“Tell everyone you did,” he replied and held up his hand for a high-five.
I slapped hands with him, and we exchanged knowing smiles. Attacks on our soldiers were down, our respect in the community was up, and we were slowly forcing people to accept that the council—and through it, the U.S. Army—was the sole provider of security and stability in the region. In short, we were winning the war of propaganda. Letting the people think that our power could have a governor assassinated for being disrespectful added to that myth.
Nine
NEW ARRIVALS
THE SUMMER HEAT AND THE SUCCESSFUL council alliance—building program faded slowly into October. Life became fairly routine. The dramatic showdowns during the summer had created a pretty wide circle of autonomy in which I could work. The trust level between my commander and me was high, while the trust level between the Iraqis and me was arguably higher. I had spent so much time in the sector now that I had started to grow more comfortable with the Iraqi culture and religion than I was with my own.
Countless times, I had sat down with the male members of an Iraqi family in their home and enjoyed a dinner from a communal pile of rice and lamb. I had become accustomed to the shows of deference and even practiced them myself. Reaching up to my forearm into a pile of rice, I would grasp the most succulent piece of meat I could find and hand it over to the elder sitting at our table. There was an order and a simplicity here that I understood.
For the most part, the women and the children sat apart, in a separate room. Quite often in my visits to more rural homes or more religious families, I would not see the women at all, just a door held open and a tray of food emerging toward us, pushed through in front of a heavily veiled head that was gone before the door even began to close. This culture became my home and my center line—so much so, that when I drove through the Christian neighborhood and saw women with their heads uncovered, it struck me as vain and out of place. The Western style of these neighborhoods appeared to violate the integrity of the area. I found myself strangely hostile toward the one neighborhood that should have reminded me of home.
In addition, I had taken to wearing the traditional black-and-white checkered scarf, or kiffeyeh, as part of my uniform. It had been a gift from a shopkeeper along the way, and in these cooler months, it fit nicely under my body armor and felt quite warm. Not to mention the visual connection it gave me to the rest of the population. I had assimilated myself so much that people hardly noticed anymore that when I made my nightly trip out to the row of plastic portable toilets, I carried a bottle of water instead of toilet paper. One of the more curious dimensions of personal hygiene here—and personal hygiene was supremely important—was the cultural decision to eschew the use of toilet paper for running water, in the Middle Eastern fashion. I had been skeptical of the efficacy of this approach until I tried it. This process was fantastically refreshing, and I felt the way a baby must feel when he is cleaned with a wet nappy. I was all smiles.
One evening, bottle of water in hand, I made my walk toward the row of blue toilets. The air was getting cooler, and the nights were getting longer. We were approaching Ramadan, the holiest season in the Muslim year. The District Council had held several elections in the last few months, and, as a matter of course, each time it elected a member from my council as the president. No doubt, the relative affluence of my council members helped them solidify the council politics in their favor. Increasingly, I had even started to receive council members from other areas, who were anxious to find out how I could help them.
I settled in to the portable toilet, pulled out my Arabic field guide, and studied it against the faint blue light created as the security lights shined through the blue plastic of the toilet. The alphabet remained inscrutable when written, but the phonetic phrases were starting to make sense. I had not progressed as quickly in this language as I had hoped, while the speed with which the Iraqis were learning English astounded me. Grown men, who spoke little or no English eight months ago, could now carry on a conversation with relative ease, provided it was confined to the subjects that we most often talked about: money, jobs, and weapons. As I sat crouched over the book, with my body armor still snugly around me, I focused intently on the curving letters and tried to block out the stench of the warm urine puddles and the cleaning chemicals that mixed in pools at my feet.
The explosions jolted me from my studies. One after another explosion screamed in through the thin plastic walls. It was a mortar attack and a big one. We had not had any mortar rounds land in the FOB in a while, and even then, it was one or two smaller ones, off target and hardly noticeable. These, however, were coming in fast and in abundant quantity—more than a dozen, if I was counting correctly. But I really was not counting. I was battling with a far more basic calculation. The rounds were so close that I could hear the white-hot shrapnel whizzing past me. There was no way to know whether one of those pieces would slice through the wall and through me like a warm knife through butter. At least I had my body armor on, but my pants were around my ankles.
Amid the whirring hisses and thumping mortars, I contemplated the age-old question of all mammals in a threatening situation. Do I stay or run? The mortars had continued for longer than normal this time, meaning that the insurgents were firing them from a place where they felt safe and they were refining their aim. It was definitely getting uncomfortable to remain exposed here. God forbid that this would be how my military career ended, pants down in a chemical toilet. It would be very Elvis but still somehow not too appealing. Making a run for it would entail some serious gyrations and the wholesale abandonment of personal hygiene, Iraqi or American style. It was a tough call. Then came the silence. It was over. I didn’t linger to enjoy the moment, though. I was sanitized and back inside before anything else could surprise me.
The duration of the mortar attack confirmed some rumors that had been circling for a week or so in the markets. A growing number of insurgent groups from outside our area were seeking a presence in our neighborhood, and they were actively recruiting. It was evident that the Sunni factions felt a certain solidarity with the city of Fallujah in western Iraq, where a large army offensive was fighting a determined resistance. Daily images of air attacks and civilian casualties fueled a public animosity. Convoys of donated medicine and food were sent to Fallujah from all over Iraq, always interspersed with weapons and fighters. Anguished compatriots scrawled cries of angst and support on the walls of Sunni neighborhoods. “La la Allawi, Nam Nam Zarqawi,” (No no Allawi, Yes yes Zarqawi), and “Fallujah Fight!” proliferated overnight.
It was the homage to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that worried me. Back in May 2004, a video titled Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American appeared on an alleged al Qaeda website in and around the markets and the teahouses of Baghdad. It showed a group of five men, their faces covered with kiffeyehs, beheading American civilian Nicholas Berg, who had been abducted and taken hostage weeks earlier. As recently as last month, Zarqawi was also believed to have personally beheaded another American civilian, Olin Eugene Armstrong. As the U.S. Army moved closer to Fallujah, Zarqawi had grown more defiant and declared “all-out war” on the Shi’a and dispatched numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shi’a militias.
Accordingly, groups of Fallujah fighters who had escaped the coalition encirclement set up in anticipation of a second offensive had relocated to Shi’a Al Dora. These savage fundamentalists made our neighborhood, which was now working well with the U.S. Army, a primary target. Their posters of dying American soldiers and burning World Trade Center towers started to appear in the market, as did numerous low-quality DVDs of successful attacks on coalition soldiers. Fallujah fighters had a well-deserved reputation for violence, and their public relations campaign was in full swing.
We were not the only people taking note of the new arrivals. The Shi’a council members had become increasingly hard to find, and patrols reported seeing fe
wer and fewer of the neighborhood watch units stationed at their normal posts. This, coupled with the increased mortar attacks, meant that we all needed to spend more time in the streets to offset the malevolent influence of the insurgent wave building beneath the surface and to reinforce our commitment to protecting innocent people.
Accordingly, I decided to roll out immediately to check on the devolving situation in the street. Staying here and getting attacked by mortars while I was trying to use the bathroom had been uncomfortable enough. There was no reason to wait here for another round of explosions. Actually, there was little time between explosions any longer. Almost continuously and from across the city, explosions rippled and popped like sparklers on the horizons, with light and sparks dancing innocuously over the carnage and confusion below. I decided to check first on the neighborhood watch units stationed on the overpass. The abandoned overpass was close to the Sunni neighborhood where the most pro-Fallujah people lived. Of all places, this would be the first one affected by the shift in demographics.
As we approached the overpass, I could not see a single person where there were normally dozens. We pulled off the concrete and drove up the unfinished dirt ramp onto the overpass. Garbage from the MREs (“meals ready to eat”), batteries, and assorted junk food tumbled lazily through the dusk air and swirled against half-filled burlap sacks. The heaps of unbagged trash stood witness to the absolute lack of discipline in these Iraqis. Fires smoldered in the many places where garbage had been gathered and lit for warmth on the previous night. I had not been up here in a few days, and I was shocked at the disrepair. My last instructions had been for the shifts of guards to fill the sandbags and begin fortifying this bridge in anticipation of increased attacks. You would have thought that the opportunity to improve one’s chance of survival would have motivated the guards to fill the bags and barricade themselves. Yet the dozen guards who had crammed themselves into the makeshift bunker that one of the American patrols had built earlier in the week were even less ready for combat than the half-filled bags were.
We deployed the Humvees to the far end of the bridge, and I hopped out to find twelve grown men crammed into a space no larger than a child’s playhouse. They were terrified, praying, and apologizing, all in Arabic. It was obvious that they had spent their time eating all of the food and then retreated into the shelter to wait out the night. It would have been comical, were it not so pathetic. They were like sheep.
Disgusted, I radioed for one of the nearby patrols to stop by with an interpreter, so that we could figure out what was going on. Because we were all out in sector this evening, it was only minutes before three more Humvees showed up. While the interpreters jumped out, the soldiers looked around in disbelief at the amount of trash on the bridge. Almost instinctively, they began stacking the sandbags, yelling and directing the Iraqis to get the sandbags filled and the trash picked up. It was not a minute too soon. As the interpreter was condensing their jumbled nonsensical pleading into coherent English sentences, I began to understand that they had been visited by several Wahabbi extremists who promised to kill them and their families if they were still on the bridge that night. They were too scared to leave during the daylight, so they were waiting until dusk to run home. They had already stacked all of their uniforms in a pile in the corner.
This was unbelievable. During the last few months, American patrols had become accustomed to seeing guys with AK-47s on this bridge and had grown used to the fact that we were on the same side. If that had changed and an insurgent group was positioned on the bridge, they would have been able to surprise the first American patrol, at least. Partly furious and partly exasperated, I did not even hear the first bullets hitting the chain-link fence that stretched up from both sides of the bridge. The fence had been installed by the original contractors to prevent people from committing suicide, but in postinvasion Iraq it was also useful for deflecting rocket-propelled grenades. The bullets flicked through the fence and skipped over the pavement.
The guards kept saying that the gunfire was coming from the minaret of a Sunni mosque, but that seemed almost impossible. The mosque was at least six hundred meters away, which was almost sniper distance. A trained sniper seemed too sophisticated for the insurgency. More familiar bursts of fire came from the opposite side of the bridge, from a white late-model car parked in an alley between two houses. Here you could clearly see several men in black masks firing AK-47s, with the puffs of smoke leaving the barrels and the sounds of firing chasing seconds later. They were well beyond their effective range but not beyond that of our heavy machine gun.
“Light ’em up,” I said to the gunner of the .50 caliber machine gun.
This antivehicle machine gun, which used a bullet that was larger than a human finger, had served valiantly since World War II. It now barked its authority across the open field. Round after round tore into the white car and sent the masked men running in different directions. Under normal circumstances, I would have been more reluctant to fire such a weapon into a populated area like this. The bullets would likely pass through several houses before coming to rest and would cause significant collateral damage. Yet something about the absolute unpreparedness of the guard force, their impending desertion, and the growing feeling that we were under attack from a mysterious force allowed me to indulge in this heavy-handedness to make a statement.
I watched three masked men disappear behind several houses. Beside me, a guard spun suddenly and collapsed. Blood spread quickly from his shoulder, as he lay crumpled in a pile. Soldiers and guards alike flattened themselves against the pavement on top of half-eaten packets of peanut butter and crackers and behind the half-filled sandbags.
The machine gunners crouched so low in their hatches that they barely stuck out. Their heads looked like turtle shells. The rest of us were gripped by the fear that we were now one bullet away. The injured guard was leaning against a Humvee now, shaken but stable. The bullet had passed through his shoulder cleanly, and our medic felt that he would be fine. Standing behind the door of my Humvee, I scanned the horizon for any logical sniper position. The cityscape was a medley of rooflines, drying laundry, and antennae. It would be impossible to find a sniper in this jumble. It would also be difficult to be a sniper on this level. The obstructions, the blowing clothes, and the wires would make such a tough shot almost impossible. The only place it made sense was—and I hated to admit this—from the minaret. Maybe these guards were scared for a reason. Maybe they actually knew what they were talking about, and maybe I should have given them the benefit of the doubt, but they were gone now. They had collected their wounded comrade and starting walking off the southern end of the bridge into a Shi’a neighborhood and toward home. The sun had set, and they were invisible long before they reached the houses. The great defection was starting, and the night was still young.
After putting out a warning to all of the units that the bridge was no longer occupied by a security force, we spent a few minutes driving the trucks around the fortifications and discussing what to do about the shelters now standing empty. An insurgent hiding in one would present a serious problem for us, but we had no means to secure them. Manpower was already stretched thin, because we were required to keep more and more trucks in sector to monitor the bubbling animosity. We resolved to destroy the shelters later, but that would require time and some heavy earth-moving equipment. We had to get back on the road. The sniper had gone quiet when the sun went down, but there was no need to stay up here any longer than necessary. We had ceded a piece of key terrain, and it did not feel good. All of the military convoys passing through our sector were now exposed to a higher risk. The bridge, which once felt like a friendly checkpoint, now looked ominously sparse.
As we sped away, I wondered whether the other guard units had received similar threats, including the ones deep in the heart of the Shi’a neighborhoods. I did not have to wait long to learn the answer. As the patrols rounded through the respective neighborhoods, the radio reports confir
med no guard sightings at most locations. Yet that was only part of the story. Bodies were starting to crop up in streets and alleyways. Every half hour, patrols reported being flagged down to find groups of men with their hands bound, decapitated, or with their throats slit. Although the details were slowly emerging, at first there seemed to be no commonality among the victims—they were teachers, butchers, carpenters—but then we realized that they were all Shi’a.
The Shi’a neighborhoods were under attack, as the Wahabbi made good on their promise to bring death—starting tonight. The streets were eerily empty as we turned toward Abu Discher. About a quarter of the way up the road, a Chevrolet Suburban was parked on the side with its brake lights still on. We approached it quickly because vehicles of this type were not common.
In fact, I knew of precisely only one in our sector, and it was owned by Sheik Mahmoud, a contractor and a council member who had a pronounced love of all things American, including this huge SUV. From the slumped position at the wheel, he appeared to have passed out from too much arak, the bootleg Iraqi liquor prevalent on the streets these days. I shook him through the open window, but he was unresponsive. Growing increasingly nervous, due to the earlier attack and the rumors of death flying rampant tonight, I prodded him again, firmly. That is when I noticed the blood—crystallized crimson pools that stretched down the far side of his starched white dishdasha. Pulling his headdress back, I could see that his face had turned purple with pooled blood from being slumped over. His eyes were glassy and unmoving. The small hole behind his ear marked the point where death had entered in the form of a small-caliber bullet. His life had blown out the opposite side, staining his robes and gluing him to the seat of his beloved American car.
There was nothing else to do, save radio this in and keep moving. The next stop was the cluster of guards near Said Mallek’s house. Their proximity to the Shi’a mosques and Said Mallek’s house should have provided them with ample protection, but because the road they guarded led directly into Sunni territory, they sat at a dangerous intersection. We rounded the corner toward their post and scanned for any guards. There was no one. Then from the bushes I noticed the beam of a flashlight, and slowly the guards emerged, six in all, looking sharp and alert. For all of the terror ringing around the sector, here at least was a spot of normalcy. We waved to them and continued our journey, wrapping back around toward the FOB. It was just after midnight. The night seemed to be quieting down after the flurry of madness at sunset.
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