Weapons of Mass Destruction (16 page)

Around 0400 hours a commotion next door roused the platoon. They took turns peering out of bedroom windows, trying to catch a glimpse of a bedraggled group of Iraqi National Guardsmen in an adjacent compound. Rumor had it they’d been flown in from Kurdistan to make a cameo appearance at the mosque attack. Everyone knew this was highly unlikely, but it made for a good story. Until recently, most of the INGs in Anbar Province hailed from CAP India, a Combined Action Platoon trained by veteran US Army and Marine Corps officers. They were virtually all Shiites whose desire to avenge themselves on Ba’athist Sunnis outweighed every other consideration, including death threats. Then the insurgency devised an even more compelling deterrent. They claimed the coalition was pitting Shiites against Sunnis to facilitate foreign domination of the region. Sectarian squabbles were momentarily eclipsed by a new species of Iraqi nationalism, united against the United States.

Kurdish freedom fighters hated both factions. Near genocide convinced them that sectarian problems continued to demand sectarian solutions. If Shiites and Sunnis decided to resist American intervention, Kurds would embrace it. Their enemy’s enemy was their friend. Centcom was perfectly willing to adopt Middle Eastern mottos and motivations when they came in handy. Shiite Guardsmen were defecting, and the coalition had to take what it could get. Kurds stepped in to replace them.

This particular unit looked more like whipped Shiites than Kurdish freedom fighters. Uniforms were mismatched. Their weapons wouldn’t have passed even a cursory inspection. They had the haunted expressions of traitors, not mercenaries, tricked into pitting themselves against their own regional interests. At the crack of dawn, they rallied for morning prayers. What they may have lacked in military discipline they made up for in spiritual conviction.

Inside the mosque, insurgents prostrated themselves to the same God, enemy camps united in spirit to Allah. Politics were a Western invention, a mere blemish on a region whose deep structure was profoundly religious. Not to worry. Their prayers were part of Washington’s strategic plan. INGs were really only there to justify, not carry out, the mosque attack. The more devout they were, the better. As long as they showed up for photo ops, no one could claim American infidels were wantonly destroying sacred property. Headlines and captions would encapsulate the apparent truth.

“Insurgents Attack Coalition Forces in Fallujah.”

“Muslim INGs Liberate Occupied Mosques.”

The offensive was scheduled to begin at dawn, but Radetzky was still brooding at the kitchen table at 0630 hours. Sinclair must have finally managed to doze off. There seemed to be no other way to account for the unmistakable sound of an airstrike, which he assumed was part of a recurring nightmare that had plagued him since the Battle of Baghdad. Rules of engagement forbade air attacks on mosques, if only to thwart the insurgency’s most effective recruiting tool. Nothing inspired jihad like the specter of burning Qurans. It turns out Sinclair wasn’t dreaming. The rule had been waived in light of what the CIA called incontrovertible evidence of the mosque’s strategic violation of Appendix D, No. 3-7. As far as McCarthy was concerned, they could call it whatever they liked as long as it authorized them to kick ass. Judging from the whining pitch and trajectory of laser-guided missiles, F-16 Vipers were targeting the mosque. The strike only lasted a couple of minutes, which was typical of aerial attacks. It didn’t take long to do the job using 500-pound explosives.

“No wonder they didn’t bother backing up the offensive,” Sinclair said.

“Even cockroaches can’t survive bombs that big,” McCarthy said.

“This is East Manhattan, remember?” Wolf said. “If these roaches are anything like their cousins back home, nothing can kill them. Not even nukes.”

They waited almost an hour before going in to mop up. The platoon was growing accustomed to inexplicable delays. The same couldn’t be said for the gang of CNN reporters that suddenly showed up, eager to start documenting evidence to justify the strike. Whenever a holy site was targeted, reinforcements were sent in for the sake of media damage control. Nothing was more damning than Al Jazeera’s coverage of mosque attacks. There was never any mention of grenades dropping like manna from minarets. Or weapons caches concealed behind qiblah walls. They featured pictures of domes with what looked like gaping holes ripped open by what was characterized as indiscriminate bombing. The extent of the damage was actually miniscule in proportion to the scale of the threat. Laser-guided bombs guaranteed an unprecedented level of precision. Under the rules of engagement of virtually any other war, the buildings would have been leveled.

Johnson was convinced imams hired their own version of embedded reporters, providing front row seats to anyone willing to conceal evidence of military operations in their mosques. Hospitals did the same thing, giving Al Jazeera photographers access to emergency rooms. Or so they said. The footage could have been bogus for all anyone knew, dating from Saddam’s genocides or the war with Iran. Heart-wrenching photographs of wounded children and stricken parents. Burn victims. Amputees. American reporters were too intimidated to follow up on these reports. More than one had already been kidnapped, even killed. They were only safe when embedded with the military.

Radical Arab networks funded out of Saudi Arabia and Qatar established what amounted to a global media monopoly. Coalition news outlets could either screen their footage or none at all. Washington decried Al Jazeera’s smear campaigns. But the Iraqi provisional government refused to shut down its television studio in Baghdad. More embedded reporters showed up. Axis of Evil rhetoric was ratcheted up a notch. Tit for tat. Johnson seemed genuinely upset that both sides were more concerned with hype than documentation. He wasn’t naive enough to think that absolute objectivity was possible, but you didn’t have to spin news like a disc jockey. The guys from CNN were practically frothing at the mouth, they were so excited at the prospect of carnage. Vietnam had cured him of what he called ambulance-chasing journalism.

“They act like war is a blood sport,” Johnson said.

“It is,” McCarthy said.

“It’s a blood ritual,” Sinclair said.

“Same difference.”

“Hardly,” Johnson said. “One of them plays to an audience.”

“So much the better,” McCarthy said. “Guess what happens when the public isn’t rooting for the home team? You were in Nam. You know goddamn good and well what happens.”

“This isn’t Nam.”

“Not yet anyway.”

Sinclair’s respect for Johnson grew with every passing day of the offensive. No doubt his military training bolstered his professional ethics. He was there to report what was really happening, not some trumped-up version of what this or that government wanted people to believe. Sinclair thought all embedded reporters should be veterans of the armed forces, preferably US Marines. Never mind the fact that even marines had dirty little secrets. Or not so little, as the case may be. Pictures of civilian casualties still lurked in Johnson’s camera, destined never to see the light of day. He wondered if what they were about to witness in the mosque would change his mind about publishing them. The free press commitment to all the news that’s fit to print implied that something somewhere was off-limits. Johnson wanted to believe that fairness rather than censorship was the determining factor. Under the circumstances, the likelihood of maintaining his ethical integrity was roughly equivalent to one of McCarthy’s milder invectives. When pigs fly.

By the time they gained access to the mosque, there was nothing left to photograph. Unidentified muckety-mucks, probably Sunni clerics, were pulling strings behind the scenes. All the weapons, all the wounded, all the dead had vanished. CNN reporters had to content themselves with shots of Iraqi National Guardsmen, rifles at the ready, fending off the bloodstained rubble. The dome held up to the bombardment, but the minaret had fallen and crashed into a public square, where its mosaic shattered like a broken mirror, still glimmering in shards. Scouring the premises for nonexistent weapons caches, Sinclair and Logan discovered a gate in back that hadn’t been visible from their surveillance perch.

“They must have evacuated civilians through here,” Sinclair said. “Before the strike.”

“I’m sure they did,” Logan said.

Times like this, Sinclair and Logan were relieved to be fighting side-by-side. Articulating what they would have done to avoid collateral damage spared them from imagining what might not have been done in the heat of battle. Sinclair was as devoutly patriotic as Logan was evangelical, an increasingly common coalition that distinguished the Iraq War from previous conflicts. The assumption was that ideological purity would trickle down into actual op plans. Distinguishing between civilians and enemy combatants was difficult, but not impossible. It’s what the American military did and terrorists didn’t do. It’s why God was on our side, not theirs.

The mosque had been a symbolic as well as military stronghold. When afternoon prayer time rolled around again, imams would no longer broadcast divinely authorized resistance, at least not in this neighborhood. Insurgents were on their own now, engaged one-on-one with coalition forces, not infidels. Sinclair was alternately relieved and disturbed. He certainly wouldn’t miss hearing clerical calls to arms, reverberating from Pakistan to Turkey in the universal language of jihad. But destroying mosques was one hell of a way to shut them up.

The platoon dispersed and fanned back out across the advancing skirmish line. Banking on the probability that the air strike had flushed resistance out of a wide radius, they moved quickly to make up lost time. Sinclair’s sniper team had to find new perches almost every half hour, just to keep up. Their third nest was a real beauty, commanding a view of the entire city. Tanks and Strykers were lined up on Highway 10, poised and ready for the second half of the offensive. Battalion 1/5 was advancing from the northern front, right on schedule. To the west, smoke billowed from the Jolan Cemetery. Apparently the mosque wasn’t the only aerial target, rules of engagement notwithstanding. Battalion 2/1 must have summoned the Vipers before they even had time to touch down for refueling.

Sinclair wrenched his attention away from the awesome sight of F-16s pounding the cemetery. Without buildings to absorb the initial impact, guided missiles cratered the killing fields. The temptation to zoom in was almost overwhelming, but the squads below were relying on his vigilance. He had to content himself with imagining the devastation. Bodies in various stages of decay blown from their final resting places, lying side by side with fresh casualties. Wasted generations of a city constantly under siege. There would be hell to pay for bombing a graveyard. Insurgents were playing Russian roulette with public sentiment. Even when they lost battles, they forced American troops to attack targets that threatened to compromise their moral integrity. Mosques. Cemeteries. Home after home after home.

Radetzky’s squad emerged from a four-story apartment complex. Wolf’s team was spending an inordinate amount of time clearing a single-family house. Sinclair wanted to radio Wolf, to find out what was going on. But Radetzky forbade nonessential chatter in his platoon. Something fluttered in Sinclair’s peripheral vision. Without moving his sights he scanned across a courtyard with the naked eye. A white flag poked through the back door of a neighboring compound. Then a head appeared. Sinclair swung his rifle around. A man emerged and walked tentatively onto a patio. Sinclair sighted him and dialed the distance into his scope. He was accompanied by three other men, all dressed in dishdashas. The leader waved the flag back and forth. The rest followed in single file, heads down with hands raised over their heads.

“Alert,” Sinclair said into his headset. “Insurgents signaling surrender. Just south of Wolf’s location.”

“How many?” barked Radetzky.

“Four.”

White flags were a notoriously dangerous weapon, especially in Iraq. Not unlike suicide bombers, sectarian militias were trained to use the act of surrendering as a decoy. Why save your ass when getting it blown off was a ticket to heaven? Radetzky’s first priority was to defend his men against potential attacks waiting in the wings. His squad was at risk, midway between two compounds with nothing but a garden shed for cover. He scanned the immediate vicinity, searching for more viable defensive positions. Their only real option was the building they had just vacated. Within seconds, several members of his squad regained access to windows overlooking the patio. Their gun barrels kept emerging and withdrawing, trying to get a bead on the clowns with the white flag. Sinclair could see that their angle was hopeless.

“Don’t worry,” Sinclair said. “I’ve got them.”

“Where’s the terp?” Radetzky asked.

The question surprised Sinclair. As far as he was concerned, interpreters were a waste of time. Body language was far more reliable than Arabic, which tended to conceal more than it revealed. Sinclair had learned to trust his instincts. Something about the leader’s demeanor didn’t ring true, like he was spoiling for a fight rather than trying to avoid one. Whether Radetzky agreed with this assessment of the immediate threat was irrelevant. His job as an officer was to keep one eye on his men, the other on the objectives of the overall mission. Centcom insisted on gathering intelligence even in accelerated combat mode. Interrogating prisoners of war could yield the kind of information they needed to pinpoint enemy cells. The trick was distinguishing between ringleaders and lackeys who had nothing to hide.

The interpreter was usually readily available. Very few platoons had the grit and discipline necessary to produce prisoners. It was much safer and expeditious to produce corpses. Their latest interpreter, Sajad, had been embedded in the company for almost three months, an unprecedented length of time in Anbar Province. Terps usually only hired themselves out as a last resort. The war had crippled local economies, and their families risked starving to death if they didn’t join forces with Americans. Sooner or later, death threats altered the calculus of survival. Their families risked being murdered in their beds if they continued to collaborate with infidel invaders. Choose your poison.