Following the RG was the Husky, a Dr. Seuss–inspired one-man bubble perched on a frame with a ground-penetrating radar array hung beneath. Then the Buffalo, another brute with a massive robotic arm emerging from the front bumper. Soldiers called it the “Claw,” and they used it to dig and sift through rock and soil. Next the JERRV with the EOD team inside, then a command-and-control Humvee, perhaps another RG-31 or two for extra firepower. This line of horned beetles crept slowly down the road an hour before the Dibis contractors, trying to get shot at, trying to find the IEDs that lay hidden, trying to disrupt them when found, trying to survive them when tripped.
On a perfectly ordinary mission, the RG-31 would drive unaware past a camouflaged IED on the side of the road. The Husky would drive over it as well, but their radar would ping from the magnetic signature, hot and loud in the operator’s ear, and WARNING would flash across his video screen, and he would slow and stop and wait, hanging above his death in his egg-like perch, calling in the exact spot for the Buffalo to search. Then the Claw would extend, rake the ground, plow the gravelly crust, and reveal, what? A wire? A 155mm round? A heavy lump in a garbage bag wrapped in black electrical tape. So the EOD team would drop the Talon robot from the JERRV, confirm the IED, place the explosives, make it go boom, scatter the pieces and parts, and pick up the key evidence by hand.
Except on one particular day, a length of copper audio-speaker wire ran off from the side of the road into the distance. This was not unusual; this type of command-wire device was common throughout our area. But in such a desolate land, no towns or settlements for miles, the Little Zab River and Dibis still far in the distance, we felt the need to investigate more. The wire ran off into nothingness.
So off we dismounted to find the wire’s end. Tracing a command wire is dangerous; directly walking along its length, such an obvious place to hide a booby trap. So my team zigged and zagged, outflanked it, found it and returned, followed its route from afar across the blank arid uplands. After a full kilometer, it descended into an obscured dried wadi, meandered along the bottom into a concrete culvert. This single mark of man upon the landscape was so far out of place it aroused immediate suspicion, but a quick check found nothing hidden, and so we dropped down into the depression.
The wire ended several feet inside the shoulder-high culvert. A large battery pack lay there, plenty of juice to overcome the resistance of so much copper between here and the bomb. No other sign of human occupation—no cigarette butts or discarded food scraps or sandal impressions in the dust—nothing to see, except this, which made my stomach flip twice:
Scrawled across the inside of the smooth concrete wall was a perfect depiction of our Route Clearance Patrol. Drawn in dark chalk as a profile view, like an ancient cave painting, each vehicle in the childish sketch was blocky but unmistakable: the smaller RG, the high-wire Husky, the fat Buffalo with a three-fingered stick-figure Claw, the JERRV, a tiny Humvee, more RGs behind.
We drove this road so rarely, and they still knew we were coming.
We looked out from the edge of the culvert and back toward the highway. Even a kilometer away, the convoy was easy to see across the empty plain.
We looked down at the sketch. The JERRV was circled in black, and crossed out with an X.
“SO YOU’VE GIVEN this a lot of thought, I’m sure,” I asked Frost, sitting on his couch, “After looking through all this evidence yourself, what do we know about the Engineer, the guy who actually knows how this all works?”
“Oh, you mean the Smart Guy,” Frost said.
“Yeah, sure, the Smart Guy. What do we know about the Smart Guy?”
“Not much.”
We laughed. No, it’s not funny.
“You know, you collect hundreds of pieces of evidence,” Frost said, as he settled in his computer chair and propped up his stick legs, “which is probably only one third of the total amount of evidence available, and still all we really know about the Smart Guy, or the Engineer, is that there is a gap in our knowledge. There’s money coming down, there’s logistics coming in, there’s IEDs trickling out the bottom, there has to be somebody there, but we have almost no direct evidence. We don’t have anybody who’s talked about that guy. We don’t have any distinct DNA biometrics profile on that guy. We just know that there is an operational signature or an equipment signature, and you only know that if you pay attention to the details. It’s like reading the classics, you have to read them all before you figure out they all reference each other. And too many of them that we thought were Smart Guys turned out to be unreliable narrators.”
IT WAS LATE in the American Surge in Iraq, in a martyrdom safe house in Tikrit, north of Samarra, in a cement room hidden away from the prying kuffar eyes, that the Engineer met the local emir for Ad Dawla al Islamiyya fin al-Iraq wa al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. They may have been shouting so loud that the women and children upstairs huddled in fear on their sleeping mats.
You are distracted and have lost your way, the Engineer may have said. Killing the Shia, and killing our fellow Muslim brothers and sisters.
The Shia are apostates, and the others are all shaheed, may Allah accept their martyrdom, the emir may have said.
It is unnecessary and against the teaching our Prophet, peace be upon him, al-Muhandis said. You do not care for the widows and orphans of our slain brothers, as our Sheikh has directed. You do not discriminate. You seek nothing but chaos. You put my albuyah nasiffah everywhere.
The collaborators are legitimate targets, the emir said. Everyone knows this.
You have lost your focus on the Great Satan brought near. He must be targeted, and his men and machines who find the albuyah nasiffah. Your revenge distracts from the Jews and Crusaders.
The Engineer pointed to a corner of stacked rocket-propelled grenades, the warheads all wrapped in aluminum foil.
And you are ruled by superstition, he accused.
We have heard the kuffar jammers protect the tanks with a field of electricity. The covering defeats the jammers, the emir replied.
These are mere rumors. You are superstitious and sloppy. You do not place the explosives around the remote detonator to hide the evidence. You do not use the gloves when making the devices.
We wrap our fingers in tape, said the emir. They will not see our fingerprints.
You leave the tape everywhere, like trash! They will find the fingerprints on the tape and find you.
The Engineer snatched the emir’s cell phone from his hand, smashed it with a nearby hammer, and removed the SIM card.
This must all be burned, immediately, said the Engineer. Have you learned nothing from the last ten years? Of course not. When our great Sheikh led the attack on the two towers at the Battle of Manhattan you were still on your mother’s dusty tit.
We have killed thousands of kuffar while the Sheikh hides, the emir replied. We are not as lucky as our other mujahideen brothers. We have not received the remote detonators and missiles to shoot down Hind helicopters, as you did in jihad years ago. We do not have the takfir Persians giving us weapons. We Sunni must do it ourselves. We conduct our own martyrdom operations.
Yes, from throughout the caliphate, the Engineer said, you bring those wishing to be shaheed through Syria and then lock them in your safe houses here, and then feed them drugs and girls, like a playboy from the Great Satan. Or you rape them and fuck their asses, like some kohl-eyed Pashtun goat herder. These are not the directives of the Sheikh. We do not need to shame our brothers into obedience. We do not need to tempt our brothers with worldly pleasures. They will submit as good Muslims.
You are the takfir, the Engineer continued. I am returning to my Afghan mujahideen brothers and the black banners of Khurasan.
IN MY MIND, the wars loomed over us like the heads of two slaughtered whales hanging from opposing sides of the Pequod’s mast. The Sperm and the Right. The favored and the lesser cousin. Kant and Locke, spiritual intuition and technical empiricism, Melville says. But
now they are also Afghanistan and Iraq, the good, long war and the wrong, unwanted one. We were all whale hunters now, looking for answers from dripping containers of sperm and blood.
Iraq and Afghanistan. In each Surge we did counterinsurgency and counterterror, we spread stability and we killed specific targets, we oozed our oil spot of peace and destroyed their network. But if the Engineer and his surrogates did the same in reverse, if some IEDs are general mayhem and some have an individual name on them, then the question hangs: what about Frost, and Fye, and Matt?
On May 18, 2008, Frost hopped onboard with a Navy EOD team responding to a call for help from an Army combat engineer’s route clearance package. The Husky had been hit, and the driver was hurt. The engineers stopped and created a security cordon and then another armored truck was hit. Two vehicles crippled and five soldiers wounded, and when Frost’s patrol arrived to rescue them the dirt road erupted and crumpled his Caiman, and now there were four more wounded, but Branden was quiet from the very beginning and he didn’t make it.
Frost knew that dirt track was famous for Christmas Tree Light devices, tiny little pressure strips made with thin motor-winding wire and a string of contacts held apart by clear rubber spacers. Drive over a contact, crush the rubber spacer, complete the circuit, boom. In fact, Frost had made that track famous; he wrote the reports and drew the cell on his map.
It was nearly impossible to see the strips except in full sunlight and crawling at ten miles per hour. But there had just been a three-day dust storm, the kind of storm that makes the sky glow orange and scours every surface as if the moon dust was sprayed with a pressure-washer. There was no way for the combat engineers to see the Christmas Tree Lights under that layer of dirt.
A few old craters in the road had been packed with explosives and covered with dust. No one had checked the old craters to make sure they had not been reused by the bomb emplacers. No one had checked ASP 3 to make sure the old ordnance wasn’t being stolen.
When Frost got hit, his patrol had not yet made it to the route clearance package. They were still two football fields away. It had to be a command wire, waiting for him or the Navy EOD team. The combat engineers had already driven that way; if it was a simple Christmas Tree Light strip, they would have triggered it themselves.
The explosives might have come from ASP 3. Or they might have been home-cooked. Either way, Frost doesn’t know for sure because no one ever did a full investigation. Official policy at the time said they should have. To move Left of Boom, a patrol that is hit should stop and secure the site and medevac the wounded and wait for a WIT or EOD team to investigate. If that response team is then hit, they should wait for yet another EOD team from another FOB in another part of the AO.
But no second team was coming. In that complex attack, three IEDs crippled three trucks and produced one killed and eight wounded, and no full investigation was done. It was an eight-to-one ratio, wounded to killed, worse than the Iraq average.
No, not eight-to-one. Remember, the interpreter doesn’t count. He’s just the terp. He’s not a US soldier. But the terp has a name. His name is Max, and he lost both of his legs and now he lives in Jordan, even if he doesn’t count for the statistics.
Even in 2008, sometimes no investigation was done. After years of looping repeated failures, the overall strategy had changed to focus on just that sort of attack, but still incidents got missed, reports went unwritten. Whatever happened to the mountain of data anyway? CSI: Baghdad is a generous comparison. It implies that someone solves the case at the end of the episode. Only rarely does that happen. Iraq was more like the first ten minutes of the show over and over and over again: collect the evidence, send it the lab, and then just move on to the next one. Cases open but rarely shut, repeated until the war ended.
Frost learned later that someone took a picture of the crater and measured it, but no one picked up evidence, no one traced the command wire, no one found the firing point, no one pursued the triggerman. Once the helo arrived and carried off the wounded, everyone had had their fill for the day and went home.
Frost didn’t feel bad that no one did an investigation. How could you take it personally? So many bombings, you had to focus on taking victories where you could. There was such a small chance the system would produce a worthwhile result anyway.
The truth was, the person who cared most about doing an investigation had just gotten hit. Frost was on his way to the hospital and out of Iraq for good, and in his absence, nothing was done. The Engineer’s targeting worked.
Three years later, in 2011, a full post-blast investigation was done for Fye. A follow-on EOD team did just as the Surge policy said they should. By then, the process had become institutionalized, and didn’t rely on the drive of one man like Frost.
The final report would determine that Fye was simply unlucky. The IED was not meant for him; it was random chance that he stepped on it. Fye knew it was dangerous to walk across the footbridge or on the main donkey path directly to the known devices in the Taliban Bazaar. It was also dangerous to take the steepest slope of the canal, hop over a wall. Left with a mix of less-obvious and random routes, he picked one. What else is there to do? The question was not what Fye did wrong, but why the emplacer would choose to put an IED there at all.
The investigation also revealed that Fye did, in fact, step on a PMN landmine with an extra charge beneath. In that area of the Horn of Panjwe, the Taliban used PMNs as high-power initiators, connecting them with detonating cord to jugs of homemade explosives buried still deeper. All told, approximately three quarters of a pound of TNT and five pounds of ammonium nitrate and aluminum (helpfully, and without mirth, shortened to ANAL in military jargon) detonated under Fye’s left foot.
But the five-liter plastic jugs found throughout that district can hold forty pounds of ANAL, not just five. Why did so little function correctly? Why did the top of the slurry simply blow itself apart in flaming chunks? Why did the lion’s share remain in the hole? Why was the mix off, in the wrong proportion, the recipe not followed?
Fye has an answer.
“I was really blessed and God was really looking out for me,” he said during my visit. “I can’t think of any other reason. You step on something of that size, and to have only the damage I have, I should have lost a lot more.”
Fye lived because the muj didn’t stir enough. They made a bad batch.
“It sucks because I fought an inanimate object and lost!” Fye continued, with a deep belly laugh, humor as defense mechanism.
“Actually, I won because I’m still here,” he corrected himself. “But you know what I mean, it’s an object.”
“You’re fighting the deviousness of the Engineer, that’s what you’re fighting, and you lived through it, so I wouldn’t say you lost,” I said.
“It’s like a scene from Scott Pilgrim,” he said, referencing the movie about a high school kid who battles a string of impossibly cartoonish ex-boyfriends in hopes of landing a girl, “but instead of actually fighting someone, it’s a weird in-your-mind fight.” Only now I’m not sure he’s only talking about the IED.
But Fye is right. All of us EOD guys—Fye, Frost, Matt, myself, the few thousand of us who served in both wars—had been originally trained to fight a thing. To fight the inanimate object. Success was simply disarming the device, until we learned to go Left of Boom, and fight the mind behind the bomb.
Frost was targeted. Fye seemed to be random. What was Matt?
“Do you know if they ever found the guy who built it?” I asked.
“No. I don’t know if they ever got the guy,” Fye said, and then he unintentionally echoed a refrain heard daily over the last decade of war:
“All that evidence just goes into that intel black hole, and you never hear about it again.”
I never got intel out of the black hole either, but now I’d have to, if I wanted to continue my investigation. The war had changed so much in the four years since I left Iraq, I barely recognized the players a
nd rules of this new game. What is in that black hole, and what are the analysts and interrogators and hunters doing to find the man who killed my friend?
PART IV
HUNT AND KILL
“Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”
—General George Washington, 1776
11 ♦ THE BLACK HOLE
IN A REMOTE PORTION OF Afghanistan north of Kabul, where the mountains ease to hills and the hills to lush irrigated fields covering a broad valley, in a tiny village set among the silty channels of the Kunduz River, a pair of Blackhawk helicopters landed near a walled compound and, against odds, a tall thin young woman from West Virginia named Sarah Soliman got out.
A helmet and body armor hung loosely about her, but beneath she wore a stylish button-down and smart business slacks. She claimed no uniform, carried no gun, lacked all the tactical accoutrements the modern soldier found fashionable, and her distinctive long red hair, so bright and authentic one startled upon first glimpse, was sensibly tied back against the rotor wash. With the confidence of a frequent flier she hopped from the side of the bird, one chunky heel on the ground at a time, and with long steps crossed the LZ of dried mud to where a man from the local ODA team was waiting for her.
He was all contrast: unwashed, M4, baggy camo pants, boots, beard. In a spotter’s scope they would make quite a matched pair. They greeted each other with comfortable familiarity and hand gestures, few words being possible under the buffet of the blades. At his feet sat six small clear bags filled with blackened junk. He pointed at the bags, hefted one, indicated a white paper report inside each, helped her carry the parcels back to the helicopter, and loaded them on the center jump seat where they would not be lost. The woman reboarded. The man turned his back and returned to his rack in the compound.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 18
