Nights in the Pink Motel: An American Strategist's Pursuit of Peace in Iraq

By Robert Earle

Nights in the Pink Motel is the first historical account of the strategic process that sought to reverse the negative consequences of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. It offers details and insights into the Iraqi insurgency and Coalition counterinsurgency available nowhere else. This book is a sustained, comprehensive account of all the conflicting factors that have made Iraq such an intractable international crisis and offers an intriguing narrative of how the American-led Coalition returned sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, while defending Iraq’s fledgling interim government against a rising insurgency and terrorism and helping ensure the success of Iraq’s first national election in January 2005. The author, Robert Earle—recruited by the first U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, to serve as Negroponte’s strategist—documents the Coalition’s uncertainty about the nature of the insurgent/terrorist enemies, whose aim is to defeat democratization in Iraq. Earle’s story explores the impediments frustrating the massive, $18 billion U.S. reconstruction effort and recounts the formulation of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy issued by Negroponte and Multinational Force-Iraq Commanding General George Casey. The title of the book is derived from the name given to the author's dingy offices a former palace of Saddam Hussein in the Green Zone of Badgad where he wrestled with developing a startegy for peace. Upon drafting the strategy, Earle learns he must be evacuated from Iraq because of massive deep vein thrombosis in his left thigh.This narrative twist takes him from the company of senior diplomats, generals, and Iraqi politicians and places him in the medical pipeline of wounded soldiers. Upon arriving home, Earle thinks his nightmare assignment in Iraq is over, but Negroponte requests that he return to Baghdad to write a long message to the President, explaining that U.S. policy is failing and offering an alternative approach. Casey, meanwhile, also wants Earle to assess the evolution of Iraqi politics and possible outcomes of the risky January 2005 election.Returning to Iraq over the strenuous objections of State Department doctors, Earle occupies the dingy environs he calls the “Pink Motel” and completes his assignments, digging deeper into the realities of the international effort to end the violence and build the peace. Nights in the Pink Motel is a graphic, first-person account of the political, military, and human efforts to dispel the fog of 21st century warfare.The book is an essential contribution to understanding how all elements of national power must be combined to defeat insurgency and terror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781612518824

Robert Earle

With more than 100 stories in print and online literary journals, Robert Earle is one of the more widely published contemporary writers of short fiction. He also is the author of the novels, Suffer the Children, In the Blood of Herod and Rome, and The Way Home, and books of nonfiction, Nights in the Pink Motel and Identities in North America. He was a diplomat for two decades (Latin America, Europe, Middle East) and has degrees in literature and writing from Princeton and Johns Hopkins, respectively. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Visit Robert online: robertearle.me

Book preview

1

When Do We Die?

As it plummets toward Baghdad, the C-130’s roar penetrates my bones. The cargo bay is so packed that our knees are zipped together, eighty sweaty, tense civilians you might otherwise see on parents’ night at the local high school. The only person I recognize is Whitey Courts, his platinum hair and craggy Irish mug luminous in the darkness. Courts will be Negroponte’s spokesman. My role will be more unusual. Negroponte has asked me to be his thinker.

Think about what? I asked him when he made this proposal after his confirmation hearing. The two of us were sitting in his State Department office, a map of Baghdad spread over the coffee table. To start with, who is the enemy? he said. We don’t have a good answer to that question. Everyone says something different. I need someone to help me think through the entire agenda so that we can try to turn this around. Would you be interested?

Everything in my life said no. For the last three years, I had been his part-time speechwriter, comfortably producing texts at home in Virginia for him to use at the United Nations in New York. Having retired from the Foreign Service, I viewed helping him at the United Nations as an interesting and efficient way to bolster the battered college fund my wife Mary and I had set up for our sons, Nick and Rob. In my mind, my career in government was over. Yes, I was focused intensely on the Middle East, but not today’s Middle East. My new novel centered on Herod the Great, Augustus, Tiberius, John the Baptist, Jesus, and Pilate. So I’d gone to Negroponte’s hearing to become the first U.S. ambassador to post-Saddam Iraq out of loyalty and curiosity, not with any intention of accompanying him to Baghdad. But as I had listened to the senators question him, I realized he wouldn’t have enough hours in the day to think through the breadth and ambiguity of what he was about to undertake.

A year after the invasion, the occupation was coming to an ugly end. In spring 2004, America wanted out of Iraq. These senators wanted out. The hydra-headed insurgency was burgeoning; bombs were exploding everywhere; our operation to clean out Fallujah had failed; our vast reconstruction effort was stalling. That’s why the Bush administration decided to restore Iraq’s sovereignty and dispatch its most senior career ambassador instead of a proconsul. This act would be a step back, substituting an embassy for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Even so, the senators questioned how sovereign a nation Iraq could be with a government brokered by the United States and United Nations and 130,000 foreign troops on its soil. And Negroponte didn’t have a convincing answer. The truth was that Iraq wouldn’t be very sovereign, but a diplomat couldn’t say that. Words wouldn’t change anything anyway. We’d have to formulate new policies, build new relationships, and take difficult steps to help make Iraqi sovereignty real and enable it to survive. That’s where Negroponte wanted my help. He told me that his interview with the president consisted of one question: Do you think democracy is possible in Iraq? We paused as I digested this oddity, confirming yet again my view of the quirky, arbitrary nature of power and its manifestation in a single personality. But I said I’d consider his proposal.

My psychiatrist wasn’t pleased. You left the Foreign Service to write, Bob. Now you’ve published a novel, and you’re working on another one. That’s your dream. Why put it at risk?

I suppose because Iraq is the worst thing since Vietnam, I answered. What if I can help get us out of this disaster? How do I say I won’t even try?

I’d be more optimistic if we had a different president.

Negroponte says he’ll have latitude. The people at the White House know they’ve made a mess of things.

What about your new book?

I’ll work on it in the off-hours. What else will there be to do?

He remained skeptical—just like the senators—but Mary and Nick and Rob went along with it. It would be a year; there would be two home-leaves. So I told Negroponte okay, and Courts did the same, joining me in a one-week course on how to avoid being kidnapped, how to recognize improvised explosive devices (IEDs), how to triage and treat burn and blast victims, and how to shoot assault rifles. We’d both served in rough places for decades but nothing like this. Again and again, we were given the message that serving in Iraq as diplomats would be a long step beyond hazard and danger. We made out wills. We provided blood samples that would facilitate DNA identification of our remains. We listened to a woman describing how she’d had much of her upper arm blown off, and we’d had a look at the gnarled results.

To avoid a brass enema, I am sitting on my flak jackets. This flying truck is penetrable. It’s plunging in a gassed-out panic, no evasive corkscrew descent, gravity hauling us in faster than the propellers can turn. What’s out there? All I can see are these men and women, their faces drained of expression. Everyone seems to be climbing a steep mental hillside of thought in the opposite direction of where we’re heading. Some of us have been up since four in the morning; it’s now mid-afternoon. We’ve been bused to an Army base in Kuwait where we were served breakfast in a factory-sized chow hall. We’ve been bused to a Kuwaiti air base, where we lined up our luggage on a crumbling service road for the bomb-sniffing dog to inspect. We’ve reloaded our luggage onto the bus. We’ve been told the plane would be three hours late. Finally, we were led out to this C-130 for chalk ten, whose route might take us north to Kirkuk and Mosul or might go straight-shot to the capital—not for us to know until we were airborne.

But now we know. It’s Baghdad, and this plane cannot keep going down forever. At some point, it’s got to hit or be hit. Then, suddenly, it smacks down on a war-chewed tarmac and heaves up dead, motors cut, electronics still whining, its drone incompletely withdrawing from the echo chamber in my bones.

When the back of the plane yawns open, the heat surges in and sticks its fingers down our throats. It’s a violent doctor, this heat. Against all instinct, out we go and discover ourselves in a placeless place with acres of flat crud and furry desert brush in the quivering distance and the oversized accoutrements of a school playground near at hand, meaning the big toy trucks, the big toy tents, the life-sized toy soldiers, the barbed wire, portable latrines, and knee-high barricades.

I join some people around pallets sunk in the dust upon which the luggage will be dropped. We are a slump-shouldered crew, advance party substitutes for the soon-to-be defunct CPA. If you can get there before me, that will help us hit the ground running, Negroponte told me. So here I am. This—God, look at it—is Iraq. A foreman presses us back with uplifted palms. Make room for the deus ex machina, its diesel rant rising, our bags riding on its protruded tongue, everything we will wear, sleep in, listen to, read, and try to keep intact for the next year, if we are not shot, blown-up, or burned in the meantime.

I drag my big bag and suit bag over to my backpack, briefcase, flak jacket, helmet, and gas mask, something like 150 pounds of stuff awkwardly shaped, hard to grab, hoist, and harness. Now what do we do? I call to Courts.

Courts says, Someone said you go into Tent A and tell ’em you’re here.

We stumble over the rocks toward what must be—first of the three—Tent A. I knock myself sideways with the two bags in my hands thumping into my knees until, faced with yet another cement barrier, I start dropping everything.

What’re you doing? Courts asks.

Leaving it here—who’s going to steal it? Look at me: I’m drenched.

Me, too. Courts shucks his load next to mine. We stand a moment catching our breath, both of us shaking. What’s this Rhino I heard about that takes us into the palace? he barks.

Some kind of armored bus, I tell him.

In Tent A—vast, gloomy, and chaotic—we learn that the Rhino arrives when it arrives and it parks where it finds space. You can’t miss it. Only the Rhino can be the Rhino. First come, first served. The crappiness of this experience, its organizational submediocrity, its indifference to anyone who has traveled six thousand miles to help America and the dying Iraqis is appalling. We pass a thermometer by the door: 132 degrees Fahrenheit.

I’m fifty-three, too old for this shit, I say.

Fucking fifty-five! Courts says, jabbing himself in his chest.

I wonder when we get killed.

Soon, I hope.

Scores of people mill beyond the tents, trailers, and barriers. Many are getting into vehicles in an adjacent parking area, privileged by arrangements of which we are ignorant. On agreeing to this gig, we’d thought we were important—Negroponte’s public face and alter ego—but apparently not that important. Each departing vehicle kicks up a cloud of whitish dust that settles in listless spasms on the baked and broiled earth. At our makeshift baggage depot, we agree to scatter in search of the Rhino, spreading our bets. I have an instinct toward a large field to the left of the trailers. Courts thinks he’ll poke around those mystery vehicles, their trunks open, drivers standing at the ready, heads wrapped in bandannas or rakishly topped with weathered outback hats. Who are they? Each little pod of humanity seems to know what it’s about, or at least has keys and wheels. But even though I don’t know what a Rhino is, I can’t imagine a Rhino pulling in there. Too tight. If I were a Rhino driver, I’d go for that field and let the peasants come running to me.

I put on my helmet, Kevlar vest, and backpack, bend down to hoist my bags, and stagger upright. Then, it’s through this miserable talcum dust in fifteen- and twenty-foot increments, probably heading in the wrong direction. Why is it logical that by going out to those busted pallets I’ll get to the Rhino? This would not be an important question if I could live with the consequences of being wrong, but if I miss that Rhino, what do I do out here? There’s no sign of airport buildings for shelter, much less a military base, but at least there’s a folding chair, and no one is sitting in it. I drop the stuff in my hands and shimmy out of the rest. The chair’s seat isn’t connected in the back left corner, but thankfully the rest of it holds me in place. The light is white. The heat bites like horseflies. I’ve been traveling for two days, and the worst danger lies just ahead—the six miles into Baghdad along Route Irish, the deadliest road in the world—but I don’t say to myself how awful this is because there is no room in me for wedding myself to my misery. This is a place I can’t afford to adore with loathing. This is a place I have to leave; therefore, I must keep surveying the sere brush for the appearance of the great gray Rhino. These are the fundamental elements of my purpose and will, and I am collapsed into them past thought.

A thing arrives, followed by a second, somewhat smaller thing. Rhinos! They circle wide and nose in toward the portable latrines, small-eyed, thick-skinned, and clumsy. How many people can they carry? The bigger one stops further away but, because it is bigger, it must be safer, so I gather my possessions and begin chugging toward it. All over this dustbin others have drawn the same conclusion, but Courts, ever his own man, crosses by me, heading for the smaller one. I stumble up to the front door and call in to the fat driver in his baseball cap,

This the Rhino?

What else would it be? he asks.

Going to the Palace?

Where else would it go?

Lots of us now throw our stuff willy-nilly into the luggage hold underneath and hustle inside, squeezing tight against each other because of all our vests, helmets, water bottles, knapsacks, and briefcases. Baseball Cap observes us with porcine indifference. He has examined no IDs, taken no roll. Once he has every seat filled and the air in the Rhino is sweat-ripe and scarce, he trundles outside for a smoke.

Someone says, He won’t go until they’re ready for us out on Irish.

Until who’s ready for us—the insurgents?

The convoy. The gunners. This is a parade. Watch.

There is nothing to do but watch. As Baseball Cap lights a second cigarette, I try to turn my head to examine the inside of our bus. This isn’t easy because my Kevlar vest binds me tight, but in a way the vest is more reassuring than annoying. It’s like a very small tent, my private place, regardless of the man pressing against me on our tiny bench seat, an older fellow in a flowered Hawaiian shirt who says, They lost my luggage. We are too intimate and yet too distant to exchange names, but this information, reinforced by his canine sadness, overwhelms that fact.

All of it? I ask.

All of it. Doggy smiles at me longingly. Maybe he isn’t older than me; maybe he’s just in worse shape. I wonder if it just fell out, he says. I can see Doggy has been brooding about this each step of the way to where we now sit, our faces Siamesed together by the tight seats and our thick vests. I look into his brown eyes, at his heavy eyebrows that could use a trim, at the boyish way his hair flops down over his forehead, the little brown seams between his yellowed teeth, the larger and smaller whisker follicles on his cheeks and jaw, the bristles in his nostrils and ears.

Do you mean out of the back of the plane? I ask.

I don’t know what I mean.

They closed the back of the plane.

What about the back of the helicopter in Kuwait?

What helicopter in Kuwait? Was he in an open-tailed Huey somewhere along the line? Is that how Doggy’s bags ended up being delivered through the roof of some poor Bedouin’s tent? What are you going to do here? he asks. Work for Negroponte, I tell him. Really? You know him? I realize I’ve made a mistake. I dare not say I’ve known Negroponte since I worked for him in Mexico in 1989 because if I say that, I’ll play into the obvious conclusion Doggy has reached that I am the one man in Iraq who can get his luggage back.

What are you going to do here? I ask, heading him off. Procurement, he says, unenthusiastically. Like many people I will meet from the private sector, he is someone who flirted with the senior levels of his profession, lost his footing, and now has no good way to pay the mortgage and tuition bills except by making the Faustian bargain to accept the huge combination of base pay, hardship pay, and danger pay he’ll receive to be a watch-sized gear in the gigantic effort to rescue Iraq from its friends, its enemies, and itself.

I don’t want to go on with this conversation because his neediness and mine are on a collision course. I have a need to get this Rhino going, a need to find out about Route Irish, the Palace, and the things that come after that, when presumably I will have a space larger than this vest to use as my shell and place of retreat. That’s unimaginable now, but it’s got to be there. Otherwise, I have no idea how I’ll live through what obviously is the worst mistake of my life.

2

Running Irish

The Rhino starts rolling into the scrub waste; I remember seeing it on TV when U.S. forces assaulted the airport more than a year ago. We grow silent, assuming that this is the beginning of Route Irish. What do we know? Baseball Cap simply called, Helmets and vests or we don’t move, as he cranked over the Rhino’s massive diesel, injecting a thin stream of air-conditioning into the sealed oblong box in which we are encased. The Rhino clanks from first gear into second, where it whines along at eight, nine miles an hour. Is Baseball Cap going slow because going fast would shake the Rhino off its frame? I stare into thickets of desert grass as if they were full of meaning. We scrape by crumbling berms. To the left, we see an open field. It’s a carcass of a landscape, the world shot dead. This can’t be Irish. No, it’s a utility road, just a scar in the corpse’s breast.

We stop. The Rhino’s air-conditioning dies. The heat whispers hello. Open the goddamn door! someone yells. I ain’t opening the goddamn door, Baseball Cap yells back. Then, we go. Go faster. Front wheels, then back wheels, onto a real road—is this Irish?—and stop again. I push up out of my seat to get a look through the windshield. Before I bounce back down, helmet hitting the overhead rack, I see we’ve tucked in behind a Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on its roof and a soldier lounging against it in full battle gear, the sweat stains below his armpits frosting his vest with salt. Another dirt-brown war wagon, its machine gunner more alert, rolls toward us on the other side of the roadway. I deduce it will circle around and cover us from behind. We’re going into battle formation; that’s how we’ll make our run.

Several minutes pass. We’re suffocating again. I glance at Doggy’s face, and then, I follow his stare toward the front of the Rhino and push myself up again to see what’s transfixing him. The drama of our situation is vividly symbolized by the adrenaline-quickened frenzy of the machine gunner up there. He’s not slouching against the fender anymore. He’s up top, swiveling his gun rapidly from side to side as we rev and roll, working the flats on both sides of the highway, swinging his gun like a club. Baseball Cap gets the Rhino going as fast as it can go, its mass in motion both a huge target and its best defense. We may be going forty, but in counterpoint to the exposed machine gunner ahead of us working the flats on both sides of the highway it feels like ten or twenty. Our beast’s big engine is maxed, yet nothing seems to change, or it all changes so slowly that this flat road—not a sixty-foot kill zone but a six-mile kill zone—feels impossible to ascend. On and on we grind. If our speed is measured by bullets or rocket-propelled grenades ready to zing our way out of the creases in this heat-warped plain, we are getting nowhere. Every second is a weird empty page.

I look at our whirling gunner. I think about getting flipped. I think about trying to get out. This experience is not easy. This experience probes and tests me. I am wholly in its grasp; it’s riveting but look, look, buildings! The outskirts of Baghdad begin to bloom in broken crusts of brown, crumbling masonry and mortar, windows without glass, doorways without doors, yards without grass, trash strewn everywhere, burned-out cars. But watch out, here comes an overpass. A sniper could be up there or down below in the shadows of its concrete pillars. Our machine gunner knows this. He loops his tool all over the place, up, down, this side, that side. Where are we going to get it? Who’s he going to spray? Then, my God, there—deep in that swale of sewaged earth—I can’t believe my eyes: a solitary soldier is sitting in a decapitated sandbag igloo, his machine gun trained on the overpass from the other side, no one with him, no vehicle nearby. Is duty like that possible? One man in the highway wastes with the frozen wave of the battered city rearing fifty yards behind his head? That is the worst job I have ever seen in my life. The heat, the danger.

Baghdad thickens. More ruined buildings. More overpasses. More traffic. Stirrings of desiccated, rusty, death-rattling life. People just driving. Ragged, disheveled people plodding on foot. And over it all, what a strange sight, giant palms, obstinate and tenacious, grandiose, still.

We’re slowing down. What’s going on? A chicane into a checkpoint. Sandbags. Barbed wire. After we slide through, I recognize an enormous building that has been bombed wide open: Ba’ath Party headquarters. We swing around it into a parking lot. All out for Baghdad central, Baseball Cap calls, opening the door to let us out. Watch your step and watch your ass. This ain’t a good place to have too much fun.

Where’s this fucking Palace? Courts asks, dragging himself over to me.

Good question, I say. We can see nothing but Big and Little Rhino, the parking lot, the fence around it, and Ba’ath Party headquarters looming beyond. Someone calls out that we have to line up our luggage again. Now stand behind your bags, we’re told, and when the sergeant passes, identify them. The man speaking is an even more weathered version of Baseball Cap. The fire of the setting sun sears us from the west. The heat hasn’t budged and isn’t going to; it’s appalling, annihilating.

What are those people doing over there with the guy with the clipboard? Courts asks.

I’ll go see.

What about your bags? Here comes the sergeant.

Tell her they’re yours.

I approach the gaggle of people around the man with the clipboard. Before I get there, I am astonished to see them lug their stuff over to some Mitsubishi Monteros and receive cans of beer as they get in. Who are they? I ask. Contractors, I’m told.

I return to tell Courts we should have been contractors. "Cans of beer? he croaks. Now what about us?" I ask. Courts is muling himself up with his backpack, briefcase, and massive suitcases.

We go out that gate.

What gate?

The one over there you can’t see behind that packing crate. And then we go into the Palace, and on the other side they say we get our keys from the housing trailer.

I am not sleeping in a tent, I say, staggering into my own luggage harness.

That’s where I draw the line, Courts agrees.

And I told Negroponte no roommates.

What did he say?

He said he’d ‘inquire.’

Oh, how nice of him.

We stagger to the obscured gate, wedge through it and see, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Saddam’s erstwhile palace. Would you look? Courts hoots. If you were going to be a dictator and make certain everyone else knew it, a palace like this is where you would live. There is a main entrance and entrances on either wing, perhaps 250 yards from one end to another. Dozens of civilian and military vehicles are parked in front. Clusters of soldiers lounge around them in fatigued oblivion. Courts and I stumble their way. This is harder than football practice; this is harder than cutting down trees all day; but I can’t lose my focus. I’m too close to gone. There’s no way I’ll ever last a year out here.

When we finally schlep inside the Palace, I realize there is an organism within its vast, gloomy entrails, something like an ocean-sized school of fish struggling inside Jonah’s whale. And this shimmering, flickering, writhing, dying thing on June 26, 2004—four days before the transition to sovereignty—is the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) digesting itself. Heavily armed soldiers, security details, Ghurka guards, and CPA desk-o-crats enzyme along in every direction, trailing in their wake a chum of fluorescent personal decay. They swim past us in and out of corridors, through doorways, and up flights of stairs. I’m entranced by the young women packing pistols on their hips, ponytails hanging out the back of their baseball caps. These aren’t soldiers in baggy fatigues; they’re some kind of something else. This is a new kind of style to me: pistol chic. Standing in the rotunda for only a minute, we’re passed by at least one hundred armed people. Courts and I exchange a glance full of alarm. High school again but with guns and no teachers! One accidental discharge would trigger a slaughter before our eyes. Is it that dangerous in the belly of the Palace itself? We slosh through to the other side of the building and stare at the sight before us. Where are we? The Florida Gulf Coast? To the right, left, and straight ahead we see tens of thousands of sandbags, dozens of palms, and hundreds of trailers.

There’s got to be at least one of those trailers for us, Courts says.

Two. One for me, one for you.

All right, two.

We find the housing trailer. A line of new arrivals extends out the door, down its wooden stairs and into the grassless dirt. Courts and I push our way in, generating looks. Inside, it’s molasses dark because lights would make it hotter. Packed. Noisy. The walls are covered with keys. Several American attendants are informing newcomers that until the CPA leaves, embassy folks will have to make do with footlockers and cots in the tents. I turn away before I let Doggy see that I’ve noticed him noticing me. Because he has no luggage, he’s gotten in there fast.

Behind the guy working the third desk, I see a woman who looks mildly drugged and will never change in the many months I’ll know her. Nothing shakes or stirs her; she is the perfect martini. I walk over and say, I’m Bob Earle, senior adviser to the ambassador.

Which one? she asks.

Which senior adviser? There’s only me that I know of.

No, I meant which ambassador. We have a lot of them out here.

Negroponte.

Oh, she says. Here, come in with me.

We go into her private cubbyhole. Courts stays behind, trying to muscle a guy at the desk. I hear him barking about his rank, the Foreign Service equivalent of major general.

Martini asks me if I have had a good trip.

Up until now, I can’t say I have. How’s your day been?

My day’s been fine.

You like it here?

Absolutely. I was with KBR in Kuwait for ten years; this is a good change of pace. The little window unit air conditioner is making her black hair wriggle like a horde of daddy longlegs. She must have grown up in Arizona if she likes it here. How long will you be staying? Say ‘at least six months,’ she instructs me.

At least six months, I say, in a trailer by myself with a desk and a chair.

Martini sips herself, growing more tranquil. A desk and a chair? Won’t you have an office?

Yes, but I have a tendency to work at all hours. If I can’t sleep, I get up and write.

What are you going to write about?

How to get us out of this mess.

Martini absorbs this proposition without comment; she doesn’t seem to agree that it’s a mess. Indeed, she’s so centered that it’s not a mess. The chaos outside her office door has nothing to do with her. I overhear Courts barking that of course he’ll share a trailer with someone, preferably an energetic young woman.

We’re in a big crunch with you guys coming in and CPA still here, Martini says, but we can put you in a shared trailer until they go, or you can take one of the half-units by yourself, though it doesn’t have a bathroom.

Where’s the bathroom?

They’re usually not too far.

What about the desk and chair?

Martini enjoys this. Everything around here happens in its own way.

You mean one step at a time?

She nods. What a fast learner I am. So for now you’ll take the half with no bath?

For now that sounds great.

On the way out, I pass Courts, who is doing his own number on a geek at the front desk. I lean close to him and whisper, Make sure you tell him you’re here for more than six months. Like a highly trained running back, Courts spins on the geek and runs the rest of the play. And I’m here for more than six months. Be sure you write that down.

I push into the maze of sandbags and make some false turns before finding unit C-2-L. Inside this tiny shed, there are a bed, a wooden wardrobe, and a chair, and it’s ghastly hot. I turn on the air conditioner; it sprays sand into my face. Then, I trudge back outside and pick up several bottles of water from a large bin. After that I find the bathroom, which is about seventy-five yards away, down the full length of the C row, over two more rows, and out into the dirt again. It’s a full-length trailer with ten shower stalls, ten heads, five sinks, and blessedly clean. I get into a shower, and as the water slops down over me, I begin to tremble. I reach for the soap dish to steady myself.

I don’t fall down in the shower stall, but after I rinse, I step out and sit on a bench wrapped in my towels for a long time. An Iraqi attendant, a young man, comes into the trailer and cleans a sink. I don’t move. He doesn’t move much either, just slowly sponges out the sink and then turns and stands there, looking at me. What a job—cleaning our bathrooms. I can’t make any more of his situation, or my own, than that. I get up, pull on my shorts, slip on my flip-flops, and go over to brush my teeth and comb my wet hair. Thanks, I say to him as I leave. If he nods in reply, it’s somewhere in his eyes. Back in the shed, with the air now actually chilly, I drink some water, lie down, and that’s the last of it as I plummet into a deep place that has been waiting for me. I fall and fall. All night long I fall.

3

The Darkness Hiding Behind the Light

It’s 6 AM. Outside, the palms rise beyond the trailer roofs. The cloudless sky is cerulean blue. No humidity, almost cool—the weightlessness of morning in the desert. Again, it’s just the young Iraqi attendant and me in the shower trailer. This time we nod to one another. So far it’s the best place I have seen in Iraq, the most spic and span, the most agreeably lit, the most functional with a friendly bottle of liquid soap in every shower stall and plenty of hot water. Little sacs of neurochemical memory release a message telling me that I am in an institution like the boarding school that made me a Greek in a Roman suit. That is what underpinned my success as a diplomat, functioning in embassies where the ambassador served as headmaster, and what I will need to fall back on now in a place where the bathroom isn’t my own, the schedule isn’t my own, and my ability to ignore the world around me will be severely challenged.

As I head out in search of food, I monitor my progress by people coming from the opposite direction with Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands. But what really strikes me are the signs.

No cell phones or other electronic devices in the JOC

Keep this door closed

Slave receptacle inside

Welcome to Chokepoint Charlie—Careful with that coffee!

We use Barbicide

Steel Dragons

DOJ/Prisons

Save water, drink beer

Ministry of Trade and Industry

Never Leave a Fallen Comrade Behind

No long guns in the dining facility—Use short-order line

Having no long gun, I enter the cavernous dining facility (DFAC), where Saddam undoubtedly hosted many banquets for his gleaming minions. Now there are food service stations in all four corners and a self-serve unit in the middle. Everywhere else there are tables. Three hundred people can eat at once and do so in constantly churning multitudes four times a day—including a meal served from 10 PM to 2 AM for late patrols and office night owls. The high ceiling reflects the din downward like an enormous satellite dish broadcasting earth back to earth: the scuffling of chairs, the rustle of clothes, the scrape of ladles against aluminum tubs, laughter and complaints shared by the soldiers, contractors, CPA personnel, Iraqi nationals who have been cleared to work in the Palace and have chow privileges—women in headscarves, men in modest suits but no ties—and enlisted men and