Later, he went to his little boy’s soccer game in the town of Hope. As he stood on the strange grass in the strange, cold air, a former neighbor approached.
“Well, Kelly Thorndike!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been hiding yourself? I haven’t seen you in ages!”
“I’m serving in Iraq, ma’am,” Dizl replied.
With surprising speed, the woman’s demeanor changed from sociable, playful interest to chilly disapproval.
“I’m a pacifist,” she snapped. “I believe we should love our enemies.”
Dizl watched his little boy’s hands move in the air, his little boy’s feet running across that strange, cold grass.
“Last week I bathed and fed an al-Qaeda terrorist,” he said.
They had his Gram’s service. He and his wife took their son to the beach, where the little boy threw rocks into the salty water with a mittened hand. The half-frozen sand squeaked beneath their boots. Pretend the snow underfoot is sand, the instructors at Fort Dix had said a lifetime ago.
In the nearby woods were little dens packed with nestled chipmunks, and larger dens where the local coyotes hunkered down, sharing the thick, gray-gold comfort of their fur. Even thamnophis, the garter snake, would be gathered with its fellows in communal nests called hibernacula where they pass the Maine winter, sheltering in the twisty embrace of other snakes.
When the time was up, Dizl’s wife and son took him back to the quiet little airport in Bangor.
TSA agents flagged Dizl as he went through airport security. His dog tags, fastened to the laces of his combat boots, set off the metal-detector. They asked him to remove the boots for inspection; this was around the time that the shoe-bomber had struck, and the Department of Homeland Security was just beginning to get obsessive about footwear. So Dizl sat down on the floor to take the boots off. The line of people behind him halted to wait.
As he sat on the airport floor, his back to the glass partition between the security area and the waiting area, his little boy saw him, approached, and pressed his face against the glass and tried to kiss him. His mother, Dizl’s wife, knelt beside the boy. She was crying.
Dizl couldn’t hear them, though he knew they were saying something. He reached out his hand to touch his son’s face, but of course he couldn’t because the glass was in the way, a physical manifestation of the distance about to be between them again.
Meanwhile, one of the passengers in the line that had formed, waiting for this soldier to take his boot off, turned to the woman behind him.
“Do you know why they keep their dog tags on their boots that way?”
“I don’t. Why?”
“It’s in case they get killed and can’t be identified by their faces.”
Then everyone in the Bangor Airport security screening line began to cry.
For his last flight, Dizl took the quick hop in a C-130 from Kuwait to Baghdad. It was a short ride, perhaps twenty minutes. There were a few new guys on the plane, and Dizl couldn’t help but notice, with some ambivalence, that they were all decked out with new state-of-the-art body armor, nice helmets, add-ons that protected the neck, the eyes, the balls. Dizl didn’t have any of this. He had his desert camouflage uniform (DCU) and planned to pick up his old stuff at BIAP.
No new stuff for me, he thought, but then at least it appeared that the higher-ups were starting to get the messages about what soldiers in Iraq really required. As the plane began its approach and descent, one of the crew came back to inform the passengers that flights in and out of BIAP had been getting shot at all day. “So if you’ve got stuff, put it on,” he said.
The kid in front of Dizl began buttoning up, doing up the Velcro, getting his gear on straight and snug.
Won’t do you any good, Dizl thought. Then he was saying it out loud. “That won’t do you any good, kid. The bullets they’re shooting at us are going to be big as cucumbers and if one comes even near you it’ll take big chunks off of you, and the plane will crash in a fiery ball, so adapt and overcome, kid.”
So saying, Dizl took a pen and wrote his blood type on his arm. “B-POS.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this, though at FOBAG, he generally wrote it on his stomach.
The plane lurched and veered. “The way the pilot is flying, they probably are shooting at us,” Dizl said. He handed the pen to the soldier. “Welcome to Iraq.”
The kid began to pray.
The numbness and detachment clung to Dizl, only lifting as he got closer and closer to the ’Ghraib. Driving down the highway from BIAP, he even felt a surge of well-being at the sight of a familiar green highway sign. The bottom of it had been cracked off in some volatile exchange, but it was still legible. In Arabic and English it said ABU GHRAIB, and an arrow pointed helpfully toward the off-ramp. When he came through the gates, there was Huladog, a permanent and comforting fixture for returning soldiers. The Marine was smiling with his mouth while his dark eyes checked Dizl over, checked him in: Good. You made it.
At the Mortar Café, Willard hugged him. “Glad to have you back, Dizl.”
Dizl felt OK then.
One of Dizl’s hardest memories from his year in Iraq isn’t even from Iraq. It’s the memory of being at the Bangor airport, untying his boots, his wife’s weeping leaving him unmoved. It’s the memory of putting out his hand to touch his son’s face, and feeling only glass, and the fact that, even now, he still feels as if he loves everyone this way, with a barrier in between, and he fears he always will. It is one of the many prices he paid to survive.
Back at FOBAG, Dizl heard about Kamal, that the friendly man had been sent home on the Happy Bus only to be murdered in front of his family. Dizl regarded Yogi’s loss and experience with unease.
In most prison entry-level classes, candidates are instructed about the importance of being fair and impartial. It’s hard to do, but it is what can make the difference between imprisonment and correction. A personal relationship between jailer and jailed can produce any number of results, few of them good. This is true in Dizl’s experience as a prison guard in Maine. He found it doubly true at Abu Ghraib.
Dizl didn’t see Kamal the way Yogi did. For one thing, Dizl spent more time physically removed from the prisoners, so he was able to maintain more emotional distance. Cynically, he wondered whether Kamal was, in fact, a Bad Guy, one who had played Yogi (who, despite his fearsome mien, was a tenderhearted man), manipulated him to get what he wanted—protection, visits, information in, and information out.
Or maybe Kamal was just as he appeared to Yogi, a genuine, good human being who had been sustained in prison by his love of his wife and his friendship with an American with whom Kamal had a genuine affinity. If such was the case, Kamal was killed for it.
Either could be true. Or both. Kamal was human, after all.
Abuse is abuse, but the far more common offense is neglect. Just as far more people neglect their children than hit them, the most ordinary form of human unkindness to strangers is that we pass them by on the other side. Or send them away in the Happy Bus. Horton was there the day that the Happy Bus brought a group of mentally ill detainees up from Bucca. When interviewed, the detainees claimed that they had been inveigled onto the bus by the promise that it was bringing them home. To put it mildly, they were not happy to find themselves pulling up to the gates of Abu Ghraib instead.
Any American prison must admit to a percentage (3–15 percent) of mentally ill prisoners, but Abu Ghraib boasted more than its share, for obvious reasons. If Iraq had once had a National Institute of Mental Health, it didn’t anymore, and the troublesome schizophrenic, clinically depressed, or dipsomaniacal joined the failed suicide bomber Thumby, and who knows how many innocents, behind the wire; there was nowhere else to go.
A detainee, mentally ill or otherwise, who in his pre–Abu Ghraib life had been an insurgent, a terrorist, or just a criminal, did not tend to show much improvement after spending a few months in the enclosures of Ganci, let alone any signs of rehabilitatio
n.
On the other hand, a detainee who had been an ordinary citizen back in Anbar Province before being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time had every opportunity to make a move in the direction of insurgency, terrorism, criminality, or craziness.
So the guy who would catch an American’s eye and slowly draw an index finger across his own throat, thus demonstrating the all-too-imaginable fate that awaited captive Americans, might have been serious and genuine in his threats. He could also have just been crazy. Each situation required different and delicate handling, and the Mainers had little to no way to differentiate the two.
One especially incensed detainee on the bus from Bucca was not only pitching a fit, he was threatening to hurl the contents of his colostomy bag, which was, in any case, overdue for refreshment.
“You can just go ahead and change it out,” one of the escort soldiers said to Horton.
“We need a medic for that,” Horton pointed out.
“C’mon. You can do it. Mostly, you just need enough guys to pin this asshole down,” the delivering MP said cheerfully.
“No,” said Horton firmly. “I am not going to do that. My guys do not have the skills to change a colostomy bag even on a cooperative detainee; I am not going to put this guy on the ground for an amateur procedure. You need to take him over to the CASH and get it done right.”
The MP said something along the lines of cheeeeeezum, but he did as Horton asked.
“That poor guy … all those guys … they were defenseless,” Horton would later say to Dizl and the others. “You know? Defenseless.”
“I’m able to report that all of my soldiers are healthy and well,” the Portland Press Herald quoted Captain Trevino in an article as the countdown to going home began.
Morale, he continued, remained good, in part because soldiers were able to communicate with their families via satellite phones and webcams attached to the computers in the command post.
It was a brand-new command post, built under the direction of some of the versatile field artillery/MP soldiers from the 152nd. “We can build it and we can blow it up!” Staff Sergeant Vigue quipped about the post to Major General Miller during one of the general’s tours of inspection.
Naturally, as New Englanders, the Mainers cheered when the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots won their respective championships. Access to news seemed a more mixed blessing when, just before Christmas, they learned that two fellow Mainers—Sergeant Thomas Dostie of Somerville and Staff Sergeant Lynn Poulin Sr. of Freedom—were among the twenty-two Americans who died when a member of the Iraqi insurgent group Ansar al-Sunna snuck into a mess tent at a US base near Mosul and blew himself up.
Huladog never went home on leave during the whole yearlong deployment at Abu Ghraib. His was a calm and constant presence.
At Christmastime, a package of drawings from Maine children arrived, among them a second-grader’s drawing of an American flag. Dizl hung it beside the door of the Mortar Café. The red-and-white stripes were carefully rendered, and a single star stood as a minimalist representation of the fifty states.
“Dear Mr. Thorndike,” the artist wrote beneath the flag in careful, crayoned letters. “Thank you for your service. Please don’t die.”
As the soldiers left for their watches at Ganci, this became an acceptable, affectionate farewell.
“Don’t die!”
“Roger that.”
Out of the misery and horror of war, a strange blessing emerges in the form of the enduring, fierce love a warrior feels for those who have served in and endured combat with him. Though it’s difficult to say if this blessing is worth the cost.
Nothing builds camaraderie like mutual suffering, and suffer the men did. Days and nights, when not filled with explosive shells, were filled with dread and intense boredom. This was dread based on real intel and an honest assessment of the sheer tactical and numerical disadvantage. And yet, in those moments, Dizl could turn to Huladog or Sugar, Parker or Hutton, a man or a woman, younger or older, skin color a non-factor because blood is red and would quite possibly paint everything and everyone soon enough, and Dizl could say, “I’m scared.”
Whoever it was would answer, “Yeah. Me too.”
Then Dizl could head off to do his work with the complete assurance that his comrades would prevent his head from being sawn off, or his burnt limbless body from ending up hung from those prison walls; they would prevent his death from being a show on the Internet for the world and his family to see. His comrades would thwart it, or die trying. He knew, and was glad to know that each of them held an identical, fully justified conviction that Dizl would do the same for them.
They risked death just to get him home for a funeral; it stood to reason they would unhesitatingly volunteer their life as sacrament to save another. Hell, history is full of soldiers and Marines, the unspoken heroes, who’ve lost their lives simply trying to recover the body of one of their comrades. There are things worse than death—failing the brother, or sister, on your left or on your right, for example. War takes so much, but at least you have your guys.
Long after Ganci made way for Redemption and the beginning of what seemed like a whole new epoch at Abu Ghraib, veteran Iraqi detainees would introduce Dizl to the newcomers as Shahein.
“This is Shahein,” they would say, in Arabic, and the new man’s eyes would grow wide.
“Marhabah, ismey Shahein,” Dizl would affirm. “Hello, I am Shahein.”
While he was away in Maine, attending his Gram’s funeral, longtime detainees at Abu Ghraib began asking where Shahein had gone.
“His grandmother died,” Captain Trevino told them. “He went home to America for the funeral.”
On his first day back on the job, Dizl was letting twenty or so detainees out of their enclosure for lunch and he cut his finger on the wire door. It started bleeding quite severely.
A detainee named Mastfa, a very religious man in his late thirties, said something in Arabic. All the detainees sat down on the ground inside the wire.
“What are you doing?”
“We will eat when your hand is taken care of,” said Mastfa. “Not before.”
In Arabic, he said—and the others repeated—“Shahein is a good man.”
So here, too, was an unexpected gift of war, a bewildering one offered to Dizl in the House of Strange Fathers.
Getting to his feet, Mastfa hugged Dizl. “I will pray for your grandmother, Shahein,” he said.
Sometime later, Mastfa was informed that his mother had died of a heart attack. Mastfa began to wail, and the detainees in his tent tried to console him. Some MPs—not guys from Maine, Dizl was glad to note—were annoyed by the wailing and they wanted to pull the mourner out to segregate him.
Dizl stood protectively in the doorway of Mastfa’s tent. He waited there, his body screening and defending Mastfa’s sanctuary, until the other MPs went away.
Some were muttering “hajji lover” under their breaths. Dizl took no real offence; the lover must love.
Redemption was a whole lot better than the disastrous Ganci, but if the camp was going to live up to its name, it would only come moment by moment, brick by brick, action by action over a long period of time. It would be up to the Mainers.
At one point, there was a small, handicapped Iraqi boy who lived in the place called the House of Ravens and Strange Fathers. One day, the dry blue sky began to rain explosives, and everyone ran for cover.
The detainees were diving into their new bomb shelters to hunker down behind their stacks of sandbags, but the little boy stood in the open. Perhaps he didn’t know what was happening, or wasn’t sure what to do. He was mentally handicapped in some way, and he was young. When children must face the instinctive choice of fight or flee, they tend to yield to a third option: freeze.
So the child froze. He stood there, stock still, in the lane between two long walls of wire, not far from the isolation cage where Shriek and Red had waited out a previous attack, as the rocke
ts wwheeerrrrrrr’d past on their various destructive paths.
Then three people, strangers who had flown a thousand miles across an unimaginable ocean as if for this sole purpose, flung their bodies over the child. Dizl, Shirley, and Sugar shielded his small body with theirs.
The Iraqi insurgency used civilians as shields; Dizl, Shirley, and Sugar became the shields. That is the difference between Good Guys and Bad.
EIGHTEEN
TROOP GREETERS
“The character of our military through history, the daring of Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima, the decency and idealism that turned enemies into allies is fully present in this generation. When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our service men and women, they saw strength and kindness and good will.”
—President George W. Bush, May 1, 2003
TO THIS DAY, Dizl doesn’t sleep well because mortars fall into his dreams. The dream mortars are just as loud as the real ones were. Try sleeping through a 120 mm mortar that has landed on your roof. Thunder wakes him up in the night.
“Thunder,” his significant other has learned to mumble, sleepy but reassuring.
Ah, right. Thunder. Normal stuff.
Traumatic stress is an obvious feature of combat and can result in what used to be called “soldier’s heart,” “shell shock,” or “battle fatigue.” We now know it as post-traumatic stress disorder, which has passed into ordinary discourse in the form of the acronym PTSD.
Occasionally one comes across estimates of the prevalence of PTSD among returning veterans that are as high as 40 percent. Chaplain Andy Gibson disputes this vigorously.
“PTSD is a diagnosis that becomes more common when the treatment is covered by insurance,” he says. “Insurance companies often pay not by the hour, but by the diagnosis. There are strong incentives for mental health providers to write something definitive on the forms, and even if they explain to their patients that this is merely preliminary, any mental health diagnosis tends to be self-fulfilling.
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