Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (25 page)

I was working with Team 10 when we were assigned to arrest an important Shia militia leader before he could leave the country. The orders and information came very late—so late, in fact, that not only did we have to try to apprehend him at the airport, but by the time we got there he had already boarded the plane.

The Americans had no authority to board the plane or even stop it from taking off. Fortunately, we were working with an Iraqi unit. I went to the security people—both Jordanian—at the gate and demanded that the man be taken off.

They weren’t impressed until I told them that they would be arrested for harboring an international criminal.

“We are with the Iraqi police, and we have no hesitation to arrest you,” I told them. It was a bluff—we weren’t authorized to arrest anyone except for our jackpot, and certainly we wouldn’t have detained the Jordanians and created an international incident. Once you were aboard a foreign plane, you were generally considered to be under that country’s protection, and any strong protest by Jordan would have released the plane and its passengers immediately—not to mention got myself and the Iraqi commander in a mountain of trouble. But the Jordanian security men didn’t know that, and after a quick phone call they decided that it made no sense to risk arrest for a man wanted by the Iraqi government.

The door to the plane was opened and we were allowed on. But then we had another problem—identifying the terrorist.

The physical description I had been given could have matched about half of Iraq, and I had no seating chart to identify him. The only clue I had was intelligence that he was traveling with his family.

Not much to go on.

I knew he’d have a false ID; I also knew that if I couldn’t positively identify him I wouldn’t be able to remove him. The Jordanians would surely ask for proof, and any delay would surely prompt them to change their minds about holding the plane and letting me take the jackpot off.

As we walked through the cabin, I got a glimpse of a man with a family I thought might be my target. But there was no way to be sure. Rather than tipping my hand, I moved to the back of the plane. There I turned around and considered the situation. At any moment I expected the Jordanians to decide to kick me off. For time’s sake I had to take a rough approach. So I started back up the aisle.

As I started past the aisle where the suspect was sitting, I suddenly stopped, as if noticing the girl sitting next to him on the aisle for the first time.

“Fatimah, how are you?” I said.

“Oh, fine, uncle,” she said, speaking politely out of habit.

Fatimah was the name of the suspect’s daughter. He grudgingly admitted he was the man we were seeking and we took him off the plane, under arrest.

Raids against kidnapping cells specializing in taking Sunnis; raids against cells specializing in taking Shia . . .

The weight of the war wore me down. There were bizarre moments—tea with the owners of a house mistakenly identified as a terrorist haven while a gunfight loomed down the block—but even the surreal had become draining rather than energizing. There were safe islands, like the one where my family lived, but the sea surrounding them continued to roil. More depressing than the constant battles was the impression that Iraq had simply become too corrupt to cure itself. We stopped working with an ICTF unit because the soldiers just couldn’t be trusted. We cut ties with ERU units that had their own agenda of targeting Sunnis at all costs.

Personally, I was done with Iraq. I was ready to go home to America.

THE PACE OF
the missions left little time to play or even rest. But I do remember some times where we all relaxed and had a little fun. For Thanksgiving 2008, I wanted to show my appreciation to the SEAL team I was working with. I told one of my friends—Singer is not his real name, but it will do—that I would get them all dinner.

I’d met Singer back in 2006, when he was a new guy—a SEAL who had only recently joined his unit. He was a very friendly and supportive man, with a good sense of humor until the mission started; then he was all business. When I told him of my plan to get dinner for the guys, he insisted that I shouldn’t pay myself. He took up a collection, and with the money the SEALs collected I was able to get four or five lambs (no turkeys though!) and a whole array of other food, better than an elaborate wedding.

They ate heartily. Then, maybe because they weren’t used to Iraqi food, they all came down with stomach flu a few hours later. Singer has not let me forget that in all the time since.

THE RELATIVE CALM
of our Baghdad neighborhood was shattered that fall when a large car bomb went off down the street a few hundred feet from our house. Aimed at Iraqi and American soldiers, the explosion destroyed a number of stores. The explosion was so severe that a piece of the door from the car that had been blown up flew all the way to our garage.

When the bomb went off, Soheila was standing in the front room. She dove to the floor as the windows shattered with the shock, then scrambled to her feet amid the broken glass and ran inside to look after the kids. They’d already thrown themselves down, huddling on the floors of the rooms, safe. It was a well-practiced precaution, but familiarity made it no less frightening.

But this was what safety looked like in Iraq; most places were a thousand times worse.

Not long after the bombing, kidnappings began in the neighborhood. This was a new development: the sons and daughters of rich people were targeted by criminals, who would take them while they were going or coming from school. It was about money, not jihad, not Islam, not God. We knew one of the victims, a child of a neighbor. The ransom they demanded was immense; though apparently the fee was always negotiated down, one million dollars was a common demand. I don’t know the details, how much was paid or how it was arranged, but the child did return.

In a few cases, the police were called, but for the most part, people found it far safer to deal with the kidnappers personally, without police. The kidnappers looked at it as a business proposition. While sometimes they claimed to be warriors of God, they generally spent their money on new cars and flashy clothes. Most operated openly and without fear, much like the Mafia in American movies.

And just like in those movies, the “real” authorities could not be trusted either. The Iraqi police and the army often proved to be as corrupt as anyone.

It was common for the army to search houses for weapons, explosives, and other items that supported the insurgency; I’d helped train some of the units. In theory, they were always supposed to be acting on intelligence, visiting houses where there was a strong probability of illegal activity.

But often their intelligence was nonexistent. The real purpose had nothing to do with fighting the mujahideen or a Shia militia, and they were the ones engaged in illegal activities.

One morning at six when I was away, a squad of soldiers came and knocked on my door, waking Soheila and the kids.

“Open up!” yelled one of the soldiers. “We have to search the house for terrorists.”

Soheila went to the door but hesitated. It was clear that the men were from the army—she could tell from the uniforms and the truck out on the street. She thought of mentioning that I worked with the Americans, but that was potentially dangerous. She knew from Mosul that many soldiers worked with the mujahideen or sold them information. She decided that the safest course was simply to open the door and not mention me or the Americans.

The men pushed into the house. She gathered the children in the hall and waited.

The soldiers went straight to the bedroom, searched quickly, then came out and went through the rest of the house. They returned without finding anything, as Soheila knew they wouldn’t.

“Sorry, sorry,” they said, returning. “We found nothing. False report. Go back to sleep.”

Relieved, Soheila and the children went back inside. It didn’t seem as if anything had been taken—the soldiers had been through so quickly, she was convinced they had come just to satisfy a superior that they were working—another common reason for “raids.” It was possible they had picked the house simply because they knew there would be no trouble there.

Excitement over, they all fell back asleep. When they woke, they began going about their normal business, eating and then preparing to go out shopping. Soheila sent our oldest into the bedroom, where we kept our money.

“Mama!” said my daughter, returning. “The money is gone! I couldn’t find it.”

Soheila ran in to look for herself. All of our cash had been taken, including what remained of our life savings, which had been hidden in the closet. We’d had a kilo of gold and about ten thousand dollars, saved up from my earnings. (At the time a kilogram of gold would have been worth twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars in the United States.) Her jewelry was missing as well.

Soheila called me, and I called some American commanders and advisors to the Iraqi army. The commanders came and questioned Soheila, allegedly investigating, but it was too late—the criminals were gone. We never knew whether they had simply been masquerading as soldiers or whether they were actual soldiers who were now covering up the theft.

BACK IN THE STATES,
Tatt was becoming more and more frustrated with the process of trying to get us a visa. Though he never told me, he started thinking of alternatives that included simply spiriting me out of the country. I’m not sure how that would have worked—I doubt he was either—but through it all he kept trying to either get the paperwork through or find a way around it. He finally enlisted the help of an immigration attorney in California who went to work on the case pro bono
.
Getting George the lawyer to help turned out to be one of the most important things Chief Tatt did; as he put it later, without the attorney’s aid he would have “suck-started my pistol” many times. George sacrificed considerable time and worked extremely hard to help Tatt; together, they started making progress—the questions that came back were easier to answer.

I should mention that I was hardly the only interpreter or Iraqi citizen whose status was affected by the glacierlike speed of the review process. According to a story published by the McClatchy news service in March 2013, less than five thousand visas have been issued under the program, despite the fact that five times that number have been authorized. Many good men and their families are in Iraq, in the same situation we were in. Thank God and the SEALs that I was able to fit into the program.

Toward the end of 2008, Tatt forwarded me a set of forms that needed to be filled out. It was only then that I started to let myself think it was really going to happen. I stopped playing my mental games, walling myself off against disappointment. Soheila and I got passports for the kids. I bought an Xbox 360 and some video games and told the kids to play them to help them learn English. I did the same with American movies.

It wasn’t just English they had to learn. They knew very little about American customs.
When do you eat? What’s the music like? What clothes should you wear?
There is only so much that you can pick up from foreign broadcasts, and I would imagine that much of that is wrong. We tried to get as much information about the United States and American life as possible. It was our future, and finally a future we could believe in.

13

Living the Dream

T
HERE WERE SIGNS
of progress in Iraq as 2008 came to a close and 2009 began. On January 1, the United States handed over security in Baghdad’s Green Zone to Iraqi authorities—something unimaginable two years before. At the end of the month, provincial elections were held with a minimum amount of violence. In February, the new American president, Barack Obama, announced that the majority of American troops would be withdrawn from the country by August 2010.

Still, Iraq was hardly a model of peace and understanding. While the number of American troops killed in the country declined, it remained a dangerous place for translators as well as soldiers. In February, Iraqi policemen opened fire on Americans who were touring their positions, killing a U.S. soldier and an interpreter in Mosul; three other men were wounded. The same day, an interpreter was among those killed in a firefight in Diyala Province in eastern Iraq.

We’d already made our decision and had no illusions about staying in Iraq. I could tell that conflict would continue without the Americans; it might even grow worse. So much blood and hatred had soaked into the fabric of the country that it would take years if not decades for peace to truly return. Most importantly, it was very depressing to hear people always talking not about how to build things, but how to tear them down. That was not talk for children to hear. It would not help them shape their future.

Even if hatred and greed weren’t contagious, the fact that I had worked so closely with the Americans would always mark me in Iraq. Worse, it would make my family’s lives that much harder, covering them with a shadow that might be impossible to escape. There were bound to be many people who hated me for working with the Americans and would hold it against them.

But life went on. I invited some of my American friends to visit us at the house. They had to sneak in—not only for our safety but theirs. Still, it felt good to host them. There is a fine tradition of hospitality in Iraq. To open one’s home to a guest honors the host as well as the guest.

We also got a dog.

I don’t suppose there’s a father anywhere in the world who can resist the pleas of his kids for a puppy. After a spirited campaign for a pet, they finally broke me down. We ventured to a pet store, where the kids and I selected Shero. He was a male German shepherd, with maybe another breed or two mixed in somewhere back in his ancestry. A smart dog, he was a fun addition to the family . . . even if Dad ended up walking him a bit more than was promised.

THE MONTHS PASSED.
Iraqi forces took over more and more of the operations. These were not small missions—hundreds of bad guys were rounded up, and I often found myself in the middle of the action. That was where I wanted to be. The SEALs who were acting as advisors had to forcibly keep me back at times, which to me made no sense. I was often the most experienced person in the unit, certainly more so than the Iraqis, and to me being the second or third person in the “train” as we entered the house made perfect sense. I could often defuse a bad situation with a simple phrase or two. If things were going bad, I could usually spot it before anyone else.

Gradually, I began being assigned to fewer and fewer operations. It took a while before I realized that the American commanders had started to hold me back because I was going to leave the country. That’s actually a standard military practice—they protect “short-timers,” but of course I had no idea.

There was plenty of danger and plenty of fanaticism still to deal with. The attitudes of the extremists remained hardened and in many ways unfathomable.

We captured a fighter at one point who told me he was sorry he hadn’t died.

“Why?” I asked, though I suspected I knew the reason.

“I wanted to have lunch with Muhammad,” he told me.

“Lunch?”

“I have been promised.”

I thought of asking whether he had checked with the Holy Prophet’s scheduler to see if he would be free. Instead, I merely asked him to explain. These sorts rarely had a sense of humor.

“I want to fight and be killed so I go to Paradise immediately, and eat with Muhammad,” he said, repeating what he had said as if it were obvious. When I finally got him to elaborate a little, I learned that some so-called religious leader had promised that he would have
exactly
such a reward if he died fighting Americans.

We talked for a while, but it was a one-sided discussion, with him reciting some American mistakes as justification for his misguided martyrdom. It was clear he had been brainwashed by his so-called religious leaders until he was no more than a walking bomb.

There’s no denying that America made mistakes in the war and elsewhere; certainly no nation has ever been perfect, and war by definition is an ugly, error-filled activity. The occupation, though well intentioned, had its share of mistakes and even outrages. Many of these mistakes could be used to inflame Muslims—burning Korans, for example, was a foolish and grave error, a grave sin that should have been avoided.

But the answer to such things is not hatred. You cannot protect your religion by destroying others. You have to build it, make things, show the world how great God is and how great the people who believe are. Instead of knocking down buildings, you make them.

I always believed this, in some way, from the time I was young, but the war made my beliefs stronger and more explicit. Seeing death and destruction taught me how precious humans are—how much potential we all have. If I had not witnessed so much death, I would think those thoughts were trivial and easy. But I’ve seen what happens when people do not value life, and I’ve paid dearly for that simple knowledge.

One thing always impressed me about the SEALs: they didn’t care what my religion was. I could have been a Shiite Muslim or a Christian, a Buddhist or a Rastafarian, and they would have treated me the same. I know because we had translators of those faiths, and not once was religion an issue for them.

IN EARLY JUNE 2009,
Tatt sent a message to one of the team members working with me:

TELL JOHNNY TO GET READY. HE’S TRAVELING ON JULY 7.

Really?

Really.

I couldn’t believe it. But then I could. Things started moving quickly—time sped by faster than it had in a decade.

The only thing we could take with us were clothes. We started selling and giving away things discreetly, careful not to make too big a deal of things.

We stumbled when we had to figure out what to do with Shero, our dog. It was too complicated to take him with us, but giving him up was hard for the kids. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who we would give him to, without coming to a conclusion. In the end, I decided the best thing to do was bring him back to the store we had purchased him from. It was a sad day for the dog, for the kids, and for me.

But we were going to America, escaping to live our dream.

Where, though? America was a big place, bigger than I could even imagine. Tatt and everyone else wanted to know what city we would settle in.

I’d told him and others Virginia—which of course is a state, not a city. I’d been working with Team 10, an East Coast team. They filled my ears with stories about Virginia and the rest of the East Coast, telling me how wonderful it was. With the time getting closer and our departure now
real,
we had to make genuine plans: we needed a city or town to head to.

My friends with Team 10 volunteered to look for a job for me as well as a place to live. They started putting out feelers. But as we were getting ready, Tatt suggested we might be more comfortable in southern California.

It was a much more temperate area, similar to Iraq in many ways. There was also a large Iraqi and Middle Eastern community, much larger it seemed than anywhere in Virginia. This meant that my family would have an easier time settling in. And the government and military had many installations and related businesses; there’d be plenty of opportunity for jobs.

Somewhere along the way, someone mentioned snow.

Snow?

“You can get snow in Virginia,” said an Iraqi who’d moved to the States some years before. “It’s not often, but it does happen.”

I had seen snow in my travels during my younger days, but I didn’t like it. The presence of the Iraqi community was really the decider, but if there had been any doubt, snow would have sealed it.

We managed to sell some of our furniture and gave the rest to relatives. But we kept the news that we were moving to America as quiet as we could. I thought it would be dangerous, even in the better sections of Baghdad, to admit you were close to Americans. The news might reach kidnappers, or even the mujahideen. To openly voice a dream—my dream—of someday living free in the United States would be the same as inviting death.

JULY 7, 2009:
Neither Soheila nor I slept the entire night. At six o’clock, we looked at each other, hopeful and yet not daring to hope, then got out of bed and went to get the children.

Inside, I had mixed feelings. I wanted my family safe. I wanted a better life. I wanted freedom.

I wanted to live the dream. And I would do it. There was no going back—I burned my old papers, everything I had, every connection to the Americans, every trace of my life here: I was afraid that if I were caught with them now, on the way to the airport or in the plane, they would betray me. The Iraqi government—or worse, terrorists—would know I was trying to escape, and kill me and my family. My past was now dead. My only hope was the future.

But leaving Iraq meant that there was a good chance I would never see my mother again. Leaving Iraq meant that my sister-in-law, who had helped us so much, would be left behind. Leaving meant that my brother and sisters, our entire family, many of my Iraqi friends, the people I knew of my tribe—at best they would be very distant now. Most if not all of them would find it safer not to acknowledge my existence. Others would have to denounce me, as I had once had to denounce my American brothers, to keep from being killed.

Leaving was something I had to do. It was not simply that I had to follow my dream, or even that I had to protect my wife and give my children a better life. It was that I had to breathe, and in order to breathe, I had to walk into the future.

The future was America. Iraq was the past.

The Mosul I knew, the city I had grown up in, was gone. It had died, just as my father had died, and my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and all my ancestors. I held the city as I held them, in the shards of my memories, in the odd remembrances and the strong feelings evoked by old photographs and nostalgic songs.

Iraq itself was fading, melting into the shimmering fog of the past, its outlines fading with each moment.

I had to move forward. I had to become an immigrant.

Finally, after an interminable wait, a car pulled up outside. Soheila and I pushed each of the children out quickly, getting them in as if we were back in Mosul at the height of the war, escaping the mujahideen.

It took only a few minutes to get to the airport, though it seemed like hours. IEDs, ambushes, checkpoints—all of the fears I’d lived with for so many years haunted me now, looming at the edges of my vision, rising one last time to taunt me. I was watchful and restless, lips tight, breath shallow.

We were as safe as we could possibly be, and yet as fragile and vulnerable as a wisp of smoke in a windstorm. We were all quiet. Saying anything would have broken whatever spell protected us.

Two SEALs were waiting for us at the airport. They were all smiles. I was having trouble breathing.

As we made our way to the airplane, my mind raced in many different directions. I tried to dismiss the fears and the paranoia about all the bad things that might happen. I tried to welcome the newness of America, and anticipate what freedom might bring. The concerns of my kids, their immediate needs for food and the restrooms, were a welcome distraction—it was easier to comfort and assure them than deal with my own uncertainties.

Then we were aboard, finding our seats. We settled in together, our own little cluster in the aircraft.

Then the plane door closed.

I looked at Soheila. We shared a moment of doubt: Were we dreaming? Was this becoming real?

All I could think of was the mission months before when we’d pulled the militia leader off the Jordanian plane. Was that going to happen now?

The passengers were in but the door was still open. What were they waiting for?

I sat in the seat, trying to remain calm—I didn’t want my wife or children to know how nervous I was. They had no idea: they knew nothing of the mission, and as far as they were concerned, nothing could stop them now.

Finally, the door was closed. And yet I still could hardly breathe. It was not until the plane started to roll that I let myself believe.

We’re going to make it!

I became weightless as the wheels left the runway. In that moment my fears fell away. Finally, reality and dream merged: we were on our way to America, on our way to safety and freedom, to the future.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
will sound anticlimactic to an American; it will seem like nothing. Often it seems that way to me as well—nothing and everything. But that is the best part of being an immigrant: even things other people think of as being trivial are special.

None of us had ever been on a commercial airliner before. We didn’t know what to expect, really. That may have helped keep the kids calm.

We flew into Jordan, stayed the night there, then took a flight to Chicago. A friend met us; we went straight to a hotel, exhausted by the trip and everything that had led to it.

The next morning, I found a computer in the hotel lobby and used Google to find a map of the area. I saw that there was a shopping center not far away. I gathered up my youngest son and together we set off in that direction, curious about what an American shopping center looked like.