She returned to Orange County two weeks before, but Eileen Padberg, sipping coffee at a Coco’s Restaurant in Fashion Island, can still recall the throbbing of helicopters in the sky above Iraq’s Green Zone 24 hours a day. She can still hear the whoosh and feel with a sort of muscle memory the thud of the mortars being fired by insurgents over the wall surrounding her compound every morning at 6:30. She can still see the worry lines in the faces of Iraqis rushing through the market in Baghdad’s Red Zone—which is everything outside the tiny Green Zone. She can remember seeing her own face in the reflection of a helicopter window at night as it hovered high above the landing zone, dropping red flares to attract enemy fire while still far enough away to evade it.

Her recollections are so visceral that the ambient sounds of Coco’s—where the median age is about 65 and the average interests look to be real estate, the stock market and golf—turn to white noise and then fall away altogether, and you can feel the claustrophobia of her 22 months in Iraq.

Padberg was a Republican political consultant from Laguna Niguel until two years ago. That’s when she dropped everything—on something like a lark, but more sober given that it involved moving from the relative tranquility of Orange County political infighting to a real, brutal killing zone—to help Iraqi businesswomen.

It wasn’t until she put on a gas mask for the first time that Padberg had second thoughts about the decision.

She was standing in an air-conditioned conference room at a Kellogg, Brown & Root office inside the Khalifa Hilton, located on a beach 40 miles south of Kuwait City. Outside, it was late May 2005, and blazingly hot. In two days, Padberg and her Iraqi-American associate were scheduled to fly to Baghdad on a lumbering U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane. An American military officer was patiently showing her and about 15 other American civilians how to attach the masks to their faces quickly enough to survive a biological weapon attack.

Along with the gas mask, Padberg had just been issued a 41-pound flak vest and a helmet. With the equipment came a briefing. “Don’t walk anywhere alone,” the officer warned them. “Don’t pick up anything on the street—there are improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, everywhere in Baghdad, and even a $100 bill can be rigged to explode.”

“That’s when the reality of my decision to go to Iraq finally sank in,” Padberg says. “Before that, I really hadn’t thought about how dangerous Iraq really was.

“I started asking myself, ‘What have I done?’ But by then it was too late to turn around.”

Padberg’s journey to Iraq began one morning inDecember 2003 in a room full of unpacked boxes. After three decades of running political campaigns for Orange County Republicans, Padberg was 60 years old and had just taken the first step in what she subconsciously knew was an inevitable march toward retirement: she had closed her Laguna Niguel office and created a home office in her sprawling stucco house.

She stared at her computer screen, trying to make revisions to a quarterly newsletter she had typed up for one of her clients, the Huntington Beach Unified High School District. Her thoughts drifted. She was single, no kids. She was approaching retirement age.

There was still work, of course. Sara Katz, a friend in San Diego with her own consulting firm, had recently asked Padberg to help write a proposal to train Iraqi women to bid on engineering contracts that were part of a much larger U.S. military water reconstruction contract in Iraq. When the Pentagon approved the proposal, Katz invited Padberg to go spend six months in Iraq making sure Iraqi businesswomen actually got a chance to participate in the rebuilding process.

She thought about the offer as she looked out the window. In the sudden mind-clearing change of perspective you get when scanning the horizon, Padberg realized the newsletter on her computer screen was going to be her last OC project for a while.

Padberg called Katz and told her she was going to forward all her clients to trusted friends and pack a suitcase for Iraq. She told a few family members and friends she was going to Iraq for half a year. Some thought she was nuts.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Padberg recalls. “I figured what the hell. I thought at the very least it would be a great adventure and huge challenge.”

Padberg’s close friend Julie Meier Wright, CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation, says that many women who knew Padberg thought she was crazy for wanting to go to Iraq. But not Wright. “I didn’t try to talk her out of it,” she says. “Eileen was going to have a unique opportunity to fundamentally help change Iraqi women’s lives, to make sure educated Iraqi women had a level playing field in rebuilding their country now that Saddam Hussein was gone.”


But in the months that passed after Padberg saw Iraq as an opportunity for “adventure” and “challenge,” the country was transformed. The initial welcome that greeted U.S. troops in March 2003 had expired, and sporadic attacks by insurgents had become a daily occurrence. A year after the invasion, insurgents ambushed four security contractors in Fallouja. In a scene reminiscent of Somalia 10 years before, enraged Iraqis dragged the burning bodies of the Americans from their smoking vehicles and strung them up on a nearby bridge.

Things worsened the following month, when photographs taken by U.S. soldiers inside Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison were beamed to television screens around the world. They depicted smiling GIs posing next to naked Iraqi detainees stacked like cordwood, or chained to their cells with women’s underwear covering their faces.