Kaboom (46 page)

Still, though, Saif managed to capture my attention when I walked into the sheik room and found the young Iraqi man pacing back and forth, whispering to himself and sporting a large black bruise underneath his right eye.

After forcefully telling him to sit and to calm down, he explained to me what had happened. He began with a huff.

“I was Sahwa for over a year, in Rashadiya, because that is where I live. I do my job good, and I like doing it. It made me feel proud and good to put food on my children's plates. I work with my friends and do many brave things to keep al-Qaeda out of Rashadiya. But then five months ago my sheik tell me and five others we must be policemen because we are younger than other Sahwa.”

As he spoke, he flailed his arms to and fro, voice ringing and changing pitches like a Southern preacher's. Ahh, I said to myself. Much respect to the Iraqi's innate feel for the melodramatic. Eddie offered Saif and me a cigarette; I accepted, but Saif continued ranting.

“We go through police training in Baghdad, and all of us complete training, because we know we must succeed for Sunnis and for the people of Rashadiya. I finish near top of my class, so I know I am a good police. Then they tell me I must work in Boob al-Sham, even though I am from Rashadiya. They split all of us up, on purpose, I know.”

“Uh huh.” I jotted down some notes on my pad and looked over at Eddie, who listened diligently. He has the patience of a saint, I thought to myself. There's no way I could listen to this all day, every day, and not eventually snap and go Columbine on everyone.

“Then I get to Boob al-Sham. They tell me I am not real police. They say I am junior to them just because I used to be Sahwa. I know it is 'cause I am Sunni. Then the police chief dock my pay for no reason, saying that I am late and that I am not wearing right uniform, but those things are not true. And then”—he held his upper cheekbone in his palm, cradling his black eye, and whispered menacingly—“they do this to me.”

I leaned across from my chair, patted him on the back, and asked Eddie to have him explain who had done what to him and when.

“I get to work this morning, and they tell me to go to house in Boob al-Sham, to talk to lady who says her neighbor is in Jaish al-Mahdi. I go with one other police who I know hated me before, and then when we get to house, I turn around and he is gone. I walk into house, and ten men in black masks jump on me and beat on me. I fight back good, but I can't fight them all. Then they hold knife to my throat and tell me if I don't quit the Boob al-Sham police and go back to Rashadiya and never come back, they will kill me and kill my entire family.” As Saif finished the story, his body shook with rage, and his voice quivered. What he said didn't sound entirely viable, but he certainly seemed to believe it to be so, if nothing else.

I fetched us all a cup of coffee and talked for another thirty or so minutes in an attempt to calm the Iraqi down. I wrote down the names of the men he believed to be involved and assured him that I'd discuss the issue with his police chief. He also claimed that he knew the police chief and most of the men to be JAM members but lacked definitive proof. I asked him to keep his eyes and ears open and to come back to us if he ever learned anything specific. He promised that he would.

“Thank you,” I told him, “both for what you're doing for your family and for what you're doing for your country. I know it's not easy, but this is very important, and you're at the forefront of the effort. You should be proud, so keep your head up.”

“I will,” he stated. “It is my honor.”

Three days later, at the weekly joint-security meeting, I approached the Boob al-Sham IP chief and mentioned Saif's name. Before I could go any deeper into my spiel, though, the chief just laughed.

“That guy?” he said. “He quit yesterday after I docked his pay because he showed up to work three hours late. He is all emotion, no brain. We will be better police station without him.”

I asked him about Saif's black eye.

“I do not know,” the police chief said, eyes blinking repeatedly, now zeroing in on the fact that my questions had been spawned by something other than mere curiosity. “He showed up smelling of whiskey one morning last week with black eye. I just thought it was a drunken fight.”

That afternoon, perturbed by what the IP chief had said, I told Eddie to call the cell phone number that Saif had left with us. The number had been disconnected. I asked a few of our contacts within the Boob al-Sham station—all Shia, like everyone there except Saif—about him, and they confirmed the police chief's version of the events. Unsure of what to do at this point, I told The Great White Hope about him since Rashadiya fell in his company's AO; I asked him to keep an eye out and told him that I wanted to talk to Saif.

We never heard from Saif again. One early evening, a few weeks later, I thought I saw him walking on the side of Route Crush at a marketplace as we drove from JSS Istalquaal to Camp Taji. I shouted out for him from the back hatch of the Stryker, but the person didn't respond and quickly fell out of my vision. The driver asked if I wanted to stop the patrol. I told him no, so we kept driving.

During the last couple months
of our fifteen-month tour in Iraq, a general in our chain of command determined that “a generational gap” existed within the officer corps and, to a lesser extent, within the NCO corps as well. He lambasted the field-grade officers below him, who in turn lambasted us, for our perceived deficiencies. According to the forwarded e-mails that I read on the subject, the general believed junior officers lacked proper discipline and didn't respect authority or military courtesies, and he
wanted this rectified. While unconfirmed, a popular rumor spread that the stimulus for all of this occurred when a company commander, of captain rank, responded to a question this general asked with “yeah, sir,” rather than “yes, sir.”

Many junior officers, myself included, agreed wholeheartedly with the general's premise that a generational gap existed within the officer corps, although our perception of it differed considerably. After spending most of our deployments at combat outposts with our soldiers, we tended to identify and think like our men more than our superiors probably wanted. Such seemed impossible to avoid, though, especially when said superiors showed up in too-clean uniforms, criticized trivial things, like soldiers not shaving enough or not wearing a full uniform while they walked to the shower, and then drove back to the FOB in time for dinner. We fought in a war. All too often, it seemed like they avoided it. The men often feared Higher more than they did hajjis, scattering like cockroaches to their rooms and locking their doors whenever VIPs arrived at the outpost or JSS. Not all of our visitors behaved like that, of course, but enough did to create the stereotype. The good spoke glowingly in public, listened to the soldiers, and if they saw something they wanted corrected, pulled one of the leaders at the outpost aside. The bad criticized in public, talked rather than listened, and never once realized they were treading in someone else's house. Rank required that we respect all of our superiors the same, so we did. It didn't require us to revere or admire them the same.

While the general believed junior officers lacked discipline and openly feared for the future of “his” army and “his” officer corps, we in turn believed that the current institutional establishment lacked the creativity and ingenuity necessary to wage a successful counterinsurgency. The very top of the flagpole implored us to remain flexible and celebrated the innovative, different manner with which we approached problem sets. We were recruited and trained to make quick decisions on the ground, so that's what we did when we arrived to combat. After the first four years of the war, it seemed overwhelmingly clear that approaching Iraq from a conventional mind-set only led to calamity.

Nevertheless, the many layers between the Pentagon's chosen ones and us clouded all of that. At best, our field-grade officers had served on the line in Desert Storm, a seventy-two-hour operation that failed to impress in the fifteen-month deployment era, unless they had fought in one of the great tank battles, like the Battle of 73 Easting. At worst, our field grades had spent
their entire line time in garrison. The brutal reality screamed that most of that generation of officers fell into the latter category. Obviously, this wasn't their fault, but many didn't understand, or they chose not to understand, the circumstances of our rearing as junior officers. They thought they imparted lessons about professionalism with rules, threats, and red tape. Instead, they came across as out-of-touch has-beens who never were, with some treasuring simplicity rather than basking in complexity. Even if they had deployed to Iraq before, they had almost always done so as a staff officer—vital to the Green Machine, certainly, but still lacking in credibility for the hypermacho combat-arms world.

I don't want to overstate the generational divide, though. The overwhelming majority of American officers wanted nothing more than to serve their country and their men honorably. Different approaches and techniques existed for such, and sometimes that caused friction among the ranks. Due to the near-automatic promotion rate up to lieutenant colonel, age differences augmented said friction. But this was not a “lions-and-lambs” World War I situation, where the lambs of senior officers sent the lions of junior officers and soldiers off to their deaths by the thousands. But to refer to the Iraq War experience as the “brains and the bureaucrats” certainly wouldn't be unfair.

I never spoke with the general about his generational gap comments, so I didn't know the exact specifics of his argument. But I believed I got a decent read on them, as various field grades regurgitated his talking points to us in the weeks following the initial e-mail chain. They wanted us to enforce the published uniform standards, stop joking around so much with the NCOs and the soldiers, and do a better job of supporting the chain of command. In short, we were told to act more professionally. Irony reared its winking face, as I wore pink boxer shorts emblazoned with pirate skulls and beer mugs underneath my pants at the time. More a passive rebel than an active radical, I just nodded knowingly during the speech, doing my best not to smirk.

An unprecedented number of junior officers were leaving the army, despite all kinds of bonuses and perks being tossed our way, not to mention the tanking economy back home. It had a lot to do with the prospect of multiple deployments, certainly, but at least in my case, that wasn't a deal breaker. The prospect of becoming a field-grade bureaucrat spouting thoughtless drivel to a new generation of junior officers was. I believed that many of the men at the top of the totem pole truly wanted the army to become a learning institution, but in my experience, the giant clog in the middle wouldn't allow for it. An institution as large as the army didn't change overnight, and
the “that's the way it was for me, so that's the way it'll be for them” mentality persisted. Honestly, if I could have remained a scout platoon leader for twenty years, I would have stayed in and been a careerist. But the organizational structure didn't allow for such stagnation. Keep moving up the pipeline or jump off of it were the only options.

Even after I submitted my separation paperwork, which would go into effect three months after we returned to Hawaii, I felt a very enticing tug to remain in the military. Every military officer worth a fuck believed the system was better off because he worked in it; looking around at some of my peers who chose to stay in the army and make a career out of it petrified me sometimes, because they would be the men leading my soldiers to combat on the next rotation. If every good officer got out after his initial commitment ended—such wasn't the case, although it sometimes felt that way—the endless carousel of ineptitude would continue to revolve, and those members of our generation who stayed in would chase out the best and the brightest of the next batch. Further, the benefits of a military career were very real and very tempting. They'd pay for graduate school, and all kinds of unconventional opportunities existed, so I didn't have to turn into what I hated, if it came to that. However, I resisted the urge to reup for two reasons: (1) I had life goals and dreams that I simply couldn't accomplish if I made the military a career, and (2) if I stayed in, I'd inevitably have to order men into combat and not go myself. The inherent nature of the profession demanded such. And I knew I'd lose a significant piece of my humanity when I forced myself to issue such an order. I'd been to hell and back with my men, and I would gladly go again since I knew I could get them back. But I also knew I couldn't order others into hell while I didn't go myself, something a senior military commander must do, and do routinely. I knew it to be a character flaw and an emotional weakness, but I understood and accepted both.

I considered it a personal victory but a professional sacrifice. If that meant I was undisciplined, so fucking be it. I knew I had made a difference in Iraq, both for Iraqis and for soldiers. That was all that mattered to me.

The number of reports
we received regarding planned attacks on Iraq's polling sites reached a fever pitch about three days before the
January 31 election. It had been a marked date for many months, due to this being the first set of national elections in the country since 2005 and the first time most Sunnis planned to participate, both as candidates and as voters. Meanwhile, the Shia voting block did not sound happy about any power sharing whatsoever, while approximately four hundred parties vied for control of the Iraqi parliament. Through all of this, Jaish al-Mahdi loomed insolently in the background, not actively running many candidates through their political wing but clearly interested in the outcome nonetheless. Most American officials believed Sadr's power play would come a few years later, after we left, but no one really knew for certain. JAM's powder keg could explode at any time.