Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Walker, Johnny

Shit.

  We locked eyes for a moment as he picked up his pace. Even if I hadn’t studied his description, I’d have known who he was from that glare.

  “That’s the jackpot,” I said, jumping from the truck. “Hey,” I shouted at him, pulling up my gun. I waved it in his direction. “Stop! Stop!”

  He spun around and, seeing the gun, froze. The SEALs, finally realizing what was going on, ran over. Before he could do anything else, he was surrounded.

  The SEALs weren’t happy about the gun, though ultimately I didn’t get in any trouble for it. They were surprised I’d jumped out of the vehicle and stopped the man—grateful, but surprised.

  Terps didn’t do that.

  And yet I felt that was what I had to do. It was natural; to not do it would have been wrong. I was part of the team, and part of the mission to accomplish a goal, which we all shared.

  Looking back, I know it was dangerous, even foolish. Not only could the jackpot have had a gun, but he could easily have had friends nearby who might have opened fire on me. And by taking an active role in stopping him, I’d made it clear to everyone on the street that I wasn’t only working for the Americans, I was working with them—and was therefore a highly prized target for insurgents of every stripe.

  None of that occurred to me at the time.

  I questioned the jackpot back at our camp. He was surprisingly free with information, mentioning a house that was being used as a possible bomb stash. Still dressed in civilian clothes, we went back out and found the place filled with bombs, missiles, artillery shells, and even sticks of TNT. It was a veritable mother lode of destruction, enough to kill thousands of people for months. We packed as much as we could into our two SUVs, blew the rest in place, then headed to the base.

  To get to the air base, we had to pass over a bridge. As we approached, we saw that an Iraqi checkpoint had been set up in the middle of the roadway. Ordinarily that wouldn’t have been a problem—Americans in Humvees pretty much zipped through checkpoints.

  But in this case, the SEALs were in civilian clothes and civilian vehicles. They had to stop or be fired at.

  At the same time, no one trusted any checkpoint in the city, even the legitimate ones. The Iraqi army was littered with insurgents and informants. Even if they weren’t traitors, the soldiers could hardly be trusted; too many were prone to panic and fire without warning.

  Add in the fact that the men in the SUVs had explosives and didn’t want to show their IDs—that wouldn’t go over at an American checkpoint, let alone an Iraqi one.

  I glanced at the dark-skinned SEAL who was driving. He could pass for an Iraqi, as long as he didn’t open his mouth.

  “I have an idea,” I told him. “Let me talk.” I told the others to stay in the shadows or cover their faces—they were all too white-skinned to pass as anything other than Westerners.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning across as we stopped. I waved my ID. “You see an American patrol?”

  “Eh?” asked the guard, coming over.

  “American patrol? You see them?”

  “Yes, yes.” The guard said he had, and we started talking. It turned out he knew one of my cousins. We spent a few long minutes catching up with nonsensical chitchat. I’m not sure what the SEALs thought of the conversation; it was fortunate that it was in Arabic.

  “Very good, very good,” I told the man finally. “We need to catch up to that patrol.”

  “Good night then,” said the guard, forgetting completely that he hadn’t checked the others’ nonexistent IDs or looked in the trucks.

  Working with the SEALs had turned me into a bit of a con man as well as an interpreter and foot soldier.

  LITTLE BY LITTLE, I built up my reputation with the SEALs. The outlines of my work were always the same: Once the site was secured, the SEALs would locate the suspect. I would ask him what his name was, confirm his identity, and off we would go, back to the base.

  It was the particulars that varied, small things changing in countless ways: how I talked, what we said, the questions, the answers. The look in the suspect’s eyes. Sometimes there was a great deal of hate, even from a man who wasn’t a suspect, a person we simply left. I had to wall the look and the emotion away and go about my business.

  I’d usually talk with the suspects on the way back to camp. Sometimes I got some information the SEALs could use, an address maybe, or the name of someone that might be involved. Depending on the circumstances, I might question him for a while when we arrived, gathering more intelligence or maybe confirming what he had told me before.

  Of more use were the documents and other intel the SEALs would gather at the house. We’d go through it, myself and the other interpreters, looking for local information that would help the SEALs to set up another operation.

  But it was often the small, nearly indefinable things that I did that impressed the SEALs the most. I knew Mosul; they didn’t. You can only get so much information from street maps and satellite photos. No intelligence briefing can explain the rhythm of a neighborhood, why the lack of people on one street is significant and not a problem on another. No computer I’ve ever come across can straighten out the confusion that occurs when a Westerner tries to pronounce an Arabic name. The SEALs were impressed that I could tell them that there was danger up a certain street but not down another. My mind was simply processing information as it always had. The nine-year-old boy who’d ventured out of his neighborhood to show how tough he was could have told the SEALs exactly the same thing. The slingshot expert, as foolish as he might have been, would have avoided exactly the same alley.

  Not that my skills weren’t advancing. My English, in particular, improved tremendously. With experience, I was able to anticipate what the SEALs wanted me to do when we were on a mission. I knew where I was supposed to be before the NCO gave the order. Explosions no longer turned my stomach.

  Fear remained. No one ever loses that completely, even if they become inured to the circumstances that provoke it.

  I think my real value to the SEALs had less to do with my technical skills than the way I handled myself. And that came from them. The SEALs were always very businesslike and aggressive; I tried to be the same. They were great role models. While I had no illusions that I was a SEAL, I wanted to be accepted by them. And they brought out the side of me that was both aggressive and professional.

  The SEALs believe that, when doing an assault, they must act with violence of action. They attempt to move as aggressively as possible, overwhelming their opponent to minimize casualties—collateral as well as their own. I interpreted the philosophy to mean this: get the job done, get it done fast, get it done right, don’t fool around. Show that you are powerful, and you are less likely to have problems.

  It was something I understood in my bones. If you need to arrest someone, do it quickly and don’t give him a chance to escape or even struggle. Otherwise there can easily be complications.

  The SEALs had a concept of brotherhood that went beyond anything I’d seen outside of an actual family, certainly beyond the camaraderie of a typical Iraqi military unit and even the American MPs I’d worked with. It’s difficult to describe the bond between them, even with metaphors. I imagine most civilians might make a parallel to a sports team; in some ways, I guess, the connection between the SEALs reminded me of the basketball teams I’d been part of. But that’s a pale comparison to the bonds they shared.

  Part of it came from their shared and parallel experiences, and not just in war. Combat is such an emphatic experience that even strangers form tight bonds, but even the “new guy” SEALs I worked with were tight before they even saw their first mission. From their famously rigorous BUD/S classes to the months of training, they had common experiences to draw on. Each man knew that the man beside him had gone through that trial and come out; there was confidence in that, something that can’t be underrated. Beyond that, each man had accepted as his own the unit philosophy that they all depended on each other and that the team as a who
le was stronger than its individual parts. It was clear that they would do anything for each other, even and especially risk death.

  Not only did I admire that philosophy and camaraderie, I wanted to be part of it. If I couldn’t be a SEAL, I could be the best terp they ever had. Ultimately, I could be their Iraqi brother.

  BUT AS 2004 went on, Americans had less and less reason to trust Iraqis, especially in Mosul. Mujahideen were coming into the city, chased from other places or recruited by the small but growing insurgency network established by al-Qaeda. Meanwhile, the growing prominence of Kurds in the city antagonized people, adding to the friction and possibly helping to prime some against the new government.

  Because of my work, I was in effect living on the U.S. base, spending the bulk of my time among Americans, not Iraqis. Going home only occasionally, I missed a lot of these changes. Perhaps I would have missed them if I was on the streets as well. Many things are clear only in retrospect. When you are in the middle of the woods at night you have a hard time knowing whether you are walking deeper in or heading out.

  For me personally, things were better than they had been in years. I was able to support my family comfortably. I could buy small presents for the kids and Soheila. I moved them back to the area in Mosul where my family had lived before the war, not far from the house that we had to sell to help my sister. We took a house on a main road near the business area of the city. It was large enough for us to be comfortable.

  Most Iraqi lives were not getting better. Former soldiers, now released from the army, found no jobs. The Americans were an easy target for hate. People who had no education were especially vulnerable to the whispers of the mujahideen. Some of what they said about the government was true enough—corruption was back, if not as bad as it had been under Saddam. Reality crushed many dreams, even simple ones of not going hungry two days in a row. And if you had no dreams to fall back on, what did you have?

  AFTER ROUGHLY SIX months, Team 7’s time in Iraq came to a close. They were replaced by Team 2. After only two or three weeks, they were assigned to go to Baghdad on an entirely different mission—PSD, or protective service detail, which basically meant that they were protecting important people. There was no need for me, so I wasn’t invited. They started packing up to leave.

  Though we’d only been together for three or four missions, the idea of their leaving still filled me with sadness. I thought that I’d never see them or any SEAL again. I knew they liked me and thought I did a good job, but I also knew that in war you have little control over the future, especially your own.

  Knowing I was going to be out of work, I started thinking of what I might do next. There were still American units in Mosul, and I considered going over to the MPs and asking for my old job back. But before I had a chance to do that, a civilian came over to the compound and asked if he could arrange to borrow a car. I started talking to him, and as it turned out, the firm he worked for needed a translator, so I went to work with them.

  It was a big change after going on direct actions with the SEALs. The civilians had some various ventures, mostly in the Kurdish area to the north. Their business consisted primarily of trying to help the new government, arranging for different types of support. (I was asked not to give specifics, most of which I don’t know anyway.) Translating for them was always interesting, but the tempo was very different than working with the SEALs.

  Still, I made some good friends and had some interesting times. One of the men, whom I’ll call Pistol, was a smart, friendly business type who was always cracking me up with jokes. You could easily forget the potential for danger when you were with him.

  The civilians loved to combine work with pleasure. They might have a meeting at a hotel or some other place in Kurdistan. We’d go up, have the meeting, then jump in a pool afterward and drink some beers. Not a bad line of work in a war.

  Americans were still liked in Kurdistan, or at least I didn’t see too much animosity toward them. But some of the people the civilians dealt with were not exactly role models. Pistol tells a funny story about meeting with a man whom he says was one of the worst human beings he ever met, the sort of guy who would brag about shooting kids for pleasure. Whether the man actually did that or not, I have no idea, but he was definitely a scary type. The civilians needed to meet with him to make sure he wouldn’t interfere with the project they were working on. They were basically buying his support, though neither he nor they thought of it in quite those terms. And they certainly didn’t express it that way the day they met.

  Unfortunately for the Americans, they weren’t used to Iraqi food, and it wasn’t unusual for them to have digestive problems after a particularly spicy meal. On the day of this meeting, Pistol was experiencing something close to dysentery. As the meeting started, he was looking a bit uncomfortable. Things got worse by the minute, and sweat began curling down the sides of his head.

  Still, he kept up the small talk with this guy. He was trying to get “in the vibe” as he called it—basically doing what a car salesman might do when he first meets a potential customer, trying to make a personal connection.

  His face started to get a reddish tone. Then it went to purple.

  “Excuse me!” he said finally, jumping up from his seat.

  Pistol ran from the room, heading for a toilet. Apparently he didn’t make it, because he came back a few minutes later, soaked in water. He looked like he had taken a shower with his clothes on.

  Which he was still wearing, since they were the only clothes he had with him.

  “I just crapped my pants,” he announced as he walked in the room.

  The Kurd we’d been talking to, the tough guy whom the Americans thought was at least a borderline psychopath, started to laugh.

  Shitting yourself is funny in every culture.

  The vibe had been made, and they concluded their deal. The venture could proceed, though you have to wonder how far it could go in Iraq if it depended on people like the Kurd not interfering.

  I wasn’t in a position to consider the moral implications of who the civilians, or anyone, for that matter, worked with. It’s difficult to make those kinds of judgments in war; moral and ethical compromises abound. For myself, my goals were simple: feed my family and help Iraq become a better place.

  Generally, the Americans had few problems. Their business seemed to go well, though I wasn’t in a position to make any deep judgments. There were surprisingly few incidents that even hinted at trouble. But the exceptions were memorable.

  Typically, getting past Kurdish checkpoints was a breeze. The Kurds in general liked the Americans, and the police and militia were well trained and disciplined. We’d show them our documents, maybe pass a word or two in conversation, and then be on our way. Iraqi checkpoints were a totally different story. We could never tell, even in Mosul, whether the people stopping us could be trusted. American civilians would be very valuable hostages.

  One day, coming back to Mosul from Kurdistan, we were stopped outside the city. The police at the post began giving my companions a hard time. They made us get out of the car and began peppering me with questions.

  Why are you coming back from northern Iraq? Why are you with Americans? What is their business? Where are they going? Why are they out at night?

  Even if the policemen were legitimate—I had my doubts—the animosity between Iraqis and Kurds in Mosul had been increasing, and resentment could easily become something more. No answer was safe.

  “Where is your commander?” I said, eyeing the soldiers as they fiddled nervously with their weapons. “I will only talk to him.”

  They hemmed and hawed, but since I’d worked with the Iraqi police, I knew which names to mention and the veiled threats those names implied. Finally they pointed to a nearby building.

  Meanwhile, they were holding my friends at gunpoint.

  “If you hear gunfire,” I told the Americans in English, “shoot and get away. Don’t worry about me.”

  I doubt t
hat put them at ease, especially since their weapons were either still in their holsters or back in the car. My own pistol was under my shirt.

  My heart began pounding as I was led inside the small building. This wasn’t the normal setup, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. Were these policemen just being overly zealous? Or was it a setup to kidnap the Americans? I worried that I shouldn’t have left them; I berated myself for not simply crashing through the checkpoint and risking the consequences.

  The officer in charge was inside, sitting in a small office. As my fingers slid toward my gun, I realized I’d seen him before.

  Thank God!

  “Hey,” I said to him with great enthusiasm. “Do you remember who I am? I worked with the American MPs.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” he said, rising. “How are you?”

  “Great, brother! How are you? It’s so good to see you.”

  “Yes!”

  “You are doing well! It’s very good to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  I couldn’t remember his name and didn’t know him very well at all. It’s even possible I was confused about remembering his face. I doubt he knew who I was either. But neither of us would admit it. We talked for a while, exactly like old friends, and I decided he was cool; his men were just being careful.

  Or maybe not. Maybe they would have kidnapped us all if I hadn’t pretended to be a great friend of the commander’s. In any event, we went outside and they let us all go. Just another typical night in Iraq.

  FAMILY LIFE WENT ON. In the summer of 2004 Soheila and I were expecting our fourth child. Pregnancy is always a perilous time, where great hope mixes with great fear, and the civil war that was beginning to consume my country didn’t make things any easier for Soheila.

  One day during the last third of her pregnancy, she became alarmed when she didn’t feel the baby inside her. She went to a clinic to be checked out.

  The doctor told her the baby had died.

  You can imagine the horrible grief. And yet, despite all of the sadness, Soheila’s thoughts passed to something more accepting: God gives; God takes.