“They must think we’re like Rome,” said Howe, a quiet Wisconsin native who buried his nose in “Popular Mechanics.”
“Hell, yeah, they think we’re Rome,” said Barger, the cocky gunner from Cincinnati who talked about “H.E.” (the high-explosive rounds at his fingertips) as much as his young bride. “They think we’re here to take their country.”
“A little country like this shouldn’t have come up on our radar unless it was for the oil value,” Howe said.
“We’re here because this guy [Saddam Hussein] is just a bad dude,” Barger said. “He supports terrorists and he’s got chem-bio. What more do you need?”
“But we haven’t found any yet,” Howe said.
Barger and Howe arrived in Tikrit, where their battalion commander, Lt. Col. Phil Battaglia, took possession from the Marines. A dozen years ago, Iraq possessed the fourth largest army in the world, and it showed. Guns and ammunition were everywhere, and Marine Brig. Gen. John F. Kelly, a loquacious Boston Irishman, stood outside one of Saddam’s Tigris River bluff palaces and explained his philosophy for disarming and rebuilding Tikrit to Battaglia and other commanders of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. Initially, the Marines took every weapon they found at checkpoints. But the sheiks, a group of Tikrit’s seven tribal leaders, convinced the Marines that guns were necessary for self-defense. “As an American Marine,” Kelly said, “it’s hard to advocate gun control.”
Tikrit did not erupt into celebration when the Marines arrived. The steely, evil eye was unmistakable. “You’ll get the look,” Kelly explained to the senior Army commanders, who wore their own blank expressions, “and you’ll know what I mean when you get it.” The Tikritis were furious when soldiers came to their homes to take down images of Saddam. The mustachioed messiah had been a passport to good living, like flying Old Glory in the U.S. One Iraqi was found rubbing his keffiyeh (a traditional head scarf) on the face of a fallen, scratched statue of Saddam. “Look,” Kelly said, “we think the bad guy/good guy ratio here is about 70/30. So, you’re going to have to deal with some bad guys.” The Marines aggressively checked backsliding. After somebody sniped at the Americans one night, they closed the town’s vital bridge. “Psy-op message: Don’t shoot at Marines,” said Lt. Col. Duffy White.
The Fourth I.D. arrived, shouldering Washington’s abysmal post-war planning. They got little in the way of nation-building blocks from the Bush-appointed Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the post-war central command (later renamed the Coalition Provisional Authority). ORHA was stillborn, and the Army officials above Battaglia knew it. “Well,” the reliably frank Army V Corps commander, Lt. Gen. William Wallace, told me a year ago in Tikrit, “we’re making this up here as we go along.” They were rebuilding without a distinct “model” and almost always without non-governmental organizations who had shied away because of safety concerns. What’s more, interpreters were harder to find than evidence that Iraq had ever possessed nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Tikrit was the last city to fall, and its capture signaled Iraq’s transition from war making to peacemaking and rebuilding. The town’s centerpiece was Saddam’s hometown palace complex, resplendent with sandstone and marble halls – and rooms full of Nazi propaganda – along the verdant Tigris River valley. Dozens of soaring examples of new and old Arabic architecture surrounded filtered, man-made lakes and channels on a manicured, 300-acre compound worthy of Disney. Tikrit was Saddam’s Berlin, a natural center of gravity, home to Baath Party members who had fled Baghdad. Five of the Bush administration’s 55 Most Wanted were “al-Tikritis,” and the Hotel Tikrit had housed the Special Security Officers, Saddam’s bodyguards. The place was so infested that secret U.S. Army memos warned that it was under control of a Ba’athist “shadow government.”
It wasn’t hard for soldiers to imagine how the locals felt. Some of Battaglia’s men sensed it in late April when he ordered the battalion’s tactical operations center to relocate next-door to a mosque, in a former funeral home-turned-Ba’ath Party meetinghouse. In Saddam’s birthplace neighborhood of Owja, just south of Tikrit, the tight quarters required tanks to pivot in the mosque’s parking lot, where they left black skids and misshapen balls of rubber. Vehicle and generator engines roared through the night. “This has Beirut written all over it,” Maj. Matthew Coleman, an officer who had cultivated rich sources in the neighborhood, said as he walked in.
Other officers chimed in. “This makes me very uncomfortable,” said Cpt. Leif Espeland, the battalion’s Lutheran chaplain. “This doesn’t fall under the respecting religious sites rule, as far as I’m concerned.” Spc. Bret Turpin, 34, a Jewish supply manager, marveled at the insensitivity. “We’re not peacekeeping,” he said. “We’re making trouble. This here’s a bad thing. I don’t like it.” Soldiers began inventing creative interpretations of the muezzin’s call to prayer. “Everyone meet at 7 to kill all the Americans,” one officer sang darkly. Others yelled back at the muezzin: “Shut the f–k up!”
Two weeks into the U.S. occupation of Tikrit, graffiti was popping up faster than the Army could cover it with white paint.
“I think our welcome’s worn out,” Lt. Tom Garner told Cpt. Dave Gray, as the two rode to the raid of the home of a suspected Republican Guard official. “We don’t even get that fake wave anymore. They just stare.”
“The city population is probably annoyed,” Gray said. “They don’t like us being around so much.” Gray, the intel officer, couldn’t decide whether he liked the post-war transition job. Something about it was fundamentally flawed. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it,” Gray said. “There is no NATO, so we’re doing the NATO thing now. But it’s kinda f–ked (to) take a bunch of infantry soldiers who’re trained to f–king kill, not mediate who ran over somebody’s dog.”
The men rolled up to the house. A day earlier, First Lt. Janucz Secomski, 27, and his assault team had removed an RPG-launcher sight, $20,000 in Iraqi dinars and four AK-47s and left another $10,000 in dinars behind. They had also cuffed and frisked a few men and taken two men into custody. Now, Secomski’s team entered the clean two-story home to find a few kids, a couple of pregnant women and an older woman inside. All wore expressions of annoyance and fear. Gray walked in last. He talked to the women using charades language while Secomski’s men searched the place. The women plead, in broken English, “Where money? Where brother? Where Mustafa?” Once again, Gray had no interpreter. “The money,” he said slowly and calmly, pointing at a plastic satchel of dinars now stacked neatly on the floor. “If money and man are bad, we keep,” he said. “If they’re good, we bring them back.”
The women telephoned “uncle,” an English speaker, to interpret. Nameer Hashim, a cousin of the house’s owner, arrived. Gray told him the Army was confiscating the remaining money. Hashim, a thickset, well-dressed bald man who spoke crisp English, told me he was an electrical engineer. He and the women convinced Gray that the remaining funds–significantly less than what the team said they had seen the day before–were proceeds from the sale of a car.
“With an RPG thrown in,” Gray said quietly to Secomski. Hashim, 42, had also been at the house the previous day.
“This guy’s full of s–t,” Secomski whispered to Gray.
“Please, we are not from Saddam’s family,” Hashim said, and wiped his hands back and forth in the common Iraqi way. “We’re from the government before Saddam. We are famous.” “There were a lot of weapons in here,” Gray said.
“Yes, it was a lot, I cannot deny this. But for one dollar you can buy one RPG.”
“Why do you have this?” Gray said, holding an RPG sight.
“Before, we fight,” Hashim said, oscillating wildly between near tears and joy. “Now, we don’t fight. We directly changes [sic] our lives.”
“I mean, I understand arming yourself,” said Gray. “I have a pistol at home.”
“Yes, I agree, it is a lot,” Hashim said. “I agree, but now Iraqis can get guns very cheaply. In America, I know, you can by a pistol for $100. Here, you can buy one for $15. You must know, we are friends. We want to be friends, Iraqis and Americans. We are not trying to hide anything. The person who gives you info doesn’t want you to go in the right direction. We are good.” Gray walked Hashim into a bedroom, where on the bed laid a green uniform–Saddam’s feared police–on top of camouflage trousers.
“What’s this?” Gray asked.
“He’s not in the Army,” Hashim said, referring to his cousin Mustafa, the owner of the house now in custody. “He’s police. You must understand we want to live a new life after 25 years. We want a new peace that starts for us the same as it starts for you.”
“That’s good, that’s why we’re here,” Gray said. “We want to be friends too.”
“Yes, but they put me on the ground,” Hashim said, pointing to Secomski.
“Look, you got mad-crazy,” Secomski said. “But we let you go, didn’t we?
“You did,” Hashim said, “but [you pushed] my chest on the ground.”
“Look,” Gray interrupted, “we don’t like RPG. RPG bad for Army.”
Finally, Gray and the assault team quietly toted more weapons and money out of the house. Rolling away, Gray sighed. He had played the ultimate diplomat, respectfully listening to Hashim. “That dude just fed us a load of bulls–t,” Gray said. “The police don’t wear jungle fatigues.” He paused. “I hate doing that stuff. Part because we’re not here to be mean, we’re here to put the country back together. But I tell you what. If I were in that position, I sure wouldn’t have been as nice as that guy.”
War Stories Mail Call
Last week Martha Brant wrote about the recurrent issue of rape in the military and raised the idea that the military chain of command may be part of the problem. Several people wrote in thoughtful replies. Excerpts:
I don’t believe that we need to change the military system. As a former active duty company commander, and a current Major in the U.S. Army Reserve, I have had the experience of dealing with many soldier issues first hand.
While every commander should create an environment where the soldier can feel open to bring issues through their chain of command, there are many routes to getting attention outside of that path. As a commander, I would question soldiers when they went out of the chain of command to resolve issues because that is the path that they should go. When there was a valid reason to go an outside path, then it was absolutely fine. For instance, I had a soldier who claimed an Equal Opportunity complaint against me and my immediate commander and I encouraged them to go to the appropriate external agency, which was the next Equal Opportunity representative outside the battalion command. I do not deny that soldiers don’t have issues with reporting things, but so does the general public. I think a better direction would be to determine the rate of people not reporting things in the civilian world against what is happening in the military. I would bet money that those rates are not so different. I am not trying to down play the importance of the subject, but let’s address the issue where it lies. We have a degradation of values in our society, and I believe that the military does more to address this issue than the general population.
Let me think about this, a commission is being set up to ask the “Pentagon Brass” why more isn’t being done to stop rape in the Armed Forces? Actions speak louder than words. I served in the Marine Corps proudly from 1982-1991 and the “Old Boy” system is the problem. I worked at the Family Service Center for two-and-a-half years, the victim was not given any compassion, any “real help” to try to cope with the rape. If she was visisted in the hospital by her “superiors” it was to say, “Hi, how you doing? We need you back at the unit by the end of the week.” Yeah, real compassion. Part of the problem is some “men” in the Armed Forces can’t handle a woman out ranking him and giving him orders. It is a blow to the male ego, I know, I was in two units that had male Marines that couldn’t stand the idea of a Woman Marine giving them orders. Since women are allowed to serve in the Armed Forces and expected to carry as much equipment as their male counterparts, then the reality is, there will always be women that outrank male service members. Congress and the Pentagon are wasting tax dollars which according to all TV news, budgets have to be cut 10 percent then 20 percent, etc. How many more commissions, investigations, congressional hearings etc. etc. are Americans going to put up with? After all this time of being out of the Marines, things haven’t changed at all. Woman service members are looked at as property and not as human beings.
Rapes in the military will continue as long as “men” control the military. Men do not see this as a serious issue in any part of our country, so why should the military be different? Also, a lot of the old timers still resent that women are allowed to be a major part of the military now, and probably feel that they deserve what they get. One thing that they could do, is keep DNA on file for all military personnel (if they don’t already) and run the DNA from a rape through immediately. It wouldn’t hurt to have a civilian trial, instead of a military trial either. But again, as long as men run things, rape will continue to be an issue in this country. Sad to say.
