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StoryCorps' Military Voices Initiative records stories from members of the U.S. military who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paul Braun is a sergeant with the 34th Military Police Company in the Minnesota Army National Guard. In 2009, when he was serving near Basra, his company was assigned an Iraqi interpreter they called Philip.

Philip came to the U.S. in late 2013, with Sergeant Braun's help, and now they live together in Minnesota. But Philip's wife and children are still in Iraq. Earlier this week, he returned home, hoping to reach his family and bring them back to the U.S.

Shortly before leaving, Philip sat down with Sgt. Braun for a StoryCorps interview in Blaine, Minn. He recalled the first day they met.

"You scared me, dude," Philip says. "Your attitude in the beginning and with your Mohawk — "

"I scared everybody with that Mohawk," Braun says.

"You told me, 'If you try to mess with my soldiers, I will shoot you,' " Philip remembers.

"You smiled at me and said, 'Someday, we will be able to laugh about this conversation while we're drinking tea,' " Braun replies. "And that's when I knew, 'I think this guy will be OK.' We started to trust you, and since you fought with us and you bled with us and you lived with us, you became us. And my Iraqi interpreter became my American brother."

"And my American soldier became my Iraqi brother," Philip says. "I used to hate Americans. You are our enemy, and that's it. And you're the only one who changed my mind. With you, I was talking about the similarity between us as people. It's just about being human there or here."

"I remember sitting down one day thinking, I didn't want to leave you alone," Braun says. "I knew how dangerous it was for you because we saw all those people that were murdered for being interpreters, and I was so afraid that that was going to happen to you. And it took years to get the proper documents to get you over here."

Braun became Philip's sponsor, filing an application with the State Department for a translator's visa. Philip came to America, but left three daughters, a son and a wife back in Iraq.

He says he's scared about going back to his home country to get them, because the so-called Islamic State controls the roads. It will be a dangerous trip.

"I hate to ask you," Braun says: "What do you think your odds of being able to make it back alive are?"

"Let's make it 50-50, man," Philip says. "Like, really, 50-50."

"It's frustrating hearing you talk about the dangers that you're going to go through over there and not being able to go with you to help you," Braun says. "As you helped me, I wanted to be able to help you back."

"I appreciate you saying that, but really, you can't," Philip says. "Just pray for me, that's it."

Philip left for Iraq on Wednesday. If all goes well, he and his family will return to the U.S. in February 2015, and move in with Sgt. Braun.

Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Andres Caballero.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.

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Iraqi interpreter

StoryCorps

Iraq

The dustiest portion of my home library includes the 1980s books — about how Japan's economy would dominate the world.

And then there are the 1990s books — about how the Y2K computer glitch would end the modern era.

Go up one more shelf for the late 2000s books — about oil "peaking." The authors claimed global oil production was reaching a peak and would soon decline, causing economic chaos.

The titles include Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, Peak Oil Survival and When Oil Peaked.

When those books were written, worldwide oil drillers were producing about 85 million barrels a day. Now they are pumping about 93 million barrels.

NPR/U.S. Energy Information Adminstration

Despite growing violence in the Middle East, oil supplies just keep rising.

At the same time, demand has been shrinking. This week, the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for oil-demand growth for this year and next.

Turns out, oil demand — not production — is what peaked.

Now prices are plunging, down around 25 percent since June.

What did the forecasters get so wrong? In large measure, their mistake was in failing to appreciate the impact of a relatively new technology, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

Because of fracking, oil is being extracted from shale formations in Texas and North Dakota. Production has shot up so quickly in those areas that the United States is now the world's largest source of oil and natural gas liquids, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia.

This new competition has shocked OPEC. Members say they want to maintain their current market share, so they are keeping up production and even boosting it.

Bottom line: The peak of production is nowhere on the horizon.

So are the authors of "peaking" books now slapping themselves in the head and admitting they had it all wrong?

Some are, at least a bit.

Energy analyst Chris Nelder wrote a book in 2008 titled Profit from the Peak. The cover's inside flap said: "There is no doubt that oil production will peak, if it hasn't already, and that all other fossil fuels will peak soon after."

In a phone discussion about his prediction, Nelder said "my expectation has not materialized."

The surge in oil production in Texas and North Dakota "has really surprised everyone," he said. "If you had told me five years ago we'd be producing more oil today, I would have said, 'No way.' I did not believe at all that this would happen."

But while he acknowledges that oil has not peaked yet, he says it might soon because "oil is trapped on a narrow ledge" where it must stand on stable prices. Holding the price of a barrel steady around $110 for years allows energy companies to invest in fracking operations.

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Over the past three years, those are exactly the conditions drillers have enjoyed. Oil was sitting pretty on a stable plateau of roughly $110 a barrel. But now, as global growth slows, the price is plunging, down to around $83 per barrel.

"China is cooling off quite a bit. Much of Europe is slipping back towards recession," Nelder said. If oil prices stay low for long, frackers may need to stand down. "There is a lower level [in price] where they just can't make money," he said.

And with OPEC pumping so much oil now to hold down prices, maybe they are using up their supplies more quickly. "Depletion never sleeps," he said.

So perhaps Nelder has been wrong so far, but could be right before too long.

That's what Kenneth Worth thinks. He's the author of Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, a 2010 book. He says the fracking boom has been so frenzied in this decade that drillers may have extracted the cheapest oil already. With fracking, oil supplies "deplete very rapidly. You have to keep drilling really fast," he said.

With prices now so low, the money to keep up the frenzy may not be there.

So maybe the "peaking" predictions weren't wrong, just premature. Then again, at some point, any forecast can turn out to be right, he says. "If you take enough of a timeline, eventually we're all dead," Worth noted.

peak oil

oil

fracking

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Meriatu Kamara, 35, lost her husband and two children to Ebola. But she and three of her children survived: (from left) Sallaymatu, Abubakar, Aminatu. They've lived in the survivors' ward for two months. They're from Makeni, a city 130 miles away and haven't yet been able to make their way home. Anders Kelto/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Anders Kelto/NPR

Meriatu Kamara, 35, lost her husband and two children to Ebola. But she and three of her children survived: (from left) Sallaymatu, Abubakar, Aminatu. They've lived in the survivors' ward for two months. They're from Makeni, a city 130 miles away and haven't yet been able to make their way home.

Anders Kelto/NPR

Jusoisatu Jusu, 24, lives in a room in an abandoned hospital ward with her six-year-old son. They've survived Ebola. And now they're stuck.

"It's terrible," she says. "We have a lot of things to do, so we want to get back."

But they can't. They live in a town called Makeni, about 130 miles away. Public transportation around the country is limited or canceled because of the outbreak. And Jusu doesn't have the money to pay for a private ride.

About 30 Ebola survivors live in this hospital ward in Kenema, a city in Sierra Leone. It was once a center for doctors who did research on Lassa fever, caused by a virus that was in Sierra Leone long before Ebola arrived. When Ebola hit, many staff members in the ward died, and the building was abandoned. Now, it's essentially a squatter camp.

Like other survivors, Jusu had to hand over her clothes to be destroyed when she arrived. She's been given one new outfit — a long, green skirt and pink tank top.

"I wash and I wear it the same thing, every day," she says.

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Kitibe, 26, has recovered from Ebola and was ready to go home. Then the hospital told him he might have TB. Anders Kelto/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Anders Kelto/NPR

Kitibe, 26, has recovered from Ebola and was ready to go home. Then the hospital told him he might have TB.

Anders Kelto/NPR

Some survivors are able to go home, but they're not always welcome. Many are told they can't get water from a shared tap or sell food at community markets, says Elizabeth Boakarie, a counselor at the hospital. Every night, she and her colleague, social worker Gladys Gassama, speak on radio shows, telling listeners to stop shunning survivors.

Another survivor at the hospital is a 26-year-old man named Kitibe. "I was tormented when I was in the Ebola ward," he says. "There was [so much] pain within my body."

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Kitibe has recovered and is ready to be discharged. Social worker Gladys Gassama takes a seat next to him for a counseling session about life after Ebola. She tells him that people in his community probably know that he had Ebola. She says when he goes home, he should try to educate people about the disease and should not act as if he's contagious because people might think he is.

Then Kitibe gets some bad news. A nurse named Donnell Tholley tells him he will not be able to leave the hospital today because he is suspected to have tuberculosis. If his test comes back positive, he'll have to spend a few weeks, possibly up to six months, in a tuberculosis unit at the hospital.

Only the TB ward is not able to accept him at the moment. So he wanders into the building where other Ebola survivors are hanging out. The room feels like a jail cell — brick walls, metal bars over the windows, a filthy bathroom off to one side. He sits on a wooden bench, next to a teenage boy, and watches the children play with a toy car.

And no one in the crowded room seems to know he likely has a contagious lung disease.

Ebola survivors

Sierra Leone

If there's one thing Charlie Crist is afraid of, it's sweating in public.

Understand that, and what happened on a Fort Lauderdale governor's debate stage this week before a live television audience might make a bit more sense.

Viewers who tuned in Wednesday night to watch Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott and former Gov. Crist (once a Republican, now a Democrat) instead saw an empty stage, with moderators explaining about "an extremely peculiar situation." Within seconds Crist strode out and spent the next several minutes lamenting Scott's absence, and how it was ridiculous to argue over the fan at the base of Crist's podium when Florida faced so many important issues, before Scott finally joined him and the debate began.

But what TV viewers didn't know was that Scott's campaign was so agitated about the fan that it was demanding the event be canceled and that the TV station providing the live feed not proceed with the broadcast.

"Why? Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine," Wendy Walker, head of one of the debate's co-sponsors, Leadership Florida, told NPR Friday. "They had a bee in their bonnets about the fan.... I said, guys, do you want the story to be the fan?"

Which is pretty much what happened. Florida media covered actual issues raised in the debate, but nationally the story was the fan. On Twitter it was #Fangate and #Fantrum and #Fanghazi. Predictably, it even made The Daily Show.

Scott campaign spokesman Greg Blair said Scott never refused to participate in the debate, and said his delay was based on "confusion" caused by Crist's violating the no-fan rules. Scott was waiting to see the resolution when he saw the debate had started without him, Blair said.

Crist's reliance on fans is well known to followers of Florida politics. He hates the idea of sweating at a public event, and for years as education commissioner, attorney general and eventually governor insisted on having a portable fan at his feet as he would give a speech or participate in debates.

Crist's debate adviser, former state senator and federal prosecutor Dan Gelber, said the debate rules originally sent to the campaign on July 22 banned electronic devices but made no mention of fans. A later version sent out Oct. 6 did prohibit fans, and Gelber said he hand-wrote an addendum saying Crist could have a fan if "temperature issues" made one necessary. He submitted that to organizers and was told it was acceptable, he said.

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The original July 22 debate rules did not mention fans. The Oct. 6 version prohibited fans. Leadership Florida hide caption

itoggle caption Leadership Florida

The original July 22 debate rules did not mention fans. The Oct. 6 version prohibited fans.

Leadership Florida

And that was where things stood until the night of the debate. When Crist went out to test his microphone, he said he felt too warm under the TV lights and requested a fan, which the campaign then set out and plugged in.

It was not long before Brett O'Donnell, Scott's debate coach, noticed and raised objections. O'Donnell is a giant in the Republican campaign world – the one-time debate coach at Liberty University has tutored George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney as they prepared for presidential debates.

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The Florida Democratic Party has released an ad reminding voters of Wednesday's fan episode. Florida Democratic Party/YouTube hide caption

itoggle caption Florida Democratic Party/YouTube

The Florida Democratic Party has released an ad reminding voters of Wednesday's fan episode.

Florida Democratic Party/YouTube

On Wednesday night, Gelber said, just minutes before the scheduled start time, O'Donnell pointed at the fan tucked beneath Crist's podium and made a big sweeping arm gesture, like an umpire calling someone out, then turned and stomped off.

"The Scott folks went literally berserk. They were just running around screaming at everybody, the station, the people who were hosting the event, Leadership Florida, just going literally nuts, saying they were going to cancel the debate," Gelber said. "It was just the most bizarre thing we had ever seen."

Leadership Florida and the Florida Press Association released a statement the day after the debate explaining that the rules banned fans, and the temperature on stage was cool enough not to require them. But Walker acknowledged that the interpretation of "temperature issues" was a subjective one, and that she personally was too busy dealing with a third-party candidate's legal challenge to worry about the possibility of a standoff over a fan.

"Honestly, at the time, it didn't seem like it was going to be a big deal," Walker said.

Scott campaign spokesman Blair said the governor is moving past the fan incident and will be talking about Florida's problems in the remaining days of the race.

The Crist camp, however, seems okay if people think about Wednesday night just a bit longer. The Florida Democratic Party on Friday released an ad featuring the fan.

S.V. Dte edits congressional and campaign finance coverage for NPR's Washington Desk.

Charlie Crist