Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Walker, Johnny

  MY TIME WITH the SEALs, my days in the war, affected me in ways I don’t even understand. I am reminded of a sculptor, who works scraping stone for five years, getting his sculpture just right. At the end of that five years, his hands are bent with the exertion against the stone. He has created a great work of art, but what has he done to his hands?

  Iraq now has become a dark place to me, a place I saw at night, a place where I worried about my wife and children. Destiny—and the SEALs—took me from there and put me in a place of light.

  If you read or watch the news, you know that Iraq is struggling. It’s even worse than the reports say. There is much killing, more than is ever broadcast. Mosul especially has become a place of turmoil, with different groups vying for power and the specter of revenge as well as hate hanging over the city. Sunni versus Shia, Iraqi versus Kurd—the divisions have become sharper as time has gone.

  They have taken a great toll. I am looking now at a photo of an area of the city I knew well, a residential and business area of three- and four-story houses, a place where there was once a park and a vibrant street life. Children crowded in the alleys that spread out from the main streets; there was a mosque at one side.

  The mosque remains, its walls battered and stained black from fire and explosions. A good number of the other buildings are gone, their only traces rubble at the edge of immaculately bulldozed lots. Some of the surviving buildings lean, their foundations disturbed forever. Others are crumbling. If there is a building that has not been touched by the war, I can’t see it through my tears.

  Sometimes I wish had the power to make true changes in Iraq. These are just thoughts, not real desires: I would never become a politician, and I have no plans to run for office anywhere, in Iraq or in America. But if it were possible, if all dreams could become realities, then I would first impose martial law on all Iraq, stopping all conflict in the country. I would bring in American and European teachers as well as policemen. I would rebuild Baghdad. It would be a new city, rebuilt from the ground up.

  Then I would go to Basra and do the same. Mosul would follow, Tal Afar—one by one, each city around the country would be replaced with a new version, rising from the ashes of the war’s destruction.

  I’d rebuild all of Iraq’s institutions—the police, the army, universities, everything. I would start programs to send as many Iraqis as possible to live in the United States for a year or two. When they got back, they would understand the possibilities.

  I’d get the money to pay for this from oil—and from ending corruption. Simply taking the money from the thieves’ pockets would do a tremendous amount for the people of Iraq. Money is being siphoned off by corrupt people everywhere. Payments are even going to Iran. Stop this, and there would be plenty of money to build anything you can think of.

  Five years, maybe ten, and Iraq would be an entirely different country.

  It’s an impossible dream—an idealist’s dream, not something an immigrant should have, since an immigrant needs to be a realist.

  Still, there are many realistic things that can be done to make Iraq better. Improving the schools should be a priority. Many of the worst problems in the country stem from the lack of education, a grave fault that the war has made worse. People for the most part are ignorant about many things, most especially the world outside their country’s boundaries. They know little that is real about America, which fosters hatred; they know very little about other religions or even their own, which fosters intolerance. Is it any wonder that violence is the result?

  WHEN I’M ASKED about the war, the question is sometimes really a different one: Do you blame the Americans for stirring up the trouble?

  Was America the cause of the violence?

  No. We had the seeds for this destruction within us all along, and whether it would have come out so soon or been delayed years, eventually the killing would have started; cancer will do its job later if not sooner.

  Saddam was his own cancer. If we had been able to deal with him ourselves . . .

  Outside influences—al-Qaeda, Shiites in Iran, the Iranian government—took advantage of our suffering and confusion after the dictator was gone. In the struggle for power, nothing was sacred, not even human life or religion. People called themselves “warriors of God” and claimed to be righteous followers of God’s plan, defenders of the faith, protectors of the good. But what they did, what they always did, was the opposite.

  God is a creator, and He wants us to celebrate what He has created. He wants us to create as well. But the people who pretended to be working in His name were not builders or creators. They didn’t protect the innocent, let alone their religion.

  Instead, they blew things up. They gave grenades to children, strapped bombs on women, drove explosives into marketplaces where innocents struggled to get the basic necessities of living. Instead of building a community, they tore it apart. Where once there had been many people of different faiths and different opinions living together, they brought fear and death, suspicion and evil.

  It was easy. All it required was hatred.

  To build a community is much harder. To make people safe and confident, to make them trust and then help each other—that is something that takes patience and a lot of sweat.

  Killing people in the name of God? That is to me the biggest sin against Him. How can you dare to do that? It is God’s creation—how can you blaspheme by undoing His majestic work? How could you think that God, the almighty of everything, would need your help to do anything?

  We are not put here to be about ourselves. That is a truth I know above all others.

  ANOTHER QUESTION I am asked is easier to answer: Will you ever go back to Iraq?

  No.

  Even if it was somehow possible to go without fear, the Iraq I knew is gone. Maybe my children will decide to visit, or their children, or their children’s children. They’ll be like all Americans, nostalgically looking not only at their roots but at what might have been. I hope what they see before them will be a country that has reached the greater part of its potential. I hope that they see peace where once there was war, new buildings where there were ruins, pretty homes where once there were slums.

  And I hope that they realize they have made themselves a much better life in America than they ever would have had there.

  I AM AN IMMIGRANT. Soon I will become an American citizen. It will be the next step on my journey. I will help other immigrants and other citizens.

  I will have my rituals, old and new.

  I am already accumulating them. On Sunday mornings I like to rise before the rest of the family. I get coffee at a local shop, then drive over to a swap meet held at an old drive-in movie theater. Tables and tents line the tired macadam. People hawk wares of all sorts, old and new, some very used, some still wrapped in plastic. I like to listen to the people as they talk and bargain; I occasionally do a bit of haggling myself. But mostly I like to walk along the aisles and look at the variety of my new country. There is a great freedom in this place—no one at the swap meet tells you where to go, or what to buy, or what to think. Every item for sale is a possibility—what use might this tool be put to? What joy might this toy bring to a child?

  We are all immigrants in this place, all living a dream of possibilities, not merely wishing for a better future but doing our best, in everyday ways, to make it. It is the immigrant’s dream, and it is finally a reality I can safely share.

  Acknowledgments

  First, to my beautiful wife: You are the love of my life, and I am so incredibly thankful to have you by my side. Your strength and support through everything were the glue that held our family together. And to my children, this is all for you—so that you have a better life. The American dream is yours; cherish it and never forget the hardships that gave you this amazing opportunity to live in freedom.

  Several people helped guide me through making this book, and they deserve special thanks. I would like to thank Jay Hoffman for his endless support
in many facets of this process. At William Morrow, editor Peter Hubbard believed in me and my story from the very beginning; I am thankful for his guidance along the way. I also received invaluable aid from Sharyn Rosenblum, Heidi Richter, and Cole Hager, without whom the book would never have been a success.

  I would also like to express thanks to my friend Brett Harrison. Brett was a driving force behind this book, helping to make it a reality; without him this next step in my dream never would have happened.

  Like many people, I owe a debt to Chris Kyle that can never be repaid. Thank you, brother.

  And, Jim, thank you for your extreme patience with me. You spent so much time and an incredible amount of effort making sure my story was told accurately and in a way that honors the sacrifices made by everyone who served. Our friendship will remain for many years to come.

  Suzanne, my sister, your generosity and that of the community upon our arrival in the United States will never be forgotten. My family owes you a sincere debt of gratitude.

  To Tatt, Brad, Kevin, Jeff, Taco, JT, Bear, Quiet Man, Bishop, and all my SEAL brothers: A simple thank-you is not enough for changing my life and the life of my family and making my American dream exist. Your talents and sacrifices for each other and this country continue to amaze me. You have been such a big part of my life, and I am so grateful for all of it. Not all of you are in the book, but you are all in my heart. When I was away from my family, I found another one with all of you. You truly are my brothers.

  —JOHNNY WALKER

  A large number of active-duty SEALs and recently retired members of the military and other government agencies helped Johnny and me as we worked on the book.

  As we noted earlier, we have decided not to use their names, due to their service or, in some cases, private contractor status. While it may not be front-page news in America, the war in Iraq is continuing every day, and American as well as Iraqi lives remain in great danger. We trust and hope that they will realize that we are both overwhelmingly grateful for their assistance, and that they understand that we don’t want to inadvertently place them in any danger.

  Besides echoing Johnny’s words above, I would especially like to thank the Walker family for their hospitality and patience in the two years it took to write this book.

  —JIM DEFELICE

  Collaborator’s Note

  By Jim DeFelice

  One late afternoon in the spring of 2011, Chris Kyle and I were sitting in his den working on the book that became American Sniper. We’d been working since the early morning; it was our third or fourth day straight and we were both badly in need of a break. But neither one of us was about to admit that to the other; SEALs don’t ever need breaks, and New Yorkers are too arrogantly competitive to admit to anything smacking of weakness.

  The conversation began dragging, and if we weren’t going to take a break we needed something to change things up a bit. So I suggested we go through a bunch of Chris’s photos and free-associate a bit. We’d played with that in the past—Chris would look at each photo and describe it; I’d ask questions to fill out what he was saying.

  Somewhere in the middle of this, we came upon an image of an Iraqi in full battle dress, holding an AK and grinning wildly. It was clear he wasn’t a SEAL—wrong cammies and gear—but he also was clearly not a member of the Iraqi army, let alone a member of the mujahideen.

  “Who’s that?” I asked. I thought maybe he was a para—a CIA officer or contract employee working with the SEALs.

  Not that they ever did that.

  Chris laughed. “Johnny Walker,” he said. “The only Iraqi I ever trusted with a gun.”

  That pretty much begged further explanation. During most of Chris’s time in Iraq, the Iraqi army was notorious for having traitors in its midst. The SEALs—and Chris—worked with them often, and they were of course armed, but there was never a high confidence factor.

  “He saved my ass a bunch of times,” added Chris. “All of ours. Johnny Walker. He was a real badass.”

  Badass being the highest accolade Chris could give anyone.

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “Johnny was a terp. But he was a lot more than a terp. A lot more.”

  Terp, of course, means interpreter. I was pretty intrigued by that—while interpreters played a really important role in Iraq, I’d never heard them praised by the guys who’d actually been on the ground with them. Chris Kyle calling one a badass—now that was something different.

  I forget the rest of the conversation; it wasn’t very long, and we quickly moved on. But Johnny Walker and his role as a kind of Super Terp remained with me.

  Johnny appears in American Sniper, with a different name and his identity heavily disguised—sorry, but at that point I believed not only that his life was in danger but that if he were identified in that book the mujahideen would make a serious effort to find him. (His nationality is wrong, and there’s no mention of him coming to America. I’ll let you work out who he is.) Unfortunately the stories about Johnny—like the vast majority of what Chris and I talked about—were left on the cutting-room floor.

  I didn’t entirely forget about Johnny, but I didn’t think much about him either until the summer of 2012. By then, American Sniper was a megahit, Chris was filming a TV show, and I was waiting for final clearance to get a double-hernia operation. One day our editor, Peter Hubbard, called me and asked if I knew who Johnny Walker was. He’d just finished talking to Chris, who’d urged him to publish Johnny’s story.

  “Would you write it?” Peter asked.

  I’m not sure if I was under painkillers at the time—probably—but with both Chris and Peter pushing it, I would have agreed in any event.

  USUALLY WHEN I collaborate on a memoir—I’ve done a couple of others besides Sniper; all were best sellers—the goal is to re-create on the page what the main “author” sounds like in person. Without boring you to death with a lot of talk about technique, the process is trickier than it may seem; vocal tics and identifiers don’t always work quite right on the page. The final product is always an approximation of the subject’s voice, optimized for the written word.

  In Johnny’s case, there was an added complication: he’s not a native English speaker. Johnny speaks English fairly well, but if it were replicated in the book it would have been close to unintelligible.

  I worked with him quite a bit not to just get his speaking patterns, but the thought processes behind them. Johnny is surprisingly philosophical and introspective. He has complex notions about religion and life, not all of which he can easily communicate in English. The trick was to adapt his thoughts as well as his words to easily readable prose that sounds the way he would sound if he were a native speaker. Listening to Johnny speak Arabic—a language of which I am wholly ignorant—turned out to be extremely helpful. His cadences—long and complex, and often quite emotional—supplied as much of the basis to the way this book sounds as his English. His Arabic has a very rhythmical sound, with what at least to a Westerner sounds like a heavy, recurring beat. I tried to duplicate it here by using word repetition and some formal rhetorical flourishes, which also gave the prose a little of the more formal style it would have had if rendered in his native language. At the same time, the book wouldn’t sound like Johnny if it didn’t have at least some of the slang he learned from Americans along the way.

  Johnny and I have worked to get this book to sound as close as it can to how he talks and thinks without making it completely unapproachable to an audience raised on English. Hopefully, we’ve succeeded.

  THERE WERE, OF COURSE, other problems in writing the book. The trickiest had to do with the vagaries of memory. Personal recollection of events is always an issue in a memoir; in fact, it’s an issue in any nonfiction writing. It was especially an issue for Johnny. He saw so much action during the war that events often blurred together. Unlike the SEAL teams, which rotated in and out of Iraq after roughly six months of work, Johnny went essentially nonstop from 2003 unt
il his escape to America. He was on a lot of missions, and a lot of them were very similar. Sorting through them was hard enough; putting them into the proper order was even tougher. We worked with several different timelines in an effort to get everything straight. In fact, while the major events in the book are presented in their proper sequence—working for the army, the SEALs, Soheila’s escape from Mosul—we were never able to place a lot of other, fortunately minor, episodes. There was so much material available that in most cases we left them out. In the other instances, we’ve noted our uncertainty about where exactly they fit on the timeline.

  We’ve also been purposely vague about the methods the SEALs and other units used. This isn’t a book about techniques and military procedures; beyond that, we didn’t want to inadvertently threaten the lives of any American in a future operation. For similar reasons of security, no SEAL on active duty is identified in the book. Most of the Iraqis aren’t either. We’ve also left out the names and some identifying features of Johnny’s children and his relatives back in Iraq. Those relatives and their acquaintances, unfortunately, remain in considerable danger.

  BY THEIR VERY NATURE, books are always a much different experience for the writers than for the readers. When I think of this book, I think primarily of the hospitality of Johnny’s family and friends, who accepted me most graciously into their lives. There were late-night barbecues, a good portion of drinking, and long arguments on politics and religion that went completely over my head because they were primarily in Arabic.

  But I’ll also think of Johnny and me driving in the winding hills outside of San Diego one early Sunday morning, the sky clear, the weather perfect. Suddenly a Hells Angel appeared behind us. Johnny, driving what can be best described as a four-cylinder family car, decided he wasn’t going to let him pass.

  He didn’t. The fact that we didn’t careen off into a ravine was a bonus, as far as Johnny was concerned.