The room around me was chaos. The doctor’s companions matched his cries as the fury of our soldiers found a home in their joints and their flesh. The hard sound of gloved fists into soft bodies echoed in the room. As the denials and the stonewalling continued, I noticed a table full of used surgical implements. The scalpels and the pliers had a secondhand, outdated look. Some were covered in rust and others in blood. I grabbed a scalpel from the table and began to fantasize about driving it into the doctor’s lying tongue and pleading eyes. I wanted to hear him admit to helping with the ambush. I wanted the opportunity to avenge Babbitt. My mind was a maelstrom, with reason seeking to overcome emotion. If ever there was a time for an execution, it was now. I raised one of the scalpels toward the doctor’s eyes. My most base, primal desires were firmly in control now. Watching his nostrils flare with fear, I could only imagine how my wildly dilated pupils must look, their excitement contrasting with my cold expression.
Somehow, though, with the scalpel inches from his face, the face of my adversary, I realized that this was not the way. The way of force and vengeance had already failed me. I needed to stop while I was still human. I thought that I had found a way to control everything. I thought that we had made the insurgency responsive to the dollar. Instead, we had just blindly run down the same road that the insurgents had trod, acting out in anger and undisciplined violence, conducting mass punishments and reaping very little reward. Somewhat apologetically, I slightly loosened the binding on the doctor’s hands and handed him off to be put him into the back of the truck for transportation to the detention facility. Although I had no faith in the interrogators’ ability to learn anything of value from him or any trust that the doctor would even be held for longer than a few days, it was our system, and I would default to it.
Meanwhile, down the road, the Iraqi army had finally been wrangled into each of the Sunni mosques, and they had discovered a huge weapons cache in one, the Yazeen Mosque, and had killed the imam in another. The details were sketchy on the shooting of the imam, but given his reputation and his missing hand from an errant bomb-making venture, no one asked too many questions. As for the Yazeen Mosque and its weapons cache, it was simply something that had to be seen to be believed. By the time we arrived on the scene, a full hour after the initial raid, Iraqi soldiers were still hauling out boxes full of weapons, bombs, and medical equipment. Several men, bleeding and bruised, sat in the back of an Iraqi army truck.
For all of our moments of zealous anger, nothing compared to unleashing the Iraqi army, which was 100 percent Shi’a, on a Sunni mosque that was suspected of assassinating Shi’a pilgrims. The beatings were merciless, but we only feebly objected. The emerging facts, in the form of this illicit weapons depot, confirmed what I had seen as we drove past with Babbitt dying in the back of the truck. This had been the command center of the attacks. The only disappointment was that the imam who had directed them was gone. Apparently, he had fled for Fallujah during the previous night and left his minions to guard the mosque. We had them and the cargo, but the brains of the operation had escaped. For all of the great photo opportunities, it remained a hollow victory.
Hollow, yes, but a victory nonetheless. Across the sector these victories rang in. I don’t know whether the recent battles had emboldened the insurgents so that they stayed around to fight longer than they should have, or if luck was finally on our side, but the number of successful engagements in a single day set a new record for us. Even as we watched the mosque cache being dismantled, a report of another engagement in a different Sunni neighborhood near the DAC came in. One of the tanks on patrol spotted several vanloads of insurgents emptying weapons from a different mosque and killed them all. A short distance away, an insurgent ambush aimed at one of the patrols was set up in the wrong direction, which allowed the patrol to come up on it from behind, again killing all of the insurgents. These small victories lifted our spirits. We were finally seeing dead insurgents, and it felt good to know that we were no longer punching in the dark. We were hitting them back.
I rode up to the latest engagement area and noted that the mosque was the one near Ammar’s house and from whose minarets the Iraqi guard on the overpass had been shot. There were only six major Sunni mosques in our sector, but they all seemed to be involved in this upsurge of violence. The fact that weapons were being unloaded from only one meant that the insurgents realized the protection afforded by the mosques had run out and that they were changing hiding places. I stood over one of the dead Iraqis who was wearing a black mask. The insurgents looked so inhuman wearing these masks, like the faceless enemy that they had been for months. I reached down and pulled the mask away. The bearded face of a portly man in his late fifties looked back at me. Back home, this type of guy would hardly be out mowing his yard, much less running weapons into a combat zone. It spoke of the level of commitment these people had, that a middle-aged man would risk his life for something he believed in.
The care packages and the yellow ribbons never stopped flowing in from home, especially now that we were close to the holidays, but how committed where the American people to this war, really? The Iraqis were all in, apparently, willing to die to liberate their homeland, to defend their religion, or for whatever purpose. My own emotional investment was on the wane. Like the temporary release of punching a pillow, the joy of finally bleeding the insurgents left me feeling more tired and not at all satisfied. The insurgency, like the pillow, could withstand my blows, taking and taking, and then it resumed its former shape. Meanwhile, I was wearing down.
Later that evening we returned to the palace we now occupied, instead of returning to the FOB. We were continuing our presence in the area to deter any attacks. From our interrogations, we had learned that the narrow dirt road skirting the river provided the insurgents with their primary ingress routes. We would blow up the road and cut their access to the south, forcing them back toward the highway, where we were better able to man checkpoints. At least, that was the plan.
The engineers made their calculations and set out to conduct the demolition of the road. I took time to stroll through the palace. It was such a strange place to be. The flatware was all silver, the dishes all china. Its splendor backed directly onto the Tigris, where three powerboats were docked, waiting for their playboy owner to return. In the barn, which housed not only thoroughbred horses but also several sports cars and all-terrain vehicles, a small family of caretakers lived a bare existence. It should have seemed odd to me that they would live in the shadow of such opulence, but I understood the two-tiered loyalty structure that defined Iraq.
The first tier of loyalty was to Saddam Hussein and his family, a loyalty based on fear. Even though U.S. forces had captured Saddam and killed his sons, people here still thought they would return. It was beyond their ability to comprehend a world without the Hussein family, and rumors of them being seen in a market or on a street dominated local conversations. The power vacuum, in the eyes of the Sunni people, was transitory. The customary rulers would return, so it was best to respect the rules as they had been left.
The second tier of loyalty was to Iraqis. These people would not defy their old masters by taking liberties with their houses, but neither would they object when fellow Iraqis used them to ambush Americans. Forced to choose sides, they would always choose the Iraqi side. That much was obvious now.
We heard a distant rumbling boom as the road was cut. A cheer went up from the soldiers in the palace. It felt as if the tide might be turning in our favor. The counterattack had defanged the mosques. We had succeeded in killing several dozen insurgents. Now we had cut their escape route. The tranquility of the night reinforced that perception, because no mortars fell on us, and only the gentle rushing of the Tigris River disturbed the stillness.
The next morning we were scheduled to return to the FOB and attend the memorial service for the dead soldiers, Babbitt and Specialist Raymond White, the soldier who had died in the second ambush in Arab Jabbour. Before we left, w
e made a quick check of the cut road. Surprisingly, we drove right over the area that had been blown up. With the road unguarded for a few hours, someone with a tractor had filled the crater and returned the road to a usable condition. I almost laughed. This was the perfect Iraq moment. Everything we endeavored to do was reversed within hours. If we built something, it was torn apart; if we destroyed something, it was rebuilt. It all goes back to loyalty and legitimacy. We had neither.
I thought about that more carefully as I sat folding and unfolding the program for Babbitt’s service. I could not get my head around the consequences of the last few days. Two dead soldiers, a half-dozen more wounded, and scores of Iraqis, innocent and combatant, left dead in the street. It all came back neatly to blowing a huge crater in the road, only to have it refilled the next day. The physical changes we exerted on our environment, the buildings we built or tore down, the councils we consecrated, and the relationships we forged came and went on a whim. Yet the emotional changes we endured were much more permanent. I discovered that my soul was much less resilient than a dirt road that could be blown apart and put back together.
Outside the FOB, normal traffic and activity had resumed and moved on from the bloody events of the previous week. As usual, the black-market gasoline and heating-fuel vendors lined the street selling their wares from plastic bottles for stratospheric prices. We had given up chasing them from the highway long ago. Despite our best efforts to push them from the roads and to destroy their illegal market, they reappeared like weeds, sprouting from cracks in the cement as soon as we passed. The business was just too good. Watching them hurriedly pull their wares from the street, one could see a microcosm of the American occupation. American forces could expend a lot of effort, eliminate the black market in fuel, force the gas station to run twenty-four hours day, and supervise everything. In these moments it might seem that the Americans were winning, that order was taking root, and the society as we planned it was beginning to develop. Yet the surge of progress, if we could call it that, would evaporate as soon as the requisite manpower stepped back into the Humvees. The American systems simply could not run themselves.
I had descended from the euphoric feelings of power and pride that had radiated from the walls of the palace and the halls of the District Advisory Council. Those places felt hollow to me now. I could while away my time, a lifetime even, without ever making a meaningful change, despite all of the glad-handing and the embraces of faux respect. I thought back to the schemes and the backroom deals that I had brokered with an air of authority and an optimism that I would get satisfaction from making friends and prolonging my survival. How quickly those deals had vanished at the earliest signs of strife.
The people had lost faith in me as Abu Floos, if they had ever really had it. They had given up on America being anything other than the latest occupier, and the illusory promises of change meant less than the struggle to defend an Iraqi identity. Living in squalor for the second straight year, the people saw my gifts for what they were: a quick fix. Like all addicts, the people had initially exhilarated themselves with my products. Now they had wanted more, and I could not deliver. The moment that the Sunni fighters arrived, I was unable to deliver security to the people who had dared to believe in me. That included the soldier whose dog tags now hung from an upended M-16 over a pair of beat-up combat boots.
The service was coming to a close, but the hardest part now lay directly in front of me. At the end of military memorial services, each attendee can walk to the front of the chapel and salute the memorial to the fallen warrior. The boots, neatly laced, will never walk another step, and the rifle, barrel down, concedes that the soldier’s last shot has been fired, but nothing can prepare you for the emptiness that the hanging identification tags create inside you. I walked slowly up to the memorial, feeling every heavy step as if it were my own last one. When I was close enough, I reached out and touched the tags. They felt cold and lonely. They had lost the warmth that comes from being snug against the chest of their owner. They no longer had the jingle that they characteristically make when they dance to the rhythm of a morning jog. They were silent witnesses to the loss that we all felt. I drew back my hand and saluted crisply, turned sharply to my left, and walked out into the fresh air.
Soon I was joined by my commander, who needed to talk off to the side. We took a walk away from the headquarters and toward the perimeter. He lit one of his omnipresent mild black cigars and started to describe our latest “problem.” The first problem was of our alleged excessive violence. One lieutenant thought that the actions of our unit during a beating we had administered were criminal and had filed a report. The second problem was that several National Guard replacement officers who were reviewing our contracting schemes were convinced that some were illegal. My commander wanted a plan to handle both of these problems before they spiraled out of control and put any of us in real danger.
I could not believe my ears. I thought that the consultants who arrived to certify the interpreters had been annoying and out of touch. To hear more of the same type of questioning from people in our own unit, on the day of a memorial service, really made me question where some people put their priorities. Then I remembered how we had felt during the first days after we arrived. We had been so judgmental, so righteous in our assessment of our predecessors’ actions. I thought that maybe the way to handle this was simply to talk to the National Guard guys, one on one, which I offered to do on behalf of the commander. After all, the council was not meeting during Ramadan, and, given recent events, it was not clear that it would ever recover to its previous level of commitment from either me or the Iraqis.
We walked back over to the headquarters, and I went directly into the office where the new officers were adjusting their belongings and settling in. At a glance, you could tell that they were more suited to life in a training environment than life over here. They were polite but standoffish and mistrusting. Their job was to conduct civil affairs and look after the implementation of various construction projects. Frankly, it created some redundancy over the job that I had already been doing for eight months. Neither of us trusted that the other side could do the job as effectively as we could do it ourselves. For my part, I tried to discourage them from applying American standards to the projects and not to upset too many of the ongoing projects in our sector. Their curt response underscored the latent animosity between these types of new arrivals and veteran combat units.
Unfortunately, their presence created more chains of reporting and indicated that the occupation was shifting into a more bureaucratic, less effective model. In preparation for the elections in January, more and more of these “specialists” arrived on a daily basis. Some of them were civilians, and others were in Army Reserve or National Guard units, but all of them had been back in the States or hunkered down in their respective camps while we battled the insurgency. Moreover, none of them had been in country for more than a month, so to hear them spewing judgments on our operations and threatening legal action right after arriving was simply too much.
It was precisely this type of bureaucratic thinking and programmed optimism that I had fought so hard to overcome in the early months. Granted, these contracts had not worked well for us under the recent pressure, and maybe for that reason I understood these new officers’ posturing. I thought they knew so little that they were dangerous only to themselves, but I did take offense at their alleging that our conduct had been improper. I was still really emotional about losing a soldier and was grappling with the failing systems that we had built. More than they would ever know, I felt the sting of the shortcomings, but it had nothing to do with the technicalities on which they were fixated.
After the New Year, security assumed an even higher priority. Sunni and Shi’a divisions became increasingly prominent as neighborhood watch security teams proliferated. Some of these teams had been, of course, my own creations, hastily conceived as a way to protect neighborhoods and mass labor projects from insur
gents. They had been created after the initial Sunni attacks, as a means to provide a mobile security monitoring force that made the council members feel more comfortable. But they had disappeared when they were needed most, and for the last two months, everyone had forgotten that they existed. It was funny how, back when I thought I was smart, I had tried to grow Shi’a influence by strategically placing Shi’a militias at potential flash points, as if they would actually fight and defend their neighborhoods. I had equipped and authorized them and cared for them as if they were my own soldiers. After a few incursions by the Sunni militia, they had abandoned us wholesale. Strangely, the Shi’a hit teams and the roving neighborhood guard units seemed to be back now, but they had grown out of control.
The guards had been useful before, to protect the labor projects and to defend their neighborhoods, when the threat had not been direct. We even felt some satisfaction in knowing that they had been responsible for some of the dead Sunni bodies that had showed up in late November. As we approached the elections, however, these attacks seemed completely arbitrary. There was a new war being waged, as Shi’a and Sunni attacked each other with greater ferocity, and we had no idea how to slow it down. Bodies appeared in the streets on a daily basis, and bombs in the market interrupted the daily commerce. The council meetings were suspended during Ramadan, but they remained sparsely attended even after the New Year. Like other projects, the councils became a relic of 2004 and existed in name and form only. The contracting duties had largely shifted to the new civil affairs specialists. I had nothing more to do with them and no means by which to try to reinvigorate any local interest in the American agenda. It was just as well, because I had continued to move deeper into a state of indifference and indolence since late November. This existence had been unthinkable a few short months ago, when my energy would not allow me to be out of contact with the people for more than a few hours.
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