To Be a Friend Is Fatal by Kirk W. Johnson

Author:Kirk W. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

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When I woke, I had dozens of responses, laden with photographs of bullet-pierced arms and legs and torsos, death threat letters with Muqtada al-Sadr’s rotund and scowling mug in the corner, and scans of US government ID badges. I studied the death threats and found three that were nearly identical, save for the name of the threatened. It was an odd thing to consider that seven thousand miles away some militia member was working away at his own computer, formatting death threats using a list of names supplied by the chewers that waited outside the checkpoints of the Green Zone.

With each round of emails I sent, my messages were forwarded to other Iraqis, who then wrote to me with their own stories. I kept asking for more—more information, more documents, more facts—and the list grew. If I was trying to draw a line around the extent of my involvement, I was doing a terrible job of it.

I stared at the names of a handful of former USAID colleagues on the list and knew that I needed to find out what had happened to the rest. I dug up a warden’s list—the HR roster of all USAID Iraq employees, American and Iraqi—took a red pen, and placed checkmarks next to Yaghdan and Ziad. There were over ninety more. Within a few days, I reconnected with nearly all of them: in the eleven months since I’d left, more than half of USAID’s Iraqi employees had fled or gone into hiding inside the country.

Within a couple weeks of the publication of the op-ed, I had all but forgotten about law school. I submitted some rushed applications and stuffed the LSAT prep books and personal statement drafts into a box in the basement. Every morning, I woke up and worked with a manic intensity on the list, which grew by a dozen names each day. I’d forget to eat at times, wading through the tragedy of my in-box before collapsing into bed with the following morning’s work on my mind.

With each revision to the list, I took the old copy out to the front porch and burned it in an empty flowerpot. There was little risk of anyone in Brighton discovering the names, of course, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Several Iraqis told me that a list of embassy employees had not been shredded but instead thrown into the trash, where it was discovered in a Baghdad landfill by a militia scouring American garbage for intelligence. Names of US-affiliated Iraqis soon appeared on the walls of neighborhood mosques under the title “Traitors.”

December 29 arrived, marking the first anniversary of the fugue state. I felt something resembling relief to be sleeping without pills or nightmares, to see the scars across my face slowly melting into flesh, to feel less brittle in bone and tooth.

But in the inventory of what might qualify as a return to normalcy, much was missing. An oral surgeon’s assistant stunned me by asking me out after staring into the pulp chambers of my incisors and vacuuming up saliva during root canals.

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