House of Strange Fathers
June 2004
When I arrived in Baghdad, I was greeted by General Miller’s staff and the Abu Ghraib intel center’s acting commander. We loaded into an armored Humvee and drove to the tent reserved for high-level military personnel for the night. It was just another tent with cots on the floor, not a big step up from the tin shed with cots in Kuwait, but with one big difference. With the outside temperature still around 100 degrees, this VIP tent was a frigid 49 degrees. I slept in my clothes because it was so damn cold.
The following morning, I met with General Miller, my former commander at Gitmo, to get my marching orders. Just the sight of him reassured me that we had a good soldier in charge here. If the late great Marine Corps general Chesty Puller had ever had a twin brother, it would have been General Geoffrey D. Miller. I welcomed the opportunity to work for him again. You never left General Miller’s office unclear about your purpose in life or what your exact mission was to be. He was about five feet five inches tall with a notable underbite. He would have been a better choice as an actor for the colonel than even John Wayne in the 1960s film about Vietnam, The Green Berets. Despite his small size, General Miller could organize soldiers with passion and a clear sense of purpose. We respected him and wanted to work for him. He measured every word with an uncanny efficiency. This gift, coupled with his telling movements and expression, provided the observer with volumes of information.
Inside the general’s office at Task Force 134 headquarters, Miller immediately focused on the mission—he was not one for much small talk. He launched into business, with his customary drawl.
“Larry, we could sure use your help,” he said, growling out the last word so it sounded more like hep. “The JIDC [Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center] doesn’t have a lot of good leaders like you. I want you to teach them how to do this the right way, teach ’em how to get prisoners to talk without all the harsh stuff. You know how to do it. You will report to me and only me.”
With his instructions on the table, he looked me in the eye. “Now, what are your questions?”
I had none. It was exactly clear what he wanted me to do: save this rapidly sinking ship.
At 2 p.m. the following day, General Miller, the acting director, and the five-man security team for the general and me boarded a Black Hawk helicopter. Because of the dangers in Iraq, all generals traveled with a well-armed security force. Twenty minutes later, we landed at Abu Ghraib. I tried to brace myself for whatever I would find here, knowing it wouldn’t be good.
As I stepped off the helicopter, I recalled Truman Capote’s description of the small, remote Kansas town in his book In Cold Blood. Americans didn’t “happen across” Abu Ghraib. Before the news of the abuses, most Americans had never even heard of this place, and the few who had rarely gave it a passing thought. This was a place you forgot as soon as possible.
Abu Ghraib was a wasteland, nothing but sand and rocks and run-down buildings, with garbage and raw sewage everywhere you looked. This was a terrible place to be, for anyone.
As I stood there surveying the scene, it struck me that I didn’t even know what this place was named for. Was it named after somebody or did the name mean something? I asked Sam, an Arabic interpreter from the intel center, and found that the meaning of Abu Ghraib held a very ominous and dark metaphorical message, even prior to the beginning of the global war on terrorism. The actions of U.S. soldiers here were not the first abuses to be attached to this name.
The word Abu refers to “father” in Arabic, and Ghraib has been interpreted to mean “strange.” Loosely translated, Abu Ghraib was interpreted by the locals to mean “the house of strange fathers.” It was built by the British in the 1950s and ’60s. Since its beginnings, it took on three or four ominous and sinister purposes in the Saddam Hussein regime. Initially, it was an insane asylum much like those found around the world before 1956. Before then, psychiatrists lacked the ability to control schizophrenics with medication, leading to many of the horrible scenes we think of from the worst mental hospitals of that time. Then Thorazine, a very effective antipsychotic medication, hit the market in the United States. It became the most effective clinical tool of its time in managing hallucinations, paranoia, and other symptoms of schizophrenia. But not in Iraq. Even in the modern era, psychiatrically ill patients were sentenced to Abu Ghraib without these modern advances, locked away, and the keys discarded. These patients were strapped to beds and beaten or tortured into submission by Iraqi guards.
Later, Abu Ghraib functioned as the torture chamber for those who either disagreed with Saddam Hussein or created a quiet discontent with his wishes. Iraqi citizens were hanged, mauled by animals, tortured, and brutalized in ways most Americans could never fathom. Some of the very worst of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities occurred right here, in these wretched buildings at Abu Ghraib.
Third, Abu Ghraib served as the center of the Hussein-era maximum-security prison system. Even a country abused by a bloodthirsty dictator has its share of hardcore criminals, and this is where Iraq sent them. Abu Ghraib housed the worst of the worst criminals—rogue degenerates, murderers, rapists, and sociopaths.
Fourth, the Abu Ghraib prison was to sequester away husbands and fathers who resisted turning their wives or daughters over to Saddam or his two favorite sons to satisfy the Husseins’ perverted sexual desires. If either Saddam or his sons sought the company of a man’s wife and the husband did not consent, the husband was arrested by a member of Saddam’s thug guard and brought to Abu Ghraib for convincing sessions. The husband or father would be beaten and tortured beyond recognition until he would consent to having his wife raped by either Saddam Hussein or one of his sons. Thousands of women were hidden away in sex harems across Iraq.
My God, this truly is hell on earth. The things that must have happened here, even before we showed up . . .
Sam waited for me to absorb all he had told me, finally adding his own commentary. “Abu Ghraib is indeed a house of strange fathers, a place of many strange fathers. It has had many ghosts,” he said quietly. “The U.S. should not have come to Abu Ghraib.”
I couldn’t disagree with Sam, based on what I had just heard. I knew already that the Iraqi government told us not go to Abu Ghraib, that it was not the right place for any kind of U.S. operation, but I didn’t really understand that warning until I was there at this “house of strange fathers.” I came to think this phrase was a powerful metaphor for not only the prison of Abu Ghraib but also the half-assed, poorly planned postwar occupation. There really wasn’t much of a plan. I remembered how, as the whole world watched, President Bush stood on that aircraft carrier and declared that the war was over. To us on the battlefield it seemed as though the administration believed that, like in the first Gulf War, the Iraqis would lay down their weapons and go home. But out on the front lines, it was clear there was no well-thought-out plan for what to do with the 20,000 prisoners we soon accumulated.
That’s how we ended up in Abu Ghraib and why I was standing there wondering if I could fix the mess we’d made. Our leaders had expected the occupation of Iraq to be a very, very short-term venture and the prison at Abu Ghraib was already there, so why not use it? We soon found the answer to that question. As many soldiers would say, right from the beginning, the U.S. occupation of Abu Ghraib was a “Charlie Foxtrot,” which could be loosely translated to mean a real shit mess. The big picture was that it was a failed postwar strategic plan. At the same time America watched our “strange fathers” lead us into a war that we now know had little to do with a real threat at that time. Strained logic forced us to swallow the idea that Saddam actually had something to do with 9/11.
All of this was running through my mind as I was finally surveying the scene at Abu Ghraib. As the interpreter said “house of strange fathers” to me for the third or fourth time, I began to think that not only was this place a house of strange fathers but also that it took a bunch of strange fathers to actually believe this ragtag Iraqi army was any real threat to America’s national security. I was not an infantry officer, but even I could see that the best Iraqi infantry unit would get their ass kicked in a fight with any Boy Scout troop in North Carolina.
As we walked from one side of the compound to the other I was increasingly lightheaded and nauseated. With an apology, I asked the general to excuse me because I didn’t feel well. I found my way to my room, an actual old prison cell with bars, about thirty square feet in size. I remembered Sergeant Danny’s warning to me to stay in an old prison cell, not one of the tents, so I at least understood why I had been put in such a shithole. In Abu Ghraib, apparently, this was high living. I collapsed onto the Army cot and passed out. Only later would I learn I was suffering from what was called the “Iraqi crud,” which was soldiers’ slang for the worst flu of your life. I awoke at 11 p.m., feeling no better than when I had gone to sleep. I resolved to see the physicians in the morning and get treated if need be. In the meantime, I had a job to do.
As I walked to the intel center, I was intensely curious to see what was really going on in this place, and more than a bit apprehensive. Walking past the sleeping soldier who was supposed to be guarding the entrance to the building, I entered and proceeded down the long hall. I moved toward the angry screams, cussing, and yelling that were coming from one of the interrogation booths. Peeking inside the door, I saw the twenty-two-year-old female interrogator being bested by a forty-year-old terrorist prisoner. The American soldier had tears in her eyes as the prisoner yelled with ferocity in Arabic and the interpreter translated.
Finally, having absorbed enough, I marched next door—about fifty steps away—into the headquarters building. The ratty cement building that held high-level intelligence papers and computers was unlocked. Inside, I found a twenty-five-year-old supervisor fast asleep with his feet up, a Playboy magazine clutched tightly to his chest. As I stood over him, I noticed he wore dark aviator sunglasses, despite it being 1:30 in the morning, and despite his being asleep. They reminded me of the sunglasses worn by the “guards” in the Stanford Prison Experiment. I tapped on his right shoulder to get his attention.
“Hey man, one of your soldiers needs some help in the booth,” I said calmly. He woke and looked startled, as if thinking, Where’d this guy come from? He snapped to attention.
“She’s getting her ass kicked and abused by this prisoner,” I continued. “It might be a good idea if we call it a night and talk about this in the morning.”
“I got it, sir,” he said with a southern accent. “We’ll shut it down for the night!”
As I walked away he called after me. “Colonel, who are you, sir?”
I turned. “Son, I’m Colonel James.”
“Well sir . . . But sir, may I ask why you’re here, sir? We ain’t never had no colonel here this time of the night, sir.”
“Yes, I can see that,” I responded, with a bit of a grimace. “Well, I’m here to keep us safe and help make us all better.” Then I turned and went to disturb the nap of the sleeping MP guard at the front door.
Like the supervisor I had just roused, the MP was stunned to see a full colonel at 1:30 a.m. at the intel center. She would later learn to expect my presence at all hours of the day and night. On my order, the MP called for assistance and escorted the unruly prisoner to his cell.
As I was leaving the intel center, alone in Abu Ghraib’s darkness, I could hear the young female interrogator crying outside the building. Ending the interrogation session had not ended her pain. The sobs I heard inside had progressed to painful heaves, with her gasps for air echoing in the quietness of the night. As I approached her, she made little effort to hide her distress, confiding in me right away.
“Colonel, I’m so afraid . . . and I’m no good at this.” She got the words out between loud cries and gasps.
I shot her a big grin. “Well, you want to talk about being scared?” I replied. “Soldier, I thought I was gonna shit my pants on that helicopter this morning. But let’s not talk about me. I need to tell you it took a lot of restraint not to smack that guy in the booth a few minutes ago.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Her curiosity was distracting her, helping her calm down.
“Heck, I was impressed with the way you kept your resolve and didn’t resort to yelling, screaming, and cussing. That took a lot of discipline,” I explained, positively reinforcing her smart actions. She stopped crying and started pulling herself together.
“Thank you, sir . . . I guess that’s something.”
Within a few minutes, we were laughing and telling stories about the Midwest and how bad the food was at Abu Ghraib. I told her that we would need each other’s help to get through this, and that I would get with her in the morning to review what went wrong and what went well with the interview. By the time I said good night, I felt like we’d made some progress with helping her cope.
As I walked away she said, “Colonel, you’re the first full bird I ever saw come out here after dark.”
That didn’t surprise me, but it was disturbing nonetheless. In about forty-five minutes in my first visit to the intel center, I had already stumbled across a major factor in how the abuses and torture had occurred at Abu Ghraib. It was plain as day: these were young, unguided soldiers. How could anyone expect them to stay tough and controlled under these conditions and pressures without any supervisor to help them? I tried to take comfort in knowing that I was here to try and help guide us all back to some sense of decency.
Now, wide awake, I wanted to see the rest of the forward operating base (FOB). Knowing that prison escapes were common at Abu Ghraib, I chambered a round in my 9mm pistol before I walked around, in case I was attacked in the darkness. Buildings were far apart at the compound. Between each building there was only darkness—that deep darkness we don’t usually see back home—sand, and the possibility of a desperate prisoner escapee stumbling upon me alone. The foul smell of Abu Ghraib coupled with the endless expanse of hot, dry sand created a frequent urge to gag. The place smelled worse than any U.S. dump or Iowa pig farm I had ever been on. I was amazed at how big the compound was. I must have walked around for an hour before I saw a single other guard or MP. This, I thought, might be just one of many reasons why there were frequent escapes. Once a prisoner made it outside the building he was in, there was little to stop him.
As I explored in the darkness, the constant state of readiness, watching for a crazed prisoner to jump out at me, kept my mind from noticing how long I was out looking around, and the hours flew by. Then I noticed that the chow hall was being opened, so I knew it must be about 6 a.m., even though the sun had not risen. As I walked toward the lights of the chow hall in the distance, there was nothing but silence in the hot air, a profound silence that seemed to be the right accompaniment to the utter darkness. Suddenly, the whole compound shook. Shit! Incoming mortars . . .
An all-out attack on the prison had started. At the gates, a massive car bomb exploded, shaking the entire compound, and as I’d learn later, killing a marine. The force of the car bomb was so powerful, even more than a hundred yards away, that I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell to the ground. I hadn’t even been at the FOB for twenty-four hours and I had already learned that life could end in an instant at this hellhole. I stayed low as I scrambled toward the lights in the distance, hoping to find some place safer than out in the middle of the compound, waiting for a mortar to land right on my head. I was trying to move forward and watch for some indication of where the mortars were landing when, suddenly, the attack stopped.
With the last explosion, the quiet of the morning returned as if nothing had ever happened. The only sound was that of some personnel far in the distance responding to the car bomb. I resumed my walk to the chow hall, and when I got to the building, I found that the attack hadn’t warranted much notice from the old hands at Abu Ghraib. Apparently, a few mortars and a car bomb were no reason to miss breakfast. I joined the line, but I was unimpressed with the food: scrambled eggs that didn’t look like scrambled eggs and cream of wheat that didn’t look like cream of wheat. I knew that all of the cooks and servers were foreign nationals, so I had to wonder if they even knew what they were making for these Americans.
Is there poison in the food? I wondered for a moment.
But I was too hungry to ponder that thought for long. Not hungry enough to eat those eggs, however. I got some fruit.
I took my tray and sat down at a table with some soldiers who had all been at Abu Ghraib for four to six months. The soldiers had experienced the fog of war and were not anxious as I sat with them. I tried to joke about being caught outside when the mortars came in, but my experience didn’t seem to impress these soldiers, who probably had been through much worse before I arrived. While we ate and complained about the food, I introduced myself and told them why I had been sent to Abu Ghraib. Sensing that they didn’t have any reluctance about talking to a colonel over breakfast, I asked them what they thought had caused the problems here.
The first answer came from a twenty-two-year-old male sergeant from Kansas with a face full of freckles from his time in the sun. He looked at me as if the answer were obvious, like I was really behind the curve for even asking.
“Those fuckers left us here, sir,” he answered, as simply as that, and went back to eating.
“Who are ‘those fuckers,’ soldier?” I asked.
He put his fork down on the table and directed his full attention to answering my question. “Sir, there are about thirty generals at Camp Victory living in luxury. They are either too gutless or have no interest in coming to this place. Sir, this is a dangerous place and you can get your ass fucking killed out here.”
Having already experienced the first morning’s attack, I knew just how true the statement was.
I asked them about the different types of prisoners by ethnicity, wondering how many of the prisoners were Sunnis or Shiites. To my surprise, the soldiers informed me that there were more divisions than just ethnic ones, telling me that we had really made the war effort worse by arresting women and children. I turned to the sergeant, surprised by what I’d just heard.
“You mean we have women and kids locked up here?” I asked.
“Yes sir, we do,” he said.
I was incredulous but kept cool, wanting to dig deeper. “Okay, but I’m not tracking with you. How does this make the war effort worse?”
The sergeant explained. “Sir, I can’t get my arms around us locking up a bunch of grandmas. How in the heck is a seventy-five-year-old lady a threat to U.S. security?”
“Sergeant, you also said we have kids locked up here. Is this correct?”
“Yes sir, we have about ten to fifteen teenagers who are ‘terrorists.’” The sergeant made quote signs in the air when he said this.
I was stunned and pushed aside my food tray, my appetite not as strong as it had been earlier. “Sergeant, can you take me to see the old women and these kids?”
“Yes sir, I’ll take you to the camp right now.”
We got up from the table immediately and put our trays away. As we left the chow hall, the sun was coming up and we could hear the Muslim prayers being played on the mosque loudspeakers across the street from the FOB. The sergeant picked up speed and motioned for me to keep up.
“Sir, we need to walk real fast,” he explained. “When those fuckers stop praying, they get all fired up and start shooting at us.”
We entered a dark, smelly building that served as a central lockup and screening facility. He opened the prison door. Inside, three elderly women were being held until they could be “processed.” I asked the crusty and angry warrant officer in charge why these women were being held. It was clear that my presence there was a bother to the warrant officer. I later learned that he was angry because his retirement papers were rescinded by the intel superiors because they needed him to stick around. Back in the States, he had a new job and home lined up, and it all had to be placed on hold due to this deployment.
The warrant officer responded to my question matter-of-factly. “Colonel, when the infantry guys storm a building or house, they scarf up everybody in the house—Mom, Dad, little Junior, Grandpa, and the bad guy they’re specifically targeting. They don’t have time to sort it out, so we have to do it.”
I was guided to another part of the FOB, a dog-pen-like place that held the teenage boys. In the 130-degree heat, without any air-conditioning, my country had around fifteen boys locked up in a tent much like wild animals. There was an overwhelming stench of feces. The conditions were so horrifying, so inhumane, that I struggled not to vomit in the presence of these soldiers. Each of the boys had a unique stare. Some simply stood in a catatonic state, others yelled obscenities, and some reached with their hands as to grab me as I walked by, desperate for me to listen to their story. It was clear from their decent weight that they were being well fed, but it was equally clear from the scarcity of personnel and foul surroundings that they lacked the medical attention of a pediatrician, psychologists, Arabic-speaking schoolteachers, Muslim chaplains, physical education activities, or any special needs consistent with what any U.S. juvenile correctional facility provided. Most animals in our country are afforded better. I was disgusted.
I later learned that at least half of these boys had been raped in captivity by other prisoners, or as a rite of passage in their hometowns, something I could still find hard to comprehend. Despite having heard of such rapes, and Hassan’s patient explanation at Gitmo, it still was hard to reconcile the sad situation in my mind. Then, after that experience, we put those teenage boys in this shithole. Why? And why had we not provided them with the services of a child psychologist? The warrant officer and the sergeant had no answers.
As I left the area, I could not get past the criminal way we were treating these children. Even if they were involved in fighting U.S. troops, and that was not a certainty, they were still young people who deserved a minimum of dignity and care. I knew that even the hardest of convicted juvenile murderers in our country would be treated far better, far more humanely. I could not get their faces out of my mind—the haunting images, the young boys looking at me, reaching out to me, pleading with their eyes, hoping I would finally be the one to help them instead of walking away. I had to walk away that night, but it nearly killed me.
I found my way back to my room, dropped to my knees at my bedside, prayed, then cried my eyes out. My God, how could a nation as mine, with so much good in it, with such a commitment to decency and the good of the individual, treat human beings this way? In my psyche, deep in my soul, I felt as though tonight I had seen the bowels of hell.
I couldn’t sleep. The pain in my soul would not allow it. I went for a walk, hoping to find another soldier who could tell me if there was a commercial phone anywhere on the base. I needed to talk to my momma. My mother was an eighty-one-year-old, proper Southern Baptist Creole woman from New Orleans and I desperately needed to hear her voice in this hellish place. Her faith, her calm voice, and her warmth had quieted my anxiety during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and in the years since, her steady, soothing voice had calmed my troubled soul on many occasions. I had never needed her more than I did that night in Abu Ghraib.
I found a soldier who directed me to the phone center, where I sat down and called my momma in New Orleans. As soon as she answered, she could hear the fear and loss of hope in my voice. Her voice instantly offered solace, but my voice still trembled as I told her this place was awful and that I was considering asking to be relieved, to be sent anywhere else but Abu Ghraib. My mother had never given me bad advice, and I needed to ask her if it was okay for me to give up, to admit that this was too much for me. My mother had a sixth-grade education and she basically taught herself to read and write by reading her Bible, got a GED, and went on to nursing school later on in her life. Whenever I was troubled, troubled in a way that it shook my soul, I would always call my momma.
Without any introduction, from her biblical library in her head, she began to tell me about Paul’s journey to Macedonia and the trials and tribulations he found along the way.
“Son, Paul didn’t know if he could do it either,” she said in the most reassuring voice. “He wanted to quit, too. He didn’t know what lay ahead of him or why God wanted him there.”
I said yes, I remembered.
“Son, God has chosen you for this journey,” she said. “Son, do not quit. Ask God to show you the way and he will.”