When An Iraqi Traffic Cop Offers To Share The Porn on His Phone

Edited, Where Appropriate, by Sam Thielman [Only some of this is my fault—Sam]

SO A FEW DAYS AGO I fell down a research rabbit hole that sent me to some pieces I wrote in Baghdad at the dawn of the troop surge. It was March 2007, by this point well into Year Two of one of the deepest depressions of my life. I was six months past getting fired, unsure if I'd get another job in journalism and googling culinary schools. Instead I flew to Iraq during one of the most violent periods of the combination occupation/civil war. Men will literally seek death before going to therapy.

Probably the best piece I produced during that trip was this piece for the Nation about the U.S. training an Iraqi police force that was pretty much top cover for sectarian militias. But the most fun piece—"fun" graded on a curve here; therapy has helped me understand that during this month of my life I saw fucked-up shit that's stayed with me in unwelcome ways—was this one.

I don't remember what IraqSlogger was exactly, beyond being a blog that compiled material for Iraq obsessives and Robert Young Pelton was part of it. It turns out I wrote a piece for them after listening to an exchange about sex and porn between Iraqi traffic cops, who I'm convinced were seizing a trolling opportunity, and U.S. soldiers, who wanted desperately for their conversation to end.

No one read my dispatch at the time or afterward. IraqSlogger hasn't existed for over a decade and can be accessed only through the Wayback Machine. But I kind of liked rediscovering the piece, so I'm going to reach into my back catalog. This was what it was like to be a fly on the wall for an absurd moment during an evil occupation.

I'm resisting the temptation to re-edit my old work. Reading how you used to write 15 years ago is nonstop cringe—take it from someone who had to go back through all their published work to get a book out of it—but to change it feels like manipulating the historical record. Is that stupid? Should I think of re-editing old journalism more like an anniversary remaster rerelease? I don't know. But I'd rather read old sentences that should have ended two clauses earlier than open myself up to accusations of revisionism. I am going to exclude the original headline. Not only didn't I write it, it's wrong in a way that's substantively trivial and, accordingly, maximally annoying. Sam inserted some clarifications in brackets but that's it.

Outside of that, this is a piece of mine from March 14, 2007; Khadimiya is (or was at the time) a Shiite neighborhood in western Baghdad.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ—IT'S A HOT AFTERNOON at al-Karkh Traffic Police headquarters in Khadimiya, easily the hottest in the last week. In a darkened office of the sunny building, [an Iraqi traffic cop,] Major Lawrence (his real name; really!), is answering inventory questions for Lieutenant Anthony Howell of the 92nd Military Police Battalion. Lawrence, who looks like a fat Bashar Assad, has the monotonous job of tracking logistics for the traffic police, and his office has the perfunctory whiteboard filled with statistics about shifts, weapons, ammunition, everything. (Whiteboards are necessary for accounting when you have only a few hours of electricity for your computers every day.)

The half-hour-long stats check bogs down to the point where Lawrence starts committing a no-no from the U.S. perspective: asking the Americans for stuff. Howell and his fellow MPs want Lawrence to go through [the Iraqis’] own chain of command for their inventory needs, both to test the efficiency of the Iraqi system and to roll back any sense of dependency. But now Lawrence has his hand out, and he can't close it. He starts out asking Howell for flak jackets — diplomatically, Howell says he'll see what he can do, but no promises — and soon he's passing out his ballpoint pens to show Howell and his colleague, civilian police adviser Jon Moore, how Iraqi pens smudge and tear paper. "How about getting me some American pens?"

The meeting is about to break when Lawrence's warrant officer, Tarek, walks in. Tarek, thin as a skeleton, has the leathery face of a thirty-year veteran officer and the dessicated teeth of a fifty-year chain smoker, and sure enough he moves over in front of Lawrence's fridge and lights a Miami-brand cigarette. Do you know Tarek? Lawrence asks. [The Americans] do, and everyone exchanges hellos. "He's a great officer, a longtime veteran," he says through the battalion translator, Achilles. "The only thing is he smokes too many cigarettes." Ha-ha; everyone laughs. Howell and Moore exchange a can-we-go-now look.

But Lawrence isn't finished. "He likes sex, too. You want to check out his cellphone? Lots of porno movies!"

Howell and Moore exchange another look. This one displays much more alarm. Suddenly this is no typical inventory meeting. Lawrence, grinning, taps Achilles, who arches an eyebrow. Achilles wants to make sure Lawrence means for him to translate what he's saying. He does. Achilles, himself bewildered, says, "He wants to know if you guys can have sex in Iraq."

MP training has not prepared the 24-year old lieutenant from West Lafayette, Indiana, for a sex chat with an Iraqi police bureaucrat. "Umm," he says. That's not really allowed.

You're kidding! Lawrence says through Achilles. "How do you do it, guys? What the fuck?"

Howell is blessed with being quick on his feet. "Lots of prayer." Moore, a terminally polite middle-aged Tennesseean, is chuckling to himself like he's trying to survive a plane crash through the power of positive thinking.

Lawrence keeps talking and Achilles keeps translating. "He was in the Iraqi Army, and when they'd be abroad, the officers would give them this white powder, to put in food, or in tea. It's called kafour; I don't know what that is in English, it's an Arabic term..." Moore nods to me: "I see where this is going." Achilles continues, "You put it in tea, it is to stop your orgasm — your erection." Howell starts shooting me looks. I'm just scribbling as fast as I can.

"You've been to Iraq three times," Lawrence says to Howell, "and you haven't had sex? You're an American citizen! How can you do that?" Actually, it's Howell's second tour.

Elderly Tarek breaks in. "If I'm away from home for just three days, I'm ready to eat my wife!"

Look, Lawrence says. "I spent ten days here at once, not long ago. It wasn't secure enough to go home. When I got back, I ate a lot of dates and honey" — an aphrodisiac — "and it was like Viagra! My wife, she was screaming! 'Ah! No more!'" He continues to share that when security improved somewhat, he was able to vary the days he got to come home, and would startle his wife. "She was like, 'What the fuck?'"

Mercifully, Lawrence shifts the subject to how the promotion system for officers works in the U.S. Army. But before we're finally about to leave, he says he feels like Howell and Moore are his brothers. "I hope you guys go back to the States and get everything you want." Achilles doesn't need to explain what Lawrence means.

AND SCENE. We return to 2022.

What maybe doesn't come across in this piece is that if the Iraqi traffic cops had gotten American soldiers to say they had sex with Iraqi women, it would be potentially incendiary. That, not prudishness, was why Howell and Moore were trying to maneuver the conversation anywhere else. My memory is that the Iraqi traffic cops were being harmlessly mischievous. They enjoyed breaking American balls. But if Howell or Moore had decided to be boastful instead of disciplined and had attempted bro'ing down with the traffic police, they could easily have incited a riot. And so, we saw no porn during that day's mission.

SPEAKING OF REVISITING OLD WORK, the living god Polly Jean Harvey has released an album of demos for Let England Shake.

Every PJ Harvey demos record is a must-have. (Her Peel Sessions counts.) 4-Track Demos was where it started for me with her, thanks to one of my dearest friends telling me to listen to it when I was 20, and since, lo-fi PJ Harvey is how I find her material transmits best. (You guessed it—Stories is my least favorite of her albums; though there are absolute bangers on it like "This Is Love.") Let England Shake is always going to resonate with me because it's her forever-war album*.

But this is really something else. "Hanging on The Wire" is one of my favorites from Let England Shake and without disrespect to Rob Ellis, Polly Jean is sometimes at her most powerful unaccompanied by drums. Meanwhile, to hear her sing the dominant part on the war poem "The Colour of Earth" is to hear her directing a song that she's confident enough to give to Mick Harvey to sing on the album. I bought this on vinyl because I knew it would be special. It didn't know it would be sublime.

*I know the Gallipoli references and so forth—poor doomed Louis of "The Colour of Earth" dies in an Anzac trench—but there's a reason she's ruminating bitterly in 2011 on the legacy of a futile nightmare, and that reason is the U.K. had been plunged headlong into the War on Terror for a decade by the time of Let England Shake.

ON FRIDAY, FEB. 11, I’ll be on a virtual panel discussing the War on Terror sponsored by the High Line, which I guess sponsors such things; I figured it would be civic to accept the invitation. That's at 2:30 pm ET. Then on Feb. 17, I'll be speaking to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not in person—which sucks, I wanted to go to Luke's emo night—but if you want to hear me talk in a highly respectable forum about REIGN OF TERROR, you can join in at 4:30 pm ET.