I tuned the man up quickly, telling him to put his hands up or the SEAL was going to blast him into tiny bits. Tatt’s demeanor made it clear I was telling the truth, and the jackpot complied. Then I asked him his name. I guess the Iraqi realized it was pretty obvious that he was the suspect, because he didn’t play any games. We soon took him away to the authorities.
One of my most important jobs was calming the family when someone was taken away for questioning. This was usually just a matter of explaining what was going on, who wanted him and why. People tended to react better if they at least knew why their husband or whoever was wanted and where he was being taken. Calming them down made them safer—yelling and screaming tended to set everyone’s nerves on edge, and in that kind of atmosphere, one wrong move could lead to a tragedy. In many cases, wives turned out to be glad that their husbands were being carted off—maybe unsurprisingly, many militants were nearly as vicious to family members as they were to supposed infidels.
Tatt’s team became smoother as it got more experienced, and missions that had taken a couple of hours at the start of the deployment were down to twenty minutes within a few months, thanks to Tatt and the rest of the NCOs. I admired the SEAL chief, but it wasn’t until a trip to Fallujah two or three months into the deployment that we became close friends.
The SEALs were assigned a small but important role in a large operation against a major al-Qaeda IED bomb-making cell operating in the Fallujah area. While effective, raids against one or two bomb makers were inevitably frustrating, because these insurgents rarely worked alone. When one was arrested or taken in for questioning, the rest of their cell quickly learned what had happened. Even if follow-up raids were launched—generally the next day, if not the same night—some members always escaped.
The idea this time was to scoop up a dozen or more bomb makers and their helpers in a single operation. Within minutes, an entire cluster of bomb makers would be rolled up.
It was an ambitious idea, born from the hideous toll the IEDs were taking. The bombs had turned some of the major roads in and around the city into killing fields. The main route from Habbaniya to Fallujah, known to the Americans as Route Michigan, became the deadliest highway in Iraq. IEDs powerful enough to turn over a Stryker armored vehicle were common.
Which naturally made me feel a little nervous when Tatt told me that our plan was to drive up from Habbaniya on Route Michigan to Fallujah.
The mujahideen had been defeated in a brutal, house-to-house campaign led primarily by Marines during November and December 2004. But that fight—known to the Americans as Operation Phantom Fury and to historians as the Second Battle of Fallujah—was only the fiercest of many conflicts in the city. In 2005, mujahideen were diminished but still very active. It would take another year and a half before the new government really had good control of the city. By then, much of it would be rubble.
We were assigned to take down two houses very close to each other just outside the city. Our main target, said to live in one of the homes, was an Islamic teacher who was issuing the cell’s fatwas—interpretations of Islamic law that, in this case, allowed Americans to be killed. Through these proclamations, he was controlling when and where the bombs would be laid.
The al-Qaeda insurgents were usually led by a cell leader who was in charge of the military operations. But a mufti—technically, the Sunni scholar or imam who issues the fatwa—who interpreted the law was critical to the operations, since he provided the formal religious reasoning or justification (if it can be called that) for the action. Their actual roles varied, but even when they were just rubber-stamping the terrorist leader’s decisions, they were critical.
I suspect that the idea of providing a religious justification for killing makes little sense to Americans. But to the al-Qaeda adherents it was crucial. In their minds, the fatwas elevated their actions. Among other things, obeying a fatwa meant they were assured of going to paradise upon dying. (There are differences in the way fatwas were used by the Sunni and Shiite insurgents, as well as in general, but those subtleties aren’t important here. In this case we are talking about Sunni followers of al-Qaeda.)
The SEALs were either ahead of schedule driving or there was a holdup somewhere else, because we suddenly stopped on the road well short of our target. I was sitting in the last Humvee with an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) guy and the driver when Tatt came back to wait with us. This was a little unusual—generally the senior chief kept to himself or stayed with the more senior members of the unit.
What made it even more unusual was the fact that our Hummer was the only vehicle with no armored protection in the convoy.
“How are you?” I said when he climbed into the truck.
“Good. How are you?”
“Good.”
A few minutes of awkward silence followed. I couldn’t quite understand why he was there—had I done something wrong? Finally I decided to ask.
“How come you are here, Senior Chief?”
“I’m just here to sit with you.”
“Oh.”
“We’re brothers, right?” added Chief Tatt.
“Yes.”
“Okay. So if we are brothers, we sit together, right?”
“Right,” I answered.
An American vehicle had been hit on the road in the vicinity a few days before. I’m sure everyone in the convoy was thinking about that as the wait dragged on. It was never a good idea to stay in one place in Iraq very long; staying along Route Michigan was certifiable insanity. Tatt or the EOD guy pulled out a ballistic blanket; we huddled in the back, the blanket draped over us.
In case you’re wondering: no, it wouldn’t have provided much protection if we were attacked.
“My wife is going to kill me if anything happens,” said Tatt finally. “Her last words to me were ‘If you get killed, I’ll kick your ass.’ ”
No one laughed. We were probably all thinking the same thing.
I calculated that I’d be ahead if I got back with one leg intact.
Finally whatever piece of coordination we were waiting for fell into place, and we moved ahead.
We got to the suspect’s house and went in without a problem. The SEALs secured the building quickly and easily; they apprehended a suspect and I was called in to determine if he was the jackpot.
I entered the room he’d been taken to and knew right off this was going to be a hard assignment. He had a determined look on his face—but he wasn’t belligerent. He was reasoned and calm, not necessarily cooperative but not resisting either.
I asked his name. He gave me a false one, which of course matched his documentation.
We parried for a while. I asked him a few questions. He answered them but didn’t say much else. Nothing that he did say incriminated him in any way. He was so good I couldn’t help but get a feeling that he was the right person, but feelings meant nothing in the end—without real proof, he could not be taken in.
We talked a little more without getting anywhere. Interestingly, he didn’t try talking me into hating the Americans or even question my religious beliefs. His answers were bland.
Finally I left the room and went to see his wife and children. They volunteered an identity that matched what he had said.
Not sure what else to do, I told them that I knew they were lying.
At first they stuck to his story. In the meantime, the SEALs who had been searching the house for evidence brought me some papers. These were in the jackpot’s name—and yet the family still maintained the man we had apprehended wasn’t the man we were seeking.
“Listen,” I told them. “You have to tell us the truth, or we will take all of you. That is the way it will be.”
It was a bluff. They didn’t suddenly change their story or renounce him, but the tones in their voices changed. I could tell from their reactions that they knew I was right, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be.
“Are you going to cooperate?”
His wife didn’t say an
ything, nor did the children.
“Well then,” I told them loudly. “Then we will take you all in.”
I stomped over to the suspect and told him that I was taking the entire family in.
“Everyone comes,” I told him. “Your wife and your kids. If you are going to lie to me—”
“Leave my family,” he said finally. “I am who you are looking for. Just leave them alone.”
We did.
The SEALs raided the other house nearby and picked up another suspect. By this time there were people in the street, loudly demanding to know what was going on; we could hear gunfire in the distance. We packed our jackpots up quickly and hustled out of there, driving to a base on the other side of the city.
It was the first time I’d seen the city since just before the war, when I’d taken a cement-truck load down from Mosul. Looking at the destruction, I couldn’t help but think what might have been if the city worked with the Americans rather than fought them.
The war had turned me into a strangely optimistic person on the one hand—I could sense so much potential in my country, in my fellow Iraqis, and in mankind in general. But on the other hand it had made me deeply sad, stressed by the waste and sheer lunacy of the hatred I saw and experienced.
Iraq made no sense. The people had complained bitterly about Saddam. Now he was gone. But instead of working with the country that had freed them, instead of building Iraq into a great land, people fought like suicidal monsters.
THE RAID NETTED most of the key people in the terrorist cell. The IED attacks stopped for roughly a week following the operation. That was considered an extraordinary success at that point in the war: the residents and the people trying to protect them had less insanity to deal with for a few days.
We returned to Baghdad and a full slate of new missions, our workload gradually increasing. We worked hard; when we got a day off we partied hard—or just slept, which sometimes was even better. One night after a mission, Chief Tatt started joking with me. He had a wry sense of humor that snuck up on you; it matched his easygoing attitude. We joked about many things—women, drinking. It was the usual SEAL humor, not much different from what you would expect to hear in a locker room.
All of a sudden, Tatt turned serious.
“Would you like to go to America?” he asked.
I thought he meant as a tourist and said something about how I’d love to see the sights someday.
“Live there,” he said, correcting me. “Would you like to become an American citizen?”
“I’m an Iraqi,” I answered, or something along those lines.
“It may not be safe for you here. Or for your family.” Tatt explained that another American unit, an Army Special Forces A Team, had recently helped get an interpreter out of the country because his life was threatened. I told him I didn’t feel that was necessary in my case; I had no fear about my fate, or my safety.
“I’m fine. I’m an Iraqi. I have my friends.”
“Are you sure?” asked Tatt.
“I’m going to finish this,” I told him. “Iraq is going to get better.”
“Roger that.”
Tatt didn’t say what he thought of my optimism. We went back to joking.
He didn’t bring it up again during the rest of his deployment. Even so, the seed of something had been planted. I was still an Iraqi, and still in my mind I believed Iraq could be a better place. But everything I’d seen over the past few months, and everything I heard from Soheila, was working to erode that hope. A better Iraq looked more and more like a fantasy. I wasn’t working on a dream; I was living in the middle of a nightmare.
AT TIMES, THE SEALs were used as a kind of special resource, helping other American or Iraqi units that were taking heavy casualties. One of those times was in al-Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that had once been home to many Iraqi Christians but by this point was infested with Sunni extremists. A U.S. National Guard unit had been assigned to the area, and while they were fine soldiers, they lacked the special training and resources the SEALs had. The SEALs started doing sniper overwatch missions and running patrols, aiming to disrupt the mujahideen networks that were giving the other Americans such a hard time. At the same time, they targeted the deadliest of the insurgent cell leaders. I think we only captured a few people on the raids, but the effect was out of proportion—not used to being hassled on their own turf, the mujahideen would lay low for several days after a SEAL operation, giving the men in the National Guard unit a temporary but very welcome respite.
In April, we were assigned to help patrol the area surrounding Abu Ghraib, the huge prison twenty miles west of Baghdad. If Americans have heard of the place at all, it’s because of the torture incidents that allegedly took place there in 2003 and 2004. By the time we were assigned there, the scandal had passed; Abu Ghraib was famous for something else: a spectacular breakout that began when a truck loaded with explosives detonated near the outer wall. The attack came April 2; a hundred or more al-Qaeda insurgents hit the walls of the prison hoping to spark a mass escape. They suffered heavy casualties. While they failed to achieve their objective—the prisoners who breached the interior fence were recaptured—the attack involved complex planning rarely seen in Iraq, with coordinated shellings and ambushes at a number of bases and highways.
Even after the attackers had been beaten back, the route from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib was a veritable highway of hell. Ambushes and IED attacks were common. The SEALs decided to scout it to see if they might be able to ambush the mujahideen planting IEDs. Tatt and I drove through the area with a member of the army unit assigned to the area. We’d just started out when Tatt pointed to some round holes in the Hummer’s interior.
“Dude, what’s that?” he asked the sergeant who was our guide.
“Oh, we were in Sadr City a while back and an IED went off,” said the sergeant nonchalantly. “Ball bearings went through.”
He added that they had killed the man where Tatt was sitting.
“That’s nothing,” continued the driver. He pointed to a ramp on the highway. “See that? We hit an IED on that ramp and flipped over the other day. Killed the turret gunner.”
If these stories hadn’t been enough to impress me, the fact that several fresh IEDs had been set up along the highway on the route home to Baghdad did. One of them was truly remarkable—made of several large artillery shells arranged together, the SEALs called it a “teepee” because it reminded them of an Indian tent. Bomb units defused the devices, but it was impossible not to think about either the brazenness of the terrorists who’d planted them in broad daylight, or the implications of having failed to spot them.
The next day I went out with another SEAL who headed the unit’s snipers. He’s still in the navy, so we’ll call him Tommy German to protect his identity.
Tommy German looked at everything with a sniper’s eye. Like a lot of SEALs, he was able to mentally render a complicated battlefield into good places and bad places with just a glance. He wanted to be in the good places; he wanted the bad guys to be in the bad places. Some of this was pretty obvious. It was better to be in a high spot than a low one. But other aspects were, and remain, a mystery to me. I just learned to accept that he saw the world differently than I did. He always got good results.
I was observant myself, though of different things. After taking our survey that afternoon, we stopped in a settlement near the prison as a group of American soldiers swept through, looking for the terrorist who had just planted a bomb. The soldiers could detect certain types of explosive on a person’s skin with the help of a special device. As we watched them work their way down the street, I noticed a man watching from the distance. He eyed the patrol, then moved quickly away. He was dressed differently than others, and it was clear that he was out of place.
“That’s the guy they want,” I told Tommy German, pointing.
“How do you know?”
“Just from the way he looked at them and turned around. You better
tell them. He’s getting away.”
Tommy German called over to one of the soldiers, and they ran and caught up with the man. Sure enough, he tested positive for explosives.
BACK IN BAGHDAD, we started getting missions that took us farther from home. Whether that was because things had calmed down in Baghdad or become more heated elsewhere, I’m really not sure. I doubt it. It was probably more that the SEALs had been recognized as a valuable resource, and everyone wanted to use them.
Whatever the reason, it was around this time that I experienced another first—riding in a helicopter.
Our mission was in the south, near Basra, and like most of our missions, it was to take place at night. We were looking for a man named Abdullah, a Shiite who’d been organizing resistance in the area.
All of that was utterly routine—aside from the fact that to get there we had to fly. I’d never been in a helicopter. Given that I had once wanted to be a pilot, I wasn’t intimidated or even very anxious.
Until one of the SEALs came up to me with a very serious face and asked, “What is your blood type?”
I had no idea what he was asking.
“What’s your blood type?” he repeated.
“Which?”
“Blood type.”
I thought it was a joke. “You want to know my blood?”
“Yes. What type is it?”
“Iraqi.”
That didn’t seem to be a reasonable answer. I thought maybe I would say “Scotch”—but his voice had turned so serious that it was clear he wasn’t in the mood for a joke.
“No, no, your blood type. Not your nationality.”
I just shook my head. “Red blood.” I had no idea what he was talking about.
He explained, almost patiently, that blood has different types, and if you are injured, the doctors need to know which one to use to replace what you’ve lost. The explanation helped a bit, though I still didn’t know the answer and had to take a simple test. But the process made me wonder: Did helicopters crash so often that people were always needing blood transfusions?
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 16