The War I Always Wanted (19 page)

We linked up with the rest of the group a few blocks away and wasted no time in moving back to the pool hall. This time we weren't so casual about it. Croom and Whipple's section sped down the busy thoroughfare and quickly blocked traffic on either side of the pool hall by parking sideways in the middle of the street. They dismounted immediately and took up positions behind their trucks. Iraqis started hustling to get out of the way, taking this as the cue for an impending shootout. My truck followed Estrada's section and we screeched to a halt right outside the front door. Textbook.

Estrada leapt out of his truck and headed for the door. Following right behind his guys, I could see out of the side of my eye as Ammar came running toward us. He was wearing
blue jeans and a striped, short-sleeve, collared shirt. Coming from Croom's vehicle, he was covering the distance as fast as his hefty legs would carry him. As I moved, I noticed that not all the civilians had cleared the street, and that some were still standing and watching the event take place.

The light was dim inside the pool hall. For some odd reason, the patrons didn't react. They just stopped playing, straightened up, and looked at us. They weren't sure yet whether or not they were in trouble. Neither was I. Estrada went with Ammar to the rear of the building first, while I stayed near the entrance. Through the awkward silence that followed, I could hear Ammar asking in Arabic about the nephew. An Iraqi standing close by just stared at me. I was covered in sweat from head to toe standing there holding a gun. From behind my Wiley-X sunglasses, I looked down and saw that he had been about to break the rack. Now he just stood there, pool cue in hand and unsure of what to do now. I had the urge to ask him, “So . . . do you like, come here often?”

In less than a minute we were back out front, Ammar and Estrada having escorted the owner from his office in the back. I could tell by the look on Ammar's face that something was wrong. As we walked the guy over to the captain for questioning, I asked Ammar, “What's up man? Dry hole?”

He said, “I don't know yet. Something funny.”

Always something funny. I stood at the entrance of an alley watching the conversation. By the shrugs and flailing arms of the pool hall owner, and the slumping shoulders, eye rolls, and neck cranes of the captain, I could clearly see that this raid, like most others we'd done, was about nothing.

While we were waiting for things to get sorted out, I stood next to Phil on the sidewalk, beneath the overhang of a shop. Guys from both of our platoons were milling about, keeping the growing crowd of Iraqi kids at bay. I noticed that right next to us, the kids kept getting closer and closer—and that it was starting to agitate one of Phil's younger sergeants. They were pushing in and giggling, asking the standard, “What ees your name, meester?”

I was only halfheartedly keeping an eye on the kids when I heard Phil's sergeant suddenly get gruff with them. “Get the fuck back!” he bellowed. “I said get the fuck back!” I turned to look at him. I was trying to figure out why he was getting upset, when he suddenly reached out and shoved the Iraqi closest to him, knocking the boy to the ground. The boy landed on his ass with an “Ummph.” The rest of the kids stopped talking, looked at the sergeant, and then moved quickly to help up their friend. They'd stopped giggling.

For the first time in two wars, I completely lost my mind. I stepped between the sergeant and the boy, getting right in the sergeant's face. I noticed he was an inch or two taller than me. “What the fuck are you . . . goddamn! . . . fucking stupid! . . . Jesus Christ! . . . create fucking terrorists! . . . turn this whole goddamn city against us with that kind of shit! . . . fucking bully! . . . gonna create more problems than you could ever deal with! . . . making terrorists! . . . don't ever let me see that kind of shit . . . god
damn
!

Everyone within a twenty-five-foot radius had gone silent in the afternoon sun. I couldn't tell who looked more surprised—the sergeant, the Iraqi kids, or Phil. They all just stood there, staring at me, waiting to see what I would do next.

I shook my head, turned my back, and walked off a few feet. Our collective frustration was starting to build.

When Ammar finally came back to me he explained that the tipster was a business rival who thought he could get the other guy's pool hall shut down by associating it with Saddam.

I thought about that and realized that the guy's plan had actually almost worked. That was how raids went in Baghdad—one guy would feed bad information to the Americans so that we would mess with a guy that had messed with him.

The next night Croom suggested we go have dinner with Ammar's family at their house in Daura. He was a sucker for home cooking. At first I was hesitant, but then considered that we deserved it after another wasted raid that afternoon. An old guy had come to us at a traffic control point and given Ammar and Croom a tip. This time it was a weapons cache belonging to one of Saddam's men, who also happened to be the guy's neighbor.

When we pulled “Saddam's man” and his terrified family from their home and out into their front yard, the women and children were sobbing uncontrollably in standard raid fashion. The guy didn't know what the fuck was going on. Then something dawned on him and he asked Ammar if this had anything to do with his neighbor.

My shoulders had slumped, defeated.

This time it was about a feud over a staircase. “Saddam's man” had built a staircase that went up to his roof along the side of his house. The problem was, that on the staircase, you could see down onto the next-door property. He told us that, aside from being paranoid and senile, the old guy had become quite upset recently and accused him of spying on the man's wife and
daughters. I looked over at the guy's huddled, crying family. I was sure that they expected we were about to cart their husband and father off to Abu Ghraib over a dispute with their neighbor.

I took one look at Croom and could see sweat running in rivulets down his bald head—probably from the combination of embarrassment and frustration. I tapped him on the arm. “Come on, man. Let's get the fuck outta here. We're wasting our time.”

Four words:
Weapons of Mass Destruction
. Five more words:
What a bunch of shit
.

Between the fall of Saddam and everything eventually devolving into chaos, you could eat dinner inside Iraqi houses without having to worry about the family being attacked for aiding the enemy. All you had to do was put one or two guys out front with the humvees for security.

Ammar's house was an oasis of sort-of-normal life in the midst of a sort-of-war. He lived in a two-story house with his mother, father, brother, sister, and their giant brown dog, not far from the highway. With his father, he'd watched from the front yard while the 3rd Infantry Division had fought its way into the city.

Watching his mother prepare the food in the kitchen while at the same time ordering everyone around, I realized that I'd never been inside an Iraqi's house when I wasn't turning over cushions or opening closets looking for guns and RPGs. It was sitting there at the kitchen table, trying to act like a human for the first time in a while, that I noticed something that made the war seem ridiculous.

On the refrigerator, Ammar's family had magnets. Some of them held photos in place. Two of them affixed a drawing
done by a child. It looked like the refrigerator I'd grown up with at my parents' house. I wondered what we were doing fighting people with magnets on their refrigerators.

When we weren't going on wild goose chases or eating chicken and couscous at Ammar's house, we were either guarding something or providing some form of civil assistance. During that time Croom and Ammar had become friends, and Ammar was working almost exclusively with our platoon. But the workload became too much and we needed some more Iraqi help.

I met the new guy late one afternoon at the Daura police station. Mohamed was a freshly minted civil engineer from the University of Baghdad. He looked nearly Western in his blue jeans, white t-shirt, goatee, sideburns, and wire-rimmed glasses. He'd heard that the Americans were hiring translators.

Within a couple of hours of meeting him, we managed to cover politics, religion, war, foreign relations, and cooking. Like so many young Iraqis, he was overly eager to tell his story to someone from the West—to inform the free world that he and the rest of his peers were, for the most part, not chemical weapon-toting holy warriors.

We talked about the merits of the invasion. Mohamed said that it had been a good idea. Whenever he spoke of Saddam or his henchmen, his face crinkled like he wanted to puke. But Mohamed was also concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He wanted to know why the Americans always seemed to side with the Israelis.

About that time a guy came into the police station looking for us. Somebody in the neighborhood behind the station had
found a UXO and they wanted help. I tried to think of a way out of dealing with it—but I couldn't come up with anything.

“Hey Mohamed,” I said. “You want to go check this out with me? It could be interesting.”

“Yes, man, of course!” He seemed flattered that I'd asked for his help. I went outside and got Sergeant Croom. In turn, he wrangled two of our guys to bring along. The informant had said something to Mohamed and pointed us in the general direction of some houses. Together, the five of us walked outside to the back of the police station and set out across a small open field.

We stuck to a heavily trodden dirt trail, so as to avoid mistakenly finding any UXOs of our own. Not halfway across the field I saw a man standing near a house, under the shade of a stand of trees. He was waving us over.

We approached cautiously. On the ground at his feet, the Iraqi pointed to something small and yellow. It looked like it was made out of plastic.

“Mohamed, tell him to get away from it. And ask him where it came from.” I had a bad habit of talking to my translator instead of talking directly to the person.

There was an exchange in Arabic. Then Mohamed turned to me. “He says an airplane dropped it. He doesn't know what it is.”

I noticed the guy inching closer to it. It was making me uncomfortable. The thing looked to me the like it might have been part of a plastic toy or something, but I wasn't taking any chances. “Mohamed, I said tell him get back from it.” I was getting agitated and the guy was now bending over it.

Croom took a step back. “Hey man,” he said. “Tell that motherfucker to back up!”

Mohamed said something in Arabic to the guy. Then the guy smiled at us revealing a mangled set of teeth. But he didn't move.

“Hey Mohamed, what's he doing?”

Mohamed said something in Arabic again.

Suddenly the guy reached down and picked the object up.

“Hey, what the fuck! Drop that motherfucker!” I screamed, raising my weapon. I started moving backward. Mohamed started shouting at the guy and the guy started talking back to him, all the while smiling and shaking the yellow object. I noticed Croom scooting near a tree, trying to get behind it. In my mind I quickly started trying to work out the combat calculus that would tell me how to deal with this.

Then Croom called out: “Hey . . . hey, Mohamed . . . tell . . . tell that motherfucker that shit's not funny, man!” His voice was that of grown man about piss his pants.

“Mohamed,” I yelled, “I'm gonna shoot this motherfucker if he doesn't drop that thing
right now
! Mohamed, do something!” I was nearly beside myself. Rather than continuing to slowly back up, I started backpedaling at a quicker pace, still pointing my weapon at the guy. The two privates with us were already way behind me. Croom stayed behind the tree, now too afraid to move out into the open.

Everybody was yelling at the same time. I didn't want to have to shoot this guy over a misunderstanding, but dying for this guy's stupidity was not an option either. This was the same thing that had happened to Charlie Company and the Iraqi who had died right in front of me. Given the choice, I would
shoot first and ask questions later. This was not how I was going to die.

Mohamed hadn't backed up all that far. He continued to bicker with the man. Suddenly I saw Mohamed raise his arms. He was standing in the middle of a potential crossfire. In front of him was a smiling man with a possible explosive. Behind him were four Americans ready to waste that man. Arms held high, he said, “Wait, wait, Friedman . . . I think this guy is fucking with you. Nobody shoot.”

From a hundred feet away I called out in response. “Why? What'd he tell you?” I could see Croom hunkered down, still behind the tree.

“I think he is fucking with us, man. I don't think it's anything. There's something wrong with this guy,” Mohamed explained, his arms still raised.

“No shit there's something wrong with this guy,” Croom chimed in from his position behind the tree.

“Friedman, really, I think we should leave. This guy is crazy or something,” Mohamed yelled to me over the distance.

Seemingly out of the blast range, I yelled back, “Fine. Great.” I looked at Croom and gave him the head nod. He took one more look at the guy before stepping gingerly from behind the tree and moving quickly toward the open field with his weapon raised.

As we trotted back to the police station, I looked back and saw the guy with the plastic toy or whatever it was still smiling at us.

It left me with an eerie feeling.

Before I left the station that day, I asked Mohamed if he'd like to work for us permanently. I told him the pay was five dollars
a day. After the way he'd handled everything, I felt like I could trust him.

He readily accepted.

The civil assistance for which we'd hired Mohamed bordered on ridiculous, considering that we had originally been hired to bring down Saddam's government and to destroy his Army. We administered unruly gas stations with thousands of frustrated customers. We helped clean up garbage together. We made sure cooking gas got passed out in the mornings. We set up traffic control points and we guarded water towers. Throughout it all, Ammar was jolly and relaxed. Mohamed on the other hand, started wearing a black knit cap and sunglasses, though I wasn't sure why.