DIFFERENT KIND OF YANKEES: Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann traded the Green Monster for the Green Zone. |
The utter dunderheadedness of Grady Little in the late innings of Game Seven of the 2003 American League Championship Series provoked a lot of seemingly irrational behavior on the behalf of many Red Sox fans. Perhaps none more so than in Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann. After witnessing one excruciating postseason defeat too many that chilly night in the Bronx, the two Northeastern dropouts decided to throw caution to the wind and head east. To a war zone. The verbose subtitle of their new book, Babylon by Bus (Penguin), pretty much says it all: “the true story of two friends who gave up their valuable franchise selling yankees suck T-shirts at Fenway to find meaning and adventure in Iraq, where they became employed by the occupation in jobs for which they lacked qualification and witnessed much that amazed and disturbed them.”
Yes, Lemoine invented the infamous yankees suck T-shirt back in 1999. And the money he and Neumann raked in, hawking them for years outside of Fenway’s green walls, helped bankroll their travels far and wide. “We often traveled a lot during the off-season, but something about that ’03 series, it’s just really hard to see the Red Sox blow it every year,” says Lemoine. “So we were like, ‘Hey, let’s go to the Middle East.’ And we just, like, went. There was no full-on plan to go to Iraq, really. We just ended up in Israel, and we heard you could take a bus into Iraq and it was not that hard to do.”
Of course, “post-war Iraq” was a much different place then than it is now. “December, January, and February of 2003 and 2004, those three months were pretty much the quietest months of the war,” says Lemoine. “That was the point where people thought, ‘Hey, maybe this is gonna work out.’ ” And since the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had a “really, really strong public relations wing,” it seemed like it might be an interesting place to drop by and help spread some freedom.
But if Babylon starts out as a 21st-century picaresque, following a pair of Xanax-popping boozehounds who stumble into the heart of a disastrous neo-imperialist boondoggle, things aren’t as funny as the book wears on. After Lemoine and Neumann find work as volunteer NGO organizers for the CPA, they get up-close looks at both the nightmarish deprivations of Iraqis in the “Red Zone” (read: most of Baghdad) and the manifest incompetence of the Americans ensconced within the 15-foot blast walls of the so-called Green Zone.
Barely three months after their arrival, things went south. Fast. “Literally, it was just two weeks of insanity that sunk the country,” says Lemoine. “There was a feeling in early March, but mid-March it just went to shit. So quickly that I couldn’t believe it.”
And when the pair was informed by an American sergeant that they were being tailed by insurgents and targeted for assassination, it was time to leave Iraq. Soon after, their friend Marla Ruzicka, the saintly 28-year-old founder of the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, was killed in a car blast. Nick Berg, a friend of a friend, was beheaded, the video put on the Internet for the world to see. And Hayder Messehn, the Iraqi with whom Lemoine and Neumann had entrusted operation of Humanitarian Aid Network of Distribution (HAND), the charitable project they’d founded, was killed in a hail of bullets in broad daylight, right in the middle of Sadr City.
“We got people killed,” says Lemoine. “We could have done more to protect this guy. We probably should’ve told him never to go back to the Green Zone.”
It’s too late for second guessing now. Just as it is for the entire country. If, once upon a time, there was a chance that democracy could spring from Iraq’s charred and arid ground, “I don’t think there are glimmers of hope now,” Lemoine says. “We’re pretty much stuck, for maybe a decade. … America really blew it.”
Ironically, of course, just seven months after Lemoine and Neumann left Iraq, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. It didn’t feel as good as they thought it would. “When you see how disgusting your country can act — this is who we are; we’re all citizens of this country — it’s hard to enjoy a baseball game as much.”
Ray Lemoine and Jeff Neumann read from Babylon by Bus on Thursday, August 17, at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, in Brookline; call 617.566.6660.
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Brookline Booksmith: http://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/
