Copyright © 2016 by W. Zach Griffith
FIRST EDITION
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Some names and situations have been changed to protect the careers, livelihoods, and reputations of men and women who served at Abu Ghraib who, despite their humanitarian efforts, would rather not be associated with one of the US military’s darkest hours.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Griffith, W. Zach.
Title: Packed for the wrong trip : a new look inside Abu Ghraib and the citizen-soldiers who redeemed America’s honor / W. Zach Griffith.
Description: New York : Arcade Publishing, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015047251 (print) | LCCN 2016002330 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781628726459 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781628726466 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Abu Ghraib Prison. | Iraq War, 2003-2011--Prisoners and prisons. | Maine. Army National Guard. Field Artillery Battalion, 152nd. | Soldiers--United States--Biography. | Prisoners of war--Iraq--Biography. | Soldiers--United States--Social conditions. | Prisoners of war--Iraq--Social conditions. | Iraq War, 2003-2011--Regimental histories--United States. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Iraq War (2003-). | HISTORY / Military / United States. | HISTORY / United States / 21st Century.
Classification: LCC DS79.767.D38 G74 2016 (print) | LCC DS79.767.D38 (ebook) | DDC 956.7044/37--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047251
Jacket design by Laura Klynstra
Front cover photograph © Getty Images
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to the men and women of the Armed Forces, current and former, whose physical, mental, and emotional sacrifices transcend the politics that send them into harm’s way, and to the memory of those we’ve lost. Semper Fidelis.
CONTENTS
ONE: Fire for Effect
TWO: The Way Life Should Be
THREE: The ’Ghraib
FOUR: Packed for the Wrong Trip
FIVE: Welcome to the Mortar Café
SIX: Why?
SEVEN: The Broiler
EIGHT: Siege
NINE: April
TEN: Eating Bees
ELEVEN: HUMINT
TWELVE: Lenny the Lobster, Hajji-Pussy, and Frank
THIRTEEN: Generals, Coed Showers, and Tampons
FOURTEEN: Groundhog’s Day
FIFTEEN: Smokes and Sandbags
SIXTEEN: Kamal
SEVENTEEN: R&R
EIGHTEEN: Troop Greeters
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
ONE
FIRE FOR EFFECT
“My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”
—President George W. Bush, May 1, 2003
ONE THOUSAND one …
Dizl saw the inside of a human head.
Another explosion ripped open the ground like a thunderbolt from a vengeful deity.
The head belonged to an Iraqi man who had recently—very recently—departed this earth and was now moving through the air between sky and sand. If death separates a human soul from the body, then this man’s soul had certainly gone on to better things by the time Dizl turned and saw the body cartwheeling on the upward thrust of explosives-displaced air. The man’s head, transected laterally, opened and closed like a Pez dispenser, and his brain slid out toward the dusty ground.
William “Kelly” Thorndike was a sometime clam digger, blueberry raker, offshore fisherman, hotelier, elementary school gym teacher, emergency services dispatcher, preschool teacher, prison guard, and longtime artist. But at that moment he was a US soldier affectionately called Dizl by his comrades, two of whom were weathering the storm of shrapnel with him.
Dizl was a Fort Benning soldier by trade: a ground-pounding infantryman, a grunt who’d found himself attached to an artillery battalion filling the role of untrained military police officers.
The other soldiers had taken to calling him “Private Major.” The title was a mash-up of the lowest-enlisted rank (private) and the highest (sergeant major). When they stepped off to Iraq, he was one of the oldest men with the lowest ranks among those shuffling onto the plane. The allusion to the prestigious rank of sergeant major came from Dizl’s ability to think above his rank, to take past experience and apply it to the clusterfuck that was their time at Abu Ghraib. He also had kids older than the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old privates he bunked with.
Dizl, middle-aged and a father of four, was a private in the 152nd Maine Army National Guard Field Artillery Battalion. Mobilized just before Christmas and sent to the Middle East, Dizl’s unit had arrived in Iraq in February of 2004. Field artillery refers to those units in a modern army that use large-caliber guns (originally catapults, more recently cannons, missile launchers, and howitzers) for mobility, tactical proficiency, and long-range, short-range, and extremely long-range “target engagement.” Basically, a FAB (field artillery battalion) exists to support the infantry from twenty miles out with things that go boom.
For various reasons Dizl and his unit been sent to war with orders completely different than the unit’s original training and purpose. The 152nd FAB had been sent to a detention facility in Iraq that none of them had ever heard of, where they would serve as military policemen (MPs).
Dizl’s unit was trained to drop ordnance on enemies from a distance. On what should have been the bright side, “detainee operations,” unlike field artillery, is supposed to be an MOS (the acronym for “military occupational specialty,” their way of making “job description” sound more impressive to prospective recruits) that does not expose one to battlefield conditions. Detainee facilities are not supposed to be sited anywhere near areas of active combat—one reason women are permitted to serve as MPs. But during the year of their deployment, the American detention facility at Abu Ghraib would come under fire from mortars, rockets, snipers, and suicide bombers virtually every day.
They would also be subjected to two assaults that resulted in what the military calls mass casualty events; so many people, soldiers, and detainees were injured that medical personnel had to triage survivors—find those who had a chance at survival, and separate them from those on the losing end of a mortal wound.
When the first of these mas-cas attacks began, Dizl was on duty with fellow soldiers Turtle and Sugar. The three men were up in the Hawk’s Nest, Tower G-7-1, which overlooked the portion of Abu Ghraib prison known as Camp Ganci.
Predominant among Ganci’s detainees were thousands of Iraqis picked up by Army and Marine units during missions throughout Iraq in the fall and winter of 2003 and 2004 and dropped off at Abu Ghraib. Many were undoubtedly Bad Guys—die-hard Saddam loyalists, native religious fanatics, or specimens of the Syrian, Yemeni, or
Saudi jihadists who had come over the unsecured borders of Iraq after the invasion.
According to later US military intelligence, however, most (estimates ranged between 60 and 90 percent depending on the political leanings of those making said estimates) of the detainees shoehorned into Ganci were noncombatants with little or no intelligence value. Thus, statistically speaking, it is probable the man who flew and died in front of Dizl’s eyes was an ordinary citizen who, whatever his personal feelings about the end of Saddam’s regime and the presence of American troops on his home soil, had merely been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had cost him his life.
Picked up and plunked down at Abu Ghraib, where no reliable mechanism yet existed for sorting the relatively innocent from the definitely guilty, he and his fellow detainees had shared their tents and dismal days with strangers, supervised by Americans who had recently acquired a worldwide reputation for brutality, torture, and sexual abuse. As if all this weren’t enough, the detainees were sitting ducks for insurgent attacks, targeted with no evidence that the attackers wished to spare their lives.
On this particular morning—April 6, 2004—the insurgents were firing 120 mm mortars into the middle of Ganci from a position beyond the multi-lane highway that ran along the southern perimeter of the facility. The attack itself lasted perhaps thirty minutes, but time doesn’t fly when mortars do.
One thousand two …
Dizl saw the man’s brain falling, and he glimpsed the underside of the empty brain cavity. Then the body landed head down, like a lawn dart. The force of the explosion had dislodged the man’s legs from their sockets at the hip and they were flapping freely before falling to rest on either side of the remains of the torso and forming a disfigured tripod of human flesh and bone.
Dizl took his eyes off the body in time to see another mortar explode and shouted at Turtle and Sugar, “Hit the deck!” He crouched over them, using his body to shield theirs from the chaos.
The mortars were “walking”toward the tower with the heedless, unstoppable power of a striding giant in a nightmarish fairytale. Between explosions Dizl raised his head and peered over the edge of the tower wall and watched the impacts burn orange in the center as high explosives threw rocks, air, and shrapnel outward through flesh and bone faster than the speed of sound.
One thousand three …
Turtle and Sugar, their views restricted by Dizl’s body, demanded details.
“What’s going on?” Sugar shouted from beneath Dizl.
It was what the military calls “fire for effect.” After a round landed and exploded, spotters on the rooftops in the town of Abu Ghraib would use their cell phones to report the results and offer suggestions for targeting adjustments to the mortar team, who would be set up well downrange and out of sight. Rules of engagement (ROE) prevented soldiers from taking out these spotters, a skill each could have performed without scratching through the surface of their abilities.
Krump
Krump
Captain Morgan’s tower, down near Ganci 2-4, was bracketed by a pair of explosions.
“What’s going on?”
“Morgan is … Ganci 2 just got smoked.”
One thousand four …
Two mortars landed in the center of a detainee tent about 150 meters from the tower—Krump—and a gaping hole opened up in the ceiling of the tent as smoke billowed out of both entrances and shrapnel tore ragged holes through fabric and flesh alike.
“What is …?”
Krump
The hajjis are flying …
It wasn’t just the man with the opened skull; the air was full of people and parts of people, along with metal, stones, and dirt. A five-ton army truck and the detainee water tower in the center of Ganci took direct hits. Rocks and shrapnel chewed up the thirty yards between the impact and Dizl, striking the tower’s walls with a loud whap while the truck burned, belching greasy black smoke into the sky.
The mortars were carving a destructive path through Ganci in twenty-five- or thirty-meter intervals. Fire for effect. The cell phone spotters would be calling it in: “Give it another thirty meters …”
Krump
“… another thirty …”
Krump
“On target. Allahu akbar!”
The Hawk’s Nest was next in line.
Dizl saw the inside of the man’s skull. He heard the rocks knocking at the tower door. He crouched over the two younger soldiers, the older GI carrying on the timeless tradition of the grizzled warrior protecting the young guys. Reflexively, he closed his eyes tightly and gritted his teeth. Gazing up into his face, interpreting his expression, Turtle and Sugar understood; the giant was walking closer. They were screwed.
TWO
THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE
SADDAM HUSSEIN WAS a vicious man who had ruled Iraq with enthusiastic brutality (together with an oil-funded selective largesse) since attaining the office of president in 1979. He made extensive use of Abu Ghraib during his reign, finding it a convenient location in which to confine opponents and dissenters (including Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist who refused to help Saddam develop the WMDs that weren’t there),1 a place where his thugs (and sometimes his sons) might torture and execute their countrymen and still be back in Baghdad in time for supper.
Having been at odds with the United States for a decade, he greeted the September 11 attacks with satisfaction, describing the day to one of Iraq’s state-controlled newspapers as “God’s punishment.” But it bears repeating that Saddam was not an Islamic extremist. He wasn’t even much of a Muslim except when political expedience demanded a show of piety. (Osama bin Laden loathed him and was offended when the Kuwaitis accepted American help in 1991 rather than give the job of expelling the Iraqis to al-Qaeda.)
When Paul Wolfowitz, architect and advocate for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, likened Saddam to Hitler, Saddam was doubtless flattered. The twentieth century’s dictators Hitler and Stalin were his heroes, but whatever fantasies he may have indulged in, Saddam remained a Hitler wannabe and a mostly local threat. The rationale “We have to fight them in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them in America” gave Saddam far too much credit. In fairness, we might also mention that Saddam’s regime initiated social reforms that led to drastic decreases in the nation’s rate of illiteracy and genuine improvements in the status of women.
Still, as would so often be noted by those pressing for the invasion, Saddam tortured and murdered thousands of his citizens, used chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds, and deliberately trained his two favorite sons to torture the family’s enemies, apparently introducing them to sexual torture as soon as they were out of puberty.
Saddam’s family of origin was what an American might call a dysfunctional blended family. Saddam’s stepfather was reputed to be a real asshole, though whether he made a more regrettable male role model than Saddam’s birth father would have done will never be known: Bio-Dad was out of the picture before Saddam was born.
Suffice it to say that cruelty was already an entrenched Hussein family value by the time Saddam himself, at the age of twenty-seven, was held and—he would claim—tortured in an Iraqi prison. Once he gained power, Saddam would be judged excessive even by his peers in a region known for the harshness of its regimes.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” may be an Arab saying, but it has been a universal principle of diplomacy. The United States supported Saddam in the fight he had picked with the Iranians during the 1980s, but then, nobody seemed to like Iran. They had a scary ayatollah for their leader and had held Americans hostage. The then Soviet Union, China, and especially France all backed Iraq too, and Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t the only foreign official who would later have to explain away his grip ’n’ grin photo with the Butcher of Baghdad.
Eight years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, the Iran–Iraq war ended in a stalemate, with Saddam in debt up to his eyeballs. Hoping to forcibly squeeze revenue out of some oil-rich territory
along the disputed border with Kuwait, he floated the notion of invading that country to American ambassador April Glasspie. Glasspie gave a tactful but discouraging answer that Saddam, unluckily, mistook for a green light.
When the United States came to Kuwait’s defense and attacked Iraq the first time around, the first President Bush really did have a broad, international Coalition of the Willing—willing, that is, to actually fight alongside our troops. Of the fragile coalition dragged into the sandbox by Bush II, only the British were genuinely able and willing to shed blood for the cause.
Sadism is not a traditional American value. Torture has been explicitly repudiated by the American military establishment dating all the way back to General George Washington’s admonition to his hard-pressed troops to treat even the most villainous British prisoners of war with generosity and respect. Moreover, Iraqis in general were not meant to be our “enemies.” Rather, they were named the primary beneficiaries of the invasion, a people whose oppression and longed-for liberation became our eleventh-hour casus belli once Saddam’s connection to al-Qaeda and his stockpiles of WMDs had both been proven nonexistent.
For symbolic reasons alone, Abu Ghraib’s notoriety among Iraqis might have been taken into account when choosing a place to confine persons suspected of rejecting our gift of freedom. “We had extraordinary concerns about using a facility with this kind of reputation,” admitted Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the later-to-be-disgraced commander of detainee operations in Iraq, but apparently these concerns weren’t extraordinary enough.
Faced with a sudden, urgent need to house and interrogate a surprisingly large number of suspected intransigent “back-sliders” (the administration had not yet admitted that they might be called “insurgents”), the US-led coalition decided to make use of facilities already in existence rather than go to the trouble and expense of new construction. So to this, the haunted House of Ravens and Strange Fathers, America imported our own ghosts and demons.
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