Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (16 page)

What made it even more unusual was the fact that our Hummer was the only vehicle with no armored protection in the convoy.

“How are you?” I said when he climbed into the truck.

“Good. How are you?”

“Good.”

A few minutes of awkward silence followed. I couldn’t quite understand why he was there—had I done something wrong? Finally I decided to ask.

“How come you are here, Senior Chief?”

“I’m just here to sit with you.”

“Oh.”

“We’re brothers, right?” added Chief Tatt.

“Yes.”

“Okay. So if we are brothers, we sit together, right?”

“Right,” I answered.

An American vehicle had been hit on the road in the vicinity a few days before. I’m sure everyone in the convoy was thinking about that as the wait dragged on. It was never a good idea to stay in one place in Iraq very long; staying along Route Michigan was certifiable insanity. Tatt or the EOD guy pulled out a ballistic blanket; we huddled in the back, the blanket draped over us.

In case you’re wondering: no, it wouldn’t have provided much protection if we were attacked.

“My wife is going to kill me if anything happens,” said Tatt finally. “Her last words to me were ‘If you get killed, I’ll kick your ass.’ ”

No one laughed. We were probably all thinking the same thing.

I calculated that I’d be ahead if I got back with one leg intact.

Finally whatever piece of coordination we were waiting for fell into place, and we moved ahead.

We got to the suspect’s house and went in without a problem. The SEALs secured the building quickly and easily; they apprehended a suspect and I was called in to determine if he was the jackpot.

I entered the room he’d been taken to and knew right off this was going to be a hard assignment. He had a determined look on his face—but he wasn’t belligerent. He was reasoned and calm, not necessarily cooperative but not resisting either.

I asked his name. He gave me a false one, which of course matched his documentation.

We parried for a while. I asked him a few questions. He answered them but didn’t say much else. Nothing that he did say incriminated him in any way. He was so good I couldn’t help but get a feeling that he was the right person, but feelings meant nothing in the end—without real proof, he could not be taken in.

We talked a little more without getting anywhere. Interestingly, he didn’t try talking me into hating the Americans or even question my religious beliefs. His answers were bland.

Finally I left the room and went to see his wife and children. They volunteered an identity that matched what he had said.

Not sure what else to do, I told them that I knew they were lying.

At first they stuck to his story. In the meantime, the SEALs who had been searching the house for evidence brought me some papers. These were in the jackpot’s name—and yet the family still maintained the man we had apprehended wasn’t the man we were seeking.

“Listen,” I told them. “You have to tell us the truth, or we will take all of you. That is the way it will be.”

It was a bluff. They didn’t suddenly change their story or renounce him, but the tones in their voices changed. I could tell from their reactions that they knew I was right, that he wasn’t who he claimed to be.

“Are you going to cooperate?”

His wife didn’t say anything, nor did the children.

“Well then,” I told them loudly. “Then we will take you all in.”

I stomped over to the suspect and told him that I was taking the entire family in.

“Everyone comes,” I told him. “Your wife and your kids. If you are going to lie to me—”

“Leave my family,” he said finally. “I am who you are looking for. Just leave them alone.”

We did.

The SEALs raided the other house nearby and picked up another suspect. By this time there were people in the street, loudly demanding to know what was going on; we could hear gunfire in the distance. We packed our jackpots up quickly and hustled out of there, driving to a base on the other side of the city.

It was the first time I’d seen the city since just before the war, when I’d taken a cement-truck load down from Mosul. Looking at the destruction, I couldn’t help but think what might have been if the city worked with the Americans rather than fought them.

The war had turned me into a strangely optimistic person on the one hand—I could sense so much potential in my country, in my fellow Iraqis, and in mankind in general. But on the other hand it had made me deeply sad, stressed by the waste and sheer lunacy of the hatred I saw and experienced.

Iraq made no sense. The people had complained bitterly about Saddam. Now he was gone. But instead of working with the country that had freed them, instead of building Iraq into a great land, people fought like suicidal monsters.

THE RAID NETTED
most of the key people in the terrorist cell. The IED attacks stopped for roughly a week following the operation. That was considered an extraordinary success at that point in the war: the residents and the people trying to protect them had less insanity to deal with for a few days.

We returned to Baghdad and a full slate of new missions, our workload gradually increasing. We worked hard; when we got a day off we partied hard—or just slept, which sometimes was even better. One night after a mission, Chief Tatt started joking with me. He had a wry sense of humor that snuck up on you; it matched his easygoing attitude. We joked about many things—women, drinking. It was the usual SEAL humor, not much different from what you would expect to hear in a locker room.

All of a sudden, Tatt turned serious.

“Would you like to go to America?” he asked.

I thought he meant as a tourist and said something about how I’d love to see the sights someday.

“Live there,” he said, correcting me. “Would you like to become an American citizen?”

“I’m an Iraqi,” I answered, or something along those lines.

“It may not be safe for you here. Or for your family.” Tatt explained that another American unit, an Army Special Forces A Team, had recently helped get an interpreter out of the country because his life was threatened. I told him I didn’t feel that was necessary in my case; I had no fear about my fate, or my safety.

“I’m fine. I’m an Iraqi. I have my friends.”

“Are you sure?” asked Tatt.

“I’m going to finish this,” I told him. “Iraq is going to get better.”

“Roger that.”

Tatt didn’t say what he thought of my optimism. We went back to joking.

He didn’t bring it up again during the rest of his deployment. Even so, the seed of something had been planted. I was still an Iraqi, and still in my mind I believed Iraq could be a better place. But everything I’d seen over the past few months, and everything I heard from Soheila, was working to erode that hope. A better Iraq looked more and more like a fantasy. I wasn’t working on a dream; I was living in the middle of a nightmare.

AT TIMES, THE
SEALs were used as a kind of special resource, helping other American or Iraqi units that were taking heavy casualties. One of those times was in al-Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that had once been home to many Iraqi Christians but by this point was infested with Sunni extremists. A U.S. National Guard unit had been assigned to the area, and while they were fine soldiers, they lacked the special training and resources the SEALs had. The SEALs started doing sniper overwatch missions and running patrols, aiming to disrupt the mujahideen networks that were giving the other Americans such a hard time. At the same time, they targeted the deadliest of the insurgent cell leaders. I think we only captured a few people on the raids, but the effect was out of proportion—not used to being hassled on their own turf, the mujahideen would lay low for several days after a SEAL operation, giving the men in the National Guard unit a temporary but very welcome respite.

In April, we were assigned to help patrol the area surrounding Abu Ghraib, the huge prison twenty miles west of Baghdad. If Americans have heard of the place at all, it’s because of the torture incidents that allegedly took place there in 2003 and 2004. By the time we were assigned there, the scandal had passed; Abu Ghraib was famous for something else: a spectacular breakout that began when a truck loaded with explosives detonated near the outer wall. The attack came April 2; a hundred or more al-Qaeda insurgents hit the walls of the prison hoping to spark a mass escape. They suffered heavy casualties. While they failed to achieve their objective—the prisoners who breached the interior fence were recaptured—the attack involved complex planning rarely seen in Iraq, with coordinated shellings and ambushes at a number of bases and highways.

Even after the attackers had been beaten back, the route from Baghdad to Abu Ghraib was a veritable highway of hell. Ambushes and IED attacks were common. The SEALs decided to scout it to see if they might be able to ambush the mujahideen planting IEDs. Tatt and I drove through the area with a member of the army unit assigned to the area. We’d just started out when Tatt pointed to some round holes in the Hummer’s interior.

“Dude, what’s that?” he asked the sergeant who was our guide.

“Oh, we were in Sadr City a while back and an IED went off,” said the sergeant nonchalantly. “Ball bearings went through.”

He added that they had killed the man where Tatt was sitting.

“That’s nothing,” continued the driver. He pointed to a ramp on the highway. “See that? We hit an IED on that ramp and flipped over the other day. Killed the turret gunner.”

If these stories hadn’t been enough to impress me, the fact that several fresh IEDs had been set up along the highway on the route home to Baghdad did. One of them was truly remarkable—made of several large artillery shells arranged together, the SEALs called it a “teepee” because it reminded them of an Indian tent. Bomb units defused the devices, but it was impossible not to think about either the brazenness of the terrorists who’d planted them in broad daylight, or the implications of having failed to spot them.

The next day I went out with another SEAL who headed the unit’s snipers. He’s still in the navy, so we’ll call him Tommy German to protect his identity.

Tommy German looked at everything with a sniper’s eye. Like a lot of SEALs, he was able to mentally render a complicated battlefield into good places and bad places with just a glance. He wanted to be in the good places; he wanted the bad guys to be in the bad places. Some of this was pretty obvious. It was better to be in a high spot than a low one. But other aspects were, and remain, a mystery to me. I just learned to accept that he saw the world differently than I did. He always got good results.

I was observant myself, though of different things. After taking our survey that afternoon, we stopped in a settlement near the prison as a group of American soldiers swept through, looking for the terrorist who had just planted a bomb. The soldiers could detect certain types of explosive on a person’s skin with the help of a special device. As we watched them work their way down the street, I noticed a man watching from the distance. He eyed the patrol, then moved quickly away. He was dressed differently than others, and it was clear that he was out of place.

“That’s the guy they want,” I told Tommy German, pointing.

“How do you know?”

“Just from the way he looked at them and turned around. You better tell them. He’s getting away.”

Tommy German called over to one of the soldiers, and they ran and caught up with the man. Sure enough, he tested positive for explosives.

BACK IN BAGHDAD,
we started getting missions that took us farther from home. Whether that was because things had calmed down in Baghdad or become more heated elsewhere, I’m really not sure. I doubt it. It was probably more that the SEALs had been recognized as a valuable resource, and everyone wanted to use them.

Whatever the reason, it was around this time that I experienced another first—riding in a helicopter.

Our mission was in the south, near Basra, and like most of our missions, it was to take place at night. We were looking for a man named Abdullah, a Shiite who’d been organizing resistance in the area.

All of that was utterly routine—aside from the fact that to get there we had to fly. I’d never been in a helicopter. Given that I had once wanted to be a pilot, I wasn’t intimidated or even very anxious.

Until one of the SEALs came up to me with a very serious face and asked, “What is your blood type?”

I had no idea what he was asking.

“What’s your blood type?” he repeated.

“Which?”

“Blood type.”

I thought it was a joke. “You want to know my blood?”

“Yes. What type is it?”

“Iraqi.”

That didn’t seem to be a reasonable answer. I thought maybe I would say “Scotch”—but his voice had turned so serious that it was clear he wasn’t in the mood for a joke.

“No, no, your blood type. Not your nationality.”

I just shook my head. “Red blood.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

He explained,
almost
patiently, that blood has different types, and if you are injured, the doctors need to know which one to use to replace what you’ve lost. The explanation helped a bit, though I still didn’t know the answer and had to take a simple test. But the process made me wonder: Did helicopters crash so often that people were always needing blood transfusions?

We drove out to the airstrip at dusk, where an MH-53 was waiting. The fifty-three, as it is known to the SEALs, is a large helicopter with a single overhead rotor, often used by special operations forces as a transport. It looks like a grasshopper on steroids, with big blisters in the front over gear, a pipe for aerial refueling that looks like a jousting spear, and extra fuel tanks that look like bombs to the uninitiated—which would definitely include me. There are door gunners with big machine guns, but it’s a transport rather than an attack helicopter. Still, it looks pretty ferocious.

And a little too heavy to get off the ground, until those big overhead rotors get angry.