Shock Factor (30 page)

Finally, the man in the yellow shirt stepped forward and announced he was a major with the Iraqi Police. Hendrickson directed his attention on him and demanded to know what was going on. The Iraqi major ignored his question and wanted to know why Hendrickson had burst into his compound. The situation escalated further, and both leaders were soon shouting at each other through the battalion interpreter.

Just inside the back door, Bumgardner and Boyce stopped in their tracks as the acidic reek of urine assailed their nostrils. Beneath it lingered another odor, one of corruption and filth. Recalled Boyce, “It smelled like a Third World morgue.”

The men were in a narrow hallway with two doors set in intervals on the left wall. Bumgardner stepped to the first one and flung it open. Three surprised Iraqi police officers swiveled their heads to him and froze. The Oregon sergeant had caught them in the middle of torturing a bound and blindfolded prisoner.

Blind fury spurred Bumgardner into the room. He pushed the prisoner out of the way as the Iraqis began yelling in broken English, “No! No! No! This is not what you think! Is okay!”

Bumgardner grabbed the nearest police officer by the neck and pushed him into a wall. Tyson, who stood well over six feet and was built like an NFL tight end, dwarfed the cop. He pinned him in place and held the cop's neck in a vise grip.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the terrified policeman.

“Hey Tyson, why don't you come on out now?” said a calm voice from the doorway. Bumgardner tore his eyes from the cops' and saw Master Sergeant Jeff McDowell, his old platoon sergeant, waving for him to step back into the hallway.

That broke the spell. He released his hold on the man and went into the hallway to compose himself. Meanwhile, Boyce and McDowell cut the prisoner loose and gave him some water.

Captain Jarrell Southall, a middle school history teacher in his civilian life, stood beside Tyson and trembled with rage. He was the battalion's personnel officer, but he also spoke Arabic and was a practicing Sunni Muslim. For those reasons, Hendrickson had brought him along. Southall had his nine millimeter pistol unholstered and held low.

McDowell and Boyce finished tending to the prisoner—to the utter bafflement of the Iraqi cops, then walked back into the hallway. The Oregon Guardsmen exchanged glances and wondered what lay behind door number two.

In the courtyard, the scout platoon's medic and combat lifesavers went to work assessing the prisoners. Kyle Trimble was one of the latter. He'd gone to high school with Tyson Bumgardner and had made the decision to join the Guard together with him. Tyson had become a squad leader in the scouts while Kyle had been waiting to go to sniper school when the deployment came up.

The wounds the prisoners had sustained affected Trimble deeply. The men showed signs of being burned. Their faces, backs, and arms were covered with lacerations and purple-red bruises. One had a suppurating gunshot wound to the knee. The bullet's entry wound was a ragged, infected hole ringed with blue-black rotting flesh.

As the Oregonians began triaging the prisoners, Trimble noticed several of the Iraqi policemen staring at him. They seemed puzzled. He got the sense that the Iraqis did not know they were doing anything wrong, as if flaying flesh off captives with rubber hoses was just a normal day at work.

Recalled Trimble, “The vibe they were giving us was very, very strange.”

Under the unsettling gaze of the Iraqi cops, Trimble opened his combat lifesaver bag and busied himself with tending to some of the lesser injured men. Mike Giordano, the platoon's medic, focused his efforts on the most severely affected, some of whom lapsed into unconsciousness as the Americans moved them into the shade.

Back inside the building, Lieutenant Boyce nodded to Bumgardner and told him to open door number two. The young sergeant turned the knob and pushed through it into a room about the size of half a basketball court.

It was jam-packed with moaning, suffering men. Some lay semiconscious in their own urine and feces, bleeding from open wounds. Some seemed delirious. Others had fallen into stupors. The prisoners who still had the strength sat cross-legged, chins draped on their chests. The smell was so overpowering that Bumgardner nearly vomited.

To Jarrell Southall, the room looked like photos he'd seen of Dachau and Buchenwald—the Nazi concentration camps the U.S. Army liberated at the end of World War II. The room felt like a furnace. Without open windows or air-conditioning, it was easily over a hundred degrees inside. There was no water in sight. Even if there was water available, the prisoners would not have been able to drink. Every one of them had their hands tied behind their back with the same yellow rope Maries had seen on the teenaged boy.

The Iraqi Police had been nothing if not thorough.

Southall tried to talk to a couple of the prisoners, telling them in Arabic that he was a Sunni Muslim. At first, nobody responded to him. Then Southall recited the Shahada, the Muslim profession of Faith.

“I bear witness that there is no deity (none truly to be worshipped) but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

That broke the silence. Several of the Sudanese captives began to tell their story. Southall listened as they recounted their sudden arrest, how their passports and work visas had been confiscated by the police. A few told him that even after they paid bribes for the return of the documentation, they were detained anyway. Others didn't have the money for a bribe. They were among the first arrested.

Southall reported all this to Lieutenant Boyce, who had seen enough. He went back outside and found Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson in mid-argument with the man in the yellow shirt.

“Sir,” Boyce interrupted, “I think you need to come see this.”

Hendrickson followed his young lieutenant into the building and saw for himself the condition of the other detainees. Captain Southall, Bumgardner, and Master Sergeant McDowell reported to their commander that they had found torture implements and photographs taken while the police officers tortured the fourteen-year-old boy Maries and Engle had seen dragged to the table.

Southall had learned that the cops had been pouring some sort of chemical agent into the eyes of their prisoners during these torture sessions. Others told him they had been burned, or had been electrocuted with a lamp whose bulb had been broken. The scouts searched the area and found the chemicals and the lamp, as well as more hoses, sticks, and aluminum bars.

Already furious at being stonewalled by the Iraqi police, the sights and smells roused him to immediate action. He ordered Sergeant Major Brunk Conley to get all the prisoners outside so they could be assessed and treated. As Conley set to that task, Hendrickson stormed back outside and told his men to disarm the Iraqi cops.

The move stunned the police. They gave up their weapons grudgingly, but made no move to resist. Soon, a stack of AK-47s rose in the courtyard. The torture implements were laid out nearby. Some of the scouts began taking photos to document this evidence.

From their observation point, Maries and Engle watched all this unfold with a sense of tremendous satisfaction. Engle saw Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson spin one police officer around and pin his hands behind his head. Hendrickson had been a cop himself for too long not to take part in the disarming and detention of these thugs.

When Conley began getting the rest of the prisoners outside, Engle spotted the man who'd been knocked unconscious when he had been slammed into a car a few days before. He got on the radio and told Lieutenant Boyce what had happened to the man so Giordano could check him for head trauma. Within minutes, the platoon's medic had put him on a stretcher with a neck brace and began giving him intravenous fluids.

As the other scouts rounded up the Iraqi Police and put them in one spot so they could be watched, Hendrickson turned his attention back to the Iraqi major. The major flatly told Hendrickson, “We have done nothing wrong here.”

Behind them, the scouts carried a writhing, screaming man out of the building and set him under the overhang. Kyle Trimble and Doc Giordano rushed to his side.

“How can you say that?” Hendrickson demanded.

“These are hardened criminals!” the major declared.

Hendrickson thought of the fourteen-year-old boy and guffawed. The major demanded that his men receive their weapons back. The Oregon commander refused. The shouting match continued for a few more minutes until, seeing nothing was going to be accomplished, Hendrickson turned and walked away. He radioed the battalion operations center and talked directly to his executive officer, Major Edward Tanguy. Tanguy reported the situation to 2–162's higher headquarters, the Arkansas National Guard's 39th Enhanced Brigade. He reported the situation and the conditions at the compound to the brigade executive officer, who told Tanguy to stand by while he talked with the 39th's commander, Brigadier General Ronald Chastain.

While Tanguy and Hendrickson waited for guidance from General Chastain, the scouts continued to work on the prisoners. The Americans went from man to man, removing their blindfolds and cutting the yellow cords that bound their arms so painfully. Kyle Trimble and Giordano focused on the writhing man who had been carried out of the building a few minutes before. His filthy blindfold had been tied so tightly to his face, and had remained on for so long, that it had damaged his eyes. Trimble had to cut it off, then peel it from his face. The man's eyes were shrunken back, a sure sign of extreme dehydration. He wailed in agony as the two Americans spoke gently to him and tried to start an IV.

Trimble attempted it first, but he couldn't get the tiny flash of blood in the cotton stuffed in the backside of the needle that indicated he had found a vein. He tried again. The man began to sob. Unable to open his eyes, his hands scrabbled weakly in search of whoever was assisting him. His fingers found Trimble's boot, and he grabbed hold for a moment.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said in English through broken teeth.

The man was wearing a sweat suit soaked with perspiration. Trimble knew he had to get fluids into the man or he would most likely die. Fluids would only be a start—he needed hospitalization fast.

He punctured the man's skin again with the needle, gently moving the tip into what he thought was a vein. This time, he saw a tiny dot of blood bloom on the cotton. Then the vein collapsed. He started over. Same result.

Giordi tried next. As he worked to get the IV started, Trimble cut the man's sweatpants off him and began pouring bottles of water over his legs to cool him off.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” the man cried to his unseen saviors.

Trimble cut his sweatshirt open to get more cool water on his body. His chest and stomach were a latticework of bruises, gashes, and lacerations.

“Kyle, he's too dehydrated to get a needle in him,” Giordi said. Kyle nodded, knowing that the only solution was to go in rectally.

“I got this, keep working,” the medic told him.

Kyle stood up and went to find another patient. As he moved through the rows of prisoners, the Sudanese called out, thanking him over and over. The Iraqi detainees were quiet, sullen, and looked tense.

Against the wall of the rectangular building, Trimble noticed an Iraqi prisoner with a brown-black bandage wrapped around one arm. He went to his side and the stench of rotted flesh hit him before he could even kneel down. The man regarded him with utter hate in his eyes. Trimble later said, “He gave me the look of death.”

Trimble helped him to his feet. The man offered no resistance. After moving him away from the main group of prisoners, the Oregonian eased him to the ground and unwrapped his bandage.

A suppurating, prurient wound ran along the length of his arm. He'd been gashed by some sort of ragged weapon, and without antibiotics or immediate medical care, it had become infected. The infection had turned gangrenous. It seemed almost pointless to treat it. Kyle knew it would almost surely have to be amputated at this point to save the man's life.

He began to clean it anyway. Carefully, he covered the wound in iodine to disinfect it, then he poured antibiotic ointment on it. The stench appalled him, but Trimble forced himself to make no sign of the revulsion he felt. As he started to wrap the wound with fresh gauze, he chanced a look in the prisoner's eyes. They were softer now, the hate replaced by gratitude.

Lieutenant Boyce was standing near Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson when Ed Tanguy came back over the radio.

“Sir, the Thirty-Ninth Brigade says to stand down.”

Dan Hendrickson was a man of supreme self-possession who concealed a deeply caring and emotional nature with a gruff and stoic demeanor. The scenes around the compound had already caused his indignation to crack that wall. Now Ed's words left him dumbfounded, unable to hide their effect.

Ross Boyce stiffened. He thought he hadn't heard the order right. “What? What?!” he sputtered.

In the MOI, Kevin Maries had tuned a radio to the battalion frequency. He, Keith Engle, and Darren Buchholz heard the order and stared at each other in complete astonishment.

“What are they talking about?” Engle managed. “We're doing the right thing here.”

Maries, ever the picture of calm, could only utter a curse. Buchholz, who had been watching his friend Kyle Trimble treat the prisoners, felt a swell of pure outrage. To him, the entire operation looked like a “torture training” exercise. How could this be acceptable in anyone's rulebook?

Especially coming less than two months after Abu Ghraib.

The order left the snipers in momentary disarray while Hendrickson stood next to his Humvee and battled to regain his composure. At length, he keyed his radio and told his exec, “You need to tell the Thirty-Ninth Brigade this is not something we can walk away from.”

“Roger.”

Ed called the 39th Brigade and relayed the message. In the meantime, the rest of the scouts learned of the order. Once they recovered from their shock, they worked even faster. Hendrickson had given them a few extra precious minutes to do what they could for the worst affected prisoners.