Redeployment(26)

“There’s two hundred fifty squirts in a gallon of milk!” she said.

Bob silently mouthed the word Google. Then he announced, “Cindy. Our fearless leader is here.”

“Oh my,” she said, springing out of her seat and walking over to shake my hand. “Sure glad to meet you!”

“I hear you’re working on an agricultural initiative,” I said.

“And a health clinic,” she said. “That’ll be tough, but it’s what the women tell me they need.”

I looked around the room.

“You can take either of the empty desks,” said Bob. “Steve won’t be using his.”

“Who’s Steve?” I said.

“The other contractor we were supposed to have,” said Cindy. She made a sad face. “He got pretty badly injured on his first day.”

“His first day?” I said. I looked over at the eerily empty desk in the back room. This was, I thought, a war zone. Death and disfigurement were possibilities for all of us.

“When he flew in to Taji,” Bob said, smirking, “he jumped out of the Black Hawk action-movie style, like he was gonna have to sprint through machine-gun fire to get to safety. Shattered his ankle with his very first step.”





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After I’d settled in, Bob oriented me to the AO, taking me to the large map hanging in our office and breaking down the region.

“Here’s us,” he said, pointing at Camp Taji. “To the east you’ve got the Tigris. There’s a few old palaces on the western banks, and the other side is farming. Fruit groves. Oranges. Lemons. That weird fruit. What’s it called?”

“Pomegranate?” I said.

“No. I like pomegranate. That stuff—” He waved his hands and grimaced, then pointed back to the east side of the Tigris on the map. “This section’s all Sunni, so during Saddam, they did all right. It’s less slummy.”

“Less slummy?” I said.

“Until the highway. Route Dover”—Bob pointed to a road running north and south—“that’s the dividing line. West of Dover, Sunnis. East of Dover, slums, shit land, a little farming irrigated by the canal.” He pointed to a thin blue line running out of the Tigris, forming the southern border of the map. “Above that there’s not much good farming. There’s a water treatment plant here”—he pointed to a black spot on the map unconnected to any marked roads—“there’s an oil refinery out to the east, and here’s JSS Istalquaal.”

“JSS,” I said. “That means there’s Iraqi units there.”

“National Police,” he said. “And two companies from the BCT. Sunni police stay on the Sunni side, Shi’a stay on the Shi’a side, but the National Police cross over.”

“What are the National Police like?” I said.

“They’re Shi’a death squads,” he said, smirking.

“Oh.”

“South of the canal is Sadr City. No one goes there except U.S. SpecOps looking to kill somebody. Istalquaal is the closest JSS in our AO to it.”

I looked up at the map. “USAID claims agriculture should be employing thirty percent of the population,” I said.

“Right,” said Bob, “but the whole system broke down after we trashed the state-run industries.”

“Fantastic,” I said.

“It wasn’t my idea,” said Bob. “We remade the Ministry of Agriculture on free market principles, but the invisible hand of the market started planting IEDs.”

“Okay,” I said, “but this region”—I pointed to the Shi’a areas—“needs water for irrigation.”

“West of Dover, too,” he said. “Irrigation systems need maintenance, and nobody’s been doing much of that.”

I tapped the dark spot he’d said was a water treatment plant. “Is this operational?”

Bob laughed. “We sunk about 1.5 million dollars’ worth of IRRF2 funds into it a couple years back.”

“What’d that buy us?”

“No idea,” Bob said. “But the chief engineer has been asking for a meeting.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Bob shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“Look,” I said, “I know there’s a limit to what I can do. But if I can do one small thing—”