At the Gate

While Tommi waited in Kuwait for transport into Iraq, I consoled myself believing her trips in and out of the country would be the most dangerous aspects of her deployment – once “behind the wire” she would be ok. A junior officer trained in military intelligence, she is an officer nonetheless and a female, all indications being that she would be assigned to grunt work for top brass deep inside the compound. Though tedious and too often demeaning, she would be a reliable distance from bullets or bombs. I rested in that belief, resolved to the difficulty of being without her but insulated against greater fears with a blanket of security that once again proved misleading.

Tommi, too, had anticipated a post in the “mayor cell,” the equivalent of a town hall for the community of 20,000 plus soldiers stationed there. Several days pass before she is able to tell me about her job, and when she does, I lose a day of my life just from knowing. Tommi is the officer in charge of initial access privileges; her duty post is a forty-by-eighty foot barricaded trailer at the front gate.

Please pause. Read that last sentence again. Can you feel the moment with me? Tommi is the only woman in her duty area, replacing a captain – a male six foot, five inches tall. She is in charge of pass security for Nationals employed by U.S. contractors engaged in the rebuilding process inside the wire. Her job is to issue passes, enact and approve security checks, and most significantly, detect and confront those attempting to scan falsified documents.

I had (almost) been ready for her deployment to Iraq; I had (almost) steeled myself to the unwelcome forecast of a two-year absence, but nothing could have prepared me for the realization of her work in that arena. I was not ready to know. I miss another meeting, am late to teach, and struggle to remember exactly what Burnett has written about images and the networked society. It takes more focus than I seem to have right now. My need for touch must show in some measure, and Wendy/friend/fellow graduate student stops what she is doing to meet it. I find my breath and begin again.

Tommi starts her day at 5:30 a.m., working ten and a half hour days, seven days a week – evening meetings are extra every other day. She oversees a staff of three and, together with them, processes in excess of 3,000 Nationals passing to and from work each day. A quick study, she is already a master in surveillance, able to instruct in the mutability of falsified documents at any moment from a pocket of fifty or more confiscated in a single day. Always a lover of language, Tommi is learning Arabic “like lightning,” she says. Assisted by translators, she is nonetheless the confronting officer when any effort is made to enter the base without access approval, a status requiring official Iraqi identification, pass validation, and a military escort.

She boasts of her work, and I’m glad to hear the strength and pride with which she is invested. “Ours in the most secure base in the arena,” she says. But I know security is a measured event, and my daughter is working the gate.

A U.S. dignitary pays a surprise visit to inspect training facilities at Tommi’s base – it’s Tommi’s base in my head now. “Nobody here even knew he was coming,” she says, “and eight minutes after his bird is on the ground, a bomb goes off two hundred and fifty meters from my post. We didn’t know he was coming, but they did. Nothing has ever pumped my stomach into my throat that fast, Mom.”

I didn’t ask if anyone was hurt. I didn’t want to know. …too much to know. …two hundred and fifty meters from the gate.

My daughter is working the gate.