There was immediate resistance on the part of the troops—Dizl declared that he planned to fill his trailer entirely with sandbags, and live underneath it—but the really effective resistance came from Captain Trevino.
Naturally, his resistance did not take place at a time or manner observable by the troops. Trevino was (and remains) a tactful man and team player. Nonetheless, though few of his men at the time knew this, he risked his bars when he refused to move his troops into Mortar Field. KBR doubtless got paid for the trailers anyhow, but the Lost Boys never moved and many of them today attribute many saved lives to Trevino risking the future of his career.
Around the middle of May, accompanied by a crowd of reporters, Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived at Abu Ghraib to see firsthand the improvements being made at the prison. Before their tour began, both men spoke briefly to about a hundred soldiers gathered in the dining facility, or DFAC. The general thanked them for their service and sacrifice. Rumsfeld’s remarks focused mostly on the photos of prisoner abuses, by then widely broadcast and published.
“It doesn’t represent America, it doesn’t represent American values, it doesn’t represent the values of each of you,” Rumsfeld said. “America isn’t perfect, but don’t let anyone tell you that America’s what’s wrong with this world,” he continued, adding, “It’s not.”
For reasons best known to himself, Rumsfeld did not take a look at Tier 1-A, nor any portion of the Hard Site, soon to be turned over to the Iraqis for use as a traditional correctional facility. The tour of Ganci was, more or less, a “windshield tour.”
Colonel Quantock described for reporters and the secretary of defense some of the safety measures the prison staff had taken to ensure detainees’ safety. Each tent was now surrounded by sandbags stacked three high on all sides, and each enclosure had at last been given concrete bunkers to protect detainees from mortar attacks.
Quantock explained that Redemption, the new camp still under construction but soon to be completed, would feature several improvements to make the detainees yet more comfortable. Camp Redemption would be covered in gravel, where Camp Ganci was all mud. Tents would have wooden floors, and prisoners would have cots to sleep on. Redemption would have electricity and, eventually, heating and air conditioning in the tents, Quantock told reporters.
“We’re going to do a lot better with this one,” he said of Camp Redemption.
It was a recurring theme for any official briefing the press about the prison to emphasize that Quantock and the Sixteenth MP Brigade had taken command of the prison well after the abuses took place. When asked, Colonel Quantock acknowledged he had “been told there were problems” when his unit was transitioning to Abu Ghraib in January of ’04. He had assumed, or even hoped, that the list he received included all the hazards, miseries, and deprivations of the place.
“It’s all about leadership standards,” said the colonel in summary. “And that’s what we’ve been focused on every day.”
It might have been pride or homesickness that inspired the 152nd to raise the Maine flag above the Mortar Café, where it flew until the anxious command staff fell prey to the fear that local residents might see it as a gesture of conquest. The flag came down to be replaced briefly by a pair of Scooby-Doo boxer shorts and then by the durable Lenny.
Lenny was a full-sized boiled-scarlet plastic lobster, the kind sold in tourist shops all over Maine. With the admirable patience only a plastic crustacean could muster, Lenny endured hundreds of trips up the flagpole, his plastic claws threaded through the flag-lines, and long, shell-melting days in the sun. This was hard duty, but Lenny did get a break. Sometimes, when one of the men went home on leave, Lenny received a tiny set of handmade documents, including a passport, so that he, too, could get away from the ’Ghraib for ten days or so of refreshing Maine normality.
The soldiers of the 152nd worked an average of seventy-eight hours a week at Abu Ghraib, with frequent workweek extensions. The soldiers occupied in detention operations frequently found themselves working up to eighteen days in a row, totaling 234 hours without a day off.
With such a demanding work schedule, there was limited personal time. A thirteen-hour workday leaves a scant eleven hours in which to eat, sleep, call home, or recreate.
“A musician must make music, and an artist must paint, and a poet must write,” Abraham Maslow said of the human need for self-actualization. And everyone likes a little fun now and then.
Dizl had a travel guitar, and he painstakingly decorated its smooth wood with precise, tattoo-like ink drawings of Ganci Tower 7-1, of bones and stones, of a lizard and the twining, ever-present barbed wire.
Though Turtle was not the only soldier at Abu Ghraib who wrote letters home, his dedication to the handwritten note was unusual. Email and Skype were available, at least intermittently, even to the lowliest private, and most communicated with their families and friends with phone calls and video chatting. However, Turtle seldom used either. Email, he declared, was insufficiently personal, not to mention prone to the risks of accidental deletion or distribution. Skyping was just too painful.
“Seeing her and hearing her makes it harder to accept being without her,” he admitted.
The courtyard outside their LSA provided space for a volleyball net, though the presence of bones, broken glass, and used hypodermic syringes made a no-diving rule necessary, even after a few wheelbarrows of sand were hauled in.
“Lickies” and “chewies,” the name detainees gave to the candy provided in care packages from home, provided a certain amount of entertainment once they began to arrive. In the early days, snacks, condiments (sugar, cinnamon, anything to vary the flavor of the food), batteries, and pornography were items of inestimable bargaining value. “For some of the guys,” Dizl amends, presumably to put distance between him and the porn. The appearance of a bag of Skittles or some peanut butter crackers from a soldier’s pocket could often turn an encounter or discussion with a prisoner into an amicable one.
Some of the Mainers persuaded a KBR contract interpreter to give them Arabic lessons, and they studied assiduously. When sent to Baghdad as an escort, Dizl purchased an Arabic-English dictionary and a couple of old tourist maps of Iraq from one of the peddlers who had set up shop inside the Green Zone. In addition to soaking up some of the countless tedious hours, it built communication that helped lay a foundation of trust.
Those with a genuine aptitude for creating Let’s Put On a Show in the Old Barn–style entertainment managed to pull off karaoke nights at the DFAC, and a boxing night that was a huge hit with spectators and participants alike.
When a small weight room was added to the amenities of FOBAG, some of the guys began exercising, and tanning. While the tanning didn’t have any additional fitness benefit, it presented itself as an attractive pastime to pasty Mainers seeking ways to preen, especially when a few days of R&R at home was in the foreseeable future. Readers combined exposure to the sun’s relentless rays with exposure to fine literature, ranging from Dune to Kipling, Hunting Dog magazine to an increasingly shabby copy of Penthouse.
Once the detainees were settled into the newly built and electrified Camp Redemption, Sugar became the unofficial “Combat Librarian” for the detainees. He made a project out of gathering and offering Arabic books and dubbed DVDs to the guys under his responsibility. The Pixar film Finding Nemo had to be yanked from circulation when the Ganci Imam told Sugar, “It is satanic.”
This story of a father fish in search of his missing fish son became a favorite among the Lost Boys of the Mortar Café. As it happened, there was a real-life father-son pair serving together in the 152nd at Abu Ghraib. The father ran the motor pool and thus was known as Jiffy-Lube, while his boy became Lube Junior.
In June, both father and son flew home on leave for the occasion of Jiffy-Lube’s stateside wedding and—more importantly from the point of view of the Lost Boys—the accompanying bachelor party. Sharing descripti
ons of sexual interludes is time-honored entertainment for heterosexual men forced to dwell, womanless, together for long periods of time with nothing to do. By the time the father-son team departed for the United States, the material available in the collective memories of the men of the 152nd had been mined so assiduously, the tailings recycled so often by telling and retelling that the sources had really been exhausted. The return of the newly married (and newly step-mothered) Jiffy-Lube and Lube Junior represented a chance to hear some decent new tales.
Naturally, the subject matter would not be drawn from the wedding night. Wives, like mothers, are sacrosanct. Rather, they would hear tales from whatever excitements had been added to alcohol to make Jiffy-Lube’s last moments of unmarried life memorable and interesting to the eagerly awaiting men back in Iraq.
When Lube Junior appeared at the Mortar Café, the first question, which Dizl claims Beerboy asked, while Beerboy indignantly pointed the finger at Night Rider, was “were there girls? Strippers?”
“There was one …” Lube Junior admitted. He was a round-faced, lamentably inexperienced young man, one forced to remain a perpetual listener during the after-hours storytelling sessions. Here, thought Night Rider, was an opportunity to redress the balance.
“Did you see her boobies?”
“Um … yes …”
“Good,” snapped Night Rider. “Don’t say anything now. Tonight, when everyone is together, you can describe the left boob. Got that?”
“Um … sir?”
“And tomorrow night, you can describe the right boob.”
“Yes, sir!”
When not discussing women’s anatomy at great length and their experiences with said anatomy in excruciating detail, Turtle began cultivating a patch of shrubbery the size of a dollar bill in the courtyard outside their living quarters. By giving it little drinks of water he transformed the fragment of dusty vegetation into an area of green measuring around two feet square. A sign beside it read: THE MAINE FOREST.
As autumn approached, the Mainers began to dream of days that began before dawn with a thermos of coffee drunk beside a trailhead or on the shoulder of a woodland road while the cold mist eddied around their ankles before spiraling skyward, and the rising sun lit the leaves still clinging to the tops of the trees. When the light reached the trees’ trunks and the hunters’ faces and the glowing orange of their hunting shirts, it was well and truly morning, and legal to begin stalking deer.
Iraq actually boasts a few species of deer—roe and fallow deer, not to mention oryx and some pretty gazelles—but none were seen at Abu Ghraib. Feral cats and feral dogs were perhaps the most visible mammalian wildlife at FOBAG, at least during the day. In theory these should have kept the rat population down, but their efforts (or perhaps their appetites) were self-evidently insufficient. There were a lot of rats.
When the bosses made it known that dead rats were the preferred variety at Abu Ghraib, the Mainers decided to translate a venerable Maine tradition and started a Big Buck Pool at the Mortar Café.
The carcasses of “harvested” rats would be hung on a pole in the courtyard as if prepared for gutting and cutting. Each was neatly labeled with the name of the hunter, the approximate weight and length of the rat, and the weapon with which the rat had been brought down.
For example:
SPC R. PARKER
BUCK [that is, male]
FOUR POUNDS, NINE AND A HALF INCHES
SIZE THIRTEEN MILITARY ISSUE BOOT
The guys at the motor pool adopted a feral kitten, which they named Hajji-Pussy, or HP for short.
Parker taught Lunch Lady how to play hackey-sack. They played for hours, toeing and heeling the little crocheted, rice-filled ball back and forth between them in the courtyard that served as the front porch and gathering place for First Platoon.
When they had first arrived at Abu Ghraib, that courtyard was a mess. It was littered with debris including a flattened soccer ball, bits of discarded clothing, plastic Iraqi prison-issue shoes, and a wealth of human bones. There were big bones, like fibulas and scapulae, and smaller ones, like phalanges and metatarsals poking intermittently out of the dirt. Some fragments of skull were still large enough to recognize. Most of the remaining skeletons likely had already been ground down, now indistinguishable from the omnipresent dust. Still, when the rains came, a faint smell of decaying flesh rose from the sticky mud, and Dizl insisted that the Lost Boys remove their boots when entering the living quarters.
“Just like the mudroom back home,” he said, when they complained. “You’re not tracking that stuff in here.”
It was a strange and sorrowful thing to dwell amid these remnants of Saddam’s victims. In the normal world, the compound would’ve been carefully excavated, the bones subjected to forensic examination and DNA analysis to determine both the truth of what had happened to their owners and to match them with grieving families. But Abu Ghraib was not and, realistically, never had been part of the normal world as the boys from Maine understood it. There was a gas chamber in their building and a room equipped with a permanently installed scaffold sized to accommodate two simultaneous hangings. Abu Ghraib was one big crime scene, one big mass grave.
Eventually, Dizl and the other soldiers began collecting the bones and setting them aside. In time, some of the bones in the growing collection seemed to match enough in size and general location to have come from a single person. Perhaps, once reassembled into a whole skeleton, this victim might be returned one day and answer the question, Where has my loved one been all this time? The Lost Boys called him “Frank” and kept him in a shoebox on the shelf.
At intervals, when someone discovered a new bone in the courtyard outside, Frank’s box would be taken down and his bones laid out in their anatomical positions like a six-foot puzzle on the floor. Then, whoever would try and piece the fragments into gaps in the skeletal structure.
Such morbid games would come under scrutiny when the tenure of the 152nd coincided with a period in which the mental health of the troops at Abu Ghraib was being attended to with anxious assiduity, lest some overlooked mental illness provoke another efflorescence of misconduct and—not incidentally—scandal. Army psychologist Colonel Larry James had recently been dispatched to the prison to evaluate conditions and make recommendations to General Miller regarding both detainee mental health care and the maintenance of psychological well-being among the troops.
A swarm of shrinks, some from the Army, some from the Red Cross or other NGOs, but all with similar diagnostic and therapeutic ambitions, followed in the colonel’s wake. One of these was a woman who, by appearance and in her heavily accented speech, strongly resembled Marlene Dietrich, at least to those soldiers old enough to know who Marlene Dietrich was.
Marlene, as she came to be known, took a dim view of some of the recreational opportunities created by the Mainers. She made it clear that the Big Buck Pool showed troubling evidence of a callous disregard for life. The fact that the rats were a risk to public health that had been specifically targeted for extermination, and if they weren’t killing rats in Iraq, these soldiers would be killing deer in Maine, made no difference to the head shrinker.
She’d already expressed concerns about the mental stability of the Mainers to the command staff when, one rainy day, she happened by their hooch and discovered some of the Lost Boys hunkered down together on the floor with a shoebox full of bones opened beside them. They innocently explained to her that they were whiling away their off hours assembling Frank.
Apparently so appalled as to have lost the power of speech, Marlene stood mutely among the rows of muddy boots, her shoulder braced against the doorjamb as if she required its support to stay upright in the presence of such madness. She lit one cigarette from the butt of the last while watching Night Rider carefully arrange gray ribs on either side of a fragmentary sternum. “We’re missing a clavicle,” he announced.
“Is this a clavicle?”
“Dude, that’s a coccyx …”
>
“You know, I think we’ve got an extra jawbone in here …”
From the doorway, Marlene rasped, in her thick, smoky, Teutonic voice, “This is not healthy.” The boys looked up in surprise. “Truly,” she lamented to the confused soldiers, “this is not healthy!”
It became a punch line in response to any number of “untoward” events. Perhaps a wrestling match went on for longer than observers felt was consistent with participants’ claims of heterosexuality, or even upon receipt of news that a soldier’s wife or girlfriend had cheated on him.
“Truly,” they would shout with joyous condemnation, “this is not healthy!”
“FRAGO: DON’T USE THE BUG SPRAY.” Command passed down word (rumor) from on high that the insect repellent the men of the 152nd relied on to keep at bay the litany of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, flies, and moths was toxic and they shouldn’t use it.
Not only a nuisance themselves, the bugs attracted hordes of feathered and furred insectivores. Bats were one of the common insect hunters. A number of bat species native to the country, including free tails, mouse-tails, horseshoe bats, tomb bats, and pipistrelles flitted over Abu Ghraib’s evening skies. No one thought to identify the species of bat that got stuck to Sugar’s face, though.
The bat had flittered across the beam of a Humvee headlight and, disoriented, attempted to turn in the air. The onrush of the vehicle swept it into the cabin, where the poor bat found itself pinned against a strange, soft object that happened to be Sugar’s face.
Sugar screamed and fell over backward, his hands clawing at his helmet. For a long, unpleasant moment, Dizl, who was in the truck, thought Sugar had been hit by sniper fire. That he had, instead, apparently been attacked by a rabid bat wasn’t a whole lot better. Though the unfortunate bat was at least as eager to be rid of Sugar as Sugar was of it, the animal’s head had gotten wedged under the front lip of Sugar’s helmet, and all it could do was flap its wings helplessly at Sugar’s cheeks and scrabble at his chin with its hind feet.
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