The Galli Report

BAQUBAH, Iraq — A young Sharon Stone fluttered about the TV screen. She wore a bare-armed white tight button shirt. Her shorts were so taught and so tiny that losing one thread in your home town would invite a misdemeanor prosecution. She had big blond hair, mid-calf boots, and as she clutched Richard Chamberlain in this bad remake of an old Safari movie, the look on her face bespoke the same message starlets have exploited since movies were actually celluloid: “Save me! Save me! Imagine how grateful I’ll be!”

The sound was turned off, and the movie had Arabic subtitles.

On one side of the TV sat a big, gray-haired bear of a man named Bruce Reges, a First Sergeant who had been deployed to Iraq when he was 57 years old. His 25-year-old bride was not happy.

On the other side of the TV, and its winsomely desperate Ms. Stone, was a 61-year-old gray-haired correspondent whose work habits were so stale that he never took his pad and pen out of his pockets.

The TV set was pointed directly toward the Iraqi Director General of something or other, who sat behind his desk with a full view of Ms. Stone, and only a peripheral view of the two Iraqi women who were speaking to him. The ladies were dressed in black, from head to toe, with only chin-to-brow portholes for their faces to poke through. I don’t think they ever looked at Sharon Stone. Maybe once; that would explain why they seemed so rigidly uncomfortable.

Sgt. Reges leaned toward me, temporarily blocking the Director General’s view of Sharon Stone. “Don’t take any pictures of those women!” Sgt. Reges warned me. It was the only time I ever saw his face without a smile on it. Really. Even later, when the Improvised Explosive Device partially blew up the Humvee behind us in our convoy, he was smiling. But now he scowled. “Don’t photograph those women! Iraqis don’t want their women to be photographed!”

He leaned back. I looked at the two dour Iraqi women, who were looking dourly at the Director General, who was gazing wistfully at Sharon, and I thought, as eloquently as I was able at the time: “What the heck?”

If nothing else, these Iraqis sure know how to maintain a pretense. Bible-thumping preachers who have been caught with prostitutes, or boys, don’t maintain their pretenses nearly as well as these Iraqis. It could take the West centuries to catch up with them, pretense-wise, although lord knows we’ve tried.

While the Director General yearningfully gazed upon Sharon Stone, I kept my camera respectfully tucked in its bag. The Iraqi ladies eventually left, some Americans came in, Sgt. Reges realized the man he came to see would probably never arrive, and so the two of us sat with nothing much to do, and nothing to look at when the movie finally ended, Sharon blissfully unaware that Richard Chamberlain was probably not the man of her dreams after all, if you catch my meaning.

* * *

Sgt. Reges and I got to talking. Reges was proud of some projects that he was happy to describe.

The first involved honeybees. Iraq had bee farmers, even a bee farmer organization, but the industry was a mess because it lacked ways to convert bee droppings or bee sweat or bee whatever into commercially viable honey. So Sgt. Reges was helping to locate and eventually to distribute honey processing equipment.

There were two options, he explained. He could buy American equipment, a kind of mini-factory that several farmers could use. But that would require a building to house it in, and employees to operate it, and – pretty important – reliable electric power to run it.

The alternative, that he preferred, was a smaller unit from India – whose villagers were equivalent to the end users in Iraq. The Indian equipment was cheap enough that an individual farmer could own it, and its electrical draw was so low that a bicycle-pedal-generator would do nicely.

The second mission Sgt Reges liked to talk about involved water. In his area of responsibility, most of the water came from a canal system that flowed from north to south. Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein had once declared that Iraq must be a major rice producer. Rice, which usually finds a home in gazillion-gallon wetland paddies, was not well suited to a desert environment. But Saddam knew best, so people began to establish rice fields in the land bordering the canal at its northern end, where water was plentiful until they started wasting it on rice.

The water-flow southward began to diminish and eventually stopped. Southern people found themselves suffering a drought. Sgt. Reges made it his mission in life to put water into the southern end of the canal. And he did. The secret: face time.

He kept talking to the Iraqis day after day, suggesting, inquiring, cajoling, and – let’s admit it – pestering them until finally they found a solution. They decided to regulate the water flow, using valves and equipment that were already in place, using methods and schedules that had been known to them for years.

In other words, Sgt. Reges brought nothing whatever to the party except a dogged determination on the part of an American soldier that an Iraqi problem be solved. He gave the Iraqis more face time than they probably wanted, convinced them to execute a solution that was already within their power, and now everyone is the better for it… except possibly the rice growers, whom you and I will assume to be insurgent sympathizers so we can ignore their plight.

Making the Iraqis find their own solutions with the tools at hand seems to be a favorite method hereabouts. For example, school kids were getting sick, and the Iraqis asked the Americans to provide them with clean water. The Iraqis submitted a request for more than $875,000 to fund the water program for a while.

When the Americans said no, the Iraqis adopted their fall-back solution: let each child bring water from home to use at school. The plan worked, because the problem was not so much that all the water was bad; the problem was that they were all drinking water communally from one source while at school.

Important problems, solutions found… but in some cases the solutions were available to the Iraqis all along. Even if the Army’s Civil Affairs mission is successful in prodding the Iraqis to employ solutions that are already in their hands, the question is presented: is it our job to do that? Should Americans be risking their lives to prod Iraqis to use their own tools to solve their own problems? I focused on the canal project:

“Is it fair to say that whatever the solution was, they figured it out,” I asked Sgt. Reges, “so it took your presence to make them want to do what they already knew how to do? Why is that? You didn’t pay them to do it, you didn’t threaten them. Why did it take a request from the American military to make them turn on water for their own citizens, since they already had the means and they already knew the method?”

“I think part of it is…” he said, “I’m trying to find the right words…” He hesitated “They look to us as people who can get things done…”

I unfairly interrupted him

“I know that you got things done, and I’m sure that the people who got [the water] are sure that you got things done,” I said, “but actually the solution was not an American solution, it was the willingness to use the solution they already had, that was provoked by the American influence. It’s like if they were hunters, and they needed venison, and they had the bow and the arrow, and the deer was running through the forest; but it took American influence to get them to shoot the arrow.”

He said that maybe there was something else the Americans did that pushed things along

“We sent an unmanned flight from one end of the canal to the other, to find out where the stoppages were,” he said, “and what does that tell them up front? They see that thing and they say ‘the Americans are looking at us, and seeing who’s stealing the water and who’s not… Some bad things could happen to the people who are doing some stealing.’”

But, I pointed out, regardless of that helpful nudge, the solution was still an Iraqi solution, and the initial refusal to apply the solution was an Iraqi decision — that got turned around by the American influence. He agreed, more or less.

After that it got serious.

If a father or son, mother or daughter dies out here convincing Iraqis to do what they already know how to do, can we really look at it as a successful mission, a victory? If we’re more than four years into the war, and it still takes a 57-year-old first sergeant to come here and say “OK, turn on the spigot” is it a victory for us when they do?

He struggled for the words. Sometimes modesty gets in the way of a structured argument. This was one of those times, I guess.

“Isn’t it what we’re supposed to do as Americans?” he finally said.

“I see my role in this as a rock pusher a little bit, you know, to get the right thing done. I like to think that’s exactly what taxpayers want us to do.”

Then he found some solid footing.

“I spent 28 years of my life in the inner city…the worst school in the district,” he said. “They asked me why I do it. I said if I don’t, I can’t look at myself in the mirror. Every day I went down there I said I’m going to try to do something today, even if I fail at it, I’m going to try. And that’s how I see this.”

He pointed out that I had spent thirty-five years thinking of the questions, and he had only a few seconds to think of the answers. And he smiled as he said it. He always smiles, you know.

He was smiling later that day, as we sat in the same Humvee, on our way back from the Government Center. A short distance after we crossed one of the bridges over the Diyala River, an IED exploded, taking out much of the front end of the Humvee behind us. I looked over at First Sergeant Reges, and he smiled.

The next day we traveled in separate Humvees along the same route. The convoy made it home without a problem. Later, when we learned that one of the bridges to the city had been blown to smithereens, First Sergeant Reges smiled and said he would have to take another route the next day.

The next day, First Sgt. Reges’ convoy was hit with small arms fire. He was smiling as I took a photo of the damage.

He always smiles. For a fellow who believes face time can win this war, the smile is more important to him than a howitzer.

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This story is part of a series featuring the Army’s Civil Affairs mission in Iraq.

Richard Galli served as an interpreter in an Army Civil Affairs unit in Vietnam (1970-71). He is in Iraq as an embedded freelance journalist.