To Be a Friend Is Fatal: The Fight to Save the Iraqis America Left Behind - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kirk W. Johnson has become the leading public voice on the plight of America’s Iraqi allies. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Fulbright Scholar, and recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and Yaddo, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy. Founder of the List Project, Johnson lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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To Be a Friend Is Fatal

Prologue

December 29, 2005

Two fingers pressed firmly against my forehead. The hand they belonged to wore a pale blue surgical glove the color of oceans on maps, except for the spatter of wine-dark blood. I was lying on a table, writhing but unable to free myself. Other blue gloves pressed against my chest, waist, legs, ankles, arms. My eyes stung. I thrashed again and freed one arm. I heard shouting. More hands appeared, forcing down my bucking knees.

“Motherfucker, how much longer?!”

A needle entered my blurred frame of vision and burrowed itself into a laceration running between my eyes. My forehead numbed for a moment before the anesthetic seeped back out with the blood, useless.

“Viente por ciento!” Loudly. Slowly.

My face was splayed open, and my lunatic flesh needed tying down. A gash ran from my right eyebrow into my left eyebrow and stopped above the eyelid. A piece of my nose was missing from its bridge, leaving behind a divot. My front teeth, dangling from a shattered jaw, had trifurcated my upper lip. Drained of blood, it looked like a worm baking on the sidewalk. My chin appeared as though it were falling off.

My brain was a captured wasp, thudding furiously against the glass walls of a jar, striking everywhere and nowhere. A suturing needle punctured through the cliff of flesh along my brow, ran a thread across the seeping ravine, before reversing course and knotting off where it started. A millimeter to the right, and repeat. After each suture, the surgeon pressed his thumb against the slowly forming rail of stitches, nudging the tracks in line, refashioning the putty of my face.

They ignored my English cries for painkillers, so I pleaded in Arabic, “Dawa, biddy dawa!”

Disconnected thoughts erupted with maniacal force: Twenty percent . . . teeth missing . . . Sheikh Kamal . . . blue gloves . . . beach . . . Fallujah . . . Mom . . . jaw . . . painkillers . . . Who are these people? . . . twenty percent.

Adrenaline coursed through each limb and muscle until my mind, exhausted, finally relaxed. My legs followed; the flailing subsided. I no longer felt the slow-moving needle, my broken wrists, my crushed nose, my jaw, my bleeding toes. The lava stilled and cooled.

The rubbery hands eased cautiously from my body. The room went quiet, save for an occasional instruction to an attending nurse and the sound of suturing needles clanking upon a steel tray.

Ninety minutes later, my face was stitched shut.

I was wheeled down the hallway on a gurney, bright ceiling lamps sweeping swiftly into my field of vision like rising and setting suns, one after another, lingering eclipse-like when I closed my eyes. The din of the waiting room hushed as orderlies pushed me through. In the operating room, the next team of doctors and assistants was preparing its tools. My jaw would need wiring, my arms would need fiberglass, my face would need masking. At last, they dosed me with general anesthesia, and I fell into a deep sleep.

October 13, 2006

The war was in its fourth autumn when Yaghdan’s future was swallowed up.

Late on a Friday afternoon, Yaghdan checked the clock on his computer screen and sighed. A few cubicles away, an American grazed on a microwaved bag of popcorn, and the scent of butter and salt tugged at Yaghdan’s hunger. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan was in its final week, and the required fast, made brutal by the long hours and his proximity to nonfasting Americans, was almost over. Yaghdan consoled himself with the thought that his wife, Haifa, was at that moment preparing an iftar feast far more sumptuous than American junk food.

The walkie-talkie on his desk squelched, and a young male American voice warbled through the handset, “Dispatch, we need a pickup from the white house, please!”

A few seconds passed, and an Iraqi driver in the motor pool replied flatly, “Okay, ten minutes.” The driver had probably only just returned from dropping off the American, Yaghdan thought. “White house” was their radio code word for the liquor store in the Green Zone. Through the thin blue walls of his cubicle in the massive bomb- and mortar-proof office building of the US Agency for International Development, Yaghdan sometimes overheard stories about the Americans’ parties. He had seen bottles strewn in the yards of the mortar-proof houses in the compound and recognized how a hangover sat on a face. He had no chance of seeing a party for himself, since Iraqis working for USAID were not allowed to stay overnight in the Green Zone.

At five o’clock, Yaghdan powered down his computer. He nodded at the Nepalese security guards as he exited through the building’s doors, reinforced to repel bullets and improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. He climbed into the Chevy Suburban idling out front, alongside other Iraqis who worked for the agency. The van snaked past demolished palaces and the sixteen-foot blast walls of the secretive compounds clotting the Green Zone. Yaghdan’s colleagues quietly removed their USAID badges and stuffed them into socks, brassieres, hidden pockets. His went into his shoe.

This daily ritual made Yaghdan nervous, but nervousness had become a function as natural as breathing or eating. It had a use, keeping them vigilant. The women wrapped hijabs around their hair and donned sunglasses. The men removed their ties and donned shemaghs.

The Suburban pulled up to the checkpoint known as the Assassins’ Gate and emptied its passengers. They stood on the edge of the Green Zone. Yaghdan smiled at a listless marine manning the US side of the checkpoint as he walked toward what Americans called the Red Zone, his country. The marine nodded slightly, his face expressionless.

Yaghdan’s gait was unsteady. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, a 7.62 millimeter Kalashnikov round tore through his left leg, but that story belonged to a more hopeful era of his life that he didn’t like to think about anymore. He had spent six feverish months on his back, while tens of thousands of soldiers, marines, aid workers, diplomats, mercenaries, and contractors poured into his country and snarled barbed wire atop blast walls. When he could walk again, he took a job with the Americans to help rebuild Iraq.

As he filed around the chicanes rimmed with menacing spindles of concertina wire, Yaghdan’s pace quickened. From this point forward, the Iraqi employees of America did not speak to one another. The 14th of July Bridge connected the Green and Red Zones, and the Iraqis trained their eyes on the ground as they crossed.

Yaghdan felt the USAID badge shift uncomfortably under his sock. He saw a handful of men gathered on the other side of the bridge, and lowered his head. These were called alassas, slang deriving from the Arabic verb “to chew”: militiamen who hunted Iraqis like him by studying the faces of those who emerged from the gates of the Green Zone.

For three years, Yaghdan had avoided the chewers by varying the entry and exit points he used to enter the Green Zone each day, never falling into a pattern. Most days, he switched taxis more than once, wore disguises, and was never dropped off directly in front of his home.

This day, exhausted and hungry, he slipped up.

As he crossed the bridge, he heard a hoarse voice call out his name. “Yaghdan!” Before he could suppress the instinct, he looked up, and in that split second confirmed his identity....