On November 7, 2003, seven Iraqi men with bound hands and hooded heads arrived at Tier 1-A of the Hard Site; they were incapacitated, disoriented, blind, and terrified.
What happened to them that night would eventually be revealed to the whole world, and would be presented as irrefutable evidence that the United States had lost both wits and morals in the fearful aftermath of the terror attacks of 9/11 and was subjecting suspected terrorists to vile, degrading torture as a matter of routine.
In addition to the torture, a big problem with the Abu Ghraib scandal was that the seven prisoners were not, in fact, suspected terrorists. Rather, they had been yanked from a crowd of detainees rioting over the quality of food after a seriously mentally ill detainee identified them as the instigators.
These men were actually accused of ordinary crimes such as car theft and burglary. Understandably, these seven were doubtless getting fed up with awaiting trial by the new and improved Iraqi criminal justice system, and it is entirely possible that they really did start the food riot.
Since they weren’t even suspected insurgents, however, these seven had no intelligence value to the American military. No military intelligence officer or contract interrogator would have had any reason to wish to interview them.
So the American soldiers present on Tier 1-A that night—Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick, Jeremy Sivits, Javal Davis, Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl, and Lynndie England—had no rational reason to think they should “soften ’em up” for the purposes of interrogation. What’s more, Sabrina Harman had the detainees’ “face sheets” in her hand, documents that offered their names, detaining units, locations of detention, and the reasons these men were being held; it meant that the soldiers knew they were tormenting people who had no intelligence value.
One of the detainees, Nori Amir Gunbar al-Yasseri, had been jailed for rape, and Harmon was sufficiently cognizant of the fact to write the word “rapeist [sic]” on his buttock and thigh with a Sharpie. The MPs could not claim to have mistaken their subjects for anything but common criminals (at least officially).
Granted, an insurgent force is, by definition, not a uniformed fighting force, so there was no way for the soldiers to know for sure that these men were or were not enemy combatants. Such sentiment had been—and continues to be—the ad hoc excuse for service members who get carried away in their duties overseas. However, on paper, these men the soldiers were about to torture had no connections with the insurrectionaries.
The Iraqis were stripped, punched, stomped, placed in a variety of strange and humiliating positions, and forced to mime fellatio and to fondle themselves. The forced masturbation was a pornographic “gift” from Charles Graner to his girlfriend, Lynndie England, who would turn twenty-one when the prison clock struck midnight.
The soldiers deliberately and gleefully photographed their actions that evening, adding to the other similarly disturbing and now-familiar photographs taken at around the same time. Photos of the detainee cowering at the end of Lynndie England’s leash, the hooded man standing on a box with wires leading out from under his clothing, and another menaced by an MP’s snarling dog, would all become iconic images by early spring.
The pictures appeared on innumerable websites, posters, banners, and jihadist recruiting materials, inciting demonstrations and violence throughout the Muslim world. To this day, mentioning the words Abu Ghraib to most Americans—and, indeed, to many non-Americans—will likely elicit images of the now iconic photographs. Skinny, scared human beings curled and huddling, their fear written clearly across dirty faces, cowering from America’s smiling heroes.
The name Abu Ghraib swiftly entered the English lexicon, sharing with My Lai and Kent State a similar history of members of our armed forces—men and women our country holds in high esteem—becoming not forces for good but forces for evil. It is, perhaps, this abrupt turn of the back to the service member’s code of honor that makes incidents such as this so disheartening.
Maine National Guard chaplain Andy Gibson, a veteran of conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the father of an Iraq War veteran, prefaces his comments about the Abu Ghraib scandal with a long denunciation of the perpetrators of the abuse. “They were dishonorable, disgusting, undisciplined, culpable, and I’m glad they went to prison,” he says. Then he pauses, to make sure this will be held firmly in mind during his ensuing remarks.
“But what Lynndie England and Charles Graner and the rest of them did was nothing like My Lai. It wasn’t Babi Yar. It was not an atrocity. I’ve seen atrocities. I’ve been there when we opened Bosnian graves filled with the murdered bodies of women, children, and old men. The guys of the 152nd were picking up the bones of people Saddam murdered—that was an atrocity. What happened at Abu Ghraib after the Americans took it over was bad—but it wasn’t even close to that.”
Occasionally you will hear the Bad Apples of Abu Ghraib defended, if weakly, by people saying, “It was nothing compared to what they would do to us.” This is true, if beside the point. Once Saddam Hussein was out of the action, and the weapons of mass destruction proved first elusive and then illusive, the rationale for the continued American occupation was that Americans are better, nobler, more honest and humane than them, no matter which “them” you have in mind—Saddam and the Ba’athists, al-Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Muqtada al-Sadr and his Sadrists.
Baghdad had fallen. America and the Coalition Partners had the pick of the real estate. Maybe there were good intentions but bad judgment when it came to using Abu Ghraib at the beginning of the occupation: The place already existed and had the requisite features (cells and walls) already in place. It was centrally located and relatively close to the capital on land that Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, and a lot of other great civilizations coveted. In an area known as the Fertile Crecent, the Abu Ghraib prison estate sat squat in the middle of the birthplace of civilization.
However, Dizl and others wondered, how many mortar rounds had to fall before some bright soul remembered that the first duty of anyone holding prisoners of war “is to remove them to a place of reasonable safety” as section 1, article 20 of the Geneva Convention states?
“The problem of the Iraqi prisoners isn’t only what is written in the news,” a prisoner declared to General Miller and the press in May of 2004. In the absence of those photographs, how long would it have taken the American and international press corps to notice that the Iraqis we imprisoned, including children, were being blown up? If Abu Ghraib was convenient enough to Baghdad that tired Triton Corporation interrogators could retreat to the air-conditioned Green Zone between sessions with the Worst of the Worst, it could not have been too difficult for reporters to find it. So where were they? Only when the photographs surfaced did Seymour Hersh bother to look into the place, and once the photos had been revealed, no one was interested in anything else.
One of the questions that forced its way into Dizl’s consciousness during the deployment continues to torment him to this day: Was I part of the problem, or part of the solution?
It is not an easy question.
His government had packed for the wrong trip, equipped him for failure and made him responsible for care he could not provide and control he could not properly exert. William Kelly Thorndike, a forty-year-old father of four, soccer coach, corrections officer, preschool teacher, and artist was forcing human beings at gunpoint to remain behind barbed wire in a filthy and demonstrably unsafe environment, and caring about them was going to break his heart. If he didn’t die at Abu Ghraib then he was going to have to live with it for the rest of his life.
When Colonel Quantock was interviewed on NPR’s Face the Nation in September 2004, he was asked to name the problems he found at Abu Ghraib. His list was a tidy summation of the horror stories Dizl and the Lost Boys of the 152nd can tell.
“The facilities were …” Quantock paused, perhaps sorting through some memory of one of the public-affairs office’s media relations classes, and came up with “inadequate.”
The spokesman for the 152nd also said, “Our soldiers got there in mid-to-late February, which was after the scandal.” He was also quoted as saying that the commander in charge of the Maine troops was “amazed” at the “heinous” acts of some of the soldiers who had preceded the Mainers, and reaffirmed “none of his soldiers were involved in any of that.” Four of the seven sentences appearing in that short piece had the abuse scandal and the innocence of the Mainers as their explicit subject.
Between August of 2003 and February of 2004, the detainee population had quadrupled, and it was still increasing. The vast majority of the new detainees were now suspects in various violent “crimes against the coalition.” They were young and old, followers and masterminds, Shiites and Sunnis, garden-variety mental patients and mad terrorists. As many as ten thousand men and perhaps about two dozen women were being held at Abu Ghraib, most of them—roughly seven thousand—confined in the portion of the prison known as Camp Ganci.
Ganci was a football field–sized rectangle of dull gray sand set into one corner of the prison. Bounded on two sides by the prison’s twenty-five-foot wall, it was separated from the rest of the facility by a high, steel chain-link fence punctuated with manned security posts placed intermittently around the perimeter.
This area was further subdivided into eight compounds, arranged in two rows of four, each separated from its neighbors by unpaved alleys wide enough for two Humvees to travel down them side by side.
Each compound was overlooked by three observation towers and a command post and surrounded by three long, long rolls of concertina wire, stacked pyramid-style. Ingress and egress was possible through a steel access cage known as a Shark Cage (because these resembled the equipment used by Jacques Cousteau). Escapes had happened, so these barriers, however forbidding they might have appeared, could not be presumed impregnable.
There were water tanks set atop scaffolding and fitted with showerheads that served as “shower points” for the detainees’ supervised bathing, and porta-potties for toileting. Shelter from sun and rain was provided by a number of white tents, which gave the area a spurious resemblance to old photographs of Civil War–era POW camps.
Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, who assumed command of all detainee and interrogation operations in Iraq in 2004, and Colonel David E. Quantock, who was given charge of detainee facilities specifically during the same period, had specific orders to clean house at Abu Ghraib in every possible way. Thus, during the year the Mainers spent in Iraq, many changes would be made that would take concrete form in a newer, more modern detainee camp. The new camp was promised to be, and in truth was, a huge improvement over Ganci. Originally called “Camp Bison,” General Miller would later decide to officially christen it Camp Redemption.
Ironically, the word “redemption” has no precise translation in Arabic. The closest match is the word yandam, which roughly translates to “let’s not do this again.” Nor does the theological concept of redemption hold much resonance in Islam, the majority religion in a country of thirty-five million.
Still, for a nation that arguably began losing its grasp on the democratic future of Iraq, it was appropriate. The name Redemption served as tacit acknowledgment of the now famous crimes committed by American “Bad Apples” at Abu Ghraib. If “Abu Ghraib” had become synonymous with American shame, “Redemption” captured the earnest American hope that disasters can be transcended, wrongs made right or at least better … and better late than never.
It would be up to the 152nd to take a place of infamous horrors and be the redemption the American government promised the Iraqi—and its own—people. Dizl and his men would carry the burden of loving their enemies on their shoulders. Because, in fact, it was their job to care for, feed, and protect the very men the United States had deemed evil.
Retired colonel Robert Rheault, former commander of Special Forces in Vietnam, explained the paradox that is the warrior’s experience of war by saying, “There is a terrible contradiction in the experience. On the one hand, you and your finest, closest, most trusted and, yes, loved comrades, and you yourself, are functioning at the very top of your ability and effort, alertness, concentration, endurance, and courage—all this good stuff in the context of a situation where other human beings are trying to kill you, and you are trying to kill them.”
Love offers safety, food, shelter, conversation; it is also the disturber of conscience, the seat of judgment, the impetus toward mercy, and the yearning for redemption.
FOUR
PACKED FOR THE WRONG TRIP
“The flow of equipment and personnel was not coordinated…. The unit could neither train at its stateside mobilization site without its equipment, nor upon arrival overseas, as two or three weeks could go by before joining with its equipment.”
—Former secretary of defense James Schlesinger
TWO OBVIOUS AND enormously significant questions will be asked by any individual sent into harm’s way in time of war, whether or not they are asked aloud.
Am I going to have to kill people?
Will I die?
Everyone dies, of course, but statistically most of us will die of heart disease or car accidents. Very few people die in explosions, blown to pieces that fly through the air, or by gunfire.
In films or on television, deaths produced by gunfire are remarkably athletic. Mel Gibson gets blown through a window or gunshot victims go flying through the air as Stallone stands alone against an army of bad guys, mowing them down with an M60 he holds in one hand. Reality is generally less ballistic. Whether hero or villain, if you are shot dead you’ll fall down. Your face will express bewilderment, if it expresses anything at all.
A bullet is shaped to move through both air and flesh, and its mass will be insufficient, relative to the mass of your body, to pick you up and fling you through any handy plate glass windows. Bullets are small and devastating, but they are not nearly as theatrical as the action sequences of summer blockbusters.
On the other hand, when a mortar round or bomb goes up, the concussive force will send a heavy wave of air that is often powerful enough to throw people and vehicles around. The punch in a mortar, or the average Iraqi IED, is sufficient to shove a nearby, unshielded body irresistibly through anything that yields, or will simply tear it to bits. Still, the body, dead, falls down—in one place or in many.
Danger slows time, or at least the perception of its passing. Mortar attacks, like other traumatic events, are perceived in slow motion, second by second—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.
Am I going to have to kill someone? Am I going to die?
Of course not, the soldiers of the 152nd reassured one another, as they waited for orders to begin the trip to Abu Ghraib. In the first place, detainee facilities, what used to be called POW camps, are usually not situated near contested areas. In fact, the first duty of an army that takes prisoners is to remove said prisoners from the battlefield for their own protection. Thus, by definition, a detainee facility is the safest possible place to serve within the theater of war, even if that war is active and continuing.
“I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that,” the secretary of defense had confidently asserted before the invasion began.
A reduction in the overall level of violence in Iraq, noticeable during the midwinter of 2003–04, and linked in the minds of American commanders to the capture of Saddam Hussein in mid-December, seemed to confirm that the war—finally more or less acknowledged as a war, at least by the brass in theater—really would wind down and be over soon.
That same winter, a major rot
ation of American troops took place, and virtually all the units that had been in Iraq for a year departed. They were replaced by fewer, though fresher, troops.4
The month of February 2004, the very month that the 152nd arrived, boasted the lowest death toll of any month of the war thus far. However, this may have been due in part to the troop rotation that sent the 800th MP Battalion home and saw the Sixteenth MP Battalion—which included the Maine tradesmen, students, personnel managers, shop foremen, state employees, and health-care workers who made up the Maine Army National Guard 152nd Forward Field Artillery Battalion—rotated in.
Their stateside training deemed complete, the 152nd flew from the United States to Camp Virginia in Kuwait, landing in two planeloads, or “chalks,” and disembarking onto sand that was blond, fine, and endless. The flight had gone without incident save for an overly enthusiastic young private who managed to slice his hand open while playing with a massive KA-BAR knife.
Upon landing, the soldiers were loaded up onto buses driven by local nationals who took to racing each other in the rickety vehicles stuffed with American troops. At one point Hula’s driver managed to get to the front of the convoy of buses but didn’t know how to get to their final destination and ended up lost in the desert and stuck in a sand dune.
While Lieutenant Murray got himself spun up stressing over a defensive perimeter, Hula set about organizing a working party to push the bus out of the dune.
“First Sergeant,” the lieutenant said severely though a quivering voice, “shouldn’t we set up a perimeter and call for an evac?”
“With what, sir?” Hula asked. They had a bus full of trained soldiers, but only two of them were armed with a small handful of bullets.
They made it out of the dune and desert with no incident, and safely to their staging point where they would play the old military game of “hurry up and wait.”
Nothing remained for the 152nd but gathering up their gear and crossing the frontier. Unfortunately, their gear was missing. Stacks and stacks of American conex boxes formed a huge, strange cityscape in the desert outside Kuwait City like the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lieutenant Murray, Dizl, Turtle, and Skeletor spent most of a long, hot day wandering up and down endless rows looking for the conex box containing their equipment.
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 4