areas where my efforts were best received. Feeling pretty good about how I could perceive the events unfolding around me and growing confident about my ability to see around corners, I walked nonchalantly into the office of the battalion’s executive officer, a major I had known for years.

  “If you do that again, you will be court-martialed,” the major said succinctly.

  “Sir, I do not understand.”

  Both of us being West Point graduates, I had defaulted into one of the four authorized responses for underclassmen at the Military Academy: “Yes, sir”; “No, sir”; “No excuse, sir”; and “Sir, I do not understand.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “If you contact your ex-wife again via e-mail, phone, or any other means, you will be court-martialed for violating a direct order. Do you understand?” His voice was as hard as stone.

  I stared blankly back at him. We had known each other for years; we had hunted together, and our wives were friends. I could sense that he felt some empathy, but he had no choice. When we arrived in Iraq, he had ordered me to cease all contact, but I had sent an e-mail asking whether she was okay. I guess she must have told his wife.

  “Yes, sir. No excuse, sir.”

  Two more automatic responses flew from my lips without a second’s hesitation. But there is an excuse, a voice screamed inside me. Every day I saw people destitute and risked my life to make their lives marginally better. Was I not entitled to at least reach out to my exwife, in these moments of gratitude for the life I had, and express my feelings of reconciliation? I could negotiate on behalf of the United States for projects that fundamentally affected the daily lives of thousands of people, but could I not negotiate on my own behalf with a woman to whom I had been married a few months earlier?

  I was not alone in this situation. Each night the trailer that housed a bank of free phones to call the United States filled with soldiers waiting to call home. From the open booths, you could hear the longing, the fighting, the pleading, and the despair as families struggled to remain intact amid a ferocious uncertainty. The tears shed into those phones in the middle of a combat zone did more damage to the morale of the soldiers than anything the insurgency could muster. Each night these soldiers came together to be alone with their loved ones, in the company of others sharing the same pain. It was a pain of loss and sorrow that we all shared, but this never made the heaviness feel any lighter.

  That evening I climbed to the roof of our headquarters building and settled myself among the forest of antennae to watch the sunset. The building, like the people in the surrounding neighborhood, had spent much of its earlier life serving as part of the Iraqi army. The peeling paint and the rotting sandbags still held painted remnants of Iraqi heraldry, although our own soldiers were applying new paint and our own symbols at a rapid clip. Like a complicated game of “capture the flag,” the former Iraqi base rapidly turned from a Saddam-themed red, white, and black to a patriotic American red, white, and blue. The new colors underscored that the victor was in residence, although the underlying structure still sagged with a certain sadness.

  Next door, the heavy breath of the forklift’s diesel engine burped and sputtered constantly, as an endless flow of contractors and fatigued soldiers futilely worked to empty an ever-replenished warehouse. Convoys of tractor-trailers circled the base like mother birds waiting to vomit their contents to the swarming mass of squawking workmen before returning to find more goods at the port. The army, long ridiculed for equipping soldiers with outdated materiel, was currently diverting attention from media reports of armor shortages with these warehouses of excess equipment. The construction of new dormitories and dining facilities was nonstop. Newly built plywood and cinder-block buildings sprung up daily. Phone centers, recreation rooms, and hot food all served as markers of American logistical triumph. Holes were pounded into walls to make room for additional generators and equipment, while every building grew new annexes and additions to accommodate the comforts freshly imported from America.

  The aged buildings groaned their reluctance to be part of the torrent of transformation. The straining beams, the creaking floors, and the bulging walls, fresh paint and all, threatened to collapse on the ambitious renovation. The slap of metal drills into concrete walls sent shivers throughout the building with the same metallic rasp that issued from the rounds chambering in the machine guns on the watchtowers.

  Beyond the towers, cars sped past the outer wall of the base, using the dirt on either side of the two-lane highway to their advantage. Racing and weaving through the chaotic exodus that left the city before dark, the writhing mass of machines and people more closely resembled a flight for survival than an evening commute. These were the “moderate Arabs,” as the United States had stridently assured us during our training. Iraqis had been described, in the sparse training pamphlets and during the country overviews given by various intelligence agencies, as being well educated but in desperate need of a liberalizing influence. Iraqis were also heralded as “modern,” another label that Americans used so frequently that it became meaningless.

  With the same gusto that was currently being applied to renovating our base, the American plan for Iraq included programs to put women in school and establish civic organizations. A myriad of programs were designed to encourage broad social participation in the new government. There were promises of elections, of new power grids that would deliver electricity to everyone twenty-four hours a day, and of schools that had computers. Above all, there was talk of “the freedom.” Any time these plans for progress became mired in details or slid off schedule, the reason was always that the pursuit of “the freedom” can take a long time. Iraqis had no experience with freedom, but they had come to appreciate the efficiency and routine that Saddam provided. This current move, chaotic as it was, did not suit them, regardless of the freedom that it symbolized. Nonetheless, the American bureaucrats were minting new plans by the minute for Iraq, and the makeover of the Iraqi populace was under way. Beyond closed doors, the triumphant American vision defaulted to an answer that was more paternalistic than progressive. Whether they wanted it or not, the buildings and the people would suffer the American vision and become “modern.”

  At this time in spring 2004, the army and the politicians still believed that the insurgents were a passing phenomenon or remnants of Saddam’s loyalists. It would be months before they realized how widespread the insurgency was and how embedded in the population the distrust of the occupation was in these early days. The negativity from the Iraqi people flowed from their reaction to our heavy-handed attempt to “modernize” their society. There was also a basic human aversion to the disruption in their daily routines, which brought them to a state of rage with greater frequency than anything ideological could. Left in complete social upheaval, with little or no sense of order, Iraqi society had rapidly devolved to a more basic existence. The civic void left people gasping for answers and looking for any vestige of their old ways and their cultural identity. People clung to anything that reminded them of a more stable past. Flailing against the tide of change and drowning in the wave of new development, many Iraqis crashed back into the one pillar of stability that they still had and that they still knew: the mosque.

  The daily trek to the call of the city’s numerous minarets was one of the few routines left intact, and that sense of permanence pulled in increasing numbers of disgruntled followers. Certainly, being thrust into an unknown and unstable world may prompt humankind to seek a higher being for guidance and relief. That much I understood. If many Iraqis had been secular when we invaded, they were fervently religious now. Yet my question had always been why this happens.

  The answer seemed obvious, as I dwelled on the realization that I was powerless to control even my own emotions. Like most humans, I relied on a certain order that is deeply embedded in our culture. From the rhythmic beating of our hearts
to the precise keeping of birth and death records, our society memorializes patterns and abhors disruption. The mere completion of an arbitrary time interval, such as a birthday or an anniversary, is celebrated with abandon and enshrined as a successful passage of time. Time circumscribes and defines the human experience. Almost universally, prisoners in solitary confinement, soldiers on deployment, and homesick college freshmen record their days away from normalcy with hard-scratched hash marks on cell walls, pencil marks on duffel bags, or reminders in Microsoft Outlook. Human beings constantly seek routines based on our past, and no place is a safe refuge from these thoughts. Even the latrines in the headquarters had a running tally of days until the next unit would arrive, and we would go home. Our awareness of time and our ability to divide it and measure it separate us from animals and make us masters of our fate. Clocks, calendars, and church bells all serve as monuments to mankind’s triumphant rise above the arbitrary chaos of nature.

  The invasion had taken that control away from the Iraqis in the same way that I had just been summarily stripped of my power to express my feelings. There were no more jobs, the Iraqi army had been disbanded, and martial law arbitrarily declared curfews and closed stores. American and coalition checkpoints whimsically sprouted up between Iraqis and their homes with no notice, sometimes forcing people to stay away from their families while their homes were searched.

  In this whirlwind of uncertainty, the one voice that was constant sang from the minarets, which stood as sentinels observing and ensuring that the passage of time was properly brought to the forefront of the Baghdad con sciousness. I, too, watched and listened and found myself comforted by the muezzins’ call to prayer. It was one of the few remnants of order in post-invasion Baghdad society. The mosque watched patiently as society disintegrated around it. After all, it was only a matter of time until the Iraqi people, with their lives torn apart, would look up in desperation and find a new compass. Even as a non-Muslim, I found it comforting to look at the towers and imagine that they truly represented a gateway to redemption.

  From my sandbagged perch among a forest of radio antennae and satellite dishes, I sat listening to the evening call to prayer. Although at first the sounds had struck me as guttural, an almost painful cry, I now found a peace in the cadence and punctuality of the ritual summons. I relished the calls with the same eagerness that I had once waiting for the chime of my family’s grandfather clock. At first, the bells routinely disrupted my sleep in quarter-hour intervals. Eventually, I took comfort in their predictability and stability and would wake from a sound sleep if they failed to ring at an appointed time. My subconscious mind and, I think, that of almost everyone, seems to crave the order and predictability of a routine, especially if the routine promises a chance to assert control over one’s own life.

  Six

  TEA WITH TERRORISTS

  THE SUN SLOWLY DISAPPEARED behind the Tigris River. The long fingers of the last light crawled over modern highways, raked through farmland, and loitered above the mid-rise Baghdad skyline, pausing to cast a final golden glow on the adjacent groves of tall palm trees. The contrast between light and shadow appeared to highlight the jarring dissonance between the melodious evening calls to prayer and the sporadic outbursts of machine-gun fire. The temporal twilight seemed an apt metaphor for the uncertainty gripping the city. As the last light faded, I wondered whether I should view the sunset as an act of destruction or renewal. Moreover, could you really have one without the other? Was this the way it always happened, with progress and purpose coming from catastrophe and chaos?

  As lights sputtered on across the city, the peaceful tranquility lasted only seconds. A high-pitched whine ripped the night air and sent me running down the stairwell. Mortar rounds landing in and around the FOB had become as much of a nightly ritual as the sunset itself, but this was different—stronger, more aggressive, and much, much louder. The explosion shook the building and reverberated across the rooftops. I ran back to the roof and timidly peeked beyond the door, wondering whether another explosion might follow. Smoke was billowing across the street near the mosque.

  I ran back downstairs to the command center. Reports had already begun to flow in from the radar set up inside the FOB. The explosion had been caused by a rocket launched from a rural area to the south. This area, known as Arab Jabbour, was home to the river mansions of the Ba’ath Party faithful, which were surrounded by huge swathes of palm groves and crisscrossed by irrigation canals. It had been a favorite area from which to launch rockets toward the Green Zone because of its remote location and the difficulty of rapid response from U.S. forces. After all, only one paved road reached down into that area, and travel along the canal roads was slow-going and treacherous. A rocket could be launched, and it would be nearly an hour before we could get there from the FOB. Yet this was the first time such a large rocket had been fired at the FOB. It appeared from the tracking plot of the launch that the dome of the mosque had been used as an aiming point to determine the azimuth, and that the rocket fell a few hundred meters short, hitting the mosque instead of the FOB.

  Within minutes, the guard towers could see large numbers of weapon-carrying Iraqis converging on the mosque. Unfortunately, the attack had come at a very inopportune moment. At the mosque, an imam had just completed a sermon calling all males to fight against the Americans and defend the Shi’a people from the ongoing injustice of the occupation. This mosque was one of the more symbolically important ones in Baghdad for several reasons. First, being in Abu Discher, it was conveniently situated among the people who were most receptive to Muqtada Al-Sadr’s populist message. The disenfranchised masses eagerly attended these sermons, which assured them of the justice inherent in an armed struggle to assert their rights.

  Second, the mosque was the last safe stopover for Shi’a pilgrims on their way to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Buses full of devout pilgrims from as close as north Baghdad and as far away as Tehran would stop here to rest, to pray, and often to pick up an armed escort for their journey southward. In the times of Saddam, Sunni tribes from Al-Anbar province had been relocated to the stretch of highway between Baghdad and Karbala to harass and intimidate these pilgrims. Lately, these tactics had become increasingly violent as the sectarian violence grew. Stories were common in markets and teahouses that these Sunni tribesmen, dressed as police, would stop convoys and ask the pilgrims whether they were “Muslim or Shi’a,” a not-so-subtle indicator that Shi’a were not considered Muslims. These stops had included assassinations and robberies, which even forced the imams to travel in disguise.

  As a result, the Sadr militia—the armed wing of Muqtada Sadr’s following—had begun hiding among the pilgrims with weapons in an attempt to give them a feeling of security. It is not clear whether these escorts provided any real security or whether it was largely theater. In any event, it was a convenient way to transport weapons and fighters around Iraq, because the United States was reluctant—indeed, nearly prohibited—from stopping these religious convoys for fear of seeming offensive. This was part of the larger initiative to avoid drawing religion into an already explosive scenario, where the Christian occupiers enforced martial law over an Islamic populace. The historical precedents for failure on this premise are many, and the analogy with the Israeli treatment of Palestinians was already headlining most sermons on the subject. The result was that mosques and religious convoys became free zones for weapons, and the open secret was that nothing could be done about it. The armed masses now surrounding the burning mosque served as a reminder that weapons and ideology combined under the domes of faith to create an explosive mixture.

  Fearing that violence would rapidly get out of control in the neighborhood, my commander decided to order most of the battalion to stand by near the area while he and a select group tried to make contact with the imam and the crowd’s leadership. Because I was the one with a relationship with the secular leadership in the area—namely, the council member who attended this mosque—I was
included in this emergency delegation. As we raced toward the gates of the FOB, sporadic machine-gun fire could already be heard, interspersed with the status updates from the battalion maneuvering into position around the neighborhood. Both sides were mobilizing for combat, which seemed inevitable. Yet we charged on with our convoy of three trucks to try to stop this rapid emotional escalation.

  As we turned into the neighborhood and headed toward the mosque, we noticed that the crowds continued to grow. People were on the rooftops, while others peered from windows and jammed the streets. Weapons flickered among the crowd like fireflies, passing from hand to hand and showing just long enough for us to take note, then they disappeared into the throng. Although the rules of engagement allowed us to kill people who posed a threat and bore weapons, we had strict orders to hold our fire. It was a tense situation with the crowd surging toward the Humvees, which pushed deeper into the grieving throng. After a few tense minutes, we were within sight of the mosque. Several bodies were still being pulled from the wreckage, and dozens more dazed bystanders were being tended to by neighbors and relatives. As we left the trucks, the crowd pressed closer. People cried, yelled, and shook their fists at us. We were alone in a sea of anger.

  It soon became clear why we were the focal point of their outrage. Through Ali, who had joined us from the FOB, we began to understand that the crowd, at the urging of Imam Al-Jaferi, had decided that the rocket had been fired by an American helicopter in response to the sermon that he had been conducting. The circling army helicopters, providing aerial overwatch for us, were the perfect foil for the provocation of the crowd. As soon as my commander heard this, he gave a quick order to pull back the helicopters. We then made our way toward the imam, who was standing like a shepherd over his raging flock.