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.

Powers and his wife Salam celebrated their wedding at the Intercontinental, the Jordanian hotel where the two met.

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.