It Happened on the Way to War (34 page)

The raid that night was a turning point for me. It was near the midway mark in my six-month deployment. As frustrated as I was with my failed interrogation and the fact that the man might be back on the streets in a short time, it was the teenager in the house who made me question my fundamental assumptions about our war effort. He was one of the first boys I spoke with in Iraq, and he reminded me of Kash. The boy was muscular and stood out among other Iraqi teenagers. He had poise that was similar to Kash, and he wanted me to take him to the United States. We had stormed his home, shouted at his mother, threw him to the floor, and detained his uncle. And yet, the boy was still enamored by the idea of America. For all our flaws, we were still envied by much of the world for our resources, our power, and maybe even some of our values.

Why weren't we capitalizing on such goodwill? The boy's perspective baffled me. If I were he and a foreign force had invaded my home, I cannot imagine feeling anything but hatred, a hate so deep that it could lead me to a cause I didn't understand or believe in simply to fight, to lash out, and to restore my honor. Maybe that boy was somehow above such base reactions. Others were not, and the more doors we kicked down, the more ill will we engendered.

There was no clear solution now that we were there. Of course we had to go after terrorists such as Zarqawi. However, those extreme factions were a small part of a much larger, highly fragmented insurgency that we didn't understand. Nearly all elements of that larger insurgency drew strength from our presence. Were our actions persecuting a small group of extremists helping to spawn the next generation of jihadists? Even if we could restore order with a velvet glove and a thousand Kael Westons, was it sustainable? Was it worth the price?

*
  General James Mattis as quoted in Thomas Ricks,
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
(Penguin Press, 2006), p. 318.

*
  Lieutenant General James Conway quoted in Michael Gordon, “Leathernecks Plan to Use Velvet Glove More than Iron Fist in Iraq,”
New York Times
, December 12, 2003.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Eleven Years Old and His Life Is Already Behind Him

Fallujah, Iraq

WINTER 2006

A SOURCE MEETING AT A BLOWN-UP WAREHOUSE in downtown Fallujah consumed the morning. The knots between my neck and shoulders expanded with relief as I removed my body armor back at base. Sweat had soaked so thoroughly through my fatigues that their thick cotton clung to my skin like spandex. I could tell from the carrot color of my urine that I was dehydrated again, though I needed coffee more than water. Earlier that morning my subteam departed on a seven-day mission, and I had stayed up all night to see them off. The hours before my Marines left on dangerous missions always made me the most anxious.

The mug with our team's call sign, Talisman, and an imprint of silver captain's bars sat next to the coffeepot. The day-old, lukewarm coffee poured like syrup and tasted like dirt. I took a gulp and sat down in front of my two laptops, one for classified communication, and the other. I wasn't looking forward to the eight hours of report writing, e-mails, and phone calls ahead.

One of fifty new e-mails was marked urgent. It read that an Iraqi woman was in critical condition at the medical clinic. The woman had been shot during a night raid, and she was requesting to speak with someone about a security issue. As they often did, my plans changed abruptly. More than half of my time in Iraq was spent reacting to unforeseen events.

Both my interpreters were out with my subteam, so I asked the lieutenant in charge of the document-exploitation unit for support. The lieutenant and I maintained a good rapport, in part because I never pulled rank on him. He told me that he would give me his best interpreter and returned minutes later with a white-haired Iraqi man wearing gold-framed glasses. The interpreter, Dr. B., was a medical doctor and American citizen of Iraqi descent. As a twenty-seven-year-old, it felt strange to be temporarily in charge of a gray-haired medical doctor with more knowledge of Iraq than I would absorb in a lifetime. As we walked to the clinic, Dr. B. told me that although it was difficult for him to leave his family and medical practice in the United States, he felt that he didn't have a choice. “It is my duty to be here.”

The clinic smelled of disinfectant. I passed a Marine missing one leg. A corpsman escorted us to the woman's room.

She had sunken cheeks and dark, brown eyes. The gaping hole in her back, we were told, was from one of our M16 rounds. Enemy AK-47 fire at such close range would have left a larger exit wound. Bile lined the bucket at the edge of her bed. I could smell it.

I looked at Dr. B.

“Not good,” he said.

“My name is Captain Rye and this is Doctor B. He's an Iraqi American and a medical doctor.”

The woman gave a slow, slight nod as Dr. B. translated my introduction.

“You're a doctor?” she asked.

“Naam.”

“Oh, that is a good thing,” she said. Tabitha had once used that line. My memory returned to Tabitha and her strong brown eyes. According to the card above her stretcher, the woman was thirty-eight years old, the same age Tabitha had been when she passed away. Sweat lined her forehead. It appeared to cause her pain to speak.

“
Mama
, you do not need to speak to us. It's better that you just relax and recover.”

“Mama?” Dr. B. raised his eyebrows.

“No, sorry, don't translate that.”

Dr. B. touched the woman's hand and encouraged her not to speak.

“No,” she replied. “I called you because there's something I must say. I must say it now.” I was taken aback by how forward she was. Iraqi women rarely approached us with information.

The woman looked at Dr. B. and spoke rapidly for two minutes before the doctor calmly raised his hand and turned to me. “She's smart, but she's not an educated woman, the wife of a farmer I suspect. She began by telling me that times were better under Saddam, people were safer, which makes sense of course because she's from a Sunni town.” Dr. B. was Kurdish by ethnicity. “She said she doesn't like us, the Americans, but that the terrorists are worse. She wants to tell us what happened so we can leave her country.”

“Please, tell us what happened,” I said.

“The terrorists, they come to our homes and threaten our families. They took a knife to my son's throat and told me they'd kill him. He's only seven. He doesn't understand. These are evil people.” The woman looked at Dr. B.

“I'm sorry to hear this. When? When did they come?”

“Four weeks ago. I've been feeding them for four weeks until you came.”

“What were they doing in your town?”

“I don't know. They wore their black masks and didn't speak around me. But they made lots of demands. They did terrible things.” She looked to the floor.

“Such as?”

Her eyes conveyed immeasurable pain. She didn't respond.

“Did you hear any of their names?”

“They were all
kunyas
: Abu Abdul, Abu Bakr, Abu Ahmed.”

“Iraqi?” Contrary to press reporting at the time, the majority of terrorists were Iraqi.

“I think, yes.”

“Did they have a name for their group?”

“I don't know.”

“What happened during the attack?”

“You came. It was fast and very late. You came from the sky.”

“Helicopters?”

“What?”

“She doesn't know what helicopters are,” Dr. B. clarified.

I would've known about a Marine helicopter raid. The raid must have been conducted by one of our most elite units, the Joint Special Operations Command.

“We appreciate this information. It's helpful. Is there something else you want to tell us?”

The woman looked at Dr. B. I couldn't shake the image of Tabitha in my mind. She had the same proud countenance, the defiance, the grace. She reached for the doctor's hand. He leaned forward, and she whispered a piece of information that would launch an onslaught of raids that night.

I asked follow-up questions. When I was done, I wanted to give her something in return. “Can we do something for your son?” I asked. On Tabitha's deathbed, I had promised to find the means to send her children to school.
Maybe I could do something similar for this woman?

She locked her eyes onto mine and whispered something.

The doctor hesitated.

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Stay away from my son.' ”

IN HIS MANUSCRIPT my father encapsulated his time in Vietnam with a single sentence: “Uncertainty abounded.” I can think of no better two-word summary for Iraq. Uncertainty defined our experience. At times it felt as if it were the only constant, the only thing that we could, paradoxically, be sure of. Most of our encounters were fraught with unknowns. They were like the raid in Fallujah with the man with the black watch and the irritating smirk. We didn't receive any additional information of value from him. Eventually, he was sent to Abu Ghraib, where we lost track of him because our prisons were too overwhelmed to function adequately. We didn't discover who killed the grand mufti of Fallujah, either. We probably never will.

The Iraqi woman survived and was escorted back to her village by an Iraqi Army convoy. Her last words to me shocked me not simply because I had wanted to help her son, but because of their candor. I wasn't used to such truth in my interactions with Iraqis. I didn't fault them for what I viewed as a culture of deception that had come to define a central part of their existence. After all, deception was a survival mechanism from decades of oppression under a vengeful, paranoid dictator. Nevertheless, it forced me to filter everything I heard from our Iraqi sources through a lens of probability. The security information that the woman provided to us about the terrorists in her village was probably true. Her hospital room was an isolated place where no other Iraqis could have heard what she said. My interpreter, Dr. B., was an American without local ties, and the woman claimed to have been tormented by the enemy. She wanted revenge, which was among the strongest of all motivations that led Iraqis to cooperate with us. Yet, there was still some doubt. There would always be doubt. Her description of the enemy was vague, and we had to be cautious of personal vendettas and local feuds with complicated histories. The only thing that I was sure of was the truth of her last line: “Stay away from my son.” I knew it from her eyes.

All of the great military theorists wrote about uncertainty, from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz with his famous phrase, the “fog of war.” When I read these classic texts in college and at basic training, I had thought I understood them. But I had no real awareness until I was in Iraq. Our job in military intelligence was to cut through the fog so that our combat forces could take the fight to the enemy. In absolute terms, ours was an impossible task because we would never see clearly through the haze.

My “come-to-Jesus moment,” as my gunnery sergeant called it, was more of a process. Real awareness didn't arrive until sometime in the second half of my deployment. I figured out then that there was no way I could lead my teams effectively, support my command, and operate while also digesting all of the HUMINT reporting and analysis that our regiment produced on any given day. I began stepping back from the daily barrage of raw intelligence reporting and took deep dives into a few threads of information that had the potential to address larger security questions. Each thread involved at least one prominent target and a convergence of reporting that we could analyze, corroborate, and use to build operations.

My new focus on depth over breadth in Iraq resembled the CFK approach to leadership development. Roughly half of Kibera's population was under the age of fifteen. The size and scope of our youth engagement programs through sports, health care, girls' empowerment, and waste management was significant. It involved an active membership of almost twenty-five hundred young men and women. From those twenty-five hundred young people, we spent most of our time and effort developing the top one hundred leaders. These were young people who volunteered constantly with the organization and proved themselves to be among the best and the brightest in Kibera. As Salim often said, we could do only so much with our scarce resources. It made sense to focus on the young people who could make the greatest positive impact in Kibera, and beyond.

So it was that during my final three months in Iraq I invested heavily in a half dozen of the most promising intelligence threads. To the best of my knowledge, the majority of these threads amounted to nothing. A couple of them, however, traced to larger tapestries that with time and work revealed new secrets of strategic importance. I focused most of my energy on the demise of Sheikh Kamal, the charismatic head of the Fallujah city council. His fall led to my most profound revelations.

THE CHIEF OF Fallujah's police, Brigadier General Salah Al Ani, met us at the entrance to the youth center with his swagger stick and dark blue flak jacket. A former Iraqi Special Forces officer who had participated in the initial deep reconnaissance of Kuwait in 1990, General Salah appeared ready for a military mission, not another Fallujah city council meeting.

“
Salaam alaikum
, Colonel Berger.” General Salah saluted.

“General.” Colonel Berger nodded.

“I have good and bad news. Kamal is dead. The good news is we have caught the assassins. They're with our intelligence now.”

“Captain.” The colonel turned to me.

“Roger, sir. I'm on it.”

My interpreter Mike and I walked fifty yards to the police station, a dismal two-story concrete stack surrounded by puddles of stagnant green sewage. I had been in the building many times to meet with the head of a small Iraqi intelligence cell, a captain with a decade of experience as a spymaster in the Mukhabarat, Saddam's principal intelligence agency. The U.S. military had declared 2006 the “Year of the Iraqi Police.” Although my relationship fell under the umbrella of capacity building, it was more confrontational than cooperative. I assumed my counterpart viewed me as an amateur. Just like Kenyans, Iraqis expected deference to age and experience. The Iraqi captain was old enough to be my father.

“Captain Rye, so good to see you,” the captain greeted me, with his phony smile. He was slender and cleancut. He wore a black mustache and had a long pinkie fingernail. His brown patent leather shoes were immaculate and shiny despite the filth surrounding us. A lightbulb dangled from the ceiling of his windowless office in the bowels of the police station. The compact space was barren, furnished with only a wooden desk and a small black-and-white television tuned to a channel playing high-pitched Arabic music. One of his deputies sat on the sofa in civilian clothes fingering prayer beads and watching me.

“
Salaam alaikum
, Captain.” I placed my hand over my heart. “May we have a word together?”