Captivity (12 page)

The windows of the middle Humvee on the other side of the road were blown out. Some soldiers ran between vehicles, while others clustered in a tight knot and bent low around what appeared to be someone lying on the ground. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could see a second body lying unattended in front of the damaged Humvee.

More people spilled out of their cars. They lounged on the guardrail, puffed on cigarettes, talked in small groups. An F-16 circled overhead. I looked around me at the tight jam of cars, the vast expanse of desert rolling out flat around us, the brown-skinned people milling around, sitting in cars, waiting with glum faces, some in long flowing clothes, all speaking to each other in incomprehensible guttural sounds. I tried to imagine what the soldiers must be seeing as they kept watch behind their guns in Kevlar helmets and flak jackets. It seemed to me there was only one thing they could see—that they were surrounded by a sea of enemies—whereas I, a lone, unarmed Westerner who was just riding a bus, saw travellers, any one of whom I could approach to ask for help if needed.

After about half an hour, one of the Humvees ventured cautiously into the desert behind five foot soldiers. The men ran in short bursts, dropped to their knees, reconnoitred with their guns ready, advanced again in the same way, gradually securing a perimeter of 150 metres. Fifteen minutes later, a helicopter emblazoned with a red cross landed inside the perimeter. Three teams carrying three stretchers hurried towards the helicopter. The first two stretchers were accompanied by medics. Ominously, the last stretcher was not. The helicopters lifted off in a whirlwind of dust.

Fifteen minutes after that, a convoy of five white Suburbans drove up the shoulder and stopped at the front of the long traffic column. Doors opened and men with cameras and big fuzzy microphones got out. They wore sunglasses and navy blue flak jackets that said CBS. They began to walk towards the Humvees. The soldier who was standing in the road stepped towards them. “Stop! Back!” he commanded.

“We’re reporters,” the men shouted.

“No! Stop now!”

The men stopped. I asked one of them if he knew what was going on. No, he said. They were on their way to Fallujah to do a story when they got stuck in the traffic jam along with everyone else. I told him what I knew. He said thank you and I went back to sitting on the guardrail amongst the Iraqis.

A few minutes later, the man came over to me, formally introduced himself as being with the
CBS Evening News
and asked me if I’d be willing
to talk with them about what I’d seen. He returned with a cameraman, someone holding a microphone, and a tall, craggy, good-natured man, the only one not wearing a flak jacket. “Hi,” he said, extending his hand, “I’m Dan Rather with the
CBS Evening News.”

“Hi,” I said, shaking his hand. I immediately thought of my father, who watches the
CBS Evening News
religiously. I wasn’t sure what to say. “I’d heard that you were here covering the story in Iraq,” I said.

“Yes, we’re here for a week. There’s nothing like being on the ground,” he said.

“No, there isn’t.”

“What’s your name?”

“James Loney.”

“Where’re you from, James? You don’t look like you’re from Iraq.”

“Canada.”

“What’s a guy from Canada doing out here?” he asked.

“I’m travelling on that bus over there. I’m on my way home after working in Baghdad for ten weeks with a peace organization. We’re documenting American human rights abuses.” His eyes seemed to glaze over when he heard the words “peace” and “human rights.”

“So, what did you see?” he asked, pointing up the road.

The cameraman focused in on me as I explained what I’d seen.

“Thanks very much,” he said, shaking my hand warmly when the interview was over. “You travel safely now.”

“Thanks. You too,” I said.

“You’ll be on the news this afternoon,” the man who set up the interview said, as if announcing that I’d just won the lottery. “Well, actually, it’ll be first thing in the morning back home.”

“Thanks. Maybe my father will see it,” I said, enjoying the thought of his surprise upon watching the news. And then it struck me, looking at all the Iraqi men and women and children standing around in the road, all of them waiting just like me, all of them having seen the same set of events: any one of them could have told the story of what had happened, and yet it was I alone whose witness held credibility and interest. The Iraqis were just an indistinguishable mass. I alone counted
because I had the skin colour, spoke the language and carried a passport that mattered. And then, even at that, they had no interest in why I had come to Iraq or what I had seen.

I got on the bus, the Humvees parted and we were on our way again. I thought for a long time about the people on those stretchers. I wondered who they were and what had happened to them. I wondered about their families, what their lives had been like in the past, and what their lives would be like in the future, if they survived. I finally had to accept that I was never going to know. I was leaving Iraq and there were so many things I didn’t know. Everything seemed to be a mystery, a half-truth or a lie. The only thing I knew for sure was that war was an outrage, and that nothing good could ever come of it.

When I got home, I found out that Colonel Sassaman had been in the news. On January 3, the day his best friend, Captain Paliwoda, was killed, soldiers under Sassaman’s command ordered two Iraqi cousins to jump into the Tigris River. Marwan and Zaydoon Fadhil, twenty-four and nineteen years old, were returning from Baghdad with a truckful of toilet fixtures and plumbing supplies. They were either a few minutes before or a few minutes after the 11:00 p.m. curfew when they were stopped by Sassaman’s men just a few hundred metres from their home. The soldiers handcuffed the cousins and transported them by armoured personnel carrier to the Tharthar Dam, where they forced them at gunpoint to jump into the river fifty feet upstream from the dam. Then they crushed the men’s truck. Marwan made it out, but Zaydoon was dragged by the current through a water-control gate in the dam. His body was found thirteen days later, a mile downstream.
^*

Sassaman learned about the incident four days later. Rumours were circulating that one of the men had drowned. The platoon officer,
Lieutenant Jack Saville, assured Sassaman that he had seen two men walking away soaking wet. Two days later Sassaman met with his commanding officer, Colonel Frederick Rudeshiem. Rudeshiem told Sassaman his men would be court-martialled if he found out they had forced the Iraqis into the water. Sassaman thought this was going too far. When the investigators came, he ordered his men to lie. “I told my guys to tell them about everything,” he explained to
New York Times
reporter Dexter Filkins. “Everything except the water.”
^*
What they had done was wrong, but it was no more serious than a high school prank.
^†
He intended to discipline the men himself by making them teach classes on integrity to their comrades.
^‡
“I wasn’t going to let the lives of my men be destroyed. Not because they pushed a couple of insurgents into a pond.”
^§

Three soldiers and one officer faced criminal charges. At the trial, the defence argued Zaydoon was an insurgent who had staged his own death. In his memoir entitled Warrior
King
, published in 2008, Sassaman writes, “It was, in fact, common practice for top blacklisted Iraqi insurgents to fake their deaths in an attempt to divert interest from a particular terrorist cell … I believe it’s likely this is what happened in the case of Zaydoon Fadhil.”
^¶
The defence introduced a classified U.S. intelligence report that said confidential Iraqi sources had seen Zaydoon alive and well in Samarra. Army prosecutors argued that the report, drawn up by a member of Sassaman’s battalion, was false.

In the end, Sergeant Tracy Perkins and Lieutenant Jack Saville were both convicted of assault. Perkins was sentenced to six months, Saville to forty-five days. Sassaman and two junior officers (Captain Matthew
Cunningham and Major Robert Gwinner) were officially reprimanded for impeding the army’s investigation. Sassaman’s conduct was called “wrongful” and “criminal.” He himself had no regrets. “I did what I thought was right in protecting those men.”
^*

His career in shreds, Nate Sassaman retired from the army on June 30, 2005. He went on to become the athletic director at a private school in Colorado Springs. When asked to reflect on his new role, Nate told a reporter, “My passion has always been helping to teach people how to be responsible for their actions and how to be able to lead courageously in times of chaos and adversity and how to enact justice. You have to have a degree of empathy to help those who are less skilled or less talented than you. I did that in the Army. Now I just don’t have to do that in combat.”
^†

In
Warrior King
, Colonel Sassaman tells us about the day he went to the family of Mahadi Al Jamal with a compensation offer of six thousand dollars. He didn’t want to do it. It had been only two days since Captain Paliwoda had been killed and Sassaman was angry. “I was frustrated beyond words that I had to pay off a family because their grandfather had died of a heart attack while my soldiers were merely doing their job; however, general army policy dictated these types of reparation payments—that’s just how it worked over there.”

These payments “typically came [with] much hand-wringing and crying, and occasionally a harsh exchange of words,” Sassaman writes. He lost his composure when one of the younger members of the family got in Sassaman’s face and started screaming. “There was a fleeting moment in which I thought about putting a bullet in his head. Instead, I got in his face and, with an interpreter by my side, explained … ‘I know you’re upset about your grandfather. I’m upset about my friend, but I’m paying you $6,000; what are you doing for me?’

“Now, I understand how that sounds. It is callous and contemptible; but it reflects precisely what I felt in my soul at that moment. I was
still the good Christian man who had come to Iraq seven months earlier, but my spirit was broken. This encounter, and my handling of it, represented a significant departure from the way I was raised and taught to be. In a very real sense, I had crossed over to the dark side. In retrospect, of course, I understand the anger and pain this family experienced … The truth is, that’s not going a long way toward bringing democracy to anybody.”
^*

With regard to the use of military force, however, Sassaman is unrepentant. “We acted with force because force was the only thing that seemed to work … the only thing the Iraqis seemed to understand.”
^†
If he regrets anything, it’s that they weren’t given the tools necessary to do their job. “We had a chance to win the war in the first year, and we didn’t.” Now he says it’s time to bring the soldiers home. “We’re sending over tired troops on old, worn-down equipment, with an American public that is not as fired up about this as it was in 2003, and I just don’t see Iraqis shouldering the load as much as they should. Let them fall into civil war and fight through this on their own.”
^‡

The first foreigner to be kidnapped was a British laundry contractor named Gary Teeley. It happened on April 5, 2004, two weeks after I returned home. By the end of the month, forty-three internationals had been kidnapped. NGOs left the country en masse. Tom Fox arrived in Baghdad on September 24, when the kidnapping of internationals was at its height. He and Matt Chandler from Oregon hunkered down in the CPT apartment while they consulted with the team’s Iraqi partners about whether or not CPT should stay. They didn’t leave the apartment for a month. Neighbours brought them food.

Margaret Hassan, the Irish-Iraqi director of CARE in Iraq, was kidnapped on October 19. Nine days later it was Borcz Khalifa, a community
development worker from Poland. Both women had worked with the team and had visited the CPT apartment. The kidnappers were practically knocking on the door.

I told Doug Pritchard, CPT’s director of program and the project support coordinator for Iraq, that I thought the team should come home. I called Matt in Iraq and told him the same thing. “I know, I know,” he said. “I keep wondering if we’re like a couple of frogs sitting in a soup pot. We can’t tell the water is getting hotter and hotter and we don’t know enough to jump out until it’s too late.”

Our Iraqi partners felt it was still possible for us to continue working, and no one else was doing the work we were doing. The decision was made to stay, and two more CPTers joined the team in November.

Nine months later, in August 2005, Greg Rollins visited me in Toronto on his way home to Surrey, B.C. I asked him what the situation was like now. “It’s bad and it’s not, if you know what I mean. There’s always the risk of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Baghdad’s a huge city, and the chances on any given day that you’re going to be in the vicinity of a bomb are really small. As for the kidnapping situation, for Iraqis it’s as bad as ever, if not worse. We ourselves are taking a lot of precautions. We have our own driver now, and we never go out alone outside of our immediate neighbourhood where people know us, and never after dark. The women all wear an
abiya
so they don’t stick out as much. We vary our travel routes all the time, and there are some places we just don’t go. It’s more restrictive, but there’s still a lot of work that we’re able to do. So far we’ve been okay. I guess it’s kind of an intuitive thing. It just seems like the risk, balanced against the precautions we’re taking and the work we’re doing, evens out. And the kidnapping of internationals has died down. There haven’t been any new cases lately.”

I asked Claire Evans, the delegation coordinator, if she was looking for someone to lead the November delegation and she said she was. I took a deep breath and said I’d be willing to go. “Oh, good,” she said.