Phil Klay - Redeployment

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 batsand 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 tripout 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 jackswhen 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.