Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (23 page)

It was the walk through the nearby streets that was hard. Rubble lay in small piles next to the hulls of buildings, landslides ignited by nearby explosives. Bodies were cut up and littered the street—heads separated from torsos. The gore was incredible, even to someone who’d witnessed years of combat.

The block where I’d grown up?

It was far from the apartment complex, and in no way close to the American installations. But it, too, had been wracked by war. The neat if humble apartments and buildings I remembered were now either completely destroyed or, worse, battered from IEDs and other explosions nearby. My old home had been destroyed; the street looked like an abandoned battlefield, which I suppose it was.

The men who did this were supposedly working for God, but how can that be? If you are working for God, why would you harm those he created?

Separating a man’s head from his body—what do children think when they see that? What is the effect on wives and sisters, daughters and friends?

Is that the reaction God wanted?

I know what I felt. I didn’t think that the murderers were men of God. I knew they were savages and devils. Their violence had achieved the opposite of what they intended.

Certainly people were afraid. But the murderers never spoke of that as a goal. They cloaked their evil in lofty lies about Paradise and protecting our religion.

There was a lot of hatred in the city, but people were not entirely blind to the true nature of what was going on, and what the people who were targeting Americans were really like.

During my short time in Mosul, I heard comments like this:

“Your son was captured by the Americans? Oh, that’s good luck—they will not kill him.”

“The government? Too bad—they are corrupt. You are going to pay a lot of money to get him back.”

“Al-Qaeda? Oh . . . they are corrupt, and he is going to die.”

The physical danger that people lived in was terrible. Even those who were spared direct pain suffered. I would imagine that the things the children saw will have a deep effect on them for the rest of their lives. My children, I am sure, were affected. But there was nothing I or anyone else could do to shelter them from the horrors as long as they stayed in the city. Evil always loomed nearby, and there were much worse things than simply seeing a body in the street.

SOME WEEKS LATER,
Soheila was inside our house with the rest of the family when she heard several cars screech to a stop on the street. She and our sister-in-law quickly put the children to bed, then ran out into the hallway. Our house had a little vestibule, separating the outside door from another inner door. The space was small, but psychologically it was large, an important barrier to the outside.

The yelling from the cars in front made it clear that the men who’d driven up were mujahideen. They were searching for someone who had the same name as one of the children inside.

“Where is his house?” shouted one. “We must find him.”

“Search the houses!”

Soheila put her body against the door. So did my sister-in-law. They started praying, saying the words a Muslim uses when burying the dead.

“Where is he?!”

The men outside were so close, Soheila could hear them charging the bolts on their AKs.

“If they come into the house, we will attack them and take their weapons,” she whispered to my sister-in-law. “We will fight them. We will not let them take the kids.”

The women waited. The men rushed into a house nearby and came out with someone who was put into the trunk of a car.

“Where’s the other house!” demanded the mujahideen. “The other one we need to get. Where?”

Someone answered. There were more shouts, and then the sound of men getting into cars and driving off.

Both women collapsed onto the floor when the cars were gone, their bodies shaking. When finally they were able to get up, Soheila called me and told me what had happened. I immediately called a relative, who drove them to a safe house in a village far away. They stayed for two weeks before coming home.

IMPRESSED BY MY
work with the Iraqi troops, a major with the ICTF invited me to go to share a few drinks one night. We went out and after a round or so, he asked what my plans for the future were.

I was noncommittal, a very valid response in Iraq.

“Why don’t you come to work with us here?” he asked, disappointed that I hadn’t jumped at the chance. “We will make you an officer, find you a house on the base—it will be a good life.”

He made it sound very attractive, but I wasn’t tempted. If I didn’t make it to America, I knew I was already doing what I wanted to do—work with the SEALs. I wasn’t going to give that up for anyone or anything.

Several other offers followed; I had a chance to work with other American military units as well as Iraqi. But I always turned them down. You don’t leave the best.

THE MISSIONS CONTINUED,
one blurring into the next. From Mosul we went to Fallujah, then to Basra, and from there to Nasiriya.

Or was it the other way around? Did we go to all or any of these places?

In my memories, this time is a never-ending panorama of violence, of arrests, of people proclaiming to believe in God yet acting against His wishes. I remember snatches of conversations, but not their meanings. I remember my heart pounding, but can’t picture exactly why. I remember running, but now don’t know if it was real or a piece of a dream.

My reputation among the militia grew, just as it had among the al-Qaeda terrorists. One of my SEAL friends, Mikey U, says there was a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on my head. I don’t doubt it. By this time I was well known among the insurgents we targeted. Their bounty didn’t matter. I’d come to hate them even more than they hated me, and I had plenty of reason.

Mikey U was with Team 10 at the time. He was a great warrior and one of those people whom you know you can completely trust the first time they look you in the eye. While he was in Iraq, he coordinated the work with the ERU, and we worked closely while he was there. The platoon did upwards of eighty or ninety operations during the roughly six months they were in Baghdad. A good number were bloody, with militia members trying to ambush or directly fight the SEALs and other units wherever they operated, and the SEALs seeking out the worst of the groups for apprehension.

The SEALs weren’t permitted in certain areas or places, although sometimes the restrictions could seem very arbitrary. At one point while I was with Mikey U, we were assigned to look for a man working with the Shia militia. We ended up on a building right next to a mosque. It was so close that a person could literally step across from one roof to the other without any fear of falling.

I
could
do that. The SEALs couldn’t—they weren’t allowed on mosque grounds.

We were up on the house roof, looking for our jackpot, when I spotted a man not far away on the mosque’s roof. I walked over, alone. The man stood looking at me. He was obviously our jackpot; it was far too late for anyone to be on the roof unless they had just hopped over to escape our search.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He said something inane and innocuous.

“We are looking for Muhammad,” I told him.

“Muhammad? That is not me.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

He said his name—which, unfortunately for him, was the name of the man we were looking for.

“Prove it,” I said. “Let me see.”

He crossed to my roof, thinking he was free.

“I lied about who we were looking for,” I told him, repeating his full name and grabbing him. “You are coming with us.”

He came along quietly, knowing he had given himself away.

I DON’T WANT
to leave you with the impression that every mission we had was successful or that things always went according to plan. In fact, things probably never went 100 percent as intended, and although we usually succeeded, there were plenty of frustrations and wasted nights.

One of our best and most elaborate plans, in fact, came to nothing. This was another mission with the Quiet Man, who could be quite clever when it came to designing operations.

The snipers were working in a Baghdad neighborhood but for some reason weren’t seeing any action. Apparently the bad guys somehow knew when they were coming and had enough sense to stay away. So the Quiet Man and I discussed the situation and came up with what in retrospect seems like a pretty obvious idea: make the bad guys come to us.

How?

The insurgents had a habit of ambushing Humvees and other vehicles hit by IEDs or disabled in some way. I suggested that we fake an incident and pick them off when they came.

One night just after twelve, a Humvee drove through an iffy Baghdad neighborhood and was disabled by a bomb. The wounded victims crawled into a nearby house. They were easy pickings; no American backup was nearby.

The men, in fact, were playacting. We’d taken over the house they’d crawled to several hours before and were hiding inside, waiting for them. The explosion, the wounds—everything was fake.

Three or four cars showed up a few minutes later, spun around the area, then took off. This was typical insurgent procedure. So was the arrival of children several minutes after that. You see, the insurgents didn’t want to expose themselves to danger, but had no compunction about sending kids. The children went through the Humvee, found the house where the men had gone to, then ran off.

Within seconds, the cars were back. The street flooded with men with AKs. Other men took out their cell phones and began calling for reinforcements.

But just as they were about to storm the house—and before we had fired—a single police car arrived. The man took a look around and began yelling at the others to leave.

The crowd of mujahideen took off. Our operation was a dud.

Was it just a coincidence that the cop arrived? Was he a good guy who had singlehandedly saved (he thought) some wounded Americans? A hero who risked his life against a dozen or more killers?

Or was he a member of the militia who’d somehow been tipped off or who otherwise guessed that the incident was staged?

We never found out. Either possibility—and maybe a few more—makes sense. In any event, the elaborate ruse went for naught. Days’ worth of preparation had been wasted.

That was Iraq.

ONE TRIP ESPECIALLY
stands out from the fog of these years, a mission to Diyala Province. We were working with a unit of Army Rangers, trying to secure a terror cell led by a man the Americans called “the Prince.”

If he had some actual claim to royalty, it was never explained to me. More likely it was just a nickname or a code name they had invented to describe his role in the insurgency.

Diyala is in the northeast of Iraq, bordering on Iran. By this time in the war, Iran was contributing quite a bit to the violence, arming and advising Shia militia and other terrorists almost openly. Iran’s influence made things in Iraq considerably worse than they might have been—but I am getting away from my story.

The target building was rather large, and the plan to go in was worked out carefully by the SEALs, who would make the actual assault while the Rangers pulled security outside. Since we were anticipating meeting several people and hoped not to have to use our weapons, I was one of the first people in.

We got in without a problem—the main door was neither locked nor guarded, if I’m remembering right—and started moving down the hall. I noticed a dozen or more shoes outside one of the rooms at the far end and pointed it out to one of the SEALs.

“You should check that room,” I told him.

“Not yet,” he grunted. “We have to do it according to our plan. First we get these rooms.”

“Do what you want,” I told him. “There are a lot of sandals there. That means there a lot of people inside the room.”

“But this is our plan.”

You can’t argue with a SEAL once he has his mind made up. The SEALs worked their way cautiously down the hall, secured the rest of the building, and only then discovered that everyone was inside the room I’d pointed out.

Given how quickly they moved, it wasn’t that big a deal. Still . . .

There were a dozen or so men in the room. None offered any resistance. We’d brought two other terps along for the mission so they could gain experience; both were relatively new. After making sure everything was under control, I left them to interview the men and went outside to get a smoke.

I found one of the Ranger sergeants in front of the building and started talking. Our conversation hadn’t gotten very far when suddenly we heard someone walking down the street. The sergeant raised his gun, and I raised mine.

Two men approached from the shadows. They had weapons strung on their bodies; one carried a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, its distinctive shape like a miniature minaret looming over his head.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Stop, stop.”

The men started to run—toward us. Their guns swung forward.

“Stop!” I repeated.

They were no more than a dozen yards away, clearly hostile. The sergeant fired, and I fired. Both men fell.

I walked over quickly with the Ranger. The men had grenades arranged on their chests; he theorized that they had planned on blowing themselves up once they got inside the building.

We pulled the bodies aside and resumed our watch, not talking now. This was one of those times when minutes and danger built together, where every second seemed to increase the potential for danger. Tension wrapped itself around my neck, stinging my muscles numb.

I went back inside the building, wondering why we were still here. The SEAL in charge told me that no one had admitted anything. He wasn’t going to leave without figuring out whether the men were innocent or not. The two terps hadn’t had much success in getting them to say anything beyond the names on their IDs.

Often the key to finding out what was going on was to find the first weak link; once one person talked, other mouths began to open. I had the men blindfolded and taken out to the garden in the back. I approached each one, pausing to ask a question or two. What I was
really
doing was looking for that weak link, touching them gently, invading their space. Their reactions told me a lot—a calm man who didn’t move would be harder to break, while a man who jerked back when I tapped his shoulder was a much better bet.