The Foreign Service Journal, June 2004

Foreign Service personnel would never need to drive in Iraq and dropped driver training from the DS Iraq course; in fact, I and other CPA FSOs have been behind the wheel in mixed CPA/military convoys, which takes some practice. More to the point, if a driver is disabled every passenger must be prepared to take over. And let’s not sugar-coat what that could mean: it could mean climbing over the seat to shove a wounded or dead driver aside. 3. If you have the option of wear- ing earth tones to a firefight, take it. I have been counseled that my pink Foreign Service-issue, button-down dress shirt was not a traditional choice for battlefield camouflage. Afterward … The rest of the day was anticli- mactic. It was too late to drive on to Najaf before dark (plus the cars needed repairs and new spare tires), so we arranged to stay overnight at the Hilla HQ, a converted hotel. We had a steak dinner with real silver- ware. The hotel even had a bar, where the Salvadorans joined us to drink Corona, shoot pool, watch a little baseball on the Armed Forces Network, and analyze the day’s events. There was no macho postur- ing; we all knew we’d been lucky. I found a few quiet minutes to sit alone on the hotel balcony looking down on the palm trees and the moonlit Euphrates — through a screen of RPG netting — and call my wife again. Throughout the evening, our Hilla-based friends and co-workers searched us out to offer congratulations and commiseration. Our good Spanish Army friend, Major “Kiké,” had experienced two ambushes of his own in previous weeks, and it was a running joke that nobody wanted to ride with bad-luck Kiké. So his first words to me that evening were, “Phil, this time it’s not my fault!” The regional Women’s Programs Coordinator, Fern Holland, rushed out along with her local assistant Salwa Oumashi to offer hugs and sodas. We last saw Fern late in the evening sorting piles of children’s books for delivery to schools. Bob Zangas, a media development officer (and a Marine Reservist who had fought in the liberation of Iraq, then sought a CPA job so he could help to rebuild the country), joined us in the bar. When Grace had gone off to her hotel room for the night, the rest of the team gathered in a cozy bunkroom of our own and prepared to sack out. It was a real bonding experience with the Salvadorans. None of them spoke more than a couple words of English; three of our team had good Spanish but for the rest of us, the relationship was built on pidgin and hand signals. Over a final quiet drink in the bunkroom (the Salvadorans aren’t supposed to drink in Iraq; please don’t tell their colonel we made them, although he is intensely proud of them for bringing honor on the Salvadoran Army and might look the other way — once), we told them, not for the first time, that we were proud to have such professionals on our team, and that we always felt safe with them. (Besides the odd firefight, these guys have stared down mobs for us.) They told us, also not for the first time, that they were proud to work with us and would willingly die to protect us. We responded with Patton’s well-known line about how you’re not supposed to die for your country; you’re sup- posed to make the other guys die for their country. The squad found this quite funny. Then Gato, who had been wounded in action as a teenage sol- dier fighting communist guerrillas in the 1980s, told us that he and his men were in Iraq to fight for peace, and they hoped Iraq would become a nation at peace. He added that they were especially pleased to be supporting the U.S., which had done so much to end terror and support democracy in El Salvador. Gato might barely have heard of Iraq a year earlier. He doesn’t have the most nuanced view of geopolitics. But at that moment I would happily have put Gato on CNN or BBC to explain the concepts of good and evil to the talking heads who have for- gotten. Safely back in Najaf four days later, we learned from Kiké that Fern, Salwa, and Bob had been ambushed and murdered on the Karbala-Hilla road. They were the first CPA civilians to die in Iraq. Their deaths hit the Najaf team hard, in part because we knew them, and in part because of the reminder of how close to death we had also come on the highway. But we also grieved because Fern, Salwa and Bob had devoted themselves to helping Iraqis build a foundation for peace and freedom in their torment- ed country. We grieved. Then we got back to work. I am very proud of what we are trying to accomplish here, and proud of the people around me. 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 4 We later told him he would have to pay for the windshield, horrifying him until he realized we were kidding.