Babylon by Bus

Jeff and Ray had la vida: selling YANKEES SUCK T-shirts five months of the year in front of Fenway Park and spending the rest of the year traveling the world. Sure, they'd go back to college at some point, but for now, the future was comfortably on hold. But the play button got pushed for them after the Sox broke their hearts in the 2003 Series. In the painfully clear light of the morning after, they looked at each other and faced up to the fact that they were in danger of becoming losers. Sad cases. What to do, where to go if you're a young American man craving experience and wisdom in late 2003? If you're Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine, you go to Baghdad. And so they did.

You might not think these two scruffy, lovably clueless characters would have made attractive candidates for the U.S. government to run the desk in Baghdad's Coalition Provisional Authority that served as the interface between the CPA and the Iraqi people, fielding complaints and requests for aid from all over for a city of more than five million people. You might be naïve. But Ray and Jeff would prove to be dedicated and ingenious public servants, and they managed to do a great deal of good during their tenure in the face of staggering frauds and feuds. They also had their full share of the wild times that young people under immense stress in war zones have had from time immemorial, especially young people who return each night to a hermetically sealed safe zone flush with money and all the temptations, legal and illegal, that money attracts.

Hard-core smart, hard-core scathing, hard-core funny, this is Apocalypse Right Now-explosive and appalling. 'Roid rage fueling gang wars between rival private-security contractors; staggering fraud involving phantom construction projects; naïve young Americans given responsibilities for which their lack of qualification would be laughable if the consequences weren't so dire-this is the inside-out view of an occupation gone wildly wrong, from the point of view of two radically unaffiliated authors, members of no tribe, beholden to no one, and afraid of nothing.

"What do you get when you mix a couple of booze-guzzling, Valium-addled, 20-something slackers from urban America with centuries-old sectarian hatred and a dubious war? Well, you get this alternately lame, alternately compelling tale from the first year after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. At loose ends, T-shirt merchants (selling 'Yankees suck' at Fenway) Lemoine and Neumann decide to head out to Iraq by way of Israel. Having passed on an opportunity to go to Baghdad earlier in the war — 'During Iraq's looting, the thought of loading up a stolen Lamborghini with Persian rugs and Baathist booty had crossed our minds. Stupid, I know' — these scalawags quickly find themselves in the middle of the Green Zone in Baghdad, scamming their way into jobs managing an NGO, dodging angry mobs in Sadr City and partying with just about everybody in town. Along with the boozing ('Jeff and I awoke at the NPR house with searing hangovers from a night of booze and pills'), there's a lot of name-dropping (among many others, Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker). Not entirely without merit, the book does capture a sense of the madness of postwar Iraq." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Neumann and Lemoiner describe how they became the "Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John MacIntyre of the Iraq War"--two young American gonzos who came to help, joined the Coalition Provisional Authority, and witnessed enough corruption, confusion and brutality to fill the pages of a very good book.

Jeff Neumann worked as a volunteer NGO coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad in early 2004 after several failed attempts at becoming a professional poker player. He currently resides in New York City and continues to travel as much as possible while trying to stay out of third-world jails.

Ray LeMoine dropped out of Northeastern University in 1999 and spent the next five years running the "Yankees Suck" T-shirt operation outside Fenway Park. As CEO, he was based everywhere from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Spain's Basque region to Revere, Massachusetts. In early 2004, he traveled to Baghdad with Jeff Neumann to help spread freedom and democracy. He lives in New York.

Donovan Webster is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Smithsonian, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He is currently employed as spiritual adviser and bail bondsman for Jeff Neumann and Ray LeMoine.