Smells Like Dead Elephants

by Matt Taibbi

  The whole vibe of my embed changed the moment that transfer went through. It was almost as if some spell had been cast around me. With the fun-loving Oklahoma crew, I never felt in danger for a second; even driving through some of the more notorious stretches of Iraqi highway, I felt as safe as a pixie in the Rose Bowl parade. But when my transfer came through, the skies darkened and I found myself standing in a carport in the marbled luxury of Camp Victory (with its absurd artificial lake and Saddam’s ornate pink Alexandrian palaces, now commandeered by no-nonsense officers of the Middle American managerial type), and suddenly I could hear a tense and ­serious-sounding Bostonian lieutenant colonel named Alfred Bazzinotti yelling questions over the Humvee engines about my blood type, asking if I had signed the proper release forms indemnifying the army in case of whatever, and then finally telling me to get the hell in the truck because we were moving out.

  Before long, though, our convoy got lost. In an attempt to stay one step ahead of the insurgents, soldiers took strange roads and byways, trying as often as possible to take ad­vantage of the Humvee’s off-road capabilities, and in this case the convoy tried to sneak across southern Baghdad at night by crossing what appeared to be an old dried-up lake bed, along a “road” that looked to me like the top edge of an ancient dam that rose steeply twenty feet off the ground on both sides. It was slow, dangerous going along this semi-cliff without streetlights, and it was no surprise to anyone when the “road” suddenly came to an end and the convoy was left looking at a precipice that stared back at us in the darkness like a bad joke. We doubled back and made it to the Baghdad city streets, where we moved through an abandoned marketplace full of cats and other feral animals that were feeding on garbage and whose eyes glowed yellow in the headlights as we drove past. Packs of wild dogs chased us, barking at every turn.

  It was just then that I saw it, off in the distance, far in front of the trucks. It was a horse—a bright white horse, so horribly emaciated that you could see all of its ribs sticking out. It was wobbling, as though using every ounce of energy in its bones to stay standing. Sick as it looked, its white coat shone through the night, arrestingly pure, like the belly of a fish. It was also blocking the road, which pissed off the soldiers. American soldiers understandably do not like to stop their trucks for any reason, much less some raggedy-ass old horse. Our driver reached down and blasted the Humvee siren—WOOO-EEEEEEEE!—which startled the animal, causing it to lope off to the left shoulder of the road.

  “Watch out for the . . . what the fuck is that?” shouted a sergeant named Vasquez.

  “It’s a horse,” said the driver.

  “Jesus. Somebody call the ASPCA,” Vasquez said, looking at the miserable creature with pity.

  “Or the glue factory,” cracked the driver.

  I looked out the Humvee window. For the first time I noticed that the horse’s hind legs were blood-streaked. It appeared to be bleeding out of its ass. As we drove past it, it lumbered to the edge of the median strip, stopped, and fell over.

  “Hey,” I said. “That horse just fucking died.”

  Nobody up front in the truck heard me. We drove on.

  IV. DON’T ASK WHY

  The How Is Hard Enough

  “Lower the big black dick?” asked Sergeant Cavanaugh.

  “Yeah,” said Sergeant Hennes. “Lower the Big Black Dick.”

  The Big Black Dick was a long black iron prod with a big square head at the end that the army had devised as a method of preventing vehicle-borne suicide bombers from ramming army convoys head-on. Technically it was called the RINO, but in this group of the 519th MP, a police transition squad on the eastern side of Baghdad, they called it the Big Black Dick.

  Everyone hated the Big Black Dick. It turned urban driving into an unpleasantly approximate experience, like steering a yacht with a wedding cake balanced on the foredeck. Moreover, if something came up and you had to make a sudden turn down an alley, there was always the possibility that you’d have to stop the truck and send one or even two people out into the open air to put the thing back in the up position, which sort of defeated the purpose of traveling under armor in the first place.

  Sergeant Jeremy Cavanaugh, a laconic young MP with a wry smile, jumped out of the Hummer, ran to the front of the truck, and lowered the unwieldy thing.

  “Dick in place,” he said sarcastically, returning to his seat.

  “Must be uncomfortable, driving with that thing,” I said.

  “Sergeant Cavanaugh has it down to a science,” noted ­Sergeant Jonathan Hennes.

  “This dick is getting a lot of action,” cracked Cavanaugh.

  He hit the accelerator and we rolled out. This was early on the afternoon of Friday, May 5; the FOB we were leaving was called Rustimayah, a dank shithole that I’d been transferred to some two weeks into my embed. Not far from the vicious, chaotic ghetto known as Sadr City, Rustimayah is the smelliest, foulest, most vermin-infested base in the whole American military archipelago. A converted Republican Guard compound, the smallish FOB is sandwiched between a trash-burning facility and a sewage-treatment plant, and when you breathe the air here it feels like drinking a dog-shit milkshake.

  Unlike the gleaming, futuristic prefab trailer camp at Liberty, which with its extensive creature comforts and vast white uniformity recalled a Holiday Inn version of Auschwitz, Rusti-mayah is just a jumble of old converted Iraqi buildings, filled to the cracks with crud and shit and larvae. An old bookshelf in one of the soldiers’ dorms here discharged thousands of tiny fruit flies every time I tried to pull a book out; another time, I exited a latrine and stepped in what I thought was black topsoil, only to have the “soil” explode into a cloud of tiny tsetse flies. Even the half-assed attempts to make the place cheery—like the Internet café-store-hangout called Baghdaddy’s! not far from the company headquarters—just made this stinky, edge-of-the-city outpost feel that much sadder.

  Hennes, the squad’s team leader, sighed as he glanced out the front passenger-side window of the truck. We were on our way to yet another police-station inspection and the road we were taking out of the FOB was not a particularly safe one—but then a lot of things about Rustimayah were not particularly safe. There were no gangs that never got hit in Rustimayah. Guys here got hit and they looked bummed out about it. ­Unlike the rah-rah atmosphere in sprawling Camp Liberty, there was an aura of depressed fatalism that stuck to everyone and every­thing on this base.

  That was even true of Hennes, a smallish, sharp-witted, clean-cut young man from Florida. I liked him right away, mainly because he made no attempt to be my friend. When we first met and I gave him my usual goofy handshake and smile—Hey, guys, I’m just here to check out this war thing you’ve got going over here!—he’d recoiled slightly, his face crinkling as though a refrigerator full of rotted cheese had just been thrown open in front of him. At work Hennes had the mildly pissed-off, perpetually put-upon look of a man who has been asked to run a McDonald’s in an insane asylum. “I don’t do this for the glory,” he cracked. “I do it to pay the bills.”

  He looked out the window now, saying nothing. The road we were on was a stretch with a bad recent record for small arms and IED incidents. There was all the usual potentially troublesome shit on both sides of the road, along with lots of Iraqi pedestrian traffic—young men in cheap slacks with mustaches and missing teeth, women in various states of religiously mandated cover, Pigpen-faced children running back and forth and belonging, hopefully, to someone.

  We roared through it and I wondered what Hennes was thinking. Here he was, thousands of miles from home, riding in a truck with a preposterous fifteen-foot black phallus pointed provocatively straight out in a street full of unsmilingly dirty people who might or might not be trying to kill him at that very minute. And all of this in order to go . . .

  To go where? Did that question cross his mind? Loosely speaking, the mandate
of this and other police transition teams was construction and training, in other words seeing that police stations got built and teaching the Iraqi police whatever it is that we teach the Iraqi police. But I was beginning to wonder even about that. There is a thing that happens in bureaucracies—and the Iraq War is nothing if not a great and monstrous bureaucratic endeavor—in which things cease to happen for reasons and begin to happen just for the sake of happening. The nature of the colossal industrial apparatus that is the American military is that it fixes problems; upon encountering difficulties, it is not designed to give up, retreat, or rethink—it must conquer every obstacle in its path; it’s a reflexive drive toward triumph hard-wired in the very spine of the bureaucracy.

  The primitive, single-plated Humvee that was first used for these patrols originally proved too vulnerable to IEDs and ­especially EFPs (explosively formed projectiles, copper-coated charges that are proficient at penetrating armor and were ­rumored to come from Chechnya). So the vehicle has been modified, and modified again, and then the modifications have been modified; it has been sent to the shop and affixed first with a Big Black Dick, then a Bigger Black Dick, and then ­extra armor and then extra armor on top of that. When the new triple-armored, Dick-bearing Humvee proved so heavy that the doors fell off their hinges, the army was forced back to the drawing board again, and doubtless a new kind of Humvee door will soon roll off the line.

  Like the endless, inconclusive wars in Orwell’s 1984, this interminable technological back and forth assumes its own logic after a while, and it may be that, nine or ten versions of the Humvee down the road, no one will even remember anymore why we needed to go to the police stations in the first place. So now Hennes and his convoy are driving to the police stations with big iron dicks in their grilles, avoiding alleys and keeping their doors shut so that they don’t fall off, while all the time trying not to get killed. That’s a complicated and hazardous enough mission for a bunch of twenty-year-olds, and it is not surprising that most of them don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about the what or the why of the mission. When the how is as difficult and problematic as it is for most soldiers in Iraq, why becomes a luxury that almost no one, not even the people in charge, can afford.

  We rolled through a section of eastern Baghdad that was a logistical nightmare—narrow, congested streets, high buildings lining both sides, debris and disabled vehicles everywhere—and finally reached the Bab-Al-Moudam police station and its ­garbage-strewn courtyard. Hennes excused himself and jumped out of the truck, indicating that I should wait.

  “You should have been here last time we were here,” said Cavanaugh, who as a Buffalo native appeared not to be shocked by Iraq.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Last time we were here, the IPs were shooting pigeons off the wall. This one guy shot a pigeon, it fell to the ground, and he went over and ripped its head off, squeezed its guts out, and fed it to a motherfucking cat.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  Hennes came back. “Let’s go,” he said.

  We inspected the station and things seemed in order except for one thing—a gigantic pile of canned sodas tossed haphazardly in one corner of the weapons room, amid a row of neatly stacked automatic weapons. The police had probably, I thought, just been thirsty and confiscated someone’s soda stash. Hennes sighed, like he’d seen this before, and asked the IP on duty what the deal was with the cans. Our translator, a masked Iraqi we called Johnny Bravo, who dreamed of being a Hollywood ­actor like Mel Gibson, explained.

  “Expired merchandise,” Johnny Bravo said. “You know, it’s the poison, man.”

  “Poisoned,” Hennes snorted. “Right. Whatever.” He shook his head and we went back to the precinct offices to meet with the bigwigs.

  Anyway, mask on—many of the translators do not trust even Iraqi police to know their identity—Johnny Bravo and I followed Hennes upstairs, where he was to meet with a pair of local police chiefs named Colonel Adnan and Lieutenant Colonel Qazoen.

  It was the by now familiar scene—a pair of mustachioed officials sitting with lit cigarettes and glasses of hot chai ready for their visitors, smiling and folding their hands. At first the meeting went well, as the two chiefs seemed to have the right answers for every question, punctuating their responses with occasional plaintive requests for equipment and money, but Hennes was noncommittal. Then he moved on to the subject of the “expired” cans in the pantry.

  “Johnny,” Hennes said, “ask him if he knows that there’s a whole bunch of cans of soda in the armory.”

  Johnny translated and Qazoen frowned, thought for a moment, then answered, his eyes looking sad and earnest.

  “He says yes, he knows,” Johnny said. “The cans are expired. They’re poisonous.”

  “Poison, right,” Hennes said.

  “He doesn’t want the people poisoned by expired soda,” Johnny said.

  “Right,” Hennes said.

  Banal as this scene was, it got right to the heart of the peculiar dysfunctionality of the occupation. After observing many interactions like this, I had taken to asking both sides exactly what the Americans’ authority was, legally, to tell the Iraqis to do anything. In this situation, for instance, could Sergeant Hennes order Colonel Adnan to throw out the soda? Or could he just suggest it? Given the fact that the whole ostensible thrust of our nation-building effort here is to impart historically despotic Iraq with a tradition of rule of law, this was a conundrum underlying our occupation that, to me anyway, seemed to threaten to reduce the entire exercise to an absurd paradox.

  One of the first Americans I’d asked this question of was Colonel Currier, the mellow intellectual CO/roving inspector those Oklahoma boys had been driving around the country. Currier is a model commander, attentive to even the smallest concerns of the lowest-ranking soldiers in his unit; he ­habitually manipulated his schedule, for instance, to make sure the soldiers he traveled with never missed hot meals.

  The colonel had worked out a coherent, logical case for ­every aspect of the mission. But even he was a little stumped by the legality question. Once, after he had given instructions and suggestions to some police officials in Tal Afar, I asked what his legal authority was to do so. “Well,” he said, shrugging, “it’s not an easy question to answer. I guess ultimately it’s like Mao said: Power comes from the barrel of a gun. I mean, we’re here, we’ve got the authority. It’s implicit.”

  When I suggested that America seemingly had stepped into the exact role of the Ba’ath party, the colonel naturally did not like that comparison. “Let’s just say it’s kind of a gray area,” he said finally.

  For most of the officers and NCOs who deal with Iraqi officials on the micro level, that uncertainty is a daily reality. “Yeah, it’s kind of a gray area,” conceded Hennes, after the soda-can exchange with the two chiefs was over. “You ask what my authority is in these situations, and the answer is, technically not much,” he said.

  Almost everything about the Iraq War is a gray area, beginning with the question of whether the soldiers are at war or not in the first place. Can they shoot or can’t they? When driving through the city, is the show of force intended to intimidate or reassure? Soldiers regaled me with stories of units that had been asked to remove their shoulder armor so as not to look “too scary” to the population. In other units, M-4 rifles were taken away from the Humvee gunners, to prevent an excess of warning shots—leaving soldiers with only the massive and lethal .50-caliber machine gun to defend themselves.

  To the soldiers, all of these contradictory initiatives testified to a confusion on high about what the army is doing in Iraq. Is this mission political or military? “Either don’t waste our time coming here or, if we are here, let us put the heat down,” one soldier told me. “There’s just too much gray area.”

  On a practical level, watching soldiers like Hennes and pet
ty Iraqi officials like Colonel Adnan stumble over the political elephant in the room—the illusion of Iraqi sovereignty—is at times a painfully uncomfortable spectacle. Complicating matters is the strange disconnect between the two cultures. As ubiquitous as our presence in the country is, the actual commerce between Americans and Iraqis is far rarer than one might expect. Soldiers still characterize locations using the old slang terms “inside” or “outside the wire,” but the ironic thing is that by “outside the wire” what everyone really means is “Iraq.” “Inside the wire,” of course, generally means “inside the FOB,” and the FOB, with its high walls and stringent security, is a hermetically sealed universe that aims for the sanitary purity of one of those oxygenated, boy-in-a-bubble biospheres. Except in rare cases, ­Iraqis are not really welcome on the FOBs, and even in those ­instances—such as the case of the “host-country nationals” whom the army hires to clean up garbage inside the walls of Abu Ghraib—they’re likely to be kept under constant surveillance by Cool Hand Luke–style walking bosses who can have them changed into ­yellow jumpsuits at the snap of a finger.

  There are exceptions, obviously—the translators, the local politicos, the guests of the occupation—but for the most part the suburban American purity of the FOB, with its volleyball courts, cookouts, and Burger Kings, is kept closely guarded, meaning that Iraq is no longer a whole country but a pool of water marred by a rapidly expanding archipelago of oil slicks. According to the army, there are some eighty-two coalition FOBs spread across Iraq. As a result of all this, communication in those few instances where our culture meets theirs tends to be dysfunctional and sad—like a pair of Down syndrome kids rolling a ball back and forth across a shag rug.

  “Okay,” said Hennes. “Last time we were here, there were some IPs shooting BB guns. . . .”

  He recounted the whole story of the pigeon massacre. Johnny Bravo translated. The Iraqi colonel listened, then frowned.