Packed for the Wrong Trip Read online

  If Charles Graner could claim to have been motivated to enlist by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, so could Dizl and many other Americans.

  At the same time, it was 9/11 that inspired the re-definition of “prisoner of war” and “torture” by Bush administration lawyers, and it was 9/11 that justified the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. The president repeatedly referred to 9/11 in ways that forged a mental link between the hijackers who had killed and injured thousands of Americans and the dictator who was injuring and killing primarily his own citizens on Iraqi soil. By the time of the invasion, 63 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.

  Civilian employees of the Coalition Provisional Authority in the Green Zone in Baghdad consumed their high-calorie and strangely pork-heavy, Halliburton-supplied, American-style meals beneath a wall mural depicting the Twin Towers framed within the outstretched wings of a bald eagle. It was the publication of a sermon praising the 9/11 attacks that provoked L. Paul Bremer to close the offices of the Mahdi Army’s newspaper al Hawza, which led to a stunningly bloody uprising of the Shia in Baghdad. And, as Dizl would note without pleasure, the disgusting and dangerous detainee compound known as Ganci had been named after New York City fire chief Peter Ganci, who died with his men in the World Trade Center on 9/11—a dubious honor for a good man.

  To emphasize the presence of love in war is not to deny the horror, injustice, and suffering of warfare, nor the cruelty and carnage that are its character. Rather, it is to point out that even the most horrific, depraved, and wasteful of human behaviors do not and cannot eliminate love. Love simply exists within these environs, as it exists everywhere. And yes, sexual love is included, but it appears in other, far more significant forms too. Love offers safety, food, shelter, conversation; it is also the disturber of conscience, the seat of judgment, the impetus toward mercy, and the yearning for redemption.

  Unbeknownst to anyone, redemption (and not merely damage control) would prove to be the mission of the 152nd at Abu Ghraib. Evil happens, as it happened at Abu Ghraib, in real time with real people inflicting and experiencing real pain. If we would claim that the 152nd succeeded in its mission—claim that redemption, honor, and, yes, love was not just possible but present at Abu Ghraib—it must be demonstrable, a spirit made manifest in the material reality of the human beings that breathed, drank, ate, walked, spoke, slept, dwelled, and died there.

  The men and women who belong to the National Guard are by and large the same men and women who serve their communities in other ways. While sometimes looked down upon by insecure active-duty service members, National Guard and reservist units have a distinct advantage that active-duty units do not. While a majority of the active military is young and inexperienced outside of their time in the military, reservists come from various occupations outside the military. Police officers, firefighters, prison guards, construction workers, and all sorts of other skilled professionals can bring a myriad of experiences to the battlefield with them when called up from their civilian lives. The 152nd had a dynamic group of men that brought a variety of skills to the table. These Mainers could use their skills from home to fill the numerous gaps left by a lack of support from “Big Army.”

  “Our guys had a wide variety of abilities,” said Mike Lord, the 152nd’s serious, bespectacled first sergeant (known for obscure reasons as Huladog). “We had everything from a satellite engineer to computer programmers, plumbers, and electricians.” It comes partly from a Maine culture, he explained. “There is a tradition of self-reliance, a tradition of being able to adapt, overcome, and repair just about anything with duct tape and string.”

  One of those men serving alongside Dizl was a young man named Shawn Keyte. He got out of high school and served for three years in the Army as an active-duty soldier from 1991 to 1994. He spent a year as a civilian before enlisting with the Maine National Guard in 1995. One weekend a month, he donned his uniform and trained with his Guard unit, unknowingly preparing not for the common civil relief missions, but for war.

  Shawn worked for the Dexter Shoe Company in (surprise) Dexter, Maine. At the same time he worked for the shoe company, he also trained and worked as a firefighter and EMT for the Dexter Fire and Ambulance Service. These skills would, incidentally, prove useful a decade later in Iraq.

  In 2000 Shawn landed a job with Frito-Lay in Bangor. He would drive a delivery truck on a route through western Maine. Shawn drove along country roads through woods and farmland, past little rivers and old mill towns and the hamlet of Monson. Here, Kim and Mike, the owners of Spring Creek Barbeque, would offer Shawn a pulled pork sandwich. He was so skinny, Kim was sure he would starve to death before he got to Greenville.

  Coming up over the rise just by the Greenville trading post, the dramatic panorama of Moosehead Lake would fling itself out before his windshield in summer blues and greens, or immaculate, glimmering winter white. It was a satisfying sight.

  Shawn was a happily married man with a baby daughter when the events of September 11, 2001, shocked contemporary America the way December 7, 1941, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked our parents and grandparents.

  The national discourse became more combative, and when the White House started banging the modern war drum—with press releases and breaking news conferences—Shawn assumed and accepted that his country would soon be expanding the terms of his service. He was right. His country would send him to Abu Ghraib.

  Andy Hazen started a microbrewery in the barn attached to the old Maine farmhouse he shared with his wife and three children in the ’90s. Fortunately located in the high hills above Penobscot Bay, where views extend all the way to Cadillac Mountain and Little Deer Isle, it was (and remains) a family-owned and -operated business.

  By the turn of the millennium, Andy’s son Ben had graduated from high school, done three years of active service with the 82nd Airborne, and was helping his father brew four different ales and a nice porter between college classes in forestry and weekends spent training with the Maine Army National Guard and the volunteer fire department. When Ben was sent to Abu Ghraib, therefore, he was missed, not only because his family loved him, but because the business couldn’t really spare him. In addition to Andy Hazen’s natural worry for his son’s safety was the added irritation of having his son deployed to fight in a war that Andy considered a bad idea.

  When Huladog was ten years old, his father went off to serve in Vietnam. As a young man, Hula had enlisted in the Marine Corps, and he carried that esprit de corps through his entire military career. Once a Marine, always a Marine, after all. Whatever reservations he might have had about military service were trumped by the news that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, had invaded Kuwait.

  When his enlistment was up, Huladog became an intelligence analyst for, among others, the Drug Enforcement Administration. He possessed the useful skill of being able to take disparate bits of information—the jottings in a drug dealer’s notebook, for example—and recognize the patterns that yield information.

  After Hula left the Corps, he signed up with the Maine National Guard, which, like the rest of his men, put him on track to one of the most infamous places in modern memory.

  Turtle had been a public school teacher in civilian life, instructing eighth graders in English and gym before his country decided it needed him at Abu Ghraib. He wrote letters to his college sweetheart, Alicia, whenever he had the chance, and when he wasn’t writing to her—his short legs braced on the sandbags stacked against the walls of the Mortar Café, a spiral-bound notebook balanced on his knee—he was generally talking about her.

  War is terribly boring, and one cannot keep an eye out for mujahideen and read, so men and women in the armed forces use conversation to pass the time. The best topics usually involve the usual disgusting things that adolescent males—and members of your military—enjoy. And girls; soldiers love to talk about their girls. Every warrior, stretching back from Iraq II to the first dust-up between tribes of our nomadic
ancestors, has talked—at length—about their girlfriends (long-term or single evening).

  So Dizl and Sugar would eventually know all about Turtle’s plump, sable-eyed paragon. They’d learn her middle name, her high school accomplishments (all-state band, soccer team captain), her college GPA, her plans for the future (law school), and her opinion of the war in Iraq (not good). Indeed, Alicia would eventually take on mythic dimensions, occasionally appearing in their dreams, cast as an angel and, depending on the dreamer, bringing either the intimate or maternal care they longed for.

  “Say hi for me,” Dizl had said to Turtle, minutes before the first mortar fell that fateful April day, and Turtle had added a note into the sweat-smeared margin.

  The literary standard to which Turtle aspired was high. He was a Civil War buff, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 40th Maine was his hero, and the letters written home from Antietam, Richmond, Gettysburg, and Appomattox to nineteenth-century farm and fishing families in Maine were his models. That he could claim ancestors who fought for the Union, as well as a grandfather who served in the Second World War and a father who, like Huladog’s dad, fought in Vietnam, needn’t surprise us. Soldiering, like medicine, firefighting, and politics, tends to run in families.

  The effort of composing prose that both met this high standard and conveyed his affection to his true love made Turtle’s rather high forehead pucker and his small, shy chin retract farther into the moist, salty folds of skin that tended to stack themselves between his jaw and the upper edge of his body armor. The visual effect was of a turtle pulled partway into its shell, which explains his nickname.

  If Dizl, at forty, was the oldest member of the 152nd, Richard Parker was one of the youngest. The last of four children, Parker joined the Guard and was deployed virtually as soon as his high school graduation ended. Tall, lanky, with a thousand-watt smile, he was already a chain-smoker—not uncommon in the military. But this didn’t seem to affect his physical fitness scores; he could run like a deer, which the more aged soldiers attributed to his youth rather than to his actual skill.

  Like many boys growing up in the predominantly rural and small-town environment of central Maine, Parker liked the outdoors. He enjoyed hunting and fishing in the expansive Maine forests. When he was old enough, he discovered the invigorating, adrenaline-spiked joys of riding a snowmobile across the wide, white expanse of a snow-covered Maine lake. He collected fossils and stamps. But what Parker really liked to do was read. He brought fantasy books about dragons and elves with him to Iraq. It was here that Dizl introduced him to the strangely appropriate desert fictions of Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

  Dizl enjoys doing nice things for people and does so without any expectation of repayment. It was and remains one of his most steadfast traits; it is not uncommon to find him organizing art therapy for fellow veterans or helping his neighbors improve their gardens. He’s a big, friendly, blue-eyed man who regards and moves through the world with the humble self-confidence of one who knows how to do a lot of useful things well. He does, conversely, walk with a limp.

  The limp is from an injury to his ankle sustained at Abu Ghraib, and he has a scar on his chest where he got hit with shrapnel. However, Dizl’s most severe war wounds are invisible. Like thousands of other American soldiers who served in Iraq, Dizl sustained what is known as a traumatic, closed-head brain injury, or TBI. He sustained the injury when a mortar shell exploded too close to him. He was outside the lethal zone of the shrapnel, but the concussive force of explosions can be just as damaging. The wave of air pressure passed through him and physically bashed his soft brain against the hard bone walls of his skull. It is one of the most common injuries our service members are returning home with.

  A TBI is by definition neurological damage. Post-traumatic stress disorder is also the result of neurological damage. Except in Dizl’s case, the PTSD was caused not by concussive force but by the toxic neurochemistry of prolonged stress; the stress of imminent death, the concern he had for his fellow soldiers, and the strain of being responsible for thousands of inmates in the middle of a war changed the way Dizl’s brain would work forever.

  Mental illness and neurological disorders are the unseen casualties of war. In the worst cases, leaders ostracized soldiers who came forward looking for help for their mental injuries. Contrary to popular belief, PTSD is not an inevitable pathology of the combat vet, but it is a fairly common one. Dizl’s got it. It hurts. However, Dizl sometimes says that PTSD was the price he paid for his brain keeping him alive. It’s the mark of a combat vet, and he holds some pride in the ailment.

  Dizl has what is sometimes known as a photographic memory. It has been both a blessing and a curse for him. It is useful for remembering policies and procedures from more than two decades of holding various jobs (including prison guard) and being the standard “Maine Man,” taking on a variety of useful tasks like gardening and carpentry. But it is a curse, because there are things that he’d like to forget, but his brain won’t stop the movie reel in front of his mind’s eye.

  To complicate the matter, he now also suffers from severe short-term memory loss. He can remember what time he woke up and what he had for breakfast in 1983. But he can’t remember conversations that happened in the last forty-eight hours.

  These men made up the 152nd—the uniquely Maine-ish group that would be responsible for turning a controversial heap of humans’ rights abuse and murder into a fully functioning and (relatively) humane prison.

  Previous visitors to Maine who have found themselves unable to stay away will cross the Piscataqua Bridge from New Hampshire these days and be surprised by a new message appended to the old Welcome to Maine sign. It now reads: OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

  This is not the welcoming sign most Mainers know, remember, and miss, and it certainly was not the heart-stirring motto that the 152nd Forward Maine National Guard Field Artillery Battalion carried with them to Abu Ghraib.

  Despite its pockets of deep poverty, Maine remains a place where people live because it is beautiful, and because it retains its own distinctive version of a traditional New England spirit, one that balances independence and interdependence, individualism and community responsibility. The old welcome sign summed up the state and the pride it prompts in its citizens:

  MAINE—THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE

  There are three broad categories of armed persons that the US Army can bring into play when our civilian government tells it to go to war: active duty, the National Guard, and the reserves. The Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have similar force structures, though the Marine Corps doesn’t have a National Guard component. A basic distinction can be drawn between those groups who perform federal missions exclusively (the regular Army and the reserves) and the National Guard, which exists first to defend and assist the citizens of a given unit’s home state.

  Though the National Guard falls under the operational support of the reserves, it is the state’s governor who has the authority to call up the Maine National Guard when, for example, there is catastrophic flooding in Aroostook County. The National Guard undertakes federal missions—war in Iraq or Afghanistan, for example—only at the specific behest of the President of the United States.

  National Guard troops were supplementing the active military in overseas engagements long before September 11, notably in the Balkans in the late 1980s. Still, during the war in Vietnam, service in the Army or Air National Guard was a way to avoid overseas deployment rather than a way to guarantee it.

  Indeed, because of the reserve and National Guard’s historic role as supplement and backup rather than front-line, the bureaucracy at Big Army did not place the highest priority on equipping and training them. The shortages of body armor and equipment that so famously plagued the full-time military in Iraq would be even more problematic for the reserves. Reservists got the leftovers or hand-me-downs. Some of the gear issued to members of the 152nd came stained with blood.

  The Maine Army National Guard’s 152nd Forward Fiel
d Artillery Battalion wasn’t originally destined for Abu Ghraib. They weren’t even supposed to go to Iraq. By the time the 152nd was called into service, the President of the United States had publicly declared Iraq to be a country in which combat operations had been successfully concluded. By definition, a field artillery battalion is a combat unit. Thus, in keeping with its structure and purpose, the 152nd was destined for Afghanistan where, as of the end of 2003, there was still unquestionably a war on, if an increasingly neglected one.

  Activated in the winter of 2003, the Mainers had begun training at Fort Dix for battle against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the slush and snow of a New Jersey winter. “It was a bit of a head-scratcher,” Huladog said. “There was always snow and the temperature was below zero.”

  Pretend what’s underfoot are rocks and sand, not snow! Pretend you’ve got body armor and radios to communicate with, pretend these soda cans are 155 mm howitzer shells. Pretend that training in hand-to-hand fighting with broomsticks is an adequate substitute for training with real weapons. Pretend there is heat in your jeep. Any questions? OK, good, BOOM—you guys over there are dead.

  In addition, the training they were receiving at Fort Dix had little to do with their mission once they went forward. There, they were given lessons in first aid, protection from chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, land navigation, and convoy protection.

  They were trained and tested on the firing and maintenance of a variety of weapons, including the M16 assault rifle, the M9 Beretta handgun, the M249 light machine gun, the M203 grenade launcher—most often seen as an under-the-barrel attachment of a rifle—the MK-19 grenade launcher, and the “maw-duce” M2 .50 caliber machine gun.

  Of course it was important for them to practice driving in formation, route reconnaissance, reacting to ambushes, and all the other skills one would like to have in the proverbial toolbox before stepping off to war. They were, after all, going to be working in a theater of operations where they would be under attack from un-uniformed insurgent groups via their favorite weapon: the improvised explosive device.