Castle: A Novel

by J. Robert Lennon

  It did not take long for me to be singled out by my commanding officer, for my intelligence and my potential for advancement. Once I had my high school diploma, I was transferred into the warrant officer school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; and upon completing the program there, I assisted in the organization and planning of several bases inside our borders. Later I was shipped overseas to help renovate and repurpose the army’s European assets. At the time Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I was working alongside a team of architects and contractors on the design and maintenance of bases.

  But something was missing in my career, and it took a curious incident to make me realize what it was. I had been visiting a base in Japan, in order to inspect an aging barracks that was under reconstruction, when I happened to overhear, through a half-open door, the sound of an officer reprimanding a soldier. I paused and took a surreptitious glance into the room, a small windowless office containing a desk, a filing cabinet, and a computer. The soldier in question was standing at attention in front of the desk; meanwhile, the officer sat behind it, part of his body blocked from the soldier’s view by the large, already-obsolete computer monitor. To his credit, the soldier seemed to display the proper respect for his superior. But the officer himself appeared small, weak, and uncomfortable, hemmed in by the trappings of his position.

  Over the next few weeks, I thought a great deal about the ergonomics of military life. I made a few sketches of bases, barracks, and prisons that incorporated my recent thinking, and showed them to the officer, a CWO3, under whom my division was then working. He passed them on to his superior, and soon I found myself face-to-face with a CWO5 and a brigadier general, who pointed to my prison drawing and said, “We want you to build that.” He was referring to the project that would eventually become Camp Alastor.

  Needless to say, I was pleased. But my reassignment to the prison project gave me pause. I had had no direct experience in this arena, and was quick to remind my superior officers of this when they informed me of my redeployment. Their response was to remind me that this assignment was to be considered an honor, and they assured me that the higher-ups had perfect confidence in my abilities.

  And for some time, it appeared that this confidence was justified. I led a team that included two architects, several builders, and a consultant CWO2 from Military Intelligence, and we completed our work under budget and ahead of schedule. Rumors abounded of the disastrous exploits of civilian contractors, with their bloated budgets, corrupt middlemen, and poor skills, and we were delighted to be able to report our successes to our commanding officers and prove ourselves superior to our rivals. When, early in the spring, the prison at last opened its doors and began accepting detainees, I led their questioning, bolstered by my structural improvements to the interrogation environment. The facility’s labyrinthine corridors, through which we led detainees in different directions at different times, contributed to a general sense of confusion and dependency; windows as narrow as arrow slits, drilled through overspec’d, two-foot-thick walls, reinforced the impossibility of escape. Cell floors were angled slightly down from the corridors, elevating army personnel several inches above the cells’ inhabitants, making them feel helpless and overpowered. Intelligence-gathering, its limited utility notwithstanding, went smoothly, with few attempts at resistance.

  The overall feel of the facility was one of calm. The dry season had not yet begun, and the interior of the building, and of our barracks, remained fairly cool, in spite of the brilliant sun. The detainees were far from cheerful, but we fielded few unreasonable complaints, and were only rarely forced to break up a fight, or settle a disagreement. Quiet Arabic conversation filled the halls; it seemed the detainees, like us, had settled in to wait, and to see what happened next. The only incongruous element during these nervous, patient days was a sound: a low, mournful whistling. Not quite tuneless, but embracing no particular melody, it sometimes had the quality of a plaintive call, as though for a beloved pet. At other times, it sounded like a small, elusive movement of some forgotten sonata; still other times it sounded like the wind. We didn’t know who was doing the whistling, or why, but as the days lengthened, it became a soundtrack to life in the facility, an ever-present, if elegiac, companion to our work.

  Then came the summer.

  The weather was very hot and dry. There was some relief from the shamal winds, when they blew; but when the air was still, time seemed to stand still with it, and the temperature routinely rose above 110 degrees. The weeks dragged by, and more detainees arrived. We requisitioned temporary off-site housing for them, but none was forthcoming, as supply lines were clogged, and the detainees, we were told, were far too dangerous to be housed outside the main compound. And so, instead, I ordered construction to begin on a new wing of the facility, and soon it was under way. Through it all, the days were colored by the aimless whistling that haunted the corridors—and though it was bothersome, no one complained, as though, in some oblique way, they thought they deserved it.

  It was around this time that I first took notice of the boy, the thirteen-year-old who had come in around the same time as the pregnant woman. We had housed him in the area of the L where our three female detainees were held, and they now all occupied the same cell, at the very end of the hallway, where they could at least experience some modicum of privacy. It was off of this hallway that I had decided the new wing would be built, and I found myself here quite often, supervising the demolition of the outer wall and the construction of a new passageway. The boy’s name, I learned, was Sufian.

  Most of the detainees would spend their time slumped against the walls of their cells in silence. Some talked in low tones. Many of them had a copy of the Qur’an, but most had nothing. Because we had never received the shipment of inmate uniforms we had been expecting, they were dressed in the clothes in which they had been captured, trousers and short-sleeved shirts, abayahs and dishdashas, and in this respect, Sufian was no different. He wore a filthy dishdasha, its grubby fabric torn and stained, and he sat on the floor at the front of the cell, peering through the steel mesh as we worked.

  There was something slightly unnerving about the boy’s gaze. His brown eyes were large and alert, possessing none of the deadness and despair evident in the eyes of many of his fellow inmates. His face was thin, his cheekbones high; combined with his lively eyes, these traits made him appear curious and highly intelligent. It was difficult to tell, however, as the boy never spoke, at least not to any of the men and women under my command.

  Though it was our policy to try to keep the Sunnis and Shiites separate, we could not determine in which, if either, category the boy belonged; even the women he now resided with had evidently ceased to bother speaking to him. He merely sat in his cell, watching and listening to all the facility’s goings-on with apparent fascination. As for me, I wondered about the child’s parents—whether they wondered where he was, or if they were even alive. I was not unfamiliar with the solitude and alienation associated with that age, particularly if one lived at some emotional distance from one’s family. And so I resolved to pay special attention to the boy while we worked nearby, and to try to make his detainment less unpleasant than it might otherwise be. Perhaps, somehow, this experience might even prove constructive for him—he could learn self-reliance, and to tell right from wrong; he would participate in this important new chapter of his country’s history.

  After a few casual visits to the boy’s cell, however, I grew perturbed by his strange stare, and turned over supervision of the corridor reconstruction to a subordinate.

  My superiors had given me clear instructions about what kind of information to seek when we interrogated detainees. We wanted to know, of course, which detainees were part of terrorist cells, which were Baathists, and which were in contact with foreign fighters, particularly Syrians and Iranians. Our political leadership was convinced that the Iranians were infiltrating the Shia, and so it became necessary to find out who was related to whom, and who knew whom; t
o separate them, and to play them off one another, telling them that their brothers or friends had talked, and had implicated them, and so on. The new influx of detainees was more fruitful in terms of intelligence; their social connections were many, and their various rivalries made it easier to goad them into revealing other detainees’ secrets.

  But there were far too many of them, and tensions among my CWO1s and enlisted men and women were high. We now housed 374 detainees in a space built for 150, and our requests for matériel were taking an increasingly long time to be filled. From the tone of my communications with my superior officers, I could tell that Camp Alastor was becoming a place that people in positions of responsibility wanted to have had nothing to do with. I continued to receive effusive praise for my work, and while I relished this praise and believed it to be in earnest, I had begun to be troubled by the notion that perhaps it was motivated, in part, by a desire to keep Camp Alastor at a distance. Perhaps, among the officer class, information had begun to circulate about difficulties at prisons elsewhere in Iraq, and those who wished to be relieved of responsibility for the consequences had already started passing the buck. To be sure, I felt an increasing disgust with the poor planning and sloppy execution of our mission, and with the people who, so far, had failed to take responsibility for these errors. But it was not my place to judge—rather, it was my place to do as I was instructed, and so I tried to blind myself to the larger picture, and continued to do my job to the best of my ability.

  My office was a small, windowless room at the center of the compound with cinderblock walls, a large aluminum-frame desk, and two chairs. I had spent much of the past several months here, filling out requisition forms, managing our overcrowding, and disciplining and counseling exhausted soldiers. I did not miss the irony in the fact that this room was much like the one I had spied in Japan, the one that had inspired my shift into ergonomics, and eventually intelligence: the one I had found so lacking at the time.

  I had been hard at work one day drafting yet another requisition form, when a private first class named Jennifer Moss came to my office with a question about detainee interrogation. I had particular fondness for this soldier, as she was nineteen years old, and, like me, had had no idea that she would ever be serving in a prison in Iraq, expecting instead to become a tactician—still, so far as I knew, her goal in the armed forces. I had learned this by asking her, late one insomniac night when I encountered her patrolling the cell block. She was stoic about her disappointment, which she otherwise felt comfortable confessing to me; her official position was that she wished to serve her country in whatever capacity her country saw fit.

  And so I was surprised to find her standing before me wearing an expression of profound unease. Even after I asked her to sit down, she slumped crookedly in the chair and declined to look me in the eye as she spoke.

  “Private,” I said, feigning displeasure, “state your business.”

  “Sir,” she began, wiping her tired and dirty face with a small white hand. “Okay, sir? Me and Lukens and Geary were talking to this guy, right?” Lukens was a big man, a fellow private, and, I believed, a good friend—perhaps a lover—of Private Moss; Geary was one of our translators, a short, nervous boy just out of graduate school. “And it got all complicated, sir.”

  “Complicated how, Private?” I asked.

  “It’s like… the guy got hostile, sir? And he spit on Lukens? And Lukens didn’t hit him or anything, but he cuffed him to the bars, sir, like on the window? And he’s been there a while, and I don’t know, sir, every time Lukens gets near him the guy spits. He doesn’t spit on me, sir, but Lukens doesn’t want me to have to do all the questioning.”

  “Are you certain,” I asked, “that he knows something?”

  She began nodding before I had even finished speaking, as though this had already been thought through.

  “Uh-huh, yes sir, that is our assessment.”

  “What makes you think so?” I asked.

  “One of the other detainees said he was al-Qaida, sir.”

  “I see.”

  “And so we ask him if he’s al-Qaida, and he spits on us and calls us names, sir.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, and then I asked her to lead me to the detainee.

  The soldiers had set up an empty cell at the back of the north wing as an interrogation room. Its interior could not be seen by the other detainees, but anything that went on there could be heard by all. As we walked down the long hallway, the detainees stared at us through the bars, their expressions angry and deflated. It occurred to me that many of them had been here for months, and I had heard nothing from anyone that indicated they would soon be transferred or freed. I was beginning to think that Camp Alastor was no longer considered temporary—that these people would be here for a long time, and I would be here with them.

  The scene in the interrogation cell was grim. Lukens was next to the door, as far from the detainee as possible. He faced the hallway and his features were hard. He stood with his rifle in both hands and his lips pressed together. Geary, the translator, was seated on a metal stool in the far corner of the room, his hands dangling between his knees, his head hung low. The hair was receding on the back of his head and his bald spot gleamed faintly in the yellow electric light. The detainee was pressed to the far wall, underneath the window, with his arms in the air above him, handcuffed to the bars. One of his feet rested on top of the other, and his knees were slightly bent in a kind of plié. He was not much taller than five feet, was thin, and appeared to be around forty. You would not think to look at him that he was capable of much resistance. Yet he had spit on Lukens.

  “Moss,” I said. “Uncuff him.”

  For just a moment, Moss appeared frightened. Then she nodded, and asked Geary for the stool. Geary got up. She moved the stool over next to the detainee and climbed up on it to undo the cuffs. The detainee turned away, as though in disgust. Soon his wrists were freed. His arms fell to his sides, his legs trembled, and he slid to the ground, where he gulped down a single sob. From down the hallway came the sound of the other detainees shifting wordlessly in their cells. I heard, faintly, the distant familiar sound of whistling.

  The detainee appeared to try to move his arms, but for the time being they could do nothing more than twitch. His hands somehow found his lap, where they lay useless, palms up, as though waiting for something to be put into them.

  I motioned Geary over to the man, and then knelt down a few feet before him. Behind me I heard Lukens shift position.

  “Ask him why he spit on Private Lukens,” I said.

  The translator spoke. A moment passed without any reaction from the detainee. Then he tipped his head up, regarded me with sad, empty eyes, and spat.

  Without hesitation, Lukens came up behind me, stepped between me and the detainee, and rammed the butt of his rifle into the man’s face.

  For a moment, no one moved. The rifle butt had struck him high on the cheek, just below the right eye. The flesh opened up and blood pooled in a ragged line. The man tried to lift his hands to cover the wound, but he couldn’t get his arms up all the way, and blood began to drip onto his lap. Geary and Moss stared in astonishment.

  “Get the medic,” I said to Geary. And to Lukens, I said, “Wait for me in my office, soldier.”

  Lukens nodded. There was embarrassment in his face, but not fear or remorse. He turned on his heel and walked out, throwing shut the cell door behind him.

  I went to the detainee and pressed a clean handkerchief to his face. Soon the medic arrived and took over. I motioned for Moss and the translator to follow me, then ordered another soldier out of the hallway and into the cell with the medic. A few minutes later, I had the three of them, Moss, Lukens, and Geary, crowded into the office. I stood beside my desk. The two chairs were empty. I turned to Lukens.

  “What on earth happened in there?” I asked him.

  “He can’t do that to you, sir.”

  I felt a small shiver of fear touch
the small of my back. “He did nothing to me, soldier. He didn’t even have anything to spit. When was the last time you gave him water?”

  Lukens and Moss looked at each other.

  “He didn’t ask for water, sir,” Moss said.

  “The guy wouldn’t even answer our questions, sir,” Lukens said, his voice louder now, and angrier. “All we wanted to know was who he knows in Dora who’s al-Qaida. It’s obvious he knows people. We were just following orders.”

  “I didn’t order you to hit him.”

  “I was just trying—”

  “Private!” I shouted, and was surprised to find myself trembling. I did not know what I was doing. I could feel the operation getting away from me. Perhaps it was already gone.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  I glared at Geary and Moss. Their faces were tired, and they were frowning. All of us wanted to be somewhere else. To the translator, I said, “What are you hearing?”

  Geary shrugged. “They don’t understand what they’re here for. They keep asking when they’re going to be released. They ask if we think they’re criminals.”

  “They are criminals!” Lukens said suddenly.

  “Private,” I said, “wait outside.”

  Lukens opened his mouth, then shut it. He turned and marched out, slamming the door behind him. The three of us looked at it for a moment, then I turned back to Geary.

  “Go on.”

  “There’s nothing to say, sir.” He rubbed his face with both of his hands. “Maybe a few of them know something—about the insurgency or something—but I’m not sure.” He paused again, swallowing air. “I’ve never done this kind of thing before. I don’t know how to put it so they’ll talk. Or even if there’s any way to get them to. I’m just… I…”