After the Fall

When a bizarre accident derailed his nation-building in Iraq, the author discovered that life in a war zone had been the easy part

ALL AMERICANS WORKING IN IRAQ, ARMED AND UNARMED, MILITARY AND CIVILIAN, DREAM ABOUT THEIR HOMECOMING -- about who will meet them at the airport, what they'll eat first, whether things will have changed much while they were gone. During my year with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq -- first in Baghdad and later in Fallujah -- the send-offs to those finishing their Green Zone tours were a weekly ritual. Deep within our perimeter of blast walls, there would be a lot of backslapping and comparing of "Baghdad Donuts," the round computer graphics that ticked how many months, days, hours, seconds and milliseconds you had been in Iraq and how many you had left to go.

I had a plan for whenever I got back to the States: a month-long road trip with friends, from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest. But when the time came, there was no send-off and no celebration at my return.

Instead, I was wheeled onto U.S. soil, pushed like luggage by a disgruntled employee through the bowels of New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. My face was awkwardly concealed with yellowed gauze and strips of medical tape. Adults stole quick glances and admonished their staring children.

I wasn't supposed to be going home. And I wasn't ready to go.

From my wheelchair, I watched a set of golf clubs circuit the baggage carousel -- anything to distract my mind from the gnawing confusion. I had left Iraq, on R&R, to join a family reunion in the Caribbean. But while I had made it to the beach, now I was here, in America, and I couldn't remember the few decisive events that had led to this. Nobody knew. Every few hours, my dad, who was escorting me back to the family home in West Chicago, Ill., asked the same question: Anything yet? He was the one who had answered the frail tapping of my ring on his hotel room window, who drew open the blinds to see my mangled face. He later told my mother, who had slept through the worst of it, that I looked as if I'd been shot at close range, that he had never seen anything worse than my face that dawn. Without any answers, he clung to his theories. You don't remember being attacked, like with a crowbar?

It was useless. Despite my restless efforts to retrieve the memory, a few critical hours of my life were inaccessible. And what I'd been able to surmise, deduced from the recollections of witnesses and the physical facts of my injuries, made little sense: On the second night of my vacation, Fallujah had uncoiled itself in my mind, commanded my sleeping body upright and piloted me toward the window of my second-story hotel room. My sleeping hands pried open its latch. I went over the rail, sending myself tumbling 15 feet to the cold pavement below.

A WEEK BEFORE IT ALL, IN THE FINAL DAYS OF 2005, my brother Soren had called me as I stood at the landing zone in Camp Fallujah, to thank me for the gift I had recently mailed him: an AK-47 slug, spent in celebratory, retaliatory or predatory fire over Baghdad one August night. It had deep coppery scratches from its scuttle along the pavement beside my hooch and looked exactly as you might imagine a fired round would look. He told me he had placed it on his desk in the public relations office of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington. "It's a good conversation piece," he said. I thought about priests picking up the bullet.

"I'll see you soon, bro!" I shouted over the thump-thump of a pair of approaching midnight helicopters. I was leaving for my R&R, five days off to meet my family at a resort in the Dominican Republic. I sat with my gear on the edge of the concrete field watching the wobbling and shivering descent of the choppers. When they touched down, I made my way toward the beckoning aerial gunner under the rotor span, who read the letters I'd inked on my hand to confirm my destination. It would take only about 20 minutes to skirt over the deserted fields of the Euphrates River valley and past the glaring perimeter lights of Abu Ghraib prison before Baghdad's knotted skein of dimly lit neighborhoods unfurled below us. The helo nosed onward, and Marine aerial gunners hunched over their 50-cals, squinting through night-vision goggles. The baby Chinook was an aging bird with paneless windows that channeled in the wind, forcing my eyes shut.

The last time I had seen Soren was in the freighted days before I left for Baghdad, in December 2004. West Chicago had been blustery but bearable. My brothers had both come home for the holidays, and we strung lights around our frozen pond in the back yard, which we shoveled off with mounting excitement. Their wives took pictures and helped my baby niece explore the ice. We played hockey without skates; Mom brought us popcorn and hot chocolate, and we stopped between goals, steam wending its way from our lungs. Dad appeared at the pond's edge for a few moments with his pipe, surveying the game and his family quietly. We stayed away from the deep end, where Derek had once fallen through the ice 20 years earlier.

The night before I left for Iraq, as my brothers and I sat in my room clanking our beer bottles, I taught them the geographic cues that the U.S. government had trained me to use if I was taken hostage and appeared on al-Jazeera, kneeling in front of masked insurgents. My forehead, north. South, my chin. My nose was Baghdad.

I'd tried for nearly two years to get myself to the war zone. During the invasion, I was living in Cairo as a Fulbright scholar, studying the intersection of politics and Islamism. It was a path I'd started down at age 15, after a trip to Egypt with my grandmother sparked a fascination with the culture. I had begun studying Arabic almost immediately. By the time Baghdad fell, I had six years of Arabic under my belt, a degree in Middle Eastern history and had lived throughout the region. I nurtured profound opposition to the war, but I thought I could contribute my skills in the attempt to rebuild Iraq.

Now it had been nearly a year since I arrived in Iraq. And, frankly, it felt wrong to leave for even a week. There was still so much to be done in Fallujah, so much to figure out. I didn't want to take that responsibility lightly, like so many U.S. officials who had come for a few hours to get their picture taken and to say they'd been. But my family rarely had reunions, and I was due for a break. Plus, just days before I left, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, soon to deploy to Fallujah from Camp Pendleton in California, had requested a briefing on USAID's work in Anbar province. I would be able to fit in that trip after my R&R and was pleased at the chance to get at least some work done while I was out of Iraq.