I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  Someone who never left the FOB, who never “goes over the wire” (the wire being the perimeter that separates the American bases from the rest of Iraq) was a “FOBBIT,” like a Hobbit. A subspecies of the Fobbit was the TOCroach—someone who doesn’t even leave the headquarters. It was the latest version of slurs from previous conflicts, like REMF (rear echelon motherfucker), or POGUEs (people other than grunts), meant to underscore the difference between those who fight the war, the troops who are killing or at risk of regularly being killed, and those who generally stay out of harm’s way and support those who fight the war. There were names for Iraqis, too. Vietnam had gooks and Somalia skinnies. In Iraq, the military had depersonalized the lingo—sometimes Iraqis were Hajis (each base had a market run by Iraqis called “the Haji shop”), but more often they were merely “local nationals,” or “AIF,” or just “bad guys” and “terrorists.”

  If you wanted to relate to the soldiers or marines (never refer to a marine as a “soldier” in print, I was warned; marines are marines; use “troops” if you need to generalize between the services), you had to understand their acronym-laced dialogue.

  “The BUB’s at 1630 in the TOC, and Delta’s CO is going, but the BC’s not going to be there so the S-3’s running it.” Translation: The daily battle update brief is at 4:30P.M. in the headquarters, and the commanding officer of Delta company will attend. The battalion commander won’t, so the battalion’s operations officer will be in charge. “Our ROE is fucking retarded.” The rules of engagement, under Multi-National Force Iraq, are unsatisfactory. “Three AIF detained, seven AIF KIA. Two LNs WIA and one TCN WIA requesting MEDVAC, nine-line to follow.” Three insurgents captured and seven killed; two Iraqi civilians and one third-country national (meaning a civilian who is not Iraqi or American) need to be brought to the hospital.

  Roger. Outstanding. What the fuck over.

  IED was the deadliest abbreviation. The improvised explosive device. The roadside bomb. The cause of over 60 percent of American casualties. I wanted to understand the IED—the Eye-E-Dee in Eye-Rack—so I put in requests to embed with the guys who go looking for them.

  Scott Johnson and Jack Tapes helped me pack for my first embed. I looked through the equipment we had in the bureau: a collection of helmets, eye protection, and body armor that had piled up in the house since the war started. There was a heavy blue vest that had a high collar to protect the neck and a piece of material that hung down to protect the groin. It came with a Velcro sticker that announcedPRESS across the chest. Tapes told me that the neck collar and groin cover probably wouldn’t actually stop any shrapnel. He also pointed out that there was no need anymore to announce you were press, as that wouldn’t prevent anyone from shooting you. He recommended a new set, which we had in brown and blue, that was about four or five pounds lighter. It had two ceramic plates, one in front and one in back, that could stop an AK-47 round. It also had thin material on the sides that could stop 9mm bullets. I chose the brown one. Tapes took a piece of silver electrical tape, wrote my blood type on it (O POS), and stuck it on the front of the vest. Then I chose a large black helmet, Wiley X eye protection, and loaded my Sony Vaio laptop with software for the BGAN, a satellite modem that looked like a small gray box and could get a high-speed Internet connection from almost anywhere, as long as there was nothing obstructing the signal. I brought my phones: an Iraqna, a small gray Nokia that worked only on the local network; my T-Mobile, which worked internationally; my BlackBerry, which also worked internationally; a reliable Thuraya satellite phone for a backup. I brought my Sony digital tape recorder, my seven megapixel digital camera, five notebooks, and a half-dozen pens. I threw in two pairs of jeans and two pairs of Old Navy khaki cargo pants that I’d bought with Andi in New York, five white T-shirts, a towel, four pairs of hiking socks, four pairs of boxers, three long-sleeved button-down shirts, a pair of shoes, and a pair of lightweight hiking boots. I found a silver sleeping bag. I packed the electronics, along with chargers for all of them, into a black Victorinox laptop bag, and stuffed the rest of my gear into a purple North Face bag.

  I tried it out to see how it felt. Wearing the body armor and helmet, with the North Face pack on my back, and the laptop bag slung over my shoulder, I could barely move.

  Scott took one look at me and said, “Dude, you’re bringing way too much stuff.”

  Tapes gave me a smaller backpack that he’d used in the Royal Marines. It was black, compact, and looked much cooler than my purple North Face rack. I got rid of a bunch of my extra clothes, my pair of shoes, and a medical kit (it took up space, and I figured I’d be with military guys who would have that). Tapes helped me jam everything else into his pack.

  The next night, eleven days after I’d arrived in Iraq, I was riding in a Buffalo on my first combat patrol. I was with the Desert Rogues, of the 1st Battalion 64th Armor Regiment, out of FOB Rustamiyah in southeastern Baghdad. The Buffalo is a massive armored vehicle, built originally for minesweeping. It weighs more than forty thousand pounds and has an excess of video cameras and mechanical arms, traveling on six giant tires. To get in, you climb up a ladder on the back, then step through a small door into a passenger compartment about ten feet above the ground. There was allegedly air-conditioning, but the whole cabin was hot air and steam and my eye protection fogged up. My body armor and helmet were soaking with sweat. The point of the trip was to find bombs, or as one officer described it: “You’ll be driving around at five miles per hour looking at trash.”

  Trash is everywhere in Iraq. It is the most distinguishing feature of the landscape. The trash defies description. There are huge piles of it outside homes, on doorsteps, in street corners, filling any vacant lot. No triple-canopy jungle or endless dunes, just pile upon pile of twisted and discarded junk, plastic, scrap metal, empty bottles, tin cans, cardboard boxes, gasoline containers, decaying fruit, a stunning collection of random shit. It is mind-boggling, as if every family in Iraq decided to toss their garbage cans out the front door at the same time, and when they figured out that no one was going to come pick it up, just proceeded to cover the trash with more trash.

  In all that trash the insurgents hide their deadliest weapons, the IEDs. The IEDs are camouflaged as trash. They look like almost everything else on the ground. Very clever, very scary, very hard to see.

  “What are the chances of finding bombs?” I asked the driver.

  He looked at me. “We’ve been doing daily sweeps since April,” he said. “So far, we haven’t found a single bomb.”

  “Oh, okay. Why is that?”

  “The Buffalo makes a lot of noise. The fucking insurgents can hear it coming a mile away and take their bombs someplace else.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  The patrol inched along. I tried to take notes, capture some dialogue. We were the middle vehicle, sandwiched between a tank and a couple of Humvees.

  There was a flash a few hundred yards back. I didn’t hear any noise. A call came over the radio—a local national had driven too close to the convoy, so the machine gunner opened up. The LN was apparently drunk and had driven in by mistake. The bullet had hit him in the leg, and the car went off the road into a ditch. The Iraqi police would bring him to the hospital. The machine gunner was twenty-one years old. One of the soldiers in the Buffalo with me said, “He’ll be saying he’s sorry now, but I bet he’ll fucking brag about shooting the guy later.”

  The patrol continued, on to Sadr City and back for about four hours. Iraqi families stared up at the colossal machine as we passed. We did not find any bombs. The captain who was running the patrol confronted me afterward. He was worried I was going to write about the shooting.

  “This is a twenty-one-year-old kid. Are you going to ruin his life?”

  I hadn’t planned to write about the shooting, figuring it wasn’t really news. An American accidentally shooting an Iraqi was a common occurrence, and the story on how the military didn’t release statistics on the frequency of accidental shootings had alread
y been told.

  “I was praying,” the captain continued. “I thought when that car went off the road it was going to blow up.” He leaned closer to me to make his point. “These kids,” said the twenty-five-year-old captain, “are making split-second decisions to save our lives.”

  I didn’t disagree. Any driver of any car on the street, any asshole with a bulky sweater, could be a bad guy waiting to detonate. I took very few notes that night. It was too overwhelming. If I’d had more experience, I probably would have written a piece about the shooting. It was one of those things that happen in war, and would’ve made a great on-scene story for theNewsweek website.

  With all the threats, all the varieties of bombs, shooting first made sense. You or them? Kill an innocent by accident, or risk letting someone blow up you and your buddies?

  In addition to the IED, there was the VBIED, or vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, the car bomb (pronounced Vee-Bid). There was also the SVBIED, the suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or suicide car bomb. (Es-Vee-Bid.) The troop favorite was the DBIED, the donkey-borne improvised explosive device, the Dee-Bid, which was rumored to have been witnessed more than once. The EFP, or explosively formed projectile or penetrator, also known as the shape charge, was a particularly deadly bomb that could rip through the thickest armor. The U.S. military officials claimed the EFPs were being imported from Iran. (The commander of the Desert Rogues showed me a photograph of the damage from an EFP detonation. He kept the photo on his laptop. The metal charge had gone through the driver’s window and killed one of his soldiers. “See the brains on the steering wheel,” he said.)

  The afternoon following the patrol, I spoke to an intel officer named Matt about a recent Es-Vee-Bid experience. Matt was six one, with blue eyes and reddish hair. We’d been talking for a while, sitting under the shade of a makeshift gazebo outside headquarters, when he got around to telling me what was on his mind.

  He’d been out on patrol, one of those getting-to-know-the-neighborhoods, win-hearts-and-minds kind of thing. The soldiers were giving out candy to the kids. One of the soldiers was swarmed by children, jumping, smiling, standing in the middle of the street.

  Matt was walking around the corner to the next street when he heard the loud explosion and ducked. He got a look in his eye as he told the story. His hand shook slightly.

  “I ran around the corner,” he said. “I saw things, little body parts, children. Tiny pieces of children.” He looked at me like he needed to apologize for what he was saying. “You know, I know this sounds cheesy,” he said, and then, “Things you’re not ever supposed to see. Arms. Legs. Of children.”

  One American and at least fifteen Iraqi children killed. Matt’s eyes drifted. He told me there’d been a counseling session afterward, set up by the army’s mental health unit to deal with post-traumatic stress after incidents like this. Matt said he attended the meeting, but didn’t think it helped very much. I told him I would email him to follow up and do a story. I was interested in how the army was handling combat stress. He never responded to my emails.

  The Desert Rogues took me in a convoy across the city, from FOB Rustamiyah on the east side of the Tigris to Camp Victory on the west, to drop me off for my next embed. Camp Victory, one of the bases surrounding the Baghdad Airport, was home to an army EOD company. Explosives ordnance disposal. The Baghdad Bomb Squad.

  The bomb squad had a small shack and yard, “the Bomb Garden,” decorated with explosives; rows of grenades and mortar shells (30mm, 60mm, 120mm, that’s a big one), Iranian grenades, Italian grenades, American grenades, Russian-made rockets, mortar tubes, all manner of land mines. Next to the Bomb Garden was the Garden of Shame, where they kept the objects that soldiers had thought were IEDs but turned out to be false alarms. There was a tea kettle, an extension cord, a piece of cable, a brake drum. The bomb squad had responded to these calls, spent hours preparing to defuse them, only to find out that they had wasted their time.

  I arrived and heard I had just missed a big one. Danny, a bomb squad tech from Tennessee, jumped out of a Humvee and rushed up onto the wooden porch of the shack, his face red beneath a do-rag, pumped on adrenaline, carrying a long sliver of metal. He’d just detonated the big IED. Ka-boom.

  “Take a look at this shrapnel,” he said. “Big as a lawn mower blade. Touch the edge.”

  I touched the edge; it was sharp.

  “Imagine that flying through the air. That’s sharp enough to kill you,” he said, then added the shrapnel to the collection in the Bomb Garden.

  The twenty-one-man bomb squad worked in twenty-four-hour shifts, responding to calls from units all over the city. When patrols spotted an IED, they called in the bomb squad to get rid of it. The unit was led by Captain Gregory Hirschey, an all-American blond who carried around a large mug of Seattle-made coffee and a frozen bottle of Gatorade. To relax, Hirschey’s soldiers spent most of their time playing Halo 2, the multiplayer video game, where futuristic warriors tried to kill each other. It got their minds off the war. Every time they went out, they knew there was a chance they’d be blown up. They were always going straight to the bombs. IEDs ranged from the simple and inexpensive to the complex and hi-tech. They could be triggered with infrared sensors, motorcycle alarms, trip wires, detonation cords. They could be pressure activated; they could be “daisy-chained,” to set off a series of explosions. There also were “second and tertiary devices,” bombs set up to kill units responding to an IED; bombs set up to kill the bomb squad. The guys in the bomb squad sometimes wore 120-pound protective suits that made them look like giant green marshmallow men. Often they’d deploy robots to defuse the IEDs, which they controlled remotely with a joystick and video monitor. Hirschey said that his best robot operators were also the unit’s “kick-ass Halo players.”

  I went out for four or five calls, and watched them detonate UXO (unexploded ordnance), of which there was plenty lying around Iraq. According to the State Department, even before the war there were 10 to 15 million land mines across the country left over from World War II, Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, and Desert Storm, making it one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. Hundreds of thousands of mortars, grenades, and other munitions from Saddam’s army also were not secured during the U.S. invasion, which gave the insurgent bomb makers plenty of material to make their IEDs.

  Hirschey was a father of three and didn’t think he was going to make it out alive. He told his wife that he’d had a premonition of his death. “If you’re going to die, why not die for your country,” he told me, trying to laugh it off. By the time they’d completed their seven-month tour, his unit had responded to 2,178 incidents. During the last month, one of his soldiers lost an arm to an IED. With only two weeks left before his scheduled return, Staff Sergeant Johnny Mason, a close friend of Hirschey’s, was disarming one bomb when a second IED was detonated, killing him instantly. Hirschey told me he’d become numb to the threat. “After a while you quit looking,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. You almost feel like you’re part of the walking dead.”

  My bomb squad story didn’t run for a few months. It was overtaken by an event back in the United States, Hurricane Katrina.

  I was sitting in the mess hall at Camp Victory, eating dinner with Captain Hirschey and the first sergeant of the bomb squad on the day Katrina hit New Orleans. There were wide-screen TVs in each corner of the mess hall, and all were turned to the Fox News Channel. At the end of dinner, the first sergeant pointed to three men watching intently at the table across the room. “There’s your story,” he said. “Those guys are from the Louisiana National Guard.”

  I changed tables and asked if they’d be willing to be interviewed. “The eye of the storm went over my parish,” one of the soldiers told me. On screen a white steeple seemed to emerge from dark water. “It’s passing over the hospital where my mom works. She’s a nurse.” The news reported there was no power at the hospital. Another soldier said: “I had to get emergency leave
on the last squall to go home and fix the flooding in the basement. I can’t imagine what this is going to do.” A third soldier leaned back in his chair. “People back home constantly worry about us,” he said. “Now we get a chance to worry about them.” The three soldiers were members of the 141st Field Artillery Unit in the 256th Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard. They had been in Iraq almost a year. They had eight days left on their tours before they were scheduled to leave. They told me banners for their homecoming had already been put up, and were now washed away.

  The captain and the first sergeant had left the mess hall by the time I was finished talking to the Louisianan soldiers. It was up to me to find my way back to the bomb squad headquarters. It was dark, about 9:00P.M., and all the huts and tents and trailers looked the same. At night, the base was an endless field of gravel, passing trucks kicking up a spectral fog of dirt particles. I felt like I was walking around the grounds of a county fair after the lights had been shut off and the gates closed. I soon realized I was lost. I walked off the main road and approached a building that looked familiar. When I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t familiar at all. But painted on the building was the name of the 141st Field Artillery, with their nickname underneath, the Baghdad Headhunters. I had somehow, through no design of my own, stumbled upon the rest of the Louisiana contingent. About a dozen soldiers were sitting at a picnic table behind their headquarters. I introduced myself. “I’m a reporter forNewsweek, ” I said. “I just spoke to some guys at the mess hall, and I was wondering if you mind if I hang out for a while.” They didn’t ask anyone for permission. They gave me their names and started to tell their stories. They had one cell phone to share and were trying to get through to their families. They were depressed. After surviving a year in Iraq, after losing soldiers to this country, they’d just learned the city where they grew up and were on the verge of going home to was destroyed.