Once everyone had their restraints cut off, they were farmed out evenly into the four cells, still blindfolded and seated facing the wall. An interpreter instructed each detainee to stay seated, to not talk, and to not remove his blindfold. Each man was also informed that if he followed these rules and acted like a gentleman, he would be treated like a gentleman. Then began the Parade of Piss. “Mister, mister. Toilet, toilet.” Once again, Jesus made manifest his displeasure with me for leaving his church. Had I stayed Mormon, gotten married at a ridiculously young age, settled down, made a family, and taken on the inevitable tour of duty of running the nursery at church while the other adults attended various meetings and Sunday school classes, I would already have served my time taking little rascals pee pee. In lieu of this duty I thought I had successfully dodged, I was now taking big rascals pee pee. And these reeked of the body odor only a Middle Eastern diet can create. So when are you being humane by letting detainees urinate (the term this lieutenant kept using was “titrate”) as needed, and when are you just plain being taken advantage of by performing an endless round-robin of urinal runs? (There isn’t actually any urinal, just a tube stuck in the dirt behind the jail.) Most of the soldiers I had with me had not worked with detainees yet and seemed to also be searching for a sense of what tone to set. I found myself walking a fine line between proper Geneva Convention–esque humane treatment of enemy combatants and being made a fool of by the same guys who had been making fools of us for the past few weeks by hitting our FOB almost nightly with mortars and RPGs, and then slipping away into the night before we could catch them. It pretty much came down to a rule of thumb: if a detainee did the pee pee dance for at least a half hour, he was probably legit and was allowed to go.
Once the initial shock and fear among the herd subsided, the chatter and blindfold fidgeting-with began. I’d say that most of these guys were model detainees, but just like with any Army platoon or company, there are always one or two problem children. First, two guys wouldn’t stop whispering to each other. So I put them in separate cells. Then one kept pulling down his blindfold, claiming his allergies were hurting his eyes. We compromised and told him we’d loosen the blindfold if he faced the wall and shut up. He only partially complied. He was warned and rewarned by the lieutenant and the interpreter. But like a child, he kept pushing the limit. Then the lieutenant and the interpreter left. More chatter, more blindfold slippage. He started eyeballing me and some of the other soldiers. (If I had been in East L.A., I’d have been compelled to proclaim, “Why you mad-doggin’ me, yo?!”) I yelled at him to shut up and pull the blindfold back up. He just smiled and gave me the thumbs-up. I’ve said that the thumbs-up in Iraq is a way of simultaneously telling someone both “okay” and “fuck you” at once, a trick this little bastard was now turning back on me deftly. I removed him from the cell, took his blindfold off, and put on a new one—a huge one made out of a first-aid cravat—and tied it as tightly as I could. I also flex-cuffed his hands behind his back, also tight enough for him to be uncomfortable. A half hour later, he had pulled the blindfold down with his teeth somehow. Last straw.
Everyone knows that duct tape can fix anything. In the Army, we have five-inch-wide green duct tape that we call hundred-mile-an-hour tape, due to its ability to mend tears in the canvas wings of Wright Brothers–era planes, good up to one hundred miles an hour. I put dickhead on his knees in the middle of his cell, removed the blindfold that he was now wearing as a dashing olive-drab scarf, and wrapped the top half of his head with about ten layers of hundred-mph tape. Then one last piece across the bridge of his nose and around his head again to seal off the small gap that invariably is present at the bottom of one’s field of vision when one is blindfolded. I tried to create as much drama as possible with the event. Our S-2 (intel) master sergeant, a mean-spirited quasi sadist, the full-time El Capitan of the jail, was in the process of systematically interrogating the detainees. He kept saying, “Okay, Sergeant, that’s enough tape. Okay, that’s enough. Okay, that’s enough, Sergeant.” The distinct sound of duct tape being applied directly off the roll was loud and satisfying as it reverberated off the six cold concrete planes of wall, floor, and ceiling. I tried my best to seem stern and to disguise the fact that my heart was pounding. One layer or fifty layers, I figured it wouldn’t make much difference as far as adhesive blindfolds go, I just wanted to give the impression of an excessive and final response to the guy’s juvenile game of tit for tat. I felt like my pious disciplinarian father; I felt like I was on the wrong side of recurring anxiety dreams I’ve always had of being imprisoned; I felt stupid and petty and cowardly.
Discipline that has some constructive end or transparent layer of camaraderie, like the relationship a soldier has with a drill sergeant, I have no problem with. But having to assert my assumed authority in front of my prisoners and my peers to make an example of this miscreant had no positive result as far as I was concerned. There’s a darkly intoxicating aspect to this kind of thing, though. I’m over-armed with my rifle and grenade launcher and the veritable ammunition dump that is the vest over my body armor. Because of this, my power over these men is near absolute. I can see how the bully feels, how one could grow fond of this darkly amusing massive imbalance of power. In the end, I just wanted to maintain order, I wanted to assert a measure of authority, but most importantly still, I did not want to perpetrate something on others that I am deeply phobic of myself—to be imprisoned and tormented.
I let this guy sit and think about what he had done wrong. Isn’t that how our parents used to put it? He finally broke his macho stoic silence after about forty-five minutes. “Mister. Mister. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I was furious at this asshole. Not only was he apparently contrite now, but his English was getting better, too. But mostly I was furious that he had “made” me do this. I yelled some nonsense at him about how it was too late to be sorry, that he would continue to be sorry before I did anything for him. Not my words, just rhetorical crap I was regurgitating from a lifetime of being caught in a punishment-lecture-punishment-lecture cycle for serial rule-breaking.
Working with me at the time was a medic, this forty-somethingish Hispanic specialist with an improbable number of vowels in his name and a thick salt-and-pepper mustache that seemed to exude an avuncular warmth. He had a pleasant and attentive demeanor and looked like he could be a dentist or a good-natured washing machine salesman at Sears. All day he had been eminently respectful to me. Everything was a snappy “Yes, Sergeant. No, Sergeant”—something that always makes me uncomfortable when coming from someone so clearly my senior. He looked at me now like he had been suffering along with this guy the whole time, maybe empathetic because he’s a medic or because he knew it would probably be his job to help separate tape from eyebrows in a few minutes. I assured him that I’d let the guy stew for only five more minutes, tops, but after I hemmed and hawed for about five more seconds, I finally just said, “Fuck it, let’s just give this jerk his reprieve.” With him on his knees again, we unwrapped his head, and then I absurdly lectured him in an unavoidably paternal (patronizing?) way in a language I knew he couldn’t understand but a tone that I knew he would. He looked up at me, his eyes red and watering (had he been crying, or were his eyes actually irritated?) and he reverently uttered, “Thank you.” After we locked the cell door (padlock on a grillelike door—not quite totally archetypical for a jail), all inside either sat or slept quietly, unmoving.
Hours later, it was the problem child’s turn to be interrogated. He was escorted by several soldiers to an out-of-sight location by the master sergeant. I sat outside by the front gate, eating an MRE. My knife, a beloved Spyderco Delica with a green handle and a black blade, slayer of MRE packages, lay in front of me as I shoveled beef and mushroom into my mouth like the engineer fed coal into the furnace of his engine in the old Popeye cartoon. As they were walking by, the master sergeant stopped for a moment to talk to someone, and my favorite detainee now stood in front of me. He eyed my knife, then
eyed me. I looked back at him, and he didn’t look away, or I should say he wouldn’t look away. Honestly, I couldn’t tell if he was trying to read my eyes like I was trying to read his or if he was just trying to memorize my face, or maybe he just plain hated me and was indulging his fascination with the object of his hate, a thirst you can never really slake.
I paid little attention to how he looked, not nearly as much attention as he seemed to pay to how I looked. If I saw him on the street right now, I probably wouldn’t recognize him. Shame on me, I guess. The first step is to remove the person-ness from your enemy. Once you remove his humanity in your mind—distance him from you, the human—it’s easier to kill him if it comes down to that. He wore a green camouflage jacket over his man-dress, making him stand out from the rest of the white and gray man-dress wearers. In the back of the jacket, at the bottom, was a buttoned flap. Ever since the advent of the man-dress, when it came time to go into combat, you’d reach between your legs, grab the back hem, and pull it up into your belt in front, creating a big man-diaper. My seminary teacher in junior high said this was called “girding your loins.” My guess is the flap on the back of his jacket was made for this same purpose, to be pulled between the legs and buttoned in the front, to turn the flowing man-dress of would-be fighters into MC Hammer pants. His hair was neat and short-cropped. I only know this, really, because I had to pull all that tape off his head. He was probably in his early twenties. I’d say if it came down to hand-to-hand, this guy, being most likely in the same weight class as me, would give me a run for my money. But most non-farmer Iraqis are in absurdly bad shape, so I’d probably prevail. If not, I’d at least bite his nose off or something really dirty like that. So there he was, staring me down again, who knows what machinations going on in his head.
April 23, 2004
I DEAD CIVILIANS
The man in the passenger seat lay slumped against the dashboard, a massive wound to his head. Kirk pulled the body upright and cut the man’s pockets open looking for ID. When he was done and let the body fall back against the dashboard, he said that what was left of the man’s brain fell out of the opening in the back of his head and onto the ground. He could handle the guy with the brain and both the dead women, but it was the three-year-old-girl, he said, that got to him.
Roughly an hour earlier, a convoy of fuel tankers and Humvees came to a halt a little north of our forward operating base when what looked like an improvised explosive device was spotted on the side of the road. Since the suspected IED was spotted mid-convoy, the vehicles were split, part to the north and part to the south, leaving the area around the IED open to prevent any of the trucks from being destroyed. Our explosive ordinance disposal team was being called in, and our quick-reaction force was going to escort them. I was in the QRF staging area that day, but I wasn’t on the mission. We were listening to the radio in a Humvee as one of the officers in the convoy was communicating with our headquarters about the IED when the convoy started to take small arms fire. They took contact from multiple directions. Then the mortar rounds started to fall. The people who attack convoys and FOBs seem to have no end to their supply of mortar rounds, a common means of attack and the primary charge of the IEDs they leave for us like Easter eggs. Thankfully they don’t know how to aim them any better than they do their rifles.
When our QRF made it to the scene, shots were still being fired, so they laid down suppressive fire as best they could. Even though this attack took place in daylight, there was much difficulty pinpointing the location of the enemy assailants. There was a building and a parked vehicle in the distance, and the guy on the ground who was calling everything up on the radio was unsure if fire was being taken from these locations. Restraint was exercised and fire was directed toward less collateral damage–inducing areas.
But to the north, another QRF also responded to this ambush, an active-duty unit newly in country. This was their first mission. Since this other QRF was on a separate communications net, the response attacks were not coordinated. This isn’t particularly important, other than it’s anyone’s guess what the communication between them and their battalion leadership was like. They also spotted a vehicle, this one on the move apparently, but less restraint and less positive target identification were exercised.
The vehicle was a white pickup, a small Toyota, one like most Iraqis stack their families into the back of, just as this family was. Everyone has these trucks in Iraq; it’s like the national vehicle. It’s also the preferred vehicle of the ICDC and insurgents alike. I can imagine that the man driving it, most likely the father of those on board, just wanted to get his family out of the area of the fighting as quickly as possible. I can also imagine that the other QRF got word that a fast-moving vehicle was our attackers’ likely means of attack and escape, a completely plausible and reasonable possibility.
From what could be gathered afterward, the Humvee gunships engaged the pickup with a SAW, an M240B, and an M2 .50-cal—or, in other words, a shitload of machine gun fire. The truck contained six people. Two men, two women, and two young girls. As is the custom in Iraq, the men were in the cab as the females huddled together in the bed of the truck. Among the dead were one of the men, both women, and a three-year-old girl, apparently smothered to death by the two women’s bullet-riddled bodies as the women tried to shield the girl from the fusillade of gunfire—the tragic irony being that this ultimate protective act was the very thing that killed the girl. The man driving was still alive when the casualty evacuation team (comprised mostly of members from my squad) got there, but he was probably on his way out. Matt said the man had numerous wounds to his legs and a gunshot wound to the scrotum, an entry wound for a bullet that had no visible exit and was most likely lodged in his pelvis or abdomen. As Matt held a pressure dressing to the man’s bleeding thigh, he felt the shattered pieces of femur grind against each other. The only one who seemed certain to survive was an eight-year-old girl who had gunshot wounds in both of her upper arms. The man and the girl were medevac’d via Blackhawk, along with another girl from a separate location nearby, who had taken a round through her cheek and leg. Whiskey and Kirk had the grisly duty of stacking the dead bodies in the back of a truck to be moved to the aid station at the FOB.
As I try to fathom what it must feel like to be a poverty-stricken eight-year-old girl and to experience the epic pain of having your family suddenly and violently killed in front of you, I have to pause and ask myself, Now what am I doing here again? I know this kind of thing happens in combat, and I kind of expected to see it, but, Jesus, the record is pretty bad so far. Since I’ve been in Iraq, in situations that my platoon has responded to, there have been three dead bad guys, two wounded civilians (one critically), and seven dead civilians, including four women, one three-year-old girl, and one mentally unstable homosexual man on a moped. Hell, if you count the suicide of the latter’s lover—an excellent two-for-one dead civilian deal—and the defamily’d guy who got his balls blown off who, even if he lived, would have wished to Allah that he was dead, that makes the tally 3 to 8, a near 1:3 ratio of dead evildoers to innocent and ridiculously poor Iraqis who couldn’t have cared less who led their country just so long as they were able to feed themselves. Now that I think about it, there have actually been more civilian casualties in our area, but these are the only ones I remember right now. Thank god none of this carnage has been carried out by anyone in my platoon or even my company, for that matter. My battalion has sustained only one casualty of its own so far, and there has been at least one engagement by another company that netted a few dozen dead bad guys, so the numbers are at least decent in that regard, but, still, I’m having a hard time being okay with all the dead civilians. But it happens so often. It’s like we should have bumper stickers that read, I DEAD CIVILIANS.
But let’s get back to the family in the truck who were killed. Like I said, I wasn’t with the QRF that day and didn’t see any of this firsthand, and all the information I got was gleaned from the guys in my
squad who were. Even though Matt said it was better that I hadn’t seen any of it, I wish I had been there—to bear witness, I suppose. So tell me, why would I wish for this?
I’ve been stewing over this dead family thing for a couple of weeks now. I’ve been painstakingly mulling over in my mind the things these insurgents do and the things we, the U.S. Army, do and the unintuitive peculiarity of how the drive to be violent seems to precede the purpose to be violent, and how rampant it is to meaninglessly develop one’s identity through injury, but frankly I don’t think I’ve figured it all out well enough yet to even kludge together a coherent line of thought. Introspectively, I’m blindly trying to sew together the absurd lateral progression one unwittingly goes through when pulling legs off grasshoppers as a child and how it is a precursor to compulsive sexual infidelity as a young adult, among a million other uncoalesced thoughts. I’m unprepared at this time to write the Gödel, Escher, Bach of my own self-loathing.
Just Another Soldier Page 8