Packed for the Wrong Trip

by W. Zach Griffith

  Who would have imagined that a piece in a newspaper only a few hundred people are ever going to read, in a state most Americans think is part of Canada, could inspire so much interest from these guys? Huladog asked himself, amazed.

  A photograph accompanied the newspaper article. It was a shot of the mailbox that stands on its post outside Beerboy’s family home. In the picture, the mailbox is patriotically decorated, the cheerful scarlet-and-white stripes of the American flag glowing against a backdrop of cerulean sky and lush, vivid green grass and trees.

  “I hadn’t realized how much I missed color,” Beerboy admitted.

  “I’m not who I was,” Dizl declared to Turtle one day. They were wriggling into their body armor with reflexive eagerness, having been startled from sleep by an explosion.

  As if this were the only conversation to be expected at such a moment, Turtle replied, “I know. I’m not who I was, either.”

  For one thing, muscle memory allowed each man to finish strapping on body armor, check the firing mechanisms of their rifles, and begin evaluating his environment for tactical defensive and offensive possibilities before the comparatively sluggish processes of his conscious awareness had even registered a threat.

  While useful for survival, the changes in the human brain brought on by prolonged exposure to a hazardous environment carve grooves so deep in one’s mental pathways that the brain only knows how to function in a war zone. Our bodies do not lightly or easily discard lessons illustrated and emphasized by danger.

  After the first mass casualty attack in April, Dizl became downright obsessive about the number and arrangement of sandbags in the Hawk’s Nest. He would pen his paeans to a sack of sand, its simplicity, its earthy good looks, the way it crunches slightly as it supports a resting elbow or a braced foot, and, above all, its yielding, all-forgiving nature. It just lies there, absorbing rain, absorbing shrapnel, and absorbing at least some of the concussive force that would otherwise snap a man’s aorta or batter his brain. You can keep your drones, your nukes, your satellites: Here is a device with so many military applications that the only limiting factor is a lack of human imagination or perhaps an insufficient will to survive.

  When Parker, book in hand, arrived one morning to find that the side walls of the little “room” at the top of the tower had been raised by a foot or so of sandbags, he gave Dizl a resentful look.

  “I know,” said Dizl.

  Parker said it anyway. “If the walls are higher than my head, I can’t watch the hajjis over the top of my book. I’ll have to stand up, like you.”

  It was true. Dizl spent a lot of his time in the Hawk’s Nest standing, pacing, pondering the tactical possibilities of what he saw laid out before him in Ganci. He had left gaps to serve as rifle ports in the sandbag walls, but these were neither large or numerous enough to allow Parker to use them for ordinary surveillance purposes.

  “You can rearrange the bags on your watch,” Dizl conceded. “You can take ’em down altogether if you’re so inclined, but when I come on watch at 1200, I want these walls to look exactly like this; the same number of bags in the same places. You got that?”

  “Roger that, Private Major,” sighed Parker.

  As it happened, it was these carefully arranged sandbags that saved Dizl’s life on April 20.

  As the rainy autumn approached and the 152nd moved operations over to the new site at Redemption, Huladog pointed out that while twenty inches of dry sand will stop a 120mm round, you need twice as much wet sand to get the same effect. Dizl gazed at his first sergeant, his face puckered.

  “Roger that,” he said, and went out to find more sandbags.

  Filling sandbags is a task requiring little in the way of skill or even strength, so it was one of the employment opportunities frequently offered to detainees. Americans often offered payment in the form of cigarettes, with a premium placed on American Marlboros, though a larger quantity of Iraqi “Miamis” could be grudgingly accepted instead. In fact, Beerboy discovered that in the micro economy of Abu Ghraib, a single Marlboro menthol was worth a whole pack of Miamis.

  Cigarettes, incidentally, were the usual motivator bored detainees would offer Thumby as an incentive when they wished for him to create some entertainment, say by flinging himself headlong into a large coil of razor wire.

  Once, when Thumby was preparing to perform just such a stunt, Dizl arrived and threatened, very credibly, to shoot Thumby rather than put everyone through a lot of gory nonsense. The rounds in his shotgun weren’t lead, but rather the small, less-lethal plastic rounds. These seldom caused real injury, but could usually generate a sufficient sting to discourage further mischief. The sound made by the racking of any round, lethal or otherwise, into the chamber of a shotgun tends to focus even a madman’s attention.

  “Come on, Sesma,” said Dizl, holding out his hand. “Come away from the wire. I’ll get you some cigarettes tomorrow.”

  “Marlboros, not Miamis,” said Thumby, and Dizl shook his head and said fine.

  Sesma was Thumby’s real name, the name Dizl had asked for one day.

  “I am Thumby,” said Thumby.

  “No. That is not your name. What is the name your mother gave you?” Dizl insisted, and Thumby got a faraway look in his eye and in a small, almost-sane voice, responded, “Sesma.”

  While cigarettes may have been parceled out with what the detainees considered excessive frugality, there was no scarcity of the basic raw material for making sandbags. And, once the long-overdue portable bomb shelters had been placed in the enclosures, detainees got downright enthusiastic about reinforcing these with stacks and stacks of sacks of sand.

  As long as the sandbags they filled were destined for their own use, there was no problem with having the detainees while away the hours of incarceration performing this task themselves. However, the rules of war forbid an occupying power from setting prisoners to work in ways that benefit the occupiers, so they couldn’t make sandbags for the Americans.

  The Americans had another pool of labor they could potentially tap for sandbag manufacture. Among the varied sorts of people collected together at Abu Ghraib was a group of about twenty Somali men. The typical appearance of Somalis is tall and thin, and thus they were known as Skinnies. They dwelled in their own enclosure and, though their living quarters lay behind wire fences, the Skinnies were not technically considered detainees. They were non-Iraqi nationals who had had the misfortune of being in Iraq as guest workers when the occupation began. They stayed behind fences because, for some reason, no one made plans to send them back to Somalia.

  So they remained, snoozing in the shade of their tents and playing cards, and once they had filled enough sandbags to satisfy their own safety needs, they showed no inclination to fill any more, at least not gratis.

  Perhaps, the command staff suggested, the Somalis could be hired to fill sandbags? They proposed the idea to the Somali leaders.

  “How much?”

  A negotiation followed. Eventually the Skinnies and the Americans made a deal that included a sum of cigarettes, candy, and other desirable commodities, and the Somalis arrived in the courtyard of the Mortar Café to begin work.

  A few days went by, and the piles of sandbags grew. The vulnerable window openings of the Mortar Café began to seem at least a little less like open invitations to mortar rounds.

  Then word came down from above that the Skinnies’ sandbagging operation must cease and desist.

  “Really? Why?”

  “It looks bad.”

  “What looks bad?”

  “We’re Americans. We’ve got history on this.”

  “You mean like from Mogadishu? Black Hawk Down?”

  “No, dummy. I mean slavery.”

  “We’re paying them!”

  “I know that. You know that. But from the outside, it looks like a bunch of whites lying around while the blacks do the work.”

  “But sir, they don’t have to work … they’re getting paid to work …�
�

  “I’m just saying. It looks bad.”

  What if a reporter took a photograph and put it on the Internet?

  They solved the problem by making sure that whenever the Somalis were filling sandbags, one of the Americans (it had to be a white American—a black American wouldn’t do at all) sat there and filled sandbags too.

  SIXTEEN

  KAMAL

  “I couldn’t help but say to [Mr. Gorbachev], just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another planet. [We’d] find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this earth together.”

  —President Ronald Reagan, 1985

  WHEN DIZL WAS, perhaps, five or six years old, he came across an article in an old, yellowed National Geographic about the cave paintings at Lascaux. He was unable to read yet, which probably intensified the visual dimension of the experience of looking at an image in ancient charcoal of human figures jabbing spears into a creature that looked like a big, hairy rhinoceros.

  In that instant, as he sat there on his Gram’s couch, the entire drama flashed before his mind’s eye in full Technicolor, DreamWorks style; it was both the moment when the power of visual art declared itself to him, and the first time he experienced the squirt of adrenaline and the slowing of time… one thousand one… one thousand two …that he would later encounter in battle, all because of a picture of a picture.

  As he got to know the detainees better, Yogi, like Dizl, wondered if some of what he had done—the scorched helmet act, for instance—might have contributed to the problem rather than to the solution.

  It’s a trickier question than it sounds. On the one hand, there were certainly people arriving at Abu Ghraib who really couldn’t understand any incentive to restrain aggression other than a show of superior force by an absolute, implacable, and even slightly insane authority figure. This was what they knew, the form in which power had always been wielded in their world.

  Someone accustomed to being yelled at, beaten, threatened with death or with the slaughter of his family, and who has, in his turn, threatened and done all of the above to others will not be able to engage in a reasoned conversation about shared values and common understandings. Civil dialogue is a learned skill, and the Detainee Inprocessing area at Abu Ghraib prison, circa 2004, was not an optimal learning environment.

  If, instead, the incoming detainees were given a six-foot-three, two-hundred-forty-pound American with crazy blue eyes and a flaming helmet, the ordinary ones might be traumatized, but the scary head-choppers might just be intimidated enough not to get themselves or anyone else killed that day.

  But then there was Kamal.

  Kamal was fifty-four years old, a round-faced, mustached man. He stood just over five feet tall, and on a good day might have weighed about a buck and a half. When the detainees had their showers, they were given razors and some simply shaved off clean, but Kamal always took care to trim his mustache carefully, as if to keep himself who he was.

  Kamal arrived at Ganci on the day of the Flaming Helmet, together with a group of a hundred or so other men, the result of a sweep conducted after allied troops found insurgent weapons in their village.

  Because Kamal was seen as a leader in his community, the Americans presumed that he must have known of the cache and thus, silently at least, supported the insurgents.

  This Kamal would deny in his conversations with Yogi, and Yogi was inclined to believe him. If the insurgents deigned to inform Kamal of their presence in the village, Yogi figured, such communication would certainly take the form of a threat: We are here. There is nothing you can do about it. Give us a hard time and we will kill you and your family. Thousands of civilians who’d been kidnapped, tortured, bombed, shot, and beheaded lent mute endorsement to such claims.

  Unlike Ganci, Camp Redemption, Kamal’s home for the foreseeable future, was deliberately and carefully organized. The layout of the new enclosures recognized and emphasized the distinctions that could be made between the dangerous detainees and those simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Redemption had five basic levels of detention. Detainees who were dangerous, violent, and inclined to fight guards or murder fellow prisoners found themselves sequestered at Level Five. The lowest risk folks lived at Level One.

  Upon arrival, everyone, with some exceptions, was placed in Level Three for thirty days. During those thirty days, guards would monitor the detainees for risk factors and behavior. Depending on results, they’d send new arrivals up to Level Four or down to Level Two.

  All personal possessions were taken away from the detainees when they got to Abu Ghraib, leaving them with a jumpsuit, a bedroll, and a pillow. When a detainee was moved to Level Two, some of those possessions would be returned, and he might have limited visits from family members. If his behavior allowed him to qualify for Level One, he would have more of his own stuff back, and more visits, maybe his infant daughter handed over the wire to be dandled and shown off to the others, maybe a moment’s embrace. Eventually, if he was cleared for discharge, he would be taken to a small tent camp set up on the former site of Ganci to be “out-processed” and sent home on the blue-and-white Nissan diesel Happy Bus. Together with the other men caught up in the sweep, Kamal had had his possessions taken away, including his own clothes. He had been given a canary-yellow jumpsuit to wear, and had the rules and systems of Redemption explained to him by the large American with the smoking helmet and the ice-blue eyes.

  He would see the man with the ice-blue eyes often and have ample opportunity to observe him, to watch his interactions with the other Americans and with the detainees. One day, perhaps two or three weeks after Kamal arrived, he approached Yogi and introduced himself, in English.

  Kamal regarded the Mainer for a moment before he calmly announced, “You do not want to kill me. I know this about you.”

  “Well,” said Yogi, an honest man, “I would if I had to.”

  “Yes, but you do not want to,” said Kamal.

  “No, I don’t,” Yogi admitted, and Kamal nodded.

  They would go on to have wide-ranging conversations over many months, talking through the wire about families and children. The familial conversation was limited to Kamal’s family, not Yogi’s. It was considered seriously unwise to give any personal information to any detainee, however kindly. They talked about what they might have been doing if the war hadn’t happened, what they might like to do when it ended. Even this first encounter would, in retrospect, be viewed through a lens adjusted by the beginnings of their mutual regard. Kamal was more than a foot shorter than Yogi, but Yogi would always remember seeing eye-to-eye with him. In fact, if anything, Kamal was taller. In the Mainer’s memory this Iraqi stood out from the other men as Mount Katahdin stands out above the low hills that surround it.

  Kamal projected the gentle energy of a man who is entirely at peace with himself, and is disposed therefore to regard anyone he encounters with a kind of friendly interest. He had an openness to engagement that was rare among those who have been arrested and imprisoned.

  When Kamal was placed in Level Two and able to receive family visits, Yogi would see his wife arriving punctually every week to visit him. They’d learned, though, in “cultural sensitivity training” that it would not have been appropriate to greet her. Between visits, Kamal sent letters home to her, which Red occasionally dropped into the command post mail bin to be read and evaluated by the Secret Squirrels before joining Iraq’s burgeoning postal system.

  How is it, Yogi wondered, that this man doesn’t loathe me? We have made life so hard for him and for his family.

  He saw Kamal’s wife making her way down the alley toward the cages, her burka flapping gently around her invisible ankles. He watched his friend’s face until Kamal’s radiant smile told him that Kamal had spotted her too.

  However, no matter how much Quantock and his men had improved it, Abu Ghraib remained an unpleasa
nt and dangerous place. There were legitimately threatening people, criminals, and insurgents held there. Including, in fact, some of the same people who had cached weapons in Kamal’s village and threatened his family. Kamal was afraid of such men and, knowing this, Yogi went out of his way to keep a vigilant eye out for mushkallah that might come near him.

  So Yogi was very, very happy when the word came that Kamal had been cleared to go home. He brought the news himself.

  “Ah,” said Kamal.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” said Yogi enthusiastically. “You’ll get to see your wife, your family, your kids, and your friends.”

  Kamal didn’t seem excited. His face was grave. “What about you, my friend? I will not see you?” he asked.

  “No,” Yogi said. “No, you won’t see me. You will go home to your wife, and soon I hope that I will go home to my wife. And I will be glad to know that you are home and well.”

  “I, too, will be glad when you are home,” Kamal said sadly.

  Kamal boarded the Happy Bus. Some of the newly released Iraqis hung out of the windows, laughing and joking as they waved good-bye, but Kamal remained quiet. The Happy Bus, fully loaded, lumbered off with a rumbling entourage of Humvees and armored trucks. Yogi waved until it turned the corner, and smiled because the whole idea of homecoming sounded so sweet.

  A few days later Yogi was supervising the arrival of visitors and spotted the familiar figure of Kamal’s wife approaching Redemption.

  Oh no! Did we put Kamal on the wrong bus? Maybe she was away from home and doesn’t realize he isn’t here?

  Kamal’s wife was scanning the faces of the soldiers around her, clearly looking for someone. When she spotted Yogi, she immediately approached.

  “I am Kamal’s wife,” she said, surprising him. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to Yogi that she, too, could speak English.

  “Yes, I know,” said Yogi. “Listen, you do know that Kamal has been sent home, don’t you? He left three days ago.”