THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH-APRIL 2026 43 the State Department and another restricted circle of readers— “consumers” in proper bureaucratic parlance—in other U.S. government agencies. As I ventured professionally far outside the confines of working in an embassy during that “Wild West” twilight assignment, I combed back through my Foreign Service career to draw on the fundamentals of my life’s work. No Ordinary Diplomatic Assignment The night we landed, I had been held up in the cargo bay (aka seating area) of the aircraft, thanking the pilot for the safe landing, executed with only night-vision goggles and on-board navigational equipment, in the absence of any runway lights. The brief delay—and the impressive darkness—explained the mud I stood in: The few hardy souls who disembarked before me had already found their way, via a graveled path, to a forlorn light several hundred yards distant, marking the tent that served as the arrivals terminal. Not seeing the circuitous path or anyone to show me the way, I had struck out directly for the light (hence, the cold mud around my ankles). Finally, I reconnected with the hard-packed—if still very wet—ground of the dirt runway and made my way to the tent-pole terminal. Several grizzled U.S. Special Forces guys greeted me without ceremony; we climbed into roughed-up armored Land Cruisers and headed down a small highway to the inelegantly named Lafarge Cement Factory military base. It was past 3 a.m. when the plainspoken master sergeant/mayor, in charge of the ramshackle base’s logistics, greeted me sleepily, gave me the Wi-Fi code, and showed me to my small trailer, delicately pointing out “the showers and the shitters” in the adjacent trailer as we passed by. I lived on that sprawling, long-shuttered French cement factory complex. Its hulking, lifeless structures loomed above us as we made our way each day to the unpainted, plywood-walled, six-table café where we shared our meals. Some of us would also trudge to the still-dusty former storage depot turned weight room. Reporting logistics were similarly lean: I had a curtained-off cubby hole about the size of a broom closet, with a scuffed-up laptop, in a small warehouse-type facility retrofitted to sleep, at any given time, 10–15 hot-bunking special forces elements. The makeshift, spartan conditions served as a useful reminder that this was no ordinary diplomatic assignment: The U.S. had closed its embassy in distant Damascus years earlier and severed diplomatic relations with the Syrian government. From that base, I radiated out on day or overnight trips. I visited Arab tribal chiefs in a remote farmhouse in the province of Deir a-Zour, near the border with Iraq, to check on recovery from the aftermath of war and urge them, despite war fatigue and frictions with other ethnic members of our local partner force, to continue supporting the U.S.-led fight against ISIS. I spent time in the heavily damaged city of Raqqa with municipal officials who were working with a handful of State Department personnel to restore basic services, clear the tons of rubble in the streets left over from the titanic fight in the latter half of 2017 to rid the city of ISIS, and refurbish damaged schools and medical facilities. Cold and Muddy Realities On one such visit, as I walked the city’s streets, assessing the appalling levels of damage to the city’s homes and businesses, a local resident accosted me. “Why are you here?” he angrily demanded to know, as he eyed my security detail warily. Understanding I was an American diplomat, he followed up, rapidfire: “Who did this?” He pointed to the vast destruction, adding: “Who will fix it?” His barbed, rhetorical questions were not hard to decipher: He, like many locals, blamed the American side for a significant part of the horrific damage the city had suffered in the fight against ISIS. “The people of this city deserve respect,” he spat out, again speaking somewhat elliptically but making clear he thought the U.S. and the broader international community were refusing to adequately fund recovery efforts. I dutifully shared this exchange with Washington and tried to describe the catastrophic damage, hoping it might convince policymakers that the relatively limited levels of assistance we were providing were insufficient and risked creating grievances and a political vacuum that ISIS could exploit for a resurgence. Throughout my career, I usually had three goals in mind for political reporting: generally, keeping the State Department and broader U.S. government informed; occasionally, feeding State its “broccoli”—getting it to consume information I felt was good for the health of U.S. foreign policy; and sometimes trying to I took refuge in the somewhat comforting corollary that information from the field and diplomatic realities on the ground help inform that policy.
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