Friday, Jul 4, 2008
"Twenty-three hours of boredom and a minute of hell": Our reporter joins U.S. troops on a mission to find guerrillas.
Dec 4, 2003 | A few nights before Thanksgiving, I stood in a light but very cold rain on a dark residential street in Baghdad, loosely surrounded by two tanks, five Humvees, a prisoner transportation truck, 52 soldiers, three Iraqi translators, two armed canine handlers, and one bomb-sniffing dog named Elsa. The soldiers -- representing both infantry and armor from the 1-36 Charlie Company of the 1st Armored Division -- were preparing to raid a house where a member of the resistance supposedly lived. A dozen of the soldiers crouched, guns ready, on either side of the house's front gate. Other soldiers cordoned off the block and pointed their weapons at nearby windows and roofs.
I had chosen to spend a day with these soldiers. Just moments before, I had been sitting in a convoy's lead humvee as the whole operation sped from the soldiers' base to the target house. Iraqi cars and pedestrians scrambled to move aside as we rumbled through the nighttime city, often going the wrong way on one-way streets. Now I watched as they banged on the gate and demanded (through one of the interpreters) that the house's occupants come outside.
After a few minutes, the gate opened. Some of the soldiers marched an older man and a number of young women to the curb and sat them down on the wet cement. One of the girls spoke very good English. She said, "Why are you doing this? We've done nothing. We always defend the Americans. We love the Americans. Now we hate you." I hovered nearby feeling sad and a little ridiculous in a flak jacket that said "press" and a borrowed helmet that misidentified me as a Sgt. Maj. Hudgins. After about 15 minutes, the search ended, the family went back inside, and the soldiers redeployed down the block to another house -- the correct house as it turned out. The first time, they had the wrong address.
Though I've been in Baghdad for a total of over three months since the end of the war, I've spent very little time with soldiers. I've mostly tried to understand what's going on here from an Iraqi perspective. And, because of that, I've tended to think about America's occupying force in fairly simplistic terms. Dumb guys with guns who have little interest in understanding Iraqis or seeing them as anything but the enemy. Of course, I should know by now that nothing in Iraq holds up to oversimplification. Out on the mission that night, I found myself feeling (not surprisingly) terrible for the Iraqi family mistakenly rousted from their home. But that feeling was tempered, even nudged aside (very surprisingly), by how sorry I felt for the soldiers themselves. I had hung out with them for several hours by then, talking, joshing. I liked these guys -- respected them, even. It wasn't their fault that we went to the wrong house first. Intelligence here is notoriously bad. They go to the wrong house all the time, some soldiers later told me. And they hate it. It's a waste of time and adrenaline. It makes them feel lousy for the Iraqis, and dispirited about their missions.
I arrived at the soldiers' base early that afternoon. The base used to be a tourist spot called "Baghdad Island," though the soldiers have renamed it "Bandit Island," after the nickname of their regiment. At the front gate Iraqi guards, acting as the first line of defense, searched me and checked my I.D. While I waited for a nearby soldier to radio my presence to the base's headquarters and confirm that they were expecting me, I took a moment to scuff up my very white sneakers with mud. I bought those sneakers right before coming to Baghdad and hadn't worn them once. Given how dirty everything gets in the city from the dust, pollution and now (in the rainy season) mud, those sneakers made me look like I had just gotten off the plane from Jordan. The Iraqi guards watched me with wide-eyed disbelief. In Iraq, people are always trying to make old stuff seem new. And here I was instantly adding years to a perfectly pristine pair of sneakers. Crazy.
I got my clearance and followed a soldier to a nearby jeep for a ride to the Tactical Operations Center, or TOC. We walked past a line of tanks with their guns aimed at the gate. Soldiers poked halfway out the tanks' top hatches. They looked cold and bored. They also looked as though they were trying hard not to stare at me. With only about six women stationed on a base containing hundreds of men, I definitely stood out.
My escort drove me past temporarily sidelined Army vehicles, rows of large olive-drab tents, clutches of sickly looking palm trees, and a handful of guys in Army-issue sweat suits jogging. It took me a moment to figure out why that particular sight was so shocking -- you just never see anyone jogging in Iraq.
We pulled in front of the prefab TOC building just as Sgt. Maj. Mark Schindler was gearing up to go in a four-jeep convoy to inspect a checkpoint in the Al Shaab neighborhood. He invited me to go along, so I did.
That was the first time I've ever worn body armor -- bulletproof vests, flak jackets, helmets (Kevlars, the soldiers call them). My uniform in Baghdad tends to be a long skirt and sweater, and I travel around sitting in the back of a beat-up car with a broken windshield. When I mentioned this to some of the soldiers, they were incredulous. How could I possibly feel safe in this city without body armor? I told them that, in all honesty, I felt safer not wearing it. That it made me feel like a target. Or, at the least, a potential object of derision among Iraqis. In short, it made me feel like one of them.
I sat in the back of Sgt. Maj. Schindler's jeep, next to the big, booted feet of the jeep's gunner who rode standing, his finger on the trigger of his very large gun. We left the base and went down a nearby highway where many IEDs (improvised explosive devices) have been killing soldiers. Resistance fighters disguise the IEDs in garbage bags or soda bottles or plaster made to look like rocks or even, occasionally, dead animals. They wait in the distance and use cobbled-together electronic triggers to detonate the explosives as the soldiers drive past. Sgt. Maj. Schindler had recently survived two such attacks. The first, on Nov. 8, missed all the vehicles in his convoy. The second, on Nov. 15, ripped through his jeep, piercing him with shrapnel and killing Sgt. Timothy Hazlit. "A day in this country," says the sergeant major, "is 23 hours, 59 minutes of boredom and one minute of hell."
We reached the crowded, poor Al Shaab neighborhood and drove through streets bordered by swells of garbage. Houses puzzled together from unmortared brick and scraps of wood and metal sat canted and sagging behind the garbage. Beat-up cars and donkey carts choked up the traffic, forcing us to slow down significantly. It was Eid -- the end-of-Ramadan celebration -- and tons of kids filled the streets in their finest shabbery. As we drove past, every single kid I saw waved or saluted or gave a thumbs-up to the soldiers. I found this utterly surprising. It seemed to me that, given all that's happened since the war's end, at least some of the kids would be staring the soldiers down or throwing rocks. But no, these kids acted downright ecstatic. Many of the boys ran alongside the jeeps waving and yelling "Hello, mister!" The soldiers waved back.
"It does them good to see the kids like that," said the sergeant major. The way he sees it, 90 percent of Iraqis like the Americans and 10 percent hate them. Of those 10 percent, 5 percent actually do something about it. I didn't say anything, but those statistics seemed very wrong to me. Most Iraqis I meet, even moderate Iraqis, feel pretty pissed off at the U.S. these days.
Get Salon in your mailbox!