Kaboom (27 page)

Though he was gone physically, Private Hot Wheels's presence stayed with the Gravediggers for the duration of the deployment. Soldiers routinely checked the website his mother established to chronicle his medical recovery. They swapped their favorite Hot Wheels's quotes and stories often, as if maintaining the mental image we had of him as a healthy young soldier would help heal the pale and skinny burn survivor in Texas. After the NCOs packed up his belongings and shipped them home, his bunk lay empty for many months, despite multiple bed shifts and comings and goings of soldiers. Private Hot Wheels hadn't died—thank God—but he loomed over the platoon like a lost ghost nonetheless. Freak accident or no, the men were now down one of their own, and they would have to finish without him. We all felt less whole, less complete, as a result.

What went unstated, of course, was that maybe something else could happen, and the next time, Fortuna might not grace us with her presence. I knew I felt it, and I saw it in the eyes of the others as well, especially after we finished talking about Private Hot Wheels or the generator fire. But we sucked it up and drove on. No other choice existed.

Specialist Haitian Sensation, in particular, had a tough time in the aftermath of the incident. “I smell the flesh burning sometimes still,” he told me weeks later. “I'll be thinking about something totally different, or working out, or watching TV, or whatever, and then it just hits me. And I can't help but wonder, you know? What else could we have done? What if I had been standing there, too? I just don't know.”

I didn't know either. None of us did. We just tried to remember that things could've been worse and kept moving. No other choice existed.

A power vacuum threatened
to tear apart the Sunni community of our AO over the summer of 2008. Colonel Mohammed fled Saba al-Bor when it became clear the Iraqi security forces intended to detain and jail him for his past status as an AQI prince. Things became even further muddled when AQI members dressed in IA uniforms assassinated Sheik
Zaydan of Bassam in his own house with a point-blank pistol shot through the roof of his mouth into the brain. Bassam, the village to Saba al-Bor's south, rested on an invisible fault line between the Grand Canal villages of our area and the Abu Ghraib district. AQI still maintained a powerful presence in and around Abu Ghraib, and judging from the recent uptick in violent events, they seemed to be interested in expanding northward. Sahwa leaders, minor sheiks, major wannabes, and newcomers of various stripes all began jockeying for influence in light of these events.

Iraqi security forces pose behind a detainee, arrested for his alleged involvement with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Such photographs were often taken after such operations and reproduced as posters in mass form. This was done for the purpose of public relations, in the hope of instilling trust within the greater Iraqi populace for their military and their police.

To help quell the terrorists' offensive and to reestablish a sense of order, a meeting was called in Bassam for all the local Sunni chieftains, American officers, and Iraqi security-force leaders. Both Captain Ten Bears and Captain Whiteback, on his last day of command, attended with our squadron commander. So did the IP and IA colonels. Haydar went, as did Abu Adnan, Boss Johnson II, and Colonel Mohammed's former deputy, Osama. From all accounts, a productive meeting ensued; however, when a 57-mm rocket flew
over them as they exited the house after the meeting, the details of such were scattered to the winds of evermore. The rocket men missed their target, significantly overshooting the meetinghouse. Instead they decapitated a seven-year-old girl playing in her house with her family.

Retribution was in order, and Coalition forces were the obvious choice to enact it. Identifying the villains served as the first point of order. Two days later, Captain Ten Bears, now in command, sent my platoon with an intel geek to Haydar's house, knowing that this sheik maintained his own extensive intelligence network. Although our unit maintained a strong relationship with Haydar, it had deteriorated slightly in the preceding months, as he felt we didn't give him and his village enough attention or funds. Whenever we tried to explain that we were simply trying to empower the various echelons of Iraqi government and weren't playing favorites, he would laugh scoffingly, “Government? This is Iraq, not America. We are tribal society, not democracy. Don't you Americans read any history books? The sheiks
are
government in Arab culture!”

Another event factoring into Haydar's dissatisfaction was the state of the water-plant contract. Predictably, it had been awarded to a cousin of Sheik Nour, and thus to the Tamimi tribe. As a result, the areas to the north and east of Haydar's village benefited, but Haydar and his people did not. And although he knew that such decisions weren't made at our level, he still gave us hell about the situation because we were there and we had to listen.

“I will never listen to fancy American in suit again!” he said, smiling bitterly. “We make very good bid, and I explain how it is fair to give us just this one contract instead of Tamimis. Just this one! And fancy American say yes, yes, he understands. And what happens?” Haydar slapped his head in anger and left the answer to his rhetorical question adrift.

We all sat on the ground in his rectangular meeting room, waiting for the feast always provided for dinner at this residence. Haydar and two of his advisers intermixed with me and five members of the Gravediggers—Staff Sergeant Boondock, Sergeant Fuego (recently promoted and permanently back with the platoon), Doc, Specialist Tunnel, and PFC Smitty—with Suge attempting to provide translation for us all. The rest of the platoon pulled security and would rotate in for food over the next hour. As per the Arab custom, we sat without chairs, facing one another in conversation. On the far wall of the room hung portraits of Haydar's grandfather and father, both dressed in the traditional dishdasha and turban and both the spitting image of their successor. The current sheik often reminded us that his grandfather
worked with the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, his father with the British. It was a subtle way to point out that while the American presence in Iraq was temporary, his family's was not.

In an attempt to change the topic of discussion, I asked him about the rocket attack. He looked back at me knowingly. “Yes,” he said. “I have my eyes looking into it.”

“Will you share that information with us if you find anything out?”

He nodded. “Of course. As long as my American friends promise to support me over Abu Adnan, if it comes to that.”

Confused, I looked over at Staff Sergeant Boondock, who shrugged his shoulders in response. “Support you in what, Haydar? I'm not following.”

He stroked his chin and smiled. “Nothing particular. Not yet, at least. I speak in . . . hypo . . . hypo . . . hypo . . . .”

Suge struggled with the translation of the last word. “Hypotheticals?” I proffered.

“Yes! That is it! Hypotentacles! That means maybes, yes?”

I tried not to laugh at Suge's crossbred word and considered Haydar's statement carefully. “You're a smart man, Haydar,” I said. “You know how we feel about Abu Adnan. We wouldn't ever support an act of violence between villages or Sahwa leaders, but in terms of having our respect and our ears, you have nothing to worry about from him. Captain Whiteback felt that way, and I know Captain Ten Bears feels that way, too.”

He nodded again. “As much I believed,” he said. “My head needed to hear it to agree with my heart.” He clapped his hands and barked orders in Arabic to the kitchen, where some of his junior Sahwa temporarily served as cooks and waiters. “Now we eat!”

That we did. Dishes and dishes of roast chicken, masgouf (a grilled fish mixed with spices), kafta (lamb meatballs), flatbread, and eggplant salad appeared, with dips of amba (a pickle condiment) and hummus providing additional flavor. Dates dipped in sugar served as our dessert. Halfway through the meal, Haydar's three-year-old son, Ghazi, ran into the meeting room to give his father a hug and a kiss.

“This is why we fight,” Haydar said as he picked up his giggling son and twirled him in the air. “So that they might have peace in a land that has never known it.”

I immediately pulled out my notebook and wrote that quote down, as Suge mumbled his agreement in broken English and celebrated with a cigarette. That, I thought to myself, is the most profound fucking thing I've
heard in a long time. True dust of the desert. I wondered how much better it sounded in Arabic.

The next day, Haydar called Suge at the combat outpost and gave us the names of the three men responsible for the rocket attack. He said that his sources would be willing to write out sworn statements against the men, contingent on our detaining them first.

The names didn't surprise anyone. Two of them belonged to the Daraji family, an inbred Sunni clan whose members all lived together in a small village southeast of Bassam. The patriarch had been arrested the prior year for a lethal IED attack on an American convoy and still called Camp Bucca home. Various sons, cousins, and nephews had been jailed or were wanted for arrest or questioning. These men didn't necessarily qualify as straight AQI; they were more like poor rural labor contracted for acts of terror. Ironically, all three of the rocket men worked as Sons of Iraq in the Bassam area, albeit at different checkpoints. Not that any of that mattered. They had brutally murdered an innocent young girl, and we got the green light for a raid. Our clarity of purpose returned.

The day after that, in the tranquil silence of the predawn, we raided the Darajis' small village.

Captain Ten Bears's plan had the three line platoons of Bravo Troop striking three target houses in the greater Bassam area simultaneously, while the Estonians pulled outer-perimeter security as the cordon. Acting in accordance with Higher's desire for more joint patrols, a three-man fire team of Iraqi army jundis augmented all of our units. One of the other platoons detained their man immediately, and the other one found no one home. At our objective house, we sorted through a multitude of women, children, and young men without finding our specific target, Ali, the reported rocket trigger puller. “He is at his Sahwa checkpoint now,” his younger half-brother and second cousin eventually told us. “Why do you seek him?”

“Uhh, we just want to talk,” I responded. “He said he had information on some Ali Babas.”

“Ah, very good,” responded the Iraqi. “There are many Ali Babas in this area, especially in the Sahwa.”

As my platoon walked out of the house and back to the vehicles, I gave them the hand-and-arm signal for “Let's hurry the fuck up” and shook the young Daraji's hand. “Just tell him we'll come back next week,” I said, ignoring the urge to wink behind my sunglasses. “We're not in a rush to talk with him or anything.”

“Of course. Thank you for coming.”

“No problem! Take care!”

Making a liar out of me almost immediately, our Strykers screamed out of the village as though with the wrath of God. We moved to the Sons of Iraq checkpoint on the southern end of Route Islanders as quickly as the tight turns of the canal roads allowed.

By the time we arrived at the checkpoint, however, Ali Daraji was nowhere to be found. His fellow guards said that he hadn't shown up to work that morning and they didn't know why. While searching the surrounding area though, Staff Sergeant Spade discovered a grey sedan parked behind a dirt mound that matched the description of Ali's vehicle given by Haydar's sources.

“Yes, that is Ali's car!” piped in one of the Sons of Iraq, eyes shifting nervously, when he realized what Staff Sergeant Spade had found. “I switch with him last night. He take my car.”

Suge now seized the moment. Our terp used his imposing size and backed the smaller Sahwa guard against a wall, roaring menacingly at him in Arabic. Two minutes later, he turned back to me, slapped his helmet and sighed, and said, “Fucking Iraqis.” The guard now wore the look of a plane-crash survivor, mainly because, I learned later, Suge had threatened to have us drop the Son of Iraq off alone in a Shia neighborhood if he did not cooperate.

“What's the deal with the cars?”

“He say that Ali Daraji make him trade cars last night at his house. He say that Ali Daraji tell him he needed to borrow his truck to move things. I think he tell truth. I put the fear of Allah in him.”

I smirked. “Looks like it. What kind of truck does this guy own then?”

Suge barked in Arabic at the Sahwa, received his answer, and nodded. “Old white truck with flat bed in back.”

The TOC kept radioing for updates, and with SFC Big Country on leave, the acting platoon sergeant—Staff Sergeant Bulldog—and I talked over the situation.