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small business in. Another two were agriculturalists for real, albeit specializing in hogs (in a Muslim country) and large-scale agribusiness, respectively, woefully out of their lanes in Iraq. As a gang they matched well with the SIGIR warning that some PRT staff were “generally able,” some were “somewhat able,” many were “less able,” and a few were “generally unable” to carry out their missions. I learned only later that there had already been seven team leaders for this group in the last twelve months and that my personnel were a disparate mix of people with reasonable skill sets, a number with incomplete skill sets, and some who weren’t any good at their jobs. The programs they had initiated reflected months of constantly changing guidance from the Embassy. The team liked to soothe over the horrors of war with whiskey and conveniently kept in the filing cabinet a bottle of some horrific Missouri rotgut. The team members’ expectations, I came to know, were variously for blind support, for unconditional appreciation, or for me to pretty much leave them alone. To me, these were by and large people aggressively devoted to mediocrity, often achieving it.
    But all that perspective would come later. Next up was a meeting to discuss the purchase of pregnant sheep for a small number of local widows. For $25,000 we’d buy the widows pregnant lambs to raise. They’d then sell the offspring. It seemed like a good enough idea, helping widows, so I asked the team how they had determined the cost of a pregnant ewe. My colleagues had asked one local sheik for a price. I asked why they hadn’t sought several prices to compare; they said that would have been inconvenient. They implored me to sign off on the idea “to make things easier.” Like the extra cash for McBlazer, this was “normal.”
    I asked how many lambs a ewe could be expected to produce in a year (the correct verb is “to lamb,” as in “The ewe is ready to lamb now”), what the going price was for a lamb, and what a decent income was for a widow in Iraq. No one knew the answers. How would the widows be selected? The sheik selling us the animals would select the recipients from his extended family. He would also teach the widows sheep raising but would take from them the first healthy lamb in return. How would the widows get by if they would not be able to keep the firstborn lamb? Not our problem. We needed only to sit back and tell the Embassy how well the project was going. The team claimed they had never been held accountable for money spent. They explained that previous leaders would sign everything without question, like a high school substitute teacher.
    I wouldn’t sign, and it looked like things were at a stalemate. As I wondered how to get out of the room and maybe grab a taxi to, say, Paris, Ms. Sharon, our Iraqi American adviser, broke the silence by announcing I did not trust her. I’d never met her before and ten minutes into the relationship was too early to not trust her, or trust her. She began crying and ran out of the room. I asked Mel if he had drafted the project and, if so, why he did not seek multiple prices and resolve some of the issues. He said Ms. Sharon had done the work. Did Ms. Sharon have an agricultural background? Mel mumbled no, her only previous work experience was doing office work in Chicago.
    My first real workday in Iraq was done. I flew back to FOB Hammer and went to bed fully expecting to be killed in my sleep by McBlazer. Unfortunately, I was not.

Tribes
    A FOB was a village, populated by tribes who rarely intermingled except on business and who had little in common except for the fact that they were all at this same place at this same time in Iraq.
    Soldiers
    The largest tribe on any FOB were the soldiers. This was their war, and in a way they were the reason most every other tribe had migrated to Iraq. At first brush it was easy to