One Writer Goes Back to Iraq
Ray LeMoine and his buddy Jeff Neumann took time off from selling “Yankees Suck” T-shirts at Red Sox games to go to Iraq in 2004, in no formal capacity. They ended up working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the organization that ran Iraq immediately following the U.S. invasion. As things rapidly “went to shit,” Ray and Jeff distributed humanitarian aid in Sadr City, avoiding bombs and doing a surprising amount of drugs. Upon returning to the U.S. following a stint in jail and a “formal dissociation” from the U.S. Army, the two friends set about writing a book about their experiences. I caught up with Ray to talk about Babylon By Bus at a barbecue downtown.
You say in the book that your families thought you were assholes for going to Iraq. Can you elaborate on that? How much did people understand what you were doing?
Not many people did. The people who best understood were some of the more experienced journalists we met in Iraq who came from more unorthodox backgrounds.
I mean to go in the first place.
When we went there in the first place we went on our own will, we didn’t tell anybody. We told a few people in random e-mails but only people who would understand. And at the time Baghdad wasn’t anything like it is today. It’s like comparing Brownsville, New York to Tribeca: it was like Tribeca then and it’s like Brownsville now. And we were right there in Amman, which is like five or six hours away by car, so we just said “Fuck it, why not check it out?”
But to your families you were like [simulates typing] “Oh, hey, we’re in Iraq?”
Yeah. I mean both of our families had trouble understanding who we were at the time anyway. We didn’t expect them to understand and we weren’t looking for that at all.
So it was like Tribeca then, but still, you know, not Tribeca. Were you worried about dying?
We were concerned about our safety. But we had been in the West Bank during really nasty stuff and in Gaza, which is nasty all the time. Baghdad is a huge city and if three car bombs went off in one day you might not even hear any of them. That’s a thing we didn’t really understand either like how random the violence was. Really it was like getting struck by lightning.
Looking back considering what happened while we were there there’s a lot of regret having gone. But when we went there was no blatant sign that things were going to go downhill so quickly. Basically everyone there was a little bit shocked at how quickly things really went to shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.
When you say “There’s a lot of regret,” you don’t mean you regret going, right?
I do. Of course. A friend of mine was killed basically because he worked with Jeff and myself and probably wouldn’t have been killed otherwise. We should have probably not gone, but you know, we did.
Essentially it wasn’t the media’s fault that we didn’t learn how bad it was in Baghdad, because there’s only one side telling their story. We were getting the military’s side, because you couldn’t go out and fact check and get the Sunni insurgent side of it. The media knew what was going on but what are they going to write ... what they feel? They have to write based on quotes and facts and only one side was providing quotes and facts.
So what happened to this guy Ski [a teenaged U.S. soldier who becomes friends with Jeff and Ray in the book]?
We didn’t have any contact with him till this summer when a magazine was fact checking an article and tracked him down on MySpace. He’s all into Nine Inch Nails, he’s like a goth guy now. He’s a really cool kid. You would like him.
Did he read your book?
I assume he saw it. I’m not on MySpace. The book has a MySpace page.
Yeah, I noticed that. Weird.
[Pause]
Or not weird?
Yeah, it’s pretty normal now. I mean, I would like to talk to Ski. If I ever went to Arizona I would look him up.
Did he get married to his girlfriend [aged 14 in the book]?
I don’t think so. And from his MySpace page it doesn’t look like they’re still together. This kid was young. I mean he just came into our office and straight up asked us for drugs. And you know, we saw what his life was like, it’s crazy what the army does. I mean I respect it.
You respect the army?
I respect service. I don’t respect anything that’s like ... designed to kill people. But I’m not actively against people who are in uniform at all, I’m actively for them. But I am against Pentagon policy, generally. It’s hard to be pro ... world domination. It’s like rooting for Coca-Cola.
How do you feel about what’s going on Iraq now?
I had a nervous breakdown.
Oh no!
You know, it’s the most stressful thing they put us on this book tour ... I don’t know if the jokes went over well cause we kind of tried to do a parody of Hunter S. Thompson and New Journalism, how like they always put themselves into the story. But I don’t think that people are really ready to laugh about what’s going on over there. So we kind of jumped the gun on that. But we were just going with what happened in the seventies and that vibe.
That was the vibe you were having in person on the book tour?
That was the vibe we put into the book. We put into the book the vibe of our influences. Even the people who gave it a positive review—I don’t know if they really got what we were trying to do. I think we kind of failed on that level.
So what do you do now?
Nothing.
For a living, nothing?
Pretty much. I get paid a little bit of money to do magazine work occasionally.
Writing?
Yeah. We got paid some money for the book. We sold a movie option ...
Is there going be a movie?
No, it was sold ... at the time it was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood but now, well he got in a little trouble, to give you a hint.
Um. What?
He got in trouble this summer ... big trouble ... for insulting an entire race of people that I belong to ...
Oh. Harsh.
Mel Gibson.
Yeah.
So we sold it to him. So we don’t know what’s going to happen.