FIFTEEN

SMOKES AND SANDBAGS

“[Sergeant Hazen] said the daily life inside the prison is eerily similar to what’s happening outside the walls…. It’s a constant game of cat and mouse, just like the constant killings, kidnappings, and bombings bouncing between Mosul, Fallujah, and Baghdad.”

—“We’re At Abu Ghraib To Make Things Better,” Camden (Maine) Herald, September 28, 2004

AFTER ONE PARTICULARLY close call with an exploding rocket or mortar (“I could never tell the difference,” he said) Dizl found himself lost in a childhood memory. He stood on Main Street in Thomaston, Maine, eating an orange-pineapple ice-cream cone. He wasn’t called Dizl then, but Kelly. He was in the fifth grade, a blond boy who had to punch a kid to prove that Kelly could be a boy’s name, too. With him at the ice-cream stand was a little girl named Wendy. Their desks had been side by side in third grade at the St. George School, where Dizl had been happy. But Dizl’s mother had fallen in love with an ex-convict who married her, and they moved to California. During two terrible years on the West Coast, Dizl and Wendy had written back and forth to one another, and by the time Dizl and his mother finally escaped from the ex-con and returned to Maine, he was ten years old.

“I love you,” he said to Wendy, after he finished his ice cream. He meant it.

Decades later, while he was in Iraq, Dizl received a care package from Wendy. It contained the book Life of Pi, and Dizl read it again and again, as if it were the Bible, because it was good and because it had come from her.

The original plan was that they were all supposed to go home in November, but—FRAGO—the 152nd got “extended” for three months.

In Washington, DC, there were public-affairs specialists whose assigned task was to scour the Internet for any news report that contained the words “Abu Ghraib” in any of its various spellings. Thus, though he didn’t know it, Beerboy’s superiors had been apprised, from Washington, of the remarks he had made to his hometown newspaper back in Maine before he was even back in Iraq from R&R.

Huladog heard about it first. Adjectives like “unhelpful” were used, and nouns like “counseling” as well. Beerboy was not, in fact, disciplined, and he owes it to the intervention of his first sergeant.

In particular the higher-ups were displeased with Beerboy’s assessment that the United States was “in the wrong country, fighting against the wrong people.”

“I’m proud of what I’m doing, but I hope this is all worth it, men and women giving their lives for the cause,” the story quoted Beerboy as saying. “I stand behind what I’m doing, but I don’t want to be a statistic and I don’t want to be a flag on the lawn in Rockport.”

“That wasn’t helpful,” said the captain.

“The sergeant is a citizen-soldier, sir,” Huladog pointed out, placing a deliberate emphasis on the word “citizen.” “As such, he retains the right to express his opinion when he is on his own time and in his own home.”

The captain said unhappily, “The people at Victory and in DC are concerned that our men do not understand the gravity of the situation.”

“Given that we are faced inside the walls and outside by Islamic extremists who want to kill us, sir, I believe my men fully understand the gravity of the situation. They do not require perspective management from Washington.”

Huladog was tempted to add, but didn’t, that Beerboy did not need advice from a lot of anxious armchair warriors who didn’t have to begin the day wondering if they’d be KIA by suppertime just because they took too long to have a bowel movement.

Who would have imagined that a piece in a newspaper only a few hundred people are ever going to read, in a state most Americans think is part of Canada, could inspire so much interest from these guys? Huladog asked himself, amazed.

A photograph accompanied the newspaper article. It was a shot of the mailbox that stands on its post outside Beerboy’s family home. In the picture, the mailbox is patriotically decorated, the cheerful scarlet-and-white stripes of the American flag glowing against a backdrop of cerulean sky and lush, vivid green grass and trees.

“I hadn’t realized how much I missed color,” Beerboy admitted.

“I’m not who I was,” Dizl declared to Turtle one day. They were wriggling into their body armor with reflexive eagerness, having been startled from sleep by an explosion.

As if this were the only conversation to be expected at such a moment, Turtle replied, “I know. I’m not who I was, either.”

For one thing, muscle memory allowed each man to finish strapping on body armor, check the firing mechanisms of their rifles, and begin evaluating his environment for tactical defensive and offensive possibilities before the comparatively sluggish processes of his conscious awareness had even registered a threat.

While useful for survival, the changes in the human brain brought on by prolonged exposure to a hazardous environment carve grooves so deep in one’s mental pathways that the brain only knows how to function in a war zone. Our bodies do not lightly or easily discard lessons illustrated and emphasized by danger.

After the first mass casualty attack in April, Dizl became downright obsessive about the number and arrangement of sandbags in the Hawk’s Nest. He would pen his paeans to a sack of sand, its simplicity, its earthy good looks, the way it crunches slightly as it supports a resting elbow or a braced foot, and, above all, its yielding, all-forgiving nature. It just lies there, absorbing rain, absorbing shrapnel, and absorbing at least some of the concussive force that would otherwise snap a man’s aorta or batter his brain. You can keep your drones, your nukes, your satellites: Here is a device with so many military applications that the only limiting factor is a lack of human imagination or perhaps an insufficient will to survive.

When Parker, book in hand, arrived one morning to find that the side walls of the little “room” at the top of the tower had been raised by a foot or so of sandbags, he gave Dizl a resentful look.

“I know,” said Dizl.

Parker said it anyway. “If the walls are higher than my head, I can’t watch the hajjis over the top of my book. I’ll have to stand up, like you.”

It was true. Dizl spent a lot of his time in the Hawk’s Nest standing, pacing, pondering the tactical possibilities of what he saw laid out before him in Ganci. He had left gaps to serve as rifle ports in the sandbag walls, but these were neither large or numerous enough to allow Parker to use them for ordinary surveillance purposes.

“You can rearrange the bags on your watch,” Dizl conceded. “You can take ’em down altogether if you’re so inclined, but when I come on watch at 1200, I want these walls to look exactly like this; the same number of bags in the same places. You got that?”

“Roger that, Private Major,” sighed Parker.

As it happened, it was these carefully arranged sandbags that saved Dizl’s life on April 20.

As the rainy autumn approached and the 152nd moved operations over to the new site at Redemption, Huladog pointed out that while twenty inches of dry sand will stop a 120mm round, you need twice as much wet sand to get the same effect. Dizl gazed at his first sergeant, his face puckered.

“Roger that,” he said, and went out to find more sandbags.

Filling sandbags is a task requiring little in the way of skill or even strength, so it was one of the employment opportunities frequently offered to detainees. Americans often offered payment in the form of cigarettes, with a premium placed on American Marlboros, though a larger quantity of Iraqi “Miamis” could be grudgingly accepted instead. In fact, Beerboy discovered that in the micro economy of Abu Ghraib, a single Marlboro menthol was worth a whole pack of Miamis.

Cigarettes, incidentally, were the usual motivator bored detainees would offer Thumby as an incentive when they wished for him to create some entertainment, say by flinging himself headlong into a large coil of razor wire.

Once, when Thumby was preparing to perform just such a stunt, Dizl arrived and threatened, very credibly, to shoot Thumby rather than put everyone through a lot of gory nonsense. The rounds in his shotgun weren’t lead, but rather the small, less-lethal plastic rounds. These seldom caused real injury, but could usually generate a sufficient sting to discourage further mischief. The sound made by the racking of any round, lethal or otherwise, into the chamber of a shotgun tends to focus even a madman’s attention.

“Come on, Sesma,” said Dizl, holding out his hand. “Come away from the wire. I’ll get you some cigarettes tomorrow.”

“Marlboros, not Miamis,” said Thumby, and Dizl shook his head and said fine.

Sesma was Thumby’s real name, the name Dizl had asked for one day.

“I am Thumby,” said Thumby.

“No. That is not your name. What is the name your mother gave you?” Dizl insisted, and Thumby got a faraway look in his eye and in a small, almost-sane voice, responded, “Sesma.”

While cigarettes may have been parceled out with what the detainees considered excessive frugality, there was no scarcity of the basic raw material for making sandbags. And, once the long-overdue portable bomb shelters had been placed in the enclosures, detainees got downright enthusiastic about reinforcing these with stacks and stacks of sacks of sand.

As long as the sandbags they filled were destined for their own use, there was no problem with having the detainees while away the hours of incarceration performing this task themselves. However, the rules of war forbid an occupying power from setting prisoners to work in ways that benefit the occupiers, so they couldn’t make sandbags for the Americans.

The Americans had another pool of labor they could potentially tap for sandbag manufacture. Among the varied sorts of people collected together at Abu Ghraib was a group of about twenty Somali men. The typical appearance of Somalis is tall and thin, and thus they were known as Skinnies. They dwelled in their own enclosure and, though their living quarters lay behind wire fences, the Skinnies were not technically considered detainees. They were non-Iraqi nationals who had had the misfortune of being in Iraq as guest workers when the occupation began. They stayed behind fences because, for some reason, no one made plans to send them back to Somalia.

So they remained, snoozing in the shade of their tents and playing cards, and once they had filled enough sandbags to satisfy their own safety needs, they showed no inclination to fill any more, at least not gratis.

Perhaps, the command staff suggested, the Somalis could be hired to fill sandbags? They proposed the idea to the Somali leaders.

“How much?”

A negotiation followed. Eventually the Skinnies and the Americans made a deal that included a sum of cigarettes, candy, and other desirable commodities, and the Somalis arrived in the courtyard of the Mortar Café to begin work.

A few days went by, and the piles of sandbags grew. The vulnerable window openings of the Mortar Café began to seem at least a little less like open invitations to mortar rounds.

Then word came down from above that the Skinnies’ sandbagging operation must cease and desist.

“Really? Why?”

“It looks bad.”

“What looks bad?”

“We’re Americans. We’ve got history on this.”

“You mean like from Mogadishu? Black Hawk Down?”

“No, dummy. I mean slavery.”

“We’re paying them!”

“I know that. You know that. But from the outside, it looks like a bunch of whites lying around while the blacks do the work.”

“But sir, they don’t have to work … they’re getting paid to work …”

“I’m just saying. It looks bad.”

What if a reporter took a photograph and put it on the Internet?

They solved the problem by making sure that whenever the Somalis were filling sandbags, one of the Americans (it had to be a white American—a black American wouldn’t do at all) sat there and filled sandbags too.