The Assassins' Gate (36 page)

Recently, Prior had experienced what he called an epiphany. He and his soldiers were searching a man's house on what turned out to be a false accusation. “And I just realized: We're on top,” he said. “Rome fell, and Greece fell, and I thought: I like being an American. I like being on top, and you don't stay on top unless there's people willing to defend it.” It was a feeling not of triumph but of clarity, and a limited kind of empathy. “I thought: What if someone did this to my family? I'd be pissed. And what if I couldn't do anything about it? And I thought: I don't want this to happen to me or my family, and we need to maintain superiority as the number one superpower.”

Tonight's target was a village along a dirt road, on a peninsula where the Diala River doubled back on itself. At sunset, Prior pulled up before a yard where a cow was grazing. A middle-aged woman came to the gate. She was the sister of Saddam Hussein and the wife of one of the men picked up on Prior's last visit.

“Saddam Hussein?” she said. “The president? He's not here.” She laughed nervously. Prior did not; his dry humor was not in evidence tonight. “Saddam Hussein moved out with his wife and children,” she said. “I don't know where they went.”

“She's lying,” the translator told Prior in a thuggish tone. Prior told the woman that he wanted to search the house. A younger woman who looked ill was trying to calm a crying baby.

The search of the bedroom turned up nothing: pictures of a young man with his girlfriend, love notes, Arab girlie photos. “Ah, that's nice,” Prior said. “It's a freaking bra wrapped in plastic.”

I went back into the living room, which was nearly bare except for a television. An old Egyptian movie was on, without sound. The woman with the baby was retching in the doorway. Speaking Arabic, the middle-aged woman said, “We were happy when you Americans came to get rid of the dictator, and now here you are searching our house. It's surprising.” Her two sons, about six and ten, were standing against a wall and staring at the soldiers. They would never forget this, I thought—big strangers in uniforms, with guns, who had already come once and taken away their father, speaking a strange language, walking through their house, removing things from closets.

The bedroom that Prior had searched turned out to be the wrong one. Saddam Hussein's bedroom was locked, and the woman couldn't produce a key. A soldier arrived with an axe; three blows with the blunt end broke open the door. The younger woman's retching grew louder. This search, too, was fruitless. Saddam Hussein was long gone.

Night had fallen while we were inside. As we left, the translator taunted the woman: He said her brother was wanted because his name was Saddam Hussein. When Prior heard this, he snapped, “Tell her the truth—he's wanted for being Fedayeen.” By morning, I was sure, the translator's remark would have made its way around the neighborhood as an example of American justice—baseless arrest, accusation without proof.

“Why did you take my husband?” the woman demanded of Prior.

“Because he's Fedayeen. He's Baath Party.”

“No! No! No!”

“Tell her he's in detention,” Prior instructed the translator. “If he's guilty, he'll be kept there. If he's not, he'll be processed and released.” (A few days later the husband was let go.)

Out on the road, Prior shone his flashlight on an old man sitting on the ground. “Why did you lie to me last time we were here and say he was just gone for the day? Tell Saddam Hussein that he's a fugitive from coalition justice, and when he returns he should turn himself in to coalition forces immediately. Let's go, we're out of here.”

We drove farther down the road and parked in front of a tall hedge. The house behind the hedge was owned by Chunky Love's sister. Prior and another soldier moved along the hedge under the palm trees and a full moon. A breeze was blowing off the river. Prior called out into the silence,
“Salaam alaikum”
—Peace be with you.

The translator turned to me. “Like Vietnam.”

I was having the same thought. I knew that it was a limited analogy, more useful for polemic than insight, but at the moment Iraq
did
feel like Vietnam. The Americans were moving half blind in an alien landscape, missing their quarry and leaving behind frightened women and boys with memories.

There was no sign of Chunky Love or his orange garbage truck full of weapons. His sister hadn't seen him in a month; when she did, she told the translator, she would kill him for turning in her husband.

Prior realized that he'd been pulled into a family feud. The sister was told that her husband would be released. Prior called this the “hearts-and-minds moment,” but the sister did not look grateful.

“What do you think, First Sergeant?” Prior asked Lahan on the way back to the base.

“I think we should disassociate ourselves from any information from Chunky Love,” Lahan said. Operative Chunky Love had gone from informant to fugitive.

Prior marveled over how many flatly contradictory stories he had heard from the same people during his two visits to the neighborhood. He admitted that he would never get to the bottom of it. “I'm not freaking Sherlock Holmes,” he said. Then he deadpanned, “I'm just an average guy, trying to get by.”

*   *   *

THE WORLD OF THE SOLDIERS
was unfamiliar to me. It was a world unto itself, with its own strange language and gear and endless rules and codes. I was frequently “sirred” and almost always made to feel welcome in their insular ranks. They enjoyed talking about what they were doing, which made them rather similar to the Iraqis and which more than anything else explained why I kept returning. They
were
average guys, and yet whenever one of them spoke about his other life back home—his favorite pizza, his degree in history—I experienced a slight jolt at recalling that these men and (a few) women, who enjoyed almost no personal freedom and privacy, who were generally more conscientious than anyone their age I'd ever met in America, who seemed to face the daily prospect of danger and death with businesslike aplomb, came from my own self-seeking culture. Prior's salary as a captain in charge of 150 men was $53,100. He and Lahan once told me that they never worried about dying,
ever.
This was their job, what they were trained to do, and they couldn't do it if they allowed normal thoughts to arise. They were molded to live for the unit and the mission, the greater good. Military life made them peculiarly un-American.

I can count my unpleasant experiences with soldiers on one hand, and they were essentially the same. One day, my driver and I got lost amid the ruins of the vast Rashid air base in south Baghdad, with its thousands of squatters picking through bombed-out military buildings. We were trying to find the entrance to Prior's camp, and we could locate only an opening in a chain-link fence along a berm where military traffic was entering and exiting. As we approached, two soldiers appeared on the berm. I got out of the car (an old, typically Iraqi Chevy Caprice that was useful for keeping a low profile) and waved, shouting to them that I was an American. One of them raised his M-16 and drew a careful bead on me, while the other instructed me to come forward with my arms raised. It was unnerving to be in the sight of that weapon while walking the fifty yards toward their position and trying to keep a friendly American smile on my face. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, they pointed out the main entrance gate a half mile up the road. On another occasion, we were waiting to meet someone at the checkpoint next to the 14th of July Bridge into the Green Zone, which would become the scene of several suicide bombings. I noticed the red-lettered sign in English and Arabic promising deadly force against anyone who stopped exactly where our car was idling only when a soldier stalked up to my window and started screaming that he had been about to shoot. On the highway down from Kirkuk to Baghdad, a different driver and I ran into a huge backup at an American checkpoint. The driver decided to cut the line, and as he was speeding along the dirt shoulder a soldier stepped out and aimed his rifle at us. We stopped and I got out with my press card, but the sight of it only enraged him more. “You're going to get me killed!” he shouted. “They see me letting an American go through and they want to shoot me. Don't do that again! No, don't try to shake my hand, they'll see you. Just get back in the car and get in line.” He was new in the country and rattled: To him Iraqis were already a threatening “they.” The closest call came when I was driving toward Baghdad on the desert highway from Jordan and traffic came to a near standstill behind an American convoy. Against the instructions of everyone in his Suburban, my driver, a Jordanian in a hurry, kept approaching the rear vehicle, whose gunner, a visibly frightened teenager, kept waving us back. Suddenly there was gunfire—the warning shots hit the asphalt in front of us. Before long we pulled over with a flat tire halfway between Ramadi and Falluja. While the driver was changing the tire, a black BMW, with four men inside staring hard at us, appeared on a dirt road parallel to the highway. For ten minutes, the car cased us, passing in one direction, then another. We waited inside the Suburban, helpless. Finally the car seemed about to draw alongside us when our driver's cousin pulled up, and the BMW moved on like a thwarted shark swimming away from prey.

Each of these encounters resulted from the absurd proximity of heavily armed soldiers and free-floating journalists in what was still, after all, a war zone, where no one really understood the rules. If I had been Iraqi, or if any of the incidents had happened a few months later, the outcome would have been worse.

The behavior of American soldiers toward Iraqis was usually less restrained. As time went on and suicide bombings increased, checkpoints became the scenes of great danger. Far too many Iraqis, sometimes families with children, went down in a hail of gunfire when they failed to understand the bewildering array of signs and hand signals and orders shouted in English. No one knows how many Iraqis have died in such situations, because the American military makes a point of not keeping track of civilian deaths and conducting investigations only under extraordinary pressure. But leaving aside these tragedies, even the daily screaming of obscenities and the spectacle of men thrown to the ground and zip-cuffed played a crucial part in fixing Iraqis' early impression of the occupation. It was often their first direct encounter with any of the thousands of Americans in their country.

The American presence in Iraq must be one of the most isolated occupations in history. There was no real way for soldiers and Iraqis to mix outside the context of their jobs. Baghdad was a long way from Saigon; there were no bars where soldiers could unwind and get into trouble. Relationships with Iraqi women were prohibited by the military and nearly impossible anyway, given the social restrictions. Everyone knew that intimacy was dangerous, and it somehow wasn't surprising when an Iraqi woman who was working at an American base went into the barracks of a soldier with whom she was presumably having an affair and ended up dead from a gunshot to her head. Prior, who worked as closely with Iraqis as any soldier in the country, entered someone's home as a guest on only one occasion during his fifteen months in Iraq, when he dropped by the house of his translator and close friend Numan al-Nima. The sight of two military vehicles parked outside and surrounded by half a dozen soldiers drew the attention of the translator's neighbors. He asked Prior not to repeat the visit.

The stress of doing regular patrols, raids, and checkpoint duty, while coming under increasingly frequent attack from Iraqis who didn't wear uniforms and drove unmarked cars, brought out a degree of brutality that was probably inevitable. But some of it was avoidable and had more to do with individual pathology and poor leadership than the nature of occupation and guerrilla war.

One night, when I was in the northern city of Kirkuk, I went out on patrol with soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which controlled the city. At one police station, the local cops had arrested a pair of Iraqi men in their late twenties, who had been blindfolded with strips of cloth, their white shirts torn and bloody, their backs scraped and bruised. The cops said that the two men had tried to run their checkpoint and crashed the car. A search had turned up a pair of ancient-looking fragmentation grenades. One of the men, a taxi driver, insisted that the grenades were for fishing; the other said he had been a passenger in the car and knew nothing about the grenades. They were now suspected insurgents, and the Americans took them to the airfield, where there was a temporary prison with about a hundred inmates.

The airfield was crisscrossed with wire and floodlit. Across a dirt field from the boxlike detention cells there was an outdoor holding pen made of metal bars and concertina wire. The suspects, hands zip-cuffed behind their backs, were put in the pen. It was after eleven, and the soldiers on guard duty weren't happy to see more work arrive. One young soldier in a green T-shirt, with dark brows and delicate pretty-boy features, directed a stream of abuse at the holding pen.

“I will fucking kick your ass,” he snarled. “I will cut you up.” One of the prisoners, the passenger, looked confused and a little scared. He indicated that he needed to urinate. “What's the matter, can't hold it? You a fucking pussy? You a cooze? Man, you are a dumb motherfucker. I could be in bed by now, dumb piece of shit.”

The leader of the patrol, a young sergeant named John Adams, called for the driver to be brought over for processing.

“Hey, retard, get up here,” the pretty boy yelled. “No, the next person—yeah, you, you fucking retard. Stand up, stand up.” The driver was brought out of the pen and his cuffs removed. He didn't look at all frightened—there was a trace of cockiness on his face—which only enraged the pretty boy. “I'm gonna break your freaking head.”