December 1, 2009

The Serving Line at Q-West

This coffee chain serves as a rough map of the United States’ global military reach—which now includes 761 bases in other countries, and another 104 bases in U.S. territories such as Guam[i] –but the Green Bean is also a symbol of how the United States has radically re-imagined the way we wage war. As the post-Cold War has given way to the era of the Long War, the U.S. military has been stretched farther and thinner than ever before. To maintain this “forever war”, as journalist Dexter Filkins calls it, military bases have been transformed into fortified mini-Americas that serve the comforts of coffee and fast food to soldiers on endless deployment. The service economy on military bases has grown so large, that armies of contractors have to be imported to staff America’s wars. In Iraq, the number of contractors has grown to more than 119,000, rivaling the 134,000 troops the U.S. has on the ground. And in Afghanistan, where the American military presence is only slated to grow, contractors already outnumber troops. In fact, according to a recent Congressional study, the Department of Defense has set a historical precedent in Afghanistan, employing the highest percentage of contractors in any conflict in the history of the United States.[ii]  

In 2006, I caught a glimpse of the military’s new contractor economy, during a trip to Iraq for a documentary film I directed about Filipino contractors titled God Is My Safest Bunker. I spent time on some of the biggest and smallest bases in the country, and what follows are some observations on life in these strange transplanted islands of America.

When I finally land in my destination, I end up in a waiting room with two burly American contractors in cargo pants and one young soldier who has just returned from a two-week leave in the States. They explain that the ‘Q’ in Q-West, is short for Qayyarah —the old Saddam air base that formerly occupied this plot of land. There are still eerie reminders of what once was: hangars that housed Iraqi M-1 Mirages, concrete storage units shaped like pyramids that Americans use as bunkers, and a modest mosque that still broadcasts regularly a recorded call to prayer. The base houses five thousand soldiers and contractors, it is located sixty miles south of Mosul and has the feel of a small American frontier town in the wide open desert of Arizona or New Mexico. In fact, there are few signals that we are even in a foreign country. Except for a small corner of the base where American soldiers train a contingent of the nascent Iraqi army, there are no locals on base. Like most U.S. installations in Iraq, Q-West has a policy of not employing Iraqis for security reasons. There is a high wall of concertina wire separating the base from the surrounding landscape and many of the people working on base have never been “outside the wire.” The effect is isolating and surreal. We are hunkered down in what feels like the middle of nowhere. Through the security fence, all you see is an empty road stretching out to a flat horizon. The only signs of Iraqi life are miles from the base, in smatterings of clay huts, which we spot from the plane ride in.

The isolation of Q-West seems to reinforce its American identity. It’s just a few days before Christmas when we arrive on the base and the whole place seems to be going out of its way to celebrate the holiday. Multi-colored lights and miniature plastic trees adorn soldiers’ trailers, signs advertising the upcoming Christmas play that features a cast of young soldiers playing disgruntled elves are posted on the walls, and care packages overflowing with candy from home seem to be everywhere. The holiday spirit is in fullest swing inside the dining hall, or dining hall administrative center, which in the language of military acronyms, translates to the DFAC.

Easily the largest building on base, the DFAC is a hangar-size structure built of concrete and steel that has the familiar feel of a high school cafeteria. There are plastic trays, styrofoam plates and long stainless steel counters displaying holiday specials: steak, roasted turkey, crab legs, shrimp cocktail and half a dozen types of pies. Glittery candelabra centerpieces and Happy Holiday napkins adorn every table, and a giant inflatable snow globe greets soldiers as they enter the hall.

The fact that the holiday is inescapable is of course deliberate. It is part of the American military’s MWR, or ‘morale, welfare and recreation’ strategy. Indeed, it is no accident that the holidays are when presidents are fondest of visiting war zones (cue George W. Bush’s stage-managed turkey). The pageantry is meant to reassure, and to prop up the idea that this is all somehow normal, that there is order in the middle of chaos, and perhaps most disturbing, that American traditions can continue—pure, whole, and unmolested—in the middle of a country that we so clearly fail to understand.

The men behind the DFAC counter have their own acronym, of course. In military speak, they are TCNs, or third country nationals. There is also another acronym used sometime, SCW, or subcontracted worker. Exactly who falls into this group seems rather arbitrary, but also quite revealing. The majority of third country nationals come from the Philippines, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. There is also a smaller subset, who mainly work as private security, that hail from Chile, Sierra Leone and Kenya (the connection to past military regimes is of course not coincidental). Western contractors, who generally serve in managerial roles, do not fall into this category. Instead, the civilians who come from the U.S., Britain, Bosnia, Australia and South Africa, are labeled “ex-pats”.

The rigid class system that separates Western contractors from their “third world” counterparts is anything but subtle. I witnessed these distinctions when I got a tour of the kitchen from Johan, a tall middle-aged South African contractor with a thick Afrikaans accent. Johan is the overseer of the dining hall. His red polo shirt and baseball cap both have an embroidered “KBR” on them, the symbol of his employer Kellogg, Brown, and Root. The company, which until 2007 was a subsidiary of Halliburton, is by far the largest contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has earned $32 billion from the U.S. government since 2001.[iii] Johan, and all of the American mid-level managers that he works with, are always wearing shirts and hats marked with KBR. Their direct underlings are mostly Turkish, and wear the logo of their company SERKA, on their shirts and caps as well. 

Before Johan walked me through the double doors that lead to the kitchen, it was clear he wanted to limit my interactions with his third country national employees. He told me it’s okay to ask workers about the food they are preparing, but any questions about working conditions, or “how they like it here,” are off limits. “It’s just a policy we have,” he said.

The kitchen was actually several giant adjoining rooms, filled with industrial-sized cooking gear. There is a room for baking bread where two Filipinos heave a giant ball of dough onto a stainless steel table, a room filled with multi-tiered ovens where racks of turkey and chicken are roasting, and another where a line of workers concentrate on carving elaborate flowers from carrots, oranges and tomatoes. Above the sinks, are laminated signs decorated with clip art of a smiling chef that reads, “Remember to wash your hands.” The instruction is written in four languages: English, Tagalog, Nepali, and Bengali.

When Johan was in the room, the workers are all silent and stiff, but just outside the kitchen, in an outdoor wooden shack covered in black netting, the scene is very different. Beneath a stenciled warning that reads, “Please limit breaks to 5 minutes,” a group of five Filipinos are joking with each other as they puff away. A chubby man with a stubble peppered me with questions about my camera. When he discovered that I am American, he started yelling shout-outs to his relatives in LA: “Maria, I’m here in Iraq,” in Tagalog, waving a hello. “I’m in the middle of the battle,” he joked. Another man, employed as a pastry chef, pulled out a photo he had hanging around his neck. It was a portrait of him, his wife and three kids. “I miss them very much,” he said.

Third country nationals are ubiquitous in Iraq. According to the Department of Defense, there are more than 56,000 TCNs in Iraq, who account for about half of the contractors employed by the U.S. military.[iv] They form the backbone of most American bases, filling every service role imaginable. In the PX (the military’s version of Wal-Mart) there are Indian men scanning bags of potato chips and cases of Coke at the check out line; at the salon—yes, the base has a fully equipped salon complete with mani/pedi stations—chatty Filipino men buzz the sides of soldiers’ heads; at the laundry, a shy Nepali man inventories bags of dirty clothes. The third country nationals are everywhere, and yet somehow they seem invisible. Few of the Americans on base seem to know much about where they live or how they live. And few Americans realize that they earn a fraction of what their American counterparts make—starting salaries for TCNs is $300-500 a month while salaries for American contractors start at $6700 a month. As one employee of Kellog, Brown and Root described it to me, “I don’t think they’re being disrespected. They’re just like the hired help.”

The man in charge of the truck yards is a stout army major with a thick Bronx accent. The first thing he explains during our tour of the yards is that there are two types of convoys—those driven by KBR and those driven by TCNs. The convoys pull into two different yards and the drivers live by two very different standards. For one, the TCN drivers, who are mostly Turkish, are not allowed to leave their yard, while the KBR drivers, who are American, walk freely around the base. In fact, I frequently spot KBR drivers, who are mostly graying men with overgrown beards, in the dining hall. The explanation for this differential treatment is generally security, although it’s unclear why Turkish drivers could be trusted to drive fuel trucks alongside US soldiers but not be trusted to eat dinner with them.

As we walked through the TCN truck yard, Turks dressed in heavy winter coats and jeans gather in groups of twos and threes around their trucks. They sat on plastic stools around small metal tables that fold out from the bottom of their trailers, revealing caches of food and drinks. As we walked along one white trailer, a mustached man signaled the major to sit down. The major obliged and the driver quickly offered us coffee, pouring a thick brew into plastic cups placed on a tablecloth of Turkish newspapers. After our coffee break, the major explained apologetically that they are working on renovating a new yard for the TCNs that will have a café and proper bathrooms.

We toured the yard a few days after I’d been on a convoy run with the “roadrunners”, who escorted a chain of KBR trucks to a base 150 miles south of Q-West. Those trucks looked like humvees on steroids. They were outfitted in heavy khaki-colored armor and their doors weighed several hundred pounds. By contrast, the trucks in the TCN yard looked like regular 18-wheelers. They have no more armor than a truck hauling peaches up the I-95 from Georgia to New York. When I asked the major about the lack of protection, he said, “Believe me, those guys have my respect.” [v]

The party was held in the back room of a Turkish kebab house, one of two Turkish businesses allowed on base (the other was a souvenir shop that sold rugs and brass-plated lamps). It was already late when the party started, and there were just a few soldiers still lingering over their meals. In the meantime, in the back room, dozens of people gathered around aluminum trays of Filipino standards: sisig, a sizzling plate of fried fatty pig parts, lo mein and flan. The men I had seen on the serving lines and in the kitchen had changed into civilian clothes, wearing jeans and baggy sweatshirts. As contractors and soldiers sat side by side, snapping photos and sipping cans of non-alcoholic beer, one kitchen employee pulled out a guitar and started strumming Christmas songs. During his rendition of Feliz Navidad, most of the room got up from their chairs and sang along.

It was an oddly genuine moment—celebrating Christmas in the back of a Turkish restaurant in the middle of the Iraqi desert with a group of homesick Filipinos. But the authenticity of the holiday did not come from imported crab legs or blinking reindeer noses. It was homespun and improvised, as close to an organic holiday as we would get.

In Iraq, the promised draw-down of American troops is already changing the landscape of the U.S. military presence. As U.S. soldiers have withdrawn from Iraqi cities, America’s sprawling network of fortified bases has become even more central to the 130,000 troops that remain. While I was staying at Camp Anaconda, one of the largest bases in Iraq, one public affairs officer, a Vietnam veteran told me the last helicopter to leave Iraq would leave from that base. ‘This will be our Saigon,” he said. But as American military planners prepare for withdrawal next year, it’s unclear what will happen to the 56,000 third country nationals when American troops leave. There are already scattered reports that TCNs are being trafficked from U.S. military bases to Iraqi factories, where they are paid even less than what they make on base. Perhaps most disturbing is the possibility that TCNs will be trafficked off base and left literally stateless, forced into an abusive working situation with no way of returning home.[vi] 

The next chapter of this story is of course already unfolding in Afghanistan, where there are more than 16,000 third country nationals working for the U.S. military. Obama’s decision to send another 30,000 American troops to the country is sure to prompt an attendant increase in contractors as each of those soldiers will require someone to do their laundry, prepare their food, and clean their latrines.   As the men and women who do these jobs move from one war zone to another, they remain caught in the middle of wars that are of someone else’s making. And as long as third country nationals remain invisible, their sacrifices to this war effort will remain unacknowledged and the U.S. will have successfully outsourced not only the comforts but many of the consequences of war.