Full Battle Rattle

by Changiz Lahidji

  I saw the stepped-up hostility every time I left the Green Zone to escort convoys of supplies to Coalition bases in various parts of Iraq—gangs of armed men roaming the streets, mosques destroyed by car bombs, and groups of civilians shouting obscenities and throwing rocks at passing convoys. There was no respite within the Green Zone either, where rockets and mortars rained down on us nightly, despite the massive concrete walls, checkpoints of sandbags and iron gates, and squads of heavily armed US troops. Again, as in the latter months of our engagement in Somalia, I wondered what the hell we were doing here and what we were trying to accomplish.

  Midday March 31, 2004, I set out in a heavily armored Land Cruiser, my M4 locked and loaded, to lead a convoy of seven trucks filled with supplies for a US Marine base a few miles west of the city of Fallujah. Though the temperature hovered in the comfortable mid-70s, I sweated under my armored vest. Part of that had to do with my state of anxiety. That morning five US Marines had been killed outside Fallujah by a roadside bomb. Fifteen Iraqis had been seriously wounded when a car bomb intended for an Iraqi police convoy exploded in the city of Baqubah.

  The four of us in the armored Land Cruiser were on high alert. I sat in the backseat, and a colleague manning a .240-cal machine gun sat beside me. Our team leader (TL) rode in the passenger seat beside the driver. Providing security at the end of the convoy were four military contractors from Blackwater riding in two unarmored Mitsubishi SUVs. One of them was a friendly former Navy SEAL and workout fanatic named Scotty Helvenston, who had been featured on the reality TV show Man vs. Beast.

  The rubble-strewn road we were on served as Fallujah’s main highway and cut through the center of what was known as the Sunni Triangle—a densely populated region northwest of Baghdad where Saddam Hussein had strong support. Locals referred to Fallujah as “the city of mosques.” We followed the ancient Euphrates River and passed the drab concrete walls of Abu Ghraib prison, which was being used by the CIA and US Army to house Iraqi detainees.

  Few people outside Iraq knew its name at this point. A month later it would gain worldwide notoriety following a story detailing prisoner abuse on the TV show 60 Minutes.

  Ahead stood a narrow metal bridge that would take us over the river and into the city. Blocking our approach stood a crowd of angry locals, some of whom carried handmade signs.

  “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a welcome party,” our driver announced.

  They were mostly young men and numbered around fifty. I wondered who had alerted them and if any of them were armed.

  “What do we do now?” the contractor beside me asked.

  “Keep moving,” our TL responded. “We’re going to try to push through.”

  “What happens if they’re insurgents?” the driver suggested.

  “Keep moving. Don’t engage unless they fire first!” Through his headset, the TL told the four guys in the SUVs at the back of the convoy to wait.

  “For what purpose?” someone in the rear Mitsubishi asked.

  “So you can clear the bridge in case we have to turn back.”

  “Maybe we should call for backup,” I suggested.

  “Guns up!” said our TL. “Keep pushing forward.”

  I readied my M4 and focused on the hands outside to see if anyone was carrying a weapon. The protesters screamed in broken English and Arabic, “Death to America! Death to President Bush! Allah Akhbar! Fallujah will be free!” They parted just enough for us to squeeze through, our hearts in our throats while the Iraqis outside slapped, punched, kicked, and spat at our Land Rover.

  “Nasty motherfuckers!” the gunner beside me groaned.

  Stealing glances to our rear, I saw the first truck make it through, then the second, third, and fourth, and reported everything to the rest of the team. As the fifth truck emerged from the crowd, I heard a peal of automatic weapons fire.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Must be the guys from Blackwater.”

  More shots followed as our TL tried to make radio contact with Scotty Helvenston and the others.

  “All vehicles report,” he shouted into the radio.

  I couldn’t hear anything outside over the roar of the engine. Peering through the dust behind me, I tried but couldn’t make out the two Mitsubishis.

  “Boss,” I said. “I don’t think they made it.”

  “Maybe they turned around,” he responded.

  “You want me to go back?” the driver asked.

  “Hell, no,” someone barked. “Haul ass to the base.”

  The ordeal had lasted no more than three minutes, but felt like hours. When we reached the Marine camp we were greeted with the terrible news that the four Blackwater guys had been killed by the mob.

  I was shocked and horrified. Later, I watched the video of their burned bodies being desecrated, dragged through the streets, and hung from the bridge.

  I felt sick for weeks afterward. Maybe we could have saved the four contractors by turning back. Maybe the mob would have overwhelmed our SUV and killed us, too.

  Angry and distressed, I quit my job at DynCorp and went to Jordan to try to get my head together. A two-hour swim in the Dead Sea helped. After that, I flew home to Santa Clara to spend time with my family.

  Three months later, I was back in Iraq, this time working as the base manager at a place called Camp Taji, on the outskirts of Baghdad. Out of five mobile homes guarded by Iraqis, I ran armored security teams that escorted VIPs from the airport to the Green Zone and back—on a road known to the Iraqis as “Death Street” and to the Americans as “IED Alley.” My unit consisted of twenty Lebanese soldiers, four South African army vets, and five Americans. Despite the tall barricades and tight security, our base was frequently hit by mortars and rockets.

  The attacks became so frequent that we started to take them for granted. One night I had just flopped down on my bed and fired up my laptop when Katyusha rockets started to rain down on us with their distinct whistling sound.

  A few seconds later my door flew open and a Lebanese guy on my team named Hassan flew in.

  “Changiz,” he exclaimed, “are you coming to the bunker?”

  “Not this time,” I replied. “I think I’ll watch a movie.”

  Thereupon, I clicked on a link to Mission: Impossible and the credits started rolling. Hassan shrugged, pulled up a chair, and we watched the movie together as Katyushas fell around us.

  The six-lane expressway my team and I traveled daily, from what was once known as Saddam Hussein International Airport to central Baghdad, was ten miles of concrete hell flanked by Sunni neighborhoods populated with Hussein loyalists. These neighborhoods, which were once designed to protect the military strongman from possible assassins, were now insurgent hideouts.

  Driving the highway was a mobile form of Russian roulette. You never knew when an insurgent car might drive up beside you at high speed, lower its window, and hit you with a burst of machine gun fire. Or when a truck laden with explosives would fly down one of the on-ramps straight into your convoy. Or when a daisy-chain of artillery shells buried under the roadway might be set off by a cell phone.

  It was so dangerous that death was a common occurrence, and local cab drivers demanded $2,000 per person for a one-way trip. Over a dozen Westerners lost their lives on the road while I was there, and several of my men were seriously injured.

  * * *

  The contracting work in Iraq was plentiful, but the atmosphere poisonous and bleak. Everywhere you went people were angry at the US, because their families were dying and their homes, mosques, and businesses were being destroyed. Day by day, hope seemed to get buried under more levels of hatred, debris, and dust. Conditions were going from bad to worse.

  Determined to escape the cycle of death, I started shopping for opportunities elsewhere. In January 2006, an old friend named David Stroop called. He said he was working for PAE International—an engineering firm that had been founded in the 1950s during the effort to rebuild Japan, which later dive
rsified to provide support to US military bases and State Department facilities overseas. It had recently been purchased by Lockheed Martin.

  Dave asked, “How would you like to go to Darfur?”

  “Darfur, Sudan?”

  “Yes.”

  “To do what?”

  “Serve as a cease-fire monitor for the African Union.”

  “A cease-fire monitor? What does that entail?”

  “It’s pretty straightforward. I’ll explain everything when you get to DC.”

  “Okay, Dave. Should I bring my combat gear, or a weapon?”

  “Negative on both,” Dave answered. “Any kind of uniform or insignia you get will be provided by the AU.”

  I bought an old pair of Army desert fatigues, packed them in a duffel, and flew to Dulles Airport for a flight to Khartoum. Waiting in line to board the flight were two guys wearing green berets. I recognized one as my former SF colleague Richard Rodriguez and slapped the beret off his head.

  Richard turned to see who it was and recognized my smiling face. “Changiz, you son of a bitch,” he said. “What the fuck you doing here?”

  “They hired me to keep your ass in line,” I joked.

  “More likely the other way around.”

  The other guy was another former SF colleague, Serafin “Serf” Tellez.

  We traded war stories all the way to Khartoum. Outside the sleek-looking airport we were met my two locals driving a beat-up SUV. They drove us to a PAE International safe house in the urban center where the Blue and White Niles meet. I had expected a cleaner, less run-down version of Mogadishu. But the city I saw out the window was boisterous and modern with a surprising number of tall glass business towers. The locals gave off a friendly vibe.

  That positive impression lasted the three days we waited in Khartoum for a twin-engine plane to ferry us west to Darfur—which means “Land of the Fur People,” who were seventeenth-century immigrants from Central Africa. The land itself consisted of mostly semiarid plains in an area roughly the size of Spain. Nothing about it shouted agricultural productivity, or economic development.

  I learned that the crisis in Darfur, which had been termed “genocide” by the first Bush administration and International Criminal Court, had its roots in the long-term economic and political marginalization of non-Arabs in Africa’s largest country, Sudan. This problem was exacerbated by a series of droughts that began in 1972 and intensified the desertification of the country and led to disputes over land between non-Arab sedentary farmers from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit tribes and Arab nomads.

  In the mid-1980s, when a Libyan-sponsored Arab supremacist movement spread into neighboring Sudan, many non-Arab Darfuri farmers felt that their interests were marginalized further. The wedge between the tribes of Darfur and the Arab-dominated national government widened even more in 1989 when General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir seized power in a bloodless coup. Declaring himself president, Bashir disbanded rival political parties and institutionalized Sharia law throughout northern Sudan.

  Over the next two decades, President Bashir adopted a policy of segregating non-Arabs and dividing Darfur into three separate regions in order to weaken tribal unity. This led to armed rebellion on the part of some tribesmen, which began in February 2003 when two separate African rebel groups—the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) took up arms against the Arab-led government. The rebels contended that the Sudanese government had ignored the Darfur region, leaving it underdeveloped and stripping it of political power.

  In response, the Bashir government bombed villages to force the rebels out. It also armed an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed (or “Devils on Horseback”)—characterized as a militantly racist and pan-Arabist organization recruited from Sudanese Arab tribes. Mounted on camels and riding in helicopters, the heavily armed Janjaweed militias stormed through villages, pillaging, raping, and otherwise brutalizing terrified tribespeople. They specifically targeted members of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit tribes. An estimated 1.4 million of them fled from farms and villages and sought shelter in hastily organized refugee camps. The crisis eventually spread into neighboring Chad as 100,000 refugees fled into that desperately poor country pursued by Janjaweed militiamen.

  The UN, US, and other members of the international community condemned the Sudanese government’s scorched-earth tactics. Complicating the situation in Darfur was the appearance of splinter rebel groups that kidnapped humanitarian workers and seized food supplies. Amnesty International and other groups accused China and Russia of supplying arms to the Bashir government in violation of a UN arms embargo.

  As the Bashir government and rebel groups traded accusations, an eclectic coalition of religious leaders, NGOs, college students, human rights groups, and Hollywood celebrities spread awareness of the large-scale humanitarian disaster. World powers were reluctant to intervene. Some called the crisis genocide, others termed it a civil war that had gotten out of control.

  No one argued that the consequences were catastrophic. A 2005 British parliamentary report estimated that over 300,000 Darfuri had died and countless others were injured—some by fighting and many more by disease and malnutrition brought on by the conflict.

  Most international efforts centered on negotiating a cease-fire to end the fighting. Many observers accused the Sudanese government of purposely drawing out these talks in order to complete its ethnic cleansing of Darfur. Between 2003 and early 2006, when I arrived, numerous cease-fires had been signed and broken.

  Richard, Serf, and I joined a force of eighty-some African Union cease-fire monitors protected by roughly 800 troops from Rwanda, Nigeria, Algeria, and South Africa. The AU assigned me the rank of major and sent me to a base outside the town of Al-Fashir—the capital of North Darfur and a traditional caravan post. My job was to report any movement of JEM rebels against Sudanese government forces and vice versa.

  The contrast between Khartoum and Al-Fashir was startling. While the former presented itself as a bustling city filled with confident, well-dressed people, Al-Fashir was a collection of tin-roofed huts on a parched plain. Its several thousand residents lived in constant fear of attack.

  Every morning, my fellow monitors and I would attend a briefing led by a South African colonel, who served as base commander. We’d hear reports of what had occurred in the field the day before. Most of them were horrific—a half-dozen villagers burned to death in such and such sector; a food convoy attacked on the way to such and such refugee camp; residents of another camp beaten with sticks; a third camp raided and eighteen residents held captive and ordered to pay a diya—also known as blood money.

  In most cases we received conflicting reports about who was responsible. Oftentimes the inciting event was some sort of personal vendetta or tribal dispute. The victims were usually from among over a million refugees housed in camps run by the UN and other organizations. A night didn’t pass when either Janjaweed militiamen or JEM or SLA rebels attacked a camp or village.

  Two or three times a week, I’d help guard convoys of trucks that went to resupply these camps. I wasn’t supposed to be armed, but I carried an AK-47 with three full mags, which I’d hide under the front seat. I always stationed myself in the lead Toyota extended-cab pickup with a Senegalese driver and two Algerian soldiers behind me.

  There were no roads to speak of, so we’d bounce over flat, parched terrain and stop at different camps, which were scattered across the plain and made up of primitive tents enclosed with a barbed wire fence. There were over 200 of these camps scattered throughout Darfur. Some were run by NGOs like CARE International Switzerland and World Vision and were guarded by local police officers trained by the AU-UN mission or Rwandan soldiers. Many had no protection.

  The camps had names like Kass, Chad, and Zam Zam. One of the biggest, Kalma, boasted over 70,000 refugees—predominantly women and children. Overcrowding and poor sanitation were endemic.

  Families used to abundant vegetables and fruit no
w lived on a watery stew made out of wheat, beans, oil, salt, and protein powder. The women carried water, gathered firewood, did the cooking, and cared for the children, while men and boys in dust-covered jeans and robes, who had previously worked on small farms, sat around with nothing to do.

  Daily temperatures shot up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and makeshift shelters offered little respite from the sun. The June–September rainy season brought some relief. But because of a lack of proper drainage, once the rain started, shelters and latrines flooded, and there were outbreaks of dysentery and cholera. Medical assistance from organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross couldn’t meet the needs of thousands, and children died daily.

  As peacekeeping monitors we had no resources of our own, but I tried to help any way I could, handing out whatever candy, cookies, sweets, medicine, or food I could get my hands on. I did a lot of listening, introducing myself as Mohammed and addressing the locals in Arabic. Everyone had a point of view, the refugees, the tribal leaders, the police, the foreign troops, and even locals loyal to the JEM.

  I collected all their cell phone numbers, kept in touch, tried to mediate conflicts, and reported on needs. Progress was painfully slow and the resources of the AU-UN mission were woefully inadequate.

  At night I returned to our AU mission house in Al-Fashir, which was luxurious by Darfur standards but would have been considered primitive in the States. In town I got a chance to see livestock and something that approached normal life. Every morning women passed outside our barbed wire fence transporting bundles of twigs and branches. As they rode by seated sidesaddle they’d point to their mouths, indicating they wanted something to eat.