Sparta (10 page)

The U.S. command found this situation unacceptable, and in November 2004 it launched Operation Phantom Fury. This consisted of ten thousand U.S. troops mounting a full-scale attack on the city of Fallujah. The force included Marines drawn from bases elsewhere in the region, among them Haditha.

Before the battle, women, children, and the elderly were advised to leave the city; thousands of them did so. Some civilians, as well as the hard-core mujahideen, remained. The battle was long and bloody. The Marines fought bravely, house to house, moving slowly through the city. More than a thousand insurgents were killed, and the rest fled.

Technically, the battle ended in a U.S. victory, but the city of Fallujah was left in ruins. Some 250,000 people had fled, and about half the houses in the city had been destroyed. Of the civilians who stayed, about six hundred had been killed. This meant another explosion of hatred: the tribal families of casualties and homeless refugees also became blood enemies of the Americans. The insurgents who died in battle became martyrs and heroes. The jihad blossomed. The battle of Fallujah became a rallying cry among the mujahideen.

The Marines understood the consequences very well. Later, an officer at Pendleton told Conrad, “Okay, we won at Fallujah. But we made Fallujah happen. We can't do that again.”

Haditha was deep Sunni territory. Like Fallujah when the Americans first arrived in the spring of 2003, it was friendly. Haditha's mayor was pro-American, and he welcomed the arrival of U.S. forces. In July, a few months after the shootings of the protesters in Fallujah, the mayor and his youngest son were assassinated, which sent a chilling message to the community. Around this time, strangers—mujahideen—began arriving in Haditha, using brutality to intimidate the local population. In November 2004 Marines were withdrawn from Haditha to fight in Fallujah. In their absence, the local insurgents acted with impunity. Dozens of policemen, who had been cooperating with the Americans, were executed.

By the following year Haditha had become a base for the insurgency. The town was only a day's drive from Al-Qa'im, on the Syrian border, and many Hadithans had family connections in Syria. The town was a convenient way station for mujahideen slipping in from outside the country, and al-Qaeda's feared and shadowy leader in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, was said to be a frequent visitor. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” was given its name there.

Haditha was small and remote, and during that year the United States effectively washed its hands of the place. It was declared a TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone. Though the alliance still maintained bases there and performed an offensive operation in May, the area was largely under the control of the mujahideen. These were religious fundamentalists, very like the Taliban. They took over all municipal functions and imposed strict sharia law on the population. All Western music was banned, as well as all behavior that was deemed immodest. Public punishments were carried out by men in hoods: whippings, the severing of hands, and decapitations took place on the bridge over the river, where people lined the banks for these events. The punishments were considered public entertainment, and families brought their children to watch. Videos of decapitations were sold in the market.

Haditha was strategically important. Not only was it part of a covert route for insurgents, but it was also the site of the largest hydroelectric dam in Iraq, a major source of electric power throughout the country. The U.S. forces were determined to protect the dam from the insurgent threat, and in 2005 they sent the U.S. Marines back into Haditha.

The events at Fallujah in 2003 had aroused a fury of anti-Americanism within the Muslim world. Fundamentalist zealots stirred it into a lethal stew of rage and kept it simmering.

The fundamentalist mullahs came from poor families that had few options. In order to better their sons' lives, parents sent them to religious school, where the boys studied the sacred text of the Koran, memorizing hundreds of its verses. When the students became mullahs and returned to their towns, they knew the Koran from end to end, but they had never read a word of any other book. They knew nothing of other religions, other political systems, other countries, or other methods of perceiving the world. They could interpret the Koran in any way they chose, and they had absolute power within the community. It was in their interest to prohibit all contact with the Western world.

Haditha, now in the grip of the mujahideen, became deeply hostile to the U.S. occupying forces. During the summer of 2005, before Conrad arrived there, six Marine snipers were ambushed and killed. One was said to have been captured alive and tortured, and his mutilated body was paraded through the streets. Videos of this, too, were sold in the market. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were devastatingly successful in Haditha. That summer, fourteen Marines were killed by a roadside bomb.

The mujahideen of Haditha controlled more than the paramilitary and religious systems—they also ran the civic and physical infrastructure. They ran the judicial system and the courts, carried out their own punishments, took charge of the well-being of the citizens, and took credit for the uninterrupted flow of power from the dam. Haditha had electricity, a bounteous supply of local food, and its own civic system. There was little room for the American presence and little tolerance for it among the muj.

In the fall of 2005, the Marines' commanding officers moved upriver. They established a command center outside the town and closer to the dam. The Marines in Haditha itself were left with a skeleton crew in violently hostile territory. Their base was in a school administration building, though some Marines moved out of this into small huts nearby. The base was called Sparta.

Sparta was remote, isolated, and embattled. Its Marines rarely left the compound unless they were in full combat gear and mounted in Humvees. Each time they left the wire they knew they might be hit: IEDs were ubiquitous and well concealed. There was little diplomatic or constructive interaction between the Marines and the locals.

That fall, another initiative was carried out in Haditha: Operation River Gate. The Marines destroyed the two bridges leading to the eastern side of the river, and then they attacked from the west, moving slowly through the town from house to house. This time they were careful not to use bombs and artillery, not to destroy the town or kill civilians. But both sides had learned from Fallujah: this time the Marines met no armed resistance. Most of the insurgents had slipped out of town the night before. At the end of the day the Marines had arrested some six hundred insurgents, most of whom were later released. They called the operation a victory, but it was hard to define exactly what they'd won.

*   *   *

“So, it was a pretty interesting place,” Conrad said. “There were some ancient sites along the river, but I never got to them.”

“You never got to slip away,” Lydia said.

“To look at archaeology?” Conrad laughed. “There was no slipping away, Mom. We were in a combat zone. We never left the wire without full battle rattle, nothing smaller than a squad, twelve or fourteen guys.”

“So what did you do when you went out?” she asked.

“Went on missions. Patrols, carrying troops around, different things. There was a local elder we'd meet with. We were supposed to be making an alliance.”

“But you didn't?” asked Marshall.

“He had no intention of making an alliance with anyone,” said Conrad. “He always had a list of things he wanted from us, and he never did anything we asked him to. It was all bullshit. He never trusted us, and we never trusted him. He'd say, ‘Give us back this man, Abdullah, he is innocent. Release him.' We'd say, ‘No way, man. Abdullah's in a decapitation video, we've seen it. He cuts people's heads off. He's staying where he is.' The guy would say, ‘He is a good man. Set him free.'” Conrad shrugged and shook his head. “Most of the locals didn't like us. We were the problem, as far as they could tell. We worked some with the policemen, but they never knew if they'd get shot just for being seen with us. Some of them were good guys, but a lot of them kept their distance. It wasn't the climate for friendship.”

“How did you work with the policemen?” Marshall asked.

“We did some training. And we used to sit on guard duty with them at night in the police station,” Conrad said. “Sometimes they'd bring food and share it with us. Theirs was always good. We called it red shit and rice.” He didn't tell them what they'd called kebabs: pricks on sticks.

“So what was it like to go out on a mission?” asked Marshall.

“We'd go in a convoy. Every time you left the wire you'd wonder if this would be the day,” said Conrad. “Some guys counted the days between IEDs, as if there were some mathematical pattern they could figure out. Lot of superstition. You couldn't eat the Charms from the MREs. They were a big deal. Everyone would get mad at you for that.”

“Charms?” asked Lydia.

“That hard candy,” said Conrad. “It came in some of the MREs, Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Charms were bad luck. Bad bad.”

“Did you ever eat them?” she asked.

“Hell, no,” said Conrad, laughing. “I wasn't going to be the one.”

They all laughed; then silence fell again.

“So, Con,” said Lydia. “Do you want to tell us about the day you were hit? Or would you rather not?”

Conrad looked down at the mat, picked up his water glass, and moved it back and forth on the quilted surface as he spoke.

“There were no Charms, as far as I know,” he said. “No mathematical patterns, nothing, though afterward someone said someone else had had a bad feeling that morning.” His glass left a faint silvery trail on the mat. “We were picking up some policemen from another outpost. I chose the route, I always did. Haditha wasn't that big, there were only so many ways you could go. We headed south, along the river. When you were in the Humvee, it was kind of like a state of suspended tension. You were tense all the time, waiting. But there was nothing you could do about it. It wasn't like being ambushed. You could have your weapons ready for that, keep your eyes open, figure out the territory. IEDs were different. You couldn't prepare for them. You could only wait for them to happen.” The cobalt glass was glittering with condensation, drops pooling along its sides. “You focused on the mission, what you were doing, keeping contact, paying attention. You did all that to distract yourself. It did no good to think about whether or not it would happen. But it was there in your mind.”

His parents sat silent, watching him.

“So that day, we were heading down along the river. We always closed off the road wherever we drove, because of suicide bombers. The locals knew that. They pulled over when they saw us coming. We were driving along between houses on one side and some empty land on the other. A strip of empty land, then orchards going down to the river. The buildings were on the other side of a little ditch. I remember looking at the ditch and thinking that I'd seen a stone slab set there for pedestrians, just a slab, a couple of feet wide, for people to cross the ditch on. I thought of the stone and I wondered if I was misremembering where I'd seen it, and then just as I was thinking,
It's been removed, they've taken it away
—that was exactly the kind of thing you paid attention to—the air kind of changed, and things went black.”

He paused again, looking down.

“Everything changes. It's like being in a vacuum tube. All the air is sucked away, and everything slows down. I remember thinking that the Humvee was sliding sideways, we were tipping over on a flat road, and what was Olivera smoking? I was trying to stay upright and turn around to see what had happened, but I couldn't move. You feel zapped, too, shocked, as though you've just run into an electric wire. You're surrounded by noise. The sound is too big to understand. The whole world is black noise, and you're floating in it. You can't move or speak, and you may die. Your body knows that. And then it's over, the light comes back, but you have no idea what happened. You still feel lost in the world. You can't figure anything out, but you have to keep going.”

There was a silence. The candles flickered, the points of light reflected in the blackness of the windowpanes.

“Hard,” said Lydia. “That sounds so hard.”

“How did you get through it?” Marshall asked.

Conrad shook his head. “Just did.”

“Con,” Lydia said, her voice quiet, “are you all right?”

The question, asked in the dim light, there with the sleeping cat, the glowing lamp, took him by surprise.

“I don't know how to answer that,” Conrad said. “I'm here.” He was ashamed of the sudden filling in his chest, the risk of tears.

“I'm so sorry,” said Lydia. “I'm so sorry.”

*   *   *

The only way he could be in this world, here, was to turn his back on the other, there. But it was unclear how he could do that when that other life kept circling back on him when he least wanted it.

At the end of the meal Marshall leaned back in his chair. Conrad knew what was coming.

“Con, any thoughts about your next step?”

“I've been thinking about graduate school.” He wondered if he sounded audibly false.

Marshall nodded.

“Great,” Lydia said. “In what?”

He saw they believed him.

“Political science. International relations,” he said. “Or law.”

Discomfort appeared on their faces as they realized his uncertainty.

“Which one are you more drawn to?” Lydia asked.

“Not sure,” Conrad said. “I've gotten really interested in political science.”

In fact his chest tightened at the idea of studying political science or international affairs or law, or anything else. Sitting silently in a crowded classroom, taking notes and trying to concentrate. Studying in the library, people moving behind him, unseen. But also, the idea of starting out again in a whole new field implied that all this, the life he'd been living for the last four years, was finished, behind him. It didn't feel finished. He was still part of it; it was still part of him. It wasn't over. He knew he had to keep going, move on, but the future seemed like a locked gate. He couldn't see into it.