The War I Always Wanted (17 page)

Within seconds they were seated side by side, flex-cuffed and with bags on their heads. I went in to try to figure out just what in the hell was going on. The first thing I noticed was that the car outside didn't match the description I'd gotten over the radio. The second was that these three didn't have a single weapon. And third, one was a girl wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

Captain B. had spoken with the scouts. It seemed that the sandbagged detainees sitting helplessly on the sidewalk had walked into the wrong place at a very bad time.

Nobody knew what to do with them, whether or not they had weapons. At that point we knew how to do only two things: kill or ignore. But if that had been combat math, then this was turning into combat calculus. Now, on a breezy April afternoon in Baghdad, we had just entered the biggest gray area since Vietnam.

Croom was standing near the unlucky looters. “What do we do now? I mean . . . what the fuck?” I asked when I got to him. We couldn't just call the police and have them come pick
them up. There were no police. And these people weren't your standard enemy combatants either.

He just shrugged and said, “Fuck if I know.”

I looked down at the three, all of whom had their had hands tied behind their backs. I saw that the girl was shaking. The two guys sitting next to her were squirming nervously. For the first time I noticed they were all wearing jeans, t-shirts, and tennis shoes. And sandbags. They looked harmless.

Suddenly one of the men spoke up. In heavily accented but understandable English, he asked his question in a quivering voice—one that hinted of guilt-ridden blame—as if it had been his idea to come here and he felt responsible for his two friends.

Through the dark-colored sandbag he turned his head up to us and asked, “Are you going to execute us?” He asked it in a tone that conveyed his expecting the worst. The man was convinced he was about to die.

Are you going to execute us?

I stopped breathing for an instant, trying to figure out if he was joking or not. I realized that he was not. I glanced at Sergeant Croom, trying to think of a way to respond. Puzzled, Croom looked back at me with raised eyebrows.

He looked down at the guy without missing a beat. “
Execute
you? Naw way, man,” he said in his Southern drawl. “We're Americans.” He looked up shifting his eyes to the river. “We don't do that shit.”

The looter pointed his head back at the ground and simply nodded, as if he weren't sure if we were going to tell him the truth or not.

It's funny—Croom's answer, while said offhandedly, had actually meant something to me. His tone had punched a hole
in my cynical shell. It meant that the way things were done in this city had changed. The executions had ceased as of the last forty-eight hours. There would be no more throwing people off buildings, no more cutting off ears or cutting out tongues. There would be no more mass graves. It was just over.

The optimism we felt that day would wilt in the coming months, as most of Iraq would become a menagerie of freakish horror. But for just that day, for just that
week
, the people there were free.

An hour later we let them go, telling them not to go into any more abandoned buildings. When Sergeant Krueger handed them the keys to their car the girl broke down sobbing. One of the men held her. The other man, who had at one point told us he had lived in Buffalo, broke into a wide grin. He looked like he was going to start jumping up and down. All three of them were still shaking like leaves. As they helped the girl into the front seat, the English speaker started rambling to Croom and me excitedly. He thanked us over and over, letting us know how appreciative of us he was, and how he would never loot anything ever again.

In two wars I'd seen plenty of people who thought they were going to die. But it was always something abstract. These people, however, had been convinced that they were going to be shot with their hands tied behind their backs in the next few minutes. Witnessing their emotional roller coaster for an hour actually made my stomach turn. This was too much—too much power and too much reality. I'd been in two wars, literally joking my way through combat both times, without ever firing a shot. Even when I had known that my chances of dying were
raised, there had still been room for humor of that special, macabre sort. But now it wasn't so funny anymore. Everything over the past year and a half had been at such a
distance
. Now it was so close. Now I could see the expressions of fear and hear the cracking voices of those subject to my authority—those civilians caught in the midst of combat.
They had been so scared
.

This wasn't what I'd been trained for. I didn't want this. It confused me.
Where was the
real
enemy?

For the first time I wanted to lay down my weapon and go home for a reason other than fear. What was I doing ten thousand miles from home, scaring a woman and two men out of their minds—to the point that they thought they were going to die? It was
their
country and
I
was the stranger. They had had absolutely nothing to do with yellow cake from Africa, chemical weapons, or 9/11, and yet, here we were pushing them around, exerting our power over them. This wasn't what I was there for.

On the way back to the refinery I couldn't get the image of that beleaguered horse in the Shah-e-Kot Valley out of my head. Like the looters, it too had been unwittingly caught up in events.

For several days I watch the animal as mortars and bombs continue to fall. It is an innocent horse trapped in the crossfire of humans working around the clock to slaughter each other. At times the horse seems placid, content to wait us out. Sometimes I think it is actually unaware of what is happening around it. But then, inevitably, a mortar round lands too close—either by accident or because a sadistic spotter calls it in—and the horse gives itself away by running and bucking and shaking its head wildly. Watching through
binoculars it looks as if the animal is being driven insane by the sounds and concussions
.

And then, after a while, it settles down, probably thinking to itself that this can't last forever
.

Seeing a living thing standing alone in the Valley was strange. It was so out of place there as explosives rained down and snipers' bullets zipped back and forth. It didn't seem fair. At night, I would listen to the Spectre gunship descend on the area and unleash its wrath. In the morning, I would always expect to see the carcass of what had been a lonely, frightened, and abandoned horse. Instead, I would see it standing on the valley floor, nose to the ground, looking for something to eat on the thawing soil. Just trying to live.

As the sun started sinking, we started winding down. I had my platoon consolidate with the rest of the battalion on the grounds of the refinery. There was an air of euphoria around the place. The thirteen-year-old conflict between the United States and Iraq seemed to be over.

Someone from Alpha Company had cracked open a fire hydrant. I hadn't seen running water in nearly a month and it reminded me that I hadn't really bathed in that time either.

After my first shower in the fire hydrant, I went and sat down on a curb, soaking up the day's last rays and drying out. I heard yelling and looked up, reflexively reaching for my M4. I saw three freshly showered guys from Alpha Company wearing not a stitch of clothing between them, chasing and tormenting each other with their wet, twisted brown t-shirts. They were trying to smack each other on the ass. I thought maybe this meant we were near the end.

* * *

Dusk was setting in an hour later and I was standing outside my humvee eating a granola bar when the evening call to prayer commenced over a loudspeaker. The sounds of the muezzin were lilting, unlike the scratchy chanting I'd had to endure in Pakistan. The singing mixed with the sound of rustling leaves in a tree that towered over the refinery grounds. Had circumstances been different, the evening breeze and the sound of the prayers could have put me to sleep. Instead, I just stood there taking it in. Beyond the walls of the refinery I could see the beige dome of a small mosque from which I assumed the call was emanating. It sounded so peaceful—the sounds of gunfire having been replaced by calls to pray.

Then I noticed the smoke on the horizon behind the mosque. Two distinct plumes—probably oil fires, were still burning in the distance. The contrast was strikingly ominous. As I listened to the music and watched the black smoke waft over the city, I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach—as if we'd broken something and didn't yet realize it. The call to prayer seemed a sign of normalcy—and of tranquility. But standing there snacking on my granola bar and looking at the evening sky, I began to feel uneasy—as if the smoke were somehow casting a pall on our success. On the surface, everything seemed great. The crackle of gunfire had diminished, along with the periodic explosions. But there was something in the way the oily smoke drifted silently beyond the mosque. It was almost an instinct, I guess—an instinct that told me we had been very naïve in coming to this place.

The war melted away. There was no announcement, no Army-wide proclamation; there was just being shot at one day, and
the next day things were just
different
. Traffic began picking up. Shops started reopening and people began venturing out from their homes without the intention of pillaging.

I spent most of my second day in Baghdad tracking down the unexploded ordnance deposited by air force and navy aircraft—along with that left by the retreating Iraqi Army.

That day was like a big Easter egg hunt. We didn't know it at the time, but we were actually competing with future insurgents to see who could collect the most Easter eggs by dark. Throughout the afternoon we found unexploded bombs, artillery pieces, caches of RPGs, and piles of anti-aircraft ammunition. Most of it we couldn't transport in our humvees, so we just copied down the GPS coordinate for the piece in question and marked it on a map. Then we left, never to see it again.

Late that afternoon, I was told by Captain B. of a reported “debris field” adjacent to the Daura Expressway. He told me to go and occupy the field with my platoon until the explosive ordnance disposal guys showed up. Basically, just to go there, hang out, and keep the natives away from anything that looked dangerous.

To deal with the Iraqis, I brought along a female linguist who had been sent to us by Brigade. I was looking forward to having someone relieve the stress that comes with communicating through hand signals and facial expressions.

We arrived at the so-called debris field just as the sun was beginning to set. It was an open area of short grass and hard-packed dirt. The field was a square about three hundred yards on each side. Apartments bordered it on two sides. Initially I noticed two soccer goals on the field, along with groups of Iraqis going to and from the apartments.
Then, as my eyes adjusted to seeking out weaponry, I began to see it.

The field was covered with ammunition in varying conditions. I could see two shattered artillery pieces nearby. It only took me a second to figure out that the Iraqi Army had emplaced a battery of anti-aircraft artillery pieces on the neighborhood soccer field. I could see that it had all been pulverized. The ground was a patchwork of littered ammunition that had been blown sky high during the attack.

We were walking through a garden in which highly explosive weeds grew. As I moved through the field, I noticed a piece of unexploded ordnance off to my left. It was big, yellow, and dented. It wasn't shaped like a regular bomb in that it was more squarish rather than long. Stepping carefully, I thought of the words “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” It had been dropped with the intent of destroying an expansive area. Now it just sat there.

Within a minute of our stopping vehicles, two hundred people were swarming the platoon. Every kid in the neighborhood wanted to see the Americans up close. I hurried to find the linguist, hoping that she could say something that would stem the rising tide of potential shrapnel recipients. I could just see a kid stepping on a leftover cluster bomblet next to me, sending us all to hell.

An older kid in a striped shirt came up to me and asked in broken English if I spoke French. When I said I didn't, he managed to make clear that he had someone he wanted me to meet. He left for a second and then brought back another guy, this one with his left arm in a sling.

The French speaker then managed to get across that the injured boy had been caught in the American bombing of this
area several days earlier. He said he'd been hit with shrapnel. As he said it, he reached toward the other boy and pulled down his shirt, revealing a row of stitches and dried blood on his chest.

He paused, looking at me. Then he pointed to an apartment building and said, “Two children . . . from there . . . killed in same attack.” He looked me in the eye. “You should not kill children.”

I didn't know what to say. Sorry? Does that cut it? I was skeptical but I decided to give it a try. “Sorry.”

The kid must have sensed the awkwardness for me because he suddenly declared, “George Boosh, good.” Then he continued “But you will understand,” he said, his eyes again meeting mine, “this is very hard for us.”

I had to say something then, so I just said, “I know.”

At the time that was more or less a lie, since I didn't know. I couldn't have known. Americans cannot comprehend what the Iraqi people have been through for the last five, fifteen, or thirty-five years.

Take an average Iraqi family in Baghdad for instance. You live for twenty years under the reign of Saddam Hussein. During that time daily life is okay. You get an excellent education at Baghdad University, the electricity is always on, and there's plenty of food. But you're cut off from the world—and your city is ruled by the secret police. You can't say anything against the government lest you risk having your family tortured and killed. Even if you do support the government, there's nothing to say you couldn't run into Uday or Qusay Hussein one night at a restaurant—and that Uday couldn't take a liking to your fifteen-year-old daughter. You lead an oppressive existence, but for the most part, it's bearable
.