Mar 30
For foreign workers on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, war can be hell. This is the story of foreign workers employed as support staff on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This article has been published in the June 6, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. Read the full article here. Photos by Peter Van Agtmael.
The last time these guardsmen were in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina left many of them homeless. Now the oil spill is threatening their livelihoods.
(As published in Slate.)
Sgt. 1st Class James Scaruffi ought to be having a good night, at least by Baghdad standards. On the grill before him, burgers fry alongside a giant vat of spicy shrimp étouffée, his favorite Cajun dish. On the patio nearby, a half-dozen cheerleaders from the New Orleans Saintsations have just arrived in black-and-gold miniskirts; they plan to spend the night at Camp Victory’s Joint Visitors Bureau hotel, where Scaruffi works as a full-time cook with the Louisiana National Guard. Although he’s whipped up gourmet dishes for a steady stream of high-profile guests since March—from Gen. George W. Casey Jr. to rap star Twista—this may be as good as it gets: gumbo, girls, and a Black Eyed Peas dance routine on the Saddam-era veranda.
But Scaruffi’s attention is focused on the flat-screen TV in the chow hall, where Fox News streams the latest images from the Deepwater Horizon fiasco: Oil-slicked turtles washing up on the shores of Grand Isle, La. Nasty tar balls sending their stench toward his native Metairie, La. Unemployed workers raging outside the bayou’s fisheries and shellfish-processing plants, where Scaruffi once made a good living repairing shrimp-peeling machines.
“It’s crazy,” he sighs, shaking his head at the consequences of the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. “Doesn’t it seem like every time we get sent to Iraq, things fall apart back home?”
In a word, yes. Scaruffi ranks among the 3,000 or so Louisiana National Guardsmen who already know what it’s like to survive a draining yearlong deployment in Iraq, only to watch on a chow-hall TV screen as an ecological crisis ambushes their home towns, livelihoods, and cultural inheritance. His unit, the 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team from Lafayette, La., shipped off to Iraq for the first time in 2004. “It was the kind of tour,” he recalls, “where you watch seven of your guys get blown up in the Bradley right in front of you, then go back out on patrol the next day.” Over the course of the deployment, the unit lost 32 soldiers. Then, nine days before they were scheduled to go home, Katrina beat them to it.
The whole unit was hit hard by the storm. Scaruffi, then an infantryman, returned to his home in Kenner to find his living room under three feet of water, toxic mold creeping up the walls. Nearly 80 percent of the brigade’s artillerymen—most of whom came from New Orleans—were suddenly homeless or jobless, according to unit officials; their historic Jackson Barracks was also destroyed. Many spent their first weeks back from war frantically searching for their families. Others found themselves pressed into immediate recovery duty, patrolling the fetid streets of the Lower 9th Ward in an effort to reclaim rotting corpses and suppress looting.
“I guess it took a while for it to really sink in, but after about a year, I didn’t know a single person who wasn’t seriously depressed,” recalls Sgt. 1st Class Marc Soileau, now a platoon sergeant for the Louisiana National Guard’s JVB in Baghdad. He spent the first 10 days after Katrina performing triage in the Superdome, loading medical patients into crowded Chinooks and Blackhawks for evacuation. “I think a lot of us were just starting to recover from the whole experience [of the storm], and now there’s this.”
By “this,” Soileau means the BP gusher, which sent an estimated 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf—between 35,000 and 62,000 barrels a day for three months—before the rig’s successful capping on July 15. He expects the spill’s aftermath will devastate not only the physical ecosystems of his native bayou, where his family has lived since the 18th century, but also the industries upon which many guardsmen depend for work: oil, fishing, shrimping, tourism, and hospitality.
Regional experts back him up. Last month, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that Louisiana was one of only five states across the country to experience a rise in unemployment, with its jobless rate increasing two-tenths of a percent in June to 7 percent. An equally grim report from Moody’s Analytics predicted that “nearly $1.2 billion in output and 17,000 jobs will be lost in the Gulf Coast states by the end of this year.”
More damning still, a team of scientists with the University of Southern Mississippi and Tulane University in New Orleans documented the first evidence of oil droplets appearing in the larvae of blue crabs and fiddler crabs from Louisiana to Pensacola, Fla.—a sign that the region’s food chains may be destabilized for months, even years, to come. Despite the rate at which surface oil seems to be dissolving into the Gulf, thousands of square miles of state waters remain closed to commercial and recreational fishing at present, and only about one-third of Louisiana’s shrimp, 20 percent of its crab, and 20 percent to 30 percent of its oysters are being harvested—an alarming statistic for a state that normally draws $2.4 billion a year from its seafood industry. It’s little wonder, then, that a recent phone survey led by two professors at Louisiana State University found nearly 60 percent of coastal Louisiana residents to be “constantly worried” about the fate of the Gulf Coast in the disaster’s wake, with 43 percent attesting that it had prevented them from focusing on their usual jobs or work.
Seven thousand miles away in Baghdad, the mental-health professionals and chaplains of the 256th Infantry Brigade are also feeling the effects of the BP slick. “I can tell you for sure that our Louisiana soldiers are stressed to the max right now,” says Chaplain Paul Polk from his office at Hope Chapel, where a poster of a grenade hangs in the waiting room with a “Take a Number” note tied to its pin. “I’ve seen a lot of guys who are very concerned about the future of the Gulf Coast, plain and simple; their livelihoods depend on it. I try to provide a listening ear and relieve some of the stress, but what can I really do?” Polk takes a deep breath. “Imagine you’re deployed in a combat zone, and then you watch the news about how the spill is devastating your community and the local wildlife and have to wonder if you’re still gonna have a job waiting for you when you get home—well, that’s more than some of our guys can bear. … They want to know: How long will the waters be unfishable? How will our guys in related industries take care of their families?”
Even before the arrival of the Saintsations pep squad, Sgt. Scaruffi’s chow hall and the entire JVB hotel has been a place for the unit’s southern Louisianans to ask these sorts of questions, and also to escape them. Based in one of Saddam Hussein’s former hunting palaces, with opulent marble floors and chandeliers, the JVB caters to hundreds of celebrities, politicians, and high-ranking military officers each year, from Vice President Joe Biden to actor James Gandolfini.
The front desk is run by a group of disarmingly cheerful musicians from the Louisiana National Guard’s 156th Army Band—a piccolo-playing geometry teacher; a band conductor who gleefully presides over a cupful of “Ragin’ Cajun” pencils; a talented young pianist from Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., who recently won Camp Victory’s Battle of the Bands. This is the first time the band has been shipped off to a combat zone since World War II, and many of its members had previously assumed their job was nondeployable. The news only began to sink in when the musicians attended a pre-deployment training at New Orleans’ luxury Roosevelt Hotel in such exotic combat skills as “telephone etiquette,” “table service and housekeeping,” and “customer service strategies.” The reality sunk in even deeper this summer, when one of the band’s members committed suicide in the Green Zone just weeks after another Louisiana National Guardsman from the same high school in Ouachita Parish died from a vehicle rollover in Al Diwaniyah.
Now, as the band and much of the rest of the JVB staff—cooks, contracting officers, security—begin returning home this month, they’re hoping to find their state’s shoreline something like they left it. “I can’t imagine anyone who won’t be affected, though,” says 1st Sgt. Bryan David, who works for a company that flies oilmen out to offshore rigs. “Everyone from the southern part of the state has family in the oil business or supporting the oil business. Everyone.”
If the unit’s coastal soldiers have one thing going for them, it’s the trademark resilience that’s carried them through four major hurricanes and two combat tours in the past half-decade. A pamphlet called “What Is a Cajun?” found in the JVB’s lobby explains: “A true Cajun … is a man of tolerance who will let the world go its way, if the world will let him go his.”
These days, even the guardsmen from up north seem possessed of a certain old-school Acadian nonchalance. Some count down their last few nights in Baghdad on the veranda, hitting golf balls toward the mission headquarters beside a sign that reads, “AINT YOUR MOMMA’S HOUSE PICK UP YOUR CIGARETTE BUTTS.” Others converse by Skype with their wives and husbands about what they plan to do when they get home (“Destroy my liver!”) or vent about the BP crisis online (“We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t plug an oil spill?”).
And Sgt. 1st Class James Scaruffi? He continues to do his thing with frozen shrimp, daydreaming all the while about what he’ll cook up with the real ones when he gets home. “Shrimp po-boy, shrimp jambalaya … I can pretty much make it all,” he explains. “If there’s any left by the time we get home.” And if not, BP beware. “If you cross a Cajun,” says the pamphlet in the JVB lobby, “he’ll give you the back of his hand or the toe of his boot.”
Since the official ‘end’ of major combat operations in September, what’s become of the 50,000 U.S. troops still in Iraq? Some are ducking the occasional mortar fire that still falls on U.S. bases. Some are running marathons and making music videos to keep themselves from going stir crazy. But many are engaging in an ambitious form of soldiering-turned-diplomacy known as “key-leader engagements” (KLEs), an increasingly central part of the U.S. military’s long-term strategy in Iraq.
(As published in The Atlantic.)
KLEs, as defined by the Military Review, seek to use informal meetings and “friendly, ordinary conversation” with local Iraqi power brokers as a tool for “altering the opinions and attitudes of the [Iraqi] population” and pursuing “information objectives.” Translation: drink a little tea, smoke a little hookah, maybe ride horses or tour a local soap factory. Ostensibly, these new ties can be cashed in for counterinsurgency mojo – the right to swap intel with Sons of Iraq militiamen, say, or to broker the construction of a solar-powered water treatment plant.
I had a chance to witness these kabuki missions up-close several months ago, when I rode along on a key-leader engagement to Tikrit. It was a mundane eight-hour mission with the 2-32 Field Artillery to visit local big shots at the outskirts of Saddam Hussein’s hometown. (Apparently, his legacy dies hard; in the marketplace, Arabic graffiti still reads “Paradise for the hero Saddam,” and watches emblazoned with his face are hot commodities.)
The typical KLE starts with a safety briefing from a sergeant: in our case, what to do if we get hit by a “frickin’ IED” or experience a “frickin’ vehicle rollover.” Then comes a snack load-up. Because these missions often entail waiting around for hours in hot parking lots and palm groves, the guys in my assigned vehicle come prepared with a copy of Maxim and a cooler filled with Rip-Its, plastic-wrapped honey buns, and Jack Link’s Teriyaki Chicken Nugget Jerky.
“It’s the Beverly Hills of our A.O. [area of operations],” explains Major Pat Proctor of our destination, the neighborhood of Al Alam. “They were the first ones in Sunni Iraq to get in on the ground floor of the Coalition presence, and they’re rolling in dough because of it.” But the lobbing of Russian grenades at passing American vehicles remains surprisingly common – even now that U.S. convoys drive with big white signs attached to their bumpers reading: “Iraqi Partnership Provincial Approved Convoy. Thank you for your patience and support.”
Our first tea-and-goat-chops stop is at the home of Mohammed Ibrahim, a skinny, well-dressed Iraqi contractor in his early thirties who’s reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American presence. He’s invited us to a feast on his living room floor with an ornery tribal leader of the local Awakening Council.
As we drive up to Ibrahim’s sprawling concrete home, we pass his lush fields of sunflowers, okra, corn, and melons. But the thick canopy of fruit trees surrounding the compound is too difficult for our Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which weighs some 26,000 pounds, to navigate. We knock down a few power lines, snap the branches off pear and pomegranate trees, and run roughshod over the pricey new ditch that Ibrahim had been building.
We park and head inside. A Bronx Tale is playing on a giant TV set. Tea is poured. The feast begins, along with the chitchat, which is really why we came here in the first place.
“Hey Mohammed,” says the command sergeant major, “I think we destroyed your ditch.”
“That’s OK.”
“We also took out a few power lines.”
“OK, no problem.”
“But don’t worry,” says Lt. Col. Robert Cain, the unit’s commander. “I’ve got a project for you: how about you raise all of the illegal power lines up five feet?”
Everyone laughs, and I assume it’s a joke, a chummy mea culpa. But when I hear Ibrahim’s back-story, I reconsider. Like so many locals in Al-Alam, he’s desperate to avoid an American withdrawal, since he’s made a fortune playing jack-of-all-trades for U.S. forces – as a power line putter-upper, a latrine cleaner, you name it. He first started working for the Americans as an interpreter in 2003, in his mid twenties. At the time, most Tikritis were rallying around Saddam, or else were too terrified to be counted among the pro-American “collaborators.” On the local U.S. base one day, Ibrahim scored a job emptying soldiers’ Port-A-Potties, and he worked his way up from there to bid on and win a construction contract to help build a local school with Coalition dollars. After that, one contract spawned another, until Ibrahim found himself where he is now: running a veritable reconstruction empire in the neighborhood that handles everything from the desalinization of local farmland to the erection of a mega power line stretching all the way across the surrounding desert to Tuz, not far from Iran. If Al Alam really is the Beverly Hills of Tikrit, Mohammed is the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and it was cooperating with the U.S. that got him there.
The feast arrives on big silver platters: goat, chicken, stuffed grape leaves, cantaloupe. We sit cross-legged on the floor and eat, as they chat some more about the power line project funded jointly by U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi government. Then we pile back into our vehicles and head out, wreaking more havoc on Ibrahim’s ditch and knocking down some more power lines. Our driver sighs, “Could we have found a route with more wires?” The wire problem gets bad enough that we have to stop to disentangle ourselves. The whole convoy is wrapped up, Medusa-style, in the same power lines that the Americans have been trying desperately to erect since the war began.
Eventually, we move on to the home of the late Lt. Col. Ahmed Subhi Al Fahal, a brash Iraqi counterterrorism officer who was killed by a suicide bomber outside a jewelry store last December. “It’s important that his family know we still care,” explains Maj. Proctor.
It’s not long until Lt. Col. Cain is sitting in a neon lawn chair outside his former ally’s house as the dead man’s tattooed mother, “Mama Ahmed,” cries and berates him about the delayed trial of her son’s killers, then asks for medicine for her headache. The “engagement team” sips tea and tries to convince Mama Ahmed to be patient – “The rule of law has to work its way out.” Meanwhile, a few enlisted guys run around with the widow’s kids, doling out the star-shaped tubes of Hannah Montana nail polish that were sent along in an aid donation package. “No dad,” Col. Ahmed’s young widow says to me in English, pointing at her five-year-old daughter who is now painting my nails. “Dad dead.”
We leave after a few hours to head back to the U.S. base. We’ve eaten some tasty, if stomach-churning, goat. We’ve downed two cans of Rip-It each. We’ve sweated ourselves into Chris Farley territory. Lt. Col. Cain and his command sergeant major have spent the day chatting with an impressive troika – a blinged-out contractor, a former insurgent, and a grieving mother – and can come away with a dose of good will for a range of projects. Mission accomplished; key leaders engaged.
For many of the 50,000-some U.S. service members who remain in Iraq, this is what the conflict has become. It’s often awkward, boring, and slow. But as they sip tea and stroll the palms, U.S. soldiers are still risking their lives, and sometimes losing them.
Sgt. David J. Luff, a 29-year-old from Hamilton, Ohio, was shot late last month by a sniper while on a key leader engagement in the same neighborhood of Tikrit we rolled through for tea and politics. The U.S.-led conflict in Iraq may have entered a “drawdown,” but it’s still a war.
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