Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  Keith observed this with great interest. He had heard nothing of the Al Betawain raid, and this was the first time any of the Oregon snipers had seen prisoners delivered to the academy.

  The Iraqi police shoved and kicked their detainees until they were lined up to their satisfaction. Engle counted thirty of them. Toward the front of the line, two cops grabbed a prisoner, who tried to resist. Bad move. The cops dragged him out of the line and threw him into the dirt. Another Iraqi policeman rushed over to help. Together, the three began whipping the detainee with rubber hoses.

  Engle’s jaw dropped. He’d seen police beatings before, but the sheer viciousness of this one left him spellbound in horror. He pulled his eyes from the binos and called to one of the forward observers, “Go get Sergeant Maries. He needs to see this.”

  Maries, who had been on his sleep cycle, appeared next to Engle a few minutes later and asked, “What’ve you got, Keith?”

  He pointed down to the bus. Maries got behind his spotter scope and watched the tail end of the beating. It had lasted five minutes. The detainee had been flayed from head to foot by the rubber hoses and was flopping around in the dirt, wracked with pain. At length, the police pulled him to his feet and pushed him back into the line.

  After that, nobody else offered any resistance.

  About a dozen police now patrolled the line of detainees. After a few minutes, the entire group was led into a walled compound next to the Iraqi Police Academy, where they disappeared into a rectangular-shaped building.

  More buses arrived. Each one parked in the dead space between the compound and the academy. The drill was always the same: the police would herd the detainees off the bus, line them up, and lead them into the rectangular building. By the end of the day, Engle counted ninety-three detainees offloaded from three buses.

  This compound, which had been virtually unused prior to this development, began to bustle with activity. More cops showed up until eighteen stood guard around the rectangular building. Others periodically went inside, retrieved a prisoner, then took him to a smaller building on the other side of the compound.

  The next morning, Maries, Engle, and Buchholz watched as a group of cops congregated on a small concrete pad in front of the rectangular building. A wooden overhang shielded them from the summer sun as they stood around, talking animatedly to each other. Some of them held rubber hoses and aluminum bars that the snipers recognized as spreaders for U.S. Army–issue cots.

  They smoked and joked for a while, then two cops tied handkerchiefs behind their necks, covered their mouth and noses with them, and approached the main entrance to the building, hefting a rubber hose and a bar. They flung the door open and plunged inside. Some of their brethren gravitated toward the windows, which the snipers could not see through.

  Minutes passed. The two cops emerged, smiling and laughing. The others clustered around them as they began talking. Through their scopes, the Oregonians saw the two cops use their hoses and the cot spreader to pantomime beating somebody. They hammered at their invisible subject, then pretended to be their victims. They cringed and cowered. The other Iraqi cops burst out laughing. Two more of them put on handkerchiefs and went into the building. They came back with fresh tales to tell the others.

  Maries reported this to the battalion operation center, but since the Volunteers had already become jaded about the behavior of the local police, the battalion took no action. To those who weren’t witness to the beating beside the bus, this seemed like normal Baghdad cop behavior—thuggish and wrong, but not the U.S. Army’s problem.

  The refusal to do anything rankled Maries. He had seen enough of how the cops operated to know that what was going on in this little compound beside the academy represented a level of violence not seen on the street. Though he had no conclusive proof, it appeared that the police were systematically torturing their detainees.

  And it continued throughout the day. Pairs of cops would enter the building with blunt weapons, emerge and be replaced by two more. Each time they came out, they would recount to the other officers waiting outside what just happened.

  While the snipers kept watch over the compound, forces far above their pay grade clicked into motion. Paul Bremer disbanded the Coalition Provisional Authority two days ahead of schedule and turned over control to the interim Iraqi government. After a year of occupation, Iraq was once again a sovereign nation, which meant that the U.S. military had to defer to the new government in the course of its operations.

  Bremer boarded a flight home on the morning of June 28, 2004, just as Keith Engle took a shift behind his Barrett. For the past few days, the activity in the compound had settled down to a grim routine. The eighteen guards on hand took turns going inside the building carrying blunt objects or hoses. They never took food or water inside, and the snipers hadn’t seen the prisoners since the first day they’d been brought in. As a result, they had no way to determine their condition, or whether they were actually being harmed.

  The police broke the routine later that morning when two of them dragged a prisoner out of the building and dumped him in the middle of the compound’s courtyard. A gaggle of cops piled on him, hoses and spreader bars flailing. They kicked, punched, and beat him as he rolled in the dirt, hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. Finally, the police lifted him off the ground and flung him, headfirst, against the side of a white pickup truck. The detainee collapsed in a heap, knocked cold from the impact.

  Maries joined Engle in time to watch the beating. Keith fumed with anger and wanted to start shooting cops to put an end to the mistreatment. Kevin Maries calmed him down, “Look, we’re going to sit tight, observe, and report.” Besides smoke-checking guys who need it, this is the primary mission snipers have. Engle, who had not yet been with the section for a full year—and had not gone to sniper school yet either—forced himself to be more patient. He stowed his emotions, though inside he still seethed. Later he recalled, “I was indignant. It was like watching your neighbor abuse his dog and being unable to do anything about it.” He felt sick.

  As the cops hauled the unconscious man back inside the building, Maries reported the incident over the radio to the battalion operations center. This time, the level of violence the snipers witnessed, combined with the other reports, alarmed Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Had the incident happened the day before, he would have gone to investigate. But that morning, Bremer was somewhere in the air en route home and that left the Iraqis in charge. Hendrickson no longer had the authority to burst into an Iraqi Police facility and demand to know what was going on. It was their sovereign business now, no matter how ugly.

  The next morning, June 29, 2004, Maries was on watch behind the scope when a group of guards gathered at the concrete pad. All at once, they poured into the rectangular building, armed with 2x4 wooden boards, more hoses, and cot spreaders. A few cops remained outside and took station at the window to watch whatever was going on inside. About a half hour passed with no further activity, then a group of Iraqi civilians approached the compound from a driveway that led to the Ministry of Interior’s main entrance. The snipers concluded that these new arrivals had come from the very building they were observing from.

  The guards rushed to open a gate, and the civilians walked into the compound with an air of authority. Leading the group was a paunchy and balding middle-aged Iraqi who sported a Saddam Hussein mustache and spectacles. He wore a pale yellow button-down shirt, green slacks, and carried a holstered pistol on his right hip. He held a sheaf of papers in one hand.

  Maries called the rest of his team. Buchholz and Engle showed up and got behind their scopes. Maries had the M24. Buchholz and Engle manned the Barretts. All three fixed their eyes to their optics, dreading what they might see next.

  Right away, they noticed how the Iraqi cops deferred to the man in the yellow shirt. Some took it to the extreme and acted obsequious. Upon Yellow Shirt’s command, several of the uniformed officers scurried off to the rectangular building
to fetch a table and some chairs. They carried them outside and placed them in the shade of a tree in the courtyard. Another cop placed a ream of blank paper on the right side of the desk. The man in the yellow shirt passed his paperwork to a minion, who sorted it and created two haphazard stacks on the desk. Somebody else put a black ballpoint pen beside one stack.

  Maries, Engle, and Buchholz realized something very bad was brewing. They grabbed their digital cameras so they could document whatever would go down next. By now, there was a mix of uniformed cops and men dressed in civilian clothes hanging around Yellow Shirt. Who the plainclothed guys were kept the snipers guessing, but the uniforms seemed almost afraid of them.

  Yellow Shirt gave another order. The uniforms armed themselves and went into the rectangular building. A few minutes later, they whipped, beat, and pushed about thirty prisoners out into the courtyard. Maries noted the detainees seemed weak and unsteady on their feet. They stumbled across the courtyard until the police shoved them to the ground near a Toyota pickup truck. Without shade, the mid-morning sun beat down on them. Already the temperature was over a hundred degrees. This new development had cowed the prisoners, who crossed their legs and kept their heads bowed. Some trembled with fear.

  The cops went back in and pulled another twenty more men out. Arrayed in four loose rows, some of the detainees couldn’t even stay upright. They slumped to the dirt, bound and blindfolded.

  The man in the yellow shirt stood by the desk and waited. A few other Iraqi Police, dressed in dark gray slacks and sky blue uniform shirts, hovered nearby. Several other men, all in civilian clothes, wandered around near the table, talking amongst themselves.

  Then some cops strutted over to the rows of detainees, selected one man seemingly at random, and dragged him over to the table, where the man in the yellow shirt tried to get him to sign some kind of document. To Maries, it looked like they were trying to coerce him into signing a confession.

  The man refused. An Iraqi policeman and a civilian Iraqi, both holding rubber hoses, threw him to the ground. He landed on his bound hands and lay on his back, still blindfolded. A cop carrying an AK-47 in his right hand stood nearby, watching casually with his left hand stuffed in a pants pocket.

  An order was given. The two men wielding hoses slammed their weapons down on the prisoner. They tore his shirt open so the rubber would do more damage to his skin. Another Iraqi police officer appeared with a cot spreader. He began to beat his legs. The man in the yellow shirt peered down at the prisoner, then stepped forward until he was by his side. He spoke to him, but apparently did not get the answer he wanted. The beating continued. Another hose-carrying policeman stepped up to take his turn. Looking down at the prisoner, he rolled his sleeves above his elbows and laid into the man, who was still lying on back. Moments later, yet another policeman boot-stomped the prisoner’s head. The man in the yellow shirt reached for his pistol. His fingers touched its butt, but he didn’t draw it from the holster. The police continued the beating.

  Engle had seen enough. Behind his Barrett, he begged Maries to let him engage. Buchholz was at the same point. All three snipers had their crosshairs trained on Yellow Shirt and two of the most violent police officers. One word, and their fingers would have slipped into their trigger guards, and three men would die.

  The man in the yellow shirt did nothing for a few moments, choosing to regard the action while still next to the writhing man. Then he thrust his hands out, as if to halt it. He began making hand gestures that appeared to indicate he was coaching them on their technique. The cops paid close attention to the lesson. Meanwhile, another detainee, this one in dark pants and a dark shirt, was culled from the ranks and taken over to the table. They forced him to sit and listen, blindfolded, as the police continued working over the first man.

  It dawned on Buchholz right then what was going on. He said later, “We were watching a torture-training exercise. With live victims.”

  Engle could barely contain his rage. He had Yellow Shirt in his scope. Three hundred yards, an easy shot. “Do you want me to take him out?” he asked Maries.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Kevin.”

  “No.”

  The beating finally ended, and the police pulled the prisoner over to the desk. The man in the yellow shirt stood next to him, as did several police officers and a civilian-dressed Iraqi. Not long after, he was pushed back to the main group of detainees.

  Then it was the dark-clothed prisoner’s turn.

  This went on for about half an hour. Maries radioed reports to the battalion operations center, giving a running commentary at times of the beatings.

  A few prisoners signed the paperwork, and they were not beaten. Most did not, and the police unleashed an escalating level of violence. They struck one detainee in the head repeatedly with a spreader bar. Engle captured one of the blows with his camera. The cop was in mid-swing and the bar glowed silver with the reflection of the morning sun.

  The police seemed to grow frustrated. When the next prisoner was dragged to the table, the beating commenced before Maries even saw the man’s mouth move. He never had a chance to sign the confession. The police simply lit into him. The man in the yellow shirt reached for his pistol again as two cops knocked the detainee down and slid a spreader bar under his legs in order to raise his feet off the ground. A third police officer began whipping the soles of the man’s feet with a black hose.

  That was enough for Maries. Though outwardly calm, he’d watched the situation grow ever more violent with growing disgust and moral outrage. The battalion staff had taken his reports, but had offered no guidance or response. Now, as the man in the yellow shirt played his fingers across the butt of his pistol again, Maries decided it was time to end this.

  He keyed his radio, “Okay, you’ve been taking my reports all morning. Nothing’s been done. If they continue to escalate, I’m going to shoot somebody.”

  The NCO on the horn at the ops center replied, “That is not within the Rules of Engagement.”

  Maries bristled at that. “I know what the ROEs are,” he barked, “and if they escalate, I will engage with deadly force.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, who was at one of the downtown hotels, heard this. He cut into the conversation, “Negative. You will not engage. I’m on my way.”

  It was a direct order from his commanding officer. Maries seethed, but acknowledged it.

  Maries checked the time. It was about 1130. The beatings had been going on since 0900. He knew it would take Hendrickson up to an hour to get to the compound from the hotels. In the meantime, all he could do was watch and wait.

  Right about then, the police officers returned to the cluster of detainees. They reached down and yanked a teenaged boy to his feet. Blindfolded and bound like the rest of the prisoners, the boy quailed in his captor’s grip. He looked perhaps fourteen years old.

  Eye in his scope, Maries saw this and recoiled. He was a father of two young children, and the thought of what lay in store for the boy made his stomach churn. For just a moment, he lost his legendary composure.

  “Oh Jesus Christ … what are they going to do to that kid?”

  The cops led the teenager over to the table, where the man in the yellow shirt was waiting.

  Maries fingered his trigger and whispered, “Not the kid. Not the kid.”

  Things were about to get really ugly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Where Shades of Gray Are Found

  Every sniper has faced a moral choice while looking through his scope. When your career involves watching people who don’t know they are being watched, you’re bound to see sordid and questionable things. You’ll see the worst of human nature; you may see the best as well. Life behind the scope is not one of moral black and whites, not when so much of the world exists in shades of gray. In those moments, our spiritual constitution is tested. In our profession, we have to make choices, we have to take that leap into the chaos of moral ambiguity. When we do, some
of us never recover from the hardest decisions we’ve had to make.

  Head down and stooped like an old man, the boy looked like he had already been worked over and now sensed he was in for more. His narrow, lime green blindfold was wrapped tight against his face, and the Iraqi police had tied his wrists with yellow cord. The cops parked him in front of the table and untied his hands. The boy’s shoulders sagged; his arms fell to his side. One of the uniforms pointed to the paperwork as he said something to the boy, which seemed a pointless gesture since the boy obviously could not see anything.

  The boy shook his head.

  The Iraqi cop pointed to the paperwork again. The boy shook his head one more time. The police were not pleased.

  Eye glued to his scope, Maries watched this with a sick sense of helplessness. He had been ordered not to engage and kill our erstwhile allies. The consequences of an American sniper killing a uniformed Iraqi police officer could have severely damaged the United States’ relationship with the freshly established interim Iraqi government. Unlike the street fight several weeks before, these cops had not made any overt hostile act against U.S. troops. There would be hell to pay if they started dropping these guys. It would mean inquiries, maybe even a court-martial and jail time. At the very least, their careers would be over.

  Kevin understood all of that. But how could he allow these thugs to beat a boy with an aluminum bar? He began to run through his options. There weren’t any.

  Then, to his surprise, the cops gave him an out. They gave up on the boy without inflicting any punishment on him. They tied his hands again and returned him to the main group of prisoners. The police pushed him down next to an older man whose left hand hung at an odd angle. Maries studied the two and concluded the older man was the boy’s father. The father’s wrist looked broken.

  Right then, a green Humvee rumbled through the compound’s main entrance. Maries and Keith Engle breathed a sigh of relief as they watched the rest of their scout platoon reach the scene. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson dismounted from the lead truck, his face set with an expression of pure anger as he sized up the situation.