August 10, 2006

A Shift in Powers

By Joshua Kors

The road from Kuwait to Baghdad was 11 hours. Brian Powers drove nine of them.

“You're shit nervous. A war just happened, and you don't know what's going on. I'd never been in a war zone before. You're looking for anything threatening. And you don't know what you're looking for. There's a mass of people and trash everywhere.” This was spring 2003, a month after coalition troops arrived, before the insurgency had taken shape.

Powers was part of the 352nd Civil Affairs Command, deployed to Baghdad to help reconstruct the city's government: its police and education department, its banking system, all shattered in the war's crossfire. What Powers didn't expect is for the city to reconstruct him. He entered the Middle East numb, he says, a bachelor, a specialist who in his own words was still “green behind the ears.” Powers left the Middle East two years and eight months later without that green shading, a sergeant whose work caught the attention of the queen of Jordan, a husband with a daughter on the way.

“Wrong Strategy, Wrong Tactics”

Back in the States, Powers was a research assistant at a Washington law firm. A year later, in Baghdad, he was a bodyguard, assigned to protect a lieutenant colonel who was working to keep the Ministry of Education running. The provisional authority was determined to keep Baghdad University up and running, to maintain a “sense of normalcy, even though some of the buildings had no electricity, no windows, there were fires, and garbage strewn all over the place from looting.” Powers says at first, the students were extremely grateful for the effort, and they approached him with gestures of friendship.

That didn't last. Within months, says Powers, the system began breaking down. It started with the payroll.

Powers' unit was assigned to make sure Baghdad's police officers got paid. But the city had no functioning credit system, and the banking system, he says, was barely stable. So police payments were made in cash, by hand. “We'd go to the bank, withdraw three-quarters of a million dollars, drive across town and dole out the money to the police captains.” Chunks of cash that large brought out the worst in everybody, says Powers, and the safeguards to make sure the captains took the right amount of money — or that the money got where it was supposed to go — were essentially non-existent. “You never got a straightforward answer from the Iraqis. ‘You say you have 100 guys? Okay, here's the money for 100 guys.'” Time after time Powers' unit would just take the captains' word for it.

“We did our job with due diligence, but it was all freewheeling cash. The lack of a coherent policy — even an 8th grader would have realized this is not the best way to do it.” Powers says that if they had more boots on the ground, his unit could have made sure the money got where it was supposed to go. But they didn't, so they couldn't.

The sergeant adds that from his vantage point, the Iraqi police captains weren't the only ones with their hands in the military till. He points to Titan Corporation, a San Diego-based defense contractor with annual revenues of approximately $2 billion. In 2003 Titan signed a contract with the U.S. government to provide translation services for $112.1 million. But on the ground in Baghdad, says Powers, his corp was repeatedly without translators. Powers says the translators he did work with were making “next to nothing”: $20 a week. They were given no benefits and on dangerous missions were provided out-of-date body armor.

Powers recalls one female translator who was struck by shrapnel from an IED and died shortly thereafter. “The sad thing about that,” he says, “she and an American soldier in my unit had a romantic involvement. They were going to get married after the war.”

At that, Powers pauses for a moment, reflecting on how the Iraqi operation turned sour. In the end, he says, it wasn't just the Iraqi police or the Pentagon's contractors. It was the military's whole approach — “the wrong strategy and the wrong tactics.” “Our strategic planners didn't understand we were facing an insurgency,” he says. “They confronted it as an opposing army, kicking in doors, making enemies from all the people.”

“The goal should have been to win the hearts and minds of the people. When you win them, that's when you win — especially in a foreign land, in someone else's country, when you don't understand the culture.” Powers says he can't believe the military didn't take that lesson from Vietnam.

But apparently it didn't. Three decades later coalition forces entered Iraq without understanding Muslim culture and, says Powers, without even attempting to understand. The sergeant speaks of troops who slipped their translators some pork, then mocked them for eating the forbidden meat. “I remember a young soldier grabbing an old woman out of her car. She was in her mid-50s, maybe 60s. He grabs her and yanks her out of the car. It's a great offense to grab a woman there. And it was clear she didn't speak English. And of course,” notes Powers, “we didn't have a translator to speak to her in Arabic.”

By summer 2003 the good will that greeted the sergeant and his civil affairs unit was beginning to collapse. In July he dropped by a Baghdad market with some fellow soldiers. Powers had his guard down. Everybody did, he says. One of the soldiers wandered away from the group to look at some music CDs. “It was a split second,” says Powers, his voice a bit clenched. “You open up for a split second — and you learn.”

An Iraqi put a pistol to the back of the soldier's head and fired. The bullet came out his cheek. Incredibly the soldier survived. But he's now a quadriplegic and has lost higher brain function.

“That really brought it home. Because before that everything was calm. We'd been there a few months, and nothing had really happened. We thought, ‘Oh, this is safe.' But the insurgency was just taking shape.” After that, Powers and his unit became suspicious of everything. The violence, he says, crept into his thoughts. “You start thinking, ‘A suicide bomber can walk right in here and kill 50 people.' You don't know who's out there to kill you.”

“It became really acute. You felt insecure everywhere.”

Powers says his unit responded to that insecurity with clenched, powerful faces, masks of authority they took on patrol with them. Initially the sergeant did the same. The reaction he got from the students at Baghdad University was remarkable. “The students stopped talking to us — first, I think, out of hatred, then out of a sense of fear.” Powers, the skinny, spectacle-wearing military man, kept up that facade until one day, a student approached him and deflated the act.

“He said, ‘You don't look like you could kill anybody. You look like a doctor.' And that was great because after that I never tried to put that mean face back on. After that, I put my smile on, and people started coming up to me again. There were other soldiers to wear the mean faces, kick in doors and stuff.”

“To this day I'm convinced that saved me from being shot at a few times,” says Powers. “People didn't shoot us because they knew us. They saw we were treating them with respect. I saw an interview on TV with kids saying they didn't shoot soldiers who they knew, the ones who were nice to them.”

Traffic at the Border

In January 2004, after nine months in Baghdad, Powers was shipped 350 miles west of the capital to a desert that divides Iraq from Jordan. It's a line on a map the British drew, one Iraq and Jordan redrew a few years ago, and says Powers, if the border weren't there, there'd be nothing — just bleak stretches of sand as far as the eye can see. “It was like the desert from ‘Star Wars.' Sand, rock and nothing else. When the wind would kick up, you'd get a sandstorm. Sometimes it was so bad it would blot out the sun.”

On the border are a few gas stations, some abandoned buildings, and a small military facility where Powers coordinated a military good will project, ushering sick Iraqi children into Jordan for medical treatment and helping humanitarian aid pass from Jordan into Iraq.

Powers was also there to put the clamp on human trafficking.

As the sergeant explains, each year Jordanian traffickers, also known as brokers, import thousands of workers from Sri Lanka, Somalia and other Third World countries, ostensibly for domestic labor, construction work and factory jobs in Iraq. After getting paid for each worker, brokers often dump them on the Iraq side of the desert, where they pile up, eking it out in ramshackle buildings, unable to cross back into Jordan without the proper paperwork.

The fear in those workers' eyes, even today, says Powers, it stays with him.

“One was this old man around 40, a short Bengali who spoke really good English. He was desperate. He came to Jordan looking for work. That didn't happen. Subtly he'd ask me for money for his daughter's medical situation. It was nothing but heart-wrenching,” says Powers. “You couldn't help but be moved by them. Finally I broke down and gave him 100 bucks for food.”

But in Iraq, even that money didn't make it where it needed to go. Shortly after Powers gave the old man his money, an Iraqi cop came by and stole it.

The fate for female workers is often worse. Powers says that after receiving females workers, many brokers will rape them and turn them into prostitutes. The sergeant got to see the face of that abuse up close, after receiving a desperate phone call from one of the other workers. “He said, ‘Brian, I got these three girls. They're in bad shape.'” Powers left the base immediately and found the three Sri Lankan women. One was 17, the other in her 20s; the third was 55. All had been drawn to Jordan to work as domestic servants. Now here they were in the desert, living in squalor, dressed in t-shirts and jeans, their skin visibly unwashed.

“The youngest one, she was beautiful. She told me she had been raped. Then she showed me the horrible scarring on her legs where they'd beaten her.” The sergeant says he couldn't believe the inhumanity of it all. “It was just such a horrendous thing for one human being to do to another. And to these petite little women. Each of them, they were like porcelain dolls that you wouldn't want to break.”

In short time Powers became irate. He made caring for the three women a personal mission. He put them up in a building inside the military compound and later, cleared a room for them near the female soldiers' quarters.

Then the handler's brother arrived. He told base officials that the girls were with him, that he had their passports and was ready to take them back to Jordan.

“I was barely able to restrain myself,” says Powers. “I said, ‘One, you're not leaving here. And two, you're giving me those passports.'” Powers called the Jordanian military officer who was working the other side border, an official he'd become friends with over recent months. The sergeant arranged for the handler's brother to be arrested the minute he crossed the border.

Powers took the extra step of explaining this arrangement to the girls, but after all they'd been through, the idea of the handler's brother walking free, leaving them on the Iraqi side of the desert, was simply too much. “The girls were so scared,” says Powers. “They were screaming and crying and throwing themselves on the floor. It took an hour of convincing them that if I let him go back to Jordan, he would be promptly arrested on the Jordanian side of the border.”

Truth is, says Powers, the captive himself was much more scared of that than being in U.S. custody. “The jails over there are run by the Jordanian General Intelligence Department. They're like the nation's secret police,” he explains. “You go into one of their prisons, you're lucky to come out a whole man again.”

In the end the handler's brother was successfully taken into Jordanian custody. And, to insure the girls' safety, Powers spoke with the deputy ambassador of Sri Lanka and drove the girls himself to the nation's embassy in Amman. “When I arrived, there were like 20, 21 women living in the embassy, in the basement, all with similar stories — being raped, taken advantage of.” Eventually the sergeant got the girls plane tickets home. He drove them to the airport, where he and a fellow soldier put their own money in the girls' hands before seeing them off.

Powers' work in this case was so outstanding, it caught the attention of his superior, who mentioned it to the ambassador, who decided he needed to share the entire situation with Rania Al-Abdullah, the queen of Jordan. “Queen Rania is very progressive, a leader for women's rights,” says Powers. When she heard about the raped girls and crooked brokerage houses, she was furious. The queen took the matter to the king, and he told his royal advisors to fix the problem.

They did. King Abdullah's men went down to the brokerage houses in Amman and shut them down.

Powers pauses, sighs, as if to say change comes slowly in the Middle East, if at all. What happened after the crooked brokerages were closed? “Two days later they opened up again, under a different name. Same cast of characters.”

With frustration in his throat, Powers compares his stymied efforts to fight human trafficking with the entire American mission. A lot of soldiers in Baghdad put their necks on the line to do a lot of courageous things, he says, but their efforts can't add up to much if the military's overall strategy doesn't work. On the ground in Iraq, he says, “you're going at 10,000 RPMs, but you're moving nowhere. It leads to a sense of futility — and cynical jokes. Sometimes we'd look at each other and think, ‘What are we doing here?'”

The slave trade keeps going; the insurgency keeps growing. “It was like, yeah, that's the way it is.”

Salam

Before Powers could loose all hope, he was shipped west again, 215 miles to the U.S. embassy in Amman, where he continued his work as a liaison between Jordan and Iraq. The American military has no soldiers quarters in the Jordanian capital, so Powers and his unit were stationed at the Intercontinental Hotel. After living in those one-room stucco constructions in the middle of the desert, the Intercontinental, he says, lay out before him like “the Magic Kingdom.” It had room service, fresh bedding, a swimming pool. And a very special Jordanian girl to pass out the towels.

Her name was Salam. Powers was hooked. “She had this … dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes,” he says.

It's at this point that the sergeant's war story takes a sudden turn. His frustration fades, and his voice begins to bounce, as if fueled by an enthusiasm he can't control. “Now, I'm not a very brave man,” he says. “I'd even say I'm intimidated by anyone who's even slightly beautiful. And her, she was so beautiful, I figure she's being hit on a hundred times a day.”

“But I had to say something.”

Powers didn't. Two months later he and friend were working out at the gym when Salam walked in, caught sight of Powers, and almost tripped. “We had a good laugh over that. I said, ‘Hey … she was looking at me.'” Finally a friend stepped in, coordinated plans with her friend, and set them up to talk. “It was like a high school scenario,” Powers says with a laugh.

Salam approached the sergeant and told him that today was her last day at the gym. At that, Powers gave her his room number. “And she called,” he says, surprise still straining his voice. “I was like, ‘Oh my God.'”

The dating began. First he, Salam and her cousin drove out to a high-scale shopping plaza and hung out in Powers' Citroën for an hour. Later they arranged to meet up at a hotel where Salam happened to be attending a cousin's wedding. Powers chuckles. The meeting was supposed to be a coincidence, he says, “but her mom knew what was up.”

Soon the sergeant himself realized what was happening. “You talk to her, and she's so sweet, so kind — she could have made friends with the devil,” he says. “I thought, she's beautiful, she's smart. It's just not going to get better than this.”

Salam was delighted at the prospect of marriage. But of course, in Muslim culture, Powers had one last hurdle to leap: Salam's father. “Oh, I was deathly afraid of ‘the Arab Father,'” says Powers. But at last he did sit down beside him. They watched Arabic music videos on the TV for a while before the sergeant turned and told her father his feelings. “I said, ‘I love Salam, and I'd really like to marry her.' I think he understood, but Salam translated too.”

“He was formal and polite. But you could see he was happy — because Salam was happy.” Powers laughs. “Later I got to know him, and he's actually a very funny, friendly, gregarious man. I'm really close with her family now, and she's really close with mine.”

Powers' superior officers were just as approving. “We were such a small group in Amman that everyone knew everything about everybody,” he says. When the time came, Powers approached his colonel. “I said, ‘I'm madly in love with her, and I think I want to marry her.' He said, ‘Okay, just know what you're getting into. Besides that,' he said, ‘you couldn't find a better woman.'”

At first the military did hold a policy prohibiting soldiers from dating locals, says Powers. But it dropped the regulation because it proved too hard to enforce. “And,” notes Powers, “it smacked of racism.”

In accordance with Muslim law, Powers converted to Islam, a simple ceremony held in a judge's quarters in which the sergeant affirmed his belief in one God and that Muhammad was His prophet. The marriage was an equally subdued event. Powers and Salam's family signed a religious contract in the judge's office.

Then came the wedding. Powers and his wife returned to the Intercontinental, where they were greeted by Salam's relatives and a Jordanian band blasting away on a bagpipe and drums. Powers' mother, nephew, one of his sisters and her husband flew in from Ohio for the occasion. “Oh, it was just a great family bash,” he says. “Everyone gathered around, and then it was dancing, dancing — dancing all through the night.”

Powers chuckles at the idea that his marriage marks a unique tale of love amidst war. He says that from his lookout in Amman, love and marriage were everywhere. He and a fellow soldier routinely ate chicken at a local KFC. Now that soldier and a worker from the fast-food restaurant are husband and wife. Powers' colonel also met a Jordanian woman; they too are set to be married. “People were joking about us,” says the sergeant. “‘Hey, what's going here? Everyone's marrying a Jordanian woman.'”

Opportunities

Powers and his pregnant wife left for Cleveland in November 2005, just before Thanksgiving. On May 2, 2006, Salam gave birth to their first daughter, Sara.

The adjustments have been difficult — for Salam, a new culture, a new nation in America; for the sergeant, a shift from bachelorhood to parenthood, from war to the marked tranquility of Ohio. Still it's clear from the steadiness, the dashes of humor in his voice, that the change of scene has been a good one for Powers. As he speaks there's still the ruckus of warfare in the background. But today it's not gunfire, but rather a die-hard water balloon fight between his young nieces and nephews.

To provide for his new family, Powers has taken a job along the assembly line at a local industrial supply company. But he speaks with determination about moving on, pursuing his master's in business at a top Ohio university. There's an optimism about his future, his coming opportunities, one that's not there when the topic returns to the military and what it can make now of the Middle East. “That's the burning question for me,” he says. “We had some great opportunities, but we're squandering the international and national community. Our plan of attack doesn't match the reality in Iraq.”

“We've made some strides,” he says. “I just hope it's not too little too late.”