Redeployment(32)

“I thought they were widows?”

Cindy shrugged and turned back to Google, occasionally blurting out fun facts like, “Nothin’ doin’ in chickens these days, not with the price of these Brazilian frozens.” I stared at the boxes of uniforms until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I left the office, slamming the flimsy wooden door behind me, and walked over to the Civil Affairs Company’s offices to talk to Major Zima again—this time about the water plant and the pipeline to the Sunni community. I found him in the midst of moving various files to new and seemingly random locations.

“That pipeline is still in construction,” Zima told me while shoving an overly large stack of paper into an overly small filing cabinet. He explained that before either of us had even gotten to Iraq, a provincial council had convinced the previous brigade’s Civil Affairs Company to build the pipeline. He’d inherited the project and thought it should continue.

“Most local water’s a mix of E. coli, heavy metals, and sulfuric acid,” Zima said. “I wouldn’t want to brush my teeth with that.”

I explained to him the Sunni-Shi’a difficulties. Then I tried to tell him about how the pipes were for the wrong water pressure. “Even if you finish it and the plant gets on line and the ministry somehow allows it to start operating,” I said, “the pipeline will pump water at such high pressure that all the toilets and sinks and spigots west of Route Dover will simultaneously explode.”

“Really?” he said, looking up from the problematic filing cabinet.

“That’s what you’re building,” I said. “Or, what the Iraqi firm you’re hiring is.”

“They’re Jordanians,” he said. “There’s only one Iraqi.” He leaned back, lifted a leg, and kicked at the filing cabinet’s drawer. The thing closed, but with bits of paper sticking out the sides. Satisfied, he looked up and said, “I’ll handle it.” When I pressed him for his solution, though, he only smiled and told me to wait.





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Having the uniforms in the office meant I had to look at them all the time. It’s no surprise I snapped.

“Do you really want me to start a goddamn baseball team in Iraq?” I practically screamed into the phone. Chris Roper was not the sort of man you screamed at. With him, it tended to be the other way around. For a career diplomat, he was surprisingly undiplomatic. Too much time spent around the Army, probably.

“The f*ck are you talking about?” he said. He had the slightest hint of a Brooklyn accent.

I told him what Major Zima had told me about the uniforms.

“Oh,” said Roper, “that. That doesn’t matter. I want to talk about the women’s business association.”

“The women’s business association is a scam,” I said. “Starting an Iraqi baseball league, though, is a joke.”

“Isn’t the Civil Affairs Company handling that?” Roper said. “I didn’t pony up for responsibility, that’s for sure.”

“You didn’t tell them about how ‘sports diplomacy’ was all the rage at the embassy?”

There was a long pause.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out, “it kind of is.”

“Jesus, Chris.”

“And you can’t cut the women’s business association.”

“Why not? It’s been going a year already and has yet to start a business. The last meeting, we rented a ‘conference and presentation room’ for fifteen thousand dollars which turned out to be an unused room in an abandoned school we built back in 2005.” I paused and took a breath. “Actually, ‘abandoned’ is the wrong word. No one ever used it.”

“Women’s empowerment is a huge mission goal for the embassy.”

“That’s why the women’s health clinic—”

“Women’s empowerment,” he said, “means jobs. Trust me when I tell you that was a key takeaway of the past ten meetings I’ve been to. The health clinic is not providing jobs.”

“It’s providing local women what they actually want and—”

“We’re sinking, what, sixty thousand into it?” he said.

“They’re not going to start—”

“There is a direct link,” Roper intoned, “between the oppression of women and extremism.”