Now Playing: Frank Sinatra
Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
The sound a soft Jordanian woman’s voice woke me from a light sleep. I had nodded off on my flight into Baghdad. I struggled to wake up and listen to what she was saying. She warned the passenger that our plane, a small two engine prop job piloted by South African bush pilots, was about the begin its decent. She promised that the final leg of the flight from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad, Iraq wouldn’t be that rough, but it would be a little disconcerting for new comers. The pilots would make gradually tightening circles directly over the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) until the G’s from the ever-tightening spiral pushed the passengers downward into my slightly uncomfortable seats. She advised that passengers could use the small vomit bag tucked into the back of the seat in front of them if they had any trouble with the pressures that would push down on them, pulling them down toward Iraq.
I tried to listen to her, but I couldn’t really focus. I had heard it all before. My future colleagues in Green Zone had warned that the flight into BIAP would be a little rough. From time to time people got sick on the flight and had to use the vomit bag, but supposedly most people didn’t have any trouble. I also knew that I had it lucky. Most government employees entering into Iraq flew from Kuwait City to Baghdad on military C-130 cargo planes. The large C-130s didn’t have any of the nice creature comforts, such as pretzel and fruit juice, that I enjoy during my two hour flight to Baghdad. The poor souls on the C-130s had to sit side-by-side in the cargo hold wearing full body armor. They shoved yellow foam ear plugs into their ears to protect themselves from the almost deafening smalls of overworked engines echoing throughout the cargo hold. During the final 30 minutes of the flight, the military pilots, generally reservists who preferred the challenge though not the pay of flying big birds in and out of BIAP rather than flying simple UPS cargo jet in and out of faceless large cities back in the States, took control of the stick and weaved the plane erratically, perhaps even playfully, in an effort to throw off insurgents who might have picked up a spare ground-to-air shoulder-fired rocket launchers after the Saddam’s fall. After the roller-coaster approach toward BIAP, the pilots would go into the same spiral move that my bush pilots would make, only the rumors I heard said that the military pilots always made spirals much tighter. A tighter spiral meant more G’s, which made the experience much worse for the passengers.
As my plane made its final downward spins into BIAP, formerly know as Saddam International Airport, I peered out the window to look at Baghdad. I recognized the bend in the Tigris where the American presence had taken hold – the Green Zone. I could make out some larger buildings yet nothing seemed distinctive. I didn’t know any of the landmarks that I would eventually get know intimately. During the year that I would spend in the Green Zone, I would get to know almost every inch of the 4.5 square mile stretch of land in the center of the capitol of a country engaged in dangerous, bloody conflict. That tiny speck of land lining the Tigris would become my home, and during rest breaks, I would even come to miss it.
Back in Washington, the Green Zone had been sold to me as the ultimate gated community. My superiors told me that it was a place where I could safely do my work. I never believed that. I had watched the news and read the papers every day since I joined the foreign service and considering volunteering for a tour in Iraq. I knew that Baghdad was the most dangerous place in the world, but as I looked at the city through the small oval windows of my plane, it looked like any other city. It looked safe.
When the plane came to rest and the engines slowly came to a halt, I quickly unclipped my seatbelt and began my way toward the front of the plane. As I stepped down onto the tarmac, my heart beat slightly stronger as I realized that I the shuttle bus that would take me to the terminal had not arrived. The airport staff wasn’t in hurry. The 1970’s era bus seemed to be creeping forward like a caterpillar. I looked around to see if anything, anything looked threatening. All I could see was a terminal without any airplanes. Off in the distance, I could see helicopter flying away from the airport. The war seemed eerily calm. I had expected to hear something almost from first second I landed.
I felt a little sheepish as realized that nothing would happen to me at the airport and then took my first tentative steps away from the plane. I had been told that the airport was safe, largely because it was nearly completely surrounded by massive U.S. military bases. The airport was also guarded by trained, professional Nepalese mercenaries who had joined Global Security, a for-hire private army specializing in static security. There were many companies like Global Security providing some of the basic security work that would, or in my mind should have, been handled by the U.S. military in Iraq. During those first few days, I quickly realized that the military simply couldn’t be everywhere in Iraq. I was going to have to get comfortable with the collection of Nepalese, Zimbabwean, el Salvadorian, Nicaraguan, and other third world nationals who would control my security, and ultimately my life, at the airport and within the Green Zone.
The small school bus-like transfer shuttle arrived and took us to the BIAP terminal. We quickly lined up before the only immigration official working that day. He was a middle aged man with a think black mustache who spoke relatively accent-free English. I laid down my diplomatic passport, which normally would get me expiated access in almost every country in the world. In Iraq, it didn’t mean anything. In fact, the immigration official didn’t even know what it was. When I laid down my military Combined Access Card (CAC) ID badge, the official sat up slightly, double checked that the face on the card was in fact mine. Then, without much further consideration, he stamped my passport and waved me through.
The CAC served as the main form of identification for US officials traveling through Iraq. The State Department required every American working for the embassy to obtain it before traveling to Iraq because it granted Americans access to military bases and facilities throughout Iraq. However, it was not the only form of identification that I carried at all times. Every day, I also carried a U.S. Embassy Baghdad ID badge, a State Department ID badge, an ID badge for my compound, and my U.S. Agency for International Development ID. Although the CAC generally trumped all other cards, from time to time the other badges were more important. As a result, industrious vendors inside Iraq sold various types of card holders that could be used to either show multiple cards at once or to quickly bring the relevant card to the forefront.
As a diplomat, I waltzed past the custom office by merely flashing my diplomatic passport. As I entered the waiting area, a vast holding tank for westerns eagerly looking for the mercenaries hired to whisk them to their semi-secure compounds in and around Baghdad, I tried to get a sense of my new world. Although I was clearly in an airport, the place seemed hollow. The waiting area lacked any amenities. There were no candy stands or newspaper racks. They were no working clocks, and the big board announcing the arrival times for flights remained locked in time. It still had the un-updated flight information for the last day before the war broke out. In a Twilight Zone-like moment, I felt like I could reach back in time and relive the moment of an Iraqi waiting for a brother or sister to slip back into their country on the eve of the war.
I quickly pushed through the waiting area loaded down by the two bags that contained everything that I needed for my tour. I stepped out of the terminal so the four people traveling with me could get cell phone reception on the flimsy IraqNA cell phone provided to every American working on my compound. My companions needed to call the driver, who worked for the massive defense contractor KBR, to come by in his lightly armored SUV and drive us to a nearby military base. They warned me that I had to think like a soldier and assume that I would have to wait for up to an hour or two for the driver to come and pick us up. Thus, I plunked my bags and body armor down on the ground. To kill time, I began talking to three other Americans who also worked for my agency and who just happened to have arrived at the same day that I did. One of the men, a tall clean shaven man, worked on large scale infrastructure projects. Another man worked as an investigator searching out contractor fraud and abuse. The third man, a contractor, worked a construction supervisor for my agency’s compound.
While we were waiting, the construction supervisor spotted an Iraqi off in the distance. The Iraqi spotted us, threw out a friendly wave, and come over to talk to us. His name was G, and he was the first Iraqi I had ever met. G was a short hairy men. He must have been about thirty-five or forty years old, though I must admit that I always had trouble guessing the age of Iraqis. During the last twenty years, they had lived through three wars, one dictatorship, years of economic sanctions, and the beginning of a civil war. The weight of these burdens lay heavily on the face and bodies of almost every Iraqi I met.
Like most Iraqis working for the Americans, G had a good college education and his English was very impressive. His voice carried a slight hint of a British accent, and he had overfilled his vocabulary with American slag phrases that had worn out their welcome in the States nearly ten years earlier. Before the war, he owned a small travel agency. His experience in the travel agency helped him secure a job as a travel specialist guiding U.S. diplomats back and forth from Iraq to the various neighboring Arab countries.
G felt that he understood Americans, and knew how to make them laugh and keep them feeling comfortable. After asking my name and learning that I had just arrived in Iraq for the first time, G pointed to a set of brand new escalators laying near the entrance to the waiting area. They were wrapped in grey tarps covered in dust. He jokingly told me that he didn’t have enough electricity in his house for more than five or six hour per day, yet the Americans had spent perhaps a million dollars to buy expensive escalators for a spartanly used airport and then let them sit outside for months still in the thick canvas wrappings.
As I began to develop a witty response to G’s observation, a black lightly-armored SUV pulled up. An aging Texan approaching Social Security age leapt out of the truck and quickly introduced himself as our KBR “taxi” driver. As he chucked my bags into the bag of his SUV, he explained that everywhere I went during my year in Iraq, I would run into KBR employees like him. He heard one rumor that there was more KRB employee in Iraq than soldiers. KBR’s army of contractors cooked food, maintained cars, ran dry cleaning facilities, and even shuttled diplomats like me around the airport.
As we pulled away from the terminal, the Texan KBR driver said that he would take us over to the “military side of the airport” so we could sign up for a helicopter into the Green Zone. For months, diplomats had been traveling between BIAP and Green Zone in large heavily armored buses. Unfortunately, in the weeks before I landed in Iraq, the bad guys had gotten pretty good at planting roadside bombs and exploding car bombs along the road between BIAP and the Green Zone, which was commonly referred to as Route Irish. Until the military could regain control over the road, everyone had to take the “air bridge,” which consisted of Army Blackhawk helicopters that flew civilians into the Green Zone. Most people loved the air bridge because it was safer and quicker than the armored bus. Unfortunately, the air bridge ended a few weeks after I arrived. Apparently Ambassador Negroponte became livid when he couldn’t arrange for a helicopter because all of them were being used to ferry Americans back and forth from the airport. That day, he demanded that military restart the bus runs.
The KBR driver never stopped talking during the ride to the military air terminal, which military personnel called the PAX. He shared his thoughts about Saddam Hussein, the invasion, and the military’s failure to plan for the post-invasion occupation, and similarities between Iraq and Vietnam. He also pointed out major landmarks, such as the CIA headquarters in Iraq, the prison facility that held Saddam Hussein, and a checkpoint that had been attacked by a car bomber. My driver seemed to have forgotten that one of his passengers was an Iraqi, but maybe he realized that holding anything back from an Iraqi would be pointless. Iraqis always seemed to know more about what the Americans were doing than the Americans did.
When we pulled into the PAX complex, I quickly felt like I had moved into a prison. Rows of blast walls and high barbed wire fences encircled the dusty compound. Soldiers and contractors wandered around aimlessly without any purpose. A few slightly damaged wooden picnic tables occupied the center of the courtyard when men sat smoking cigarettes and telling stories. On the far side of the compound, the military installed a row a green outhouses, and along the flight line line it had erected three large air conditioned tents near the airfield. Two of the tents were filed with very uncomfortable seats and large televisions constantly tuned into Fox News. The third tent served as the “ticket counter” for helicopter flights into the Green Zone.
When I walked up to the ticket counter, a specialist told me that he might be able to squeeze me onto the last Blackhawk flight into the Zone, but as soon as he left the counter, I heard the sound of two helicopters starting their engine. The specialist said he would try to stop the helicopters. He dashed out to the flight line, but he didn’t have a chance. They took off before the specialist left the tent. I asked if he could call them back, but he only smiled wryly. Apparently military chopper pilots don’t swing back for diplomats.
Thankfully, the British “flight counter” was still open. The Brits had a more aggressive soldier who called down to the flight line to reserve a few seats for myself and my new colleagues. He ran out to the flight line and talked to the ground crew to let them know that we were coming. A few minutes later, the British soldier escorted me down to the flight line. I was rushing down to the BIAP runway with bags in toe when in the distance I spotted the two British helicopters, a Puma Mk 1 and some type of smaller helicopter loaded with weapons, that would ferry me into the Green Zone. As soon as they touched down, the door gunner on the Puma frantically waved for us to jump into his helicopter. Ducking slightly to keep our heads well below the whirling blades and keep our belongings from flying away, I worked with my colleagues to our belonging into small storage area in the middle of the Puma.
As soon as we finish tossing in the last of gear and the final person jumped into the helicopter, we took off for the Green Zone. The small gunship helicopter ran shotgun slightly behind the Puma and occasionally communicated to our door gunner, whose eyes constantly scanned the rooftops of Baghdad with the keen understanding that the Puma had very thin armor and could not survive a direct hit from anything larger than an assault rifle. He sat on a small wooden crate, which he kicked from one side of the helicopter to the other whenever we wanted to look out the opposite door, which he left open during the flight. We flew very low to the ground and weaved around a lot in an effort to confuse anyone trying to line up the helicopter in their gun sights.
The sound of the helicopter blades whirling above me and the air rushing in through the open side door made my ears ring. One of my colleagues smiled slightly as he watched me gaze out into the rooftops. He leaned over and shouted in my ear that I needed to carry earplugs with me whenever I flew into or out of BIAP. I nodded slightly in agreement. As he pulled away from me I noticed that he, and everyone else, had jammed small yellow foam pads into their ears. I also noticed that everyone else had put on their body armor. In the rush to get onto the helicopter, I had forgotten to put on my gear. It lay safely packed in my bag protecting my belonging while I rode in a thinly armored military helicopter to my new home in the heart of a war zone. .
