Packed for the Wrong Trip

by W. Zach Griffith

  OK, Red thought. Bartlett is dead for sure this time.

  Bartlett began thrashing around, so Red helped him disentangle himself, then pushed him bodily into the bunker, which was very small and so dark it was impossible to see if anyone else was in there.

  The concertina will have been breached. The detainees are going to be coming through the wire, he thought. I have to secure the weapons in the command post or we’ll really be fucked.

  “Stay here,” he shouted to Bartlett. At least, it felt like he was shouting. He couldn’t even hear himself and Bartlett just looked dazed. On his way out of the bunker, Red was blocked by something large and dark, and his hand was on his sidearm before he realized it was Cowan.

  Together, he and Cowan secured the guns in the command post. They saw a mortar land close to Dizl’s tower and explode. Dizl’s dead, Red thought as the mortars continued falling as he unlocked the first gate in the Ganci 7 Shark Cage.

  “Open this up,” said an older man, one who had taken on the role of compound chief. He was standing before the second gate. “Let us bring the wounded men out of here.”

  “I can’t,” said Red. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to bring them to the gate and let me take it from there. I can’t let you out.”

  The compound chief shook his head angrily, and turned away.

  Lunch Lady was supervising the sewage burning and the redistribution of food after the detainees thought they’d found worms when he heard the first mortar land. A dozen people still holding their lunch plates fell over like cut grass. Shrapnel and gravel flew outward at the speed of sound, blowing a man’s legs clean off.

  The body of a man, stretched prone with a gaping hole gushing blood from the middle of his torso, appeared in front of Dizl’s tower where, a few seconds before, the smiling Young Elvis had been. Elvis was gone, disappeared into thin air as far as Lunch Lady could tell. The body hadn’t been there when the shelling started; he’d been flown via Mortar Air from some other part of the compound.

  Sergeant Bret King, a.k.a. Yager Bomb, came sprinting through the dust, blood, and chaos to fetch Dizl’s rucksack that was full of their improvised medical gear. IV bags were all hooked up and ready to go with permanent marker instructions, and Maxi Pads, tampons for packing the meaty holes of the screaming wounded, and rolls of self-adhesive athletic-style bandage to hold the field-expedient first aid packing materials in place filled the bag.

  Krump

  Another mortar round landed, another deadly explosion splashed the inhabitants of Abu Ghraib with another wave of buzzing shrapnel. The three tents closest to Dizl looked as if a human meat cannon had been used to blast their occupants through the canvas ceilings. Ribbons of skin clinging to pieces of human meat fluttered down through the air in a grisly hail.

  Dizl was alive but down, and he’d just watched Young Elvis die. The same explosion that killed the boy temporarily deafened Dizl and wreaked long-term, permanent damage to his brain.

  “I saw him [Young Elvis] get blown to flinders,” Dizl said, recounting the horrific event years later. “He was smiling at me, and giving me a running thumbs-up.”

  Still deaf from the concussive force of the rocket exploding, Dizl could only watch as sheets of the boy’s skin flapped in the breeze from where they’d snagged on the razor wire, attracting clouds of carrion birds. Sparrows too, hundreds of European house sparrows, the ones that normally haunted the edges of Ganci perched on the wire, had swooped in to scarf up the lunchtime rice and other delicacies.

  “Crows and ravens gobbled up the fleshy chunks of Young Elvis and the others before the rockets and mortars even stopped falling on us all,” Dizl said.

  Out of the muffled silence, someone called “Coach! Coach!” It was Roy, who had played forward for the soccer team Dizl coached back home in Maine. Roy was shouting in his face.

  Captain Morgan stripped Dizl out of his body armor so he could check for shrapnel wounds. There was a wound above Dizl’s collarbone. Morgan pulled out a splinter of metal and handed it to Dizl. It wasn’t until later that Morgan noticed blood running down his own wrist; shrapnel had hit him too.

  There were more explosions, but even if Morgan had been able to tell a mortar round from a rocket, or either from the sound of a VBIED ramming and detonating to breach the gate to the prison, all sounds were muted and indistinguishable now.

  Dazed, Dizl got to his feet and tried to check his area. He could feel the onset of shock and (like Red) remembered his combat medic training. He loosened his clothing. He was getting increasingly dizzy, his head hurt terribly, and he had a sharp pain in his spine, just below the top of his body armor.

  Krump

  Meanwhile, Red was overseeing the triage near the Ganci 7 command post. The wounded leaned against the back wall of the building while the other MPs worked frantically to stop the bleeding, treat for shock, start IVs, stick in the morphine, and wrap the wounds protectively with Maxi Pads. One detainee wandered slowly all the way across the compound, blood streaming down his legs, and Yogi helped him through the gate. Red turned to find this man standing at his elbow looking up at him. The Iraqi held out his hand and it took Red a moment to realize the mangled, fleshy little package was the man’s genitals.

  “Help me,” he said, in English.

  “OK. It will be OK,” said Red, though he knew it wouldn’t be. “Go sit down right over there, buddy. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  Red watched as, obediently, the man walked over, slumped down against the wall, and died.

  Looking down from the tower, Dizl saw Middle Elvis was screaming up at him, wide-eyed, his terror and anguish inaudible but obvious. His mouth was moving: My brother! My brother!

  Young Elvis had been blown to flinders. His behind and hips had bounced off the tower; sheets of his skin still hung from the barbed wire and those useless old radio lines.

  “Shahein, where is my brother?” Middle Elvis begged Dizl to answer him while the crows wolfed down the bits of what, less than five minutes before, had been a bright-eyed boy who loved soccer and the peanut butter crackers from the Mainer’s MREs. And Middle Elvis’s brother.

  A crow flew past Dizl’s face, with parts of someone in its beak, and he thought, The crows have come and carried your brother away.

  Then, it was quiet, just for a moment, before the screaming began. Dizl heard (and still hears to this day) the petrified voices begging and screaming for help while the crows and ravens feasted. They, the crows and ravens, seemed very thankful and unafraid as they ate the fiddly-bits of people; the parts we all take for granted while we are still alive.

  The shooting was mostly done. Middle Elvis was wandering around the compound in a daze, crying. At intervals, Dizl would hear his mosquito voice saying: “Please. Please.”

  When the all-clear sounded, several soldiers were sent into the enclosures to pick up what remained. The smoke dissipated while Dizl and the other soldiers attended to the wounded, evacuating those in need of urgent surgical care. They had to assemble the body parts that had been scattered about like grisly children’s toys and match them to corpses before they could bury the dead in graves aligned with Mecca. Even when those gruesome tasks were over, generals still needed their paperwork.

  “Sir, this detainee is believed to have been killed, by insurgent indirect fire.”

  “Believed to have been killed? What does that mean? Who believes this?”

  “Oh, I believe it, sir. I saw him get blown to flinders, and the crows ate him before the mortars even stopped falling.”

  The dead needed to be identified and accounted for, the idea being that someone might be able to find out what had happened to their husband, brother, son, or uncle who’d been taken to Abu Ghraib, never to return.

  The uninjured detainees were combing their compounds for the last bits, hoping to do their Muslim comrades the courtesy of getting whatever remained of them decently buried before darkness fell.

  A sheet of skin still hung from the sil
ent radio wires outside Ganci 7-1. Dizl had resumed his position in the tower after being treated by the medics. To his bruised and aching brain, the skin resembled an old-fashioned pocket handkerchief hung there to be bleached and cleaned by sanitizing rays of the sun. As he watched, the skin dried and shrank in the desert air. Eventually, it was a small, stiff, brown stick. A detainee paused next to the wire and gazed at what hung from it. Glancing up, he spotted Dizl. Raising his eyebrows interrogatively, the man cocked his head to one side and plucked at the skin of his arm.

  Dizl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It’s skin.”

  The man reached up, snapped the wizened brown stick from the wire, dug a hole in the dust with his toe, and buried it. The sun went down.

  It turned out that extra sandbags Dizl had recently added to his tower saved his life by absorbing some of the shrapnel from the mortar that exploded nearby and deflecting the rest upward. The shards of metal dug themselves into the ceiling of the tower room, rather than into Dizl’s face (Parker would amuse himself on subsequent watches by working pieces of shrapnel out of the plywood, to be saved as souvenirs).

  On the night after the attack or, more accurately, in the wee hours of the twenty-first, when Dizl finally got undressed for bed, he discovered that his pockets, his underwear, and even his socks inside his tightly laced boots were full of sand. The mortar explosion had created a vacuum powerful enough to suck the sand from the damaged sandbags out of the air and blow it violently into the innermost recesses of his clothing.

  The first reports of the attack filtering back to Maine National Guard Headquarters at Camp Keys in Augusta, Maine, claimed (inaccurately) that 90 out of the 120 Mainers had been killed that day. Investigators would later determine that at least forty mortars landed and detonated within the walls of Abu Ghraib prison, leaving twenty-two detainees dead and over ninety wounded.

  Somewhere in Iraq, a mother mourns for her youngest boy, and a widow mourns for a husband. She does not know that he died flying, his transected head opening and closing like a child’s toy, while a forty-year-old father of four from Maine covered the bodies of his comrades with his own, closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and waited for death.

  TEN

  EATING BEES

  “Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez … issued orders that tactics like depriving prisoners of sleep, hooding them for long periods of time or forcing them into ‘stress positions’ to weaken their resistance to interrogation would no longer be allowed.”

  —The New York Times, May 14, 2004

  IF AIR FORCE colonel Nelson had evaluated the situation at Abu Ghraib at the end of April 2004, he could have described it as, if anything, even worse than it had been during the deployment of the 800th MPs. Human beings do, simply, get burned out by relentless stress and suffering. April 29 was Sergeant Major Vacho’s birthday. He’d just been given a cake when someone arrived with the grievous news that a soldier from another unit had put the muzzle of his sidearm into his own mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Abu Ghraib continued to be “a troublesome arena even for a well-trained MP or MI (Military Intelligence) unit,” and the former field artillery guys now designated MPs (Dizl insisted on calling himself a FAMP) were still lacking formal training, though the on-the-job education had been vivid and relentless.

  The war continued with no end in sight, and the detainees would remain in fixed and exposed camp facilities, at least until the soldiers of the Sixteenth could build them newer and safer dwelling places.

  Meanwhile, the photographs proved such a potent recruiting tool that the ranks of the insurgency began to fill with foreign fighters, many of whom only decided to join the insurgency after the infamous photos hit the world stage. Ahmad al-Shayea, a Saudi citizen who traveled to Iraq to join the insurgency and later went on to speak out publicly against al-Qaeda, was one such person called to action by the Abu Ghraib photos:

  Ahmad had to find the strength. He called the pictures of Abu Ghraib to mind. One of the Iraqis had said the hellish prison was not that far from them. He thought of all the young men like himself being held there, raped and beaten by the American Crusaders. He felt their pain in the pit of his stomach, his head pondering as if he too was hanging by his neck at Abu Ghraib. The jihadi told him the American Crusaders and Jews would not rest until they had killed every last Muslim.9

  Abu Ghraib had been a previously neglected sideshow of Operation Iraqi Freedom. But it had now gained the attention of the international press as well as the United States government. In the aftermath of the revelations of prisoner abuse, the prison would receive a parade of visitors, including the secretary of defense, the secretary of the army, General Myers (then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Lieutenant-General Sanchez, General Ryder (then Provost Marshal for Iraq), Major General Miller, and delegations from the International Red Cross and Amnesty International.

  These people would be accompanied by any number of other foreign and Iraqi dignitaries, reporters, photographers, and television crews. Everything the Sixteenth MP Battalion did or neglected to do was being scrutinized through the magnifying lens of the scandal.

  In sharp contrast to his predecessor, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who had no experience in detainee operations, Colonel David E. Quantock was full-time Army and held a degree in criminal justice. He had the right qualifications, and a serious, long-standing commitment to doing detainee operations properly.

  One of the first things Quantock did was to clarify the role of military police at Abu Ghraib. Their sole task, for which everyone would be held strictly accountable, would be to provide safe and humane care to detainees. Again and again he repeated his message to anyone who asked (and quite a few who didn’t). His troops would provide for the care and control of detained persons while treating them with dignity and respect. Period. He backed up the rhetoric with effective leadership. He showed up, got his hands dirty, and made sure his men were taken care of.

  “I would eat bees for that man,” Dizl said about Colonel Quantock.

  Much, however, could not change. Quantock undoubtedly knew all about what a detainee facility should be like, but his troops, including much of the command staff, were still learning on the fly. Abu Ghraib remained at the mercy of its wartime geography, sandwiched between the hot zones of Baghdad and Fallujah.

  In addition to missiles aimed deliberately at FOBAG, the inhabitants could easily become the collateral damage of nearby and unrelated firefights. For example, when a convoy on the highway was attacked, the soldiers in the convoy would return fire, and stray bullets from both sides would drop into the prison to ricochet off the concrete walls or go punching through an overflowing porta-potty. Plywood doors, the steel wall of a conex box, or the molded plastic side of a porta-potty provided no protection from flying projectiles. Nearly every surface bore decorative holes or chunks missing from concrete walls.

  Meanwhile, until the Great Sorting was complete, detainees remained a mixed bag (young, innocent, terrorists, criminals) stuck with deplorable, dangerous living conditions, and they remained frustrated and hostile.

  When the smoke had cleared, and the explosion that could have killed him hadn’t, Dizl’s memories and longings for the sweet, calm life he had lived in Maine with those he loved slid down a hole inside of him to be locked away in some safer place and wait for better days.

  I am here, still alive at Abu Ghraib, he thought. What next?

  Piss in the corners, Dizl advised himself after a few minutes of self-reflection.

  Pissing in the corners is a colloquial term among prison guards. It means getting in with the prisoners, getting into things, sticking your nose (tactfully) into other people’s business, solving some problems, and creating a few for those who find themselves straying off a healthy path.

  “It’s like being a waiter in a fine restaurant,” Dizl told Turtle with an expansive gesture.

  Turtle looked dubiously at the tents, sagging dispiritedly from their tent poles, and at the trash
.

  “Seriously. A good waiter must be aware of every nook and cranny within his area of responsibility, and so must we.”

  That a guard at Abu Ghraib could be likened to a waiter at Marcel’s would have seemed more unlikely, Turtle considered, except that it was precisely this experience that had allowed Dizl to manage the worms-in-the-beans incident.

  “Roger that,” said Turtle.

  From the Hawk’s Nest, Dizl had witnessed more than a few unpleasant Lord Of The Flies–style dramas among the detainees, and fellow guards reported similar incidents from their respective posts.

  What to do? Improvise, adapt, and overcome, the age-old rule instructed. To this, Dizl added an adage gleaned from doing “custody and control” for the imprisoned citizens of Maine: Piss in the corners.

  However, a Ganci tower guard, who saw all, was mandated to remain in the tower twelve hours a day, merely communicating—often without radios—all his observations to the mobile rovers on the ground, soldiers assigned to roam around the camp looking for trouble. Given that each enclosure held five to seven hundred detainees, with perhaps six or seven untrained MPs watching over them, there was no way to adequately police what happened inside the wire.

  Perhaps it amounted to a Hail Mary pass, but Dizl had the sudden idea that if someone on the detainee side of the wire could be made to feel responsible for what was, in effect, public safety, the Americans might have a better shot at protecting everyone on the inside from the downright diabolical dangers intensifying on the other side of the wall.

  So Dizl called for one of the rovers to cover his tower while Dizl went to summon Kathib, the self-appointed detainee czar of Ganci 7-1, who’d been running the place like a mobster and brazenly held court in a rat’s nest of a tent right in front of Dizl’s tower.