I Lost My Love in Baghdad

by Michael Hastings

  This is the first day of the operation. The plan is to clear a neighborhood in Baghdad. It is very hot out, even before the sun comes up. By 7A.M. , I am sweating and smoking; by noon I am sweating more than I ever have before and I’m chugging two-liter bottles of water to no effect; by 4P.M. , as we head back to base, I am sitting inside the Stryker trying not to pass out or puke. Finally, we are there, we make it back. I made it. Oops, not quite. We took a wrong turn. We are at Camp Liberty, not Camp Striker. I’m dizzy. “Shit,” I say to anyone who’s listening. “Can you pass me a bag or something?”

  I throw up in a canvas bag. I am dehydrated. They try to give me an IV at the TOC, but it doesn’t stick; the needle won’t stay in my arm, so eventually we give up and I drink more water and vow that tomorrow I’m going to take rehydration tablets.

  Five soldiers ask me that night: “So you’re the reporter who threw up in the vehicle commander’s bag?”

  Week One. The neighborhood the 4-23 is clearing is called Ghazaliya. During Saddam’s time, it was a wealthy, Sunni area, a prestigious place to live in the western part of the city. Over the past six months, the neighborhood has turned into a battleground.

  I’m in Lieutenant Colonel Norris’s vehicle. We arrive at the starting point for the operation, a road running parallel to a train track on the edge of the neighborhood. More than fifteen Stryker vehicles rumble to a stop, dust rising in the pink sun. The Strykers are massive, multiton green machines that remind me of the kind of vehicle I’d want to be riding in during an alien invasion. It is the first time in the war the Strykers, a relatively new vehicle, are being used in Baghdad. The Stryker armor is better than Humvee armor. Eight men can sit inside the troop compartment; the driver is in the nose; there are four portholes in the roof; two “air guards” in the back, where soldiers stand guard, their bodies half exposed; the other two portholes are for the vehicle commander and the machine gunner; the machine gun can also be operated by joystick from inside the vehicle.

  A fleet of Iraqi police cars and Iraqi Army trucks pulls up, twenty minutes late. The Americans and Iraqis huddle to discuss the plan for the day, deciding which unit gets which block to search.

  Norris surveys the scene. The road is next to two football-sized fields full of trash. A lone woman in a black hijab is picking through the garbage.

  “Hundreds of bodies have been dumped here,” Norris says. “This is the dead zone. This is the kill zone.”

  Ghazaliya is on a “sectarian fault line,” Norris explains. The neighborhood to the north, Shula, is mostly Shiite and Shiite militias and death squads have been making frequent attacks on Ghazaliya: lobbing mortars and firing rockets, kidnappings and executions at illegal checkpoints. Insurgents in Ghazaliya do the same to the residents of Shula.

  Norris tells me a story he heard from a high-ranking Iraqi officer. The insurgents took a baby, cut off the head, sewed a dog’s head on the baby, “cooked the baby in an oven and left it on someone’s front doorstep.”

  I doubt if the story is true, but it’s the kind of story that’s going around.

  Around noon, I walk onto a small residential street with a platoon from the 4-23. Two widows greet us, holding photos of their lost husbands and brothers. Can you help me, they cry, can you help me?

  The widows explain that fifty men from their neighborhood were kidnapped by men in security forces uniforms in September 2005. They don’t know where they are. I take the names down, though there is an understanding that it is futile; the women know they are gone.

  An American officer I’m with asks one of the widows: “Did you contact the police about it?”

  The widow looks at him, incredulous: “It was the police who kidnapped them!”

  Week Two. The clearing operation in Ghazaliya continues. The heat is intense, 115 degrees, sometimes 120 degrees and climbing.

  I walk with the soldiers. There is no action, no bang-bang, so I try to describe what the soldiers are going through, the monotony and the boredom and the heat. I focus on the sweat.

  You start to sweat before you even start to move. You sweat more than humanly possible. Your eyebrows and mustache leak with sweat. Your pants are soaked with sweat and leave a damp mark where you sit. You drink liter after liter of water and Gatorade, which makes you sweat more, and the sweat becomes even saltier and collects in the Wiley X eye protection you wear and stings your eyes. Cramped in the Stryker, the heat reaches 140 degrees. You feel the sweat coming through the soldier’s clothes next to you, mixed with the sweat soaked in your uniform. The uniforms are heavy and love sweat. You must have your sleeves rolled down for safety, a regulation in place to protect your skin from possible exposure to fire damage in case of attack. You must be wearing thirty-one pounds of body armor, along with a three-pound helmet which actually feels like it’s baking the brain, seven clips of 5.56mm ammunition, carrying a seven-pound M-4 rifle, a radio, or a shovel, or a pair of bolt cutters. You start climbing over walls to get into locked houses, breaking down doors, looking for a bomb that could explode or sniper ready to shoot you in the face.

  This is Baghdad in the summer, this is the mission assigned to the 4-23 Tomahawks, which they are doing instead of going home. The soldiers have a word for it: the Suck. “Baghdad is a real suckfest,” says twenty-one-year-old Phillip Jereza, as he sits in the back of a Stryker. “At least you’re not the only one in the suckfest. We have each other.” One soldier has his company’s unofficial motto scrawled on a white undershirt:WE SUCK THE LEAST.

  There is a certain bitterness among the men, a well-earned cynicism, openly expressed. Sergeant Brian Patton believes there is a political motive behind the extension and the Battle for Baghdad. Midterm elections are coming up in November; the Republicans want to show that Baghdad is stable. “We’re fighting for the House of Representatives,” says Patton. “You could call this the November 2 extension.” As we walk, a young private grabs a lemon from a lemon tree: “This country sucks,” he says, inhaling the lemon. “This lemon smells good.” He throws the lemon at a house. A veteran sergeant who asks me not use his name because he doesn’t want to get in trouble blames Donald Rumsfeld personally. “I wish I could meet Don,” he says. “I call him Don. I’d like to punch him in the face, then I’d like to punch him in the gut. It’s like he doesn’t realize he’s destroying families.”

  Streets in Ghazaliya stink like raw sewage. A sickening, acrid smell of shit and chemicals. The sewage floods the pavement and stretches along the street like a liquid sidewalk, bluish-gray pools warming in the sun.

  These streets used to be nice; the houses were owned by upper-class families. Now every third house we enter is abandoned, the Iraqi families who once lived here having left the country or the city. It is an exodus of the educated—doctors, lawyers, professors, businessmen. Those with the resources and skills to play a role in rebuilding the country are gone.

  I go into an abandoned three-floor home with a few soldiers. The soldiers kick down the expensive wooden door. Dust on everything. Toilet still works. It feels like an invasion of privacy. On the bookshelf are engineering texts in German. This Iraqi must be a professor or something. The photo albums have been left behind. I look at the family, at their wedding photos, the snapshots of sons and daughters and relatives.

  I stop and look at the photo albums in half a dozen other empty homes.

  After ten days, the 172nd Brigade has searched over twenty thousand homes. And what are the soldiers looking for? Weapons, explosives, bad guys. The problem is that the Iraqi Army and police are infiltrated with spies, and the spies tip off the bad guys to move their weapons to other places before the soldiers arrive.

  Iraqi law: Each household is allowed one AK-47 with two magazines. Mosques are allowed five AK-47s. At one house, the soldiers take away a pistol from an old man who lives with four women. “How can I defend my family,” he says. “Sir, it’s our orders,” replies the soldier. The old man, hunched over, frail, white hair on the rim of his balding head, co
ntinues to plead his case but loses his pistol.

  And where are the bad guys? Where are the terrorists, the insurgents, the death squads? They are lying low; they have melted away; they are probably not going to launch a large attack when the Americans are on the streets in these numbers. Maybe a bomb or a sniper, but nothing big. They prefer to wait and hide and attack the soldiers when they travel in small convoys, with IEDs, by ambush. It’s the classic strategy of guerrilla warfare when facing a foe that is superiorly armed. I hear soldiers complain: “If they’d just come out and fight, they wouldn’t stand a chance.” And that’s exactly why they don’t; they don’t need to; they aren’t facing midterm elections; the insurgents have all the time in the world. It’s their country, after all.

  I remember reading somewhere that once you start complaining that the enemy isn’t playing by the rules, you’re in trouble.

  A group of Iraqi teenagers watches us move from home to home. I start to interview them—one of them, a twenty-two-year-old named Saif, speaks English. I ask him if he is a Sunni or a Shiite. He hates that question, though he admits he’s a Shiite. We are standing next to an ankle-deep puddle of waste. “Look, look at least if I am going to die, I accept that, but at least give me a clean street to die in!” He likes journalism but is in dental school; we exchange email addresses and keep in touch. Over the next eight months, Saif and his family move to three different neighborhoods. He continues to go to dental school. He sends me a text one day that reads “breaking news school under attack.” I call him. He tells me that his school is being attacked by a gunman. “The girls are screaming,” he says, “can you hear them?” He says he will write something for me about it. The next day, the bridge he takes on the way to school is destroyed in a bombing.

  Still Week Two, still in Ghazaliya. Half the Iraqi Army soldiers and police don’t show up for the searches, and the half that do show up want to quit at noon. We search three mosques. They are minifortresses, with sandbags and fighting positions. Weapons are discovered in all of them. At one mosque, where the largest stash was found, mortar rounds are hidden in the minarets; magazines of AK-47 ammunition are stuffed in a plastic bag behind an air conditioner. A beheading knife is buried in the grounds; a soldier finds it with a metal detector. Behind the mosque, the metal detector goes off again; the Americans start to dig up the grass yard, and they find an entire arsenal, including rocket-launching tubes.

  An American general comes out to check on the action. He tours the mosque, and gives the soldiers coins: pocket-sized medallions with the 4th Infantry Division crest. I ask the general what gives him confidence in the plan to secure Baghdad if we are working with the Iraqi police force, which is known to be infiltrated by militias and death squads. “We’re trying to make these neighborhoods into little Mayberries,” he says instead. He is not joking.

  A week later, the 4-23 gets chastised for searching the mosques so thoroughly, and they are told by the division command that they aren’t allowed to go into mosques anymore. Political sensitivities; we are in a Muslim country and it understandably angers Iraq’s Muslim politicians and their constituents when the American military enters their places of worship, even if they are being used as staging grounds for attacks on both Americans and Iraqis. The 4-23 gets a new rule: Iraqi soldiers can search the mosques first, and if they find anything, then the Americans can enter. But the Iraqi soldiers never seem to find anything.

  We search the Ghazaliya branch office of the Iraqi Islamic Party and find materials to make IEDs and a stash of grenades and heavy machine gun ammo. The Americans believe the IED materials are being used to attack Coalition forces. Captain Brad Velotta questions the head of the office, an Iraqi politician who is a member of the local government, for two hours, but the politician is not detained.

  Week Three. A young captain is giving his men a lecture on the base at Striker. “Water conservation is in effect,” he says. “They’re serious this time. So if you’re going to rub one out, do it in the Port-a-John.” The Port-a-Johns are spaced in groups of twos and fours and sixes on the hot gravel, behind blast walls, and are cleaned daily by Filipinos who spray water and disinfectant on them from a large truck. The Port-a-Johns are like plastic saunas with graffiti. “I lost ten pounds taking a five-pound shit,” says one bit of scrawl. Another line of graffiti is about Operation Iraqi Freedom—every year or so, the military updates the OIF mission name with a number to mark the passing of time. “OIF 1, OIF 2, OIF 3, how much fucking freedom do these Iraqis need?”

  I spend the day on base, writing up my reporting. I put my laptop on the metal cot and type. After I’m finished, I bring the laptop outside, with my BGAN satellite modem. I set the modem up, resting the gray box on a concrete duck-and-cover bunker, and send my file by email to New York.

  Newsweekalso sends a reporter to Alaska, to interview the families of the soldiers I’ve interviewed, including those of Captain Velotta and Captain Grauer.

  Rumsfeld goes to Alaska, too, and meets with soldiers’ wives at Fort Lewis. One wife asks the secretary of defense: “Why is the 172nd doing all the house searches? Isn’t that the Iraqis’ job?” “Over 90 percent of the house clearings are being handled by the Iraqis,” Rumsfeld responds. The women in the audience start shouting, “No!” and, “That’s not true!” Rumsfeld shoots back, “No? What do you mean? Don’t say ‘no,’ that’s what I’ve been told. It’s the task of the Iraqis to go through the buildings.”

  A midnight raid is planned for a “high value” target. The target is a middle-aged Iraqi man who runs an insurgent cell. There’s good intel from the S-2 shop. (S-2 is the code name for military intelligence.) At 1:30A.M. , I climb into the Stryker vehicle, sitting in the troop compartment on a bench next to six soldiers. Two of them just got back to Iraq after going home to Alaska. I ask them how they feel, and one closes his eyes and shakes his head. The other says, “I thought this shit was over for me.” There isn’t much conversation; everyone is tired, after having spent the day searching houses on the street. Heads nod, as the soldiers catch twenty minutes of sleep on the drive into Baghdad.

  When we get close to the objective, the vehicle commander says: “Drop ramp,” and the back of the Stryker opens up slowly. I follow the soldiers out onto the street. It’s dark and the city at night is like an empty movie set called “Downtown Baghdad.” A four-block area is cordoned off. We stick close to the buildings, jogging, heading toward the apartment complex where the target is suspected to live. But the homes next to the target’s apartment building must be secured as well. I follow three soldiers through a metal gate to a front door. One of them pushes the buzzer. No answer. He knocks on the door. Knocks again. Nothing. One soldier steps back to cover the other, who takes a running kick at the door. The door busts open. The three soldiers run inside, rifles ready, illuminating the inside of the house with flashlights attached to the scopes of their M-4s. A woman starts to scream. The flashlights and rifle barrels point to a bed. A husband and wife are lying on a queen-sized bed, an infant cradled between them. The woman is hyperventilating; she does not stop screaming, she is in a white and pink nightgown and she keeps screaming and hyperventilating and her husband tries to calm her as she holds the infant. The soldiers look mildly embarrassed and don’t point their weapons at her anymore. When we walk out, I ask one of the soldiers if that happens often, finding a man and woman in bed. “Yes,” the soldier says. “Once we came in a house and the husband was doing his old lady on the couch.”

  “Was she naked?” I asked. “Was she hot?”

  “Hell, yes, she was fine,” says the soldier. “But her old man was pissed.”

  A few days before my embed is over, my younger brother Jeff arrives in Iraq with the 10th Mountain Division. He happens to be assigned to Camp Striker. We see each other and hang out. I hadn’t seen him since the spring, when he went out to dinner with Andi and me in New York. Very odd, very strange—totally surreal. To see him brings the feeling of home—that feeling doesn’t fit
with this environment. We call our parents in Vermont on my Iraqna—it is 7A.M. their time. “Hi, Mom and Dad, we’re calling from Baghdad…”

  My embed is over. Captain Velotta brings me back to the Green Zone in a convoy of three Strykers. The soldiers I’m sitting next to bullshit throughout the half-hour drive: “If the bitch finds out I got promoted, she’s gonna want more alimony.” Another: “I don’t want to go home, fucking lawyer is after me. I hope they keep extending me.” It’s an easy run, a fluff mission, a relaxed drive from the base down Airport Road to the Green Zone on a Saturday. No searches, no patrols; they’re even planning to stop at the Crossed Swords.

  And then, about fifteen minutes into the drive, an IED goes off on the other side of the street. Velotta orders the convoy to stop, the ramp drops, and we rush out. An eight-year-old boy is sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, bleeding from the neck. He looks up at us as we stand over him. The medic gives him first aid, a simple white bandage on his neck, and he is saved. Velotta has his men do a quick search of the area to see if they can find the triggerman, but there is no one around except the eight-year-old boy and his father, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We pile back into the vehicles, and continue into the Green Zone. We do have time to stop at the Crossed Swords, and we pose for a group photograph.

  My story on the embed gets edited and closes in the magazine the next day. I end the story on the note that, remarkably, still no soldiers have been killed in the 4-23. On Sunday, the magazine comes out. The same day, Lucian Read, the photographer working forNewsweek who had been with me during the embed, decides to go out with the 4-23 on one more patrol. I don’t go, I have my story; but Lucian is freelance so he takes the chance to get more pictures. That evening, he calls me. He is waiting at the hospital in the Green Zone, the CASH, and he tells me while they were out, Corporal Alexander Jordan, twenty-four, was killed by a sniper. They didn’t catch the sniper. They drove as fast as they could to get Jordan to the hospital for medical attention, but he died en route. I drive to the hospital to pick up Lucian; the Strykers are parked in a line outside; Norris is standing in the vehicle commander’s porthole, his face taut and unresponsive.