Packed for the Wrong Trip Read online

  “In an insurgency, it is the political result that is always paramount. Though devastating physically, the most significant effect of roadside bombs was that they made US troops wary of operating among the people. The fact that insurgents were able to place so many bombs, often repeatedly along the same stretches of road, also made a political statement, because it meant the locals weren’t reporting on them. Coalition forces are forced to interact with the Iraqi populace from a defensive posture, effectively driving a psychological wedge between the people and their protectors,” Major General Peter Chiarelli, who commanded the First Cavalry Division in Iraq in 2004, observed.2

  However, not only were most of their classes given via hours of PowerPoint lectures (a mind-numbing experience known as “death by PowerPoint”), some of the education they were receiving was incorrect. It turned out they spent hours learning phrases in the wrong dialects for the region they would be deploying to. Many of them wouldn’t find this out until they tried out their new linguistic skills on uncomprehending detainees.

  A week before the scheduled deployment to Afghanistan, word came down. The Maine reservists would be going to Iraq instead, to a place none of them had ever heard of.

  “Abu … what?”

  “Abu Ghraib. It’s a detention facility. A prison.”

  “What do they need a field artillery unit for?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll tell you when you get there.”

  When informed, at last, of the destination and duty awaiting his men, Captain Phillip Trevino also made one of what were to be many behind-the-scenes attempts to acquire some extra hands-on training and experience with prison equipment for them. Once he realized they were about to be transformed into military policemen doing detainee ops, Trevino wangled a field trip to the local federal penitentiary.

  Except for Dizl, few of the members of the 152nd had ever set foot inside a correctional facility of any kind, and Trevino figured that the tour might offer at least a glimpse of what the care and control of prisoners actually looked like. Trevino also managed to arrange for a training session from civilian corrections officers in a skill that goes by the ominous name of “extractions.” This is what is required when a recalcitrant inmate refuses to come out of his cell upon request.

  New Jersey’s felons did their best to resemble captured terrorists, snarling, eyeballing, and assuring the touring soldiers that horrible wounds and death awaited them in Iraq even as stateside wives and girlfriends were seduced away.

  “How long you gonna be over there? A year? Dang, man!” said one.

  “How long are you going to be in here?” Turtle responded.

  After taking a moment to mull this over, the prisoner decided his feelings were hurt and muttered, “Don’t have to get personal about it.”

  The captain’s abhorrence of the “check-in-a-box” style of training became well known among the training command staff at Fort Dix. While Hula said that the instructors had all the sincerity and desire to teach their deploying comrades the skills required to survive in a war zone, they did not have the required support from higher command.

  At one point, Hula was informed by a series of irate sergeants major and colonels that if he didn’t get his commanding officer in line, Captain Trevino would be relieved of duty. The military loves checked boxes. Whether they indicate actual acquisition of knowledge or not boils down to the small-unit leaders ensuring actual education. Captain Trevino and Hula were hell-bent on making sure their soldiers had the tools they needed to survive.

  Big Army—feeling the heat from the secretary of defense’s office—had other ideas and was keen on getting the 152nd forward in the most expedited manner possible, and the pressure could be felt all the way down through the ranks. Like his or her civilian counterparts, a military police officer is normally put through an application and screening process intended to weed out druggies, weirdoes, and people with criminal histories. The ones who make the cut are sent to a military police academy, running a prison.

  But all of this takes time and time was one of the resources squandered in the run-up to the war. Suddenly in need of many more MPs than the military had available, field artillerymen were made into prison guards on the strength of whatever bits of training could be stuffed into them before and during their deployment.

  Military training in a new skill follows a formula: familiarization, practical application, and then a demonstrated execution of new skills. For example, airborne units will practice jumping out of planes using platforms a safe distance above the ground before even stepping into an airplane. The movements and techniques are drilled into soldiers so that they become second nature, requiring no thought as they step out of a perfectly good airplane for the first time. Even then, people have been known to go splat.

  By this standard the men of the 152nd were not just poorly trained, they were untrained. They were not briefed on the layout of Abu Ghraib, nor the character and distribution of its population, nor on the security situation that awaited them. Much, however, was made of the Geneva Convention and the necessity of refraining from photographing detainees. Three days of hastily concentrated classes passed in a forgettable blur. Certificates were distributed with disproportionate fanfare, allowing public-affairs officers to tell the press, straight-faced, that only “certified” prison guards were working in Iraq.

  Captain Trevino received a flight time just over five hours before departure; he still had men out in the field undergoing their pre-deployment training.

  “You men squared away and ready to go to war?” an enthusiastic colonel asked Hula.

  “No, sir,” the first sergeant said to the much higher-ranking officer, “I still have men in the field.”

  Quietly but firmly, Captain Trevino also made a small protest when he refused to sign the certificates before the unit stepped onto the tarmac and headed off to war without that final check in the box.

  This lack of training was an eerily common theme among deploying units, not just the 152nd.

  Discussing the Jessica Lynch debacle, “The unit was not trained to be in the situation they were in, was not equipped to be there, no GPS [global positioning system, a satellite-guided navigation system], no radios, no training on crew-served weapons, only one crew-served weapon in there, no night vision gear,” was the harsh but accurate judgment later delivered by General Peter Shoomaker after he became the Army Chief of Staff. 3

  “We didn’t know how to go to war,” Hula said. “The last major war they’d had was Vietnam and it’d been so long that many of our generals came from administrative jobs. They didn’t even know how to prepare their men.”

  They had no after-action report meeting, no way to adjust the training for the better for the next units to rotate their way though on their way to Iraq. The high-ranking officers in charge wanted to hear nothing that could be improved; they wanted men pushed through to theater.

  When the plane had lifted off and begun arching toward Camp Virginia, Kuwait, the entire contingent of soldiers cheered. “Why are you all so excited to go to war?” asked a pretty stewardess for the chartered aircraft bringing them across thousands of miles of ocean and strange lands.

  “We’re not,” Hula explained to her. “We’re just happy to be leaving Fort Dix.”

  That cheer, Hula said, summed up about the entire Fort Dix experience.

  1 Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 142.

  2 Tom Ricks, Fiasco (New York: Penguin, 2007), 221.

  3 Ricks, Fiasco, p. 119.

  THREE

  THE ’GHRAIB

  “All told, more than three thousand suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. They are no longer a problem for the United States and our friends and allies.”

  —President George W. Bush, January 2003

  FIRST SERGEANT MIKE Lord, a.k.a. Huladog, was responsible fo
r the overall well-being of the soldiers under his command and offered his men the following advice as a prophylactic against losing one’s mind in preparation for their time in Iraq: “The smart soldier lives by the three-hour rule,” he’d say. “Three hours from now, you’ll probably be doing something different than what you planned.”

  It might be a tiny change, Huladog explained, a mere tweak to the standard operating procedure (SOP), or it could be a completely and massively revised mission. Either way, it’s a FRAGO, short for “fragmentation order.” It’s the Army way.

  There is an idea that many of the soldiers we send into harm’s way are poor people whose desperation recruiters are wont to take advantage of, or that men and women fill the ranks whom judges have given the choice “go to jail, or enlist.”

  While military service has been shown to help an individual move up the economic ladder, in fact enlisting for an all-volunteer military has higher demands than many people think. Sadly, the minimum requirements of having a diploma and a healthy body can be hard to meet for kids growing up in places that offer little access to education and health care. Criminal history and drug use are more common in poor communities and are added hurdles to a military career. Admittedly, though no public-affairs officer will confirm or deny, such standards tend to slacken a bit when the economy is robust and offers more alternatives, or when America has overextended itself as, for example, by fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq simultaneously.

  That being said, members of our armed forces nonetheless tend to come from the middle and lower-middle classes. Contrary to popular belief, minorities comprise a smaller percentage of the military population than of the general population. Perhaps less surprisingly, so do women. Certainly there are financial motivations for military service, but the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, as well as the Coast Guard, offer additional attractions for young men and women, not the least of which is the chance to participate in one of the few remaining institutions in American life in which words like “service,” “honor,” and “courage” are used without irony; most join for selfless reasons.

  The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 alongside President Bush’s now somewhat infamous coalition of the willing. While US forces technically had forty-eight allied countries backing them, the only countries other than the United States to put boots on the ground were the United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland. Our other allies would eventually send ground units once the initial invasion was complete.

  By May, President Bush considered the results of the invasion and the removal of Saddam Hussein from the seat of power sufficiently successful enough to allow him to make a public declaration that the war was over. He became the first standing US president to make an arrested landing (using a metal wire stretched across the landing deck of an aircraft carrier, which catches a hook on the tail of the plane to slow it down and prevent it falling off the other end of the runway upon landing). He arrived aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier anchored off the coast of California, in a Lockheed S-3 Viking—a craft used by the US Navy to identify and track enemy submarines.

  It was aboard the Abraham Lincoln that Bush delivered his victory speech. Behind him, forming a backdrop for the phalanx of television cameras, was a large banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

  No matter how loud and proud that banner may have been, in 2004 the wars stretched the US Armed Forces thin and generals were pulling National Guard units to serve active-duty roles in jobs they hadn’t trained for. This is not uncommon in any of the services, where individual service members are often pulled from their desk or infantry jobs to serve as prisoner escorts, security, personal drivers, bus drivers, cooks, and all other manner of duties. “Adapt and overcome” is the unofficial motto of the military.

  Objections to the deployments of National Guard soldiers and active-duty service members on their third and fourth combat tours were met from the pro-war side with an argument along the lines of, “Well, you joined up because you wanted the money, and now you’re complaining that you might actually have to fulfill your commitments.” Those whose complaints were overheard by soldiers of superior rank would often have the addendum “sack up.”

  In the same month that Bush declared the war won, the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Virginia, was deployed to Iraq. Among these MPs were Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynndie England. The 372nd would spend the summer training new Iraqi police officers at Al Hillah.

  Al Hillah is an ancient city described as the location of the tomb of the prophet Ezekiel. But it is also the site of a mass grave containing the bodies of thousands of Iraqis who had been murdered a dozen years before the arrival of US troops by Saddam Hussein’s security forces.

  However, as the summer came to an end, the 372nd was subsumed into the 800th MP Brigade. Under the command of (Reserve) Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, this unit was given the new responsibility of providing care and control of prisoners at the Baghdad Correctional Center.

  Recently commandeered by the Americans, the prison was known colloquially as Abu Ghraib, a garbage-strewn complex of grayish-brown buildings clustered within 280 acres of gray-brown, gravelly sand and surrounded by a twenty-five-foot-high grayish-brown concrete perimeter wall. Atop the sand lay a few inches of gray dust that the wind would whip into a gritty fog and rain would turn into mud the sticky consistency of pizza dough. The whole world of Abu Ghraib was gray.

  In Arabic, Abu Ghraib most often means “Place of the Raven,” though it is sometimes also translated to “House of Strange Fathers.” Either would seem an appropriately sinister appellation for what amounted to Saddam Hussein’s Lubyanka, but in fact the name did not properly belong to the prison itself.

  Like the old Maine State Prison in Thomaston where Dizl had worked, the Baghdad Correctional Center was known by the name of the nearest town, though Abu Ghraib is a big city by Maine standards, boasting 180,000 residents, and located about twenty miles northwest of Baghdad.

  The name Abu Ghraib was briefly mentioned in the American press during the first Gulf War, when a factory in the city was suspected of producing not infant formula but chemical weapons agents. The same factory, having been rebuilt, was proffered when the Bush administration was presenting its evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom. (As of this writing, no evidence of anything but baby milk has ever been discovered there.)

  British contractors, creating a facility that offered convenient proximity to the capital so that Saddam’s secret police could make frequent and ruthless use of its amenities, built the prison in 1960s.

  By the time of the American invasion, these “amenities” included torture and gas chambers. There was also a breezeway used as a shooting gallery and a room outfitted with a two-scaffold gallows for quick, efficient, simultaneous hangings.

  Adjoining the hanging room was a cluster of cells in which condemned men would await execution. These rooms were far too small to permit an adult to recline, so prisoners would sit and wait, watching other convicts die in pairs while awaiting their own execution.

  Not surprisingly, given its nightmarish past as one of Saddam’s go-to sites for torture and murder, Abu Ghraib was energetically looted during the generalized disorder that followed the fall of Baghdad. The looting and violence prompted the hurried resurrection of Abu Ghraib as a place to hold rioters and malefactors. Saying “Abu Ghraib” in Iraq can manifest the same feelings that saying “Auschwitz” can bring to survivors of Hitler’s holocaust; at least one hundred thousand prisoners of Saddam’s state were liquidated there according to Army Public Affairs.

  The torture and execution chambers would be turned to other, more benign purposes once the Americans took over (Dizl would eventually sleep in one, for example), but the building known as the Hard Site was kept in service. The Americans began to use its three tiers of barred cells to house “high value” captives thought to possess actionable intelligence about
a rapidly growing insurgency. The Hard Site was also the place where problem prisoners from the general prison population could be temporarily sequestered.

  Throughout the autumn of 2003, mystified by the increasing strength of an unforeseen insurgency, officials from the White House began to exert tremendous pressure on soldiers in the field to capture sources of HUMINT, or “human intelligence.” Obligingly, soldiers and Marines scooped up any and all likely candidates and dropped them off at Abu Ghraib. This wound up packing the facility with more detainees than its understaffed, underequipped, and untrained personnel could safely manage.

  Marines would be on patrol and an RPG would go ripping by overhead, so the Marines would go in the direction of the point of launch. They would sometimes find a soccer game or other community gathering and ask, “Who the hell shot that at us?” Of course, no one would answer so the Marines would go, “OK motherfuckers, all of you are coming with us now,” and the people would end up in Abu Ghraib. Next thing allied forces knew, there were eighteen thousand prisoners stuffed into a space the size of the Samoset Resort.

  In addition to the intense pressure from Washington came a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” that gave intelligence units throughout the theater of war the idea they had free range to use more intense methods of detention and interrogation that had been condemned and even prosecuted as war crimes under previous American administrations. The prison became the filter through which the entire war on terror was designed. The language in the rules of war changed to incorporate the new “rules.” Rumsfeld changed the language of “POW” to “detainee” so the United States could legally keep prisoners of war in a war zone.

  The resulting damage to human lives and to America’s strategic interests and moral authority in the world remained deniable until the damage was exposed, up close and personal, at Abu Ghraib.