Choosing a Path
June–July 2004
I went back to my room, exhausted. I had cried my soul out, and hadn’t slept for well over twenty-four hours. But I still found myself restless, the wheels in my head moving too fast to sleep, so I left my room and started to walk around the FOB again. I ended up on the other side of the post. It was a godawful place. It looked like a prison camp in a third world country. I could not escape the odor of feces, dead animals, mixed with a novel, revolting scent my person had not previously experienced.
As I patrolled, I couldn’t help but notice a big horse of a man walking toward me. It was Major Tom Smithon, the brigade surgeon. Major Smithon, an Army Reserve cardiologist from Mississippi, had a haggard, unhappy look chiseled into his face. Although I knew that he was a brilliant and dedicated physician, it was immediately clear that he was one who had experienced many of life’s disappointments. I would come to learn that he was treated by his fellow officers like the chubby boy who was either selected last or never chosen at all for the schoolyard team. His wishes, ideas, or requests for improving Abu Ghraib in any way were always acknowledged by his superiors or fellow colleagues, but ultimately denied.
When Smithon saw me, he obviously realized who I must be. He grabbed me firmly and said, “Sir, I’m so goddamned glad to see you. I’ve been pinch-hitting as the post shrink since I got here. I have no idea what I’m doing. I medicate most of the psychotic patients and suicidal patients so they’re not a danger to themselves or us.”
“Is the post psychiatrist or psychologist not very helpful to you?” I asked.
He replied, “Shit, sir, there ain’t none here.”
For the umpteenth time that day/night, I was flabbergasted. “What is the population on this post, Major?” I asked.
“Well sir, we have about six to eight thousand prisoners, sometimes it’s hard to tell because the numbers change every day, plus we have about two thousand soldiers and marines here as well, sir.”
“Are you telling me, Major, that we have ten thousand people on this post and mental health services are not available?” My voice was rising despite my attempt to remain calm.
“Yes sir, that’s exactly what I’m telling you,” he replied. “The 322nd Medical Brigade sends a psychologist and a chaplain here once in a while, but that’s only to see U.S. soldiers and marines.”
“Well, why don’t the psychologist and chaplain treat the prisoners while they’re here?”
“Sir, they tell me that they were ordered by the commanding general of the 322nd Medical Brigade to not provide any services to prisoners. Their general thinks it ain’t his mission to provide mental health care to prisoners.”
I stood speechless. I struggled for words that appropriately described my emotions and none came. This wasn’t even a conflict between my roles as doctor and soldier. Certainly in my position as a psychologist this offended me, but it outraged me just as much in my role as an Army officer. Deliberately withholding mental health care from prisoners—when they clearly needed it and the help was available—was inexcusable. I was filled with a rage and a deep sense of shame for my country that I had never before felt. At that moment, it occurred to me, I had just walked into a new mission.
On top of guiding the intel center out of the abyss of shame, I would need to build a mental health system for the prisoners as well as the soldiers. This would be a daunting task: nowhere in the entire country of Iraq could you find extra psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers simply standing around with nothing to do. I was on my own in these early days, with no biscuit staff to share the workload.
But I did have support. From the first meeting I had with General Miller after arriving, he emphasized that he was behind me. This took care of Step 1 of my plan right away—have the commanding general be my only boss. He also stressed that he expected me to come up with the solutions that would set Abu Ghraib right. He made it clear to the leadership on post that I had open access to anything I needed to accomplish the mission. I was tasked with putting together for him a plan for what we needed to do in order to improve morale, interrogations, the work done by the MPs, facilities, health care for the detainees and the staff, post security, and how I would manage the overarching psychological despair at Abu Ghraib.
The second day I was in Abu Ghraib, I introduced myself to the commanding officer of the Combat Support Hospital. Their mission was providing medical services for the roughly eight thousand prisoners and the approximately two thousand soldiers and marines at Abu Ghraib. The commanding officer of the Combat Support Hospital was a disheveled-looking, elderly colonel who was the senior physician of the medical team at Abu Ghraib. Colonel Barksdale was a well-respected physician back home in Fresno, California, but in this combat zone his soft-spoken style, depressed personality, and schizoid tendencies served neither the mission nor his team of doctors, nurses, and medics very well. Some would refer to him as a “quiet and distant leader.”
That was a nice way of saying that the man’s brain and heart were fried. The instant I looked into his eyes and shook his hand, I saw that empty combat stare—a stare that allowed me to see his pain, almost like a reflective mirror into his soul. I could see the deep, vast emptiness in his emotional reserve tank. I knew that Colonel Barksdale had become engulfed in the “fog of war.” It’s called a fog because it is like trying to navigate in a thick fog; a lack of clear vision and poor judgment were common and poor decisions would be made. Colonel Barksdale had become an ineffective combat leader and I needed to do whatever I could to help him. His eyes had that “deer in the headlights” stare, which was not a good look for the person in charge of the post hospital. He had a scruffy look about him with his hair uncombed and his uniform a mess. His words rolled off his lips from the side of his mouth in a mumble most of the time. He was angry and I would come to learn why. He felt abandoned by the commanding general of the 322nd Medical Brigade, who was living in luxury back in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Like for Major Smithon, Colonel Barksdale’s requests for additional staff, basic medical supplies, and support were denied or caught up in motionless bureaucratic red tape. It was as though the Abu Ghraib medical staff were either an inconvenience or an embarrassment for the medical leadership in the lavish Green Zone.
Colonel Barksdale’s appearance and attitude were troubling, but I was gratified to see that he was not giving up on his mission. Even though the colonel and his medical staff were mentally fried, they continued to drive on and do the best they could with few resources from senior medical leaders. They regularly saw the horrors of war but their needs were constantly shunned by the medical leadership in Iraq. In spite of this, they still managed to save many lives and care for many prisoners and soldiers. As I saw them struggle on despite the circumstances, I felt privileged to know them.
Colonel Barksdale and his people were kept busy because, as I was constantly reminded, Abu Ghraib was a dangerous place. He told me about how one night before my arrival, Iraqi insurgents started aimlessly firing mortars into the Abu Ghraib compound. Rather than killing American soldiers, these mortars landed inside the prison camp that housed many Iraqi prisoners. On that night, twenty-nine Iraqi prisoners were blown up by their own people in that senseless attack. Colonel Barksdale and his medical team worked all night in the emergency room and surgery units of the Combat Support Hospital, saving many lives. Guts, brains, eyes, limbs, and raw human flesh peppered the prison camp ground. The Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center, which bordered the prison camp, was almost overrun by prisoners running through barbed-wire fencing fleeing the mortar carnage. That seemed to be the turning point psychologically for both the medical staff and many at the intel center, the point at which their minds started sliding downhill fast. By the time I arrived, it seemed as though they were still performing their medical duties, but they had the facial expressions of firemen whose buddies had died when a burning roof collapsed from above as they all watched. Like these firemen, often their only choice was to stand and watch others die.
My days were packed with meetings, walking around the Abu Ghraib post, consulting with the military police, interrogators, and medical staff. In addition, I had to find two other psychologists in the United States and some enlisted psych techs to build a biscuit team. My goal was to fix hell—this place called Abu Ghraib—and it would require intense effort to not only build a team for the biscuit but to get the mental health resources that were needed for the detainees and the soldiers on the post. Frequent power outages, mortar attacks, broken computers, and crappy phone connections slowed the progress.
I spent several hours a day building relationships with suspicious interrogators as well as the military police leaders. They all wondered, “What is a psychologist doing here and how can he help me?” To this end, I had many cups of coffee with the more experienced officers on the post as well as the young men and women stuck in this place—the eighteen- to twenty-year-old privates. Soon we were able to start forging a policy and doctrine on how to manage detainees in a safe and humane way, and how to do interrogations without any abuse.
My mission frequently required me to convoy from Abu Ghraib to Baghdad, which could be an all-day affair. Traveling in Iraq was always risky business. Once you left the relative safety of the Abu Ghraib prison or any other American base, anything could happen. Even the folks back home had heard plenty about IEDs—improvised explosive devices—and knew that a great proportion of the American deaths in Iraq were caused by these bombs. The devices were usually hidden along the road and an Iraqi was hiding somewhere nearby, ready to set them off remotely when a military convoy passed by. Often improvised from standard bombs, mortars, and other ordnance, the bombs could produce a huge blast that would tear through even an armored Humvee. In addition, you were always at risk of being ambushed, particularly when the convoy had to slow or stop for any reason. Those dangers meant that traveling from Abu Ghraib to Baghdad, or anywhere else, was never as simple as hopping in a truck and driving off. It always required a convoy of Humvees in which every passenger was armed and ready to fight. When there was trouble, Army policy was to just keep going and drive through the kill zone as long as your vehicle was still operational. The Marines, on the other hand, would stop their convoy and go after the fucker who tried to kill them, even if it meant they might lose someone in the process.
Even though it should have been a thirty-minute drive to Baghdad, it often turned into an all-day event. You could get stuck out on the highway after an ambush or a bomb had been discovered. In these situations, the roads would be shut down and the bomb disposal units would take all day to find and dispose of the bomb.
While on a convoy I had plenty of time to sit in the Humvee, my weapon at the ready, and just think. I used this time to gather myself, my thoughts, my bearings. I began to realize the scope of my mission in Abu Ghraib. It was much bigger than just the interrogation cell. This undertaking would test every fiber of my moral compass. Each day, to remain sane, ethical, and moral, the challenges of Abu Ghraib would come to force a true north compass check. My beacon out of this darkness would be the question I asked myself over and over again: Which road would a decent human being take?
That question ran through my mind every time I talked with soldiers at Abu Ghraib who had been through so much already but seemed so unlike those we had seen abusing detainees in the pictures on CNN. One of those soldiers who had been through hell before my arrival was a seasoned Army warrant officer named Betty Patterson, whom I met on my tenth day in Abu Ghraib. This was no innocent young recruit or a soft desk jockey who’d never seen a moment of stress in the field. Warrant Officer Patterson was experienced and tough even before she arrived in Abu Ghraib, but she told me about how this place had nearly broken her. On Christmas Day 2003, she told me, thirty-three mortars landed inside the Abu Ghraib compound.
“Colonel, I sat in my room all day and night on Christmas Day with my helmet and body armor on. I just sat on my bed and rocked back and forth all day and night. It was fucking terror in my head I ain’t never seen before.”
What a way to spend Christmas, sitting on your bed wondering if the next mortar would kill you. She told me about another mortar barrage she had endured.
“Two Army interrogators who were friends of mine were killed standing right outside the interrogation booths,” she said, her eyes getting that distant look as she relived the moment in her mind. “Sir, I heard the howling, screeching sound of an incoming mortar. The ground shook. I fell to the ground and heard my buddies screaming. The next thing, we were kneeling down and saying a prayer. They were gone. They were two very fine Americans. I still see their faces at night sometimes.”
Betty spoke vividly of how she came to feel that she had no control over her fate, what social scientists have described as “learned helplessness.” Learned helplessness is what happens to a person’s mind when no matter what you do, or which way you turn, you get shocked or hurt emotionally or physically. I learned about this condition in graduate school through an experiment that involves placing a lab rat on an electrical hotplate that has a maze on top of it, then letting the rat try to find the route that does not yield an electrical shock. If the rat gets shocked no matter which way it goes in the maze, it will soon just stop and roll over and stop trying to determine its fate—the situation has convinced the rat that it is helpless, that there is no use trying. Learned helplessness is what Warrant Officer Patterson as well as many others I knew from Abu Ghraib described to me. No matter which way they turned in the Abu Ghraib maze, they were shocked with horror, death, poor leadership, inadequate facilities, and foul living conditions unfit for humans.
What can I do to fix this? I asked myself. “We need a hospital with not only a large staff, but well-resourced, fresh staff and with the necessary mental health services,” I wrote down on the back of a Stars & Stripes newspaper. (I needed to learn to carry a notepad with me. My great thoughts were accumulating on airplane napkins and old newspapers.) So far it had been a battle to convince the medical leadership in Baghdad that the mission at Abu Ghraib warranted a large field hospital. It would have been easier talking to a camel out in the barren desert.
One of the roadblocks was Colonel Kerry Matson, the senior mental health officer in Iraq. Colonel Matson, an old friend of mine, was assigned as the coordinator for all mental health services and staffing in Iraq. She had been a mental health officer for nearly twenty-five years, yet I could not get her to see the need to have a permanent mental health team assigned to Abu Ghraib and the other prison way south, Camp Bucca. Colonel Matson just didn’t want to hear it. She believed that it was a waste to send a full complement of mental health services to Abu Ghraib. I trusted Matson and saw this officer as a confidante and friend, but I disagreed with Kerry on the battle plan for mental health services at Abu Ghraib. We often had lunch together when I convoyed to Camp Victory in Baghdad, where Matson was stationed in relative comfort and with nearly everything the Army could offer at her disposal. Colonel Matson argued that if a soldier at Abu Ghraib needed services, we could just load him up in a Humvee and drive him twenty-seven miles to Baghdad to see a psychiatrist. After all, driving twenty-seven miles to see a psychiatrist wouldn’t be considered unreasonable back home in the States, right? I couldn’t help but think that Colonel Matson was seeing this issue purely as a health care professional, rather than through the eyes of a soldier. Colonel Matson didn’t have a problem with loading one soldier up in a Humvee and sending him back to Camp Victory for a brief appointment with a psychiatrist. It was a dumbass idea and outright dangerous.
Colonel Matson had lost sight of the fact that we had many soldiers at Abu Ghraib who needed mental health services. The killings, the carnage, sexual assaults, depression, and fear were abundant at Abu Ghraib and the officer responsible for coordinating services at the compound failed to see the need for these services to be offered there. I had to try to appeal to the soldier in my friend.
“Kerry, you’re forgetting one thing. Back home, that soldier can hop in a car by himself or with a buddy and go to the doctor. In Abu Ghraib, getting that one soldier to Baghdad requires a convoy of three armored Humvees. That’s a total of nine soldiers to deliver one patient to the Army hospital in Camp Victory. You really think that’s a good way to get mental health services to these folks?”
It took a bit more back-and-forth, with some arguing about how many soldiers really would need to take that dangerous convoy, but I won the debate, for the moment at least, when Colonel Matson gave in. This was only one small victory; there was plenty more to be done, and over the next few weeks my friend drove me up the wall by saying no to every request, every suggestion for improving mental health care.
Colonel Matson wasn’t just trying to be obstinate when my efforts were resisted. She was in turn being pressured by the senior physician in Baghdad, the commanding general of the 322nd Medical Brigade, Brigadier General Thomas Huck. Huck believed that it was not his mission to provide mental health care to detainees. One reason Matson was being pushed around was that, although a brilliant mental health officer, she lacked the squared-away appearance required of all good military officers—a perfect uniform and an attitude to match. Matson’s uniform was never quite right, just like her posture and the way she carried herself. It was all close enough to be technically compliant, but the West Point graduates in Baghdad instantly spotted any shortcomings. Without a real military bearing in her appearance and attitude, Colonel Matson might be considered a good mental health officer but would never be seen as “one of the boys” in a combat zone. But I also knew that her appearance wasn’t the only explanation for why she was seen as an outsider. Her boss, the commanding general, wasn’t respected much either, and that undercut her authority with the troops. Her boss was a squared-away type, but the troops questioned him for entirely different reasons related to his job performance.
After a while, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to make much progress with Colonel Matson, nor the leadership at the 322nd Medical Brigade. I decided to work around these folks and go right to General Miller on this one. General Miller had little respect for the commanding general of the 322nd Medical Brigade, so he was receptive to my ideas. My staff and I wrote up a detailed report on the mental health needs at Abu Ghraib.
During one of our regular meetings a few days later, I went over my argument for why we needed a large complement of mental health staff, ready to make the case with some passion if necessary. But General Miller just listened to my explanation and said, “Tell me what we need, Larry, and I’ll get it.” The timing was perfect because there was a debate back in Washington, D.C., at the Office of the Surgeon General, that centered on medical resources at Abu Ghraib. Many felt that the prison was going to close any day now, so why put resources into it? But as long as the issue was being debated, General Miller said, there was an opening to make our case for better medical services. My belief was that we had soldiers on the ground and it was the largest prison population in Iraq. These were the imperatives one needed to justify the resources, I thought. I explained to General Miller that the limited medical and mental health resources at Abu Ghraib were completely inadequate for this population. I told him we needed a team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and psych nurses to meet the need there. General Miller called the Army surgeon general that night and told him we needed more medical and mental health resources. The next day, Miller reported to me that by the end of July staff from the new 115th Field Hospital would start rolling into Abu Ghraib. And with it would be a complement of about thirty psychologists, psychiatrists, psych nurses, and psych techs.
Most of my medical colleagues in the region hated me for this. It would mean that some of them would have to leave the comfort and safety of their offices in the Green Zone in Baghdad by the U.S. embassy. Perhaps, just maybe, one or two of them would have to perform their medical duties in Abu Ghraib and risk getting shot at, or worse, not be able to watch TV. Let’s just say I didn’t shed a tear over their plight.
June was flying by quickly as I assembled a biscuit team of two psychologists in addition to myself and two enlisted psych techs. This was not easy. At this point there was neither a training course for a psychologist to acquire expertise in this area nor much that one could read. So Colonel Banks and I identified two solid reserve clinical psychologists who were willing to put their lives on the line and come to this hellhole. One of the officers was a senior ranking psychologist within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The other was well trained as a psychologist. I told Colonel Banks, “Just send me two good officers and I’ll do the rest.” He did exactly that. The enlisted techs who were selected had both worked for me previously; one at Walter Reed and the other at Gitmo. I trusted them to serve as my eyes and ears with the enlisted soldiers. Now that we were fully staffed we were able to be present at the intel center twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. The orders from the general, myself, and the intel center director were crystal clear: if the biscuit was not present, there were to be no interrogations. The additional benefit of having a full staff allowed me to spend a great deal of time walking the compound and grasping just what in the hell had led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the looming level of despair that was ever-present.
One of the first things I noticed was that these soldiers, who probably arrived in excellent physical condition, were starting to look like couch potatoes. I learned a long, long time ago as a psychologist that one of the worst things for a patient who is depressed is to be inactive and lie on the sofa most of the day, just hiding away from the world. We had a lot of that going on at Abu Ghraib, or at least the combat-zone equivalent of lying on the sofa. Most of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib gained ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds during their deployment. Many of them were attempting to hide and use food as their elixir. I knew that activity is one of the keys to getting a depressed patient turned around in the right direction. We got busy with putting together a physical fitness program, and I requested more equipment for the gym.
There were plenty of examples of how things had gotten so bad at Abu Ghraib. In addition to the lousy oversight by superior officers, the prison population posed challenges that would have been daunting even back in the States, with all the best resources available and without the fear of mortars coming at you. One day in early July, I was asked to see a teenage Iraqi soldier, a boy, who had been arrested for firing an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) at some soldiers. This kid was apparently suicidal. I went to see him and once again my heart dropped at the sight of such a young boy in our custody. I knew, though, that being held by the U.S. Army was not this child’s only problem.
His name was Abid, and though he was about fifteen years old, he could have passed for much older. He looked disheveled, smelled of feces, and wore tattered, torn clothes. He looked and smelled as bad as a sixty-year-old man living on the street in Washington, D.C. Through the aide of an Arabic interpreter, I learned that he had been kidnapped from his home by a local gang lord. Like most other teenage boys in his country, he was indoctrinated at a local mosque and believed that it was his duty to kill Americans and all other infidels. Also, he was angry because he felt that U.S. soldiers had wrongly captured his father and placed him in prison. The boy’s father, a truck driver, had lost his business and their home because he was locked up for eight months. It was apparent to me that Abid was very ill and the translator explained to me that the boy complained of a stomachache as well as wanting to kill himself. I called the camp physician to examine him. While we were waiting I chatted casually with the prisoner, with the aid of the interpreter, Harim. Eventually I got him laughing about how ugly his first girlfriend was.
“Hey, if you’re locked up here, at least you don’t have to see her in your hometown, right?” I waited for the translator, and then I saw a small grin creep across Abid’s face. He spoke softly to the translator, who then interpreted for me.
“He says he’s hoping the girl’s father will arrange for her to marry someone else while he is locked up,” Harim said. I looked at Abid and we both laughed out loud.
Seeing Abid laugh was some solace. In a way, even after my duty at Gitmo I was still sort of unprepared for this type of prisoner. Seeing a child in prison never seems right. But still, it’s not every day in the United States that you meet a teenager who was arrested for trying to blow the head off a policeman.
The living conditions were inhumane at Abu Ghraib, and it was particularly wrong for any youth to be housed in such filth. I needed to develop a rehabilitative plan for these young boys who were in our prison, to include their psychological, medical, academic, religious, and athletic needs. Our military was equally ill-prepared (medically, academically, in facilities/logistical planning, and in terms of mental health services) to manage the juvenile enemy combatant. No one was prepared for the large number of teenage terrorists we would encounter in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I worked closely with the camp physician and leadership to form the nucleus for a rehab team. We put in an order to improve the facilities with air-conditioning, and we made plans for adding recreational and educational activities. General Miller brokered a deal with the Iraqi minister of education to provide us with Iraqi tutors for the teenagers, and that helped us make tremendous progress with their rehabilitation.
I thought a lot about Abid while I was in Iraq. He could appear cheerful, kind, and engaging as long as you didn’t talk about why he wanted to kill Americans. That was when you realized you didn’t really want this kid hanging around your neighborhood. Whenever anyone asked him about shooting at soldiers, building weapons and IEDs, or bombmaking factories, he would sit up in his chair and the pupils of his brown eyes would dilate. He went from likable teenager to homicidal terrorist in an instant, like you had flipped a switch. He would begin each sentence with “It says in the Koran,” but he could never tell the Arabic translator where in the Koran it said so. He couldn’t read a lick! This was a common strategy of the Iraqi and Afghani leaders: deny people the ability to read. Illiteracy enslaved them in that they would have to rely on the Koran’s interpretation from the gang lord or the tribal leaders. They couldn’t read it for themselves and realize those people were feeding them a lot of bullshit to suit their own agenda. I learned that this was why so many schools in Afghanistan had minefields around them—to keep the children out of schools, to keep them dumb, to keep them useful.
The translator Harim would sometimes try to enlighten the young man about how he had been led astray by people who lied to him about the Koran. One afternoon he told Abid, “Islam is a peaceful religion. A good Muslim never hurts anybody with his hands or his mouth.”
“Kill all nonbelievers!” Abid shouted in response, full of intense rage. It was almost like the mental rigidity of many delusional patients I had seen over the years. I couldn’t help but ask myself on many occasions, Is Abid crazy? Can this be more than just a wrongheaded dedication to his cause? Is he thinking this way because of a delusional disorder?
These were questions our country was not prepared to answer, and even more so as they related to juvenile enemy combatants. The closest we had ever come to waging war against an enemy with a similar mind-set was when we fought the Japanese in World War II. The kamikaze suicide bombers would sign up for missions that required them to crash their planes into U.S. ships. We had never seen this prior to World War II—and the very idea of young people sacrificed by their leaders, and willing to be sacrificed, freaked us out at the time. The thought of such unstoppable fanaticism probably unnerved American servicemen even more than the actual damage wrought by the suicide attacks. That was terrorism. This time around in the global war on terrorism, we were unnerved by the idea of these teenage terrorists coming at us in such large numbers. Like the Japanese suicide bombers, the JECs are rarely talked out of their mind-set of “kill all nonbelievers.” In some regions, 10 to 20 percent of the Muslim fighters are teenagers. As the global war on terrorism spreads, we will have to dissect and analyze this issue. If we are to be effective in this war, we will have to ask, “Is this part of a mental delusion?”
The question has to be asked and the problem of teenage terrorists and their possible mental disorder has to be addressed. The first suicide bomber who walks into Madison Square Garden or Union Station may very well be a twelve- or thirteen-year-old with a backpack filled with C-4 explosives. I’m sure Abid would have been willing to do it.
Abid and the other JECs were constantly on my mind through June and July as I struggled to figure out how we should handle them, how I could care for their psychological needs as a doctor while fulfilling my duty to my country as a U.S. soldier. That was the type of question that often troubled me as I settled into operations in Abu Ghraib. I could never get away from the human suffering in this place. The screams and desperate faces of those young boys, and the smells of their filthy cages, came to me in my sleep, and they still do. And to this day, when I least expect it, I see the image of that young female interrogator being psychologically tortured by the terrorist in the late night of my first twenty-four-hour period at Abu Ghraib. Sometimes I can clearly see her face and hear her gasping for air as though she were standing right next to me. If I could pick the one thing that was perhaps the most broken about Abu Ghraib, it would be those sailors, soldiers, and marines abandoned when night fell upon them. Rarely would there be any officers or senior enlisted soldiers providing oversight, supervision, or guidance to interrogators in the late-night hours. I knew that it would be an uphill battle to convince many of the supervising interrogators to come out of their cement buildings, stand over the shoulders of these young interrogators, and provide 100 percent supervision at all times.
I eventually asked myself why a supervisor would not want to come and work with their subordinates or provide the necessary oversight. There were really only two or three answers I could come up with. Perhaps fear, desperation, and hopelessness hung over the sand of Abu Ghraib like an early morning fog on a fall day. There was no respite from fear for the troops at this place. Most of us, when we experienced fear, could find a safe haven, a sanctuary—a psychological safe place. The fear doesn’t just go on and on and on. Abu Ghraib lacked the usual things most American boys and girls grew to expect and experience in their lives back home—physical and emotional safety. I could see it in their eyes. As a child my mother’s calm voice soothed me. “Son, it’s gonna be okay. You’ll feel better in the morning,” she would say. No one here had their mothers to reassure them, but soldiers need the same thing from their commanders, the adult, military equivalent of hearing that someone is in control and watching over them and making sure everything will be fine. These soldiers lacked the comfort of their leaders telling them it would be okay. Rather, the leaders would commonly express or show their sense of hopelessness and that things would get worse.
Toward the end of July it became clear to me that this was the answer. Many of the leaders at Abu Ghraib simply did not want to be there. They were angry and depressed, and not hiding it well. It was like a festering cancer. So my goal was to lead by example and sleep only perhaps three or four hours and spend the rest of my time at the intel center. I wanted those soldiers to see a colonel walking around all the time, to see me there at all times of the day and night, with a good word for them and a good attitude. This was the second of the eleven steps I had formulated for fixing this place—be an active, positive influence at all times.
I thought that leading by example would be what the doctor ordered. It worked. Over time it became the norm to see other officers and senior enlisted soldiers walking the halls, being there for the junior soldiers and even having a little fun. It made a difference for those soldiers.