His voice trailed off, and he stared at the floor.
“Sir?” It was Moss. “Most of us are with Lukens, sir.” She spoke quietly, as she had done the night she told me about her goals in the military. She had never seemed younger to me than she did now. “I mean, some of these people, they’re obviously not al-Qaida or anything. But, I mean, it’s a war, sir. They’re the enemy.”
Geary was shaking his head. “But they don’t know they’re the enemy. They don’t know why they’re here.”
“Some of us think they’re just playing dumb, sir,” Moss went on.
Geary didn’t respond, except to continue shaking his head. From outside, we heard Lukens’s enraged voice, reverberating down the long hallway: “Hajji, quit the fucking whistling!”
Involuntarily, I let out a long sigh. Now I would need to discipline Lukens for losing his temper. But he had only given voice to emotions we were all feeling. The whistling—everything, in fact, the weather, the overcrowding, all of it—had come to seem like an accusation, one to which there was no reasonable response.
I sat down behind my desk and stared at the wall over Moss’s shoulder. A calendar hung there, one I had brought from the States. Each month bore a different kind of weather—hurricane, tornado, snowstorm. There was a thunderstorm in San Francisco—that was the photo for April—and a foggy Boston street scene for October. December showed now, and the picture was of a row of icicles hanging from the eaves of a barn in Maine. I had seen none of these phenomena in Iraq. There was no sandstorm on the calendar, and no drought. Soon I would need a new calendar, and the varieties of American weather would be thrown away. I began to wonder when I would next see an icicle, or a thunderstorm. I fell into a reverie of sorts then, remembering. I don’t know how long it was before Moss roused me with the clearing of her throat. I looked up.
“Sir?” she said.
“Bring the detainee to the infirmary, please,” I said. “You guard him, Private, until the medic says it’s time to put him back into the population. Geary,” I added, “go get some sleep. Let everyone get some sleep. And send in Lukens when you leave.”
“Yes, sir,” Moss replied. Geary nodded. And they walked out.
That was the beginning of what would prove to be a time of many problems at Camp Alastor. The problems I refer to are now well known, from the photographs taken elsewhere. I will not claim that we were entirely innocent of adopting such tactics with our detainees—we knew how to “push their buttons,” how to make them feel unclean, and humiliated. We understood how to frighten them—how to convince them that death was imminent without causing them lasting physical harm. We used dogs, and even snakes. We desecrated their holy books, blasphemed their God.
But we had been assured that the work we were doing was necessary and good, and that it would save lives. And there was a sense that, if only our expansion could be completed, if only more personnel were to arrive, then everything would settle down, and our work could be streamlined, and we could learn what we needed to without so much strenuous effort. Every day I expected the supply trucks to arrive, the troop transport vehicles. Every day I thought might be the day that we turned the corner.
TWENTY
Instead, three months later, I walked away from the man in the pit, entered the building, stumbled into the latrine, and vomited into the closest toilet. Then I walked to my office, closed and locked the door, and sat down behind the desk.
I didn’t move for some time. My body was slick with sweat and filth that even repeated showering had failed to remove, and the inside of my mouth was rank and gluey with sick. The calendar I had stared at during my discussion with Moss and Geary was gone now, and none had arrived to replace it.
Things had deteriorated quickly after the incident with Private Lukens. In retrospect, I see that I ought to have dealt with his actions more severely; or, ideally, I should have predicted the level of despair to which the situation would soon descend. Foremost among my failures had been my obliviousness to the anxiety faced by the men and women under my command. They, I now understood, were no better suited to the task of managing a vast and diverse prison population than I was; indeed, they were far less so. They had been trained in desert combat and, to a lesser extent, urban warfare. They knew how to identify an enemy and neutralize it. Now they had been charged with the welfare of hundreds of the very people they had learned to hate and fear—and been ordered, by me, to extract information from them.
Our mission was a failure. We had discovered close to nothing about the enemy, except how to hurt him.
And we did hurt him. The man Lukens had struck with his rifle endured further questioning, under even greater duress, and he gave us some names, which we passed on to the CW5 for intelligence in our theater. What value these names might actually have had, or if they were the names of real people, or people the man had invented to satisfy us, we never learned. But the names did represent a success of sorts, and the soldiers who extracted them were singled out for praise. And so our questioning intensified. That man, in fact, was the man in the pit, the man I threw my canteen to. We had likely gotten from him all that we could. Yet we couldn’t stop interrogating him. It was as though we had become addicted to him, fixated on the moment of relief we felt when he talked. We wanted to feel that relief again. We wanted to please our superiors and bask in their implicit approval.
We forced people’s heads into tubs of water and covered their faces with soaking rags. We burned them and bruised them and shocked them and bled them. We stripped them naked and paraded them in front of their countrymen. We threatened to murder their children.
It wasn’t that we felt nothing for these people, whose guilt or innocence was unknown to us, and unknowable. Indeed, we felt disgust. If they were guilty, then they were disgusting for their crimes; if innocent, they were disgusting for being foolish enough to be apprehended. When they cowered in terror from our blows, we hated their cowardice; when they tried to fight back, we hated their arrogance. When they begged us to stop, we hated their weakness, and when they silently endured, we hated their imperturbability. They were less than human, these people, these idiots whose language could not be understood, whose ways of living were so foreign. The more we hurt them, the more we hated them—how could they be so weak? How could they sit there and take it? Why didn’t they rise up against us? Why didn’t their people come with guns and bombs and free them? There were hundreds of them and dozens of us, and still they let themselves be dominated. And they said they knew nothing and no one, and yet, in spite of everything, they named names, they named places, they named times. And we gave the information to our superiors and the information was swallowed up, never to be heard again.
Two things happened in February. The first was that we had begun to hear rumors that there were photos, not from our camp, but from elsewhere, and that these photos had made their way into the civilian world. There was no immediate fallout from this revelation, but it cast a dark cloud over our operation, and made us all feel as if our work here was drawing to some kind of ignominious close.
The other thing was Sufian.
It was the boy, the one who was detained with the women. I had ordered him to be questioned when another detainee claimed that his father was a member of the insurgency loyal to Shiite cleric and Baghdad hero Moqtada al-Sadr.
I had told two soldiers to go and get the boy, and insisted that he be questioned in my office, not in the room where the other interrogations had been taking place. By this time I was well aware that the questioning had gone too far, but I no longer felt that I could stop it. I no longer felt that I had the authority to, and I had so come to despise the facility, my role as its commanding officer, and the detainees themselves, that I had no desire to. But I did not regard the women and the boy as part of the general population of the facility, did not regard them as dangerous or as valuable sources of information; and for the most part they had remained quiet and calm, had demanded little, and had acquiesced quic
kly and without complaint to all of our commands. And so the boy would be given special consideration during questioning.
The boy sat across from me, occupying the only chair other than my own. He was very thin, and slightly stooped, like a grandfather; his unlined face was dark and inscrutable, and the beginning of a mustache stained his upper lip. He was no longer wearing his dishdasha; at some point he had been given jeans and a golf shirt, and these now hung from him like pieces of mold that had grown there, and their reek filled the room. Nobody appeared to be bothered; we were all accustomed to this odor, and at times exuded it ourselves. Geary, the translator, leaned listlessly against the wall to my right; the two soldiers who had brought the boy flanked the door, their rifles at the ready. Geary looked terrible—his eyes hollow, his lips cracked, his hair lank. He was now the only translator. The other had been transferred abruptly, and his replacement never arrived.
“Ask him,” I said, gazing at the boy, “his father’s name.”
Geary blinked and turned to the boy in slow motion. He spoke with lethargic ease, as though he were drunk.
The boy blinked as well, as if in response. Then he tilted back his head, cleared his throat, and began to whistle.
Here in the confines of my office, the mournful sound of Sufian’s tuneless whistle came as a terrible shock. It was him—he was the whistler! I had not been aware of how completely this sound had infected my waking hours; it seemed a permanent, obscure, and distant motif, a kind of haunting. My body tensed, and my hands found the edge of my desk and gripped it.
The two soldiers shifted their weight from one foot to the other. Geary let out a long, terrible sigh. I removed a handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my forehead. I said, “Ask him again.”
“He won’t say anything.” Geary had long ago stopped calling me sir, and I had stopped caring.
I shrugged.
Geary asked again, and the boy merely continued to whistle.
Every one of my muscles was clenched now. The boy’s cheerless passivity was maddening. Didn’t I deserve at least some acknowledgment of my efforts to protect him from harm? Wasn’t it clear to him that he had been favored, and that this favoritism had a source? The least he could do was answer my very simple question—or even refuse to answer it. Anything but this—this whistling, which felt as though it was boring into my head like an auger. It occurred to me that the melody, if you could call it that, never seemed to repeat itself, never seemed to break into any particular theme or phrase; and yet I could have recognized it anywhere: it had an identity, a personality. For all that, it resisted understanding. It was foreign, far more foreign than this place. It was alien.
Through gritted teeth, I asked several more questions—who his father’s friends were, what cafés he frequented, what mosque he worshipped at. The boy Sufian paused after each, then displayed a small, grim smile, and resumed his whistling. I don’t know what purpose the whistling served—whether it meant something to him, whether it was a comfort, or a weapon, or simply a way of passing the time. I only know that I felt deeply, painfully tired of it.
At this point I gave up, and ordered everyone but Sufian out of the room.
The specifics of what happened next would be difficult to relate, even if I was able to remember them clearly. Much has been said about the “fog of war” that clouds our judgment in times of great stress; the term could also be applied to the tendency of memory to twist and reshape itself, especially the memory of dramatic moments. What is clear to me is that I had intended to make the boy Sufian talk, regardless of the relative unimportance of anything he might say. Indeed, with the translator gone, it was unlikely that I would have been able to understand him, even had I been successful. In any event, the fact remains that the boy’s continued silence (his speechlessness, that is—I am not figuring his strange, frightening whistling into this characterization) represented a danger to the stability of the facility, the morale of the men and women under my command, and the pliability of his fellow detainees.
In addition, I am certain, and I openly admit this, that I used some degree of physical coercion in my efforts to break the boy’s silence. This would have been inevitable, given his failure to respond to verbal persuasion. And the one other certainty, as far as I can tell, is that the boy must have had some physical infirmity, perhaps the result of the violence in his neighborhood before his apprehension by U.S. troops, perhaps some congenital condition, which made him particularly susceptible to the effects of rough handling.
Whatever the case, I of course regret the outcome. But the actual end result was not, in fact, my original intention; and while no one can be blamed except myself, I consider it reasonable to regard the boy as, in a larger sense, a casualty of war.
I do remember my profound exhaustion at the end of that day, and I recall taking the unusual step of returning to barracks and going to bed before it was dark. I also remember the soldiers who came to me the next day to ask me what should be done with the boy’s body.
In addition, I remember, with quite painful clarity, the faces of the men and women under my command when I gathered them together in the mess and tried to initiate a conversation about where, and how, precisely, our efforts had gone awry, and what we might do to begin to rectify our situation. Their misery and confusion were manifest in their stunned staring eyes, and when I received no reasonable comments or suggestions, I understood that my authority had finally been stretched beyond its limits and snapped. I forgave them all in that moment, for it had been my own incapacity to lead that had brought us to this juncture, and it was beyond my power to bring us out.
And now, at last, I sat at my desk, having come in from the drainage pits and thrown up, and I stared at the empty chair where the boy had sat, and I wondered what had been done with his body, and whether I had been told and forgotten, or never been told, or whether it was all just a nightmare from which I could not, however desperately I struggled to lift my head, wake up. My mind, at this juncture, was far too tired to hold on to any thought for long. I barely had the strength to take my keys from my pocket, or to insert one of them into the bottom right-hand drawer, let alone to remove from that drawer the warped and cracked wooden box that contained my father’s Enfield. But I did it: I set it on the desk before me, and lifted the creaking lid, and stared for seconds, minutes, maybe hours at the gun there.
I did not, of course, kill myself—in retrospect, I doubt the thing would have fired, so long had it been since I had cleaned or even inspected it; and I don’t believe that suicide was even my intention. Rather, I was reminiscing about my father, about our terribly flawed life together, and his sad end, when a knock came at the door, and the knob rattled, and I heard the jingle of keys. A moment later the door fell open.
They were hard and healthy, the soldiers, in contrast with my own. They were from the general, I understood, and had come for me at last. I went willingly, leaving the Enfield behind, and I never saw the gun, the facility, or any of my men again.
I was taken care of in the days and weeks leading up to the hearings. From my Washington hotel, I gazed out upon the busy lives of civilians, who had already grown weary of the war, which they thought they’d been permitted to forget, which was supposed to fade away into a memory of triumph.
The hearings themselves were of little consequence. By and large I was questioned gently, apologetically, and what few difficult questions arose, I was evidently able to answer to the satisfaction of all. When I was asked about the boy, I told them that I didn’t know how he had died. When I was asked if he had died during an interrogation, I replied that, no, he was no longer under questioning at that time. When I was asked if perhaps he had been beaten by one of his fellow prisoners—perhaps a terrorist eager to prevent his divulging vital information—I answered that such a thing was indeed a plausible explanation.
I was followed at the stand by a physician I had never seen in my life, who testified that, after examining the body of the dead detainee, he c
ould find no evidence that he had been questioned under duress, or in any way abused by prison guards.
When it was over, I was told to choose a place to live, and I chose a small town in the Midwest where I knew no one. I was put on indefinite furlough, set up in an apartment, and given an assumed name. A bank account was established for me, and soon my back pay and previous savings were transferred to me, along with an additional large amount, the purpose of which was never clearly articulated.
I don’t recall with any degree of precision what I did in those months. I was aware that my case was publicized, but by that time the election had taken place, and people were no longer engaged by the Iraq prison torture story. My own awareness of the situation in Iraq was vague, though it seemed clear that it was going no better than it had been when I was there, and perhaps had grown worse. In any event, I tried not to give it much thought. I think I spent a lot of my time walking, out to the edge of town and back, and then out to the other edge of town. I believe I read a lot of books, though I don’t recall which ones, or what they were about. I did not have a television; however, I am not certain what I did with the time I would have spent watching television, if I’d had one.
I began to feel as though I had chosen the wrong place to live, and that I should leave and go somewhere else. And one day, many months after my discharge, I closed out my bank account, and loaded everything I owned—it was not much—into my car, and drove east until at last I arrived in Gerrysburg, and bought the land upon which the house and the rock and the castle stood. I suppose that, in the end, this was something that I needed to do.
With painful effort, I managed to stand and raise my arm up to my own waiting hand. I braced my feet against the pit wall and began, slowly, to scale it; my other self leaned back, counterbalancing himself against my weight. My broken ribs rang with pain, but I would not stop until I had reached the top. When I had nearly made it, a second hand appeared to pull me the rest of the way, and I grabbed it. At last I was up and out, and I released my grip, and as I collapsed to the forest floor I was surprised to discover that my other self was nowhere to be seen.
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