Topic: A Tall Order For A Marine: Feeding The Hand That Bit You

New York Times
December 30, 2007
By Damien Cave
FALLUJA, Iraq--CAPT. SEAN MILLER shook his head like a big brother. He and his marines had just walked by a cluster of large orange garbage bins, American-bought, from which thieves had ripped the wheels, and now they confronted a cemetery entrance that Captain Miller had paid an Iraqi contractor to fix. It was still broken.
He snapped a photograph and moved on.
It was one more day on the job here in Anbar Province, where fighting has given way to fixing. But reconstruction was hardly the only thing on the captain’s mind. Falluja’s past as the epicenter of the Sunni rebellion was with him too.
“The road we just walked down, I lost three marines on that road,” said the captain, a compact 32-year-old company commander from Virginia. “I was wounded in Falluja too, so walking down these streets — it’s not easy.”
“Reconciliation,” he said, eyeing some Iraqi policemen nearby. “It’s a hard pill to swallow.”
Since long before this war, forgiveness has been Iraq’s greatest challenge. What does it take for an abused, angry population to move on after so much suffering? Can they ever learn to trust one another?
In 2007, more than before, the same questions became central for Americans like Captain Miller. This was the deadliest year of the war for American troops. But it was also the year of a sudden shift in Sunni loyalties throughout Iraq, overnight turning enemies of America into allies against more extreme Islamists.
The Americans welcomed the turnabout, which has helped decrease violence throughout the country, but they were not prepared for it. It has been 25 years since another generation of marines failed to separate the sides in Lebanon’s civil war, and the Middle East, with its long history of about-faces and betrayals, where allegiances are shallow and enmities deep, often still defies American logic.
Battle-scarred marines and soldiers are now doing what they couldn’t fathom less than a year ago, working beside Iraqis who may have tried to kill them. Ordered to act as mentors and honest brokers, to suppress personal feelings for the common good, the troops are surrounded by a language they don’t speak, rejiggering alliances they don’t quite fathom, while they try to rebuild a broken, politically immature nation on bedrock American values of enterprise, tolerance, hard work and optimism. Horatio Alger and Audie Murphy — those archetypal “can do” Americans — once again are hearing “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The Iraqis are wary, too, because they think, perhaps mistakenly, that they recognize the Americans’ behavior. Seventeen years ago, the first President Bush turned furiously against the Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein, only to abandon Iraq’s Shiites when they rose up against Mr. Hussein. Then, after toppling Mr. Hussein, marines stormed the Sunni stronghold of Falluja three years ago, subduing its rebels by decimating the city and leaving hundreds dead.
Mutual distrust is what remains. Iraqis resent American power but also say they fear that the Americans will leave without making the country stable and prosperous. Hearing such contradictory attitudes is part of what bewilders the Americans, who continue to wonder if their old enemies are just playing them — snatching all the money and arms they can in preparation for a future battle.
The uneasiness shows up throughout Iraq, but it is particularly acute in Anbar, the desert province in Iraq’s far west where the shift from war to tentative peace has been most abrupt. Ask an American infantryman where he served and when he answers “Anbar,” he’ll rarely say more; one word is enough, a shorthand for horrors.
Captain Miller commands Kilo Company, in the Third Battalion of the Fifth Marine Regiment, which suffered 194 casualties — roughly one of every six marines — in its last rotation in Anbar, from January 2006 to May 2006. His old platoon had it worse; one in four killed or wounded.
Captain Miller, who displays an easygoing charm in his new role as diplomat and city planner, cajoler and referee, was himself injured when his Humvee hit a mine in September 2006. The explosion threw him from the vehicle and temporarily blinded his left eye. He had to cheat on his eye exam to get back to Iraq (“I used my good eye when the doctor turned around,” he said) and what he found on his return was vastly different from what he had left. Three months into deployment, the battalion has yet to suffer a casualty from hostile action.
Captain Miller said that he, like most marines, was immensely relieved that the violence had subsided. But spending time with him also reveals a deep ambivalence about the new bond with Anbar’s Sunnis, and ultimately with Iraq.
One recent day began with smiles and easy handshakes as he greeted the tribal sheiks and local officials of the Falluja District Council. He and his battalion commander had come to lend support and to speed the delivery of services.
But getting Iraqis to take the lead was a challenge. When discussion turned to a heating fuel shortage, Captain Miller scanned the room for a contractor he had asked to stand and address the issue. The man hadn’t shown up. When he explained later, through an interpreter, that he had expected a more formal invitation, Captain Miller just rolled his eyes.
That is the way things have gone in Iraq for years, and often the root of the problem can be traced to Saddam Hussein. His paranoid totalitarian rule crushed initiative, set neighbor against neighbor and injected fear into nearly every interaction. The regime’s abuses can still be seen in Sunni-Shiite antagonisms: Sunnis were favored under Mr. Hussein, and do not relish their loss of status; Shiites feel they are finally getting their due and have little interest in sharing.
The divide shows up in the streets.
From the council meeting, Captain Miller drove to a command center near a school where another contractor had left a job unfinished. The school department’s chief engineer offered an explanation: the contractor was a Shiite and knew that his bosses at the Education Ministry — also Shiites — wouldn’t mind the lapse in a Sunni city.
Whatever the reason, the chief engineer now finds himself following Captain Miller to meeting after meeting, pleading for assistance, a reluctant supplicant to a foreigner half his age.
Falluja has become a city filled with such relationships. Around lunchtime, Captain Miller and his marines walked to a second school, where the captain was treated like the mayor of a poor American city. He had expected to discuss awards for students who had recited passages from the Koran. But in the principal’s office, he found a handful of strangers.
“Who are these guys?” he asked.
For the next hour, they bombarded him with demands. Two men asked about a relative who they said had been detained several years ago.
A bearded man seeking work pushed forward a contract that included a $50,000 charge for a generator that Captain Miller knew he could buy for $8,000.
Captain Miller listened, initially calm. He took notes. But as the requests kept coming, he grew more annoyed, firing baffled glances at a marine sitting next to him.
Then a man in a leather jacket leaned forward. He told Captain Miller that another marine had promised to pay him for burying 535 Iraqis killed during the American assaults on Falluja in 2004.
“So someone told you we would pay you to bury dead bodies but never gave you anything in writing?” Captain Miller said.
The man nodded.
And Captain Miller lost his cool.
“Those guys were trying to kill me,” he said, his voice just shy of a yell. “You want me to pay to have them buried?”
The room went quiet. Old, searing memories — of shattered bodies and dead friends — seemed to hang in the air.
Marines are not known for emoting. They fight wars. End of story. But a businesslike approach to nation-building can’t always mask a gut-level anger, barely suppressed, at working with Iraqis who may be former insurgents.