“Gentlemen,” he began, and I interpreted. “This entire outfit has been infiltrated by al-Qaeda—top to bottom.”
“OK. How many?” Migone asked.
“Many—we are overrun. Other divisions are encountering the same problem. It’s getting harder and harder to smoke them out. For now, we have to keep up the routines as if we know nothing. We can run a few drills before you leave.”
“Overrun—as in outnumbered?”
“Possibly, Lieutenant Colonel. Yes. We don’t know how many. The fact is—I don’t trust my soldiers.”
“In other words, Commander?”
“In other words, sir…” The lone Iraqi chief swallowed hard and then looked over each man in the room. “None of you are safe. Not even me. You’re here to take a look, make your presence known.”
“There are ten of us, and you have just these three?” Migone said. “I don’t like that balance.”
“Without you, sir, there is just one of me.”
IN THE CORRIDOR before making our way back up, Brownsword turned to me. “Mikey, you get your gear and set up in my cell. They’ll slit your throat in your sleep if they can. You go nowhere alone. Kapish?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I got it. Is he for real, sir?” I’d heard of infiltrators in the IA, and even among the terps, but had thought it was an anomaly or one of the many war myths that swirled around the bases, usually in the DFACs or over mindless card games.
“Oh, he’s for real all right. We’re fighting a cancer over here—and it has metastasized.”
BACK IN OUR fetid section, under the silent gaze of the IA soldiers who’d taken up positions at either end, I grabbed my kit and carted it right over to Brownsword’s cell. Already, he and Migone were bringing in sheets of plywood and tacking them to the gates, masking the guards’ lethal views.
“We’re gonna sleep in shifts and make sure we are hard targets,” Brownsword said. “Mikey, you don’t move from this cell unless I tell ya.”
Then he pulled out his full arsenal and kitted up: M240 Bravo with two hundred rounds of ammo propped behind a sandbag at one end of the hallway—in case the terrorists thought about mounting an attack or lobbing in a grenade—jumpmaster blade strapped to the outside of his leg, pistols, combat knife, all in full view. Then he found a set of brass knuckles and slid them over his fingers and clenched his fist.
“Right now, I’m going to have myself a nice little tour of this rat’s nest,” he said.
“OK, sir,” I said from the end of the bunk, and could feel my neck pulsing. The cell was cold, but the air was strangely oppressive. Like prey, I could sense our predicament with every living breath. Inside those bleak walls, we were trapped—only one way out.
“You know, Mikey,” Brownsword said, checking his armor before leaving. “When I was in training stateside, they taught us to build trust by stripping off our gear, putting away our weapons—as a sign of good faith. But the reality is, this is the Middle East, not California. And right here, right now, we are sleeping in enemy territory. In this part of the world, you gotta display your strength full throttle. I know you Yazidi are pacifists, but you gotta let these guys know if they decide to fuck with you, you won’t hold back. Maybe even let them think you’re a little bit crazy. You got that?”
“I got it, sir.”
“I know it may go against your beliefs, but this is something you’ll need to come to terms with soon. If our situation here is any indication of what’s coming, and I think it is, you’re going to need to remember what I’m telling you.”
Then Captain Brownsword stepped into the hall and looked both ways as though he was checking the traffic. He cleared his throat and sauntered up and down the passage, conferring with the others before going out past the plywood-covered gates.
“You and your guys can scram,” I heard him say to the Iraqi guards, and then he went whistling down the stairs.
DEEP INTO THE long night, the prison seemed to hold me in its jaws, considering. Every few minutes, I heard muted sounds reverberate as though we were in the vacant cavity of a prehistoric beast. I tried not to imagine the barbarism that had played out within those walls, but Captain Brownsword was right—they seemed to weep their cruel history.
Between restless waking dreams, I heard a noise and looked up to see a silhouette standing in the corridor before me, obscuring the bars.
“Who’s there?” I called into the pitch, and felt the thunder of my heart.
But there was no answer and I sat up to peer into the heavy gloom.
I made out the wet sound of lips parting and could just see a dull light reflecting off teeth. The warm scent of fresh shisha reached me like a curse.
“RPG,” I said to the darkness. “What is it?”
No answer. No movement whatsoever. The outline of the man stood stock still, looking in as though he saw right through the darkness and all the way into my skin.
Then in the faraway corridors, I could make out the echoes of Brownsword whistling Yankee Doodle, and the metallic raps and long clanks of his left hand running those brass knuckles against cell bars, no matter who was slumbering behind them. He’d been up and down every floor, all night long, raking the cells like a madman. Pistol ready in his right hand, half grin slicing his all-American face.
Several times he came back to check on the others and me.
The first time, he said, “The Iraqis have bored holes into the plywood, Mikey.”
“Why would they do that, sir?”
“To watch us. If you lean out you can see them.”
Now, I heard him making his way back, moving toward the turret. The form before my cell let out a small breath and recoiled. Then he moved slowly back down the hall, feet shuffling. I heard steel bars slide open and shut. Another man coughed into his tank. And I sat in the dark and waited for Brownsword.
Chapter Nine
General Petraeus
WE CRUISED IN THE HUMVEES, EAST ON HIGHWAY 47, PASSING just south of Qaryat al-Ashiq and Badush, known for its cement plant and prison and nothing more. Mile after wasted mile, not a living thing in sight. Then, under the lingering arm of the Tigris, we descended into her undulant colonized valley, skimming the dark viscera of Mosul. Blackbirds circled the carbon haze and trash danced over the road. Parallel to the track, military planes thundered down the runway, taking off against so many odds into a fuel-laced ozone that shimmered like cellophane. The thoroughfare cleaving Camp Marez from Diamondback always seemed like a road back into civilization: the DFAC with its salad bar and buffet lines, PX, and industrial laundry machines. Past wired checkpoints toward the gate in the throng of base traffic, a recent spring rainfall had rinsed the road clean; we slowed way down.
I was in the back, staring out, tired spine resting against the metal. iPod in my lap, headphones blaring. Every muscle, taut while out in the desert scrimmage, suddenly slackened. We’d have a few hours off to get ourselves together: wash our fatigues, eat a good meal, call mom before the next move-out. By now, I’d been through most of the motley outposts and HQs studded across the northern provinces, made a surprise visit to my startled Daki in Khanasor, had dinner with the rest of the team at Basim’s house, shaved my head, bulked up lifting weights.
Dump truck at a standstill, idling near the last set of gates, we didn’t think anything of it. Base traffic was as relentless as the conflict it fed: deliveries and convoys, food and fuel, coming and going sunup to sundown. We were ten minutes ahead of schedule—on the nose, Brownsword would tell me later. Any other day, we’d have made a scheduled pit stop to relieve ourselves, take a smoke, grab a Gatorade—and looking back, not one of us remembers why we just kept going on the 47. Maybe there was no reason at all, and in some ways that makes it harder. In a war, survival often hinges on the infinitesimal—the stupid. If we’d taken our break that day, we’d all be dead.
Moving through the final gate into Marez, we passed another combat advisory team, all fueled up, going out the other way in their conv
oy. In a standing position behind the “Pig,” Brownsword waved and called out a hello; blurred faces and hands appeared briefly behind the armored windscreens. Even now, I can see them: the wide hollows of their young eyes, fleeting rise of their palms. How many times I’ve wished so hard to go back and stop that convoy in its tracks—we all have. In dreams, I run out screaming to no avail. Other times, I just watch them go again and again and again, finally waking tangled in the layers of my own sweaty sorrow. Our team knew that team, even if just on sight—every living soldier and terp. All of us, together, and so far from home.
Pulling into the motor pool, the hatch came down and I had my mind on one thing—a nice bowl of chicken noodle soup. Saltine crackers on the side. I’d already asked the Filipino cook to show me how to make it. Boots on the ground in the lot, body armor and helmet still on, ear buds dangling; before I’d walked two paces, a mortal fault line suddenly cracked open across oblivion and called in its marker.
The ear-splitting explosion slashed the sky, pushed me sideways, and shook the earth. Every head in the lot went straight up. We all knew what to expect, and it all came: tower of smoke, a rush of hot wind from the ensuing fire, and then people running, running, running—mouths open, but soundless. Sirens blared. My ears were ringing. And I just stood there, watching the acrid smoke drive a black channel straight into heaven. Six soldiers vaporized. Two children standing on the side of the road erased from the world. Dozens wounded in diabolical ways. You could smell it.
Then I ran fast with my team and huddled against concrete barriers, where we waited coated in grime like sewer rats until the all-clear. Migone had his hands folded over his lap and stared into them as though into a chasm. Brownsword sat next to him doing the same. For a long time, none of us said a word, but we all shared the same thoughts, passing them between us like breaking bread together.
It was probably a fertilizer bomb—maybe a few thousand pounds. Brownsword thought he heard shots fired as we were pulling in; the soldiers must have known.
“This one is gonna stick, isn’t it?” Migone said.
“Yeah, it is.” When he spoke, it looked like Brownsword was moving a sharp stone around in his mouth.
It was Good Friday, April 10, 2009, and we’d just missed the deadliest attack against American forces in over a year, and the second in Mosul in months. Not because we were smarter or better equipped or saved for some predetermined purpose. Ten minutes—six hundred extra seconds on the clock—had bought us our lives. And all because not one of us had to get out and take a piss.
UNDER STRINGS OF Christmas lights and paper lanterns, sweaty bodies packed the dance floor set up in the yard. Music blared, voices crooned, and the lights overhead twinkled against a backdrop of spiraling streamers: all red, white, and blue. Even now, every Fourth of July, I think back to Ron Bowers, a self-declared man of God and country, who read me verses from the Bible and articles from the Constitution. Bowers taught me everything I knew about the United States of America, starting with “independence,” a word I’d heard but never understood that you lived—until now. My country’s sovereignty was declared on October 3, 1932, when the British gave up the last yoke of their rule, over 150 years after America split from the same crown. The similarities ended there—and you didn’t need a history book to understand how.
Revelers in party hats had come from all over the FOB and other bases. By dusk dozens of soldiers and Iraqi personnel converged on PAD 2 for the barbecue and camaraderie, and to pretend for just a few hours that there wasn’t a holy war raging past our doorstep. Migone and Brownsword told me that Spider’s parties were always big and notorious. Out in the festooned yard, a sea of smiles, parting only when more food came in on aluminum trays. I could not imagine the time when I had not lived the raw base life and known those two gregarious men—we were brothers-in-arms and kinship, and the fact would be proven to me again and again.
The two of them sat back in folding chairs, with Zina, our new female terp, standing off to one side. Brownsword said we could end this war in no time if we just invited all the tribes and their sheikhs to have a sit-down, fire up the hookah, and make a few deals. It was finally occurring to the higher-ups that the war couldn’t be won by bombing everything to smithereens; General David Petraeus wanted his officers in among the people, carving out allegiances.
I had met the general one time at Camp Taji in the sweltering late summer of 2008, while at a training conference for MiTTs. Petraeus was right: the tribes were the ones you have to answer to in Iraq. But if the rumors of a full US withdrawal were true, I wondered how those deals would hold when America was gone. There’s no loyalty out in the desert.
The day Zina showed up at FOB Sykes with her long braided hair and lithe gusto, she gave me a sliver of hope for the future—and a female in fatigues to gaze upon like an apparition. If a young Arab woman was working the dirt and still kicking, I thought, things in the wider country must be improving. She also made cordon and search interrogations easier: wives and daughters, who were mute around the males in uniform, gravitated to her readily, and usually with the bitter truth. Married to and divorced from an American officer, desert-wise Zina had returned to the broken land of her birth to do her part to cobble it back together. In some ways, we were in awe of the woman Brownsword called “Zina the Warrior.”
“Mikey,” she kept asking me, “what are your plans after this? After the Coalition leaves?”
“Zina, they won’t all leave—ever. The Americans still have bases in Germany and Korea and other places.” I was trying to convince myself as much as her. I had seen firsthand what happened to Mosul after Petraeus left—it was what Migone called “a shit-show.” But with all we’d been through, Team Spider had taken over my entire worldview. The truth was I could have gone on with them that way for years, and maybe I believed I would.
“If I were you, I’d get my family out and just start over. There’s an American special visa program for terps. It’s called an SIV. You should start thinking about it.” Zina wasn’t the first to say as much. “You’re Yazidi, and that’s even more dangerous than what I am.”
“What do you mean—what you are? You’re fine. Brownsword says it all the time: that Zina—she’s fine.” And I laughed.
“Don’t act stupid, Mikey. I’m a woman—a whore for the West. They’d murder my family and burn down my house. It’s already happening to some of us.”
RPG had been listening to our conversation. Just then, he stepped in and handed over a new pack of buns, as I worked a dozen beef patties that hissed fat over the coals, flipping them one after the other like cards. “Lambs to the slaughter,” he said—I can still hear him say it. I told them both that the worst was almost over, that we had protection now. My youthful optimism no more then a frustration, Zina would hear none of it.
RPG just winked at me.
Hours before, he and several terps had driven a pickup into Tal Afar’s market streets to buy the young beast that now dripped its rich fat over a spit in the yard. RPG had been the one to slit the young lamb’s throat in the crooked shade of the fence line, where he’d kept it tethered. From a distance, I’d caught sight of the animal’s resigned black eyes when it turned its head momentarily and looked at me, just as the blade went down—it knew, and didn’t even flinch as the thing was done. I remember still the first slaps of blood splashing over the dry dirt, and one of the others said RPG had used his knife better than a mullah.
I watched Brownsword work the dance floor, eyes half-shut. Migone was sprawled in a chair looking out into the shisha fog of the party in full swing. Even now, it amazes me how they could peel off their body armor in the very heart of the blistering Jazeera and live those hours as though tomorrow we weren’t heading out past the wire again. I put more meat over the coals and realized I was doing exactly the same thing—nothing else to do but keep going.
If you didn’t come back, you just didn’t.
ONE YEAR LATER, in the summer zenith of 2010, I w
as called from the relative idyll of those northern outposts and down into Iraq’s notorious desert bloodbath—Al-Anbar Province, better known as “the Sunni Triangle.” The largest “governate” in the country, Anbar’s strategic location on the Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi borders made it the home base of AQI, who’d wrested control over the historic smuggling routes first carved out during the days of the Old Silk Road, back when the East traded culture and materials with the West, and without any carnage. From that solid foothold, AQI’s leaders fanned into the villages, recruiting massive numbers of disgruntled, and therefore willing, native insurgents, and co-opted the sheikhs from the most powerful tribes.
Though predominantly Sunni, the insurgency was not monolithic, but was made up of myriad factions: Baathists, Salafi-Jihadi Islamists, and other elements from the ousted regime. Moreover, the insurgency’s face changed perpetually like a chameleon, depending on the influence of external forces. In short order, they carried out an onslaught of complex mass-casualty suicide bombings.
I’d run around those merciless sands many times before, as a temporary terp supporting combat teams and officers, trying to put a lid on the mayhem and break up the nefarious enemy cells. The region was swarming with terrorist groups and criminal gangs, and we might as well have been trying to catch them all with plastic spoons. If Mosul was a city of bombs, Anbar was a kingdom of indiscriminate killing.
One man drove a fist through the rampant insurgency, becoming an icon to those who served under him, including me—General David Petraeus, commander of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq (MNF-I). Under his authority beginning in February 2007, the boiling-over violence gradually tempered. In September 2008, Major General John Kelly had signed over the assumption of responsibility for security of Al-Anbar to Mamoun Rasheed, governor of the province.
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