The Things They Cannot Say

by Kevin Sites

  Iscol’s first deployment with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines wasn’t what he had bargained for. While he had hoped to be part of the main fighting effort near Baghdad or al-Anbar Province, he ended up commanding small boat operations in the Shatt al-Arab waterways in the south near Basra.

  “Day and night we were running patrols along the waterway, boarding fishing boats and seizing weapons or intercepting smugglers going into Iran with oil,” says Iscol. “Every boat we inspected had signs of smuggling and their bilge tanks were filled with oil. Most boats had fake floors with storage space underneath. We’d use six boats on these patrols; two boats would provide overwatch, with snipers circling the boat you were boarding. Then we would use the others to form a boarding party up,” Iscol says. “First we’d stop the boats, asking permission to board. The captain is told to get all of his men out on his deck in one place. Then we’d search for weapons and other contraband.”

  It was not the kind of action he was expecting to see in Iraq.

  “Here were these major historical events going on and I had not been a part of it,” says Iscol. “It was the kind of feeling someone from the ‘Greatest Generation’ might have had being rejected for service in World War II because of flat feet.”

  But as soon as he got home to the States, Iscol started searching for a way to get back. His platoon sergeant had a friend in another battalion, 3/1 Marines, and after sending e-mails and making phone calls, they both wrangled a transfer to the unit. By June of 2004, Iscol was in Iraq again, after spending only a few months at home. A week into the deployment Iscol was made commander of a Combined Action Platoon of Marines that embedded for the next four months with six platoons of Iraqi National Guard soldiers. Five of the platoons, Iscol says, were made of up of Shias and had a record of fighting effectively alongside Marines. One platoon, however, was dominated by Sunnis and was likely, he says, to have had ties to the insurgency.

  It was here Iscol met the most important man of his deployment, his interpreter Khalil Abood. Abood would become Iscol’s liaison, guide, teacher and confidant. Their relationship would become so close that some of the Iraqi soldiers started calling Abood “Abu Zachi,” or “the father of Zach.”

  After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Abood was trying to support his family on his $10-a-month pension. He went to Amadiya, where the American Army had just set up an outpost, and got a job working for them. He eventually ended up in al-Anbar Province working with the Marines.

  Abood had the gravitas to deal with everyone on their own terms, from poor farmers to distinguished sheiks. In fact, Iscol says Abood’s rapport with tribal leaders was so good that Iscol sometimes felt like a little boy trying to be a grown-up when he was with Abood. This frustration came out early on in the deployment when Iscol interrupted Abood during a meeting with tribal elders.

  “I appreciate the fact you’re talking with them, but do you mind translating so I’m not left out of conversations?” he remembers saying. But in fact, Abood had only been greeting them and making salutations; they hadn’t even begun talking business yet. The room went silent. “I knew then,” says Iscol, “it was a moment for me to check my arrogance at the door and be humble. Abood knew a lot more about any of this than I did.”

  “The next six months we were working together every day. He was my eyes, ears and voice,” says Iscol. “In terms of trusting him I felt Abood is like Geppetto: he has a very old soul, a decent human being. There was just something about him.”

  And it would be during one defining moment for Iscol that Abood would provide the greatest guidance and support, for which Iscol would spend much of his time after returning to America attempting to repay him.

  “We got a call from our battalion that night that a high-value target would be traveling from Fallujah to Baghdad. We needed to set up a checkpoint, put out the wire, put out cones. And since a lot of times insurgents would drive up to checkpoints, shoot at us and run away, I had an idea that we would set up cat claws, remote-control spike strips to pop up and shred their tires as they tried to make their retreat. We set this up on Route Michigan five kilometers east of Fallujah.[23] We’re in an ambush position and wait, then at a certain point in the night a dump truck flies by,” says Iscol. “It crashes through the first barrier. And our machine gunner opens fire on it”—as Iscol says he ordered the Marine to do under those circumstances. “Then everyone opens up, including the Iraqis [the Iraqi National Guard]. Another problem: we had a poor geometry of fire and some of those rounds being fired at the truck are landing near us since we were waiting by the spike strips. We thought we were being shot at. Finally, the dump truck rolls off the side of the road.”

  The Marines assumed the truck was a VBIED, American military lingo for “vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.”

  “We waited for it to explode, but it didn’t,” says Iscol. “While one of my Marines covered, another opened the door to the vehicle. We saw the old man who had been the driver. He was dead, his dishdash covered with blood. I remember the smell… diesel fuel mixed with blood,” says Iscol. He’s quiet, circumspect, as he goes back to that place in his mind.

  “At that point you want it to make sense,” he says when he continues. “We wanted to believe we killed a bad guy, rather than a civilian. So I start thinking maybe something else would explain why he ran the checkpoint. We checked his truck. There were tons of white boxes but no contraband. The thing that I remember the most was not the visual; it was the smell. Unrefined diesel fuel and blood seeping from the door. The cabin was just shot to shit. The metal looked like Swiss cheese, all the metal, the bench seat, all shot up. And there was this older Iraqi man, maybe in his sixties. His face was fine, untouched, but his dishdash was soaked in blood.” Iscol pauses.

  “I felt completely sick to my stomach and nauseous. On one hand you’re worried about your Marines and the ones who pulled the trigger. You’re hoping to God you find out this guy is an insurgent. Then you start thinking, Could we have done anything differently? Almost immediately I was replaying things in my head. It was a nauseous confusion. You feel sick to your stomach that you’ve killed this innocent guy, but you’re hoping he’s a bad guy. And you kind of go back and forth with it.”

  When Iscol went back to the truck he heard his platoon sergeant yelling at the lance corporal for shooting downrange toward the spot where Iscol had been waiting with the spike strips. It was the same machine gunner who had been the main source of firepower unloaded on the dump truck. Iscol knew that with his plan to capture retreating insurgents, he had devised a bad field of fire. The lance corporal had been right to fire on the truck and had lined up his fire properly. Iscol had just been in the wrong spot. And it seemed clear to him they had also killed the wrong man—a civilian.

  “We needed to tell him [the lance corporal] he did the right thing and he needs to do the same thing tomorrow,” Iscol says. “And that kills you. You’re responsible for your Marines’ welfare when you’re there, but also for their mental health when they come home.” If that lance corporal had hesitated, other Marines or Iraqi soldiers may have died. Still, the truth of and responsibility for what had happened, justified or not, sat uneasily on Iscol’s shoulders. He felt very much alone in his command.

  “We brought the body back to camp and batted him and took him to the Iraqi police station.[24] As I was writing the incident report, I remember being nervous about whether we were going to get in trouble. I was a little surprised how quickly it was settled. I got an e-mail back with ‘case closed.’ The shooting was considered justified. When everything was finally in the clear, I worried that we weren’t putting enough emphasis on the value of Iraqi life,” says Iscol. “We got to protect ourselves but this guy died. I wanted the regiment, the MEF [Marine Expeditionary Force], to acknowledge that this was a human life and that it warranted an investigation.”

  But the value of that life was not lost on Iscol when the brother of the Iraqi truck driver who had been killed came to the b
ase to meet with him.

  “I spent most of the day with this guy and learned about his family,” says Iscol. “The brother told me that he [the driver who was killed] married late in life because he had spent most of his time taking care of his mother. He also had two young children.” Iscol also found out from the brother the likely reasons why the man they had killed did not stop at the checkpoint. He had poor eyesight and the brakes on the dump truck were bad.

  “I called a JAG officer and immediately made a reparation of twenty-five hundred dollars, which was going rate for wrongful death.[25] I think he [the driver’s brother] was scared to death coming to see us. I can only imagine what it’s like for him. When I’d apologize for what had happened he’d say it’s God’s will, it was his time. My translators and I were really worried that he would be robbed and killed for the [reparation] money, so Abood drove him home.

  “Abood was very deferential and kind to the brother, but also continued to empathize with me. ‘It was a tragedy,’ he told me, ‘because it couldn’t happen any other way. Everyone made the best decisions they could with the information they had.’

  “At the time, I kept reinforcing that, but I blame myself now,” says Iscol. “When I look back on it, I reacted as if there were a fifty percent chance the truck coming at us was a suicide bomber. I wish we had taken more risks. But if something happened to my Marines and they became endangered I would have felt completely opposite. Still, I question, did we make ourselves safer for this action or create more insurgents?”

  Later, the incident would also challenge him to think about the bigger picture, the strategic one, about the military’s emphasis on “force protection,” safeguarding the lives of U.S. troops first, sometimes at the expense of innocent civilian lives, as in this incident.[26] And after years of robustly defending the mission, volunteering to go to Iraq not once but twice, Iscol also began to wonder, after his deployment, whether the American military should’ve ever gone there in the first place.

  But Iscol didn’t have a lot of time to contemplate what happened in Iraq while he was in there. As the summer wore on, so did the tensions mounting in Fallujah, and incidents around the camp reinforced his unsettled feelings about his mission so far.

  “We had these two puppies, named after our call signs, Beowulf and Cannonball. Beowulf ate fly poison and began convulsing. None of the Marines wanted to put it down,” says Iscol. “A Navy corpsman called me over and I put a sandbag over the puppy’s head and killed it with my nine-millimeter. That was the moment when I realized this was going to be a lot different than I thought it would be. Thought I’d be killing insurgents and stopping fanatics—instead I killed a puppy.”

  When Iscol first returned home from Iraq, he felt a sense of urgency to confirm that his service in Iraq did indeed have purpose. At various engagements he spoke with a zealous assurance that America had been right to go to war in Iraq. But as the months went by, Iscol began to see through his own bluster and did what he was educated to do: contemplate his experiences more deeply. One seminal operation dominated his thoughts, the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, when American and Iraqi troops took back the city from insurgents, but at a cost of nearly leveling it.

  “We came home from that deployment thinking we had accomplished a lot of things. Insurgent activity, especially in al-Anbar Province, was almost nothing,” says Iscol. “But when I saw things go to shit again I wondered what we really had accomplished. You begin to see with great clarity what happened in Fallujah. We looked at Blackwater [the killing and burning of the bodies of four American security contractors] as the beginning. But for Iraqis it started a year earlier,” says Iscol.

  “With the benefit of hindsight, I’ve become more thoughtful about what we did there. I don’t think you can really go to combat and not look back, not reflect. When you go to war and you come back it doesn’t leave you. How can you not think about things differently?”

  One of the things Iscol knew he could not leave behind in Iraq was his interpreter Abood. Because of his work with American soldiers and Marines, Abood, his wife and his four daughters became the target of constant threats, which eventually forced them to leave Iraq and take refuge in Jordan, along with thousands of others. At the time the U.S. immigration policy for Iraqis, even those who assisted American forces, was to allow only a trickle to enter the U.S., three thousand per year.

  For Iscol, this was not nearly good enough, especially since the man who had helped keep him and his Marines alive in Iraq was now the target of death squads. He began writing letters and making calls, using some of his parents’ political connections, even walking the halls of Capitol Hill in his Marine dress blue uniform, knocking on office doors of senators he believed could help. His persistence finally paid off when Iscol was allowed to testify on Capitol Hill on behalf of Abood and other Iraqi interpreters. The day he spoke, Abood and his family were granted refugee status. Six months later they were in New York.

  “It’s great that happened,” Iscol says, “but do we have to hold a hearing every time we try to bring someone here?”

  Iscol helped set Abood up in a hotel owned by family friends and then helped him and his daughters get jobs as interpreters. While the impact for Abood was immediate, Iscol’s work also helped to pressure the government to increase the number of special immigrant visas for people like Abood, who assist American military or policy efforts abroad and then become targets because of it.

  Iscol didn’t intend his efforts as a kind of reparation for the shooting of the Iraqi driver by Marines under his command, but it did highlight his determination to prove that an Iraqi life is no less valuable than an American one.

  Even so, he wasn’t done yet. The young man raised on the exhortations of Exeter Academy’s founder John Phillips to combine knowledge with goodness in the service of mankind had more he wanted to give.

  “War demands the best and worst of man,” he said in an interview with Fast Company magazine about his new project, a documentary titled The Western Front concerning his experiences in Iraq and echoing its namesake, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as the questions the book raises about the value and purpose of war. “Fallujah was a very tough fight and I saw and participated in some pretty awful stuff.”

  Rather than recoiling from his war’s memories and his own mistakes, Iscol sought them out aggressively. He wanted to understand his choices and how they might be instructive in the future, both to himself and his country. It was in the pursuit of this documentary that Iscol first came to me. Because of my “notorious” video of the shooting in the mosque, he knew that I had been embedded with another company in his battalion during Operation Phantom Fury. He sent me an e-mail asking to use some of the video I shot in his film. At first I reacted negatively, even harshly, to the request. Early on I had taken a lot of grief from ex-Marines for releasing the mosque video. But then almost invariably, I would get requests from them years later, asking for some of my other battle footage to use in memorial videos or personal highlight reels. I thought Iscol was requesting the same. But he explained his project and then asked to do an interview with me about what I had seen in Fallujah. Although it never made it into the film (it complicated the narrative, which was about Iscol’s experiences, not mine), I began to trust that he was really struggling with his choices in war and this was the vehicle in which he could both explore them and perhaps find some closure, by sharing their lessons.

  He was attempting to break the destructive grip of some of his wartime experiences by listening to that most important voice. J. Glenn Gray comments on this voice inside of us in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle: “Whatever his response, the person who hears the call of conscience is aware of freedom in the form of a choice. He could have performed differently than he did; an act of his might have been different. The whole realm of the potential in human action is opened to him and with it the fateful recognition that he is in charge of his own course. C
onscience is thus the first instance in the form of self- consciousness. It is that form that gives to us an unmistakable sense of free individuality and separates for us the domains of the actual and the ideal. Therewith the life of reflection begins, and the inner history of the individual no longer corresponds to his outer fate.”

  The need to help Abood as well as to produce a documentary about his own mistakes and his shifting belief system were part of Iscol’s attempts to extricate himself from that “outer fate.”

  “I began to wonder if we as a country needed to rethink our reliance on the use of force to keep us safe and why we, as a nation, we had not evolved,” Iscol said in the same Fast Company interview. “We are fighting two wars that didn’t even register as election year issues. Having our troops engaged in combat over there might make us feel safer back home, but are we as a nation simply repeating the same mistakes we made at that checkpoint?”

  But Iscol is impatient for answers. In the documentary, he travels back to Iraq, no longer as a Marine carrying a weapon, but as a man carrying his conscience. He is looking for more from his time in war than just stories with unsatisfactory endings. He is seeking, simply, perhaps nobly even, to understand.

  Postscript

  Iscol has kept up a breakneck pace since his return from Iraq. He’s the founder and CEO of a tech startup company called HirePurpose that uses analytical tools to match transitional job seekers, such as military veterans, with employers. He also serves as executive director of the Headstrong Project, a nonprofit focused on developing cost- and stigma-free mental health care for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. His documentary, The Western Front, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and is scheduled for release in 2013.