As his leadership tended to consist of tormenting some kids and winding the rest up for misbehavior, Shriek was a bit of a problem. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, when mortars were falling, he had the irritating habit of postponing his retreat into the safety of the new bomb shelters until one of the soldiers had threatened him. At that point, he would move indolently toward the shelter where the other kids were already huddled, offering his all-purpose English-language commentary on his world.
“Mortars are good!”
Red was very tired of the hyperactivity, the bullying, and the ostentatious slow walk to the bomb shelter.
So the day came when—Krumpboom!—a mortar fell, and then another, and Shriek smiled at Red and said, “Mortars are good.” He was just turning to begin his slow, contemptuous shuffle to the bunker when Red flung the gate wide.
“Get over here, kid,” he said, clutching Shriek by his shirt. Red pulled him out of the compound and marched him briskly into the alley between the compounds. Krump! Another mortar fell, this one a little closer. In the middle of the flat, dirt alley stood the steel cage used as an isolation cell for Level Five detainees who just weren’t getting with the program.
“What do you want me to tell your mother, kid?” Red asked Shriek as they approached the cage. “I mean, when she comes to Abu Ghraib to pick up your body: What do you want me to say to her?”
He unlocked and opened the door to the isolation cell with one hand, keeping hold of Shriek with the other. Krump! Another mortar. It was definitely closer. He pushed Shriek into the cage.
“Huh? What shall I tell her?”
Red stepped into the cage after Shriek, slammed the door shut, locked it, and threw the keys out through the wire. “You want me to tell her that mortars are good?”
Krump! Krump! Shriek was down on the ground now, curled into a ball, yelling. Krump! Red was on the ground too, curled up next to Shriek so his body might shield his, but he was still yelling in the kid’s ear: “Mortars are good? Is that what you want me to say?”
Krump … Krump … the mortar attack went on for twenty minutes, perhaps half an hour. It seemed longer. When it was over, Red picked Shriek up and set him on his feet.
“Listen, kid,” he said seriously. “In a couple of weeks, you’re going to be eighteen, and that means you won’t be the big kid in the little kids’ compound, you’ll be the little man in the men’s compound. You have to decide how you’re going to handle yourself, and I’ll tell you right now, if you keep acting the way you do, you aren’t going to do very well.”
“OK,” said Shriek weakly.
“No more ‘mortars are good,’ OK?”
“OK.”
And Shriek was a pretty well-behaved boy after that. It wasn’t too long, anyway, before it was decided that Shriek could be discharged, presumably into the bosom of his family. When he was boarding the Happy Bus, he handed Red a present. It was a long strip of fabric.
“From the tent,” Shriek said, and grinned. As he and Red both knew, this material was contraband in itself, as the guards took a dim view of prisoners who damaged prison property. On this strip of fabric, Shriek had carefully written, in passable calligraphy, his name in Arabic and English.
“Ali Abu Neda,” Red read aloud.
“Yes,” said Ali. “That is so you don’t forget me.”
In June, two simple words saved lives: “kill” and “them.”
The ROEs still in place did not permit the soldiers or Marines on the ground to make independent decisions about what did and did not constitute a threat. Something that didn’t look right—the guy skull-fucking you with his binoculars from the overpass, for example—had to be phoned in to “Shadow Main” and approval obtained before countermeasures could be taken.
One evening, two vans approached the main gate to the prison. The Marine at the gate called the command post inside, and Lunch Lady picked up the phone.
“Sir, two vehicles are approaching at a high rate of speed.”
“Kill them,” said Lunch Lady, and the Marine opened fire.
The vehicles, loaded with explosives, detonated, killing one Marine, but the blast occurred far enough away that the gates were not breached, as was the intention.
It happened that Horton was outside the wall that evening, and when he heard the explosion, he also ignored the ROE, which would have required him to fall back inside the prison. Instead, he charged into the fray and fought beside the Marines, earning himself another “adverse counseling” session with superiors outside his unit and the enthusiastic gratitude of the Marines themselves.
Military leaders later decided Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the swaggering, self-appointed, “pathologically brutal” representative of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, instigated the attack.
He’d named himself after a youth spent in the Jordanian city of Zarqa, but his friends called him al-Ghraib, “the strange one.” Al-Zarqawi was responsible for the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad that killed twenty-two people and led to the withdrawal of the United Nations from Iraq. He deployed suicide bombers for another massacre of pilgrims in Najaf and Karbala in December of ’04, and had made the provocation of sectarian violence a personal project. As if all this weren’t enough, in the vicinity of FOBAG, al-Zarqawi was the head of the head-choppers, personally decapitating at least a half dozen people for the benefit of web-surfers worldwide.
The local garbage pickers—line workers in the ubiquitous third-world recycling program—found and sold paperwork to al-Zarqawi that bore the names of officers, or envelopes with names and return addresses still legibly inscribed.
So the Secret Squirrels would pass along reliable HUMINT that al-Zarqawi had put a price on the head of this or that officer at FOBAG, and there were wives and husbands back home in Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico who received hate mail from al-Zarqawi’s operatives. “We know where your husband is,” the letters would say. “We know where you are.”
Then there was the memorable moment when one of the most docile, compliant detainees of Ganci 4 was headed for home and planted his flip-flop–shod foot onto the step of the Happy Bus, turned to Turtle, smiled, and said, “I hear Maine is very nice this time of year. I shall go visit your family.”
This was the source of Beerboy’s fretfulness about Chief. Even if he eventually decided to trust that Chief was OK, this offered no reason to abandon a more generalized paranoia. Huladog reminded his Mainers, again and again, to destroy their paperwork. Horton shredded his and then burned it for good measure while thinking of his wife and daughters on the other side of the world, whom he loved with a passion that his time at Abu Ghraib had only purified and made plainer.
One day, a few of the Lost Boys were “tasked” with taking a small convoy of trucks to BIAP. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence. There were many reasons for Abu Ghraib personnel to travel beyond the relative safety of the prison walls. A detainee scheduled to make his case at the Iraqi provisional court in the Green Zone; a soldier whose injury or illness was more than even Chiclets’s skills could manage, or whose mental health issues might benefit from an hour of talk therapy (albeit bracketed with couple of hours of extremely stressful travel); someone heading off for home leave from BIAP, or someone who needed to be picked up and returned to FOBAG; escorts for valuable men or matériel—all such expeditions required a minimum of three up-armored Humvees to counter the risks posed by IEDs and ambushes.
For some, shepherding a convoy was a welcome opportunity to get out from behind the walls of FOBAG and take a gander at the towns, people, and farmlands surrounding the prison.
Though very little of Iraq’s land is viable for agriculture, what exists is concentrated in the area around Baghdad, with water from the legendary Tigris creating a zone of vegetation that gives the scenery a Floridian look. Irrigation canals meander past fields and plantations of date palms, and the Tigris flows green when seen from the seat of a passing vehicle but is revealed as an astonishing, tropical turquoise when viewed from a helic
opter.
Fields of barley and wheat glow golden in the sun, and farms boast rows of lush plants laden with tomatoes, cucumbers, and chickpeas. Children would appear along the roads, having learned to expect a shower of candy from American Humvees. When the natural cosmetics company Tom’s of Maine sent over a case of toothbrushes, Dizl took to tossing these to the kids, who to his amusement generally reacted with the comical disgust of young American trick-or-treaters offered apples instead of candy corn on Halloween.
The excursions to Baghdad would’ve been idyllic, in fact, if it weren’t for the roadside bombs, the heavy objects and explosives dropped from the overpasses, the snipers and rock-throwers, and the gigantic craters and bullet pockmarks that scarred the buildings and palaces of Baghdad.
On one memorable occasion, Dizl was driving a truck that chose a bad moment to shed its serpentine belt. Immobilized for what was probably five minutes but felt more like so many hours, Dizl and Beerboy waited for the rest of the convoy to turn itself around and return to the rescue while, all around them, Iraqi MMAs (males of military age) responded to this targeting opportunity by making ominous cell-phone calls.
Travel was dangerous. This was the reality that brought Huladog to the staging area to see the convoys off, and again to welcome them home, all smiles, while his eyes moved from face to face, assuring himself that all his guys were back, and whole.
By this point in their deployment, the Lost Boys knew the route and the routine. They drove in a manner that would give any Maine State Trooper an aneurysm. The key to avoid getting hit was high speed, weaving back and forth over the median and into oncoming traffic to avoid possible VBIEDs, and veering violently when any object larger than a cigarette packet was spotted beside the road.
Dizl made sure that Lenny the Lobster accompanied him and the other soldiers on their convoys. The plastic lobster would sit on the dashboard next to a can of Moxie soda to help remind the soldiers of the 152nd of their home.
Before setting off on one particular convoy, they received intel that would make them even more jumpy and leery of civilian vehicles. Insurgents had begun driving high-performance sedans packed with explosives into the middle of military convoys before detonating. Before setting out, Dizl made sure to remind his guys of the rules of convoys that were much like the rules of the middle-school lunch line: No cutting.
A substantial concrete barrier, with one Humvee-sized opening left to accommodate traffic, defended the main route to BIAP. Iraqi civilians used this opening as well, and soldiers were sometimes posted at it, making the opening an occasional impromptu checkpoint. The Mainers’ Humvee, number two in a line of three, darted off the main drag and made the left-hand turn through the barrier without slowing down. It was your basic up-armored lefty at thirty miles an hour through a twelve-foot gap in reinforced concrete.
As the lead Humvee cleared the opening, a white van with a group of Iraqi men inside attempted to make a thirty-mile-per-hour right-hand turn and cut in line between the lead vehicle and the Mainer’s gun truck.
“Hey! No cutting,” Dizl heard himself shouting as the adrenaline spiked his heart rate and tunneled his vision.
Lunch Lady, at the wheel and already flinching in expectation of an explosion, accelerated. As the driver, Lunch Lady’s vehicle would serve as his weapon, and his goal was to smash the van and its occupants into the concrete barrier. Meanwhile the gunner, Roy-Roy-the-Naked-Boy, swung the Humvee’s roof-mounted machine gun around to bear on the white van.
“Ramming!” shouted Dizl.
“I’m gonna shoot!” shouted Roy-Roy.
“Oh, fuck,” someone yelled.
Just as Roy, Dizl, and Lunch Lady were about to unleash hell on the white van, Dizl noticed something was off about what they were all sure was a VBIED about to send them home early.
“Wait!”
As it turned out, the men in the white van were not terrorists. They were just a group of national-civilian workers who had made a gross error in line etiquette. Luckily for them and everyone involved, the van’s driver slammed on the brakes. As the Humvee hurtled past, the soldiers caught a glimpse of the occupants, displaying the appropriate bug-eyed, wide-mouthed screaming and hand-flailing body language of people about to be crushed and machine-gunned to death by those crazy Americans from Abu Ghraib.
Dizl turned in the passenger seat to check Lunch Lady’s well-being and saw the same bug-eyes and the open mouth. He probably looked that way, too.
Meanwhile, Roy-Roy-the-Naked-Boy was jabbering in adrenaline-infused war lingo from the gun turret. “Yeah,” he yelled. “Take that, motherfucker. Did you see that, Lieutenant? Hey, Lieutenant, did you see that? Whooo-whee! Git some!”
They dropped off their passenger at BIAP, stopped by Brigade HQ to take care of some small errands, and then made a drama-free run back to Abu Ghraib. Huladog was there at the gate to meet them, counting their heads with the subtlest movement of his calm brown eyes.
Protocol was to fuel up vehicles before returning them to the motor pool, so Dizl drove their Humvee around to the fuel point. The KBR civilian contractors—the ones Roy-Roy, wide-eyed, had once described as “men from places with monkeys” (an accidental bit of racism, perhaps, as the contractors were from “exotic” places like Africa)—came out of the shade to work the gas pump.
The wall that rose behind the fuel tanks stood perhaps twelve feet high. It was made of the usual grayish-brown reinforced concrete, and on the other side of its illusory protection lay the living quarters for the Lost Boys.
His heart rate still slightly elevated, his perceptions sharpened by the neurochemistry of near-tragedy, Dizl saw a cat. Stretched out on the wall, perhaps to dry in preparation for tanning, was the freshly rugged-out pelt of a large, orange cat.
Dizl’s first thought was: Garfield!
And then came realization: “Holy shit!” he said out loud.“They ate it.” The KBR guys ate the cat!
After that day, Hajji-Pussy wore a little kitty-collar that, in indelible Sharpie, someone wrote “Pet of the 152nd FA. Please don’t eat.”
FIFTEEN
SMOKES AND SANDBAGS
“[Sergeant Hazen] said the daily life inside the prison is eerily similar to what’s happening outside the walls…. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse, just like the constant killings, kidnappings, and bombings bouncing between Mosul, Fallujah, and Baghdad.”
—“We’re At Abu Ghraib To Make Things Better,” Camden (Maine) Herald, September 28, 2004
AFTER ONE PARTICULARLY close call with an exploding rocket or mortar (“I could never tell the difference,” he said) Dizl found himself lost in a childhood memory. He stood on Main Street in Thomaston, Maine, eating an orange-pineapple ice-cream cone. He wasn’t called Dizl then, but Kelly. He was in the fifth grade, a blond boy who had to punch a kid to prove that Kelly could be a boy’s name, too. With him at the ice-cream stand was a little girl named Wendy. Their desks had been side by side in third grade at the St. George School, where Dizl had been happy. But Dizl’s mother had fallen in love with an ex-convict who married her, and they moved to California. During two terrible years on the West Coast, Dizl and Wendy had written back and forth to one another, and by the time Dizl and his mother finally escaped from the ex-con and returned to Maine, he was ten years old.
“I love you,” he said to Wendy, after he finished his ice cream. He meant it.
Decades later, while he was in Iraq, Dizl received a care package from Wendy. It contained the book Life of Pi, and Dizl read it again and again, as if it were the Bible, because it was good and because it had come from her.
The original plan was that they were all supposed to go home in November, but—FRAGO—the 152nd got “extended” for three months.
In Washington, DC, there were public-affairs specialists whose assigned task was to scour the Internet for any news report that contained the words “Abu Ghraib” in any of its various spellings. Thus, though he didn’t know it, Beerboy’s superiors had be
en apprised, from Washington, of the remarks he had made to his hometown newspaper back in Maine before he was even back in Iraq from R&R.
Huladog heard about it first. Adjectives like “unhelpful” were used, and nouns like “counseling” as well. Beerboy was not, in fact, disciplined, and he owes it to the intervention of his first sergeant.
In particular the higher-ups were displeased with Beerboy’s assessment that the United States was “in the wrong country, fighting against the wrong people.”
“I’m proud of what I’m doing, but I hope this is all worth it, men and women giving their lives for the cause,” the story quoted Beerboy as saying. “I stand behind what I’m doing, but I don’t want to be a statistic and I don’t want to be a flag on the lawn in Rockport.”
“That wasn’t helpful,” said the captain.
“The sergeant is a citizen-soldier, sir,” Huladog pointed out, placing a deliberate emphasis on the word “citizen.” “As such, he retains the right to express his opinion when he is on his own time and in his own home.”
The captain said unhappily, “The people at Victory and in DC are concerned that our men do not understand the gravity of the situation.”
“Given that we are faced inside the walls and outside by Islamic extremists who want to kill us, sir, I believe my men fully understand the gravity of the situation. They do not require perspective management from Washington.”
Huladog was tempted to add, but didn’t, that Beerboy did not need advice from a lot of anxious armchair warriors who didn’t have to begin the day wondering if they’d be KIA by suppertime just because they took too long to have a bowel movement.
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 17
