Fort Apache, Iraq

"We drove the streets, spitting Beanie Babies in all directions."
(photo: Matt Taibbi; plus: See his video.)

"What happened? I got blowed up," said Matthews, who told me right up front that he disliked the media. "I blew up at this one reporter," he snarled. "She was like, 'So you saw an IED?' And I was like, 'Motherfucker, I touched an IED.' I got six pieces of shrapnel in my face, so don't talk to me about seeing."

The guys in the squad listened vaguely to the story, then jumped in their vehicles and drove off, past the spot where the sniper had picked off one of ours the night before, past the spot where the other MP had caught shrapnel in his chest two nights ago, and then finally out of town and due north. If the enemy was watching, we didn't know it; not even a cat crossed our path all day long. Eventually we made it to a Kurdish city called Irbil, where everybody loved us and we got to stay in a hotel and eat pizza and watch shitty American soap operas on a giant projection television in the hotel lobby, where we lolled around with our feet up on the furniture like cows sleeping in high grass.

Kurdistan is paradise for American troops. "If only they were all Kurds" is something you'll hear said often by soldiers. Oppressed for centuries by Arabs of all stripes -- Sunni, Shia, Syrian, Iraqi -- the Kurds have been legitimately worshipful of American troops. This raw countryside with low, rolling mountains and smiling dark-haired men and women in Western dress provides a stark contrast to the rest of Iraq, covered in garbage and full of people who sneer in the best-case scenario.

The rumor in Kurdistan is that the local Kurdish militia -- the formerly anti-Saddam guerrillas, the Peshmerga -- will kill ten civilians for every American killed, which means you can walk the streets here. So we walked the streets, with their old markets of hanging clothes and cheap gold chains and big baskets of nuts and fruits, bought ice cream, winked at girls and snapped pictures of ruins. Conquering heroes. We were Donald Rumsfeld's wet dream.

But later that night, after we visited an Iraqi-police target-shooting range, a somber mood fell over the squad. Who knows what it was. Maybe it was because it didn't really feel right being here, if you weren't getting shot at. "I'd just like to feel like I was participating," said Cpl. Jimmy Shepard, an affable weightlifter. The lot of us were crammed into a pair of civilian SUVs run by the MPs up there -- they have no need to drive in armor all the time in Kurdistan -- and on the way home from the range, everyone's head was hanging as the sun went down on another incident-free day. The 158th is a wonder when it's loose and working; it doesn't do too well with silence.

Just then something horrible befouled the air: One of the guys farted, breaking up the somber moment. It was the perfect response to the overserious "war is hell" vibe threatening the atmosphere.

"That shit just ain't right," Spicer protested.

"That's as wrong as two boys fucking," agreed Wilkerson.

Then the group broke out singing a song called "Gay Factory Worker From the South" and the mood was restored. The trip ended a few days later without incident. The 158th was never going to get hit.

II. THE BIG SCORE
Porkfest in the Desert
Iraq is many things -- a horrifically dangerous war zone, a crumbling nation-state, a lousy place to buy a blintz. It is also a privateer's paradise, a macro version of one of those department-store contests where the contestant gets to run up and down the aisles cramming as much shit as possible into his shopping cart. Except the time period is ten years, not ten minutes.

By the time we reached a Kurdish city called Sulimaniyah, less than a week into my trip, the euphoria I'd felt in my first days with the 158th was rapidly giving way to more predictable feelings of paranoia and self-recrimination. As a journalist in Iraq, you can't help but start to feel like what you are, which is a vermin and an outsider. In many ways, being embedded with U.S. troops in the liberal-media/Michael Moore age is sort of like being asked to march into Sunday services in a Lexington, Kentucky, megachurch wearing an assless biker-dominatrix costume: One is conscious of having been the subject of many past sermons. In the Army mind-set, the relative success and failure of the Iraq War is all a matter of perception, and if you follow that calculus far enough, which a certain unmistakable minority of soldiers will, all of the bombings are actually the media's fault.

Any journalist in Iraq who does not regularly feel the urge to puke his guts out from conscience-sickness is probably not in the right line of work, because increasingly, almost anything he does here is a gruesome betrayal of someone or other -- the soldiers and their mission if he tells too much of the truth, himself and the public if he does not.

I was already beginning to feel weighed down by that issue when we reached Sulimaniyah, having seen things that I knew would fall under the category of "not helpful" if they appeared in print. The job in Suli was a visit/inspection by Currier of the Sulimaniyah Police Academy, a training facility built by the Americans and maintained by a pair of steely-eyed, sun-beaten Las Vegans whom I will call Bob and Ray. As the conduits to American funding of the school and, indirectly, the region, Bob and Ray clearly enjoyed the status of local emirs of the Man Who Would Be King genus, suckling languidly at the teat of the war effort and cheerfully overseeing various budget-devouring construction initiatives. When I arrived, they were in the middle of building a full-size "mock police station," complete with every conceivable bell and whistle for use in teaching recruits, while also training police recruits of various stripes and enthusiasms -- some had been rejected when portraits of Saddam Hussein were discovered in their shirt pockets.

The whole setup reeked of some idle Midwestern retired police officer's ultimate leisure fantasy: a tit job, a nice fat income, an endlessly replicating budget kept thousands of miles and a war zone away from any scrutiny by Washington, a huge staff of mute, mustachioed subordinates to build cabinets and sweep floors, a pool table, a satellite TV and a big yard full of rocks and desert plants to pump a few rounds into when things get slow. Yes, they lived in grim, modular trailers, but that seemed like a fair trade-off for a honey life. I could barely contain my jealousy.

Bob and Ray clearly had a plan in place for Currier's visit: to beg shamelessly for $4 million more to expand the facility. They had already gotten $4.8 million, but who knows what the final cost would end up being. Private contractors play an intimate role in almost every aspect of the Iraq War operation, performing a whole range of tasks traditionally handled by the military -- driving convoy trucks, providing security for government officials and other important personages, even "sucking shit," as the soldiers call cleaning out sewage. The profits can be astronomical, and there is plenty of evidence that costs to the taxpayer are ballooning due to the prevalence of cost-plus contracts, a system under which the more the contractor spends, the more he makes. In cost-plus, every company in a chain of subcontractors simply adds its own percentage profit charge to whatever moneys have been spent -- as high as thirty or forty percent in some cases -- so that a $150,000-per-year security guard may end up costing the government $600,000 or more. Henry Bunting, a former Halliburton purchasing officer, recently said that he often heard officials at Halliburton subsidiary KBR say, "Don't worry about price. It's cost-plus."

It's clear that there is a lot of money to be made in Iraq -- soldiers who are miserable will come back for a few years to get themselves a house or a boat or two. A lot of the contractors seem to be guys like Bob and Ray -- Southern or Western ex-cops or ex-military personnel (according to one report, thirty-two percent come from a few Southern states) who come to the Middle East with halos over their heads "to help," and go home a few years later with that big score tucked away.

Americans are a missionary people; we cannot resist wanting to help other nations. Of course, the Iraqis know, instinctively, that nothing on Earth is more dangerous than an American who visits your land and suddenly gets that goofy-ass Tim Allen Home Improvement-fixer-upper look in his eyes. And it's comical to see how powerful that philanthropic urge becomes when it is attached to 4 million potential dollars. Pleading their case to Currier in the air-conditioned quiet of their trailer offices (plywood furniture, beat-up couch, bookshelf full of Christian hymnals and Michael Crichton novels), the pair began their pitch by comparing their plight to that of a similar training facility the Army apparently had in Jordan, where some $12 million had apparently been spent just on a staff recreation center.

"I mean, if you're going to do that," said Bob, an older man with silver hair, "you might as well just take the money and go light a match to it."

"And here we ask for just $4 million!" complained Ray, a younger type with a slight potbelly stretching out from a striped artificial-fabric polo shirt. "And the money is just very hard to get our hands on."

Diplomatically, Currier said nothing, and the conversation shifted to a discussion of widespread problems with recruits across the province. Seeing Currier's despair at the long list of obstacles, Bob smelled an opening and pounced like an animal.

"I think the thing to do is invest another $10 to $15 million right here and do it right," he said bluntly.

A bold move, but it fell flat. Nothing from the colonel. Bob and Ray were physically leaning forward in their chairs by this point.

Currier: "Do we have training for NCOs, commissars, etc.?"

Bob: "It would be wonderful to run a class for these guys. We'd do some training for them, sure."

Bob smiled. It was the smile of a vacuum-cleaner salesman face-to-face with a housewife. Training? We can do training. Heck, this little baby cleans carpets of all types, from shag to Persian.... Let me show you what I mean, ma'am....

Bob smiled again. It was time for him to bring out his ace in the hole, Maj. Gen. Sabah Jalal Gharib, head of local law enforcement. I would see a number of these inspection-budgetary meetings, and the playbook was almost always the same. The local official, a toothy personage with a lit cigarette, a gray suit and a mustache, was usually introduced by the American bureaucrat-privateer, propped up as the second coming of Fiorello LaGuardia or Augusto Pinochet or both, and praised to the heavens for his hatred of Saddam and his devotion to the cause. He is invited to speak briefly. When he finishes, he is applauded, called a "good guy" and then shuffled to the side. Finally, a request for funding is made. It's the same every time.