Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (9 page)

As you might expect, the Shiite insurgents and the Sunni insurgents were strongest in the areas where other members of their faith dominated. As the insurgencies grew, so did the tension between the two branches of Islam.

There were many permutations in the civil war that raged during the occupation, alliances of convenience and longer-lasting ones of blood. We weren’t interested in the politics or the religion of the terrorists we were assigned to arrest, but in dealing with the people on the ground it was helpful to know what their overall allegiance and background was. Realizing that you were looking for a Shiite meant you didn’t have to waste your time with a suspect who was Sunni, for example. But otherwise, the subtleties of who reported to whom and who prayed a certain way were irrelevant to anyone dealing on the street level with the problem. You don’t ask how a man ties his turban when he’s pointing a machine gun at you.

IN THE SPRING
of 2004, the Mahdi Army began an open revolt, seizing swaths of Baghdad and some small towns in the south where Shiites had the majority population. Al-Qaeda and the associated mujahideen associated with it—
mujahideen
means Islamic fighters in general, but in Iraq it was usually used to refer to Sunni insurgents —stepped up their attacks. It was during this time that four Blackwater contractors were killed and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, an incident that inflamed many Americans and became emblematic of the insurgency’s hatred for Americans.

By now, I was one of five interpreters, or “terps,” working with the MP company. With tensions increasing every day and the police now a popular target for the insurgents, the job became more stressful—and, perversely, more interesting.

Mosul, farther north than either Baghdad or Fallujah, gradually saw more and more violence. Police stations were attacked with IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Individual policemen were targeted and attacked. It wasn’t only rank-and-file policemen, nor were the small, isolated stations the only ones targeted. The Sheik Fatihi police station, a major installation, was attacked with a bomb and a drive-by shooting in March. Within days, the terrorists tried to kill Major General Mohammed Khairi al-Barhawi, the chief of police for the Nineveh governorate (the province of which Mosul is the capital). Al-Barhawi escaped, but four policemen were injured, as were several civilians. The same day, insurgents lobbed four mortar shells at one of the city police stations, and two foreign contractors were killed in a drive-by shooting.

Car bombs soon became the terror weapon of choice. A quartet of bombings in June killed 62 people and injured another 220. Western analysts and news media speculated that the increase in violence was due to the pending turnover of authority from the United States to the new Iraqi government. According to that theory, the attacks would wind down once the elections were held. It was a nice theory, but facts didn’t back it up; the attacks continued.

Most of these were isolated, affecting only a few people. I don’t remember most of them, and what I do recall are mostly snatches of things here and there, attacks where the MPs responded and I went along.

In the fall, two American army engineers went to a police station to handle some business. As they arrived, a man in a white SUV nearby detonated the explosives in his vehicle, killing one of the Americans as well as himself.

I was with the MPs at their airport base when the call came in. We loaded into the Humvees and drove over. I jumped out as soon as we pulled up, and began gathering information. There was a crowd already, and newspeople seemingly everywhere—I ended up being in one of the video reports of the incident.

Looking at the bodies of the dead men—both the American and the insurgent—I had a terrible sense that much worse was to come. The new Iraqi government had done little to clamp down on the violence; it was impotent, and that impotence would encourage even greater violence. On top of that, there was plenty of desperation and corruption, the twin enablers of the insurgency. Not every policeman in the city we worked with would take money to look the other way or tell al-Qaeda about our plans, but there were certainly plenty who would do both. Many government officials were even worse. And people who weren’t corrupt were fearful, afraid for their lives. Just doing their jobs put them in danger. The fact that the police did nothing after the IED attack was hardly surprising.

Americans tended to look at the violence in terms of the attacks on their soldiers and other citizens, which was understandable. But many more Iraqis were targeted and killed than Americans as the insurgency continued. What happened to Mosul in 2004 was shocking. The previous fall, the city was peaceful, with most people living more or less as they had before the war—Sunni and Shia side by side. Even during winter, insurgents elsewhere labeled the city a “white chicken”—a place of cowards—because things were relatively calm and religious animosity almost nonexistent.

By the summer, all of that was over. If you were to make a comparison involving a chicken when talking about Mosul, it was to one that had had its head cut off.

The new government and the police that supported them were targets not just because they were allied with the Americans, but because the central government was seen as being dominated by Shiites. Al-Qaeda deliberately targeted Shiites to “purify” the religion. Adding to the chaos was a power struggle between al-Qaeda, former Ba’ath Party members, and the remnants of the Fedayeen, all trying to assert their will.

Desperation fed desperation, which in turn fed violence. There were few jobs and food was often scarce. Even winter clothes were hard to get that year; when you could find them, the prices were too much for many to afford. People lived in very bad conditions; most were depressed or angry, or both. I’d returned home to a hero’s welcome when I got my job with the Americans. Now that was a sure way to invite trouble, if not death.

Stubbornly, I refused to recognize the danger I was in. I didn’t think anything could happen to my family or myself. Partly this was because the people around me had no desire to join the mujahideen. Nor did they have any trouble with me. They knew I was a fair and honest man; no one, I thought, would hurt such a person, let alone his family.

One of my cousins had given me a colorful jacket woven in India as a gift. It was unique and I liked it a lot. I wore it on my rounds with the MPs—Soheila recognized it immediately when we saw the news video from the car bomb.

It was a bright marker, something that made me stand out. But for some reason, though I saw what was happening to my country, I didn’t yet understand that standing out made you a target for all the evil around you.

SHORTLY AFTER THE
SUV bombing, the MPs loaned me to another American unit working with the Iraqi police. With American help and prodding, the police had launched an undercover investigation aimed at closing a black-market operation selling guns out of a coffee shop. The investigation had reached the point where they were ready to make an arrest.

Once again I was a translator and a liaison for the Americans. I went inside with the Iraqi police, who made the actual arrest. As I was watching what they were doing, I noticed a customer stuffing a pistol under his belt. I grabbed it from him—it was a Browning semiautomatic, a nice one with wooden furniture—and turned him over to the cops. They continued going about their business, questioning the suspect and a few men who’d been dealing with him before herding them all out of the shop.

We were still a good distance from the Hummers when we were ambushed by two or three men with AKs who were across the way, crouched on a hill nearby. At that point, I wasn’t authorized to carry a weapon—another thing Americans were very sticky about. I’d given the Browning to the police and was therefore unarmed.

Instinctively, I grabbed a rifle from the cop next to me and started firing. The men with the guns, probably black marketeers angry about getting their favorite shopping spot busted, ran off. Whether I hit any or not I’m not sure, but I definitely did my best to get them.

In my mind’s eye, I see blood spurting everywhere when I look back. I know logically that they were too far and it was too dark for me to see, but emotionally I want to have gotten my revenge for their attack.

The Hummers raced up and I jumped in with the Iraqi cops. I still had a few bullets in the gun, and I kept it ready. I was alone with the police in the truck, and, not knowing them, it suddenly occurred to me that one or more might shoot me. I didn’t know any of them, since I’d never worked with them before, and while it may seem paranoid now, at the time it felt like a very rational fear. The short encounter had changed me dramatically. I’d gone from having no fear at all for my life to being suspicious of everything and everyone around me.

Back at the base, the MPs’ commander announced loudly that one of the Iraqi policemen had done an excellent job and should be commended. Then he asked that the man who had provided the covering fire step forward.

It took me a few seconds to realize he was talking about me. I was the only Iraqi who had fired back.

I stepped forward, a bit shy—I didn’t 100 percent trust that I was going to be commended rather than bawled out.

The commander was surprised that the interpreter, not the police, had been the one taking the fight to the insurgents. But he praised me nonetheless.

Sergeant Byrd and the MPs who knew me said they weren’t surprised at all. They’d already seen me change from a man of words to a man who was fighting as hard as they were.

After that fight, I realized I was fighting for Iraq, or at least my vision of what it could be: a safe place for family, a country with a future.

It sounds almost grandiose, like I came to a major conclusion and decision. But I didn’t. It just naturally happened. To that point, the job was about making money for my family. Now it was something more.

It didn’t have to be. I could have quit. Or I could have stayed back and still done my job. Most interpreters did just that.

Yet it wouldn’t have felt right: I would have felt not like a quitter but a coward. Staying back as a translator in the shadows, behind others, just doing the letter of my job: that would have been even worse. That would have made me a ghost, skittering along at the edges of life. It would have been just as cowardly as running away.

Don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t look for a fight. I wouldn’t take on a tank or go “Rambo” against hordes of better-armed insurgents. But I wouldn’t let myself be pushed around. I gravitated toward the action, and once there, I did what I had to do. A kind of primitive animal instinct took over:

Motherfucker, you want to take my life? Well, fuck you, I will take yours.

That was the sensation I felt at the moment. And after the adrenaline faded, after things calmed down, it was joined by another, deeper feeling:

Motherfucker, you aren’t going to take my country away. You aren’t going to win.

Fuck you. This is my country. This is my Iraq.

ONE MORNING IN
the fall of 2004, I reported to work as usual. When I came in, an American sergeant—I’ll call him Sergeant East—greeted me and motioned me into a room for a private conversation. He asked if I’d be willing to change jobs and work with a different group of Americans. He didn’t give many details, but he hinted that the work would be very important, and probably more exciting than what I was doing now. It would also pay more—two and a half times more, as a matter of fact.

The money alone made it worthwhile. I was a little surprised, though, that I had been asked. From his description, the job entailed a lot of missions, something the Americans generally preferred to leave to younger men. And not only was I the oldest of the interpreters at forty, but I had the worst English language skills among them.

Admittedly, interpreting on a mission was often easier than interpreting on a routine police patrol. The vocabulary was much more limited, and you could get through most of what had to be done without speaking English at all, at least until you were needed to talk to a subject or target. But youth was a real asset during an operation. Even the ones I’d been on with the MPs required the ability to move quickly, climb, jump, and simply stay working for a long period of time.

Forty doesn’t seem that old now, and I suspect fifty won’t seem very old in a few years either. But to be honest, my body was showing all the signs you’d expect it to show as it aged. It had been quite a long time since I’d wowed Mosul on the basketball court or represented the region in the high jump. Truthfully, there were plenty of times I felt like an old man.

Still, I was flattered to be asked, and I could tell from the way Sergeant East spoke that he thought the new job would be an honor, or at least something of a promotion.

“So who are these guys?” I asked.

“SEALs.”

“Okay.” I nodded, but in truth I had no idea what
SEALs
meant, let alone who these guys were or what they did. The sergeant clearly held them in high esteem, but beyond that, they were a mystery.

SEALs?
Seals?
Aquatic animals?

It’s a good thing that my English wasn’t any better, because then I would have been truly confused. As it was, I just decided to do as I was told and see what happened.

Sergeant East sent me over to a compound on the air base to talk to the SEALs. As soon as I walked into their common room and saw their gear setup, I realized these guys meant serious business. These weren’t just warriors, they were first-class warriors. They had much better equipment than the MPs. They were all in excellent shape, real athletes. And they had a certain way of talking and walking that seemed commanding and very professional.

I was interviewed by one of the chief petty officers, Neal. He asked me a few questions about what I had done with the MPs and some other background things. The questions all seemed pretty easy. In fact, they felt
too
easy, as if I should be telling him more or have some sort of elaborate explanation. I went into detail about what I had done with the MPs and the Iraqi police, and still felt as if I wasn’t giving him enough information to impress him.