Labid
Mood:  lazy
Now Playing: The Shins
Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
Labid worked in the motor pool. He had the look of an accountant, particularly when he wore his glasses. Sometimes he even acted like an accountant, especially when he double-checked his logs or meticulously cleaned the mud off his vehicle at the end of the day before going home. When I heard that he had been selected to travel to Washington, DC to attend a State Department defensive driving class, I gave him lots of tourist information about DC. I had lived there for five years before coming to Iraq, and I knew the city better than anyone else I had ever met. I wanted to make sure he had the chance to truly enjoy the city. Although it wasn’t hard to gather the information I had collected, he was extremely grateful that I had taken the time to gather it for him.

Because he started to trust me, when the USAID travel agent began making minor mistakes on his travel schedule, Labid came to me to fix it. He felt that the travel agent wasn’t giving him the same respect that she would have given an American, and for some reason, Labid felt that I could help resolve it. I did what I could, and even though the problems might have ironed themselves out without my assistance, I helped reassure Labid that at least one American on the compound cared.

Those little interactions created a bond between us. He felt comfortable with me and believed that I would watch out for him. During the following months, he and I would occasionally have lunch together in the compound dining hall, and when he would drive me around the Green Zone, he and I would talk about what the Americans were trying to do in Iraq. He remained unfailingly committed to America, despite everything that had gone wrong in Iraq. I tried to warn him that America cared about Iraq, but sometimes its attention span was short. Labid wouldn’t listen to me.

“What do you think will happen to all the Iraqis that work for USAID after all the Americans finish the new embassy complex and move everyone into a single compound?” I asked one day to help prove that the U.S. government frequently forgot about those who worked for them the minute they were out of sight.

Labid stopped the car and looked at me in shock. “What do you mean?”

“Will they need a motor pool any more? Will they need the full team of mechanics? What about the landscapers hired to maintain the USAID and State Department compounds? All the Americans are going to live in one compound and probably won’t need as many people. They won’t need drivers to shuttle them from one end of the Green Zone to another. Even if they are going to keep some Iraqi drivers, they won’t need as many as they have now. Plus, the State Department already has a bunch of contracted KBR employees that provide those same services.”

“No, USAID can’t get rid of us. We have worked for them for over two years.”

“It won’t matter,” I said flatly.

“They know we work hard. They know that we risk our lives coming through those checkpoints every day.”

I reminded him of how the compound had fired dozens of GSO employees without even a week’s notice. USAID had needed to cut back on its administrative expenses, and the GSO employees were the easiest people to fire. They were disposable. Most Americans didn’t know their names, let alone how to pronounce them. Nevertheless, Labid didn’t believe me. He couldn’t let go of his unflappable faith in America. The Americans had liberated his country. The Americans had given him a job. The American president promised that he would stay in Iraq until the very end. America was a great country that would never turn its back on him.

Slightly more than a year after I left Iraq, insurgents or perhaps militiamen identified Labid as an American sympathizer. On Valentine’s Day 2007, they drove up in a car and shot him near one of the Green Zone checkpoints. After shooting him, they stood over his bloody body and watched his life slowly slip out of him until he died. Then they drove off, leaving Labid’s body in the street.

The Iraqi community in the Green Zone is small, and word of the killing spread quickly. Eventually, all the Americans working for USAID heard what had happened, but that night in the USAID compound, the Americans went ahead with their planned Valentine’s Day celebration.

I learned of Labid’s death from a press release put out by USAID. The press release didn’t list Labid’s name, but I emailed my American friends living in the Green Zone to get the full details. They told me the grisly details, but they didn’t tell me everything. I learned about the party that went on as scheduled from an Iraqi refugee who arrived in the States a few weeks after Labid died. None of my American friends wanted me to know that life in the Zone had continued as usual. They only told me of Labid’s death and commented that his death was a reminder of how bad Iraq had gotten, but by leaving out the other details of the story, they failed to show how sick the Green Zone had become.