Fixing Hell

by Larry C. James

  One of the enlisted soldiers who worked for me was a thirty-seven-year-old female from San Antonio, Texas, and she served an important role in our effort to protect the female soldiers. Staff Sergeant Kyra Denison, although not the most operationally minded soldier, became the matriarch to all the females in the intel unit. She provided counsel and compassion and served as a protective buffer to help thwart subtle sexual advances on the vulnerable young females at Abu Ghraib. She carved out new roles for the biscuit in addition to the work with the interrogators and MPs.

  Another example of our multitalented resources was our other enlisted biscuit, Sergeant Jesus Realson. As a former tank driver, Realson brought valuable military skills many interrogators lacked. This guy knew the bread-and-butter skills of a soldier—how to kill and how to avoid being killed—better than most interrogators or Army specialists who hadn’t practiced those skills since boot camp. Realson’s tactical military skills proved extremely valuable in training our interrogators in defending the camp against the inevitable nighttime attacks. Sergeant Realson was gifted in his ability to teach anyone, even the most unlikely warrior, how to shoot. On one night when we were expecting a major assault on the camp, he actually taught a gay male interrogator, all of about 120 pounds, how to load and fire a .50 caliber machine gun—a big, badass weapon. I’ll never forget the image of Sergeant Realson teaching the .50 cal to this soldier who was actually wearing makeup at the time. With helmet and Army gear on, this interrogator tested Sergeant Realson’s patience as he became more preoccupied with his nails, makeup, and whether the helmet messed up his hairstyle than with how to target the enemy or how to load the machine gun.

  Most Americans would find this odd—gay soldiers on the battlefield, and especially one so openly gay. The truth is that, just like in any city in America, about 5 to 10 percent of our soldiers were either gay or lesbian. While the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy encouraged both the soldier and the military to just avoid making an issue of the individual’s sexual orientation, sometimes in the field people let their guards down and their true selves came through. Then “don’t ask, don’t tell” became “pretend not to notice, just don’t say anything.” Once in a combat zone, the military usually focused more on how you performed your duties than anything else, so the same behavior that might have gotten you a reprimand or even a discharge at a base back home sometimes would result in officers looking the other way. And besides, at Abu Ghraib, the leaders usually weren’t around anyway. That’s how we ended up with a soldier in makeup manning a .50 cal. that night—quite effectively as it turned out. Most importantly, this young soldier was a good person, damn good at his job, and he was willing to give his life for our country. None of us cared at all about his sexual orientation.

  I saw many other examples of how surprisingly diverse our troops are. A lesbian soldier once helped me unjam my M16 rifle while in a convoy. I didn’t have to ask her if she was lesbian, but as a highly trained psychologist I spotted all the signals that made that a pretty safe conclusion. At the very least, this was one tough gal, no matter her sexual orientation. Her voice was deeper than mine, and if I had any tattoos I’m sure that I would have chosen more feminine ones than hers. Our convoy was stopped on the main road between Baghdad and Abu Ghraib and we thought we heard gunfire. As I tried to lock and load my M16, it jammed and I struggled to get it cleared. Sergeant Jackie saw the struggle on my face as I sat to her left side in the back of the Humvee. As she reached for my M16 with her left hand, I could see tattoos on the back of her left wrist and on her arms that might best be described as colorful and suggestive. She placed her own M16 between her legs and delicately balanced a Marlboro cigarette in the right corner of her mouth while firmly holding my M16 with her left hand. I said two things quietly to myself. One, I’m glad she is on our side. And two, we have got to figure out a way to get gals like this up on the front lines. Like the gay soldier manning the machine gun, Sergeant Jackie was impeccable at performing her duties and nobody really cared what she did after work.

  Still, we had sexual issues on the post, and not everyone on the base was fine with what the civilian world calls “alternative lifestyles” and what military folk often call much worse. At the daily 4 p.m. briefing meeting one day, the post commander was enraged. He was briefed that there was a “friendly fellow” lurking around the marines’ locker room in the morning. The guy was a civilian contract intel analyst from Oregon. This “friendly fellow” went on the other side of the post, into the Marine barracks locker room that morning, trying to be helpful with some buff young marines as they came out of the shower. The marines did not embrace him, to say the least. The post commander, a southern boy, had his hand on his pistol while I watched the veins in his neck expand and his face get redder by the second. He yelled out at us all.

  “I can’t have this on my post!” he screamed. “I ain’t gonna have any monkeyshine like this shit here. I can’t have some Peter Pan going into the Marine locker room offering to give a marine a massage as he comes out the shower. That fella’s lucky he only got his ass kicked. I want that friendly fella off my post by sundown.”

  The friendly fella was packed up, loaded in a Humvee, and headed for a plane at the MAC terminal in Baghdad by 6 p.m. that same day. Unfortunately, most would remember this one incident and focus on it to cast aspersions on gay soldiers. We actually had more problems with heterosexual soldiers getting pregnant or sexually assaulted.

  Indeed, the many unchecked bedfellows at Abu Ghraib contributed to the dark hopelessness there. My staff and I became the watchful eyes and ears of the commanding general. There were many challenges for us, from the abusive interrogators to the ones who lacked the social skills to interview a dead man in the ground. Teaching just basic interpersonal skills went a long way, as many of these young soldiers were right out of the Army’s brief interrogator school, and high school right before that.

  On top of this, the Army was running out of real, qualified MPs and began sending store clerks, artillerymen, truck drivers, and the like to a two- or three-week course, and then to Abu Ghraib where they would work as card-carrying MPs. Each found a steep learning curve where failure could mean getting shanked by a detainee.

  Small things became big things in a combat zone, exacerbated by actionless leaders plagued by indecisiveness, moral corruption, a lack of expertise, or just good old-fashioned incompetence. Two to five detainees escaped every other week, and the strangeness of Abu Ghraib allowed the MP leaders to see this as normal. The last prison I worked at had one escape in ten years. The next day, the warden was canned.

  The complicated conceptual, psychological, and emotional web that was woven at Abu Ghraib was like that of a venomous spider on the hunt. Most Americans’ hearts sank, like mine, when they saw the dirty pictures of the naked detainees as Abu Ghraib. But there was no rational trigger for those abuses. The explanations usually put forth were that the actions were taken “to soften them up for interrogations,” or “it was just rogue soldiers doing this stuff.” I was learning that there was more—much more—to understanding how those despicable photos came to be. Desperation, hopelessness, poor leadership, depression, abandonment, rage, sexual exploitation, and a sense of defenselessness collectively yielded a climate of despair, which was exacerbated by the torrid, smothering heat, and unsanitary living conditions. Early on at Abu Ghraib, lack of e-mail, phone calls, and mail from home worsened the weaknesses in all of the soldiers—they were detached from their humanity. The Army and Air Force military stores refused to provide services in Abu Ghraib for fear of their employees getting killed. Only after they were given an ultimatum—“Come to Abu Ghraib or leave Iraq”—would they open a store there. Prior to this, female soldiers had no place to purchase feminine items and soldiers could not purchase condoms. Soldiers were reprimanded by their senior sergeants because of dirty uniforms, even though they lacked laundry facilities and a store on post to purchase basic uniform items. Over time,
an Internet café with a phone center was built, along with a store, barber shop, movie room, and laundry. Yet regardless of the improvements in the facilities, emotional scars remained due to the tragic first year of our presence in Abu Ghraib.

  Step 3 of my action plan—actively engage leadership in the work—was progressing well, in part because the commanding general was so supportive. By mid August, the new intel center director decided he liked what he was seeing from us and put a rule in place that the biscuit needed to be present at all times if interrogations were going on. Although I was glad to see him embrace Step 4—provide 100 percent supervision at all times to the soldiers overseeing the prisoner interviews—implementing it right away would be difficult. It was going to be physically almost impossible for us to observe all the interrogations because we had no way of monitoring all of them at the same time. So I convinced the leadership, with the support of the general, to go ahead with Steps 5 and 6 by installing video cameras in all of the interrogation booths and providing a video monitoring center much like we had in Cuba. This enabled multiple layers of supervision, with someone always observing the interrogation. Either myself or anyone from the biscuit staff could sit in one room and through the aid of video monitoring see what was going on in all interrogations at the same time. This became a critical safeguard.

  Soon after the new cameras were installed, I was watching an interrogation that so far had been uneventful and frankly kind of boring. But we began to notice that the Arabic interpreter was starting to raise his voice in a manner inconsistent with the interrogator’s voice. As things began to escalate, the twenty-year-old, 140-pound male interrogator had to break up a fight between the Arabic interpreter and the Iraqi prisoner. As we suspected from watching on video, the interrogator found out that the interpreter was interjecting his own comments as he interpreted. For example, the interrogator would ask, “How do you get along with your mother?” The interpreter would say, “How do you get along with that whore mother of yours, you fucking dog?” Not exactly the same thing. Or the interrogator would ask, “Are you married?” and the interpreter would say, “A homosexual pig like you must not be married, no?” When we realized what was going on, we sent in some help to keep things calm. It was only through the video monitoring by the biscuit staff that an all-out brawl was avoided. We explained quite firmly to the interpreter that his job was to just translate what we said, no more. There’s a time to go for the throat when interrogating a prisoner, but the whole process of trying to ease our way in with the prisoner was being thwarted by an interpreter who thought he knew better.

  It became critical for me to just walk about the compound at Abu Ghraib, at all hours of the day and night. I had learned that good leaders are “there” in the organization and have their hands on all aspects of the operation. When I was walking around the base at Abu Ghraib, ducking into buildings here and there just to see what was going on, I often thought of my time at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the comment that probably sent the surgeon general of the Army to early retirement. During an interview, he said, “I don’t do barracks inspection.” He implied that it was beneath him and inconsequential to his duties. When I read that quote in the Washington Post I said to myself, “Why not?” If a leader wants to make a difference, he’s got to go poking around in the basement and the closet. That’s where I was finding the problems at Abu Ghraib.

  Bad leaders never go to the basement, I thought. Everything can look good from your desk, but that’s not what’s really going on.

  New gym equipment I had requested soon after my arrival finally arrived, and I made sure my biscuit staff and I led by example. We started working out at the gym every night until some staff were hit by mortar fragments. Then we moved the equipment and began working out in the hallway in our barracks building. Many of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib welcomed the chance to get back into an exercise routine, and I could tell that it was helping work off some of the anxiety and depression. But still, anger abounded among many of the senior enlisted supervisors and officers. They just didn’t want to be there and as a result did everything within their power to not support the mission.

  Much of my work was administrative and clinical in nature, but I was always looking for chances to make a difference with individuals, the guys and gals on the front line, because I knew how a bad attitude could fester if left unchecked. On one of my convoys to Baghdad in mid-August, I sat in the backseat of a Humvee with three other soldiers squeezed into this vehicle. In the vehicle with me was an officer by the name of Jim Carlson, a little guy who chain-smoked at every opportunity and was the stereotypical geek. Carlson was very angry and bitter about his deployment; resentment radiated from his presence. On this day we were stuck at Camp Victory for a good two to three hours waiting for a bomb to be cleared off the main road leading back to Abu Ghraib. The whole time, Carlson bitched, pissed, and moaned about how bad it was being in the Army, how bad the leadership was and how miserable his life was since he arrived at “this fucking shithole.” I sat quietly, watching and observing the impact this angry officer had upon all the young soldiers in our vehicle. He had no idea how his bitterness, poor military bearing, depression, and rage negatively affected the young men and women around him. After I’d heard enough of his bellyaching, I pulled him aside.

  “Jim, in any organization it is appropriate for you to complain up your chain of command, to your superiors, not down the chain of command,” I told him. “Remember, this is a combat zone and for whatever reasons, we’re here, good or bad. As a leader and a supervisor, you cannot give up hope and the mission. What I’m asking you to do is be a positive force with these young troops. They need this from you and they deserve it from you.”

  My talk snapped him out of his negative spiral for a moment and he was very apologetic. But still, he didn’t think I understood how unhappy he was. “Sir, you’re new here. You just have no idea how hopeless it can be at Abu Ghraib,” he said.

  “Jim, thanks for trusting me enough to let me know how you feel,” I said. “But here’s the deal: a few months from now, if you ever hear me pissing and moaning like you just did with your subordinates, tap me on my shoulder and remind me that a good leader needs to be a calm, levelheaded, positive voice at all times.”

  “Okay, sir,” he said. “I got it and I’ll hold you to it.”

  That appeared to be a turning point for us because after that interaction it seemed that people were a lot more cheerful. I did whatever I could do to help morale by being positive and improving living conditions for all the soldiers around me.

  One day I walked into a meeting where a female soldier was very upset because she was told that she could not sleep with her husband, who was also stationed at Abu Ghraib. Sometimes in life, as you move about, you hear some shit that is so bizarre, so idiotic, it puts your thoughts on pause, and this was one of those moments. I couldn’t help but start laughing and I went to the soldier’s supervisor.

  “Man, this is crazy,” I told him. “Let me get this straight, Sergeant. You mean she can’t sleep in the same room with her husband and she can’t have sex with her husband, and they are assigned in the same unit, correct?”

  “Sir, sex is off-limits and it simply violates one of the general’s orders,” he explained. “Sex is not authorized even between married couples who are in the same unit together.”

  I pulled the soldier aside and told her to let me work on it, that I would see what I could do. I was never able to arrange for these two married soldiers to work the same shift and live together, but we were able to arrange weekend passes to Baghdad for them.

  Sex was a complicating factor in much of our work at Abu Ghraib. I came to know several single women at Abu Ghraib who got pregnant, received adverse legal action, and were sent home. Private Jeni Nelson was a short, fat, seriously ugly young lady. She looked as though she was crying all the time. Nevertheless, she got a boyfriend, got pregnant, and was promptly sent home by her company commander. Did she
do it on purpose to get out of Abu Ghraib? Probably, and I’m sure she wasn’t the first.

  I couldn’t help but have very bad memories of a conversation with a colonel at Gitmo back in 2003. I had walked into the little mini-mart during the lunch hour and Colonel Clements was bitching out the cashier for having condoms on the shelf. He was yelling, “Sex is not authorized in my camp!” and the cashier was stammering something about how he didn’t decide what to put on the shelves. Later, outside in the parking lot, I stopped Colonel Clements and asked what the hell that was about.

  “Colonel, why would we not want these boys and girls to practice safe sex?”

  He was pissed at me! “Safe sex? All sex here is safe because there ain’t supposed to be no fucking sex on this damn post!”

  With a grin, I told him, “Colonel, if you put a boy monkey in a cage and the boy monkey in the cage is swinging on the vine with the girl monkey, sooner or later, you’re gonna have little baby monkeys in the cage. It’s only natural, Colonel. We would never try to outlaw sex on a college campus, now would we, Colonel?”

  I could begin to see steam rise from his collar. He mumbled something, got in his car, and drove away. Colonel Clements didn’t speak to me for a month after that, but I began to see condoms in the mini-mart again even though he had ordered the store clerk to remove all condoms from the shelf. We went through pretty much the same sort of debate at Abu Ghraib, and then in the middle of the summer the same change began to occur at the Abu Ghraib mini-mart. Condoms appeared, and before long we saw an overall improvement in the morale among the soldiers. I began to hear people laughing, telling stories, watching movies together, and simply having fun again.

  Even though I was making slow progress in turning things around, I did not fathom that my biggest challenge still lay ahead of me. This one was an internal struggle, one that I would have to solve on my own. Now I was facing every day as a doctor in a combat zone, and I would soon have to determine, once and for all, whether I could be both a doctor and a military officer.