Packed for the Wrong Trip

by W. Zach Griffith

  Later, Dizl would draw a cartoon for the 152nd’s FOBAG news-letter, reinterpreting the ineffectual movements of the trapped bat as the manifestation of some strange interspecies amorous advance. Sugar was, after all, Dizl pointed out, probably pretty cute to a bat.

  On being shown the cartoon, Sugar shook his head. “This is not healthy,” he declared.

  Allied soldiers weren’t the only ones living in less than acceptable and mind-numbingly boring conditions. The quality of life for detainees at Abu Ghraib was pretty crummy too, especially at first. Some of them could alleviate the grinding boredom by making contraband, like the very useful hajji-hammer, or by making mushkallah (trouble) among themselves. They could beat someone up, always an attractive recreational option for some, although the Mainers were a whole lot more proactive about stopping fights than the previous guards had apparently been.

  “I saw them fighting. I shot them. They ran like rabbits,” Specialist Humpty said.

  He was a man of few words, but an excellent marksman. The nonlethal rounds fired from Humpty’s M16 would consistently sting exactly the right anatomical target—enough to distract, not enough to injure.

  Presented with Humpty’s veni, vidi, vici style of report writing, Beerboy tried tactfully to explain that his account of the incident wouldn’t please the bosses.

  Humpty gazed at his sergeant with his usual egg-like imperturbability. “That’s what happened,” he said at last.

  “Well, I know, Humpty, but the bosses like to have just a bit more detail.”

  Then, wilting under the continued impassivity of Humpty’s gaze, Beerboy dismissed him. With a sigh, he sat down and picked up his pen.

  At 1640 hours on the northwest side of G-2, I observed Rachma 294055-A approaching Rachma 284492-D in an aggressive manner …

  Occasionally, these fights became a team effort for guys like Lucifer and his compatriots. Riots occurred, though in general these were much more easily contained than they had been in the past. During one of these outbreaks of bad behavior, Lucifer got shot right between the eyes, though lucky for him the bullet was made of plastic.

  With unusual docility, Lucifer approached Red, pointing to the black plastic tail fin that was sticking out of the bridge of his nose.

  “God … OK. Hold still,” Red said. He looked closely at Lucifer’s nose, while Lucifer, crossed-eyed, tried to assess his situation. “No!” snapped Red, when Lucifer raised his hand to touch the thing. “Don’t touch!” Red remembered hearing, somewhere, that the sinus cavity is separated from a person’s brain only by a thin membrane. Clearly, this less-lethal round was stuck in Lucifer’s sinuses, which had to mean that any untoward movement could be, well, lethal.

  “We’ll call the doctor,” Red decided. He radioed to the Combat Support Hospital (CASH) and explained the situation to the lieutenant colonel/doctor who answered the call.

  “Bring him down here,” the doctor advised.

  “Sir, I don’t want to move him.”

  The doctor harrumphed. “All right. I’ll come to you,” he said.

  For ten minutes or so, Red watched Lucifer anxiously. Lucifer didn’t seem to be in too much pain. He was still on his feet, and showed no inclination to sit down, let alone pass out. The wound bled a little.

  “It will be OK,” said Red.

  The doctor arrived, an IBA thrown on over his scrubs, and marched up to the detainee. “What’ve we got here?” He leaned in, adjusting his glasses for a closer look. “Huh,” he grunted. Then he reached out and, with the air of a wine connoisseur pulling a cork, plucked the bullet from between Lucifer’s eyes.

  “You didn’t want to maybe numb him up a little, first?” said Red, but the doctor was already marching back to the CASH.

  “Put a Band-Aid over the hole,” he advised over his shoulder. “Should be fine.”

  So Red put a Band-Aid on Lucifer’s nose, applying antibiotic ointment first. He hovered around for a few days, calling Lucifer to the wire at intervals so he could check the man for signs of infection or brain damage, but Lucifer seemed to heal well. Soon, he was his nasty, vicious self again. What finally more or less cured Lucifer of his problematic and dangerous behavior was not being shot with rubber bullets, however unpleasant this near-lobotomy had been. Rather, it was the Red Cross–approved restraint chair the Mainers had built according to Maine State Prison specs. Two trips to the chair, combined with relentless professionalism and consistency, and Lucifer became voluntarily compliant.

  Though, as Turtle observed, “he still hates out-of-staters.”

  Mostly the detainees structured their time around bathing their feet, hands, and faces before prayers, as well as the prayers themselves, offered in the direction of Mecca five times daily.

  Snacks, too, were entertaining to acquire because it required some effort on the detainee’s part (begging, swiping, bargaining) to convince guards to give in to their pleas.

  Still, the basics of prayer, food, personal hygiene, and Count left hours in the day to fill, and some of the more ingenious detainees could’ve out-created MacGyver or Martha Stewart. Using only materials scavenged or stolen, they fashioned purses and shopping bags, weapons, and even a radio antenna made from a Styrofoam dinner plate, wires, and aluminum foil. One guy took his newly issued canary-yellow prison jumpsuit into his tent and came out wearing a three-piece suit that Turtle told him admiringly was “badass.”

  Sometimes, when a detainee left on the Happy Bus, they gave the homemade items as good-bye presents to the soldiers. Red received a box about the size of a Monopoly board that was exquisitely, intricately inlaid with minute bits of wood, glass, and pebbles that the detainee had collected from the debris of the prison and shaped laboriously using only handmade tools.

  Another detainee smelted a nail in a campfire, shaped it, drilled it, and sharpened it until he had a needle that he used to embroider flowers, geometric designs, and sayings from the Koran into the plastic of empty MRE bags using colorful embroidery threads he’d carefully unraveled from scraps of cloth.

  “Mister-mister! I have one spoon please? One spoon?” was a common request. In the hands of a skilled Iraqi crafter, an ordinary metal spoon could become a beautiful little belt buckle. Unfortunately, a spoon could also become a lethal weapon with little effort, so the guards were advised not to be generous with them.

  Beerboy struck up a bit of a friendship with a dignified older detainee whose real name was Ali, though Beerboy called him Chief. This gentleman who, clad in a long gray shirt and red pants, somehow bore a strong resemblance to the thinner versions of Santa Claus, was an artist in real life. During one conversation through the wire, Chief asked Beerboy about the derivation of his nickname, and the sergeant explained that he and his father brewed beer in a small town in Maine.

  “Ah! Beerboy!” said Chief. “So … I would like some, ah … colored pencils? I would make you a picture as a gift.”

  As he was scrounging up some colored pencils from the resident artist, Dizl, and cutting a piece of cardboard out of an MRE carton, Beerboy wondered whether he had talked too much. Will Al-Qaeda in Iraq send hate mail to my family, or blow up the brewery? he thought. It’s not as if it would be very hard to find, even with the minimal information I’ve given to this guy. Maine is small.

  He set aside distrust, however, and handed the cardboard and the pencils across the wire to Chief, who disappeared into his tent. After an hour or so, he came out, bearing his offering with shy pride. It was a drawing of a beer tankard sporting the classic cap of foam. The Arabic writing, Chief explained, said “Beerboy.”

  “Wow! Thanks!” said Beerboy, moved.

  And then, because this was the way of things at Abu Ghraib, the sergeant brought the picture to another enclosure and confirmed the translation.

  “What does this say?” he asked a random detainee.

  “It says … ah … beer … boy?” the man replied, mystified.

  “Good. Shukran. Thank you.”

  For a
young man who hailed from a village in which many residents still don’t lock their doors, distrust was an alien and uncomfortable experience. As it happened, al-Zarqawi never did turn up in his hometown, and Chief’s gift adorns a wall in the brewery to this day.

  For a time, detainee soccer was a distraction and was at least as tightly organized as the Maine coastal amateur’s league in which Dizl played hamy el hadef, or goalkeeper. There were bitter contests for the championship, until the Americans discovered that the teams had been formed along sectarian lines (Shiites vs. Sunnis) and were mirroring the civil war that had begun beyond the walls and, sadly, had to put a stop to the games.

  During the Great Sorting and subsequent relocation into Redemption, Shiites and Sunnis perforce had separate living quarters, though naturally it pained the idealists to do this. In the words of one famous American, “Can’t we all just get along?” But the answer, at least in the short term, was no.

  Though they shared an enthusiasm for soccer, if the descendants of Ali and the fans of the Caliphate were restricted to intramural play, the competition was less aggressive and injurious, and the post-game celebrations far less likely to end in fistfights and the subsequent discharge of nonlethal rounds from the towers.

  THIRTEEN

  GENERALS, COED SHOWERS, AND TAMPONS

  “I didn’t want to disappoint [Graner] just because then he’ll leave me and I’ll feel alone in this war zone.”

  —Interview with Lynndie England, BBC, aired August 13, 2009

  AFEW OF the Mainers were in Tower G-7-1 one night, eating the most delicious ice cream from Belgium, of all places. The Iraqi night was calm; the men were happy and relaxed. It wouldn’t last, however, and the peace was broken by the chattering thunder of a heavy machine gun squirting long streams of tracers at their tower.

  The Bad Guys had snuck the gun up onto that ever-handy highway overpass. Tracer rounds that looked like flaming tennis balls snapped past the tower and the big bullets sounded like timbers snapping in half as they broke the sound barrier over Dizl’s head.

  But the Mainers kept eating the ice cream, hunkered down on the floor. The boot (new guy) was staring up at the tracers. His eyes were wide and his mouth wobbled around a scream. He wasn’t eating his ice cream. So, giggling like school kids, Dizl, Parker, Red, and Turtle scarfed down his portion too as the strings of bullets snap, snap, snapped overhead.

  They were National Guard troops stuck in a silly little wooden tower at Abu Ghraib, eating what they would afterward refer to as Belgian PTSD medicine. They were veterans. After what must have seemed like an indeterminably long time to the boot, Marines from K Company, recently assigned to protect the prison, lit the Bad Guys up, decimating their little group and making them pay for the indiscretion. The Mainers cheered and hugged and laughed.

  They had all wet their pants, of course, but the new guy was the only one who was worried about it. He wasn’t a veteran yet. He hadn’t eaten his ice cream.

  As the world foamed and raved over the photo scandal, General Miller arrived for another visit, if only so that news agencies could take pictures of the American brass marching muscularly around the prison with purposeful expressions. But the war was going badly all over the theater, not just at Abu Ghraib, and running detainee operations for a country that appeared to be in the middle of a meltdown couldn’t have been easy for the general.

  Damage control wasn’t the only motivation for Miller’s visits to FOBAG. In any event, on this particular occasion Sergeant Horton decided that the general and the press corps were marching through Ganci in such a way that the most disgusting and potentially lethal features of life there were bound to elude his notice.

  “Goddamn it,” Horton announced from his spot beside Dizl in the Hawk’s Nest where they watched the general’s progress through the prison. He got to his feet and headed for the stairs.

  “What’s up?” Dizl asked.

  Horton paused and glared at Dizl from under his eyebrows. “The general is not going to see the shit.”

  “Huh?”

  “General Miller needs to know about the shit. And you know what, Diz? Fifteen minutes from now, I’m going to be just like you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When I get back, I won’t be an E-5 anymore, I’ll be a forty-year-old E-1 private, just like you.”

  Dizl grinned. “Ah. Roger that,” he said.

  As Dizl watched, fascinated, from the Hawk’s Nest, Horton proceeded to stalk the general as he and his entourage wended their way around Ganci. The wire fences formed a maze and Horton had a hard time figuring out not only where the general was, but what route he could take to be sure of intercepting him. Lacking radios, Dizl could offer no aerial guidance from his vantage point in the tower.

  At last, by accident or providence, Horton found himself perhaps ten yards away from the general, separated from him only by the tall, chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

  “General, sir,” he called through the barrier. “Could I have a word with you, sir?”

  General Miller turned. On the other side of a fence stood a barrel-chested, mostly eyebrows American sergeant. Behind the sergeant, and behind concertina wire, a large group of detainees gathered, perhaps anticipating a show.

  “Sergeant?” the unsmiling general responded.

  “Sir,” barked Horton. “With all due respect, sir, the sanitary situation here is unacceptable. There is human waste everywhere. Look, sir,” Horton said, turning over his boot for the general’s inspection. “There is human excrement on the soles of our boots. The detainees are walking around in sewage. This is not acceptable, sir.”

  General Miller shot a sharp, sideways glance at a hovering subordinate.

  “Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Sergeant.”

  “Sir!” said Horton. “Yes, sir.”

  As it turned out, Horton wasn’t the only one who’d insisted on pointing out the discrepancies to the general. During Miller’s meeting with the command staff, Huladog respectfully reminded the general of the standard operating procedure for detainees, or prisoners of war.

  “Sir, I refer to the Five Ss,” said Huladog, referring to field manual guidance of search, segregate, silence, speed, safeguard. “Given the frequency and intensity of enemy fire, it seems to me that we cannot claim to be providing for the proper safeguarding of these people.”

  This was not the first time Huladog had raised this point. Before the April attacks, the response was that the soldiers in FOBAG would just have to make use of what was available, but not to worry because, according to commanders, there were sufficient troops on the ground in the area to ensure the safety of all Abu Ghraib’s inhabitants.

  The second time he asked, they had already endured the April attacks, and the original answer was too obviously incorrect to deliver with a straight face. So this time, the general’s staff told Huladog and the other officers about the plans already underway to transfer the whole detainee operation to the new Camp Bucca, already in place and being renovated and expanded.

  This was probably not a lie, incidentally, though it was the most cheerful possible spin that Miller could put on the truth of the matter, which was that the accommodations under construction at Bucca would be sufficient to relieve some pressure at Abu Ghraib, but couldn’t house the whole crowd. Perhaps, too, the general’s staff was hoping that the more optimistic predictions about the Iraqi conflict coming from the office of the secretary of defense would prove based in fact rather than in politics, and Abu Ghraib would soon be unnecessary.

  Still, in the meantime it was hard to deny the mortars or the shit on the soles of Horton’s boots, and perhaps this is why Horton was not, as it turned out, demoted to E-1, although he was “counseled.”

  It all boiled down to poop. In 2004, one could divide the overall population of Abu Ghraib prison by the answers given to a single question: Where do you defecate?

  According to a reliable informant, American civilian emp
loyees of the omnipresent Kellogg Brown & Root had genuine, porcelain flushing toilets in their trailers while soldiers and detainees did their business in porta-potties.

  These needed to be pumped out at regular intervals if they were to remain “fresh,” or at least to prevent them from actually overflowing. So periodically a flock of little tanker trucks would arrive at Abu Ghraib, pump out the porta-potties, and take the contents away to be disgorged into what one can only hope was an environmentally sound lagoon in the southeast corner of the prison grounds.

  The soldiers on duty in the Ganci towers could see, and sometimes smell, the lagoon seething and bubbling beneath the desert sun. As the moisture evaporated, the pond, dubbed Shit Lake, developed what Dizl and the Lost Boys referred to as a puddin’ skin thick enough for the smaller feral dogs to skitter across its undulating surface.

  “Does anyone check the shit trucks?” Dizl asked one day, as he and Turtle sat sweating in the tower.

  “Check the shit trucks? What for?” asked Turtle. He was peeling the wrapper from a package of peanut butter crackers. He offered one to Dizl.

  “Insurgents. Bombs. They come through the gate empty, and no one looks inside.” Dizl chewed.

  “Who’s going to want to check? Have you ever smelled one of those things?”

  “There is a rule when working in a prison. If you can see it, those hundreds of other sets of eyeballs have already seen it and they have a plan. Your job is to disrupt their plan.”

  “You think the insurgents have a plan for the shit trucks?”

  “I’m saying that if you were an insurgent, you could hide a bunch of guys with guns in one of those tanks. Once through the gate, you would all bail out and start blasting. Like the Trojan Horse.”

  “I would be so nauseated from being in the tank I wouldn’t be able to do anything but puke,” Turtle pointed out. “Wanna Twix?” he added.

  Dizl took the Twix and conceded, “Still, someone ought to check the trucks.”