“Threat level is at amber,” the major said.
“Yes, sir. I know.”
Then Dizl aimed the M16 at a chanting detainee’s head. If he had to shoot, he could only hope the bullet would pass through one head and hit a few more freaked out, homicidal detainees behind him. Dizl, like every other MP in Ganci, was facing down the common problem of too many potential hostiles and not nearly enough bullets. In that moment Dizl could’ve sworn he actually heard the major growl, like an angry dog, as he soaked up the reality of Camp Ganci.
Am I going to kill somebody? he thought. Am I going to die?
He didn’t, not that day. But back home in Maine, a neighbor had taken to keeping a public count of the casualties of the Iraq war, representing each American soldier’s death by a yellow flag stuck in his front lawn. They were a vivid memory for Dizl, the hundreds of yellow flags fluttering. He really didn’t want one of those little flags flying for him.
The incident passed in seconds creeping slowly by.
One thousand one …
“One rock flies, I’m shooting you in the fucking face and blowing your head off.”
One thousand two …
The detainees began noticing him and elbowing each other, nodding at the man pointing a gun at their collective heads.
One thousand three …
The crowd began to disperse, their complaints not enough to warrant facing down an armed man. They left an arch of stones marking where they’d been standing ready to riot only seconds before.
One thousand four …
End of incident.
At the start of Lunch Lady’s shift on April 6, there was word from higher up that a mortar attack to cover a massive prison escape was planned for the day. Lunch Lady began his tower duties prepared to be vigilant.
He could never tell the difference between mortars and rockets, but he heard the first ones arrive and explode. He saw them “walking,” just as Dizl had, and thought, oh shit, they’re coming right for me.
A round tore through a detainee tent and smoke poured out of both sides. A single man walked out. He was missing a part of his foot. He looked at Lunch Lady, who saw the fear in the man’s eyes just before he died and collapsed in a heap to the ground.
The lieutenant began yelling at the terrified detainees, and when one finally stopped screaming and looked, Lunch Lady pointed at the tent that had been hit. The detainee looked into the tent, puked and then staggered away.
The next guy who looked in gagged too, but did not leave. He waved urgently to Lunch Lady, imploring him for some kind of direction. The lieutenant pointed to a blanket that was draped across another tent, thinking they could use it as a stretcher. All but five men from that tent would survive the explosion.
“This heroic detainee went in and pulled a guy out,” Lunch Lady later told his men. “He was still alive, though bleeding. As the wounded man was carried out, I pointed again to the blanket, and it was as if the hero could read my thoughts. He grabbed another guy who was running by, and they carried the wounded man to the aid station. The two of them came back over and over again. They carried all the detainees from that tent to the aid station.”
The lieutenant, deafened by the explosions, hadn’t heard the voices calling to him from the Motorolas, imploring him to answer and let them know he was all right. Skeletor arrived to the scene at last. Having seen the tower disappear amid a shower of explosions, he was certain Lunch Lady had been killed.
“Are you OK?” he shouted into his lieutenant’s face.
“What?”
Skeletor shook his head and hugged him.
However, the chaos was far from over. Skeletor and Yogi managed to rescue most of the wounded from Ganci 4, though their efforts were delayed by some of the more fervent detainees in the compound.
“Stop throwing rocks!” Skeletor shouted through the wire. “Get down. You’ve got to get below the shrapnel.” A rock flew past his head.
“Goddamn it,” said Yogi. He lowered his shotgun and aimed it at the chest of the nearest rock-thrower. “Fucking shackers! We need you to bring us your wounded. Drop the fucking rock.” Skeletor pointed his shotgun at them too. There was a brief, tense standoff, and then, to the Mainers’ relief, the rock dropped to the ground, and the wounded started coming.
Those survivors with minor flesh wounds came to the gate under their own power, but others had massive, gaping holes and missing limbs and had to be carried. One man had his calf blown off and was bleeding profusely and screaming in pain. The guy Skeletor called Midget was brought up to the cage with a hole in his chest, already dead, no doubt killed instantly. Skeletor had time to remember seeing Midget go flying into the side of the shower point.
Then an old man with a long, grayish-white beard that was flecked with blood and shards of bone from his gaping chest wound took Skeletor’s attention. He was gasping for breath, his mouth opening and closing. He was pale and a pool of blood was growing fast in the dust beneath him. A man who went by Chiclets and the other medics were working on him, trying to stop the bleeding, but Skeletor could tell the old man was going to die by the way he looked at them.
The man who had had his calf blown off survived long enough to be loaded into the medevac, only to die on the way to Baghdad. The medics were able to keep dozens more alive long enough to see them safely into the hands of the doctors and survive the attack.
Coalition forces arrested Hussein abu Mastfa, along with a bunch of his relatives, for retaliating against a rival family. Hussein owned a trucking business and another family was trying to gain control of some of Hussein’s territory. The families had an argument that turned violent and Hussein’s niece was killed when his car was ambushed. Hussein, his sons, nephews, and cousins had been on their way to the rival family’s home when coalition forces caught them. Hussein, imprisoned in Ganci 4 with his posse, quickly became the compound chief.
So after the first large attack in which detainees began chucking rocks at the guards, Staff Sergeant Hurtt, called—for reasons unknown—Tex, gathered Hussein and his relatives for a meeting. Through Firos, a detainee with a good enough grasp on the English language to be designated an interpreter, Tex told the detainee leadership, “I want you to know how sorry I am that this attack happened. I am sorry your friends and family members have been killed and injured. It was a horrible day for everyone, but I want you to know I am proud of how you reacted. The throwing of rocks was bad, but I understand that you were upset. Afterward, you helped us.”
The tent chiefs listened, their faces grave. A few nodded agreement, or at least acknowledgement.
“If we should be attacked like this again, we will do our best to help save your wounded men, but you have to help us, too. No rock throwing, no rioting. Bring the wounded here, to the front, and we will help them. Thank you again for working with us. Together, we saved many lives.”
As the deprivations of the siege continued to worsen, the prisoners of Ganci became quite unruly, all except the ones in Ganci 4. At one point, detainees in all the other compounds began hurling rocks at the towers, chanting, threatening to tear down their tents and fling them across the concertina wires, walk right out, and attack. Truth be told, they easily could have done this. The tent cloth was thick enough to have protected them from the sharp wire, and if several compounds tried it at once, the Americans would have been swiftly outnumbered and overrun. However, Hussein and his relatives rounded up the seven hundred or so detainees in Ganci 4. They made it clear they would not partake in the festivities; instead they all sat down facing away from the other compounds.
“I think they appreciated what Tex told them,” Skeletor told Dizl afterward. “We may have earned a bit of respect from them.” This change among the prisoners of Ganci 4 would continue; when the second mas-cas began, no rocks would meet the soldiers who arrived at the Shark Cage in Ganci 4.
Captain Morgan would remember thinking that April 20 was going to be one of the good days, because he would be shar
ing a tower with Dizl. He loved days like that, since solitude made a twelve-hour watch long. On the other hand, there had been intel about a possible attack. Sometimes a young warrior would hear intel about the Bad Guys getting frisky and look forward to a violent encounter. The men of the 152nd were at the point where the novelty of war had long since vanished.
It was another Groundhog Day for Dizl and Captain Morgan as the detainees were served their midday meal of beans and rice just before the changing of the watch at 1200. Following lunch, the detainees would endure Count and then they could do as they pleased until the evening meal, prayer, and bed. Captain Morgan was standing behind Dizl, performing an overwatch for some workers who were pumping out the detainee porta-potties positioned near the Hawk’s Nest.
Because of the siege, the contents could not be trucked away, so they’d dug slit trenches to channel and contain the waste of thousands of people. The sheer quantity made it necessary to occasionally set the mess on fire, which was not a treat for those on duty in the Hawk’s Nest, perched barely fifteen feet above the burning turds. Foul smoke wafted in from between the floorboards and made their eyes water.
On the plus side, Dizl thought gloomily, the smoke might discourage the flies.
He would’ve said it out loud to Lunch Lady but the flies were so thick that opening one’s mouth risked munching a mouthful.
Someone was calling to Dizl.
“Shahein!” It was the boy, perhaps fifteen years old, who the Mainers had dubbed Young Elvis. He was calling Dizl by a nickname the detainees had given him. Shahein meant “Eagle,” as Dizl must have appeared to them up in his tower, gazing down on the detainees with the intense focus of a great bird of prey.
“Shahein, there are bugs in the food,” Young Elvis said. “No good, very bad, please help.”
Dizl dismounted his tower—a no-no, but Lunch Lady remained to oversee the burning, so Dizl felt the area was sufficiently covered. A quick look at Young Elvis’s white plastic picnic plate revealed what looked very much like little white worms or bug eggs. On closer examination, these proved to be the whitish sprout that sits in the indentation of a bean, but these had become separated from the beans during the cooking of the lunchtime stew.
A small crowd of detainees gathered as Dizl explained to Young Elvis that the white things in the food were not bugs but part of the bean. All agreed, through the wire, on the truth of this observation, but it was clear there would still be a problem when the stew was served to the thousands of detainees.
Standing there, in the stinking heat of Abu Ghraib, Dizl heard an echo from his old life in Maine. “Never make excuses for bad food,” Marcel Lacasse Sr. insisted. Marcel was the French-Canadian chef at Marcel’s Restaurant in Rockport, where Dizl had worked as a waiter years before. “If something is wrong, it may as well be your fault. Just fix the problem.”
“Let me see what I can do,” Dizl told the detainees.
The bean stew discussion between the detainees and Dizl took perhaps a minute. Dizl hustled back into his position in the tower and called Red, telling him to contact the chow hall immediately, and request more food.
“More food?” Red repeated, startled.
“Tell them that the problem really is bugs or they won’t do it.”
“There isn’t enough time to get more food for so many people,” Red protested.
“I’ve worked in large kitchens, Red. There’s bound to be more of something, rice at least, because the detainees usually get rice twice a day anyway.”
So Red made a call up the line. He called back: “More rice is on the way.”
End of incident.
Total turnaround time for the new rice was, maybe, ten minutes. Thanks, Marcel, thought Dizl.
“Good man, Shahein,” said Young Elvis.
And Young Elvis turned and ran back to his tent, which he shared with about twenty other detainees, two of whom were his brothers, known as Middle Elvis and Old Elvis.
Young Elvis wasn’t the only child at Abu Ghraib. In fact, there were easily a dozen juveniles eighteen and under mixed into the horde prior to what Dizl called the “Great Sorting,” after which those who had not been sent home were relegated to their own enclosure in Redemption, sited in Level Three so as to be closer to the watchful supervision and protection of the soldiers in the command post.
The Great Sorting was what the soldiers of the 152nd named the process of separating out and organizing detainees into different groups that would be easier to manage and hopefully, a little more harmonious. Through interviews and investigations, less threatening detainees were taken out from the more hardcore insurgents, and those likely to be innocent of anything but being in the wrong place at the wrong time started to get processed out of the prison and released. The idea was that common criminals, insurgents, and the innocent would be kept in different parts of the camp. Sunnis and Shiites would also be kept separate to help ease cultural and historical differences that could flair into violence.
At the time, there was no Iraqi equivalent of a Department of Human Services willing or able to take charge of juvenile offenders. Once the Great Sorting had taken place, the remaining children were, in fact, actual enemy combatants. Their skills ranged from expert IED manufacturing to being trigger boys and scouts for the enemy. These were kids to whom the Wahabis offered the carrot of cash and any number of truly scary sticks, which included the looming threat of a hole getting drilled in their skull.
When Marines at Fallujah or some other battle zone picked up kids, there was no place to send them other than Abu Ghraib.
Dizl considered that, given the alternatives, these kids were in good hands. They were being cared for by a bunch of dads, including him, and female MPs, many of whom couldn’t help but think of themselves as surrogate moms.
The kids formed a group of little rascals, like the street urchins from Oliver Twist. As the kids taught him the Arabic names for beasts and birds, Dizl bestowed them with animal names in return. There was a sawed-off, rugged, grumpy, chain-smoking twelve-year-old he called Ah-neb (ant), while Tat-twah was named for a marsh bird that makes a tat-tat sound when alarmed. It seemed like an appropriate onomatopoeic name given that Tat-twah was always tattling on his buddies. There was a bird that looked a bit like a phoebe, an insectivore called a bulbul that hunted in the rolls of concertina wire for anything that skittered. Bulbul—the human—could creep through the wire and pick up bits of trash and treasure without getting snagged.
One day, the boys asked Dizl if he had a wife, and if she was jameelah (beautiful).
“Yes, I have a wife, and yes, she is jameelah.”
They giggled and whistled and made curvy movements with their hands to indicate a shapely female body.
“La! Madame pheel (elephant)!”
“Shanoo?!” (wha-at?)
As he’d reached the limits of his Arabic, Dizl proceeded to stomp around like a mad she-elephant, waving his arm like a flailing trunk. The little monsters fell about laughing at him and chattering to each other. The idea that Shahein was married to a beautiful American woman the size of an angry elephant was an amusing one.
“She’s the one who sent me to Abu Ghraib!” Dizl told them wryly, and they laughed and laughed.
Normally, by one o’clock, the detainees would be finishing their midday meal but, due to the bean stew incident, the lunch schedule had shifted a bit in Ganci Compound 7-1, so at least some of the detainees were still milling around in the open and hadn’t yet returned to the shade of the tents to rest.
Captain Morgan was still performing his over-watch for the civilian workers burning the turds. The flies greeted Dizl’s return to the tower with glad buzzing. From the tower, he watched the men finishing their food, scraping the last remnants of broth from their Styrofoam plates.
Young Elvis was smiling like a little leaguer who had hit his first home run and he gave Shahein a running thumbs-up as he passed the tower.
From the tower Dizl could see beyond the wall
of the prison to where an Iraqi truck was towing a large agricultural trailer with a tarp over it. The truck crawled along the overpass that spanned the highway to Fallujah. The overpass hung in the air a few hundred meters from the western corner of FOBAG. The truck was moving too slowly.
For Dizl, time suddenly slowed to a crawl. The noise from the sewer pump was very loud. Young Elvis trotted toward his tent.
One thousand one …
Young Elvis, perhaps twenty-five yards from the tower, slowed to a walk.
One thousand two …
He was still giving Shahein a big thumbs-up, still smiling. The pump motor stopped, the flies buzzed.
One thousand three …
Young Elvis, like everyone else on the ground in Ganci, couldn’t see the man perched atop the agricultural trailer training binoculars on the compound, but Dizl, reaching for his own binoculars, could see that the truck on the overpass had now almost stopped moving altogether.
One thousand four …
Young Elvis still smiled at the American in the tower. The spotter on the overpass was looking at the American in the tower too.
One thousand five …
Dizl turned his head, still reaching for his binoculars, picked up the Motorola instead, and screamed, “Mortar!”
When the first mortar struck inside Ganci 7 on April 20, Red was standing near the command post with Cowan and Bartlett. The force of the explosion flung all three soldiers over the vehicle. Red went flipping, head-over-heels, through the air over the length of the vehicle, landing on his neck behind the tailpipe.
I’m dead, he thought. An instructor’s voice from years before popped into his head: ten plus ten.
He counted his fingers. He counted his toes. All ten are there. OK, I’m not dead.
Red sat up, his ears ringing and head stuffy. He saw Bartlett lying motionless nearby.
Bartlett is dead, he thought. Where’s Cowan? But then Bartlett was on his feet and they were headed for the bunker tucked in beside the command post, when the next mortar—krump—flung them into the air again. Red picked himself up again. Bartlett was hanging in the camouflage netting.
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