A New Jerseyan’s unusual road to Baghdad.
Armand Cucciniello will never forget his arrival in Iraq. “It was a sweltering day. I remember stepping off that plane; the heat hits you immediately. I looked up into the sky and saw all this dust…I thought, Oh, my God, I’ve just landed in hell.â€?
That was late August 2006. Cucciniello, a native of East Hanover, had landed a job as a media analyst for a strategic communications firm under contract with the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. His office would be in the garish confines of Saddam Hussein’s former Republican Palace in Baghdad.
After the shock of his Iraqi arrival, Cucciniello waited with colleagues for a nervous four hours at a marker on a dirt road. A helicopter was to take them for the eight-minute flight into the Green Zone, the supposedly secure area in the center of Baghdad. It was Cucciniello’s first helicopter ride.
“I’m flying over Baghdad saying to myself, Dear God, please don’t let me get shot down,â€? he says. “It was sepia-toned, right around sunset, and you could see that maybe 100 years ago, the city must have been beautiful… You could think of Aladdin and the Disney movies.â€?
Reaching Hussein’s palace, Cucciniello immediately grasped the reality of life in a war zone. “Everyone that’s part of a security detail has an M16 and a handgun. You’re constantly surrounded by guns and loaded weapons,� he says. “I adjusted to that right away, but you realize that anything can happen.�
And something unexpected did happen. One month after Cucciniello arrived in Iraq, the coalition force declined to renew its contract with his employer, the Rendon Group. Cucciniello’s media-monitoring job was over. Through contacts, he learned that the State Department had positions available in its public affairs office. By October, Cucciniello had a new job as a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy. In an instant, he went from monitoring the news to shaping it by presenting State Department positions to media outlets around the world.
Although new to the job, Cucciniello was soon assigned to handle press relations for all U.S. Congressional visits. He eventually worked on Barack Obama’s July 2008 Iraqi trip and John McCain’s now-famous stroll through the Shorja market in April 2007, when the presidential candidate-to-be described how secure he felt on the ground in Iraq. Cucciniello also handled press for the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), which prosecutes former regime members.
A week after Cucciniello started with the IHT, he found himself seated in the front row of a small courthouse, waiting for judgment to be rendered on a defendant just a few feet away. The accused man’s name: Saddam Hussein. The former Iraqi ruler was about to be sentenced to death.
“It was just remarkable,� says Cucciniello. “I remember being a kid and watching CNN during the first Gulf War and seeing this man firing off a shotgun and smoking a cigar.�
Armand Cucciniello III was born on December 7, 1979, the middle child of Armand Jr., a property manager, and Mary, a housewife. Armand and his sisters, Maria and Lisa, attended Catholic schools; in Armand’s case, the all-boys Seton Hall Prep in West Orange. More committed to his studies than any social pursuits, he planned to become a chemist. “I was curious about how the world worked,� Cucciniello says.
He entered Boston University, with its well-regarded chemistry program. In Boston, he lost some of his bookish reserve and started a relationship with a girlfriend. In the summer of 1999, after his freshman year at BU, Cucciniello came back to New Jersey and took a course in world religion at Montclair State, where he became intrigued by Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam.
“They were very different from the traditions I grew up with, a different way of looking at existence and humanity overall,� says Cucciniello. “It was more focused on the earthly realm, even though I still believe in the afterlife. It rounded out the picture of spirituality.�
Cucciniello returned to Boston in the fall to a course load of intensive organic chemistry, advanced physics, and multivariable calculus. But the appeal of these subjects was lost to his new fascination with Eastern religion.
“I had just had it,� he says. “I didn’t like science anymore. My whole world, at least in terms of my career, was thrown off.� Cucciniello swapped majors to religious studies and social anthropology, specializing in South Asia, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Predictably, Cucciniello’s mother was not pleased. “She was always worried I was going to convert,� Cucciniello says. Still, he kept up his grades and eventually quelled his parents’ concerns. Encouraged by a favorite professor, in 2001 Cucciniello enrolled in a study-abroad program at the University of Mysore in southern India for his senior-year fall semester.
Shortly after his arrival in India, Cucciniello and a friend were having dinner when a fellow student rushed into the restaurant with the news that the World Trade Center had been attacked. Cucciniello returned to his dorm room to watch the events unfold on television and saw the Twin Towers fall.
“It was a bizarre, surreal feeling,� he says. “I’d only been in India less than a month, and this cataclysmic event happens not just in my home country, but practically in my backyard. East Hanover is 23 miles from Manhattan. I had this profound sense of guilt about being away. I heard how so many people back home were pitching in and pulling bodies from the rubble, just being there during a time of solidarity.�
Cucciniello returned home for Christmas to a world that was palpably different. He felt like a different person too. No longer interested in a career in academia, he was accepted to a master’s-degree program focused on South Asia at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.
There was another big change afoot for Cucciniello. Upon graduation from Boston University, he broke up with his longtime girlfriend and came out of the closet. “India helped me realize that it was okay to come out and be gay,� he says. “I was encountering Hindus and Buddhists who were friendly, wonderful, God-loving people; it was okay that they weren’t Christian. By realizing that the whole world wasn’t like me—here was a country of 1 billion people of a different religion than me, that had been around a lot longer than my country—I realized it was okay to be different.�
Cucciniello waited almost a year to tell his parents. It was, he says, the only time he saw his father cry. The news was even more painful for Cucciniello’s mother. “She wasn’t screaming Bible verses at me, but she did believe my soul would burn in hell,� says Cucciniello. “She’d been taught that, and I had too. [But] my mother’s come around, about 178 degrees in the past [six] years.�
“There was so much drama because of my ignorance about homosexuality,� Mary Cucciniello says. “We were brought up that—I hate to use the word ‘prejudiced’—if someone was in any way different, you passed a remark. I felt bad because of what he was going through as a child, and I never knew about it. That’s what made it tough for me, to think that my son was, in my eyes, suffering, and I didn’t know about it.�
In time, the Cucciniellos reconciled. But first, Armand returned to India for an internship with Dow Jones Newswire in Delhi and Bombay, covering the booming information technology industry. When he returned stateside, Cucciniello finished the course work for his degree in Washington, D.C., where he was introduced to an Indonesia analyst for the Rendon Group. The company needed an analyst to cover India and Pakistan. Cucciniello got the job and spent the next two and a half years monitoring English-language media in those countries.
The Rendon job strengthened Cucciniello’s knowledge of South Asia. Rendon had another ongoing media-monitoring contract, with Multi-National Force in Iraq, a.k.a. the Coalition. Cucciniello decided that Iraq would be his next destination.
“Strangely, because I was confident about it, my father was okay with it,� Cucciniello says. “My sisters had a tougher time with it, and of course my mother was beside herself.�
Before leaving for Iraq, Cucciniello underwent two weeks of training and medical checks in El Paso, Texas. There he learned how to deal with the extreme hazards such as roadside bombs awaiting him in the war zone.
“They teach you how to behave if you’re taken hostage,� Cucciniello recalls. “I can’t disclose any of that, for obvious reasons. But sitting in those classes, you realize you’re going to someplace bizarre, someplace you’ll never again experience, assuming you leave in one piece.�
Cucciniello arrived at Baghdad International Airport on August 30, 2006, on a C130 military plane from Kuwait City. He took up residence in a trailer behind Hussein’s palace.
“Coming [to Iraq], you don’t know if you’re going to come home. It’s always [reported as] ‘the heavily fortified Green Zone.’ But there’s still danger. Are we facing as much as the troops on the front line? Of course not. But we civilians face the same amount of danger as troops in the Green Zone…. We have huge concrete walls to protect us, but things fly over them.â€?
As recently as March and April of this year, the Green Zone came under attack. “It was a lot worse than the media was reporting,� Cucciniello says. “We’d dealt with that from March through August of 2007. What happened in March of ’08 was much more accurate in terms of where [the rockets] were hitting. That made for increased worry here.
“This was right around the time Prime Minister [Nori] al-Maliki ordered his troops into Basra. That was Good Friday. It was Easter Sunday when the rockets started. I woke up that morning at 5:30 to an alarm going off, an alarm that I hadn’t heard in months. But somehow my subconscious was still wired to react. I jumped out of bed and went over to the bunker. I was in there for an hour, then got to work early, about 6:30 or 7. The alarms were going off all day. That continued for a good, solid two weeks.�
Still, Cucciniello says the situation in the war-torn nation is much improved. “There’s been a confluence inside Iraq over the past year—political, economic, and military-related initiatives. To use a phrase that Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker often uses with journalists, ‘We’ve turned the corner.’ We haven’t reached victory, but Iraq has definitely turned a corner over the past year.�
Cucciniello had been scheduled to depart Iraq in December, but decided—to his family’s dismay—to extend his tour until June. “Two and a half years is plenty of time here. But there are some things I’d like to finish up,� he says. “I think that staying here for the start of the new administration would be interesting, to see how things change politically on the inside.�
Evan Rothman is a frequent contributor to New Jersey Monthly.
Being Gay in Iraq: ‘Enter at Your Own Risk’
Although the subject has not gotten much media coverage, Armand Cucciniello, who makes no secret of his sexual orientation, says there is nothing that unusual about being gay in Iraq.
“There are plenty of gay people out here, both on the civilian and military side. Some of us are out in the open, like myself, [but] most aren’t,� Cucciniello says.
The irony of being gay in Iraq is not lost on Cucciniello. “We came in here under a conservative administration pushing family values and how immoral it is to be gay. But there are so many gay people here. At the highest levels, there are gay people working in Iraq.�
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Cucciniello also cites the oddity of having staffers for the Department of Defense (which he describes as “the most conservative agency�) working alongside colleagues from the State Department (“traditionally the most liberal�). “Having gay people like myself who are out of the closet working so closely with what’s still very much a conservative culture has been very interesting. It’s also been very nice. I’ve had a number of colleagues, some in the Army, tell me or some of my gay friends that we’ve done tremendous benefit to their understanding of gay people.�
As far as coming out in Iraq, Cucciniello says there is no rulebook. “It’s sort of like entering the war in general: You enter at your own risk.� But, he adds, “I haven’t experienced any homophobia in the last two years, knock on wood.�
Despite being out, Cucciniello says he has not discovered any bar scene for gays in Iraq. “And I’ve been here long enough that I would know about it. In terms of sex life, it’s the same as it is for straight people. They’re doing it on the down-low, so to speak.� Click here to read the rest of Our Man in Iraq. If you enjoyed this article, you also might like our other stories that talk about thePeople of New Jersey.