Shock Factor (31 page)

The seconds ticked off too fast. Tanguy's voice came over the radio, “The order stands.”

Hendrickson was not having it. “We cannot turn this over to the Iraqi Police.”

The Oregonians had no legal authority to be there. Thanks to the early changeover of power, they were infringing on the activities of a sovereign nation's police force. Had this all happened three days before, the scouts could have arrested the entire Iraqi Police detachment and released the prisoners themselves. Not now.

No legal authority, perhaps. But the moral authority was clear to every American in the compound. Kyle Trimble recalled, “No matter who these prisoners were, you have to provide medical aid to those in need. That is common humanity.”

Nobody was under any illusions here. If Hendrickson pulled out, the police would win. It would vindicate their sense that they had done nothing wrong. The beatings and torture would continue. Several of the prisoners were already urgent medical evacuation casualties. If the Americans left, these men faced agonizing deaths.

“Volunteer Six,” Tanguy called to Hendrickson, “The Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave. Now. There is no discussion here.”

The cop from Corvallis refused to give up, “Have you talked to First Cav?” The 1st Cavalry Division was the 39th Brigade's higher command. Hendrickson was trying to go above Brigadier General Chastain's head, a very risky move.

Major Tanguy had heard enough from the 39th Brigade to sense that the Volunteers were skating on thin ice. If Hendrickson pushed this, Tanguy feared he would be relieved on the spot.

“Six, Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave now,” Tanguy reiterated.

Hendrickson frowned in abject disgust and looked at Boyce.
Options?

An idea came to Boyce, “Sir, Brigadier General Jones's office is in the MOI main building. We can walk over there and we can grab somebody from his office to come see this. Or, if he's there, we can get him to come see this for himself.” Jones was the 1st Cav's assistant division commander.

“Okay, let's do it.”

Boyce, Hendrickson, and a couple of the scouts began walking toward the compound's main gate. They had three hundred yards to cover. They walked in silence.

They had only taken a few steps when Major Tanguy radioed, “Six, we need confirmation that you are leaving.”

Hendrickson tried to buy time, “I'm having trouble hearing you.”

Tanguy wasn't buying it. The 39th Brigade was breathing down his neck. It felt to him like they were not going to wait much longer to fire his battalion commander. He needed to impart the sense of urgency he was feeling.

“Six, we need confirmation you are leaving,” he repeated.

“You're breaking up,” Hendrickson said again.

Ross Boyce could hear the tension rising over the radio. The escalation made him fear his commander was about to be relieved, too.

Hendrickson stopped walking. He'd grown up the son of a U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabre Jet pilot who had fought in the Korean War. He'd played football in high school and at Cabrillo Junior College in Santa Cruz, California. His life had been founded and built around discipline, attention to detail, and following orders. He had never disobeyed a direct order.

He wanted to disobey this one. Badly. If he did, and he was fired, Major Tanguy would take over the battalion and the Volunteers would be withdrawn anyway. What purpose would it serve to push the 39th into firing him?

He turned to Ross Boyce and spoke over the radio, “Okay, 2–162, we're leaving. Now.”

Sheer disgust greeted the order among the scouts. Captain Southall initially refused to leave. So did some of the scouts. Kyle Trimble tried to get the prisoners in need of urgent medical care evacuated with the platoon, but that request was denied. “At least let us finish what we're doing here,” he pleaded.

No luck. Trimble was able to finish wrapping the gangrenous arm in a new bandage, grab his combat lifesaver gag, and get to the Humvees as the rest of the platoon mounted up. Mike Giordano was forced to stop working on the desperately dehydrated man and join the rest of the platoon as well.

The Iraqi Police looked triumphant. Several started for their AKs and torture implements. Fearing reprisal and a possible shoot-out, the scouts lowered their weapons and warned the Iraqi cops away from their guns.

When the last Humvee passed through the main entrance, the Iraqi cops knew they were in the clear. Captain Southall watched them pick up their weapons and head for the prisoners. With hope of salvation gone, the Oregon snipers saw terror bloom in the eyes of these helpless men.

Maries pulled his eye from his spotter scope and spoke to his snipers. Back in Oregon, he had handpicked each one of them. He was their leader, their mentor. Most had learned more about the sniper's craft from Maries than they had at the schoolhouse in Little Rock.

What had just happened left them reeling. The high ground was gone, stolen from them by their own chain of command. The ugly, real world grayness had swallowed them whole.

Yet, this thing wasn't over. The snipers were Hendrickson's trump, and Maries knew it. The 39th Brigade hadn't said anything about pulling out of the MOI position. For now, he and his men weren't going anywhere.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Lifesavers

All afternoon, the snipers studied every move the Iraqi cops made. A small American military police unit showed up. They talked with their Iraqi counterparts for a short time, then left. As soon as the last American cleared the compound, the cops went right back to beating and torturing the detainees.

Keith Engle seethed at the sight. He wanted to engage. So did Darren Buchholz, who lay beside Maries with his Barrett .50 cal. Maries controlled his own helpless rage by going stone cold. They documented everything and continued to report each development to the battalion operations center.

The American MP unit returned that afternoon. With their return, the beatings ceased. Not long after, a motorcade of black armored SUVs rolled into the compound and parked near the overhang. They were armored and had smoke-black tinted windows. Maries, Engle, and Buchholz all began taking photographs as men dismounted. Engle snapped his photos through a pair of binoculars. Maries worked with his spotting scope. So did Buchholz.

The Oregon snipers recoiled when they saw who they'd just caught on camera. The men who dismounted were all Caucasian Westerners. They had black bulletproof vests and carried folding stock variants of the AK-47. All of them were dressed in civilian clothes. They moved swiftly and with professional acumen to set up security around their rigs. A moment later, another white male, this one dressed in a slate gray business suit, appeared from one of the SUVs.

“Who the hell is that fucking guy?” Engle asked in shock.

He had medium-length gray hair that almost looked like a pompadour from three hundred yards away. He walked with a stiffness that seemed to Maries to indicate he was not an American.

Maries studied these new arrivals as they headed to meet with Yellow Shirt. The guys with the AK-47s were clearly the gray-haired man's personal security detail. Since reaching Baghdad in April, the snipers had seen all sorts of contract security types, especially down at the hotels. All of the American companies issued their people M4 rifles and .45 caliber pistols. The only mercenaries he'd encountered carrying Soviet bloc weaponry worked for a British company called Parson Limited.

Because of this and the more formal way he walked, Maries began to think of Gray Hair as a Brit.

Whoever he was, the Iraqis treated him with deference. He met them at the overhang in front of the rectangular building. The cops clustered around him. In the far back of the circle stood a tall Caucasian-looking male in a black shirt. Nobody had any idea who he was.

The MP's moved to the gray-haired man's right and listened to him as he addressed the Iraqi Police. Heads nodded. A few of the Iraqis spoke. The meeting lasted a half hour, then the gray-haired man walked out of the compound and headed for the Ministry of Interior's main building. Maries leapt to his feet and told his men to stay put and keep their eyes on the compound. He set off to find the gray-haired man.

He dashed downstairs as quickly as he could, but by the time he got to the lobby, the man was nowhere in sight. He searched several floors and then gave up.

Maries returned to the hide site just in time to see a gaggle of civilian Iraqi officials show up at the compound. The man in the yellow shirt talked with them for several minutes, then turned and gave some orders to his minions. A few minutes later, the cops began lining all the detainees up in the courtyard again. The snipers counted ninety-three altogether.

The Iraqi cops brought the prisoners cigarettes, food, and water. Those who could ate. Others were too far gone to do so. They smoked in silence as the snipers covertly examined them through their scopes. Thirty-five of the ninety-three were Sudanese. They also noticed a Caucasian detainee in the mix.

The Iraqi officials left just before 1800. The MPs were long gone by that point, and the snipers figured their departure would herald a new round of beatings.

Not this time. The cops appeared to be in enforced merciful mode after the arrival of so much brass. Soon, they let the prisoners bathe in the courtyard. Just before sunset, they selected a dozen men, escorted them to the main gate and let them go. The prisoners hobbled out into the street in front of the Ministry of Interior and disappeared into Baghdad traffic.

The next day, the police released another batch of prisoners. With great satisfaction, the snipers saw the fourteen-year-old boy and his broken-wristed father in the mix. They were lucky to escape. Eventually, Maries and his men saw the police release about sixty of their prisoners. What happened to the last thirty-three remains a mystery.

While the snipers kept watch over the torture compound, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson tried to find out who gave the order to withdraw from the compound. He could not get a straight answer. Instead, the 39th Brigade ordered the Volunteers to remain silent about the incident. It was not to be discussed anywhere.

Kept in the dark and told to stay quiet about what they had seen did not sit well with the Oregonians. There'd already been friction between the Arkansans and the Volunteers, and this caused even more. Here, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, was a story of a group of citizen-soldiers who had done the right thing. They had displayed compassion, humanity, and mercy at a time when the world's media was flaying the United States for the abuses caught on camera at Abu Ghraib.

After 2–162 pulled out, the torture at the compound was eventually stopped. Between the arrival of the MPs, Gray Hair, and the Iraqi officials, two-thirds of the prisoners survived their treatment. Had Maries's sniper section not escalated the situation and forced Hendrickson to go check it out, many of those ninety-three men surely would have vanished. This would have been the perfect counter to Abu Ghraib had the chain of command seized the public relations opportunity and released the news through U.S. Army channels. The gag order ensured that wouldn't happen.

Throughout history, America's citizen-soldiers have proved to be independent souls and often resistant to Army regulations and discipline. In this case, the moral outrage the Volunteers felt trumped the 39th Brigade's gag order. They wanted answers, and they wanted the story of what had happened to those prisoners known.

Several of the Volunteers, including Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson, detailed the events of June 29, 2004, to
Oregonian
reporter Mike Francis. Mike embedded with the Volunteers several times during the deployment and proved to be a stalwart friend of the Oregon soldiers. They trusted him. The photographs the snipers shot found their way into his hands, and he gathered numerous eyewitness accounts through the summer of 2004.

The men believed they were violating an unjust order, but were also well aware that by doing so, they put their own careers at risk. That didn't matter. Hendrickson's mantra—do the right thing—had permeated down to the youngest privates. The hard right is never easy, but they were prepared to suffer the consequences. To them, the country needed to know what had happened.

The story broke with a front-page feature in the
Oregonian.
Media outlets all over the world picked up on it. Instead of focusing on the selfless actions of the Volunteers, the majority of the ink spilled over the incident lambasted the order to withdraw from the compound. Numerous attempts were made to find out exactly who that order came from. While there was suspicion that it came from above division level, nothing was ever confirmed.

After Francis ran his story, an Air Force major general held a press conference in the Pentagon, where he announced that none of the Oregonians would be punished for violating the gag order. The truth was, any JAG officer would have known that it was an illegal order in the first place. Hendrickson and his men had every right to disobey it.

During the research for the story, Mike Francis discovered that the interim Iraqi government felt enough outrage over the Volunteers' arrival in the compound that one of its first official acts was to lodge a protest with the U.S. ambassador. The diplomats were walking on eggshells in hopes of building a solid relationship with the new Iraqi government. Instead, the incident had created sharp tension between the new Iraqi government and the U.S. authorities, which was probably one of the reasons the gag order was issued. Nobody wanted to make a bad situation worse.

On July 4, 2004, the
Boston Globe
ran a story about the incident based on an interview with a Coalition Provisional Authority official named Steve Casteel. Until June 28, Casteel had been in charge of the Ministry of Interior. When the changeover took place, he became a senior American adviser to the MOI and was primarily responsible for building and structuring Iraq's law enforcement capabilities. He helped organize a number of Iraqi police units, including the special commando battalions that were later accused by international organizations of many heinous crimes.