Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  ‘Why couldn’t you just send ’em along with the convoy?’

  ‘Against the rules. The US Army doesn’t chauffeur Iraqi civilians.’

  ‘Ill tell you something, Mad Dog, you must be the only bastard in Iraq who’s not bending the rules.’

  ‘Thing is, Dai, once you bend rules you end up with them broken. Then there aren’t any rules.’ McQueen threw up his wide quarterback shoulders. ‘I’m looking forward to the ride.’

  ‘We could check out St Elijah on the way back,’ I said.

  Mad Dog folded his arms and the way he nodded thoughtfully it was like he was considering the idea for the first time.

  ‘That’s a damned good idea, Ash,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to take my camera.’

  We filed out and made our way to the mess hall. It was packed with soldiers and civilians, trays clattering, food slopping on plates, cans hissing open. I took my usual cheeseburger and Freedom fries, left the tray on a table and went to the fridge to grab some drinks. Tanya followed and I picked out a Diet Coke and gave it to her while I grabbed myself two cartons of milk. She pursed her lips in thoughtful approval, realizing I had noted what she was drinking the previous evening.

  ‘James, I wanted to say, I wasn’t, you know, leading you on last night. I hope I wasn’t giving out the wrong signals?’

  ‘Signals? No, of course not. It never crossed my mind,’ I said.

  Lines furrowed her brow. ‘Is that a fact? Hmm. I guess I must be losing my touch.’ She smiled and the eyebrow went up. ‘Look, when I said it was the closest I’d been to a guy for a long time, it was true. It is true.’

  Tanya looked me straight in the eye and my pulse quickened. I remembered studying her across the table the previous night, how her eyes had looked wild and full of strange energy.

  ‘After the mortar attack and all,’ she said, ‘there was, like, a buzz going.’

  I patted my heart. ‘I felt it,’ I said.

  ‘Let’s just, you know, see what happens?’

  ‘Best offer I’ve had all day,’ I told her, and the vague smile bowed her pink lips. She glanced across the hall towards Dai.

  ‘He’s something else,’ she said.

  ‘Not your type,’ I replied and she flushed.

  ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  I grinned at her.

  ‘You doos,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what that means, but you totally are one.’ And her eyes had that wild look again.

  Along with about a hundred other guys I kept my vision zeroed on Tanya Carillo’s hips as we made our way back to the table. I plastered my cheeseburger in ketchup and watched Dai stabbing the air with his fork between mouthfuls of meat loaf. He was rattling out policy failures in Afghanistan while Mad Dog passively took it like a breakwater shrugging off the incoming waves.

  Dai was now rambling on about Israel and conspiracies and God knows what, with loudly spoken words like extraordinary rendition, Bagram and Guantánamo starting to draw some attention from neighbouring tables.

  During the invasion of Afghanistan, Dai was saying, the CIA was paying thousands of dollars in blood money for al-Qaeda suspects. He had seen a handbill spread among the Afghanis that promised ‘wealth beyond your wildest dreams’ for each terrorist handed in. And who did the tribal warlords hand over: goatherds, Pakistani teenagers, bin Laden’s illiterate driver and as many of their own enemies and rivals as they could persuade the Americans to pay for.

  ‘In December, a couple of months back, your lot let over three hundred prisoners out of Guantánamo, cleared of all charges after five fucking years,’ Dai said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘What does that say about the CIA and US intelligence?’

  ‘It says, Keep your voice down a tad, there are guys in this room who are doing a good job – and there are guys who have lost their buddies.’

  Tanya passed around some coffees and settled back in her seat.

  ‘What about you, Dai, what do you think the war’s all about?’ she asked. ‘Or is it classified?’

  ‘Nothing I do is classified, darling. Open book, that’s me.’

  He leaned forward, folding his arms, and the red dragon seemed to be breathing as he held her gaze. He told her the same thing we always told newcomers to our debates. That basically we had no idea, none at all, because if we did, we wouldn’t be debating it.

  ‘Jim and me,’ he indicated me with a shrug, ‘we don’t know, but then again, we’re not supposed to. We’re just the hired help. We just always find it surprising that whenever we have these chats where we put the world to rights and discuss slanderous rumour and hearsay, that none of you lot ever seem to ask yourself any of these questions.’

  ‘Hey, at my pay-grade I just do as I’m told,’ Tanya replied. She grinned at McQueen. ‘What’s your excuse, sir?’

  ‘What, you think it’s different when you’re an officer? Hell, I’m just another soldier obeying orders, whether or not I know why. “Ours is not to reason why”, remember?’

  ‘Mate, been there and got the T-shirt,’ Dai snorted.

  They all laughed. At least there was something they agreed on.

  ‘There is one more thing,’ said Dai.

  ‘Let’s have it,’ said McQueen.

  ‘Globalization,’ he said. ‘Before we invaded Afghanistan, it provided about 20 per cent of the world’s opium. Now it’s 80 per cent. While we’re kicking in doors and shooting up villages, the bandits are taking the raw product over the mountains to Iran and Turkey, where they turn it into heroin and flood the streets of London and Washington. I can’t think of a better example of the free market – our junkies are funding the Taliban.’

  ‘You’re such a goddamn cynic,’ said Mad Dog.

  ‘Don’t mean I’m wrong, does it?’ he replied and leaned close to McQueen. ‘Look, mate, in the War on Terror what are the goals exactly? What’s the timeframe? The enemy is cunning and adaptable, and – instead of building hospitals, infrastructure and all that hearts-and-minds shit to draw local civpop support away from the radical cunts – we’ve only gone and poked the whole Muslim world into a right fucking frenzy, haven’t we? It doesn’t take the brains of an archbishop to see that invading Afghan and Iraq has given every Islamist nutter around the world a common cause, does it?’

  Dai paused to swig some Coke, and I chipped in, reminding Mad Dog of a conversation we’d had a year previously.

  ‘The thing is, Steve, the attack on the Twin Towers was the classic tactic of the underdog, to provoke the larger and more powerful party to overreact and push the undecided moderate population into the underdog’s camp. The US reacted predictably and played right into their hands.’

  ‘So what should we have done? Nothing?’ demanded Shaun.

  He was looking hot under the collar. Even Tanya had lost her smile. I realized that we were once again treading the edge of what was acceptable conversation.

  ‘No, of course not,’ I replied. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s nothing personal. But consider this, after 9/11 the whole world was outraged, and that includes many moderate Muslims. 9/11 wasn’t just a great opportunity for al-Qaeda to push the US into overreacting, it was a great opportunity for the US to pull away popular support for Islamist terrorism on a global scale.’

  I paused. I held their gaze and they nodded grudgingly.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ said Shaun.

  ‘You guys had the moral high ground. You had the choice to do almost anything and the world would have supported you. And you chose War on Terror. Now, six years later, with US troops fighting in two Muslim countries and thousands dead on both sides, you’ve used up your credit in terms of public sympathy.’

  They started to look stubborn again.

  ‘So what was the right choice?’ asked Tanya with a little steel behind her voice.

  ‘War on Terror but with more thought put into it? Honestly I don’t know,’ I told her. I tried to be conciliatory and her frown turned into a thoughtful look. ‘Who knows, maybe I
would have chosen the same thing, because vengeance is all about emotional satisfaction for the public. But I’m not President of the United States. And his job isn’t about satisfying emotional cravings, he has a responsibility to make decisions in the interests of the public good, even if those decisions are unpopular. I mean, can any of you look me in the eye and honestly say you believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have NOT increased terrorist recruiting and activity?’

  ‘I guess not,’ answered Tanya after a pause.

  ‘And can any of you honestly say that it was a total surprise, that nobody thought that us invading Iraq was going to piss off Muslims around the world? Of course not. Everyone knew that that was not just likely, but almost a certain consequence of the invasion.’

  The others all nodded, understanding.

  ‘So,’ I continued. ‘I don’t know what the right choice was, but I would hate to think that George Bush made this decision thinking about political survival and public opinion, rather than giving a bit more weight to the almost certain consequences. And the fact that I can even wonder about that is bad news in itself.’

  ‘I promise you this,’ continued Cobus, joining in unexpectedly. ‘The war has made the world more unsafe, more terrified, and billions of dollars that would have been better spent on almost anything else have been transferred to private corporations supplying services for the war. Believe me, I’m in the security industry and we’ve never seen it so good. Profits are through the roof and, from a free-market point of view, as a contractor, this is a bottomless well of lucrative contracts with no incentive for it ever to end.’

  There was a moment’s silence following this unexpected announcement.

  ‘Jeez, I forgot how depressing you guys are,’ said Mad Dog.

  ‘The truth hurts, mate,’ said Dai.

  CHAPTER 11

  MAD DOG AND team were busy arranging his convoy to Basra. He was taking Tanya with him, on her first trip ‘outside the wire’ on a fairly straightforward run down Route Tampa. They would depart at three o’clock the next morning. The two sergeants, Shaun and Scott, were staying behind to mind the shop. Dai and I had our packs on our backs, having packed up from Cobus’s container, and I felt at peace with the world as we took a stroll along the blast wall-lined boulevards down to the river to meet Cobus and pick up the vehicles scrounged up for Sammy’s family. After dropping them off Dai and I would be heading off to spend the night in Aradisa Idah at the SF house.

  Dai clicked, flicked and rolled his thumb over his Zippo in one motion, and lit up. He smoked quickly, as if he was in a hurry and wanted to get it over with. I told him about my meeting with Sammy and his family. There wasn’t much to report. They were hanging on, keeping their heads down.

  ‘I should have shot that cunt Ibrahim when I had the chance.’

  ‘Make sure you take it next time.’

  ‘You know what they say, Jim. Opportunity only knocks once.’

  ‘Does it, though?’

  He drew down on the cigarette and nodded as he thought about that.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he added, and ground out the fag beneath his boot.

  Brilliant green birds lifted into the air as we passed, and settled in the date palms. The maintenance men were still sat on the rubble. They didn’t look as if they had moved an inch in the last six hours.

  ‘Jesus, look at these poor cunts, still hard at it,’ pointed Dai, ‘no respite, working their fingers to the bone. Giving them rocks a damned good sitting on, they are. Can’t be easy having to drink all that chai, hey Abdul?’

  Laziness aside, I wondered why anyone would want to sit all day next to the crater at a proven enemy aiming point for mortar fire.

  It still came as a surprise to me that in the Green Zone, behind the walls where Iraqis were not allowed to go, there was a community of locals who had lived in the palace complex before the war and had remained there ever since. They were Saddam’s clerks and cleaners, chauffeurs and gardeners, working now for the Americans and relieved, I was sure, to be protected from the world outside. If Dai was right and everything the CIA planned leaked out, here was a large pool of potential fifth columnists.

  We had passed the PX, turned left at the blasted shell of the Ba’ath Party former headquarters, passed the site of the old Haji market and the CSH, then hung a right to walk down to the river. We stopped to watch two Iraqis moving a car. A vintage Chevrolet had broken down and a guy with another car had stuck a tyre between the two vehicles to push it. Each time the rear car braked, the Chevy shot forward, the tyre fell out and they had to chase it down the street. It was like a scene from the Keystone Cops, the drivers yelling and throwing their arms in the air.

  Dai lit another fag. ‘Wankers,’ he remarked.

  ‘Probably haven’t got a rope,’ I said, and he shook his head as he looked back at me.

  ‘No, mate, they’re just wankers.’

  Iraqis often had a cock-eyed way of doing things, but I never mistook this for a lack of intelligence. It was an irony to me that Iraq was the cradle of civilization and could with a stretch of the imagination claim to have planted the seeds that led to the Renaissance.

  When in the seventh century AD the Arabs conquered what today is called Iraq, they found highly developed architecture and schools of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and natural science many of which predated the Greeks. After establishing Baghdad as their capital, the Abbasid caliphs created a team of scribes and filled the library with translations of Greek writers, including Aristotle, Euclid, the mathematician, and Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine.

  Unfortunately the subsequent obsession with Islamic scholarship and interpretation of the Prophet’s precedents would take up much of the time, intellectual debates and Arab thinking by the time of the Renaissance, but the work of early scholars influenced Muslim philosophy and, for five centuries, Arabic replaced Greek as the language of scientific enquiry. When Christian scholars followed the crusades to the Holy Land, they were shocked to discover that the Arabs had made greater strides than them in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, chemistry, architecture, even gardening. Then, for reasons of interest only to historians and academics, as the light of scientific and technological enquiry grew brighter in Europe, it dimmed further in the Arab world.

  An obscene quantity of priceless treasures were lost when the Baghdad museum was pillaged, but the early Christian and prehistoric sites in Iraq remain preserved in the dry air. Between battles and water-maintenance checks, I had come across temples and fortresses dating back six thousand years. You put the AK on safety and, when you study the fine work of these long-vanished craftsmen, you wonder how much we have evolved since the Euphrates and Tigris rose in what they say was the great flood and deposited the ark on Mount Ararat.

  I was sure Colonel McQueen was going to try to take in St Elijah on our excursion to Mosul – not far from Ararat, now I come to think of it – but he at least had it easy since the monastery lay within the protection of FOB Marez. The sites I had wanted to see were all in hardcore insurgent areas. We had passed the turn-off to the Aqar Quf ziggurat a couple of times when driving out into the Western Desert from Baghdad. That might have been safe to visit, but the moment had never been right to take a detour and see this amazing monument, already 1,500 years old by the birth of Christ and only a few centuries younger than the Etemenanki ziggurat at Babylon, the one most closely associated with the legend of the Tower of Babel. However, there is virtually nothing left of the Etemenanki, and the other great Iraqi ziggurat at Ur, from the twenty-first century BC, is unfortunately so reconstructed that I believe nothing of the original can be seen.

  Sammy had planned all the time I was in Baghdad to take me to Samarra to see the Malwiya, the soaring, conical-shaped minaret attached to the Great Mosque. The structure was built by the Abbasids in the ninth century AD and combines the ideals of Islam with the architecture of ancient Babylonia, the sheer walkway circling the tower making the climb to God a humbling experie
nce. When the US Department of Defense created a set of cards to educate the military on the importance of respecting Iraq’s cultural heritage, the Malwiya was one of the featured sites.

  Dai clapped his hands, ending my musing. The Keystone Cops had got the car away on about the ninth attempt.

  ‘We could have put that on YouTube,’ he said. ‘Hang on a second, I need a leak.’

  We wandered into the nearest palace building that stood open, without any security or military banning access. Many of the palaces had been turned over by the CF, for example to be used by the Jordanian embassy. This was one of the few that still had busy offices filled with Americans in both civilian dress and desert-camouflage BDUs.

  We made our way along a pink and pale green marble corridor with murals depicting idealized desert scenes, an extended caravanserai of dancers, traders, camels and sturdy men with bold moustaches and an uncanny resemblance to the former tenant.

  ‘Where’s the gents’ room, mate?’ Dai asked a guy in fatigues hurrying towards us.

  ‘Make a left at the end,’ he said and kept going.

  A scene on the mural showed a group of Arabs in fancy headdresses meeting a group of Africans in white djellabas.

  ‘How’s Africa treating you, then?’ Dai asked.

  ‘Weather’s fantastic, food’s all right, but I’m getting a bit bored of it if I’m honest,’ I replied. ‘I’m with a good team although one of them’s a Frenchie who gives me more drama than the locals, as you can imagine.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Medical’s a pain in the arse. I’m popping malaria pills every day, and you need to stay close to the cities to get anything like decent treatment for even simple ailments,’ I continued. ‘Otherwise, out in the country, if you get a toothache you can fucking die from it while they’re out praying to the sun for you to recover. Nice people by and large, bearing in mind they’ve just come through a shitty civil war. The further you move away from the coast the worse it gets.’