Father of Money

by Jason Whiteley

  Much to my chagrin, I noticed a few soldiers from the Eighty-Second Airborne Division chuckling nearby. Wearing only their soft caps instead of helmets, with weapons slung casually and exuding a battle-worn confidence, they had the look of the combat instructors who had filled the woods around West Point during my summers there. Those seasoned combat veterans pushed cadets through leadership drills and combat simulations. Dozens of times, after reacting to an artillery simulator by running flat out and diving onto the rock-strewn ground, I had looked up into the same mocking smiles. If it was instructive then, it felt almost insulting now.

  Here, again, the experienced teachers watched their pupils react to a stimulus to which they had long ago become immune. These soldiers had fought in Afghanistan for almost a year, had briefly returned home, and then had been sent to Iraq for a few months. By my rough count, they had been with their families for fewer than three months in the last eighteen. It would not be a stretch to say that they were ecstatic to see us, and their bemused expressions showed a joyful mix of relief and exhaustion. They motioned us onward and gestured toward a tall chain-link fence illuminated by a row of portable searchlights.

  As the effect of the mortars wore off, I tried to take in the environment. My impression was really more that I had stumbled onto the night shift of a construction crew, rather than a combat zone or a military air base. The flimsy fence was adorned with signs warning of workplace dangers. Airmen with orange safety vests ushered us along a chalk-lined path. Bright multi-headed lights attached to portable generators both illuminated the area and obscured everything beyond their fierce glow. A mixture of military and civilian vehicles crowded the gravel parking lot.

  At the edge of the lot and beyond the fence, a relic of World War II waited to greet the newest initiates into the latest chapter of American conflict. The workhorse of the army for the last five decades, the 2.5 ton truck—the “deuce and a half”—is an unarmored diesel with an open back and plank sideboards, the vehicle often shown in photographs of Korea and Vietnam. It seemed a bit anachronistic that in a war described as the most modern and efficient in history, the digital battlefield still relied on the power of a diesel engine to deliver us into the waiting danger.

  One after another, we climbed into our place in history, shuffling uncomfortably forward, pressing farther into the open cargo bed, subconsciously searching in vain for someplace that felt safe. The rusted metal bed and the wooden sideboards would offer little real protection, but I still felt myself pressing deeply into them, as legions before me had done. The engine rumbled to life, the sound of a proud warhorse carrying the latest crop of green replacements into the fray.

  For a moment I flashed back to a diesel truck that my dad had owned when I was a child. A stripped-down, blue Chevrolet Blazer that he used in his surveying business and brought home only when we were going hunting, it was a four-wheel-drive brute. I remember how easily it clawed through the thick mud of the back roads of East Texas and how effortlessly it carried my dad and me on adventures that filled my imagination. To this day, the sound of a diesel truck makes me feel secure, confident, and ready for an adventure. I reached into these memories to prepare myself for this adventure, another hunting trip, and to galvanize my confidence in myself.

  A head popped up over the tailgate and a raspy voice jerked me back to reality. This was not going to be a weekend outing in East Texas with a stop at the local Dairy Queen on the way home. The sergeant hanging onto the back of the truck explained that the road had been a focal point of the nascent insurgency. As the site of one of Saddam’s palaces, complete with artificial lakes, the airport complex was surrounded by neighborhoods filled with Saddam loyalists, due to a legacy of rewarding the party faithful with homes closest to strategic locations. Our route would bisect these enclaves of burgeoning hostility and resistance and run south for a twenty-minute drive down what was becoming known as the “most dangerous road in the world.”

  The sergeant concluded his spiel with a less-than-welcoming reminder. “It is a natural choke point. This is the only airport that services Baghdad, and there is only one highway that leads to and from it, so keep a keen eye on the cars and the alleyways.”

  Keeping an eye on anything would be pretty difficult. Aside from the glare of security lights around the airfield, an inky black sky thwarted any attempt to discern much of the surrounding area. The neighborhoods remained without electricity since the invasion, with only a few generators sporadically powering fluorescent lights above the low brick walls. Complicating matters, most of us were without any night-vision equipment. Of the many equipment shortages and mismatches, this was probably the most detrimental. As a tank battalion, we were authorized only two sets of night-vision goggles for each four soldiers, because in a standard four-man tank crew, the night-vision capability was built into the tank for the gunner and the driver. Accordingly, in Baghdad, when we were all without tanks and forced into the role of infantrymen, we lacked basic materiel to accomplish our tasks. The rest of the equipment shortages would soon become apparent, but for now, squinting into the darkness seemed to be an appropriate beginning to my year in Baghdad.

  The truck rumbled beyond the wall surrounding the airport and barreled past the checkpoint manned by army sentries. The metallic sound of the machine gun chambering a round clued each of us to do the same. I reached into my pocket for my allotment of bullets—all three of them. One of the other, almost comical, bureaucratic oversights of this mighty army at war was the garrison mentality of ordnance accountability. Because no one from our unit had “signed for” or was deemed accountable for our bullets, we were not “authorized” to carry any. As a result, we had each been given three bullets as spares, just in case!

  The empty magazine gave an unsatisfied hiss as I purposefully pressed the bullets inside it. The spring hardly compressed. Under normal conditions, soldiers would carry six or more of these magazines, each fully loaded with thirty bullets, which weighed it down with significant killing power. In comparison, my one meek magazine danced lightly between my fingers and glided almost harmlessly into the rifle’s magazine well. It hardly seemed like an act of preparation for combat and more like gearing up for a shooting game at a county fair.

  I remembered the scene in George Orwell’s Animal Farm when the animals covered their stalls of sand with hay to appear more prosperous than they were. The analogy had been aimed at communism, but from my huddle of soldiers with three rounds apiece, the image applied equally well. This gamesmanship and manipulation of reality would plague our deployment for its entirety, in time making almost everything we did seem more like a pile of sand than of hay. For now, I just turned into the breeze and chambered one of my lonely bullets.

  The asphalt highway unfolded before us, as any blacktop would. It did not seem particularly treacherous at first glance. There were two lanes going to the airport and two coming from it. The palm tree groves that had grown in the median had been recently cleared to improve the visibility alongside the road and to enhance the fields of fire along the route. The silhouettes of a legion of barren stumps were now clearly visible in the field of oncoming headlights. Despite the late hour, a fair number of vehicles, some American military, some Iraqi civilian, peppered the highway. Even against the dark sky, there was enough light to see the menacing machine guns atop the escort Humvees. Standing through the roofs, the machine-gunners leveled their weapons outward, and belts of ammunition spilled forth. They wore bandanas around their faces and clear goggles to protect them from the wind and the dust. Covered from their helmets to their gloved hands, they looked more machine than man, and their well-defined, deliberate movements did little to change that image. One hand lay on the machine gun, the second held up a scuffed M-16.

  Our transport, escorted by two well-armed Humvees, bore down rapidly on several slower cars, whose feeble engines struggled to both turn the tires and power their headlights. “Crack! Crack!” The sharp report of an M-16 sounded from one of the Hum
vees. A taxi veered wildly to the side of the road and pulled to a halt. The terrified face of an elderly man peered above the steering wheel as we streaked past. His heart, no doubt, was racing like my own, both of us startled by the aggressive martial signaling. The use of live ammunition to direct traffic? It seemed a bit excessive to me, and I could tell from the concerned looks around me that the others thought the same. For weeks now, our briefings and preparation had centered on respect for the Iraqis and interacting with them as benevolently as possible. The army had adopted a strategy that forced soldiers to take more risks to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that we were respectfully passing through their country and not occupying it.

  A few moments later, our convoy swerved as it crossed beneath a metal pedestrian footbridge, again accompanied by a couple of “warning shots.” Although the overpasses and the bridges could be lookouts and ambush points, they also provided the means for children to walk to school and the elderly to get to market, so taking them down had not been an option. Yet neither should have been spraying them indiscriminately with bullets. Like most challenges in Iraq, there could be no single solution to even the simplest of tasks. Most green lieutenants would succeed at the military tasks of securing a bridge. Likewise, most engineers would excel at demolishing a bridge. Yet in this case, the bridge could not be approached as either a military or an engineering obstacle. It was a political one, in the same way that every object in Iraq, from the smallest rock to the biggest building, had assumed an aura of political significance. The world was watching as the U.S. military tried to elaborate on its battlefield success and establish a positive political system, where a law of consensual and transparent origin would guide society and objectively arbitrate and dispense justice. It was the perceived opposite of Saddam’s totalitarian system, which had been characterized, we thought, by whimsy and injustice.

  A few more miles of whizzing highway brought us south of a major cross street. The glowing stacks of the Al Dora power plant loomed just off the highway, while in the distance the Al Dora refinery lit a Halloween sky of smoke and orange. The large houses nearby remained mostly dark and appeared empty. Like the airport, the power plant and the refinery represented what the army called “Saddam’s crown jewels.” He had surrounded them with the homes of Ba’ath Party officials, many of whom had been educated abroad during friendly times. These neighborhoods had been designed to buffer the important infrastructure from the Shi’a lower classes. The large, ornate houses now stood abandoned because party officials of any rank had fled ahead of U.S. forces for Jordan and Syria. In their absence, these grand neighborhoods had become a no-man’s-land of squatting families. The only sign of life was the occasional glow of a trash fire.

  The darkness ended abruptly with the magnificently lit green towers of a Shi’a mosque.

  Rows of poor Shi’a houses huddled around the mosque. The houses were sporadically built and haphazardly constructed. Colored flags flew high on the desert breeze, held aloft for the first time in decades to celebrate the Shi’a holy month of Arba’een. Although at the time I did not know the name or the reason for these flags, their power was striking. Every house, hut, tent, and field flew the flags. Even among trash-strewn piles of rubble, uninhabitable mounds of shelter for the most abjectly poor, the flags flew defiantly. It was a remarkably powerful demonstration of unity and allegiance. Within the country’s majority Shi’a population, a smoldering resistance to the oppression of Saddam Hussein’s regime had caught fire after the invasion. These streets had provided little resistance to the invasion, and the residents largely welcomed the overthrow of Saddam’s government. For the first six months after the invasion, they remained cautiously optimistic that their interests and their faith would be better served by the new government. Democracy should favor them, as the majority. Yet the solidarity of these particular people and their sense of disenfranchisement, which echoed in the Friday sermons, would create a ready army for Muqtada Al-Sadr. These streets, lit with a communal generator and united by a common faith, would be galvanized in the next few days into an uprising that would last for months and would permanently alter the relationship between the Shi’a people and the U.S. military.

  The truck barely slowed as it left the asphalt highway for a rough dirt road. A black expanse of towering wall showed against its headlights. The forward operating base (FOB) was surrounded by a large, barren field, an area whose buildings the army had bulldozed. Trigger-happy guards in towers that rose menacingly along the walls kept the area clear of any trespassers. The lights of the neighborhood disappeared as we rounded the corner of the compound and drove between the outermost gates.

  The guards, nearly invisible along the wall, challenged the driver with the current password. The correct answer put our wheels in motion again, and we pulled inside the main wall, which I could tell now was even larger than I had thought. Forty feet tall and almost four feet thick, it towered over us as we clambered from the back of the truck to unload our weapons. The procedure for entering the base remained unchanged from the peacetime army ritual of exiting a firing range. Soldiers filed from the back of the vehicle and lined up in single file. One by one, we dropped the magazines from our rifles and pulled the charging levers forcefully to the rear. This ejection of the chambered rounds, followed by the empty discharge “clicks” of the firing pins reseating, was accompanied by a cry of “All clear!” We remounted the truck.

  Turning from this entry area into the main expanse of the base revealed a peculiar mix of soldier life. Everywhere, soldiers in battle-dress uniforms and soft caps walked and talked casually, with weapons slung at their backs. A basketball court was fully in use. Diesel-burning convoys rumbled past, notably without doors, revealing the armored and battle-worn soldiers within.

  The soldiers we were here to replace met us as soon as we arrived at the headquarters. A two-story former Iraqi army building, it stood triumphantly adjacent to several open fields and peered just over the surrounding walls. Sandbags filled each of the windows, and a forest of antennae jutted from the roof. Inside was a no-frills entry hall with a staircase immediately leading to a second level, where our sleeping quarters would be for the next year. We followed our new escorts upstairs and plunked our bags down on their recently emptied beds. We would replace them in every sense: what they did, where they slept, whom they knew, and ultimately how they felt.

  The rooms were primarily divided by rank, with six captains sharing one large room and noncommissioned officers across the hallway in a similar dormitory-style room. The bathroom facilities were limited to one toilet and one shower at each end of the long corridor. To offset the toilet shortage, a series of portable toilets, serviced by civilian contractors, had been deposited just outside the building. The chemical smell of solvent and feces wafted pungently through the open windows that were not protected by sandbags.

  Each bed had a locker next to it, which would hold each soldier’s valuables and clothing. As expected, these lockers had begun to accumulate a fair share of graffiti and unit insignia from the various alumni who had used them for storage. Colorful slogans and playful jeers greeted us when we opened the doors of our new wardrobes.

  I placed my entire duffel bag in the locker and latched it with the lock from the bag. There was no time to either organize my gear or tidy my new home. A battle briefing was scheduled to begin in a few moments, where each of us would sit next to our mentor and begin the process of downloading his knowledge.

  The next few days of inductions and briefings blurred together. By this point, the rest of our unit had arrived via convoy from Kuwait. Almost without pause, they had begun pairing up with their counterparts, as I had done with mine. The soldiers tirelessly moved into barracks rooms, prepared equipment, and patrolled the streets with the unit we were replacing that night.

  These early, confusing days were full of surprises, both logistical and operational. The Humvees that greeted us were a sorry lot, unarmored and without doors. The soldiers had p
referred the ability to quickly enter and exit, freely and efficiently interacting with the population. The explosion of one of the first improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Baghdad a few weeks prior to our arrival changed this practice dramatically. Welders worked night and day fabricating iron doors for the Humvees, with the finished product looking more like something from Mad Max than from the U.S. Army. Metal plates were welded onto floorboards, and sandbags were strategically placed over the floors and the roofs. The retrofitted Humvees drooped under the burden. They had not been designed to accommodate the additional weight, and now they looked like overworked pack mules.

  Operationally, the unit we were replacing had almost twice the number of soldiers we did, yet we were responsible for the same area. Simply determining how to cover it without exhausting our soldiers was a challenge. On its own, this issue would have been difficult to resolve, but the revelations of the moral ambiguity of this assignment would soon jar our collective conscience. The night before we took over and our counterparts left, we witnessed the uglier side of being an occupying army.

  Higher command had handed down the order to “kill or capture” a target, identified as an insurgent. Because the night mission was to encompass a large area and provide a good opportunity to see “how things were done,” our unit joined our counterparts, man for man, for our first combat mission. At the appointed hour, a line of Humvees snaked throughout the FOB, rumbling toward the gate, some with machine guns mounted on top of them, others with open backs filled with soldiers fidgeting with their equipment. Once we cleared the gate, the Humvees sped in single file toward the sleeping neighborhood where intelligence said the man would be and wound through its empty streets. As planned, we diverged to encircle the target’s house. Screeching to a halt, the Humvees emptied as soldiers rushed up to the door. They paused, gathered themselves, and burst through. From the street I watched the same scenario happen at several other houses simultaneously, because families often lived adjacently and targets sometimes could be found one or two houses over. Yelling, screaming, the crash of breaking furniture, and chaos echoed through the still night.