The Great Divide

"HOW WAS IT?” Tim asked as I stood over his desk back in Asad, two days later.

“It was definitely worth the trip.”

He took me outside the office. He told me he had wanted to go with me, but that he was put on standby for a tactical operation, and he couldn’t tell me that at the time. For the first time, I told him about my mini-breakdown in his trailer, and that I’d been terrified the whole time I was gone — traveling, at the Firm Base 1 — and that now I felt like …

He finished my sentence: “You feel like a load is off your shoulders.” Exactly. “Everything you felt, I feel, we all feel, when we go on a mission,” he said. “That’s it. There’s a lot of waiting around, and then it’s your turn to do your duty.”

I asked if we were still going on his mission. “Nah,” he said. “Where you were, that was the real deal. Nothing more I can show you.” We stood in the sun and looked at each other without saying anything for a second or two. I told him about the meeting, and that when it ended, I saw in Yaseen’s eyes a glimmer of … “Hope,” he said, again finishing my thought. “Now you can get why I’m here, right? And why we can’t leave right now. While we’re here, there’s hope. If we leave right now, hope’s gone. That’s something you have to be here to appreciate.”

Well, I said, what about that mortar attack after the meeting?

“Fuck it.”

TWO MONTHS AGO, in Philadelphia, as Timmy and I finish up breakfast and talk, passers-by zip past the windows on 15th Street. I hear holiday music playing in the background: Bing Crosby is singing about coming home for Christmas. His words are optimistic, yet his tone is unmistakably melancholy, as if he doesn’t quite believe the tune he sings. My friend doesn’t have that problem. “The Iraqis want things done now,” he says. “And we want it done now. It’s the way society is. All those little meetings you have, like the one you saw with Cordone, you’re building relationships, and you have to be patient.”

As simple as that. But Timmy is aware, of course, of what the Iraq War scorecard now looks like: In that October vote, the referendum on the proposed Iraqi constitution — the election for which the 5th CAG worked so hard and risked so much — the majority of Iraq’s Sunnis turned out. And all told, 78 percent of Iraqis approved the document. In Anbar Province, however, in cities like Ramadi and Hit, where Cordone, Wheelock, Timmy and the rest had focused their energies, virtually no Sunnis cast ballots. On the day of that election, Ramadi and Hit, in particular, appeared to be ghost towns. The violence in Anbar hasn’t subsided; rather, it has gotten worse, and a ride on the Hit-Haditha corridor still has the potential to be a one-way trip.

The provincial governments that the 5th CAG helped establish do endure, but because of sectarian fighting, they meet on an “as-available basis.” The environment around the Ramadi Government Center is so “unpermissive” that, according to a CAG officer currently in Anbar, before the elected officials can convene there and get down to the business of governing, the center has to once again be made secure. And as the number of U.S. troops dying on a monthly basis in the country has risen, the civil war that the 5th CAG worked to prevent is now largely viewed in the States as a reality, a view that many in the military now share as well. It was hardly a surprise, then, that the reaction to President Bush’s current plan to send more troops to Iraq was overwhelmingly negative.

Yet Timmy remains steadfast in his belief that U.S. involvement is required, and he sees hope for a stable and democratic Iraq. Perhaps that’s because his expectations and his realization of what’s required in Iraq have always been more realistic than mine. “Nothing is perfect,” he says. “You invade a country. And suddenly servicemen are getting killed, and it’s, ‘Oh my God, let’s pull out, let’s pull out.’ The focus is on that.”