“NO WAY!” RAISING HIS considerable girth to pound on the table in the direction of the Shi’a delegates, the Sunni imam, Imam Mahmoud, usually quite calm, reacted more violently than I ever imagined.
“You know that violence against Sunni people is happening every day. Now you want us to turn in our guns and be lorded over by an army of Shi’a?” The cleric’s English was at its best, pointedly and condescendingly pronouncing “Shi’a” as if it were a disease.
Of course, the obvious point, not made by anyone at the table, was that the Shi’a had lived this way for years, being abused and intimidated by a well-armed Sunni minority who kept them so tightly underfoot that they had no chance to even practice their religion openly. It was a point that did not need to be made in this hour of triumph. The Shi’a silently acknowledged this outburst, by keeping their eyes low and their fingers flicking through prayer beads. Perhaps they even understood the imam’s frustration to a degree.
In order to keep the agenda moving, I began to outline some additional details. The sheiks or the council members would collect a supervisory fee for work done in and around their areas. This made the imam sit back down.
The conversation stayed on money. They wanted the price list for the weapons and wanted to know whether they could collect a finder’s fee for large shipments. I didn’t see why not. The conversation had started tensely, but it was no longer Sunni versus Shi’a—it was all about greed. By the end of the meeting, people could barely wait to start scrounging up weapons to sell and help people to go to work.
I thought it was a huge success. I stayed behind to talk with Said Mallek about the security force and to follow up with him on Imam Sa’ad. Heydar, another council member from Abu Discher, stayed behind to join the discussion as well. The two of them whispered back and forth with Ali. From their averted glances and nods, I could tell they were negotiating.
“Heydar wants to know the price for five hundred rocket-propelled grenades and three hundred grenade launchers.”
That was a pretty large amount, especially from mild-mannered Heydar.
“He also wants you to pick them up and deliver them to a guy he knows.”
This was a cryptic, but not wholly unanticipated, request. The Iraqis were sensitive to scenarios where they could be recorded or exposed by the U.S. Army. Selling weapons back to the army would undoubtedly place their names on a list of some sort. Although we offered the buyback on an amnesty basis, the army planned to clandestinely film it in order to learn more about the people who had access to large amounts of weapons. I was getting an education right now.
Ali went on to translate that since the fighting on the first day of our arrival, Heydar had been responsible for hiding all of the weapons for the neighborhood. Heydar, the elderly Santa-bearded council member, the guy who was always warm to me, was keeping the neighborhood’s illicit arms supply. He could see the expression on my face and gave me a wink.
Ali continued that Heydar also arranged for weapons to be brought in from other areas, especially in the Kurdish-controlled area, where the violence was minimal and the prices were low. They were brought in by truck, in an operation owned by a shadowy arms dealer called “Q.”
Ali added, “Heydar wants you to meet Q and sell these weapons. Then bring him the money.”
Another wink from Heydar. He was enjoying this. He also seemed to be following the English part of the conversation pretty well for someone who claimed not to speak English.
“No problem,” I replied, “but I want to know more about the night of the ambush. Who all was involved that I know?”
Without an interpreter and smirking like a child caught stealing cookies, Said Mallek said the words that I had long suspected, “All of us.”
Well, at least it was in the open now. The Shi’a members of the council were also Mahdi Army members—followers of Muqtada Al-Sadr. Some in the U.S. Army continued to consider affiliation with Sadr’s followers as a stand-alone offense. They routinely incarcerated and detained Iraqis for this show of allegiance. Yet I took the view that this group, though violent, had recently begun to act inside the political process. Membership alone was insufficient reason to detain someone. The way that our cooperation was developing, I thought we were co-opting them more and more. We might as well let them preserve their leadership structure because an organization is easier to control than a thousand different people.
That had been one of the defining characteristics of the Shi’a-Sunni demarcation in our meetings. All of the Shi’a imams attended a central religious school and had a fairly unified chain of authority, going all the way to the ayatollahs, most of whom were in Iran. I considered this analogous to the Catholic Church and its hierarchy, leading back to the pope. If you could get a view from the Shi’a collectively, it was more or less a binding commitment on them all.
The Sunni lacked this organization entirely. Any person could open a Sunni mosque, which I called the Protestant approach. The more secular Sunni and the religious Sunni who followed autonomous mosques were both nearly ungovernable. Their collective leader had been Saddam and the Ba’ath Party. With those two societal pillars gone, there simply had not been enough time to coalesce the Sunni spirit around a central organization. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Ja’ish Al-Sunna represented three growing Sunni insurgencies that tried desperately to catalyze some unification among them, but so far these remained highly confederated.
For this reason, I preferred the Shi’a, and our current arrangement suited me well. I would meet this arms dealer Q and make the sale, hoping that this would lead to another level of cooperation and understanding. At the very least, I would keep learning about this Mahdi Army organization and file all of that in our records.
Through Heydar, I arranged to meet Q at a mosque on the day of the weapons buyback program. Heydar would arrange everything and meet us there, so everyone was comfortable. The program was in two days, and we seemed set.
The next two items for Said Mallek were all about manpower. I needed a list of laborers, at least a thousand. A couple hundred were to work as guards, who would receive weapons, radios, and ammunition from me. They would answer to me, and they would be assigned to the places that I instructed. The army would fortify their positions, as required, and I would personally see to their operation. In short, I was asking for a roster of soldiers to command.
The laborers, I left to Said Mallek. I told him more specifically about the plan and requested that he be in charge of commencing the project. He agreed. The road running from the project site to his house divided formerly Sunni territory from Shi’a territory. I proposed an annexation of this land, essentially turning a Sunni area into a Shi’a area and extending Said Mallek’s personal authority well beyond its present borders.
With everyone happy and agreeing, I left for the FOB, and Said Mallek and Heydar went off to start their planning. The details were coming together nicely, and I was pleased with the level of trust I seemed to be accumulating from these guys. All jokes about my honorary membership in the Mahdi Army aside, I was collecting information at an astonishing rate. A few months ago, we did not know anything about this organization, The magic intelligence reports from the Green Zone were laughably vague, often warning in dire terms that an “Arab male of average height, driving a white, or maybe dark-colored, car is moving weapons into the neighborhood tonight or maybe tomorrow.” In the context of the recent contracts, my persistence, and this weapons buyback program, I knew I was starting to understand the hierarchy of the Mahdi Army and would learn the identity of their main weapon supplier. Like an idiot, I brought this up during the battalion’s strategy meeting that night.
“We need to pick up this Q,” said the person responsible for assigning targets or people to be detained. He added, “And Heydar.”
“No way.” My response was hostile to the very idea of betraying this meet-up. Sure, we might get Q, but Q is part of a larger organization. Wouldn’t it be better to connect with Q and learn about where he gets his weapons from? With all of the talk about weapons coming from Iran or Saudi Arabia, we still had no real person to confirm how that happened. Q could do that. He could explain how Chinese grenades manufactured a week earlier could be found in our sector. He would be more valuable over tea than behind bars. Our detention facilities, even after the Abu Ghraib photos came out, did not scare anyone.
Suddenly, I came up with a great idea. Pick up Heydar. Arrest him for being involved with the Mahdi Army. We could send a unit to do it tonight, and in the morning I would personally let him out. It would create the impression that I was on his side more than on the U.S. Army’s, and it might well prompt some additional information from him. At the very least, it would soothe his worries and those of Q that I was a trustworthy guy.
The manipulation would have been unseemly a few months back when we thought that transparency and honesty were the key values to rebuilding this society. Now everyone at the table knew that this was a different place. Here, personal allegiance and manipulation were expected. Not even a half hour after the meeting, a group of soldiers burst through Heydar’s door, put him in handcuffs, and carted him over to our detention facility. As soon as he arrived, my phone rang.
Said Mallek said, “Heydar is in your jail.”
Perfect, I thought. I expressed all of the proper outrage to make my disbelief sound genuine. Not even Ali or the interpreters had known of this plan, so my surprise seemed genuine to all of the Iraqis. I went upstairs for a hot shower and a few Sopranos episodes, reveling in my own trickery.
The next morning before breakfast, I went to see Heydar. The poor guy looked quite disheveled in his orange prison jumpsuit, with his uncombed hair and beard matted from sleeping on the floor. More important, he looked genuinely happy to see me, kissing me firmly on both cheeks when I arrived. I signed him out of the detention facilities and walked him to the front gate. The entire way he was jovial and happy, but he donned his mask of indifference as soon as we were in sight of the road. Our collaboration and friendship were liabilities to him out there beyond the wall, just as my relationship with him could become a liability to me inside the walls. I had taken a stand against having him detained for real. If he turned out to be involved in a future attack that harmed Americans, I would feel that responsibility. I didn’t linger on those thoughts, however, because I believed what we were doing made us all safer, but it was interesting to note from his body language that he must have felt the same way. If anything bad should befall his organization, to which he had given me a glimpse, he would be responsible. As he left, I got the feeling that we each understood our risks.
Ali called a couple of hours later to inform me that the meeting with Q had been moved up to today and would be at the DAC, not at the mosque. There had been some internal discord over going through with the sale after Heydar had been arrested. My ability to secure his release kept the sale on, but Q wanted it done faster and at the DAC, where presumably he felt safer. I am sure there was more to the story. Probably more hard-line elements did not want the sale to happen at all, or there was an argument over how to share the money. In any event, I had an hour to get ready for my first meeting with an arms dealer.
Arriving at the DAC, I was greeted by the guards and Hillal, as usual. There was no one else around, just the Misfits and me. We took up our customary positions and we waited. At precisely the appointed hour, a flatbed truck with a red cab rumbled toward the gate. I did not know what to expect, but my mind defaulted to “truck bomb.” I ordered everyone back and yelled to the guards to stop the truck. On command, they began yelling in Arabic and firing warning shots in the air in order to get the driver to stop.
After the first burst of warning shots ripped the air, a familiar bearded face popped out from the passenger side window, yelling in return. Of course, it was Heydar. Behind the truck, as expected, was the white Mercedes with Ali, Ammar, and Q. The guards gathered their composure and let them through the gate. As the truck and the Mercedes pulled in, I walked over and had a look at the bed of the truck as it swung into a parking space. It was empty. My face must have contorted in disbelief. I looked from face to face, searching for an explanation and thinking about the various insults I was going to unleash.
Meanwhile, the Iraqis watched me, barely containing their laughter. I was definitely the last one to know this joke, and they thoroughly enjoyed it. Q, a slightly built, well-dressed man, shook hands with me and said something unintelligible to the driver. The driver scrambled into the bed of the truck and removed a metal panel from the back of the cab.
“Have a look,” said Q, gesturing up towards the driver, who now squatted adjacent to a gaping hole.
I climbed into the bed of the truck, walked along its creaky wooden floor, and peered into the hole. I could not see anything. Confused, I looked to the driver. He reached inside and pulled out a sack of grenades. And then another and another. For a full five minutes, the driver’s torso would disappear into the hidden compartment and return with grenades or grenade launchers—hundreds of them.
I was shocked, and I complimented Q and Heydar on their ability to conceal these weapons.
“How many of these trucks passed through our checkpoints every day?” I wondered aloud.
“Many.”
The answer from Q validated one of the long-held beliefs about our shortcomings in this occupation. We searched homes, vehicles, and people, but still a truck loaded with weapons could pull into a parking lot, as expected, and we would see it as empty and wave it through. Under years of Saddam’s rule, the Iraqis had become masterful at hiding precious belongings, and we were pretty childish in how we searched. Of course, part of that was out of deference to the locals and part of it was a practical concern. We did not have the time or the desire to start drilling holes in people’s cars and walls to look for hidden compartments, although that is what would be required to find the hidden contraband stowed away in everyday objects. I continued my praise of their ingenuity and seized the opportunity and their collective gloating to take pictures to “prove how gullible Americans were.” In truth, I wanted these pictures to go out to our soldiers, so that we could at least try to find more vehicles rigged to smuggle like this one.
After the grenades had been unloaded and everyone had a laugh at the “incompetent Americans,” we sent Hillal to get food from one of the nearby restaurants. Now that I had Q and Heydar in the same place, I wanted to spend time talking with them about these weapons and the sale. We went inside and waited for the food to arrive, enjoying the steaming cups of sweet tea that had become almost an obsession with me. Into a single glass, the Iraqis would pour enough sugar to fill it almost a quarter full, then add the tea on top of it. The result was a fragrant sugar-and-caffeine rush that my body had come to depend upon.
Hillal’s sons came bursting in with bags of cooked rice and chicken, and Hillal himself offered to slaughter a goat for us. We politely declined the latter and laid the carryout food on the table. Deferring to Q, we took turns grabbing the meat and piles of rice by hand and scooping them onto a few thin plates. The plates, it seemed, were largely for the Americans, as the Iraqis were content to reach in and eat directly from the piles of chicken and rice, with no intermediate utensils. It made sense to me, so I did the same.
In between mouthfuls of moist chicken and rice, I asked all about the weapons-trading business. As it turned out, most of my theories on weapons had been correct. The biggest buyers were the mosques, which armed themselves via weapons-dealing cartels. The money came from within and outside Iraq, often carried by pilgrims from Iran or taxi drivers who made journeys between Baghdad and Amman. Similarly, the weapons would travel between regions as mosques prepared for violence. He elaborated that these particular grenades had been bound for an insurgent group in Najaf during the uprising in April, but the fighting had ended, and the prices really fell there. The offer of immunity and the fair pricing structure created an opportunity for Q to make a low-risk profit and unload the weapons. He usually liked to hold them for only a few days, and he had held them too long.
The stories went on between Q and Ali, who had known each other in previous times when they were both black-market money exchangers. Ali always knew these guys well, and as I watched him interact, it was clear to me that he was a pretty central figure himself. For all I knew, he could have connected Heydar with Q in the first place. It was a weird feeling, eating lunch with a guy who had previously participated in an attack against me, the guy who supplied the guns, and my interpreter, who, because he was in the middle of everything else, was probably involved that night as well. The strangest thing was that it was not repugnant to me at all. It was more of a sign that I had been accepted into this circle, although I was not sure what that meant or how I felt about the army.
Increasingly, I had felt at odds with some of the directives and approaches that the higher levels of the army and the State Department sent down. I found myself rooting for the small successes of the Iraqis, even if it meant helping them sell weapons while staying free of any potential identification. I did not see it as them using me or even as my using them. Rather, I saw it as our building a team that was outside of the directed army protocol, on the one side, and beyond the ongoing calls for armed resistance on the other, which were becoming ever more strident. We were defying the will of our respective masters, and I think we were all the better for it.
I arranged for the army to buy Q’s weapons, using couriers from the neighborhood so that he did not implicate himself. I would then have my interpreters deliver his share of the proceeds, minus a roughly $1,000 finder’s fee for the council members. The council members, after all, had played their part as intermediaries to the mosque leadership and the diversion of Q from his original customers to me. It was an illustrative event, insofar as I confirmed that you could buy the confidence of these organizations, and the mosques had extremely well-developed supply networks.
Hours after the buyback ended, the council members were loitering outside the DAC. Everyone was in a good mood. Sunni and Shi’a congregated amicably and waited for the Humvees to arrive. They would wait a few hours longer than expected because there had been one small complication that would reverberate for months. The volatile Ammar had been arrested. He had gone to the weapons buyback site and argued with the soldiers there, who were not from our unit. In typical fashion, he had lost his temper and started yelling. The U.S. soldiers were not amused, and he was swiftly detained, despite his credentials as an interpreter.
The suspicion among the people responsible for FOB security was that the interpreters were double agents, a distrust that had grown stronger the longer we were in country. They were all employed by a contractor in the Green Zone who was based in the United States, but there had been no formal security-screening process when they were hired. In fact, in the early days of the invasion, speaking English was sufficient for virtually anyone to get a contract for $600 per month—a lot of money in Iraq, although the work was hard and the hours long. The interpreters rode in the same Humvees as the soldiers, fought and died in the same ambushes, and generally bore the same risks. Yet they had recently been forbidden from carrying weapons or cell phones. This came at a time when the insurgents targeted interpreters and their families with increasing ferocity, with the goal of severing the link between the army and the population.
The result was that the interpreters felt betrayed by all sides, and, in some cases, they probably did make side deals with various groups or organizations to stay alive. When I went to retrieve Ammar, I was greeted by three security consultants so new in country that their cargo vests from Wal-Mart still smelled like the plastic fishing worms that had been two aisles over. They proceeded to lecture me about how they have been for some time aware that Ammar was an insurgent and that his actions today proved he was unstable. They played the retired military intelligence gambit up as high as it could go, allowing their egos to alternate between Perry Mason and George Patton. They were ridiculous in a way that made them seem harmless, but then they said the most unbelievable thing I could have heard. They told me plainly that I did not have the authority to release Ammar. I did not even know who these couch potatoes were, and now they were giving me orders. I thought it could not get any worse, until they began to describe their masterful theory on how I had personally been “turned” into an enemy operative.
I am not even sure how the rest of their story went, except that several other interpreters felt that Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad had received special treatment for their work with the council. They alleged that the interpreters and the council members took bribes, and that I supported it. This made me a “terrorist.”
With my own personal army now standing at the sector’s every key intersection, these self-important civilians were literally traveling down a dangerous road right now and did not even know it. My mind quickly reeled through a series of actions. Should I arrange for an IED to hit their truck? Should I call up an ambush? If they wanted to see the danger of calling people an enemy operative, why not illustrate what an enemy operative might do?
Their perception of me was typical of the half-baked ideas that rained in from their arrogant ilk in the Green Zone, whether a security consultant (often a retired military officer), a veteran State Department employee getting his first taste of sunlight and reality, or worse, a newly minted one who knows exactly what would be done because he has a master’s degree. These guys and the rest of the people who sat in judgment and second-guessed the soldiers in the field were the most dangerous individuals in Iraq. Generals who had served in Vietnam as lieutenants and captains have written volumes about the “stacked helicopters” there—in civilian terms, micromanagement—and how that was one of the biggest mistakes that undermined the effectiveness of one of our greatest strengths—the initiative of the American junior officer. Senior officers’ helicopters would congregate over the battlefield at altitudes according to rank, with colonels hovering below generals, all relaying orders to the poor lieutenant who was trying to slog with his platoon through the rice paddy.
The books on this chapter of our history unanimously agree that this should never happen again. Yet in typical army fashion, it not only happened again but was far worse. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, the scrutiny of our operations intensified. Each Iraqi who was interrogated or stopped by a U.S. patrol had to be recorded, digitally photographed and inspected by a medic, and offered treatment for even incidental bumps and bruises. The unmanned drones followed our patrols, with people from the Green Zone often asking the drivers on the radio reserved for tactical communication why they went right instead of left or why they had stopped so long in a certain location. This type of surveillance of our own troops further separated those in combat from those in the FOBs and the Green Zone.
Now the guys in the field felt as if they had to avoid two equally stealthy enemies. Instead of interrogating people and bringing them in, we started taking them to different holding facilities in the sector, places where they could be interrogated without the threat of an unmanned aerial vehicle recording a soldier punching someone “for no reason.” The classic overreaction to Abu Ghraib had destroyed our trust of the system, and now these consultants were even living in our FOB and questioning our contacts and methods, based on nothing more than rumor and “twenty years of experience in the DOD.”
I mustered every last ounce of my willpower to politely tell the consultants how I could not care less, and I left to find my commander. Like me, he shared a fiercely independent and autonomous view. Our methods had created one of the more peaceful sectors in Baghdad, and we had managed to do what few others had, which was to gain and sustain a dialogue with the former combatants and their leadership. If the interpreters were on the take, then who really cared? Iraqis were not Americans and did not see interpreters as translation devices that mechanically changed Arabic to English. They preferred certain individuals and expressed trust for interpreters as human beings. It was a distinction sometimes lost on the “Green Zone Guys,” who allocated interpreters as if they were spare parts.
As I briefed my commander on the incident with the consultants, he turned purple with rage. In seconds, we were striding toward the brigade commander’s office. I waited outside while the two senior officers talked it out. Less than five minutes later, my boss stuck his head out and told me to go get Ammar, then get all of the other officers into the conference room. I was a bit confused but happy that this issue seemed to be working out. I went across to the detention facility and told Ammar he could go, and then I told the experts where they could go, which was a warm, but not tropical, destination of biblical reference. Ammar also had a few phrases to say to them, but I shut him up and sent him to the DAC to tell everyone that I would be there in an hour. Ammar turned and hollered at some other interpreters walking toward the gate in order to get a ride, then stopped short.
“They took my money.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Those guys, when they put me in there.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I reassured him.
This was not good. The rules had specifically prohibited interpreters from selling back weapons, because the intelligence officers and the “experts” wanted to track who was selling and what their connection was to the known nebulas of insurgents. Of course, we knew that as well, which is why we had the DAC guards and Ammar sell Q’s weapons. Even though my boss knew of this plan, some of the nuances were better kept from him until this all blew over, except that the money was the current topic of the briefing.
“And he had almost $5,000 in cash when we stopped him.” The officers in my battalion were all seated in the battalion conference room as the security consultants droned on about how they had saved us from an imminent threat—namely, Ammar. The consultants had even put together a slide show of data on all of our interpreters. The pictures of Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad, taken from their badge photos, beamed back from the projector. As they droned on, I imagined them getting ambushed on the outside and amused myself by thinking about how fast they’d run in those new boots.
“And so these three interpreters will not be allowed on the FOB and will lose their employment with the contractor,” the head consultant pronounced.
“And you three will not be allowed in the battalion area, “mumbled my battalion commander loud enough to be heard by all.
Our brigade commander, who had been seated in the rear of the room, gestured for my battalion commander to follow him outside. A few uncomfortable minutes later, the two commanders reached a compromise whereby we would abide by the security consultants’ report in exchange for receiving more interpreters in the future. The security consultants left smugly and accompanied the brigade commander back to the brigade headquarters. Their answer to a perceived security anomaly had been the ejection of our three interpreters, which showed little regard for the intrinsic value that the interpreters had acquired in terms of trust and institutional knowledge.
I am sure the consultants felt like heroes who had saved our lives, but as soon as they left, we hatched our own plan to subvert their civilian overreach. My commander had a simple but effective plan.
“Just tell Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad that we will pick them up in sector from now on. As for the money, we’ll find a way to get them paid. For now, they can be neighborhood watch supervisors. Doesn’t that pay $600 per month?”
It really paid less, but I got his point. He understood that these guys were assets to us, and insofar as he still felt they were worth having around, we would keep them around. The increasingly bizarre rules of this FOB were chafing us all. When we arrived from Kuwait, the basketball courts in the middle were used and people walked around without their body armor. Now, because a suicide bomber had blown up another mess hall in another part of the country, we were ordered to wear body armor at all times while outdoors. There was no more basketball, soccer, or running without your body armor. On selected days, we even had to wear the body armor while we ate. This was probably bearable for the office workers, who put it on to go eat and go to the barracks, but for those of us who wore it eighteen hours a day in sector, it was backbreaking. Literally, we could no longer remove the body armor except to sleep. The insidious hand of FOB security was crushing our spirit and endangering our tactical operations by depriving us of key interpreters. My commander pushed back hard.
“And go get that money back, as well. That belongs to somebody, doesn’t it?”
My commander meant that someone had sold his weapons and was waiting for this money to arrive. Just because Ammar had been detained with it did not mean that the seller was not still waiting for his money.
Retrieving the money would be a pleasure. Ammar also had some pretty nice pistols confiscated, and I wanted to get those. I walked back over to the detention facility, where all of the weapons and the confiscated items, including the money, were stored. Another policy change in the last few weeks was that we were now to turn in all confiscated weapons at this central collection point. This really hampered my ability to hand out weapons to the people as tokens of our gratitude, so my unit largely ignored this rule, but we were running low.
The sergeant in charge tried to supervise me while I took the money and Ammar’s weapons, but as he turned to process another prisoner, I slid six more pistols into my backpack. This is what it had come to; we were stealing from one another inside the FOB, fighting the war inside the wall. Sadly, this civil war between the field units and the FOB units, emboldened by the contractors and the lifelong diplomats, came at precisely the time when we were the most successful we had ever been with the Iraqis. Our soldiers were safer in the streets than they had been a month earlier, and that had nothing to do with “how to properly screen an individual for a security risk.”
The trucks were already running when I threw the bag full of pistols and money into the backseat. The Misfits understood the deal better than most. They were on every mission with me and knew that we had a good plan going. They had seen the changes in the street and heard the stories from other soldiers in our unit. No patrol could enter the streets these days without crowds clamoring around and asking for “Captain Whiteley.” My prestige increased daily in the street, and people understood the concept of a person in charge, not a unit. Our arrangement made the transition government structure transparent and easy for everyone.
“Captain Whiteley!” The kisses came in quickly from the scrum of sheiks waiting for me at the DAC. Ammar, sullen, was there, as was Ali, holding a backpack full of the loot from the buyback. Ali, Ammar, and I went into a small room inside the DAC with the money and the receipts. Ali’s former life as a money exchanger was on display as the bills whizzed through his hands faster than any counting machine, sorting the bag of bills into stacks that corresponded to names on our list. One by one, the council members came into the room, discreetly took their money, thanked us, and left. It was a sign of respect that they did not count it.
After I distributed the gains from the buyback, the mood in the council was high. Almost everyone had received a taste of the proceeds. In the army, the buyback was being heralded as a tremendous success that made the streets of Baghdad safer. The ordnance disposal unit had gathered all of the weapons that we had collected, except a few that we plucked out to give away as gifts to our new neighborhood watchmen. They then detonated the pile in a remote area near the FOB. The huge explosion and plume wafted across the skyline, proclaiming that the tools of violence had been destroyed.
Back in the FOB, my phone rang constantly as dozens of people arrived at the gates of the FOB to see me, each promising to show me a cache of weapons. Although the buyback was over, it really only now rang true to the people. They had watched skeptically as their neighbors traded in their weapons to the Americans and received cash. No one (except Ammar) had gone to jail. No one had been tortured. Now a whole new wave of people seeking cash began to show up, and the only name they knew was “Captain Whiteley.”
I was no longer interested in these weapon sellers, even when they described themselves as possible informants. Iraqis have an insatiable demand for attention, and once you met a person, he would return daily seeking favors and offering bribes. It taxed my patience and took my time, and I was not alone. No one, or at least very few people, responded to visitors at the gate. The visitors would come in, check in with an interpreter, and then take a seat in a small waiting room, where they would sit all day. Sometimes people would see them, other times not. In the beginning, I had seen everyone, eager to be helpful, but I now spent my time only with people who could help me. These unfiltered masses were no help to me, one on one. Their stories of woe and begging annoyed and frustrated me. I had a standard message for them to see their council member, unless something was really extraordinary.
“This guy says he has a car bomb.” The soldier on the phone was calling from the front gate, and he sounded excited.
Well, this might be extraordinary. Car bombs had been a recent development here. They really only showed up near the Green Zone. On my way to the front gate, I stopped by the ordnance disposal unit and told them what was going on. There was no way I was walking out there myself to see whether it was a car bomb. Like me, the soldiers in this unit were excited. They had a special remote-controlled robot that could verify that it was a car bomb, and they always liked to use it.
While we waited for the ordnance guys to get their robot and inspect the car, I brought the informant into the FOB so we could chat. Using the interpreter from the gate, I asked where and how this guy had found the car bomb. He had a very long and rambling answer, but the one phrase that kept reappearing in his story was the “Yazeen Mosque”—a Sunni mosque directly across from the FOB that harbored anti-U.S. rallies and could conceivably be a headquarters for al Qaeda in Iraq.
A large explosion startled everyone, as the ordnance team detonated the car bomb. The informant looked at me expectantly, and I made arrangements for him to receive his money before he left. I thanked him and walked back over to my headquarters. I needed to find a way into that mosque.