Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  “Volunteer Six,” Tanguy called to Hendrickson, “The Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave. Now. There is no discussion here.”

  The cop from Corvallis refused to give up, “Have you talked to First Cav?” The 1st Cavalry Division was the 39th Brigade’s higher command. Hendrickson was trying to go above Brigadier General Chastain’s head, a very risky move.

  Major Tanguy had heard enough from the 39th Brigade to sense that the Volunteers were skating on thin ice. If Hendrickson pushed this, Tanguy feared he would be relieved on the spot.

  “Six, Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave now,” Tanguy reiterated.

  Hendrickson frowned in abject disgust and looked at Boyce. Options?

  An idea came to Boyce, “Sir, Brigadier General Jones’s office is in the MOI main building. We can walk over there and we can grab somebody from his office to come see this. Or, if he’s there, we can get him to come see this for himself.” Jones was the 1st Cav’s assistant division commander.

  “Okay, let’s do it.”

  Boyce, Hendrickson, and a couple of the scouts began walking toward the compound’s main gate. They had three hundred yards to cover. They walked in silence.

  They had only taken a few steps when Major Tanguy radioed, “Six, we need confirmation that you are leaving.”

  Hendrickson tried to buy time, “I’m having trouble hearing you.”

  Tanguy wasn’t buying it. The 39th Brigade was breathing down his neck. It felt to him like they were not going to wait much longer to fire his battalion commander. He needed to impart the sense of urgency he was feeling.

  “Six, we need confirmation you are leaving,” he repeated.

  “You’re breaking up,” Hendrickson said again.

  Ross Boyce could hear the tension rising over the radio. The escalation made him fear his commander was about to be relieved, too.

  Hendrickson stopped walking. He’d grown up the son of a U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabre Jet pilot who had fought in the Korean War. He’d played football in high school and at Cabrillo Junior College in Santa Cruz, California. His life had been founded and built around discipline, attention to detail, and following orders. He had never disobeyed a direct order.

  He wanted to disobey this one. Badly. If he did, and he was fired, Major Tanguy would take over the battalion and the Volunteers would be withdrawn anyway. What purpose would it serve to push the 39th into firing him?

  He turned to Ross Boyce and spoke over the radio, “Okay, 2–162, we’re leaving. Now.”

  Sheer disgust greeted the order among the scouts. Captain Southall initially refused to leave. So did some of the scouts. Kyle Trimble tried to get the prisoners in need of urgent medical care evacuated with the platoon, but that request was denied. “At least let us finish what we’re doing here,” he pleaded.

  No luck. Trimble was able to finish wrapping the gangrenous arm in a new bandage, grab his combat lifesaver gag, and get to the Humvees as the rest of the platoon mounted up. Mike Giordano was forced to stop working on the desperately dehydrated man and join the rest of the platoon as well.

  The Iraqi Police looked triumphant. Several started for their AKs and torture implements. Fearing reprisal and a possible shoot-out, the scouts lowered their weapons and warned the Iraqi cops away from their guns.

  When the last Humvee passed through the main entrance, the Iraqi cops knew they were in the clear. Captain Southall watched them pick up their weapons and head for the prisoners. With hope of salvation gone, the Oregon snipers saw terror bloom in the eyes of these helpless men.

  Maries pulled his eye from his spotter scope and spoke to his snipers. Back in Oregon, he had handpicked each one of them. He was their leader, their mentor. Most had learned more about the sniper’s craft from Maries than they had at the schoolhouse in Little Rock.

  What had just happened left them reeling. The high ground was gone, stolen from them by their own chain of command. The ugly, real world grayness had swallowed them whole.

  Yet, this thing wasn’t over. The snipers were Hendrickson’s trump, and Maries knew it. The 39th Brigade hadn’t said anything about pulling out of the MOI position. For now, he and his men weren’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Lifesavers

  All afternoon, the snipers studied every move the Iraqi cops made. A small American military police unit showed up. They talked with their Iraqi counterparts for a short time, then left. As soon as the last American cleared the compound, the cops went right back to beating and torturing the detainees.

  Keith Engle seethed at the sight. He wanted to engage. So did Darren Buchholz, who lay beside Maries with his Barrett .50 cal. Maries controlled his own helpless rage by going stone cold. They documented everything and continued to report each development to the battalion operations center.

  The American MP unit returned that afternoon. With their return, the beatings ceased. Not long after, a motorcade of black armored SUVs rolled into the compound and parked near the overhang. They were armored and had smoke-black tinted windows. Maries, Engle, and Buchholz all began taking photographs as men dismounted. Engle snapped his photos through a pair of binoculars. Maries worked with his spotting scope. So did Buchholz.

  The Oregon snipers recoiled when they saw who they’d just caught on camera. The men who dismounted were all Caucasian Westerners. They had black bulletproof vests and carried folding stock variants of the AK-47. All of them were dressed in civilian clothes. They moved swiftly and with professional acumen to set up security around their rigs. A moment later, another white male, this one dressed in a slate gray business suit, appeared from one of the SUVs.

  “Who the hell is that fucking guy?” Engle asked in shock.

  He had medium-length gray hair that almost looked like a pompadour from three hundred yards away. He walked with a stiffness that seemed to Maries to indicate he was not an American.

  Maries studied these new arrivals as they headed to meet with Yellow Shirt. The guys with the AK-47s were clearly the gray-haired man’s personal security detail. Since reaching Baghdad in April, the snipers had seen all sorts of contract security types, especially down at the hotels. All of the American companies issued their people M4 rifles and .45 caliber pistols. The only mercenaries he’d encountered carrying Soviet bloc weaponry worked for a British company called Parson Limited.

  Because of this and the more formal way he walked, Maries began to think of Gray Hair as a Brit.

  Whoever he was, the Iraqis treated him with deference. He met them at the overhang in front of the rectangular building. The cops clustered around him. In the far back of the circle stood a tall Caucasian-looking male in a black shirt. Nobody had any idea who he was.

  The MP’s moved to the gray-haired man’s right and listened to him as he addressed the Iraqi Police. Heads nodded. A few of the Iraqis spoke. The meeting lasted a half hour, then the gray-haired man walked out of the compound and headed for the Ministry of Interior’s main building. Maries leapt to his feet and told his men to stay put and keep their eyes on the compound. He set off to find the gray-haired man.

  He dashed downstairs as quickly as he could, but by the time he got to the lobby, the man was nowhere in sight. He searched several floors and then gave up.

  Maries returned to the hide site just in time to see a gaggle of civilian Iraqi officials show up at the compound. The man in the yellow shirt talked with them for several minutes, then turned and gave some orders to his minions. A few minutes later, the cops began lining all the detainees up in the courtyard again. The snipers counted ninety-three altogether.

  The Iraqi cops brought the prisoners cigarettes, food, and water. Those who could ate. Others were too far gone to do so. They smoked in silence as the snipers covertly examined them through their scopes. Thirty-five of the ninety-three were Sudanese. They also noticed a Caucasian detainee in the mix.

  The Iraqi officials left just before 1800. The MPs were long gone by that point, and the sni
pers figured their departure would herald a new round of beatings.

  Not this time. The cops appeared to be in enforced merciful mode after the arrival of so much brass. Soon, they let the prisoners bathe in the courtyard. Just before sunset, they selected a dozen men, escorted them to the main gate and let them go. The prisoners hobbled out into the street in front of the Ministry of Interior and disappeared into Baghdad traffic.

  The next day, the police released another batch of prisoners. With great satisfaction, the snipers saw the fourteen-year-old boy and his broken-wristed father in the mix. They were lucky to escape. Eventually, Maries and his men saw the police release about sixty of their prisoners. What happened to the last thirty-three remains a mystery.

  While the snipers kept watch over the torture compound, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson tried to find out who gave the order to withdraw from the compound. He could not get a straight answer. Instead, the 39th Brigade ordered the Volunteers to remain silent about the incident. It was not to be discussed anywhere.

  Kept in the dark and told to stay quiet about what they had seen did not sit well with the Oregonians. There’d already been friction between the Arkansans and the Volunteers, and this caused even more. Here, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, was a story of a group of citizen-soldiers who had done the right thing. They had displayed compassion, humanity, and mercy at a time when the world’s media was flaying the United States for the abuses caught on camera at Abu Ghraib.

  After 2–162 pulled out, the torture at the compound was eventually stopped. Between the arrival of the MPs, Gray Hair, and the Iraqi officials, two-thirds of the prisoners survived their treatment. Had Maries’s sniper section not escalated the situation and forced Hendrickson to go check it out, many of those ninety-three men surely would have vanished. This would have been the perfect counter to Abu Ghraib had the chain of command seized the public relations opportunity and released the news through U.S. Army channels. The gag order ensured that wouldn’t happen.

  Throughout history, America’s citizen-soldiers have proved to be independent souls and often resistant to Army regulations and discipline. In this case, the moral outrage the Volunteers felt trumped the 39th Brigade’s gag order. They wanted answers, and they wanted the story of what had happened to those prisoners known.

  Several of the Volunteers, including Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson, detailed the events of June 29, 2004, to Oregonian reporter Mike Francis. Mike embedded with the Volunteers several times during the deployment and proved to be a stalwart friend of the Oregon soldiers. They trusted him. The photographs the snipers shot found their way into his hands, and he gathered numerous eyewitness accounts through the summer of 2004.

  The men believed they were violating an unjust order, but were also well aware that by doing so, they put their own careers at risk. That didn’t matter. Hendrickson’s mantra—do the right thing—had permeated down to the youngest privates. The hard right is never easy, but they were prepared to suffer the consequences. To them, the country needed to know what had happened.

  The story broke with a front-page feature in the Oregonian. Media outlets all over the world picked up on it. Instead of focusing on the selfless actions of the Volunteers, the majority of the ink spilled over the incident lambasted the order to withdraw from the compound. Numerous attempts were made to find out exactly who that order came from. While there was suspicion that it came from above division level, nothing was ever confirmed.

  After Francis ran his story, an Air Force major general held a press conference in the Pentagon, where he announced that none of the Oregonians would be punished for violating the gag order. The truth was, any JAG officer would have known that it was an illegal order in the first place. Hendrickson and his men had every right to disobey it.

  During the research for the story, Mike Francis discovered that the interim Iraqi government felt enough outrage over the Volunteers’ arrival in the compound that one of its first official acts was to lodge a protest with the U.S. ambassador. The diplomats were walking on eggshells in hopes of building a solid relationship with the new Iraqi government. Instead, the incident had created sharp tension between the new Iraqi government and the U.S. authorities, which was probably one of the reasons the gag order was issued. Nobody wanted to make a bad situation worse.

  On July 4, 2004, the Boston Globe ran a story about the incident based on an interview with a Coalition Provisional Authority official named Steve Casteel. Until June 28, Casteel had been in charge of the Ministry of Interior. When the changeover took place, he became a senior American adviser to the MOI and was primarily responsible for building and structuring Iraq’s law enforcement capabilities. He helped organize a number of Iraqi police units, including the special commando battalions that were later accused by international organizations of many heinous crimes.

  In the article, Casteel described the incident on the twenty-ninth as a turf war between some American MPs and the Iraqis at the MOI, a battle that went all the way to the prime minister’s office. His version of events categorically denied the Iraqi Police were abusing prisoners. Instead, he claimed the MPs overreacted after seeing the Iraqi cops drag some detainees outside into the sun.

  Casteel’s version of events did not match the reality documented by 2–162’s scout platoon. When Mike Francis’s story ran, complete with photographs of the Iraqi Police in the middle of beating the prisoners, Casteel’s account and the Boston Globe article were completely discredited.

  Upon returning home, 2–162’s snipers identified Casteel as the gray-haired man who entered the compound late in the afternoon on the twenty-ninth. Though he declined to be interviewed for this book, it is probable that whatever he said to the Iraqi Police that day helped secure the release of the prisoners.

  Exactly who the prisoners were and why they were arrested also remains unclear. The Sudanese swept up in the Al Betawain raid claimed they were innocent of any wrongdoing, and quite possibly that was true. However, many of the Sudanese males we encountered in 2003 had come to Iraq to fight as volunteers for the Saddam Hussein regime. Some were tied to al-Qaida, which had used Sudan as a base of operations for years prior to 9/11. During one fight in the spring of 2003, I smoke-checked three Sudanese who were fighting alongside a Fedayeen group that had launched a counterattack against our regiment.

  In 2004 and 2005, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRA) documented repeated instances of forcible eviction, assaults, murders, and blackmail against the Sudanese immigrants living in Iraq. This campaign of terror was carried out by Shia militia groups—the same ones that had penetrated the Iraqi police force. Between December 2004 and February 2005, seventeen Sudanese immigrants were killed in these militia attacks.

  Why were the Sudanese targeted by the Shia militia groups? The easiest explanation is that many of them had come to fight for Saddam in 2003 and the fall of the regime trapped them in the country. They had been volunteers of a Sunni regime that had oppressed the Iraqi Shia population for decades. The militias went after them as payback.

  Another answer is that at least some of the Sudanese were a link in the al-Qaida Iraq network that was just taking shape in 2004. By targeting them, the Shia militias and the police had hopes of unraveling, then destroying, as many al-Qaida nodes as possible.

  Whatever the case, many of these Sudanese tried to flee Iraq, only to end up confined in camp K-70 in Al Anbar Province only a few kiloyards from the Jordanian border. They languished there for years in harsh conditions until the Romanian government opened up a special refugee facility for them in Timisoara. By early 2009, 138 Sudanese had reached Romania safely, including 40 children.

  Whether innocent or not, the fact was the Shia militia had made terrorizing the Sudanese in Baghdad a priority. The Al Betawain raid could have been part of that campaign.

  As for the other prisoners, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson and the other men on the ground that day believed that some of them may have been criminals or insurgents. This was the ma
in reason why Hendrickson did not immediately order the prisoners untied when the Volunteers first entered the compound. Only after seeing the torture facility inside the rectangular building did he give that order. Whatever the case, one thing was abundantly clear to the Volunteers: guilty or innocent, no human being should ever have to endure what those prisoners had. Though many aspects of what happened that day are clouded in shades of gray, that part will always be black and white for the Oregonians.

  For 2–162’s scout sniper platoon, the day represents a lost opportunity. Ninety-three prisoners were in that compound on June 29. Had they been left to do the right thing, all ninety-three would have made it out alive. Despite the order to withdraw, they saved sixty men. Their actions that day were noble and just. They could take pride in what they were able to accomplish given the minefield of politics, ethnic warfare, and international diplomacy they encountered.

  Yet it is the fate of the lost thirty-three that continues to weigh on the Oregonians. They had entered a chamber of horrors, one that scarred them as Buchenwald scarred the GIs who stumbled upon it in 1945. Even eight years later, the memories of that day are raw and spiked with pain. Recalled Kyle Trimble, “We were denied closure. We never got it. And now, we live with that every day.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Off the Chain

  Maries’s snipers spent July in the triangular rotation established earlier in that spring. The routine soon devolved into tedium. Day after day, they sat atop the MOI and the Sheraton watching and waiting. The Shia Uprising ended in late June, crushed by additional American forces. A tenuous calm marked the mid-summer days as the Mahdi Militia melted away to lairs throughout the city to recruit, reequip, and rebuild.

  To a man, 2-162’s snipers felt they could have been doing much more than watch and report activity around northeast Baghdad. They drafted creative plans designed to maximize their value on the battlefield. Some of the men wanted to use the scout platoon to insert them into key locations around the city where they could set ambushes or take out local Mahdi leaders that the battalion’s Intel shop identified for them.