It Happened on the Way to War (32 page)

“Ultimately, solutions to problems involving poverty are possible only if those affected by it drive development,” Kim said in her acceptance speech on behalf of the organization.

That evening would help catapult CFK to the next level. The very thought of the recognition and the possibilities of what could come muzzled the gunfire. We were making an impact, and nothing was more rewarding than that. But, I was in Fallujah, and good news from CFK wasn't enough for me to reconsider my compartments, or my incipient bloodlust.

IT TOOK SIX weeks for me to establish a battle rhythm. My work divided broadly into four areas: leading my Marines; operating; representing our other HUMINT teams at the regiment; and developing liaison relationships with the Iraqi police, U.S. Special Forces units, FBI, and other government agencies. Not surprisingly, I enjoyed operating more than anything else. Some of my most meaningful operational work occurred at the Fallujah city council, with a motley group of recently elected officials whom we hoped would gradually take over from Colonel Berger and govern Fallujah.

The nascent Fallujah city council had many problems. One of our greatest areas of concern was trust and security. We were fairly certain most of the city council members maintained contact with insurgent groups. It would be difficult for them to stay alive if they didn't. Some of the members were heavily connected, while other members, whom we may have been able to trust to greater degrees, faced serious threats from the most extreme factions of the insurgency, such as Al Qaeda in Iraq. My task was a classic counterintelligence mission to identify the members of the council who were connected to the most extreme terrorist groups. One of the members who concerned me most was the chairman, Sheikh Kamal Shakir al-Nazal.

For weeks I watched Sheikh Kamal. I studied his mannerisms from a hidden room overlooking the meeting place of the city council, a dilapidated theater in one of Saddam Hussein's former youth centers. Sheikh Kamal's gray robe draped regally over his body and hung from his arms, winglike, as he made sweeping gestures to convey grief, frustration, and authority. He was a good actor. It was difficult to discern his true passions from deception, and he seemed to relish the moments when the spotlight turned his way. He was a strong man, too, physically large, with heavy hands and a sculpted salt-and-pepper beard. A white kaffiyeh headwrap added a couple of inches to his stature. Colonel Berger, conversely, had a medium build, a shaved head, and a tough, blunt face. When they spoke with one another, the sheikh often held his hands together as a sign of respect.

“He's a scumbag,” Colonel Berger's staff intelligence officer, Major J.G. from New Jersey, characterized Sheikh Kamal with his trademark cynicism. “But he's our scumbag.”

The lone U.S. State Department representative in Fallujah, Kael Weston, thought differently. Kael, who dropped out of a doctoral program at the London School of Economics to make his way to the front lines, had lived in a forward operating base in downtown Fallujah for more than eighteen months, longer than any other American. A skilled diplomat with a boyish face and a prep-school look that belied his courage and experience, Kael helped set up and convene the locally appointed city council.

“He's a brave man,” Kael said of Sheikh Kamal. “Few men were willing to step up and take the job. He's not perfect. No one is, but we need to protect him. He's got one of the most dangerous jobs in Fallujah.”

The chairman of the Fallujah city council, Sheikh Kamal had a long title with little power. We controlled Fallujah with an iron fist, though we were beginning to gradually transition authority to the local government. This transition required trust, time, and security. Yet as I had seen in the Horn of Africa, Marine commanders rotated every six to twelve months and often had contrasting styles of communicating with locals. Kael's interactions were unique for their length and character. He cared deeply about Iraqi well-being, and he frequently expressed his compassion and concern. As for our military, some officers thought Kael was naive. I disagreed. It was impossible to live in downtown Fallujah for any extended time and be naive, and without Kael, it seemed unlikely that Sheikh Kamal and other Sunni leaders would have risked their lives by holding public office.

Rumor had it that Kael was considered a rogue political officer in the State Department, where few volunteered repeatedly for such hardship posts. Regardless of how he was viewed by others, there was a severe shortage of foreign service officers near the battlefield, and that was more than unfortunate. It was tragic. Kael Weston was exactly the type of foreign service officer we needed on the front lines. The military filled the nation-building vacuum because we had the economic resources and a can-do attitude. However, we weren't very good at it. My big takeaway from the Horn of Africa was that absent a tectonic shift in our force structure and culture, we would never do nation building well.

The business of rebuilding governments needed to be led by a different part of American foreign policy, not the Department of Defense. Every time Marines spoke at the Fallujah city council, our weapons and uniforms signaled to Iraqis that we were an occupation force, not a transitional one. Nation building had more to do with Carolina for Kibera than the U.S. Marine Corps. We needed the Kael Westons and the Colonel Bergers, but apart from Fallujah, we typically had only an armed, uniformed presence.

THE WINTER OF 2005–6 was a turbulent time in Al Anbar Province. Staff officers at the regiment measured and monitored activity in comparison to what we called a baseline level of violence. Activity held steady to the regiment's baseline throughout my deployment at about five to ten SIGACTS per day. Most of the SIGACTS were IED explosions and skirmishes with small arms. We averaged a few casualties each day, and a couple of Marine and Iraqi soldiers killed in action every week.

It was a slow bleed, for the most part. Too often, however, our forces confronted catastrophic IEDs or well-coordinated enemy attacks against our forward operating bases. At these unpredictable moments the levels of violence spiked from the baseline like an electrocardiogram, and because of the injuries more blood was often needed at medical.

December 1 was one of those days. I was in my office swigging coffee and preparing for a sensitive operation with Kael at the next city council meeting when an e-mail marked urgent popped into my in-box. The silent alert called for all hands with type A blood. I wouldn't have seen it in time if the corporal from the intelligence shop had not sounded off: “A POS AND NEG NEEDED AT MEDICAL!”

It was the first time I was in the office for a type A blood call. I darted out the door and ran a quarter mile to the clinic, a unit once called the Cheaters of Death.

A high-back Humvee used to transport troops was errantly parked near the entrance of the clinic, its cargo splattered with blood, sand, and shards of camouflage. In the open hangar a dozen Marines of various ranks and duties sat silently hunchbacked on cots with thin red tubes running from their arms.

A corpsman swabbed my arm and prepared his needle. “What happened?” I asked in a hushed tone.

“Mass casualty. More than a dozen Marines wounded. Many KIA.”

The needle went in and my blood flowed out. We all wanted to do more, but we could at least do something. A private who looked sixteen sat next to me softly weeping. He was in the formation with more than fifty other Marines when four bombs hidden beneath the earth erupted.

My blood filled two bags. I began to feel light-headed midway into the second bag when a sudden fear overwhelmed me. It was an amplified version of the anxiety I carried when my small team of a sergeant, a gunnery sergeant, and a linguist were out on reconnaissance missions:
Did something happen to them?

My gunnery sergeant had a lot of experience and a healthy paranoia. He had fought through the Battle of Fallujah and hunted Al Qaeda with Delta Force. Yet sometimes training and experience didn't matter. Something had happened to them. I was sure of it.

A stretcher passed with a badly wounded Marine. A crimson circle stained the white sheets near his torso. One of his arms dangled over the steel railing. It was heavily tattooed, like my sergeant's arm.
Was it my sergeant?

The needle ripped from my arm and blood squirted across the floor as I stood and took off toward the stretcher. A corpsman caught me, sliding his body between me and the wounded Marine. He placed his hand up in front of my chest. “Sir?”

“Who's that?” I pointed to the stretcher. “What unit is this?”

“Two-seven,” he said, referring to the infantry battalion. I knew that my Marines were with Recon. It couldn't be my sergeant. “Sir, you need to sit down.”

I returned to the bloody cot. Soon another corpsman came and told me to leave. They had enough type A for the day.

THE SENSITIVE OPERATION that I was planning with Kael involved Sheikh Kamal, the chairman of the city council. After more than six months of their working closely together, the sheikh had approached Kael and offered to provide intelligence about an important security matter. We planned a meeting for me to debrief him after the next city council gathering. For the sheikh's safety, the meeting would have to be quick and discreet.

The following city council meeting dragged on for two hours. It was another mind-numbing affair. The same issues came up each week: detainees, raids, checkpoints, identification cards, curfews, weapons permits, infrastructure repair, and war reparations. An action-oriented commander with little patience for painstaking political negotiation, Colonel Berger rarely spoke during the meetings. When a question was directed his way, the colonel stood from his chair in the front row and answered directly. If he could do something, he said it. Much of the time, however, he couldn't agree to the demands for security reasons.

I watched as a few journalists from international newspapers took notes. It was rare to have Western reporters attend Fallujah city council meetings. We were curious to see how Sheikh Kamal would behave in their presence. We had warned him ahead of time to be careful with his remarks.

“La, la, la!”
(No, no, no!) The sheikh slapped the table with his palm and leaped into a dramatic performance that was recorded verbatim by one of our few Marine officers who spoke Iraqi-dialect Arabic fluently:

In the name of God the most compassionate and merciful,… I have been the chairman for six months now, and I feel that I have accomplished nothing. I've done nothing for the city. I feel I have absolutely no real power. I am in deep despair with regard to my duties. We've been complaining about a checkpoint for three months and nothing has been done. We've complained about raids on government institutions, and just yesterday the real estate office was raided. We've talked endlessly about stopping the detention of innocent people. The city council building itself has been attacked more than once. Our clerics have been attacked and ultimately our Mufti Sheikh Hamza was assassinated. We've submitted requests to arm the city council and the imams [religious leaders], and each week this goes back and forth with no results. The fact is, I have submitted my resignation on more than one occasion, but the council members continue to tell me to remain in place. Up to now, my credibility is zero … Then, the [local Fallujah] newspaper said I was meeting secretly with the Marines. They insinuate that I'm in league with the Marines, but I'm in such a state that Colonel Berger could very well be ready to arrest me!… I have no communication with the resistance [the insurgency]. However, if you press me to answer, I would say, if I were in the resistance, I would be proud to say that I was in it.

After the meeting, councilors began chatting with one another and some of the American military officers, as was custom. With a stern face and angry eyes, Colonel Berger walked out of the room with Major J.G. before an Iraqi could engage him in conversation. The colonel was fed up with Sheikh Kamal. Although it wasn't uncommon for members of the city council to praise the resistance while speaking to Iraqi audiences, this was the first time Sheikh Kamal had made such comments in the presence of foreign press.

Kael made a subtle gesture to the sheikh. I moved through a concealed passage and met them in a locker room that we had converted into an office. Kael excused himself and said he'd be back in ten minutes.

“We've never met. I'm a security officer. What you tell me will be strictly confidential.”

Sheikh Kamal looked at my interpreter, who went by the nickname Mike.

“He's American,” I said, maintaining my eye contact with the sheikh.

“Not Shiite?” Sheikh Kamal believed that all Shiites harbored loyalties to Iran.

“That's right.”

A tall Moroccan American with a great sense of humor, Mike had come to Iraq as a contract interpreter in search of adventure and a larger paycheck. He didn't know until he signed up that our contract interpreters suffered higher casualty rates than most American combat units. We were fortunate to have him. Mike was one of only a few HUMINT interpreters who never complained about being tapped for dangerous missions, and he was an excellent interpreter who had quickly learned the local dialect.

“Not Iraqi?” Kamal asked.

“Correct.”

“But he speaks well.”

We were losing precious time. “So what is it you've come to share with me today?”

Sheikh Kamal began describing the location of a terrorist safe house less than a half mile from where we sat. He spoke like many Iraqis, circling around the subject with hyperbole and repetition. We didn't have time.

“I'm sorry to interrupt you, Sheikh, but who are these terrorists?”

“They're assassins.”

“Assassins?”

“Yes. They are the ones who killed Sheikh Hamza. They'll be there tonight. After that I don't know.”

Sheikh Hamza Abbas al-Issawi had been the grand mufti of Fallujah, the most senior religious leader in the city. A few months earlier Kael had encouraged Sheikh Hamza to publicly declare his support for the local Iraqi government because Fallujans had boycotted previous elections. Sheikh Hamza had vacillated until days before the October Iraqi constitutional referendum, when he had made a brave public stand by calling on Fallujans to vote, and “Fallujah's sons” to join the police. It was a consequential moment. Police registration had increased immediately, and the referendum had occurred peacefully, with a remarkably high level of voter participation. Two weeks after the referendum, however, assassins gunned down the grand mufti as he walked to his mosque for morning prayers. His assassination conformed to the modus operandi of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, second only to Osama bin Laden on America's most wanted list. Zarqawi had made the City of Mosques his headquarters until the Battle of Fallujah, when he dressed as a woman and fled in advance of our assault.