Kaboom (21 page)

“I know nothing.”

“We'll see. Maybe you know something important that you do not know is important.”

Five minutes and many rebuffs later, I felt stonewalled.

“Fine,” I said. “You win. Bring me the little girl. Damn it, I said no talking in there! Translate that as soothingly as possible, Super Mario.”

“What's soothingly?”

“Nevermind. They got the point.”

A young girl walked up to me shyly, taking Super Mario's hand, which guided her to the seat next to mine. She had big black eyes and wore her hair in pigtails. Her mouth hadn't closed since she had first seen the American giant, PFC Das Boot himself, some minutes earlier.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Matt. What's yours?”

She gazed at Super Mario for many seconds before answering. “Asma.”

“What's her deal?” I asked the terp.

“She is surprised I speak Arabic,” he said, “because I wear American uniform.”

“Ah. Okay, Asma. I was hoping you could help me out.”

“With what?” she whispered, avoiding any and all eye contact. Her eyes kept swinging back behind me, to the doorway where her mother and her older sister still were.

“Do any men live here?” I asked.

“Not since my father died.”

“When was that?”

“One year ago, I think.”

“Do any men come here now? Men who aren't in your family?”

Her eyes betrayed her once more. She tried glancing behind me again, and when I moved my body so as to block her vantage point, she suddenly became very interested in a piece of concrete below her.

“No,” she said. “The only men that ever come here come during the day to our shop.”

“Please, don't lie to me. I thought we were friends. Aren't we friends?”

There was a slight pause before she answered. “No.”

I couldn't believe it. My friendship request had been rejected by an eight-year-old. “No? Why not?”

“Because you are American,” she replied matter-of-factly.

Well, at least I got one honest answer out of her, I thought. Super Mario laughed, in spite of himself, and gave it a shot. “What about me?” he asked. “I am Iraqi. Can we be friends?”

She didn't even bother to hesitate this time. “No, you are Iraqi, but you are American now. We cannot be friends. I'm sorry.”

I tried to ask her who had said we couldn't be friends, but one could only ask an eight-year-old so many questions before the kid oystered up. There were pearls of wisdom tucked away in there, but I certainly wasn't going to uncover them.

“Hey, sir.” Staff Sergeant Boondock loomed in the doorway. “House is clear. No weapons, no propaganda, not even an expensive TV. Nothing.”

“Any sign of a man being here recently? Clothes or something?”

He shook his head. “Nope. The only thing is . . . well . . . I think the story we got is right. There's only one mattress in the entire house, and it's in the older daughter's room. Queen size. That doesn't make any sense.”

“Okay.” I hadn't been looking forward to this questioning. I was awkward enough with girls, even when I wasn't accusing them of being terrorist whores selling their body to Mahdi Army insurgents hell-bent on my bloody destruction. “Might as well bring her out here, then.”

Out came an Iraqi girl so homely it was striking. She was built like a rectangle, seemingly hadn't washed her hair for weeks, and wore way too much bright red blush. She claimed she was twenty-three, but I wouldn't have placed her a day over sixteen. The dynamics of this questioning had changed considerably from the last one. Now, my interviewee kept trying to stare at me, while I avoided any and all eye contact.

“I was hoping you could help us out by answering a few questions.”

“Sure. I'd love to help out the Americans.”

“Right. We know you know a man named Fadl. Tell us where he is now.”

“Fadl? I do not know a Fadl.” I looked back up at her face, searching for signs of a wry grin but found nothing except dreary eyes probing me like I was an alien freshly arrived from Mars. Just like the slutty girls back in high school, I thought, an empty face with an empty gaze. She had seen too much of the primal desires of man already to have any sense of awe anymore. There was no intrigue left in human relationships for her.

“There is no reason to lie to me. We know what is going on here. I don't care about that. We need to talk with Fadl.”

“I do not know anyone by that name,” she said. I couldn't decide if I had picked up a tinge of smugness in her voice, or if that had been my imagination. I asked her about her bed and was told that the whole family slept on the mattress with her. That was as far as I was willing to go with that subject. We couldn't help people who didn't want to be helped.

I now asked the mother to come out to the patio. I could hear the frustration seeping into my own voice. My men paced anxiously, waiting for me to finish. I went with the expedited version of tactical questioning.

“Do you know a man named Fadl?”

“No.”

“Do bad men come here at night?”

“No.”

“Are you lying to me?”

“No.”

The mother stared back at me, just as aloofly as her teenage daughter had minutes before, and then smiled. I had lived with a single mother long enough to know that this woman was feigning deference. Behind this masquerade
of feminine submission was a tartness as sharp as razor blades and a will as staunch as steel. Boyish charm or no, this woman wanted me out of her house as soon as possible—and that meant perpetuating the lies of her family members. I decided that she was thinking that the known horrors of Fadl were still better than the unknown horrors that could occur if it was learned she'd helped the Americans.

I tilted my head and looked back at her. “I understand why you're lying to me. You are scared. I would be scared too.” I pulled out my notepad, tore out a piece of blank paper, and handed that and a pen to Super Mario. “Write down the number to the combat outpost,” I told him, before continuing my talk with the mother. “Call us if you get scared again. We can help you.” I took the paper from Super Mario and pressed it in the mother's hands. “We want to help you.”

She bit her lip and whispered back at me. “I will.” She looked around her, absorbing the tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, clean-shaven, stoic profiles of SFC Big Country, Staff Sergeant Boondock, Sergeant Spade, and PFC Das Boot. For the briefest of moments, I thought she was going to collapse into one of their arms and begin weeping. Instead, she simply bit her lip again and stared down at the ground. It was the final, and surest, sign for us to depart.

On our way out though, I waved the teenage girl out of the house and to the front walkway. She brushed past her still motionless mother and strolled up to us.

“Tell Fadl,” I said as soon as she came within earshot, “that we're going to capture him or kill him. It's only a matter of time.” I turned around and walked on to our Strykers, not bothering to listen to a fresh set of protests of ignorance.

A few days later—after receiving intel that Fadl had left town—we conducted a patrol in the same neighborhood as the house in question and decided to pay a visit. The dismounts hadn't even knocked on the front door yet when the gunners radioed us, saying that they had stopped a car with two military-aged males trying to break the cordon and make an escape.

Neither of them was Fadl. They were just two nobody punks, drunk on something and high on something else. They eventually admitted, though, that they had visited with the dreary eyes on the queen-size mattress. For a price, of course.

Fadl's fleeing Saba al-Bor hadn't solved all of the family's problems—certainly not the financial ones. We called the IPs, who detained the two for
being under the influence, and then we remounted our Strykers. Perhaps there was something kinetic in nature out there for us to deal with.

If there was, we intended to find it.

I saw the stun grenade
before I heard it. The flash washed out my night vision, blinding me momentarily. Then I heard the blast break the early-morning silence, crashing like a ceramic plate dropped to the ground. Harsh, rigid shouts in the distance followed, some one hundred meters to my front. This is not good, I thought. I need to do something.

I squatted on the side of the road and switched knees to relieve the pressure. I was currently just one small part of a great camo odyssey, along with five members of my platoon—Sergeant Spade, Specialist Tunnel, Specialist Haitian Sensation, PFC Cold-Cuts, and PFC Smitty—a squad of American military police (MP), a squad of Iraqi police, and approximately forty members of Task Force Cobra. The reason for such a miscellany of Coalition forces boiled down to one thing: Task Force Cobra's heavy-handed reputation. When they told us that they had a target in Saba al-Bor, in the vicinity of the Sunni mosque on Route Gold, our Higher begged them to allow a unit from Bravo Troop to accompany them. Shockingly, Task Force Cobra's leadership acquiesced. However, because of the raid's proximity to the mosque, Task Force Cobra's patrol leader—presumably a special ops captain or major, although he wore no rank and told me to call him Steve, so I didn't know for sure—asked for Iraqi police support so that they could use the Iraqis to clear the mosque if necessary. This, in turn, meant a squad of MPs joined the mission, as they were under orders to go everywhere the IPs went. All of this baggage frustrated the Task Force Cobra supersoldiers to no end, as they normally operated as an independent entity. Concurrently, my role in all of this was crystal clear.

“Dude,” Captain Whiteback said to me before we left the combat outpost on foot, “you're the ranking normal army guy out there. Just make sure they don't break too much, okay? We'll still be here tomorrow; they won't.”

Easier said than done. My radio gurgled with a report from Task Force Cobra's assault force. “We got two men on the ground! They've been temporarily
disabled by the flashbangs, and we're searching them now. We're on the roof of the mosque.”

Goddamn it. They were supposed to come no closer to the mosque than the building directly east of it. If one golden rule existed in our modern counter insurgency, it was that Americans did not enter anything Muslims considered holy. To do so constituted a public relations disaster and always seemed to have second- and third-order effects that crippled the greater COIN effort. All of the Iraqi police were across the road from me, gazing into the darkness with confused expressions.

“These guys say they're security guards for the mosque,” the assault force reported. “Both have AK-47s. One of them matches the target's description, but the name on his ID card doesn't match.”

Steve's voice responded. “Roger. Clear the building and continue tactical questioning.”

This, I thought again, is definitely not good. I stood up, turned around, and found Sergeant Spade. “I'm going up there,” I said. “Watch the guys and the MPs. I'm taking the IP squad with me.”

I jogged across the road and told the MP NCO he and the IPs were coming with me, after which we strode up Route Gold toward the mosque.

Task Force Cobra's support force kneeled on both sides of the road in a staggered column. As we neared the front gate of the mosque, a Task Force Cobra soldier materialized out of the night and put his hand up. Like seemingly every member of his unit, this soldier was as tall as SFC Big Country and as muscled as Staff Sergeant Bulldog. He towered over me, the MP NCO, and the Iraqis.

“Whoa, Lieutenant, no one goes past here except TF Cobra,” he said.

“Bullshit,” I responded. “That's a fucking mosque. You guys aren't supposed to be in there, and you know it. You need the Iraqi police in there now.”

The giant tilted his head and smirked down at me. This bastard is amused, I thought, fuming. Nevertheless, he turned around and whispered into his radio. Ten seconds later, presumably after receiving a response, he turned back around and nodded.

“Alright. Go ahead. The APL [assistant patrol leader] will meet you at the back entrance.”

I nodded back and started walking. The back entrance? Good Christ, that meant they were already in the building. I prayed they weren't executing their normal clearing procedures.

When we walked around the side of the mosque, the APL stood at the back entrance. Unlike Steve, the APL wasn't special operations but rather a new member of the Ranger Regiment. He had served in a standard army unit on his first deployment. Only a year older than me and a junior captain in rank, he and I had discussed mutual friends and traded junior-officer gripes back at the combat outpost before the mission ensued.

I pointed at the door, and the IPs and the MP NCO understood, moving inside. I saw Task Force Cobra soldiers already inside. “Dude,” I said to the APL, “what the fuck?”

“I know, I know,” he said. “We're not supposed to be in here. But they found a second ID card in the guy's shoes that matches the name we have, and he said he's a guard here. He killed soldiers and marines in Fallujah as a sniper, you know? Steve said to go ahead and clear it. . . . You know how it is. The IPs live here. They won't be looking too hard for fear of actually finding something.”

He had a point. The Iraqi police weren't exactly known for their trustworthiness or their dedication to duty. And I hadn't known exactly what the target had been wanted for before the APL told me; learning certainly sparked the vengeful part of my being. Still, though, this all felt wrong.