It Happened on the Way to War (36 page)

“Oh, yeah, that. Looks like grad school.” My decision was set days earlier when I received e-mails from Harvard. Tracy had been ecstatic when I called with the news. My excitement, however, was tempered by everything around me. I didn't have the mental capacity, time, or energy to build another psychological compartment and think about what came after Iraq.

Joe congratulated me and said that I'd be missed within our HUMINT community. He thought the graduate school program, which we had spoken about in the past, would be a good way to read and reflect on our wartime experience. His opinion meant a great deal to me. Some commanders would have held it against me for not making the Marine Corps a career, but not men such as Joe Burke and Mike Dubrule. They were leaders who would support what was best for their men, even if that was something that wasn't necessarily in the short-term interests of the Marine Corps.

SERGEANT A.B. AND another of our skilled interrogators spent hours with the two boys each day for two weeks. They learned their movements and mannerisms. They confirmed their identities and carved out contradictions in their stories. By the end of the second week, Sergeant A.B. was convinced that the boys had killed Sheikh Kamal. But he didn't have a confession.

A general approved our request to delay the boys' transfer to Abu Ghraib for a third week. On the twentieth day, our team made a breakthrough. It was the eleven-year-old's sweet tooth that did him in. Sergeant A.B. and his partner had tried many different incentives on the boys, including every type of candy available on base. However, when a guard detected that the younger boy craved a boxed grape drink served with dinner, Sergeant A.B.'s partner took a case of the sugar water into the interrogation booth. Surprisingly, hours later, he walked out with a confession. The boy admitted to driving the BMW. His foot had barely reached the gas pedal. With his confession, the older boy buckled and admitted to having pulled the trigger. The fifteen-year-old claimed that a member of the city council had coerced them to kill the sheikh.

It was a startling discovery, and we needed to continue the interrogation to extract all of the details. Unfortunately, we weren't permitted another extension. The following day, the boys were transferred to Abu Ghraib prison.

WE CALLED ABU Ghraib “the black hole” because it was so difficult to receive information from the massive prison that two years earlier had shocked the world. Our detainees went to Abu Ghraib and disappeared in an ocean of nearly five thousand prisoners. We rarely received intelligence from follow-up interrogations, and we often weren't notified when suspected terrorists were released after hasty trials at the dysfunctional Iraqi Criminal Court. E-mails and phone calls to Abu Ghraib went unreturned. On one occasion, a sheikh from Fallujah had died in the prison. Incredibly, his body couldn't be found for Kael Weston to return it to Fallujah's leaders for proper Muslim burial.

Days after the boys were transferred from our custody at Camp Fallujah I caught a helicopter to Abu Ghraib. I needed to secure approval for Sergeant A.B.'s partner to continue his interrogation, and I was also hoping to initiate a better relationship between the prison and my regiment.

The prison's stench hit me as our helicopter hovered over one of its many well-lit landing pads. The foul smell resembled the funk from reused, sweaty socks. For years to come similar odors would trigger vivid memories of my thirty-six-hour visit to this infamous place.

The following morning, a major greeted me at his cubicle in the Abu Ghraib intelligence shop, a bunker with meat hooks still lodged in the walls from Saddam's time. The major was the Marine Corps' liaison officer to Abu Ghraib. His bloodshot eyes and pale face gave the immediate impression of an overworked staff officer on the verge of collapse. He listened as I briefed him, then he cut straight to the point: “So we need to locate the two boys and get the approval for your sergeant to spend some time here?”

“Yes, sir.” We sorted through some paperwork and routed a formal request to the general in charge. Afterward, the major called a guard to show me where the kids were being held. The guard, a barrel-chested sergeant with bloated cauliflower ears, was in a Florida National Guard infantry unit. He had never received training to work at a prison. As we left the major's office I asked him about the pervasive sock stench.

“Yeah, I don't even notice it no more,” he responded. “No one really knows what it is. There's speculation, some superstitions. My theory? My theory's that Saddam ripped one on this place right before we bombed his sorry ass. Then that smell just hung here, Saddam's last fart.” He chuckled and then lowered his voice. “But there are ghosts here, sir. They creep this place out, I tell ya. Some of the prisoners believe Saddam's still around. Not here, but watchin'. Especially the Shiites. They believe this. This place has bad memories, like over there.”

The sergeant pointed to a block of white buildings that looked like the rest of the cement rectangles zigzagging across the prison. “In there, that's where it happened. That's where they did those things to those prisoners. Section 1-A. Ya want to see it?”

“Yes.”

It was eerily quiet as our boots clapped down the halls. Soon we were in parts of the prison that had never seen sunlight. The smell of urine and body odor overpowered the sock stench. Orange-suited prisoners languishing in cells eyed us as we passed. No one spoke.

Section 1-A looked similar to other parts of the prison except there were no prisoners. It was a small area. I wouldn't have recognized it from my memory of the notorious prisoner-abuse photographs. Its yellow walls had been cleansed of the blood smears, the makeshift torture games having long been disassembled and removed. No physical reminder remained of what had happened. Yet there we were.

The photographs that were released to the press were bad enough. There were, however, others that were never made public. I had seen many of them on our classified intranet. The graphic images returned to my mind as I stood there. I saw the blood on the walls, mutilated prisoners on leashes, covered with feces, sodomized by truncheons, stacked into naked pyramids, the terror, the trauma, the fear, the fear so pure it was nauseating. A howl echoed through the halls. It was so sharp in pitch I wanted to cover my ears. Suddenly it stopped, and I was panting like a dog.

“What was that?”

“What was what, sir?”

“That noise?”

“Noise, sir? There was no noise.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh.”

“I don't know how it happened.” The sergeant said, “How could we have done this.”

“Done what?” I was flustered from the howl. I could have sworn it was real.

“The torture, the abuse. I mean, it's despicable. We're Americans. We're better than that.”

HOW AND WHY were the questions I had asked myself as a fifteen-year-old when I saw Rwandan boys my age on television murdering a man with machetes and clubs spiked with nails. Those questions remained unanswered, as did the one that I had found even more disturbing: What would I have done if I were born to the majority ethnic group in Rwanda and was told to participate in genocide? That question haunted me in part because I grew up believing a clear line existed between good and evil, and that people could freely choose to be safely on one side or the other. My experiences in the Marines and in Kibera suggested to me that a long, wide spectrum lies between these two poles, and that most people are capable of doing evil things, including myself. I had never been at the other extreme of the spectrum, near a point of pure goodness, and I knew few people who existed in that space. Tabitha and Salim were there, or they were close. I was not. For most of my life I was somewhere in between, and in five short months in Iraq I had moved far closer to the dark end than I would ever have imagined.

My combat experiences were nowhere near as intense, tragic, and terrifying as many others'. But they allowed me a glimpse into the abyss and its seductive, slippery force. It didn't take long for me to begin to move down the slope. Within weeks in Fallujah I experienced moments of bloodlust, the impulse to destroy for destruction's sake. Much of our training was geared to control these impulses, and our training was generally effective. But how long could I keep my morality intact and not act on these violent, misplaced urges? I didn't know. Maybe months. Maybe years. It would certainly depend in part on the circumstances I faced, my moral luck. Eventually, though, a place as toxic as Iraq's Sunni Triangle in 2006 would take me farther down the levels of the inferno.

There I was standing in Abu Ghraib 1-A, a place that had once been at the far evil end of the spectrum when three years earlier a group of young Americans went beyond the point of no return and shamed us all. For whatever reasons, they became outliers at a volatile, confused time. These men and women, these American soldiers, were without the proper resources, training, or leadership. They were part of a broken system that fed negative thoughts and tolerated cruelty. At one point, most of them were probably decent people who never imagined what they would become. While these circumstances mattered and dispersed responsibility, they still weren't enough.

What would I have done if I was so unfortunate to have been in the guard force of Abu Ghraib prison in 2003? So many things in our lives were outside of our control, and yet we had choices to make and decisions to own. In this extreme circumstance, the answer was clear. It was clearer to me than Rwanda because the context was more sharply defined and I could relate to parts of it more readily. While I may have had the capacity to do evil things, nothing could have seduced me into participating or witnessing as a bystander what had happened at Abu Ghraib. It would never happen.

My upbringing, the opportunities I had been given, the second chances, and something spiritual deep inside me gave me the strength to say “never.” We existed to guard the defenseless against such sadism. I would lose everything, including my life, before I relented to that horror or ever gave up fighting it. It was too far down the spectrum. I knew this. What I didn't know was at which level of the inferno I would eventually stop, and what it would take to push me that far.

Not all Marines felt such a pull toward the primal and elusive powers of darkness as I had, though many of us did, and we resisted because of our training, leadership, and values. Nevertheless, the more destruction and killing one experiences, the harder it becomes to ward off evil. Marines in combat are often called to operate at the very rim of the abyss, the point at which the spectrum is a blur. We flirt with the darkness and attempt to control it. But few people, I believe, can control it forever, and this was part of the reason why we constantly rotated units in and out of combat zones. Burnout happened at various degrees on three levels: physical, mental, and spiritual. I believed I witnessed that last level in its extreme manifestation with the Ethiopian military intelligence captain who admired Don Corleone, the sly Iraqi captain in Fallujah, and there, at that moment, with the specter of American soldiers in a dungeon at Abu Ghraib. It was the burnout of the soul.

WE EXITED 1-A and stepped outside to rows of tents where detainees were kept on cots, twenty to thirty prisoners per tent.

“This is our Boy Scout camp.” The sergeant pointed to a small dirt patch at the end of the row of tents. “That's the day care. Looks like it's playtime.”

Some kids in orange jumpsuits were in the middle of a soccer game. We stepped up to the sidelines. The sweaty sock funk was so pungent I wondered if it slowed the kids down. Two helicopters roared overhead, adding to a breeze across the dirt patch. A field of date trees stood timelessly behind the base's glimmering razor wire. The dull
thunk-thunk
of mortar fire sounded in the distance.

“Ya see 'em, sir?”

The boys were playing together on the shirtless team. Their brown chests were as flat as their backs. The eleven-year-old took a forward, offensive position. He hustled, though his ballhandling was poor. Soon his teammates were cutting him out of the action. As he became more and more frustrated, the eleven-year-old abandoned his position and chased the ball up and down the field. The fifteen-year-old, on the other hand, took a midfield position and stuck to a defensive game. His approach was strategic and restrained. He studied the field for the right moments to exert bursts of energy. He had better ball control than his younger accomplice, though his step was flat-footed and ungainly.

The eleven-year-old finally caught up with the ball and took off toward the sweeper, a skilled defender who looked to be at least sixteen years old. The small boy didn't stand a chance until his friend and accomplice sprinted ahead, lowered his shoulder, and crashed into the sweeper.

The young boy continued toward the goal. He didn't have the ball control to change his course when the goalie charged. A split second before contact, the boy thrust his leg back and toed the ball into the goal as the goalie crushed him in a head-on collision.

Squirming out from beneath the goalie, the boy bounced up and threw his open hands in the air.
“ALLAHU AKBAR!”
he shouted. “GOD IS GREAT!”

Not until I saw the boys on that dirt patch playing soccer did it really hit me. As troubled as I was by the boys' situation, I had still viewed them as the enemy. Now, they had confessed and were playing soccer, and I was seeing them again for who they were. Kids. They were just boys. They still knew how to laugh. They could still afford a smile.

What would Salim think?
He would be surprised to see me there in my body armor looking like a robot. Once he got over that, if he could, he would see the potential in those kids trapped in an impossible situation. I had tried to convince myself that the boys at Abu Ghraib were guilty, yet I couldn't help but feel sympathy and sadness as I stood there thinking about Salim and Kibera. Those boys were smart and capable. They had foiled our best interrogators for more than two weeks. They were kids caught in the cross fire, born to circumstances they couldn't control. They didn't have great mentors, a quality education, or safety. They didn't have second chances. A powerful Iraqi man who sat on the city council had coerced them to commit murder.
Were they really guilty? What would I have done as an eleven-year-old in that boy's place, or when I was fifteen and angry at the world?