While there were operations where the SEALs used unoccupied buildings, this wasn’t possible in many cases. The houses had to be selected based on tactical criteria—in the simplest terms, the snipers needed a position where they had a good view of the surroundings and were well positioned to protect the ground troops or civilians in the area. That generally meant going into someone’s home.
Unlike missions where we were sent to arrest someone, there were no forced entries to these houses. We basically showed up and knocked on the door. You didn’t get to volunteer your house, and generally it wasn’t an assignment you could refuse either. That made the situation more than a little delicate. While the family would be compensated for their trouble, no amount of money really could make up for what was, under even the best of circumstances, a huge inconvenience.
The worst circumstance could be dire catastrophe. There was always a possibility that the snipers and therefore the house would become targets. And in Iraq, being a target could easily mean obliteration.
With the exception of Dan, no one was injured on any of the missions that I was on. The families were always well protected, and the damage to their homes minimal. That was probably as much a function of luck as the precautions the SEALs took, but the SEALs very generously gave me credit as well. A few, including my friend Chris Kyle, say I helped save many lives. I’m grateful that they think that.
The Americans usually did their best to protect the inhabitants and make them comfortable, but uninvited houseguests are never truly welcome. My job was to be a diplomat as well as a translator. I would tell the family as much as I could about what was going on; while there were always limits, I would never lie to them. I’d be honest about the fact that we were a serious inconvenience.
I can’t remember anyone trying to force the SEALs out or actively resisting—the SEALs were all heavily armed and there would have been no sense. But the reception wasn’t as negative as you might imagine. Most people accepted the SEALs’ presence, at least grudgingly; many even claimed to understand that the SEALs were trying to keep people safe, including the family in the house. Every so often a person actually welcomed them, if only out of curiosity.
As I started to get used to the missions, I got better at finding ways of putting people at ease. More than once I acted as a grocer and chef, going out to the marketplace to pick up some food and coming back to cook. Buying the family food—we never used their money—was one way of making a bond with them. It also let me scout the area discreetly. Going out also tended to make it less obvious that Americans were in the house—no activity at a home early in the day was a dead giveaway that something was up, and it wasn’t smart to broadcast that fact to the insurgents until absolutely necessary.
A few times I took a family member out with me. I had my pistol under my clothes and watched the person closely, but by 2005 and 2006, when the overwatches really picked up, I’d become a pretty good judge of character. It was easy to tell which side the people were on within the first few minutes of our arrival.
But even if the family opposed the American intervention and the new government, my immediate goal was to make them feel safe while we were there. Once in a while, that worked so well that they didn’t want us to leave.
Small kindnesses paid big dividends. Iraq was still wracked by wrenching poverty and shortages. People lacked a lot of the basic necessities, and helping them out won many over. This didn’t take much; one family we stayed with had no gas for their heater or stove. We called back to the camp and at night had a truck deliver propane to them. The old lady whose house it was wouldn’t let us go when we were scheduled to.
“If you leave now,” she told the SEAL in charge of the operation, “I will run out of the house screaming that the Americans are here, and you will have a lot of trouble.”
He called the head shed and told them we had to stay for another twenty-four hours.
I learned that it was a good idea for the family and at least some of the Americans to eat together. This was another part of the personal diplomacy, another little step in helping build some trust. There was a larger purpose to it, beyond calming the occupants of the house. If fighting an insurgency is all about winning over hearts and minds, it can be best done on a one-to-one basis, one family at a time. Showing people that the Americans were on their side—proving that they wanted to make them safe, not take over the country—and that they weren’t monsters contributed to the overall war effort.
None of this was a usual part of an interpreter’s job, and at first I caught some grief because of things like going out of the house with the people to shop. After a while, though, the SEALs’ supervisors came to see that what I was doing was helping them a great deal. If the people inside the house were not unhappy, they were much easier to watch—and there was much less need to be wary of them. If the mood inside the house was calm, the snipers could do their job without interruption. And so the snipers started asking that I go along all the time. I was happy to oblige.
I’D LONG AGO passed the stage of being a “regular” interpreter. It wasn’t part of a conscious plan. A lot of it was just self-preservation: I simply didn’t want myself or the people I was with to be targets, or at least more vulnerable targets than necessary. But it was also an outgrowth of my personality. I couldn’t sit inside a house without doing something. I had to move, I had to act. If I was capable of doing something, I felt I should do it.
I had to be involved in the fight.
It was one thing to win over the snipers and the noncommissioned officers in charge of the units and quite another to win over the officers, who tended to be much more cautious, or maybe just more observant of the rules and regulations.
I remember a conversation with someone in the head shed who told me, point-blank, not to leave a house once I was in it.
“You don’t own me,” I told him. “I am Iraqi. I have to do what I have to do.”
“Johnny, how are we going to save you if something happens?” asked the officer, trying to reason with me. “We have a responsibility to protect you, but you’re making it difficult.”
“I know what I am doing. I know the risks. You don’t have to protect me.”
We argued for a while, and I’m not sure that I ever really convinced him—but I continued to go out. Gradually he stopped questioning me. When people came to understand that I took care of business, they stopped bugging me.
Or maybe I just heard them less and less.
I CAN’T MENTION SEAL snipers without mentioning my friend Chris Kyle, who in a lot of ways is the reason I wrote this book. I happen to be mentioned, in disguise, in his book, American Sniper, and it was Chris who urged that this book be written. I owe him, and all of his SEAL friends, a very large debt of gratitude.
I worked with him for only a short while when he was deployed with Team 3 in Baghdad. I liked him immediately and we became great friends. He was very humble and respectful, easygoing and friendly. We came from very different backgrounds and religions, but there was never any friction because of it. He did his best to teach me a few things about bolt rifles, long-range shooting, and hunting as we passed the time between missions.
His Texas accent was hard to understand, though.
“Speak English!” I told him constantly.
He’d just laugh and make his Texas drawl even deeper. He was a great jokester and a fun person; his death still grieves me. I was lucky to see him not long before he was killed, and I still treasure that memory.
THE EXAMPLE OF Chris and other snipers was very much in my mind when the SEALs began training a group of Iraqi soldiers to perform overwatch as snipers.
The SEAL unit’s XO—the executive officer, or second in charge—asked that I get involved. I was reluctant. Having seen other Iraqi army units in action, I barely trusted these guys, and I must admit to some prejudice about the Iraqis’ fighting abilities. But gradually the dozen or so men won me over with a good work ethic and sincerity.
I didn’t teach them anything about weapons, of course, but I shared everything I knew about dealing with the families and strategies for gathering intel. I worked with the SEALs to make their exercises more realistic, booby-trapping targets and adding extra difficulties to the exercises.
I have to admit that I was proud of the Iraqi group when they “graduated” from the training sessions and began going out on missions with the SEALs. They weren’t SEALs, but they were probably the most professional group of non-American soldiers I worked with in Iraq.
BACK IN THE STATES, Tatt was working on getting us out. Congress had passed the law making it easier for Iraqis who’d worked with the Americans to emigrate; it provided special immigrant visas which were supposed to be in plentiful supply. Tatt was excited when he reviewed the requirements. Not only did I qualify for the program, but the law allowed for a large number of immigrants and streamlined the approval process.
At least it was supposed to. The paperwork proved as daunting as ever. Ironically, the easiest part was getting recommendations from the many officers and others I’d worked with. Men I barely remembered came forward to help Tatt, writing testimonials that made my eyes tear. They cited hundreds of missions I’d gone on, and talked about life-and-death situations that I barely remembered.
It was the “routine” part of the documentation that became the barrier. Asking for a birth certificate in America is commonplace. In Iraq, it’s unusual. Our record-keeping traditions are, should we say, very different from those in America.
Consistent spelling of names from one document to another is the exception rather than the rule. Spelling proved an Achilles’ heel, as several times the process of reviewing my application came to a complete halt as the spelling of a name on one record didn’t match the spelling on another. Tatt worked furiously to try to sort things out. Especially frustrating for him were the “normal” bureaucratic delays—it could take months for the State Department, say, to answer a simple inquiry. Their answer might contain another question. Several times he felt as if he was going back to square one.
The SEALs have an incredible informal network, both inside and outside the service; Tatt called in favors at the Pentagon and elsewhere as he put the package together. But the wheels of government moved at glacier pace, and while everyone agreed getting me out was a priority, he began to fear it would never happen.
Fortunately, Tatt didn’t share his despair with me. He continued to check in, using e-mail and occasional phone calls. He was optimistic about the process and our hopes—probably more so than he had a right to be. I passed those feelings on to Soheila, who by now was in need of every piece of optimism she could get. If things had calmed down in Mosul, she didn’t see it. She spoke constantly of escaping, desperation in her voice.
Another person might have given up at that point, collapsed into a weeping, paralyzed shell. Soheila wasn’t like that; she was a fighter, a survivor. But the pressure of the war had clearly become too intense. I ached to help her, but all I could do was repeat optimistic lines about how we would soon be free and in America.
Lines, not lies. I certainly believed them, for I had no other choice—if I didn’t believe we would be safe and free one day, I would have collapsed into a weepy, paralyzed person myself. I forced myself to be optimistic when I talked with her.
Optimism is a precious commodity in wartime, and for all the cigarettes and booze I consumed at what for me was a record pace, I found little to boost my mood for real. Only work, and being around the SEALs, made me feel whole; only my SEAL brothers made me feel there was hope for the future.
IF I’D BEEN tempted to dismiss Soheila’s concerns for her safety, a short trip I made back to Mosul more than demonstrated that they were real.
We were working with an Iraqi unit that was assigned to strike an insurgent base inside an apartment complex. Because of the situation, the SEALs didn’t need me as a translator or a liaison; instead, they assigned me to scout the area, then basically watch their backs during the operation. They gave me a radio and sent me out. I walked the area, surveying the complex and then finding a good vantage point to watch for enemy reinforcements. At least from my perspective, it turned out to be an easy operation; the insurgents had gotten cocky and were mostly off guard. I stayed in my vantage point, isolated and safe, filing routine reports throughout the day.
It was the walk through the nearby streets that was hard. Rubble lay in small piles next to the hulls of buildings, landslides ignited by nearby explosives. Bodies were cut up and littered the street—heads separated from torsos. The gore was incredible, even to someone who’d witnessed years of combat.
The block where I’d grown up?
It was far from the apartment complex, and in no way close to the American installations. But it, too, had been wracked by war. The neat if humble apartments and buildings I remembered were now either completely destroyed or, worse, battered from IEDs and other explosions nearby. My old home had been destroyed; the street looked like an abandoned battlefield, which I suppose it was.
The men who did this were supposedly working for God, but how can that be? If you are working for God, why would you harm those he created?
Separating a man’s head from his body—what do children think when they see that? What is the effect on wives and sisters, daughters and friends?
Is that the reaction God wanted?
I know what I felt. I didn’t think that the murderers were men of God. I knew they were savages and devils. Their violence had achieved the opposite of what they intended.
Certainly people were afraid. But the murderers never spoke of that as a goal. They cloaked their evil in lofty lies about Paradise and protecting our religion.
There was a lot of hatred in the city, but people were not entirely blind to the true nature of what was going on, and what the people who were targeting Americans were really like.
During my short time in Mosul, I heard comments like this:
“Your son was captured by the Americans? Oh, that’s good luck—they will not kill him.”
“The government? Too bad—they are corrupt. You are going to pay a lot of money to get him back.”
“Al-Qaeda? Oh . . . they are corrupt, and he is going to die.”
The physical danger that people lived in was terrible. Even those who were spared direct pain suffered. I would imagine that the things the children saw will have a deep effect on them for the rest of their lives. My children, I am sure, were affected. But there was nothing I or anyone else could do to shelter them from the horrors as long as they stayed in the city. Evil always loomed nearby, and there were much worse things than simply seeing a body in the street.
SOME WEEKS LATER, Soheila was inside our house with the rest of the family when she heard several cars screech to a stop on the street. She and our sister-in-law quickly put the children to bed, then ran out into the hallway. Our house had a little vestibule, separating the outside door from another inner door. The space was small, but psychologically it was large, an important barrier to the outside.
The yelling from the cars in front made it clear that the men who’d driven up were mujahideen. They were searching for someone who had the same name as one of the children inside.
“Where is his house?” shouted one. “We must find him.”
“Search the houses!”
Soheila put her body against the door. So did my sister-in-law. They started praying, saying the words a Muslim uses when burying the dead.
“Where is he?!”
The men outside were so close, Soheila could hear them charging the bolts on their AKs.
“If they come into the house, we will attack them and take their weapons,” she whispered to my sister-in-law. “We will fight them. We will not let them take the kids.”
The women waited. The men rushed into a house nearby and came out with someone who was put into the trunk of a car.
“Where’s the other house!” demanded the mujahideen. “The oth
er one we need to get. Where?”
Someone answered. There were more shouts, and then the sound of men getting into cars and driving off.
Both women collapsed onto the floor when the cars were gone, their bodies shaking. When finally they were able to get up, Soheila called me and told me what had happened. I immediately called a relative, who drove them to a safe house in a village far away. They stayed for two weeks before coming home.
IMPRESSED BY MY work with the Iraqi troops, a major with the ICTF invited me to go to share a few drinks one night. We went out and after a round or so, he asked what my plans for the future were.
I was noncommittal, a very valid response in Iraq.
“Why don’t you come to work with us here?” he asked, disappointed that I hadn’t jumped at the chance. “We will make you an officer, find you a house on the base—it will be a good life.”
He made it sound very attractive, but I wasn’t tempted. If I didn’t make it to America, I knew I was already doing what I wanted to do—work with the SEALs. I wasn’t going to give that up for anyone or anything.
Several other offers followed; I had a chance to work with other American military units as well as Iraqi. But I always turned them down. You don’t leave the best.
THE MISSIONS CONTINUED, one blurring into the next. From Mosul we went to Fallujah, then to Basra, and from there to Nasiriya.
Or was it the other way around? Did we go to all or any of these places?
In my memories, this time is a never-ending panorama of violence, of arrests, of people proclaiming to believe in God yet acting against His wishes. I remember snatches of conversations, but not their meanings. I remember my heart pounding, but can’t picture exactly why. I remember running, but now don’t know if it was real or a piece of a dream.
My reputation among the militia grew, just as it had among the al-Qaeda terrorists. One of my SEAL friends, Mikey U, says there was a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on my head. I don’t doubt it. By this time I was well known among the insurgents we targeted. Their bounty didn’t matter. I’d come to hate them even more than they hated me, and I had plenty of reason.
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 22