THE SUMMER HEAT AND THE SUCCESSFUL council alliance—building program faded slowly into October. Life became fairly routine. The dramatic showdowns during the summer had created a pretty wide circle of autonomy in which I could work. The trust level between my commander and me was high, while the trust level between the Iraqis and me was arguably higher. I had spent so much time in the sector now that I had started to grow more comfortable with the Iraqi culture and religion than I was with my own.
Countless times, I had sat down with the male members of an Iraqi family in their home and enjoyed a dinner from a communal pile of rice and lamb. I had become accustomed to the shows of deference and even practiced them myself. Reaching up to my forearm into a pile of rice, I would grasp the most succulent piece of meat I could find and hand it over to the elder sitting at our table. There was an order and a simplicity here that I understood.
For the most part, the women and the children sat apart, in a separate room. Quite often in my visits to more rural homes or more religious families, I would not see the women at all, just a door held open and a tray of food emerging toward us, pushed through in front of a heavily veiled head that was gone before the door even began to close. This culture became my home and my center line—so much so, that when I drove through the Christian neighborhood and saw women with their heads uncovered, it struck me as vain and out of place. The Western style of these neighborhoods appeared to violate the integrity of the area. I found myself strangely hostile toward the one neighborhood that should have reminded me of home.
In addition, I had taken to wearing the traditional black-and-white checkered scarf, or kiffeyeh, as part of my uniform. It had been a gift from a shopkeeper along the way, and in these cooler months, it fit nicely under my body armor and felt quite warm. Not to mention the visual connection it gave me to the rest of the population. I had assimilated myself so much that people hardly noticed anymore that when I made my nightly trip out to the row of plastic portable toilets, I carried a bottle of water instead of toilet paper. One of the more curious dimensions of personal hygiene here—and personal hygiene was supremely important—was the cultural decision to eschew the use of toilet paper for running water, in the Middle Eastern fashion. I had been skeptical of the efficacy of this approach until I tried it. This process was fantastically refreshing, and I felt the way a baby must feel when he is cleaned with a wet nappy. I was all smiles.
One evening, bottle of water in hand, I made my walk toward the row of blue toilets. The air was getting cooler, and the nights were getting longer. We were approaching Ramadan, the holiest season in the Muslim year. The District Council had held several elections in the last few months, and, as a matter of course, each time it elected a member from my council as the president. No doubt, the relative affluence of my council members helped them solidify the council politics in their favor. Increasingly, I had even started to receive council members from other areas, who were anxious to find out how I could help them.
I settled in to the portable toilet, pulled out my Arabic field guide, and studied it against the faint blue light created as the security lights shined through the blue plastic of the toilet. The alphabet remained inscrutable when written, but the phonetic phrases were starting to make sense. I had not progressed as quickly in this language as I had hoped, while the speed with which the Iraqis were learning English astounded me. Grown men, who spoke little or no English eight months ago, could now carry on a conversation with relative ease, provided it was confined to the subjects that we most often talked about: money, jobs, and weapons. As I sat crouched over the book, with my body armor still snugly around me, I focused intently on the curving letters and tried to block out the stench of the warm urine puddles and the cleaning chemicals that mixed in pools at my feet.
The explosions jolted me from my studies. One after another explosion screamed in through the thin plastic walls. It was a mortar attack and a big one. We had not had any mortar rounds land in the FOB in a while, and even then, it was one or two smaller ones, off target and hardly noticeable. These, however, were coming in fast and in abundant quantity—more than a dozen, if I was counting correctly. But I really was not counting. I was battling with a far more basic calculation. The rounds were so close that I could hear the white-hot shrapnel whizzing past me. There was no way to know whether one of those pieces would slice through the wall and through me like a warm knife through butter. At least I had my body armor on, but my pants were around my ankles.
Amid the whirring hisses and thumping mortars, I contemplated the age-old question of all mammals in a threatening situation. Do I stay or run? The mortars had continued for longer than normal this time, meaning that the insurgents were firing them from a place where they felt safe and they were refining their aim. It was definitely getting uncomfortable to remain exposed here. God forbid that this would be how my military career ended, pants down in a chemical toilet. It would be very Elvis but still somehow not too appealing. Making a run for it would entail some serious gyrations and the wholesale abandonment of personal hygiene, Iraqi or American style. It was a tough call. Then came the silence. It was over. I didn’t linger to enjoy the moment, though. I was sanitized and back inside before anything else could surprise me.
The duration of the mortar attack confirmed some rumors that had been circling for a week or so in the markets. A growing number of insurgent groups from outside our area were seeking a presence in our neighborhood, and they were actively recruiting. It was evident that the Sunni factions felt a certain solidarity with the city of Fallujah in western Iraq, where a large army offensive was fighting a determined resistance. Daily images of air attacks and civilian casualties fueled a public animosity. Convoys of donated medicine and food were sent to Fallujah from all over Iraq, always interspersed with weapons and fighters. Anguished compatriots scrawled cries of angst and support on the walls of Sunni neighborhoods. “La la Allawi, Nam Nam Zarqawi,” (No no Allawi, Yes yes Zarqawi), and “Fallujah Fight!” proliferated overnight.
It was the homage to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that worried me. Back in May 2004, a video titled Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi Slaughters an American appeared on an alleged al Qaeda website in and around the markets and the teahouses of Baghdad. It showed a group of five men, their faces covered with kiffeyehs, beheading American civilian Nicholas Berg, who had been abducted and taken hostage weeks earlier. As recently as last month, Zarqawi was also believed to have personally beheaded another American civilian, Olin Eugene Armstrong. As the U.S. Army moved closer to Fallujah, Zarqawi had grown more defiant and declared “all-out war” on the Shi’a and dispatched numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shi’a militias.
Accordingly, groups of Fallujah fighters who had escaped the coalition encirclement set up in anticipation of a second offensive had relocated to Shi’a Al Dora. These savage fundamentalists made our neighborhood, which was now working well with the U.S. Army, a primary target. Their posters of dying American soldiers and burning World Trade Center towers started to appear in the market, as did numerous low-quality DVDs of successful attacks on coalition soldiers. Fallujah fighters had a well-deserved reputation for violence, and their public relations campaign was in full swing.
We were not the only people taking note of the new arrivals. The Shi’a council members had become increasingly hard to find, and patrols reported seeing fewer and fewer of the neighborhood watch units stationed at their normal posts. This, coupled with the increased mortar attacks, meant that we all needed to spend more time in the streets to offset the malevolent influence of the insurgent wave building beneath the surface and to reinforce our commitment to protecting innocent people.
Accordingly, I decided to roll out immediately to check on the devolving situation in the street. Staying here and getting attacked by mortars while I was trying to use the bathroom had been uncomfortable enough. There was no reason to wait here for another round of explosions. Actually, there was little time between explosions any longer. Almost continuously and from across the city, explosions rippled and popped like sparklers on the horizons, with light and sparks dancing innocuously over the carnage and confusion below. I decided to check first on the neighborhood watch units stationed on the overpass. The abandoned overpass was close to the Sunni neighborhood where the most pro-Fallujah people lived. Of all places, this would be the first one affected by the shift in demographics.
As we approached the overpass, I could not see a single person where there were normally dozens. We pulled off the concrete and drove up the unfinished dirt ramp onto the overpass. Garbage from the MREs (“meals ready to eat”), batteries, and assorted junk food tumbled lazily through the dusk air and swirled against half-filled burlap sacks. The heaps of unbagged trash stood witness to the absolute lack of discipline in these Iraqis. Fires smoldered in the many places where garbage had been gathered and lit for warmth on the previous night. I had not been up here in a few days, and I was shocked at the disrepair. My last instructions had been for the shifts of guards to fill the sandbags and begin fortifying this bridge in anticipation of increased attacks. You would have thought that the opportunity to improve one’s chance of survival would have motivated the guards to fill the bags and barricade themselves. Yet the dozen guards who had crammed themselves into the makeshift bunker that one of the American patrols had built earlier in the week were even less ready for combat than the half-filled bags were.
We deployed the Humvees to the far end of the bridge, and I hopped out to find twelve grown men crammed into a space no larger than a child’s playhouse. They were terrified, praying, and apologizing, all in Arabic. It was obvious that they had spent their time eating all of the food and then retreated into the shelter to wait out the night. It would have been comical, were it not so pathetic. They were like sheep.
Disgusted, I radioed for one of the nearby patrols to stop by with an interpreter, so that we could figure out what was going on. Because we were all out in sector this evening, it was only minutes before three more Humvees showed up. While the interpreters jumped out, the soldiers looked around in disbelief at the amount of trash on the bridge. Almost instinctively, they began stacking the sandbags, yelling and directing the Iraqis to get the sandbags filled and the trash picked up. It was not a minute too soon. As the interpreter was condensing their jumbled nonsensical pleading into coherent English sentences, I began to understand that they had been visited by several Wahabbi extremists who promised to kill them and their families if they were still on the bridge that night. They were too scared to leave during the daylight, so they were waiting until dusk to run home. They had already stacked all of their uniforms in a pile in the corner.
This was unbelievable. During the last few months, American patrols had become accustomed to seeing guys with AK-47s on this bridge and had grown used to the fact that we were on the same side. If that had changed and an insurgent group was positioned on the bridge, they would have been able to surprise the first American patrol, at least. Partly furious and partly exasperated, I did not even hear the first bullets hitting the chain-link fence that stretched up from both sides of the bridge. The fence had been installed by the original contractors to prevent people from committing suicide, but in postinvasion Iraq it was also useful for deflecting rocket-propelled grenades. The bullets flicked through the fence and skipped over the pavement.
The guards kept saying that the gunfire was coming from the minaret of a Sunni mosque, but that seemed almost impossible. The mosque was at least six hundred meters away, which was almost sniper distance. A trained sniper seemed too sophisticated for the insurgency. More familiar bursts of fire came from the opposite side of the bridge, from a white late-model car parked in an alley between two houses. Here you could clearly see several men in black masks firing AK-47s, with the puffs of smoke leaving the barrels and the sounds of firing chasing seconds later. They were well beyond their effective range but not beyond that of our heavy machine gun.
“Light ’em up,” I said to the gunner of the .50 caliber machine gun.
This antivehicle machine gun, which used a bullet that was larger than a human finger, had served valiantly since World War II. It now barked its authority across the open field. Round after round tore into the white car and sent the masked men running in different directions. Under normal circumstances, I would have been more reluctant to fire such a weapon into a populated area like this. The bullets would likely pass through several houses before coming to rest and would cause significant collateral damage. Yet something about the absolute unpreparedness of the guard force, their impending desertion, and the growing feeling that we were under attack from a mysterious force allowed me to indulge in this heavy-handedness to make a statement.
I watched three masked men disappear behind several houses. Beside me, a guard spun suddenly and collapsed. Blood spread quickly from his shoulder, as he lay crumpled in a pile. Soldiers and guards alike flattened themselves against the pavement on top of half-eaten packets of peanut butter and crackers and behind the half-filled sandbags.
The machine gunners crouched so low in their hatches that they barely stuck out. Their heads looked like turtle shells. The rest of us were gripped by the fear that we were now one bullet away. The injured guard was leaning against a Humvee now, shaken but stable. The bullet had passed through his shoulder cleanly, and our medic felt that he would be fine. Standing behind the door of my Humvee, I scanned the horizon for any logical sniper position. The cityscape was a medley of rooflines, drying laundry, and antennae. It would be impossible to find a sniper in this jumble. It would also be difficult to be a sniper on this level. The obstructions, the blowing clothes, and the wires would make such a tough shot almost impossible. The only place it made sense was—and I hated to admit this—from the minaret. Maybe these guards were scared for a reason. Maybe they actually knew what they were talking about, and maybe I should have given them the benefit of the doubt, but they were gone now. They had collected their wounded comrade and starting walking off the southern end of the bridge into a Shi’a neighborhood and toward home. The sun had set, and they were invisible long before they reached the houses. The great defection was starting, and the night was still young.
After putting out a warning to all of the units that the bridge was no longer occupied by a security force, we spent a few minutes driving the trucks around the fortifications and discussing what to do about the shelters now standing empty. An insurgent hiding in one would present a serious problem for us, but we had no means to secure them. Manpower was already stretched thin, because we were required to keep more and more trucks in sector to monitor the bubbling animosity. We resolved to destroy the shelters later, but that would require time and some heavy earth-moving equipment. We had to get back on the road. The sniper had gone quiet when the sun went down, but there was no need to stay up here any longer than necessary. We had ceded a piece of key terrain, and it did not feel good. All of the military convoys passing through our sector were now exposed to a higher risk. The bridge, which once felt like a friendly checkpoint, now looked ominously sparse.
As we sped away, I wondered whether the other guard units had received similar threats, including the ones deep in the heart of the Shi’a neighborhoods. I did not have to wait long to learn the answer. As the patrols rounded through the respective neighborhoods, the radio reports confirmed no guard sightings at most locations. Yet that was only part of the story. Bodies were starting to crop up in streets and alleyways. Every half hour, patrols reported being flagged down to find groups of men with their hands bound, decapitated, or with their throats slit. Although the details were slowly emerging, at first there seemed to be no commonality among the victims—they were teachers, butchers, carpenters—but then we realized that they were all Shi’a.
The Shi’a neighborhoods were under attack, as the Wahabbi made good on their promise to bring death—starting tonight. The streets were eerily empty as we turned toward Abu Discher. About a quarter of the way up the road, a Chevrolet Suburban was parked on the side with its brake lights still on. We approached it quickly because vehicles of this type were not common.
In fact, I knew of precisely only one in our sector, and it was owned by Sheik Mahmoud, a contractor and a council member who had a pronounced love of all things American, including this huge SUV. From the slumped position at the wheel, he appeared to have passed out from too much arak, the bootleg Iraqi liquor prevalent on the streets these days. I shook him through the open window, but he was unresponsive. Growing increasingly nervous, due to the earlier attack and the rumors of death flying rampant tonight, I prodded him again, firmly. That is when I noticed the blood—crystallized crimson pools that stretched down the far side of his starched white dishdasha. Pulling his headdress back, I could see that his face had turned purple with pooled blood from being slumped over. His eyes were glassy and unmoving. The small hole behind his ear marked the point where death had entered in the form of a small-caliber bullet. His life had blown out the opposite side, staining his robes and gluing him to the seat of his beloved American car.
There was nothing else to do, save radio this in and keep moving. The next stop was the cluster of guards near Said Mallek’s house. Their proximity to the Shi’a mosques and Said Mallek’s house should have provided them with ample protection, but because the road they guarded led directly into Sunni territory, they sat at a dangerous intersection. We rounded the corner toward their post and scanned for any guards. There was no one. Then from the bushes I noticed the beam of a flashlight, and slowly the guards emerged, six in all, looking sharp and alert. For all of the terror ringing around the sector, here at least was a spot of normalcy. We waved to them and continued our journey, wrapping back around toward the FOB. It was just after midnight. The night seemed to be quieting down after the flurry of madness at sunset.
We darted across the highway and into the shadow of the FOB wall, when all of a sudden heavy machine-gun fire tore through the night. It was close, and there was a lot of it. We whipped the Humvees around and raced back the way we came. Bounding over the railroad tracks, we saw people gathering in the street where the guards had been near Said Mallek’s house. We passed through them and got out. Another patrol from the area raced in from the opposite direction. Riddled with bullets, the guards’ bodies were still warm. Family members pressed their crying faces into the bodies of their loved ones, while my soldiers began searching around the perimeter. The interpreter from the other patrol learned that three cars had passed by and opened fire in a very textbook ambush. From the spent shell casings, we confirmed that they had used at least one large-caliber machine gun. This was bad news for several reasons. First, this attack had happened on the doorstep of Said Mallek and the FOB, which meant that the enemy was audacious. Second, this heavy machine gun, in conjunction with the suspected sniper from earlier that evening, basically confirmed that we were dealing with a new enemy who was well equipped and well trained.
I needed to find a solution to this problem, but to really do that, I needed my own interpreter. I had not seen Ali all day, and Ammar was not answering his phone. I tried calling it again, but Ali answered. It was two in the morning, but he did not sound sleepy; he sounded almost worried. “Where are you guys?” I asked.
“We are in the hospital. Ammar has been shot, and you have to come take him to the Green Zone.”
Ali went on to say that Ammar had been left for dead near his home in one of the Sunni neighborhoods. Ammar had lived dangerously close to the Sunni mosque whose minaret may have been the sniper’s nest. He was afraid that the gunmen who attacked Ammar would follow him to the hospital to finish the job, and he pleaded with us to come get them both.
This was a tricky position. The hospital in the Green Zone did treat both Americans and Iraqis, but usually only Iraqis who either worked for the U.S. government or were wounded by U.S. forces, including suspected insurgents, in some cases. Since his firing, Ammar had been confined to an unofficial role beyond the FOB, and he had been wounded by an Iraqi.
After I told my commander what was going on, he did not even hesitate. “Go get him.”
One reason that people were loyal was that they expected to be taken care of if they were hurt. This was truer than ever in an Iraqi system that prized paternalism. The ongoing attack was as much against our legitimacy and to undermine our ability to provide security to those who helped us as it was a sectarian uprising.
The hospital was in northern Baghdad, well beyond our sector and buried in a maze of streets we did not know. On a chaotic night like this, it would be a tense trip. The highways were empty, except for a few American patrols, as we raced north toward the high-rise canyons that led toward the hospital. As we tore through their desolate streets, I looked up nervously. There were so many windows, so many floors, how would we even begin to defend ourselves here. I prayed that we would not have to fight and urged the convoy on faster, bargaining that reckless driving was preferable to becoming an easy target.
A half-hour later, we pulled into the driveway of a mammoth building with groups of people huddled outside of every entrance. The vast socialist structure of the hospital stood cold and unfeeling above the hundreds of wailing people who were looking through the piles of bodies being dropped off at the overflowing morgue. The cool weather kept the smell down, but the salty smell of blood still wafted intermittently through the air. Leaving the trucks parked with gunners at their stations, six of us walked toward the front door. We passed like ghosts through the grieving crowds. We sensed no animosity toward us; these people now just longed to see their loved ones in whatever condition they might be. Respectfully, we moved quickly beyond them and into the great marble hall.
The entryway differed from every other hospital I had ever visited. There was no reception desk, no bustling nurses. This was more of a warehouse than a hospital. It was a place where dying people were stockpiled until they passed away and were picked up by the crowds outside. There was no hope here, except in one place, and that was on the grizzled face of Ali, who met us at the steps and guided us up three flights of enormous stairs.
We did not say much. The threat of the returning gunmen seemed real enough to keep all of us focused on getting Ammar out as quickly as possible. On the fourth floor, we exited the stairwell to find some semblance of a hospital. Here were doctors and nurses, all of whom immediately objected to our presence. We did not even slow down to hear their objections, which no doubt entailed a berating on how many people our occupation had pushed into this understaffed building.
Ammar looked terrible. He was covered in gauze and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Scabs had formed all over his arms and legs. Ali explained to us that the hospital lacked the anticoagulant that would allow an intravenous tube to remain inserted for long periods, so every couple of hours the needle had to be moved to a fresh location and reinserted. By the looks of his arms, this had already happened dozens of times. It looked as if the bullets had primarily hit him in the shoulder and his arms because the gauze in those areas was soaked through with blood. He was weak and barely conscious, but we had no choice. We had to get him to the Green Zone. If he could survive that trip, he would live. If he did not make the trip, he would at least die faster than he would here, where the rudimentary medical care would prolong his pain for a few days before infection took him under.
After we removed his tubes, two soldiers carried him toward the door. A doctor appeared to protest, only to have Ali wave his pistol in his face. The whole situation was absurd. We were kidnapping a guy from a hospital, so that he would not be killed by his assailants or by the germ-ridden hospital itself. We had our guns out, in a hospital, violating the dignity of the hallways of healing with our implements of pain and despair. This was the night from hell.
The soldiers liked Ammar, despite his frequent histrionics, and they treated him as a fellow combatant. They carried him down the stairs with as much determination as if he had been one of our own. We carefully placed him in the Humvee and drove into the rising sun and toward the Green Zone. We were exhausted by the time we reached the hospital there. By our passing him off as an interpreter who had been badly wounded while serving with us, he was admitted without question and taken immediately to the urgent-care ward.
The entire aura of the sector was definitely different now. What had started as a simple drive around the sector had turned into a twelve-hour patrol of attacks, cataloguing dead bodies, and transporting wounded, but we needed to make one more stop on the way back to the FOB. While we had Ali to interpret, we had to summon the council members for an emergency meeting.
The soldiers ate breakfast in the hospital and caught up on some well-deserved sleep. Ali and I hit the phones, trying to get everyone together at the DAC in the next hour. The task proved difficult. The carnage had shaken the faith that the council members had been investing in our system. The Wahabbi fighters and Sunni extremists had immediately cowed the populace with their macabre displays of violence. Even my well-armed Shi’a allies were scared.
These attacks also affected me on a personal level. They represented the loss of an investment. I had allied myself with these Shi’a figures, made them influential, and attached my name to them. In Iraqi lore, these council members, neighborhood watch units, and interpreters all existed as proof of my ability to provide security and prosperity. Yet in one night, a council member was dead, the guard force was routed, and one of my interpreters was in the hospital. This violence against people under my protection sent a very clear message: Abu Floos cannot protect you.
It was true. I saw diminishing support for my leadership, as phone call after phone call went unanswered. In the end, the only people who agreed to meet were, predictably, the council members who were also members of the Mahdi Army. Said Mallek, Heydar, and a few other lesser ones would be in a mosque in Abu Discher in a half hour. They would not leave the neighborhood, and they would not be seen at the DAC. I already knew what they were going to demand.
“We need cars.” The consensus of the assembled militia leadership was hardly surprising. During the initial talks about the neighborhood watch program, the great debate had been about stationary versus roving guard units. They had argued then, and now, that stationary guards were just targets. My concern had been that authorizing guys who had previously fought the U.S. Army to stand around with weapons was risky enough, let alone putting them in cars and making them mobile hit teams. Nonetheless, they were obviously the last of our allies, and we had to reinforce them where we could.
I agreed to write authorization letters for six cars, each to carry no more than three people and no pistols, only AK-47s. During traffic stops, rifles were easier than pistols for the troops to spot and therefore could be monitored. The cars would be confined to the Shi’a neighborhoods and could not go marauding into Sunni territory on revenge killings. Given the number of dead Shi’a in the street last night, I knew that vendettas were a definite possibility, although nothing about the group’s demeanor gave this away. Two imams, three council members, one U.S. Army captain, and an interpreter had just conceded that we were all on the run now. There would be no more holding of ground and imposing our will on the surrounding areas. We had been stripped down as being less efficient, less trained, and less lethal than our adversary. These council members thought that mobility was the answer, and I hoped they were right. The truth is that nothing would have made me happier than some devastating attacks on the homes harboring these newly arrived fighters who had brought so much bloodshed to our streets.
I wrote the letters and handed them over. Our business was done. Ali stayed because he could not go back to the FOB, and he was safe here. The rest of us made our way back to the FOB to sleep for a few hours and digest these new arrangements. We should have known that it would not abate just so we could better process it. No sooner had we dropped our body armor off in the foyer of our headquarters than my commander told me to send the Misfits to pick up a BBC television crew from the Baghdad Airport. They were to bring the crew back here to embed with one of our units. I was floored. My guys were hardly rested. Making the hour-and-a-half trip to the airport and back that evening hardly seemed fair.
Unfortunately, there was no one else left, so the job of retrieving the reporters that evening fell to my soldiers. They would have the rest of the day to recover before going back out, and most of them enjoyed the large shopping complex in the airport base. That would give them something to look forward to. I would spend the next couple of hours explaining my theories on the demise of Iraqi social order in a special targeting meeting attended by all of the company commanders and my battalion commander.
“It’s Ramadan.” The sentence floated out like a self-defining revelation.
It was Ramadan; that was true. The holiest month of the Islamic year had started only a few days ago. Its imminent arrival had been preceded by a deluge of briefings on the observances of its customs, as well as an array of histograms comparing the violence that had surrounded Ramadan in previous conflicts. Although there were many competing arguments about violence during Ramadan, the most cynical view seemed the most appropriate. Ramadan, like all holy months, is a time of commitment and renewal. It is analogous to the month of Lent in the Catholic calendar, when fasting brings you more in line with your faith and strengthens the ties to your religion. Ramadan is a month of martyrdom and commitment to Islamic ideology and, more important, a time of victory for Muslim armies. The nights have specific meanings and are afforded names that correspond with their attributes. Depending on your particular interpretation, these names and promises were either literal or metaphorical.
We were only days away from the “Laylat ul-Qadr,” or “The Night of Power,” a time when those who are martyred have a greater assurance of a place in paradise. The consensus was that the Sunni insurgency was recruiting people for some massive attack. On the conference table lay the most concrete evidence we had to date of a new insurgency: a plastic AK-47, a plastic replica of the burning World Trade Center, and a cartoonish picture of a successful ambush against American soldiers. Black trash bags full of these items leaned against the wall, spilling such propaganda for kids like toys from an evil Santa Claus. One of the patrols had picked up these recruiting tools from a market during a routine search. According to locals, the toys had been the central attraction during the Sunni insurgents’ previous night’s meeting and recruitment drive. Similar to our using soccer balls and T-shirts, the insurgents used toys to target children to join their cause. The soldiers who found the bags were first clued in that something was amiss when children who routinely waved hello now pretended to shoot rocket-propelled grenades at them. Instead of kicking soccer balls, the kids pantomimed throwing grenades. Clearly, something had gone awry the night before.
Most of the battalion had come back into the FOB for dinner and to refuel the Humvees. Our plan was to keep people out in sector more frequently during the night and hope to deter another evening of bloodshed. The reports of violence had slowed down during the afternoon and the early evening. By the time the evening prayers began, it seemed like everything was returning to normal. Walking back from the mess hall, a few of us hoped aloud that the previous night had been the insurgents’ offensive—their one night of fury.
A ripping explosion and a blast of light knocked away any hope that the peace would last. The explosion was so far away that the light reached us first, followed a few seconds later by a rolling baritone explosion. It was easily the biggest explosion we had seen. We ran for the headquarters and started monitoring radio transmissions. The reports came quickly because the bomb had gone off near the Green Zone and in a fairly wealthy residential neighborhood close to several Middle Eastern embassies. From the early reports, it had been a car bomb. We had yet to see one used in our sector. Then came the report that explained it all. It had been a fuel tanker rigged with a bomb. The damage was so widespread that the yellow-gray cloud was visible from our FOB almost two miles away. It looked as if the insurgents had at least one more night left in them.