Black Knights, Dark Days

by Fisk, J. Matthew;

  “That’s just great,” Aguero growled reaching into his arsenal and dropping several more F-bombs.

  We reached the spot designated as Checkpoint 1, which coincidently was the source of the traffic jam. Two-lane roads, holding three lanes of traffic, fed into a traffic circle at the corner of Routes Gold and Bravo. Germany has arguably the best implementation of traffic circles, aided by patient, orderly drivers, but German planners would keel over dead from culture shock if they saw what was happening at Checkpoint 1 that day in Sadr City. Iraq has no working traffic signals that I could ever discern. Couple that with sociopathic drivers who lean toward anarchy and you arrive at an epiphany in understanding Sadr City traffic. Uniformed Iraqi police officers and well-meaning civilians added to the chaos by attempting to give conflicting directions regarding who should go and who should stop in unsnarling the mess.

  Our platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Swope came from behind us and took charge of the situation. He posted his soldiers at strategic locations and began to alternately wave people through or hold them in place. Staff Sergeant York, towering over everyone with his six-foot-five-inch frame, took post in the middle of the street and radiated motivation to overcome driver inertia.

  In the Iraqi culture, you can ask someone to wait by extending your arm, holding your palm up and joining your fingers in a gesture reminiscent of Italians talking about food with their hands. When I used the gesture, I usually looked an Iraqi directly in the eyes and added the dialogue from an old TV commercial: “That’s one spicy meat-a-ball.” The response was usually positive.

  There were a lot of those gestures and several others used within the five minutes we needed to clear a path through the snarl and maneuver our vehicles through to the other side of Checkpoint 1. Once clear, we left the task of clearing the residual to the Iraqi policeman who seemed genuinely puzzled at how we had just accomplished such a feat. We mounted our vehicles and continued to our first scheduled stop.

  Crossing the two-and-a-half-mile sprawl of Sadr City took just minutes once we breached the traffic circle. Automobiles still crammed the streets, but they all seemed to be moving in the same direction at the same speed. Tall buildings lined the streets, and almost all of them seemed to house some sort of commercial enterprise in three to five stories of brick and concrete. Brightly painted signs bearing Arabic lettering were sometimes augmented with English words. I could read ‘Faisal for Clothing’ as we crossed Route Charlie and a little after, ‘Abdul for Dentist.’

  The Lieutenant rattled off street names for Riddell as the young Oregon native wove our vehicle around a mix of European import cars and donkey carts. “You see that wall with graffiti that says Down USA?” Aguero asked. “That’s Route Echo. You see that sign on the left with the word Kurdish? That’s right before Route Fox. Route Texas is just after that. When you can’t go any farther, you’ve reached Route Golf and the far western edge of the city. You’re gonna turn right there. Come on! Give it some gas. You can’t be scared to drive aggressively in this city.”

  Our first stop was a hospital. A high wall, painted aquamarine, surrounded the facility. Our convoy parked nose-to-tail just outside the entrance where a guard force watched our arrival with interest. Swope began to bark orders in his unique, quietly intense way. In short order, he had chosen those who would accompany the Lieutenant inside and left Staff Sergeant Davis in charge of the perimeter security. Staff Sergeant York and I followed Lieutenant Aguero to the gate where the uncertain guards awaited our arrival.

  Aguero gave the standard Arabic greeting and the guards responded in kind, tapping their chests with their right palm as a sign of sincerity. Through Monsoor, he told them of his desire to meet with the hospital administrator. Once they had summoned the chief of security, a well-fed man named Monther Fahker—no, I am not making that up—Aguero began to ask Mister Fahker a set of questions regarding the guards’ status. Had they been paid? Did they all have weapons and uniforms? Were there any problems? All of these questions and answers were haltingly relayed by Monsoor and dutifully copied down into my little green notebook.

  As Security Chief Fahker led us deeper and deeper into the hospital, I noticed that the only decoration on the walls was the same colorful poster placed at random intervals through the hallway. I paused for a second to examine it. The writing was Arabic, which I couldn’t read, but the images were gruesome—civilians torn up in one form or another in bloody batches. Inset at the top of each poster was a picture of a man wearing the black robes and turban of a Shi’a cleric. His fat face was rimmed with a mature beard and dark circles underlined dark, fierce eyes. He was shown jabbing a finger in the air as if warning viewers to heed his words—or else. I paused long enough to grasp the message, and our visiting party got ahead of me, so I had to run to catch up with Staff Sergeant York. He knew all about the posters and the cleric depicted.

  “That’s Mookie,” he told me, identifying the intense man as Sadr City’s Big Man on Campus, Muqtada Al Sadr. I had heard a lot about this man, but this was the first photo of him that I could remember seeing. Suddenly it seemed important to know what the Arabic words meant. When our party passed another poster, I asked Monsoor to translate. He read the words and it looked like he was struggling to put them into English. I got the feeling he was trying to decide how literal he wanted to be in telling me what the message was. Finally, he just shrugged. “This is religious poster saying how bad is the violence. It is not bad, this saying. It is from the Prophet, peace unto him.”

  While I tried to correlate the bloody imagery with any kind of peace, Aguero concluded his interview with the hospital director and led us back to the vehicles. Our next objective was close enough to walk, so we set out on foot while the Humvees shadowed us at a slow pace. There were only two large structures on the street, the hospital compound behind us and another tall, brick edifice at the far corner to our front. A wall ran the entire length of the street, festooned with posters proclaiming the greatness of Muqtada Al Sadr. On the far side of the street was a block of apartment buildings from which noisy groups of children scampered to follow us, skipping and shouting. This romping made everyone nervous until we saw the toothy smiles and heard them shouting in fractured English. “Mista, Mista! Good, good Mista! I luff you, Mista!” Shifting my rifle to free a hand, I engaged in a long series of high-fives with the kids and tried some of my Arabic. That was met with wondering looks from some and applause from others. I felt a little like a rock star struggling through a mob of adoring fans.

  A few hours later, the radio brought orders for us to visit an Iraqi fire station on the south side of the city. This was way out of our Area of Responsibility or AOR, but since we were the only patrol then outside the wire, we got the mission. The firemen at the station had reported a big pile of explosive devices that civilians had turned in, and they wanted someone with sufficient expertise in disposing of it to take possession. Our company commander, Captain Troy Denomy, wanted us to see what they had and give him our opinion of what should be done with it.

  When we finally found the station, the Fire Chief greeted us warmly. His uniform was clean and pressed and his gray mustache was meticulously groomed. He led us to a fenced area beside the station and pointed to a pile of stuff that seemed to be mostly old 60mm mortar rounds plus some old Soviet rockets and a few land mines. I didn’t know the details, but Aguero did. As he identified each item, I carefully recorded it in my book. We photographed it all and then returned to the vehicles where the Lieutenant got on the radio to make his report. Then the waiting game began.

  While we milled around waiting for instructions from the Company Commander, Swope decided curious locals were approaching closer to our vehicles than he was willing to abide. He told the squad leaders to keep the civilians at a distance and outside our hasty perimeter. The lieutenant had nothing specific for me to do, so I moved around from soldier to soldier on the perimeter, trying to keep myself from being a static sniper target. Spe
cialist Joseph Thompson was in position at the intersection nearest our position and I spent a little time with him. Thompson was on a second tour in Iraq and not very happy about it. I tried a little Jimi Hendrix on him to improve the mood. “Hey, Joe, where you goin’ with that gun in yo’ hand?”

  He almost smiled through his usual dour expression. Thompson was chunky and what is usually considered overweight for an Army infantryman. Fortunately, he carried the weight with surprising speed and endurance. Thompson was the only man in the platoon with a mustache, and he wore mirrored sunglasses that made him look like a stereotypical State Trooper.

  “How do you like being the L-T’s little whipping boy?” he asked and let the smile come through as he waited for my response.

  “Hey, I get to drink chai among the high muckety-mucks with my helmet off while you guys are out here sweatin’ buckets. I’ll take that deal any day.” Joe was a friend and I’d always felt a sort of brotherly concern for him. He had been married for more than a year but had spent less than a week with his wife. He told me the forced separation caused some strain in their relationship. I decided not to mention his domestic situation and pointed at a cluster of kids staring at us from across the intersection.

  “Just a bunch of kids saying give me this and give me that,” Joe responded. “I hate these little pot lickers.”

  “They’re just kids.” I shrugged and surveyed said pot lickers. They didn’t look very dangerous to me.

  “Say that when they start chunkin’ rocks at your head.” Joe was the only one in the platoon who had been deployed for the initial invasion a year ago. He’d volunteered to be a driver when the call went out, but his unit hadn’t seen any serious action. That didn’t keep him from a jaded attitude about Iraqis and Iraq in general.

  “You just gotta know how to talk to them, Joe.” I turned toward a nearby youngster, maybe 16 and wearing a faded pink t-shirt. He was carefully studying us and just as carefully trying to appear that he wasn’t. I tried my Arabic on him and asked him to approach. He looked startled and pointed at his chest. “Yes, yes, you. Come here.” Apparently my Arabic communicated. He stood and walked quickly over to us seeming relaxed and unafraid.

  “Peace to you.”

  “And to you, peace,” He responded and laughed with delight at conversing with an American in his native language.

  “My name is Mathias,” I said, using the Arabic translation of Matthew. “What is your name?”

  He laughed again and said, “My name is Mohammed. You speak Arabi?”

  “Little,” I replied, having reached almost the limit of my vocabulary.

  Mohammed surprised me with some broken English. “Mista Mathias, you like Iraq?”

  “Yes, excellent,” I lied in Arabic.

  “You have baby?”

  ”No.”

  “You have wife?”

  My thoughts went instantly across the ocean to Texas. “Yes,” I said and felt crushing loneliness settle in my chest.

  “You show me picture?”

  I pulled out my old black wallet and showed him the two pictures that I always carried. One was a picture of her with her brown hair up, her full lips almost in a pout. The other was one of us holding each other and smiling. She looked so small next to me, her arms around my shoulders. Her hair was curly and her face was radiant. Her oval-shaped glasses and tiny nose conspired to make her look like some cute little pet shop rabbit. As I looked at the pictures with Mohammed, I ached to hear her voice.

  Mohammed made some clicking noises as he examined the photos. “Very good, Mathias. You make baby?”

  Unsure how this conversation would develop, I turned the tables and began to ask him how to say different things in Arabic. While we talked, some younger kids had mustered the courage to approach and crowd around us. Suddenly it seemed that my desire to foster good will with the natives had drawn too much unwanted attention. From the corner of my eye I saw Swope approaching. He did not look pleased.

  “Fisk!” He hissed at me. “Move everybody back. The last thing we need is for one of them to shoot a soldier in the back of the head.”

  “Yes, Sergeant!” I shook Mohammed’s hand. In Arabic I said, “Goodbye. Please go away.” Mohammed tapped his chest in respect and led the smaller children away with him. I went back to the lieutenant’s Humvee and sat down to wait until higher gave us instructions.

  It was around 1530 hours when Staff Sergeant Darcy Robinson called our attention to a van moving slowly along Route Pluto. Young men were hanging out the windows and waving large red, black, and green flags. They were chanting a slogan in Arabic so loudly that we could hear it clearly. It was rhythmic and repeated several times. It started out “Allah! Mohammed!” and after that came words that I couldn’t pick out until the chant finished with an emphatic, “MOOK-tada, MOOK-tada, MOOK-tada!” It seemed to be some sort of peppy, cheerleader-like slogan, but the shouters were angry young men. We watched tensely, anticipating that the drive-by pep squad would become a drive-by firing squad. They passed us and continued down the street, chanting all the while, as if they were performing just for us. I was unimpressed and wanted my money back.

  EOD arrived 20 minutes later and asked us to watch their back while they loaded up the suspect munitions. We agreed in a fit of brotherly compassion despite being hot, sweaty, and way overdue to shrug out of our combat gear. By 1630 hours, The Explosive Ordnance Disposal techs determined the munitions were stable enough to transport. We led them out of the neighborhood without incident and when our routes diverged, we turned onto the road leading back to the FOB. We had been patrolling outside the wire for eight hours, but nothing about the experience was like any nine-to-five job.

  Our cooks had established a dining tent for our culinary satisfaction to serve the 2/5 CAV warriors until the Change of Responsibility with 2nd ACR scheduled a few days hence. It was, without a doubt, the most dismal fare ever spawned. Navy cooks, after they leave the service, are qualified to work as gourmet chefs at five-star restaurants. Army cooks, by contrast, are barely fit for fast-food duty.

  Chow consisted of a variety of foods packaged in large tin cans that were heated by immersing them in boiling water. Cooks then open the cans and dump the contents into serving pans. The usual treats are beans and rice, peas, cubed potatoes, hamburger-like patties of some vaguely carbon-based life form, and chicken. Lots of chicken.

  The Army has a sick fascination with the chicken. If you eat Army chow long enough you will begin to hallucinate, mistaking the eagle on the Army seal for what my daddy called yard bird.

  When you find yourself in this sort of situation, you cope by using vast amounts of whatever sauce or seasoning you can find. For a hot minute my heart beat with delight when I saw the familiar and soothing shape of an A-1 steak sauce bottle. I almost tore off the cap in my eagerness to get at the brown gold inside. I was chagrined to discover, however, that the cooks were receiving only sauces produced right there in the good ol’ Middle of East. The stuff was hideous. In the dark I had failed to perceive that the label was blue and advertising in Arabic letters what must have said “Good Good Mista Sauce.” Back in the states I would religiously dump A-1 sauce on just about everything, up to and including scrambled eggs. I would think twice about dumping this stuff on the ground lest I receive punishment from the Environmental Protection Agency.

  I wanted to buy some Gatorade to flush the taste of the imitation chicken meat—not to mention the damned sauce—from my mouth, but we were not allowed in the PX until after the fourth day of the month for some reason. A dark, angry cloud was beginning to form over my head. I stomped dejectedly toward the shower that I had promised myself earlier.

  When I had finished washing myself in water deemed unsafe to brush our teeth in, I returned to our bivouac site. The FOB was actually an old chemical weapons plant and prison under Saddam’s regime. The existing buildings were occupied by 2nd ACR and those few soldiers from our own unit who h
ad come here a month earlier as part of the advance party.

  The walls enclosed a rectangular area that might have been 800 meters by 400 meters. Guard towers were dispersed at even intervals along the low wall. To our south was Route Silver, a spread of Iraqi farm country, and then the city of Baghdad. To our west was a narrow dirt road, a canal full of feces and fish, a large open tract of farm land, and an impoverished collection of shacks known as Triangle Town. Clusters of brick houses huddled against our eastern wall. Another military compound adjoined our northern wall housing the Iraqi National Guard. A door in the wall connected our two camps.

  Since the base was relatively new, they had not yet finished the barracks we were to occupy. We could see them, though. Large white-washed two-story buildings built of reinforced concrete were designed to house one company of soldiers each. They were all complete except for the plumbing and electrical work. Eventually—soon, we were told—there would be running water and air conditioners. For the present all we could do was pine for them.

  Our company was sleeping in the oily dirt of the motor pool on the end of the camp closest to the Iraqi Army installation. Our gear would not arrive for several days, so those infamously uncomfortable Army cots were a rare, highly sought commodity. Those of us who could not find one slept in vehicles, on vehicles, on rucksacks or anything that would get us off of the ground and away from wandering scorpions and camel spiders. I stretched out on a row of duffel bags, keeping my M16A3 and M-14 sniper rifle within arm’s reach.

  There was no indication, lying there on those duffel bags at the end of my first mission in Iraq, that demons lurked and a year later I would be fighting an intense battle with them like so many other soldiers scarred by intense battlefield experiences.

  

  At dawn on my second day in Iraq, I struggled up off the duffel bags, groaning and stretching an aching body. The sun was still a mere suggestion of light in the eastern sky. Most of my comrades were dozing in the pale morning light. A mist hung over the FOB, lending a mythic air to the routine activities of an Army unit coming to life. Soldiers generally try to exercise noise discipline by conducting business quietly, even in a relatively safe environment, but gas-powered generators purred here and there around the base. The smell of diesel exhaust, an ever-present odor in third-world countries, barely muted the stench of raw sewage and other odorous filth wafting over our compound’s short walls.