Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  ‘This is no accident. I know,’ I remember Sammy saying. ‘They destroy Baghdad as a warning to the world. Mr Rumsfeld, he clever man.’

  Sammy liked to play the fool, but I had learned that words of wisdom often came from his lips.

  When asked why US troops didn’t stop the lawlessness in Baghdad, Rumsfeld famously replied: ‘Stuff happens . . . and it’s untidy and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.’

  It sounded like quirky, good ol’ boy honesty on Fox News, but it didn’t play the same way to viewers in the Arab world watching Al Jazeera.

  ‘We know,’ said Sammy.

  People in London – Washington too, I assume – were still obsessing about the legality of the war. Me included. But now I was back, I could see that this was irrelevant to the Iraqis.

  What they wanted from the Coalition was fresh water, electricity and security. After that, they wanted the rule of law – even Saddam had managed that – and jobs so that they could support their families. Three years after Saddam fell they were still waiting, and it was a comfort to me that there were American officers like Mad Dog inside the Green Zone who saw that, beyond the politics, beyond their own promotions, was a community that had suffered thirty years of Saddam dictatorship and were suffering still after three years of calculated chaos or unprecedented incompetence, depending on which side of the T-walls you happened to be sitting.

  Colonel Steve ‘Mad Dog’ McQueen, hair thinner, face more ravaged, eyes as keen as ever, was waiting for us at the bus stop as the Humvees rolled in.

  ‘Go say hi,’ said Cobus. ‘I’ll get your bag out of the other wagon.’

  I grabbed Mad Dog’s hand and we both grinned wildly at each other. It was fantastic to see him again. This was a man who had stood at my shoulder under fire when our house had been attacked three nights in a row, had been in more tight spots with me than I cared to remember, and more importantly had a sense of humour, which I had found rare in US officers above the rank of major.

  ‘Nice shirt,’ he said, eyeing my floral ensemble with amusement. He waved his hand around. ‘Welcome home. Baghdad missed you.’

  I smiled crookedly because, the funny thing was, he was right. With so many familiar sights, just in the last hour or so, it actually did feel like coming home.

  From my day sack, I fished out some sports magazines and a bottle of whisky each for Mad Dog and Cobus, which seemed to please them. I noticed the sergeant standing off to one side. Mad Dog beckoned her over. She was stunning and walked towards us with a swing of her hips that turned every male head within a hundred metres. My mouth went dry.

  ‘James Ashcroft,’ McQueen said. I’d already seen the name flash CARILLO stitched on to the front of her body armour. Now I got the rest. ‘Please let me introduce Sergeant Tanya Carillo, my right hand.’

  She stretched out her own right hand and met my most charming smile with a glacial scowl.

  ‘Call me James,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll call you Asshat,’ she replied grimly. ‘Nice shirt, you asshat. Does this look like Hawaii to you?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ I gaped blankly at her open hostility.

  Then she cracked up, laughing at the expression on my face – perfect American teeth, a spark in her wide-set brown eyes, her hair a long, dark ponytail that hung over one shoulder in a distinctly un-military fashion that I approved of.

  ‘Colonel McQueen told me to bust your balls,’ she added, her generous mouth in a wide grin, ‘but I can’t keep a straight face.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d last longer than five goddamn seconds,’ Mad Dog muttered in the background.

  As we shook hands, I was sure she held on a fraction longer than was needed, and she held my gaze until I looked away.

  I had already noticed that McQueen and Carillo were wearing helmets and body armour. In fact so was everyone else around me. I had dismissed it as a new regulation dress code that had been introduced during my absence. Previously everyone had wandered around the Green Zone in shirts and jackets.

  ‘Has there been an increase in the threat level recently?’ I knocked Mad Dog on his chest plate as we started walking towards the embassy entrance.

  ‘Yeah, we just started receiving a load of IDF every evening. They normally start around 18:30 so we probably best get you inside.’

  I glanced down at my Kobold – it was 5.30pm. I looked up to make a joke and saw Cobus freeze, his head cocked up, looking to the south. He seemed to be straining to hear something, but with the idling engines of the Humvees we could hardly hear ourselves talk.

  I flinched as a colossal explosion rocked the traffic circle up at the junction of the 14 July Bridge 200m away. A huge cloud of smoke and dust rose up and shrapnel clattered over the concrete of the ceremonial archway and pinged off the metal statues of Iraqi soldiers in the centre of the circle.

  Everyone’s head whipped around, each looking for the explosion and asking themselves the same question, VBIED or mortar? If the insurgents had managed to get a VBIED through the front checkpoint that was very bad news. It was bad enough that they were landing mortars and rockets inside the Green Zone.

  I remembered an attack the year before when a Katyusha rocket punched straight into the main-office hall in the embassy, bounced off the floor and back out through the roof without exploding. Three people were injured and one poor woman killed, a contracting officer, who was physically hit by the rocket and virtually torn apart as she was picked up and hurled across the hall by the impact.

  I had been looking directly at the traffic circle and was aware that it was a mortar. It was huge, too, at least an 81mm. Cars veered crazily off the road and the few pedestrians hit the deck or ran for cover. Only one lone LAV hummed along obliviously. Within its armoured shell the crew was unconcerned about shrapnel.

  We all ran for cover. It was chaos, bodies everywhere, like the start of the London marathon. The Humvees were the heavy armoured versions; they just slammed the doors shut and the gunners dropped down inside. The rest of us piled into ditches and under the concrete ‘U’s that had been conveniently spaced out around the car park for just such an eventuality. I moved quickly. I remembered clearly the last time I had been there a mortar had come down next to our house and blown some poor bastard driver’s legs off as he stood next to his car.

  As I dropped into a ditch, I turned and was knocked flat on my back by Tanya coming in after me; who, to be fair, had been thrown in bodily by Cobus. She lay full length on top of me, our faces inches apart, both of us open-mouthed in surprise, and I was just thinking it’s a shame we were both wearing body armour when, a split second later, Cobus landed on top of Tanya like a pile-driver and pancaked us both with a sickening crunch.

  Six foot three of heavy Afrikaner wearing his armour and full combat load must have weighed 300 pounds, and the shock drove all the air from my lungs. Nose to nose with me, Tanya’s eyes bulged until they nearly popped out and her face was suffused with blood. She gurgled something incoherently. I couldn’t feel my legs. I tried to explain that I needed to breathe but only a weak hiss came out.

  ‘Yisss! That was a big one,’ Cobus said. He slid off and wedged in next to me, waving a bottle in my face. ‘Don’t worry, man, I saved the whisky.’

  I glared at him silently and suppressed the overpowering urge to vomit my lungs out.

  Then he looked at the two of us. Tanya’s head had flopped down on my shoulder in what would have otherwise been a gesture of fond affection.

  ‘Fark, you two seem to be getting on together. You don’t waste any time, hey Ash?’

  ‘Unnh,’ grunted Tanya.

  I couldn’t even manage that.

  There was one more explosion further away, then two more in the distance. Silence fell, other than the idling engines of the Humvees.

  ‘Urgh.’ Tanya pushed herself off my chest to sit on my legs. She scowled at Cobus. ‘What did you eat for breakfast, cement?’

  I
heard Mad Dog talking to someone and guessed he was at the other end of the trench. After a couple of minutes of silence people were looking out of their holes and from around vehicles.

  ‘Guess that’s it for the moment. Let’s move it before the queue at the checkpoint builds up again.’ Mad Dog’s head appeared, blocking my view of the clouds. He leaned down and helped me up.

  Cobus had my Bergen with him so we jogged over straight away to the Marine and Gurkha checkpoint to unload our weapons into the drum and get our passes checked. Everyone else started emerging from cover.

  ‘Kept my whisky safe!’ Mad Dog grinned like a schoolboy and passed his bottle to Cobus to carry through, since US military have a strict no-alcohol policy.

  We walked around the side of the palace building to the accommodation cabins at the back. Row after row of container housing units, or ‘CHU’s, stretched out behind Saddam’s swimming pool, each one surrounded by a wall of sandbags. Many of the sandbags had frayed and degraded because of the sunlight and leaked sand copiously, so that the walls lost their shape and sagged pathetically. Four years into the war and labour gangs of Iraqis were still being escorted in and out by US soldiers to perform sandbag-filling details. I am sure that each night they went home with their day’s pay in US dollars to be debriefed by the insurgent commanders as to the exact location of military and sensitive emplacements within the Green Zone.

  ‘You are staying in here with me just for tonight, Ash,’ said Cobus as he unlocked a doorway and dumped my Bergen just inside. He pulled out a couple of folding deckchairs. ‘I normally share with a Dutch officer. He finished his tour last week and his bunk is free until tomorrow or the day after when they allocate someone else.’

  ‘Then where? And where are all of us going to sleep? Remember there are Seamus, Dai and probably Les as well.’ I knew that Cobus would have sorted something out.

  ‘The old American Special Forces villa by the river, you remember?’

  Of course I remembered. We had known these guys for over a year, two different teams of Green Berets, one after the other, and when our house had been stormed by our own mutinous guards, it had been the SF villa that we had used as our emergency rendezvous.

  ‘I am still in touch with the guys there,’ continued Cobus, ‘doing them favours and such like. It’s a different team now from when you were here last, but all good guys. They are expecting you.’

  Cobus unfolded the chairs between two faded sandbag walls and indicated that Tanya and I should sit down. He and McQueen perched on the corner of a stack of sandbags and both lit a cigarette.

  ‘Welcome to my office,’ Mad Dog said distractedly, and waved away the smoke. ‘I’ve got to stop these things before I get home.’

  It reminded me of Hendriks, these giants of men afraid of nothing but their wives. Maybe we all need something to be afraid so we don’t forget we’re not bulletproof.

  ‘Cobus must have filled you in,’ McQueen said.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said.

  The two men exchanged glances.

  ‘I’m making a courtesy call in Basra day after tomorrow for a couple of days,’ Mad Dog continued. ‘That’ll give you time to see Sammy. You’ve got your team?’

  ‘I’ve got confirmation from Dai and Seamus. I’m waiting on Les.’

  ‘That’s great. That’s four of you, plus Sammy and Cobus, and I can lend you two of my sergeants. You’ll meet them later. That makes at least eight of you, plus Sammy’s brother if he is any good. More than enough. Cobus and Sergeant Carillo will handle the logistics,’ he added. ‘Anything you need, just tell them.’

  Tanya smiled in acknowledgement. Our eyes met for a moment. I liked the arched lift of her eyebrows, as if she were studying a view.

  ‘We already have three SUVs, and I have three sets of maps, plus all the waypoints plotted into my GPS. When you come up to the office you can plug into my laptop and download them on to yours.’

  McQueen sighed. ‘Monday already,’ he said. ‘We’re set for your trip to Mosul Friday. Four days.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ I responded.

  He puffed away on his cigarette. For a fifty-six-year-old colonel, McQueen looked fit still, but there were bags under his eyes. He seemed listless.

  A silence hung over our little group.

  I broke it just to keep the conversation going. ‘How are things out there?’

  ‘Worse,’ he replied. ‘It has to get worse before it can get better.’

  ‘We read in the papers the surge is working.’

  ‘It is working. We were getting our asses kicked before, and now our guys aren’t being harassed as much. But the Shi’ites are seizing power and crushing anyone who gets in their way.’

  ‘Is Sammy in their way?’ I asked him.

  ‘He’s a reminder of the past,’ McQueen answered. ‘You remember what Machiavelli said. The prince has to kill all his enemies if he’s going to become king.’

  ‘And who’s the prince?’

  ‘The man in black, our old friend Muqtata al-Sadr,’ he replied.

  ‘You think the order comes from al-Sadr?’

  ‘No. No. No.’ McQueen shook his head. ‘While it’s going crazy out there every man and his dog is settling old scores.’

  ‘And Colonel Ibrahim’s writing the death warrants?’

  ‘That’s the intel,’ McQueen replied, glancing again at Cobus. ‘Sammy’s in a safe house with the family. Cobus will take you out there tomorrow.’

  Cobus stood and the look he exchanged with Mad Dog suddenly made him look tired too. Cobus had been in Iraq for over three years and the liaison role he performed for McQueen must have put him out on the streets of Baghdad nearly every day. He was McQueen’s eyes and ears in the city, a mission fraught with any number of dangers and too important to be compromised.

  While most senior brass came to Iraq to oil their way up the greasy pole, Mad Dog was covertly looking out for the interpreters and informers who had laid their lives on the line supporting Coalition Forces and were now being abandoned by the Americans and British alike.

  It was an issue that would disgust every soldier from Coalition nations who had served in Iraq. After the fall of Saddam and the liberation of the country from the Ba’athist regime, dozens, then hundreds of English-speaking Iraqis had signed up to act as interpreters, a resource desperately needed by every unit down to company and platoon level across the entire country.

  Almost universally men, these unarmed Iraqis risked their lives every day on patrol with Coalition Forces, facing the same danger from gunfire and IEDs as did the Coalition troops. They then faced the additional danger of finishing their working day and having to go home unprotected, often to places where the local community might take revenge on them for aiding the invader. If identified as collaborators their entire family was at risk as well.

  I had lost count of the number of horror stories I had heard of the chilling retribution carried out on interpreters and their relatives by the militias. Entire families, down to the children, would have their throats cut, women raped, the men tortured bestially before execution. I had read one report of a man having his face cut off with piano wire before he and his family were executed. It was anyone’s guess as to whether they had made the family watch his torture and death first; more likely the other way around, they would have made him watch the deaths of his wife and children before killing him. There were even instances where the death squads had turned up to butcher the interpreter and, finding that he had escaped, had slaughtered the neighbours, just to set an example.

  After three years many Iraqis who had worked for the CF, or even the new Iraqi government, were having to quit their jobs and move to different cities to save their lives and the lives of their loved ones. They had been betrayed in the cruellest of bureaucratic ironies. Due to the ‘Iraqification’ process – the daunting and illogical step of handing over all reconstruction efforts and entities to the control of the Iraqi government – the US government had overlo
oked several small matters.

  The least of these was handing over control and management of any hospital or infrastructure project, government ministry or other entity. Everything handed over took on the same pattern – all current management were sacked so that relatives of the head man could take their jobs, regardless of whether they could perform those roles, or even read or write. The grudges resulting from this, both real and imagined, inspired rival militias to ever more frenzied fratricidal killings of their fellow Iraqis.

  Another key issue is that when those entities were handed over, so were the administrative functions and paperwork, including material from the human-resources department. The Americans and British naïvely assumed that the new management would want to keep using the same workforce and focus on keeping the entities running, as opposed to concentrating on wiping out any opposition and enriching themselves.

  The lack of thought put into the handover of the human-resources data was an inexcusable failure of operational security. It meant, for example, that if you were a Shia minister in charge of a new department, you now had all these neat and comprehensive files of the personal details of all of your enemies, the Sunni employees who had been ‘collaborating’ all these years with the American occupiers.

  After the bulk of ‘Iraqification’ had been achieved in 2005, many military, State Department and DoD mandarins had slapped themselves on the backs for achieving the handover by the dates set by the Pentagon and White House. The majority knew that it was going to turn into a circus, but had no choice but to follow orders – whether they wanted to or not, the running of Iraq had to be handed over to its own people. The country, and Baghdad in particular, had then exploded.

  Requests to the US and UK for asylum or refugee status from men who had faced the dangers of years of combat on behalf of the CF, who had been ostracized by their communities and who feared for their family’s safety, were all declined. Bitter and abandoned, interpreters fled their homes. Untold numbers were caught by militias, they and their families killed. Letters of support and furious requests from high-ranking Coalition military officers were ignored by the US and UK governments back home in a shameful breach of trust and a total abrogation of responsibility.