Part 1: From executive suite to Baghdad’s slums

As you drive through certain neighborhoods you see people smiling and waving, thanking us for being here. These folks have had tumultuous history by any standard. They deserve the right to be free. They deserve the right to be safe.
— Excerpt from an e-mail message Tom Deierlein sent from Baghdad on July 28, 2006

Laura T. Coffey Contributing editor • E-mail

A single shot, from such close range it was deafening, knocked Tom Deierlein to the street.

A sniper had been watching as Deierlein, a U.S. Army captain, and about a dozen other armed soldiers climbed out of their Humvees in Adhamiya, where Iraqi garbage collectors had been fired upon less than an hour before. The neighborhood was one of Baghdad’s most treacherous.

Garbage had become a symbol of Iraq’s decay and collapse. It concealed rats, bodies and roadside bombs. Trash stood in piles more than 5 feet high on some streets. 

Deierlein and the other soldiers in his civil affairs unit weren’t usually charged with providing security in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. They were in Baghdad to help restore the most basic infrastructure, such as garbage collection. It wasn’t going well.

But amid the chaos, they had found a way to make a small difference — by doing what they could to help the city’s most impoverished residents.

Days earlier, Deierlein, 38, and his buddies had handed out Flintstones chewable vitamins to a crowd of smiling mothers only blocks away. Deierlein had told them: These will help your children grow stronger and taller.

“Shukran, shukran!” the women had replied in Arabic. “Thank you, thank you!”

The vitamins, as well as toys, crayons and coloring books, were gifts from Americans, donated to a makeshift charity Deierlein had created shortly after arriving in Iraq.

But on this day, as Deierlein and the others stepped onto the street, no one spoke to them. No children ran up to say hello.

An unexpected assignment
Deierlein didn’t have to be in that filthy Baghdad neighborhood. When the Army reached back into his life in October 2005, he was well past his eight-year service obligation to the military. A senior-level advertising executive, he lived in a trendy Manhattan apartment and had a share house in the Hamptons. He was engaged to marry a beautiful airline pilot. He owned a tuxedo and wore it often. He hadn’t worn an Army uniform in 12 years.

Call-up orders arrived in his mailbox anyway. When he balked, an Army official told him he could be jailed if he didn’t report for training.

Then, a few days before Deierlein was set to ship out, another Army official called to say that his military obligations had, in fact, already been met, that he owed the military nothing. He didn’t have to report for duty after all.

He went anyway.

By then, much of the mammoth task of putting Baghdad back together had fallen to tiny teams of reservists. Deierlein (pronounced DEER-line) led one of these four-member teams during his tour of duty. Their assignment: Find ways to get schools and hospitals rebuilt, factories and fire stations reopened, local governments functioning as they should and basic utilities such as trash collection up and running again for millions of residents.

Tom’s Journal Called back to active duty “I didn’t want you to hear it through the grapevine. When I got home Wednesday night, there was a packet of military orders in my mailbox. No joke.”

For the most part, the reservists in Deierlein’s civil affairs company had no idea how to tackle such complicated projects. Still, they did their best. They met with local officials and contractors in different sectors of Baghdad and tried to provide guidance and support. Too often, though, the people they befriended were assassinated, and the projects they carried out were attacked by insurgents.

Frustrations mounted for the reservists, people in their 30s and 40s who had put their lives and careers on hold to serve in Iraq. Like Deierlein, several didn’t have to deploy because they had fulfilled their military obligations years earlier. They, too, got called up, and they went anyway.

All their adult lives, they’d been proud that their Army training equipped them to parachute into almost any situation and figure it out. They wanted to do good work — important work — during their year on the ground. But nothing could have prepared them for the sheer size of this assignment, or for the violence and lawlessness they encountered. Deierlein and his fellow soldiers quickly realized how hard it was to have an impact in Iraq.

So they found another way.

‘People are suffering’
The Army provided thousands of bags of food and bottles of water to the people of Iraq, but Deierlein decided to go further. Shaken by the malnourished, desperately poor children he saw, he asked loved ones and well-wishers back home who wanted to send him care packages to send supplies for Iraqi kids instead.

Boxes began to arrive.

Deierlein fell into the habit of writing about his Baghdad experiences in monthly e-mail updates to his family members, friends and colleagues. Those e-mail messages get forwarded, and forwarded, and forwarded.

More boxes arrived.

Before long, Deierlein and his friends in his civil affairs company were distributing children’s clothes, shoes, vitamins, toys, soccer balls, school supplies and blankets in one poverty-stricken area after another.

“We really enjoyed those kind of opportunities because you drove through these neighborhoods day after day after day,” Deierlein said. “There’s a lot of innocent, decent people that just are there and are suffering. So even if you could alleviate that suffering a little bit, it really did make you feel good.”

During the humanitarian-aid drop in September 2006 when Deierlein handed out vitamins, an elderly Sunni woman fainted in temperatures approaching 110 degrees. Deierlein ran to a nearby Humvee and grabbed a stretcher. He and the others carried the woman, limp in her long black dress and headscarf, into an air-conditioned room. Deierlein held the woman’s hand.

“While I am 100 percent sure I wasn’t supposed to be doing that,” he recalled, “she reached out, and it seemed natural.”

Deierlein stepped back outside into the heat, which he described in an e-mail message as feeling “exactly like when you open an oven to check your food and the air pushes into your face.” He had more vitamins to give away to the moms, more gifts for their curious, smiling children.

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