U.S. soldiers investigate the site of a car bomb attack in the Karradah neighborhood in central Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 23, 2007. Three parked cars exploded in a predominantly Shiite area in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 19, police said.(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
The contractor’s story
… A night flight from Fallujah, the Iraqi girl and doing “God’s work”
By RICK STAGER
The Intelligencer
AL ASAD AIRBASE, Western Iraq — The reason I took this job in Iraq was denial: Look, I’m still working. I haven’t been relegated to making bird houses in the basement yet. I’ve got a job, how could I be old? Also, I needed the money. So I found perhaps the single employer who would hire a retiree my age (66) at a decent salary: KBR Halliburton.
The bombs and land mines I encountered in Iraq were the truths I have had to face, but I’m getting ahead of my story. Let me start at the beginning.
My adventure started out pleasantly enough on a Sunday in early January, following my reply to a KBR ad for engineering types familiar with autoCAD, the computer drafting software that I used while living in Bucks County and working for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.
My daughter, a high school senior, drove me to the Philadelphia airport to catch an afternoon flight to Houston. From there, I went to the company’s deployment center in a rundown shopping mall.
KBR is all business, fulfilling a cost-plus contract with the government with fixed fees for specific tasks. For example, I was told the company gets $48,000 for processing every new hire. Because testing positive for illicit drugs, AIDS and certain other diseases is a deal-breaker, KBR screens out anyone with these conditions. Inside a hangar-sized building with office trailers arranged in a “U” shape, we spent the day getting X-rays, lung capacity tests, EKGs, hearing and eye exams, blood and urine tests, and inoculations.
What followed were endless indoctrinations on company ethics, safety, security, etc, etc. The session on what to do if you were taken hostage was particularly interesting, as was the one on how to use a nuclear/biological hazards suit.
A week later, we were bused to George Bush Intercontinental Airport for the nine-hour trip to Amsterdam, before flying on to Dubai, then to Baghdad airport. There, a series of bomb blasts alarmed everyone as we waited for a Russian charter plane.
SANDSTORMS AND CAMEL SPIDERS
An hour after takeoff, we landed here at Al Asad Airfield. It’s a 25-square-mile moonscape of a place in the western desert of Iraq, where sandstorms arrive like tsunamis and aggressive camel spiders as big as your fist crawl out at night.
Somewhat dazed after the long trip and little sleep, I went through the motions of filling out forms and getting my assignment to living quarters in a crude Army tent with 18 other contractors in rough plywood cubicles that aren’t as nice as animal stalls. The ungodly racket of jet fighter planes and helicopter gunships coming and going overhead made sleep difficult.
KBR’s role throughout Iraq is to support the military. It feeds (including lobster dinners once a week), houses, provides electricity, hot showers and disposes of sewage and trash for 140,000 soldiers plus countless contractors like myself. This is a huge money machine, with high level managers making $20,000 a month and more. As for me, I’m salaried at more than $100,000 annually. Even truck drivers make $100,000 for a one-year commitment. And it’s tax free. So who’s gonna turn off the money spigot?
Most KBR recruits are blue-collar types from Middle America and the South, particularly Texas. This is a place for second-raters willing to sacrifice to make first-rate wages.
They’re men and women with marriages gone bad, behind in their bills, unable to find good jobs back in the states or just looking for opportunity. Most have big plans. They talk about flipping houses, starting their own businesses — even going into business against KBR.
Naturally, the best qualified people aren’t desperate enough to exile themselves to such a place as this. So, KBR hires more people than are needed, partly due to the inefficiency of those willing to work here and partly due to the inherent difficulties of this embattled environment.
The result is a myriad of problems, like weeks with no paper towels and sometimes no water in the bathrooms; no paper and ink cartridges for our computers; no wiring schematics for broken generators that are supposed to be overhauled; and an inability to find shutoff valves when a backhoe guy chomps through the water main.
FLIGHT TO FALLUJAH
My job is to provide engineering services to nine military bases here in El Ambar province. I fly between them to analyze electrical problems, then back to Al Asad to make plans on a computer to fix them.
I hadn’t been in Iraq a month when my team got the call to Fallujah.
To get there, we had to fly to Baghdad and lay over for a day at the big Army base. The next morning, loaded down with baggage, laptops, body armor and helmets, we clanked out to two Blackhawk helicopters, the most wicked looking and sounding machines I’ve seen outside a science fiction movie. They’re long, low to the ground, insect like. Both were roaring, their blades spinning viciously. We climbed aboard and I put plugs in my ears.
Almost gently, we lifted off and were cruising low, no more than 500 feet above Baghdad in broad daylight until we settled down into a nest of whirring machines near the embassy in the Green Zone, our first stop. Doors slid back and people stepped off, new ones climbed on and soon we were airborne again, always in pairs, one looking out for the other.
We ‘choppered’ over the ruined city until densely packed houses gave way to fields and groves of date palms, rivers and the vast desert. I could see the machine gun barrel on my side swivel up and down from time to time, as though the gunner had spotted something of interest, then it came to rest again.
In less than an hour, we settled slowly onto a runway of the Saddam Hussein-era military base outside Fallujah, where much killing has taken place.
The base is staffed by more than 10,000 Marines. These kids all have a common look, especially in their camo uniforms and toting M-16s over their shoulders. Most are clean cut, earnest looking, fair-skinned, often blue-eyed. They appear to be middle class, from the South mostly. They are conspicuously polite.
While we were being escorted around the buildings, the chief electrician at the base got an urgent call for help. A mortuary trailer had been moved and the generator had to be hooked up. As we watched the chief connect it, the small talk revealed the mortuary gets two or three customers a week. Two or three of those scrubbed, clipped kids we see every day wind up in that trailer.
While we were at the base, a careless KBR guy driving through a checkpoint was shot dead by a Ugandan guard. Since this has happened more than once, we were soon given a written reminder of security procedures and made to sign a form to document that we had read the regulations.
After we completed our survey, we squeezed into an SUV that bumped along without headlights toward a group of low, dark, windowless buildings silhouetted against the night sky. Here and there, a few chem-lights glowed eerily to mark paths and doorways. Off in the distance, blue runway lights trailed away toward the black horizon.
We entered the first building to find a bright, fluorescent-lit plywood interior. We signed in, were handed felt tip markers and told to write the initials of our destination on the backs of our left hands. “AA” stood for Al Asad. Then we marched back out into the dark to another plywood building, where we waited.
THE IRAQI GIRL
Ten soldiers and a woman attempted to sleep with various degrees of success on wooden benches and a few folding cots.
The young woman with wild black hair was sleeping fitfully. She awoke, yawned and asked what time it was. She got up, looked in the cooler for a drink, found none, winced and sat down near us, her right foot dangling over her left leg, vibrating nervously.
“Susan” (she was emphatic about the name) is an Iraqi interpreter.
She’d been no farther from her Baghdad home than Jordan, where she recuperated in 2005 from injuries she received when an IED blew up her convoy. She seemed so American in the way she was dressed — black jeans, a black pullover with a sequined design on the front. The free way she talked is so typically American (and un-typically Iraqi) that it was hard to think I wasn’t talking to a college girl you might meet on the beach in Fort Lauderdale.
She told of the repression of women in Iraq, especially since the Shia have asserted themselves. (She is Shia.) Women are considered the property of their fathers and husbands, accorded little respect and have limited opportunities in education and careers. Susan will have none of it. She’s defiant. She’ll change her country for the better, even if it requires collaboration with the Americans, a sin she knows could cost her and/or her family their lives.
The heavy thundering of a landing helicopter shook the building after midnight. The plywood door opened and a soldier entered. “Allen, Cotton, Denis, Jenkins … Stager … ” he called out. The Iraqi girl and I got up, struggled into our body armor, donned our helmets, hoisted our bags and trooped into the darkness.
A screaming Chinook was perched on our left, silvery in the night, blades whirling expectantly. We marched up the ramp into the Spartan fuselage, dumped our baggage on one side of the ship and strapped ourselves in on a canvas bench on the other.
Exposed hydraulic lines and cabling covered the interior. A machine gun angled out of an opening amidships. Through the cockpit doorway, a constellation of sea green instruments glowed in the dark. Alive, its engines ever roaring, the beast gently bumped up and down expectantly. In the dim blue interior light, uniformed crew members dashed back and forth, their helmets garnished with special equipment, lights and microphones — looking like sci-fi characters.
The pitch of the engines increased, even audible through my earplugs, as the bird lifted into the moonlit sky. With cold wind blowing in the machinegun port, I noticed the landscape below looking much like America, spangled with the lights of cities and towns.
FAKE AMERICA
I took a job as a contractor in Iraq partly because I hoped to understand more about the country, why we are here and what America’s chances of success might be.
What I’ve learned is that these huge military bases are worlds unto themselves. They are completely surrounded and shut off from the real Iraq by miles of 10-foot-high concrete “T-walls” and Hesco barriers, rows of wire-reinforced sand bags.
Al Asad is a fake America, with its 25,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines, thousands of contractors, and laborers from Third World countries. It’s a place where English is the language, American money the currency, hamburgers and hominy grits the fare in the dining facilities.
Americans go about their daily business as they would at home, only here it is done in deteriorating Iraqi army buildings, row after row of trailer-like pre-fab housing and office units, power stations, repair shops and base cafeterias. Americans stop to chat with each other about a basketball game they saw on TV the night before, a barbecue they plan to have, office politics.
Rarely is Iraq even mentioned in conversation. Here, nothing can be learned of Iraq “outside the wire” that defines this fake America.
All the Iraqis who once did what we do here — the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, cleaners, office workers, managers, accountants, pilots and airplane mechanics —sit in squalid homes in the towns and villages of the real Iraq, unemployed and resentful.
If we are to “win” in Iraq, this certainly isn’t the way to do it.
BIG DEAN
At another base, on yet another trip, I waited in a large air-conditioned tent with a couple dozen soldiers, Marines and some contractors.
I got to talking to Dean, a big guy from northern Michigan. He had been in Iraq for a couple of years as a “recovery driver,” a job he’s well-qualified for, having operated a logging truck. Dean has crisscrossed Iraq and knows well the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah. He’s had to inure himself to the danger, just do his job.
He said life for the Iraqis has gone from bad to worse. They’ve lost the good jobs, and water, electricity and sewage disposal is intermittent or not available. He said Ramadi, with a population of 400,000, had to call our recovery truck drivers to drag the city’s only sewage truck into our base to get its pump replaced so the government could remove sewage from the basement of City Hall.
KABOOM!
A thunderous explosion shook the building. We looked at each other in silent disbelief. What was that!? A moment later we were running out the door to a bunker, where we sat for the next 45 minutes listening to two-way radios screech, “Clear the roads for Charlie Med, med, med … say again … Clear the roads for Charlie Med, med, med.”
It was a car bomb by the main gate. More booms. “Outgoing,” someone said.
Quarter to eleven the same night, I was in the operations office when the klaxon went off — URUGA, URUGA, URUGA! —and an urgent voice yelled over the loudspeakers, “Incoming, Incoming, Incoming!”
Again, I ran for the bunker.
Really thunderous explosions went off nearby, three, four, five in a row. A base electrician told us it was our 155mm howitzers. They have a “kill radius” of 100 meters — a whole neighborhood.
Two weeks later at 1 a.m., I boarded a big Sikorsky H-53 Sea Stallion copter to fly to Ar Ramadi, one of the worst of all the dumpy American military bases.
In the dark, the Sea Stallion looked like something out of the movie “Alien.” Inside, it practically rained hydraulic fluid on us. With ear plugs, the screaming engines were tolerable. In the dark, I looked out the half open ramp as the helicopter arced into the night sky. I could see the spooky black silhouette of another H-53 following close behind.
On landing, I slipped in the dark on the oil slick ramp and nearly broke my neck. Curses, curses.
GOD’S WORK
With my work completed at the base a few days later, I waited in the dark for a lift back to Al Asad. Suddenly, a roaring swarm of helicopters blasted sand and dirt into the air and into my face. I hid behind a T-wall, then made my way to a tent to get out of the sandstorm.
There, I met Army Private Jorgensen, a big, affable soldier from Provo, Utah, a Mormon.
He told me he’d been at Ramadi for eight months. When he arrived, there were firefights daily and he saw few people on the streets. Now, attacks were down to every couple of weeks, and citizens were outdoors, waving and smiling at American soldiers. He said the people of Ramadi were tired of being bullied by the insurgents, whom he described as well-financed Iraqis and mercenaries from Syria, Egypt, Korea and China.
While Jorgensen said he wasn’t overly religious, he believes we Americans are doing God’s work in Iraq.
A few weeks later, I was driven out to the flight line at Ramadi to return to Al Asad. Lounging to the side of a hut was a smiling young Arab interpreter, modishly dressed and reeking of cheap cologne.
The kid was a phenomenon. He spoke English so well you could tell he was thinking in English. He told me much about ancient Mesopotamia, the architecture, history, religion. He pulled out a copy of the Quran, showed me the beautiful Arabic script that you read from right to left, from the back of the book to the front.
He lived in Sadar City, and acknowledged he could be killed for collaborating. He was just 20, a student of statistics at a university in Baghdad. I learned from him that the Iraqis get along fine with Iraqi Jews and Christians, but they simply hate Israel and, maybe even more, Iran.
He told me Iran started the Iran-Iraq war, and that I could go online to find out that Israel planned to take over the entire area between the Euphrates and the Nile! All this from a very intelligent kid, too bright and too young to hate so much, I thought.
VIEW FROM HOME
The worst thing about living in a place like Al Asad is the utter lack of privacy.
There are the public latrines and showers. You sleep communally in an open stall in a tent, work elbow-to-elbow in a trailer with the same people 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week. You get up from your desks, drive together to the cafeteria, eat elbow to elbow. Sneeze, and the same three or four people murmur, “God bless you!” I don’t want to be God blessed. I just want to be able to sneeze and sleep in private.
In June, I returned to the United States for a few weeks of R&R. I was able to gain some privacy at last. But I still hadn’t learned enough about the real Iraq to assess our chances in the war. Therefore, I have returned to this unpleasant place for a while longer.
A friend, cynical as ever, e-mailed me as I departed.
“So how’s the ‘surge’ working over there?” he wrote. “Can you walk down the streets alone and unarmed, admire the women in their summer burkas? Maybe stop in the local café and have tea with Iraqis as they tell their love of democracy and the U.S.?
“Sorry, I’m daydreaming again. Stay safe.”
Rick Stager resides near Pottstown. Two of his children graduated from George School; a son lives in Fountainville in Central Bucks. Stager continues to be stationed at Al Asad.
July 28, 2007 8:35 PM
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