Kaboom

by Matthew Gallagher

  An Iraqi National Police commando waits for his Black Hawk helicopter chalk to depart during an air assault mission.

  When Captain Frowny-Face informed us about the missions and their intent, I expressed some misgivings about conducting show-of-force missions nearly six years into the Iraq War. It seemed like counter-counterinsurgency to me; the Iraqis were all too familiar with our weaponry, and all kinds of historical data proved the success of COIN rested with restraint instead of show of power. Captain Frowny-Face nodded and told me I could e-mail our new brigade commander if I cared that much, as long as I didn’t include him in the inevitable mess that would follow. I laughed, said, “Roger,” and asked to go on one of the air assaults since I knew, on a visceral level, I’d have a hell of a time.

  I awoke with the sun on the day of our air assault into Sabah Qasar. I hurried over to the chow hall for a quick coffee and bowl of cereal, threw on my body armor and helmet, grabbed my rifle, and walked over to the JSS’s helipad. I met Lieutenant Mongo en route.

  “Your cav buddies are going to forsake you,” he told me with a grin. “Doing an air assault is pretty infantry. I thought you all avoided helicopters like the plague?”

  “We do,” I responded. “But we hate PowerPoint more, so at least this gets me away from a computer for a few hours. Do Black Hawks have barf bags like commercial airplanes do?”

  At the helipad, two squads of Iraqi National Police joined Lieutenant Mongo’s platoon, in addition to our battalion XO and Captain Frowny-Face. I had been assigned to SFC B’s patrol team, and I walked over to him and his guys.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I’m not going to piss in your Kool-Aid. Just let me know if you need me to chat someone up or drink some chai. I know you and your guys know what you’re doing.”

  “Sir,” he replied while arching his eyebrows, “we’re all just along for the ride on a boondoggle like this. Who knows, though, maybe we’ll finally find those weapons of mass destruction.”

  Ten minutes later, the four Black Hawks arrived, and we began our cold-load training with the grounded helicopters. Every patrol split into two loads for two helicopters, with each load carrying four American soldiers and three Iraqi National Police. It took five minutes for us to learn how to run, jump into, and quickly buckle up inside the Black Hawk. It took another five minutes for us to learn how to jump out and drop immediately into the prone position, rifles in the shooting position. It took us fifteen minutes to get the Iraqis to understand why they needed to point their AK-47 muzzles down in the helicopter instead of up.

  For such a violence-centric culture, I thought to myself, they sure aren’t big on gun safety.

  While we waited for the actual mission to ensue, the bomb-sniffing dogs assigned to one of the other patrols began barking unmercifully at the various Iraqi National Police. The NPs, men who had shown no fear in the face of their own potential deaths on many occasions, shrank away from the German shepherds like turtles retreating into their shells. “Nothing like teaching our canines to be racist!” a junior NCO of Hispanic descent from Lieutenant Mongo’s platoon boomed. “They may not be able to see brown, but they sure can fucking smell it!”

  Shortly thereafter, we loaded up onto the Black Hawks and took off. My patrol was a part of the first chalk. For most of the NPs, this served as their first experience in a helicopter; as a result, they could not contain their excitement. Even their sergeant beamed like a flashlight. One of the commandos across from me handed me a digital camera, and I snapped a shot of three of them doing their best Arnold Schwarzenegger pose. I, in turn, handed them my digital camera, and they snapped a photograph of an NP commando and me. We both smiled instead of postured.

  I garnered a seat on the end of the Black Hawk, and thus had an excellent view of the scenery below us, albeit through a window. Irrigated squares of green and blue intermixed with grainy, desert blobs, with small building blocks suddenly rising up out of the passing dust lands like pop-ups at a target range. Highways became streaking black tears, while roads transformed into isolated angles of dirt specks. A cloudscape of white fluff floated by, seizing us in its wake. Everything about the Iraq I knew so well on the ground changed, except for one thing. The great Tigris River still refused to stir. Even from a bird’s eye view in the sky, it still slinked along with all the worry of a worm.

  “Two minutes!” the crew chief screamed from the front of the chopper. We all gathered ourselves and prepared for a rapid offload. The earth swirled up at us as we descended, and I verified that my rifle was locked and loaded. “One minute” became “thirty seconds,” which became “ten seconds,” which became “go go go!” and the large metal door swung across my line of vision. I counted one, two, three, four bodies by me, then leapt out into the sunny unknown, pacing three steps to my right before plunging down to the ground in the prone position, rifle oriented out.

  Thank you, Jesus, I whispered, for not letting me fuck that up somehow. The cavalry jokes never would have ended.

  As the helicopter took off, its rotary wing beating at the air behind me, I took in our surroundings. We had landed in the middle of a farmer’s crop field, and I saw a few locals fleeing from us in every direction. Good Christ, I thought, they think we’re reenacting La Drang Valley. Can’t say that I blame them, either. Four Black Hawk helicopters landing in a retirement community couldn’t be considered normal, even in central Iraq. We stood up and moved to the large security perimeter being established by the soldiers from the other choppers.

  It took us about ten minutes to get a proper head count and break into our respective patrol groups. Mine headed southeast to clear a neighborhood of about ten farmhouses and unknown building structures. The locals we encountered seemed, at best, confused as to why we had arrived at their homes in such a fashion; at worst, their faces sealed themselves in absolute panic. No amount of smiling or friendly American bumbling could get them to calm down—given the elderly age of most of the population, I was just glad we didn’t stumble upon a dead body, post-heart attack.

  At the second farmhouse we approached, we found an old Iraqi man sitting on the front stoop. He spoke in Arabic as soon as we got within earshot of him.

  “He say we can take whatever we want,” the interpreter told SFC B and me.

  “Huh?” SFC B snorted. “What, does he think we’re hear to rob him?”

  The interpreter spoke to the old man, who grunted back a few phrases, then went back to staring off into the distance.

  “He does not care,” the terp translated. “He just want quiet.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess old people are the same everywhere.”

  We roamed houses, fields, and shacks, finding absolutely nothing of interest, beyond an old military pistol a retired colonel claimed was a relic of the Iran-Iraq War. I let him keep it, and he kissed me on both cheeks. I silently hoped I hadn’t contracted herpes in the process. After three hours of this, we moved back to the landing zone, learning that the villagewide cache sweep had yielded zero people of interest and zero caches. Then the helicopters landed again, picked us up, and whisked us back to JSS Istalquaal.

  Once situated back on the choppers, the NPs celebrated, smiling widely and giving one another high-fives. The American soldiers leaned glumly on their rifle butts, seemingly eager for an early afternoon nap. The Black Hawk pilots interrupted both states of mind by swooping the helicopters on the way back, giving the trip a roller coaster feel.

  Once we landed back at the JSS, Lieutenant Rant met us at the helipad. He grinned wickedly at me as I cleared my rifle of ammunition, a golden round twirling to the ground.

  “You show those old people what we’re capable of?” he asked.

  “You know it.” I spat for effect. “They’re all terrified now.”

  The seesaw of precision targeting in counterinsurgency certainly teetered one way after our air-assault missions. But as a junior captain who operated only at the tactical level, I guess I didn’t really have the ri
ght to determine which side this teeter leaned toward.

  SETTING SONS

  Viva la reconciliation!

  “Hello? Is anyone in here?”

  I recognized Eddie’s voice from the outside door and called him into the company TOC. I sat alone in the TOC, hunched over in my seat, staring intently at my computer screen, clicking the mouse maniacally. Everyone else had left for dinner some minutes before, but due to a game or ten of helicopter, I hadn’t joined them yet.

  “Sir,” Eddie said, “this man, he . . . he is very desperate to talk.”

  “Oh yeah? What about? FUCK!”

  “What’s wrong, sir!”

  “Nothing. I just crashed.” I turned and faced Eddie. “So, what’s up with this dude?”

  “He say he is new Iraqi police who just reported to the Boob al-Sham station last month. He used to be Sahwa but on the other side of Dover. He say his boss hates him and take away his money, other police beat him, all because he is Sunni.”

  “Okay,” I shrugged. “Same old story, then?” After months and months and months of dealing with Iraqis’ complaints and concerns, I’d heard it all. The only request that would surprise me anymore would be for Chemical Ali’s vintage pog collection.

  “Maybe,” Eddie said. “He has big black eye, so maybe not.”

  The second-worst-kept secret in Iraq in early 2009—behind Iran’s various ties with and influences on Jaish al-Mahdi’s special groups—was the Iraqi national government’s contentious relationship with the Sahwa. Prime Minster Nouri al-Maliki’s Shia-heavy government viewed the Sons of Iraq as the American military’s personal Sunni militia (Sunni Muslims populated most, though not all, of the Sahwa’s ranks) and held them in contempt, often reminding the nationalized Iraqi security forces like the army and the National Police that the Sahwa were not a legitimate military organization but hired mercenaries. In my experience with Sahwa members, I found they reciprocated this distrust. Depending on the Sahwa leader and where his particular anger lay, they accused al-Maliki of being a puppet for either America or Iran.

  As our deployment progressed, and 2007 became 2008 and 2008 became 2009, it became increasingly clear that Iraq was not willing to turn the American Sahwa Band-Aid into an Iraqi Sahwa surgery. After months of haggling in the upper echelons of government, they eventually agreed to allow a certain percentage of Sons of Iraq—I heard anywhere from 10 to 25 percent but never read of any conclusive number—the opportunity to transition into official security-force positions, provided they met the prerequisite physical requirements. Further, in the last four months of our deployment, Iraq became responsible for Sahwa payments; as a result, most of the Sahwa leaders trimmed their rosters because the Iraqi government proved far less flexible with payments than the American military had been. Worries that these now former Sons of Iraq would seek employment with the insurgency again spread across Mesopotamia with the subtlety of a drunken weatherman.

  At JSS Istalquaal, we witnessed and dealt with the transition of the Sons of Iraq more and more in the post-SOFA era. When we met with the police commanders, they complained of their new Sahwa recruits, claiming they were lazy, never showed up to work on time, and didn’t conduct themselves professionally. And about once a week, a new police recruit would come to the JSS, stating that all of his coworkers doubled as JAM pawns, that they ostracized him without reason or provocation, and that his pay didn’t match those of the other police. The Shia-Sunni religious divide rested at the core of this split, running across Iraq like a fault line. Because of all of that, the grievances of this man—Eddie told me his name was Saif as we walked over to the meeting room—with the Iraqi police did not seem out of the ordinary. Unjust, sure, if true, but not unusual.

  Still, though, Saif managed to capture my attention when I walked into the sheik room and found the young Iraqi man pacing back and forth, whispering to himself and sporting a large black bruise underneath his right eye.

  After forcefully telling him to sit and to calm down, he explained to me what had happened. He began with a huff.

  “I was Sahwa for over a year, in Rashadiya, because that is where I live. I do my job good, and I like doing it. It made me feel proud and good to put food on my children’s plates. I work with my friends and do many brave things to keep al-Qaeda out of Rashadiya. But then five months ago my sheik tell me and five others we must be policemen because we are younger than other Sahwa.”

  As he spoke, he flailed his arms to and fro, voice ringing and changing pitches like a Southern preacher’s. Ahh, I said to myself. Much respect to the Iraqi’s innate feel for the melodramatic. Eddie offered Saif and me a cigarette; I accepted, but Saif continued ranting.

  “We go through police training in Baghdad, and all of us complete training, because we know we must succeed for Sunnis and for the people of Rashadiya. I finish near top of my class, so I know I am a good police. Then they tell me I must work in Boob al-Sham, even though I am from Rashadiya. They split all of us up, on purpose, I know.”

  “Uh huh.” I jotted down some notes on my pad and looked over at Eddie, who listened diligently. He has the patience of a saint, I thought to myself. There’s no way I could listen to this all day, every day, and not eventually snap and go Columbine on everyone.

  “Then I get to Boob al-Sham. They tell me I am not real police. They say I am junior to them just because I used to be Sahwa. I know it is ’cause I am Sunni. Then the police chief dock my pay for no reason, saying that I am late and that I am not wearing right uniform, but those things are not true. And then”—he held his upper cheekbone in his palm, cradling his black eye, and whispered menacingly—“they do this to me.”

  I leaned across from my chair, patted him on the back, and asked Eddie to have him explain who had done what to him and when.

  “I get to work this morning, and they tell me to go to house in Boob al-Sham, to talk to lady who says her neighbor is in Jaish al-Mahdi. I go with one other police who I know hated me before, and then when we get to house, I turn around and he is gone. I walk into house, and ten men in black masks jump on me and beat on me. I fight back good, but I can’t fight them all. Then they hold knife to my throat and tell me if I don’t quit the Boob al-Sham police and go back to Rashadiya and never come back, they will kill me and kill my entire family.” As Saif finished the story, his body shook with rage, and his voice quivered. What he said didn’t sound entirely viable, but he certainly seemed to believe it to be so, if nothing else.

  I fetched us all a cup of coffee and talked for another thirty or so minutes in an attempt to calm the Iraqi down. I wrote down the names of the men he believed to be involved and assured him that I’d discuss the issue with his police chief. He also claimed that he knew the police chief and most of the men to be JAM members but lacked definitive proof. I asked him to keep his eyes and ears open and to come back to us if he ever learned anything specific. He promised that he would.

  “Thank you,” I told him, “both for what you’re doing for your family and for what you’re doing for your country. I know it’s not easy, but this is very important, and you’re at the forefront of the effort. You should be proud, so keep your head up.”

  “I will,” he stated. “It is my honor.”

  Three days later, at the weekly joint-security meeting, I approached the Boob al-Sham IP chief and mentioned Saif’s name. Before I could go any deeper into my spiel, though, the chief just laughed.

  “That guy?” he said. “He quit yesterday after I docked his pay because he showed up to work three hours late. He is all emotion, no brain. We will be better police station without him.”

  I asked him about Saif’s black eye.

  “I do not know,” the police chief said, eyes blinking repeatedly, now zeroing in on the fact that my questions had been spawned by something other than mere curiosity. “He showed up smelling of whiskey one morning last week with black eye. I just thought it was a drunken fight.”

  That afternoon, perturbed by what the I
P chief had said, I told Eddie to call the cell phone number that Saif had left with us. The number had been disconnected. I asked a few of our contacts within the Boob al-Sham station—all Shia, like everyone there except Saif—about him, and they confirmed the police chief’s version of the events. Unsure of what to do at this point, I told The Great White Hope about him since Rashadiya fell in his company’s AO; I asked him to keep an eye out and told him that I wanted to talk to Saif.

  We never heard from Saif again. One early evening, a few weeks later, I thought I saw him walking on the side of Route Crush at a marketplace as we drove from JSS Istalquaal to Camp Taji. I shouted out for him from the back hatch of the Stryker, but the person didn’t respond and quickly fell out of my vision. The driver asked if I wanted to stop the patrol. I told him no, so we kept driving.

  A GENERATIONAL GAP

  During the last couple months of our fifteen-month tour in Iraq, a general in our chain of command determined that “a generational gap” existed within the officer corps and, to a lesser extent, within the NCO corps as well. He lambasted the field-grade officers below him, who in turn lambasted us, for our perceived deficiencies. According to the forwarded e-mails that I read on the subject, the general believed junior officers lacked proper discipline and didn’t respect authority or military courtesies, and he wanted this rectified. While unconfirmed, a popular rumor spread that the stimulus for all of this occurred when a company commander, of captain rank, responded to a question this general asked with “yeah, sir,” rather than “yes, sir.”

  Many junior officers, myself included, agreed wholeheartedly with the general’s premise that a generational gap existed within the officer corps, although our perception of it differed considerably. After spending most of our deployments at combat outposts with our soldiers, we tended to identify and think like our men more than our superiors probably wanted. Such seemed impossible to avoid, though, especially when said superiors showed up in too-clean uniforms, criticized trivial things, like soldiers not shaving enough or not wearing a full uniform while they walked to the shower, and then drove back to the FOB in time for dinner. We fought in a war. All too often, it seemed like they avoided it. The men often feared Higher more than they did hajjis, scattering like cockroaches to their rooms and locking their doors whenever VIPs arrived at the outpost or JSS. Not all of our visitors behaved like that, of course, but enough did to create the stereotype. The good spoke glowingly in public, listened to the soldiers, and if they saw something they wanted corrected, pulled one of the leaders at the outpost aside. The bad criticized in public, talked rather than listened, and never once realized they were treading in someone else’s house. Rank required that we respect all of our superiors the same, so we did. It didn’t require us to revere or admire them the same.