Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (15 page)

Worse was his habit of pretending to be better than me because he was an American citizen and I wasn’t.

I’ve already mentioned that U.S. citizens were getting paid a lot more to translate than native Iraqis were. The SEALs who knew about it didn’t think it was fair, and a few told me that they had protested. I appreciated their support, but unfortunately their complaints didn’t change anything.

Apparently the difference in pay schedules reinforced whatever nonsense the Kurd thought about our relative worth. One day he began pestering me somehow, getting on my nerves by being a showoff and a know-it-all. Finally I lost my temper.

“I have had it,” I told him. “If you keep talking that way I will beat you with my shoe! Come, we’ll go outside—if you are really a man you will fight me.”

“No, no, Johnny,” he insisted. “I am not going outside.”

“Come on!” I told him.

His face turned pale. I doubt he’d seen me so mad. He stayed put.

“Come on!” I shouted. “Now.”

Some SEALs came in and tempers were defused.

I never warmed up to him in Iraq. And yet—today he and I remain friends. I talk to him often, and see him occasionally. We disagree on many things, just as we did in Iraq.

Why are we still friends? I’m not sure. Was it the shared experience of war? Is it something in my nature, or his nature, to remain friends with a person we disagree with?

It may be. For me, a disagreement does not meant that you are not my friend or brother. In fact, I expect that you will disagree at times. I expect you to stand up to me—as I will to you.

He’s still king of the cranks. Always complaining, even when I know he has nothing to complain about.

AFTER THE ELECTIONS,
our Baghdad missions primarily involved apprehending suspected insurgents in safe houses around the area. We ran operations nearly every night for long stretches. Then would come two or three days when we stayed put before going out again. I’m sure there was a certain order and pace to the operation tempo, but I wasn’t privy to the planning or the thought process behind it. I just did what the SEALs said had to be done. And that meant going out.

The SEALs used a variety of vehicles in Baghdad, but most of the early missions were made using Strykers. The Stryker is an eight-wheeled armored vehicle whose bottom looks like a metal boat and whose top resembles a moving pillbox. The vehicles can fit a half-dozen men comfortably in the back; usually a lot more were crammed inside, squeezing against their battle gear and other equipment. The vehicles could take heavy abuse from guns and even most IEDs, so if you didn’t get squeezed to death inside they were very safe. But the engines on the vehicles were very loud, and were a dead giveaway that Americans were on a mission in the area. So usually we would park them at a distance from the target, then go in on foot. This meant that we were exposed for a mile or more, but it gave the SEALs the element of tactical surprise, and they felt giving up the protection of the armored vehicle was an acceptable tradeoff.

Generally, the operations were in the dark of the night. Unlike Mosul, I wasn’t familiar with Baghdad, and a lot of times if it weren’t for the navigator I would have been as lost as the Americans. But the night had its compensations. It was easier to take insurgents by surprise, since they usually lacked infrared and other night gear. They were also generally active during the day, and so were either tired or sleeping when we moved. And at night there was less chance of random civilians wandering into a dangerous situation.

While I’d come highly recommended, I hadn’t worked with this group of SEALs before and not all of them trusted me. One, a senior chief I’ll call Red, was standoffish and, I sensed, suspicious. I didn’t take it personally—he seemed to be that way with everyone, or at least anyone who wasn’t a SEAL.

Around the time of the elections we were assigned to find a suspect at a house deep in an area controlled by insurgents. The mission went along as planned; Humvees carried the unit close to the area and we moved in slowly, carefully, the SEALs barely seeming to breathe. I was near a SEAL I’ll call Dan, a friendly but serious type who was watching out for me as we walked.

After a few moments of walking, the target house came in sight. The SEALs began moving to secure the perimeter, with a small group getting ready to stage at the front door to go in. But before they were ready, someone appeared in one of the upstairs windows and began firing.

I was near the house, separated from the lead element by several yards. Bullets began flying from an AK, answered by shots from the SEALs. As I started to duck from the gunfire, Dan fell to the ground, hit.

I saw the mujahideen gunman and the gunfire clearly, but I had no weapon to fire back—the SEALs were under orders not to give me one. Instead, I turned and ran to Dan. He was too big to carry—most of the SEALs are, even for me—so I grabbed him as best I could and dragged him with me out onto the street. The AK rattled behind me, bullets crashing into the darkness and nearby buildings. I had no idea how close any of the bullets were coming, and I was absolutely not going to stop to find out.

As the SEALs near the house responded to the gunfire, I managed to get Dan back to a staging area near the Hummers. Someone came over and administered first aid—he’d been hit in the hand, not a life-threatening injury but a serious one nonetheless. All hell continued for a few minutes—gunfire, shouting.

Then, suddenly, it was quiet, as if a switch had been thrown.

“Go!” yelled one of the SEALs. “Back in the trucks.”

I helped Dan into one of the vehicles and got into another as we evacuated to the base. I never found out what happened at the house, how many insurgents there had been, whether they had been killed or simply escaped. That was often the way gunfights and battles went for me—I would catch intense snippets, fractions of the whole that might be terrifying or might, if luck was with me, be completely innocuous and mundane. Occasionally later I would get the whole picture from a briefing or, more likely, from the other guys telling their fractions of the whole as we unwound. But that didn’t happen that night. The gunfight had been too intense and too sudden for anyone to process yet.

What did happen was this:

One of the SEALs came over and nodded solemnly to me.

“Red never trusts anyone,” he said in a tone the SEALs reserved for the most sincere moments. “But he trusts you. Thanks for helping Dan.”

I don’t think anyone’s ever paid me a higher compliment, or I’ve ever felt half so honored.

WORKING WITH THE
SEALs in Baghdad drew me closer to them than before. Maybe closer to anyone than I’ve ever been in my life, with the exception of my family. We lived together, we worked together, occasionally we played together. We shared a common enemy. Gradually, I came to adopt some of their likes and dislikes for music and food—and drinks. I learned more about America and the ideals that they believed in. I was still very much an Iraqi, and saw my future here, but it was in this period that I came to admire the United States not just for its military power but for its ideals. Religious tolerance. Equality under the law. Justice, freedom, the pursuit of happiness, a chance to make yourself better—these were ideals Iraq lacked.

Maybe it wouldn’t, I thought, if we kept hitting the insurgents, the destroyers of dreams. Maybe with them gone there would be a chance to make my country better.

Weeks passed into months. The time went quickly; we were always working.

But it went slowly in another way—I missed my family. The hours were long without them. I kept looking for a time when I might get away, but no chance came. Soheila and I spoke by cell phone every day, often ten or more times. But there were stretches when the cell phones weren’t working, either because of power blackouts or other reasons.

Those times were hard on my wife. It was bad enough that she was hearing fighting all around her. The television was filled with news reports about attacks in Baghdad: IEDs, shootings, suicide bombers. She was obsessed with my safety even more than she was with hers and the kids’, but could do nothing about it.

We must have had the same conversation a hundred times:

“Tell me, tell me, are you okay?” she would ask.

“Of course I am okay, Soheila. I am a very happy person.”

“Don’t lie—tell me what you are doing.”

“I am working. I am very safe. This is the safest place in the world.”

I would tell her the same thing, with slight variations, over and over each day. I would change the subject, asking her how the kids were and what they were up to. Maybe if there was something amusing that had happened, not related to the mission, or a joke I had heard, I would share it with her. I tried to make her laugh, or at least smile a bit. I don’t know that it worked. Her voice was often strained and afraid. The poet in her was hiding.

Soheila called so often some days that it was impossible for me to answer her calls right away. Then, when I finally got back to her, she would unload.

“You cannot imagine how afraid for you we are!” she would say. Her voice was somewhere between scolding and crying. And it was, of course, loud. “Myself and your mom—we can only worry! We worry! Is Johnny safe?”

I tried to calm her down and reassure her, but I doubt she was convinced. You can only do so much for someone else’s fear in the best of circumstances, and Iraq was far from the best of circumstances. As confident as I was that I would be okay, it was impossible to get her to feel the same way. Soheila prayed and read the Koran, which was more comfort than I myself could give.

My relatives and friends in Mosul were watching out for her, to be sure, but there was only so much that they would be able to do if trouble came. Relatives and friends spread rumors that I had started a business in Syria, which added to the perception that I had given up on my family and run from trouble. Those rumors helped Soheila and the kids; anyone who heard them would feel it was senseless to attack them, as they no longer had any dealings with me.

But the rumors gnawed at me. Who wants to be a coward, even a pretend one?

There were still people who wanted to kill me for having worked with the Americans. Soheila continually heard gossip and vague threats, not just at me but at her as well. Some of these rumors were from well-meaning people, who only wanted to protect her. One of our family friends was said to be a member of an insurgent cell—I have no proof that in fact he was—and he often passed along warnings meant to remind her to be careful. Whether they were based on real information or not, neither Soheila nor I ever knew. Some warnings she heeded, but most were beside the point—like everyone in Mosul, like most people in all of Iraq, being careful had become the same as breathing. Neither breathing nor care would keep them alive, however, and they all knew that.

And me?

I didn’t care about my own safety. To me, it was then and has always been in God’s hands. What fear I had about dying, at least in those months, was the fear that if I died, my wife and children would be penniless. So I kept working, saving my money, missing my wife and kids. Until finally I missed them so much that I decided I had to go and see them in Mosul, despite all the warnings.

8

The Seeds of a Dream

I
GOT UP EARLY
that morning. The weather was good: spring, edging into summer, not unbearably hot yet, not too windy. I made my way from my house on the SEAL compound into the city, walking and getting a taxi and walking until I arrived in a Shia area. There I found another taxi driver. After talking to him a bit, I asked if he’d be willing to take me to Mosul.

He would, as long as I could meet his price. It was the equivalent of somewhere between forty and sixty dollars, for a ride that in peacetime might take between five and six hours, covering some 250 miles.

“Done,” I told him.

Our route was longer and not nearly as direct as the route I had routinely taken with my truck. We skirted the worst highway with its onerous checkpoints, the cabdriver’s big old Caprice bucking as we flew past fields of dust where crops once grew. The sun grew warm. I talked with the driver, but only half paid attention to his words. I thought of my family, watching the road at the same time, looking for IEDs and mujahideen and bandits, all of whom were common. Bandits were a special problem, known to prey on lone cars. A man who could afford to pay sixty dollars to rent a taxi for the trip was surely a man worth kidnapping, if not killing.

There’s no way to communicate what this drive was like: boring and endless, tension filled and mundane. Knives could have been pressing on every part of my skull, around my neck, at my chest and wrists—I would have been more comfortable. I smoked cigarettes (Marlboros had become my favorite), pretended to talk with the driver, and willed our destination closer.

He knew his business, which was much more than driving. When we were stopped at a checkpoint run by the militia, he used a Shia accent, smoothly talking with the guards and getting us through. He took a different tack with the army.

We were still a good distance from Mosul, some six or seven hours later, when I gave him directions to a Shia district in the city, a place not only far from my house but where I believed he would feel himself safe. I began to get hopeful; I allowed myself to think not only of what I would do when I got home, but of how it would feel to touch my children, my older son and my baby boy, my girls, princesses in their father’s eye. I thought of my wife, touching her gently, watching her from across the room.

And then something was wrong with the car. We slowed abruptly. Vehicles that had been far behind came up and passed in a blur.

“What?” I asked the driver.

Had we been shot at? There’d been no sound, no explosion.

“What?” I asked again.

He didn’t know. Something was wrong with the cab. Its speed kept dropping, until at last we were crawling along. We were within sight of the city, an easy target for anyone who cared to try us.

The driver kept going as best he could. Each time a car passed in either direction, I felt my breath quicken and my heart jump.

Finally, we were in Mosul. There was no greeting or fanfare—nor, thankfully, any bullets or militia. There were only familiar streets, light brown buildings, and a slight twinge of burnt metal in the air.

Home.

The driver found a garage. I got out and left him to deal with the car. It was late afternoon, but there was still plenty of light, which to me meant one thing—it was too early to go home.

I walked a little while, then found a place where I could rest for a few moments and call Soheila. I wasn’t known in this part of town, and anonymity had its rewards—safety mostly.

“Hello, Johnny,” she said when I called. “How are you?”

“I am coming home,” I told her.

“What? When?”

“Tonight. I’m in Mosul now.”

She was more worried than surprised.

“It’s not safe for you!” she told me.

“You don’t want to see me?”

“Johnny!”

“I will be there after dark. Leave the gate unlocked,” I told her.

“Johnny, please—”

“I’ll call. Make sure the gate is unlocked.”

I hung up. The next few hours were infinitely long. I saw some good friends, relatives whom I could trust. But mostly I waited, fearing that night would never come, and when it did, worrying that the blackness that fell on the city wasn’t black enough.

It could never be black enough to protect me, never dark enough to shield me from the assassins lurking in the city streets. Many men would have loved to make their names by killing the man who worked with the American SEALs. To them, I was their career and their future; kill me and both were assured.

Finally I could wait no longer. Wandering through town, I finally went to a place where I knew there would be a taxi. I got a ride to a block near the house, called home, then walked around, turning in different directions until I arrived at the gate.

It was unlocked.

Soheila was waiting just inside the door. I folded her against me, holding her as close as I had ever held her or any human being before or since.

I STAYED TEN DAYS.
No one outside the house knew I was there. Even some of our closest relatives never found out.

It was good to see my family, but I’d escaped from one cage to another, and the one in Mosul was even smaller. When visitors came for Soheila or the others, I stayed upstairs in the bedroom, making myself as quiet as a rug, smoking and softly pacing back and forth, a rat in a box whose every breath might put my entire family in jeopardy. There was little to do besides smoking and drinking the whiskey I had brought with me. I spent most of the hours in the room wishing time away.

Lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, I decided the cowards would never have the courage to confront me. They knew I would kill them. Instead, they would go after my family. They would take out their hate on the innocent, as criminal bullies always do. I resolved to do everything I could to protect them; if it meant feeding the rumors that I was a coward, so be it.

My visit was both long and short—long because of the hours spent alone waiting, and short because we had precious little time together. I was needed back in Baghdad for work, and though I delayed as long as I could, after a week I knew not only that I had to go back but that I wanted to. My family didn’t want me to leave, but they also knew that my going would make them safer.

When I left, I told them all not to worry about me. I would be fine.

“I am not the person who decides my age. God will,” I told Soheila and my mother. Both were in tears. “And God plans to keep me alive for a very long time. I have a lot of work. And a lot of dreams.”

My mother began to sob uncontrollably. I steeled my heart and left.

IN THE SPRING
of 2005, a new group from SEAL Team 7 transitioned into Baghdad, taking over operations there and “inheriting” me. And it was then that I met a man who would profoundly change my life, though neither he nor I had any hint at the time.

Like nearly all the SEALs I’ve talked about here, the senior chief petty officer is still on active duty, so I’ll refer to him only as Chief Tatt. And like most of the other SEALs, he was about average height, on the trim side, and quick with a joke. He lives in southern California and has a California “vibe”—you wouldn’t be surprised to see him on a motorcycle or a surfboard.

The leadership of the SEAL units transitioning in would spend some time with the men they were replacing, getting to know what had worked and what hadn’t. It was routine during that transition for the interpreters to be discussed. I wasn’t included in this talk, of course, and if I had been in this instance, my face would have turned red with embarrassment.

“Listen to what Johnny Walker tells you,” the chief who was leaving told Tatt. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s saved us a bunch of times.”

That was the highest praise a SEAL could give anyone, let alone an interpreter.

I didn’t know about it at the time, and even if I had, I probably would have been a little nervous meeting the new NCO. You never know exactly how you’re going to mesh with any supervisor, and in my case, language and customs were always something of a barrier. There was plenty I didn’t understand about American ways or the language itself.

Fortunately, Tatt and I got along pretty well from the start. I saw early on that he and his men were still working things out. The platoon had a lot of new guys, and while they’d gone through extensive and even brutal training, it’s just not the same as the real thing. On their first mission they were very uncoordinated, moving through the house we’d been assigned to hit as if they were in slow motion.

The initial entry went well enough. The house’s occupants, woken in the middle of the night, offered no resistance and the place was secured. But our jackpot was nowhere to be found.

The people in the house claimed to have no idea of who he was. I started talking to them, trying to figure out what was going on, when all of a sudden I heard a shout from upstairs.

“Johnny!” bellowed Tatt. “Tell this guy to get his hands up!”

I bounded up the stairs to find Tatt holding his weapon on a semibelligerent Iraqi who’d hopped down from the roof, where he’d been hiding. Apparently he thought the SEALs had returned downstairs and wouldn’t come up again; he was eyeing the window as an escape route. Tatt, meanwhile, was trying desperately to remember the pidgin Arabic he’d memorized, and was spitting nonsensical phrases that baffled and confused the suspect.

I tuned the man up quickly, telling him to put his hands up or the SEAL was going to blast him into tiny bits. Tatt’s demeanor made it clear I was telling the truth, and the jackpot complied. Then I asked him his name. I guess the Iraqi realized it was pretty obvious that he was the suspect, because he didn’t play any games. We soon took him away to the authorities.

One of my most important jobs was calming the family when someone was taken away for questioning. This was usually just a matter of explaining what was going on, who wanted him and why. People tended to react better if they at least knew why their husband or whoever was wanted and where he was being taken. Calming them down made them safer—yelling and screaming tended to set everyone’s nerves on edge, and in that kind of atmosphere, one wrong move could lead to a tragedy. In many cases, wives turned out to be glad that their husbands were being carted off—maybe unsurprisingly, many militants were nearly as vicious to family members as they were to supposed infidels.

Tatt’s team became smoother as it got more experienced, and missions that had taken a couple of hours at the start of the deployment were down to twenty minutes within a few months, thanks to Tatt and the rest of the NCOs. I admired the SEAL chief, but it wasn’t until a trip to Fallujah two or three months into the deployment that we became close friends.

The SEALs were assigned a small but important role in a large operation against a major al-Qaeda IED bomb-making cell operating in the Fallujah area. While effective, raids against one or two bomb makers were inevitably frustrating, because these insurgents rarely worked alone. When one was arrested or taken in for questioning, the rest of their cell quickly learned what had happened. Even if follow-up raids were launched—generally the next day, if not the same night—some members always escaped.

The idea this time was to scoop up a dozen or more bomb makers and their helpers in a single operation. Within minutes, an entire cluster of bomb makers would be rolled up.

It was an ambitious idea, born from the hideous toll the IEDs were taking. The bombs had turned some of the major roads in and around the city into killing fields. The main route from Habbaniya to Fallujah, known to the Americans as Route Michigan, became the deadliest highway in Iraq. IEDs powerful enough to turn over a Stryker armored vehicle were common.

Which naturally made me feel a little nervous when Tatt told me that our plan was to drive up from Habbaniya on Route Michigan to Fallujah.

The mujahideen had been defeated in a brutal, house-to-house campaign led primarily by Marines during November and December 2004. But that fight—known to the Americans as Operation Phantom Fury and to historians as the Second Battle of Fallujah—was only the fiercest of many conflicts in the city. In 2005, mujahideen were diminished but still very active. It would take another year and a half before the new government really had good control of the city. By then, much of it would be rubble.

We were assigned to take down two houses very close to each other just outside the city. Our main target, said to live in one of the homes, was an Islamic teacher who was issuing the cell’s fatwas—interpretations of Islamic law that, in this case, allowed Americans to be killed. Through these proclamations, he was controlling when and where the bombs would be laid.

The al-Qaeda insurgents were usually led by a cell leader who was in charge of the military operations. But a mufti—technically, the Sunni scholar or imam who issues the fatwa—who interpreted the law was critical to the operations, since he provided the formal religious reasoning or justification (if it can be called that) for the action. Their actual roles varied, but even when they were just rubber-stamping the terrorist leader’s decisions, they were critical.

I suspect that the idea of providing a religious justification for killing makes little sense to Americans. But to the al-Qaeda adherents it was crucial. In their minds, the fatwas elevated their actions. Among other things, obeying a fatwa meant they were assured of going to paradise upon dying. (There are differences in the way fatwas were used by the Sunni and Shiite insurgents, as well as in general, but those subtleties aren’t important here. In this case we are talking about Sunni followers of al-Qaeda.)

The SEALs were either ahead of schedule driving or there was a holdup somewhere else, because we suddenly stopped on the road well short of our target. I was sitting in the last Humvee with an EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) guy and the driver when Tatt came back to wait with us. This was a little unusual—generally the senior chief kept to himself or stayed with the more senior members of the unit.