IT WAS SCARY AS HELL if you thought about it, so I decided not to think about it. An aviator I knew half a lifetime before had told me that there is a comfort zone for helicopter pilots of at least a thousand feet over the power lines and treetops. At that altitude, the pilot had time to work out problems that might pop up before slamming into the ground. We were in a Blackhawk about a hundred and fifty feet off the deck going what I figured was just as fast as the aircraft would go. In the dark. It was a great ride, and I decided to enjoy it as if I were at a theme park.
The handful of passengers were leaving Camp Victory in Baghdad for what the press officers would have had to call an undisclosed location. It was still pretty early in the Iraq War, less than a year after the initial invasion. We were part of the advance party for a larger mission coming in to debrief members of a group designated as a Foreign Terrorist organization. We had flown in piecemeal on commercial airlines from Washington through various hubs in Europe to Kuwait. The Kuwaitis, still ever so thankful to the U.S. for kicking Saddam out of their country in 1991, confiscated a bottle of single malt scotch from me at the airport. Bastards. We hung around Kuwait—which rivals Djibouti for the worst place on earth—for a couple days, drawing equipment and sitting through briefings before we pushed for Baghdad in a C-130.
One of our team members was enough of a senior official that he was designated a VIP, and we had a couple of colonels assigned directly from Combined Joint Task Force-7 headquarters as minders, so we got priority over a few other flights that were previously scheduled. Our Blackhawk and gunship escort took off from Camp Victory at about midnight.
Somewhere out over the desert, probably not far outside of Baghdad proper, the gunners test-fired their weapons. I was wearing a set of headphones; I could hear what the crew were saying over the ICS. So I knew what was coming. Still, only a few hours in-country and on our first night flight in Iraq, I jumped a bit when the two M240s on our aircraft and the gunship’s 30mm chain gun fired. The guns served as a reminder that this really wasn’t a theme park and, perhaps more importantly, that because I was in Iraq as a Foreign Service officer rather than a soldier, I was unarmed.
We arrived around 2:00 am, I think. After a very short meeting with senior staff of the camp, mostly in deference to our boss, we were trundled off to a tent and told when to show up for chow in the morning.
At daybreak, we took a walk around. The base was pretty spartan. A few cinderblock buildings made up the headquarters. Some huge fuel and water bladders lay scattered about, looking like giant waterbeds sitting out in the sun. The Army Reserve troops guarding the detainees slept in tents.
As the advance party, our small team’s task was to determine if we could actually do what we had been sent to do. After a half-day of briefings and tours, we huddled and gave the thumbs up to the rest of the team to join us.
Within a day or two the others arrived, and we set out to organize ourselves for the mission. The task at hand was relatively simple: interview over three-thousand people about their past, what their intentions were towards the U.S., and what they wanted to do in the future. No prob.
The base was so small, not even the Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) contractors would come and work there, so we had Army cooks making hot rations twice a day and MREs, or another prepackaged meal, referred to as a “Jimmy Dean” for lunch.
We lived in tents, officially called Tent, General Purpose, Medium, and known as GP-Medium. They were green canvas duck, 32 feet long and 16 feet wide, 12 feet tall in the center and just under six feet tall at the walls, held up by wooden poles and tied down with ropes and wooden stakes. If you were lucky on this base, your tent had a liner. We weren’t lucky. So when it was hot, there was only one layer of insulation. When it was cold there was only one layer of insulation.
There were no addresses or street signs to orient on, so people took to decorating the wooden doors of their tents with Magic Marker art and giving the tent a name that would serve as an address. Everyone in our tent had served in Afghanistan previously, so we became the Northern Alliance. The women across the path called theirs the Tent of the Rising Sun. Just down the block was the Sand Trap.
Because we would be in proximity to a large group of people whom the USG considered terrorists, we decided to use pseudonyms. I chose Andy. To this day, I still don’t remember the real names for most of the people on that team.
The work, while weird, wasn’t hard. Each morning we would have a short meeting and then most of the team would load up on buses wearing Kevlar helmets and fragmentation vests—not the current issue vest with the heavy SAPI (Small Arms Protective Insert) plates designed to stop a 7.62 round, but the old Kevlar vests that wouldn’t stop a bee-sting—for the ride over to the area where we worked. I didn’t share in this joy for the first few weeks. Our boss had me working as a liaison between all the different USG agencies on the base. Mostly just hanging around the headquarters in case something came up.
Usually, this allowed me the chance to attend briefings rife with Powerpoint slides, and drink lots of coffee with representatives of any organization in the U.S. government that had even a potential interest in the information our team was gathering. Sometimes in the afternoons I would grab a humvee and one of the other liaison officers and go exploring. There were weapons and ammunitions caches, both large and small, all around the area. If you were interested, you could pick up anything from a Kalashnikov or an RPG to a main battle tank or a howitzer.
The official motto of the staff officer is, Livin’ The Dream. Even though the jobs are not what anyone joined the military (or the Foreign Service) to do, lots of senior officers get stuck in these positions and most suffer the indignities of preparing briefings, monitoring ongoing situations that other officers are leading, and generally making things happen behind the lines, with quiet resignation and with as much humor as possible. But after a while, I grew bored sitting on the staff, so I asked to join the rest of the team in the daily grind.
We interviewed all day. After work we would grab showers as we could, and then wait for meals. Some of the guys had brought a golf club or two, and had begun to hit balls off the earthen berms around the camp. For some reason this highly annoyed the military team, who instructed our guys to stop. So they started playing Frisbee golf through the camp. I’m sure this annoyed the military guys just as much, but there was little to be done about it. Personally, I read and wrote mostly. There was a small tent set aside as a “library” where boxes of books were unceremoniously dumped. I probably went through a dozen books a month.
I wrote a couple of short stories. I modeled characters in the stories on members of my team, taking both physical and emotional traits from the people walking around the camp and applying them to the people walking around in my stories. One story was about an Agency officer who made a professional decision that got his NGO-worker girlfriend killed. At story’s end he put a bullet in his brain. Cheery stuff.
One of our team had brought a guitar with him, which I would borrow sometimes in the evenings. Several of us would sit around in the cool evening air, drinking whisky and passing the guitar around. I sent my mom a picture of myself in that setting. I figured it would calm her nerves since the news coming out of Iraq was pretty bad. I suspect every other American in Iraq had a harder, more dangerous, deadlier tour than I did.
In hindsight, heading off to Iraq so soon after returning from Afghanistan—with all of my problems there—might not have been the smartest idea. But, it turned out that the easy nature of most of the Iraq deployment served as a good ramp down from Afghanistan. If I had done something similar, taking a lower adrenaline job like I had in Iraq as an interim assignment rather than dropping immediately into a desk job in the European bureau, I might have actually been able to tolerate the tedious work in Washington. But probably not.
A few weeks into our stay, Moqtada al Sadr starting acting up. His Madhi Army were a belligerent group of insurgents who mostly lived in and around Baghdad, but they were also active on the road between our camp and the biggest U.S. base in the area, Balad Air Base. In my role as the liaison to every possible government agency, I attended a staff briefing for the soldiers on Al Sadr and his supporters.
The Army Reserve troops that manned our base were technically prison guards, so their assignment to guard the terrorists we were debriefing seemed logical. But the battalion commander was out of her depth. At the end of this briefing, she was taking questions.
As is always the case, the sergeants in the room asked the most pertinent questions: “What are our rules of engagement? How do we identify these guys? Do we shoot on sight?”
There was an ugly pause while the battalion commander looked stricken. She stammered some nonsense about following SOPs—Standard Operating Procedures. Her operations officer stood up to bail her out. But he was only slightly more effective. The staff clearly hadn’t thought this through, and was too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know. On the way out of the briefing, the senior sergeants formed a circle and began to develop a set of operational procedures on the fly. These are the kinds of staff failures that get people killed. Even in combat arms units this stuff happens, but happens less. This combat support unit wasn’t prepared for this type of operation, so I decided that, unless instructed to leave the base, I would stay inside the bubble.
Still, I didn’t feel safe. I sort of longed for a weapon. So on one of my drives around the camps, I stopped at a cache of small arms I knew about—one filled with Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and lots of ammunition. I found a Kalashnikov that was in reasonable condition and a couple of magazines’ worth of ammunition to call my own. I borrowed a cleaning kit from one of the NCOs on the staff and got the weapon operational, and stashed it in my locker, just in case.
Not long after, we had a very non-specific threat against the base—we were to be rocketed sometime during a 24-hour period. It turned out that the camp was under the control of a brigade of the 1st Infantry Division and the brigade commander had been a cavalry troop commander I’d served under when I was a lieutenant in Germany. The guy was a very competent officer, despite being a bit of a martinet and a prig. His staff sent down the force protection posture for the post during this period, instructing us to wear body armor and Kevlar helmets at all times when we weren’t inside hardened buildings.
The battalion staff interpreted this to mean that anyone inside the cinderblock buildings could operate as normal, but anyone in the tents had to wear their battle rattle 24 hours a day. The folly of this was manifest since none of the cinderblock buildings could in any way have been considered hardened, but the battalion staff simply didn’t want to wear their combat gear so they interpreted the order in their favor. Further, in order to fully comply with the order, everyone would have had to wear helmets and body armor in the showers.
After the 24-hour period had passed, every base in the area stood down except ours. When I asked over at the battalion staff why we hadn’t, the officer I asked told me, “Because brigade says so.” In fact, it was exactly the opposite: Brigade headquarters had apparently forgotten to send the “stand down” message to this isolated little outpost. This battalion hadn’t adapted to the new reality of being in a real war. They were still operating in the peacetime past, afraid of questioning or ignoring stupid instructions, unable to understand what was important in combat. The staff was probably as dangerous to us as were the terrorists their units were guarding.
Late in our stay I received an email from a friend at my reserve unit back in DC. The military, and really all of America, was still reeling in the wake of the Abu Ghraib debacle. The guys involved in the picture taking that broke the scandal were reserve MPs from West Virginia. But the pictures only exposed a deeper problem in the area of detainee operations, and that problem included elements of the intelligence community. So anyone with a human intelligence background was waiting for the phone to ring because so many military officers in a small community were under investigation or being relieved. My buddy emailed to say that my name had moved up on the list of reservists to be mobilized, and that I was likely heading to Iraq. The irony of learning I was headed to Iraq while I was sitting in Iraq was delicious, but quickly soured.
After a few rounds of give and take over the fact that I already WAS in Iraq—albeit for the Department of State—I learned I had a couple of options. One was to volunteer for mobilization, at which point they would offer me some choices. The other options were considerably less palatable, so I volunteered. The choices they offered me were: (1) go to Mauritania and open the embassy’s Defense Attaché office. (2) go to Eastern Congo and run around out there in the midst of the ongoing war. (3) go to Sudan. I chose Sudan.
I went back to my desk job at State in Washington and broke the news to my boss, but left out the part about volunteering. It took a few weeks to get orders and to get on my way, but less than four months after leaving Iraq, I was headed for Sudan.