Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (6 page)

“I saw some South Africans shoot up the grill of a car that was driving behind them,” he tells me, shaking his head. “There was no reason, they did it just because they could.”

There’s not a lot of talking in the car on the way from the airport. I want to shoot a story about driving on Route Irish, and planned to videotape my guards, and the drama of the ride into Baghdad, but when I take out my camera, they strongly suggest that I put it away. They don’t want anyone knowing who they are.

Even in an armored car, we have to wear Kevlar vests. If we got ambushed, insurgents might be able to disable the car, then we’d have to take our chances outside. That’s when the vest could come in handy. The guards radio our location constantly to CNN’s office so that if we’re kidnapped, CNN will at least know where it happened.

Thousands of Iraqis use Route Irish each day. The traffic moves in fits and starts; cars merge from unseen on-ramps. That’s often from where attacks are launched.

We drive fast, constantly scanning the traffic around us. A car suddenly appears out of nowhere. It’s coming up quickly behind us. Eyes dart. Bodies shift.

“Four guys, young, bearded,” one of my guards says into a walkie-talkie.

“Ali Babas,” says another, using the universal term for bad guys.

We stay tense, expect an attack, but nothing happens. The car swerves off; another takes its place. After awhile I stop paying attention, stop noticing my heart pounding against the Kevlar.

“THIS ROAD, I
think it’s the most dangerous in world, you know?” my driver said, smiling.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me.”

This was on another trip to Sarajevo. I think it was 1994, into the war’s second year. I had an armored Land Rover this time. The airport was shut down—too many mortars, too many snipers. The only road in and out of Sarajevo zigzagged down Mount Igman, a small dirt-and-gravel lane with hairpin turns. It scared me more than I liked to admit. Every now and then we’d pass the rusted remains of shot-up trucks, which only added to the
Apocalypse Now
feel of the trip.

At first I kept quizzing the driver at every turn: “This stretch, coming up, is this dangerous?”

He’d just smile. After a while, I stopped asking. It was all so dangerous; there was no point talking about it. You just had to sit back and hope the morning mist held long enough to cover you, or hope the Serb snipers were too hungover to aim straight. Luck, fate, God—you believed in whatever got you down the mountain. I put my faith in the Clash, and made a couple promises to God just in case. (I like to cover all my bases.) My driver seemed crazy, perhaps manic-depressive, but in Sarajevo that wasn’t unusual. He was a big, bald, good-looking Bosnian, who attempted to screw just about every woman we came in contact with. He seemed to succeed more often than not. I’d get into the armored Land Rover in the morning, and there’d be a used condom on my seat.

“Jesus Christ, do you have to have sex in the car?” was usually how I greeted him.

“I know,” he’d say, “but what can I do? It’s the safest place to fuck.”

It was hard to argue with his logic. In another place I would have been annoyed at having to work with him, but in Sarajevo, especially on the Mount Igman road, he was exactly the kind of guy I wanted behind the wheel. He always drove fast, but when the road got bad, he’d floor it. Sometimes he’d curse the Serbs, call their mothers jackals and their daughters whores. That’s when I knew we were on a particularly bad stretch. When he began to spit, I’d buckle up.

The last time I came down the Mount Igman road, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side-view mirror. “Charlie Don’t Surf” was blaring from the cassette player and my face was completely drained of color; my eyebrows were furrowed, my mouth frozen in a lunatic grin. When we finally made it into the city, I was so relieved, all I could do was laugh. The driver looked at me as if I were the one who was crazy. Then he started laughing too.

FROM THE HEADLINES
and pictures you’d think Iraq was complete chaos, but the truth is much more complicated. I learned this during my first trip here for CNN. It was June 2004, and I’d come to cover the handover of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an interim Iraqi government. I went on patrol with the U.S. First Cavalry in charge of Route Irish. A routine recon—buttoned-down Bradleys, up-armored Humvees.

“It’s nowhere near as bad as you see on TV,” a young soldier said to me. “Sure, you get shot at sometimes, but mostly it’s real boring.”

On TV they fast-forward to the most dramatic images; they rarely mention the downtime. On patrol it’s the opposite: the hours tick by slowly; it’s easy to become complacent. It was 110 degrees, and the young reservists were drenched in sweat, their skin wet under camouflage vests and behind wraparound glasses. In Baghdad you can’t see anyone’s eyes.

“I’m sweating more than an E-six trying to read,” Ryan Peterson joked, poking fun at his staff sergeant, his hands never far from the machine gun mounted on the back of the Humvee. Peterson had been on a patrol that was ambushed two months before, and he knew damn well there was nothing he could do to stop it from happening again. The truck’s armor plating reached only up to Peterson’s waist, so standing in the back together, we were partially exposed. We didn’t have much choice.

“What do you think about Iraq?” I asked him.

“This place?” he said, shrugging and looking around as if he’d just noticed it for the first time. “Could go either way at this point, either way.”

I didn’t bother asking him if he cared.

“When the bullets start flying,” Master Sergeant James Ross told me, “all that ‘Huah,’ ‘Army of One’ stuff goes out the window. All you care about is the soldiers around you, that’s it.” Ross should know: during the ambush he had had to run across an open field under fire. Now he’s convinced he’ll get out of here alive.

“I don’t know why,” he told me quietly, “but I just got this feeling.”

That day, the patrol was looking for IEDs and delivering water to a neighborhood near Route Irish. The kind of mission they went on every day.

“Is this part of the plan to ‘win hearts and minds’?” I asked one of the officers.

He laughed. “We’re not trying to win any hearts and minds,” he said, making fun of the phrase as he spoke it. “That dog ain’t gonna hunt. Right now we’re just trying to co-opt as many of them as we can. At this point, that’s about all we can do.”

The army was giving money away to local leaders, creating construction projects to keep men working. They handed out comic books for kids, and for adults, cigarettes with toll-free numbers printed on the packs, so they could easily inform on their neighbors.

After ten hours, the patrol ended. The soldiers cleared their weapons as they pulled into their heavily fortified base. They’d grab a few hours of sleep and do it all again the next day. I went back to the CNN office in the Palestine Hotel feeling as if the day had been a waste. The patrol had been uneventful. When I stepped inside, phones were ringing, producers were yelling into satellite phones trying to confirm information. There had been multiple coordinated attacks against Iraqi police stations in several cities. Dozens were dead. The headlines that night on American TV and in the newspapers the following day would be
IRAQ EXPLODES
.

At first I was pissed off that I had missed it, stuck on a patrol that had gone nowhere. Then I realized that there was a lesson to be learned about what gets covered, what we see about Iraq at home. Not all of Iraq had exploded that day, at least not the part of Baghdad I was in. The headline could just as easily have been “200 Gallons of Water Delivered to Neighborhood Near Baghdad Airport.” It would have been just as accurate, though arguably not as important. Perhaps the soldier I spoke to earlier was right: sometimes Iraq is not like what you see on TV.

IN BAGHDAD IN
2005 the list of what you can’t do is much longer than the list of what you can. You can’t: eat in a restaurant; go to the movies; hail a taxi; go out at night; stroll down the street; stand in a crowd; stay in one spot too long; use the same route; get stuck in traffic; forget to barricade your door at night; neglect to speak in code when using walkie-talkies; or go anywhere without armed guards, communication devices, an ID, a Kevlar vest, or a multi-vehicle convoy. You can’t forget you’re a target.

Other than that, it’s not so bad.

It’s two days before the interim presidential elections, which will be either a milestone of democracy or a meaningless gesture, depending on what edge of the political spectrum you hang from. The security situation seems a bit better, but it’s hard to know. There are more Iraqis manning roadblocks, but how good any of them is in a fight is impossible to tell.

There are true believers to be sure, holed up behind high walls and concertina wire, camped out in the “Green Zone,” the most protected spot in the center of town: civilians and soldiers, planners and plotters, trying to respond to events on the ground. The Green Zone is a city within a city. Walled off. Cut off. Miles of blast screens and barriers several feet thick. You meet with military officials there, and they give you briefings with bar graphs and pie charts: number of operations, number of insurgent attacks. It all seems so neat and clear, but outside the Green Zone it’s anything but.

I’m in an up-armored Humvee, barreling down the center of a Baghdad street.

“Locals put shit out in the road all the time to slow us down,” Captain Thomas Pugsley says.

Already tonight one soldier from his brigade has been killed, and another one is in the hospital undergoing surgery. “You lose soldiers, and it sucks, but you just have to drive on,” he says, his eyes constantly scanning one side of the road, then the other. “I don’t think there’s a unit in this brigade that hasn’t lost at least one if not more. It’s always in the back of your mind when you go out, but you got a job to do and the whole highlight of our time here will be based on the outcome of these elections, so we’re trying to put our best foot forward, and make the best of it we can.”

Captain Pugsley’s got a couple of platoons of Iraqi National Guard troops to check on. They’re supposed to be guarding polling stations in advance of the elections.

“It seems calm,” I say to no one in particular.

“It always seems calm until the first bullet flies by,” a voice says out of the dark.

Captain Pugsley is with Alpha Battery, Fifth Brigade, First Cavalry. He’s a field artillery unit battery commander, but Baghdad doesn’t need those. It needs bodies on the ground. So after a brief “transitioning,” Pugsley and his soldiers were rebranded mechanized light infantry.

“I thought it was going to be all frickin’ desert,” Pugsley says of Iraq, “but it’s not.” He interrupts himself every few seconds to shout instructions to his gunner, Specialist Chris Maxfield, who’s sticking halfway out of the roof of the Humvee behind a fifty-caliber machine gun and clutching a spotlight.

“What do we got? Spotlight!” Pugsley also yells directions to his driver: “Go around! Watch it! Go wide left! Stay away from it!”

They are constantly on the lookout for IEDs, which are becoming ever more sophisticated and deadly. U.S. soldiers have found them hidden in abandoned cars, in garbage, even in the carcasses of dead dogs placed on the side of the road.

“We build it, they blow it up,” Pugsley says, checking off in his head the list of recent attacks. “Our neighborhood advisory council building got blown up twice, our Iraqi police station got blown up on the same corner, and the youth center that the Iraqi government was building for the kids—someone blew that up too. We’re rebuilding them all again.”

“There’s time it seems to get better, and then it just falls apart again,” Specialist Maxfield tells me later, “and then you start over again, rebuilding, doing projects; then it goes back to the way it was before. I personally don’t care. All I care about is going home.”

Maxfield is twenty-four. He has only one more month to go; then he plans to get out of the army and go to college.

On patrols some officers try to sell you the story, upbeat West Pointers who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and taken the class: Dealing with the Media 101. They focus on the big picture. Ask an enlisted guy how it’s working with the Iraqis and he’ll likely tell you, “They aren’t worth a pile of shit.” Ask an officer, it’s usually a different story: “We’re working well together with our Iraqi partners,” they’ll say. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

When we get to the polling spot, the Iraqi troops are freaked. They didn’t think they’d have to stay out overnight, with no supplies. “I know it sucks,” Captain Puglsey tells them. “We’ll try to get some cots out to you and some flashlights.”

A few blocks away, Pugsley notices one Iraqi soldier dancing. “Hey, get to work!” he yells. “You’ve got a job to do!”

“Anything that represents progress is a potential target,” First Lieutenant Adam Jacobs tells me. He worries not just about the insurgents and the Iraqi forces, but also about keeping his young soldiers focused. “It’s hard to keep them motivated,” he says. “I just try to remind them that what they’re doing—though it seems mundane at the time—is for a greater good. Just to sort of gain the bigger picture when they’re on a rooftop staring at a road that there’s not much traffic going down.”

Riding along in the pitch black Humvee, you really have to admire these guys. Reporters can leave, fly home when they’re done, but these young men and women are stuck for the long haul. They work around the clock. Countless patrols. No end in sight.

Outside another polling station, an Iraqi National Guard soldier, masked and alone, stares out into the darkness. The whites of his eyes dart about nervously; they are the only part of him visible beneath his black balaclava. Gunshots echo in the street.

Back at base, a camp called Victory, there’s row after row of trailers, a Burger King, and a giant PX. You can buy TVs, stereos, and T-shirts that ask
WHO’SE YOUR BAGHDADDY
? You can also just stand in the aisles, close your eyes, and listen to the Muzak. For a moment it feels like America. It doesn’t last long, but it sure does feel good.