by Matt Taibbi
“He says,” said Johnny Bravo, “that this was my hobby, but that if you don’t want me to, I won’t do it anymore.”
“Well,” said Hennes graciously, “I like to shoot BB guns, too, I just don’t like to do it at work. Let’s try to keep it professional.”
Johnny Bravo translated. Upon hearing the admonition about professionalism, the colonel seemed to sour; his face changed and he began gesticulating forcefully as he answered.
“He says,” said Johnny, “that his men work long hours, and you have to give them a chance to breathe.”
Hennes sighed. “Well, of course . . .”
“He says,” continued Johnny, “that nowadays they’re always getting hit by IEDs, and it used to be rarely. So the men, they need to have a little fun and you don’t want us to have any fun.”
Hennes looked momentarily perplexed by this answer. “Well, I understand needing a release,” he said. “But I just didn’t think that was very professional.”
The next day I was due to fly out of Rustimayah by helicopter, but something came up and so instead I spent the entire day at the helipad, waiting for a flight out. It was late in the long, hot afternoon when Hennes showed up, along with some of the other NCOs in the unit, including his friend Sergeant Brian Stake and another of the unit’s translators, a slightly older man named Salim. Hennes was wide-eyed and in a state of highly agitated sarcasm; I could see right away that something had happened.
“Gee, too bad you missed us today,” he said. “We got in a firefight.”
We went to the cafeteria for dinner. Listening to the conversation between Stake and Hennes, fresh from an afternoon of combat, made me powerfully aware of the gulf that separates soldiers and civilians. Whatever our reasons for doing so—whether it’s academics anxious to test beloved theories, or politicians making gambits out of self-interest, or even patriotic civilians voting for sacrifices that others have to make—whenever society makes life-or-death decisions, the burden always ends up with these guys, right here.
“Why did they attack us?” Hennes asked sarcastically. “They attacked us because they didn’t get their morning paper.”
“Yeah,” said Stake. “They didn’t find out who won the Sabres-Flyers game.”
I bit my lip, the thought involuntarily popping into my head: Who did win that game?
“Wait, I don’t understand,” said Salim. “They attack because of a paper?”
Hennes shook his head, resisting the urge to laugh. “No,” he said. “It’s just . . .”
“Actually,” deadpanned Sergeant Stake, “when it was over, we just ordered some chai and talked things over.”
“Yeah,” said Hennes. “Let’s be peaceful.”
Salim looked up helplessly. Were they being serious? No one bothered to straighten him out.
As often as the soldiers get attacked, there is surprisingly little discussion among the troops about who is actually doing the shooting. Is it Al Qaeda? The Mahdi army? Foreign Shia fighters from Iran? Sunni extremists? There are literally hundreds of possibilities; one intelligence operative told me that each and every day, fighters came in claiming to belong to groups with new names. “You might get five young guys in a town, just playing at being bad guys,” he said. “They’ll call themselves the Grandmother’s Brigade or something. But they’re basically just gangbangers.” The distinctions interest the intelligence guys, but to most soldiers it doesn’t really matter who’s doing the shooting. They all go by one name—Hajii, a name we use the same way we used Charlie a few decades ago.
I left Rustimayah that night, but I was back a week later. For a memorial service. Two soldiers from that same battalion had been killed when a bomb hit them en route to a police station. I was told that it was an EFP that tore straight through the Humvee armor and that there was nothing left of the men but ash.
V. YOU CAN STEAL WI-FI ANYWHERE
Three Days in Abu Ghraib
Early one Sunday morning I met up with a man I’ll call the Commando. He had his own Humvee, but he was driving in a military convoy. As far as I knew, no Westerner drives in Iraq without the military anymore—not even an intrepid ex-military international black-operations expert who claims to be a close personal friend of Alice Cooper’s, like the Commando. The convoy rolled out of a Baghdad FOB and moved slowly into the city, taking a serpentine route around an IED location reported just an hour earlier.
In the car, the Commando explained something to me. “There is no offensive operation in the regular army here,” he said. “The intelligence guys, the special ops, they are the force here. It’s all on us.”
The Commando is the kind of guy who would stand out in a crowd of civilians, like a lion tamer wandering the aisles of a Circle K. Tall, deeply tanned, with a silver Fu Manchu mustache and the build of a heavyweight karate champion (which he probably was, for all I know), he has a booming voice and a garrulous character, unnervingly intense and almost too quick to make intimate friendships; he’d found me in a military cafeteria, where I guess I’d looked scruffy and pathetic amid all the armed soldiers, and had decided to adopt me. “You should disembed, come with me,” he said, patting my back violently. “I’ll take you somewhere that’ll blow your fucking mind.”
Now that I’d actually come to meet him I was regretting it. The Commando looked like he just might be crazy. He was moving his lips as he whispered some song to himself. His huge sunglasses betrayed nothing in his eyes, which I suspected were darting back and forth. The convoy moved out of the city limits; I sank in the Humvee seat.
“Hey, Commando,” I said finally. “They’re going to hang me by my balls for this.”
He leaned over and smiled. “You’re going to be looking bad guys right in the eye,” he said. “Trust me.”
After about a half hour drive, we came to a large walled facility, marked on each corner with lookout towers. FOB Abu Ghraib. My asshole puckered violently. “I could spend the next year standing on a box with a hood over my head and wires coming out of my ass,” I thought. But my entrance into the facility was smooth and uneventful. Abu Ghraib’s closing had been announced long ago. When I arrived it was about a month away from what personnel there expected would be its last days as a functioning military prison.
The place looked like a ghost town—like one of those abandoned factory sites in Rust Belt cities, where giant industrial structures once teeming with people now sit mute on the lakeshores. It was home, seemingly, to more birds than people; the old prison blocks were now populated every ten feet or so with buzzing nests of beautiful barn swallows, lending the facility, with its portraits of a bereted Saddam crumbling away piece by piece from the concrete walls, a strangely peaceful and beneficent air.
The FOB itself is a large, squarish, walled camp with an odd layout. On the right side as you enter is another walled-off section within the prison grounds that used to contain political cells in Saddam’s time. The main “hard site” where terror suspects were still being held was in a complex of buildings that included a rec center, a chapel, a restaurant (the Mortar Cafe), a first-class field hospital, even a Green Bean, which is sort of like an army version of Starbucks. (Before I left I would indulge in the perverse thrill of ordering a double cappuccino with a vanilla shot at Abu Ghraib.) Years of American occupation have left this place in a relatively clean state, although remnants of the horrific squalor still exist, most notably in the form of sweeping piles of trash and junk along the walls of the facility.
There is not much I can tell about my Abu Ghraib experience, except to say that I was there for three of the very weirdest days of my entire life. The Commando dumped me in an abandoned cell block and shut the door behind me almost immediately upon arrival. Three times a day he would bring me food—ribs and chicken and other delights from the typically well-stocked FOB cafeteria—and then leave me alone for fifteen hours or
more to devour the piles of trashy books he left for me as entertainment (how the Erica Jong novel Sappho’s Leap made it to Abu Ghraib I’ll never figure out). I was to avoid all people, keep quiet, and when he took me out of my cell for tours of the FOB—once a day or so—I was to watch my mouth and look like some mysteriously high-ranking spook. Who would know in a place like this?
“You go where I go,” he said on the first day. “And don’t ask any fucking questions. In the meantime, stay here and don’t move.”
He shut the cell door. I stood for a moment in the middle of my cell, staring at the white concrete walls; it took exactly ten seconds for me to burst out laughing. The next hours were taken up with a variety of absurd activities: push-ups, line drawings of dogs, experimentation with a mime routine. Late in the evening I turned on my laptop and discovered, to my absolute amazement, that there was a functioning wireless hub in the building. I got online and promptly spent most of that night filling out sunny customer-survey responses for various stateside corporations.
Dear Krispy Kreme Corporation . . . Thank you for being YOU.
Outside my room, behind the boarded-up barred window, I could hear residents of the village just beyond the prison walls chanting their evening prayers. Later at night I would hear something else entirely—the sounds of mortar shells crashing close by, two biggish blasts shaking the room.
Abu Ghraib is the symbol of American mistakes in Iraq, the place where the weird criminal perversions of bored, porn-surfing American teenagers clashed spectacularly with fastidious, sexually inviolate Islamic culture. It was also a most powerful symbol of our misguided perception of ourselves and our place in the world.
We came into this war expecting to be treated like the GIs who went into France a half century ago—worshipped, instantly excused for the occasional excess or foible, and handed the keys to both the castle wine cellar and the nurses’ dormitory. Instead we were treated like unclean monsters by the people we liberated, and around the world our every move was viciously scrutinized not only by those same Europeans we rescued ages ago but by our own press.
The failure of Abu Ghraib was the failure to accept the role we had created for ourselves as new masters of subject peoples. We wanted to rule absolutely and also to be liked, which was why our first reaction after the scandal broke was to issue profuse apologies, call for a self-flagellating round of investigations, and demand the prison’s closure. A hegemonic power more comfortable with ruling would have just shot the reporter who broke the story and moved on.
But America has never been able to stomach that kind of thing, which is why, incidentally, this occupation of Iraq is probably not going to work. We are too civilized to make ourselves truly feared in public, but not civilized enough to properly restrain our power in private.
On my second day in the facility, the Commando roused me out of my bunk and dragged me out for a tour. Beyond one wall of the facility there stood a clearly visible row of residential apartments, a neighborhood called Khandari, which the Commando explained was a hotbed of activity. “Hajiis looking right over the wall,” he said. “They have gunfire there two or three times a week.”
We drove around. The Commando pointed out a small hole through which a group of prisoners had made a daring escape some months back. “Now, no American male could ever have made it through that hole,” he said. “But three of those stinky little bastards slid through here.” He laughed as he recounted the story. One of the escapees, he said, made it over the wall. The other two, however, stayed behind and tried to blend in by putting on some civilian clothes. When a squad of soldiers confronted them, they tried to talk their way out of trouble by claiming to be employees of KBR. “They were like, ‘KBR! KBR!’” he laughed. “They still had on their jumpsuits under their civilian clothes. Yeah, right, KBR.”
We made our way around. A helicopter was landing in the middle of the compound and a small group of American soldiers led out a group of six dark-skinned men in FlexiCuffs. A female soldier arranged them in lock step, then marched them off toward the hard site. We followed them and along one wall were boxes of prefab halal food. At least proper care was taken to meet the prisoners’ dietary restrictions.
“They’ll be given a number, then interviewed,” the Commando said. “As for these influxes . . . on a good day, we’ll have that helicopter full of guys land ten to twelve times.”
He threw me back in my cell. This time I read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. If there is a worse way to spend a day than being locked in Abu Ghraib prison reading Jonathan Franzen I’m not aware of it. In the early evening the Commando came back. “Sandstorm,” he said. “Come on out.”
I climbed up a flight of stairs to the rooftop. I looked around in all directions. The place looked like Mars—a sea of red sand, impenetrable beyond fifty yards or so. “Wow,” I said.
“It gets much redder than this,” he said admiringly. “It gets fucking beet red. I got pictures.”
He took me back to my cell. The next day it was more of the same. The Commando spoke much and often about the bravery of the men who were out risking their lives to bring terror suspects to this facility. He explained to me that many men like him were moved to pitch in after 9/11. They live outside the public view, their accomplishments never noted by anyone, much of what they do for a living a secret even from their own families. I never did find out exactly what he did at the facility, although I had a few ideas. But I was struck suddenly that what I was looking at here wasn’t a portrait of American iniquity in Iraq but the offensive side of our war. What is public about Iraq is the pounding our soldiers take, the day-in, day-out IED attacks against teenagers in Humvees. Most of the men our reporters know in embeds are on the defensive from sunup to sundown.
There is an impression that we are not fighting back, but we are. Here in Abu Ghraib and places like it, away from public view, we swoop down in the night and snatch people out of their homes by the half dozen. I would imagine that rules are bent. But what rules can there be in a place like this? (The Commando’s take on the Geneva Convention: “While you’re beating his ass, don’t take his picture.”) I asked the Commando at one point what the goal was: “Is the idea that we’ll keep capturing these guys, until there won’t be any more of them?”
“Who knows?” he said. “I guess.”
One last long night in the hooch. I read a military-equipment magazine with an article about the psychological importance of leaving a big hole in the enemy when you shoot him. “A big hole is more devastating than a little pucker,” it noted. I wrote that down, for future reference. In the morning the Commando dragged me out for the last time and tossed me in the Hummer. We picked up coffee from the Green Bean and settled into the convoy line. On the way back the Commando regaled me with stories of his personal exploits. He hinted at access to the kind of information that would keep all of America awake if it knew, even blurting out one threat he’d heard about that made me very uncomfortable being a New Yorker. Americans are a sheltered people, but our secret warriors are not—even if it’s only as an adversary, they’ve at least looked the world in the eye. But they never get to share their experience. In Iraq, half of our fight is always going to be in the shadows.
The convoy rolled on until we reached another FOB, where we stopped for one last lunch. He told me stories of comrades he’d lost in Afghanistan, and the lengths he’d gone to for one man’s family. I was not sure I agreed with the Commando’s take on the Iraq War or what the possibilities were for its success; I got the feeling, in fact, that he was only dimly interested in who the other side or sides even were—the most important thing being who was giving the orders to fight. But his devotion to his friends and allies was powerful and unmistakable. “It’s like a little community,” he said, “where people do things for each other.”
“Good luck,” I said, shaking his hand.
“You too.”
VI. DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
No Way Out as a Way of Life
The Iraq War, the central political event of this generation, this crazy flash point that will find a way to touch the lives of almost everyone in the world before it’s over, is here to stay. We must come to grips with the reality of this monstrous, rapidly expanding thing that is fast taking on far greater dimensions and meaning than a mere foreign-policy blunder.
This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence—the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man versus the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al Qaeda’s literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the past thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert.
Beyond the walls of the FOB the chaos of Iraq is just a fresh take on the same old totalitarian doublethink from the last century that sent Nazis and Communists on crazed quests for paradise by sanctioning the violence buried in their dumb hearts. All bloody revolutions rely for their success on ideologies that dehumanize the nonbeliever, and these Islamic fanatics roaming the streets of Baghdad, piously chanting “Allahu Akbar!” as they watch the bodies of ice salesmen or infidel teenagers cook, are no different. On top of everything else, they’re not even original.
Nothing like that abject savagery is evident on the American side. But there is something very unsettling in the way that the war effort has re-created the cozy isolationism of the American suburbs in its giant military outposts. It’s a concentrated dose of our culture, where Mom, her tennis lesson awaiting, sends the kids off to school and Dad, the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet, brings home a paycheck earned on the backs of industrial slaves from China.
