Nearly all the guys had chronically bleeding rectums, probably due to the cumulative effect of the chow, the germs, and the strenuous desire to have one’s business done as swiftly as possible before a mortar landed on them and an army chaplain would have to inform their mother or wife that their loved one died on an overflowing plastic toilet.
Baby wipes, sent from home, helped a little. However, several Americans learned the hard way to check if their wipes were for human use and not disinfectant; an application of bleach or cleaning products hardly soothes a burning anus. On the other hand, a wipe enhanced with aloe vera could be downright luxurious.
One of the perks of riding a convoy to Baghdad was the opportunity to use a toilet that wasn’t subject to mortars or rocket fire.
“Hey, Diz,” Parker asked one day. “Where were you yesterday?”
“Went to Baghdad, to Brigade HQ.”
“How was it?”
“There was a real toilet,” Dizl replied dreamily.
In the courtyard outside the Mortar Café, the soldiers could wash their uniforms in a set of automatic washers that strongly resembled the toy appliances sold to children. Imagine the laundry equivalent of an Easy Bake Oven, with a similarly toy-like capacity and power, as if whoever manufactured the things was afraid the soldiers might hurt themselves with a real laundry machine, or even a bucket-and-mangle.
Then there was the matter of where one bathed. There was a shower trailer, the kind you see at construction sites. It had five shower stalls and sinks for hand washing and tooth brushing, but the one at FOBAG had many large holes in it. While this was a problem for privacy, it also made it a little too obvious that the shower trailer was as armored as an empty beer can. It is difficult to enjoy the experience of showering, naked, in a fiberglass shower stall when a bullet or a mortar might come punching through the wall.
Seeking some protection from the snipers and exploding shells, the Mainers tended to prefer the hard shower located down in an old torture chamber plumbed with makeshift, but effective, piping. The water came out of pipes above stalls demarked by cheap plastic shower curtains. Given the least encouragement, these would wrap themselves around the shower in a clammy and surely germ-laden embrace.
There were no drains either. The wastewater simply flowed across the floor and out into the corridor, where it disappeared into a crack in the concrete so deep that Dizl was sure it dribbled all the way down to hell. The hard shower was fetid and spooky, but at least there was concrete between a naked self and the mortars. This was a psychological asset more than anything; plenty of concrete walls and roofs at FOBAG had impromptu windows and skylights punched in them.
The shower was coed, which hadn’t bothered the men and women stationed at FOBAG. It was like camp or the coed facilities college students have in their dorms. It was not especially uncomfortable.
Then the smart people from Big Army got involved. They didn’t want to risk having anything at FOBAG that could have any potential of turning into a problem resembling sexual harassment. The photos of naked detainees simulating blowjobs still sat in the front of every commander’s mind.
So the FRAGO came down: “NO MORE COED SHOWERING! And while we’re on the subject: NO URINATING IN THE SHOWER!”
“God! I can’t believe this!” Humpty groaned, upon reading the “DON’T PISS IN THE SHOWER” sign, as if yet another basic human right had been snatched away from him.
“Remember the three-hour rule,” Dizl said helpfully. “Maybe it’ll change back.”
The powers at “Shadow Main,” the headquarters of Abu Ghraib, actually wanted the hard shower closed down and disassembled. Huladog responded with the requisite “roger that” and proceeded to dutifully ignore the order.
Instead, he worked out a male/female shower schedule to accommodate the needs of the few women dwelling nearby, and convinced the KBR water deliveryman that, despite loud brass sounds to the contrary, it was still OK to refill the tank.
“If you get caught doing it, I’ll take the blame,” he said reassuringly. As the ubiquitous refrain had it, “What can they do to me? Send me to Abu Ghraib?”
Home may be where your heart is, Dizl mused, but FOBAG is where our hearts, brains, guts, spines, and balls are. The priority is keeping them all connected to each other.
Dizl didn’t think “balls and ovaries.” Of the 124 members of the 152nd FAB, none were female. A field artillery battalion is considered a front-line combat unit and therefore not open to female soldiers under the ban against women serving on the “front line.”
On the other hand, MP units do include women, and the units from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico deployed with the 152nd at Abu Ghraib had a few female soldiers in their complement.
This presented some predictable issues. When some female MPs took to sunbathing on the roof of the Mortar Café, for example, the chopper traffic over the building became so thick that the women were asked to desist, for reasons of safety. Though, as a grateful Dizl pointed out, the hovering helicopters tended to suppress enemy fire, no small benefit for all concerned.
A diminutive, redheaded Pennsylvanian added a welcome touch of feminine energy to FOBAG life when she befriended a number of the Mainers. Dizl and Red nicknamed her Shirley because she resembled the perky character on the TV sitcom Laverne and Shirley.
Shirley was energetic, kind, and funny as hell. She taught a detainee nicknamed Jackie Chan to do the chicken dance, and she was a favorite with the juveniles. Though she would bristle when described this way, the Mainers thought Shirley was adorable.
She lived in a prison cell at FOBAG. She liked the relative security of bars on the doors and concrete walls all around her to keep out most of the mortars.
She had a total of three roommates at Abu Ghraib. Of these, two became pregnant and were sent home. The first one was pregnant before she left the United States; the other became pregnant while at Abu Ghraib.
“People are still people no matter where they go,” Shirley said to Dizl.
Despite the standing “no sex in a combat zone” order, the staff at the clinic found that, to their surprise, the courtesy jar of condoms needed to be refilled far more often than the courtesy jar of candy. However, with birth control usually being one of the many details often overlooked in moments of passion and pregnancy being a ticket out of a deployment, it meant soldiers were “still people,” and mistakes happened.
The only shortcoming to Shirley’s quarters was that the cell wasn’t in the basement; what makes a dungeon makes a sanctuary. Well, that and the lack of anything resembling indoor plumbing. However tedious it was to up-armor for yet another schlep to the porta-potty, peeing in a bottle wasn’t an option for Shirley.
A plastic box the size of a phone booth heats up to sauna temperatures under the savage Middle Eastern sun. The smell is downright offensive even in the best of times. When there was a siege on and the KBR pumper trucks stopped coming, the toilets smelled like the end of the world.
To make female hygiene and bathroom practices even more complicated, the whiteboard outside the command post offered daily warnings about burning personal correspondence and anything else that might compromise the already fragile operational security at FOBAG, which included used tampons. This naturally made a woman wonder: what use might al-Sarawak make of the knowledge that the female soldiers at Abu Ghraib were on the rag?
When one was crouching in the porta-potty, nose instinctively burrowing behind the ineffectual mask of one’s IBA collar, head whirling from the combined effects of heat and a refusal to inhale, the safe, secure disposal of a pearlized plastic tampon applicator seemed borderline impossible. Years later, Shirley could still be awestruck by the unassuming feature of American life that is the toilet. The gleaming porcelain surfaces and elegant, sculptural lines, the satisfying waterfall sound it makes while rinsing everything away, were no longer basic necessities but luxuries.
Adorable and generous, Shirley’s mother sent a care package once a we
ek filled with treats and personal hygiene items, enough so that Shirley was a frequent contributor to the “Take It If You Need It” shelf in the supply room.
Shirley, to the chagrin of male and female politicians, was one of thousands of women serving in Iraq in 2004. In fact, the Center for Military Readiness, a nonprofit educational organization that openly opposes allowing homosexuals to serve in the military, also aims to limit the number and career choices for women in the military. There are members of the armed forces who continue to argue against women in combat roles, claiming they aren’t mentally and physically strong enough. Some organizations believe that women are more prone to erratic or violent manners when under the stress of surviving a “man’s world.”
“There is no excuse for what happened at Abu Ghraib,” declared Elaine Donnelly, the founder of the Center for Military Readiness. “I am disturbed by the role that a few female soldiers played in it. It seems that a gradual but sweeping degradation in civilized values is happening before our eyes. No surprise to me, since we are forcing women to compete in the ultimate male world, the world of war, which is anything but civilized,” suggesting that the presence of women at the prison was a contributing factor to, and maybe even the cause of, the abuse on Tier 1-A.
Women serve as soldiers and Marines in harm’s way. This can be accepted cognitively and yet still shock the heart when, for example, a feminine name jumps out from the list of the year’s dead. The ban on women engaging directly in front-line combat missions has been rendered moot by the predominance of insurgent and terrorism-based warfare in our time. According to the Department of Defense, as of 2014, 958 female service members have been wounded and 152 have died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What Donnelly laments, the degradation of civilized values that comes from the equal participation of women in traditionally masculine spheres, attempts to exclude women from responsibility for evil using nineteenth-century misogynistic cultural rules. This is not uncommon.
When one mentions the surprising number of women who took starring roles in the Abu Ghraib scandal, female friends sometimes grow defensive.
“Well, but these were women who were trying to get by in a male environment,” they explain. “They were trying to fit in, they had to prove themselves, show they were just as tough as the boys. They couldn’t rock the boat!”
However, putting the responsibility of the abuses by the “fragile female soldier in a man’s army” on their male compatriots detracts from the participation of women like Shirley in the project of Redemption, which was not a matter of genes and hormones but rather of a determined, daily decision on the part of an individual, male or female. Their goal was to show their enemies—unarmed in cages—compassion.
It is Lynndie England’s leash that lets us know who Shirley is. Shirley is the one who had the strength to actually bear the burden of moral responsibility, of strength and compassion even in the face of evil.
FOURTEEN
GROUNDHOG’S DAY
“On Monday, about 400 prisoners were set free—more than half of a planned two-day total of 640 releases, military officials said…. [M]any of the detainees said Abu Ghraib was not the same prison it was when reports of abuse by US guards surfaced more than a month ago.
‘The Army is good now,’ said Satr Sim Mohammad, 23.”
—“For Freed Iraqis, Mixed Emotions; Many Leaving Abu Ghraib Cite Improvements Since Scandal,” Washington Post, June 15, 2004
TWO ROCKETS LANDED on the roof above Red’s room and exploded.
He had been sleeping on his back, hands resting on his chest, thumbs locked, which was always how he slept.
“You look like you’re ready for the coffin,” Sugar remarked once, to which Red simply answered, “Well, I might as well be.”
The first explosion woke him, and when he turned his head instinctively away from the loudest noise and opened his eyes, there was an orange glob of molten metal—part of the housing from the rocket—stuck to the wall next to his head. He could feel the heat on his nose.
He leapt up and had time to strap himself into his body armor and snatch his rifle off the hooks on the wall before the second rocket exploded and blew him out of his door and onto the floor of the hallway.
The hall was filled with smoke. Red could feel the effort his brain was making as it sent forth messages, telling the heart to keep beating, imploring the legs to get moving, but the legs were ignoring these. Or maybe they, like Red himself, couldn’t hear anything.
A familiar face materialized out of the smoke. It was his friend, the diminutive Marine who went by the nickname of Gunsmoke.
Gunsmoke’s mouth was opening and closing with some violence. What’s he doing? Red wondered.
Shouting, of course.
Red shook his head and pointed to his ears.
Gunsmoke tore open Red’s vest, reached inside it, and ran his hands over Red’s stomach and around his back. What the hell? Gunsmoke withdrew his hands and checked them for blood. He refastened the body armor, looked up, caught Red’s eye, and gave him an exaggerated thumbs-up.
Ah. No holes in me. That’s good.
Gunsmoke’s mouth was moving again, “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Red shook his head and pointed to his legs, They don’t work.
Gunsmoke frowned. That’s bad. Then he shrugged, grabbed hold of the strap on the back of Red’s ballistic vest, and dragged the big man briskly down the hallway to safety.
The concussive force of the explosions had bruised the inside of Red’s spinal column, producing an injury that is a variation on a traumatic brain injury. As it turned out, once the initial swelling went down, the brain’s messages could get through, and sensation returned to Red’s legs. To this day, they still have shaky, painful moments.
Once Gunsmoke had seen Red safely into Chiclets’s hands, he dashed back into the still-smoking LSA and retrieved Red’s family photos from where they were still pinned on the splintered walls of his room.
“The shrapnel chewed ’em up a little,” he said apologetically when he handed them to Red. “But you can still see their faces.”
It was just another day at the ’Ghraib.
Skeletor stopped by Tower 2 in Ganci 4 one day to have a chat with Major Payne who, when not standing guard duty, filled the important role of FOBAG barber. From the tower, Skeletor saw a group of detainees behaving strangely. One man began beating the bottom of an upside down trashcan with a stick while the detainees around him began to chant and dance.
“Staff Sergeant,” Skeletor said into his Motorola. “The guys in 4 are doing some weird sort of tribal thing here.”
“Check?”
“They’re drumming and dancing around.”
“I’ll come over and take a look,” said the staff sergeant.
“Roger that.”
“Do you think it could be the signal for a riot?” asked Payne nervously.
“That stick is large enough to use as a weapon,” Skeletor replied thoughtfully.
Below them they saw Tex, now recovered from being rocked by the mortar attack, arrive at the wire and beckon to Firos, the translator, and to Abu Hussein. The compound chief approached the wire smiling.
“No mushkallah,” Hussein said reassuringly.
Firos explained, “It is a religious celebration, Captain Tex.”
“What are you using for a drumstick?”
Abu Hussein called the drummer over to the wire. The drummer held his drumstick aloft for inspection and Tex saw it was the bottom section of a crutch.
Tex laughed. “Does this mean some poor guy is doing without his crutch?”
Hussein pointed to one of the tents. “It’s OK,” he said. “No mushkallah.”
“All right, then,” Tex said. “Party on.”
He went up the stairs to the tower, where he and Skeletor and Payne watched the drumming and dancing. At length, the drumming paused and Hussein said something to the others. They turned to the tower and wa
ved their thanks at Tex.
Tex waved back.
Flushed with exertion and the joy of their celebration, the detainees gathered around the base of the tower and shouted “Tex!”
Tex threw up his arms.
“Tex! Tex! Tex!” the detainees chanted. Tex threw up his arms again, and they all cheered and laughed. It turned into an impromptu celebration of its own, the staff sergeant throwing up his arms, the detainees chanting, everyone laughing, the drummer pounding out a syncopated accompaniment. For all of these men, living amid the mortars and concertina behind the walls of Abu Ghraib, it was a much-needed moment of sheer, silly joy.
Rioting was a real threat, and while the excitement of the celebration didn’t escalate beyond a fun party, ideology, pent-up frustration, or sheer boredom could erupt in violence that was often directed at other prisoners. In August, two prisoners were shot dead during a riot in the worst episode of internal violence in months. Five prisoners had already been attacked and injured. Something had to be done to quell the brawl before they could be rescued from the compound, so the soldiers at first tried to control the crowd with variations on the saying, “drop the fucking rocks,” then with less-lethal rounds (rubber bullets). At last, a soldier from Pennsylvania opened up with his shotgun.
Yogi arrived just after the gun went off, in time to oversee a doomed effort to resuscitate the two detainees who’d sustained mortal wounds from the lethal shotgun blasts. Yogi would be haunted by the episode. He felt responsible (“Well, we are responsible for these people, aren’t we?” he pointed out to Dizl) for not managing to arrive at the scene in time to somehow make it turn out in some other, better way. This burden was made heavier by Yogi’s belief that the wrong guys had been shot. “These were the guys who were usually trying to help us out,” he pointed out. “They weren’t the instigators.”
“I don’t think the Pennsylvania guy knew them,” Dizl said.
Yogi shook his head. “I should’ve gotten there sooner,” he said.
There was an older teenager, perhaps seventeen, who Red nicknamed Shriek. A skinny kid with an electrified frizz of wild hair, in an American school system he would undoubtedly have been classified as ADHD and appropriately medicated. As it was, he had spent a few months as the leader of an insurgent mortar team and he had killed many people—though the number was almost certainly exaggerated—which he clearly thought entitled him to the fearful respect of the other kids in his compound.
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