It Happened on the Way to War (33 page)

Sheikh Kamal believed he was Zarqawi's next target. He claimed his source was reliable and had direct access to the information. “Zarqawi is after me. You understand, Captain? He wants me dead.”

I understood, and it was believable. Kael opened the door. I had three minutes left. We needed a target description. Among other things, the sheikh noted that one of the terrorists wore a black watch with Roman numerals and a red dot at twelve o'clock. It was a useful clue. Most Iraqi men preferred silver and gold knockoff Rolex watches.

Kael stepped in. “We really need to go now.”

The sheikh and I shook hands. He had a surprisingly light grip and soft skin.

“Shukran,
Sheikh
.”
I thanked him.

Sheikh Kamal looked me in the eye, and for a moment I sensed the depth of his fears. He had the look of a condemned man, a man out of options.

“KAMAL, THAT SON of a bitch.” Colonel Berger stood in his wood-paneled office and spit tobacco into a plastic soda bottle. The office had once been the headquarters of an Iraqi general in command of Iranian dissidents.

“I don't believe him,” Major J.G. said after I briefed them on my meeting with Sheikh Kamal.

“What do you think, Captain?” the colonel asked.

I was an attachment to the regiment. Although I didn't report to Major J.G., I was there to support him and the colonel. It was important that I didn't lose their trust, especially in moments when we disagreed professionally.

“I think Kamal believes the information he's telling us is true,” I said, “and the threat's credible. AMZ [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] is after these guys. Kamal knows it. He's scared.”

“Good,” Major J.G. quipped.

“All right,” Colonel Berger concluded. “Captain, you're on the raid. Two-six will hit the target tonight.”

I walked out of the colonel's office and prepared my gear: night-vision goggles, red-lens flashlight, notebook, street map, flex-cuffs, and rifle. I spent more than half of my time in Iraq in the safety of large U.S. bases. Having few opportunities to accompany raids, I was eager for the action. There was nothing like the thrill of producing intelligence that drove operations, and I sensed Sheikh Kamal's information was the best chance we had come across to capture the assassins of Fallujah's grand mufti. If we succeeded, it would be a blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Something else made me hunger for the evening's assault. Winston Churchill once said that nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at without result. That was true for me the first time, after that roadside bomb in Colonel Berger's Humvee, and the handful of other times that I had been in IED attacks or shot at. The high was always there, and the frustration, too. Yet while the highs were disconnected bursts of adrenaline, the frustration mounted. It grew both gradually and rapidly depending on forces that often felt out of our control.

The problem, I believed, was that I never shot back. The raid that evening might give me an opportunity to confront the enemy head-on. This impulse to do damage was about retribution as well as courage. It was primal. Yet, it was more than that. The dark element was a curiosity with and attraction to violence. Shooting back and killing were other parts of the elephant, that giant that was too large to ever experience in totality. The elephant was war.

Our actions brought us closer to the very forces of evil and their illusions that we battled. When does violence become evil? When do we cross that line? Is there a line? I didn't know, and at the time I wasn't thinking about the answers. I was too busy with the maelstrom of combat leadership. Soon enough, however, I would be forced to confront these questions.

THAT EVENING MY favorite interpreter, Mike, was preparing for a five-day reconnaissance mission with my team. So I met another interpreter, a Shiite Iraqi American, at the forward operating base next to the youth center.

“Sounds like a hard target,” the lieutenant whose platoon was tasked to conduct the raid reacted after I briefed him on the intel. A
hard target
meant a higher probability that we would face resistance. Although there might be a family in the house, we couldn't take any chances. If the assassins were there, we had to be ready for a fight.

We rolled out at midnight in Humvees. The city was still. It was well past curfew. Earlier that evening an F-18 fighter pilot flew over Fallujah and illuminated the target house with an infrared marker. The building glowed like football stadium lights through our night-vision goggles. We stopped in the middle of an empty street, dismounted, and surrounded the house. Each Marine wore more than thirty pounds of inch-thick armor, a helmet, ballistic glasses, fire-retardant gloves, a radio headset, and drop pouches and pockets stuffed with ammunition and grenades. We looked like robots.

I positioned myself at the gate behind the stack, a squad of Marines poised to raid the target. “Good to go, Talisman?” the lieutenant asked over his headset, using my call sign.

Something wasn't right. The gate didn't match Sheikh Kamal's description. The pilot had painted the wrong house. I walked up to the adjacent flat with the right gate. The platoon shifted.

“Now, Talisman?”

“Yes.”

A Marine with a battering ram smashed the steel gate open, shattering the night's silence. Two Marines lobbed blank grenades called flash bangs. Explosion. The stack stormed the house, rifles raised, shouting as they cleared the rooms in search of the enemy.

“CLEAR.”

“WOMAN, FOUR CHILDREN.”

“BEDROOM CLEAR.”

“TWO MAMS (military-age males).”

“ON THE GROUND. GET ON THE GROUND. I SAID GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND.”

“CLEAR.”

“CLEAR.”

“ALL CLEAR.”

My interpreter and I walked in.

Four children sat next to an older woman on the floor of a living room. They stared at us with wide, terrified eyes. The oldest child appeared to be a teenage boy, perhaps fifteen years old.

“Sorry for the interruption,” I said to the woman, oddly, as if I simply needed to ask her for the time. She looked at me with a blank face. Perhaps she had been through a raid before. Raids like ours occurred throughout Fallujah nearly every night.

“Where do you want them, sir?” a Marine asked, holding a blindfolded man with hands bound behind his back.

“Outside. Keep them blindfolded, separated, and guarded.”

As he walked by, I spotted a black watch.

“Hold on, Marine.” I inspected its face. Red dot at twelve o'clock. Adrenaline surged through my body.
Got him
.

I made a hasty decision to speak with the teenager hoping that he would provide me with information that I could use against the man with the black watch. Muscular and clean-cut, the boy was shaking as he followed me to an empty room. His T-shirt had a Manchester United logo on it. I removed my helmet and glasses and placed my hand on his shoulder. “It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to ask you some questions. You like Man-U?”

“Naam,”
he responded, relaxing as I made a comment about soccer and asked him some simple questions about his identity. The woman in the other room was his mother. His father had died before the Battle of Fallujah, when Zarqawi controlled the city.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I responded, wondering if his father had fought against us. “Who are the two men?”

The boy hesitated.

“What are their names?”

“Please,” he sighed.

“We can leave once you tell me. But I can't leave until then. You can do it.”

For twenty minutes I repeated myself, consoling the boy and asking him for the names of the two men. I didn't know whether he would cooperate, and I worried about how much time I was spending with him.

He looked at me with empty eyes until I touched his elbow and asked, “They're in the resistance, aren't they?”

He sighed. “
Naam
.”

“Good. You're doing the right thing. Now what are their names?”

He revealed their full names and
kunyas
, their Arabic noms de guerre. The man with the black watch was the boy's uncle. He showed up unannounced every other month and spent a few nights at the boy's mother's home. Allegedly the uncle boasted about fighting Americans but never spoke specifically about his missions. I couldn't tell how much information the boy was concealing from me, though he appeared to be candid and the circumstances of our conversation made me believe the information that he chose to reveal was probably reliable.

“Do you know who Sheikh Hamza was?”

“Mufti?”

“Yes.”

The boy nodded.

“Your uncle was involved with his death.”

“No, I don't think that's possible.” He looked confused.

There was commotion outside our room. A Marine opened the door. “Sir, we discovered a cache.”

I turned to the boy. “Where are the weapons?”

“In the shed.”

“You knew about them but you didn't tell me.”

“I didn't think about it. They bring weapons with them when they show up.”

“What kind?”

“I don't know. Rifles, grenade throwers.”

“I'm going to go look. But before I do, is there anything else I should know?”

He looked me in the eyes. “Please, take me to the U.S.”

The boy's response stunned me. I placed my hand back on his shoulder. I wanted to encourage him but not lead him on. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be in his position.

“I can't do that. I don't have that power. But I hope one day I'll see you in the U.S. Just don't join the insurgency. That's a dead end.”

“Okay.” The boy dropped his head.

A MARINE LED me to the small shed where we discovered a rocket-propelled grenade and two AK-47 rifles buried under a pile of rubble. Although Fallujah was rife with illegal weapons, it was an important discovery, because without it we had no grounds to detain the two targets for more than twenty-four hours of questioning.

We brought the men back to our forward operating base at the youth center. I began my interrogation at 0300 hours in an empty shipping container. A Marine guard stood behind the man with the black watch, who sat on a box in front of me. He was a short, paunchy man in his late twenties with ruddy cheeks and heavy dandruff.

I began with the “we know all” interrogation approach, suggesting it was futile for him to resist because we had so much information. We knew he was from Baghdad and traveled frequently to Fallujah. We knew he was in the insurgency. We knew his name and many other things.

The man didn't respond. A faint smirk spread across his face as he sat staring at the floor.

“Why are you in Fallujah?”

He claimed that he had come to sell dates.

“Where?”

“In the market.”

“What's your relationship to the woman in the house?”

“A friend.”

“What's her name?”

He shrugged and muttered a name.

“What's her full name?”

“I don't know.” Smirk.

Around and around we went for hours. I moved through different interrogation approaches. The man replied with smirks and shrugs, nothing else.

“So tell me, then, about November twenty-ninth.” I was getting angry.

He didn't reply.

“November twenty-ninth. What were you doing in Fallujah on November twenty-ninth?”

“I don't know.”

“But you know you were in Fallujah then.”

“No.” Smirk, shrug.

“Sheikh Hamza. That was the day you killed him.”

“No.”

I launched into the “fear up” interrogation approach, shouting at him and pointing my finger in his face. “YOU KILLED HIM!”

“No, you did.”

“WHAT? YOU'RE KILLING YOUR OWN PEOPLE. WHO SET YOU UP TO THIS?”

“I did nothing.”

“YOU WERE SET UP. WHO SET YOU UP?”

“NO!” He shook his head like a boy in a temper tantrum.

“You're going to prison.”

Smirk, shrug.

“Other prisoners will know you killed the grand mufti.”

“No.”

There was nowhere else to go, and I was wearing myself out and losing my cool. I wanted to wipe that smirk off his face with the butt of my rifle. But I subdued the impulse. That wasn't how we interrogated detainees. We had to hold ourselves to higher standards, and that was so much easier to say back in the United States than it was to believe at 0600 hours in a shipping container in Fallujah eyeball to eyeball with a man who I was convinced would kill me if he had the chance. Yet it was the only way. It was the only way for the practical reason that there was no evidence that coercive interrogations provided more reliable information. And it was the only way for the just and more important reason that morality exists on a slippery slope and we as individuals, and as a nation, are nothing without our principles.

I loathed the feeling of impotence. I had given that three-hour interrogation everything I had, and I suspected that subsequent interrogators, all of whom were overworked, would have a low probability of getting anything valuable out of him. He clearly had resistance training. We knew from our raids of terrorist safe houses that many insurgents had heard about our unclassified military intelligence manuals, including the book that detailed all of our interrogation approaches, from “we know all” to “fear-up.” According to our regulations, we would have two weeks at Camp Fallujah to interrogate the man and his friend before deciding whether or not to send them to Abu Ghraib. If our two weeks at Camp Fallujah revealed no additional information, it was highly unlikely that the men would be in custody for more than three months. Our prisons in Iraq were overloaded with more than fifteen thousand detainees, and illegal small-arms possessions were among the weakest of offenses. It was possible, and perhaps probable, that we had caught the assassins of Fallujah's grand mufti only to turn them back to the streets in less than three months. Then they would be armed with more information about our capabilities and probably all the more eager to kill us and the brave Iraqis like Sheikh Kamal who were stepping up to repair their broken nation.