He did learn one more important fact, though, from researching his Gallieni oil spots. After six months of analysis, Frost noticed an additional trend within the cells. They each had distinctive methods, distinctive materials, but some also had distinctive targets. Some tried to kill Iraqi policemen and assassinate politicians. Some only conducted nuisance attacks against the main oil refinery in Bajji. Some killed civilians, the more the merrier. Some neighborhoods tried to kill each other. Some killed American soldiers, any soldier. But a few, an ever growing number in fact, discriminated. They passed over one truck for another. They skipped security to focus on the package being secured.
They were targeting us just like we were targeting them.
10 ♦ I’M GOING TO KILL YOU BOMB MAN
IT WAS IN THE MIDST of the Surges, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, that I had a job as a contractor teaching EOD techs the skills they would need to survive al-Muhandis. In the worst of the years, sometimes even this limited aspiration seemed to be too lofty. Survival always came first, and often wholly defined success. But eventually, the message of the Surge—that there were a practically infinite number of potential bombs available, and so hunting the people who made them was our way out of the country—sank in, and the students understood that their long-term survival would be based on the short-term collection of evidence. Post-blast investigation was already part of our job description, but the effort was sporadic and opportunistic, and not a universally accepted and explicit priority until now. The setting for my classes may have been academic, but the students’ relationship with the topic was not; the soldiers would run daily missions less than a month following our brief encounter.
So a Left of Boom paradigm shift was in order. The bomb in the road was no longer simply a dangerous obstacle to be breached. It was now an opportunity to understand the thinking of the insurgents, and, ultimately, the Engineer. The forensic evidence was necessary, but just the means to an end, nothing more than lumps of burned scrap unless combined with an analysis of the scene; the will behind the attack almost always more important than the bomb itself. Was the device indiscriminate, general chaos, meant for any poor soul? Or was it controlled, saved for a specific target? How do you know?
Or to put it another way, as I would ask myself later, were the bombs that got Fye, Frost, and Matt simply bad luck or meant for them?
To start this conversation, I always showed two videos to my students. Chosen to inspire reflection and discussion in the classroom, they were examples of their enemy collecting intelligence and evidence in reverse.
The first grainy video stream shows an American patrol of armored vehicles winding through an Afghan canyon. The camera is zoomed in. No ridgeline or sky is visible. The line of armored trucks slowly creeps along an impossibly narrow gravel track, left shoulder open to a steep ravine. No soldiers are visible, no gunners even poking their heads from rooftop turrets, only the great shuffling beasts, armored nose to armored tail. Then a cloud of smoke appears under the front tires of the lead vehicle. The convoy lurches to a halt. As is typical of such videos, popular Muslim prayer melodies sung by all-male choirs loop in the background; if the detonation was audible from the cameraman’s vantage point, it was lost in postproduction. Nothing happens for several minutes, the camera stays fixed, the dust cloud blows away, the chanting continues, and then several tiny soldiers appear in the frame. They dismount and run up to the lead vehicle, pick up bits of armor and headlight and the front bumper that has been blown off, open up the rear hatch of the RG-31 MRAP, and toss them inside. A banner in Arabic scrolls across the top of the video, subtitled in English by the helpful intelligence agencies who passed on the tape: “The Americans hide the shame of their weakness.”
The second video is more heavily edited and doctored. The target is the same: a line of knobby machines with nary a human in sight. But this time the armored patrol is close, partially obscured by a field of poppies. Two blasts hit this convoy, and a prolonged firefight ensues, the camera jumping wildly as the videographer takes cover. The same religious music plays in the background, but the sounds of the shots remain, the heartbeat thump of the incoming heavy machine gun fire, the clip and rack of the AK outgoing, the calls of ALLAHU AKBAR over and over and over again, the shouter’s voice turning falsetto in the ecstatic throes of it. Then suddenly the scene breaks and jumps forward in time, and we see the driver’s view as the ambushers travel the same road that the American patrol had just occupied. The camera pauses to focus on an enormous pile of jettisoned .50 cal brass and links, a stain on the sheets providing evidence of the American portion of the orgy. The camera stops at each blast crater along the road, the frame freezing as a clip art arrow from PowerPoint is sloppily superimposed over the hole, the words (again, helpfully translated) “The American Illusion” printed across the top of the screen. The short video ends with an inspection of evidence picked up from the scene: a pile of truck parts, the sharp teeth of a rear differential, the drive shaft and forked clamp, assorted nuts and bolts, and armored plates that could only come from the undercarriage of a Humvee. Now the title banner has changed: “The American Delusion.”
Such videos are far more sophisticated than the standard camera phone clip of your daughter’s dance recital. The graphic overlays resemble those of 1970s-era local news, but the editing and distribution network is slick, the work of established production companies that run credits at the front or back of each video. Shot by the teenage gunmen, uploaded to the Cloud, sliced and diced by the militia’s own editing staff or an affiliate both sympathetic and savvy, then distributed via complex channels that mirror tribe and sect. The Islamic State would eventually master the art of such videos, producing a mix of propaganda and extortion. But the audience for these earlier incarnations was still primarily local, and the goal was inspiration and recruitment. Attached to emails and posted on bulletin boards, so that, in a matter of hours, crowds of young men would huddle in Middle Eastern Internet cafés and city squares, watching the flickering images on their cousin’s cell phone.
“What’s the illusion here, guys? What is the delusion this video is combatting?” I asked the soldiers sitting in my class.
My students instantly got it.
“The delusion is that with all of our armor we’re invincible,” they said. “The videos are proof we can be killed.”
I LOOKED, BUT I never found a video of the attack that killed Matt Schwartz. I looked because I wanted to know if Matt was targeted. Watch enough of those videos on YouTube, and you can tell some are more than basic ambushes. You can tell they discovered this oil spot thing for themselves.
I don’t know when they figured it out. I also don’t know if it was al-Muhandis that first told them, but I suspect it. As a contractor, I have dug in far more IEDs than I have cleared, and I have played the Engineer far more often than the hero. The ratio isn’t even close, and I know the first thing I always wanted to do when placing a bomb is kill the guy who’s coming to take it apart. I don’t think I’m projecting. I think it’s human nature.
I served as a proxy al-Muhandis for years, testing, training, and fine-tuning portions of the military’s IED detection capability. In Balad in 2005, the Predator pilots wanted to test their thermal and infrared cameras. How long does a heavy metal artillery shell retain the heat it collects all day, how long into the cooler evening can you spot it? So we placed devices along the runways, using real steel ordnance but fake triggers. We did the same in an old bomb dump in Kirkuk in 2006, for Predators and other aircraft. Again in Nevada in 2007, where the brand-new Predator pilots practice looking for the telltale signs: fresh dirt, changes in temperature, artificial lines and curves where there should be only natural jumble. The human eye has a remarkable ability to spot slight order in randomness, even when the eye and the Predator’s camera are separated by seven thousand miles.
More often, I played the Engineer to train other EOD technicians. Thousands of IEDs it must be, over the years, that I’ve p
laced in bags on the side of the road, stuffed into the trunks of cars, slid into culverts and under asphalt roads, sifted into sand and loose gravel, packed into snowbanks, hidden in Hawaiian jungles and Alaskan tundra and Adirondack hills and Carolinian piney woods and the empty gullies and wadis of the Colorado uplands that look like an Afghan postcard.
When you build a device for another EOD tech, rather than a Predator, a higher level of precision is required. EOD techs are often taught, when searching for a bomb, to imagine “how they would do it,” how they would booby-trap the area, where they would hide the device. But that’s wrong. You have to imagine how your adversary would do it, get in his mind, synthesize every device you have ever disabled, and then apply that algorithm to your terrain and specific sector. If you get that wrong, your EOD students will know. So the IED construction has to be perfect, the placement genuine, the scenario legit. And after having trained the unit, spent time with the guys, there was an intimacy. I wasn’t trying to kill an empty uniform. I was trying to kill Tom. I had seen Tom work. I knew where he would step, and so that’s where I would put the bomb.
This kinship is not an artifact of the training environment. I once heard a story from a Marine unit out west, in Fallujah or Ramadi or similar enclave resisting Gallieni’s oil spread. They did a raid, and in the rubbled basement of a bombed-out apartment building they found a weapons cache. It contained all the normal evidence, RPGs and remote triggers, but also, very unusually, a television and a VCR. Next to the VCR was a pile of tapes all labeled like this: Staff Sergeant Jones. Sergeant Perkins. Gunnery Sergeant Taylor. And they all look at each other because that’s their names, the Marines doing the raid. And when Gunny Taylor put the tape in and watched—and this is the part that will make an EOD tech’s blood run cold—it was hours of spliced-together video of every operation he had run for weeks. The Engineer had identified each man from the name stitched on his uniform. This wasn’t propaganda meant for a general audience; al-Muhandis had been creating game film like a football scout. Perkins uses the robot, but Taylor skips it to outflank and do a visual recon. Jones always talks to security first, stands at the window of the platoon leader’s MRAP. The Engineer had been stalking Jones and Taylor and Perkins and knew their techniques and preferences and habits at least as well as they did.
That intel came down like it used to in the old days right after 9/11, as a classified rumor. It could be an urban legend, like Candy Man or Bloody Mary. It is, at least, the worst kind of ghost story one EOD tech could tell another.
We heard other classified rumors. That the Irish Republican Army and Colombian FARC were training the highest bidder in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the Iraqi kids were tracking us, and that the Arabic graffiti in the worst neighborhoods said “I’m going to kill you bomb man.” That the same groups were trying to abduct us or capture one of our robots. That the Engineer had gotten his degree at MIT as a sleeper agent, and that’s why the devices were so sophisticated and changed so fast in reaction to our countermeasures. We had inadvertently trained him.
The most frequent rumor said that there was a $25,000 bounty on the head of every EOD technician. I have never found anyone who could provide conclusive evidence, one way or the other, that there really was such a reward. I have asked hundreds of fellow EOD techs, and while no one can confirm it, they nearly all believed it, and why not? While the US Army was instituting “stop loss,” forcing infantry grunts to stay in past their enlistments, they were simultaneously writing $100,000 checks to entice EOD guys to do the same. A similar check sealed the deal for Matt Schwartz to reenlist. If even a bureaucrat in the faraway Pentagon saw our value, then surely the other side did too. Not much of a stretch to bounties and videotapes.
So I don’t know when the other side learned the nuances of targeting, discriminating both among American military options and in their internal battles. In Iraq, it might have been during the Sunni Awakening in the mid-2000s, when the revenge attacks started. They killed tribal leaders in Ramadi and Fallujah with sophisticated improvised limpet mines that attached to the underside of cars and detonated when the driver reached a certain speed. In Afghanistan, it started much earlier. When the Taliban ordered a string of assassinations in the summer of 2011, killing specific politicians and police chiefs in Kandahar and outlying villages, they were merely resurrecting an Al Qaeda-trained tactic. The first shot of the post-9/11 wars was actually fired two days before the World Trade Center attacks, on September 9, when Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed by Al Qaeda. Massoud was a hero of the resistance against the Soviets in the 1980s and the leader of the Northern Alliance, the last credible indigenous threat to the Taliban. He was known as the Lion of Panjshir, the Shir-e-Panjshir, the Lion of Five Lions, and he was assassinated by two Arab suicide bombers who posed as journalists. The IED was hidden in their video camera; we still don’t know the name of the Engineer who built it.
We also don’t know what they call their oil-spot model. I don’t know if it has three rings. I’ve never looked at the maps on the bunker wall of this war’s Bamboo Pentagon, and neither has anyone else; we used JDAMs dropped from fighter jets to flatten the apartment building of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one-time head of Al Qaeda in Iraq. We hit the front entrance of Hindu Kush caves to trap the Taliban inside. Osama Bin Laden was no General Giap, and the material discovered in his house in Abbottabad was philosophical, not operational.
But whatever they call their method, and whenever they first discovered it, and whomever can be credited with it, one thing is certain: it worked. They knew the US military was an oil spot too, and they adjusted tactics to combat it.
The point of the Surge was to get past the wall of IEDs, to reach into the oily membrane of the insurgent cell and grab the human will that lies behind. The IED is a machine, the oil-spot third ring human emplacer an automaton. It was in killing the second and first rings, the inner rings of the oil spot, where real damage could be done.
But the enemy has always gotten a vote, as the old saying goes, and the enemy voted to do the same thing back to us. The outer layer of our oil spot is tougher, a technological film of electronics and machinery and plate metal. Armored trucks that take a licking. Robots and drones. They could damage our trucks every day, and we’d just keep repairing them. A Predator could be shot down, and an EOD robot could be destroyed, but there would always be more. Talon robots cost only $100,000, chump change for JIEDDO.
So in Iraq the Engineer developed ever-larger IEDs, and in Afghanistan they appeared in the dirt where soldiers walked. They pierced the veil, and once inside, they knew the relative value of each ring. In the outer layer, a pink farm boy from rural Ohio or an ambitious Latino Marine from inner-city Los Angeles. But even better, the next level in, an EOD technician who disarms their bombs. A special ops soldier who comes to snatch them in the middle of the night. An officer who was successful spreading a counterinsurgency oil spot. They knew where the utility lay.
In The Outpost, Jake Tapper tells the tragic story of Captain Rob Yllescas, targeted for assassination because he proved so successful at befriending Afghan elders and leading shuras. Yllescas was killed via a radio-controlled IED, the only appearance of such a device in the entire book. Casualties during the Iraq Surge leapt 20 percent for Green Berets and doubled for EOD techs. SEAL teams didn’t lose a single man in Iraq until 2006, and then they lost twelve in the Surge.
The bomb maker and the bomb safer. We each sent our technological avatars into battle. We each sought to reach through that curtain and grasp the other. We each persisted, day after month after year, implementing strategies strikingly similar. Why? Because it’s a job? Because someone told us to? Or because his brother is dead, and so is mine?
No, this isn’t a book about why. Only what and how. Why never makes sense. My own tours in Iraq had taught me that. Asking why only produces an answer too arbitrary or inhuman to apply to any man you love.
Veterans of Vietnam know that when you hit the LZ, you never wanted to
jump out of the helicopter next to the guy with the M60, because the VC hiding in the tree line tried to shoot the man with the big belt-fed Pig first. For hundreds of years, as long as snipers and sharpshooters have existed, the powerful and unusual have drawn the attention of the opposing army. How is this different?
Because violence has evolved from the personal to the individual. Because each for the other is not merely a target of opportunity. This is the war plan. We need to move Left of Boom, and the bomb man needs to die.
MATT SCHWARTZ DIED on a route clearance mission. I did those missions when I was in Iraq as well, and even back then the Engineer knew how to target.
When I was in Kirkuk in 2006, we fought in the city, and we fought to the south toward Baghdad, and we fought to the southwest to Tikrit, and we fought to the west to the Tigris, but to the east lay mountains and Iran, and to the north the tablelands rose and rose in a vast emptiness. The land was flat scrub all the way to the Little Zab River Valley, and beyond lay Erbil, where they said the Kurds lived in peace and bombs never went off, and tidy American-style Cape Cods sprouted like green shoots from the cracked earth. We rarely drove north because the war wasn’t there and we didn’t want to take it there.
But, occasionally, the contractors had to work on the Dibis Dam on the Little Zab or on the power station there and the massive steel transmission towers from which were strung the high-voltage power cables, and so we would join with the combat engineers and drive up the highway from Kirkuk to Dibis, on roads that rarely saw American patrols.
The line of armored vehicles that swept and cleared highways, the biggest vehicles with the toughest armor we had, varied little from mission to mission and year to year. An RG-31 on point, tough as your grandfather’s old hickory ax handle. Every mission the RG would hit an IED, the hood would be blown back into the armored windshield, a front tire would shred, and the team leader in the front seat would call back on the radio, “Yeah, we’re fine. Just had our bell rung.”
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 17