We left the next morning out of Baghdad on a day like any other day that spring—sunny and warm. We headed north on Highway One, following the map toward Mosul. Along the way we bypassed Tikrit, probably passing within a mile or two of the still fugitive Saddam Hussein. We traveled past green pastures outside of old Samarra and we drove through the refinery town of Bayji. Journeying north, the landscape began to change. Hills began to rise up and mountains emerged from the haze on the horizon. After a day’s drive, we entered the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh, now known as Mosul.
There we took a left and drove west into the setting sun. We drove for half an hour until we were less than twenty-five miles from the Syrian border. We drove until we had reached the city of Tal Afar.
9
Northern Iraq
May through October 2003
Tal Afar eventually became a bloody mess. Some of it I was there for, most of it I wasn’t. I had been driving the car of fantasy war, playing chicken with the eighteen-wheeler of real war for two years. By the time I lost my nerve and swerved that summer, it was almost too late.
Guys in my battalion lost legs, eyes, and jaws. Three others got killed. They got hit with bullets, grenades, bombs, and RPGs. We killed terrorists and insurgents. In the process we killed civilians. We shot kids. It became pretty standard guerilla war. In a perverse way, it became the war I’d always wanted.
When we got there, Tal Afar was a peaceful city of fifty thousand inhabitants—comprising mostly Turkomen and Kurds, but also a few Arabs. The landscape was hilly and full of scrub brush—and dozens and dozens of archaeological sites. Tal Afar itself is built around the remnants of an Ottoman fortress—that being one of the newer sites.
In the beginning, Croom and I would receive a sector on a map and be told by Captain B. to “find out what they need.” What he meant was that we were to drive into the surrounding countryside, go to each individual village with its adobe buildings, thatched roofs, sheep, and chickens, and write down any complaints the local “mukhtar” had. Those could range anywhere from bad roads to no fresh water to “Saddam released all the prisoners before the war and now a murderer lives in our village.”
Figuring out a way to fix their predicaments wasn’t our problem at that point, however. It was just: meet the mukhtar, write down his complaints, stay for lunch if he insisted, and hand all this “intelligence” over to the battalion headquarters.
We spent the first two weeks working like that. The war was over for us. It had ended over a month earlier in Baghdad during a montage of toppling statues, looting, and explosions. We’d gone back to card playing, magazine reading, and now, cultural immersion.
I was surprised then, when I was told by Captain B. one afternoon to be ready to go on a raid that night with Task Force 20. Task Force 20 was the super-secret amalgamation of what I assumed to be U.S. Army Special Forces, Delta Force, and the CIA. Keeping all the hush-hush task forces straight in my head always took a lot of effort. Task Force 20. Task Force 11. Task Force Dagger. K-Bar. Saber. Task Force Blue. Brown. Hammer. DeathForceKill-9000. They all ran together.
When the Task Force 20 guys actually showed up that night, they appeared to be half of a Special Forces A-team along with a CIA operative who spoke Arabic. The CIA officer was a middle-aged guy with glasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap.
I was upbeat. The mission was to capture the Ten of Diamonds—Saddam’s vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan. He was supposedly nearby, hiding with a gold-toothed bodyguard in an outlying village. My interest in the mission revolved around the soldier’s paradox again—I didn’t necessarily want to be involved with “Taha’s Last Stand,” but I had gotten so bored that this was something to break the monotony. It made me feel like I was in the infantry.
But then the Task Force 20 major who was in charge told us that unfortunately, the intel was six days old. A balloon rockets across the room, discharging all its air from within, and lands flaccidly on the ground at my feet. With those words—six days old—I knew it was futile. I knew that we would end up going through the motions, not capture anybody, and maybe terrify a farmer and his family half to death. Six days when you’re chasing fugitives might as well be three years. The pointlessness of the raids was starting to wear on my nerves.
We timed portions of the raid down to the second—something I’d never done before. And it was good practice. Everybody was in position when they were supposed to be. Mohamed was in his disguise—this time a knit cap and a bandana that covered his face. And everything went off without a hitch—except for the fact that Taha wasn’t there when we arrived. It came across the radio as, “dry hole.”
This surprised no one.
After that I settled back into my job as an infantryman-turned-local water supply officer. We started talking about the war in the past tense whenever we referred to the actual fighting of March and April—as in, “back during the war.” Even when vaguely warlike events presented themselves, we conveniently brushed them off or dismissed them as someone else’s problem.
One afternoon an orange and white taxi drove up to the front entrance of our compound. I called for Mohamed and then walked out into the fading afternoon light to see what the driver wanted. As we approached the car, the taxi driver opened the rear door closest to us. I stuck my head in while Mohamed talked to the driver.
It was a similar scene to one I’d had to deal with in Baghdad. Crumpled in the back seat was an Iraqi, bleeding from a gunshot wound. He had tears streaming down his face and he was sobbing uncontrollably. He looked terrified. I assumed this was because he believed himself to be running out of blood. I stepped back from the open door.
“Okay, Mohamed. What’s the deal? What is this?”
Mohamed responded without taking his eyes off the cab driver. “He says they were attacked by members of the Baath Party . . . and that they were lucky to escape alive.” The taxi driver said something and pointed off into the distance. Mohamed continued to translate. “He says they are just up the road . . . only a few kilometers from here.”
I looked at Mohamed and smiled, cynically. “Right. That’s a new one. I’m sure it’s one of Saddam’s closest buddies.” Insurgency was not yet one of the words in my Iraq war vocabulary. “They’re full of shit. We’ve seen this before. Why don’t they go to the hospital in Tal Afar?” I figured they had tried to rob someone and then been thwarted . . . or that it had been something personal—maybe a feud between families.
Mohamed asked the question and then answered me. “He says they want protection.”
Protection? The request sounded strange at first, but then I remembered how melodramatic so many of the civilians with whom I’d dealt had been. I rolled my eyes. “Hold on. I’ll talk to Captain B.” A minute later I came back. Mohamed was still standing next to the taxi conversing with the driver. “Yeah, tell these guys to get the fuck out of here. Go to the hospital in Tal Afar for treatment. We’re too busy to deal with this kind of stuff.” I glanced into the back seat again and saw that the wounded Iraqi was still bawling.
I wondered why they’d felt the need to bring their problem to us. The war was over. The partisan war we’d all feared in the beginning had never materialized. Issues of violence no longer concerned us. We were more worried about cooking gas distribution, drinking water issues, possible elections, and which coalition country would be the one to relieve us in the next couple of months.
Several days later I was given a one-week notice by Captain B. that I would be leaving Delta Company. He told me that I was being promoted to executive officer and that I’d be going back to Bravo Company to become its second in command. I would return there only two days prior to a new commander taking over for the departing Captain K. That part suited me fine. It would hold the conflicts to a minimum.
I had mixed feelings about the whole thing. I was looking forward to returning to my old company, but I had become comfortable with Sergeant Croom and the Delta guys. I’d fought my second war with
them and bonded with them—and I felt like I was leaving them right in the middle of something we hadn’t yet finished as a team. There’s never a good time to leave a squad or a platoon or a company. It’s just harder in a war—or a sort-of-war. Out of everybody, I think it was Mohamed who took my transfer the hardest.
I spent the first week or so of my new job in a fog. Every aspect of it was foreign to me. Having spent two years in the world of “shoot, move, and communicate,” I now had to learn resupply, maintenance cycles, and the art of company movement planning. The new commander, Captain Mike Jones, a West Pointer, had never commanded a company either—so we were learning together.
The whole thing—the war, my job—seemed to be smooth sailing from here on out as far as I was concerned. Northern Iraq was peaceful, unlike the areas nearer Baghdad and Fallujah, where the situation still seemed to be smoldering. I felt like we had lucked out in coming up here.
When the insurgency started in Tal Afar, nobody was killed. There was neither a wounded soldier nor a shot fired. When it happened, we weren’t even sure if we’d actually been attacked. The event was at the same time insidious and laughable—and it signaled the spread of the cancerous insurgency to northwest Iraq.
I had been inside the TOC talking to Phil and another soldier when I decided to rack out for the evening in Bravo Company’s barracks building next door. I walked outside the open door in the rear of the TOC wearing only desert camouflage bottoms, sandals, and a brown t-shirt. There was a slight breeze blowing that made the hot night bearable. I first stepped toward the barracks building, but then remembered that I wanted to take a leak before heading off to bed.
The piss tubes were located at the rear of the property, not fifty feet away from the door through which I’d just walked. They backed up to the fortified, sand-filled barrier that marked the northern edge of our headquarters. I walked that direction, carefully stepping over the puddles of water left by our big metal camouflaged water buffalo. I reached the tubes, picked out the most sanitary-looking one, unbuttoned, and conducted my business. The operation went as planned.
I shook it off, buttoned back up, and turned to head back to my waiting cot. I’d walked about thirty feet when a blast shattered the evening calm. It came from the alleyway behind the barriers, on the other side of the piss tubes—not twenty feet from where I’d been standing. I wondered if I was just a magnet for random explosives.
For a second I stood there, confused. Does this concern me? I looked at the barrier wall, scanning for smoke or a breach, listening for voices or a car. But in the darkness I couldn’t see anything. And there was only silence. The thought of an attack didn’t even register. That was out of the question. Our war had ended two months earlier, sometime in April. Of course there was some harassment taking place in the newly christened Sunni Triangle, but that wasn’t anywhere close to us. Our main problems were civil in nature—not guerilla.
From inside the TOC I heard a, “What the fuck was that?”
Then something changed inside my head. I don’t know what and I don’t know why, but it did. It just didn’t feel right anymore. I turned and hurried back to the building. Before I got there, guys were already coming out to see what all the racket had been about. I walked back to the CP near my room. Some guys were putting on boots; others were just sitting on the edges of their cots looking inconvenienced by the mystery noise. Nobody knew what to do. We debated whether you could counterattack a mystery noise and couldn’t come up with anything.
Word was passed to gear up into full battle rattle, and we decided to dispatch a squad to go check out the perimeter of the headquarters. Those of us now indoors largely ignored the first order, but we did send a squad to investigate.
Meanwhile, the platoon leaders and I wagered on what the result would be. I didn’t have any clue as to what it could have been, but I wasn’t yet convinced that it was a real attack. Things had just been too peaceful in Tal Afar for the last eight weeks.
The next morning I was told that somebody had set two barrels against the back wall of our compound. In the bottoms they had placed old artillery shells. And on top they had placed wood and trash. They lit the barrels on fire, in the hopes that when the fire reached the bottom the shells would explode.
It was good initiative, but bad judgment on their part. Unfortunately for the insurgent, only one of the rounds detonated, causing a minor fire on the barrier wall. The effort had been paltry at best, showing distinct signs of amateurism. Placing explosives at the base of a “blast wall” usually runs contrary to conventional wisdom in guerilla warfare. You’re supposed to hit the weak points, not the blast walls.
But that’s not the point. The bottom line was that the peace forged after the fall of Baghdad—the peace in which we’d lived for the last two months in Tal Afar—had just ended. With a muffled boom and nothing else, it had ended. By the hands of some clumsy amateur, it had simply ceased being. Unknown to us, we had been facing a dam all along—a dam that had now cracked and sprung a leak. Behind it was a deluge of terrorists and insurgents, IEDs, and RPGs.
I am in the mountains, standing next to Sergeant Collins. The Shah-e-Kot Valley, still smoking after an endless week of pounding, stretches out before us. It is a clear dusk and now that the sun has dropped behind the ridge to the west, we can each see our own breath. A B-52, thousands of feet above us, is flying in our direction. Without taking his eyes off of the plane, Collins says, “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if he dropped his payload right now?”
“Yeah, it would,” I say. “Hey, wait a sec . . . What is . . .”
A dozen little pale dots are now visible below the flying aircraft. Slowly, they fall behind it—drifting in our direction. He has dropped his payload of dumb bombs. For a second I want to panic. I realize that if I could run at this altitude, there’s no way I could outrun such a number of bombs. If they are going to hit our position, they will hit it, and we will be vaporized. Even if the pilot has made a mistake, even if he realizes it, there’s nothing he can do to call them back. It has already happened to us once.
Reading my mind, Sergeant Collins, eyes still glued to the sky, says, “That’s the kind of shit you can’t run from.”
The bombs gradually float directly over us, getting bigger by the second. Their trajectory takes them onto the south side of the mountain next to us, where they impact with not-too-distant thuds.
I often dream of falling bombs. Sometimes they’re of things that really happened, and I’m back in the valley. Other times they’re not, and strange, far away cannons are launching screaming orange fireballs in my direction. Either way, it’s the same feeling of helplessness and terror. In neither dream can I escape.
In Iraq, these were replayed weekly like old film reels through my head at night. And when it wasn’t falling bombs it was mountain shootouts. When it wasn’t combat, it was Nikki.
I can’t remember now what I was dreaming about at half past eleven on the night of July 19. It could have been any of the three.
I opened my eyes and turned my head toward the door of the room. I was still half asleep. In the doorway I could see a silhouette against the lit hallway. I recognized it as Specialist Kuykendall, Captain Jones’ RTO. Not sure if I was still dreaming, I wondered what he was doing standing there. Then I realized he must have awakened me. He’d probably been standing there saying my name. I reached up to my ears and pulled out a pair of now silent headphones.
“What . . .” I paused and cleared my throat. “What’s up, man? What do you need?” I asked him.
He said something about a shooting, but whatever he said didn’t really strike me as something that was important to me.
Still groggy and unmoved from my cot, I said, “Anybody hurt? Was it any of our guys?” I only had one eye open.
He said he didn’t know about casualties but that it was definitely not Bravo Company.
I propped myself up on an elbow. “Kuykendall, do I need to get up for this?” I felt like I was about to
pass right back out. I was vaguely thinking that this was most likely gunfire that didn’t concern me.
He said he didn’t think so. He said he was just passing along chatter he’d heard on the radio and thought maybe I should know about it since Captain Jones was gone for the evening.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “Come wake me up again if this turns into a big deal or something.”
He said he would, no problem.
I passed into unconsciousness.
“Sir, you need to wake up. Lieutenant Friedman . . . Sir, you awake?”
It was Kuykendall’s voice again. I opened my eyes. I felt like I’d just closed them a second earlier. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed since he’d come around the first time. I propped myself up on my elbow again, squinting into the light that came from the hallway. “Yeah, what’s up, man?”
“Sir, you need to get up. The commander’s on his way back here. Battalion’s getting spun up . . . there was an attack on the mortar platoon . . . .”
I stopped him. I knew from the sound of his voice that we were in trouble. I was already swinging my legs out of the cot and putting my boots on. “Kuykendall,” I said, trying to find his eyes somewhere on the silhouette that stood in the doorframe, “how bad is it?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Two dead, sir. One wounded.”
Before the words were out of his mouth my stomach had already dropped. I threw my head back and looked at the ceiling. I brought it back down and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “Be there in a second,” I said.
For twenty seconds I sat there on the edge of my cot, letting the fact sink in that after nearly two years of war, our luck had finally run out. The barrel-bomb at the TOC had been our luck sputtering. Now it was gone.
I had been sleeping in the master bedroom of an oil company’s guesthouse at Ayn Zalah. We had temporarily relocated the company CP to this small but upscale village that sat among a group of hills forty miles northeast of Tal Afar. From the high ground at Ayn Zalah, there is a spectacular view of the lake caused by the damming of the Tigris. On clearer days there, you can see through the summer haze and into the mountains of Turkey. And at night you can look out across the water and view the tiny city lights of the Kurdish city of Dohuk.
The War I Always Wanted Page 14
