by David Finkel
That was where Kauzlarich directed the convoy now, to the spot where this had happened, so he could show the neighborhood how the United States of America was capable of responding. “Deny sanctuary to insurgents,” it said in the field manual, which was what Kauzlarich intended to do as the convoy eased from Pluto into one of the AO’s nicer neighborhoods and rolled to a stop by a fresh hole in the ground, caused by the IED. “Let’s go clear,” Kauzlarich said to his men, and soon twenty-three heavily armed soldiers were walking the streets and randomly searching houses.
They came to a house with laundry hanging in the courtyard and a neat row of shoes by the front door. Without asking permission, some of the soldiers went inside, through the first floor, up the stairs, through the second floor, into the closets, into the drawers.
They came to another house with a fruit tree out front, and a small metal tank for storing water that struck a soldier as peculiar. In silence, the family that lived in the house watched as the soldier unscrewed the cap of the tank and inhaled to make sure it was in fact water in there, and now watched another soldier reach up into the fruit tree and begin feeling around. He swept along one branch and then another. He stood on his tiptoes and felt among the leaves until he found what he was looking for, and as the family kept watching, he brought a ripe piece of fruit to his mouth and took a bite.
Each search took a few minutes at most and constituted the entire relationship between the Americans and the Iraqis. Unlike the riskier operations that occurred in the middle of the night, in which soldiers broke down doors as they went after specific targets, there was a businesslike feel to these searches: Into the house, search, ask a few questions, out. Next. In, search, out. Not that there wasn’t risk—they were here, after all, because someone had tried to kill some of them with an IED. And snipers were a risk as well, which was why soldiers walked with their weapons raised as they approached the next house, outside of which stood a man who invited Kauzlarich inside for some tea.
This had never happened before. In all the searches Kauzlarich had done, people always had passively stepped aside as he and his soldiers entered their houses, but this was the first time someone had invited him in.
So he went in, accompanied by an Iraqi national who worked as his interpreter. Four of his soldiers assigned to guard him also went in, while two other soldiers remained in the front courtyard as the first line of defense in case of an ambush.
The man led Kauzlarich past his surprised-looking family and motioned him toward a chair in a spotlessly clean living room. There was a table with a vase filled with artificial flowers, and a cabinet that was stacked with fragile dishes and teacups. “You have a beautiful house,” Kauzlarich said, sitting down, his helmet still on, his body armor still on, his handgun within easy reach, and the man smiled and said thank you even as circles of perspiration began to appear under his arms.
Off in the kitchen, water for tea was heating. Outside, other soldiers continued to clear houses of neighbors who had seen this man ask an American to come inside. Inside, the man explained to Kauzlarich why Iraqis were hesitant to cooperate. “I’m afraid to work with the Americans because the militia threatened me. I have no money. I wish I could,” he said in Arabic, pausing so his words could be translated by Kauzlarich’s interpreter, and now he switched to English to better describe what his life had become:
“Very difficult.”
The two of them continued to talk. The man said he was sixty-eight. Kauzlarich said the man didn’t look it. The man said he had been in the Iraqi air force. Kauzlarich nodded again. It wasn’t a hot day, but the man’s perspiration stains were growing. More than five minutes had gone by now. Surely the neighbors were keeping track.
“If people ask me later on, ‘Why Americans are in your house?’ I’ll just say, ‘Searching,’” the man said, more to himself than to Kauzlarich.
Tea was served.
“Hey, Nate,” Kauzlarich said to Showman, “walk around. Just have them escort you around the house.”
Ten minutes now. The man folded his fingers. He unfolded his fingers. He pulled up his socks. He said, “When I heard the IED go off last night, my heart—my chest . . .” He said he had been sitting in this very room when the IED exploded, eating dinner, and that the walls shook, but nothing had been broken.
Fifteen minutes. The man told Kauzlarich about one of his sons, who he said had been kidnapped two weeks before and repeatedly beaten until the man paid a $ 10,000 ransom. That’s why he had no money.
Twenty minutes. “I like America. When America came, I put flowers out front,” the man said. But at this point, “If I put them out, they will kill me.” His perspiration stains were huge now. Twenty minutes. House searches didn’t take twenty minutes. Everyone knew that. Kauzlarich stood.
“Shukran,” he said, taking the man’s hand.
“I’m sorry I cannot support you,” the man said. “I’m afraid for my life.”
He escorted Kauzlarich outside, and as Kauzlarich and his soldiers moved on, the man was immediately surrounded by neighbors.
“He wasn’t nervous about us. He was nervous about the people outside wondering what he was telling us while we were in his home,” Kauzlarich would say later. “It’s a catch-22. They want security. They know we can provide it. They need to tell us where the bad guy is, but they fear for their life, that if we don’t do anything about it the bad man will come and kill them. They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t.”
Where was the bad guy, though? Other than everywhere? Where was the specific one who had set off the IED? Back at the fresh hole now, surrounded by neighborhood children who were shouting, “Mister, mister,” and clamoring for soccer balls, Kauzlarich wondered what to do next. Surely someone in the neighborhood knew who had done this, but how could he persuade them that as damned as they thought they would be for dealing with the Americans, they would be more damned if they did not?
Strength was part of counterinsurgency, too. He decided to call in a show of force, which would involve a pair of F-18 jets coming in over the neighborhood, low and without warning. The sound would be ear-splitting and frightening. Houses would vibrate. Walls would shake. Furniture would rattle. Teacups might topple, though Kauzlarich hoped that wouldn’t be the case.
He and his soldiers got in the Humvees to leave, and now another thing happened that hadn’t happened before—the children applauded and waved goodbye.
Off the soldiers went, feet aligned, hands tucked, eyes sweeping, jammers jamming, creeping back to the FOB.
Here came the jets.
3
MAY 7, 2007
Our troops are now carrying out a new strategy in Iraq under the leadership of
a new commander, General David Petraeus. He’s an expert in counterinsurgency warfare.
The goal of the new strategy he is implementing is to help the Iraqis secure their capital
so they can make progress toward reconciliation and build a free nation that respects
the rights of its people, upholds the rule of law, and fights extremists alongside the
United States in the war on terror. This strategy is still in its early stages . . .
—GEORGE W. BUSH, May 5, 2007
Of all the soldiers in the battalion, none was closer to Kauzlarich than Brent Cummings. Three years younger than Kauzlarich, Cummings had joined the army for the admittedly simple reason that he loved the United States and wanted to defend his admittedly sentimental version of it, which was his family, his front porch, a copy of the Sunday New York Times, a microbrewed beer, and a dog. He had been with the battalion since its very first days, and believed, so far, in the 2-16’s mission as morally correct. As Kauzlarich’s number two, Cummings tried to approach the war with the same level of certainty. But he was more brooding than Kauzlarich, and more introspective than most any soldier in the battalion, which resulted in a deeper need from the war than merely a desire for victory. As he said one day when describing differenc
es between Kauzlarich and himself: “He can see despair, and it doesn’t bother him as much as it bothers me.”
That ability to be bothered, and the need to ease it by at least trying to act with decency, was why Cummings was on his telephone one day getting increasingly upset.
Brent Cummings
“We have to remove the human waste and the body. And that’s going to cost money” he was saying.
He paused to listen.
“Yeah, they’ll say, ‘Buy the bleach,’ but how much bleach do I have to buy?They’ll say, ‘Buy the lye,’ but, Christ, how much will that cost?”
He paused again.
“It’s not water. It’s sewage. It’s yeccchh.”
He took a breath, trying to calm down.
“No. I haven’t seen Bob. Only pictures. But it looks awful.”
Sighing, he hung up and picked up one of the pictures. It was an aerial view of Kamaliyah, the most out-of-control area in the AO. Sixty thousand people were said to live there, and they had been largely ignored since the war began. Insurgents were thought to be everywhere. Open trenches of raw sewage lined the streets, and most of the factories on the eastern edge had been abandoned, one of which had a courtyard with a hole in it. That was where soldiers had discovered a cadaver they began calling Bob.
Bob was shorthand for bobbing in the float, Cummings explained.
Float was also shorthand, for several feet of raw sewage.
And what was “bobbing in the float” shorthand for? He shook his head. He was exasperated beyond words. The war was costing the United States $300 million a day, and because of rules governing how it could be spent, he couldn’t get enough money to get rid of a cadaver that was obstructing the 2-16’s most crucial mission so far, bringing Kamaliyah under control. It needed to be done quickly. Rockets and mortars were being launched from Kamaliyah into the FOB and the Green Zone, and intelligence reports suggested that EFPs and IEDs were being assembled there as well.
The factory, which once produced spaghetti, of all things, was the key to how this was going to be done. An essential part of the surge’s counter-insurgency strategy involved moving soldiers off of FOBs and into smaller, less imposing command outposts, or COPs, that would be set up in the middle of neighborhoods. The thinking behind COPs was best summed up by David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who was an adviser to General David Petraeus and who wrote in a 2006 paper widely circulated in the military: “The first rule of deployment in counterinsurgency is to be there . . . If you are not present when an incident happens, there is usually little you can do about it. So your first order of business is to establish presence . . . This demands a residential approach—living in your sector, in close proximity to the population, rather than raiding into the area from remote, secure bases. Movement on foot, sleeping in local villages, night-patrolling: all these seem more dangerous than they are. They establish links with the locals, who see you as real people they can trust and do business with, not as aliens who descend from an armored box.”
So important were COPs to the surge that Petraeus’s staff tracked how many there were as one of the indicators of the surge’s effectiveness. Every time one was established, battalion would send word of it to brigade, which would send word to division, which would send word to corps, which would send word to Petraeus’s staff, which would add it to a tally sheet that was transmitted to Washington. Kauzlarich, so far, had added one to the list—a COP for Alpha Company in the middle of the AO—but wanted to add more. A second COP would soon be installed for Charlie Company, in the southern end of the AO, but, for tactical reasons, the COP needed most of all would be the one for Bravo Company, up north in Kamaliyah. The middle of Kamaliyah was too unstable for one, but the edge seemed safer, and that’s where the abandoned spaghetti factory was.
So in went some soldiers, breaching the gate and swarming inside, where they discovered rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, mortar shells, the makings of three EFPs, and a square piece of metal covering a hole that they suspected was booby-trapped. Ever so carefully they lifted the cover and found themselves peering down into the factory’s septic tank at Bob.
The body, floating, was in a billowing, once-white shirt. The toes were gone. The fingers were gone. The head, separated and floating next to the body, had a gunshot hole in the face.
The soldiers quickly lowered the cover.
By now they had dealt with bodies, including a man they’d hired to help build Charlie Company’s COP who had been executed soon after starting work. That death had been especially gruesome; whoever killed him had done so by tightening his head in a vise and leaving him for his wife to discover. But Bob, somehow, seemed even worse. Unless the body were removed, it would be there day and night, afloat in the float during meals and sleep, and how could the 120 soldiers of Bravo Company ever get comfortable with that?
“It’s a morale issue. Who wants to live over a dead body?” Cummings said. “And part of it is a moral issue, too. I mean, he was somebody’s son, and maybe husband, and for dignity’s sake, well, it cheapens us to leave him there. I mean, even calling him Bob is disrespectful. I don’t know . . .”
The need for decency: suddenly it was important to Cummings in this country of cadavers to do the proper thing about one of them. But how? No one wanted to descend into the sewage and touch a dead body. Not the soldiers. Not the Iraqis. And not him, either. So Bob floated on as more days passed and soldiers continued to clear other parts of the factory, every so often lifting the cover. One day the skull had sunk from view. Another day it was back. Another day the thought occurred that there might be more bodies in the septic tank, that Bob might simply be the one on top.
Down went the cover.
Finally, Cummings decided to have a look for himself.
The drive from the FOB to the factory was only five miles or so, but that didn’t mean it was easy. A combat plan had to be drawn up, just in case of an ambush. A convoy of five Humvees, two dozen soldiers, and an interpreter had to be assembled. On went body armor, earplugs, and eye protection, and off the convoy went, past new trash piles that might be hiding bombs, along a dirt road under which might be buried bombs, and now past an unseen bomb that detonated.
It happened just after the last Humvee had passed by. There were no injuries, just some noise and rising smoke, and so the convoy kept pushing ahead. Now it passed a dead water buffalo, on its back, exceedingly swollen, one more thing in this part of Baghdad on the verge of exploding, and now it came to a stop by a yellowish building topped by a torn tin roof that was banging around in the wind.
“The spaghetti factory,” Cummings said, and soon he and Captain Jeff Jager, the commander of Bravo Company, were staring down into the septic tank.
“Well, what I think we do is . . . man,” Cummings said, with absolutely no idea what to do now that he was seeing Bob up close.
“I think you gotta clean it out,” Jager said. “I think you gotta suck all the shit out of there and you gotta clean it out. I think the first step is sucking the shit out, second step is finding somebody to go down there to get it up. It’ll cost some money.”
“Yeah,” Cummings said, knowing the rules about spending money, none of which covered the removal of a dead Iraqi from a septic tank in an abandoned spaghetti factory.
“I mean, we’re gonna have some heartache moving into a building that’s got a dead body in a sewage septic tank,” Jager said. He picked up a long metal pipe and stirred the float until the skull disappeared.
“I mean, someone has disgraced him as bad as you can possibly disgrace a human being,” Cummings said as the skull reappeared. “And there’s a not a playbook that we can go to that says when you open it up: ‘Here’s how you remove a body from a septic tank.’”
Jager gave it another stir. “The one contractor I brought up here, he was willing to do everything here, but he wanted nothing to do with that,” he said. “I asked him how much it would take for him to get that out of there, an
d he said, ‘You couldn’t pay me enough.’”
“If it were a U.S. soldier, sure. We would be there in a heartbeat,” Cummings said.
“We could drop down there and get it out ourselves,” Jager said. “But—”
“But what soldier am I going to ask to go in there to do that?” Cummings said, and after Jager put the cover back in place, the two of them went on a tour of the rest of the factory.
It was such a mess, with cracked walls and piles of ruined equipment, that it was hard to see 120 soldiers moving in. But Jager assured Cummings it could be done and had to be done. “We know the militia has used this as a base of operations,” he said. “There are reports that they used this for torture and murder.” Bob was evidence of that, he said, “and the guys next door will tell you about screams and the sounds of people being beaten.”
They stepped out of the front gate, onto the street, and more soldiers joined them as they began walking the perimeter. There was already a solid cement wall surrounding the factory, but for security reasons the height would have to be doubled with blast walls, and the streets would have to be blocked off with coils of razor wire.
Around the first corner now, Cummings noticed a mud-brick hovel that had been built near the factory wall, so close that it would have to be swallowed up inside the blast walls. Then he saw clothing hanging in the yard and realized that someone lived there, so he made his way through a gate that led into the property and walked toward a man who, when he saw the soldiers, began noticeably shaking in fear.