Sports brought me local fame and new friends throughout the city. We started spending time in bars, getting into a little trouble—the occasional fight. I was less aggressive than I had been when I was younger, more sure of myself, maybe. Still, if you pushed me the wrong way I would certainly stand up for myself. What’s the American saying? I didn’t start fights, but I certainly finished them.
Naturally, this was the time I discovered girls. A lot of them want to talk to you when you are a local hero, even in a society where boys and girls are not supposed to mingle. What we did as teenagers wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in America, but in Iraq, simply talking to a girl could cause a scandal. I did my share of talking, with the occasional stolen kiss when no one else was looking.
To graduate high school and go on to college, I needed to pass a special exam. Math was my downfall. I missed a lot of my math classes because of basketball and other activities in school. As I said, my heart really wasn’t into studying. I stayed in high school for five years, but never did well enough to pass. As a consequence, like all Iraqi men not going on to college or able to buy their way out of service, I had to go into the military.
Before I left Mosul, though, I made one last, very important discovery: a girl named Soheila. She changed my life.
2
Love and War
ONE HOT AUGUST day in 1987, just before I joined the army, I spotted a pretty girl going into a house near when my cousin lived. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Ever. At that very moment, I felt something I had never felt before. Her name was Soheila.
How do I describe that feeling? Even in Arabic, I struggle to find the right words. My tongue is not capable of describing my emotion in that moment. There is no way to describe how my heart boiled inside my chest.
I couldn’t keep my feelings to myself. I told my sister, who told Soheila. She seemed unimpressed. Fifteen or sixteen at the time, she brushed off my interest. She was concentrating on her schoolwork, hoping to go into medicine when she got older. She was hoping to be a doctor or something else important—she had a flare for writing. She had no time for boys, let alone me.
I’m not one to take no for an answer, especially in something so important as love. My sister tried to let me down gently, but I paid no attention: I knew what I wanted. I called Soheila a few days later.
“Hey, Soheila,” I told her. “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be friends.”
That was apparently the right thing to say, because she didn’t just blow me off. Soon, we were talking to each other practically every day.
Though I’d never taken much notice of her, in fact our families had once been very close. Soheila’s great-grandparents had come to Mosul in 1937 from Basra, the large Shiite-dominated city far to the south of Iraq. They had relocated to save Soheila’s great-grandfather’s life. He’d been in a conflict there that resulted in someone’s death. Though the actual circumstances now are obscure, it seems obvious enough that he was blamed; in order to escape retribution the family fled north, looking for a city where they weren’t known.
They found their way to Mosul. Without family, they had no one really to rely on. My grandfather happened to befriend the family and helped them get established; for a time they even lived in the same house. The two families grew close enough that my mother and her sisters considered Soheila’s mother and aunts to be cousins.
Some of that connection was lost as the offspring grew. The girls moved out on their own to various places, and by the time I was in high school I personally had only a slight acquaintance with the family. But the women in the families remembered their friends, and my mother and Soheila’s mother would occasionally share tea when they saw each other. That family connection turned out to be important to helping me fulfill my growing desire.
I haven’t talked about religion to this point because it hasn’t been a critical part of the story. Our family was Sunni, the largest branch of Islam in the world, and the most numerous in Mosul by far. We weren’t overly observant, which was pretty much the norm when I was growing up. I might have gone to a mosque once or twice a year, if that. Soheila’s family was from the Shia branch of the religion. Today, there is much animosity between Shia and Sunni in Iraq. This wasn’t true at the time. And since her family had been in the city for decades, most people had no idea that they were Shia. Religion simply wasn’t as important as it would become later on, and for most people it wasn’t a divider. It certainly didn’t keep us apart.
Iraqi culture was a different story. A boy phoning a girl is frowned on at best, forbidden at worst—especially if there is a love interest.
Because of the closeness of our families in the past, I could claim to be a quasi-relative, which makes seeing someone from the other sex a little easier. And in theory, I was only interested in being Soheila’s friend. But of course friendship wasn’t what I was after, and I couldn’t keep up that pretense very long.
Soheila was a true beauty, and there were plenty of men in Mosul who wanted to marry her. Most were older and more accomplished than I was, with better prospects for giving her a happy and comfortable life in Saddam’s Iraq. But while it had taken her a little longer to love me the way I loved her, I think the more she knew me, the more she saw that we were made for each other.
Ordinarily, I would have gone to Soheila’s father and told him that I wanted to marry his daughter. But Soheila’s mother and father had divorced when she was young. Her father had gone back down south; Soheila lived with her mother. So it was her mother I really had to persuade.
After some months, I decided to tell my mother that I wanted to marry her. My mother agreed to tell Soheila’s mom.
Soheila’s mother said no.
No!
“Soheila is the smartest one in our family,” said her mother. “I want her to be a doctor. I want her to be a famous woman. I am sure that she will be something special.”
I thought she was already someone special, but that didn’t seem to count for much.
Soheila found out about my proposal and argued with her mother, saying that she would continue going to school and become a doctor after she was married. But that didn’t change her mother’s mind. Part of my offense may have been my boldness—it wasn’t considered proper to be obviously in love—but I also had lesser prospects and accomplishments than other suitors. In any event, the love of my life was forbidden to me. I went into the army a bachelor, though not a committed one.
IF YOU WERE rich in Iraq, you could pay money to avoid having to serve in the military. It was one of the many things that helped make the society unfair. Needless to say, I didn’t have the money to pay, and since I had not done well enough on my tests to be admitted to college, the army was my future—at least for two years, the mandatory enlistment. I reported for duty in early 1988.
By accident, my timing happened to be perfect. The war with Iran, which had been going on since 1980, was petering out and would soon be officially over. Though inconclusive, the war claimed the lives of untold thousands of Iraqis; casualty estimates range as high as half a million. Countless civilians on both sides died, and the war caused considerable financial hardship in Iraq. It was my great fortune to miss having to fight in the conflict.
If you’re thinking that my experience as a soldier was anything like joining the American military, you’re greatly mistaken. The Iraqi army was about as similar to the U.S. Army as a plastic toy tank is to the real thing.
Say, instead, a broken toy tank.
Basic training wasn’t very arduous. Nor did anyone make much of an effort to figure out what I was good at, let alone ask what I wanted to do. I was “volunteered” to become a radioman, then assigned to an anti-aircraft unit.
It worked like this: There were a bunch of us in a room. An officer divided us up with an arbitrary wave of his hand.
“You men over here,” he said, “you are now going to become communications specialists.” And a similar process decided I
was working in an anti-aircraft unit.
It didn’t make all that much difference to me. I looked at my service just as an obligation, something to get through before real life began. I did manage to make a few friends; some of them remained quite close after our service. We slept in barracks, a dozen or so of us together. Our equipment was ancient, laughable by American standards. Much of it was Russian, though its age was a bigger drawback than who had manufactured it.
My anti-aircraft artillery group was stationed in Baiji, 160 kilometers or roughly a hundred miles south of Mosul on the road to Baghdad. The unit was part of the “sky protection service,” though I’m not sure how much protection we really offered. My crew manned a Russian-made 37 mm gun. The gun had been a reasonably decent weapon when it was first fielded by the Soviet Union—which would have been in 1939. It was obsolete well before the end of World War II. By the time my unit operated it, it was old even by Iraqi standards, outclassed not only by missiles but by weapons such as the ZSU-57-2, which fired larger shells greater distances, and the ZSU-23-4, whose four-barrel guns could be aimed with radar.
Not that any of that mattered. We were close to the lowest rung of the ladder when it came to the army. If there was a war, our job was likely to be bomb fodder.
Life in the military was dull, duller, and dullest. I can hardly remember any of it, but let me assure you, I was never Iraq’s standout soldier. I did my job, followed orders, and got along with the other men in the unit. For me, that was enough of an accomplishment. I became familiar with an AK-47 assault rifle, but was far from a marksman with it. As for the radio, I could turn the knobs and work the switches, but that was hardly rocket science.
At the very end of July 1990, I went on leave and returned to Mosul. While I was there, I went to the hospital to visit a friend. On August 2, I happened to be waiting in the hospital when I heard on the radio that Kuwait had just become the nineteenth province of Iraq.
Shit, I thought. Now there will be big trouble.
SADDAM HUSSEIN HAD been our country’s dictator since my childhood. Technically, he was the president and the head of the Ba’ath Party. In reality, he was close to a god, with the power of life and death over us all.
He hadn’t been elected to either position. A member of the al-Begat tribe—which itself was part of the al-Bu Nasir tribe—he had joined the Ba’ath Party as a young man and rose through the ranks during a period of turmoil and revolts in the late 1950s and ’60s. When the Ba’athists took control of the government in 1968, he became an important power behind the scenes. He consolidated his hold on the government and took formal power in 1979. Within weeks he completed a purge of that Ba’ath Party, eliminating anyone who might be able to challenge him.
Saddam, as a Sunni and as a Ba’athist, was a member of the minority in Iraq. To rule the country, he divided his enemies, often violently. He built up an internal security system, enforcing his will through spies and common people willing to rat on their neighbors and in some cases even their family members. Criticizing Saddam was treason; claiming someone had done so was an easy way to get back at someone you didn’t like.
From what I have heard, Saddam started out as a fairly benign ruler. The older people told me he did the country much good when he first came to power. He built schools and hospitals, and seemed to be working for the people. But if that was true, his thinking changed as his rule went on. He started working for himself and his friends. Perhaps the circle around him grew tighter and greedier. With less people to tell him the truth about things, maybe he thought it was fine to take what he wanted for himself, rather than using his power to make things better for the country as whole. Whatever the reason, the results were devastating for Iraq.
With Saddam’s rise, the Ba’ath Party was in effective control of the country. In most areas, especially in Mosul and other places in the north where Saddam’s party was strong, you had to be a member of the Ba’ath Party if you wanted to work. It wasn’t optional. Most people who were members of the party didn’t like Saddam, but they needed to support their families.
Even I was a member of the party, though only at the most basic level. I joined when I was in middle school. We all did. It wasn’t voluntary; on the other hand, the requirements weren’t the most onerous. I spent three or four months going to meetings, which to me were just another set of classes I had to attend, though these were held after school. The lessons were little more than indoctrination sessions, and shallow ones at that. Supposedly we were being taught about Iraqi history and the like, but the classes were really designed to convince us that Saddam was godlike and that we should follow all that he and the Ba’ath Party dictated.
The instructor was not very good. He had a lot of his basic facts about Iraq wrong. For someone like me, a bit of a smart aleck and a showoff, this was a real temptation. I could show how tough and quick I was with something other than my fists.
I was wise enough not to contradict him directly in class, which would have brought me a swift cuff or some other punishment. Instead, I started asking him questions. He got embarrassed, because he really didn’t know the answers and wasn’t very good at camouflaging his ignorance. He’d fumble around, the other kids would give me knowing looks, and I’d do my best not to smirk.
The secret of my success was a book on our country’s history. The instructor was supposed to be working from the book, but was too lazy to read it. I was simply looking through the book for arcane details and then asking about them. He grew more and more embarrassed as the classes went on, until finally he told me I didn’t have to attend anymore.
That was the most valuable thing I learned from the Ba’ath Party—if you were enough of a smart-ass, they would leave you alone.
There was a line, of course. If you were too much of a smart-ass, especially when you got older, they had ways of dealing with you which were not very pleasant. But I was able to walk the line.
LIKE MOST IRAQIS, I’d had no idea that Saddam was planning an invasion of Kuwait. Anyone paying attention in the outside world knew that tensions had been building between the two countries at Saddam’s instigation for months, but most Iraqis had no clue what was going on, even if they were in the military.
In the U.S. Army, soldiers hear plenty of rumors and can piece information together from different things like mobilizations and news reports. But in Iraq, no one trusted anyone, and rank-and-file soldiers certainly weren’t to be trusted with any information. The isolation of our unit, along with its distance from Baghdad and the front lines, meant that little information, even of the rumor variety, made it to me.
And of course the general public found out only what Saddam wanted them to find out. He wasn’t about to publicize his intentions to take over Kuwait until he was ready to do so. Once the invasion started, all of the information the government-supported media spread reinforced his contention that the Kuwaitis were in the wrong and that their country rightfully belonged to us. Within twenty-four hours, Kuwait was suppressed and Saddam presented the country with a fait accompli.
The history of Kuwait and Iraq was a complicated one, but not in the ways that Saddam and his regime implied. According to most sources, Kuwait City was only settled in the eighteenth century; the area was mostly empty before then. By the nineteenth century it was an important trading metropolis. That importance grew as oil became a critical export in the region.
Like most of the Middle East and all of Iraq, Kuwait was part of the Ottoman Empire. But in the mid-eighteenth century, Sabah I bin Jaber established himself as the emir of Kuwait. (Sabah I bin Jaber was the leader of a tribe that originated in Iraq; among the reasons they are said to have gone to Kuwait was persecution by the ruling Turks.) Though still owing allegiance to the Ottomans, Sabah I bin Jaber was granted a certain amount of autonomy and independence over the region. Some of that independence continued after the arrival of the British, who also ended up formalizing Kuwait’s borders with Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
In 1961,
Kuwait became independent. At no time in the modern era had Kuwait been part of Iraq.
Nor had it been hostile. Kuwait was a close ally of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988. The country gave or loaned Iraq a great deal of money as well as strategic support. Leftover debts from the war were one of the reasons for friction with Saddam’s government at the end of the 1980s. But these were never more than a pretext for Saddam. He saw an opportunity to do many things by annexing Kuwait besides skipping out on money owed.
Kuwait had oil revenues that he coveted. Kuwait City was a modern trading port, which would give Iraq much more access to world trade and, not coincidentally, bring the regime additional money. Conquering Kuwait would make Saddam appear grand and accomplished to his people. It would also take their minds off the long and senseless war that had dwindled down to an inconclusive close a few years before. And what would the world care about Kuwait?
While I knew there would be trouble as soon as I heard the news, a lot of my neighbors saw things differently. Kuwait was an opportunity. To them, the invasion was a chance to rip off Kuwait. I remember seeing cars loaded down with loot: televisions, household items. There were suddenly a lot of new cars in the neighborhood—even a Chevy Caprice. The classic American automobile became a status symbol for a short while in some parts of Iraq.
Let me not say that everything was stolen. I don’t know. Maybe some were purchased. But certainly the prices must have been very low compared to what they would have been before the invasion.
Meanwhile, Saddam filled our airwaves with proclamations that Kuwait belonged to Iraq, and that it was only just that we reclaim our territory. The actual history didn’t matter to Saddam.
“We took our rightful lands back,” he claimed again and again. “It was always ours, and now it is again.”
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 3