Redeployment(28)

Najdah and the staff lawyer would do their best to help these women out, occasionally raising their concerns with the local councils and power brokers. They didn’t try to “liberate” the Iraqi women—whatever that means—or turn them into entrepreneurs. Najdah and her staff listened to them and helped them with their actual problems. In the case of the fourteen-year-old, Najdah had a friend on the police force raid the girl’s home as well as the brothel. The girl went to prison. For her, it was the best alternative.

I made a few trips out to the clinic and had started thinking about expanding the idea to other communities when Kazemi finally got back to us with concrete ideas for a meeting. I arranged things with him and then tried to set up a convoy with one of the units at Istalquaal.

“Nobody’s been that way in a long time,” one company commander told me over the phone. “There’s probably IEDs there from ’04. We have no idea what we might hit.”

That’s not something you want to hear from a hardened soldier. I’d already done a couple convoys by the time I got to Istalquaal, but the memory of that assessment and the wary nervousness of the soldiers there gave me what, in the military, they refer to as a “high pucker factor.” The platoon that eventually took me out had clearly drawn the last straw. They all knew it. “Let’s go get blown up,” I overheard one soldier saying to another. When we got on the road, my only comfort was the obvious boredom of my translator, a somewhat short and pudgy Sunni Muslim everybody referred to as “the Professor.”

“Why do they call you the Professor?” I asked him.

“Because I was a professor,” he said, taking off his glasses and rubbing them as if to emphasize the point, “before you came and destroyed this country.”

We were getting off to an awkward start. “You know,” I said, “when this all started I opposed the war… .”

“You have baked Iraq like a cake,” he said, “and given it to Iran to eat.”

He sniffed and folded his arms over his belly and closed his eyes. I pretended something on the side of the road had caught my eye. Most translators would never say anything like that to an American. We sat in silence for a while.

“Istalquaal,” I finally said, trying to draw him out. “Does it mean freedom, or liberation?”

He opened his eyes a crack and looked at me sidelong. “Istalquaal? Istiqlal means independence,” he said. “Istalquaal means nothing. It means Americans can’t speak Arabic.”

It was rumored the Professor had blood on his hands from the Saddam days. Whether that was true or not, he was our best interpreter. On the road, though, he wasn’t much company. He sat with his hands folded and his eyes closed, possibly sleeping, possibly avoiding conversation.

The landscape out there was desolate. No trees, no animals, no plants, no water—nothing. Often, when people try to describe Iraq, you hear a lot of references to Mad Max, the postapocalyptic film trilogy where biker gangs in S&M gear drive across the desert, killing one another for gasoline. I’ve never found the description particularly apt. Aside from that weird Shi’a festival where everybody beats themselves with chains, you won’t find much fetish gear in country. And out there, not seeing a single living thing, I’d have welcomed the sight of other humans, even a biker gang in leather face masks and assless chaps. But war, unfortunately, is not like the movies.

Kazemi wasn’t there when we got to the plant, a large, blockish structure with a row of enormous concrete cylinders topped by metal pipes. We went to the main building, but when we tried to get inside and out of the sun, we couldn’t open the front door. It was large, metal, and so rusted that it wouldn’t budge.

“Here, sir,” said a burly Army sergeant. He smiled at his fellow soldiers, no doubt thinking he’d show them how much stronger and better at door opening the Army was than the State Department. He pushed at it. Nothing. Still smiling, with the eyes of most of the soldiers on him, the sergeant backed up a step and launched himself into the door. The primary effect was a loud booming noise. Now red-faced, he started cursing, and with everybody, even the Professor, watching him, he backed up about fifteen feet and then ran into the door at full speed. The crash of his body armor against the steel was enormous, and the door opened with a screaming metallic creak. A few soldiers cheered.

Inside was dark and rusty.

“I don’t think anyone’s been here in a while, sir,” said the sergeant.