Fixing Hell (2 page)
I was steeled for a bad situation, but as I stepped off the helicopter, I still wasn’t quite prepared for what I saw. Abu Ghraib could be charitably described as a set of damaged buildings that had been built on a garbage dump. The whole compound was in disrepair. Trash was everywhere. Within my first five steps after disembarking from the helicopter, the smell of raw sewage overwhelmed my senses and nearly made me retch. This was a barren wasteland interrupted only by garbage and filth.
My God. I’ve never seen anything like this. I can’t believe our people have to work in this.
As I walked from one side of the compound to the other, I tried to maintain my composure, but I was growing increasingly lightheaded and nauseated. I found my way to my room, actually an old prison cell with bars, about thirty square feet in size. It smelled of mold, dirt, and body odor. Its only furnishing was a green Army cot, onto which I collapsed, and passed out. After a brief, restless nap, the clamminess of my sweat-drenched shirt and pants awakened me. It was 11 p.m. I was feeling ill, probably dehydrated from the now 130-degree heat.
The physical battering had caught me off guard. I was so focused on steeling myself mentally for what I would find with the prisoners that the heat and the overall level of hardship in the camp had blindsided me. But I had work to do and the Army didn’t send me here to lie around on a cot and grouse about the heat. I hauled myself from the bed, found the chow hall and visited with a few soldiers on the night shift, and asked them for directions to the intel center—the building where prisoners were interrogated. I had to see what was going on here, and the intel center was the heart of it all. Because it is surrounded by the enemy, it is more psychologically demanding to work there. Whatever was wrong at Abu Ghraib was coming out of that building.
During my five-month tour at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, if I had learned one thing above all others, it was that good leaders need to be present at all hours of the day and night. That had proved to be key to correcting some of the problems at that prison, and as bad as those problems were, Abu Ghraib promised to be much worse. In Cuba I found that when good leaders were missing, bad things happened. So how better to see the level of supervision at Abu Ghraib than to arrive at the intel center, unannounced, at about 1 a.m.? As I walked to the center, I didn’t realize how pivotal a role my first thirty minutes of observations would play in my understanding of how and why everything went so wrong at Abu Ghraib. I approached the guard shack, but instead of an alert soldier asking to see my badges, I saw a very young female military police officer, an MP, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, who couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds with all of her gear on—with her head down, sound asleep. Falling asleep on guard duty is a grave failing, a huge infraction that should result in immediate reprimand and formal discipline, but I didn’t wake her. A tiny little MP sleeping soundly at the door to a prison full of POWs and terrorists was a disconcerting sight, and it took some self-control to calm this Army officer’s natural urge to explode with an angry tirade that would sure as hell wake the guard up. My goal on this first night was to simply observe, to see the situation before I started trying to fix it.
I walked unnoticed right past the sleeping guard, my loaded 9mm pistol hanging from my belt, and directly into the interrogation section of the facility.
Beyond the guard station I walked down the long hall, encountering no one else. For a moment there was no sound but that of my boots on the concrete floor. But soon I could hear angry screams, cursing, and yelling, in both English and something else. I immediately surmised that an interrogation was in process and realized I was about to see the infamous interrogation process at Abu Ghraib.
Here we go. Let’s see what’s really going on in this place. Sure sounds like some awful shit going down in there.
I headed for the terrible sounds, fearing I would see an example of the abuses I had heard so much about already. As I continued toward the source of the screaming, I passed by empty interrogation booths, each roughly the size of a college dorm room, with cheap furniture, usually a table and three chairs. When I reached the occupied room the screaming became clearer to my ears and I began to make out the sounds of an Iraqi screaming in his own language and then a male voice I assumed was the interrogator, screaming equally loudly and viciously. I had seen plenty of interrogations before, but I wondered what I would see on the other side of that door. The images of abuse and prisoner degradation raced through my mind again, and I braced myself for the scene that might accompany the screaming.
I took a deep breath and opened the door slowly, peeking in without the occupants noticing. Inside the interrogation booth was a twenty-two-year-old female soldier trying to conduct an interrogation. Sitting across the table from her was a shackled forty-year-old male prisoner, who had been brought into the prison for being a hardcore, killer terrorist, and he looked every bit the part. Alongside the prisoner was a male Arabic interpreter.
The American soldier was slumped in her chair and had tears in her eyes as the prisoner yelled at her ferociously in Arabic. The translator interpreted the prisoner’s words effectively, repeating them in English with a harsh yell and fast pace consistent with the prisoner’s voice. It all made for a strange combination: the screaming vitriol from the prisoner, followed quickly by the translation of the harsh words from a kind-looking Iraqi translator.
“I’ll kill you, bitch! When I get out of here, I’ll sodomize you before I cut your throat! You American women are nothing but whores! After I rape your mother I will set fire to that bitch’s body. In my country a bitch like you would be beheaded for looking in the eyes of a man like me!”
Clearly the tables had turned in that room and the interrogator was in trouble. No supervisors were around, this violent prisoner was clearly out of control, threatening the life of a young soldier, and the lone MP guard was asleep. I chose to remain quiet and observe the wrongness of this awful place at that time—a young soldier abandoned by her superiors, practically on her own at night with a vicious terrorist, struggling to do her job in a horrible place, under wretched conditions. She was so young and innocent-seeming that she immediately reminded me of my niece, whom I pictured in the same situation. I felt sorry for this young soldier. As I watched her, I realized the reports of prisoner abuse, as bad as they were, did not tell the full story of Abu Ghraib.
This, too, was Abu Ghraib.
Journey to Gitmo
May 2002
W
hen I was sixteen, I attended an all-black, all-male Catholic high school that was strict about rules and heavy on the discipline. For me, that meant constantly getting in trouble for running my mouth too much. A buddy named Tyrone and I were talking about what our parents did for a living one day, and he said his old man was a psychologist. I didn’t really have any idea what a psychologist did, so Tyrone explained that his father talked to people for a living. I didn’t think much more about it until I visited Tyrone’s house one evening and had a chat with his dad. I asked Tyrone’s father exactly what he did at work.
“Well,” he said, “I get paid a lot of money for talking to people.”
This sounded interesting, but I was still trying to fit the concept into the world I knew at my strict school. “Do you ever get sent to detention for talking too much?” I asked.
Tyrone’s father laughed long and hard before catching his breath and answering my question. “No, son, I don’t go to detention,” he said. “I talk as long as I want, and the longer I talk, the more I get paid.”
I was sold on the idea. Many more conversations followed with Tyrone’s father in the next few years, and by the time I went to college in 1975 I had my plan all laid out: an undergraduate degree in four years and on to a PhD and a career in psychology. I left my beloved New Orleans, where I felt truly at home as a light-skinned black man of Creole heritage, to attend the University of Dubuque in Iowa, where I feared I would stand out like a palm tree in a cornfield. The folks in Iowa welcomed me warmly, though, and my full football and track scholarship paid for nearly everything I needed. I was an intensely focused student athlete, spending every minute on my studies or on the practice field, so much so that my roommate insisted on setting me up on a blind date because he figured I would never make the effort myself. The blind date turned out to be a lovely, petite Iowa girl named Janet who had fourteen brothers and sisters, all of them raised by their father to be fiercely independent and capable. When he was repairing the roof and needed someone else up there with a hammer, he didn’t give a damn if the closest offspring’s name was Jack or Jane, the kid better scramble up on the roof.
On our first date, we were riding around in Janet’s little white Gremlin when a tire went flat. Already liking this gal enough that I wanted to impress her with my gallantry, I hopped out and went right to changing the tire. What I had forgotten, and what I could never tell this girl I’d just met, was that being raised in a house full of women had left me with absolutely zero mechanical skills. I looked into the trunk of that car and had no idea how to even get the spare tire out. After I fumbled with it for a while, Janet finally came around and, with a look of consternation, showed me how to do it. At least she wasn’t strong enough to actually lift the tire out by herself.
Once we got the tire around to the side of the car, I began fumbling with the jack, getting more embarrassed and ham-handed as I realized I didn’t know how to work it. Janet watched for a few minutes and finally had had enough. With a heavy sigh and a roll of the eyes, she said, “Stand back and get out of the way.” I did as I was told and watched this beautiful little gal change that tire like she’d done it a hundred times before and didn’t need any man to come to her rescue.
Ten minutes later, we were back on the road and I was in love. Later, I called my mother back in New Orleans and told her I’d met the woman I was going to marry. She expressed skepticism, to say the least, but I kept going on and on about how capable Janet was and how I’d never seen a woman take charge like that before, a woman who could be so delicate and gentle but also so independent. By the end of the phone call, my mother knew I was serious.
I married Janet while still in school and we had our son soon after. While obtaining my doctorate, I wrote my dissertation on child molesters. That required working twenty to thirty hours a week in a prison, interviewing prisoners. Still facing several more years of training as a psychology resident in a hospital, I looked at the different opportunities and my attention kept going to the military option. Medical residents were, and still are to some degree, treated like indentured servants, working extremely long hours under stressful conditions for very little pay. Of all the places you could train, the military provided the best pay, and it also offered excellent benefits for my family. And on top of that, I liked the idea that I could serve my country while seeing the world. I joined the Navy and trained at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington, D.C., and then my first assignment right out of training was the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where my years of experience working with prisoners for my dissertation prompted my boss to immediately assign me as the brig psychologist.
Temporary assignments followed in Guam, Japan, and the Philippines. Though the experience was largely positive, I didn’t reenlist in the Navy when the time came. Instead I became an assistant professor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, not far from New Orleans where I always felt at home. While teaching at LSU, I also worked as a consultant at the local prison. The work was satisfying, but I soon felt out of place in the almost entirely white suburb where I lived with other professionals from the university. This was Louisiana, but it wasn’t New Orleans. My wife and son also didn’t feel at home in Baton Rouge, but none of us wanted to complain. The final straw for me came in 1991 when the white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke came in second in the Republican primary for governor. I was dismayed to see that 85 percent of voters in my district had voted for this former Grand Wizard of the KKK. How could I raise my biracial son in this community?
I was miserable but I didn’t want to uproot my family again after only eighteen months in Louisiana. With great hesitation, I broached the topic of moving from Baton Rouge and was relieved when my wife and son revealed that they, too, hated this place and wanted to go. Was there any chance of moving back to Hawaii? we wondered. I was still a Navy reservist so I looked into going active duty with the Navy again, and found they would be glad to have me back. But the most likely assignment would be Beaufort, South Carolina, or Cherry Point, North Carolina, and I didn’t think that would be much of an improvement for my multiracial family. I was having a drink in a bar one evening, mulling over what to do next, when good fortune walked in wearing an Army uniform and sat down next to me. I was wearing my Navy reserves uniform, so we struck up a conversation and I soon learned he was the chief psychologist for the Army. As we talked and compared notes on our previous tours in Hawaii, he mentioned that he was having a hard time finding qualified psychologists in the Army who were willing to pick up and move to Pearl Harbor. I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
“Sir, don’t jerk my chain,” I said. “If I could do it, I’d join the Army and take that assignment in Hawaii myself.”
My new friend made a few calls and soon I was in the Army, headed to Hawaii. I spent eight good years there and then in August 1999 I was reassigned from Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. By then I had established myself as a leading military psychologist and an expert on the psychology of prisoners.
In the spring of 2002, I had already had a long, interesting career as a military psychologist. A colonel with plenty of experience in the field, I was not going to be at a loss for stories to tell after dinner or having a beer with other veterans and psychologists. I still had several years before retiring from the Army, but my three-year assignment at Walter Reed was winding down. I had about six to eight months left on this tour before my wife and I returned to our quiet life in Hawaii, where I would return to working at Tripler Army Medical Center.