We Meant Well Page 4

  Tribes

  A FOB was a village, populated by tribes who rarely intermingled except on business and who had little in common except for the fact that they were all at this same place at this same time in Iraq.

  Soldiers

  The largest tribe on any FOB were the soldiers. This was their war, and in a way they were the reason most every other tribe had migrated to Iraq. At first brush it was easy to sort the soldiers into clichés—redneck gun nuts, high school dropouts, tired Southern guys, the barracks intellectual, the kid from Brooklyn—every one of them a type for the next Saving Private Ryan. They dressed and walked alike and shaved their heads, allowing you to stop thinking at the first stereotype if you wanted to. The Army was a big place, and once you identified a type chances were there were more of him or her around. But after you were living on the FOB for a while you got to hear their stories. Ran away from an evil girlfriend, needed money for college, father said get a job or get out, that sort of thing. Each of them was proud to serve but each of them had at least another reason that they carried around for joining the military, their own little secret weight. Few Rambos at this level.

  The soldier tribe distinguished itself with names and mascots that spoke to the odd feedback loop between Iraq war reality and American pop culture. Many units had names like Mighty Warriors or Spartans, with logos all clearly based on the movie 300. Others liked death-inspired names such as Death Dealers, Gravediggers, Ghostriders, and the like, with logos ripped from the Eddie character on Iron Maiden album covers. A few old-timers clung to Indian names like Crazy Horse Platoon or Gunslingers, usually with flaming-skull logos that used to feature on biker jackets. The names were not creative and, when applied to nonmartial subunits like the finance office or the medical team, seemed out of place.

  KBR White

  KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root) conducted the backstage portion of this war. They hired people in the United States to come to Iraq and run the generators, fix the plumbing, and do all the maintenance and logistics stuff because there were nowhere near enough soldiers around to do those things. After the soldier tribe, these people were the largest group on the FOB. Not all contractors worked for KBR, as many were subcontractors and sub-subcontractors (over three hundred US companies had people in Iraq), but everyone referred to tribe members who were contractors simply as KBR. At the peak there were an estimated 150,000 contractors of various types in Iraq. They were almost uniformly white, male, and from the southern United States (or maybe they all just talked that way). Some who had been in the military, however briefly and inconsequentially, spoke of their former service constantly. This impressed the soldiers in exactly the same way a dropout who continued to hang around the school parking lot impressed high school juniors. These guys often referred to other men as “brother” and liked to dress in “tactical” clothing, made by the 5.11 company. You could tell 5.11 clothing by the vast number of unnecessary pockets all over the shirts and pants. I had a pair of such pants myself, with over a dozen pockets, each with Velcro and snaps and D rings and all sorts of accessories. If you filled all the pockets, you wouldn’t be able to climb stairs. The KBR men imagined themselves as Chuck-Norris-the-young-martial-arts-killer but instead mimicked Chuck-Norris-the-aging-caricature. The six-figure salaries KBR paid them were augmented with free trips home and all sorts of benefits. These costs were of course passed on to the taxpayer and may have been part of the reason soldiers were paid only mediocre wages—even in the military there was only so much money to go around.

  KBR Brown

  What the KBR White personnel did not do was anything dirty, dark, or dangerous, such as cleaning latrines, digging holes, unloading things, guarding places, or serving food. Exclusively young male workers imported from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and other Third World garden spots did those jobs. KBR paid them low wages by American standards but pretty good wages by Sri Lankan standards, which undoubtedly made those jobs more palatable. There were rumors of virtual slavery, always unconfirmed, of workers tricked by middlemen into becoming indentured for their travel costs and finishing their year in Iraq in a downward spiral of debt. KBR Brown people were mysterious. Almost none of them spoke more than a handful of English phrases (“closed now cleaning time, you wait, no use toilet broken”) and I never encountered them except behind the serving counter or cleaning things.

  The servant assigned to the bank of latrines behind our office was there from morning until late at night. He had a small folding campstool that he sat on, sliding it leftward over the course of the day to keep within the shadow of the latrine bank as the sun moved. Seemingly from the near-constant scrubbing, his right arm was muscled while his left was thin. He was so thorough that our latrines were closed for cleaning a good part of the working day. He smiled at everyone but said nothing. I do not know where he used the latrine himself or if he was subjected to some sort of Dickensian regime where he had to use substandard facilities whilst laboring in ours. One day he was gone, replaced by a younger man who spoke so little English that we never knew if the replacement was a punishment or a promotion for our old guy. It all gave the place a last-days-of-the-Raj feel, when it did not give it a we-are-slave-owners feel.

  KBR Green

  The members of KBR Green were also white but they carried weapons and did security things on the FOB. Most were Americans, with a few exotic Brits and shady South Africans thrown in. Many used to work for Blackwater, which escaped accountability for its alleged evil actions by cleverly changing its name to Xe. Not to their face, most people would call these guys mercs, not contractors, in that they carried weapons on behalf of the US government, sometimes shot at Iraqis, but were not soldiers. This is what the military would look like without its senior NCOs—a frat house with guns. This tribe differentiated itself from the soldiers. They especially favored fingerless leather gloves—think biker gang or Insane Clown Posse fanboys. Popular was a clean-shaven head, no mustache, but a spiky goatee about four inches long teased straight out. You know the look from late-night convenience-store beer runs.

  They walked around like Yosemite Sam, with their arms out as if their very biceps prevented them from standing straight. They were bullies, of course, flirting inappropriately with the women and posturing around the men. Count on them to wear the most expensive Oakley sunglasses and the most unnecessary gear (gold man bracelets, tactical hair gel), a bit like Jersey Shore rejects.

  The tribe worked out in the gym a lot, as did the soldiers. The KBR Green guys, however, ended up huge, ripped, and strong while the soldiers just ended up strong, leading to whispered discussions about large-scale steroid use. Aggressive tattoos on all exposed skin seemed a condition of membership, especially wavy inked patterns around the biceps and on the neck. They all let on that they were former SEALs, Green Berets, SAS men, Legion of Doom members, but they could not talk about it. Nor did they disclose their last names (soldiers, however, only had last names, as in “Tell Smith to get on that”). Instead they tended to go by nicknames like Bulldog, Spider, Red Bull, Wolverine, Smitty, or Sully. Extra credit if you caught one using a nickname left over from Top Gun. If arrogance was contagious they’d all be sneezing. All Aryan, all dudely.

  Other Contractors

  This might have been the most distant, opaque, and self-enclosed tribe of all. There was a group of young Filipino men and women who ran the concessions on the FOB. No one knew how they got there or how they supported themselves with something like an embroidery shop on a military base. They did not engage in conversation for any reason, though all spoke English, perhaps because the women were hit on by the soldiers and contractors approximately ten million thousand times a day. The American military had always depended on a community of Filipinos to staff its bars and curio shops, so these workers may have been brought in just for tradition’s sake.

  In addition to the Filipinos, there was a contingent of very young men from the slums of Uganda who guarded most US military facilities. Paying Ugandans saved
money because guard duty was boring until it became suddenly violent; then it was boring again for a long time. Americans did not want to do such work, and it cost a lot of money to get Americans to volunteer for the Army. Ugandans were cheap, they knew about weapons as former child soldiers, and for some reason the contracting company had a connection into Uganda. (The Embassy used a different contractor and so was guarded exclusively by Peruvians.) For the same reasons Mexicans cut your lawn at home and Hondurans cleaned your hotel rooms, your Army guards came from Uganda.

  The Ugandans were a sad group. Manning the guard towers at night, they could sometimes be heard singing to one another, sweetly calling out to a fellow countryman two hundred meters downrange but even farther away from home than we were. The Ugandans spoke only a few words of English and just could not deal with the cold. In winter, the desert gets cold at night, and for months Iraq is semitemperate and often rainy. Guarding things tends to involve standing still or walking around outside, a bad mix for the Ugandans. As soon as the weather cooled off even a bit, they would break out an amazing collection of nonstandard colorful wool caps and heavy gear, to the point where one poor guard was wearing hockey gloves to keep warm.

  I’d learned from one of the US citizen supervisors that a Ugandan guard might make $600 a month, with much of it owed back to the brokers and middlemen who helped him get from Africa to Mesopotamia. The Ugandan could also be fined by his supervisor up to $100 for lying, sleeping on duty, or some other infraction. A US citizen supervisor might make $20,000 a month, tax free, with benefits, while in Iraq.

  Iraqis

  Aside from the few local Iraqis who ran the small hajji shops and commuted in and out of the FOB, there were two other groups of Iraqis who worked with us, the Iraqi Army and our own imported Iraqi Americans.

  The US Army units I embedded with sometimes trained the Iraqi Army, who were now our allies against the insurgents. The Iraqi Army did not live on the FOB but often hung around for meals and to buy things at the franchise shops. The training seemed a bit nonsensical at times, consisting of either rote simple drills or over-the-top complex vehicle maintenance lessons that were a struggle for the many nonliterate enlisted Iraqis. Training the Iraqis was clearly regarded by our side as among the worst duty in-country. The Iraqis were gleefully a Third World organization, in the opinion of the soldiers who worked with them, and were considered sloppy about discipline, casual with their weapons, and adamantly untrainable. As a token of our conquering them, the Iraqi name tags were in English and Arabic, which must have pissed them off every time they looked in the mirror. An Iraqi general who often visited always had his ten-year-old son with him, wearing an exact replica of Dad’s uniform, right down to the gun in a holster. An American soldier who tried talking to the kid discovered that the gun was real—and loaded.

  The Iraqi Americans were another tribe who worked primarily as translators. They had immigrated to the United States and become citizens years ago. Most were from Detroit or Chicago, recruited by subcontractors for their alleged language skills. Most of our Iraqi American translators were employees of an Alaskan Native–owned business. This business had one employee in the States, an Alaskan Native far away in Alaska, and subcontracted to some other business that recruited Iraqi Americans in Detroit and sent them to us in Baghdad. To help support minority businesses such as those owned by Alaskan Natives, the US government offered them an advantage in the otherwise competitive bidding process, a sort of contracting affirmative action, even as they subbed out 100 percent of the work. It seemed like a get-rich-quick Internet scam, but it was legal.

  Like KBR White personnel, the Iraqi Americans had six-figure salaries, free trips home, and sweet benefits. Many of them had not lived in Iraq for years yet we used them as cultural advisers. Some had lived entirely within Iraqi American communities in the States and spoke poor English but served as translators nevertheless. Some were Kurdish and/or Christian, which no doubt impressed the Muslim Arabs we primarily interacted with. The supposed best of the bunch served as BBAs (bilingual and bicultural advisers), each with a specialty topic such as “agriculture” or “women’s issues.” Many were nice folks but knew nothing about agriculture or women’s issues. One BBA who worked with us was named a “women’s program adviser” by sole virtue of her having lady parts; when we moved to another FOB, she became an agricultural adviser because we needed an ag adviser and she was there. No one will ever know how much of our failure in reconstructing Iraq was caused simply by bad translation and subject-matter ignorance, but it would be a decent percentage.

  Money and Our Meth Habit

  We lacked a lot of things in Iraq: flush toilets, fresh vegetables, the comfort of family members nearby, and of course adult supervision, strategic guidance, and common sense. Like Guns N’ Roses’ budget for meth after a new hit, the one thing we did not lack was money. There was money everywhere. A soldier recalled unloading pallets of new US hundred-dollar bills, millions of dollars flushing out of the belly of a C-130 cargo aircraft to be picked up off the runway by forklifts (operated by soldiers who would make less in their lifetimes than what was on their skids at that moment). You couldn’t walk around a corner without stumbling over bales of money; the place was lousy with it. In my twenty-three years working for the State Department, we never had enough money. We were always being told to “do more with less,” as if slogans were cash. Now there was literally more money than we could spend. It was weird. We’d be watching the news from home about foreclosures, and I’d be reading e-mails from my sister about school cutbacks, while signing off on tens of thousands of dollars for stuff in Iraq. At one point we were tasked to give out microgrants, $5,000 in actual cash handed to an Iraqi to “open a business,” no strings attached. If he took the money and in front of us spent it on dope and pinball, it was no matter. We wondered among ourselves whether we shouldn’t be running a PRT in Detroit or New Orleans instead of Baghdad.

  In addition to the $63 billion Congress had handed us for Iraq’s reconstruction, we also had some $91 billion of captured Iraqi funds (that were mostly misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority), plus another $18 billion donated by countries such as Japan and South Korea. In 2009, we had another $387 million for aid to internal refugees that paid for many reconstruction-like projects. If that was not enough, over a billion additional US dollars were spent on operating costs for the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. By comparison, the reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost, in 2010 dollars, only $32 billion and $17 billion, respectively.7

  While a lot of the money was spent in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no one could find a match to set it on fire, at the local level money was spent via two programs: CERP and QRF. CERP was Army money, the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Though originally provided to address emergency humanitarian needs and short-term counterinsurgency costs, this nearly unlimited pool of cash came to be spent on reconstruction. The local US Army Commander could himself approve projects up to $200,000, with almost no technical or policy oversight. Accounting was fast and loose; a 2009 audit, for example, found the Army could not account for $8.7 billion in funds.8 It might have been stolen or just lost; no one will ever know. The Army shared its money with us at the ePRTs, partly out of generosity, partly out of pity, and partly because individual military units were graded on how much cash they spent—more money spent meant more reconstruction kudos on evaluation reports.

  The PRTs lobbied State for their own funding source for their own projects, separate from the mother Embassy’s adventures and independent of the Army. State’s original idea was that the PRTs would use Army money in the field while the Embassy pursued its own course. Success depended on how well we could convince the military to use its money for our goals. Of course only when goals overlapped would that plan work. Often it did not work and the effectiveness of the early PRTs was limited.

  In summer 2007, State gave in and created the Qui
ck Response Fund (QRF). QRF was the Surge’s signature civilian resource. It was PRT-directed development money, independent of the massive financial resources of the military. The problems began almost immediately, when the Embassy’s Regional Security Office sought to extend its control to vetting all PRT assistance to Iraqis. But Iraqis, wary of who would have access to their personal information, would not consent to a complex security review. PRTs thus lost much of their initiative, missing opportunities during early lulls in violence. A change was necessary, vetting was loosened in line with practicality, things picked up, and as of late September 2008 QRF had approved 2,065 programs and disbursed almost 50 percent of its funds. Between 2007 and 2010, QRF spent over $152 million. That relatively small sum doesn’t tell the whole story. Army CERP outfunded State QRF roughly ten to one throughout the war, with many of the projects directed by or turned over to the ePRTs. Overall, billions were spent.

  Despite the common wisdom that spending money was easy, our work was encumbered by two unconnected problems: the ever-changing mandate on what to do and the cumbersome procedures that accompanied QRF.

  The Embassy, isolated in the Green Zone, was obsessive in insisting on its ability to shape events in Iraq through our project work. It tasked the PRTs with broad goals, or LOEs (rhymes with Lou, Lines of Effort), such as “building a civil society,” as if we were playing a freakishly long version of The Sims. The ePRT then had to make up local projects to show efforts were being made in each Line of Effort. Sometimes it was simple, as with an agriculture LOE: we would pay for pesticide spraying on date trees like Saddam used to do. With vaguer themes such as “empowering women,” the LOE was a harder target to hit and we flopped around with conferences and small-business funding. Added to the LOE issue was the constantly changing guidance on scope, where the rules seemed more compulsive than obsessive. One fiscal quarter the emphasis from the Embassy would be on limited, immediate-impact projects, while three months later we’d be told to shift to long-term efforts. We would abandon our date spraying to focus on a derelict water plant, until a blast from above would flip us back to smaller stuff like buying school supplies. Somewhere in Foggy Bottom this all came together in the form of bar charts and PowerPoint widgets and made sense to people far removed from the dust and grit.