We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren Read Free Book Online

thousand times a day. The American military had always depended on a community of Filipinos to staff its bars and curio shops, so these workers may have been brought in just for tradition’s sake.
    In addition to the Filipinos, there was a contingent of very young men from the slums of Uganda who guarded most US military facilities. Paying Ugandans saved money because guard duty was boring until it became suddenly violent; then it was boring again for a long time. Americans did not want to do such work, and it cost a lot of money to get Americans to volunteer for the Army. Ugandans were cheap, they knew about weapons as former child soldiers, and for some reason the contracting company had a connection into Uganda. (The Embassy used a different contractor and so was guarded exclusively by Peruvians.) For the same reasons Mexicans cut your lawn at home and Hondurans cleaned your hotel rooms, your Army guards came from Uganda.
    The Ugandans were a sad group. Manning the guard towers at night, they could sometimes be heard singing to one another, sweetly calling out to a fellow countryman two hundred meters downrange but even farther away from home than we were. The Ugandans spoke only a few words of English and just could not deal with the cold. In winter, the desert gets cold at night, and for months Iraq is semitemperate and often rainy. Guarding things tends to involve standing still or walking around outside, a bad mix for the Ugandans. As soon as the weather cooled off even a bit, they would break out an amazing collection of nonstandard colorful wool caps and heavy gear, to the point where one poor guard was wearing hockey gloves to keep warm.
    I’d learned from one of the US citizen supervisors that a Ugandan guard might make $600 a month, with much of it owed back to the brokers and middlemen who helped him get from Africa to Mesopotamia. The Ugandan could also be fined by his supervisor up to $100 for lying, sleeping on duty, or some other infraction. A US citizen supervisor might make $20,000 a month, tax free, with benefits, while in Iraq.
    Iraqis
    Aside from the few local Iraqis who ran the small hajji shops and commuted in and out of the FOB, there were two other groups of Iraqis who worked with us, the Iraqi Army and our own imported Iraqi Americans.
    The US Army units I embedded with sometimes trained the Iraqi Army, who were now our allies against the insurgents. The Iraqi Army did not live on the FOB but often hung around for meals and to buy things at the franchise shops. The training seemed a bit nonsensical at times, consisting of either rote simple drills or over-the-top complex vehicle maintenance lessons that were a struggle for the many nonliterate enlisted Iraqis. Training the Iraqis was clearly regarded by our side as among the worst duty in-country. The Iraqis were gleefully a Third World organization, in the opinion of the soldiers who worked with them, and were considered sloppy about discipline, casual with their weapons, and adamantly untrainable. As a token of our conquering them, the Iraqi name tags were in English and Arabic, which must have pissed them off every time they looked in the mirror. An Iraqi general who often visited always had his ten-year-old son with him, wearing an exact replica of Dad’s uniform, right down to the gun in a holster. An American soldier who tried talking to the kid discovered that the gun was real—and loaded.
    The Iraqi Americans were another tribe who worked primarily as translators. They had immigrated to the United States and become citizens years ago. Most were from Detroit or Chicago, recruited by subcontractors for their alleged language skills. Most of our Iraqi American translators were employees of an Alaskan Native–owned business. This business had one employee in the States, an Alaskan Native far away in Alaska, and subcontracted to some other business that recruited Iraqi Americans in Detroit and sent them to us in Baghdad. To