Fixing Hell (18 page)

“I guess I can understand that, Corporal,” I said. “Now, what do you mean by defending yourself? What do you do when you see some guy coming at you like that now?”

“I get to shoot one of those fuckers in the head,” Corporal Kellar said with a grin.

Then, without any pause or change in facial expression, he went on to talk about his wife and three-month-old son back in Tennessee and how he would go fishing with his son as soon as he got back home. Defending his position didn’t faze Corporal Kellar, and I saw a similar attitude with many other soldiers. These men and women were trained to fight the enemy, and one of the worst things you could do to them was to take them out of the fray, to make them stand idly by as threats loomed. A form of discipline at Abu Ghraib was to take a marine off guard tower duty if he was not properly performing his other duties. That punishment always produced quick results. All marines wanted to be in the fight.

As I climbed down from the tower, Corporal Kellar had a bright smile on his face. He yelled after me. “Hey, Colonel! Next time the shooting starts, come up here, sir, and you can see me shoot one of those fuckers in the head!”

A little disturbing, I thought, but if someone needs to be shot, I wanted men and women like Corporal Kellar up in that guard tower. I knew I could rest easy at night with Kellar up there, thinking about fishing with his son while he kept his eyes peeled for bad guys in pickups.

It was getting to be the end of the day and the sun was making a spectacular exit in the desert sky. I headed to the chow hall and sat down at a table with Major Quincy, the deputy director of the intel center, who seemed to be disliked by every person in the center. He lacked the social awareness to realize that everyone around him was either pissed at him or just saw him as “like a log in the middle of the road, in the way.” That’s how one of his subordinates had described him to me. Sitting down next to him, I instantly felt the same vibe that everyone had received from this guy. Major Quincy wore thick glasses, tried his best to speak as little as possible, and it seemed as though he shunned even the basic levels of human contact. I’m a friendly guy who could get just about anyone to talk to me if I tried, but this guy was sending off all kinds of signals that said “leave me the hell alone.”

Like Colonel Barksdale and his medical staff, Major Quincy was able to walk, talk, and put one foot in front of the other, but it was clear that he had emotionally disengaged from the staff and his mission at Abu Ghraib. It was a struggle for him to psychologically survive each day. I did my best to chat him up, and he begrudgingly responded to my efforts, probably only because I outranked him. After some pleasantries about the food and the heat and the usual bullshit, I moved into a more serious line of questioning.

“You’ve been here a good while, you must have seen how this place got the way it is.”

Major Quincy paused and stopped eating. I could tell he was trying to decide whether to brush off my question or tell me what he really thought. He finally went for the second option.

“Sir, I doubt if you have enough time in the day for me to describe what’s got me to where I am at in my head right now,” he said. Wow, he has some self-awareness about how messed up he is. That’s good.

“Major, I got nothing better to do,” I said. “Take your time.”

“Well, it’s like this. I was brought here to do a job without the proper training, we were never staffed for the mission, the chain of command was never clear, the entire intel company had only one vehicle, and our equipment sucked.”

He elaborated on some of those problems, venting about some issues that obviously had been gnawing at him a while. But it was when the subject of leadership arose that he really got pissed.

“Colonel, we have not had a commander or director for more than three months. How can you run any organization like that, sir?”

With the floodgates finally open, Major Quincy went on to describe a litany of serious problems he had witnessed in this hellhole. He began to describe the inappropriate sexual relations that were rampant at Abu Ghraib. He described a whorehouse that was run by some of the staff with the tacit consent of the leadership at that time.

“Heck, sir, one of the intel company commanders here got fired because he installed a wireless camera in the female soldiers’ shower. And at night him and some of the enlisted soldiers would watch videos of their fellow female soldiers taking showers that very same morning. I doubt that he was ever court-martialed. The only thing ever happened to him that I recall was that he was simply reassigned.”

Over the next few weeks, Major Quincy and I continued the conversation we started that first evening in the chow hall, often talking late into the night. We were talking one night and I felt like he had finally decided he could trust me, that he was letting his guard down more. I asked him to tell me what he thought was the psychological “marker” or line in the sand for him that he had crossed and that led to the debacle at Abu Ghraib. He talked about the military intelligence brigade commander, Colonel Paulsen, who also served as the post commander. The colonel had a meltdown after his driver got killed.

“Quincy, I wasn’t here then,” I said. “What on earth are you talking about?”

He described how the military intel commander’s young driver was killed in a mortar attack right in front of the colonel’s eyes. On that night, Colonel Paulsen, his driver, and some other young soldiers were in a tent. Paulsen was standing and talking to his driver when a huge mortar came in through the top of the tent and landed right behind his driver. The kid’s body was sliced up like it was fed through a tree shredder. “Sir, that fella was probably dead before he hit the ground,” Major Quincy said.

I could only shake my head at the thought.

“Colonel, sir . . . there’s more,” Quincy offered quietly.

“How could there be more to this awful story?”

“Sir, all the soldiers in that tent that night were either killed or torn apart with sharp metal fragments from the mortar, except Colonel Paulsen. He walked out of that tent without a scratch on him. You should have heard him describe how he just couldn’t figure that out, how those young men were torn completely apart and he didn’t even get a scratch. Colonel James, he was neither the same officer nor human being after that incident.”

Other soldiers described Colonel Paulsen as depressed after that incident, but no one knew if he was ever seen by a psychologist. But soldier after soldier described how their leader, Colonel Paulsen, psychologically disappeared after that day. As a result, as night fell upon the post, this senior leader disappeared physically as well as psychologically, and unfortunately, his trauma-induced withdrawal gave permission for all his subordinate officers to follow suit. The vacancy at the top made it possible for the sociopaths to run unchecked and prey upon others.

During our long talks, Major Quincy shared many things that had happened with other officers and enlisted soldiers he had come to know. Through these many conversations I was able to conceptually weave a web and connect the dots in my head as to how the despair and hopelessness and defenselessness described by Major Quincy led to what the renowned psychologist Dr. Al Bandura has described as “moral disengagement.” Simply stated, moral disengagement is what happens to human beings when they’re stretched beyond their emotional and psychological capacity. Their bodies, psyches, minds, and souls disengage from events around them and they become detached, in an almost dissociative state. Unchecked, a person will “reconstrue,” or use strained logic to justify their amoral behaviors. That’s exactly what we had seen already from those involved in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Some argued that “those prisoners had to be tortured so we could protect Americans.” Moreover, moral disengagement produces a tendency to diffuse responsibility and blame the victim. Thus what we saw at Abu Ghraib was a process whereby the prisoners were blamed for the torture and the disengaged mind-set prospered. It was now clear to me, more than ever, that the biscuit staff and I needed to be present “twenty-four seven” if we were to identify and prevent atrocities from happening ever again.

One night in the first half of August, as I headed out back of my barracks building to the port-a-potty, in the dark night I could hear the sound of a woman crying. Specialist Molly Hansen, from upstate New York, was stooped over behind a Humvee with her head down in her hands. She looked as though she was about thirteen years old but I was to learn that she was actually a nineteen-year-old former cheerleader. Molly had joined the Army in order to acquire the funds to go to college, as her family didn’t have the means. As I approached her and she caught sight of my rank, she stood to attention and tried to find her military bearing, issuing a feeble salute. Even in the dark Iraq night I could see the tears running down her face as she struggled to gather herself and find the military discipline she once knew, almost an eternity ago in boot camp. I placed my right arm around her shoulders and told her she could relax, that I just wanted to talk to her and see what was wrong.

She began to shake uncontrollably. I could feel that she was trying hard to contain an urge to break out in full-fledged hysterics.

“Colonel, please forgive me for crying like this, sir,” she said in a trembling voice.

“Easy, soldier,” I said. “Just catch your breath for a moment. Don’t try to talk. Let’s just walk so we can visit for a while.”

As we walked, she regained her composure and was able to start talking to me more calmly. She explained that she had been pressured, although not physically held down and forced, into a sexual relationship with her sergeant in charge.

I asked if she wanted me to accompany her to the military police office right now or in the morning.

“Sir, it would be a waste of time because this stuff happens here over time and nobody will do a damn thing about it.”

I wanted to tell her that I could make sure something happened, but I sensed that she didn’t need another male superior coercing her into anything right now. So I told her it would be a good idea for her to go to the emergency room for treatment and documentation purposes, then she could decide later whether to go to the police. Molly felt that this wouldn’t do any good either, because she was not held down and physically raped, so it would be seen as consensual.

After a good talk and walk, Molly was feeling better, and so I said good night to her after encouraging her to come to me if she needed help with this situation or just wanted to talk. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I had accomplished, but at least I had reached out and let her know help was available.

The next morning, I made a point to see Molly in the chow hall during breakfast. She felt that she still didn’t want to press charges. My heart ached to look at this young woman and know what kind of pain she was keeping locked inside. Molly was representative of the many soldiers abandoned at Abu Ghraib, their hopes and dreams darkened and dimmed by vacant leaders or preyed upon by others who masqueraded as soldiers.

Still not content to let Molly’s situation go unresolved, I went to see the lawyer of the post without revealing her name. We discussed my concerns but the lawyer was not encouraging.

“Sir, unless the female soldier is willing to press charges, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “We’re in a combat zone and people get caught up in all kinds of strange relationships. Colonel James, I’ve been in country for almost a year now, and sir, sometimes when soldiers feel vulnerable, they seek comfort in a sexual way.”

It sounded to me like he was either saying Molly had sought out the relationship or that her sergeant was justified in using her to satisfy his own needs. I took issue with this and bit his head off.

“Soldier, mothers and fathers from our country put faith and trust in us that we will protect their sons and daughters in harm’s way. I will never accept your bullshit response!”

I walked to the office of the company commander, a young twenty-seven-year-old captain. We had a long talk about this situation and I convinced him that something had to change. After our talk it became our company’s policy that all females would be escorted at night by a buddy system. We became hypervigilant and on the lookout for sexual assault, and I let it be known that this colonel would not tolerate some of the bullshit that had taken place in this camp before. The problem drastically decreased after the policy changes.

One of the enlisted soldiers who worked for me was a thirty-seven-year-old female from San Antonio, Texas, and she served an important role in our effort to protect the female soldiers. Staff Sergeant Kyra Denison, although not the most operationally minded soldier, became the matriarch to all the females in the intel unit. She provided counsel and compassion and served as a protective buffer to help thwart subtle sexual advances on the vulnerable young females at Abu Ghraib. She carved out new roles for the biscuit in addition to the work with the interrogators and MPs.

Another example of our multitalented resources was our other enlisted biscuit, Sergeant Jesus Realson. As a former tank driver, Realson brought valuable military skills many interrogators lacked. This guy knew the bread-and-butter skills of a soldier—how to kill and how to avoid being killed—better than most interrogators or Army specialists who hadn’t practiced those skills since boot camp. Realson’s tactical military skills proved extremely valuable in training our interrogators in defending the camp against the inevitable nighttime attacks. Sergeant Realson was gifted in his ability to teach anyone, even the most unlikely warrior, how to shoot. On one night when we were expecting a major assault on the camp, he actually taught a gay male interrogator, all of about 120 pounds, how to load and fire a .50 caliber machine gun—a big, badass weapon. I’ll never forget the image of Sergeant Realson teaching the .50 cal to this soldier who was actually wearing makeup at the time. With helmet and Army gear on, this interrogator tested Sergeant Realson’s patience as he became more preoccupied with his nails, makeup, and whether the helmet messed up his hairstyle than with how to target the enemy or how to load the machine gun.