THIRTEEN

GENERALS, COED SHOWERS, AND TAMPONS

“I didn’t want to disappoint [Graner] just because then he’ll leave me and I’ll feel alone in this war zone.”

—Interview with Lynndie England, BBC, aired August 13, 2009

AFEW OF the Mainers were in Tower G-7-1 one night, eating the most delicious ice cream from Belgium, of all places. The Iraqi night was calm; the men were happy and relaxed. It wouldn’t last, however, and the peace was broken by the chattering thunder of a heavy machine gun squirting long streams of tracers at their tower.

The Bad Guys had snuck the gun up onto that ever-handy highway overpass. Tracer rounds that looked like flaming tennis balls snapped past the tower and the big bullets sounded like timbers snapping in half as they broke the sound barrier over Dizl’s head.

But the Mainers kept eating the ice cream, hunkered down on the floor. The boot (new guy) was staring up at the tracers. His eyes were wide and his mouth wobbled around a scream. He wasn’t eating his ice cream. So, giggling like school kids, Dizl, Parker, Red, and Turtle scarfed down his portion too as the strings of bullets snap, snap, snapped overhead.

They were National Guard troops stuck in a silly little wooden tower at Abu Ghraib, eating what they would afterward refer to as Belgian PTSD medicine. They were veterans. After what must have seemed like an indeterminably long time to the boot, Marines from K Company, recently assigned to protect the prison, lit the Bad Guys up, decimating their little group and making them pay for the indiscretion. The Mainers cheered and hugged and laughed.

They had all wet their pants, of course, but the new guy was the only one who was worried about it. He wasn’t a veteran yet. He hadn’t eaten his ice cream.

As the world foamed and raved over the photo scandal, General Miller arrived for another visit, if only so that news agencies could take pictures of the American brass marching muscularly around the prison with purposeful expressions. But the war was going badly all over the theater, not just at Abu Ghraib, and running detainee operations for a country that appeared to be in the middle of a meltdown couldn’t have been easy for the general.

Damage control wasn’t the only motivation for Miller’s visits to FOBAG. In any event, on this particular occasion Sergeant Horton decided that the general and the press corps were marching through Ganci in such a way that the most disgusting and potentially lethal features of life there were bound to elude his notice.

“Goddamn it,” Horton announced from his spot beside Dizl in the Hawk’s Nest where they watched the general’s progress through the prison. He got to his feet and headed for the stairs.

“What’s up?” Dizl asked.

Horton paused and glared at Dizl from under his eyebrows. “The general is not going to see the shit.”

“Huh?”

“General Miller needs to know about the shit. And you know what, Diz? Fifteen minutes from now, I’m going to be just like you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When I get back, I won’t be an E-5 anymore, I’ll be a forty-year-old E-1 private, just like you.”

Dizl grinned. “Ah. Roger that,” he said.

As Dizl watched, fascinated, from the Hawk’s Nest, Horton proceeded to stalk the general as he and his entourage wended their way around Ganci. The wire fences formed a maze and Horton had a hard time figuring out not only where the general was, but what route he could take to be sure of intercepting him. Lacking radios, Dizl could offer no aerial guidance from his vantage point in the tower.

At last, by accident or providence, Horton found himself perhaps ten yards away from the general, separated from him only by the tall, chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

“General, sir,” he called through the barrier. “Could I have a word with you, sir?”

General Miller turned. On the other side of a fence stood a barrel-chested, mostly eyebrows American sergeant. Behind the sergeant, and behind concertina wire, a large group of detainees gathered, perhaps anticipating a show.

“Sergeant?” the unsmiling general responded.

“Sir,” barked Horton. “With all due respect, sir, the sanitary situation here is unacceptable. There is human waste everywhere. Look, sir,” Horton said, turning over his boot for the general’s inspection. “There is human excrement on the soles of our boots. The detainees are walking around in sewage. This is not acceptable, sir.”

General Miller shot a sharp, sideways glance at a hovering subordinate.

“Thank you for bringing it to my attention, Sergeant.”

“Sir!” said Horton. “Yes, sir.”

As it turned out, Horton wasn’t the only one who’d insisted on pointing out the discrepancies to the general. During Miller’s meeting with the command staff, Huladog respectfully reminded the general of the standard operating procedure for detainees, or prisoners of war.

“Sir, I refer to the Five Ss,” said Huladog, referring to field manual guidance of search, segregate, silence, speed, safeguard. “Given the frequency and intensity of enemy fire, it seems to me that we cannot claim to be providing for the proper safeguarding of these people.”

This was not the first time Huladog had raised this point. Before the April attacks, the response was that the soldiers in FOBAG would just have to make use of what was available, but not to worry because, according to commanders, there were sufficient troops on the ground in the area to ensure the safety of all Abu Ghraib’s inhabitants.

The second time he asked, they had already endured the April attacks, and the original answer was too obviously incorrect to deliver with a straight face. So this time, the general’s staff told Huladog and the other officers about the plans already underway to transfer the whole detainee operation to the new Camp Bucca, already in place and being renovated and expanded.

This was probably not a lie, incidentally, though it was the most cheerful possible spin that Miller could put on the truth of the matter, which was that the accommodations under construction at Bucca would be sufficient to relieve some pressure at Abu Ghraib, but couldn’t house the whole crowd. Perhaps, too, the general’s staff was hoping that the more optimistic predictions about the Iraqi conflict coming from the office of the secretary of defense would prove based in fact rather than in politics, and Abu Ghraib would soon be unnecessary.

Still, in the meantime it was hard to deny the mortars or the shit on the soles of Horton’s boots, and perhaps this is why Horton was not, as it turned out, demoted to E-1, although he was “counseled.”

It all boiled down to poop. In 2004, one could divide the overall population of Abu Ghraib prison by the answers given to a single question: Where do you defecate?

According to a reliable informant, American civilian employees of the omnipresent Kellogg Brown & Root had genuine, porcelain flushing toilets in their trailers while soldiers and detainees did their business in porta-potties.

These needed to be pumped out at regular intervals if they were to remain “fresh,” or at least to prevent them from actually overflowing. So periodically a flock of little tanker trucks would arrive at Abu Ghraib, pump out the porta-potties, and take the contents away to be disgorged into what one can only hope was an environmentally sound lagoon in the southeast corner of the prison grounds.

The soldiers on duty in the Ganci towers could see, and sometimes smell, the lagoon seething and bubbling beneath the desert sun. As the moisture evaporated, the pond, dubbed Shit Lake, developed what Dizl and the Lost Boys referred to as a puddin’ skin thick enough for the smaller feral dogs to skitter across its undulating surface.

“Does anyone check the shit trucks?” Dizl asked one day, as he and Turtle sat sweating in the tower.

“Check the shit trucks? What for?” asked Turtle. He was peeling the wrapper from a package of peanut butter crackers. He offered one to Dizl.

“Insurgents. Bombs. They come through the gate empty, and no one looks inside.” Dizl chewed.

“Who’s going to want to check? Have you ever smelled one of those things?”

“There is a rule when working in a prison. If you can see it, those hundreds of other sets of eyeballs have already seen it and they have a plan. Your job is to disrupt their plan.”

“You think the insurgents have a plan for the shit trucks?”

“I’m saying that if you were an insurgent, you could hide a bunch of guys with guns in one of those tanks. Once through the gate, you would all bail out and start blasting. Like the Trojan Horse.”

“I would be so nauseated from being in the tank I wouldn’t be able to do anything but puke,” Turtle pointed out. “Wanna Twix?” he added.

Dizl took the Twix and conceded, “Still, someone ought to check the trucks.”

Nearly all the guys had chronically bleeding rectums, probably due to the cumulative effect of the chow, the germs, and the strenuous desire to have one’s business done as swiftly as possible before a mortar landed on them and an army chaplain would have to inform their mother or wife that their loved one died on an overflowing plastic toilet.

Baby wipes, sent from home, helped a little. However, several Americans learned the hard way to check if their wipes were for human use and not disinfectant; an application of bleach or cleaning products hardly soothes a burning anus. On the other hand, a wipe enhanced with aloe vera could be downright luxurious.

One of the perks of riding a convoy to Baghdad was the opportunity to use a toilet that wasn’t subject to mortars or rocket fire.

“Hey, Diz,” Parker asked one day. “Where were you yesterday?”

“Went to Baghdad, to Brigade HQ.”

“How was it?”

“There was a real toilet,” Dizl replied dreamily.

In the courtyard outside the Mortar Café, the soldiers could wash their uniforms in a set of automatic washers that strongly resembled the toy appliances sold to children. Imagine the laundry equivalent of an Easy Bake Oven, with a similarly toy-like capacity and power, as if whoever manufactured the things was afraid the soldiers might hurt themselves with a real laundry machine, or even a bucket-and-mangle.

Then there was the matter of where one bathed. There was a shower trailer, the kind you see at construction sites. It had five shower stalls and sinks for hand washing and tooth brushing, but the one at FOBAG had many large holes in it. While this was a problem for privacy, it also made it a little too obvious that the shower trailer was as armored as an empty beer can. It is difficult to enjoy the experience of showering, naked, in a fiberglass shower stall when a bullet or a mortar might come punching through the wall.

Seeking some protection from the snipers and exploding shells, the Mainers tended to prefer the hard shower located down in an old torture chamber plumbed with makeshift, but effective, piping. The water came out of pipes above stalls demarked by cheap plastic shower curtains. Given the least encouragement, these would wrap themselves around the shower in a clammy and surely germ-laden embrace.

There were no drains either. The wastewater simply flowed across the floor and out into the corridor, where it disappeared into a crack in the concrete so deep that Dizl was sure it dribbled all the way down to hell. The hard shower was fetid and spooky, but at least there was concrete between a naked self and the mortars. This was a psychological asset more than anything; plenty of concrete walls and roofs at FOBAG had impromptu windows and skylights punched in them.

The shower was coed, which hadn’t bothered the men and women stationed at FOBAG. It was like camp or the coed facilities college students have in their dorms. It was not especially uncomfortable.

Then the smart people from Big Army got involved. They didn’t want to risk having anything at FOBAG that could have any potential of turning into a problem resembling sexual harassment. The photos of naked detainees simulating blowjobs still sat in the front of every commander’s mind.

So the FRAGO came down: “NO MORE COED SHOWERING! And while we’re on the subject: NO URINATING IN THE SHOWER!”

“God! I can’t believe this!” Humpty groaned, upon reading the “DON’T PISS IN THE SHOWER” sign, as if yet another basic human right had been snatched away from him.

“Remember the three-hour rule,” Dizl said helpfully. “Maybe it’ll change back.”

The powers at “Shadow Main,” the headquarters of Abu Ghraib, actually wanted the hard shower closed down and disassembled. Huladog responded with the requisite “roger that” and proceeded to dutifully ignore the order.

Instead, he worked out a male/female shower schedule to accommodate the needs of the few women dwelling nearby, and convinced the KBR water deliveryman that, despite loud brass sounds to the contrary, it was still OK to refill the tank.

“If you get caught doing it, I’ll take the blame,” he said reassuringly. As the ubiquitous refrain had it, “What can they do to me? Send me to Abu Ghraib?”

Home may be where your heart is, Dizl mused, but FOBAG is where our hearts, brains, guts, spines, and balls are. The priority is keeping them all connected to each other.

Dizl didn’t think “balls and ovaries.” Of the 124 members of the 152nd FAB, none were female. A field artillery battalion is considered a front-line combat unit and therefore not open to female soldiers under the ban against women serving on the “front line.”

On the other hand, MP units do include women, and the units from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Puerto Rico deployed with the 152nd at Abu Ghraib had a few female soldiers in their complement.

This presented some predictable issues. When some female MPs took to sunbathing on the roof of the Mortar Café, for example, the chopper traffic over the building became so thick that the women were asked to desist, for reasons of safety. Though, as a grateful Dizl pointed out, the hovering helicopters tended to suppress enemy fire, no small benefit for all concerned.

A diminutive, redheaded Pennsylvanian added a welcome touch of feminine energy to FOBAG life when she befriended a number of the Mainers. Dizl and Red nicknamed her Shirley because she resembled the perky character on the TV sitcom Laverne and Shirley.

Shirley was energetic, kind, and funny as hell. She taught a detainee nicknamed Jackie Chan to do the chicken dance, and she was a favorite with the juveniles. Though she would bristle when described this way, the Mainers thought Shirley was adorable.

She lived in a prison cell at FOBAG. She liked the relative security of bars on the doors and concrete walls all around her to keep out most of the mortars.

She had a total of three roommates at Abu Ghraib. Of these, two became pregnant and were sent home. The first one was pregnant before she left the United States; the other became pregnant while at Abu Ghraib.

“People are still people no matter where they go,” Shirley said to Dizl.

Despite the standing “no sex in a combat zone” order, the staff at the clinic found that, to their surprise, the courtesy jar of condoms needed to be refilled far more often than the courtesy jar of candy. However, with birth control usually being one of the many details often overlooked in moments of passion and pregnancy being a ticket out of a deployment, it meant soldiers were “still people,” and mistakes happened.

The only shortcoming to Shirley’s quarters was that the cell wasn’t in the basement; what makes a dungeon makes a sanctuary. Well, that and the lack of anything resembling indoor plumbing. However tedious it was to up-armor for yet another schlep to the porta-potty, peeing in a bottle wasn’t an option for Shirley.

A plastic box the size of a phone booth heats up to sauna temperatures under the savage Middle Eastern sun. The smell is downright offensive even in the best of times. When there was a siege on and the KBR pumper trucks stopped coming, the toilets smelled like the end of the world.

To make female hygiene and bathroom practices even more complicated, the whiteboard outside the command post offered daily warnings about burning personal correspondence and anything else that might compromise the already fragile operational security at FOBAG, which included used tampons. This naturally made a woman wonder: what use might al-Sarawak make of the knowledge that the female soldiers at Abu Ghraib were on the rag?

When one was crouching in the porta-potty, nose instinctively burrowing behind the ineffectual mask of one’s IBA collar, head whirling from the combined effects of heat and a refusal to inhale, the safe, secure disposal of a pearlized plastic tampon applicator seemed borderline impossible. Years later, Shirley could still be awestruck by the unassuming feature of American life that is the toilet. The gleaming porcelain surfaces and elegant, sculptural lines, the satisfying waterfall sound it makes while rinsing everything away, were no longer basic necessities but luxuries.

Adorable and generous, Shirley’s mother sent a care package once a week filled with treats and personal hygiene items, enough so that Shirley was a frequent contributor to the “Take It If You Need It” shelf in the supply room.

Shirley, to the chagrin of male and female politicians, was one of thousands of women serving in Iraq in 2004. In fact, the Center for Military Readiness, a nonprofit educational organization that openly opposes allowing homosexuals to serve in the military, also aims to limit the number and career choices for women in the military. There are members of the armed forces who continue to argue against women in combat roles, claiming they aren’t mentally and physically strong enough. Some organizations believe that women are more prone to erratic or violent manners when under the stress of surviving a “man’s world.”

“There is no excuse for what happened at Abu Ghraib,” declared Elaine Donnelly, the founder of the Center for Military Readiness. “I am disturbed by the role that a few female soldiers played in it. It seems that a gradual but sweeping degradation in civilized values is happening before our eyes. No surprise to me, since we are forcing women to compete in the ultimate male world, the world of war, which is anything but civilized,” suggesting that the presence of women at the prison was a contributing factor to, and maybe even the cause of, the abuse on Tier 1-A.

Women serve as soldiers and Marines in harm’s way. This can be accepted cognitively and yet still shock the heart when, for example, a feminine name jumps out from the list of the year’s dead. The ban on women engaging directly in front-line combat missions has been rendered moot by the predominance of insurgent and terrorism-based warfare in our time. According to the Department of Defense, as of 2014, 958 female service members have been wounded and 152 have died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What Donnelly laments, the degradation of civilized values that comes from the equal participation of women in traditionally masculine spheres, attempts to exclude women from responsibility for evil using nineteenth-century misogynistic cultural rules. This is not uncommon.

When one mentions the surprising number of women who took starring roles in the Abu Ghraib scandal, female friends sometimes grow defensive.

“Well, but these were women who were trying to get by in a male environment,” they explain. “They were trying to fit in, they had to prove themselves, show they were just as tough as the boys. They couldn’t rock the boat!”

However, putting the responsibility of the abuses by the “fragile female soldier in a man’s army” on their male compatriots detracts from the participation of women like Shirley in the project of Redemption, which was not a matter of genes and hormones but rather of a determined, daily decision on the part of an individual, male or female. Their goal was to show their enemies—unarmed in cages—compassion.

It is Lynndie England’s leash that lets us know who Shirley is. Shirley is the one who had the strength to actually bear the burden of moral responsibility, of strength and compassion even in the face of evil.