IRAQ: Trapped in Taqaddum -- I become a local national

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By Doug Smith in western Iraq

“Welcome to Taqaddum,” the sign said.

I looked at my Iraqi colleague, Saif Rasheed. He shrugged. The name meant nothing to him except “progress” in Arabic. All we knew was that we were on a base somewhere in Iraq’s western desert.

A mechanical problem had cut short our flight to Ramadi. The crew chief told us, shouting through our earplugs in the dark noisy belly of the helicopter, that another would pick us up at 9.

It was dusk. Not too bad. We’d be back on our way to Ramadi in barely an hour. Or so we thought.

A Ugandan guard in a floppy hat who carried an assault rifle across his beige bush jacket stopped us with a humorless stare.

“Search.”

He looked suspiciously at our cellphones, laptop, tape recorder and video camera.

A sign on the wall said all were prohibited, but we were carrying credentials issued by the U.S. military’s Combined Press Information Center in the Green Zone.

“DOD badge?” he asked.

“We’re press,” I said.

Unimpressed, he ordered us into the hooch, a dim room with four handmade benches and a few cots squeezed in the back. Three Iraqi translators from our flight were already there. Two more Ugandans sat at a desk. I saw our passports tucked into an old ledger book.

“We’ll keep these,” one of the guards said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just for security,” she said.

Ugandans, like Bolivians and before them Georgians and Nepalese, are scattered all over Iraq performing guard duty under contract to the U.S. military.

Each group has distinctive traits. But I’ve found them all to differ from Americans in one notable way: Where Americans are comfortable interpreting rules, these quasi-soldiers will only follow them. Lacking a rule that precisely fits an occasion, they will apply one they think comes close.

Thus it was that Saif’s Iraqi passport and possibly my faux Iraqi facial hair put us in the category of Local Nationals, along with Third Country Nationals the absolute bottom of the pecking order of a U.S. base. Not only that, we were outlaws carrying phony badges and contraband.

I asked to speak with the PAO, the base public affairs officer. They had no idea what I meant. They ordered us to put down our bags and move away from them. I was beginning to be annoyed.

“Just let it go,” I thought. “It’s only for an hour.”

At 9, a Marine from the manifest office burst through the door and called the three translators, two men and a woman, all bound for Fallouja. They went with him.

By 9:30, I was growing concerned. I stared down the Ugandan at the desk and said, “I’m going to the manifest office.”

My meaning was clear: “Shoot me if you must.”

I went through a plywood door into the large dark cavern of the hangar. On a row of plywood offices to one side a sign over a closed window said “Manifest.” I knocked. The window slid open.

“That flight was canceled,” the Marine behind the window said.

The next would be at 0900, nearly 12 hours away.

“Can you call the PAO?” I asked.

He didn’t know what a PAO was.

So there we were, in the boondocks of a giant base among people who had no idea how its center worked. The Ugandans had our passports, and no one who could help us knew we were there.

I withdrew to the hooch, resigned to spending the night under the unblinking eyes of the Ugandans. When we asked to use the bathroom, one of them escorted us under arms.

Saif and I laid out our sleeping bags and did our best to sleep through the blare of the Ugandans’ radio and TV, both on at once.

Some time later, I was awakened by a commotion when the three Iraqi translators returned for reasons that made no sense to me then.

As nearly as I could tell from her elevated voice, the woman was saying she couldn’t sleep among half a dozen men, a plea that failed to move the Ugandans.

Since there weren’t enough cots, a young man who had been reading the Koran earlier moved to a wooden bench, giving his cot to the woman.

In the morning, a Marine came in the door and told us to put on our helmets and body armor, grab our things and assemble outside.

Elatedly, we marched back to the runway. There we were told to put down our things and retire to the waiting hooch, a small shack inside a ring of blast wall next to the runway.

A blustery wind had levitated the desert sand. The helicopters were waiting for the weather to clear.

Two hours later the Marine came back and told us to grab our things and follow him. The flight was canceled.

At this point, my frustration erupted. If I had to stay in Taqaddum 12 more hours, I was going to get some work done. In the back of the Ugandans’ hooch I took out my laptop.

Saif told me later that the guard at the desk looked at me as if I was strapping on a suicide belt.

He ordered me to bring him my laptop. Since he had the AK, I complied.

But I kept on going out the door and into the hangar. At the manifest window I unloaded on a Marine named Navarro.

“You’ve got to do something,” I whined.

Navarro followed me out to the hooch. Taking a quick look at our passports, he shook his head in disbelief.

“They’re good,” he said gruffly. “Give them their stuff.”

To me he said, “You go in that hooch.” He pointed to an adjoining building. The words “Outbound Helo” were painted on its side. It was larger than the Ugandans’ hooch, brighter, air conditioned and quiet.

But most important, we were no longer Local Nationals. We were free.

In the confusion, the female translator slipped through the Ugandans’ net and approached Saif. They exchanged a few words in Arabic. Surreptitiously, she handed him a small gold card.

Saif opened his cellphone, removed his SIM card and put hers in its place.

Tearfully, she called her children in Baghdad who hadn’t heard from her in two days.

I felt a twinge of guilt leaving her behind, but I had made up my mind to act.

Saif and I set out to find the PAO.

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