ONCE WE GOT JOBS, life in Baghdad settled into a basic routine. By day, we worked—moderating regular open-house meetings for Iraqis, international NGO employees, and military personnel; studying the database for Iraq's reconstruction; and deciphering the blizzard of acronyms used by the military and CPA. Eventually we started making aid runs and writing up "field action reports" in the hope that, when the time came and Iraqis took over our jobs, they'd have an accurate paper trail to build on. By night, we ate, drank, and socialized with journalists, soldiers, and aid workers.

At $30 a night, the al-Rabei was too pricey for the long haul. So with help from a shady American we called Sketchy Dave, we found an apartment in a building in Karada, an OK neighborhood outside the Green Zone, on the east bank of the Tigris. The building was full of foreigners like us, the majority of them ultra-left militant peaceniks. We didn't support the war—far from it—and our basic take was that the invasion and occupation were grossly mismanaged clusterfucks. But Jeff and I were completely serious about working to make this bad situation a little better. As a result, we tended to find the lefties' "No blood for oil!" rhetoric just as useless as anything the Bush administration said.

In our building, the most prominent lefty group was Circus 2 Iraq, whose members lived on the floor above us. Led by a young British law student named Jo Wilding, Circus 2 Iraq was composed of Europeans who'd come to Baghdad to make Iraqi kids laugh, a goal they never stopped mentioning.

"Wait, you guys are a circus?" Jeff asked Jo when we first met her, during an impromptu party in their apartment.

"Yeah, a circus. You guys work for the occupation?"

"Yeah," I said. "We do NGO coordination for the CPA."

"Why would you work for the CPA?"

"Because it's our country," I said.

"You support the war?"

"No."

"Then how can you work for them?"

"Life is full of contradiction and compromise," I said. "We're just trying to help. The Coalition offered us work doing something we could do, so we're doing it."

"Nah," Jo said. She wasn't buying.

There were other clowns in the room, including Luis, a hash-loving Frenchman. Sensing a political debate brewing, he stepped in to make peace. "Politics are nothing," he said. "Americans treat politics as an argument, like sport! Always yelling on TV. All politics is really negotiation."

"So I want to negotiate," Jo snapped.

"At least we're doing something besides smoking pot and drinking moonshine," Jeff said to Luis. "You ever see that movie Shakes the Clown? That's you guys."

"Who?" asked one of the clowns, a juggler named Peat.

"There's a movie about this hard-living clown, starring Bobcat Goldthwait." Pause. "Never mind."

"Tell me."

"Shakes is a scumbag clown, like Krusty."

"Oh."

Peat had been a war junkie for years. He said he'd lost a few teeth during an explosion in Northern Ireland, so now he wore dentures. That night he kept saying, "I luvvv chill-druun!" Then he'd take a long swig from a bottle of Jordanian booze, a brand that featured scantily clad girls on the labels. "I'm collecting all the ladies," he said. "This is Cassandra. Would you like to meet her, boys?"

Truth be told, we drank plenty ourselves, but Jo didn't. She hacked away busily on a laptop. Her serious, determined attitude slightly cramped the mood. But if not for her motivated spirit, Circus 2 Iraq would never have accomplished anything.