Fifty yards from the gate, the driver stopped.
“Two Arab-looking guys in an old car driving up to a military gate? No way,” he said as though to himself. Then he explained that sometimes the less experienced guards would just shoot and check later.
“You mean you want me to walk now?” I didn’t move. All I could see out the window were cement walls and razor wire. A sparse wasteland on one side, grim skeletons of the city in the distance on the other.
“Yes. Get out.”
I handed him the other half of his payment; much of the first had gone to appease renegade patrols along the way, and before I’d walked ten feet on the trampled dirt road, he was already well out of sight.
FOB MAREZ SAT next to Camp Diamondback, which was a huge military city made up of large white tents and Containerized Housing Units called CHUs, or “cans,” running the length of the airfield and far out into surrounding territory—barbed wire, hulking barriers, gates, and lookout towers. It was a twenty-first-century fortress designed to contain the human and material instruments of a military superpower, while keeping the ancient war raging past its walls from getting in.
Hyperactive cells of insurgents were right next door, and every now and again lobbed mortars into the fields, sniped at platoons going out on missions, or sent along a drugged-up suicide bomber. On December 22, 2004, during the lunch-hour rush, a 122mm rocket careened at 1,500 miles per hour right through the roof of the large, soft-sided white tent of the dining facility, detonating into three thousand fragments over a radius of more than eighty feet, and plunging into everything in its path. The mortal carnage in the aftermath was catastrophic—twenty-two dead and over sixty wounded in a jumble of food, bloody trays, and searing shrapnel.
Security there was ironclad and aggressive, nothing like the gentle pat down and casual high fives the soldiers had given me at the Khanasor water tower. All I had on me were a few crumpled dinars and my fake ID card, but the guards still checked me head to toe with a metal detector. Right away, I glimpsed a big American flag and the Airborne eagle insignia hanging under the guard tower, saw the flash of a star-spangled grin, heard a roar of laughter, and thought of White. He’d been through those very gates, walked the gravel roads. And he’d died in pieces under that stinging sky. It never occurred to me that I might be signing up for the same fatal destiny. All I could think about was sending my first pay-packet home, and I imagined what Daki could do with it: pay bills, buy meat, maybe even new shoes. Live a little, at last.
A pair of soldiers flanked me across the compound and pointed to a windowless building like all the others.
“You wait right here in this CHU now, and don’t go wandering.”
I didn’t dare go outside. Didn’t dare do a thing except breathe inside that tank under ranks of cold electric lights. A few hours in, a man brought me a plate of wings, showed me to a latrine. Maybe I thought it was a test of will, as my whole life so far had been, and so I sat—nine hours straight or more.
At 18:00, two female MPs came to escort me out; no sign of the woman from GLS.
They escorted me all the way to the gate. No eye contact. Hands on their weapons. Told me not to talk so much when I rambled.
“If you had a legit appointment, someone would be here.”
Then they sent me back out, gates slowly closing.
THE SUN HAD arched westward across the sky and over the banks of the winding Tigris, where the dark heart of Mosul beat. I was out on an empty gravel road headed for the wrong side of town—wrong side of anywhere. No choice, I walked alone for about a mile, the lights of the nearby airfield ablaze like small fires, the city just beginning to twinkle. I was on the lookout for a safe place to hunker down and hatch a temporary survival plan, but there was nothing whatsoever in that military no-go zone. For a moment, I stopped and just stared way out: somewhere in the east lay the tumbled ruins of the ancient city of Nineveh, which had once held dominion on the flourishing river highway between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean. In that wrecked place of crumbling urban blocks full of siren wails and the clack-clack of gunfire once stood the largest and most prosperous city in the world.
Now, all was still in the land of the ancient Assyrians. Women in cramped city houses were making supper, their men were making bombs, and children of war were trying for a childhood. The base spread out behind me was the biggest target in Nineveh Province, but even there in its shadow and among the lingering souls of the ancients, I felt like the second-biggest: a poor Yazidi boy offering his services to the infidels for something as fleeting as dinars. If I got caught wandering out there, my purpose would be instantly clear, and so would the consequence—decapitation or a bullet to the head. Of course, they would beat me first; maybe sever a finger to send back to my mother.
Then the muezzin call swelled over the terrifying rise of my first Mosul night, and I stood on a ribbon of tamped dirt listening to its soporific whine, and the city beyond seemed to surrender, going full quiet as it folded into its own spell. I stood there as though on a tightrope—my chances of surviving the night out there were slim.
The guards up ahead peered at me under their helmets, and beams of light hit my eyes. Stunned like prey, arms held out and ready to run, all I could think of was to yell out:
“Help!”
And then a simple phrase uttered through the bleak air bridged the chasm of fear my mind had just fallen into.
“Cawani basi ti ib xer hati”—hello and welcome.
“Yazidi?” I called out, and ran straight for the sounds as though to arms held open.
The men lowered their barrels and laughed.
“Knew you were Yazidi when you didn’t kneel down to pray,” one of them said. “Let me guess. Did GLS forget you?”
THEY GAVE ME a CHU with a bunk, and by morning I was in a room taking the interpreter test. One hundred multiple-choice questions covering Iraqi history, politics, and geography, and I only had to get half of them right. I passed with flying colors, got my badge, and waited in another CHU with four other “virgin-terps,” three Kurds and a Sunni—in Iraq, that’s how countrymen identified one another. We were all eating from plates of fried eggs and talking about the test when a man came in and stood before us, clipboard in his hand. He looked right at me.
“Write this down on this piece of paper: There are three hundred people in that building with concrete walls. Write it in English and then write it in Arabic.”
“What about Kurdish and Kurmanji?” I said, scribbling.
“You speak all those and write in all those?”
“Yes, sir. I do.” Still writing.
When I handed the clipboard back to him, he looked it over and grinned.
“You a badass, son?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“You are a badass, son—and I need one good badass this morning. Come with me.”
On our way across the compound, a line of Humvees thundering past to yet another CHU, Sergeant Cook gave me the rundown. Boots crunching the ground, he walked fast and stopped several times to check his clipboard. He was gnawing on his cheek like it was gum, licked his lips again and again. The air outside was hot.
“I’m assigning you to a small team. Ten guys or so. All highly skilled. You’ll be embedding with an Iraqi army unit stationed out here in Mosul—7th Brigade, 2nd Division, under Colonel Dildar Jamel Mohammed; you’ll do just fine. The teams rotate in and out of COPs—those are combat outposts located in hostile areas. In fact, you guys are scheduled to go out tomorrow morning. Your job will be to interpret between the Iraqi army and our guys, back and forth. So anytime they need to talk to each other in person, or via radio channels, or among the locals out on patrol, you’re on. So get to know the comms people really well. You get that?”
Keeping up my pace, I just nodded, taking in what I could.
“And one other thing. We give all terps new names. You look like a Michael to me—like the archangel. Yazidis believe in angels, right? Think t
hat should do it.”
WHEN SERGEANT COOK opened the door, a group of men were sitting around in shorts playing video games and shouting out plays in front of a small television set. Madden NFL, I’d learn later. The airless tank reeked of sweat and fruit juice; a large fan was sending out a useless breeze from the corner. The men all stopped and looked over, handing me their easy smiles like cards from a deck.
“You guys welcome your new terp,” Cook said from the open door. “This is Michael, fresh off the boat. Practically speaks in tongues. Mikey—this is Team Shady.”
I went down the line shaking sweaty hands, hearing ranks and names rise up that I’d never remember: Captain Christopher, gunner; Captain Randy Agnew, logistics officer and gunner; Sergeant José Solis, medic from Puerto Rico. The three other terps stood against the wall, sizing me up, nodded half-friendly, and then looked back to the screen. In a moment, the game was on again and they were right back to it. There was a lone man in the corner reading. Flaxen-haired and wide-shouldered, he was deep into his book, mouth working. Carefully, he finished his page, dog-eared a corner, got right out of his chair, and came over to me, hand out, eyes straight ahead.
“Ronald Bowers, Sergeant. Communications. From Idaho. You’ll be riding along with me tomorrow—up in the first MRAP.”
When I shook his hand, his blue eyes met me straight on, and I recognized the unflinching goodness my mother talked about that you could see in a man when he greeted you. He had an easy smile and was young—apple pie American to the core. I looked down at the book he was reading.
“Bible,” he said. “Never leave home without it.”
“My book is in here,” I said, and pointed at my temple.
“I get that.” Then he looked over at the other terps and back at me. “Let’s get you over to the DFAC—that’s the dining facility. We can talk things over in there. Fill you in on tomorrow’s drill. You missed the morning meeting.”
On the other side of the door, Ron stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. “Those other terps in there are good men. Solid. Just do yourself one little favor to get along—”
“Never talk about being Yazidi,” I cut in, matter-of-fact. “Don’t worry, I’ve lived my whole life not talking about it.”
Chapter Six
A Farewell to Angels
WHEN THE MINE RESISTANT AMBUSH PROTECTED (MRAP) vehicle left the wire, ground beneath the chassis surrendered as her deep treads chewed trenches through the gravel. Titanic slabs of steel cloaked the mammoth, nine-foot-high body. Every time those trucks powered up in the lot, they sounded like monsters gorging their way out of the earth. Inside the V-shaped hull, I flew out of my jump chair; hands pushed me back and strapped me in. Fully kitted up in fatigues and body armor, with two metal plates stuffed into deep pockets front and back that could stop bullets from an AK-47. I blended right in.
Helmet sitting in my lap, I put it back on after the team went out to the dirt pile past the gate and test-fired their weapons. Each hot discharge cracked the air to pieces, sending wild echoes right through my bones, and I held in a breath. We were about to traverse terrorist-infested Mosul and I should have been nervous, maybe even terrified, but I wasn’t. Adolescent adrenaline had kicked in, overtaking every impulse and coursing through me like a street drug. Before leaving, I’d lingered in the lot while Bowers sat behind the wheels to check things over. He was in charge of all four vehicles: signals, encryption codes, upgrades, and regular maintenance. Every now and again he called out to me, asking if I had this and that. New sand-colored boots laced up tight over a fresh pair of socks, I sauntered like a bullfighter around the metal mammoth I’d heard one of the guys call “Princess,” as she groaned in her patient idling.
WE STRADDLED THE western edge of the city and headed north at a lumbering pace, and nothing much happened. Mayhem is all every fresh recruit expects when crossing the jowls of war, but the heavy drive along the two-lane thoroughfare was eerily uneventful. The team told me it was that way most days lately, and it felt to them like we were being baited into a lethal form of combat lethargy. Mosul had a primal force all its own; when it wanted to kill, it did so with a sudden and unrelenting savagery.
IEDs littered the grid, just waiting to go off, and even though we were riding in a beast designed to eat bombs, every soldier in that vehicle was primed for a death match. If the convoy went by the same pile of trash several days in a row, the enemy might conclude it was a good place to sneak in an explosive device. Every now and then we’d stop while something up front was checked; a suspicious parked car, or a possible sniper’s nest. What I could see through the MRAP’s front armored glass was dismal: squalid blocks of walled buildings and streams of black water running along the disintegrating gutters.
“They hardly ever shoot at us when we go out,” Bowers called back. “But they’re always watching.”
“Hell yeah,” one of the guys shouted. “Hell yeah.”
COP HOTEL WAS named for the once luxurious and now ransacked Hotel Mosul, which sat high on a bluff like a modern-day pyramid looming over the outpost and fast-flowing Tigris. Smack in the middle of downtown, it was the perfect location for a garrison designed to engage in tight-block operations all over the city. Saddam Hussein had built a villa for his brother fronting the river, complete with a now barren pear orchard; colorful patches of the elaborate flower gardens remained, though unattended and weed-choked. The tacky villa with its European-inspired columns housed Colonel Dildar, commander of the 7th Brigade, and his mostly Kurdish division. Team Shady was one of many advisory support teams rotating out from COPs all over the country, as part of the “Iraq in the Lead” program and the long-term exit strategy of letting Iraq fight for Iraq.
Conditions were sparse: no showers or flushing toilets; plenty of boxed cereal and strawberry-flavored milk. Nestled in an open green space near the riverbank, the terps shared rooms in the building with the rest of the team. I set up my bunk, blankets, and kit. As far as precious possessions went, all I had to my borrowed name were the shamag, a Middle Eastern scarf, and shades Bowers had given me as part of the “not getting shot at for being Yazidi” strategy. Whatever their ethnicity, Arabic-speaking combat interpreters were targets, but Yazidi terps were prized kills. I half wondered if my Shia and Kurdish counterparts had welcomed me into the fold only because my presence made them marginally safer.
Bowers found me sitting on my bunk and taking in the magazine pictures of women dressed in string bikinis festooning the back wall. Earlier, I’d had a reassuring back-and-forth with my fellow terps, who’d given me a couple Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues before taking me down to meet Colonel Dildar and Major Jonathan Howell at the villa. Both those men were approachable and took time to greet me with pleasant promises of a soldier’s education and an open door policy. I’d be seeing a lot of them in the coming weeks. Tomorrow morning we were heading into the city again, this time out of our moving bunker and on foot, right into the concrete guts.
Amused, Bowers cackled as I peeled my farm boy eyes from the machismo décor. I looked at him and tried out a shrug, but my face was radiating heat like a hot plate. Sergeant José, the medic, stood behind Bowers popping open a soda, affable Latin grin widening under his gold-framed Ray-Bans. Then he raised his bottle to the wall in a mock toast and took a sip.
“We all figured it was high time you were initiated properly into the Team,” Bowers said. “Come on outside.”
Freed of armor and with sweat patches already reeking on our shirts, we made our way to the outdoor latrines: two plywood closets in a walled yard—several bullet holes caught my attention. Ten feet away, men were hanging around shooting the breeze and looking on as two fifty-gallon drums cut down into big foot-high bowls sat in the lot, their vile contents smoldering. It didn’t take more than one inhale to register what was going on. The hot stench of excrement was sickening. Walking over, I felt a pool of bile stir in my gut and then burn up past my throat.
One of the men sauntered up
to me with a long, stained stick. “Here you go, Mikey, it’s your turn to stir the team stew.”
Natural Waste Ordinance Disposal, otherwise known as shit-burning. Shoving the stick into the drum, I dug around the black sizzling mess, all the men singing “Stir it up,” over and over again. And I did. Putrid gases rose up to greet me like a sucker punch. I laughed until I gagged and fell back into the yard.
“Welcome to Mosul, Mikey.”
Later, Bowers arranged a quick call to my frantic mother before taking me up to the hotel roof for an antenna check. When I told her I was having the time of my life, it wasn’t a lie.
THE MAN-MADE ISLANDS of trash floating lazily along the river delivered a rank smell in the gloomy morning hours, and I stood on the polluted banks, listening to the muezzin lure its faithful. Week after week, it was always the same: slow drive out into the labyrinth, alleys like slits and abandoned warehouses offering ample nooks and crannies for doped-up fanatics to hide in. Searches and interrogations. A chaos of bullets and filth.
Soldiers poured out into the streets. Clumps of black garbage bags lay scattered like charred skins over the roads and stuck to the spires of fences. Shaking hands with our weary neighbors. Handing out leaflets about safety checks. At first, Mosul seemed like nothing more than a sinister maze of irredeemable urban poverty. None of what I saw was all that striking to me, a denizen of mud-hut villages. But the sheer scale was suffocating. When you were mired down inside her maw, Mosul seemed to have no beginning and no end.
Still, there were fleeting moments of beauty: children in ill-matched clothes, a mishmash of washed-out colors, often ran out unafraid, arms flapping to greet the soldiers. In their upturned faces and lit-up eyes you saw what was left of decency in that ruined part of the world, and it gave me hope. When he wasn’t in the truck standing on overwatch, Bowers always stopped for those eager gaggles, kneeling way down to pass around lollipops, taking his time. I’d interpret his good wishes in Arabic, all of us laughing in that moment as though there wasn’t really a war going on. Bowers had a wife named Angie and seven children under five waiting for him at home, all counting the days like rosary beads; you could see the longing slip over his eyes.
Shadow on the Mountain Page 6