What Was Asked of Us

by Trish Wood

  Ahmed Chalabi had probably been in Baghdad a month or so, and I had run into him at the palace, but I never had any direct dealings with him. All I knew about him is what most of the Iraqis seemed to believe, that he was the choice of the Bush administration to be installed as the new leader of Iraq. Chalabi was an Iraqi exile, and after Baghdad fell, he was driven into the capital by our military while I was still there. I tried to stay away from . . . from that particular issue. When the announcement was made that he was coming to town, coming into Baghdad, our office was flooded with individuals that were concerned about his past, concerned about the fact he had an open indictment in Jordan, and how could we support an individual who had been alleged to have conducted some criminal acts and bring him into Baghdad, and ask him to be responsible for any part of the government. The office was flooded. I mean, every thirty minutes I’d rotate somebody new through, and let him say what they had to say, and move him out, from the lowest-level person, the commoner on the street, to influential sheikhs within the tribes.

  The amazing thing is that in Iraq, even the lowest-level person knows about politics. They understand particularly foreign policy, because it affects their country so much. So, to have, you know, a day laborer come in and say about Chalabi, “Why would your country do this?” Everyone was very upset about that. I realized at that point in time, it was not going to be easy if that was ever the plan at all, to install him, even as an informal leader. He’s proven, you know, that he has nine lives. The consensus among most of the leadership that I had contact with was that this was something we probably should have reconsidered. In the military, you learn to speak up before the decision’s made, and when the decision’s made, you follow your leader. We had to do the best we could.

  I don’t think I’ve ever lost hope, even to this day. I haven’t lost hope for the Iraqis, but hope has to be based on what the Iraqis want the outcome to be. Not what we want. They still go to work. The fact that these guys still line up at police stations, even though they are getting blown up by suicide bombers, tells you they want it to work. If I weren’t a single father, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. I’d be back over there, because I believe that what we started is something we can’t walk away from. We have an obligation, not just to the Iraqis, but to ourselves, to finish, and if I could I would go back over there tomorrow and do the exact same things I did. I have a lot of Iraqi friends that I still stay in contact with. When we start something, we need to finish it.

  “Our mission was at odds

  with itself”

  TANIA QUIÑONES

  CONNECTICUT ARMY NATIONAL GUARD

  143RD MILITARY POLICE COMPANY

  APRIL 2003-APRIL 2004

  BAGHDAD

  The looting had already begun by the time we got into Baghdad in April. Even the FOB where we stayed was completely gutted. These guys don’t just come and take your chairs—they take the toilets. In one place, it even looked like they were trying to tear off wallpaper from the walls. As we were driving around, we saw people running with things. There were a lot of instances where people kidnap a house. They’d go into a house with guns and just claim it as theirs.

  We would try to mediate and find out what the situation was, but it is kind of hard to do any real type of concrete police work because it’s always somebody else’s word over another’s. You’ve got to go with your instincts in a lot of situations, especially in the beginning, when we didn’t really have translators. Even the first time we stopped a vehicle on the road after curfew, we’re walking slowly up to the vehicle and trying to tell them to get out of the car, stop, and they’re just looking at us. We really had to put ourselves in their situation. They have no idea, not even by the inflection in our voice, what we are trying to say, and we have weapons. The weapon isn’t drawn, but they just don’t understand. This was difficult. They’re just watching, totally clueless. They have no idea why they are being stopped.

  The checkpoints sucked. We were searching for weapons because in the beginning we were just trying to get all these weapons off the streets. I mean, everybody had them. It was just insane. Pretty much every car we stopped at that time had a weapon. They were everywhere. I don’t know if the people understood they weren’t supposed to have them. But they were in a situation where there’s no security; there’s no police; people are looting. I would want a weapon under those circumstances. Quite frankly, I can’t blame them. But as far as our mission went, we were trying to take them off the streets.

  At first, when our checkpoints caused a traffic jam, people would be pissed, but not like they were later. For the most part, they didn’t really say anything. I don’t know if it was because they knew that we couldn’t understand them, or maybe they didn’t want to get on our bad side. Everybody was very compliant, even the ones that had weapons were very compliant. Nobody would be arguing. Almost like robots. But that changed. Eventually, people did get really pissed about the traffic, and the other problem was that nobody had any gas. And while we had fuel, they couldn’t get any. What they were driving almost looked like the Flintstones car, and half of them were pushing their cars, and we always saw them on the side of the road. I could imagine cases where a husband would go out and not come home for two days because his car broke down, and there is no way to call, so he just shows up a couple of days later. So people started getting pissed at the checkpoints. Too much waiting, no gas. It wasn’t just one thing that was making them mad. It was everything.

  Toward the middle and the end of my tour, around spring ’04, people were very vocal. We were doing dinar exchanges so people could trade in their money, because it wasn’t worth anything. They would go around with pillow sacks full of money because they needed so much to buy anything. They were getting new high-denomination dinars and ones that didn’t have Saddam on them. They were burning all that old Saddam money. The dinar exchange was outside in the heat, and it was just crazy, because people were out there all day long, staying forever. The lines were so long. People had no water. There was no shade. People needed to get this money, and they’re only letting women and children go first, and all the men were getting pissed off. They were sort of rioting, going crazy, pushing. We had concertina wire set up so people could form lines, and people were getting shoved onto the concertina wire. We had to take out the hose and just hose everybody down to keep them calm. People were really pissed off and upset. They were coming at us. They were passing out, and people died right there at the dinar exchange out in the heat. I don’t know why they died, whether it was heatstroke or lack of water or just maybe they were old. I mean, that was probably one of the worst frenzies. They needed the money, and they couldn’t afford to go home without it, or to imagine coming back another day. Then when we shut it off—no more money until tomorrow—people went crazy. It was a bad situation. Concertina wire’s sharp like a razor blade, and you can get cut really badly. I remember there was concertina wire on one side of us, and a tank behind us, and a wall on the other, with a huge group of people advancing toward me and my partner and about to trample us into the concertina wire. You bet your ass I’m going to fight my way out. I had to use my baton, and it was insane because we nearly got trampled.

  The dinar exchanges were planned by the Green Zone people who didn’t seem to know how it actually was on the ground. That was a problem with a lot of the things they set up. They just weren’t out there to see how it really goes down. And it was really sad. A lot of people got hurt.

  We came after the full combat operations were over, and we came in to be security but also to help the people. Our mission was at odds with itself because we can’t trust anybody, but we’re trying to trust the people. We are making their lives really difficult, and they’re pissed at us, and I’m pissed that they’re pissed at me because I’m trying to help them out. At the same time I’m pissed that we’ve put all this on them, you know what I mean?

  There were situations where because I’m female, I was told there were certa
in things I couldn’t do. For instance, there was one time we had this big mission, and there was going to be a big raid to do. All we were going to do was security on the outside, because they were going to raid these couple of buildings looking for a key individual. They called our platoon in just to do the perimeter security. It was something we did all the time. These were Special Forces—American and from a couple of other countries—and they were dropping in from a helicopter and all that crap. When they saw us, they were pissed. There was only me and this other female, and they were complaining and said they were not going to do the mission, and they went on complaining. And my platoon sergeant was like, What are you talking about; you’re not coming with us? Sorry, you’re coming whether you like it or not. Then they said, We’re not doing this mission with any girls on it. This is a high-speed mission and da, da, da . . . We’re not working with any females.

  We ended up doing it anyway. I just kind of laughed. I laughed it off. There is a lot of testosterone going around over there and a lot of pissing contests, like who does this better, who saw more bombed-out roads, who shot this person, who got in a lot of firefights. I never really entered the conversation. I just laughed. OK, whatever. It happened all the time, especially in field artillery. I don’t know if they were trying to show off because I’m female, but it drove me crazy . . . such a pissing contest over there.

  “It was just a dog, another

  casualty of the war”

  JASON NEELY

  BRADLEY GUNNER

  “CRAZY HORSE” TROOP

  3RD SQUADRON

  7TH CAVALRY REGIMENT

  3RD INFANTRY DIVISION

  MARCH-AUGUST 2003

  BALAD

  We had a fucking dog, a puppy, and this other unit was all jealous of us because we’d actually seen combat and all this other stuff—that’s the theory anyway. Anyway, these guys fucking killed our little puppy dog that we were taking care of. It was this other army outfit that was sharing an area with us before they were going to take over. It was a unit from 4th ID, and there’s a two-week lag, a layover where you go on patrol together and kind of show each other the lay of the land. Well, around this time, we are running around being a bunch of dicks without our uniforms, wearing Hawaiian shirts around the FOB. We’re like some sideshow from the movie M*A*S*H. That fit us perfectly. We were watching a video one night, and tracer rounds were flying over our heads, and finally it was like, fuck, let’s shut the movie off and go on patrol.

  Anyway, these motherfuckers slit our dog’s throat and took it out on one of their patrols and dumped it alongside the road. Obviously, if your dog shows up missing, you’re going to start asking some questions. So we started asking around camp, “Hey, have you seen our dog?” This one guy says, “Hey, you are never going to see that dog again.” And then some private comes over and says, “These guys killed your dog.” We were pretty pissed off, and some of our guys were talking about, in a cloudy way, about retaliating by killing the guys who killed our dog. That’s how crazy people can get in these situations. . . . We were like, hold on; it’s a fucking dog. We can tip them over when they are in the shitter or something. Let’s not shoot anybody.

  The dog’s name was Nowatay, and it was a little curbside setter. It was the cutest little puppy, and it kind of looked like a Labrador kind of thing.

  Our first sergeant—he’s a fucking badass motherfucker. This is a guy who will readily, if a dog turns against him or bites him or one of his kin, will readily shoot that dog immediately. But he was also a dog lover. When he got word of this, he went on a fucking headhunt to find out who killed our dog, because he wanted to have them court-martialed for crimes against an animal. You know, punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  We never found out who did it, and after a while we stopped talking about retaliating because, after all, it was just a dog, another casualty of the war. Who knows what would have happened to it anyway?

  “They thought we were bringing them America”

  JONATHAN POWERS

  “THE GUNNERS”

  1ST ARMORED DIVISION

  MAY 2003-JULY 2004

  “GUNNER PALACE,” BAGHDAD

  Baghdad’s fallen already, and we’re in Kuwait in May. We are supposed to be training, but there were no guidelines about what kind of training we needed for the situation we were going into, nothing about training for certain kinds of checkpoints. We were handed a book about as thick as a wallet, a little green book on Iraq, and that was our knowledge of the country we were about to enter. So us lower-level officers took it on ourselves, and I went and found an old platoon sergeant and I said, “Look, you need to train my guys on how to raid a house and how to conduct a street patrol because these are things we don’t do in the artillery . . . artillery is shooting big cannons. We’re not trained to do this. We’re not trained to take prisoners.” So we made our own plan, and we took the tents in Kuwait and divided them into rooms and raided them like we were raiding a house. At night we played capture the flag with our NVGs on, because I felt we were going to be patrolling at night, and these guys had to be comfortable with their goggles.

  The drive into Iraq was amazing because you are driving through a desert, and there’s kids standing on the side of the road trying to sell you hash or cola and cigarettes or old Iraqi money, but there’s no towns around; we are in the middle of nowhere. So where do these kids come from? As we get closer to Baghdad, we start seeing blown-out Iraqi tanks and you realize, boy, a lot of shit just happened here. We are in a hundred-vehicle convoy, and we were going down the street looking at rooftops, waiting for guys to shoot at us. There were people coming out to the edge of the road; kids are begging for candy, food, whatever, and one kid, I swear to God, dropped his pants and wiggled his little you-know-what, his little eight-year-old dick at us. My platoon sergeant and I looked at each other like, what are we getting into?

  So we roll through Baghdad and get to this fedayeen camp. We set up our perimeters, and no one knows what we’re doing, so we sleep in our Humvees tonight and we’ll figure out this camp tomorrow. At about four-thirty or five in the morning and sun’s just starting to come up. None of us wanted to sleep because we just wanted to sort of explore this thing. One of the first things I did that morning was walk down and put my hand in the Tigris River. . . . It was sort of exciting, the birthplace of civilization. My buddy and I are passing a canteen back and forth, just talking. Later, we end up exploring around this old camp in teams. And so we’re exploring, and my buddy Ted and I get into this firing range. And we’re digging through some of the old targets and here are these targets with Donald Rumsfeld’s face on it . . . a big picture of him. There’s a hundred of these things, and so Ted and I rolled them up, and we stuffed them in our bags, and I mailed a bunch of them home to my friends because I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. They were training by shooting at their Donald Rumsfeld targets. He was target practice. I thought that was hysterical.

  Now us guys are the peacekeepers coming in to replace the war fighters. The concept is that the war fighters take the city, and then you bring in the new faces so that Iraqis don’t see the 3rd ID guys and think, Oh my God, this guy just killed my brother! We were supposed to be seen as the brand-new soldiers, brought in to clean up and reconstruct. For instance, we are at this checkpoint, and this Iraqi guy comes up trying to sell us some Iraqi knives. We thought nothing of it, but the 3rd ID guys come in at a hundred miles an hour, dive off of their Humvee, and take this guy down. They threw him into a ditch because they thought the guy was trying to kill us. That is the mentality these guys had from fighting the war; they saw horrible things fighting the war, and they lost certain sensitivities that we hadn’t lost yet. We lost it by the time we left Iraq, but we hadn’t lost it yet.

  At that time, I don’t think there was much of a separation between what an enemy combatant was and wasn’t because there was still a Baathist rumble and still some Saddam people around. The war w
asn’t over by any means at this point, even though a few days after we got there President Bush said it was over—major combat operations anyway. On the day the president said that, we had our first major firefight. Bush’s comments really pissed everybody off . . . infuriated the soldiers. Later, he said, “Bring it on.” Don’t tell the guys attacking us to “bring it on.” Don’t suggest that we should be attacked, especially when we don’t have the proper gear. We didn’t have enough armored Humvees even later; a year into the war, we still weren’t getting the gear we needed.

  But we did have these water-sack things, and it was so hot that a lot of guys wore them. It was a backpack with a hose, basically. It was funny because they had a blue line running through it that you put in your mouth to drink out of. The Iraqis thought it was air-conditioning, that we were wearing air-conditioned suits because we never complained about how hot it was. We would look at them like, are you crazy? Look, we’re white folks from America, under eighty pounds of gear. Don’t tell me how hot it is. I know how hot it is.

  From the time I got there, I watched the whole thing fall apart. You could kind of gauge that by my relationship with Ahmed, the guy that ran the propane shop in my sector. He spoke no English, and I could speak only enough Arabic at the time to say, “Hello, put your gun down or I’ll shoot you,” and stuff like that, but nothing conversational. Anyway, we went to Ahmed’s house for dinner and I took a 9mm and stuffed it in the back of my pants just in case, but I covered it up because Ahmed always asked us to remove our gear and put our weapons in the corner. I always kept my weapon because you never know who might come barreling out of the closet or whatever. But I considered Ahmed a friend.