Kaboom (38 page)

“Zien!” I said, using the Arabic word for “good.” Anytime an interpreter wasn't around, we tended to keep conversations simple.

As we came into the meeting room, I spotted Eddie's wrinkled skull hunched over in a chair in the center of the room and heard a deep, nasal snore coming from that direction.

“Hey, Eddie,” I said, grinning back at Lieutenant Anwar, “you okay, man?”

“Yes, sir!” Eddie said, bolting up. “I . . . uhh . . . just close my eyes for a bit before the meeting, you know?” Eddie worked hard and never stopped being on call for interpreting. He certainly deserved his power naps.

I sat down to Eddie's left, while Lieutenant Anwar sat to his right. I pulled out my notebook and the latest high-value-target list (HVTL) printout from my cargo pocket. The number one name on the list had remained the same since the beginning of the summer. “Have you guys heard anything new regarding Ali the Beard?” I asked Lieutenant Anwar.

“We hear he come up from Sadr City last week for funeral,” Lieutenant Anwar responded through Eddie. “But source says he left right after, in convoy of six black trucks. We didn't hear he was here until after he left.”

Late or not, this info definitely qualified as news to me. Although not as well organized as Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull's and Staff Sergeant Jorge's source networks, the Iraqis had proven to be very skillful at developing their own independent networks and tended to rely on a larger number of individuals than we did. They relied less on technology and money—our strengths—and more on cultivating personal relationships and developing trust, built-in cultural advantages we simply could not mimic or replicate.

“No,” I said levelly, “I had not heard that. Thank you for sharing that. We're still tracking his brother Abbas in Hussaniyah though.”

Lieutenant Anwar nodded. “As are we. We get very close many times, but it does not matter until we have him in jail.” He slammed his fist on the table for emphasis, then pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Eddie and I both accepted one, and Lieutenant Anwar lit all three. He continued to mumble to himself in Arabic about Abbas.

“He does not like Abbas the Beard,” Eddie explained to me between puffs.

I smirked. “I gathered that.”

I glanced down at my HVTL for the next name on the list, but Lieutenant Anwar pressed forth.

“What do you know about Qusay al-Juma?”

I bit down on my lip, hoping I hadn't done so too noticeably. While in theory we shared all our information and intelligence with the Iraqi security forces and they did the same for us, in practice neither occurred. I knew Lieutenant Anwar held pieces back from us, and we did the same. Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull, in particular, proceeded very cautiously with what he shared, assuming correctly that the Iraqis' internal units were riddled with leaks and spies for JAM. Further complicating these information exchanges
were ambiguous rules about security clearances that read and briefed well but held no place in a fast-paced, ever-evolving counterinsurgency. We waded through them to the best of our abilities. In the meantime, the answer was that we knew a lot about Qusay al-Juma. But the hows and whys of such weren't for Lieutenant Anwar or any other Iraqi right now. I shrugged my shoulders and begrudgingly planted another seed of mistrust in the Mesopotamian soil. “He dropped off our radar last month,” I said. “What about you?”

He stared back at me protractedly, and I forced myself to maintain eye contact. “We have tried the past week to gain information on his whereabouts and gathered nothing.”

Our conversation continued, with me going down my HVTL and Lieutenant Anwar rattling off names from memory. A slow, methodical, verbal swap meet evolved; when I gave him a tidbit, I got one in return; when I put forth a gem, one was quickly spat back at me. Forty minutes and two cigarettes each later, Lieutenant Anwar leaned back in his chair and said offhandedly, “Did you hear that we detained Hussayn the Star in a raid two nights ago?”

I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I admired his restraint, knowing that I wouldn't have been able to sit on that for an entire meeting. He had probed us and our source network to see if we knew about the detention. While we didn't consider Hussayn the Star to be the high-ranking JAM leader that the Iraqi National Police did, it still served as quite a coup for them, especially from a public relations standpoint. And, in late-2008 Iraq, getting the general populace to trust and believe in their own security forces probably mattered more than taking apart the insurgent cell networks one by one.

“Good for you guys!” I said, standing up to clap him on the back and give him a fist pound for good measure. “We hadn't heard that, but that's awesome. Congratulations!”

He took another drag from his cigarette, clearly satisfied, both for capturing Hussayn the Star and for getting one over on the Americans. I let him bask in his victory for a few more seconds before I walked over to a desk in the rear corner, opened a drawer, and pulled out a box. I had a surprise of my own. I tossed the box over to Lieutenant Anwar.

“Consider that a late Ramadan or early Christmas present,” I said.

The box contained a brand-new digital camera I had procured from one of 2-14 Cavalry's supply sergeants back on Camp Taji. It always paid to play nice with the logisticians, and he owed me a favor anyhow. For the past month or so, Lieutenant Anwar had pleaded with us to get him a digital camera,
like the ones all American platoons used out in sector. I knew how much practical use the National Police could get out of it and of the slowness of their own bureaucratic supply chain. I also understood how much it meant to Lieutenant Anwar that he'd be able to go back to his commander with this. So, when I had found myself on Camp Taji four days earlier, between a stop at the barber shop and a Taco Bell run, I swung by and picked it up from the supply sergeant.

He smiled, openly and honestly, blinking his eyes in surprise. “Thank you, Cap-e-tan . . . thank you.” Eddie added, posttranslation, “This gift means very much to him, sir. You do very good thing for Lieutenant Anwar.”

“No worries, man,” I said. “Let me show you how it works.” As we put in the batteries and Lieutenant Anwar explored the various functions of the camera, he leaned up and put his arm on my shoulder. “Colonel Najij will be very proud of me for this,” he stated. “I will return this favor to you, I promise.”

I winked at him. “I know you will. I have no doubt.”

“Do you have family back home?” he asked suddenly. “Wife?” The questions took me aback at first. Through all our meetings, both official and otherwise, we had never ventured into the realm of personal lives. Figuring this was his attempt to tighten our relationship, in light of the digital camera gift, I answered him.

“I do,” I said. “I have my parents, obviously, and a little brother. And a girlfriend.”

“Do you have any photographs?” he asked. “I'd like very much to see them.”

I pulled my wallet out of my pocket. Behind my debit card and military ID, I found two wallet-sized photographs—one, taken when I was still in college, was of my mother, my little brother, my golden retriever, and myself; the other was of my girlfriend. “That's them,” I said, smirking and shrugging my shoulders. “They are all saints for putting up with me and my antics.”

“They are very nice-looking people,” Lieutenant Anwar said. “I would like very much to meet them someday.”

“That'd be cool,” I replied, then remembered some sense of decorum.

“What about you, dude? You a family man?”

He quickly pulled out his own wallet. “Yes, I am. I have wife and baby daughter. She is my light.” The photo he showed was of himself, dressed in his police uniform, holding a giggling, smiling baby girl, who I figured to be about a year old. In the photo, his daughter reached up and tugged on his nose, while Lieutenant Anwar smiled with a contentment I never saw him flash on the job.

“She is very beautiful,” I told him. “You must be very proud.”

“I am. She is why I fight for Iraq. So she never sees what I have seen.”

Not knowing what else to say, I simply nodded and changed the subject back to the intricacies of the digital camera. Ten minutes later, I walked him back outside, and we parted ways, promising to meet again the next week. Then I stared at the flame in the distance for a while. It still danced.

Critics called them
war profiteers and vigilantes. Proponents labeled them patriots vital to the Iraq War effort. My interactions with them varied sharply, sometimes evoking my wrath, sometimes invoking my gratitude. Private contractors proliferated in the sands of Iraq throughout the war, and during my time there, they numbered approximately 180,000 in total—about 15,000 more personnel than Coalition forces had serving during the surge's peak. Of that number, only 20,000 or so served as private security guards, but thanks to the company Blackwater's infamous time in theater, they became the public face for contractors in Iraq.

In his presidential farewell address to the nation in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned against such privatization and development of the military-industrial complex. Almost fifty years later, half the globe away from America, it appeared that his words were proving both prophetic and fruitless. One couldn't walk a half mile at Camp Taji or any of the combat outposts without seeing a sign of Halliburton's lovechild, KBR—from the trailers we lived in, to the electric outlets we plugged into, to the Porta-Johns we crapped in. In theory, I detested our military's reliance on civilian enterprises and their nine-to-five work mentality. In practice, I happily ate the chocolate ice cream the army would never have provided and basked in air-conditioning the military probably would have fucked up somehow.

Just as with soldiers, there were good civilians and bad civilians. Almost all of both qualified as former or retired military. The good ones understood their job existed to help soldiers, to facilitate whatever facet of the war was tasked to them, and they didn't pretend they still served in the armed forces. The bad ones viewed their job as a perk to retiring from military service, constantly pointed out how much more money they made than the soldiers actually fighting the war, and only cared about their little slice of the Green Machine, big picture be damned.

Bitching about contractors and their exploits in Iraq felt as natural to soldiers as sleeping and smoking. But outside of a few typical and mundane interactions, I never really got too fired up about them; their presence in our brushfire war seemed natural, given our postmodern republic's interpretation of free markets and privatized industry. The military-industrial complex had evolved into a monster with thousands and thousands of money-udders for contractors to suckle off of, and I certainly had no right or reason to call foul. Further, I just didn't see how the daymare of an army of hired guns could ever come to fruition in America—from my perspective, the military presence seemed too strong and influential. One day in the fall of 2008, though, I experienced some of the pitfalls of the growing reliance on the private security firms, albeit on a negligible scale.

At about nine in the morning, when walking back to my room from the showers at JSS Istalquaal, I spotted something odd: a fleet of up-armored suburbans parked in our motor pool between our Strykers and Humvees. Mildly intrigued, I stopped to watch a group of tall, white, large-chested men walk over to the Iraqi police side of the JSS. Most sported thick, lumberjack beards and baseball caps and wore various mishmashes of military and police gear. I stood a good two hundred meters away from them, but it appeared that they carried a variety of assault rifles as well. One of them looked over at me, so I gave a little wave, while holding my hygiene kit and shower towel and wearing flip-flops. He didn't wave back. Once they disappeared through the IP gate, I continued to my room. When I walked by the motor pool again a few hours later, I noticed the up-armored suburbans were gone. I never did learn exactly why they came to our JSS, although Captain Frowny-Face thought some State Department official had arrived for a meeting that morning. At the time, I assumed they were Blackwater (now known as Xe) personnel, but they could just as likely have been from DynCorp or Triple Canopy, two other private security firms employed by the U.S. State Department.

I didn't give the unknown men with lumberjack beards and safari bush vests another thought until two days later, when Lieutenant Rant walked into the TOC.

“Some Iraqi just came in and said we had destroyed his car,” he told me.

“Oh yeah?” I was playing a helicopter video game on my computer, and Lieutenant Rant's story didn't sound like anything out of the ordinary. Iraqis had proven very adept at concocting ways to elicit money from us, and this tale lacked all kinds of creativity points.

“Yeah, but he said it wasn't us, it was Americans in trucks or something, who didn't wear normal uniforms. He said it happened right on Dover too. You hear anything about that?”

I paused my game and looked up. “No,” I replied, “but I did see some Blackwater dudes here two days ago. When did this supposedly happen?”

“Two days ago, around noon.” Still standing and leaning against a nearby pillar, Lieutenant Rant shook his head. “He said there was a traffic jam ahead, and the trucks were honking and weaving around like mad men and plowed straight into him going pretty fast. He said his wife had to go to the hospital, and his car is completely totaled. He brought in a photo of a busted car, but that could be from anything.”

I arched an eyebrow. “That sucks. Think it's true?”

Lieutenant Rant shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? He wouldn't be the first Iraqi to lie about this, but then again, it wouldn't be the first time those security guys destroyed an Iraqi's personal property. He said they barely stopped, but they told him to come here for reimbursement.”