We drove out to the airstrip at dusk, where an MH-53 was waiting. The fifty-three, as it is known to the SEALs, is a large helicopter with a single overhead rotor, often used by special operations forces as a transport. It looks like a grasshopper on steroids, with big blisters in the front over gear, a pipe for aerial refueling that looks like a jousting spear, and extra fuel tanks that look like bombs to the uninitiated—which would definitely include me. There are door gunners with big machine guns, but it’s a transport rather than an attack helicopter. Still, it looks pretty ferocious.
And a little too heavy to get off the ground, until those big overhead rotors get angry.
And that night they sounded very pissed off.
Probably sensing that I was a little apprehensive, the SEALs had me sit up near the pilot against the bulkhead, which put quite a lot of the helicopter between me and the door. The ride itself was uneventful—I just sat and hoped the big-ass helicopter wouldn’t shake my brains out of my head. My eyes were closed for a good portion of the ride.
Then, just before we were supposed to land, my legs fell numb.
I couldn’t wake them for anything. I don’t know whether it was nerves or just the fact that I was sitting on them wrong, but they were so numb that I stumbled when I got up. I managed to get out of the helicopter, but just barely, falling face-first to the ground as the fifty-three shuddered and shook above me.
The choppers kick up a tornado when they take off, and I found myself pelted by waves of grit, stones, and violent wind. I got up, fell down again, stumbled to my feet and collapsed yet again, this time into a shallow mud hole. When I got up I was blind—the night vision glasses the SEALs had given me to wear were covered with a sheen of mud.
I finally managed to push the gear off my face and run up toward the house, which was a few dozen meters away. My radio was buzzing.
“Where’s Johnny!” someone was shouting. “Where the hell is Johnny Walker?”
“Here, here,” I answered, trying to get my discombobulated gear back into place. I think they may have thought I didn’t get off the helo.
“Johnny, come on,” said one of the SEALs. “We need you inside.”
By the time I got myself together, the SEALs had already cleared the house. I was a mess, covered with mud and dirt, my long beard embedded with muck.
About a half-dozen men had been found in the house. They all had IDs—and none of them read Abdullah, the name of our jackpot. Rather than denying knowing him, the men told the SEALs that Abdullah was supposed to have come to the house that night, but had never arrived.
Right, I thought, looking them over. I had no hard intelligence beyond the man’s name, but it seemed pretty obvious that these guys were lying. Their stories were very well polished, and they didn’t look me or anyone else straight in the eye as they gave them.
I considered what I might do. My goal was to find the jackpot, but I was sure that if I asked who in the room was named Abdullah, I’d be greeted with silence, then a host of denials. So I watched them for a while, getting a feel for how they interacted. It soon became obvious that they were all stealing glances at one individual.
Abdullah?
I had the men taken out to talk to me individually, asking general questions, going over things they’d already said. I spoke in low, confidential tones, and tried to be as casual and friendly as possible. I spoke to two or three men, then had the man they’d all been glancing at brought over.
“Hey, what’s up, Abdullah?” I said in Arabic. “How they are treating you? Are you okay?”
“I am fine,” he said. “Nothing is up.”
His smile drained quickly as he realized he’d just given himself away by answering to his name.
“Jackpot,” I told the SEALs who’d brought him in.
So at least my helicopter ride was not for nothing.
I LEARNED OVER time that there are many, many ways to get information from an enemy. Often the best way is to use simple questions that seem to have nothing to do with anything—working someone’s name into a sentence as I did with Abdullah, for example, and then watching the response. In many cases the suspects we apprehended were prepared for difficult questioning and were on their guard to be asked about explosives and other things. But answering a greeting? That was not something they had prepared for. Saying hello was something they had done all their lives. It was nothing to worry about—was it?
I wasn’t able to get information from everyone, and not every mission the SEALs staged was a success. Many times we would go out and find that the intelligence that we’d gotten was bad or incomplete. At times when we found a suspect accused of being an insurgent, the information and accusation turned out to be false. A lot of that depended on where the intelligence had come from. American sources were by far the best, probably because they had already been vetted or developed from intelligence from another suspect.
Ironically, Iraqi sources, which should have been the best, were often way off. Part of the reason was that people quickly learned that, as in the Saddam Hussein years, they could make trouble for enemies by claiming they were up to no good. If they were convincing enough, they could inconvenience the person and often do even worse harm.
There were several missions where we would look for IED parts in a building, only to find none. A thorough search could turn a house practically upside down. While that didn’t necessarily mean the man who owned the house wasn’t an insurgent—he might have moved the material before we arrived—in many cases it was clear he’d been set up. I felt bad, but there was little I could do beyond apologizing. This was the nature of the war I found myself in. Vague rumors had the power of a television newscast, and small vendettas and jealousies could be settled by getting someone in trouble with the authorities.
I was disappointed when we went through a mission only to find that there was no jackpot, no hidden cache of weapons, no success. It didn’t seem to bother the SEALs, though—they gauged their missions by how well they performed, not by the value of the intelligence their orders were based on. For them, the important thing was doing their job as well they possibly could.
As the op tempo—the frequency and speed of our missions—increased, I found myself worrying more and more about what might go wrong. The closer we got to the start, the more I tensed. It was as if my hands and arms and legs and feet were all attached by a string to my heart. My heart beat faster, pulling the imaginary string taut, until every part of my body was ready to snap.
One day I came out of the house to get ready for an operation planned for Baghdad later in the evening. I saw Bry, one of the senior chiefs, standing in front of a Hummer with another SEAL. They were both laughing, cigars hanging from their mouths.
They looked like they were getting ready to go to a ball game, not on a mission. They were so relaxed, in fact, that I thought the operation had been canceled and was surprised to find that it wasn’t.
The mission came and went; like so many of them, I can’t remember the details. The next afternoon we were going out again. A few hours before we were set to leave, I came out of my house and once again saw Bry smoking and joking with a friend. It looked like they were planning a night on the town, not a journey into the worst part of Baghdad to grab a suspected bomb maker. I smiled, shrugged, and went about my business.
The next afternoon, the same thing happened. Finally, my curiosity got the better of me.
“Hey guys,” I said, walking over to them. “What is this business? Why are you smoking these things? Why are you not getting ready for the mission?”
“We are getting ready,” said Bry.
“Chief, aren’t you scared?” I asked. “You are laughing—you are not serious. It looks like you are going to an adventure, not on a mission.”
“So?”
“You don’t worry?”
“If we don’t know what’s going to happen, why should we be scared?” answered Bry. He went on to explain that good things could happen just as w
ell as bad things. In fact, the odds were in favor of good things, since the missions were so well planned. So why be afraid? Why not be happy?
“It’s more likely something will go right. Don’t worry about the bad until it happens.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you have a cigar for me?”
He handed one over. From that point on, I never worried about all the bad things that might happen on a mission. I didn’t always smoke cigars—they are an acquired taste, I have learned—but I adopted Bry’s philosophy as my own. It fit in with what I had told Soheila and with how I thought about my own safety in general.
If I don’t know what is going to happen, then what is the sense of worrying about it?
ABOUT CIGARS—THE SEALs were smoking big, fat, and very smelly Cubans. The first time I smoked one—whoof. My head, my stomach, my throat—I coughed my lungs dry and felt my stomach do flips for hours. But I thought what the hell. I had to copy them. And so I tried. For days, with the same results.
It took a while for me to realize that you don’t smoke cigars like you smoke cigarettes: you don’t inhale, among other things.
Cigars were only one of the ways that I tried melding my personality to the SEALs’. I listened to the metal rock they listened to before missions and grew to like it. They were making me American without my really knowing it.
IF THE FIRST HALF of 2005 was hard for Soheila and the kids, the second half was even worse. The violence in Mosul became so great that once again I had a relative whisk them from the city.
It was arranged quickly. That evening, dressed in old clothes—very traditional ones, with no hint of Western influence and no suggestion of wealth—Soheila and the kids waited by the door for the car to arrive. When she saw it pulling up, my wife pulled up the scarf she was using as a mask, then ushered the children out, urging them to run as fast as they could to the nearby car. She held the baby in her arms.
They stayed in the home of an acquaintance near the Syrian border for several days. It was a primitive place, small and without many comforts, save the most important—it was safe.
Still, there was no question of the family staying there for very long. Life was far too primitive and restricted. Living there was like living in caveman times. After a few days, the kids began to grow restless. As soon as the atmosphere in Mosul calmed down, they returned, once more in secret.
It was neither the first nor the last time they left Mosul in fear. Over the course of the next few years, Soheila and the kids would flee and stay in the homes of acquaintances outside the city a dozen times. The pattern was always the same—a fresh outbreak of violence or threats would prompt warnings from others; relatives or friends would help them leave; they would stay away for a few days or weeks. Even today, I do not dare name the people, for fear that they might be retaliated against. And yet I owe them so much gratitude that I cannot express it in words.
I was still speaking to Soheila by phone several times a day, as much as ever. In many of these conversations, she’d mention that she wanted to move to Baghdad to be with me. She didn’t know how bad Baghdad was. Nor did she realize that without a support network of friends and family nearby, she would be even more isolated and vulnerable.
One of the truly diabolic aspects of Iraq was the corruption among government and army officials. Graft was everywhere, at every level. The fact that everything was for sale meant you couldn’t trust anyone. The people who were supposed to protect Iraqi citizens—the police, the soldiers, the government workers—might be easily bought off or convinced to look the other way. The Iraqi army had plenty of opportunities to get information about me; while I’d be safe on base, my family would be exposed in the city. Without family or tribal connections in Baghdad, I had no one I could trust to watch them. At least in Mosul, we had people who would protect them—including several who we believed were close enough to the insurgency to hear rumors of threats.
Still aching for my family, I arranged to meet them in Kurdistan not long after they had come back from the village. They were driven up by car; I flew up. We met at the airport, then drove to a hotel and spent the next ten days together. It was a vacation—or almost like a vacation, since there was never a way to completely block off the danger we were in or the fear of what might happen when the week ended and we returned to the war.
MOST OF THE SUBJECTS we were sent after were not particularly smart or crafty; they tended to be uneducated and brainwashed, for lack of a better word, by other extremists. But occasionally we would run into a truly intelligent insurgent, one who was not only a killer but an effective one. These were sometimes the hardest men to deal with, not so much because they were smart but because they were dedicated. They believed in what they did and were ruthless because of it. Their intelligence just made them harder to catch.
Some of them had a strange sense of honor. They saw themselves not simply as warriors of God, but as noble warriors of God. They were proud of what they had accomplished, even when they had killed many innocent people.
One of the strangest of these types was a man we found in the Adhamiyah area of Baghdad, which is in the northwest corner of the city. It had been an upscale area before the war; by 2005 it was a hotbed of insurgent activity.
The mission started when an Iraqi came in to give information about a bomb maker working in the area. According to this source, the man had ignited an IED on a passing American convoy a few days before. That part didn’t bother the informer; it was the fact that the insurgent had ignited it while women and children were passing that sent him over the edge. Killing soldiers was one thing, killing kids another.
“Enough is enough,” he told the SEAL who interviewed him. “Enough.”
We took the man to the house, where we found and arrested the bomb maker. Once apprehended, this al-Qaeda associate told us of another member of his cell, a much higher-ranking insurgent who proved to be the linchpin of the local insurgency. Within hours we were at his house. To our surprise, not only did Linchpin surrender without a fight, but he began talking freely about his exploits. We brought him back to the camp and he sat with Tatt and myself bragging about everything he had done.
Linchpin spoke good English, and Tatt was able to talk to him directly. The interview went on for hours, more conversation than interrogation. His information led to more arrests and a raid on a house where a false wall led to a cache of weapons that must have included at least twenty machine guns and a host of mines. From there, we raided an apartment complex looking for some al-Qaeda members and Tunisians who’d been recruited for a suicide attack. We missed the Tunisians but must have rolled up half a dozen al-Qaeda members in the process of busting the operation. The suicide attack was thwarted, at least for the time being.
Linchpin was proud that he had been captured by the SEALs; he apparently considered them warriors worthy of his own exalted rank. He took a liking to Tatt. At least that’s how I interpreted his statement to the chief as he was leaving:
“Mr. Tatt, you’re an honorable man. If I ever capture you, I will put a bullet in your skull and not cut off your head.”
Tatt thanked him for his consideration.
Handed over to the Iraqi government, Linchpin and five or six of his associates were tried for terrorist activities. It was said to be one of the first actual terrorist trials in the country under the new government, and it resulted in convictions. The men were sent to Abu Ghraib.
A few months later, Linchpin bribed his way out of jail; according to the rumors we’ve heard, he paid the equivalent of six thousand dollars.
That was the way things worked in Iraq.
BACK IN THE United States, news reports of the war caused a variety of different reactions. I had no idea that there were debates over the nature of the war, whether it should continue or not and how it should be waged. The workings of democracy were still very foreign to me and while these issues affected not just me but all Iraqis, I’m not sure what I would have made of the debate. The job in Ir
aq certainly wasn’t finished or over; the country was a long way from being a better place.
Among the debates was one on how to help interpreters who worked with the American forces. By this point, word of how vulnerable we were had begun making its way back to the States. Even though there wasn’t a lot of attention being paid to the issue in the media, some members of Congress began discussing the possibility of granting special visas and then citizenship to translators and others who had put themselves in danger by helping American forces.
For me, the issue was still moot. More and more, I’d come to see America as a place to dream about, with its riches, movies, and sports stars. But it was too distant to be anything but a dream. And it wasn’t my home. I’d never thought of it as anything other than a place far away. The idea of moving there didn’t seem real. So when Chief Tatt mentioned it again, I gave him the same answer I had earlier—thanks, but no thanks.
I don’t know if Tatt was disappointed or whether he didn’t think I understood what he was offering. Whatever it was, he let it slide.
Team 7’s deployment ended in the spring of 2005. According to the commendation I later received, there were roughly 150 missions during that time—not quite one a day, but close.
I felt bad when it came time for them to leave. By now, I was secure as a SEAL interpreter, reasonably sure that I would remain with the SEALs in a job no matter which unit was rotating in. But over months of living and working together with the SEALs I formed close ties with many, and there was always a question when they left of whether I would see them again.
Honestly, I didn’t expect to. Things change so quickly in war. The bonds we forged wouldn’t be broken, but the opportunity of seeing friends was a constant casualty. This was especially true of the senior people, who often were given new assignments and promotions when they returned to America from Iraq.
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 17