Great! I made it, he thought, stopping to catch his breath. When he looked up, Dizl was face to face with a large sign: FUEL POINT. He was standing next to thousands and thousands of gallons of fuel: volatile, inflammable, explosive fuel.
ShitShitShitShit, he thought and took off running again, knowing that if a mortar hit the fuel point (and surely it’s what the bastards were aiming for?), he wouldn’t survive.
Lunch Lady had seen the sign too and was also running while holding a similar internal conversation about the explosive potential of all that gas and diesel. The full realization of the situation struck him most forcefully when the oldest guy in the platoon went bolting past him as if he were standing still.
“My pace did not pick up until Thorndike flew past me in a sprint toward safety,” he recalled later. “Thinking this was a good idea, I joined him running as fast as I could.”
They arrived back at the Mortar Café more or less at the same moment, bursting through the door and into the illusory shelter of their dwelling place.
Krump. Krump. Two more shells touched down outside, more unwelcome gifts from the local insurgents.
Some of the other guys were in there—Parker, Turtle, the big kid they called Humpty, wide-eyed Lost Boys with their hands held over their ears and their mouths open. Dizl couldn’t bring himself to tell them about the ocean of fuel that lay not twenty-five yards away from the cinder blocks against which several of them rested their trusting backs. Later, they would put sandbags on the windows and lobby the leadership to get the gasoline moved a little farther away.
The Mainers’ baptism by mortar fire removed any vestige of denial about the dangers of the place and situation that Dizl, Lunch Lady, Skeletor, Turtle, and the rest of the Lost Boys had been brought to serve in.
Later, after his friend Wendy sent him the novel Life of Pi, Dizl was able to articulate what his first day at FOBAG had shown him: I’m in a rowboat with a fucking tiger, and all around me is ocean. The tiger is under the tarp. I can’t see it, but it’s there. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
On his first evening’s duty in Tower 7–1, listening to the still-strange sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the nearby mosque, Private Dizl was startled when a hamama, a pigeon the size of a large duck, blundered into the side of his tower with a hollow thunk.
It fell, flapping dismally, just inside the wire.
Hey, thought Dizl, with a Mainer’s reflexive recognition of a chance to do a little living off the land. That thing would taste good roasted.
All of a sudden, an Iraqi kid materialized beside the wire, obviously with the same thought in mind. He peered up at Dizl and pointed inquiringly in the direction of the bird’s carcass.
“No,” Dizl said initially. Then, curious to see what the kid did next, he relented. “OK why not? You can have it.”
The kid grabbed the pigeon and disappeared into a tent. Soon enough, the appetizing aroma of roasting hamama reached Dizl’s nostrils for the first time, which told Dizl that detainees had means of building fires in their tents.
That was an eye-opener.
He would later come to find that at least one group of detainees had turned a corner of their tent into a little blacksmith’s shop for the express purpose of manufacturing shivs, shanks, and even swords out of scrap metal and rebar. Material wasn’t nearly as difficult to come by as one might think. Ganci was built on a landfill. When the detainees were feeling energetic, they could dig straight down and find all sorts of materials and scrap.
Dizl had worked as a guard at the Maine State Prison, where prisoners were also known to do some creative repurposing. They made everything from knives to bongs to slingshots and crossbows and all other manner of contraband out of only what pieces were available to them. So the ingenuity of the detainees at Abu Ghraib was not as surprising to Dizl as it would be to some.
Aside from the mortars, it was in the area of basic hygiene that life at Abu Ghraib departed most dramatically from any American norm. There were primitive shower points and a whole lot of porta-potties, which were generally filled to capacity or beyond and stank like nothing Dizl had ever encountered before. There was also trash on the ground—a lot of it.
You’ve got fifteen-year-olds … and over there’s a ninety-year-old man … so how are we doing the control, care, and treatment for these two very different sorts of prisoners? How can we possibly be meeting their different needs?
Overall, Dizl thought, there was something slapdash and contingent about Abu Ghraib. It reminded him less of a functioning detention center than of a semi-successful refugee camp thrown up in the first few weeks after a disaster. Walking into the ’Ghraib was like something out of The Lord of the Rings mixed with Lord of the Flies, and it reminded Dizl of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell.
“Calling FOBAG a prison would be like selling apricots at a peach stand,” Dizl explained. “Sure, there are similarities, but an apricot isn’t a peach.”
But the Americans had been at Abu Ghraib for months, not weeks, and UNICEF was not en route. In fact, once their headquarters in Baghdad had been strategically bombed in the initial round of insurgent attacks, the United Nations itself had pulled out of Iraq.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski would later quote a general, roaring “We’re running a prison system for an entire country by the seat of our pants!”5 That’s how it felt to Private Thorndike, too.
We’re not meeting these people’s needs. And we’re still making this up as we go along.
Dizl was alone in an end tower one night. His back was to the village of Nasser Wa Salam. The proximity of the village meant there was a history of sniper fire coming from the people who lived right on the other side of the wall, so sniper screens hung over the little window. They’d have to sit with their backs to the snipers, concentrating on their areas of responsibility. Sometimes their duty included ignoring the impact of bullets on the sandbags behind them as the Iraqis tried to shoot through the peephole opening.
Dizl looked around and estimated that between the village in back and the detainees in front, he had about thirty feet of what anyone could really call friendly space.
In front of him, by the shower point, a faucet dribbled water. Periodically, as Dizl watched, someone would come along, use the stinking porta-potty, then come to the faucet to wash his feet for prayer. Then someone else would come along and fill a plastic water bottle.
Hold on. This isn’t good, Dizl would think.
Looking around, Dizl saw a detainee of perhaps sixty seated nearby. He bore a strong likeness to one of Dizl’s high school math teachers—a smart man, but really, really depressed.
“Hey!” said Dizl, pointing to the water. “Look, the way those men are using that water is no good. Mushkallah! Not safe.”
The man looked up. In impeccable English, he answered, “Yes. I am a doctor. My specialty is in internal medicine.”
Dizl regarded him with astonishment.
“Although I work on hearts.” The doctor continued. “Cardiology. You understand?”
“Sure, but …”
“Yes. Well, don’t worry, mister. These men … their immune systems will simply … well, they will have to tolerate this.” He made a gesture with his hands that encompassed the tap, the porta-potties, and perhaps the whole of Abu Ghraib. “What else can one do?”
It wasn’t a cop-out, Dizl realized. It was simple reality. The detainees had to urinate and defecate. The porta-potties were overflowing. They had to wash their feet. They had to drink water. There was one water source. They were stuck at Abu Ghraib. What else can one do?
Dizl sat back in his seat.
He thought about the depressed heart doctor, the roasting hamama, about the old man shuffling along, leaning on a young boy. He thought about the mortars and the meager protection of the Mortar Café, and then compared that with the stark absence of protection afforded to the detainees living in canvas tents behind wire fences.
A
fter a few hours of mind-numbing boredom, Dizl heard the sound of boots coming up the stairs. A helmet bearing the full-bird insignia of a colonel appeared through the floor. Private Thorndike leaped immediately to attention.
Colonel David E. Quantock was the newly appointed brigade commander for the Sixteenth MP Brigade under which the 152nd served at Abu Ghraib. He was making what the troops would soon learn were frequent evening rounds of the posts and areas of operations (AOs) throughout Abu Ghraib.
Once he had put the soldier at ease, as only a commanding officer can do, Colonel Quantock turned his gaze outward.
“So, Private Thorndike,” he said. “What do you think?”
“About Abu Ghraib, sir?”
“About Abu Ghraib.”
It is hard to explain what it’s like being a junior ranking enlisted soldier having a conversation with a full-bird colonel. He is, essentially, your boss’s boss’s boss, who has the power not only to put you in prison for speaking to him the wrong way, if he so chooses, but he can also order you to your certain death.
In addition, anything one says to a high-ranking commissioned officer is bound to work its way back down through the chain of command where it acts as an excuse for your noncommissioned officer to give you an ass chewing for “jumping the chain of command.” And no, it does not matter that the colonel came to you asking you questions.
“Well, sir,” said Dizl. “It strikes me that this place is something like a cross between a refugee camp and a prison, and frankly, whatever it is, it’s just not sustainable.”
“Go on,” said Quantock.
Emboldened, Dizl went on: “I’ve worked in a prison, sir. I know what a functioning prison looks like, and this isn’t it.”
“Uh huh.”
“The hardest part is going to be teaching our guys the job, teaching them how to do custody and control. Even if you’ve had the training, it’s a difficult job, and they haven’t had the training. If anything, because they’re field artillery, they’ve had the opposite class—how to kill people. And killing people isn’t that hard when you’re in the middle of a war zone, scared shitless. Sir.”
“Go on,” said Quantock.
Dizl looked inquiringly at him, but the colonel evidently meant it.
“OK, in theory these detainees are all terrorists, right? They’re all our enemy. That old guy, that kid, that poor bastard there who used to be a doctor, if they got hold of some weapons, we would be facing an in-house insurgency and we would have no choice: We would have to shoot them.”
“Yes.”
“Since you asked, sir, I think the whole place really needs to be completely reorganized,” said Dizl firmly. “And preferably with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind.”
“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” the colonel repeated.
With characteristic enthusiasm, Dizl explained.
Abraham Maslow was a humanistic psychologist who developed a theory of personality that became influential in a variety of spheres—education, to name an obvious one, but also corrections. In Maslow’s hierarchy, basic physiological needs such as food, water, the ability to maintain a consistent body temperature, and safety are necessities for basic human functioning.
“We have placed these people in a situation in which their basic needs are not being met, and those unsatisfied needs are going to control their thoughts and behaviors. This isn’t good, sir.”
Dizl went on for a while. Quantock was a good listener, and perhaps it was pleasant for the colonel to spend time discussing ideas with another middle-aged man, one whose years made him a peer even as his low rank removed him from the realm of commissioned officers whose words might be tinted by ambition or slanted for the time-honored purpose of covering their ass.
At last, Colonel Quantock got to his feet. He bade the soldier a grave and courteous farewell and departed. What Dizl didn’t know was that the colonel was on one of his usual trips out to the “front lines.” Quantock’s AO covered thousands of square miles and he had four brigades under his command. Over the course of the next year or so, the man would log more than one hundred thousand miles on his vehicle getting out to see his troops.
President Bush insisted that morale among troops in Iraq was much higher than people back home thought, “just ask people who have been there.” But it quickly became clear to anyone who actually did that soldiers in Iraq, particularly those in the National Guard and reserve units, were very unhappy: “Many soldiers described their training as insufficient…. A survey of twelve hundred deployed soldiers from the Illinois Army National Guard found that ‘the majority of soldiers feel they are poorly informed, inadequately cared for, and that training in their units is boring and unorganized,’ according to a summery by Brigadier General Charles Fleming, the deputy commander of the Illinois Guard.”6
Colonel Quantock’s goal was to get out to the troops and tell them from his own lips why their jobs guarding the detainees were so important. It was his belief that if his soldiers knew why they were doing something, they would most often get behind it.
“You can’t just give an order and say, ‘because I said so,’” Quantock said. “If it doesn’t work with my kids, it won’t work with soldiers.”
The next morning, Captain Trevino accosted Dizl: “What on earth did you say to Quantock?” Trevino inquired.
“What are you talking about, sir?”
“Today, in the Command Staff Meeting, Quantock told us he had a long conversation last night with a certain Private Thorndike …”
“Oh, shit, sir, really?”
“… about the condition of the facility. He said we all needed to get on board with what you were talking about. What were you talking about?”
“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” said Dizl, and he set about explaining the philosophy to his Captain.
As it turned out, Dizl had made quite an impression on the colonel. His philosophy, and the philosophy of the Mainers regarding the treatment and humane housing of detainees, would filter out from Quantock to the other units at the ’Ghraib. While official US policy was “hands off” in light of the allegations surrounding the 372nd, it was Dizl and the Mainers, combined with Quantock’s own leadership philosophies, that began pushing detainee operations in the morally righteous (or as close as one can get in a war zone) direction.
Not long after the First Platoon had begun working in Ganci, Specialist Cohen, the twenty-seven-year-old father of two little girls, arrived at Abu Ghraib to fill a hole in the roster left vacant when a soldier scheduled to be deployed got sick.
The new man was assigned to Tower G-7-1. Each of the guard towers overlooking Ganci was composed of a wooden, sand-filled box measuring roughly ten feet by ten feet, with a wooden, sand-filled roof overhead draped in anti-sniper netting. This structure rested upon a metal conex box, which looked like a shipping container one might see stacked on a wharf in Baltimore, or piled like enormous Legos in a Kuwaiti desert. Specialist Cohen and Dizl would be standing watch back to back for one twelve-hour watch after another, noon to midnight, for months to come.
Dizl set about getting the new guy oriented and up to speed. First, he gave a comprehensive overview of the situation on the ground: “Pretty much FUBAR, so trust in the leadership and, as Huladog would say, ‘remember the three-hour rule.’
“And listen, Specialist Cohen. What is your handle going to be for talking on the radio?”
By this time, the rest of the soldiers of the 152nd already had their nicknames. The peer-bestowed branding worked out well enough for some: Skeletor, Tex, Red, and Knight Ranger were all cool names. Others, however—Dizl, Turtle, Beerboy, and Lunch Lady—had to live with their goofy call signs.
As he considered the question, Specialist Cohen began rolling up his pant leg. Glowering from his calf muscle, he had a tattoo of the comic book character Wolverine.
“I was thinking, maybe, Wolverine?” he said insecurely.
“Well,” said Dizl thoughtfully. “That would be pretty
cool as a cool-guy name. Of course, the guys in my platoon stuck me with Dizl.”
“Dizl?”
“You know,” Kelly said, a Mainer doing an absentminded impression of Snoop Dogg, “ThornDizl-mantizzle dog word up ham slice … whatever.”
They laughed.
A call came over the little radio. “Does anyone have any sugar? We made coffee in the command post, and can’t find sugar to put into it.”
“I have some,” Specialist Cohen volunteered. “I’ve got a bunch in my rucksack.”
“We have sugar here in 7-1,” Dizl reported.
“Right on!” squawked one voice.
Another barked, “Who’s got sugar?”
“The new guy,” said Dizl.
“What’s his call sign?” asked Huladog.
Dizl looked at Specialist Cohen, still sitting there with his pant leg rolled up. Dizl smiled.
“Sugar,” he said. “The new guy’s name is Sugar!”
Sugar jumped to his feet. “You bastard!” he protested, reaching for the radio, but it was too late. The news was out. New guy calls himself Sugar. Ain’t that sweet?
Shortly after arriving, Sugar went to assist Turtle in handling an injured detainee; he prepared to don latex gloves as per the SOP, to minimize the potential for germs to be transferred to or from the prisoner.
“You won’t need those,” said Turtle.
“What do you mean? We have to wear gloves.”
“Trust me.”
The new MP didn’t trust Turtle and put the gloves on his hands. Within seconds, the gloves began to swell as the latex trapped the perspiration continuously exuding from his wrists and palms. Within minutes Sugar had a set of watery udders dangling at the ends of his arms. The detainees, including the injured one, found it very entertaining.
A man could drink twelve liters of water every day and never need to pee. They drank Turkish bottled water until summer came and the heat got hotter. Then the Turkish water became foggy and had sea monkeys swimming in it. The men were ordered not to drink it. The lab at Camp Victory in Baghdad tested it and, unsurprisingly, it was found to be non-potable, having traces of diesel fuel, feces of unknown origin, pesticides, and other contaminants.
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