Packed for the Wrong Trip

by W. Zach Griffith

  “He came home,” she said. “And the very night that he arrived, the insurgents came and shot him in the head.”

  Yogi, stunned, stared at her. He must have eventually said something, though he would never afterward remember what. Perhaps he said, “Oh no!” or “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They told us he had collaborated with the Americans in this place. They shot him in front of all of us. In front of his family.”

  Speechless with grief and horror, Yogi looked at her, then down at his boots, then at her again. She looked back, her brown eyes meeting and searching his blue ones.

  “I have something for you,” she continued quietly. She reached into the folds of her burka and pulled out a small, silver-colored chain necklace. From it dangled a thin, metal charm in the shape of the country of Iraq. “I want to give this to you. I would like for you to take it home to your wife.”

  “Ma’am, you don’t have to …”

  “This was given to me by Kamal when he was courting me. He wrote me letters from this place, and he told me about you, that you were a kind man and his friend.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know …”

  “So I would like for you to bring this home to your wife. I want your wife to know that there are people here, in Iraq, who loved her husband.”

  Some European house sparrows that lived in the brickwork of their LSA befriended Dizl. Dizl was a bird-watcher, so they provided a comforting diversion. When he observed the birds, he thought of his grandmother and also of James Bond.

  Not the spy, that is, but a well-known ornithologist who, believe it or not, had served as the namesake for the hero of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Besides having been a fan of Bond’s bird books, Fleming apparently thought his was a superbly ordinary name for an extraordinary British spy.

  Dizl had met Bond at the Gasparilla Inn on Boca Grande Island off the western coast of Florida, where Dizl drove a laundry truck for a time. He often thought of him and the interesting conversations they might have had if the aged ornithologist mimicked the spy and turned up at Abu Ghraib.

  Abu Ghraib’s sparrows liked to perch on a wire near a building that housed one of Saddam Hussein’s torture cells. This room, with its tiled walls and floor, had no plumbing but boasted a big brass drain in the floor. There were two iron hooks in the ceiling, where Baathist dungeon masters would hang two friends or relatives from opposing hooks for torture. When it rained, a horrible smell would crawl up the brass drain.

  This room became Dizl’s art studio for a brief time. He made many drawings of the sparrows. “When you are trapped by duty or situation, in a hellish place,” he explained to Red, “the notion of having wings can consume you.”

  One day, Sergeant Major Vacho showed Dizl a military challenge coin.

  For those unfamiliar with this part of military culture, a challenge coin is a medallion about the size of a silver dollar that you carry in your pocket, which usually depicts the unit’s name, logo, and some motivational drawing of war or the various scary animals that serve as symbols and nicknames. The idea used to be that if you are sitting in a bar and another veteran “challenges” you, you can show him or her your coin, and he or she has to buy you a beer. If you forgot the coin in your other pants, then you’ve got to buy them the beer.

  While few contemporary service members have even been “challenged,” or attempted a “challenge,” the coin itself has become something of a collector’s item. Marines, for instance, will show off coins passed to them by the commandant or sergeant major of the Marine Corps on tidy desk display racks.

  “Do you think you could design one of these for Abu Ghraib?” the sergeant major asked Dizl.

  “We don’t have any art stuff, Sergeant Major,” Dizl pointed out.

  “Sketch something up, and we’ll see what happens.”

  “Adapt and overcome” applies everywhere.

  So Dizl went to talk to Jiffy-Lube at the motor pool. After considering the issues for a few minutes, Jiffy-Lube rooted around and found a piece of transparent Plexiglas about the size of an old record album cover.

  This Dizl made into a light table by laying the Plexiglas across his knees and bracing his army-issue flashlight between his feet so the beam shone upward. It worked surprisingly well, at least during hours of darkness, and the drawings Dizl made on the computer paper Huladog supplied were the beginning of what he designated the Abu Ghraib Combat Art Initiative.

  The design of the coin took Dizl a few days of deliberate thought, even as he sat sweating out his watch in the Hawk’s Nest. The iconography wasn’t the hard part: Shemis, the sun god and source of overwhelming heat (yes, yes, it’s a dry heat) obviously should be featured, along with the omnipresent towers of FOBAG.

  As he thought about the project, another image kept surfacing, submerging, and resurfacing in Dizl’s mind: the image of a female soldier giving a happy thumbs-up next to a dead detainee in a body bag. The world had seen the photo, the Mainers of the 152nd had seen the photo, and they bore the weight of knowing what the world now thought about them and their service. This is what we are up against at Abu Ghraib. Those photos, and what they represent.

  Restoring America’s honor was the mission of the 152nd, and so Restoring America’s Honor would be the E Pluribus Unum for the challenge coin. Long before Rumsfeld, or the Tea Party, laid claim to the phrase, it presented itself to Dizl as he sat amid the sandbags in Tower 7-1 through the long, hot, slumberous hours of the noon to midnight watch.

  After completing the midnight ritual of trading places with young Parker, Dizl walked slowly back to his LSA. He was eager to get to his combat light table and start working on the lettering for that hook, Restoring America’s Honor.

  Pausing by the fuel point, he became aware that dark human figures were scuttling and hustling among the buildings, motivated by mortars to move quick and stay low. A helicopter full of Marines clattered overhead. It was a QRF (quick reaction force) battering its way through the sky, off to chase the Bad Guys and forestall explosions.

  The rhino knocked the shit out of us and everything else, Dizl mused. Finally, someone had the bright idea to sharpen the sticks.

  He experienced a sudden, strong desire to meet the family of the real Ganci, the fire chief who died on 9/11. He wanted to show them the coin he would design, show them his drawings, tell them about Redemption. He wanted them to know, wanted everyone to know, that there was honor and great love associated with their name.

  At Abu Ghraib, the Great Sorting steadily reduced the numbers of detainees, releasing the innocent or apparently innocent, sometimes a hundred or more at a time. More and more, those that remained would be indisputably insurgents, foreign fighters, and dangerous persons, and thus could be expected to excite less sympathy among the Americans holding them.

  Shirley could generally be found supervising the checkpoint at the entrance to the Hard Site. “High value” detainees were neither confined nor interviewed by Americans at the Hard Site by this time, and the portion of the building still under US control provided a safe, secure living space for the few remaining female prisoners. Shirley’s supervisor was an E-6 so unfairly handsome that the Lost Boys had nicknamed him Sam Spade, Male Model, though for short they called him Spade.

  Shirley was a friendly person, and she had grown up with brothers and been in the military long enough not to be flustered by the presence of even so impressive a specimen as Spade.

  They got to know each other well, in the way that people do who spend twelve or fourteen hours a day together, sometimes for weeks at a time. It took Shirley a while to notice that Spade was supervising her AO with what struck disinterested observers (Dizl, for example, and Yogi) as excessive diligence. In the end, Spade’s persistence paid off and Shirley eventually began to take him seriously. It helped that he was kind and capable, and also that he smelled good.

  It’s hard to imagine wooing in the context of Abu Ghraib, what with the sand, the spiders, the sweaty unifor
ms, and the frequent bouts of a dysentery-like condition that the Lost Boys referred to as JMA, an in-group acronym standing for “Juicy Man-Ass.”

  Still, one day Sam Spade kissed Shirley, and that was that. They fell in love.

  “We will just tell people we met in prison,” Sam Spade told her, laughing.

  There was something comforting in the thought of two good people finding one another and so, in some sense, finding home in a bad place. If they were lucky and stubborn, Spade and Shirley would be able, always, to share not only the bond of committed spouses but also the bond of comrades who have shared the shattering experience of war. All in all, Dizl thought, Spade and Shirley were to be envied.

  That some men and women (or men and men or women and women) had extramarital affairs with one another while at FOBAG should not surprise anyone with the slightest acquaintance or sympathy with human nature.

  By the same token, no one should be astonished to hear that some soldiers at Abu Ghraib received the unwelcome news that their stateside spouses, bored by sacrifice and exhausted by solitude, were exploring other relationship options.

  However, anyone with the energy to gin up moral indignation about the adultery, fornication, and other “self-soothing methods” that doubtless blotted the records of many American soldiers at Abu Ghraib has no possible way of understanding that, to those on the ground, these indiscretions were simply dwarfed by the huge and consequential moral questions that cried forth from that place and time, and echo still.

  SEVENTEEN

  R&R

  “What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”

  —Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864

  FIRST SERGEANT NOTES

  For 13 September 2004

  PLACE IN BURN BOX WHEN DONE REMEMBER!

  Weather: Today 100 down to 70. Winds at 5–15 knots. Next two days 102 to 70 and 102 to 70.

  Sun up 0645, down 1912. Moon up 0517, down 1853.

  MSRs—Closed till tomorrow. Still some guys running around with car bombs.

  CONVOY LESSONS LEARNED—As you all may know, SGM Butler’s convoy was hit with an IED. His vehicle rolled three times. Your Platoon Sergeant has his AAR. Read and heed.

  UNIFORM CHANGES—OK, here we go again. Your Platoon Sergeant has this list. See him for more details. No Arabic writing anywhere.

  KBR—Lost three more workers yesterday executed and kidnapped. You may see a degradation of services around here similar to that which we experienced in April. Conserve drinking water. We may have to include spraying down the porta-potties and cleaning the other shower area in our daily cleanup.

  WHEN ATTACKED—You defend from where ever you are at. If you are at the DFAC, you defend from the DFAC. Do not run back to the LSA or the compounds. If you’re at the compounds, keep the detainees in. If you’re at the LSA, stay in the building and follow the directions of whoever is in charge there. Don’t go on the roof or start shooting outside the LSA from the inside. Get with your Platoon Sergeant for more detailed information.

  ROE—Colonel Thomas has said that if you observe a bad guy violating the ROE (like a local in the back of a pickup with a machine gun mounted on the back) you can shoot. You don’t have to wait for permission from Shadow Main. Follow the theater ROE for outside the compound when outside the compound, and the levels of force for inside the compound.

  2D PLT AREA—When they leave, that area is to stay vacant. Do not move into any of those rooms.

  EXTRA STUFF—All the extra items and stuff you may have acquired while here will not all fit in the conex boxes we will have to go home. If you want to start mailing some stuff home, I would start to consider that now. Expect to be leaving or selling the furniture and large items you have here if you can’t mail them home. Also, expect there not to be many “someones” to sell them to, if we’re here to the end.

  The Iraqis were now managing the Hard Site where ordinary prisoners spent their days. The Hard Site had its own, exterior tower, manned by Iraqis who, from this vantage point, had a splendid view of everything that went on in the prison. They had clear lines of sight and fire on the helo pad, the DFAC, the front gate, the fuel point, the convoy staging area, everything.

  Al-Zarqawi would boast, before his death, of having had spies well placed at Abu Ghraib. Dizl, for one, doesn’t doubt that one or more of the Iraqi guards might have been among these.

  Given the manifold and uncertain threats facing coalition forces throughout Iraq and around Abu Ghraib especially, it might have been wiser to delay handing over the Hard Site to the Iraqis. Certainly, as it turned out, the prisoners themselves would come to prefer the custody of Americans, who were, though this would not be advertised on Al Jazeera, considerably more restrained than their poorly paid and ambiguously motivated Iraqi counterparts.

  In any organization, the decisions made by managers are often inexplicable to those on the line. Indeed, orders from above frequently strike subordinates as plain stupid even when the results aren’t potentially lethal. Sometimes those decisions are stupid, based on misguided theories without sufficient appreciation of the facts on the ground. Sometimes the orders given by a superior officer are based on orders given to him by his own superiors, and so on up the line like a game of telephone with sometimes deadly consequences.

  When the generals told the 152nd that Iraqis were taking over the Hard Site, Dizl and the others heard, “You will let the Iraqi Police put potential spies on the outer perimeter of the Hard Site where they will be able to view our entire operation from a commanding, elevated position, and yes, they will be allowed to keep their cell phones.”

  No matter how they interpreted them, the command staff on the ground at Abu Ghraib could not disobey such orders, nor even publicly question the wisdom of those who gave them. For Dizl, Huladog, Tex, Beerboy, and the others, improvise, adapt, and overcome was combined with do not make us look bad. Meanwhile, they had their own priorities, like making sure everyone marooned at Abu Ghraib, good guys and bad, made it home in one piece.

  Home—Maine, that is—the people, the landscape, the normal sights and smells of it, the feel of your child’s hair beneath your tousling hand became memories so exquisite that a man would instinctively place them in some locked mental cupboard, lest the longing they provoked in him become too excruciating to bear. The reality of Abu Ghraib was what was most important. It demanded complete attention. What remained on the other side of the looking glass would have to wait and fade into relative obscurity.

  Sent home for a week or ten days of leave, a soldier wouldn’t have nearly enough time for his mind and heart, attuned to the urgencies of war, to adjust to the peaceful priorities his family and friends would so eagerly press upon him. He wouldn’t have time to disconnect from Abu Ghraib, and the fact that he would soon be returning made him disinclined to try. Comfort means complacency, and complacency kills.

  Perhaps it isn’t quite so odd, then, that nearly every soldier sent home on leave during his time at Abu Ghraib would, upon his return, respond to the question “How was it?” with “It was awful. I wish I hadn’t gone.”

  When Dizl’s grandmother died, though, he needed to go home for the funeral. Gram had been the constant of his childhood, the love of his earliest life.

  Huladog pulled some strings and made a space appear on a C-130 flying out of BIAP. A number of soldiers then risked their necks driving Dizl down the runway so he could catch his plane; they were brothers, willing to face death so their comrade could make it home and say good-bye to a loving family member.

  The C-130 lifted off and flew the way they do: straight up, cork-screwing into the sky, just like in a war movie. Wayne Newton and Kenny Chesney were on the plane too, for some reason. When they landed safely in Kuwait, Dizl told Wayne Newton that his Gram had been a fan.r />
  The closer that he got to home, the more distant he felt from it.

  Dizl’s wife and young son met him at the snowy Bangor International Airport, a place that seemed library-quiet after the din of Iraq. I am a ghost, he thought, as he greeted them. He submitted to their kisses, but could not feel their presence. It was like being trapped in a glass room, separated from the family he had missed so much by this foggy, glass-like numbness.

  During the week he was in Maine, he went hunting. He sat in the woods, listening to the familiar but unfamiliar birdsongs, inhaling the familiar but unfamiliar scents of pine and crushed fern. He saw a deer. It was within range, standing still, looking at him with its soft eyes, its big ears pricked and alert, but he didn’t pull the trigger.

  He chose not to shoot because he could, knowing that there might be a time he wouldn’t be able to choose not to shoot a detainee when he returned. It’d already happened when Dizl had had to take a shot at a detainee to save the life of another. Three pissed-off prisoners were beating on a fourth with large metal tent poles. Dizl lined up the front post of his shotgun at the space in the fray where his first target’s head kept popping up. He aimed just below the chin. Even with a nonlethal round, a shot to that tender spot would certainly kill the man.

  The shot went high, though; instead of killing the attacker, it hit him on the top of the head and scalped him. Dizl shot the other two in quick succession. By the time he got to the last attacker, he and three other MPs had all lined up their shots, and the rubber buckshot from multiple guns all hit the man at the same time. It looked to Dizl as if the troublesome detainee had been swatted to the ground by a powerful fist.

  He didn’t have to shoot the deer. Dizl wanted to keep the choice to commit violence his during a time when he often did not. He had no reason to shoot the deer other than for sport and he knew he’d soon be returning to a place where he might be required to take a life in the line of duty. Nothing required him to shoot the deer, so he didn’t. He was hunting, home safe in Maine, and, perhaps, wanted to avoid violence just as long as he could.