The order was given: “Whatever you do, don’t drink the water with the purple label!”
No wait: “FRAGO! Don’t drink the water with the blue label. The purple label’s fine.”
Because it was hot, and they were thirsty, some guys got fed up with the confusion and drank whatever water came their way. So Dizl started a rumor that the terrorists had put semen in the blue-labeled bottles along with all the other crap. This at least kept the Lost Boys from drinking it.
Eventually, a better product, or at least ones containing no visible life-forms, replaced the bad water. The ground at Abu Ghraib as, indeed, all over Iraq, was littered with plastic bottles. When they come to excavate this ancient land, archaeologists of the future will find, amid the old news of bones, teeth, and scraps of sharpened metal, the plastics that will alone declare this to have been a more modern violence.
5 Ricks, Fiasco, 204.
6 Ricks, Fiasco, 309.
SIX
WHY?
“[The Iraqi Shiites are] the insurmountable obstacle.”
—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in a letter to Osama bin Laden
“MY BIGGEST REGRET of my life is becoming a statistic of Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq,” Dizl said, years after returning home “safe and sound.”
He was riding the ferry home to North Haven one afternoon when he found himself in a conversation about the war in Iraq, and his time there, with a woman he knew in the way all Mainers seem to know each other.
“Why were you in Iraq?” she asked.
“My country sent me,” Dizl replied.
“Do you regret going?”
“No.”
“What did you do there?”
“My unit replaced the picture takers at Abu Ghraib.”
“Did you get injured?”
“Yes, I was blown up, and received a moderate TBI.”
“We should just bring all our troops home, and let them just kill themselves.”
“We can’t, remember September 11? Al-Qaeda will do that again.”
“Would you go back?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Is it all really worth it?”
Dizl pondered for a moment before answering. Not because he didn’t have an answer, but because his experience told him that if he stood up for what he believed in, people would become uncomfortable, exclusionary, and discriminating
“Ask any family member of someone who was murdered on September 11 if it’s all worth it.”
They talked about politics, and he explained that the Taliban is Afghanistan’s problem, and that we are after al-Qaeda. He asked her to try and imagine North Haven Island suddenly being populated by a thousand Republicans. Her eyes got big as she exclaimed, “Oh, God!”
His antianxiety meds are designed to help Dizl coexist with people like the nurse from the ferry, or any number of the American populace who aren’t bothered by their own apathy and ignorance.
Dizl gets criticized for not going to basketball games on the island. He can’t go because the cheering people remind him of thousands of screaming detainees that were being slaughtered by insurgent mortars, and of a man being brought to the base of his tower by his family. The dying man continued hemorrhaging blood as they begged Dizl to help him. Dizl can’t forget the man gasping like a fish on the ice, his eyes bulging wide as he looked up at Dizl and died. The dead man’s family still glares at the retired soldier in his dreams, as if somehow haunting Dizl for the murder of their loved one.
“We had no stuff,” he tells his nightmares in desperation. “We were surrounded. I begged, borrowed, or stole any lifesaving tools that I could get my hands on.”
To this day, if Dizl shares this truth with people, they think he’s crazy. “Oh poor dear,” they say. “He’s just too intense; let’s not invite them to dinner. Just knowing is too much for me.”
They don’t care that when Dizl goes to bed at night, he has no tangible sense of what he did that day; TBI and PTSD threw a real kink in his short-term memory. The truth is, Dizl never really left Abu Ghraib. He brought a piece of Maine there, and then turned around and brought a piece of that terrible place home with him to roost.
The Islamic faith, to which virtually all Iraqis subscribe, traces its origins to the early seventh-century life and ministry of the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet was born sometime around the end of the sixth century, and by the time he died in 632 he had conquered most of Arabia. He had, unfortunately, failed to clearly nominate a successor.
Within the first decades, therefore, a power struggle had erupted between those who wanted Islam to be led by a khalif (Arabic for “successor,” and rendered in English as “caliph”) and those who believed that the leadership should descend through the biological line of the Prophet traced through Ali, husband to Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima. The competition between these two groups quickly turned violent, and much of the violence played out within the territory of what is now known as Iraq, which had first fallen under the dominion of Islam in 633.
Imam Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, dwelled in Iraq and was assassinated there. As per Ali’s instructions, his followers strapped his body to a white camel and buried him where the camel stopped; this site became the holy city of Najaf.
Hussein, the son of Ali and the grandson of the Prophet, was killed, or “martyred,” by the superior forces of the Caliphate near Kerbala.
Thus in 2004, when Al-Qaeda in Iraq—a Sunni group—detonated a series of car and suicide bombs in Kerbala and Baghdad that killed hundreds, the victims were Shiite pilgrims gathering in ritual mourning for the death of Hussein ibn Ali. And when the violence in present-day Iraq is met with disgusted explanations along the lines of “these people have been killing each other for centuries,” this is what they are talking about.
Tempting though it is to declare the ancient Sunni/Shiite divide a permanent obstacle to cooperation and peace among Muslims, it should be said that religious animosity could be intensified, or even created, by political rivalries in which goods other than theological correctness are at stake.
Protestants and Catholics fought bitter, horrendously violent wars against each other, and not only in the far distant past but more recently, as seen in Northern Ireland. At the same time, people have been known to omit even foundational theological disagreements and cooperate nicely when it is in both of their interests or those of external, dominant powers.
Faith, in other words, can prove interchangeable and malleable when profitable. Unfortunately, religious identity in the Iraq of 2004 had become a hard bright line that fewer and fewer Iraqi citizens could bring themselves to cross.
Saddam Hussein was a Sunni and his Baath Party was likewise predominantly Sunni. Afghanistan is largely Sunni, with the Taliban representing the fundamentalist end of the Sunni spectrum. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are offshoots of the Sunni fundamentalist Wahabi movement in Saudi Arabia.
In 1979, Wahabis took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, trapping thousands of worshippers and provoking a siege and final battle in which hundreds died, but the American public, riveted by the Iranian hostage crisis playing out at the same time, paid little attention to this cataclysmic event.
This was unfortunate; “the siege of Mecca” would prove the beginning of our problems with bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The insurgent group Al-Qaeda in Iraq that sprang up in the aftermath of the invasion, and its leader, al-Zarqawi, are also Sunnis and boast a far higher proportion of foreign—especially Saudi—fighters as well.
In neighboring Iran the overwhelming majority are Shiites—estimates put the percentage at 90–95. With 63 percent of the total, Shiites make up a smaller majority in Iraq, with the remainder of the populace composed of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and a sprinkling of Christians. Despite their greater numbers, the Sunnis have politically and socially dominated Iraqi Shiites in part due to the fact that the Sunnis were favored by the British during the period of British colonial rule, and afterward they enjoyed the de fac
to support of the United States and Western Europe.
Political power tends to translate into economic power, and Iraq’s Sunnis have reaped the associated benefits of better nutrition, housing, health care, and education, making them seem more familiar to Westerners.
Knowing just this much, one might begin to understand why a nation weakened by years of political repression and misrule; two disastrous, bloody wars; a decade of sanctions; and the chaos, disorder, and violence that followed the American invasion could so easily slide into the prepared grooves of sectarian revenge, power struggles, and cyclical violence.
One can tidy up the situation the Mainers walked into in 2004 to 2005, with its jumbled names of cities, militias, and battles, by imagining a very rough line drawn between north and south. In the north there was a Sunni majority: al-Qaeda, al-Zarqawi, Fallujah, Mosul, and Anbar Province. Shiite groups, Kerbala, Najaf, Nasseria, Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Sadr Militia operated to the south.
Smack in the disputed center is the capital, Baghdad, and its hapless satellite, Abu Ghraib.
When the Mainers arrived in Iraq, they knew little or nothing about Islam. But in this, they were no different from the majority of Americans, for whom Islam is as mysterious (and perhaps as frightening) as Christianity doubtless appears to an Iraqi. While a bit of cultural sensitivity training formed part of the anxious little mini-education stuffed in at Camp Victory, soldiers and detainees would learn most of what they would ever know of their respective characters and cultures from each other.
The gulf that separated the Mainers’ and detainees’ respective understanding of what was happening at Abu Ghraib made itself clear in a conversation Red had with a group in Ganci 7 in the days that followed the first mass casualty attack in April. Having mustered their courage and best English vocabulary, they demanded, “Mister-mister, why are you doing this to us?”
After a short, mutually bewildering back-and-forth, it emerged that these detainees had reached the conclusion that it was the Americans, or their Coalition Partners, who were mortaring Abu Ghraib.
That is, since the Americans had taken the Iraqis into custody because they thought they were bad, it followed that they had been brought to Abu Ghraib to be concentrated into dense groups and bombed out of existence.
The fact that, as Red pointed out, American soldiers were also being injured and killed by the mortars wasn’t persuasive. Perhaps they had learned to judge brutality by the “what would Saddam do?” standard, and assumed Americans also believed that committing mass murder was simply routine politics.
On the other hand, perhaps their interpretation was based on the worldwide public image of the United States—the rhetoric President Bush and past presidents pushed to the world that the United States is the world’s only superpower, a nation of unlimited resources and astonishing power.
Our psychological operations had done a fantastic job reinforcing this message to the people of Iraq, especially when it preceded the undeniably unmatched might of the US military. Ipso facto, Americans can do whatever we want to do, and it follows that if we don’t do something it is because we have chosen not to. When our troops didn’t prevent the looting of Iraq’s treasures, protect pilgrims at holy sites from mass murder, or house detainees in decent, safe, and hygienic facilities, it stood to reason in the detainees’ minds that their harrowing experiences in Abu Ghraib were all part of a carefully orchestrated American plot.
In processing, where detainees and their guards met for the first time, there was nothing done to alleviate the mutual incomprehension. It started with a captured Iraqi being informed—via an unvetted interpreter—that they were being sent to Abu Ghraib. To the average Iraqi, this was akin to a citizen of the Soviet Union being informed that they were going to the Gulag.
For similar reasons, not even the most pro-Coalition Iraqi could possibly drive in through the gates of Abu Ghraib feeling optimistic about his prospects, and none of what he saw within its walls would soothe him.
Specialist Yogi met new arrivals at the low building bearing a sign reading “391st Military Police Battalion Detainee Inprocessing.” It was a tidy white sign, decorated with reproductions of the shoulder patches worn by airborne and MP units in charge, but its effect was somewhat spoiled by the words “Prisoner Inprocessing,” which had earlier been spray-painted in large black and, unfortunately, permanent letters on the gritty concrete wall.
The wall itself was cracked and battered; large chunks were missing as if some giant toddler had been teething on the concrete. Wires looped, snakelike, from eyebolt to eyebolt before disappearing behind a doorframe. Was it age, looting, or gunfire that knocked off patches of the cement cladding? What were the wires draped across the building and disappearing through the doors going to be used for?
Original windows had been covered over with plywood, and two plywood doors marked PRISONER ENTRY and VISITORS were flanked by makeshift benches made out of boards resting on stacked concrete blocks. There was one battered, plastic garbage can and an air conditioning unit with its tangled wire snaking through a gap cut into the visitor’s doorframe.
Meanwhile, Yogi had been told he could assume the men presented to him at inprocessing (in groups numbering as many as 125 at a time) were fighters, insurgents, or head-choppers, any one or more of whom might just have made a personal decision that very morning to kill as many Americans as possible before taking the express route from Abu Ghraib to Paradise.
Surely this was true for at least some of the men and women who walked through those doors, and all of them looked the part. Meanwhile, presumably, the Iraqis could do the math as easily as he could: Yogi drove the bus from inprocessing to Ganci alone, outnumbered by the prisoners one hundred (or more) to one. No other soldiers rode the bus with him, not even a single ally who might’ve sat, facing backward, to keep an eye on the passengers while he drove.
“There were never enough of us,” Dizl would say, “never enough of the right people. So we had to become the right people. We had to make ourselves enough.”
On one occasion, when the descriptions of the group waiting for him at inprocessing were especially hair-raising, Yogi decided a bit of theater was called for.
All the Mainers kept a bottle of hand sanitizer tucked into a helmet-strap, in the hope that frequent use would keep pathogens at bay. Yogi gave his helmet a generous coating of the stuff.
Hand sanitizer is mostly alcohol, and thus it’s flammable. Yogi paused briefly outside the room where the incoming detainees awaited him, lit his helmet on fire, and burst through the doors.
“Welcome to hell, my friends. Time to learn the rules!”
Other times, Yogi and Skeletor were assigned to be “mobile rovers.” It was their job to patrol the perimeters of the compounds looking for fights, suspicious activity, and breaches in the concertina wire. They were also to serve as backup to the other mobile rovers in adjacent compounds. Periodically they also manned a tower for a comrade who needed to hit the head or sneak a smoke.
As a mobile rover, one of Yogi’s more exciting responsibilities was to perform the headcounts in Gancis 7 and 8. This meant stripping off body armor and gun belt and entering a compound through the double gates of the “shark cage” carrying nothing but a pen and a clipboard.
The hundreds of detainees would line up in front of him. Stepping forward one by one, they would present their wristband for Yogi’s inspection. The bands looked something like a hospital identity bracelet and they displayed a small photograph of the detainee together with his eleven-digit identification number. Yogi would match the number to the name on his list, check that the photo resembled its wearer, and make appropriate notations.
Count was often the time when Yogi would be told of minor medical problems or other needs, and sometimes news of a planned riot or other dangerous activity would be mumbled beneath the breath of a detainee, his face kept carefully blank.
Yogi had received virtually no training in any of this. Indeed, on the first day
that he entered Ganci 8 to perform his first Count, no one had thought to tell him that Ganci 8 was reserved primarily for detainees strongly suspected of being Fedayeen: the trained, loyal, and angry remnants of the paramilitary organization created by Saddam.
When Yogi—sans armor, sans weapon—entered the compound, he found himself swiftly encircled by detainees, their eyes and body language transmitting enough hostility to make the hot air crackle.
Yogi beat a tactical retreat to return later with reinforcements. Count was completed, but it was a disquieting experience. After all, it was plain that there weren’t enough MPs available to have reinforcements for every Count (which guards had to complete three times per shift).
“I can help you with this,” declared a short, wiry, utterly self-confident Marine, when the problem was discussed over dinner in the chow hall that evening.
“Do you smoke?”
“Yes,” said Yogi.
“This is what you do,” said the Marine, who had taken on the nickname Gunsmoke. “Tomorrow morning, you go into Ganci 8 just like you did today, all by yourself. Those Fedayeen form up around you again, if they start with the eye-fucking again, you just stand in front of the guy you figure to be the leader of the gang. And you light yourself a cigarette …”
“Yeah?”
“… and hold it up in the air like this.” Gunsmoke demonstrated, clamping a ballpoint between his second and third fingers so that it poked up in the air.
“All right,” said Yogi skeptically. “But where are you going to be?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be in the tower.”
“Great. You’ll be a hundred yards away.”
“Just hold the cigarette up for … let’s say ten seconds.”
“10-4,” said Yogi. “If you say so.”
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 7
