Walk in My Combat Boots

by James Patterson

  We live inside the cigarette factory, which is on the city grid, so we have power maybe half the time. We walk around a lot with headlamps and flashlights. We sleep in the basement. There are no showers. To keep morale up, we have video games going in one of the big rooms. After patrol, I’ll sit down with the guys and play college football and talk smack about their teams sucking and vice versa. The practical jokes are constant. One of my guys duct-tapes my vest and helmet to the ceiling.

  I keep in contact with the woman I met right before I deployed. I told her I would be gone for about a year and promised to stay in touch. I brought a deck of cards with me, and I write a message on a card and mail it to her once a week.

  To resupply, we have to go down to FOB Loyalty, which means driving Route Predators. We always go in a convoy of thirty to forty vehicles. One day, at the start of our supply run, we’re hit by sixteen IEDs.

  My ears are ringing, and I’m thanking God that there aren’t any casualties, when I get a radio call about another possible IED up ahead. They give me the grid coordinates. I radio them to our engineering unit. They drive ahead to investigate, and we wait along Route Predators.

  We’re sitting ducks.

  Finally, an engineer radios me. “We just don’t have…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do about this.”

  He’s saying he can’t clear it. The problem is, we can’t take any other routes. We have nearly forty vehicles in our convoy—and most of them are too damaged at this point. We can’t take another IED. I radio that up to the battalion.

  “Look, you guys have just got to get through it,” battalion says. “Figure a way out. Charlie Mike.”

  Continue mission.

  We reach the grid location. The convoy stops. We can’t go around the bomb, only through it.

  I’ve given what I’m about to do next a lot of thought.

  I order the MRAP to go first. It’s designed to withstand attacks from IEDs, but that doesn’t mean the people inside are safe. Soldiers still get injured and die. The IED up ahead could—

  A thundering, earsplitting explosion shakes the ground—an EFP hits the MRAP and pierces its armor.

  The vehicle catches fire. We’re attacked. Troops in contact.

  We start doing everything we’re trained to do, everyone getting into a fighting position while we figure out how to corner off the vehicle, get the fire out, and assess any casualties. Only I can’t get any reports because my radio is down. I jump to a nearby vehicle, get the same result.

  A kid from another platoon gets hit in the leg. We can’t get an IV in him because we can’t find a vein, and if we don’t get fluids in him he’ll die. I’ve got to call in a nine line for medevac. I jump from vehicle to vehicle as gunfire goes off, trying to find comms.

  Not a single radio is working.

  I need to get that wounded kid medical attention because he’s bad. I know there’s a medic unit at FOB Loyalty, so I order four vehicles to take the kid there for treatment or he’s not going to make it. The vehicles take off and the rest of us stay behind to try to defeat the enemy and put the fire out in the MRAP.

  We tow the MRAP back to base. There’s a terrible feeling we all get looking at the blood and scorch marks, where the EFPs penetrated the armor. The feeling worsens when I receive news about the wounded kid: he died while on the way to FOB Loyalty. It’s the first time I’ve experienced a loss.

  Morale reaches a low point when convoys stop delivering our food. They can’t. Route Predators has become so bad no one will drive it. We end up getting airdrops of food, water, and ammunition. A lot of the MREs go bad because it’s 130 degrees. When we go out on patrol, we search for food at homes and shops. We buy chickens.

  Months later, a kid named Matt Taylor goes out on foot patrol. A van pulls alongside him, its side doors opening to men armed with M16s. A round hits Matt in his left arm, and the shrapnel goes up his shoulder and into his heart. I break the news to Alpha. This one hits us especially hard. Matt was a beloved individual. Everyone loved the guy. Great personality.

  We lose another soldier shortly thereafter, in a firefight that lasts over twenty-four hours. Everyone’s emotional, exhausted and dragging ass, sick of the shitty living conditions. But we still have to drive on. We still have months to go on our deployment, and as their leader I’ve got to get my team through this while also knowing when to kick ass to get everyone performing at their optimum levels.

  That means doing drills after long patrols. We can’t be complacent. Whatever the crucible experience, you’ve got to go out tonight, tomorrow, and the next day. Maybe you won’t come back or maybe it will be someone else. The unit is what matters. The unit needs to keep going and going because war doesn’t stop.

  RED

  Red grew up in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father served in the Navy. Red joined the Army at seventeen, shortly after high school. Two days before he graduated from basic training, 9/11 happened. He served for thirteen years. He was a noncommissioned officer and worked as a human intelligence collector, MOS 35 Mike.

  In 2006, I’m coming off my shift when I step outside the prison and see the bus. Normally, it carries one, maybe two of what we call high-value individuals. This afternoon, the bus is packed with Iraqis. They’re being led into the prison.

  I walk up to Chief, the warrant officer in charge of the prison, and ask what’s going on.

  “Someone got intel about an HVI [High-Value Individual] at a café,” he says. “Don’t know who the guy is or what he looks like, so we rolled up the whole café.”

  “If you need help screening people, I’ll help you screen.”

  Chief knows I’ve learned Arabic and can speak it pretty decently—which irritates the locals, having some white guy come in and start asking them questions in their language.

  I’ve always had a knack for languages. At fifteen, I learned Spanish because I liked a Mexican girl. Then, after I joined the Army, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute, where I studied Korean for fifteen months. I won their annual speech competition and went on to compete against other colleges in California and won the state title. Not bad for a kid from Gastonia, North Carolina.

  Chief also knows I’m an interrogator. “Okay,” he says. “Get to it.”

  The Iraqis go first to medical, where they get screened. There they trade their long white robes, called dishdashas, for jumpsuits, and then they’re brought straight to the interrogation booths. I go in without an interpreter and start having basic conversations: “Hey, what’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “Why’d you get captured?” I love asking that last question because it always gets them pissed off. When people get angry, sometimes they let things slip. Valuable things.

  One of the guards comes up to me while I’m screening a prisoner. He pulls me aside and hands me a folded piece of paper.

  “I found that note inside a guy’s dishdasha,” he tells me. “We don’t know what it says—it’s in Arabic.”

  I can make out some of the Arabic but not all of it. I leave to go find our interpreter. He reads the piece of paper several times.

  “This isn’t a note,” he says. “It’s a letter addressed to the leader of the Jaysh al-Mahdi militia.”

  I’m familiar with the militia. We all are. JAM, as it’s called, is a lesser-known extremist group in the area. Everyone back home in the States thinks all we deal with is Al-Qaeda, but there are a ton of extremist groups operating in Iraq, and for different reasons they don’t always work together.

  “This unit,” the interpreter says, “is called the Army of the Messiah. It seems to operate like an Army platoon—company, battalion, brigade, division—but the letter is mainly an inventory of a weapons cache somewhere here in the city.”

  My blood is pumping. “And the person the letter is addressed to?”

  I’m floored when he tells me the guy’s name.

  This JAM battalion commander is an extremely high-leve
l HVI. We’ve been looking for his ass for a long, long time. And someone right here in the prison was carrying a letter addressed to this guy. I leave the interpreter, find the guard, and have him bring me to the letter holder.

  I go into the booth, find one of my young soldiers talking to this old man sitting at a table. I kick out the soldier and look the old guy over. He is dressed in a jumpsuit, handcuffed, shaking.

  “Why are you shaking?” I ask in English.

  “I need a cigarette.”

  I pull out a cigarette and a lighter and sit down. “How many you smoke a day?”

  He holds up three fingers.

  “Three cigarettes? That’s it?”

  He shakes his head. “Three packs.”

  Most Iraqis look older than they are because of the sun. This guy also smokes three packs a day. No wonder he looks seventy even though I was told he’s forty.

  I light a cigarette.

  Blow smoke in his face as I remove the folded letter from my pocket.

  “You want a pack of cigarettes?” I ask. “Don’t tell me a single fucking lie about what’s on that piece of paper, and you’ll get all the cigarettes you want, bud.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck the paper even is!”

  Okay, cool. Here we go.

  I smoke one cigarette after another as I ask him questions. He won’t answer them. He throws his hands around, cussing me out in Arabic, thinking I don’t know what he’s saying. I don’t react, either, which is critical.

  The man keeps insisting he knows nothing about the letter. I keep chain-smoking to the point where I’ve got a headache, maybe even nicotine poisoning. My goal is to keep the whole room filled with smoke. I’m a smoker, so I know what it’s like to not be able to have a cigarette.

  I sit there, waiting, smoking. This isn’t some crazy technique I learned back at the schoolhouse during my advanced intelligence training days. I’m just playing the game that’s coming to me. I keep at this guy, keep asking him about the letter, and he keeps telling me he doesn’t know anything.

  This goes on for hours.

  And then he says, “I do remember that letter.”

  I wait.

  He says, “I found it on the ground of the bus, and I was gonna give it to you guys.”

  Which is pretty clever of him to say, since he knows we pay people to turn in IEDs, even other insurgents. What we’re doing is paying the Iraqis to protect their own neighborhoods. We’re putting security in their hands—and it’s working. Significant attacks have started to decrease.

  “I was gonna give it to you guys,” the man says again.

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, not bullshit! That was my plan, to give—”

  “If that were true, you would have started off with that. But you started off with the whole ‘I don’t know what the fuck that letter is.’ Why did you change your story?”

  “I can’t think. I need a cigarette.”

  “Why did you change your story?”

  “Give me a cigarette. I can’t think.”

  “I’ll give you a cigarette when you tell me why you changed your story.”

  We keep going around and around, keep going at it, keep going at it.

  Chow time rolls around, so I leave the cell to get him a plate. My head is pounding, and I feel woozy. I check my watch. I’ve been at it for six hours.

  I bring him his food. He slaps it off the table.

  “I want a cigarette!”

  I decide to step up my game a little. “You know what? I’m gonna help you think,” I say, and hand him a cigarette.

  He’s handcuffed, so he has to take the cigarette with both hands. He mutters “Thank you, thank you” over and over again as he brings it up to his mouth. Then he leans forward, obviously wanting me to light it for him.

  “You asked for a cigarette,” I tell him. “I’ve given you what you asked for, and you haven’t given me a single thing I asked for. Now you want a cigarette and a lighter? Fuck no.”

  The guy isn’t happy about this. He breaks the cigarette in half and immediately regrets his decision. He tries to put it back together, sees that he can’t, knows he can’t, and his nicotine withdrawal grabs him by the balls and breaks him. I can see it in his eyes.

  I light another cigarette.

  I blow smoke in his face.

  He starts to cry genuine, real-life tears. He’s a defeated man. He crosses his arms and stares at the broken cigarette.

  He says, “I wrote the letter.”

  “Oh, you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful,” I say. “Now listen. I’m gonna start asking you some questions. I need you to understand that I don’t believe a goddamn word you’re saying, so make sure you answer these questions appropriately.” I take a drag off my cigarette and blow smoke in his face. “Why’d you write the letter?”

  He starts talking, and it becomes very clear to me that he’s telling me the truth. He says he’s the personal assistant, for lack of a better word, to this brigade commander. The man was asked to write the letter because he has very good handwriting. His job was to deliver the letter, which contains a detailed inventory of a weapons cache. He gives me the location.

  After I finish writing down what he’s told me, I get up and leave to check out his information. Before I go to my computer, I send one of my junior interrogators into the booth and do what’s called map tracking: I trace the weapon cache’s location using satellite imagery.

  The guy’s information checks out on my computer. On my way back, I see my junior interrogator coming out of the booth. He’s smiling.

  “We’ve got the location,” he says, and starts laughing.

  “What?”

  “He told me to see if Master needs anything else. That’s what he’s calling you—Master. You mentally broke him.”

  And it only took ten hours, using what I call the Needs a Cigarette approach.

  My junior interrogator says, “He also thought Master might like to know where the brigade commander is.”

  We roll up the brigade commander. They let me handle the interrogation.

  The technique I decide to use isn’t intended to work; it’s just for shock value. The brigade commander has been in prison for all of five minutes and I am already in his face. I slam the notebook and pen down on the table and say, “I’m gonna leave, and on that piece of paper you’re gonna write down who the fuck you are, who the fuck you work for, and everything you fucking do. And may God himself have mercy on your soul if, when I come back, you haven’t written anything down, or you’re lying.”

  I leave, go back to the office, and I watch from the camera recording his interrogation. I’m watching him sitting there, staring at the pad. Half of them write, half of them don’t.

  He starts writing.

  When he’s finished, I go back into the booth and grab the notebook.

  “I’m done,” he says.

  “Done what?”

  “Running. I’m tired of running. You sons of bitches keep looking for me. I’m done.”

  Outside, I hand the notebook to my interpreter.

  It’s clear the brigade commander has spilled his guts. He’s written down his real name, what he does for the Army of the Messiah, everything.

  I go back into the booth. “Seems like you told the truth.”

  “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but I have two conditions. First, you make sure my family is safe, get them out of town. Then you help us get to America.”

  Naturally, I tell him I’ll help him and his family.

  He talks heavy and hard. While I listen, I start thinking about a buddy of mine, a really good intel guy, this young superstar who recently returned home after a fifteen-month deployment. We saw a ton of potential in this kid, so we took him under our wing, trained him, tried passing on our knowledge to him, tried to make him the next generation because everyone knows he’s “the guy.”

  Thirty days after he returned ho
me, he put a bullet in his head.

  This guy never had any mental issues, and he was always upbeat. But when you’re in Iraq, you don’t have any days off. If you’re here for a year, it’s 365 days, every day. You never get a break, and it takes years off your life. Big years. There’s the physical demand—always being on patrol or being stuck doing time-sensitive target (TST) missions and not sleeping for forty-eight hours—and then there’s the mental aspect of seeing all the shit you see, doing the shit you do. Sometimes you do things that don’t feel right. You question your own morality. It’s mentally and emotionally and spiritually draining.

  Every. Single. Day.

  As I listen to the brigade commander, a man who will turn out to be one of my most valuable sources, a man who will help us break a couple of other people inside the prison and help us in some other, more classified matters—as I listen to him spill his secrets to protect himself and his family, I realize I’m burned out. I’ve got nothing left. Here, in this moment, I know I’m done.

  Years later, when people ask me about my time in the Army, ask me what I miss, I’ll tell them I don’t miss anything at all. I’ll feel like an asshole when I say that—people miss things, I know, I get it. I can tell stories, laugh, and joke when I look back on my crazy, fun, weird, and scary times. I don’t regret what I did, but I don’t miss it. I don’t miss a damn thing.

  NATE HARLAN

  Nate Harlan comes from a military family. His older brother served in the Marines, his father served in the Army National Guard reserves, and his grandfather served in France during World War I. He joined the Army National Guard at twenty-seven. Nate left the service as a captain.