by Nada Bakos
“How can you say that?” Greg shot back. He leaned back against an aluminum-plated countertop. “You want Hussein to nuke Israel? We’re removing a corrupt and violent government to install a more stable one in its place. It’s the right thing to do.”
“But you can’t replace every government you don’t like,” I told him. “Trust me, what you’ve been hearing is public spin; it’s not actual intelligence.” I pointed in the direction of Cropper. “Every single day, all those prisoners are telling me the same thing: there are no WMD, no terrorist connections, nothing.” I could feel my blood pressure rising.
“If we want to find chemical weapons, we’re in the wrong place,” I proclaimed. “If we want to find al Qaida, we’re in the wrong place.” I sighed. “Why are we even here?”
That question had been looming ever larger over everything I experienced in Iraq that summer, from the terrible to the trivial. But as I sat there next to Greg and his squadron, watching the sun set on the Fourth of July, my preoccupations felt like a subject for another time.
As dusk settled, a few soldiers stumbled out of the makeshift CIA bar. General Order Number 1 had most people feeling pretty pent up, and because I was a woman and was breathing, one of the boys stopped to chat me up. He dropped down on one knee in the packed dirt right front of me, leaning on my leg so he could remain upright.
“You… are jush…” he said.
I was slightly taken by surprise at this Romeo’s hard-to-resist expression of love. Even beyond the absurdity of the moment and my lack of interest, I couldn’t imagine where this soldier expected we might explore his newly found feelings for me. It’s not like there was much privacy on that base. My bed each night was surrounded by forty new “friends” in that Kremlinesque ballroom. No one had privacy—though that didn’t stop some people. One evening I’d taken a shortcut through the palace and walked past a couple on a cot in the hallway in the midst of conscious coupling. “Any port in a storm” was clearly their rationale—maybe in more ways than one.
Regardless, I was happily unavailable. As I sat there smirking at Romeo, I had to consider things such as the gossip mill in those camps and the fact that the testosterone haze there creates damning double standards for the ways men and women are judged after those encounters. My fairly new relationship with Roger had weathered the distance remarkably well after a few months, even over e-mail and sporadic cell-phone calls. He’d just moved my belongings into our new house, and our wish list of renovations always gave us something to talk about. He’d acknowledged that with my being in Iraq, doing intense work, he’d begun to feel by comparison a bit like a muggle in our relationship—one of the laymen in the Harry Potter books who aren’t blessed with the ability to perform magic. But he always made himself available to tell goofy stories or listen to me ramble even after the strangest of days and at the oddest of hours, and that was the best gift of all.
Following that Fourth of July party, I found a new benefit to being related to a pilot in Iraq: for a little adventure away from the base, nothing beats a helicopter.
As much as those Baghdad raids had given me a feel for the task force’s ground transportation, I told Greg, I’d never been in a special operations chopper. I had no idea what that experience must be like. He and his squadron mates offered to rectify that situation. There was a reconnaissance mission in Ramadi, some sixty miles west of Baghdad, that was still in the planning stage. Given a little prep time, the task force teams used some of their free time to make practice runs.
“There’s a source who’s going to point out an insurgent safe house,” Greg had said. “There’s always room for one more on the chopper.”
Soon afterward, when things quieted down at the plywood shack, my cousin found me an unused helmet and body armor and packed me into the back of a single-rotor SH-60 Seahawk.
The helmet was way too big; I was able to spin it 360 degrees around my head, but there didn’t seem to be other options available so I kept quiet.
Greg wouldn’t be joining us for the flight because he was in a mission-planning session, but he assured me I was in good hands. Outside the helicopter, the pilots finished their preflight check of the aircraft, then climbed into the cockpit. Greg stepped back from the starboard sliding cabin door and waved. As we lifted off, I watched BIAP slowly sink into a cloud of swirling sand. This is amazing, I thought. It’ll be a perfect way to see more of the country.
What I hadn’t been told was that sometime during the day, our flight plan had changed. Soon after takeoff, I could tell we weren’t flying to Ramadi because the shadows weren’t consistent with heading west, and I could see land I didn’t recognize.
Looking out the window, I registered that there was a bar jutting out horizontally over the doorway on the outside of the helicopter. I’d casually noticed the thick, olive-drab rope pinned to it as I climbed into the Seahawk, but suddenly the fifty-foot coil of “fast rope” sitting by the cabin door took on vastly different meaning. These ropes are what tactical teams dangle outside a hovering helicopter, then slide down at just shy of breakneck speed when there is nowhere to land near their insertion point.
Moments later, I caught sight of tracer fire outside the helicopter. In front of me, the SEAL team leader pointed to the special operator on my right. “Do exactly what he says,” the team leader mouthed over the noise of the rotors and air rushing through the cabin.
“My” SEAL offered me a quick crash course in key hand signals, among them the sweeping gesture that meant “move forward” and the clenched fist that meant “freeze.” Then he added his new favorite as a nod to a movie that was frequently watched at BIAP, Team America: World Police: the upward arm sweep and the silent shriek that meant “panic.”
I thought that signal might actually come in handy.
Soon the helicopter cleared a thicket of trees, hovering over the edge of a scrubby field that led to a little beige house in the distance. The Seahawk began its descent. We’d clearly arrived at our destination. But the tension level inside the helicopter ratcheted up when we lost the advantage of altitude. As we set down in the field, urgency took over.
SEALs darted out of the helicopter, more than two hundred pounds of man and materiel apiece gliding in one effortless motion. My eyes narrowed; I felt like I was looking through a keyhole; was he really giving me that hand signal?
In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t grab the fast rope and strap myself to the helicopter like a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. I had no weapon, which was probably for the best. I could only see clearly for a few seconds at a time; the helmet didn’t fit snugly on my head, so it slid down over my eyes if I wasn’t holding it. Also, I’d just been taught a collection of hand signals, which suggested there might be any number of bad guys involved in whatever was about to happen. I’d seen enough of the aftermath of special operations raids to know that I wanted no part of the actual assault.
At the time, however, whining didn’t seem appropriate. When my SEAL told me to follow him, I swung one leg out the door, then the other, and plopped down into a patch of grass. I crouched behind him and tried to focus on him. The helicopter lifted off right behind us.
“Careful,” he mouthed, the whirring of the blades lifting off drowning out any sound. He was pointing off to our right.
Lying on its side in the packed dirt a few feet away was a matte-gray metal canister the shape of a soft-drink can. It had a white nylon ribbon attached to the top. I recognized it from pictures I’d seen not long before: it was a cluster bomblet—part of a frightful weapons system banned in war zones by more than one hundred nations but not by the United States.
Cluster bombs come in various shapes and sizes, but all incorporate dozens if not hundreds of individual “bomblets” packed inside a rocket. During the invasion, American forces had dropped cluster bombs from planes and launched them from the ground. In midair, bomblets, full of jagged metal shards, were ejected and rained down indiscriminately over an area as
wide as several football fields.
The 1.5 million or so bomblets used during the invasion of Iraq were devastatingly effective at clearing out enemy strongholds. That’s why the Pentagon refuses to discontinue their use. But I’d heard about their presence in Iraq for another reason: the munitions come with an infamously high dud rate. Anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of the bomblets, depending on the weapon, fail to detonate. Once at rest on the ground, the undetonated bombs effectively become land mines, making them equally devastating for civilians, children, and even coalition forces unlucky enough to stumble upon them. By the time of our landing in that field, US cluster bomblets had already killed a half dozen American troops in Iraq—and I immediately regretted not clinging to the helicopter.
“Watch your feet,” my SEAL said.
“Oh, shit,” I mumbled, even though I knew he couldn’t hear me.
The cadence picked up as we advanced toward the mud-brick house. Grass and gravel crunched underfoot. I scampered along with my right hand holding the helmet back out of my eyes, fixating with each step on the few square feet of turf ahead.
Once we reached the side of the house, I crouched low and tugged at the neckline of my body armor. It was slick with sweat. Above me, exposed thatching from the roof hung listlessly, casting late-afternoon shadows along a pockmarked wall. I thought about the other raids I’d been on; I wondered who was inside the house and what it was going to take to get them out.
With that my chaperone waved his hand at me, then pointed at a line of SEALs swooping around the corner of the house toward the front door.
“Wait,” I mouthed. “What’s that mean? Should I go, too?”
I cast a glance over my shoulder just in time to see the last SEAL’s boots sneak around the corner. When I turned back, still crouching low, my SEAL was already off, curling in the other direction around the back of the house.
And now I’m alone, I thought. This is not what I planned.
In that moment I had an out-of-body experience: I caught a glimpse of myself from above, standing there against the wall, alone and sweaty, completely out of place. Frankly, it was comical. If anyone was filming this, I looked like an asshole who was going to either be embarrassed or die. I wasn’t sure which.
Improvising an action plan, I popped up and took a few steps toward the front of the house, clutching my helmet and watching for land mines. I moved as quietly as possible, then flattened myself against the wall. I sucked in my stomach for good measure.
I took stock of my surroundings; the only sound was a light southerly breeze rustling the grass nearby. No one’s shooting, I thought. That’s good. I exhaled.
I poked my head around the corner for a quick look at the front of the house. No one’s outside, either, I thought. So they’re inside the house, and they’re not shooting. That’s really good.
Suddenly the gravel crunched behind me. I spun around and faced straight down the barrel of a matte-black M4 carbine. My entire body seized. I couldn’t have thrown my hands in the air if I’d wanted to.
With that, my SEAL, who’d looped back around the house to find me, lowered his weapon. “You all right?” he said with a grin. “That,” he said—re-creating the jabbing, pointing motion he made just before he and the others entered the house—“meant you should go with them.” I was a tiny bit angry, but for the most part I was so relieved I just wanted to give him a giant kiss. I refrained. Clearly I was being hazed.
He led me around the front of the house, then inside. The other team members offered me a chair at the table in the run-down little kitchen, and we waited for the helicopter to return and pick us up while a few poked around the house.
Only there in the kitchen did I recognize something else. Among our group were two other women, who had obviously been with us the entire time. They were clad in the same gear as the men, so at a quick glance earlier I hadn’t realized they weren’t men. Roughly a decade before the Pentagon would end its official ban on women in combat, these two had barreled ahead of me into the house with carbines at the ready. When I asked about their presence, they told me quickly that some special operations teams were starting to include women in hopes of better interacting with the women and children found inside homes being raided. Then they turned away from our conversation and went back to picking up their gear. I suddenly was wishing I was fifteen years younger, envious of the experience these young women were able to have, and at the same time so ecstatic that women were finally allowed to be part of combat missions. I wanted to get their autographs.
As soon as I got back to BIAP, I called Roger at home for a slice of normalcy.
“Hey, the gym down the street is offering Pilates!” he said. “How cool is that?”
It was exactly what I needed to hear. Even if, to this day, he says he feels like Denis Thatcher to my Margaret whenever we tell that story.
The memory of those women clad in body armor stayed with me for the next few days. Those women were finally getting the recognition they deserved, which gave me a renewed energy for my job. Beyond debriefing detainees, there was always a steady stream of other intelligence that I scoured. In particular, I enjoyed scrutinizing data from technical collection, piecing together networks much the same way I followed the money with the Agency’s Office of Transnational Issues. This was big-picture research that extended far beyond narrowing the bull’s-eye on the next individual to arrest.
I’d been up early one fateful July morning in 2003, preparing my notes for a SOF briefing. I’d felt a little light-headed that day, but that was hardly unusual in Baghdad. Whether it was because of the heat, the warmed-over hot dogs I’d eaten the night before, or the hasty bit of shut-eye I’d managed to catch in the “Thunderdome,” I felt off somehow. But I took solace in the fact that people never felt fully like themselves at BIAP. Wars don’t stop for wooziness, and I wasn’t going to, either.
In the SOF conference room, I offered a quick hello to Charley and the various Pentagon commanders assembled. Some I recognized; others I didn’t. I could never keep track of ranks or which close-cropped military planners were in the country at which time, much less which task force personnel might be in a briefing on any given day. If they were in that little conference room, I knew they were heavy hitters. That was good enough for me.
Charley took the early lead in the meeting, outlining the intelligence we’d been collecting. “With all that,” he said, “I think—”
Suddenly I didn’t feel so great.
Burgle, ppppppffffttt. That was my stomach, I thought, and that was not good.
I took a deep breath and tried to envision a happy place. Any happy place.
Burgle!
And like that I was gone. I bolted. I left Charley there in midsentence and hustled straight out the door.
I later read a report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that said 76 percent of Americans in Iraq at the time battled diarrhea. After more than one million workdays were lost to the ailment by servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon put Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the same lab responsible for the underpinnings of the Internet, GPS, and cutting-edge fighter jets—on the case to find a quick cure. I didn’t know that then, of course. All I knew was that the SOF commanders are not the kinds of guys you want to ditch in the middle of a meeting.
In the distance was my salvation: a row of blue porta-potties on the other side of the gravel lot. I tested a few long strides, then—“Nope, nope!”—went back to a clenched waddle to keep it all together.
I threw open the door on the first plastic throne. It smelled like a sewage sauna; the whole place sizzled in the Baghdad sunshine. I hopped in, spun around, and clawed at my pants. In that moment, I couldn’t help but laugh at the memory of the SOF guys winking at me on the Fourth of July. “You’re so pretty,” I said out loud, in a mocking tone. I thanked every higher power I could think of that there was toilet paper in there.
Some fifteen minutes later, I stu
mbled out of the porta-potty and into my vehicle and drove to our terminal. Inside I found the CIA’s staff medic, who took one look at me and said, “Oh, wow.” He pointed at the nearest cot. “Why don’t you lie down there for a second?”
The medic gave me enough Cipro for a small village. Still, walking back from the medic, I knew I was going to need to stay near some plumbing. The plumbing in our terminal was unstable at best, but it was the only plumbing we had.
I locked myself inside a bathroom in a less inhabited part of the terminal. There I lay down on the cool, dirty, and sandy tile floor. I looked at the ceiling and thought about home. Or movies. Anything, really, except the wave of pain rolling through my torso every five minutes.
The next day I was able to escape the bathroom long enough to do a few hours of work; then I would collapse back there by the loo in a dehydrated heap. Ron and Percy even came to visit. “We just followed the crime scene tape,” they said with a smirk.
They handed me a few coveted bottles of Gatorade.
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
“Don’t worry,” they said. “Iraq isn’t going anywhere.”
By the following day, I was fully back at the grind again, taking my Cipro, working on a new stream of detainees at Cropper. Ron and Percy had been right, of course: those prisoners hadn’t gone anywhere. It wasn’t clear that any progress at all, even the incremental kind, was being made in our larger efforts in Iraq. As we entered the dog days of summer, I got the sense that a dark cloud was gathering on the horizon. There were still periodic silly moments to be found around BIAP, but the people with whom my work brought me into contact—those who knew Iraq best—didn’t indulge in even a minute of optimism.
The first time I spoke with Tariq Aziz, I saw him in his underwear. I think he actually preferred it that way.
