Arriving at the DAC, I was greeted by the guards and Hillal, as usual. There was no one else around, just the Misfits and me. We took up our customary positions and we waited. At precisely the appointed hour, a flatbed truck with a red cab rumbled toward the gate. I did not know what to expect, but my mind defaulted to “truck bomb.” I ordered everyone back and yelled to the guards to stop the truck. On command, they began yelling in Arabic and firing warning shots in the air in order to get the driver to stop.
After the first burst of warning shots ripped the air, a familiar bearded face popped out from the passenger side window, yelling in return. Of course, it was Heydar. Behind the truck, as expected, was the white Mercedes with Ali, Ammar, and Q. The guards gathered their composure and let them through the gate. As the truck and the Mercedes pulled in, I walked over and had a look at the bed of the truck as it swung into a parking space. It was empty. My face must have contorted in disbelief. I looked from face to face, searching for an explanation and thinking about the various insults I was going to unleash.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis watched me, barely containing their laughter. I was definitely the last one to know this joke, and they thoroughly enjoyed it. Q, a slightly built, well-dressed man, shook hands with me and said something unintelligible to the driver. The driver scrambled into the bed of the truck and removed a metal panel from the back of the cab.
“Have a look,” said Q, gesturing up towards the driver, who now squatted adjacent to a gaping hole.
I climbed into the bed of the truck, walked along its creaky wooden floor, and peered into the hole. I could not see anything. Confused, I looked to the driver. He reached inside and pulled out a sack of grenades. And then another and another. For a full five minutes, the driver’s torso would disappear into the hidden compartment and return with grenades or grenade launchers—hundreds of them.
I was shocked, and I complimented Q and Heydar on their ability to conceal these weapons.
“How many of these trucks passed through our checkpoints every day?” I wondered aloud.
“Many.”
The answer from Q validated one of the long-held beliefs about our shortcomings in this occupation. We searched homes, vehicles, and people, but still a truck loaded with weapons could pull into a parking lot, as expected, and we would see it as empty and wave it through. Under years of Saddam’s rule, the Iraqis had become masterful at hiding precious belongings, and we were pretty childish in how we searched. Of course, part of that was out of deference to the locals and part of it was a practical concern. We did not have the time or the desire to start drilling holes in people’s cars and walls to look for hidden compartments, although that is what would be required to find the hidden contraband stowed away in everyday objects. I continued my praise of their ingenuity and seized the opportunity and their collective gloating to take pictures to “prove how gullible Americans were.” In truth, I wanted these pictures to go out to our soldiers, so that we could at least try to find more vehicles rigged to smuggle like this one.
After the grenades had been unloaded and everyone had a laugh at the “incompetent Americans,” we sent Hillal to get food from one of the nearby restaurants. Now that I had Q and Heydar in the same place, I wanted to spend time talking with them about these weapons and the sale. We went inside and waited for the food to arrive, enjoying the steaming cups of sweet tea that had become almost an obsession with me. Into a single glass, the Iraqis would pour enough sugar to fill it almost a quarter full, then add the tea on top of it. The result was a fragrant sugar-and-caffeine rush that my body had come to depend upon.
Hillal’s sons came bursting in with bags of cooked rice and chicken, and Hillal himself offered to slaughter a goat for us. We politely declined the latter and laid the carryout food on the table. Deferring to Q, we took turns grabbing the meat and piles of rice by hand and scooping them onto a few thin plates. The plates, it seemed, were largely for the Americans, as the Iraqis were content to reach in and eat directly from the piles of chicken and rice, with no intermediate utensils. It made sense to me, so I did the same.
In between mouthfuls of moist chicken and rice, I asked all about the weapons-trading business. As it turned out, most of my theories on weapons had been correct. The biggest buyers were the mosques, which armed themselves via weapons-dealing cartels. The money came from within and outside Iraq, often carried by pilgrims from Iran or taxi drivers who made journeys between Baghdad and Amman. Similarly, the weapons would travel between regions as mosques prepared for violence. He elaborated that these particular grenades had been bound for an insurgent group in Najaf during the uprising in April, but the fighting had ended, and the prices really fell there. The offer of immunity and the fair pricing structure created an opportunity for Q to make a low-risk profit and unload the weapons. He usually liked to hold them for only a few days, and he had held them too long.
The stories went on between Q and Ali, who had known each other in previous times when they were both black-market money exchangers. Ali always knew these guys well, and as I watched him interact, it was clear to me that he was a pretty central figure himself. For all I knew, he could have connected Heydar with Q in the first place. It was a weird feeling, eating lunch with a guy who had previously participated in an attack against me, the guy who supplied the guns, and my interpreter, who, because he was in the middle of everything else, was probably involved that night as well. The strangest thing was that it was not repugnant to me at all. It was more of a sign that I had been accepted into this circle, although I was not sure what that meant or how I felt about the army.
Increasingly, I had felt at odds with some of the directives and approaches that the higher levels of the army and the State Department sent down. I found myself rooting for the small successes of the Iraqis, even if it meant helping them sell weapons while staying free of any potential identification. I did not see it as them using me or even as my using them. Rather, I saw it as our building a team that was outside of the directed army protocol, on the one side, and beyond the ongoing calls for armed resistance on the other, which were becoming ever more strident. We were defying the will of our respective masters, and I think we were all the better for it.
I arranged for the army to buy Q’s weapons, using couriers from the neighborhood so that he did not implicate himself. I would then have my interpreters deliver his share of the proceeds, minus a roughly $1,000 finder’s fee for the council members. The council members, after all, had played their part as intermediaries to the mosque leadership and the diversion of Q from his original customers to me. It was an illustrative event, insofar as I confirmed that you could buy the confidence of these organizations, and the mosques had extremely well-developed supply networks.
Hours after the buyback ended, the council members were loitering outside the DAC. Everyone was in a good mood. Sunni and Shi’a congregated amicably and waited for the Humvees to arrive. They would wait a few hours longer than expected because there had been one small complication that would reverberate for months. The volatile Ammar had been arrested. He had gone to the weapons buyback site and argued with the soldiers there, who were not from our unit. In typical fashion, he had lost his temper and started yelling. The U.S. soldiers were not amused, and he was swiftly detained, despite his credentials as an interpreter.
The suspicion among the people responsible for FOB security was that the interpreters were double agents, a distrust that had grown stronger the longer we were in country. They were all employed by a contractor in the Green Zone who was based in the United States, but there had been no formal security-screening process when they were hired. In fact, in the early days of the invasion, speaking English was sufficient for virtually anyone to get a contract for $600 per month—a lot of money in Iraq, although the work was hard and the hours long. The interpreters rode in the same Humvees as the soldiers, fought and died in the same ambushes, and generally bore the same risks. Yet they had recently been forbidden from carrying w
eapons or cell phones. This came at a time when the insurgents targeted interpreters and their families with increasing ferocity, with the goal of severing the link between the army and the population.
The result was that the interpreters felt betrayed by all sides, and, in some cases, they probably did make side deals with various groups or organizations to stay alive. When I went to retrieve Ammar, I was greeted by three security consultants so new in country that their cargo vests from Wal-Mart still smelled like the plastic fishing worms that had been two aisles over. They proceeded to lecture me about how they have been for some time aware that Ammar was an insurgent and that his actions today proved he was unstable. They played the retired military intelligence gambit up as high as it could go, allowing their egos to alternate between Perry Mason and George Patton. They were ridiculous in a way that made them seem harmless, but then they said the most unbelievable thing I could have heard. They told me plainly that I did not have the authority to release Ammar. I did not even know who these couch potatoes were, and now they were giving me orders. I thought it could not get any worse, until they began to describe their masterful theory on how I had personally been “turned” into an enemy operative.
I am not even sure how the rest of their story went, except that several other interpreters felt that Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad had received special treatment for their work with the council. They alleged that the interpreters and the council members took bribes, and that I supported it. This made me a “terrorist.”
With my own personal army now standing at the sector’s every key intersection, these self-important civilians were literally traveling down a dangerous road right now and did not even know it. My mind quickly reeled through a series of actions. Should I arrange for an IED to hit their truck? Should I call up an ambush? If they wanted to see the danger of calling people an enemy operative, why not illustrate what an enemy operative might do?
Their perception of me was typical of the half-baked ideas that rained in from their arrogant ilk in the Green Zone, whether a security consultant (often a retired military officer), a veteran State Department employee getting his first taste of sunlight and reality, or worse, a newly minted one who knows exactly what would be done because he has a master’s degree. These guys and the rest of the people who sat in judgment and second-guessed the soldiers in the field were the most dangerous individuals in Iraq. Generals who had served in Vietnam as lieutenants and captains have written volumes about the “stacked helicopters” there—in civilian terms, micromanagement—and how that was one of the biggest mistakes that undermined the effectiveness of one of our greatest strengths—the initiative of the American junior officer. Senior officers’ helicopters would congregate over the battlefield at altitudes according to rank, with colonels hovering below generals, all relaying orders to the poor lieutenant who was trying to slog with his platoon through the rice paddy.
The books on this chapter of our history unanimously agree that this should never happen again. Yet in typical army fashion, it not only happened again but was far worse. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, the scrutiny of our operations intensified. Each Iraqi who was interrogated or stopped by a U.S. patrol had to be recorded, digitally photographed and inspected by a medic, and offered treatment for even incidental bumps and bruises. The unmanned drones followed our patrols, with people from the Green Zone often asking the drivers on the radio reserved for tactical communication why they went right instead of left or why they had stopped so long in a certain location. This type of surveillance of our own troops further separated those in combat from those in the FOBs and the Green Zone.
Now the guys in the field felt as if they had to avoid two equally stealthy enemies. Instead of interrogating people and bringing them in, we started taking them to different holding facilities in the sector, places where they could be interrogated without the threat of an unmanned aerial vehicle recording a soldier punching someone “for no reason.” The classic overreaction to Abu Ghraib had destroyed our trust of the system, and now these consultants were even living in our FOB and questioning our contacts and methods, based on nothing more than rumor and “twenty years of experience in the DOD.”
I mustered every last ounce of my willpower to politely tell the consultants how I could not care less, and I left to find my commander. Like me, he shared a fiercely independent and autonomous view. Our methods had created one of the more peaceful sectors in Baghdad, and we had managed to do what few others had, which was to gain and sustain a dialogue with the former combatants and their leadership. If the interpreters were on the take, then who really cared? Iraqis were not Americans and did not see interpreters as translation devices that mechanically changed Arabic to English. They preferred certain individuals and expressed trust for interpreters as human beings. It was a distinction sometimes lost on the “Green Zone Guys,” who allocated interpreters as if they were spare parts.
As I briefed my commander on the incident with the consultants, he turned purple with rage. In seconds, we were striding toward the brigade commander’s office. I waited outside while the two senior officers talked it out. Less than five minutes later, my boss stuck his head out and told me to go get Ammar, then get all of the other officers into the conference room. I was a bit confused but happy that this issue seemed to be working out. I went across to the detention facility and told Ammar he could go, and then I told the experts where they could go, which was a warm, but not tropical, destination of biblical reference. Ammar also had a few phrases to say to them, but I shut him up and sent him to the DAC to tell everyone that I would be there in an hour. Ammar turned and hollered at some other interpreters walking toward the gate in order to get a ride, then stopped short.
“They took my money.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Those guys, when they put me in there.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I reassured him.
This was not good. The rules had specifically prohibited interpreters from selling back weapons, because the intelligence officers and the “experts” wanted to track who was selling and what their connection was to the known nebulas of insurgents. Of course, we knew that as well, which is why we had the DAC guards and Ammar sell Q’s weapons. Even though my boss knew of this plan, some of the nuances were better kept from him until this all blew over, except that the money was the current topic of the briefing.
“And he had almost $5,000 in cash when we stopped him.” The officers in my battalion were all seated in the battalion conference room as the security consultants droned on about how they had saved us from an imminent threat—namely, Ammar. The consultants had even put together a slide show of data on all of our interpreters. The pictures of Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad, taken from their badge photos, beamed back from the projector. As they droned on, I imagined them getting ambushed on the outside and amused myself by thinking about how fast they’d run in those new boots.
“And so these three interpreters will not be allowed on the FOB and will lose their employment with the contractor,” the head consultant pronounced.
“And you three will not be allowed in the battalion area, “mumbled my battalion commander loud enough to be heard by all.
Our brigade commander, who had been seated in the rear of the room, gestured for my battalion commander to follow him outside. A few uncomfortable minutes later, the two commanders reached a compromise whereby we would abide by the security consultants’ report in exchange for receiving more interpreters in the future. The security consultants left smugly and accompanied the brigade commander back to the brigade headquarters. Their answer to a perceived security anomaly had been the ejection of our three interpreters, which showed little regard for the intrinsic value that the interpreters had acquired in terms of trust and institutional knowledge.
I am sure the consultants felt like heroes who had saved our lives, but as soon as they left, we hatched our own plan to subvert their civilian overreach. My commander had a simple but effecti
ve plan.
“Just tell Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad that we will pick them up in sector from now on. As for the money, we’ll find a way to get them paid. For now, they can be neighborhood watch supervisors. Doesn’t that pay $600 per month?”
It really paid less, but I got his point. He understood that these guys were assets to us, and insofar as he still felt they were worth having around, we would keep them around. The increasingly bizarre rules of this FOB were chafing us all. When we arrived from Kuwait, the basketball courts in the middle were used and people walked around without their body armor. Now, because a suicide bomber had blown up another mess hall in another part of the country, we were ordered to wear body armor at all times while outdoors. There was no more basketball, soccer, or running without your body armor. On selected days, we even had to wear the body armor while we ate. This was probably bearable for the office workers, who put it on to go eat and go to the barracks, but for those of us who wore it eighteen hours a day in sector, it was backbreaking. Literally, we could no longer remove the body armor except to sleep. The insidious hand of FOB security was crushing our spirit and endangering our tactical operations by depriving us of key interpreters. My commander pushed back hard.
“And go get that money back, as well. That belongs to somebody, doesn’t it?”
My commander meant that someone had sold his weapons and was waiting for this money to arrive. Just because Ammar had been detained with it did not mean that the seller was not still waiting for his money.
Father of Money Page 13
