Roosevelt resident chose to ply trade in Iraq
By: Matt Chiappardi
ROOSEVELT Over the past three years, Joe Zahora spent many a Friday afternoon barbecuing poolside before retiring to his room to watch a DVD or a football game. Outside his window, his view was filled with palm and date trees set against the backdrop of azure skies.
But the razor wire, blast walls and men carrying machine guns that he also saw belied this place as an exotic vacation locale.
The longtime Roosevelt resident was in Iraq, not as a soldier or a tourist, but as a hired construction project manager, rebuilding the devastated landscape and infrastructure of that Arab nation after nearly 30 years of war and neglect.
The pools were inside one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces. Although he said he sometimes worked more than 100 hours a week, he’d usually have Friday afternoons off to relax in one of the former president’s mansions.
His neighborhood was Karadat Miryam in Baghdad inside the Green Zone, an area in the central part of the city cordoned off by coalition forces that once housed the Provisional Authority that governed Iraq before the 2005 elections. The 4-square-mile area is still the center of the international presence in Iraq surrounded by a heavily armed perimeter.
Karadat Miryam is just a few yards away from the Baghdad Zoo, where the infamous Uday Hussein, one of Saddam’s sons, was rumored to feed virgins, and his enemies, to one of the menagerie’s tigers.
"I didn’t feel comfortable walking by myself in that neighborhood," Mr. Zahora, 54, said in an interview late last month.
Surrounded by the guerrilla aftermath of the U.S. invasion, Mr. Zahora and his crew of construction workers and civil engineers worked to restore power, water, and other necessities to many of Iraq’s cities.
His job was to repair most of the urban damage that resulted not only from the two Gulf Wars and the war between Iraq and its neighbor Iran in the 1980s, but the decades of neglect most of the infrastructure had sustained since Saddam Hussein took power in the late 1970s.
That task, he said, was daunting.
Of the 394 electrical towers that strung power from one municipality to the next, 350 of them, he said, were damaged, destroyed or missing. To make matters more difficult, almost all of his work had to be done remotely from Baghdad. The Iraqis working under him would only go out, he said, disguised as members of the Ministry of Electricity. And even then, their safety in the lawless country was questionable. One of the men who worked for him was killed.
Mr. Zahora, a 21-year resident of the borough, left what he described as a very stressful job in Philadelphia in 2004. He accepted a position with the Washington Group, an international company based in Idaho that provides construction and civil engineering work for governments around the world. The company, which was also instrumental in the effort to dismantle nuclear weapons in the Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was awarded a contract by the U.S. government in 2003 after the Iraqi government dissolved as a result of the invasion.
Some people might call Mr. Zahora’s attempt at relaxation by working in Iraq, folly. But Mr. Zahora saw it as both an adventure and an opportunity for service.
"I had a desire to help Iraq to get back on its feet, and it was an opportunity to put my skills to good use," he said.
Plus, he added, the money was very attractive.
His family wasn’t happy with his decision.
"The impact on my family was rough," Mr. Zahora said.
His wife, Diane, 14-year-old son Joseph, and 9-year-old daughter Rebecca eventually came around to supporting his decision, he said. His work schedule with short spurts of time in Iraq, about 70 days, followed by two weeks leave to visit home made it easier.
Yet, time apart took its toll.
"I felt like I missed some part of (my children’s) growing up," said Mr. Zahora.
"My wife had the harder job, despite the fact that I was the one over there," he added.
Insulated from Baghdad’s violence and poverty on a modular and portable compound surrounded by a U.S. military base, Mr. Zahora rarely left his temporary home.
Still, he’d sometimes hear, or hear about, the explosions that would rip through Baghdad’s streets and markets and then land on the evening news programs of nearly every Western country.
Nonetheless he said, "I never felt I was in any danger."
"I was on a military base surrounded by 30,000 soldiers, and it wasn’t a significant part of everyday life. Those attacks are random and sectarian; they don’t happen at the same place every day," he said.
On the few occasions he did leave, his security detail was heavy.
"We’d have Chevy Suburbans in the front and back and a Ford Explorer where we rode in the middle," he said.
All of the cars were armored, and all of the guards were armed. Attacks by guerrillas or insurgents, Mr. Zahora said, were unlikely.
"The insurgents preferred to shoot at people who didn’t shoot back," he said.
[vmo: possibly cut: ]The first group of mercenaries his company used for security are best described as "cowboys," by Mr. Zahora.
[vmo: ditto: ]They’d typically drive very quickly through the city streets and highways, shoot without provocation, and ram their vehicles into any car unfortunate enough to be in their paths, he said.
[vmo: ditto: ]"I was personally embarrassed by the image we were projecting," he said.
[vmo: ditto: ]They were soon fired by Washington Group, and a security company from South Africa took their place. They were far more professional, said Mr. Zahora.
[vmo: ditto: ]"They drove slowly, always creating a bubble around us for protection," he said.
When Mr. Zahora first went to Iraq in the summer of 2004, things were relatively calm. Major military operations were deemed complete at the time and the insurgency had yet to reach the boiling point it did about a year-and-a-half later. And even then, Mr. Zahora said the most apparent change in the daily lives of the Iraqis he worked with was one of mood.
"They were optimistic when we first got there. They had hope," he said.
"Now, a lot of that hope has turned to despair."
There were also constant reminders that he was indeed inside a war zone.
Bullets would sometimes land on deck patios, the results he believed of shots constantly being fired into the air. And although, the U.S. military controlled Iraq’s airspace, there was still random incoming fire from rockets and mortars shot blindly from somewhere in the Iraqi countryside.
Six months after he arrived, he said, even those stopped.
It was not until the destruction of Samarra’s Golden Mosque in late 2005 that violence began to rise again.
The random aerial bombardments began to increase, almost to 2004 levels, in the early months of this year, he said. That, in his opinion, is what prompted this summer’s troop increase.
A troop increase in excess of 30,000 to the already 150,000-strong force was ordered by President George W. Bush early this year. While Mr. Zahora said he believed the initial invasion "wasn’t supported by any facts," he does believe the U.S. government is doing the right thing now.
"Everything (Bush) is saying now is backed up by action," said the contractor, whose time in Iraq and with the Washington Group ended in June.
"The focus of the American effort in Iraq has noticeably given (the Iraqis) the abilities and skills (to govern) themselves," he added.
Yet, he believes that work is far from finished and a troop withdrawal now would have disastrous consequences.
"I feel strongly that the country would fall into immediate chaos if we left now," he said.
"There is no strong Iraqi central authority to put them in a position to do anything. (A troop withdrawal) would create a lot of instability, and that instability would spill over the borders into the whole region," he added.
In the meantime, Mr. Zahora says, life goes on in Iraq much like it has since that region birthed history’s earliest known civilization.
"It’s just people trying to live their everyday lives," he said.
"It’s not a constant war zone. That stuff is random at different locations everyday," he added.
The tragedy, he says, is that the Iraq people are caught in the middle of the arbitrary violence that continues to impede Iraq’s transformation into a modern liberal democracy.
"That randomness," he said, "has taken the Iraqis’ hope away."