The two men left, and as Hanna and I walked back to the COC we discussed the accusations.
“I wonder what that was all about with Za’id beating up on the jundi and the guy shooting himself,” I said. “That sounds a little crazy.”
“We’ll check it out,” Hanna answered.
No sooner had we entered the operations center than Lieutenant Bates walked in and handed me a piece of paper with a translated report.
“What’s this?” I asked, glancing at the document. Bates grinned evilly.
“A soldier from Second Company shot himself in the leg today because he wanted to go on leave,” he said.
Where there’s smoke, I thought sourly, there’s fire. Our suspicion continued to climb.
I needed to see the fire for myself, and so on 2 July the team convoyed out to Vera Cruz and Okinawa to visit 1st and 2nd companies once again. Captain Hanna and I sat down with Major Za’id in the bunker of his office, and for more than an hour we discussed the complex fuel issue. Za’id stuck to the same story Captain Majid had painted for us on our previous visit: Ayad continually refused to provide 2nd Company with the fuel it desperately needed for running its generators. It was fast becoming a tired old song for us, and in Ayad’s absence there was nothing I could do to effect change for any of the companies. Sensing that I needed a shift in subject, Hanna interjected.
“Sadie,” he said, leaning forward, “we heard about the jundi who shot himself out here several days ago.”
“Yes,” Za’id replied, producing a piece of paper from a file and pointing to it. “He was a bad soldier, and he shot himself just to get out of work.”
I looked at Hanna and rolled my eyes. Sure, I mouthed.
“Well, sadie,” Hanna added. “I’ll be honest with you. We heard that the jundi shot himself because he was being abused out here at Vera Cruz.”
Za’id sat upright as if he had been given an electric shock, and he launched into a drawn-out explanation of what had actually happened, including an overly detailed description of how the young man had pressed the barrel of his AK-47 into the meat of his calf and pulled the trigger. Za’id vehemently denied roughing up the soldier, and in the end he explained that the soldier had been treated at the hospital.
“Well, where is he now?” I asked.
“I sent him home on medical leave,” he replied.
I grimaced.
“You said he shot himself because he wanted to go on mujaas,” I began.
“Yes.”
“Well,” I continued, “I hate to say it, but by sending the jundi home you just gave him what he wanted. And now all of your soldiers know that if they really want to go home on mujaas then all they have to do is shoot themselves.”
“But we didn’t have the facilities here to look after him,” Za’id countered.
“That’s not really the point,” I said. “Besides, you could have transferred him to COP South. He could have been watched there. Our medic could have monitored him.”
Za’id was dismissive, insisting that the soldier would be charged once he returned from leave. It was a dead-end conversation; Hanna and I both knew we wouldn’t get the answers we sought, and so we dropped the subject.
As Hanna and I left the office Za’id followed us, continuing his rant about fuel. I finally turned to him.
“Sadie, look,” I said sternly. “I already told your XO this, but I’ll repeat myself. I will talk to Muqaddam Rukn Ayad about the fuel issue when he returns from mujaas only if you promise to talk to him as well. I’m not going to do it alone. You have to get involved and speak up to your commander.”
He promised he would. I didn’t believe him.
Things began to unravel around the camp in Ayad’s absence. That evening, as I sat with several of the Marines watching a movie, my radio beeped.
“Six, this is Two,” Lieutenant Ski said.
“Send it.”
“Chow hall report for you,” he said plainly. “Just got back from chow with the IAs. The food was plentiful and fit for human consumption. And a jundi just fired off a green-star cluster inside the chow tent.”
“What?” I said.
“Roger,” he replied. “The flare hit the jundi in the face and bounced around the tent then went through the roof.”
“Is anyone hurt?” I asked.
“Negative. The jundi’s face is bruised and cut, but that’s it. There are burn marks all over the floor, and there’s a big-ass hole in the tent.”
“Jesus,” I said to the Marines seated next to me. “They’re like a bunch of fucking children.”
I rekeyed my radio.
“Three-one, this is Six.”
“Three-one,” Lieutenant Grubb answered.
“Did you hear Two’s report?”
“Roger.”
“Go collect all the flares from the guards,” I told him. “They obviously can’t handle them properly.”
“Roger, I’m on it.”
Grubb and Staff Sergeant Leek returned an hour later, arms filled with the signal flares we had issued the tower guards weeks earlier.
“Couple of them were stored already primed,” Grubb said, shaking his head.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked. Staff Sergeant Leek handed me one of the green plastic tubes that were used to store the cylindrical flares.
“Here, check this out, sir,” he said, pointing to the inside. A soldier had armed the flare by affixing the cap with the firing pin inside the tube’s base so that the flare’s primer would rest against it. Storing the flare in such a manner was akin to cocking the hammer on a pistol and carrying it around ready to fire. It had been an accident waiting to happen, and sure enough it had. It was an act of absolute stupidity on the part of the soldiers, made even more unacceptable because Grubb had already instructed them on the proper storage of the flares when they were not in use. The soldier who had fired the flare had been lucky to escape with only cuts and bruises. He just as easily could have lost an eye, or worse.
The nonsense continued. The following day, as Grubb was out running laps around the compound, a speeding convoy of IA trucks barreled down the gravel path directly at him. I watched frozen from afar, expecting the vehicles to run down the lieutenant and leave him dead by the side of the road. Instead, they barely missed him, blanketing Grubb in a choking cloud of the chalky moon dust that permeated the compound. He continued to exercise, shaking his head angrily back and forth and mouthing the word “Motherfuckers.”
It wasn’t the first time the IAs had sped like madmen through the camp. Whenever the battalion commander was not around the junood inevitably drove like idiots, especially when returning from patrols. My deep-seated fear of the Marines getting shot by a careless Iraqi and his rifle was nearly matched by my worry that one of my men would get run over by the IAs. My concerns weren’t baseless. Nonbattle injuries and deaths from mishaps like vehicle accidents were a persistent danger in Iraq, and the fact that my Marines were constantly in close proximity to a bunch of Iraqi soldiers who were borderline psychotic behind the wheel was practically enough to give me the shits. On several occasions I too had nearly been hit by IA drivers speeding through camp at night, and I had finally had enough. Lieutenant Bates relayed my irritation to Captain Al’aa and convinced him to lay sandbags throughout the camp to serve as speed bumps for the reckless junood. But it wasn’t long before the soldiers simply started driving around them. Our effort to slow their movement through the compound had produced exactly the opposite effect. The IAs now had a high-speed slalom course that they could practice swerving through as fast as possible.
The morning of 5 July dawned bright and hot, and as the team prepared to convoy to the regional security meeting in Husaybah, Hanna walked up to me.
“Sir, a report just came in,” he said. “The battle position at Samsiyah just got blown up.”
“What?” I said skeptically.
“Yeah, they said the BP was completely destroyed.”
Samsiyah, loca
ted more than two and a half hours to our east, was in 2nd Battalion’s AO. I knew the MiTT team leader for that battalion, and my concern for him and his men skyrocketed.
“Any Coalition casualties?” I asked.
“Nothing reported yet,” Hanna replied.
I followed him back to the COC, where the information about the incident began to trickle in. As usual the initial reports were sketchy, but eventually it unfolded that an explosive-laden truck had sped into the ECP and detonated after one of the Iraqi guards opened fire with his machine gun. The resulting concussion and fireball tore apart the truck and flattened several buildings around the ECP. Eventually more than a dozen Iraqi casualties were reported, but thankfully no Marines were wounded. Days later photos of the scene were displayed to me. The suicide bomber’s flattened, charred face and scalp had been found dozens of meters away from the point of detonation. It looked like the mask of human skin worn by Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
Dark humor, indeed.
Lieutenant Colonel Ayad finally returned from leave on 5 July, and the next evening I went to see him. In the days leading up to his return I had organized my notes for our eventual meeting, planning to drop the hammer on him about everything that had gone haywire while he had been away. But he beat me to the punch and confessed to all that had gone to hell in his absence. At last his staff had provided him a full brief, and for nearly two hours I listened to him recount what had happened. As he listed every transgression committed I offered my views on each. Carefully acknowledging each incident, he was visibly embarrassed by all the ways in which his battalion had shown its ass. But one thing was missing from his confession: his own sense of personal responsibility for what had taken place while he was on leave.
“My officers let me down,” he said angrily, beginning a message he would cling to throughout the conversation. “They let me down and did not supervise the junood. That’s why everything went wrong.”
I nodded, saying nothing and allowing him to explain his side of things.
“I will crack down on my officers,” he declared. “Managing my officers is like keeping a coiled spring compressed with your hand. You must hold down the spring. If you don’t, then the minute you take your hand away the spring will go crazy.”
I understood what he meant, but such heavy-handed tactics would always result in chaos as soon as he wasn’t around. I turned to the topic of discipline.
“Sadie,” I said, exhaling, “I think what happened while you were gone was merely a symptom of a much greater issue. I think there is a discipline problem in Third Battalion.”
He looked at me blankly. One of the benefits of working through interpreters was that in the time it took my sentences to be translated I was able to collect my thoughts and measure my words appropriately before speaking again.
“You say that discipline in your battalion is important to you, and that your junood are disciplined,” I continued. “And that’s true. The junood are disciplined when you are around. But the definition of true discipline is when soldiers do the right thing even in the absence of supervision. Your junood aren’t doing the right thing in your absence.”
“But look at the officers I have working for me,” he replied, skirting the subject. “Captain Ali, Captain Hussein, Captain Al’aa . . . they are lazy and incompetent. They are the officers who are in charge and allow these things to happen when I am on mujaas.”
“If they are incompetent, then you need to fire them, sadie,” I said. “Otherwise you need to counsel them and make sure they understand what you expect of them whenever you go away.”
He was noncommittal about my suggestions. Sensing that I had taken that subject to its limit, I turned to the issue of fuel and water distribution to the camps.
“Here is the perception that the soldiers from First and Second companies have,” I explained. “They don’t receive the same amount of fuel and water as the soldiers who live at COP South do. They know that the generators run longer at COP South. That means the air-conditioning is run longer each day at COP South. That means the refrigerators are run longer each day at COP South. They also know that the soldiers at COP South get more water each day than they do. What all that really means to those soldiers is that the men who live at COP South are better cared for and therefore more important.”
“But I increased the amount of fuel for both companies from five thousand liters to six thousand liters each month,” he countered.
“Do you really know how much fuel they need to run their generators?” I asked. “Or are you just relying on what they tell you?”
He didn’t answer.
“You can’t really know how much fuel First and Second companies require unless they track their fuel consumption. Otherwise they are just guessing how much they need. Or they are selling the fuel out in town.”
“None of my officers would ever sell their companies’ fuel out in town,” he said defensively.
“Okay, but if you say you are giving them enough, and they say you aren’t giving them enough, how do you really know where the fuel is going?” I asked pointedly. “How do you know how they are really using the fuel?”
“Okay,” he agreed. “I will direct a fuel study by the two company commanders to find out how much they actually use and how much they actually need.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. I was starting to make some progress.
“But I need to keep a reserve here at COP South,” he added. “What if there is an emergency and we need fuel? The brigade didn’t submit the monthly fuel request, and the delivery has been delayed again.”
Convincing Ayad to abandon his ingrained inclination to stockpile supplies would be difficult. But since he had just demonstrated a willingness to do the right thing and supply more fuel to the two companies, I decided to offer him a carrot.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” I began. “If you give a full complement of fuel to First and Second companies and you run out of fuel here at COP South, then my MiTT team will give Third Battalion thirteen hundred liters per day for your generators and Humvees until the brigade finally delivers fuel.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling his toothy grin. “Very good, thank you. And thank you for your advice and for being honest with me about my battalion.”
I left Ayad’s office more confused than ever about him and the battalion as a whole. While it seemed that I had achieved a victory in the fuel issue, a numbing sense of defeat still plagued me. In our long months at COP South I had been searching the battalion for an honest broker, someone the Marines could always trust to tell the truth and who would be the battalion’s champion for organizational change. As I walked back to our compound I realized no such person had materialized. Two camps existed within the battalion: Ayad, and his officer corps. Neither camp trusted the other, and we didn’t know who to believe. Everyone had his personal agenda and twisted the facts on every issue to suit his own particular situation. Our dealings with the IA staff had become one big game of “he said, she said.” I knew that the truth lay somewhere in between, but no matter how hard we tried we couldn’t seem to find it.
I plopped down on a dusty couch in the MWR hut, emotionally spent, and as I conveyed my frustrations to Hanna, Bates, and Ski I realized something else. Despite our confusion and skepticism, the team seemed to have finally reached a significant watershed. As the previous MiTT advisors were departing COP South they had told us it took them about four months to really figure out what was going on in the battalion, to really get to know their counterparts on a personal level, and to finally earn some measure of the battalion’s trust. We had naively insisted to ourselves it wouldn’t take us that long, but sitting down with my officers I realized that we had just reached that point. Now, even though there were only two months left in our deployment, we might actually be able to accomplish something.
But then it dawned on me. We would soon have to turn over the reins to a new team, and the whole process would start anew on
ce again. I lay awake for a long time that night more discouraged than ever, wondering how any measurable progress would ever be made.
Chapter 28
Critters
It is not long before the Outlanders realize that the Iraqi army soldiers are not the only tenants with whom we share the camp. The critters are out here, and very quickly we come to accept that it is actually their camp, and we are merely visitors. The critters will be here long after we are gone.
We are overfed and overstocked with food. Our kitchen bulges with boxes of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and crate after crate of processed, prepackaged food. It is the mother lode for the army of mice that burrows in the hidden recesses of our huts, and our efforts to halt their attacks on our food stores are feckless. Finding traces of mice in the kitchen is common, and when grabbing something to eat it becomes customary for the Marines to inspect their food before biting into it to ensure that a rodent has not beaten them to the punch. Food inspection techniques include the bread-bag flip, the peanut butter spin, and the potato chip bag pressure check. I take nothing for granted, because biting into food that the mice have already sampled gives me the same queasy, sick-to-my-stomach feeling as when you bite into an apple and find a wormhole.
At first we rarely see them. Just as we take time to get used to our surroundings, so too do the mice to get accustomed to our presence. It starts with one peeking out from a darkened corner, waiting to see if we will pursue it. But we are too busy watching movies or eating to give chase to a creature that is smaller and swifter than we are. Soon they scurry through the MWR hut and past our boots in broad daylight, daring us to go after them, and then one day they run over our feet. One evening less than three months after our arrival, as I sit on the couch and watch television, one brave bastard of a mouse pokes his head through an opening in the couch’s headboard. His tiny face is right next to mine, and given our bizarre circumstances I half-expect him to crack a smile at me. And in that moment I realize that they have won. No amount of mousetraps and vermin proofing of our food and huts will stop them. Despite the Marines’ occasional parading through camp of a hapless victim snared by a glue trap, we know we are fighting a losing battle.
In the Gray Area Page 20
