by Matt Taibbi
ANYWAY, WHEN I joined the 615th that morning, the soldiers were in their usual playful mood. Specialist Pamela Wall, nicknamed “Humboldt” for her not-infrequent spaceouts, did her Asteroids impersonation for the group, an almost completely indescribable spastic side shuffle that I guess was an attempt at imitating a floating spaceship. Squad leader Sergeant Whitman, a straight-as-an-arrow Bill Paxton look-alike, wrestled goofily with Sergeant Daniel Biederman, trying to snare him in a headlock.
I gritted my teeth nervously, looking left and right. I’d been hearing explosions all morning. I couldn’t tell whether I just hadn’t heard them early on in my trip, whether they were actually getting more frequent, or whether I was just stressing. But it seemed to me now like every one of these early premission briefings was being interrupted by IED blasts right outside the gates. The sense that the violence was increasing seemed to penetrate even the happy-worker-elf vibe of the 615th. The morning briefing continued, with the group’s laid-back southerner, Sergeant Conn, relaying the announcements of the day.
“Okay, we have a new acronym,” he said, referring to a ubiquitous insurgent weapon that had up till then been known as an explosively formed projectile. “The EFP will from now on be called an AAIED, for anti-armor IED—”
BOOM! The squad shuddered as the sound of a massive explosion rocked the compound. The blast sounded like it came from somewhere just outside the camp exit.
“Fuck!” whispered a soldier named O’Braden, who was standing next to me. He shook his head in frustration.
“Somebody just had a bad day,” editorialized Conn.
Conn was about to start up the briefing again when yet another blast rocked the compound. This one was even bigger—or seemed bigger, anyway.
BOOOOOMM!
“Damn!” said Conn.
“Jesus!” said O’Braden.
A hush fell over the squad. Everybody tried to shrug it off, but I could see it had an effect—throughout the squad you could see bugged-out eyes and wringing hands and a few involuntary glances in the direction of the FOB gates. The briefing went on. Owing to a new directive—issued in the wake of a recent incident in which a Humvee driver’s leg was severed by an EFP and stuck in place on the truck accelerator—we had to practice a new drill for slowing down the Humvee in case of such an event. We piled into the trucks, and each of the drivers practiced slumping over in his or her seat. In the truck I was in, a soldier named Schumann fell over, resting her face on the steering wheel, and stared blankly out the truck window. Since I was going to be in the car, I had to do the drill, too—so I practiced pushing her limp body out of the way, reaching over the seat, and grabbing the e-brake. After a minute she looked up. “Okay?” she sighed. “Are we done?”
“Yeah,” whispered Conn. “We’re done.”
SOON AFTERWARD the briefing ended and we rolled out of the FOB, headed for yet another police station.
The four-vehicle convoy of the 615th zoomed through western Baghdad, winding through back roads, jumping median strips and driving against traffic on two-lane streets, twisting into dead ends and doubling back again. In the backseat of the second truck I furiously copied down the dialogue between gunner, driver, and truck commander:
Clear low wires!
Yeah, clear low wires, sorry.
Crossing over, flipping a bitch!
Flipping a bitch, crossing over.
Got a box up on the road.
Trash pile on the right!
In my previous embed assignment the lexicon had been a lot different. If the wisecracking grunts of the 158th MP were an X-rated vaudeville show—a gang of guardsmen from Oklahoma who spent most of their time swearing like sea captains and singing songs like “Gay Factory Worker from the South” while they burned up the highways—the 615th was an after-school special. All the classic high-school types were represented. O’Braden, the driver in my truck today, was the reformed Judd Nelson discipline case, a brooding, dark-haired sentimentalist who gushed about the sacrifices soldiers had to make. Bastien, the skinny, hyperactive gunner, was the class fuck-up, the kid who sits in the back row shooting spitballs. Sergeant Biederman, the squad leader today, was…well, I don’t know who he was in the movie. In this unit he’s a quiet leader who always seems a little exasperated, trying to keep it all together but occasionally losing his patience. A slight man at 130 pounds with a cherubic face, he’s been struggling today with the seventy-odd pounds of gear he has to carry with his uniform—not with the weight but with the arrangement—and is anxious to get to the station so he can redo some of the straps on his pouches.
Got a green truck on the left!
Got a blown-up piece of shit on the right!
Making a left—correction, right.
Alright, coming out. Train tracks! Gonna be a tight fit.
Hold on, Bastien.
Alright, you’re clear of the wire.
We slithered under the low wire of the side street. Biederman looked out the window and sighed. The young sergeant had had shit luck ever since I arrived. The first time we’d made this trip, to the Al Mamoon police station, there’d been a friendly-fire incident on his watch. The IPLO (a civilian American policeman contracted to train Iraqis forces) assigned to us, some cop from Georgia who’d been hired to teach self-defense to Iraqi cops, had been fiddling with his Glock pistol just inside the precinct gates when suddenly the weapon fired.
Biederman had been standing with his back to the IPLO, talking to me, when the shot went off. The look on his face recalled a cartoon character whose hat flies ten feet in the air in surprise. He immediately pushed me behind a car (not that I needed any help to run and hide), pulled out his weapon, and went over to investigate. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but upon learning that it was gunfire from our own party Biederman sagged visibly, like an animal taking a bullet. The look on his face said it all: This is the last fucking thing I need!
The IPLO was himself a symbol of everything that was fucked up, myopic, and stupid about the war. If you viewed the occupation as a luxury government employment program for American security-industry types—a kind of gold-leaf Tennessee Valley Authority for connected ex–Pentagon execs and retired cops and soldiers, all of whom could come to the Valley and set themselves up with a nice six-figure-or-better job inside the bubble—then you might think this made sense, having some monolingual Georgia cop come all the way to Baghdad at a taxpayer-supported rate of nine grand a month to teach hand-to-hand combat techniques to Iraqi cops who’d be shot or bombed long before they got within a hundred yards of an insurgent. But if you were a Sergeant Biederman and it was your job to transport said Georgian through dangerous enemy territory so that he could collect on this insane version of federal welfare, then it couldn’t possibly make less sense. The idea that any of us might actually get killed so that this redneck retiree could buy his wife a new living room set was such complete and utter madness that it simply was not possible to think about it.
But Biederman resisted the urge to complain too much about the obvious, although you could still see in his eyes his frustration at this absurd assignment, which nearly ended in his overpaid civilian shooting someone in the foot right in front of a goddamned reporter.
“Jesus” was all he’d said, shaking his head.
Now we were heading back to the same station. Biederman said nothing, but he looked like a man needing a nap.
We went into the station. Biederman directed some of the guys to take up watch positions on the roof; meanwhile, he and I, along with Schumann and the medic White, repaired to an unlit little room on the first floor of the station designated for use by the Americans. He took off his gear and repacked his pouches so that they fit more snugly. Like most of the soldiers, Biederman had had to pay for a lot of the stuff he carried on his body out of his own pocket. One soldier in the 615th estimated that the average tally for all the special pouches, gloves, and protective gear most soldiers in Iraq wear is about four hundred bucks. There are all kinds of ancilla
ry costs to fighting in Iraq. Soldiers pay for their own Internet access, for their phone calls home, in some cases for their own armor. Looking at Biederman, I remembered suddenly having an aide to Bernie Sanders explain to me how a government that spends more than $600 billion a year can end up short the money needed for body armor and other equipment for soldiers in the field—congressmen tended to raid the operations and maintenance part of the defense budget for their earmark requests, specifically that part of the budget that paid for soldiers’ equipment. (They took $9 billion out of the O&M accounts alone in 2005, for instance.) The huge bloated weapons systems they tended to leave alone.
His uniform rearranged successfully, Biederman pulled up a chair and sat down. I took off my ballistic vest and lazily filmed another pair of soldiers who’d come in and taken to filling out a Mad Libs questionnaire.
“Number?” said the first soldier.
“Um,” said the second. “Sixty-nine.”
“Name?”
He paused. “Powell.”
“Noun?”
The second soldier paused. “Vagina,” he said.
“Year?”
The second soldier paused at this one. “Nineteen sixty-nine,” he said, predictably.
Suddenly there was a huge explosion.
BOOOOOOOOMMMMM!
We all jumped sideways and covered our ears. That was close, really close. From the sound of things, a car bomb not far from the station. We looked out the window; a thin plume of gray smoke wafted up in the distance. Despite the obvious proximity of the explosion, none of the Iraqi Police in the station moved so much as an inch.
“They don’t go to check it out?” I asked Biederman.
He shook his head. “We have to make them go,” he said.
“They’re scared,” said Schumann. “Wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, yes…,” I said.
“They’re not really cops, the way we have cops,” Schumann added. “They don’t, like, enforce traffic laws or anything.”
“If one of their guys is involved,” added White, “they’ll rush out there. But if not…”
The IPs sat down, nervously stirring their tea. Out the window, I could have sworn I actually heard the sounds of flames licking the air—that was how close the burning car hulk was.
A few minutes passed. The soldiers finished their Mad Lib and started reading.
“Write down in sixty-nine words or less,” giggled the first soldier, “why you think that Powell should be elected vagina of the year.”
Biederman said nothing. Somewhere down the hall, the civilian instructor from Georgia, the same one who’d nearly shot us by accident a few days before, was giving an ad-hoc class in a cramped old supply room. The last time I’d checked, he was using the Hacky Sack champ Winslow to demonstrate to the explosion-averse IPs how to get out of a headlock.
“You push on the elbow sharply like this,” he said, “and you just slide out like so…”
The IPs, standing in a mute semicircle, waited for the translation and nodded. I went back down the hall to the unlit room with the Mad Lib players.
It was almost time to head back out. Explosions in the morning, gunfire on the way, another explosion at lunchtime…but at least we got a Mad Lib finished and spent a few hundred taxpayer bucks an hour teaching a couple of lazy-ass Iraqi cops who will never leave their police stations for any meaningful reason to practice self-defense techniques against criminals they will never apprehend. Plus, we had time for an MRE lunch. They sure didn’t have packs of Skittles at Bastogne!
Sure, this made sense. This was worth the trouble, this Iraq war.
Biederman sighed, shook his head, and looked up at no one in particular.
“What the fuck are we doing here?” he whispered.
I shrugged. Who knew?
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” he muttered.
We got into the trucks and went back home.
Sometime later, when I’d find myself holed up in a similarly isolated retreat in the Texas Hill Country with the ex-military preacher Phil Fortenberry—talking about enemy aircraft and arterial breaches with somewhat older men and women, many of them ex-soldiers moved on to a different but no less confusing stage of life—I wondered if somehow the army, with its same tireless belief in American can-doism and its same sit-in-a-circle get-to-know-u rituals, doesn’t prepare some of these kids for future Encounter Weekends. Maybe it was a stretch, but there was something about this weird sojourn through the violence and trauma of Iraq, continued on later through sexual brokenness and loneliness and substance abuse and all the other existential horrors of life in a massive industrial empire like ours—something about going through all that with only a third-rate carnival barker like Phil Fortenberry or some other midlevel officer to make sense of it for you was what made it hard to imagine anything sadder.
FIVE
DISCOVER THE DIFFERENCE
IN ORDER TO BECOME a full-fledged member of the Cornerstone Church you must take a class—another excruciatingly dull seminar led by an admonishing fourth-tier minister with an unresolved power complex. It’s actually a two-day course: a two-hour Friday-night jaunt and a six-hour haul the next morning.
I skipped the Friday-night session, spooked by the life coach seminar the night before. At that class, I had been shocked and horrified when a nunlike post-chemotherapy church administrator passed out forms asking for our Social Security numbers for a “routine” background check—a potentially fatal development for my entire satanic enterprise. Note to Christians: demon journalists do not fear the word of the Lord, but they do fear the national credit inquiry system. I left abruptly in the middle of that class, citing an emergency phone call—leaving my increasingly hormone-crazed companion Laurie, who’d cheerily kept my seat warm for me before I showed up, to finish out the gig alone.
“But where are you going?” she asked.
“I’m…sorry,” I stammered. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got a problem.”
Concerned, Laurie called me several times the next day, pleading with me to come to the Friday-night membership class. But I was afraid that one, too, would require some kind of incriminating ID, so I cooked up a real tearjerker of a story to get out of the Friday session. Even I was ashamed of laying this one on my Sister in Christ.
“It’s my ex,” I explained on the phone. “It turns out she wants to get a divorce right away. She’s apparently met somebody…”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “That’s what I was going through recently.”
Soon Laurie was rambling about her ex. I blinked off the Internet screen I’d been reading and cracked open a soda. This was going to take a while.
Laurie’s phone calls were epic events, although they didn’t require much participation on my part. She made one call that lasted long enough for me to watch nearly two entire DVD episodes of House on my computer, hitting the pause button only occasionally to offer a “Yeah” or a “Mm-hmm.” She occasionally forced me to interrupt. In one call a few days before, for instance, Laurie had revealed to me that her ex-boyfriend, Rick, who’d recently binned her for a younger woman, was some kind of supergenius—a supergenius who drove a really big truck, lived with his mother, and had been unable to fix her skeet launcher.
“He’s got a two hundred IQ, honey,” she whispered. “I mean, he’s brilliant. He’s not like you or me.”
“Wow,” I said.
“We were a good couple in that way, though,” she added. “My IQ is one eighty-nine.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, reading about the Barry Bonds contract dispute on ESPN.com. “Right.”
“I mean, we had this remarkable energy—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What did you say your IQ was?”
“A hundred and eighty-nine, honey,” she said.
I frowned. “Wasn’t Einstein’s IQ around there somewhere?”
She paused. “Well, probably, honey,” she said. “I had that test taken when I was a child. Of course, I’ve lo
st some of it since then—I just don’t read enough.”
“Naturally,” I said. “Who has the time?”
“Oh, tell me about it, sweet baby,” she said. “I just get so tired after work…”
The conversation ended an hour later. I could see very clearly that Laurie was suffering; she was terribly lonely and still coping with the death of her husband from the year before. But for some reason her anxiety had gone into overdrive in the past week. She was fidgeting, calling everyone, fussing—she couldn’t sit still. Her storytelling was increasingly manic. In this latest call, the Rick story was evolving. Apparently the cad not only owed her money but earlier in the week had given his cell phone to his new younger girlfriend and had the younger girlfriend call up poor Laurie and bitch her out. Much drama ensued, with Laurie—“just to help her out”—quickly informing the new girl that Rick would never give her a baby, because he hates babies. And also because, Laurie added, he had problems with his libido, problems that were exacerbated by his mother’s habit of stealing his Cialis, which she diabolically did to prevent him from getting it on with women. Without Cialis, Laurie insisted, “it wadn’t happening.” By the time I had all this grasped in my head, she had gotten back to the money.
“It’s like you said, he used me,” she said. “And I don’t think I’m ever going to get that money back.”
“Mmm, probably not,” I said.
“I was even thinking about 1099-ing him,” she said.
