Within minutes, sleepy men and scared boys were dragged into the street, blindly blinking into flashlights. As the soldiers and the interpreters repeatedly questioned them, the sounds of women crying and more furniture breaking continued to be heard from inside as the search for contraband ensued. One of the men, obviously agitated by the unprotected state of his female family members before the sweeping horde of American soldiers, aggressively attempted to break free. Within seconds, gloved fists and boots pounded him nearly into unconsciousness. The sudden, savage response surprised most of us new guys, although it seemed quite routine to our counterparts. After a few more minutes, with the target not found, the order was given to bind all of the “military-age males” and throw them into the back of the truck for further questioning on the base. We loaded back up, and just as quickly as we had arrived, we returned to the base.
As the trucks dropped us off in front of our sleeping quarters, my commander called a meeting. “What the hell was that?” a chorus of officers asked. We had been trained and instructed that we were to interact with the Iraqis on a level of super-civility, akin to an upstanding civil police force.
“Was it necessary to beat that guy down? He was just worried about his family,” another concerned voice asked.
“Should we report that? Was that a war crime?” Our minds struggled out loud with these questions. The reality of the gloved fist into the night-robed midsection, the steel boot into sleep-matted hair, seemed so over-zealous and so primitive. Most of us could not comprehend that level of violence in modern society.
These discussions, mostly among the senior officers, lasted almost an hour. In the end, the commander decided that although the incident was not acceptable in any way, it was not our role to judge the actions of a unit based on a single episode. Somehow, we all knew that this level of violence had not been aberrant; indeed, most of the counterparts considered their actions to have been a light warning. Yet we appeased our collective guilt by vowing that our turn in charge, beginning tomorrow night, would be different. We would deal with Iraqis as a people with a robust bundle of rights, and we would be more mindful of unintended consequences. In my view, episodes like this, emasculating the head of a household and depriving the family of all of its male occupants for extended questioning, could only incite the insurgents and weaken our case for a cooperative arrangement as we sought to build a participatory Iraqi government. By our acting this way, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish ourselves from Saddam’s thugs.
Following downstairs after the captain whom I was to replace, I passed a squawking room filled with maps and radios—the tactical command post, or TAC. This room was the hub of all of the battalion activity, with patrol units checking in and giving updates on their status. Soldiers dutifully logged this information into notebooks and recorded it onto maps. This was also where orders from higher units were received by the tactical personnel. A flurry of activity reports and updates flew up and down the chain of command in this room, and the six radio operators tirelessly and thanklessly captured it all on paper. Even though I had been around TACs in a training environment, this real version was more alive and more scrupulously managed than anything I had previously witnessed.
The adjacent room looked like a regular conference room, with a huge table surrounded by chairs, each of which had a chair to its rear, reminiscent of the United Nations meetings where the delegates are backed by support personnel. Along one entire wall was a map of the battalion area, the entirety of southern Baghdad. The map was colorfully marked into different zones of responsibility, corresponding to each of the battalion’s companies. Layers upon layers of Arabic names and English names made the map almost illegible to the untrained eye, with our predecessors using colloquial names for these areas in off-handed remarks. This was one reason we were here early—to begin learning this jargon and absorbing our predecessors’ knowledge of the area.
On the opposite wall, something resembling a family tree had been mapped. This organizational chart contained all of the key Iraqis in our sector. Here were posted photos, names, and aliases, with lines drawn among them. There were several groupings. This particular family tree, which had more blanks than people, represented the army’s first systematic attempt to map Iraq’s shadowy post-invasion power structure. Using the same basic theory that domestic police use to track organized crime, we created a giant web that radiated in familial or professional connections from an apprehended criminal to aid our understanding.
“Criminal,” in this sense, did not necessarily mean “terrorist” or “resistance fighter.” Actual criminal activity was sweeping the area, and there was no Iraqi police force to help halt it. Therefore, army units had the almost impossible task of apprehending car thieves, murderers, rapists, and other lowlifes who generally tormented the population. The goal of these extra missions was threefold. The first was to appease the population generally and try to prevent the increasing calls for vigilante justice and armed neighborhood groups. By actively following up on these complaints, the army and the U.S. government urged citizens to institutionalize justice in objective enforcement agencies and not to personalize these vendettas in a way that eschewed a lawful outcome.
The second reason was more in line with contemporary police thinking on the “tipping point.” Specifically, if lawlessness, even low-level lawlessness, was allowed to continue, then escalation was not only possible but probable. By taking a firm line against even smaller infractions, the objective was to foreclose greater infractions that could be detrimental to regenerating civil society or could contribute to the growing attitude that crime was the only profitable employment in this period of high uncertainty.
The third and most simple reason was to establish a commonality with respect to identifying Iraqi civilians. Iraqi males typically have three names. The first name is given. The second name is the father’s given name. The third name is the grandfather’s given name. For example, Ibrahim Abdullah Muhammad and Sa’ad Abdullah Muhammad are likely brothers. There is also a tribal name attached at the very end, although it was commonly dropped during identification. Further complicating and confusing the identification was the propensity of Iraqi males to be called by their “Abu” names. In most cases, this was “Abu,” meaning “father of,” followed by the first male child. From the previous example, Ibrahim Abdullah Muhammad might have a son, Ali. Ali would be called Ali Ibrahim Abdullah, in keeping with the pattern, while Ibrahim could now be called Abu Ali.
There are two points to note about the Abu names. First, given the small number of Arabic male names, literally hundreds of Abu Alis could be clustered in the same neighborhood. Second, Americans spelled these names phonetically, meaning Mohammad, Muhammad, Mohamed, and Mohammod could all be the same person. Without capturing these isolated data points and cross-checking and linking them within a central system, detecting or uncovering systemic overlaps would be almost impossible. I would imagine that the FBI used a similar system to find out who whacked whom, when all it had to go on were street nicknames and organized-crime aliases. Too bad that we were not trained in this, any more than a slew of Sopranos episodes could prepare us.
In the conference room, our predecessors each took a seat at the table, some stopping to place an additional annotation on the map or the family tree. Each of us took a seat behind our respective counterpart. My seat was behind the current “Gov,” or governance officer. The other seats were occupied by representatives from the various staff sections: intelligence, operations, supply, public affairs (a new addition), and governance (also a new addition). The outgoing battalion commander directed the meeting, which consisted of a real-time battle update that was largely incomprehensible to us because we lacked the fundamental knowledge of places and names of personnel to mentally picture what was happening. This micro-brief was followed by a painfully comprehensive “hand-off” briefing designed to bring each of us into a more complete understanding of the current state of affairs. It
was organized along the army’s traditional lines of operation, and from these, it became immediately clear that this would not be similar to any training exercise we had ever encountered. The lines of operation, or LOOs, subdivided battles into areas of responsibility. Each of these areas contained certain tasks and milestones that were meant to ascribe responsibility for combat performance and to measure success. Yet our tasks were not military objectives. Rather, they read more like political science hypotheses: establish an objective police force, promote effective self-governance, and encourage economic activity.
It was notable that these goals represented truly well-intentioned ideas. The promulgation of these particular societal pillars was laudable and I believe correctly represented the “center of gravity” for establishing a stable societal nexus. The execution, however, would be a continuing overreach for us, as it had been for our predecessors. There were both moral and practical reasons for this shortcoming. First, the moral legitimacy for implementing this type of comprehensive governance really rests with the people. According to our own democratic principles, governments are formed “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” In Iraq, we formed a government of the people (assuming that they agreed with American ideology and security interests and their U.S. counterparts), by the people (the U.S. government on behalf of the “people”) and for the people (and selected U.S. contractors). This gap in a just mandate would give rise to a number of challenges in the coming months and years.
Second, the army is not equipped to “promote transparent governance.” Yes, college-educated officers and staffs can implement plans that purport to allow transparent government and economic incentives, but the actual tools for such a process reside within other government agencies. The State Department, in particular, and its subdivision the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) should be primarily responsible for advising in these areas. Yet months after the occupation began, and during my entire time in Iraq, I never once saw anyone from either of these agencies in the street.
There were contracts executed on the State Department’s behalf that often overlapped with army initiatives, as illustrated by the discussion in the first meeting. “The Al-Hamza school in Abu Discher has been painted,” said my counterpart, referring to an elementary school in a poor Shi’a neighborhood.
“Again?! What the fuck is going on here?” the battalion commander, visibly angry, demanded of his frightened captains.
“Is this not the same school that we painted two months ago?” he continued.
“Yes, sir. It is, but this wasn’t our contract. This was part of a State Department contract with Bechtel.” My counterpart tried in vain to explain that it had not been the battalion’s money that was wasted, but the commander wasn’t buying it.
“Who authorizes this shit? How is it possible that people can come onto my territory and assign contracts and I don’t know about it?!”
Silence.
The reason for this little squabble would become clearer to me as time went by, but the initial issue was obvious. Each battalion commander had a pool of money from which he could assign and authorize projects. These funds were referred to as the Commander’s Emergency Relief Projects. The usual process of assigning this money and its projects was delegated to the battalion commander and his company commanders. If a company commander in his discussions with the people decided to install new roadside lighting to simultaneously help light a neighborhood street and provide security, the battalion could hire an Iraqi contractor to install the light poles. The benefits here are obvious: company commanders have the power to immediately shape their environments to provide greater chances of military success, the Iraqi people can request and revive the social services that a functioning government would provide, and a local contractor would make money.
These amounts were not large in absolute terms, Yet the fact that the State Department and various Green Zone agencies were duplicating contracts created problems of wasted battalion assets, conflicting contractors, and an image of a disjointed agency relationship. This became particularly troublesome with each contract, as every day more and more contractors arrived at the base demanding to be paid for some work they had done for some “U.S. group.” Fake documents had become rife, and as units transitioned, the army was asked to check on projects on behalf of other agencies whose personnel usually remained ensconced in the Green Zone due to the security situation.
Herein was the real reason for the ire of the battalion commander. His troops were in the streets every day, interfacing with the Iraqis and being asked to validate the spending and contractor supervision. They were building allegiances and solidifying friendships with this money, and the battalion commander resented wasting it on something that was already going to be done by someone else. As the one in charge of this area and the man solely responsible for what occurred within its limits, the commander detested not being consulted and then being asked to deal with the complications that arose.
Four
SITTING IN JUDGMENT
MY COUNTERPART LOOKED at his watch nervously. The battle update meeting had already run for almost two hours. We were expected to be at a neighborhood advisory council meeting within the hour. It would be my first time to try to connect names and faces to the words and the projects that I had been hearing about for the last few weeks. All of the maps and the charts had remained inscrutable against the backdrop of real life. This would be a chance to venture outside of the walled compound and meet some actual Iraqis.
The meeting ended abruptly with the commander rising and raising a salute to the officers seated at the table. In an instant, chairs skidded backward, slamming into the knees of us seated immediately in the row behind. The captains martially answered their commanders’ salutes, while the remainder of us stood ramrod straight, respecting the military custom that demanded we show our allegiance and acknowledge the hierarchy at the beginning and the end of each meeting.
“Let’s go,” my counterpart called to me over his shoulder, already well on his way to the door. By the time we reached the outside exit, a mere ten steps from our meeting room, he had entirely transformed himself. His body armor, strategically hung with extra magazines, a few grenades, and a flashlight, magically covered his torso. His weapon, clipped into its harness, appeared at once casual and dangerous. Holding his helmet in one gloved hand, he donned ballistic sunglasses and shoved open the door. The blast of heat had little apparent effect on him.
I was still fumbling with my body armor. Its rich green color was in stark relief to the dust-smudged armor worn by our counterparts. Sections of the body armor that were long ago discarded as extraneous by our predecessors still hung in perfect form from mine. It had a strap to protect my neck and a triangular piece, akin to a catcher’s cup, to cover the groin. My helmet had no clip for night-vision equipment, and I had no magazines, no ammunition, no tactical flashlight, and no aiming laser—just a new M-16, with no scope. My uniform was more suited to a new recruit at the firing range, rather than a soldier on a battlefield.
We walked to the waiting trucks, and immediately one of the soldiers, politely and pointedly, made the same observation. “Sir,” he addressed me, “you can’t go out like that.”
Within seconds, he had removed the neck and groin protectors and urged me to tuck the tail of my battle-dress uniform into my pants to avoid getting the shirttail caught on anything. I did. He then handed me two full magazines, one of which I put into the weapon and one I put into a pocket. Despite the ad hoc nature of his attempt to get me “battle ready,” I immediately felt more confident.
“Don’t worry,” he added. “We will take care of you.”
That was the personal security detachment’s function. These soldiers’ purpose was to safely escort my counterpart to meetings, secure the building, and generally provide a bodyguard service.
It was obvious they took their job seriously. All three Humvees were heavily armored and heavily arme
d. The lead Humvee was equipped with three soldiers and a mounted automatic grenade launcher. The second Humvee had three soldiers and a .50 caliber machine gun. The middle Humvee, where my counterpart rode, was equipped with a driver, a gunner, and a M-240B machine gun. All of the soldiers looked loose but grim. They were happy to be going home soon but still very much focused on the mission at hand. The casualties of the IED attack just before our arrival were still fresh on their minds, and they seemed aware that the environment was changing.
On a command, the convoy moved toward the gate, engines roaring and dust clouds trailing. We sped through the gate to the sound of soldiers loading their weapons. A quick test-fire burst from the machine guns gave the whole exit a Spaghetti Western feel. Here, we were the cowboys riding out and shooting our way into town, which was conveniently called “Indian country,” in politically incorrect military slang. The Humvees groaned as they hit the highway, aided by the increasingly familiar “crack” of the warning shots. We wove through traffic at a breakneck pace, while the sheer size of the Humvees intimidated the overmatched cars sputtering along the highway. Once or twice, the driver used the size and strength of our Humvee to ram civilian vehicles to the side of the road. From my seat, “the nudge” was a barely palpable thump, akin to crossing a speed bump. Yet I glanced backward to see the crushed fender of the car, which left its anguished occupants stalled in the middle of the highway. Traffic was already piling up behind the damaged car.
Father of Money Page 6
