Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. I admired his restraint, knowing that I wouldn’t have been able to sit on that for an entire meeting. He had probed us and our source network to see if we knew about the detention. While we didn’t consider Hussayn the Star to be the high-ranking JAM leader that the Iraqi National Police did, it still served as quite a coup for them, especially from a public relations standpoint. And, in late-2008 Iraq, getting the general populace to trust and believe in their own security forces probably mattered more than taking apart the insurgent cell networks one by one.

  “Good for you guys!” I said, standing up to clap him on the back and give him a fist pound for good measure. “We hadn’t heard that, but that’s awesome. Congratulations!”

  He took another drag from his cigarette, clearly satisfied, both for capturing Hussayn the Star and for getting one over on the Americans. I let him bask in his victory for a few more seconds before I walked over to a desk in the rear corner, opened a drawer, and pulled out a box. I had a surprise of my own. I tossed the box over to Lieutenant Anwar.

  “Consider that a late Ramadan or early Christmas present,” I said.

  The box contained a brand-new digital camera I had procured from one of 2-14 Cavalry’s supply sergeants back on Camp Taji. It always paid to play nice with the logisticians, and he owed me a favor anyhow. For the past month or so, Lieutenant Anwar had pleaded with us to get him a digital camera, like the ones all American platoons used out in sector. I knew how much practical use the National Police could get out of it and of the slowness of their own bureaucratic supply chain. I also understood how much it meant to Lieutenant Anwar that he’d be able to go back to his commander with this. So, when I had found myself on Camp Taji four days earlier, between a stop at the barber shop and a Taco Bell run, I swung by and picked it up from the supply sergeant.

  He smiled, openly and honestly, blinking his eyes in surprise. “Thank you, Cap-e-tan . . . thank you.” Eddie added, posttranslation, “This gift means very much to him, sir. You do very good thing for Lieutenant Anwar.”

  “No worries, man,” I said. “Let me show you how it works.” As we put in the batteries and Lieutenant Anwar explored the various functions of the camera, he leaned up and put his arm on my shoulder. “Colonel Najij will be very proud of me for this,” he stated. “I will return this favor to you, I promise.”

  I winked at him. “I know you will. I have no doubt.”

  “Do you have family back home?” he asked suddenly. “Wife?” The questions took me aback at first. Through all our meetings, both official and otherwise, we had never ventured into the realm of personal lives. Figuring this was his attempt to tighten our relationship, in light of the digital camera gift, I answered him.

  “I do,” I said. “I have my parents, obviously, and a little brother. And a girlfriend.”

  “Do you have any photographs?” he asked. “I’d like very much to see them.”

  I pulled my wallet out of my pocket. Behind my debit card and military ID, I found two wallet-sized photographs—one, taken when I was still in college, was of my mother, my little brother, my golden retriever, and myself; the other was of my girlfriend. “That’s them,” I said, smirking and shrugging my shoulders. “They are all saints for putting up with me and my antics.”

  “They are very nice-looking people,” Lieutenant Anwar said. “I would like very much to meet them someday.”

  “That’d be cool,” I replied, then remembered some sense of decorum.

  “What about you, dude? You a family man?”

  He quickly pulled out his own wallet. “Yes, I am. I have wife and baby daughter. She is my light.” The photo he showed was of himself, dressed in his police uniform, holding a giggling, smiling baby girl, who I figured to be about a year old. In the photo, his daughter reached up and tugged on his nose, while Lieutenant Anwar smiled with a contentment I never saw him flash on the job.

  “She is very beautiful,” I told him. “You must be very proud.”

  “I am. She is why I fight for Iraq. So she never sees what I have seen.”

  Not knowing what else to say, I simply nodded and changed the subject back to the intricacies of the digital camera. Ten minutes later, I walked him back outside, and we parted ways, promising to meet again the next week. Then I stared at the flame in the distance for a while. It still danced.

  MASTERS OF WAR

  Critics called them war profiteers and vigilantes. Proponents labeled them patriots vital to the Iraq War effort. My interactions with them varied sharply, sometimes evoking my wrath, sometimes invoking my gratitude. Private contractors proliferated in the sands of Iraq throughout the war, and during my time there, they numbered approximately 180,000 in total—about 15,000 more personnel than Coalition forces had serving during the surge’s peak. Of that number, only 20,000 or so served as private security guards, but thanks to the company Blackwater’s infamous time in theater, they became the public face for contractors in Iraq.

  In his presidential farewell address to the nation in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned against such privatization and development of the military-industrial complex. Almost fifty years later, half the globe away from America, it appeared that his words were proving both prophetic and fruitless. One couldn’t walk a half mile at Camp Taji or any of the combat outposts without seeing a sign of Halliburton’s lovechild, KBR—from the trailers we lived in, to the electric outlets we plugged into, to the Porta-Johns we crapped in. In theory, I detested our military’s reliance on civilian enterprises and their nine-to-five work mentality. In practice, I happily ate the chocolate ice cream the army would never have provided and basked in air-conditioning the military probably would have fucked up somehow.

  Just as with soldiers, there were good civilians and bad civilians. Almost all of both qualified as former or retired military. The good ones understood their job existed to help soldiers, to facilitate whatever facet of the war was tasked to them, and they didn’t pretend they still served in the armed forces. The bad ones viewed their job as a perk to retiring from military service, constantly pointed out how much more money they made than the soldiers actually fighting the war, and only cared about their little slice of the Green Machine, big picture be damned.

  Bitching about contractors and their exploits in Iraq felt as natural to soldiers as sleeping and smoking. But outside of a few typical and mundane interactions, I never really got too fired up about them; their presence in our brushfire war seemed natural, given our postmodern republic’s interpretation of free markets and privatized industry. The military-industrial complex had evolved into a monster with thousands and thousands of money-udders for contractors to suckle off of, and I certainly had no right or reason to call foul. Further, I just didn’t see how the daymare of an army of hired guns could ever come to fruition in America—from my perspective, the military presence seemed too strong and influential. One day in the fall of 2008, though, I experienced some of the pitfalls of the growing reliance on the private security firms, albeit on a negligible scale.

  At about nine in the morning, when walking back to my room from the showers at JSS Istalquaal, I spotted something odd: a fleet of up-armored suburbans parked in our motor pool between our Strykers and Humvees. Mildly intrigued, I stopped to watch a group of tall, white, large-chested men walk over to the Iraqi police side of the JSS. Most sported thick, lumberjack beards and baseball caps and wore various mishmashes of military and police gear. I stood a good two hundred meters away from them, but it appeared that they carried a variety of assault rifles as well. One of them looked over at me, so I gave a little wave, while holding my hygiene kit and shower towel and wearing flip-flops. He didn’t wave back. Once they disappeared through the IP gate, I continued to my room. When I walked by the motor pool again a few hours later, I noticed the up-armored suburbans were gone. I never did learn exactly why they came to our JSS, although Captain Frowny-Face thought some State Department official had arrived for a meeting that mo
rning. At the time, I assumed they were Blackwater (now known as Xe) personnel, but they could just as likely have been from DynCorp or Triple Canopy, two other private security firms employed by the U.S. State Department.

  I didn’t give the unknown men with lumberjack beards and safari bush vests another thought until two days later, when Lieutenant Rant walked into the TOC.

  “Some Iraqi just came in and said we had destroyed his car,” he told me.

  “Oh yeah?” I was playing a helicopter video game on my computer, and Lieutenant Rant’s story didn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary. Iraqis had proven very adept at concocting ways to elicit money from us, and this tale lacked all kinds of creativity points.

  “Yeah, but he said it wasn’t us, it was Americans in trucks or something, who didn’t wear normal uniforms. He said it happened right on Dover too. You hear anything about that?”

  I paused my game and looked up. “No,” I replied, “but I did see some Blackwater dudes here two days ago. When did this supposedly happen?”

  “Two days ago, around noon.” Still standing and leaning against a nearby pillar, Lieutenant Rant shook his head. “He said there was a traffic jam ahead, and the trucks were honking and weaving around like mad men and plowed straight into him going pretty fast. He said his wife had to go to the hospital, and his car is completely totaled. He brought in a photo of a busted car, but that could be from anything.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “That sucks. Think it’s true?”

  Lieutenant Rant shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? He wouldn’t be the first Iraqi to lie about this, but then again, it wouldn’t be the first time those security guys destroyed an Iraqi’s personal property. He said they barely stopped, but they told him to come here for reimbursement.”

  “Hah!” This story became more believable by the minute. “What did you do?”

  “The only thing I could do. I listened to him for forty-five minutes because no one else would. Then I gave him a claims card, showed him how to fill it out, and told him to go to Camp Taji with it. Hopefully, they’ll pay him there.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “hopefully.” I paused and gave a fist pump. “In other news, I’m up to 6,000 points on the helicopter game.”

  “You bastard!”

  While the alleged car wreck paled in comparison to some of the greater private security firm scandals of the Iraq War—like the Blackwater Baghdad shootings in Nisoor Square on September 16, 2007, when seventeen Iraqi civilians lost their lives—it served as a firsthand display for me that contractors played by different rules than those of us on active duty. While the majority of these security contractors doubtlessly executed their duties professionally and honorably, the stark lack of accountability after a crisis continued to plague the firms. Because they were beholden to their respective companies rather than to a nation or a national purpose (like the Iraqi counterinsurgency), private security firms in the Iraq War incarnated President Eisenhower’s worst fears. As with any private enterprise, they were motivated to make money and protect their investments, even at the expense of more ambitious and loftier goals. Providing for oneself and one’s family definitely qualifies as an honorable intention for an individual, but that can’t be said for an organization as a whole. While the military had its own share of scandals over the course of the war, the institution itself held grander ambitions and higher purposes than financial benefit. The same could not be said of the private security firms. It showed.

  ALL HALLOWS’ EVE

  “So, Ali, who do you think is going to win the Super Bowl this year?”

  Hooting and hollering from the group of soldiers in Alpha Company’s common area drowned out the familiar jingle of the cable television channel ESPN’s Sportscenter, which played on the television in the front of the room. At a complete loss for words, I did my best to soak up the surrealism of the moment, while standing in the back of the room. Seven of Lieutenant Mongo’s soldiers sat on leather couches or stood, holding their M4s, most watching ESPN through the Armed Forces Network on television. Four of them wore skeleton masks on top of their heads, a remnant of the mission they had completed twenty minutes earlier on this Halloween night. One of the others sported a rainbow clown wig and a big red clown nose. Meanwhile, two bound and blindfolded Iraqis sat on the couches between them in grimy brown and grey pajamas, giving the illusion that they were just as entranced by the football highlights on Sportscenter as the soldiers. The unintentional comedy of the situation registered off the charts, something not lost on the men assigned to guard the Iraqis.

  “Someone needs to record this shit,” a junior NCO said as he gave one of the men a bottle of water. “We could be on the next ESPN commercial and get famous.”

  One of the Iraqis mumbled something in Arabic and held up his hands, likely claiming they were bound too tightly. While a young specialist went over to him to loosen the flex-cuffs, another soldier patted the Iraqi on the back. “I agree, Mohammed. The Patriots suck this year without Tom Brady. Good fucking point. If you ever get out of jail, you should become a broadcaster for ESPN 12: The Hajjis.”

  The room exploded with laughter, and I chuckled right along. The irony of the moment demanded it.

  The backstory for our current set of circumstances wasn’t quite as hilarious. Acting on a local-national tip, Lieutenant Mongo’s platoon cut short their Halloween party to conduct a raid in Hussaniyah for Abbas the Beard, Ali the Beard’s younger half-brother. Both served as high-ranking JAM special-groups leaders. The house reported to us proved to be a dry hole, but in the building next door, the Bad Boys found a man matching Abbas’s physical description with two other military-aged males. Captain Frowny-Face gave the go-ahead to bring them in for tactical questioning; according to both American regulations and Iraqi laws, we had twenty-four hours to keep them at the JSS before we needed to free them or officially detain them and transport them to Camp Taji. Once they arrived back at JSS Istalquaal, though, we realized that the trailer normally used to keep potential detainees had been moved by an engineer unit. Since the HUMINT collection teams preferred to tactically question the men one at a time in the meeting room, we found the next-best option for available waiting space while the three rotated through—the common area.

  I left the soldiers and the Iraqis to their football highlights and walked into the sheik meeting room, where Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull and Specialist Wildebeest sat with Eddie, talking to the purported Abbas the Beard. The Iraqi’s blindfold had been lifted, and he spoke wildly, tongue wagging like an auctioneer’s. Specialist Wildebeest spoke to him, while Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull stared at him protractedly and dismissively.

  “How goes it?” I asked.

  “Same old story,” Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull replied. “He says he isn’t Abbas the Beard, but he has heard of him. We have the source Las Cruces coming in to identify him.”

  “Las Cruces? You seriously couldn’t come up with a better nickname than Las Cruces?”

  Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull laughed. “Don’t hate, sir. It sticks out in your mind, doesn’t it?”

  I scratched my head. “Yeah, I guess so. Where’s Lieutenant Rant?”

  “He’s inventorying all the stuff they brought back with the three Iraqis in the radio room.”

  “Cool. Come get me when Las Crucifixion gets here, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  I found Lieutenant Rant in the radio room, just as Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull had stated. He wore a pair of blue latex, antiseptic gloves to keep his fingerprints off the inventory.

  “They find anything good?”

  Lieutenant Rant shook his head. “Just the one AK every household has. There are a bunch of papers too, but they really aren’t worth checking out unless we get confirmation that this is actually Abbas. At first glance, it just looks like typical household stuff, like bills and journals.”

  A few minutes later, Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull walked into the radio room. “We may have a problem,” he told me
and Lieutenant Rant.

  “What’s that?”

  “Las Cruces says it’s not him. We showed him a digital photo of these guys outside. He says it looks just like him, but it’s not the actual Abbas the Beard.”

  “Fucking fantastic.”

  “But”—Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull paused, choosing his words carefully—“Las Cruces has mad street cred because he used to be in JAM. He might still be with them. So he might be lying to try to save Abbas for whatever reason.”

  “Possible,” I responded. “Any chance any of the other sources could come in and say definitively?”

  He shook his head. “No, sir, not with the time requirements we have. Most of them are too scared to come here, especially at night. They think the IPs and the NPs have rats who’ll spot them. Captain Frowny-Face told me to send the photos to brigade, though, for confirmation up there. Sometimes they have more info and better photographs than we do.”

  I walked back to the common area and joined the soldiers and the Iraqis for more Sportscenter highlights. The paradoxical contrast of the situation had faded, and to a man, we all just wanted some clarification so we could go to bed. I fully expected brigade to confirm Las Cruces’s assessment, and then we’d free the three Iraqis, apologizing profusely and giving them a free breakfast MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat, prepackaged army food) for their trouble. When Lieutenant Rant walked out of the company TOC ten minutes later, blinking in surprise, I asked him what had happened.

  “I just talked to some intel major from brigade on the phone. She says it’s definitely him.”