Do you wish the Geneva Conventions weren’t quite so particular about photographing detained persons, so that you could have a picture of Young Elvis munching crackers, instead of that memory of his small brown hand, waving at you as he ran by the tower, or the boy’s voice as he called, “You are a good man, Shahein!”Even as your eyes fixed themselves on the man with binoculars on the overpass and time began its sickening crawl?
“You are a good man, Shahein.”
This is what Dizl has to go by.
In his more somber moments, he fears most of the Iraqis he knew at Abu Ghraib are now dead: the ones whose mother-given names he knew, the ones he and his comrades named for themselves even as they were named in return, and the ones known to him only by theirID numbers.
He hopes the kids are OK, at least. Tat-twah and Bulbul, all the Little Rascals and Shriek too. Dizl hangs on to the hope that they are well, happy, and doing good things with their lives, and that whether Kamal was a saint—as Yogi believes—or a sinner, Kamal’s daughter should by now be prom queen and president of her graduating class. One can hope, anyway.
War movies almost always seem to end with the triumphant return of the troops. As if victory, or making it home safe, is the only thing a warrior needs to return to his old self. Even after the credits and the welcome home parties drift into fond memory, the movie still plays for Dizl, whether he wants it to or not. It is indeed his very humanism that keeps his dreams haunted.
Dizl has tears in his eyes when he says he’s named some of his egg-laying hens after Iraqi detainees. “Because I miss them.”
The American people sit there, themselves teetering on the edge of a well full of poverty, depression, or any of the other monsters loosed from Pandora’s Box, laughing at—or dismissing—the others around them falling in. They don’t realize there are those around and among them being pulled into that well by weights they hung around their own necks on the behalf of the American people.
Every second Dizl is home is the first second of the rest of his life as he bears his moral weight. The moment-by-moment struggle to stay loving despite the burden of mental injury and the horrific memories. The fight for survival started when the first mortar exploded, showering Dizl with dirt and debris from a country not his own, and has not ended. Perhaps it never will.
One thousand one …
12 Ballen, Terrorists in Love,40.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FIRST AND FOREMOST, I’d like to thank Dizl, Hula, and all the men of the 152nd. Words will never be able to capture the entirety of your heroism and service to this country. It is an honor to play my part in sharing this piece of your story. You showed the world who the best of America—and Maine—are. You make me proud to call this great state home. I’d also like to thank my mother. This project reminded me a lot of the homeschool years, the collaboration on papers and short stories that set the mold for the writer I am today. Thank you for that gift and so many others. I love you. I’d also like to tip my hat to my editor, Maxim, for being so patient with me and to Shaun, my agent, for his efforts in finding the right publisher.
An overview of the Abu Ghraib prison the Mainers inherited.
The whole place was covered in trash and human feces. The soldiers were surrounded by the worst elements of human existence: pain, fear, hate, and garbage, endless garbage.
Detainees conduct their morning prayers.
Guard towers were cobbled together out of shipping containers and ingenuity.
Much of Ganci was located on top of an old landfill. Detainees could dig down through the dirt floors of their tents and find all manner of garbage that could be used to make weapons and even a radio.
One of many impact craters from insurgent indirect fire (a rocket or mortar).
This empty warehouse space would serve as the combat support hospital during the mass casualty events.
An old cell door in the courtyard became known as the Door to Hell. “If anywhere had the entrance to hell,” Kelly Thorndike said, “it was Abu Ghraib.”
Nearly every wall was decorated with smatterings of bullet and shrapnel craters, testament to what the Mainers and detainees alike endured.
Abu Ghraib was also home to stray cats. The Mainers adopted one of these and named it Hajji-Pussy. After Dizl saw that some of the KBR truckers had eaten a different cat, they made Hajji-Pussy a little collar that said “Please don’t eat.”
The Mainers hunted the plethora of rats that cohabited Abu Ghraib, competing to get the largest.
The yellow dots are confirmed points of impact, or where indirect fire like mortars and rockets landed and exploded. The purple dots are confirmed points of origin, or where the round was fired from. In the time it took the soldiers to figure out where the round had orginated from, the insurgents would have blended back into the civilian population.
Supply trucks that the 152nd brought with them to Iraq didn’t have sufficient armor. So, the Mainers “up-armored” their vehicles with steel plates acquired from Abu Ghraib. These “homemade” armored vehicles were not unique to Abu Ghraib. Units all over Iraq were ill equipped with unarmored or too lightly armored vehicles.
KBR fuel trucks burn after getting hit by an insurgent ambush. Resupplying Abu Ghraib became more and more difficult as the insurgency focused on the prison camp as the photos of the abuses there circulated the world stage.
A CH-47 Chinook helicopter lands carrying Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for his visit to Abu Ghraib.
Kelly “Dizl” Thorndike passes time during a moment of relative calm. Relaxation was almost impossible for the soldiers of the 152nd as mortars and rockets were nearly everyday occurrences.
Dizl and other soldiers from the 152nd at Fort Dix in New Jersey before they stepped off to the Middle East. Temperatures were in the single digits and they had no radios for the training event. Turns out, they wouldn’t have them for their deployment either.
Dizl and some of the other Lost Boys snap a photo in Kuwait just before stepping off to head to Iraq, where they would spend the next year at Abu Graib prison.
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 22