Fixing Hell (14 page)
“Colonel, I’m so afraid . . . and I’m no good at this.” She got the words out between loud cries and gasps.
I shot her a big grin. “Well, you want to talk about being scared?” I replied. “Soldier, I thought I was gonna shit my pants on that helicopter this morning. But let’s not talk about me. I need to tell you it took a lot of restraint not to smack that guy in the booth a few minutes ago.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Her curiosity was distracting her, helping her calm down.
“Heck, I was impressed with the way you kept your resolve and didn’t resort to yelling, screaming, and cussing. That took a lot of discipline,” I explained, positively reinforcing her smart actions. She stopped crying and started pulling herself together.
“Thank you, sir . . . I guess that’s something.”
Within a few minutes, we were laughing and telling stories about the Midwest and how bad the food was at Abu Ghraib. I told her that we would need each other’s help to get through this, and that I would get with her in the morning to review what went wrong and what went well with the interview. By the time I said good night, I felt like we’d made some progress with helping her cope.
As I walked away she said, “Colonel, you’re the first full bird I ever saw come out here after dark.”
That didn’t surprise me, but it was disturbing nonetheless. In about forty-five minutes in my first visit to the intel center, I had already stumbled across a major factor in how the abuses and torture had occurred at Abu Ghraib. It was plain as day: these were young, unguided soldiers. How could anyone expect them to stay tough and controlled under these conditions and pressures without any supervisor to help them? I tried to take comfort in knowing that I was here to try and help guide us all back to some sense of decency.
Now, wide awake, I wanted to see the rest of the forward operating base (FOB). Knowing that prison escapes were common at Abu Ghraib, I chambered a round in my 9mm pistol before I walked around, in case I was attacked in the darkness. Buildings were far apart at the compound. Between each building there was only darkness—that deep darkness we don’t usually see back home—sand, and the possibility of a desperate prisoner escapee stumbling upon me alone. The foul smell of Abu Ghraib coupled with the endless expanse of hot, dry sand created a frequent urge to gag. The place smelled worse than any U.S. dump or Iowa pig farm I had ever been on. I was amazed at how big the compound was. I must have walked around for an hour before I saw a single other guard or MP. This, I thought, might be just one of many reasons why there were frequent escapes. Once a prisoner made it outside the building he was in, there was little to stop him.
As I explored in the darkness, the constant state of readiness, watching for a crazed prisoner to jump out at me, kept my mind from noticing how long I was out looking around, and the hours flew by. Then I noticed that the chow hall was being opened, so I knew it must be about 6 a.m., even though the sun had not risen. As I walked toward the lights of the chow hall in the distance, there was nothing but silence in the hot air, a profound silence that seemed to be the right accompaniment to the utter darkness. Suddenly, the whole compound shook. Shit! Incoming mortars . . .
An all-out attack on the prison had started. At the gates, a massive car bomb exploded, shaking the entire compound, and as I’d learn later, killing a marine. The force of the car bomb was so powerful, even more than a hundred yards away, that I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell to the ground. I hadn’t even been at the FOB for twenty-four hours and I had already learned that life could end in an instant at this hellhole. I stayed low as I scrambled toward the lights in the distance, hoping to find some place safer than out in the middle of the compound, waiting for a mortar to land right on my head. I was trying to move forward and watch for some indication of where the mortars were landing when, suddenly, the attack stopped.
With the last explosion, the quiet of the morning returned as if nothing had ever happened. The only sound was that of some personnel far in the distance responding to the car bomb. I resumed my walk to the chow hall, and when I got to the building, I found that the attack hadn’t warranted much notice from the old hands at Abu Ghraib. Apparently, a few mortars and a car bomb were no reason to miss breakfast. I joined the line, but I was unimpressed with the food: scrambled eggs that didn’t look like scrambled eggs and cream of wheat that didn’t look like cream of wheat. I knew that all of the cooks and servers were foreign nationals, so I had to wonder if they even knew what they were making for these Americans.
Is there poison in the food?
I wondered for a moment.
But I was too hungry to ponder that thought for long. Not hungry enough to eat those eggs, however. I got some fruit.
I took my tray and sat down at a table with some soldiers who had all been at Abu Ghraib for four to six months. The soldiers had experienced the fog of war and were not anxious as I sat with them. I tried to joke about being caught outside when the mortars came in, but my experience didn’t seem to impress these soldiers, who probably had been through much worse before I arrived. While we ate and complained about the food, I introduced myself and told them why I had been sent to Abu Ghraib. Sensing that they didn’t have any reluctance about talking to a colonel over breakfast, I asked them what they thought had caused the problems here.
The first answer came from a twenty-two-year-old male sergeant from Kansas with a face full of freckles from his time in the sun. He looked at me as if the answer were obvious, like I was really behind the curve for even asking.
“Those fuckers left us here, sir,” he answered, as simply as that, and went back to eating.
“Who are ‘those fuckers,’ soldier?” I asked.
He put his fork down on the table and directed his full attention to answering my question. “Sir, there are about thirty generals at Camp Victory living in luxury. They are either too gutless or have no interest in coming to this place. Sir, this is a dangerous place and you can get your ass fucking killed out here.”
Having already experienced the first morning’s attack, I knew just how true the statement was.
I asked them about the different types of prisoners by ethnicity, wondering how many of the prisoners were Sunnis or Shiites. To my surprise, the soldiers informed me that there were more divisions than just ethnic ones, telling me that we had really made the war effort worse by arresting women and children. I turned to the sergeant, surprised by what I’d just heard.
“You mean we have women and kids locked up here?” I asked.
“Yes sir, we do,” he said.
I was incredulous but kept cool, wanting to dig deeper. “Okay, but I’m not tracking with you. How does this make the war effort worse?”
The sergeant explained. “Sir, I can’t get my arms around us locking up a bunch of grandmas. How in the heck is a seventy-five-year-old lady a threat to U.S. security?”
“Sergeant, you also said we have kids locked up here. Is this correct?”
“Yes sir, we have about ten to fifteen teenagers who are ‘terrorists.’” The sergeant made quote signs in the air when he said this.
I was stunned and pushed aside my food tray, my appetite not as strong as it had been earlier. “Sergeant, can you take me to see the old women and these kids?”
“Yes sir, I’ll take you to the camp right now.”
We got up from the table immediately and put our trays away. As we left the chow hall, the sun was coming up and we could hear the Muslim prayers being played on the mosque loudspeakers across the street from the FOB. The sergeant picked up speed and motioned for me to keep up.
“Sir, we need to walk real fast,” he explained. “When those fuckers stop praying, they get all fired up and start shooting at us.”
We entered a dark, smelly building that served as a central lockup and screening facility. He opened the prison door. Inside, three elderly women were being held until they could be “processed.” I asked the crusty and angry warrant officer in charge why these women were being held. It was clear that my presence there was a bother to the warrant officer. I later learned that he was angry because his retirement papers were rescinded by the intel superiors because they needed him to stick around. Back in the States, he had a new job and home lined up, and it all had to be placed on hold due to this deployment.
The warrant officer responded to my question matter-of-factly. “Colonel, when the infantry guys storm a building or house, they scarf up everybody in the house—Mom, Dad, little Junior, Grandpa, and the bad guy they’re specifically targeting. They don’t have time to sort it out, so we have to do it.”
I was guided to another part of the FOB, a dog-pen-like place that held the teenage boys. In the 130-degree heat, without any air-conditioning, my country had around fifteen boys locked up in a tent much like wild animals. There was an overwhelming stench of feces. The conditions were so horrifying, so inhumane, that I struggled not to vomit in the presence of these soldiers. Each of the boys had a unique stare. Some simply stood in a catatonic state, others yelled obscenities, and some reached with their hands as to grab me as I walked by, desperate for me to listen to their story. It was clear from their decent weight that they were being well fed, but it was equally clear from the scarcity of personnel and foul surroundings that they lacked the medical attention of a pediatrician, psychologists, Arabic-speaking schoolteachers, Muslim chaplains, physical education activities, or any special needs consistent with what any U.S. juvenile correctional facility provided. Most animals in our country are afforded better. I was disgusted.
I later learned that at least half of these boys had been raped in captivity by other prisoners, or as a rite of passage in their hometowns, something I could still find hard to comprehend. Despite having heard of such rapes, and Hassan’s patient explanation at Gitmo, it still was hard to reconcile the sad situation in my mind. Then, after that experience, we put those teenage boys in this shithole. Why? And why had we not provided them with the services of a child psychologist? The warrant officer and the sergeant had no answers.
As I left the area, I could not get past the criminal way we were treating these children. Even if they were involved in fighting U.S. troops, and that was not a certainty, they were still young people who deserved a minimum of dignity and care. I knew that even the hardest of convicted juvenile murderers in our country would be treated far better, far more humanely. I could not get their faces out of my mind—the haunting images, the young boys looking at me, reaching out to me, pleading with their eyes, hoping I would finally be the one to help them instead of walking away. I had to walk away that night, but it nearly killed me.
I found my way back to my room, dropped to my knees at my bedside, prayed, then cried my eyes out. My God, how could a nation as mine, with so much good in it, with such a commitment to decency and the good of the individual, treat human beings this way? In my psyche, deep in my soul, I felt as though tonight I had seen the bowels of hell.
I couldn’t sleep. The pain in my soul would not allow it. I went for a walk, hoping to find another soldier who could tell me if there was a commercial phone anywhere on the base. I needed to talk to my momma. My mother was an eighty-one-year-old, proper Southern Baptist Creole woman from New Orleans and I desperately needed to hear her voice in this hellish place. Her faith, her calm voice, and her warmth had quieted my anxiety during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and in the years since, her steady, soothing voice had calmed my troubled soul on many occasions. I had never needed her more than I did that night in Abu Ghraib.
I found a soldier who directed me to the phone center, where I sat down and called my momma in New Orleans. As soon as she answered, she could hear the fear and loss of hope in my voice. Her voice instantly offered solace, but my voice still trembled as I told her this place was awful and that I was considering asking to be relieved, to be sent anywhere else but Abu Ghraib. My mother had never given me bad advice, and I needed to ask her if it was okay for me to give up, to admit that this was too much for me. My mother had a sixth-grade education and she basically taught herself to read and write by reading her Bible, got a GED, and went on to nursing school later on in her life. Whenever I was troubled, troubled in a way that it shook my soul, I would always call my momma.
Without any introduction, from her biblical library in her head, she began to tell me about Paul’s journey to Macedonia and the trials and tribulations he found along the way.
“Son, Paul didn’t know if he could do it either,” she said in the most reassuring voice. “He wanted to quit, too. He didn’t know what lay ahead of him or why God wanted him there.”
I said yes, I remembered.
“Son, God has chosen you for this journey,” she said. “Son, do not quit. Ask God to show you the way and he will.”
Choosing a Path
June–July 2004
I
went back to my room, exhausted. I had cried my soul out, and hadn’t slept for well over twenty-four hours. But I still found myself restless, the wheels in my head moving too fast to sleep, so I left my room and started to walk around the FOB again. I ended up on the other side of the post. It was a godawful place. It looked like a prison camp in a third world country. I could not escape the odor of feces, dead animals, mixed with a novel, revolting scent my person had not previously experienced.
As I patrolled, I couldn’t help but notice a big horse of a man walking toward me. It was Major Tom Smithon, the brigade surgeon. Major Smithon, an Army Reserve cardiologist from Mississippi, had a haggard, unhappy look chiseled into his face. Although I knew that he was a brilliant and dedicated physician, it was immediately clear that he was one who had experienced many of life’s disappointments. I would come to learn that he was treated by his fellow officers like the chubby boy who was either selected last or never chosen at all for the schoolyard team. His wishes, ideas, or requests for improving Abu Ghraib in any way were always acknowledged by his superiors or fellow colleagues, but ultimately denied.