Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (22 page)

The Ranger was rescued, and since he wasn’t hurt too badly, I suppose the story does have something of a happy or at least not terribly sad ending. But the intelligence that had taken them to the house turned out to be bad: the Iraqi was a traffic officer; he’d fired because he thought he was being attacked by insurgents.

The bad information had probably been passed along by someone hoping to cause him grief, which obviously they succeeded in doing. The whole mess was straightened out without further loss of life, fortunately.

Even among ourselves, you could never be too careful about information or a source—sometimes the people you least suspected were guilty.

We had a translator who wanted to do a good job in the worst way, or so he claimed. He started copying everything I did, from the way I talked to the way I walked, from how I dressed to how I cursed.

We were brothers, don’t you know?

In his mind, maybe. He was what the kids these days call a “try hard”—he tried hard, but too hard, to make an impression. He started developing sources on his own time, trying to find insurgents in Baghdad. Then he brought the “intel” he developed to the SEAL commanders, suggesting that they authorize missions.

The problem was, his information was generally about Sunni insurgents, and we were assigned to hunt Shia.

Around that same time we got information about a cell in east Baghdad that worked out of a house. The mission was planned, and we took a source with us to the house. There were several people in the house when we got there. They seemed bewildered, but offered no resistance, insisting there had been a mistake.

Admittedly, this was what nearly everyone said when we arrived. A mujahideen cell leader would not, as a general rule, admit who he was when first confronted. So initially the SEALs weren’t surprised or convinced. They called the source in and asked him to confirm that they had captured the right plotters.

He poked his head in the room, then poked it out.

“Those are the men,” he said.

The glimpse around the room couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds, if that. His response seemed much too quick to me, so I went up and found my boss. The SEAL team chief also felt something wasn’t right—the men had protested too logically, and the source seemed too dismissive of the SEALs’ concerns.

“I have an idea,” I told him. “Wait until I try it, then we’ll know.”

The chief—he’s still on active duty so we’ll call him Bear—gave me a strange look, but he trusted me and didn’t object when I went inside. A few minutes later, I came out dressed in one of the men’s clothes. They were traditional Iraqi clothes—loose-fitting pants, baggy shirt—very different than the fatigues I’d been in.

Bear was amused, but hid his smile as he walked me over to the informer. With every step, our act intensified—I was his prisoner, and he was determined to take me in and hand me over to the authorities.

“We found another,” said Bear, pushing me in front of the informer. “Is he one of them?”

“Yes, yes, he’s bad, he’s bad, he’s bad,” said the informer, shaking his head and scowling in my direction before quickly turning away.

Bear ended up having everyone released. Needless to say, we never worked with that informer again.

11

Friends, Neighbors, and Snipers

M
ATCHING WITS WITH
bad guys on missions was always interesting. Equally challenging, but very different, were missions where I accompanied SEAL sniper teams as they did overwatches in various areas.

I started doing sniper missions very early on—I’d accompanied a team in Mosul for the elections—and eventually came to specialize in them. They were not only challenging but long, generally running up to twenty-four hours. Most terps tried to avoid them, but that was exactly why I liked them.

On an overwatch mission, a team of SEAL snipers would set up a position where they could watch a specific area. Usually this meant going on the roof of a house, which in Iraq were mostly flat and nearly always used as a patio would be used in America. From the roof, the snipers would watch an area while a unit patrolled, searched, or went into a house to make an arrest. Or they might keep an eye on a place where there had been trouble—say an area where IEDs were being planted, or a government building that was believed to be targeted by bombers.

While the number of people assigned to the mission varied, usually there would be one or two snipers in the house, along with two or three men providing security. More SEALs might be used initially when the house was selected, just to make sure there was no trouble, and at various points, different Iraqi units and their members joined us. For the most part, though, overwatches were conducted by a small subset of the entire platoon. That meant there was less firepower immediately available if something went wrong—or if things went
right
and the snipers themselves were targeted.

While there were operations where the SEALs used unoccupied buildings, this wasn’t possible in many cases. The houses had to be selected based on tactical criteria—in the simplest terms, the snipers needed a position where they had a good view of the surroundings and were well positioned to protect the ground troops or civilians in the area. That generally meant going into someone’s home.

Unlike missions where we were sent to arrest someone, there were no forced entries to these houses. We basically showed up and knocked on the door. You didn’t get to volunteer your house, and generally it wasn’t an assignment you could refuse either. That made the situation more than a little delicate. While the family would be compensated for their trouble, no amount of money really could make up for what was, under even the best of circumstances, a huge inconvenience.

The
worst
circumstance could be dire catastrophe. There was
always
a possibility that the snipers and therefore the house would become targets. And in Iraq, being a target could easily mean obliteration.

With the exception of Dan, no one was injured on any of the missions that I was on. The families were always well protected, and the damage to their homes minimal. That was probably as much a function of luck as the precautions the SEALs took, but the SEALs very generously gave me credit as well. A few, including my friend Chris Kyle, say I helped save many lives. I’m grateful that they think that.

The Americans usually did their best to protect the inhabitants and make them comfortable, but uninvited houseguests are never truly welcome. My job was to be a diplomat as well as a translator. I would tell the family as much as I could about what was going on; while there were always limits, I would never lie to them. I’d be honest about the fact that we were a serious inconvenience.

I can’t remember anyone trying to force the SEALs out or actively resisting—the SEALs were all heavily armed and there would have been no sense. But the reception wasn’t as negative as you might imagine. Most people accepted the SEALs’ presence, at least grudgingly; many even claimed to understand that the SEALs were trying to keep people safe, including the family in the house. Every so often a person actually welcomed them, if only out of curiosity.

As I started to get used to the missions, I got better at finding ways of putting people at ease. More than once I acted as a grocer and chef, going out to the marketplace to pick up some food and coming back to cook. Buying the family food—we never used their money—was one way of making a bond with them. It also let me scout the area discreetly. Going out also tended to make it less obvious that Americans were in the house—no activity at a home early in the day was a dead giveaway that something was up, and it wasn’t smart to broadcast that fact to the insurgents until absolutely necessary.

A few times I took a family member out with me. I had my pistol under my clothes and watched the person closely, but by 2005 and 2006, when the overwatches really picked up, I’d become a pretty good judge of character. It was easy to tell which side the people were on within the first few minutes of our arrival.

But even if the family opposed the American intervention and the new government, my immediate goal was to make them feel safe while we were there. Once in a while, that worked so well that they didn’t want us to leave.

Small kindnesses paid big dividends. Iraq was still wracked by wrenching poverty and shortages. People lacked a lot of the basic necessities, and helping them out won many over. This didn’t take much; one family we stayed with had no gas for their heater or stove. We called back to the camp and at night had a truck deliver propane to them. The old lady whose house it was wouldn’t let us go when we were scheduled to.

“If you leave now,” she told the SEAL in charge of the operation, “I will run out of the house screaming that the Americans are here, and you will have a lot of trouble.”

He called the head shed and told them we had to stay for another twenty-four hours.

I learned that it was a good idea for the family and at least some of the Americans to eat together. This was another part of the personal diplomacy, another little step in helping build some trust. There was a larger purpose to it, beyond calming the occupants of the house. If fighting an insurgency is all about winning over hearts and minds, it can be best done on a one-to-one basis, one family at a time. Showing people that the Americans were on their side—proving that they wanted to make them safe, not take over the country—and that they weren’t monsters contributed to the overall war effort.

None of this was a usual part of an interpreter’s job, and at first I caught some grief because of things like going out of the house with the people to shop. After a while, though, the SEALs’ supervisors came to see that what I was doing was helping them a great deal. If the people inside the house were not unhappy, they were much easier to watch—and there was much less need to be wary of them. If the mood inside the house was calm, the snipers could do their job without interruption. And so the snipers started asking that I go along all the time. I was happy to oblige.

I’D LONG AGO
passed the stage of being a “regular” interpreter. It wasn’t part of a conscious plan. A lot of it was just self-preservation: I simply didn’t want myself or the people I was with to be targets, or at least more vulnerable targets than necessary. But it was also an outgrowth of my personality. I couldn’t sit inside a house without doing something. I had to move, I had to
act
. If I was capable of doing something, I felt I should do it.

I had to be involved in the fight.

It was one thing to win over the snipers and the noncommissioned officers in charge of the units and quite another to win over the officers, who tended to be much more cautious, or maybe just more observant of the rules and regulations.

I remember a conversation with someone in the head shed who told me, point-blank, not to leave a house once I was in it.

“You don’t own me,” I told him. “I am Iraqi. I have to do what I have to do.”

“Johnny, how are we going to save you if something happens?” asked the officer, trying to reason with me. “We have a responsibility to protect you, but you’re making it difficult.”

“I know what I am doing. I know the risks. You don’t have to protect me.”

We argued for a while, and I’m not sure that I ever really convinced him—but I continued to go out. Gradually he stopped questioning me. When people came to understand that I took care of business, they stopped bugging me.

Or maybe I just heard them less and less.

I CAN’T MENTION
SEAL snipers without mentioning my friend Chris Kyle, who in a lot of ways is the reason I wrote this book. I happen to be mentioned, in disguise, in his book,
American Sniper,
and it was Chris who urged that this book be written. I owe him, and all of his SEAL friends, a very large debt of gratitude.

I worked with him for only a short while when he was deployed with Team 3 in Baghdad. I liked him immediately and we became great friends. He was very humble and respectful, easygoing and friendly. We came from very different backgrounds and religions, but there was never any friction because of it. He did his best to teach me a few things about bolt rifles, long-range shooting, and hunting as we passed the time between missions.

His Texas accent was hard to understand, though.

“Speak English!” I told him constantly.

He’d just laugh and make his Texas drawl even deeper. He was a great jokester and a fun person; his death still grieves me. I was lucky to see him not long before he was killed, and I still treasure that memory.

THE EXAMPLE OF
Chris and other snipers was very much in my mind when the SEALs began training a group of Iraqi soldiers to perform overwatch as snipers.

The SEAL unit’s XO—the executive officer, or second in charge—asked that I get involved. I was reluctant. Having seen other Iraqi army units in action, I barely trusted these guys, and I must admit to some prejudice about the Iraqis’ fighting abilities. But gradually the dozen or so men won me over with a good work ethic and sincerity.

I didn’t teach them anything about weapons, of course, but I shared everything I knew about dealing with the families and strategies for gathering intel. I worked with the SEALs to make their exercises more realistic, booby-trapping targets and adding extra difficulties to the exercises.

I have to admit that I was proud of the Iraqi group when they “graduated” from the training sessions and began going out on missions with the SEALs. They weren’t SEALs, but they were probably the most professional group of non-American soldiers I worked with in Iraq.

BACK IN THE STATES,
Tatt was working on getting us out. Congress had passed the law making it easier for Iraqis who’d worked with the Americans to emigrate; it provided special immigrant visas which were supposed to be in plentiful supply. Tatt was excited when he reviewed the requirements. Not only did I qualify for the program, but the law allowed for a large number of immigrants and streamlined the approval process.

At least it was supposed to. The paperwork proved as daunting as ever. Ironically, the easiest part was getting recommendations from the many officers and others I’d worked with. Men I barely remembered came forward to help Tatt, writing testimonials that made my eyes tear. They cited hundreds of missions I’d gone on, and talked about life-and-death situations that I barely remembered.

It was the “routine” part of the documentation that became the barrier. Asking for a birth certificate in America is commonplace. In Iraq, it’s unusual. Our record-keeping traditions are, should we say, very different from those in America.

Consistent spelling of names from one document to another is the exception rather than the rule. Spelling proved an Achilles’ heel, as several times the process of reviewing my application came to a complete halt as the spelling of a name on one record didn’t match the spelling on another. Tatt worked furiously to try to sort things out. Especially frustrating for him were the “normal” bureaucratic delays—it could take months for the State Department, say, to answer a simple inquiry. Their answer might contain another question. Several times he felt as if he was going back to square one.

The SEALs have an incredible informal network, both inside and outside the service; Tatt called in favors at the Pentagon and elsewhere as he put the package together. But the wheels of government moved at glacier pace, and while everyone agreed getting me out was a priority, he began to fear it would never happen.

Fortunately, Tatt didn’t share his despair with me. He continued to check in, using e-mail and occasional phone calls. He was optimistic about the process and our hopes—probably more so than he had a right to be. I passed those feelings on to Soheila, who by now was in need of every piece of optimism she could get. If things had calmed down in Mosul, she didn’t see it. She spoke constantly of escaping, desperation in her voice.

Another person might have given up at that point, collapsed into a weeping, paralyzed shell. Soheila wasn’t like that; she was a fighter, a survivor. But the pressure of the war had clearly become too intense. I ached to help her, but all I could do was repeat optimistic lines about how we would soon be free and in America.

Lines,
not
lies
. I certainly believed them, for I had no other choice—if I didn’t believe we would be safe and free one day, I would have collapsed into a weepy, paralyzed person myself. I forced myself to be optimistic when I talked with her.

Optimism is a precious commodity in wartime, and for all the cigarettes and booze I consumed at what for me was a record pace, I found little to boost my mood for real. Only work, and being around the SEALs, made me feel whole; only my SEAL brothers made me feel there was hope for the future.

IF I’D BEEN
tempted to dismiss Soheila’s concerns for her safety, a short trip I made back to Mosul more than demonstrated that they were real.

We were working with an Iraqi unit that was assigned to strike an insurgent base inside an apartment complex. Because of the situation, the SEALs didn’t need me as a translator or a liaison; instead, they assigned me to scout the area, then basically watch their backs during the operation. They gave me a radio and sent me out. I walked the area, surveying the complex and then finding a good vantage point to watch for enemy reinforcements. At least from my perspective, it turned out to be an easy operation; the insurgents had gotten cocky and were mostly off guard. I stayed in my vantage point, isolated and safe, filing routine reports throughout the day.