Fixing Hell

by Larry C. James

  Sergeant Major Clemens just looked up at me like it was the hundredth time he’d heard somebody say that. “Them boys ain’t been comin’ round that much,” he said in his southern drawl.

  “Sergeant Major, what in the heck are you talking about, man?”

  Sergeant Major Clemens took a deep breath and explained. “Sir, a few months ago, those Eastern European guys who had the contract on the shitter trucks . . . Well sir, a couple of them were kidnapped and got their heads chopped off with a machete. Since then, if we can’t provide them an armed escort they refuse to come on post with their big truck and clean out the shitters.”

  “Well, that’s fine, but we still got to go to the bathroom,” I replied.

  “No problem, Colonel,” he said with a grin. “I guess we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way and dig holes out back, fill it with kerosene. Yup, doin’ ya business and then setting it on fire. That’s the old-fashioned way, Colonel.”

  I said, “Fine, whatever. Just fix it, Sergeant Major.” A couple days went by and I began to see the Eastern Europeans show up and we didn’t have to resort to digging holes and burning kerosene to go to the bathroom. But they still didn’t come often enough, and the port-a-potties were so foul that you avoided going until you just couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Later, I was having coffee with a couple of infantry privates and we started grousing about the sad state of our toilets. One of them, Private Johnny Tolson from Arkansas, looked at me with a conspiratorial grin and leaned in a little closer. “Sir, you know, they got real shitters over by that got damn KBR building back there,” he said.

  I said, “Soldier, that can’t be right. We don’t have any real toilets here.”

  Private Tolson cracked a big smile and said, “Colonel, let me tell you a little secret. Once a month, we break in there just to sit on a real toilet. Sir, let’s go on a mission tonight. We’ll break into the KBR building and I’ll show you the stuff those bastards got.”

  I declined, but at 3 a.m. Private Tolson and his buddies headed over to the KBR building for their “mission.” When I saw him the next day, he asked me what the hell KBR stood for anyway, and I explained that KBR was a spin-off company of Halliburton. It was a huge company that benefited from the billions of dollars in federal contracts we outsourced to rich Republican politicians and friends of the current administration. I asked Tolson if they had accomplished their mission in the night. He said, “Sir, white porcelain never looked so inviting.” Tolson and his buddies would break into the building for nature’s respite once or twice a month. Small pleasures in hell, I thought.

  There were other examples of downright mismanagement or just incompetence. One day in early August, the post commander started yelling again at the 4 p.m. briefing meeting. He had discovered that the KBR contractor had ordered a new $75,000 fire truck for Abu Ghraib—without any fire hoses. The commander couldn’t believe the stupidity and the waste of taxpayer money. “What a dumbass . . .” he muttered, shaking his head. “Who in the fuck would order a damn fire truck without any shitting hoses?” he yelled at no one in particular. “I’m in a zoo.”

  My true enlightenment didn’t come from those top-level briefings, however. The more time I spent with young soldiers and junior officers, the more the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Not only were these soldiers and marines abandoned by their leadership, but they also were not allowed to defend themselves from the enemy, which is a basic human right that every American is afforded in the Constitution. Not long after that meeting with the irate post commander, I decided to go up in the main guard tower and visit with Corporal Kellar, one of the guards who had been there for a while. He was a pint-sized, freckle-faced marine—about five foot six and only 150 pounds—but he more than made up for his small size with a deep passion for serving his country. We talked about changes over the previous six months, since the abuses of Abu Ghraib first started getting attention back home, and he pointed out that there had been both good and bad changes.

  “I can get to sleep a little easier at night, sir,” he said. “I mean, at least I don’t feel like I’m gonna be shot in the head while waiting for a phone call from Baghdad headquarters.”

  I wasn’t tracking with him. “Corporal Kellar, what in the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “Son, I’m fairly new here, and I don’t know how things were done six months ago.”

  “Heck, Colonel, now we can get in the fight,” he explained. “A few months ago when I would see an Iraqi man put a mortar in the tube, getting ready to fire at us, we couldn’t defend ourselves. I had to call the ops shop back in Baghdad and get permission to engage. The whole time I was on the phone I was staring at that dude and hoping he wouldn’t fire before I got permission to engage him.”

  I just shook my head, amazed at the stupidity that led to such a restriction.

  “Now sir, anytime I see one of those bastards pull up in a white pup truck and take out a weapon, I can defend myself. Dying for my country, sir, I don’t mind that at all. Sir, it was just sitting on my ass and waiting to get permission, while I was gonna get blasted by a shithead, that’s what took me for a loop, sir.”

  “I guess I can understand that, Corporal,” I said. “Now, what do you mean by defending yourself? What do you do when you see some guy coming at you like that now?”

  “I get to shoot one of those fuckers in the head,” Corporal Kellar said with a grin.

  Then, without any pause or change in facial expression, he went on to talk about his wife and three-month-old son back in Tennessee and how he would go fishing with his son as soon as he got back home. Defending his position didn’t faze Corporal Kellar, and I saw a similar attitude with many other soldiers. These men and women were trained to fight the enemy, and one of the worst things you could do to them was to take them out of the fray, to make them stand idly by as threats loomed. A form of discipline at Abu Ghraib was to take a marine off guard tower duty if he was not properly performing his other duties. That punishment always produced quick results. All marines wanted to be in the fight.

  As I climbed down from the tower, Corporal Kellar had a bright smile on his face. He yelled after me. “Hey, Colonel! Next time the shooting starts, come up here, sir, and you can see me shoot one of those fuckers in the head!”

  A little disturbing, I thought, but if someone needs to be shot, I wanted men and women like Corporal Kellar up in that guard tower. I knew I could rest easy at night with Kellar up there, thinking about fishing with his son while he kept his eyes peeled for bad guys in pickups.

  It was getting to be the end of the day and the sun was making a spectacular exit in the desert sky. I headed to the chow hall and sat down at a table with Major Quincy, the deputy director of the intel center, who seemed to be disliked by every person in the center. He lacked the social awareness to realize that everyone around him was either pissed at him or just saw him as “like a log in the middle of the road, in the way.” That’s how one of his subordinates had described him to me. Sitting down next to him, I instantly felt the same vibe that everyone had received from this guy. Major Quincy wore thick glasses, tried his best to speak as little as possible, and it seemed as though he shunned even the basic levels of human contact. I’m a friendly guy who could get just about anyone to talk to me if I tried, but this guy was sending off all kinds of signals that said “leave me the hell alone.”

  Like Colonel Barksdale and his medical staff, Major Quincy was able to walk, talk, and put one foot in front of the other, but it was clear that he had emotionally disengaged from the staff and his mission at Abu Ghraib. It was a struggle for him to psychologically survive each day. I did my best to chat him up, and he begrudgingly responded to my efforts, probably only because I outranked him. After some pleasantries about the food and the heat and the usual bullshit, I moved into a more serious line of questioning.

  “You’ve been here a good while, you must have seen how this place got the way it is.”

&nb
sp; Major Quincy paused and stopped eating. I could tell he was trying to decide whether to brush off my question or tell me what he really thought. He finally went for the second option.

  “Sir, I doubt if you have enough time in the day for me to describe what’s got me to where I am at in my head right now,” he said. Wow, he has some self-awareness about how messed up he is. That’s good.

  “Major, I got nothing better to do,” I said. “Take your time.”

  “Well, it’s like this. I was brought here to do a job without the proper training, we were never staffed for the mission, the chain of command was never clear, the entire intel company had only one vehicle, and our equipment sucked.”

  He elaborated on some of those problems, venting about some issues that obviously had been gnawing at him a while. But it was when the subject of leadership arose that he really got pissed.

  “Colonel, we have not had a commander or director for more than three months. How can you run any organization like that, sir?”

  With the floodgates finally open, Major Quincy went on to describe a litany of serious problems he had witnessed in this hellhole. He began to describe the inappropriate sexual relations that were rampant at Abu Ghraib. He described a whorehouse that was run by some of the staff with the tacit consent of the leadership at that time.

  “Heck, sir, one of the intel company commanders here got fired because he installed a wireless camera in the female soldiers’ shower. And at night him and some of the enlisted soldiers would watch videos of their fellow female soldiers taking showers that very same morning. I doubt that he was ever court-martialed. The only thing ever happened to him that I recall was that he was simply reassigned.”

  Over the next few weeks, Major Quincy and I continued the conversation we started that first evening in the chow hall, often talking late into the night. We were talking one night and I felt like he had finally decided he could trust me, that he was letting his guard down more. I asked him to tell me what he thought was the psychological “marker” or line in the sand for him that he had crossed and that led to the debacle at Abu Ghraib. He talked about the military intelligence brigade commander, Colonel Paulsen, who also served as the post commander. The colonel had a meltdown after his driver got killed.

  “Quincy, I wasn’t here then,” I said. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  He described how the military intel commander’s young driver was killed in a mortar attack right in front of the colonel’s eyes. On that night, Colonel Paulsen, his driver, and some other young soldiers were in a tent. Paulsen was standing and talking to his driver when a huge mortar came in through the top of the tent and landed right behind his driver. The kid’s body was sliced up like it was fed through a tree shredder. “Sir, that fella was probably dead before he hit the ground,” Major Quincy said.

  I could only shake my head at the thought.

  “Colonel, sir . . . there’s more,” Quincy offered quietly.

  “How could there be more to this awful story?”

  “Sir, all the soldiers in that tent that night were either killed or torn apart with sharp metal fragments from the mortar, except Colonel Paulsen. He walked out of that tent without a scratch on him. You should have heard him describe how he just couldn’t figure that out, how those young men were torn completely apart and he didn’t even get a scratch. Colonel James, he was neither the same officer nor human being after that incident.”

  Other soldiers described Colonel Paulsen as depressed after that incident, but no one knew if he was ever seen by a psychologist. But soldier after soldier described how their leader, Colonel Paulsen, psychologically disappeared after that day. As a result, as night fell upon the post, this senior leader disappeared physically as well as psychologically, and unfortunately, his trauma-induced withdrawal gave permission for all his subordinate officers to follow suit. The vacancy at the top made it possible for the sociopaths to run unchecked and prey upon others.

  During our long talks, Major Quincy shared many things that had happened with other officers and enlisted soldiers he had come to know. Through these many conversations I was able to conceptually weave a web and connect the dots in my head as to how the despair and hopelessness and defenselessness described by Major Quincy led to what the renowned psychologist Dr. Al Bandura has described as “moral disengagement.” Simply stated, moral disengagement is what happens to human beings when they’re stretched beyond their emotional and psychological capacity. Their bodies, psyches, minds, and souls disengage from events around them and they become detached, in an almost dissociative state. Unchecked, a person will “reconstrue,” or use strained logic to justify their amoral behaviors. That’s exactly what we had seen already from those involved in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Some argued that “those prisoners had to be tortured so we could protect Americans.” Moreover, moral disengagement produces a tendency to diffuse responsibility and blame the victim. Thus what we saw at Abu Ghraib was a process whereby the prisoners were blamed for the torture and the disengaged mind-set prospered. It was now clear to me, more than ever, that the biscuit staff and I needed to be present “twenty-four seven” if we were to identify and prevent atrocities from happening ever again.

  One night in the first half of August, as I headed out back of my barracks building to the port-a-potty, in the dark night I could hear the sound of a woman crying. Specialist Molly Hansen, from upstate New York, was stooped over behind a Humvee with her head down in her hands. She looked as though she was about thirteen years old but I was to learn that she was actually a nineteen-year-old former cheerleader. Molly had joined the Army in order to acquire the funds to go to college, as her family didn’t have the means. As I approached her and she caught sight of my rank, she stood to attention and tried to find her military bearing, issuing a feeble salute. Even in the dark Iraq night I could see the tears running down her face as she struggled to gather herself and find the military discipline she once knew, almost an eternity ago in boot camp. I placed my right arm around her shoulders and told her she could relax, that I just wanted to talk to her and see what was wrong.

  She began to shake uncontrollably. I could feel that she was trying hard to contain an urge to break out in full-fledged hysterics.

  “Colonel, please forgive me for crying like this, sir,” she said in a trembling voice.

  “Easy, soldier,” I said. “Just catch your breath for a moment. Don’t try to talk. Let’s just walk so we can visit for a while.”

  As we walked, she regained her composure and was able to start talking to me more calmly. She explained that she had been pressured, although not physically held down and forced, into a sexual relationship with her sergeant in charge.

  I asked if she wanted me to accompany her to the military police office right now or in the morning.

  “Sir, it would be a waste of time because this stuff happens here over time and nobody will do a damn thing about it.”

  I wanted to tell her that I could make sure something happened, but I sensed that she didn’t need another male superior coercing her into anything right now. So I told her it would be a good idea for her to go to the emergency room for treatment and documentation purposes, then she could decide later whether to go to the police. Molly felt that this wouldn’t do any good either, because she was not held down and physically raped, so it would be seen as consensual.

  After a good talk and walk, Molly was feeling better, and so I said good night to her after encouraging her to come to me if she needed help with this situation or just wanted to talk. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I had accomplished, but at least I had reached out and let her know help was available.

  The next morning, I made a point to see Molly in the chow hall during breakfast. She felt that she still didn’t want to press charges. My heart ached to look at this young woman and know what kind of pain she was keeping locked inside. Molly was representative of the many soldiers abandoned at Abu Ghraib, their hopes and dreams darken
ed and dimmed by vacant leaders or preyed upon by others who masqueraded as soldiers.

  Still not content to let Molly’s situation go unresolved, I went to see the lawyer of the post without revealing her name. We discussed my concerns but the lawyer was not encouraging.

  “Sir, unless the female soldier is willing to press charges, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “We’re in a combat zone and people get caught up in all kinds of strange relationships. Colonel James, I’ve been in country for almost a year now, and sir, sometimes when soldiers feel vulnerable, they seek comfort in a sexual way.”

  It sounded to me like he was either saying Molly had sought out the relationship or that her sergeant was justified in using her to satisfy his own needs. I took issue with this and bit his head off.

  “Soldier, mothers and fathers from our country put faith and trust in us that we will protect their sons and daughters in harm’s way. I will never accept your bullshit response!”

  I walked to the office of the company commander, a young twenty-seven-year-old captain. We had a long talk about this situation and I convinced him that something had to change. After our talk it became our company’s policy that all females would be escorted at night by a buddy system. We became hypervigilant and on the lookout for sexual assault, and I let it be known that this colonel would not tolerate some of the bullshit that had taken place in this camp before. The problem drastically decreased after the policy changes.