Totally unqualified to rebuild Iraq

``Did you hear that Uncle Mel was arrested last night?" Ray LeMoine asks with the spark of someone who knows he has procured a prime nugget of incredibly tasty information.

Uncle Mel is Mel Gibson. He's become Uncle Mel for no good reason except that LeMoine and his buddy Jeff Neumann bestow pet names on almost everyone they encounter. Their world is chock a block with individuals who have been re christened Mr. Mustachio, Sketchy Dave, and Sticker Mafioso. But unlike Sticker Mafioso, who hired thugs to beat up the pair in an attempt to take over their T-shirt business, Uncle Mel has the potential to be a benevolent presence in their loosely hinged universe.

Gibson's production company, Con Artists, is in the early stages of turning LeMoine and Neumann's true tale of two ne'er-do-wells who end up as civilian employees in occupied Iraq into a six-hour miniseries for the USA Network. (Representatives for Con Artists, busy with damage control last week over ABC's cancellation of its Holocaust miniseries, did not respond to requests for comment.) The deal came shortly before LeMoine and Neumann started writing their book ``Babylon by Bus: Or, 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." Uncle Mel's adaptation will bear the more concise title ``Peace Out."

Over a combination of Red Bull and beer, LeMoine, 27, and Neumann, 30, explain how a pair of Northeastern University dropouts with a combined resume of playing in hard core bands and winning (and then promptly losing) tens of thousands of dollars in poker tournaments produced a literal and euphemistic hangover story about their experiences in Baghdad. The book, which hit stores last week, is a bit of ``Ray and Jeff's Excellent Adventure" mixed with ``Fear and Loathing in Baghdad."

Until the fall of 2003, the two men were making good money selling ``Yankees Suck" T-shirts outside Fenway Park. They weren't the first to sell the shirts -- technically their cartel was the second -- but for four years they had the biggest operation. They employed 30 of their closest friends. Their Mission Hill-based klatch fanned out around Fenway nightly, selling the shirts along with others bearing cruder slogans, some of which implied scandalous intimacy among certain members of the Yankees. LeMoine, the architect of the operation, bought a silk-screening press to keep up with demand. On a good night, their small army would sell hundreds of shirts to well-liquored fans.

``I don't want to say numbers," Neumann says. ``But we'd make a killing at a game, especially when any contending teams came to town."

Their lives were wrapped around the Sox -- and having a good time. They sold shirts during baseball season and in the off-season, traveled on the profits. It would be easy to dismiss LeMoine and Neumann as a couple of boozing, brawling party boys (which is true), but they also appear to be bright, articulate, and ravenous students of current affairs.

``We're complete morons half the time," Neumann says. ``But at the same time we're fascinated by politics and foreign affairs. Most of our free time is spent educating ourselves on this stuff. Some people might try to discredit us as just being idiot party jerks, which is partially true. But we care about this stuff, too. Not everybody has to be a foreign- policy nerd to care about what's going on in the world."

Their vacation spots included such places as Nicaragua, Argentina, and Haiti, countries that were recovering from political unrest. Not only did these locations offer dirt-cheap travel and easy access to prescription drugs and sleazy good times, they also allowed the pair to see how people survived through political strife.

In the fall of 2003, their beloved Red Sox lost the American League Championship to the Yankees, both men were dumped by their girlfriends, and they were spending too much time with ``people we really shouldn't have been hanging out with." LeMoine and Neumann had hit bottom. They proceeded to do what any 20-somethings with a love of parties and politics would do: They bought one-way tickets to the Middle East.

They arrived in Tel Aviv for what they thought would be wild New Year's Eve parties -- forgetting that the country follows the Jewish calendar. After exploring some of the most dangerous sections of the West Bank in January 2004, they hopped a bus from Jordan to Baghdad. They didn't bother informing their families of travel plans until after they arrived in Iraq.

``We knew that we wanted to go to Iraq," says LeMoine. ``But we didn't know that we could go. We didn't know how easy it was."

At the beginning of 2004, Iraq was a relatively quiet place. George Bush had declared the end of major combat the previous May, and the insurgency had yet to fully take root. LeMoine and Neumann don't agree with the war, but they are quite passionate in offering their support for US troops and Iraqi civilians. They arrived in Baghdad nearly broke, thanks to some spectacular gambling losses, and ended up doing something they had never done on other trips: They found jobs.

Within 24 hours of getting off the dusty bus , the two were employed by the US government's Coalition Provisional Authority, the organization that acted as Iraq's interim government. They didn't exactly lie about their experience, they just casually mentioned they'd recently been in the West Bank. With no background checks, they were given badges, accommodation in the Republican Palace, and access to Saddam Hussein's former swimming pool. They spent time socializing and getting toasted on scotch and Xanax. More important, they worked 50 to 60 hours a week coming up with inventive ways to distribute foreign aid to Iraqis who were attempting to rebuild their lives. At the CPA, the two created a nongovernment agency called HAND (Humanitarian Aid Network of Distribution) and started traveling the countryside to deliver donated clothes, school supplies, and medical supplies that had been piling up at Baghdad International Airport.

``The funny thing about Jeff and Ray is that they could sort of come across as the Bill and Ted of Baghdad," says Jen Banbury, a journalist who befriended the pair in Iraq. ``But the truth is that they're very smart guys, they're very, very competent guys, and they have really good hearts. All of those things were quite readily apparent when they showed up and started hanging out at our house.

``Even though they were probably the least likely people for the job [at the Coalition Provisional Authority], they probably ended up doing a better job than other people would have because they broke a lot of the rules, and they went beyond the bounds of the bureaucracy, which did not endear them to a lot of people, but because of that, they were able to accomplish more."

The two men took it upon themselves to leave the safety of the Green Zone and drive to cities outside Baghdad to distribute aid. They befriended Iraqis in their travels, along with disaffected soldiers. They also came to care deeply about their work. Bill and Ted were growing up.

They were planning to stay in the country and work, but by the end of March 2004, the violence had reached a point where it was unsafe for the two to continue. After returning to the United States, via a brief prison stay in Amman, they began telling their story, which led to a meeting with Gibson (``He was the one who really understood and seemed most interested in our story," LeMoine says), and eventually the book.

Perhaps for the sake of their families' sanity, LeMoine and Neumann are staying mum about future plans, but their time in Iraq has changed their perspective. They are out of the T-shirt business, and looking at careers that will allow them to travel, such as photojournalism.

``At the end of all of that, I realized I wasn't living my life the way that I wanted or should have been," Neumann says. `` I'm 30 years old now, definitely not old, but I can't be running around acting like I'm 18. Being in Iraq was a major, major reality check. As corny as it sounds, it put a lot of things in perspective. It made me rethink how I've been living so far."

Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com.