Getting a handle on the situation became Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson’s first priority. He deployed the sniper teams out onto hide sites all over their new area of operations, and Maries’s men soon found excellent spots in Baghdad’s busy high-rise buildings from which to observe the goings on around their patrol base. In downtown, they actually took over the observation point my sniper section had built on the Sheraton Hotel in 2003 after our Marine battalion helped capture the capital. It provided an excellent vantage point of the area, and Maries’s snipers were sent there to help protect the Western press corps still working out of the hotel.
The Ministry of Interior (MOI) building was another one selected by Maries as a prime vantage point. From the fifteenth floor, his sniper teams could watch several key intersections in northeast Baghdad. On the floors below them, American civilians and military personnel worked from shabby offices and cubicles as they propped up the Iraqi bureaucracy that would eventually replace them when the transfer of authority took place later on in the summer. The place hummed with activity at all hours of the day.
The Oregon snipers took over the entire fifteenth floor. Being workout fanatics, they dragged exercise equipment into one of the interior rooms and created a makeshift gym. During scrounging trips to lower floors, they acquired chairs, tables, and even a mini-fridge that made life on their floor a little more comfortable.
During one of those scrounging trips, six-foot-two-inch-tall Sergeant Darren Buchholz discovered there were more than just bureaucrats in the building with them. Buchholz, whom Maries had pulled into the sniper section in 2001, wandered onto a lower floor none of the other snipers had yet visited. To his surprise, he found a Caucasian female secretary sitting at a desk outside a closed office door.
Dressed in nothing but BDU pants and a tan undershirt, Buchholz approached the secretary with an air of brassy authority.
“I wanna talk to your boss.”
The secretary smiled warmly and led him through the office door.
Buchholz stopped in his tracks. He had intended to requisition a few chairs from the woman’s supervisor. Instead, he found himself in an ornate room full of elegant wood furniture that was totally out of place in a building that looked like it had been decorated by the Salvation Army. It felt like he’d walked into a CEO’s office in an otherwise down-at-the-ears strip mall that had been leased out to county services.
The walls were covered with photographs of world leaders and generals posing with the dapper, gray-haired man sitting behind a desk at the other end of the room. He was dressed in an expensive suit. A pistol lay on his desk within easy reach.
Buchholz stared at the man, who quietly asked, “Can I help you?”
The Fortune 500 setting knocked the swagger out of Buchholz. Deferentially, he introduced himself and explained his purpose and mission in the building. The man rose from his chair. For a second, Buchholz thought the man might reach for his pistol, but he simply came around his desk to shake the Oregonian’s hand.
Despite the suit, the man possessed a steely, almost sinister sort of aura that unnerved Buchholz. The man was clearly used to this reaction, and took charge of the encounter. He gave Darren his business card that indicated he was one of the senior-level members of a particular “Other Governmental Agency,” and asked if he could do anything for the Oregon snipers working upstairs.
Buchholz was surprised by his helpfulness, but he wasn’t about to take advantage of it. Politely, he extricated himself as quickly as he could and beat a hasty retreat upstairs, never to return to that floor.
It was the first indication that things were not as they seemed in the Ministry of Interior building.
Maries established a rotation for his five teams that kept them moving between the Sheraton, the MOI, and rolling out with the scouts as they patrolled the city. Usually, two teams would man each observation post for a week to ten days at a time. A fire team from the scout platoon usually provided security. At the MOI, the Oregonians took to sealing themselves onto the fifteenth floor by chaining and locking the stairwell doors.
Every few days, a logistics run would be made and food would be delivered to the men under the guise of normal working traffic into the building. The snipers and their spotters rotated time on their weapons, ensuring that Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson had eyes on his section of Baghdad 24/7.
During those first weeks in Baghdad, Maries and his men saw a lot of things go down from their observation points. Suicide bombings, car bombs, mortar and rocket attacks took place almost every day. It did not take long for Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia, the primary Shia insurgent force in Baghdad, to discover that the Volunteers had moved into their neighborhood. They targeted 2–162’s base every day with sudden mortar and rocket strikes. Periodically, a car or van would cruise by the entrance and blast off a few rounds from an AK. Once in a while, they’d even fire RPG’s at the base.
On the MOI observation point, the snipers made a concerted effort to pinpoint the mortar and launch sites used to hit their base. This was no easy task, and even when they did see a launch, the Coalition forces in the area usually could not react fast enough to catch the mortar crews before they vanished into the byzantine streets of Sadr City, a massive slum that made up most of eastern Baghdad.
Between long stretches on the OPs, the snipers took turns going out on dismounted and vehicular patrols with the rest of the scout platoon. These missions led to the snipers’ first taste of battle.
One night in the late spring of 2004, the scouts had dismounted from their unarmored Humvees in what turned out to be a very hostile neighborhood. Darren Buchholz was with the platoon that night. Usually, he carried a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle and a scoped M14 that he loved for its semiauto capabilities, but on this mission he’d brought along his M4 with a PEQ-14 laser designator for use with his night vision goggles. While in the street, the scouts spotted a light flashing intermittently on a rooftop two hundred yards away. Moments later, somebody sprayed the street with automatic weapons fire. The scouts took cover and searched for targets. After a moment, the scene went quiet.
As the scouts continued with the patrol, the light flashed again from the same rooftop. Seconds later, somebody laced them with machine-gun fire again. This happened several more times until the scouts realized what was going on. There was an insurgent standing on the rooftop, signaling his fellow fighters with a flashlight. Each time he used it, the other insurgents would make a hit-and-run attack on the platoon.
Buchholz found a stable firing position in the street and waited for the man on the rooftop to return. Through his night vision goggles, he spotted the insurgent reappear. Buchholz illuminated him with his PEQ-14. Wind was minimal; the night was warm and still. He pulled the trigger and smoke-checked the insurgent with a single shot from his M4.
After the patrol, the platoon learned that the man on the roof was an Iraqi cop, and he’d been signaling the enemy while atop the local police station. It was one of the first indications the battalion picked up that the Iraqi Police, which was predominantly Shia, had been penetrated by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia.
Others evidence accumulated. That spring, the Volunteers received numerous distress calls from the neighboring police stations claiming to be under attack. The Oregonians would send a platoon out to the rescue, only to be ambushed en route. Other times, they would show up and find everything normal at the station. As they drove back to Patrol Base Volunteer, Mahdi Militiamen would spring an ambush. At times, the police even gave the Mahdi fighters free access to their armories. The insurgents took what they wanted, then vanished into the streets where they used those weapons against our troops.
From the observation point I had established the year before on the Sheraton Hotel, the 2–162 snipers witnessed many unsavory acts by the Iraqi Police. More than once, Buchholz saw them beating people during routine traffic stops. Engle observed them doing similar things as well. The Oregonians grew disgusted by the behavior
of their erstwhile allies, but could do little about it besides report it up to the battalion operations center.
In 2004, most of the police had been recruited since the invasion from the ranks of the Shia Iraqi population. This was part of our de-Ba’athification program designed to sweep away the last vestiges of the despotic Saddam Hussein regime. Before the 2003 invasion, the police were largely composed of Sunni, who served as the oppressive bulwark for the dictatorship.
During the 2003 drive on Baghdad, my sniper section discovered how brutality was a mainstay of Iraqi police operations. We had been scouting toward the capital, several kiloyards in front of the main body of our battalion, when waves of nausea overtook me. I’d come down with some sort of stomach bug the night before, and I’d languished all morning in our Humvee’s right seat, trying not to puke all over our Blue Force Tracker as we searched for the enemy.
We rounded a bend and I ordered our driver to halt. As soon as the Humvee stopped, I bailed out, grabbed an ammo crate, and made a beeline toward the side of the road. In seconds, I was running at both ends, praying that we wouldn’t end up in a firefight. All I had was my 9mm pistol, which I kept holstered on my flak jacket for easy access. Between retches, I drew it and held it at my side, wishing I’d brought my rifle with me when I had slid off the truck. Of course, my gunner thought this was hilarious, and he busted out laughing while manning his weapon in the turret of our Humvee.
Meanwhile, the rest of my men dismounted and set up security. Several of them pushed up the road to clear the police station. They came back a moment later and said, “Hey, Boss, you’ve got to come see this.”
When I was finally able to get off the crate, I followed them into the station. At first glance, it looked like a typical small-town, down-at-the-ears constabulary office. That was until the men showed me the torture chamber. The Iraqi cops would take prisoners back there, strap them onto a metal bed, and go to work on them. A car battery sat nearby with jumper cables attached. The other end of the cables dangled from hooks in the nearby wall. During sessions, these would be clipped to the bedsprings to electrocute the prisoner. The sight of such a barbaric thing filled us with grim resolve. This regime had to be destroyed.
We saw that sort of thing in nearly every police station we cleared. In April 2003, as the Iraqi Police returned to work for the first time, our unit went out on joint patrols with the cops to help put an end to the looting going on. Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, my company executive officer, rolled out on one patrol that encountered a bank robbery in progress. The Iraqi cops caught one of the looters as he tried to escape and began beating hell out of him. On one hand, this was their country and their way of doing business. Stuff like this was going on all over Baghdad. On the other hand, this was not the way we did business, and we were here to bring a new era to the Iraqi people. Clearly, this wasn’t the way to start it off. Plus, a news crew had come along for the ride, and Casey worried that this could end up being a very bad media moment. Finally, he walked up to the Iraqi police commander and said, “If you or your boys beat someone else like that today, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head before you can throw the second kick.”
The cop nodded in understanding. The prisoner was loaded into a vehicle and taken away to the nearest police station, where I have no doubt a metal bed and a car battery awaited him.
Some things you cannot change overnight. When the Volunteers showed up a year later, they discovered the same behavior, different actors. The Iraqi police uniform still represented repression and fear to the people, and beatings were just part of a day’s job on the street. The Shia cops turned out to be just as bad as the Sunni ones. There was a lot of payback to dish out after decades of brutal repression by the Ba’athists.
That spring, as the Oregonians tried to get a handle on the chaos, a small number of American military police injected a dangerous new dynamic into the equation. It started at the end of April when media reports surfaced alleging that American MPs were torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Photos taken by the abusers found their way into the press, and these shocking images made international news for months afterward. America lost the moral high ground in Iraq and received near universal condemnation for the twisted behavior of a few bad American cops.
The media spent weeks publishing scores of horrific photos from Abu Ghraib. The story not only didn’t go away, the scope and depth of the scrutiny increased. The Economist called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. Editorials blasting the administration, the U.S. Army, and the effort in Iraq filled hundreds of newspapers from the Denver Post to France’s Le Monde.
This happened just as the American occupation of Iraq was about to enter a delicate new phase. Since the end of the initial invasion in the spring of 2003, Iraq had been governed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, a civilian agency headed by Paul Bremer, a career diplomat. This was a temporary arrangement, and Bremer planned to hand power back to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, 2004.
For the men and women patrolling the streets, Abu Ghraib stirred up massive anti-American sentiment. The ranks of the various insurgent groups swelled with indignant and hate-filled volunteers, some of whom came from all over the Muslim world to join the battle.
In the weeks that followed, the violence in Iraq intensified. In retaliation for Abu Ghraib, al-Qaida kidnapped, tortured, and beheaded American civilian contractor Nicholas Berg. His execution was videotaped by his murderers and posted on the Internet.
The Oregon snipers saw an uptick in attacks from their vantage points at the hotel and the MOI. While out on patrols with the scout platoon, they also detected a shift in the mood of the locals. Everyone in an American uniform was paying the price for what had happened at Abu Ghraib.
On June 4, 2004, the battalion lost two enlisted men and a promising platoon leader during a firefight on the edge of Sadr City. The Oregonians had rushed to the rescue of a New Jersey MP unit that had been hit by rockets, roadside bombs, and machine-gun fire. A secondary bomb detonated, killing five Americans altogether. The ambush was carried out by a cell of Mahdi Militiamen and was witnessed by several Iraqi reporters who were working for Western news agencies, including the Associated Press. Within minutes of the attack, film and photos of the dead and dying Americans were published on the Internet. Various news outlets picked them up and used them for months after. One of the reporters embedded with the enemy that day, Karim Kadim, later received an American Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism for his work during the uprising.
Aside from the firefight downtown, the snipers had yet to do anything they felt to be substantive. Maries and the rest of his section seethed at what was going on. A week after the June 4 attack, the scout platoon captured several members of the Mahdi Militia cell that carried out that operation, but the snipers were minimally involved in that coup. It seemed that everyone else in the battalion was contributing while they were sitting on their hands in the two observation points. Their frustration level grew daily.
On June 17, the snipers rotated assignments again. Kevin Maries and Keith Engle took the MOI observation point along with Darren Buchholz and one other team. Darren had lost his spotter a few weeks before and had not picked up a new one yet, so he had been working with Maries and Engle. This time, the snipers brought with them two “Fisters”—forward artillery observer—whom they hoped would help them take out the mortar and rocket teams operating out of eastern Baghdad. They would be up there for almost two weeks this time, and the snipers settled in as best they could. They shucked off their heavy body armor, left their helmets and BDU tops with the rest of their gear to stay as comfortable as possible, then took turns glassing the neighborhood. Each team had an M24, a semiautomatic Barrett .50 cal, several M4s, and Buchholz’s venerable scoped M14.
One night, while Buchholz was on watch, two gunshots rang out. They seemed to have come from the nearby Iraqi Police Academy. Buchholz began glassing it. A few moments passed. Suddenly, a door to one
of the academy buildings flew open and a hunched-over Iraqi cop appeared. He dragged a limp body across a courtyard and into another building. A second cop pulling another limp figure followed not long afterward.
Buchholz called Maries and Engle. The snipers conferred. This smelled like an execution. Maries radioed the battalion operations center and reported the incident. The Volunteers were later told that prisoners at the academy had rioted, leading to a crackdown by the Iraqi Police that resulted in several injuries, but no deaths. The Oregon snipers didn’t buy it, but they hadn’t seen enough to prove the story was a cover for something more sinister. They couldn’t even be sure that the bodies dragged from the building were dead or just unconscious. Maries told his men to keep a close eye on the academy and watch for anything further that was suspicious.
A few days later, the Iraqi Police conducted a raid in Al Betawain, a Sunni Baghdad neighborhood that included a small population of African immigrants. They rounded up dozens of men, about half of whom were Sudanese. Some of them lacked passports and work papers. The police arrested them on the spot. Others displayed their documentation, which the Iraqi cops confiscated and demanded a bribe for their return. The police detained anyone who couldn’t pay the bribe. They also arrested a few who did shell out the money. The detainees, which included elderly men and young boys, were bound and blindfolded and packed into waiting buses.
That afternoon, Keith Engle was on watch. He had his own .50 caliber Barrett beside him, Maries’s M24 bolt-action rifle, their spotting scope, and a pair of M22 binoculars. Instead of using his scopes, he happened to have the binos in hand when a bus drove up alongside the Police Academy’s main wall and lurched to a halt. A bunch of police officers appeared, some of whom were armed with sticks and rubber hoses. They began pulling men off the bus and lining them up single file.
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