Fixing Hell (17 page)
I eventually asked myself why a supervisor would not want to come and work with their subordinates or provide the necessary oversight. There were really only two or three answers I could come up with. Perhaps fear, desperation, and hopelessness hung over the sand of Abu Ghraib like an early morning fog on a fall day. There was no respite from fear for the troops at this place. Most of us, when we experienced fear, could find a safe haven, a sanctuary—a psychological safe place. The fear doesn’t just go on and on and on. Abu Ghraib lacked the usual things most American boys and girls grew to expect and experience in their lives back home—physical and emotional safety. I could see it in their eyes. As a child my mother’s calm voice soothed me. “Son, it’s gonna be okay. You’ll feel better in the morning,” she would say. No one here had their mothers to reassure them, but soldiers need the same thing from their commanders, the adult, military equivalent of hearing that someone is in control and watching over them and making sure everything will be fine. These soldiers lacked the comfort of their leaders telling them it would be okay. Rather, the leaders would commonly express or show their sense of hopelessness and that things would get worse.
Toward the end of July it became clear to me that this was the answer. Many of the leaders at Abu Ghraib simply did not want to be there. They were angry and depressed, and not hiding it well. It was like a festering cancer. So my goal was to lead by example and sleep only perhaps three or four hours and spend the rest of my time at the intel center. I wanted those soldiers to see a colonel walking around all the time, to see me there at all times of the day and night, with a good word for them and a good attitude. This was the second of the eleven steps I had formulated for fixing this place—be an active, positive influence at all times.
I thought that leading by example would be what the doctor ordered. It worked. Over time it became the norm to see other officers and senior enlisted soldiers walking the halls, being there for the junior soldiers and even having a little fun. It made a difference for those soldiers.
I’m in a Zoo
Early August 2004
T
he 115th Field Hospital out of Fort Polk, Louisiana, was deployed to Abu Ghraib in mid to late July 2004. With it came surgeons, family practice specialists, a preventive medicine team, a full lab, and a sorely needed mental health team. I convinced the leadership that the mission required half of the mental health team to remain in Abu Ghraib and the other half to deploy south to the other prison, Camp Bucca, the newest detention center in southern Iraq. An inpatient psychiatric facility was built at Abu Ghraib for the detainees, coupled with outpatient services for the Army staff and prisoners.
We ended up with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, psych techs, and psych nurses to run the mental health services for the detainees as well as the soldiers. Likewise, we also got a psychiatrist, a social worker, psych nurses, and psych techs to staff a mental health clinic at Camp Bucca. We built a twelve- to sixteen-bed psych hospital at Abu Ghraib for the detainees and had more advanced mental health services for the Iraqis than anywhere else in the country. The standard procedure in Iraq—among the Iraqis themselves, not American soldiers—was to either beat a mentally ill patient, torture him, tie him up, or just drug the shit out of the guy so he couldn’t cause any trouble. Finally, my staff and I had brought the mental health care standards of the American Correctional Health Services Association, the group that sets standards for health care in American prisons, to the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. Much of the good work in this area was done by a psychologist by the name of Captain Pat Bradleson, as well as the psychiatrist Major Martin Shorts.
Pat had trained under me at Walter Reed for a year. He stood about five foot seven and was a slender 160 pounds with dark hair. He wore gold wire-framed glasses that were as thick as a Coke bottle. Pat looked more like a nerdy store clerk than a rough-and-tough military officer. Perhaps this may be why some in the military shunned him—he just didn’t look the part. His appearance, together with his slow-moving and deliberate style, would often get in his way at Walter Reed. But somehow he found his stride at Abu Ghraib and came out of his shell. A combat zone can make a soldier better or make him worse, and Pat grew as an officer, soldier, and man at Abu Ghraib. He developed the outpatient unit from the ground up for both the detainees and the military staff. Pat and I had many hilarious conversations and consultations about the camp’s two most difficult patients. One was a psychotic, loudmouthed Moroccan Jew who had a penchant for telling the Arab prisoners what to do and how to do it, and on occasion he would remind them all that they were not God’s chosen people. Needless to say, he got his ass kicked on a weekly basis. Undaunted, while in the midst of his schizophrenic stupor, he was determined to convert all of the Muslim fundamentalists and help them see the error of their ways. He was not successful. Pat and I would scratch our heads on many occasions, wondering how we could get this guy out of the camp alive and in one piece. He had lost his passport, had been divorced by his Moroccan wife, was flat-out crazy, and was Jewish in a place where that never helped ease your day.
Pat became a master at managing complicated patients like these with all of the cultural, medical, and State Department issues woven into it. He was able to help this patient who had neither a passport nor a birth certificate get home. His other cross to bear was a patient by the name of “Thumpy.” Thumpy was a suicide bomber who changed his mind in midstream. We didn’t know exactly how he abandoned the idea, but in the process he blew off several fingers, which somehow led to the nickname Thumpy. He was a walking personality disorder, just a chronic pain in the ass. He liked cutting on himself to ease his stress and, like the Moroccan Jewish guy, loved to confront the hardened killers in the detainee population. Well, like the Moroccan, he would also get his ass kicked on a regular basis. Pat was able to establish a rapport with this guy as well, which kept him stabilized and safe.
Major Shorts, the psychiatrist, was a former artillery officer prior to going to medical school. You could tell by his appearance and bearing that he was a no-bullshit military officer. This was what the mission needed, and Major Shorts excelled at developing the inpatient psych unit. From the moment I saw him in the hallway of our barracks building I knew he would organize the mental health team. We were now able to offer our soldiers at Abu Ghraib the same level of outpatient mental health services they would receive back home. At the same time, we brought on board enough well-trained mental health staff that our mental health department at Abu Ghraib could provide detainees with nearly all of the services delivered at any prison in the United States. Finally, soldiers and detainees were both covered.
But with more medical services came more newbies who assumed they knew how everything should be done. In August we saw more of those “terrorism experts” who had never actually looked in the eyes of a terrorist, but regardless of that minor detail, their PhDs or MDs made them the authorities on the subject. These experts tried to dismiss the idea that mental illness could help explain the terrorists’ actions, arguing that there was in fact a low rate of mental illness in the terrorist population. Mind you, on a daily basis I would see “Abdul” or “Hassad” either talk to a turd in his cell or try to eat it. Then he would throw what was left of it in the face of the guard or make decorative pottery out of it—with a purpose, and with pride. We had built the inpatient psychiatric facility at Abu Ghraib over the objections of those experts who said there was little need for it, and then, in order to prove to the medical planners how sane they were, the schizophrenics at Abu Ghraib set the inpatient psych unit on fire in early August, the day after we opened it. The same experts who had tried to tell me that these detainees were perfectly sane now asked me why the psych patients had set the new unit on fire. I responded with just one line: The voices told them to do it.
By this time I was settled into the routine of Abu Ghraib and I felt like we had achieved a major goal by establishing the necessary mental health infrastructure. I had never stopped trying to understand how the abuse came to be, but in August I felt I had more time to focus on that question. I decided to start small and work my way up to the top as a process of trying to find what went wrong and how all of the many problems combined to create the debacle at Abu Ghraib. I was on the lookout for the many small indignities that can beat down any soldier in the field after a while, and they weren’t hard to find. After chow one afternoon, I headed for the port-a-potty. I stopped short when I saw that it was literally overflowing with crap. Before I could open the door to the potty the smell just about knocked me over. I gagged, shut the door, and went to the next one. It was worse! There’s nothing like the smell of an overflowing port-a-potty on a 130-degree day. I found the sergeant major in the headquarters building to report the problem to him.
Sergeant Major Clemens just looked up at me like it was the hundredth time he’d heard somebody say that. “Them boys ain’t been comin’ round that much,” he said in his southern drawl.
“Sergeant Major, what in the heck are you talking about, man?”
Sergeant Major Clemens took a deep breath and explained. “Sir, a few months ago, those Eastern European guys who had the contract on the shitter trucks . . . Well sir, a couple of them were kidnapped and got their heads chopped off with a machete. Since then, if we can’t provide them an armed escort they refuse to come on post with their big truck and clean out the shitters.”
“Well, that’s fine, but we still got to go to the bathroom,” I replied.
“No problem, Colonel,” he said with a grin. “I guess we’ll just have to do it the old-fashioned way and dig holes out back, fill it with kerosene. Yup, doin’ ya business and then setting it on fire. That’s the old-fashioned way, Colonel.”
I said, “Fine, whatever. Just fix it, Sergeant Major.” A couple days went by and I began to see the Eastern Europeans show up and we didn’t have to resort to digging holes and burning kerosene to go to the bathroom. But they still didn’t come often enough, and the port-a-potties were so foul that you avoided going until you just couldn’t stand it anymore.
Later, I was having coffee with a couple of infantry privates and we started grousing about the sad state of our toilets. One of them, Private Johnny Tolson from Arkansas, looked at me with a conspiratorial grin and leaned in a little closer. “Sir, you know, they got real shitters over by that got damn KBR building back there,” he said.
I said, “Soldier, that can’t be right. We don’t have any real toilets here.”
Private Tolson cracked a big smile and said, “Colonel, let me tell you a little secret. Once a month, we break in there just to sit on a real toilet. Sir, let’s go on a mission tonight. We’ll break into the KBR building and I’ll show you the stuff those bastards got.”
I declined, but at 3 a.m. Private Tolson and his buddies headed over to the KBR building for their “mission.” When I saw him the next day, he asked me what the hell KBR stood for anyway, and I explained that KBR was a spin-off company of Halliburton. It was a huge company that benefited from the billions of dollars in federal contracts we outsourced to rich Republican politicians and friends of the current administration. I asked Tolson if they had accomplished their mission in the night. He said, “Sir, white porcelain never looked so inviting.” Tolson and his buddies would break into the building for nature’s respite once or twice a month. Small pleasures in hell, I thought.
There were other examples of downright mismanagement or just incompetence. One day in early August, the post commander started yelling again at the 4 p.m. briefing meeting. He had discovered that the KBR contractor had ordered a new $75,000 fire truck for Abu Ghraib—without any fire hoses. The commander couldn’t believe the stupidity and the waste of taxpayer money. “What a dumbass . . .” he muttered, shaking his head. “Who in the fuck would order a damn fire truck without any shitting hoses?” he yelled at no one in particular. “I’m in a zoo.”
My true enlightenment didn’t come from those top-level briefings, however. The more time I spent with young soldiers and junior officers, the more the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Not only were these soldiers and marines abandoned by their leadership, but they also were not allowed to defend themselves from the enemy, which is a basic human right that every American is afforded in the Constitution. Not long after that meeting with the irate post commander, I decided to go up in the main guard tower and visit with Corporal Kellar, one of the guards who had been there for a while. He was a pint-sized, freckle-faced marine—about five foot six and only 150 pounds—but he more than made up for his small size with a deep passion for serving his country. We talked about changes over the previous six months, since the abuses of Abu Ghraib first started getting attention back home, and he pointed out that there had been both good and bad changes.
“I can get to sleep a little easier at night, sir,” he said. “I mean, at least I don’t feel like I’m gonna be shot in the head while waiting for a phone call from Baghdad headquarters.”
I wasn’t tracking with him. “Corporal Kellar, what in the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “Son, I’m fairly new here, and I don’t know how things were done six months ago.”
“Heck, Colonel, now we can get in the fight,” he explained. “A few months ago when I would see an Iraqi man put a mortar in the tube, getting ready to fire at us, we couldn’t defend ourselves. I had to call the ops shop back in Baghdad and get permission to engage. The whole time I was on the phone I was staring at that dude and hoping he wouldn’t fire before I got permission to engage him.”
I just shook my head, amazed at the stupidity that led to such a restriction.
“Now sir, anytime I see one of those bastards pull up in a white pup truck and take out a weapon, I can defend myself. Dying for my country, sir, I don’t mind that at all. Sir, it was just sitting on my ass and waiting to get permission, while I was gonna get blasted by a shithead, that’s what took me for a loop, sir.”