Father of Money

by Jason Whiteley

  We darted across the highway and into the shadow of the FOB wall, when all of a sudden heavy machine-gun fire tore through the night. It was close, and there was a lot of it. We whipped the Humvees around and raced back the way we came. Bounding over the railroad tracks, we saw people gathering in the street where the guards had been near Said Mallek’s house. We passed through them and got out. Another patrol from the area raced in from the opposite direction. Riddled with bullets, the guards’ bodies were still warm. Family members pressed their crying faces into the bodies of their loved ones, while my soldiers began searching around the perimeter. The interpreter from the other patrol learned that three cars had passed by and opened fire in a very textbook ambush. From the spent shell casings, we confirmed that they had used at least one large-caliber machine gun. This was bad news for several reasons. First, this attack had happened on the doorstep of Said Mallek and the FOB, which meant that the enemy was audacious. Second, this heavy machine gun, in conjunction with the suspected sniper from earlier that evening, basically confirmed that we were dealing with a new enemy who was well equipped and well trained.

  I needed to find a solution to this problem, but to really do that, I needed my own interpreter. I had not seen Ali all day, and Ammar was not answering his phone. I tried calling it again, but Ali answered. It was two in the morning, but he did not sound sleepy; he sounded almost worried. “Where are you guys?” I asked.

  “We are in the hospital. Ammar has been shot, and you have to come take him to the Green Zone.”

  Ali went on to say that Ammar had been left for dead near his home in one of the Sunni neighborhoods. Ammar had lived dangerously close to the Sunni mosque whose minaret may have been the sniper’s nest. He was afraid that the gunmen who attacked Ammar would follow him to the hospital to finish the job, and he pleaded with us to come get them both.

  This was a tricky position. The hospital in the Green Zone did treat both Americans and Iraqis, but usually only Iraqis who either worked for the U.S. government or were wounded by U.S. forces, including suspected insurgents, in some cases. Since his firing, Ammar had been confined to an unofficial role beyond the FOB, and he had been wounded by an Iraqi.

  After I told my commander what was going on, he did not even hesitate. “Go get him.”

  One reason that people were loyal was that they expected to be taken care of if they were hurt. This was truer than ever in an Iraqi system that prized paternalism. The ongoing attack was as much against our legitimacy and to undermine our ability to provide security to those who helped us as it was a sectarian uprising.

  The hospital was in northern Baghdad, well beyond our sector and buried in a maze of streets we did not know. On a chaotic night like this, it would be a tense trip. The highways were empty, except for a few American patrols, as we raced north toward the high-rise canyons that led toward the hospital. As we tore through their desolate streets, I looked up nervously. There were so many windows, so many floors, how would we even begin to defend ourselves here. I prayed that we would not have to fight and urged the convoy on faster, bargaining that reckless driving was preferable to becoming an easy target.

  A half-hour later, we pulled into the driveway of a mammoth building with groups of people huddled outside of every entrance. The vast socialist structure of the hospital stood cold and unfeeling above the hundreds of wailing people who were looking through the piles of bodies being dropped off at the overflowing morgue. The cool weather kept the smell down, but the salty smell of blood still wafted intermittently through the air. Leaving the trucks parked with gunners at their stations, six of us walked toward the front door. We passed like ghosts through the grieving crowds. We sensed no animosity toward us; these people now just longed to see their loved ones in whatever condition they might be. Respectfully, we moved quickly beyond them and into the great marble hall.

  The entryway differed from every other hospital I had ever visited. There was no reception desk, no bustling nurses. This was more of a warehouse than a hospital. It was a place where dying people were stockpiled until they passed away and were picked up by the crowds outside. There was no hope here, except in one place, and that was on the grizzled face of Ali, who met us at the steps and guided us up three flights of enormous stairs.

  We did not say much. The threat of the returning gunmen seemed real enough to keep all of us focused on getting Ammar out as quickly as possible. On the fourth floor, we exited the stairwell to find some semblance of a hospital. Here were doctors and nurses, all of whom immediately objected to our presence. We did not even slow down to hear their objections, which no doubt entailed a berating on how many people our occupation had pushed into this understaffed building.

  Ammar looked terrible. He was covered in gauze and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Scabs had formed all over his arms and legs. Ali explained to us that the hospital lacked the anticoagulant that would allow an intravenous tube to remain inserted for long periods, so every couple of hours the needle had to be moved to a fresh location and reinserted. By the looks of his arms, this had already happened dozens of times. It looked as if the bullets had primarily hit him in the shoulder and his arms because the gauze in those areas was soaked through with blood. He was weak and barely conscious, but we had no choice. We had to get him to the Green Zone. If he could survive that trip, he would live. If he did not make the trip, he would at least die faster than he would here, where the rudimentary medical care would prolong his pain for a few days before infection took him under.

  After we removed his tubes, two soldiers carried him toward the door. A doctor appeared to protest, only to have Ali wave his pistol in his face. The whole situation was absurd. We were kidnapping a guy from a hospital, so that he would not be killed by his assailants or by the germ-ridden hospital itself. We had our guns out, in a hospital, violating the dignity of the hallways of healing with our implements of pain and despair. This was the night from hell.

  The soldiers liked Ammar, despite his frequent histrionics, and they treated him as a fellow combatant. They carried him down the stairs with as much determination as if he had been one of our own. We carefully placed him in the Humvee and drove into the rising sun and toward the Green Zone. We were exhausted by the time we reached the hospital there. By our passing him off as an interpreter who had been badly wounded while serving with us, he was admitted without question and taken immediately to the urgent-care ward.

  The entire aura of the sector was definitely different now. What had started as a simple drive around the sector had turned into a twelve-hour patrol of attacks, cataloguing dead bodies, and transporting wounded, but we needed to make one more stop on the way back to the FOB. While we had Ali to interpret, we had to summon the council members for an emergency meeting.

  The soldiers ate breakfast in the hospital and caught up on some well-deserved sleep. Ali and I hit the phones, trying to get everyone together at the DAC in the next hour. The task proved difficult. The carnage had shaken the faith that the council members had been investing in our system. The Wahabbi fighters and Sunni extremists had immediately cowed the populace with their macabre displays of violence. Even my well-armed Shi’a allies were scared.

  These attacks also affected me on a personal level. They represented the loss of an investment. I had allied myself with these Shi’a figures, made them influential, and attached my name to them. In Iraqi lore, these council members, neighborhood watch units, and interpreters all existed as proof of my ability to provide security and prosperity. Yet in one night, a council member was dead, the guard force was routed, and one of my interpreters was in the hospital. This violence against people under my protection sent a very clear message: Abu Floos cannot protect you.

  It was true. I saw diminishing support for my leadership, as phone call after phone call went unanswered. In the end, the only people who agreed to meet were, predictably, the council members who were also members of the Mahdi Army. Said Mallek, Heydar, and a few other lesser ones wo
uld be in a mosque in Abu Discher in a half hour. They would not leave the neighborhood, and they would not be seen at the DAC. I already knew what they were going to demand.

  “We need cars.” The consensus of the assembled militia leadership was hardly surprising. During the initial talks about the neighborhood watch program, the great debate had been about stationary versus roving guard units. They had argued then, and now, that stationary guards were just targets. My concern had been that authorizing guys who had previously fought the U.S. Army to stand around with weapons was risky enough, let alone putting them in cars and making them mobile hit teams. Nonetheless, they were obviously the last of our allies, and we had to reinforce them where we could.

  I agreed to write authorization letters for six cars, each to carry no more than three people and no pistols, only AK-47s. During traffic stops, rifles were easier than pistols for the troops to spot and therefore could be monitored. The cars would be confined to the Shi’a neighborhoods and could not go marauding into Sunni territory on revenge killings. Given the number of dead Shi’a in the street last night, I knew that vendettas were a definite possibility, although nothing about the group’s demeanor gave this away. Two imams, three council members, one U.S. Army captain, and an interpreter had just conceded that we were all on the run now. There would be no more holding of ground and imposing our will on the surrounding areas. We had been stripped down as being less efficient, less trained, and less lethal than our adversary. These council members thought that mobility was the answer, and I hoped they were right. The truth is that nothing would have made me happier than some devastating attacks on the homes harboring these newly arrived fighters who had brought so much bloodshed to our streets.

  I wrote the letters and handed them over. Our business was done. Ali stayed because he could not go back to the FOB, and he was safe here. The rest of us made our way back to the FOB to sleep for a few hours and digest these new arrangements. We should have known that it would not abate just so we could better process it. No sooner had we dropped our body armor off in the foyer of our headquarters than my commander told me to send the Misfits to pick up a BBC television crew from the Baghdad Airport. They were to bring the crew back here to embed with one of our units. I was floored. My guys were hardly rested. Making the hour-and-a-half trip to the airport and back that evening hardly seemed fair.

  Unfortunately, there was no one else left, so the job of retrieving the reporters that evening fell to my soldiers. They would have the rest of the day to recover before going back out, and most of them enjoyed the large shopping complex in the airport base. That would give them something to look forward to. I would spend the next couple of hours explaining my theories on the demise of Iraqi social order in a special targeting meeting attended by all of the company commanders and my battalion commander.

  “It’s Ramadan.” The sentence floated out like a self-defining revelation.

  It was Ramadan; that was true. The holiest month of the Islamic year had started only a few days ago. Its imminent arrival had been preceded by a deluge of briefings on the observances of its customs, as well as an array of histograms comparing the violence that had surrounded Ramadan in previous conflicts. Although there were many competing arguments about violence during Ramadan, the most cynical view seemed the most appropriate. Ramadan, like all holy months, is a time of commitment and renewal. It is analogous to the month of Lent in the Catholic calendar, when fasting brings you more in line with your faith and strengthens the ties to your religion. Ramadan is a month of martyrdom and commitment to Islamic ideology and, more important, a time of victory for Muslim armies. The nights have specific meanings and are afforded names that correspond with their attributes. Depending on your particular interpretation, these names and promises were either literal or metaphorical.

  We were only days away from the “Laylat ul-Qadr,” or “The Night of Power,” a time when those who are martyred have a greater assurance of a place in paradise. The consensus was that the Sunni insurgency was recruiting people for some massive attack. On the conference table lay the most concrete evidence we had to date of a new insurgency: a plastic AK-47, a plastic replica of the burning World Trade Center, and a cartoonish picture of a successful ambush against American soldiers. Black trash bags full of these items leaned against the wall, spilling such propaganda for kids like toys from an evil Santa Claus. One of the patrols had picked up these recruiting tools from a market during a routine search. According to locals, the toys had been the central attraction during the Sunni insurgents’ previous night’s meeting and recruitment drive. Similar to our using soccer balls and T-shirts, the insurgents used toys to target children to join their cause. The soldiers who found the bags were first clued in that something was amiss when children who routinely waved hello now pretended to shoot rocket-propelled grenades at them. Instead of kicking soccer balls, the kids pantomimed throwing grenades. Clearly, something had gone awry the night before.

  Most of the battalion had come back into the FOB for dinner and to refuel the Humvees. Our plan was to keep people out in sector more frequently during the night and hope to deter another evening of bloodshed. The reports of violence had slowed down during the afternoon and the early evening. By the time the evening prayers began, it seemed like everything was returning to normal. Walking back from the mess hall, a few of us hoped aloud that the previous night had been the insurgents’ offensive—their one night of fury.

  A ripping explosion and a blast of light knocked away any hope that the peace would last. The explosion was so far away that the light reached us first, followed a few seconds later by a rolling baritone explosion. It was easily the biggest explosion we had seen. We ran for the headquarters and started monitoring radio transmissions. The reports came quickly because the bomb had gone off near the Green Zone and in a fairly wealthy residential neighborhood close to several Middle Eastern embassies. From the early reports, it had been a car bomb. We had yet to see one used in our sector. Then came the report that explained it all. It had been a fuel tanker rigged with a bomb. The damage was so widespread that the yellow-gray cloud was visible from our FOB almost two miles away. It looked as if the insurgents had at least one more night left in them.

  Ten

  FIGHTING AND FASTING

  BECAUSE THE MISFITS WERE picking up the BBC crew at the airport, I had nothing to do that evening after the targeting meeting except listen to the radio squawk about the damage from the exploded fuel truck. I tried to determine what connections we were overlooking. I went next-door and stared at our family tree. Some of these lines represented blood ties, and others simply implied an association. I had colored in the Shi’a ones a long time ago, and they remained far more developed than our Sunni linkages. I focused my attention on those Sunni gaps. The insurgency was Sunni, and we knew so little about them. The only definite linkage we had were the imams at two mosques, who were both known to preach a Wahabbi brand of Islam. That was it. The entire corpus of our Sunni knowledge came down to a slim set of data and innuendos. It was a poor showing for our having been here for ten months. Now we were reaping the benefits of not knowing what was going on.

  As if to emphasize how clueless I felt, another shockwave rolled through the building and knocked the dust loose from the shelves. I went to the foyer, half expecting to see the ceiling caved in. The sound had been so immediate and so demanding that it could only have come from close by. To my surprise the building was fine, and the foyer was full of curious people—no debris, no destruction. I walked outside and everything looked normal there, too. In a moment of relief, I thought that maybe it had been a controlled detonation. Those occurred from time to time, as engineers and demolition experts blew up confiscated weapons and explosives behind the FOB.

  Unfortunately, there was no such luck. The flurry of activity forming near the barracks suggested that something was going on that was by no means “controlled.” I turned back to the foyer just in time to see my commander chargin
g my way, looking determined and pulling his body armor on. He grunted in my direction. I knew him well enough that I guessed I was joining him for the ride—wherever that may be.

  I grabbed my body armor and my rifle, both of them still where I had put them down that morning. The body armor, damp and disgusting, smelled like a mix of locker-room sweat and hospital antiseptic. I felt almost nauseated to pull it back on after I had showered, but I had no choice. The trucks had already started, and my commander was ready to roll. Flailing one arm through the vest and the other toward the door, I ran to catch up. I jumped into the backseat with excitement—the way we rushed out to deal with incidents sometimes felt foolish and other times dangerous; this time it just felt mischievous. There was no target, I had no clue what was happening, and the explosion was so loud it did not even seem real. Everything about this trip had a weird feeling to it.

  We were on the highway and driving toward a Christian neighborhood before I started to understand what had happened. In fact, I would say I did not understand it completely until we turned the corner off the main street to where a church had stood a few hours earlier—not a small church, either, but a large church complex that straddled an entire block. Even though I was not as familiar with this part of the sector as the other soldiers were, I distinctly remembered that the church had dominated this area and had been across from a small park. The Humvee stopped, and we got out. Even though it was as dark as pitch, the smell of burning metal guided me toward an open space where the church used to stand.