EIGHT
SIEGE
“There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is ‘Bring ’em on!’ We’ve got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.”
—President George W. Bush, July 2, 2003
WHILE A MAINER who enlisted in the National Guard in 2010 did so with the full knowledge that he or she would likely be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, someone like Skeletor, who joined the Guard in 1996, could be forgiven for assuming that he would be protecting the citizens of Maine during moments of statewide crisis. Or perhaps be sent to assist other states for a week or so, like to Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina.
In addition, employers of these guardsmen, like Frito-Lay or its parent company, PepsiCo, might also have presumed that if their truck driver had to change hats and become a guardsman for a time, his or her job wouldn’t have to be held vacant for longer than a few weeks or, at most, a few months.
As it was, Skeletor was away from his Dexter-Dover-Foxcroft-Greenville route for sixteen months. PepsiCo was very nice about it. They sent Skeletor an enormous care package full of food, to fatten him up perhaps, or just to remind him of home.
The significance of food can easily be missed in the superabundance that passes for normal American life, but for the detained of Abu Ghraib as well as for their guards, a meal was not only nourishment but a source of entertainment, a means of demonstrating power, or a precious link to cultural identity, not to mention the only reliable relief from the otherwise boring sameness of the hours that pass behind the wire.
It was a food riot that had led to the seven detainees being taken to the Hard Site where Graner and England waited. Food’s significance became dramatically obvious, too, when Abu Ghraib came under siege by the insurgents in the spring of the 152nd’s deployment.
On April 9, Dizl wrote a letter to a friend back home. It was terse and to the point: “We’re surrounded and under siege. Things don’t look good. If I don’t make it back, could you please take care of my hunting dogs for me? I don’t want to leave my wife with that problem.”
Dizl dropped it off in the mailbox at the company command post. He saw it as a bit of a Hail Mary; if Abu Ghraib “went Alamo,” the chances were pretty good that the mail would not be delivered, but it made him feel better anyway.
Dizl wasn’t the only one hedging his bets: Huladog received a number of envelopes containing last letters to wives and sweethearts, which he was requested to hold, just in case.
The First Sergeant, like the rest of Abu Ghraib’s command staffers, did his best to shield the enlisted guys from knowing just how bad the situation was. The darkening under Hula’s eyes and the thousand-yard stare told the men the truth.
To impose a siege on any FOB in Iraq essentially meant blowing up the trucks of everything from computer equipment to ordnance to water that traveled to and from the coalition’s bases. Foreign workers, including American civilians who had signed up to work for the fabulous salaries offered by KBR/Halliburton, drove most of these trucks.
The trucks were arriving with less frequency the longer the 152nd stayed there, Dizl noticed. When the shit trucks had stopped coming to pump out the overflowing shitters, the story was that insurgents had kidnapped the KBR drivers and left their beheaded bodies inside the tanks of human waste.
Despite the US military’s warning that Iraq’s roads were far too dangerous for any traffic, a convoy of nineteen KBR trucks headed for Baghdad on the morning of April 9. It was attacked just outside of Abu Ghraib in what was the single deadliest incident involving US contractors in the war to that point. Six drivers died, another was kidnapped, and one simply vanished, never to be heard from again, while the rest sustained serious injuries. The billowing flames and black smoke were visible from Abu Ghraib, and the story arrived by the end of the day.
Dizl could only watch from his tower as an estimated eight hundred to one thousand fighters surrounded the prison. Buses and truckloads of insurgents were moving into the town, and once the fighters had unloaded themselves and their gear, women and children boarded and were driven away. The neighborhood around the prison fell eerily quiet as it became less of a town and more of a stronghold for the enemy forces.
At the time, the prison housed somewhere between seven and ten thousand detainees in Ganci alone. Thirty MPs managed these thousands on two twelve-hour watches, noon to midnight (Dizl’s watch) and midnight to noon.
There were not enough soldiers to maintain control under optimal conditions, let alone while under a serious and sustained attack. Moreover, the besieged of FOBAG had been given a two-hour “standalone order,” meaning that the soldiers there should expect no assistance from the outside for at least that long if they were assaulted by a large force. Everyone knew that there would not be anything like enough boots on the ground to hold Abu Ghraib for two hours. When the story of what had happened to the KBR convoy reached them, they watched the plume of smoke rising from nearby and wondered if they were about to share the fate of the kidnapped KBR driver.
“Save your last bullet for yourself” became one of the mottos among the Lost Boys.
As darkness set in, the inhabitants of FOBAG prepared for another uneasy night. Dizl and Sugar took up their posts in the tower overlooking Ganci 7.
“Hey Sugar,” said Dizl.
“Yeah?”
“It’s my little boy’s birthday today.”
“No kidding? April 9? Hey,” Sugar said kindly. “Cool!”
“Listen, if I’m killed tonight, before midnight, could you make sure First Sergeant records the death date as the tenth instead?”
Sugar said, “Sure, Diz. Yes. I’ll do that.”
“Thanks,” Dizl said. He felt a sense of relief like after he’d ensured the proper care of his hunting dogs.
There was more relief to come that night: Instead of the anticipated cry of artillery rounds sailing in over the walls or an insurgent assault they probably would not have been able to withstand, the denizens of Abu Ghraib heard the far-off purr of turbine engines. An Abrams tank and a Bradley fighting vehicle arrived. The Americans cheered the cheers of the liberated and the detainees joined in.
No shots were fired. The Bad Guys melted away into the night.
Even with the arrival of Marine and Army units offering protection, FOBAG remained under siege. Days passed, then a week. Between the chaos erupting in Baghdad and the violence up the road in Fallujah, coalition forces virtually everywhere in Iraq were busy with their own versions of the same problems. They didn’t have enough resources to work with, the intel was gappy, and no one had the tools they needed to complete their various missions. Adapt and overcome.
Rumors had circulated among the troops even as the Mainers had boarded the plane for BIAP weeks prior that something weird had been going on at Abu Ghraib, but that was long before the photos were published abroad via television and the Internet. Until that happened, near the end of April, and even for quite a long while afterward, it seemed that the troops on the ground at Abu Ghraib knew less than anyone else on Earth about what was going on.
“What’s going on, sir?”
“FUBAR.”
The insurgents certainly seemed to be better informed. On March 20, 2004, the Department of Defense announced that eleven soldiers would be court-martialed on charges that they abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Almost immediately, mortar attacks, which had been a feature of daily life at Abu Ghraib from the beginning of its time as an American facility, became more frequent and more sustained.
Two all-out, mass casualty attacks occurred in April of ’04, though it wasn’t until April 28 that, after delaying broadcast for two weeks at the request of the White House, CBS showed the photographs of the abuse as part of a Sixty Minutes II report.
When Dizl eventually saw the photographs of Americans abusing detainees, he heard the cosmic screams of all the poor souls who had died in that hellhole: the thousands tortured and murdered by
Saddam and then the dozens who had died before his eyes.
The Iraqis knew about it before the Americans did. It was, after all, their sons, brothers, fathers, grandfathers, and even sisters (there were women at Abu Ghraib, though not many) who were being kept in the prison. It was their relatives and friends who were the guards in the all-Iraqi part of the facility where only ordinary criminals were kept, or it was their neighbors who unloaded the supply convoys, collected the garbage, and emptied the porta-potties.
Among other evidence of disorder and neglect, the Taguba Report (the official US Army report of the investigation into the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib) noted that three prisoners had actually escaped from Abu Ghraib during the same period in which the abuses took place, but even when information was not being carried out in the mouths of escapees, it remained perfectly possible to take advantage of the comings and goings of civilian workers and send and receive notes or messages. For that matter, it wasn’t impossible in some parts of Ganci to wrap a note around a rock and chuck it over the wall, or for someone on the outside to pick it up, read it, and chuck an answer back.
Buildings taller than the walls that enclosed the facility surrounded Abu Ghraib prison. As is true in many of the world’s hot, dry places, in Iraq a roof is considered living space and tends also to be easily accessible from the street. Anyone standing on the roof of a tall building could see right over the wall into Abu Ghraib. Or, if he were so inclined, he could shoot over that wall.
As the spring wore on, Graner’s photographs appeared and were instantly weaponized, the insurgency intensified, and more and more people seemed to be shooting over the walls. Dizl knew it was going to be bad when he saw the photo of England with the prisoner on the end of a dog leash. Oh, boy, Dizl thought when he saw the photos. Here we go.
“This was a country where goats ride in the front passenger seat while the wife is in the back,” Dizl said. “Women are not valued and there’s an American woman leading an Iraqi man around on a dog leash.” The photo of Specialist Sabrina Harman with an enthusiastic smile and a thumbs-up while leaning over a dead body said to the Iraqi people, “American mothers, sisters, and daughters think dead Arabs are ‘thumbs-up.’” Insurgents still show the pictures to this day. It’s an understandably easy recruiting tool. “Guys that could have gone home on the happy bus got blown to flinders by mortars instead.”
A mortar is a relatively simple weapon. It’s easy to use as long-range, heavy weapons go, which explains its popularity among insurgent and terrorist groups. A modern mortar consists of a metal tube set at an angle to the ground, usually ranging somewhere between 45 and 85 degrees. As a rule of thumb, the higher the angle, the less distance the shell will travel. Gunners drop a purpose-designed bomb into the tube, where it hits a firing pin that detonates the propellant attached to the bomb’s tail and launches the projectile.
There’s no motor, just the mathematics of the arc. When the shell hits its peak, gravity takes over and the round falls to earth. The most modern shells come with assortments of GPS-driven steering fins and other high-tech bells and whistles. These are expensive and hard to use, however, and the insurgents did not have access to such technology. The most common shells used by insurgents are often the simple, mass-produced mortars with a fuse and detonator set in the nose that sets off the explosives inside. Those on the receiving end of these “low-tech” projectiles, however, would see little difference.
Well-trained mortar operators can drop shells on the enemy with impressive accuracy. Insurgent forces do not have the luxury of the level of training the allied forces have. Without a spotter, many of their rounds impact with little or no effect. However, when a spotter equipped with binoculars and a cell phone is positioned somewhere near the targeted area, he or she can dial the explosions in on one tempting target or another (hence the “walking”).
Mortars, like other conventional weapons, come in a number of sizes and can carry various payloads. They can be filled with chemicals, both lethal and not. In fact, the Bad Guys habituating the area around the prison were constantly threatening to launch a sarin gas attack. Death by a nerve agent such as sarin is long and excruciatingly painful. The nerve endings in muscles lose the ability to shut off, resulting in horrific muscle contortions strong enough to break bones as the victim twists uncontrollably into inhuman shapes. Eventually the diaphragm ceases to function and the victim dies of asphyxiation, but only after suffering the bone-shattering, muscle-tearing effects of the gas.
Luckily, Dizl and the Mainers did not have to contend with a gas attack, as the insurgency had no access to it, but the standard high-explosive shells were doing enough damage by themselves. The HE inside a basic mortar is designed to fragment the metal casing into a thousand pieces ranging in size from a pea to a twisted ceiling fan blade.
The energy from the detonation expends itself outward, so the tail fin usually survives the blast and can be found afterward, sticking out of the dirt at the point of impact. Employing mathematical formulas bequeathed by Newton, survivors of the attack can use the angle at which the tail has thrust itself into the ground to determine the point of origin (referred to, mostly straight-faced, as the POO).
Assuming the mortar round behaves as advertised, the size of the resulting fragments won’t matter so much as where they impact because the velocity behind them means they can apply a massive amount of force. A peppercorn shot through the head or into the liver can be sufficient to render a soldier “non-mission-capable” and/or dead.
Quality can vary when it comes to any product, particularly when the consumers are insurgents in an occupied country. Occasionally, the ordnance flung over the walls of the prison would fail to detonate. The duds would be carefully removed and taken to a safe open space where they would be detonated with another explosive. This was a necessary measure but one that added yet more unnerving explosions to punctuate daily life at Abu Ghraib.
The radio crackled and Dizl heard Turtle asking for assistance with one of their regularly misbehaving Abu Ghraib residents whom the Americans called “Thumby.” The bomb-maker had earned his moniker because when he decided he’d had enough of the insurgent lifestyle (so he said) and went to go get rid of explosives, they went off and he blew both his thumbs clean off.
Thumby appears in the annals of the Abu Ghraib scandal as the detainee who somehow managed to smuggle a gun into the Hard Site, and later for naming the bad apples of Tier 1-A who would become the subjects of the illicit photographs.
The gun Thumby got his hands on was smuggled to him by a guard who now resided as a detainee. The guard’s “name” was ABB, or “Anal Bleeding Boy,” thanks to his predisposition to inserting his toothbrush into his own anus. ABB fell in love with the Mainers and would toothbrush his ass while looking lustily into the eyes of passing rovers. While at first disconcerting, the Mainers eventually learned to roll their eyes at the amorous attention and continue about their fourteen-hour workday.
Graner and England were long gone, back to the States and courts-martial, but Thumby was still around, and he was a pain in the ass.
Thumby would do anything for a Marlboro, only really becoming crazy and dangerous when he was having a nicotine fit. Other detainees, once they learned this about their fellow prisoner, would pay him in cigarettes to hurl himself into the piles of razor wire.
“Thumby’s cutting himself again,” Turtle announced, somewhat unnecessarily, as the prisoner’s arms were streaming blood when Dizl and Sugar showed up to help. Among the indispensable items not provided to the soldiers of the 152nd were adequate medical supplies. Dizl had trained as a combat lifesaver, but even he hadn’t been issued a kit that would allow him to deal adequately with the daily minor injuries that come from working in a prison located in a war zone, let alone a catastrophic one. So he’d emailed his wife.
“Please send as many sanitary napkins as you can,” Dizl wrote. “The kind with that long tail, if you can find them. Cram as many of those tampons as you can
fit into a box. Make sure you get O.B. tampons because they’re the right size to fit a bullet hole. Oh, and could you send some Ziploc bags, too?”
Once the package arrived, Dizl settled himself on the floor of the Mortar Café and made each of the guys in First Platoon a Ziploc bag filled with napkins and tampons, to be carried with them at all times.
So when Thumby was discovered in the isolation cage, his arms streaming blood from the cuts he had inflicted on himself with a piece of glass, the Mainers swathed his arms in Kotex—a clean, effective, “field-expedient” sanitary bandage.
NINE
APRIL
“American soldiers in Abu Ghraib were not injured Tuesday when guerrillas fired the barrage of mortar rounds into walls of the prison killing the 22 detainees, but 92 security detainees were injured—25 seriously.”
—“Postcard from Abu Ghraib,” Camden (Maine) Herald
THERE WERE ABOUT thirty MPs inside Ganci on April 6, 2004, the day things first got really pear-shaped and detainees started up one of their “Death to America” chants with fervor. From his tower, Dizl heard a voice on the Motorola radio pass along an order: “Use of force is to be set at the level of ‘amber.’” This meant that a weapon could be loaded but there must be no round in the chamber.
A senior officer, smoking a cigar, wandered out to see what had the detainees all worked up so he could determine what orders to give if the rocks began to fly.
As the officer chewed on his cigar, Dizl loaded all his weapons to threat level red (for dead). Once his shotgun and pistol were ready, Dizl loaded his M16. He had a pair of double-stacked thirty-round magazines fastened together with industrial-grade Velcro—a nonregulation piece of ordnance his brother had sent for just such an occasion. The major stood, damp cigar crammed in mouth, and watched him snap the double-stack into his weapon and pull back the charging handle. Dizl made sure the round had gone into the chamber before he tapped the forward assist and closed the ejector port cover, just as he had been taught to do in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, years before.
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 9
