266: I'm From the Private Sector and I'm Here to Help

Ira Glass

William is part of a team that's rebuilding one of the power plants outside Baghdad. And for everything that you've probably heard about how dangerous it is to be in Iraq, and how difficult much of the work is, here's one occupational hazard you probably haven't heard of.

Ira Glass

Jerry's training Iraqi police.

Ira Glass

Don works out at the airport for a private security firm. He says everybody loses track of time.

Ira Glass

Today's radio show came from a simple set of questions. We keep hearing about these private contractors who are working in Iraq. These are civilians, doing everything for US troops from serving meals and building housing to maintaining weapons systems. Private contractors interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Other contractors are the people who are actually rebuilding Iraq's sewage, and water, and electrical infrastructure.

And here at our radio show we wondered, who are these people who signed up for this, who decided that the very best job that they could get was going to be in the middle of a war zone? Should we just see them as mercenaries? Are they motivated by feelings that are more idealistic than that?

Civilians are part of this war in unprecedented numbers. They're an important part of the war effort. They're part of what is going to determine if we're successful in Iraq or not. Nobody knows for sure, but it is at least 20,000 people in Iraq, working just as soldiers-for-hire, escorting convoys, protecting stuff. That's more than any of the countries in the Coalition of the Willing have sent. Britain, who sent the most, only sent 9,000 troops.

Private contractors, in a sense, are our biggest allies in Iraq, the coalition partners that nobody ever talks about, partly because they're private companies, who don't usually give access to reporters, under no obligation to give access. As a result, we don't even know how many of their employees have died. There's a website called icasualties.org, which lists 243 confirmed deaths, actual names. This is far more casualties than all of our allies combined.

About a year ago, April 2004-- this is right at the moment when the violence in Iraq was really heating up-- one of our contributing editors, Nancy Updike, headed into Iraq, and managed to spend three weeks with employees of several different companies who are operating there. We're devoting our entire program today to her report.

From Chicago Public Radio, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. And we start at the airport.

Ira Glass

When Nancy was in Iraq, one of the dozens of security firms operating there was an outfit based in Rhode Island called Custer Battles, named for the two guys who started the company. Among other things, they had a contract to run security for much of Baghdad International Airport, where there are also lots of US soldiers stationed. Here's Nancy.

Nancy Updike

The US military and the private security contractors working in Iraq, who are often ex-military themselves, usually get along. But not always. I was driving around Baghdad International Airport on a Tuesday afternoon with Dave Shoe, a six foot four, former middle school social studies teacher, former Army Sergeant, current employee of Custer Battles, when he pulled up next to two guys jogging in gray t-shirts that said, ARMY.

Nancy Updike

Dave climbed down from his truck, and this became a 10-minute argument, complete with finger pointing, getting in each other's faces, almost touching chests. There are tens of thousands of US soldiers living on the airport grounds, which are huge, 11 square miles. And many of them don't realize that even though the airport is used by military helicopters and planes, it's also a civilian airport, guarded in part by a civilian company. And some areas are off-limits, even to US soldiers.

So Dave spends a lot of time kicking people out of places. Very few respond graciously.

Nancy Updike

As we drove away, Dave put the incident in context.

Nancy Updike

Of course, almost any job involves dealing with a few people you wish you could eject into deep space. But most jobs don't have, on top of that, the stress of daily shootings and bombings, and being thousands of miles from home. So I asked everyone, why come to Baghdad?

Nancy Updike

Don Ritchie oversees Custer Battles security operations at the airport. When he retired from the military at 43, he needed to find a job.

Nancy Updike

Adam McCall does patrols at the airport. He says he took 9/11 personally, and got himself a job for a while at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. He still wants to make a difference, but the money is better here in Iraq.

Nancy Updike

The median income in the United States, according to the Census Bureau, is a bit over $40,000 a year. In Iraq, Americans working for private companies usually start at around $80,000, tax-free. Some get more for overtime or hazardous duty. Security guys make over $100,000 a year. Again, the first $80,000 isn't taxed if they stay outside the states for 330 days. Housing and meals are free. If you can tolerate the tension, heat, long hours, uneven phone service, loneliness, sexual frustration, and fear, Baghdad can be a good place not just to make money, but also to make enough money to maybe turn your life around.

People told me they now have savings for the first time. They'd be able to send their kids to the universities they want. Or put that divorce behind them. Henry [? Bosarge's ?] job is repairing guns for Custer Battles at the airport. He was in the military for nine years, and puts it in perspective this way, bringing up one of the biggest private companies in Iraq, KBR, Kellogg Brown & Root.

Nancy Updike

Money, the idea that private contractors will save taxpayer money, is just one reason behind the boom in hiring civilians to do these jobs. The other reason is that the military is shrinking. There were two million active duty US military personnel in 1990. Now it's 1.4 million. Private contractors are filling in the jobs that the old, bigger military used to do for itself: peeling potatoes, fixing equipment, building housing. The idea is to free up soldiers for what the Pentagon calls war-making, combat.

The line's gotten blurry, though. More and more, private contractors are hired to guard, patrol, escort people and food and equipment through dangerous places, jobs that end up putting them in combat. Military commanders have said they're afraid the vastly higher salaries in these private companies, essentially for-profit armies, will drain the military of experienced people.

Nancy Updike

Custer Battles has different groups working in Iraq. There are the people out at the airport. And then there are guys who work out of Baghdad, PSDs, personal security details, like the guys who were killed in Fallujah. PSDs protect businessmen, military convoys, some government officials, and private contractors who've come to rebuild. Hank is the man who was brought in to clean up Custer Battles' PSD operation. It's had some problems. More on that later. Hank has a vision for the kind of men he wants working for him.

Nancy Updike

It's possible Hank came up with this description by looking in the mirror. He's a 49-year-old man with small blue eyes, a former paratrooper and ranger, the son of a decorated soldier, married to the daughter of a soldier, father of two soldiers, one of whom was in Iraq and is now in Afghanistan on a mission he can't talk about. Hank is cryptic. He doesn't want me to use his last name. He won't even tell me what rank he achieved. I looked it up later. Lieutenant colonel. He's done private security work overseas before, he won't give details, of course. But he will-- and this is the thing about Hank-- he will poke fun at it.

Nancy Updike

So he wants his PSD guys to have to look.

Nancy Updike

And he walks around doing that look, but he also knows it's all a bit of a put-on, a man dance, as he calls it. And with tens of thousands of American military and ex-military and private military in Iraq right now, it's very possible that we are standing in the middle of the largest man dance on the planet.

Nancy Updike

Hank has called a meeting of the personal security detail guys to go over the week's schedule and work out solutions to some of the problems they've been having. The meeting is in a long room off the main dining area of their hotel. The guys are sitting scattered around the room, mostly Americans, a few from other countries, England, Ireland, Nepal. They're all on year-long contracts as shooters, armed protection.

Hank is roaming the room and occasionally clicking to change the slide on the projector. A lot of the meeting is about cars, because a lot of PSD work is just driving people safely from A to B: Baghdad to Mosul, Mosul to Basra. Safely in Iraq, by the way, means driving as fast as they can at all times, to avoid getting shot or blown up. All the security companies do this. And Custer Battles, in order to keep their security guys free to scan the road and shoot, if necessary, uses Iraqi drivers. Baghdad Bob, AKA Hustler, sees a problem with this, because it seems the Iraqis they've hired, very understandably, have been balking at some of the driving instructions they get.

Nancy Updike

The PSD guys, meanwhile, depend on aggressive driving to protect themselves. If they're surrounded by a hostile crowd, for instance, or if other cars try to box them in for an ambush. But, as Baghdad Bob points out, driving aggressively at the wrong time could also get everyone shot.

Nancy Updike

It becomes clear that the US military is just as much of a danger for the PSD guys as the Iraqi insurgents. Finally, Hank interrupts the discussion with a decision.

Nancy Updike

Hank is trying to change some things about the operation. He's here to establish rules and procedures. One result of America's sudden and unprecedented reliance on private security in this war, is that Custer Battles, like many security companies in Iraq, hired a lot of new people very quickly. And Hank is trying to transform them from a bunch of ex-military guys assembled ad hoc to a smooth, standardized workforce, where everyone gets first aid training and regular target practice, good weapons and ammunition, a cell phone, and a uniform, khaki pants, and a navy polo that says Custer Battles on it.

Hank believes in America's mission here in Iraq. He believes private security work is the linchpin in that mission's success. It goes like this. Security guys protect the businessmen trying to start companies in Iraq, and the contractors rebuilding the infrastructure.

Nancy Updike

Hank is not just out to fix Custer Battles. No opportunity for instruction or improvement is missed.

Nancy Updike

I was paying for my lunch one day, and Hank was talking to the hotel's wait staff. And all of a sudden, Hank and one of the Iraqi staff were gripping hands across the counter and trying to pull each other over. Hank finally grabbed the guy's other hand, so he had both of them, and dragged him halfway across.

[LAUGHTER]

I stood there watching in amazement.

Nancy Updike

This game of Hank's is not just a game, it's one of his projects. Iraqi men need to work on their upper body strength, he told me more than once. It's very American to say, as George Bush has said, we're not here to change you, we don't want you to become Americans. But we can't help ourselves. Look at Hank. He wants to help, and he knows what will help you. His generosity is interventionist in nature. In the elevator, he explains, it's OK for men to touch each other if they're trying to haul one another over a counter. What's not OK is what he sees Arab men doing every day on the streets of Baghdad.

Nancy Updike

Every Saturday night, Custer Battles PSD guys gather at what they call the viking table in the dining room of the Sinbad Hotel for a big dinner. Tonight, a new guy nicknamed Elvis, because he sings and his last name is Presley, brought his guitar. The table is only half-seated, maybe 15 people out of Custer Battles' 60 PSD guys. I end up sitting near Scott, AKA Grumpy, a heavy Vietnam vet who smokes tiny cigars called Swisher Sweets. Scott's been in Iraq for five months.

Nancy Updike

It's not all about the money, he says. And the guy across from him nods. Most of the PSD guys I talked to said some version of this, the money's good, but I'm also here to help. A few said, I'm here for the adventure. Only two fully embraced the word mercenary. A man named Rob who told me about a mercenary bar in the jungles of Cambodia called Sharky's. They get good bands, he said. And a British guy named Richard who said, I'm here for the money, and so is everyone else.

I asked the PSD guys if they think we did the right thing by invading Iraq. The responses-- and this ended up being true with everyone I talked to, not just PSD guys-- the responses broke down like this. Around 20% were completely gung-ho: yes, we should have invaded exactly when we did, no questions. Maybe 10% expressed some doubts. And the rest felt like David, an earnest man in his mid-30s with gold-rimmed glasses.

Nancy Updike

I talked to Tara, a tiny blonde from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who screens passengers out at the Baghdad Airport. An honorary viking princess, Hank calls her. Before coming to Iraq, she'd never been away from home for more than two weeks. She had breakfast with her mom every Tuesday. And while Hank is trying to eliminate physical affection between Iraqi men, Tara has stumbled into her own cheerful project to spread American values.

Nancy Updike

Before I started doing a story about Custer Battles, a few people advised me against it. That company doesn't have a good reputation, a person pretty high up in the Coalition Provisional Authority told me. I ran all this by Hank, who copped to it immediately.

Nancy Updike

Gunslingers was only part of what I'd heard. I told Hank a rumor someone had told me, that Custer Battles had engaged in a huge gun fight at their old hotel, the Al Hayat one night. And when the smoke cleared, it turned out they'd been firing at each other the whole time. No enemy, just Custer Battles guys hearing their own continued gunfire, and believing that meant they were still under attack. Hank confirmed that an event like this had taken place, but it was started by an initial RPG attack on the hotel. He told me what he'd heard from the guys themselves. He got to Iraq after it had happened.

Nancy Updike

To be clear, all this shooting, those 3,000 rounds fired from the hotel, went out into a residential neighborhood in Baghdad. It's likely that, as Hank believes, no one was injured or killed, in spite of all this firepower. Nobody came forward with bodies. But, and this is an important but, there was no formal investigation of the incident, not by the Iraqi police, not by the US military. And Custer Battles, though it did its own internal investigation, wasn't required to report it to anyone.

The Custer Battles people I met seemed to be steady men, not trigger happy. Hank, for instance, has never shot a person in his life, even after years in the army and months in Iraq. But all of them, like the employees of every other security company in Iraq, are operating in a context where the rules aren't clear. This is all so new, having over 60 private security firms, some with their own helicopters, their own heavy arms, operating in the middle of a war zone, not subject to the same rules as the military, but not necessarily subject to any other rules.

Right now, the US government is trying to invent some new guidelines. But they're not in place yet. In Iraq, there are no clear consequences for making a mistake, or for being reckless.

Nancy Updike

Hank's handle on the walkie talkie system is Krom, K-R-O-M, the god Conan prays to in Conan the Barbarian. Mighty Duck is the operations manager.

Nancy Updike

In the weeks after I left, right after Fallujah, the violence escalated, not because of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, Hank told me. Those weren't the turning point. Even before the pictures were made public, there were three weeks, Hank said, when it was hard to go anywhere without getting shot at. Americans hunkered down in hotels, including security people.

When there were missions, his men would ask about whether they were really necessary, and the quality of the available intelligence. Four different times, men refused to go on missions, Hank said. And there were casualties. Elvis, who played guitar at the viking dinner, was shot in the leg when the hotel was sprayed with gunfire. Dave Shoe, the guy you heard at the beginning of the show, who got into that argument with the major at the airport, was ambushed in his car and shot in the head. He's OK.

And one of their British guys was killed execution-style, pulled from his car in a crowd and shot in the back of the head. People were badly shaken, Hank said. But no one's quit so far.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. In the year since we first broadcast this program, Hank says that 11 Custer Battles security guys have been killed. And Custer Battles itself has been banned from getting government contracts in Iraq, after federal investigators found that it billed for all kinds of work that it never did, defrauding the war effort of at least $50 million, allegedly. The company denies the charges. The case is in court. Other private contractors face similar charges. Halliburton has $1.8 billion, that's billion, in disputed billings in Iraq. Coming up, when is a shovel not a shovel? That's in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, we're devoting our entire program to Nancy Updike's report on civilian contractors in Iraq. She was there in April 2004, and we first broadcast her story a year ago. But the situation with private military contractors working in Iraq hasn't changed that much. It's still one private contractor for every six US military personnel. To give you a sense of how unprecedented that number is, having that many civilians working alongside the US army in the middle of a war zone, back in the first Gulf War, it was one private contractor for every 60 military personnel. By some estimates, a quarter of all the reconstruction money for Iraq will go to these private security firms.

We resume Nancy's story at the Green Zone, which at the time was where the American operation in Iraq was based, A four-square-mile area in Baghdad, surrounded by 15-foot walls and barbed wire, with US soldiers guarding the only entrances. Lots of private contractors live or work there, alongside thousands of soldiers and government workers. Here's Nancy.

Nancy Updike

The Green Zone is a sprawl, like Los Angeles, a big, hot, paved sprawl full of humvees and SUVs, and men and women jogging along the wide roads in shorts. You never see that anywhere else in Baghdad. There's a disco at the Al Rashid hotel on Saturday nights in the Green Zone, karaoke on Friday's, taekwondo, an internet cafe, and a long outdoor flea market with Iraqi kids selling CDs, or movies and porn on DVD, fanny packs, makeup, satellite dishes, also a variety of Saddam-themed lighters and watches. It seems the final stage of a brutal dictatorship is kitsch.

A few restaurants have also sprung up in the Green Zone, including a Chinese place that is so obscurely located, it's like the gay bars of the 50s. You have to go with someone who already knows where it is. Otherwise, why would you ever walk through the chipped opening in the stone wall next to the hospital, and go down the long, rubble filled alley? And if you did, how would you know to make a left into the small, crab-grassy courtyard with plastic chairs and tables with boxes of tissue on them?

In any other part of the world, this place would not survive. In addition to its difficult-to-find entrance, the restaurant is right next to a helipad. But this place is thriving. It is a monument to the power of word of mouth, and to the desperation created by the fact that daily fare for most Americans in the Green Zone is meals at a cafeteria where food is prepared for thousands of people at a time. Dragon Chinese restaurant is also a testament to the axiom, which I'm coining here, that Kung Pao chicken will always find a way to exist wherever Americans are present.

Nancy Updike

I've come to the restaurant with a group of guys who work for Fluor Corporation, which is under contract to the Army Corps of Engineers to help rebuild the electricity system in Iraq. Fluor asked me to use only the first names of their employees for their safety and that of their families. Everyone here has had a long day, mostly sitting at the airport in Kuwait waiting for a military transport plane to Baghdad. We begin drinking immediately.

Perhaps in the spirit of imagining ways to unwind, the Fluor guys start talking about whether it's true what they've heard about there being a brothel in the Green Zone. And if that's true, is it possible that a person could, as it were, order in?

Nancy Updike

By the time I was listening to this conversation at this restaurant, I had been in Baghdad two weeks. And I'd stopped counting the number of times a day when I thought, wow, it really is all men here.

Mike from Texas starts out on a small tear. He's 30 years old with dark blue eyes, and a blonde moustache growing down the sides of his mouth. He instigates the brothel conversation, then orders a bottle of Captain Morgan rum, for himself. But the evening surprisingly gets less rowdy as it goes on. It turns out Mike is a geek, though a kind I've never encountered before, a power plant geek. He's really, really into what he does: the job, the tools.

Nancy Updike

He wants to see the cranes. The conversation gets more and more inside. Shim stock. Couplings. Pipe guys versus mechanical guys.

Nancy Updike

There are guys who come to Iraq who know guns, and do guns. And then there are guys who come to Iraq who are technicians, or specialists, in some area. Geeks. Sewage geeks. Water geeks. Refinery geeks. Electricity geeks.

Nancy Updike

I drive out to a power plant near Baghdad with Lee, who's supervising Fluor's work there. He is a solid man in big, square glasses with mousy hair you wouldn't guess was 57. Lee has done just about every power plant job there is. He's not flashy, but men follow him. A few told me they only came to Iraq because Lee asked them. After about an hour and a half, we turn onto a road that's suddenly quite rural, mostly small houses, farmland, lots of kids outside.

Nancy Updike

IED, improvised explosive device.

Nancy Updike

Lee is unflappable. I know this, because 40 minutes before we saw these kids waving, we were in a traffic jam leaving Baghdad and got ambushed and shot at. It happened fast. My tape machine was off because Lee had been telling me about Fluor's security procedures and I'd agreed not to record that in order to keep them secret. As he was talking, we both saw a black BMW weaving aggressively in between the cars. We noted, without alarm, that this was, according to the private security guys in Iraq, the typical bad guy car. And it was driving in the typical bad guy way that private security guys were always warning about.

And then, suddenly, it cut right in front of the first car in our convoy, the one just ahead of us, and stopped short. And we heard the fake sounding pop pop of real gunfire, and saw Fluor's security guys in the car ahead of us get out and start shooting.

Nancy Updike

You can hear Lee and his driver reassuring me, OK, OK, you're all right, you're fine. The driver even tapped the glass to remind me we were in an armored car. I'd forgotten, but I don't think I would have been less frightened if I'd remembered. Cars were stopped all around us, ordinary Iraqis caught in a shoot-out. We were trapped too, until the BMW sped off and disappeared into traffic. Then we drove off. We never found out where the car went, who was in it.

Nancy Updike

Lee asked me to turn the tape machine off again, though he said I could write down what he was saying. Six of Fluor's Iraqi security guards were killed when they blocked a suicide bomber's car. His own secretary, an Iraqi woman, was gunned down and killed in front of her house. He doesn't know why. He assumes it's because she was working for an American, him.

A power plant is magnificent. If you ever get a chance to walk around inside one, do it. It's a world on another scale. 60-foot fuel tanks and hundreds of yards of huge metal tubing. A transformer that looks like a multi-armed robot on its way out to crush houses. Cranes, just like Mike from the Chinese restaurant wanted to see.

Nancy Updike

You know that thing in your house that kind of works but is really falling apart, and needs to be just taken out and replaced, or at least given a total overhaul, but, unless it breaks down completely, you're just going to keep it the way it is? That is Iraq's entire electricity system. Lee spent over an hour spelling out its problems for me.

Even before the war, electricity would go on and off. Very little of the power grid was damaged during the war, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The bigger problem is that most power plants in Iraq are at least 20 years old, and were starved by Saddam Hussein of money and parts for years. During sanctions, the plants fell apart even more. Iraqis who were glad to see America get rid of Saddam Hussein, now don't understand why, more than a year after the US invaded, promising to make their lives better, they're still dealing with blackouts every day.

Electricity, after security, is the number-one frustration for a lot of Iraqis. Lee knows this. Fluor employees are working seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, trying to fix six plants at once, at each one, cramming work that should take a year or more into seven months. Everything is a problem. Every one of the 28 power plants in Iraq, like a snowflake, is a unique apparatus, jerry-rigged and retrofitted and carefully taped together by Iraqi workers for years. This means repair at every plant must also be unique.

All parts and equipment need to be imported. There's no manufacturing inside Iraq. There's also a worldwide shortage right now of exactly the big machines that are the guts of power plants. Plus, there's the looting, which everyone talks about, but it's hard to picture just how devastating it must have been, until you're standing in a 320-acre power plant, in which every gauge, valve, wire, small motor, and scrap of metal that wasn't nailed down or too heavy to move, was carted off.

Rick Moore, the site manager, a tall, thin man from Oklahoma who needs to use more sunblock, says anything left behind was junky at a very special and rarely seen level of junkiness.

Nancy Updike

Karen Hahn is different from most people you've heard so far. She doesn't work with big equipment. She's never been in the military. She's from north of the Mason Dixon line. She's a she. And she loves being in Iraq. She loves it so much that she sounds happy, even if she's talking about screening bags at the Baghdad airport, which is the first job she had when she got here last summer. Here's why Iraq has made her so happy.

A year ago, she was a divorced, underemployed single mother who was deeply in debt and felt cursed. She'd get a job, and a few months later, like clockwork, the company or branch would go under. This happened six times. She got to the point where she would say in job interviews, if you hire me, your company is doomed. She was broke. She was depressed.

Finally, she got a job as a screener at the Greater Rochester International Airport. She'd only been doing it a few months when they asked for volunteers to go to Baghdad. Her hand shot up, to her own surprise. She flew out 10 days later, leaving her 11-year-old daughter with her ex-husband. Working for Custer Battles has changed her life. She's been promoted three times in the last year, and is now running their human resources department in Iraq, living a life she couldn't have imagined a year ago, and making bank.

Nancy Updike

Karen knows it's a luxury to feel this way in Baghdad. She's living at the airport as well as working there, and it's a big, protected American enclave, like the Green Zone, surrounded by walls and guarded by soldiers, mostly insulated from the hazards of the rest of Baghdad. She tells a story about an Iraqi woman who flew into the airport. Her husband, child, and mother-in-law had just been killed. From a car bomb, Karen thinks.

Nancy Updike

The major crimes unit in Baghdad is in a small, grungy yellow building, like an old public school, with corridors dotted with small offices, each one with a desk, and a chair, and a guy, no computers. Jerry Burke is here for an inspection. He's a 57-year-old former Boston beat cop and detective, hired by the Department of Justice to be a mentor and adviser for Iraqi police, to help them build a modern police force. He's exactly the guy you'd want to be in Iraq, doing his job and meeting Iraqis. He respects and understands police work and human rights laws. He's patient, knowledgeable, and, frankly, cuddly.

Nancy Updike

The kind of cuddly, though, that believes in surprise inspections. The Iraqi police guarding the jail open a locked metal door and show us into an area that opens to a filthy bathroom on one end, and has two rooms off to the right, stuffy, but relatively clean, each with about 50 men sitting on blankets on the floor, staring at us.

Nancy Updike

When he first got to Baghdad, Jerry says, beatings were common in jail and food was not. If your family brought you food, great. If they didn't, too bad. Now Baghdad jails are providing two meals a day, he said, the Red Cross standard. Overcrowding can still be a problem, sometimes over 100 men packed into a room that's full at 50. Jerry checks in with the commander, General Rod, confers about the prisoners, and we head to the next station.

Nancy Updike

IPs, Iraqi police.

Nancy Updike

There's more. Iraqi cops would never get weapons training under Saddam Hussein. They'd just get a weapon. No target practice. So they don't know how to shoot. Corruption was endemic, and many older cops see no reason to change.

Jerry has the tiniest translator possible, with a tiny voice. Osma is 27, but can, and sometimes does, pass herself off as a teenager. She has long, straight brown hair, a small face, and is draped in what looks like a massive, sleeveless shawl, but is, in fact, Jerry's special lightweight bulletproof vest from home. He had it sent over for her. She's too small to support the weight of a regular vest.

They have a routine. Jerry keeps trying to set her up with his driver, [? Hatten. ?] She amuses herself by making up stories that she tries to convince Jerry are true. For instance, an April fool's joke she played on him, which Jerry explains, with Osma shaking her head and correcting him.

Nancy Updike

Osma calls him Abu Matthew, father of Matthew, his son's name. It's a term of respect and endearment.

Nancy Updike

This is the idea of democracy as it's filtered down to the street, Osma said. Iraqis doing things they know probably aren't right, like driving down the wrong side of the highway, for instance, and saying, well, this is democracy, this is freedom.

[MILITARY COMMAND]

[DRUMROLL]

It's graduation day for the first batch of Iraqi police recruits to complete the new eight-week training program at the police academy in Baghdad. Almost 500 men and a few women in bright blue shirts and navy pants. They're heading into the most dangerous job an Iraqi can have, Jerry says. Nearly 500 Iraqi police have been killed in attacks by insurgents since the war ended. Two officers Jerry knew, leaders in reforming the police, were murdered.

Some police officers have joined the insurgents. Some refuse to fight them. One tried to suicide-bomb the chief of police. The recruits march around, then stop and stand at attention in front of a raised platform with a canopy over it, where Iraqi and American dignitaries are sitting. Jerry is up there, also Paul Bremer, who gives a speech that's translated into Arabic as he goes along. He starts out with the Arabic greeting, peace be upon you.

Nancy Updike

Bremer is delivering this speech the day after the killing and mutilation of the four private security guys in Fallujah. He has to address this, and he does, over and over again.

Nancy Updike

The central idea of the speech, that the people who mutilated the bodies of four Americans in Fallujah represent the worst of Iraq, and you, the new police recruits, represent the best, isn't a bad point. But by framing every compliment as a contrast to Fallujah, and by never mentioning how big a risk these recruits are taking by putting on police uniforms, Bremer makes clear he's speaking more to the home audience, to the cameras that will replay clips in America, than he is to the people standing in front of him.

Nancy Updike

Jerry is frustrated at the pace of reconstruction, both overall and in the police system. It took six months to get the Coalition Provisional Authority to buy guns and bulletproof vests for Iraqi police, he says. Not enough Americans were brought in to work with the new cops. And there's still a lot of corruption among the old cops, not just bribery, but cases of rape, murder, and kidnapping. Just last month, shots were fired at his translator Osma's house. Rather than take it to the police, she decided to resolve it with a tribal mediator, which even Jerry thought would be more effective.

Nancy Updike

The last day I spent with Hank, the Custer Battles guy from the first half of the show, we pulled up to a soldier who was guarding the entrance to a shooting range where Hank and the Custer Battles guys were heading to get some target practice. Just before we stopped to get out, Hank said--

Nancy Updike

This ended up being the theme of the morning, though it's the kind of thing Hanks says all the time.

Nancy Updike

There was a question I'd been trying to ask Hank the whole time I spent in Iraq about exactly this, the frontier of freedom, and his relationship to it. But I could never quite get it right, so I tried once more. And the question amounted to, do you ever have doubts about what you're doing here?

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. Well, our program was produced today by Sarah Koenig and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Diane Cook, Wendy Dorr, Jane Feltes, and Lisa Pollak. Our senior producer's Julie Snyder.

In the year since today's program was first broadcast, the number of Iraqi police and military killed has climbed from 500, as Nancy said, to at least 2,200. And in fact the real number may be more like 3,000.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

You know, you can download today's program and our archives at audible.com/thisamericanlife. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight by Mr. Torey Malatia, who is not afraid of your guff.

Ira Glass

Back next week with more stories of this American life.

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