The guy in charge of the cells next door is a Navy diver, and he calls himself Sergeant Sunday when the Big Show asks his name, so the Big Show looks at you and says, “And you are Sergeant...Monday?” and you go with it for the next nine months, and he never calls you out on it since you’re carrying a taser and a bottle of OC the size of a fire extinguisher.
Another time, while handing out forty roast beef sandwiches that are sealed in cellophane—something they’ve never seen before, but something you’ve seen in every single gas station grab-and-go cooler across America—the Big Show comes to the bars and runs another line of Bob’s Everything Sauce across his sandwich and asks, “What is this?” pointing at the shaved, roasted meat. “Is good. Not Kurdi food.”
You shake your head and tell him it’s American, so he asks if it’s beef by mooing, and you say, “No, it’s...it’s ah...” snapping your fingers and looking off toward the ceiling.
So, then he asks what it is again, bleating like a lamb this time.
Again, you say, “No.”
At that, he shrugs his shoulders, laughs, and woofs like a dog, but you snap your fingers again and oink like a pig and watch all expression leave his face while all chance of him entering Paradise leaves his afterlife and he chokes on his last bite of purported pig smothered in Bob’s Everything Sauce. But it’s what he gets for not reading the label. So then, he gets to watch you pull an extra sandwich from the box and slather it with sauce and moo at him while you walk to the other cells.
When you look back, he’s peering into the trash can where he tossed the rest of his roast beef sandwich, unblinking.
In the accompanying cell awaits a problem child who developed a habit of mocking and undermining the guards, making the smooth day less so—day after day—until there is a shift in power and the delay between the issuing of orders and the carrying out of said orders can no longer be overlooked.
He’s a celebrity of sorts, famous for beheading a French journalist on Al Jazeera. Remember the video? There’s a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling, staring blankly, defeated. Standing above him is a man shrouded in black clothing, wielding a machete like the one Aladdin uses in the cartoon when he finally gets tough. Then he hacks off the guy’s head. But it takes a few tries.
Now that shrouded man wears a yellow jumpsuit and is waiting for you in the WC with his nose an inch from the wall. His eyebrows damn near touch too. This is a guy you can pick out from the crowd while they pace out in the rec yard. He looks like the spokesman Geico used before the little lizard. The Kurds pulled him from the line of men while they walked back from the rec yards, and you have the youngest Kurd you can find search his person.
Random searches happen every day when the detainees return to their cells. This one is done to separate him from his cellmates, from the men who’d begun to listen to him, respect him, and who’d stopped listening to their cell chief.
He believes the Koran states all Americans must be cleansed, but you inform him the book was written about nine hundred years before America was a thing. You ask him—through the terp—to show you where it says it, but he’s illiterate. He has to admit he’s bullshitting his cellmates during his impromptu sermons. You’ve embarrassed him. And now he’s been undermined, too.
Checkmate.
Having the youngest KCP officer on the cellblock search him is the greatest disrespect you can dole out from your toolbox, aside from lifting your boot off the floor to respond to any special requests the detainees make. In case you dozed off during the four-hour-long cultural sensitivity training PowerPoint, in their eyes, showing them the bottom of a boot is the same as flipping them the bird. To add insult to injury, you have the terp write la with a sharpie on the bottom of your boots. So, your la, your no, becomes a fuck no to any and all requests.
The goal isn’t to upset them, it’s to quiet them, and get on with the already scheduled program. There’s a nearly nonstop list of checks and calls and counts and accountability measures to be completed during the twelve-hour shift. You don’t have time to cater to some mass murderer’s missing creature comforts.
This all takes place post—Abu Ghraib, by the way, so your job is to treat detainees with dignity and respect, not to strip them naked and stack them into a pyramid or parade them around on leashes. But their rumor mill works at a staggering speed and in comically hyperbolic degrees, so when the three of you enter the WC and instruct the Kurd to lock you in, he gets uneasy.
You stand behind the detainee, Sergeant Sunday stands on his left side, but within his peripheral vision, and that big John Coffey—looking bastard who we’ll call Sergeant Smith stands to his right side, leaning against the door to the catwalk.
The three of you calmly discuss his crimes that lead to his apprehension, how his disruptions must come to an end. You put an extra husk in your voice, speaking inches from his ear the way a lover would.
He doesn’t speak a word of English.
You can talk about anything. Even the food from home you miss, and you do. Bananas Foster from Landry’s. Tacos from 4th Street Market.
Each time you start a new sentence, and a new wave of breath brushes his skin, he shudders.
Seeing how shaken he is, you pull on a pair of gloves and take hold of his shirt sleeves—bring his arms out to his sides, pinch his palms between your thumb and forefinger, rolling his wrists until his palms point skyward. He doesn’t need to hear the command to spread his feet apart, he just does it. By then, it’s expected of him. Whether he likes it or not, he’s institutionalized.
Your left foot is placed alongside his right foot, and your left knee is placed behind his right knee. If he moves, twitches, you can toss him to the floor by rotating your knee to the right. If he lowers his arms, indicating in any way he’s thinking of moving toward you when you’re searching a leg of his jumpsuit, you can stand up with your shoulder between his legs and send him tumbling to the concrete floor. But that’s only if Sunday or Smith do not flatten him before you get the chance.
First, you slap his ankle, and he lifts his foot into the air robotically. He knows the drill. The flip-flop is handed over to Smith, who inspects it—looking for anything jammed into the foam sole—while you spread his toes apart, looking for the sake of looking.
Every inch of his body is squeezed, patted, pressed on. Your hands go in his pockets. His ass crack is credit card swiped. His pecker is pulled away from his scrotum, his balls are moved to the side. Every crevice is checked twice.
Before you’re done, you check the calluses on his hands, run your fingers through his hair, tilting his head back the way you do with a PEZ dispenser. His mouth opens—wide—and his tongue turns clockwise, then counter-clockwise.
Satisfied, you step away and let Sunday search him. All three of you search his person until his demeanor, his posture, is no longer one of a strident, murderous man bent on leading his cellmates into some sort of coup.
Once he’s learned he is not in charge, the cell door is opened, and he’s let back inside, still quaking, still crying, with the chest of his jumpsuit sprinkled with tears and the crotch soaked with piss. His cellmates look at him, and he looks at them, staring blankly, defeated. They make like the Red Sea for him and let him move back toward his sleeping mat. No one places a hand on his shoulder to console him. No one looks toward the door, toward the three of you. Some turn toward a corner of the cell to pray to Mecca once more. Some gather in groups to be led through the pages of the Koran by someone other than him. No one pays him any attention or gives him any more credence after that. He disappears and becomes another numbered detainee waiting for his sentence to end.
IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK
FEAR IS A FUNNY THING.
Roosevelt proclaimed: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself Whatever fear festered in him, radicalized him, soaked his jumpsuit in piss, was laid dormant after that afternoon come-to-Jesus in the WC.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a bit more insightful when he said: Th
e oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. That is the fear that broke him: the fear of what would happen to him while locked in with a trinity of infidels. The fear of the foreign language tossed around the room. The fear of an enemy’s breath on his skin as he stood helpless. The fear of being locked inside the walls of a prison, watching Kurdish men prepare to take the reins over him, knowing, one day, the keys will be handed off to them—after generations of Arabs gassing, murdering, robbing, raping the Kurdish people. The fear of being kept behind the same bars where some of those same Kurds were once imprisoned, but now they stand on the outside of the bars and stare inside the cells, pacing, waiting for the day the helicopters and Humvees take the Americans elsewhere.
Somewhere within the confines of the prison yards lay the bodies of over forty thousand Kurds who were tortured to death, assassinated, starved until they withered away—their husks piled into mass graves.
You remember pictures from a PowerPoint showing new construction needed to convert the place into an operational theater internment facility, and the cementing of the inner courtyard. The photos of the older construction looked patchy at best, like every scene in every horror movie where the killer hid the bodies in the basement and threw some new concrete over the top.
Another rumor speculates the bodies were buried beneath what is now the farmer’s fields surrounding the FOB. The uncultivated areas were known to be full of leftover landmines from the Iran-Iraq war, while the cultivated fields were well-fertilized crops.
Once the courtyard is cemented over and turned into rec yards, the detainees spend an hour each day outside while their cells are tossed, searched, and their only possessions rifled through. In exchange, they get to breathe in the fresh mountain air. Some see green for the first time in their lives. Rumor worms its way from cell to cell until they all become convinced they’re being held in Iran—home to 75 million Shiite Muslims—a crushing thought for the twelve hundred or so Sunni detainees who once entertained escaping.
They don’t know they’re being held in one of a dozen buildings built for barracks by the Russians to help fortify their border during the Iran-Iraq war. Most weren’t alive then. Construction started in ’77, so their ignorance is understandable. Especially once you consider the succession of dictators who treated their history books like an Etch A Sketch.
The mountains mystify those who take the time to look up. Others keep their eye on the ball and play soccer in the rec yard. At night, if they’re good, they get to watch the DVDs brought by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. They have a choice: last year’s FIFA World Cup tournament, or Tom and Jerry—the cartoon cat and mouse.
Watching them watching children’s cartoons, sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the caged television set with undivided attention, silenced by the slapstick violence, is a sight you’ll carry with you as long as dementia doesn’t riddle you. The delight on their faces is childlike. The same as a child’s face aglow with birthday candles while waiting for their friends and family to finish singing the song so they can stuff their faces with cake and ice cream and tear into a stack of presents meant just for them.
This is the Third World, though, and the power grid does waver.
That’s not something said with a sly smile, hinting how a breaker switch could be flipped and the scene on the television would shrink to a pinhole of light and ruin their evening, all for the sake of some sadistic pleasure.
When the prison does go black, there is confusion on everyone’s part. The radios crackle to life with overlapping checks to make sure they still work. There’s no word from whoever is in charge; they’ve lost power too.
Only the battery-operated handhelds can transmit.
Inside the cell, there is a growing murmur, and an eventual, “Sergeant, Sergeant?” to which you reply, “No shit!” and turn to double-time down the darkened catwalk toward the center stairwell, where the office awaits.
You’ll step into the solid blackness where you’ll yell, “Flashlight!” and wait to feel the hard plastic slap the palm of your hand. But before you turn and go, you’ll pause to take in the screams escaping from the opposite end of the cellblock and let go an amused laugh at the cowardice of these mass murderers and jihadists coming to light in the dark.
Turning on your heel, you make way for a shadow running the same path you did a few seconds earlier. Your eyes have adjusted some, but not as well as his. There’s no jingle of handcuffs coming off him, nor do his boots clomp when he trots by you. He doesn’t bother to stop for a flashlight, either, which leads you to think it’s one of the KCP officers. He heads for the screams, and the cries grow louder, dominoing from one cell to the next.
Inside your cells, you can see only as far as the beam of light can pierce through the fog. There shouldn’t be a fog. You’ve been running, yes, and huffing, but anti-fog is a punch line. Yet there’s no difference when you lift the safety glasses away up from the bridge of your nose. This makes you take a literal step back and look to see if some Kurd didn’t shower the cell with pepper spray to quiet their screams, but the canister hasn’t moved, and the Kurds can’t be seen. Not believing your eyes makes you take in a deep, forceful breath.
There’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Your chest would be tight, and your nose would run with so much OC in the air. Muddled, you shine the light again and watch a swaying sea of yellow and shadow. Some are bunched in a corner; others run from one side to the other, zigzagging, dodging, and ducking. There’s no making sense of the shadows, so you kill the light and squint at the petrified men inside, waiting for your eyes to adjust.
And then the mass of yellow jumpsuits moves from one wall to the corner to the far corner, toppling the piles of Korans and dumping the water from the washtub onto the floor in doing so.
Some break from the pulsing mass of yellow and cling to the bars pleading to you. Their shadow seems to taunt them the way Peter Pan’s did before Wendy sewed it back on.
Horrified by your inaction, they spasm and twitch and sprint back to the mass of others. Some men fall to the floor and huddle together in a quaking pile. Convinced something extraordinary is happening—or supernatural—you feel your skin prickle, which causes you to close the window, step back against the far wall and lean into the moonlight, and fold your arms tight across your chest while you wait for the generators to wake and the courtyard lights to flicker, snap back to life with their nauseating orange glow once again, trading the screams inside the cell for the insipid needling buzz of the fluorescents overhead.
The next night, you’re sitting on the edge of your rack rather than standing in front of the cells conducting an accountability check. Boredom takes a seat next to you and won’t stop droning on, so you make your way to the Morale Welfare and Recreation room, where you discover it’s either too late or too early to call your wife and you’ve watched every movie the USO sent—twice—so you haul your laptop into the detainee visitation room where you’ll first open a Word document to write this all down.
Moments after the conclusion of the day’s final prayer call, two guys from another cellblock enter with a single detainee, hooded and handcuffed. He’ll just sit there until the next morning when his questioning will commence. But as long as he’s in there, you can’t be.
With nowhere else to go, you head back to your bunk following someone from the Mobile Security Unit. You’re not sure who it is, but you know he’s Mobile because NAVY isn’t written down the side of his sweats in giant golden letters.
With the lighting as sparse as it is, the navy-blue hoodie looks black, and his silhouette reminds you of a medieval monk, one wandering around this prison searching for some solitude just like you. The two of you stroll past the female berthing, past the chief’s berthing, past the first-class berthing, before he turns into the smoke pit sitting beneath the northeast turret gunner’s nest.
The rain fro
m the night before stands ankle-deep on the catwalk. The Iraqis or Russians or whoever built the place didn’t exactly take pride in their work, meaning: the concrete floor is crooked, cracked, slanted, split here and there with rebar peeking through. Though, when you look for the high spots, so your shoes don’t get soaked, there isn’t one ripple in the puddle pooled beneath the turret gunner’s nest—nor is there a soul in the smoke pit.
Back in your bunk, you slide your makeshift curtain closed, lie on top of your sleeping bag, power on your laptop once again, and type some more of this story. But your thoughts ebb back to the scene below the turret gunner’s nest, and you pull your dangling foot onto the mattress.
The gunners have seen things, too.
Within every uncultivated field surrounding the FOB lies a minefield. Most accept it as fact that somewhere out there lie tens of thousands of tortured dead. The gunners have reported seeing someone out there more than once. The sighting is always confirmed by the assistant gunners, and later by the surveillance footage. When that someone fails to stop, fails to comply, comes closer, comes through the fence, comes across the fields—then the gunner must fire. At their disposal are two machine guns: the Ma Deuce and the 240, as well as the Mark 19 grenade launcher. The gunners are taught to fire to stop the threat. Not to kill. They’re taught to fire a two-round burst, followed by a three-round burst, followed by another two-round burst. Anyone will tell you it’s impossible to fire a belt-fed weapon and count at the same time, so you’re taught to recite a poem. It’s something of an abbreviated haiku:
As You Were Page 18