IDs cost about thirty or forty dollars, American, on the black market. If I could get them, I’m sure anyone, including a terrorist, could as well.
I HADN’T BEEN with the SEALs more than a few weeks when they told me they were moving their operations to Baghdad and asked if I would come. It was January 2005. The elections were coming up, and their task group was one of the units selected to help ensure they could be held.
The offer presented a dilemma: Should I go with them and leave my family here, or should I stay in the city?
I didn’t want to leave Soheila and the kids. But ironically, going would make my family safer. If I wasn’t around, people would have no reason to look for me and no reason to watch or attack my family. It would be easy, in fact, to spread rumors that I had run away, out of fear of the mujahideen.
In short, leaving was the smartest thing to do.
I went home that night and told Soheila.
“Remember, you were asking if I would leave Mosul and go to Baghdad?” I said when the kids were asleep.
“Yes?”
“I think you are right. I will go to Baghdad. I am going to work with the Americans there.”
She was happy. I didn’t give my wife many details about what I was doing—I didn’t even tell her the specifics of whom I was working with. And I didn’t ask her to come with me.
What I didn’t know at the time was that Baghdad was far worse than Mosul. It had become the most dangerous place on earth.
7
Baghdad
BEFORE THE WAR, Baghdad was a city of more than 7 million people. A good number of them lived in poverty and suffered the ills of the poor everywhere: substandard houses, terrible sanitation, poor medical care, horribly inadequate education. The list is endless.
But it was also a city of promise. It had bustling business sectors, wide avenues, and soaring monuments. Spread out along the Tigris, it was second only to Cairo in population in the Middle East. Its history was second to none, not even Egypt’s. Baghdad was renowned as a center of learning in medieval times, and that tradition survived in its five universities. Everywhere in the city there is history—the ancient walls; the Golden Gate Palace where the caliph lived; the Suq al-Ghazel Minaret, older than the Sistine Chapel.
The British helped rebuild the city in the years before and after World War II, until it was a gem, or as close to a gem as possible before Saddam’s reign cast the whole nation under a cloud. Even so, Baghdad remained a city of ambition, a place where young people came to make or find their fortune, a flickering flame of optimism and hope. With the government offices and the headquarters of many Iraqi businesses there, it was always a place of commerce and excitement. Poets, writers, and artists continued to be drawn by its schools and entertainment venues.
Maybe its grandeur was nothing compared to cities in the United States or Europe, but still it was a vibrant city, even after the war with Iran and the bombardment following the takeover of Kuwait. I visited occasionally as a youth and then a truck driver, and the energy vibrated in the air.
The Baghdad I drove through with the SEALs was a much different place, a land of gray walls and dulled ambitions, a place filled with rubble, trash, and sprays of gunfire. Whole blocks were closed by piles of debris. House facades had crumbled into the roadways. Checkpoints, concrete barriers, and barbed wire were everywhere. Walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. Shrapnel had chinked buildings; the sidewalks and paved streets were marked by bloodstains that would never come off.
Baghdad had become desolation itself, an eighty-square-mile cauldron of hatred and disgust.
THE HISTORICAL ROOTS of the hatred between Sunni and Shia Muslims owes something to Baghdad’s time under the Ottomans, when the Sunni Turks clashed with the Shiite Iranian Safavids for dominance in the region. The Iranians conquered Baghdad during the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1623–39, but were eventually thrown back. During that war, there was a great massacre of Sunni believers by the Iranian shah, who wanted to purify the city for the Shia.
The memory of the conflict between the two branches of Islam has ebbed and flowed over the centuries since. For much of my lifetime, it remained largely dormant. There was conflict, certainly, and always debate—we Iraqis love to debate and argue, and settle the world’s affairs late into the night with great emotion. But bloodshed between the two branches simply because of religion was unheard of.
As I have said, that had all changed with Saddam’s overthrow. While Shiites were the majority population in Baghdad, there were a large number of Sunni as well. As various factions vied for political control, divisions along religious lines were inevitable.
Elections were scheduled for the end of January 2005. They were the first free elections after the American takeover. Al-Qaeda in Iraq vowed to disrupt the elections, and the SEALs were among many American units that were ordered to help keep the peace and make the elections possible.
I joined a sniper team on the day of the vote, providing overwatch to protect a polling site. On a typical overwatch mission, the SEALs would take over a house or a building, make sure the family was secure and taken care of, then set up what is traditionally called a hide for the snipers to work from.
Hide probably gives most people the wrong idea of what the SEALs were doing. It typically conjures an image of a heavily camouflaged sniper perched somewhere in a jungle, his position perfectly blending in with the surroundings. The hides in Baghdad were nothing like that.
Typically in Iraq, at least in the cities and towns, one or two snipers would go to a roof of a building, accompanied by two or three other men providing security. The snipers—SEALs generally didn’t use spotters, unlike other American military branches—would find a comfortable position where they could lie or sit while manning their gun and surveying the area. They sometimes attempted to camouflage where they were, or at least make it not look so obvious. But even when they did that, the nature of the war meant that after the first shot they were targets for others; their hide quickly turned into a fighting position.
Rooftops were generally used not only because they had a good vantage but they made setting up very easy. They didn’t restrict the snipers or the men with them if they had to change position or move quickly.
Alternatively, the SEALs would use the top story of a building, or sometimes lower floors if the structure was very tall. When working from here, they usually used windows, although at times they would make small holes in the walls or use holes that had already been made. Any damage to the house was supposed to be covered by the U.S. or Iraqi government.
My job as the interpreter was to talk to the family of the house and reassure them that no one would be hurt and that they would receive compensation. This was a very different mission than going after a suspect. Often the people we stayed with were, if not pro-American and in favor of the new government, at least neutral. It was important to be as diplomatic as possible and treat them exactly as I would want to be treated.
Of course, they were often uncomfortable. Our presence could endanger them, not just that day but for days that followed. And they were literally our prisoners while we were there, though we did our best not to treat them that way.
More people than you might suppose were understanding and usually cooperative. There’s a deep impulse in Iraqi culture to honor guests, and I think this impulse helped tremendously. More importantly, we showed the people by our behavior that we were trying to do the right thing. Our goal was to make their lives safer, and I think that they appreciated that.
The building the SEALs chose on the day of the elections was a commercial building still under construction, and my translation skills weren’t needed. I spent most of my time up on the roof, watching with the SEALs as they scanned the streets near the polling site. It was a tense time, and an exciting one: democracy was a new sensation. It was the first time the people had a say in their own government in Iraq.
But the thing I remember most about that day was how cold it
was. Baghdad in winter can be freezing, certainly for someone like me who is used to more temperate weather. I had to move constantly to keep myself warm.
Nothing bad happened on our watch. It was almost a letdown: a good letdown.
There was one great irony. I was helping protect people who were voting, but I didn’t vote myself. I was working.
On the other hand, thinking back on the candidates, I’m not sure I would have cast a ballot for any of them anyway. That’s the problem with democracy—sometimes you have to make the best choice from among bad possibilities.
Politics is not a clean deal in Iraq. You have to smile and laugh and get along when you want to do just the opposite. You have to act like a phony—or so it seems to me.
Am I too cynical?
I was not so jaded then. I was still clinging to the idea of a better Iraq. But what I saw as time went on soured me greatly.
It was on that mission that I befriended Sleepy Boy, a SEAL who earned his name because he could instantly fall asleep, no matter what the circumstances. It really was something incredible. When his watch was over, he would put his weapon down, lean to the side, and within seconds he was out. On that mission, the temperature must have been below freezing; still, he slept like a baby. Maybe he had Eskimo blood.
My most memorable time with Sleepy Boy came when he was driving a Humvee—but that came much later, and that story will have to wait.
BACK IN MOSUL, my wife watched the violence around her continue. While insurgents were leaving family members, especially women and children, alone, it didn’t pay to take any chances. Assassinations and car bombings continued; IEDs were often planted on the nearby streets.
Soheila kept largely to herself, rarely going out, not even to see her side of the family. My brother’s widow would go to the stores for food and other necessities. She wore her veil and kept her face covered so she would not be recognized—something many women in Mosul did, as much for safety as religious reasons. Any sort of display or action that seemed unreligious would very possibly be seized on as an excuse for an attack. Wearing Western-style clothes or makeup was out of the question.
Children stayed inside—mine especially. They might go to school for a few days, then stay home for many more. People would pass the word—things are not safe, there is danger today, plans are being made, etc. Many times these were just wild rumors, but who could afford to take a chance? There was plenty of killing to make even a doubter believe.
Our home’s location near a main street was both a blessing and a curse. It was easy to sense the mood of things simply by counting the number of people passing on the street—if there were few people, trouble was brewing. On the other hand, it was right near the main route taken by American vehicles when they patrolled or drove to the nearby police station. That meant the mujahideen and their spies were always nearby. The street was a prime area for car bombs and other booby traps.
The school was nearby, another half blessing, half curse. For us, it meant that the kids didn’t have to go far—but it also meant that the children were near IEDs.
More than once, Soheila heard an explosion outside in the direction of the school. Frantic with fear, she and my mother ran from the house to see what had happened, running all the way to the school until they saw our kids.
My children were always safe; the schools themselves were never targeted. But the bombs killed many on the streets. Soheila told me of passing freshly injured men on the street, blood still wet on their chest and legs. She ignored the smell of destruction, the mixture of burnt explosive and plastic and flesh, running as fast as she could to make sure our children were okay.
Other women did the same. They would ignore the Iraqi soldiers trying to cordon off the area and the Americans coming to investigate. They walled their emotions off, concentrating just on running, and just on their own children.
WHILE I’D BEEN the only interpreter for the task group in Mosul, the increased tempo of operations in Baghdad meant that the SEALs needed several, and so two more joined the unit soon after we arrived. Both had worked with SEALs before and knew the routine pretty well.
One of them was a man named Oliver. I liked Oliver, whose family had come from Lebanon. He was a nice man and a competent interpreter, but as the missions went on he began to get what the SEALs call “soft.” He wasn’t a coward, but he had trouble with the physical aspects of the job, like jumping over walls and keeping up with the SEALs. He flinched at trouble, and started moving slower and slower.
He never said he was scared and never ran away, but his declining physical abilities seemed to be proportional to the increasing danger we were in. I think the pressure accumulated on him the way scratches accumulate on a car, until all of the paint is worn off. The job took a toll, and in his case, it came to weigh him down and turn him into an old man.
The SEALs would ask him to do something, and he would do it. But he rarely showed the kind of aggressive initiative that the SEALs valued. They don’t want to just go somewhere—they want to run there. They also want to be there before someone else suggests it. Oliver eventually wasn’t up to that and soon got left behind, assigned to do inside work rather than going out on missions. That put a little more pressure on me, but I didn’t mind.
Stress is a funny thing. I was smoking more, and drinking. Was that as a result of stress?
At the time, I didn’t completely understand the concept. Without words in Arabic or English to adequately express what I was feeling, maybe I didn’t understand completely what was going on inside my head. I knew I had to do my job, and I had to survive the war, and I had to worry about my wife and my children—were those things stress?
Surely, but again, it was like being in the middle of a vast jungle and trying to walk out. You focus on your goal, not on the mosquitos buzzing at your face at every step.
The three interpreters lived in a tiny house near the SEALs’ quarters in their compound. When I say that the house was tiny, I mean tiny, even by Iraqi standards. There were two rooms, including the kitchen, which was where I slept. To make enough room for my bed, I moved out the washer and dryer that had been in the corner, snugging myself in as best I could.
The translators were not all one happy family. We got along all right for the most part, but every so often there would be friction and one or the other of us would get his nose out of joint, to use an American expression. One man in particular seemed to always be rubbing me the wrong way.
I’ll call him the Kurd, because that’s what his ethnic background was, but this short, round fellow was actually an American citizen. The funny thing was, he seemed always to be criticizing America—not for the war, but for itself. For America being America.
There were a million things wrong with the country, he said, from traffic to shopping malls to politics and jobs, religious intolerance to taxes. I can’t even list them all.
The criticisms didn’t bother me much, even though much of what he said seemed petty. What irked me was his hypocrisy. He was two-faced. When he was talking with Oliver and myself, he was very down on America, talking about all of the mistakes that the United States had made and often being highly critical of the country. But then, if we were with some of the SEALs, he would say only nice things about America.
Worse was his habit of pretending to be better than me because he was an American citizen and I wasn’t.
I’ve already mentioned that U.S. citizens were getting paid a lot more to translate than native Iraqis were. The SEALs who knew about it didn’t think it was fair, and a few told me that they had protested. I appreciated their support, but unfortunately their complaints didn’t change anything.
Apparently the difference in pay schedules reinforced whatever nonsense the Kurd thought about our relative worth. One day he began pestering me somehow, getting on my nerves by being a showoff and a know-it-all. Finally I lost my temper.
“I have had it,” I told him. “If you keep talking that way I will beat you with my
shoe! Come, we’ll go outside—if you are really a man you will fight me.”
“No, no, Johnny,” he insisted. “I am not going outside.”
“Come on!” I told him.
His face turned pale. I doubt he’d seen me so mad. He stayed put.
“Come on!” I shouted. “Now.”
Some SEALs came in and tempers were defused.
I never warmed up to him in Iraq. And yet—today he and I remain friends. I talk to him often, and see him occasionally. We disagree on many things, just as we did in Iraq.
Why are we still friends? I’m not sure. Was it the shared experience of war? Is it something in my nature, or his nature, to remain friends with a person we disagree with?
It may be. For me, a disagreement does not meant that you are not my friend or brother. In fact, I expect that you will disagree at times. I expect you to stand up to me—as I will to you.
He’s still king of the cranks. Always complaining, even when I know he has nothing to complain about.
AFTER THE ELECTIONS, our Baghdad missions primarily involved apprehending suspected insurgents in safe houses around the area. We ran operations nearly every night for long stretches. Then would come two or three days when we stayed put before going out again. I’m sure there was a certain order and pace to the operation tempo, but I wasn’t privy to the planning or the thought process behind it. I just did what the SEALs said had to be done. And that meant going out.
The SEALs used a variety of vehicles in Baghdad, but most of the early missions were made using Strykers. The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored vehicle whose bottom looks like a metal boat and whose top resembles a moving pillbox. The vehicles can fit a half-dozen men comfortably in the back; usually a lot more were crammed inside, squeezing against their battle gear and other equipment. The vehicles could take heavy abuse from guns and even most IEDs, so if you didn’t get squeezed to death inside they were very safe. But the engines on the vehicles were very loud, and were a dead giveaway that Americans were on a mission in the area. So usually we would park them at a distance from the target, then go in on foot. This meant that we were exposed for a mile or more, but it gave the SEALs the element of tactical surprise, and they felt giving up the protection of the armored vehicle was an acceptable tradeoff.
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 14