But power knew no vacuum in Saddam City. Less than one day after the old regime’s collapse, images of bearded, turbaned clerics covered nearly every vertical surface along the sides of the road. U.S.-sanctioned damnatio memoriae had begun immediately and contributed to the change. The Americans trumpeted the renaming of Saddam International Airport as Baghdad International Airport and the redesignation of Saddam City as Sadr City. The wisdom of the latter change eluded us.
“That guy’s gonna come back and fuck us, sir,” Espera told me. “We just gave the fucker the golden key. Compare his shit-hole neighborhood to the rest of Baghdad. Anyone who doesn’t think the Shia want revenge needs to spend some time outside his air-conditioned office.”
We rejoiced in our new home. Painted in English on the side of the building was a sign: IRAQI STATE TOBACCO COMPANY. The factory grounds included a tall office tower and four warehouses. Fire raged through all but one of the warehouses, releasing clouds of sickly sweet smoke as thousands of bales of tobacco and millions of cigarettes burned. After three weeks of stress-induced smoking and dipping, the Marines rummaged through the one remaining warehouse, gleefully piling cartons of cigarettes in the back of the Humvees.
A concrete wall topped with concertina wire surrounded the compound. Inside the wall grew trees and a small garden. The parking lots were newly paved, and a triple-tiered concrete fountain decorated the lawn in front of the office building. Saddam’s sons had run the tobacco company, accounting for its prosperous feel in a sea of third world desperation. Inside the wall were hundreds of Marines in an orderly camp. Outside the wall were five million Iraqis in an anarchic city. The only human interaction across the barrier was provided by Navy SEAL snipers on the roof of the office building. They had orders to shoot any Iraqi with a weapon. They fired every few minutes throughout the afternoon and into the night.
We were supposed to begin patrolling Sadr City the next day. In the cavernous room where the battalion set up its operations center, I unfolded my new map of Baghdad on the concrete floor. The city sprawled across four hundred square kilometers, with a population of more than five million. It was bigger than Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, or Dallas. I carefully outlined the battalion’s zone in blue marker. The area covered twenty blocks square on the north side of the Tigris. It was the most densely populated part of the city. Other units’ zones abutted ours, so it looked as if all of Baghdad had been carved into manageable chunks.
With most of the Marine Corps and Army converging on Baghdad, there would be a lot of U.S. power in the city. If each small unit took control of a neighborhood and maintained a continuous presence in it, we could accomplish a lot. I envisioned meeting with a town council, maybe sharing tea with the elders, and having the autonomy to address their most pressing needs. Judging by what we’d already seen, I suspected that money, fresh water, and medical supplies would go a long way toward creating goodwill. The key, though, would be continuity. We had to develop personal relationships and deliver on our promises. We had to be in the same places day after day, learning the routines, learning names and faces, and learning to sense when something was amiss. When I finally refolded the map and left the operations center, I felt a new confidence and sense of purpose. The night was warm. As I crawled into my sleeping bag on the pavement, a firefight raged outside the wall. Tracers arced through the dark sky, and I wondered where all the bullets would land.
The next morning, our patrol was canceled. We would be leaving the cigarette factory the following day for another part of the city. First Recon’s zone had already changed. My faith in the postwar planning cracked just a bit. I rationalized that it was a mammoth operation and there would be a short adjustment period as all the units settled into place. But two days after the end of the shooting war, looters and criminals owned the city. U.S. patrols kept an uneasy peace during the day, but the Marines were ordered back inside their bases by sunset. At night, a tide of revenge killings ebbed and flowed across Baghdad as running gun battles consumed whole neighborhoods. We were forbidden to intervene. The consensus among many Marine commanders was that revenge would settle into a natural equilibrium. Instead, it seemed to beget more revenge. A finite supply of goodwill toward the Americans evaporated with the passing of each anarchic day. I briefed the platoon on our impending departure from the cigarette factory and already saw the doubt in their eyes.
We drove north from Baghdad to our new headquarters in a children’s hospital a few kilometers outside the city. Traffic gridlocked the highway’s southbound lanes. Mobs of jubilant people partied their way home after having fled Baghdad weeks earlier to avoid the bombing. Iraqis waved from the beds of dump trucks and the roofs of cars. Marines returned the honks and waves. I marveled at the sheer size of the city, the number of people.
“Can you imagine what it would have been like if these people had actually decided to fight us?” I asked.
“Just wait a few months till we don’t live up to their expectations and they do decide to fight,” Gunny Wynn said, looking grim.
We pulled into the children’s hospital a few minutes after noon. Like most facilities in Iraq, regardless of their intended purpose, it had an air of military order. A gated guardhouse opened to a long, tree-lined road leading to half a dozen whitewashed buildings. Guard towers dotted a sand berm bulldozed up around the compound. Each company moved into its own building of patient rooms, with battalion headquarters settling into what were once the hospital’s administrative offices. The entire place had been looted. Smashed bottles, syringes, and piles of paper covered the floor of each room. No furniture remained; even the light fixtures and switch plates had been ripped from the walls. I sat down to eat lunch with the platoon.
“So, sir, what do you think is going to happen?” Jacks asked the question, but he spoke for the others, and all eyes settled on me. Sitting around and talking with the platoon was my favorite pastime in Iraq. Sometimes I’d come up with new topics just because I didn’t want the conversations to end.
“It’s too soon to say, but I’ll tell you what I hope will happen,” I said. “I hope we’ll stop moving around and be assigned a sector. I hope we’ll patrol in that sector day after day. These people don’t give a fuck about democracy right now. They need clean water. They need to know they won’t get shot in the middle of the night. People put their money on the horse that looks like a winner. We need to convince them that we’re the winner.”
“But what are the odds of that happening, sir?” Corporal Chaffin asked, as he scrubbed a rifle balanced on his knees. “I bet we keep moving around, making promises we can’t keep, and then the normal people will start to see us as occupiers instead of liberators.” Chaffin was fair-skinned with reddish hair. His complexion darkened as he spoke. “Pretty soon, no one will want us here, and then the fucking liberals at home will start to bitch, and pretty soon we’ll be back in Vietnam. Only instead of reading about it in a book, we’ll be living it.”
“I guess I’m more optimistic than that,” I answered. “This isn’t Vietnam — the guys we’re fighting have no superpower support, no sanctuary next door.”