The next morning, Yogi went back to Ganci 8. He peeled off his body armor and weapons and let himself in through the shark cage. Again, he found himself surrounded by glowering men. With casual aplomb, Yogi pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, put it to his lips, and lit it. He took a good, deep lungful of smoke and then held the cigarette up above his right shoulder, as he had been instructed.
There was a very brief (far less than ten seconds) silence. Then the crack of a rifle, and a cloud of gritty dirt squirted up from the bare ground ahead of Yogi’s boots.
Yogi brought his hand around and inspected what was left of the cigarette. It had been clipped off, very neatly, just above the point where the small white paper cylinder emerged from between his knuckles.
His eyes refocused beyond the amputated cigarette, and his cold blue gaze met and held the basilisk stare of the leader of these Fedayeen.
“Do we understand each other now?” he asked.
Further on in the deployment, Dizl gave Yogi and the others some pointers he’d picked up, having been trained as a prison guard and working in a high-risk “super” maximum-security prison.
“Vary your route and your routine,” he advised, pointing out that people are much more habit driven than we think, and habit breeds predictability. “It’s too easy to fall into a predictable routine, turning right at the command post door every morning, walking clockwise and then counterclockwise, day after day. Given that you eat at more or less the same times, it is normal for your body to declare itself ready for the Port-a-John with such reliable regularity that a detainee could set his watch by you, if he had one.”
Dizl’s insights were validated when, during a search of one of the detainee’s tents, they found a piece of paper neatly charting the guard’s names, their shifts, meals, bathroom breaks, and days off. Such information was invaluable when it came to the timing of such activities as transferring contraband, beating up a rival, or planning an escape.
When not on roving patrol, Dizl and the other soldiers were working in a guard tower. It was an activity similar to standing watch on an offshore scallop dragger or working a fire tower in the big North woods. The guy in the tower was tasked with keeping his eyes peeled for problems. Other people had the job of putting the fires out.
Ganci’s fires were (usually) metaphorical, though they burned hot. When they weren’t trying to dodge incoming mortar rounds, the detainees at Abu Ghraib did what any confined, bored group of humans will do: They invented social problems and then attempted to solve them. At least some of these solutions took violent forms; physical assaults were not uncommon.
The center towers, like Tower 7-1, had two seats in which two soldiers could sit back to back, one guy facing the sunrise, the other watching the sun set. They did this for fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. Sometimes they’d do this for weeks at a time before getting a day off to recover.
Tower 7-1 was nicknamed the Hawk’s Nest because of the tactical and visually important position it held on the Ganci Compound grid. From there, a soldier could scan a 360-degree slice of the neighborhood: FOBAG proper, plus the dreaded overpass that loomed outside the westerly wall of the prison, so close they could read the road signs. The town of Nasser Wa Salam sat less than thirty yards from the nearest outside boundary of the northwest section of the compound. A good set of binoculars gave the man on watch the gist of what was happening in the general FOBAG vicinity. If a mortar or two came sailing in during daylight hours, a soldier in the Hawk’s Nest could get a visual on where it had originated and landed, enabling the occupants of Ganci to respond more swiftly to whatever was coming next.
The two soldiers in the Hawk’s Nest were each assigned to watch an east–west running lane, a path between the fences of the detainee pens. Parker and Dizl generally took turns covering the westerly side of Ganci 7-1. Sugar and Captain Morgan watched the easterly lane of Ganci 5-3—the lane that was Parker and Dizl’s six o’clock.
“They had my six,” is how Dizl describes this set-up. The phrase is claimed to have originated with fighter pilots unable to scan for any threat that might be directly behind the plane, but it has become a way to describe something deeper than mere “backup.” You have to wait for backup, you don’t have to wait for whoever has your six, they’re already there; you don’t even have check to make sure they’re still there. You just know they are.
There was a kid in the 152nd nicknamed “Willard,” a tall, twentyish, good-looking boy. Willard was scared of the mortars. Well, actually they were all scared of them. Only a moron wouldn’t be. Willard’s father was a chopper pilot for the Maine Air National Guard, and he flew into Kuwait to visit his son before the battalion crossed into Iraq. Because Willard’s father had experience with medevac (“medical evacuation”) flights, he knew too well what Willard was getting into. When the moment came, it was hard for father and son to say good-bye.
One morning, a few weeks (but numerous mortar attacks) after they had arrived at FOBAG, Willard seemed particularly anxious. Or maybe it was Dizl who was anxious and needed to offer encouraging words at least as much as Willard needed to hear them. In any event, Dizl took a large abdominal first-aid dressing out of his CLS (Combat Lifesaver) bag and wrote WILLARD on the front of it.
He showed it to the kid and said, “See? It’s for you if you need it.” He put it into his cargo pocket, and there it stayed. Whenever things got ugly, whenever the detainees seemed particularly grumpy, or a morning briefing contained yet another variation on the theme of “how we’re gonna die today” (these were increasingly common as the insurgency increased in skill and ferocity), Dizl would catch Willard’s eye and point to his pocket.
Within the confines of a civilian existence, it doesn’t sound like it would be comforting. However, such morbid reassurances are common in places where the morbid is a daily occurrence. So it was normal in a world where the men of the 152nd would spend many moments asking their personal deities things like:
“Please, God, don’t let me die here.”
“Allah, don’t let me get blown up by a mortar round, OK?”
“Buddha, could you please not let me be kidnapped and beheaded by insurgents who will broadcast my death for my mom to see on YouTube or LiveLeak?”
When Willard and Dizl would be separated for any length of time—for example when Willard was sent to Baghdad to provide security for a convoy—Dizl would greet their reunion with extravagant delight, hollering “Willard!” and hugging the boy until he blushed.
It was of great comfort to Willard to have the friendly giant Dizl covering his six, especially during the mortar attack of April 6, 2004. On Ganci Compound the detainees had taken a pretty severe hit, and they wondered if the all-powerful Americans were doing it or, if not, perhaps the Bad Guys on the outside were punishing them for getting too friendly with the infidel invaders?
Not surprisingly, within days of this first attack the detainees started to get pretty grumpy. Thousands of Iraqi men with rocks the size of softballs clenched in their scared and angry hands began loudly chanting their version of “Death to America.”
Maybe they were hoping that if they chanted it loudly and sincerely enough, the insurgents on the outside would hear it, and spare the detainees another nightmarish assault. If so, within weeks it would be made agonizingly plain that their countrymen were not impressed.
On the other hand, the Americans took the detainees’ words very seriously. In fact, the aggressive chanting would haunt dreams and echo in all similar sounds heard long after the Mainers went home. Dizl would hear it, an unbearable mnemonic, in the unified encouragements of crowds at high school basketball games or rock concerts:
Death to America!
Death to America!
Rah, rah, rah!
SEVEN
THE BROILER
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?”
“
As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have.”
—Exchange between an American soldier and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
ONCE THE MEN of the 152nd settled into the routine of their deployment to Ganci, life began to take on a certain rhythmic predictability. At least it did for those whose responsibilities put them on the front lines with the detainees. When he was asked to come up with a “handle” for use when communicating, former Frito-Lay truck driver and now army specialist Shawn Keyte offered “Black Bear,” with more hope than confidence. It didn’t take.
The detainees had already christened him Hesanoi, which Keyte was told meant either “long, slender fruit” or “sheep herder.” Though he had never had much to do with sheep, and did not think of himself as particularly fruit-like, the long, slender part was accurate.
Specialist Quint—a.k.a. Major Payne, the namesake and main character of his favorite movie—declared that Shawn reminded him of one of the old Masters of the Universe cartoon characters. So Shawn the truck driver became Skeletor to his fellow soldiers. The detainees, however, stuck with Hesanoi.
Major Payne had just spent several days renovating an old washroom in the Mortar Café into a first-class barbershop complete with camouflage netting to protect both barber and customer from the view of snipers and a repurposed, adjustable tank seat for the customer to sit on. He christened his new business the House O’ Payne and, for a dollar, would clip hair according to military specifications. The dollar was put into a pot, to provide funding for a festive bash to be held when the tour of duty ended and the Mainers could go home.
But for those senior-ranking soldiers, such as Huladog, Beerboy, and Lunch Lady, whose pay grades granted them the dubious privilege of attending the military intelligence briefings, there was a growing unease. They did the best they could to shield the lower-ranking men of First Platoon from the more alarming bits of intel they were privy to, but the more experienced and perceptive among the men began to feel it nonetheless.
Sitting there, day after day in the Hawk’s Nest, the sun hovering what felt like six inches above his head, Dizl watched the oncoming firestorm from the hot seat of the tower. He called it the Broiler.
It came on slowly. High-powered government representatives started showing up and taking walk-throughs to recon the situation on the ground. Any incident involving harm to a detainee not only had to be reported, but the report went straight up the chain of command to land on Rumsfeld’s desk. Coming back down the chain of command was what seemed a constant stream of changes in the rules of engagement, even as the mortars fell and the command staffers looked grayer and more concerned by the day.
Dizl sat in his tower and watched as, outside the prison walls in the town of Abu Ghraib, Iraqi civilians were growing increasingly frustrated at the continued lack of basic services and the increasing rates of crime, along with the risks of being caught up in the growing violence. In March 2004, a mere 14 percent of Iraqis polled regarded the Coalition Provisional Authority with confidence, down from 47 percent only five months before.7 (“This is America?” an Iraqi man said, despairing and disbelieving, to journalist Anthony Shadid. “We thought America could do anything.”8)
The heroic rescue of Jessica Lynch, as it had been told back in 2003, was publicly revealed to be another lie. And, of course, the photos from Abu Ghraib were about to become international headline news.
Dizl watched the frying pan heat up around him from his tower, his duty forcing him to sit powerless against the fury of the ever-burning Shemis (what the Americans took to calling Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god) and watch the populace around him get angrier and the detainees become violently fidgety.
Sizzle, sizzle, my nizzle.
On Ashura, the holiest day of the year for Shia Muslims, nearly 180 people died when suicide bombers and cars laden with explosives detonated at shrines in Baghdad and Karbala.
Sizzle, sizzle went the Broiler, when four men from Blackwater Security were killed a few miles down the road in Fallujah. Their bodies had been burned, dragged behind a truck, and eventually hung from a bridge above the blue-green Euphrates. Dizl could see the smoke from the fires and the truckloads of insurgent fighters and weapons headed into the stronghold city.
In the Baghdad neighborhood known as Sadr City, the Mahdi Army ambushed a US Army patrol, killing eight Americans and wounding fifty-seven more. The Bad Guys weren’t stupid. They could see that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were just so many fish in a barrel, inexperienced, underequipped, and undermanned. So the mortars splashed into everything and anyone, and the detainees got grumpy, and they picked up rocks from the ground within their enclosures and chanted “Death to America.”
Messages from somewhere high up the chain came through loud, clear, and on repeat. The soldiers of the Sixteenth MP Brigade, the men and women from Maine, Ohio, Indiana, and Puerto Rico were not—repeat, not—to heap naked detainees into piles, force them to simulate fellatio, scare the piss or crap out of them, or otherwise do anything that remotely resembled those goddamned pictures. Don’t take pictures of the detainees, and don’t kill them.
Every day, the Lost Boys walked from their LSA to breakfast, and from breakfast to Ganci, where they passed a sign, red-on-white, Arabic and English, that was posted on the wire fence: WARNING THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA. DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED. But actually, Dizl mused, the only people in the area with full authorization to use deadly force were the Bad Guys. The Americans had rules of engagement that were evolving from “defend yourself” to “you are accountable for every bullet. If you fuck up, you’ll go to prison.” Problem was, following the definition of “not fucking up” could get you killed.
Added to the stress of confusing ROEs, it was a tactical nightmare for the men stationed at the prison to defend it (or at least hide from the indirect fire, or IDF) because Abu Ghraib lay between two major highways, both primary transit routes for insurgent and coalition forces en route to and from various battle zones.
Baghdad was the city center from which Abu Ghraib and the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah were a mere fifteen miles to the north. So insurgents heading down to Sadr City, or up to Fallujah to prepare for or join in one of the cataclysmic battles there, would fire off a mortar round or toss a few grenades into Ganci compound as they passed by. When the insurgents decided to mount a sustained attack on Abu Ghraib—this became more common after the publication of the photos—the highways also provided elevated viewing platforms for spotters walking the mortar rounds into high-value targets.
The insurgent forces knew that the United States had a standing policy to avoid collateral damage wherever possible. So they learned that a ten-year-old boy made an excellent spotter for mortar fire, and that a VBIED driven behind a car filled with civilians bought itself time to get closer to the target. The son of a Maine game warden, recently returned from a tour in Iraq, said that al-Qaeda insurgents would use women as shields, shooting from behind their shoulders.
Not only did putting civilians in harm’s way hinder our soldiers’ ability to respond and give the insurgents a tactical advantage, it also gave them an edge in the back-and-forth propaganda war. Civilian deaths, from whatever cause, could be easily, ruthlessly “weaponized” against an occupation that claimed to be occupying Iraq for its own good. The more pictures the citizens of Iraq saw of women and children killed by allied forces, the less accepting they would be of continued occupation.
The IDF attacks on Ganci were inevitably going to kill and maim imprisoned Iraqis in far greater numbers than American soldiers, certainly many more than even the most brutal American MP would do. And yet Abu Ghraib received more mortar rounds after the photos were publicized, as if by blowing their own countrymen to pieces they were punishing the United States. Those infamous photos would fuel more deaths of both allied forces and Iraqi citizens.
Dizl’s theory was that the Bad Guys were trying to get the detainees massed in Ganci to fr
eak out and riot. The Americans would’ve had no choice but to rock them, and massacres would make more pictures to run on Al Jazeera.
The FOBAG rules of engagement did not allow for shooting a man standing on a highway overpass with binoculars and a cell phone, no matter how recognizable such behavior might be to soldiers who were, after all, trained in field artillery.
The insurgents were more than capable of figuring out the constraints under which the troops defending Abu Ghraib operated and exploiting these with eerie precision and flexibility. For example, one ROE would say something like, “You can only shoot a guy who is actually holding a weapon aimed at you. It is not enough to merely suspect him of having hostile intent: He has to be actually holding a gun.”
Once insurgents figured out this rule, they would send a man who would appear on the roof of a building in full view of the Marine manning a perimeter tower. There, he would snatch up a rifle, obviously pre-positioned, aim, fire into the compound, then throw the rifle down. Marines preparing to return fire would watch as their opponent, now unarmed, dashed across the roof to the exit stairs, only to reappear minutes later on the roof of another building, where he would pluck up another pre-stashed rifle, aim it, and fire.
The detainees were sick of being detained under such conditions. Who could blame them? Dizl thought on more than one occasion. You couldn’t keep me penned in that mess for long either. Meanwhile, it wasn’t only the detainees who were wondering what the hell the world’s only superpower was doing in and to Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom appeared to be headed south, if it had ever held to True North in the first place, which Dizl, among others, had begun to doubt.
The sun baked him in his armor and the rockets and the mortars kept falling, like a Biblical rain, on the just and the unjust alike. Taken all around, it was pretty fucking miserable.
7 Ricks, Fiasco, 326.
8 Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (New York: Picador, 2006).
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