The War I Always Wanted (20 page)

Then, after a month of social disorder in Baghdad, minus any real fighting, the entire 101st Airborne Division received orders to base itself out of Mosul. Our battalion was headed to Tal Afar, a city thirty miles away from the provincial capital.

Rather than find new interpreters in northern Iraq, Battalion allowed us to convince our Baghdad translators to come with us on the journey. We offered to double their pay to ten dollars a day if they would agree to officially become part of the unit. Of the twenty or so translators in the unit, eight decided to make the move with us.

For Ammar, it wasn't a question of
if
he would do it, but of how much stuff he could bring and how much more money he was going to make. Mohamed was a harder sell. He told me that he was going to have to discuss it with his family for a few days. I was disappointed to hear that he was considering not
coming because I'd gotten so used to working with him over the past several weeks.

The morning of the day before we left, Mohamed announced as soon as we picked him up for work that he would be joining us on the trip. He seemed reluctant, but resolved to go through with it all the same. I felt that it wasn't any of my business to really probe and find out what the issues were. I just accepted his decision and left it alone. All he asked was that he get to go home that afternoon to gather his things and to have a final dinner with his family that evening.

When we picked him up that night, he was waiting patiently with a single bag outside some shops on a prearranged street corner in Daura. When we pulled over, he approached with some members of his family. I'd never met them before. His father was a balding, middle-aged man, and he was wearing a button-down white shirt and khakis. After I shook his hand, he looked at me with an enthusiastic, yet somehow hesitant smile. Then he said in broken English, “Please take care of our son. We love him very much.” It was a terribly direct statement and I could sense the fear and concern.

It's funny—that was the only time a parent of one of my guys ever appealed to me directly to take care of his or her son.

I still hear those words sometimes. It was something about the way he looked at me when he said them. He had so much faith in us, as Americans, that he was willing to give us his son.

Long after I was done with the war, I got an email telling me that American soldiers had shot Mohamed's father behind the wheel of his car when he hadn't stopped at a checkpoint in time. He had lived, but the three bullets that struck him had permanently mangled his left arm. And even though they'd shot Mohamed's
father by mistake, the military refused to provide or pay for his medical care.

I often wonder what he thinks of us now.

On the ride back, I wondered what the conversations had been like in Mohamed's house that week. I figured that it was Mohamed's mother who was terrified of letting him go. In the end, they probably decided that just having an income would make it worth it. I gazed at the sky as it faded from purple to black, feeling the wind rushing in through the open window of the moving humvee. Then I looked at Mohamed riding on the bench in the bed of the truck. He seemed content and happy; he seemed at peace with having just joined an army. Maybe he figured he could do some good for his country. The war seemed to be over and the reconstruction looked to be in full swing. I looked ahead at the traffic. Things were looking up. I wondered if this meant that we might be heading home sometime soon.

Then I noticed the traffic stopped ahead.

We snaked our way through the stopped cars and trucks before coming to an intersection. A minivan was turned on its side in the middle of the intersection. Figuring we could help, I stopped the platoon. Walking toward it, I noticed broken glass covering the asphalt like glitter. In the glare of the headlights my long shadow stretched across bodies lying in the street. I looked at the traffic signals and saw that they were as dark as the night itself. No electricity. When I got closer I could hear the music in the tape player of the van still blaring. It fused with the moaning that came from the mouths of the victims.

One of Whipple's guys was first on the scene with an aid bag. More of the guys soon followed. They stepped gingerly over broken glass that was everywhere—glass on which the men from the van were lying.

Four Iraqis had been pulled from the wreckage, but another was still inside, his head crushed between the dash and the pavement. When I stuck my head in the upside down driver's side door, it just looked
wrong
. There was something obviously not right about the way his body looked normal before ending where his neck met the dash and the road. There was just way too little room for a head in there.

The guys worked on the other injured occupants, doing what little they could with what little we had. At the same time, Ammar and Mohamed worked on crowd control, attempting to keep the growing throng of onlookers at bay. All the while the cassette in the van continued to belt out festive tunes in Arabic, giving the scene a twisted quality.

At some point a patrol from the 82nd Airborne happened by and began assisting. With their help we were able to extract the corpse from the van. His face had been torn off completely. I was surprised that his head was still attached. I thought,
That's something good at least
. Someone reached in and ejected the tape. The sudden silence seemed odd. All I could hear were voices, traffic on the periphery, and still more faint moans.

Since our relieving unit was now on site, I decided they could deal with it. I had seen enough.

As we were loading up to leave, I witnessed an ominous sign, though at the time I didn't think much of it. A car turned the corner, driving around the overturned van. It came within inches of Ammar. I watched it, frozen for a second, and then
listened as someone inside called something out to him. Without stopping, they drove off.

I walked toward Ammar and asked him what they'd said.

“Oh, it's nothing,” he said shaking his head and waving me off in his normal cocky manner. “Some punk just called me a traitor.”

We left the next morning out of Baghdad on a day like any other day that spring—sunny and warm. We headed north on Highway One, following the map toward Mosul. Along the way we bypassed Tikrit, probably passing within a mile or two of the still fugitive Saddam Hussein. We traveled past green pastures outside of old Samarra and we drove through the refinery town of Bayji. Journeying north, the landscape began to change. Hills began to rise up and mountains emerged from the haze on the horizon. After a day's drive, we entered the ancient Assyrian capital of Nineveh, now known as Mosul.

There we took a left and drove west into the setting sun. We drove for half an hour until we were less than twenty-five miles from the Syrian border. We drove until we had reached the city of Tal Afar.

9
 
Northern Iraq

May through October 2003

Tal Afar eventually became a bloody mess. Some of it I was there for, most of it I wasn't. I had been driving the car of fantasy war, playing chicken with the eighteen-wheeler of real war for two years. By the time I lost my nerve and swerved that summer, it was almost too late.

Guys in my battalion lost legs, eyes, and jaws. Three others got killed. They got hit with bullets, grenades, bombs, and RPGs. We killed terrorists and insurgents. In the process we killed civilians. We shot kids. It became pretty standard guerilla war. In a perverse way, it became the war I'd always wanted.

When we got there, Tal Afar was a peaceful city of fifty thousand inhabitants—comprising mostly Turkomen and Kurds, but also a few Arabs. The landscape was hilly and full of scrub brush—and dozens and dozens of archaeological sites. Tal Afar itself is built around the remnants of an Ottoman fortress—that being one of the newer sites.

In the beginning, Croom and I would receive a sector on a map and be told by Captain B. to “find out what they need.” What he meant was that we were to drive into the surrounding countryside, go to each individual village with its adobe buildings, thatched roofs, sheep, and chickens, and write down any complaints the local “mukhtar” had. Those could range anywhere from bad roads to no fresh water to “Saddam released all the prisoners before the war and now a murderer lives in our village.”

Figuring out a way to fix their predicaments wasn't our problem at that point, however. It was just: meet the mukhtar, write down his complaints, stay for lunch if he insisted, and hand all this “intelligence” over to the battalion headquarters.

We spent the first two weeks working like that. The war was over for us. It had ended over a month earlier in Baghdad during a montage of toppling statues, looting, and explosions. We'd gone back to card playing, magazine reading, and now, cultural immersion.

I was surprised then, when I was told by Captain B. one afternoon to be ready to go on a raid that night with Task Force 20. Task Force 20 was the super-secret amalgamation of what I assumed to be U.S. Army Special Forces, Delta Force, and the CIA. Keeping all the hush-hush task forces straight in my head always took a lot of effort. Task Force 20. Task Force 11. Task Force Dagger. K-Bar. Saber. Task Force Blue. Brown. Hammer. DeathForceKill-9000. They all ran together.

When the Task Force 20 guys actually showed up that night, they appeared to be half of a Special Forces A-team along with a CIA operative who spoke Arabic. The CIA officer was a middle-aged guy with glasses and a New York Yankees baseball cap.

I was upbeat. The mission was to capture the Ten of Diamonds—Saddam's vice president, Taha Yasin Ramadan. He was supposedly nearby, hiding with a gold-toothed bodyguard in an outlying village. My interest in the mission revolved around the soldier's paradox again—I didn't necessarily want to be involved with “Taha's Last Stand,” but I had gotten so bored that this was something to break the monotony. It made me feel like I was in the infantry.

But then the Task Force 20 major who was in charge told us that unfortunately, the intel was six days old.
A balloon rockets across the room, discharging all its air from within, and lands flaccidly on the ground at my feet
. With those words—
six days old
—I knew it was futile. I knew that we would end up going through the motions, not capture anybody, and maybe terrify a farmer and his family half to death. Six days when you're chasing fugitives might as well be three years. The pointlessness of the raids was starting to wear on my nerves.

We timed portions of the raid down to the second—something I'd never done before. And it was good practice. Everybody was in position when they were supposed to be. Mohamed was in his disguise—this time a knit cap and a bandana that covered his face. And everything went off without a hitch—except for the fact that Taha wasn't there when we arrived. It came across the radio as, “dry hole.”

This surprised no one.

After that I settled back into my job as an infantryman-turned-local water supply officer. We started talking about the war in the past tense whenever we referred to the actual fighting of March and April—as in, “back during the war.” Even when vaguely warlike events presented themselves, we
conveniently brushed them off or dismissed them as someone else's problem.

One afternoon an orange and white taxi drove up to the front entrance of our compound. I called for Mohamed and then walked out into the fading afternoon light to see what the driver wanted. As we approached the car, the taxi driver opened the rear door closest to us. I stuck my head in while Mohamed talked to the driver.

It was a similar scene to one I'd had to deal with in Baghdad. Crumpled in the back seat was an Iraqi, bleeding from a gunshot wound. He had tears streaming down his face and he was sobbing uncontrollably. He looked terrified. I assumed this was because he believed himself to be running out of blood. I stepped back from the open door.

“Okay, Mohamed. What's the deal? What is this?”

Mohamed responded without taking his eyes off the cab driver. “He says they were attacked by members of the Baath Party . . . and that they were lucky to escape alive.” The taxi driver said something and pointed off into the distance. Mohamed continued to translate. “He says they are just up the road . . . only a few kilometers from here.”

I looked at Mohamed and smiled, cynically. “Right. That's a new one. I'm sure it's one of Saddam's closest buddies.” Insurgency was not yet one of the words in my Iraq war vocabulary. “They're full of shit. We've seen this before. Why don't they go to the hospital in Tal Afar?” I figured they had tried to rob someone and then been thwarted . . . or that it had been something personal—maybe a feud between families.

Mohamed asked the question and then answered me. “He says they want protection.”

Protection?
The request sounded strange at first, but then I remembered how melodramatic so many of the civilians with whom I'd dealt had been. I rolled my eyes. “Hold on. I'll talk to Captain B.” A minute later I came back. Mohamed was still standing next to the taxi conversing with the driver. “Yeah, tell these guys to get the fuck out of here. Go to the hospital in Tal Afar for treatment. We're too busy to deal with this kind of stuff.” I glanced into the back seat again and saw that the wounded Iraqi was still bawling.