As one comes to expect in the army, the day I anticipated was not the day I experienced yesterday. To begin with, I showed up for duty an hour late because, unbeknownst to me, we had "sprung forward" over the course of the night. And I was greeted not with the mundane tidying and prep work I was expecting, in anticipation of our imminent departure, but an overflowing septic system that had shit water flowing onto the concrete.
The morning spent toiling in human waste got me thinking about how my little ordeal could shed some light on the larger situation.
I work at an Iraqi facility where Iraqi government personel outnumber Americans and my boss is also the highest ranking American around. Its nice to be away from the flagpole, as the saying goes, because it cuts down on the bullshit of keeping up appearances you find at the major garrisons. Like any workplace, a day of work on a military installation involves a lot of effort looking busy so the boss won't think you're available for more assignments. Out here we don't have that problem, we are essentially our own boss. We do what the mission requires and a bit more, then call it a day. That means a lot of free time. So putting in a little more effort yesterday wasn't a problem in and of itself, there are certainly much worse details to be on in Iraq.
I don't think I was the only one who got started late, because by the time I got downstairs, two of my collegues were still in the first stages of the problem solving process. My plumbing fixtures were not effected by the problem since I am upstairs, but apparently on the first floor all the showers were backed up with fecal matter. All of which was Iraqi. Americans use the one functioning western style toilet, which is not located where the problem occured, and we pop the drain cover once a week to make sure there is nothing backing up the water flow. But no Iraqi was in sight as we went about trying to address the situation.
For three hours four of us worked to fix the problem. We popped the drain covers and started bailing shit water out of the holes. First we cut the top off a two liter bottle, put a rock in the bottom, and used two pieces of 550 cord as handles to get the water out the way you would use a bucket to draw water from a well. Then one sergeant used the top instead. With the hole in the bottom, the bottle top went straight in without coersion and we were just dumping the water on the ground, so the small amount that he lost down the hole didn't offset the total amount he was able to hold in his IWED (improvised water extracting device). After a while our interpreter found a little bucket that held maybe three liters of water and we started taking turns bailing out another of the filled storage tanks. We found all sorts of stuff in there, razors, tomatoes, empty cigarette packs, a sandal, it was as if people were just throwing trash directly into the tanks. After we found a guy taking a shower and had him stop, we were able to make some progress bringing the water level down, but we still couldn't identify out the central problem. We hadn't yet exposed all the pipes, so we started poking around with sticks and rods trying to figure out which way the water flowed, which tanks drained into which, ect. It was around that time that the officer in charge said, "Isn't this typical, four Americans cleaning up the Iraqis' shit?" We did finally sort out how the three tanks connected and were able to finally see all the pipes. But the water level was still not falling below a certain point and there was a lot of debris. Then the plumber showed up.
Which was nice because he had an SST (shit sucking truck), pipe snakes, and an apprentice (who couldn't have been more than fourteen). Plus he seemed to know what he was doing. At this point, the Iraqi in charge of the facility decided to finally show up and get involved. My sergeant was none too pleased with that. In our experience with the man that is his standard behavior. Do nothing to help solve the problem unless its he has no choice but to act or it makes him look good. Anyway, the plumber proceeded to lower the water level further than we were able and seemed to address the problem. We still don't think he fixed the underlying source of the back up, just treated the symptoms, but my team should be long gone by the time he needs to come out again.
This story brings to mind two different impressions of Iraqi society in my experience. The first is that Iraqis are used to a much more centralized decision making system than Americans, so they look to authority figures to solve many problems we would try to solve ourselves. Whether its been a city council meeting, talking with citizens while on patrol, seeing how people deal with crises of various degrees of severity, or my day to day interation with the police and soldiers, I often find that Iraqis will look to their superior or to us to solve the problem at hand. When we were trying to stand up a police force in Anah, the city council wanted Ramadi to supply the chief and the cops. Soldiers and policemen are unwilling or reluctant to address problems they readily acknowledge, unless directed to do something by their sergeant or officer. When we busted a water main and cut water off to a town, there was no effort to alleviate the situation as we struggled to get them drinking water as we patched the hole. It was our fault, but the officials who could have helped had an oversized estimate of our capacity to deliver water to this town of 2000 people. And in my current location, whenever there is a problem the Iraqi personnel look to us first before themselves to fix it, as with the sewage system. In a larger sense, I think many have correctly identified this as an obstacle to the overall mission. We are seen as the ultimate authority in Iraq, not the central government, and we will be seen as such until we leave. That means we have to play the role of authority as Iraqis know it, not the other way around.
The second thing I've come away with thus far is a corollary to the first and a source of much frustration in the American ranks. Since our society places a great deal of emphasis on personal responsibility and initiative, most other societies will come off as lazy or unambitious. That is the case here. I've heard many soldiers comment on the idea that Iraqis won't do anything for themselves, you can't get them to work, or they are only looking for a handout. The result of this difference in attitudes and expectations is that your average soldier is either contemptuous of Iraqis or trying to transform an entire culture (particularly in the security forces) in our image. The first attitude gets us nowhere and the second would take years of continuous application to come to fruition. In lieu of a focused mission for most of our servicemembers over here and a lack of knowledge about Iraqi society predeployment, we are forced to rely on our own ideas of how society should function to shape our activities.
There are many conclusions to draw from the story as I present it. One is that we should have just waited for the expert to show up instead of using our American can-do-itivness to solve a problem beyond our capabilities. But we did manage to get enough water moved to allow people to defecate without seeing the results in the next stall, just in case the plumber never made it. Another is that Iraqi plumbing sucks, which in this case it does. The one most soldiers and, if you go by politician's rhetoric, most Americans would draw is that we have worked hard on behalf of Iraqis, but they won't do the work necessary to bring the problem to a close. I think there is some validity to that argument, but it misses the bigger picture.
People lacking the required knowledge (non-plumbers/an army) and tools were sent to do a job (fix a septic system/rebuild civil society). Despite the lack of expertise, the wrong people could eventually reach a successful conclusion (over the course of several hours or days that could be used for better purposes/over the course of several years or decades and several hundred billion, probably trillions, of dollars that could be used for better purposes). It would be nice if the people standing on the sidelines (the pooping Iraqi policemen/the Iraqi people) would lend us a hand, but ultimately the problem is beyond their control. Hopefully the people (the plumber and his sidekick/Iraqi political leaders) best placed to solve the problem (fixing a septic system/rebuilding civil society) show up eventually and do their jobs.
Throw in the hundreds of thousands of people killed, wounded, and displaced and a lack of WMD and there is no reason for us to be here anymore, if there ever was a reason in the first place (none if you ask me).
So I say let's stop scooping shit out of a hole and get back to readying our stuff so we can get the fuck out of here. But I'm not the sergeant so I'll just keep bailing.