Ryan Smithson Read online

  When we arrive at the prison by a Chinook helicopter, we can tell right away that Abu Ghraib is a different world. It’s the same war with the same fight, but there is something more: an aura of sorts.

  It’s an energy. This place is alive. Maybe some of it has to do with that whole naked photograph thing. Maybe its fame or infamy is what makes it so interesting, like Times Square in New York City. But there is something deeper. Just like the energy of New York City goes much deeper than Times Square.

  For the next month ten soldiers from Headquarters Company will live the Abu Ghraib experience. We will breathe it and we will taste it.

  There are several prison buildings on post, and we stay in one of the old ones. It’s been converted from housing Iraqi prisoners to housing soldiers. A foot and a half of concrete protects us from the daily mortaring.

  The base is small and personal, and I think this has a lot to do with its aura. The soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib are the soldiers fighting the war. This is where the bad guys come to be punished. The genuine bad guys. Even the desk jockeys who live in Abu Ghraib aren’t desk jockeys. They are investigators, interrogators, and intelligence. They run the war; it starts and ends with them.

  In the chow hall we eat among top executives from the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) and the FBI. Romanian soldiers, who are allowed to have full beards, eat at the table across from us. Australian and British soldiers eat next to them. Most of the rest are either American military intelligence or MPs (Military Police). Some are KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root) employees, which consist mostly of local Iraqis and “third country nationals” from places like India and the Philippines.

  That’s one thing people don’t understand about this war. Everyone who hears “contractor” in relation to Iraq thinks it’s some Halliburton or Blackwater rep who’s pulling in $100,000 to $250,000 per year. People don’t realize that the thousands of cooks, laundry service personnel, and shit/shower trailer cleaners who keep the war effort going are making about two hundred dollars a month. And that’s their wage after they’ve reimbursed their companies for flying them to the theater. And guess where 100 percent of their wage goes. Not in their pockets. They send it home to support their families.

  Perhaps the most fascinating group of soldiers at Abu Ghraib is a small team of SF (Special Forces) who sit at the far table near the door. They don’t talk to anyone. They don’t have to. They wear the new uniforms that no one is yet issued: the gray and tan digital camouflage called the ACU (Army Combat Uniform). They don’t wear rank or name tapes. There is only the strip on their left breast pocket, the pocket over their heart, that reads U.S. ARMY. Their pants aren’t tucked in, and while off duty, they wear running sneakers instead of combat boots. Their hair is shaggy, their faces covered in stubble. They might shave once a week. Their eyes are dark and hold secrets that no one will ever know.

  And we, like boys looking up to men, watch the SF guys from across the room. We respect them and fear them. But something in the darkness of their eyes says, “I respect you, too.” Though I may just be imagining it.

  This post has a life all its own. It’s smack in the middle of a lush oasis. The surrounding palm trees give the impression of a jungle. It’s like a different world, of wars past. It feels separated from the rest of Iraq.

  Our engineering project is an earth-moving mission to flatten out the southeast corner of the base, thus making more room for prison space. Our operation is constantly delayed—sometimes for several minutes, sometimes for over an hour. All this delay for mortar attacks and car bombs: insurgents trying to break through and release their friends.

  The regular hours are one of the most satisfying parts of this mission. We work seven A.M. to three P.M. with an hour for lunch at noon. There are two other engineering companies with whom we’re working, and they handle the swing and night shifts. The days are hot and dusty, but the “union hours,” as we call them, are heaven sent.

  Also, our highest authority is two buck sergeants: Ken Payne and Tim Folden. Having a low-ranking command in the army is always a good thing. There are no higher-ups breathing down their necks to breathe down our necks about accountability or productivity. Work hours are leisurely and our activities off duty are less monitored.

  There are eight of us besides Payne and Folden: Todd Wegner, Josh Roman, Justin Greene, Austin Rhodes, Josh Miller, and I, and two maintenance guys, Tomzack and Harding. Tomzack is a buck sergeant, and supervises Harding, a smart-ass specialist like the rest of us. Harding keeps an inflatable sheep in his room back at camp. The sheep has a hole built in underneath its tail. That’s the kind of humor you see in the army.

  The EQ guys, we run the dump trucks, dozers, graders, and the HYEX (Hydraulic Excavator). One of us sits in the HYEX on the northeast side of post. There’s a giant surplus of dirt there. Two at a time, we drive dump trucks to the pick-up spot, the HYEX fills us up, and we drive to the southeast corner to dump. This is where we need to build up the land to make it level. As the dirt comes, we level it out with the dozers. Then, we fine-tune the leveling with the graders.

  We take turns on the equipment, and Payne and Folden supervise. Tomzack and Harding wait for stuff to break down.

  One morning around six thirty, we’re sitting around the prison cell waking up. Josh Roman walks in from outside. He’s an early bird today and went to breakfast chow. Abu Ghraib, by the way, has one of the best army chow halls I’ve ever eaten in. I think it’s because KBR never has to cook for more than one thousand people. Breakfast is especially good, but only Roman went today.

  We have a pot of coffee ready, and Folden pours us all cups. Roman grounds his rifle, Kevlar, and body armor.

  “You guys hear the car bomb that went off this morning?” he asks. “Like six o’clock?”

  No one had. Our prison building is less than a hundred yards from the front gate, apparently where it went off, and no one heard it. By April we’re fully accustomed to explosions. We’d lived through Samarra and a couple explosions on the road, and Camp Anaconda was blown up regularly enough that an explosion meant little more than an inconvenient stay in a concrete bunker. When you’re at war, a lot of things are on your mind. Worrying about every little thing that blows up is a waste of time. Besides, if a mortar or other kind of explosion is close enough to harm you, you’re pretty much toasted no matter what. Most of the time it’s unavoidable. Not to mention we were living in a concrete prison designed to confine terrorists. Not much could be heard through the walls of this place.

  But Josh Roman sticks to his story. A car bomb went off a half an hour ago, and we should probably hold up a minute or two before going out to the job site. We continue to drink coffee and get ready. We put our tops on, lace up our boots, don our body armor, throw on our Kevlars, and grab our rifles. We are tentative. We calculate the odds of a second attack, but we have a mission.

  In our prison-turned-barracks a short hallway where our prison rooms are located runs into the main hallway. The main hallway leads outside. On the ceiling of the main hallway, every twenty or so feet, there are long fluorescent lights. The hallway’s walls are solid concrete except for spots of built-in ventilation that let in a quarter inch of dust from the sandstorms.

  In the winter in Iraq you get peanut butter mud. The rest of the year sandstorms throw around enough dust to bury Manhattan.

  I walk down our little hallway.

  “I’m telling you, man, don’t go out there,” says Roman. “They’re hot today.”

  Where our little hallway meets the main hallway, I turn around and in the coolest voice I say, “Ah, Roman, quit bein’ a pussy.”

  As I turn around—

  Ka-blam!

  —a second car bomb explodes.

  It’s funny how intuitive your body can be to violent explosions. After only a handful of them you can tell how far away, what direction, and even a rough estimate of the size. This one is huge, and it comes from the main gate.

  The percussion bl
ast, even through the thick concrete walls, numbs my brain for a second. I watch as the layer of dust on the floor jumps into the air and settles back down as if it’s connected. A single dirt blanket. Like magic.

  One of the fluorescent lights unhinges and swings down from one side. One of the light tubes pops out, flies through the air, and shatters in a white cloud of dust. The other tube sits in the swinging housing flickering on and off, trying to stay lit.

  I pivot a ballet-worthy 180 degrees and tell Roman, “I think we should wait a little while. They’re hot today.”

  Nowhere else could that timing have been better. And nowhere else can you find humility in the form of a car bomb.

  After a good half hour we walk to the job site and begin working. It’s just another day.

  On another day Todd Wegner runs from a mortar attack.

  Miller, Roman, and I hear the mortars go off as we deal out a game of Texas Hold ’Em. Playing poker is an excellent way to kill time in the army.

  I wave a hand to the room across the hall. “Hey, Sergeant Folden!” I yell.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re not dead,” I say.

  “That’s good,” he says.

  After any attack we have to report to our chain of command that we’re okay. This is called accountability.

  “Are you all in there?” Folden asks me.

  “Except Wags.”

  “All right.”

  And we continue our game. We’re using these awful candies for poker chips. They come from a big bowl in the chow hall, and no one ever eats them. Remember the sugar-free candies you get after a good checkup at the dentist? They’re worse than those.

  We each grabbed a healthy handful on our way back from dinner chow. No one thought to bring poker chips with us to Abu Ghraib, and they were the next best thing. They come in four colors, and we give each color a value. Red is five, orange is ten, yellow is twenty, and green is a hundred.

  Mortars are flying around exploding, and Josh Roman raises my bet.

  “I’m going to beat you like the Red Sox beat the Yankees,” he says.

  “Low blow, man. Low blow.”

  Roman is from Massachusetts. I’m from New York. His room back at Anaconda is kitty-corner to mine. So when I walk out of my room, I have to see his stupid 2004 World Series championship banner he hung on his wall outside. On my wall outside, I wrote, “Yeah, 1 out of 86 ain’t bad.” Then, just to one-up him, I stole a pair of his underwear (clean underwear, thank you) and wrote “Go, Yankees” down the fly in permanent marker.

  I see his raise, and then the son of a bitch throws down a full house. Then he collects the pile of dentist candy.

  Josh Miller, from Nowhere, Ohio, grew up on a dairy farm. He says he’s thankful he folded.

  Then Todd Wegner runs into our room. He’s out of breath and sweating.

  “Holy shit,” he says.

  He’s smiling, thankful to be alive, I suppose.

  “What happened to you?” I ask him.

  “Did you hear those mortars?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I was just running from them,” he says. “Holy shit, man. That was crazy.”

  There’s a wooden rack in the common area where we place our Kevlars, body armor, and weapons. It’s our best friend at three o’clock, when our shift ends.

  Todd is sweating bullets and heaving like he just finished a PT test. He was on his way back from this Internet café, and he ran all the way from the middle of the base to our barracks. He doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of the rack, just stands there smiling, in shock. I ask him if he wants in on some poker, and all he says is “Holy shit.”

  On his face is another story. He wants to say much more. He wants to grab us and shake us into reality. He wants us to understand, to feel his fear, his excitement, the high he is on. We simply can’t.

  “Hey, Folden!” I yell. “Wags is here.”

  “All right!” he yells back. “Good to see you, buddy.”

  “Want us to deal you in?” I ask again.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says, his mind still wrapping around the fact that he has just run from flying bombs.

  “All right. Blind is ten,” I say, and deal.

  “Holy shit,” Wegner says to himself. His hands are shaking as he puts his gear on the rack.

  A few days later I leave the barracks to grab some dinner. I go alone because it’s nice to have solitude sometimes.

  Abu Ghraib is a unique setup for a military post because it was a high security prison. It has a series of small secure bases inside one larger secure base. The inner sections are mostly housing quarters, command quarters, and the main prison buildings. The chow hall and Internet/phone café are large trailers in the middle of all these tiny enclosed bases.

  The enclosed section in which we’re staying has a barracks, a laundry service station, and a gym with free weights, treadmills, and machines. It’s surrounded by a twenty-foot-high concrete wall with guard towers. When the guard towers are manned, it means things have gone horribly awry. At the entrance to our section there’s a spot where a manned gate once stood, but there is no longer a need for one. Our “gate” is now a thirty-foot break in the wall.

  As I near the break in the wall, thinking about the day, it’s close to the end of dinner chow, and no one is around.

  My rifle is slung across my back. For the first weeks in-country it was hard to get used to the awkwardness of body armor. One of the difficulties was taking my weapon on and off. Its sling got caught on my ammo pouches, tourniquet, bayonet, field dressing pack, or my arm. By now, though, I am used to the mechanics of protective clothing and could probably pull my weapon across my armored body while shimmying underneath a dump truck and eating Twinkies. I’ve strategically shifted the components attached to my armor so there is a diagonal stretch of open body armor where my sling fits snug.

  Right outside of our gate is the post’s fuel point: two M978 HEMTT trucks that each hold 2,500 gallons of diesel fuel. Any piece of equipment on post that needs fuel comes here. It’s nice having the fuel point so close to us. That is except for one minor detail: five thousand gallons of diesel fuel is one hell of a target for mortar attacks.

  A bird flies over my head, a very fast bird, nothing more than a dark streak. And it’s flying too low. The sound catches up, and I realize this is no bird. A deep gust follows the dark streak over my head. Then the bird explodes about thirty yards away, near the helipad. The helipad is another big target for the attacks. To destroy its flat surface is to hinder the ability for helicopters to land.

  Smoke and debris fly downward over the helipad. The explosion resonates through my bones, and I see what kind of mortar this is: the most dangerous kind, an airburst.

  Impact mortars explode when they hit something. But the problem with those is that, unless the mortar is right on target, half the shrapnel is embedded into the ground.

  The airburst mortar that flies over my head attempts to solve the problem of wasted shrapnel. Probably this one uses a radio frequency. Inside the mortar round is a little micro-transmitter that sends out a continuous radio signal. As the mortar sends and receives the signal, sort of like a bat flying blind, it knows how far off the ground it is. At a predetermined measurement, usually about ten feet, the round explodes. And what you get is 100 percent of the shrapnel flying into your target.

  The explosion barely breaks my stride. I am going to chow, and that’s where I plan on being in a couple minutes. When bombs go off on a convoy, our SOP is to push through, just keep driving no matter what. This reaction is less about survival than it is about control. Truth is I have no control over a roadside bomb or IED. I have no control over whether or not an airburst mortar round lands on my head. But I do have control over whether or not I run.

  Up until this point mortars are nothing more than a nuisance. If we are outside and hear explosions, we have to stop, find shelter, and wait out the attack. Mortar attacks just annoy me. They make me feel like a
prisoner.

  But today I’m not going to be made a prisoner by this flying bomb. I am going to dinner, for God’s sake. I have never been close enough to a mortar to hear the deep gush of it flying before it explodes. It’s a startling whoosh, a quick displacement of air, and then the boom of the explosion.

  I keep walking, about to get to the gate. I hope I get to see another one explode just so it will make for a better story. But that probably won’t happen. They usually don’t launch a second one. And they almost never launch more than two. These munitions, they’re costly.

  Whoosh, whoosh; BOOM, BOOM. I get my wish.

  Two of them, side by side. I can’t see them, but these explosions are even louder than the explosions from the first one. I can feel the ground shake. They are close, just the other side of the wall, I think. Five thousand gallons of diesel fuel—that’s 37,750 pounds—sit on the other side of the wall.

  It’s time to swallow my pride and run.

  Whoosh; BOOM.

  Another bird, way too fast for a normal bird.

  I am a hundred yards away from my barracks, and I turn a quick circle looking for a closer refuge.

  “You know where you are?” a soldier yells to me over the last explosion. He’s twenty yards away and sees the confusion on my face. All his weight is on one foot, ready to take off toward his barracks. He wants to make sure I am okay before he runs, because that’s what soldiers do. That’s how we stay alive.

  I shake my head and yell, “No!”

  “Follow me,” he says.

  Whoosh; BOOM.

  And I don’t argue.

  He runs around the side of the nearest building to what appears to be a sort of alleyway. He runs past a closed door and continues around the far side of the building.

  What’s wrong with that door? I wonder.

  Whoosh; BOOM.

  This mortar lands behind me aways. The ground shakes. Think being chased by a T. Rex.

  Where will the next one land? I wonder.

  My guide runs along a chain-link fence that stretches between two barracks buildings: converted prisons. He runs toward the fence’s open gate. Here, the dirt runs into gravel, and his feet slip beneath him.