To Be a Friend Is Fatal (12 page)

I nervously blurted out my name and USAID.

“Okay, I don't know what that is, but whatever. Who has an extra med pack for Mr. Johnson?”

Someone lobbed over a small canvas sack that contained gauze and
some packets of powder, which I assumed were for sterilizing an open wound. I climbed into the back of a “tub,” a Humvee with a pickup truck bed framed with armor plating. Beneath our feet ran a patchwork of heavy green fabric—essentially a blanket of flak jackets woven together to stop IED shrapnel from blasting up through the bottom of the bed.

As we approached the border of the camp, the convoy paused, and the cold sound of M16 clips snapping into place filled the air. I tugged at the straps of my helmet in futility. In the previous few days, two Iraqi boys had thrown grenades at marine convoys. One managed to get a “ringer,” as the captain put it: when it landed in the tub, its blast took with it several fingers and limbs and incinerated necks and palms.

“Johnson, you're the swatter,” grunted a marine across from me, as the convoy lurched toward the city.

“What's that?” I asked.

“It's simple. You see a grenade comin', swat it back.”

I sat silent for a moment. He grinned a little. A lieutenant colonel chimed in, and said, “Look, if you miss it, just throw yourself over it to save us, okay?” At this, the other marines in the back of the tub burst out laughing. I smiled a bit and looked back at the first marine, whose grin had disappeared back into a blank face. “Seriously, though, if you see one, swat it back.”

I stared at my hands as the convoy emerged from the floury desert road and onto the hardball asphalt heading westward into Fallujah. As we passed below a pedestrian walkway, each Humvee in the convoy swerved violently, an evasive tactic to avoid any grenades dropped from above, jostling me against the marines on either side of me, who raised their rifles over the edge of the tub like the legs of a spider crawling from a drain.

In such moments, every Iraqi looks like a killer. We move at thirty miles per hour—any faster, and you wouldn't be able to spot an IED or VBIED—over roads that have been renamed by the Americans. Route Michigan. Mobile. Huskie. Irish. Fran. Denver. The Arabic names were too difficult for them. Along with the marines, my eyes dart around in search of unusual piles of trash along the road that might conceal a bomb; bits of wire running up tree trunks that might lead to a bomb; unusual amounts of layers of clothing that might conceal a vest bomb; the direction of a car's tires, which might suggest whether it's about to
accelerate a bomb into you. I glare at three Iraqi children, no more than eight years old, who stand alongside the road as we pass. One of them wears flip-flops and kneads a soccer ball back and forth under his foot.

The years of my life spent studying the language and living throughout the region drained swiftly from the tub that day. It meant nothing that I spoke Arabic or understood their history and religion. The only thing that mattered was that these kids stayed away from my vehicle and that they not make any quick movements when I passed by. They needed to freeze.

We snaked our way through the chicanes at the entrance of the CMOC, and I jumped from the Humvee with a heavy thud, armor tugging at my shoulders.

The citizens of Fallujah lined up outside the CMOC, the nexus of interaction with the Americans. It was previously a youth center where kids came for after-school sports, clubs, and tutoring. In the area where the marines guarding the center slept at night hung a funk of sweat and fatigue made worse by the fact that the windows were sealed shut. In a small courtyard in the middle of the CMOC loomed an elevated boxing ring, three ropes and all, with punishing wooden floorboards.

At the heart of the CMOC reigned a large theater with a stage that looked as though it was set for a performance of
Stalag 17
. Ten-foot-tall stacks of sandbags were piled in front of every window, all of which were lined with strips of duct tape, meant to minimize the shattering effect if a mortar hit. In the center of the stage was a large easel that displayed a four-by-four-foot satellite image of the city. Down in the auditorium section, a T-shaped array of collapsible tables and flimsy white stacking chairs hosted the daily proceedings between the Fallujah city council leaders and the marines. Very frequently, the two groups climbed up to the stage to point at a particular intersection on the map, arguing over a checkpoint here or there. Another easel nearby was papered with American-made posters touting the “heroes of Fallujah”: the nascent Fallujah police force. They looked the same as the insurgent posters that had plastered the city between April and November the previous year,
using the same language of
heroes
,
martyrs
,
defenders
,
lions of Fallujah
,
sons of Fallujah
.

As winter approached and I settled into my job, I came into town for regular meetings at the CMOC. A week before Thanksgiving, I sat with a young marine by the boxing ring, smoking a cigarette and watching a gaunt turkey that had been picked up in some village outside of town. It strutted around the ring, pecking its beak inquisitively at cigarette butts and bits of trash left over from MRE packs. The marines assigned to the CMOC were planning to cook it for the holiday.

The city was on edge: a schoolboy had been killed the day before. An Iraqi sniper fired an errant round at a marine foot patrol, striking the boy instead. The Fallujans believed the marines had killed the child, and they were now keeping their children at home and out of school for fear of losing another.

“They're accusing us? They probably already know who it was!” The young marine flicked his cigarette toward an ammunition case that someone had repurposed into an ashtray, which overflowed with hundreds upon hundreds of butts. It smoldered for a half minute before burning out. The turkey strolled by in another lap around the courtyard.

The marine had a rucksack by his feet, and after looking around, he gestured at me to take a look inside. With a boyish excitement, he flashed open its contents: large shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. A couple hundred thousand dollars' worth, I guessed. “What's that for?” I asked.

“Fuckin' condolence payments.”

The institution of solatia and condolence payments had become systematized by the war's second year: once a month, the Fallujans stood in line with their grievances. Someone's husband was killed. Someone's arm was shot off. Someone's car had been shot up. Someone's door had been kicked down in a night raid.

The rates were fixed:

• $2,500 for a dead Iraqi,

• $1,500 for a serious injury (“resulting in permanent disability or significant disfigurement”), and

• $200 for a minor injury.

Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli explained to National Public Radio that the practice “is common in this part of the world—it means a death payment; a death gratuity, so to speak—it is part of life over here.” A Government Accountability Office briefing to Congress on the practice offered a helpful explanatory scenario on slide 16: “Two members of the same family are killed in a car hit by US forces. The family could receive a maximum of $7,500 in . . . condolence payments ($2,500 for each death and up to $2,500 for vehicle damage).”

Not all life is valued equally by our bureaucracies: a dead Afghan ran only $2,336. A permanently disabled or disfigured Afghan cost only $467.

“Shit, I heard that the sniper team is a pair of fuckin' kids, a twelve-year-old and his little bro!” The marine stood up and parted with his bag of money.

The sniper became an obsession for many of us. In November and well into December, at least a dozen marines were killed. The rumor about the young brothers swirled with other theories, including one in which an elite Chechen sniper had traveled all the way to Fallujah to kill Americans.

One night I hopped onto a midnight convoy running from Camp Fallujah to the CMOC and found myself sitting next to a mannequin. Several more were piled in the Humvee's trunk, to be used by counter-sniper teams that were struggling to get a lock on the sniper's location. The mannequins were positioned on various rooftops throughout the city and propped up with the hope of drawing fire and smoking out the sniper.

I thought back to journalist Nir Rosen's reporting for the
Asia Times
during the interlude in fighting between May and November 2004, when the town was overrun by insurgents. A day after the marines pulled back in their first failed onslaught, the city held a poetry festival in which the “heroes of the resistance” sat onstage. One of them, a twelve-year-old named Saud, had apparently sniped several marines. Mohammed Khalil Kawkaz recited a poem condemning anyone from the city who had stepped forward to work with the Americans, called “The Fallujah Tragedy”:

Fallujah is a tall date palm

She never accepts anybody touching her dates

She will shoot arrows into the eyes of those who try to taste her

This is Fallujah, your bride, O Euphrates!

She will never fall in love with anyone but you

America dug in the ground and pulled

Out the roots of the date palm

The earth hugs the destroyed houses

The women burned and the children suffered

Calling to the governing council

You are deaf and dumb, O governing council!

You found honor in meeting him who pillaged Fallujah.

O Euphrates, what happened to you, that you just lay down?

Get up and fight with your waves and swallow this country and the others,

Stand with Fallujah.

Since the poetry festival, we had razed large sections of the city. But maybe Saud the sniper boy was still in action. Because the sniper had once shot at marines in the expansive gravel field surrounding the CMOC, which was supposedly secure, we were instructed not to linger outside. The only time I ventured across the gravel was en route to the cluster of port-o-johns. In the first days and nights, I armored up, but I soon grew impatient and one day burst from the CMOC doors, running in a zigzag line as I juked my way to the bathroom. Its thin plastic doors offered about as much protection from a sniper round as a stick of butter. Once inside, I rocked back and forth, occasionally leaning forward with the absurd hope that this constant movement would reduce the odds of a sniper hitting me. I started wearing armor again and came to despise port-o-johns.

The Fallujans did not line up only for condolence payments. Many came to the CMOC with the names of their husbands or sons or fathers who had been detained as part of the counterinsurgency efforts. Getting PUC'd up, the marines called it: “person under control.” It was once
standard operating procedure to arrest as many people as possible in the vicinity of an IED blast, with the hopes that the triggerman might be found among them.

Once detained, their eyeballs would be scanned and their names would be entered into BATS, the Biometrics Automated Toolset System, which was implemented in force in the city. One of my roommates back at Camp Fallujah was a defense contractor and lead support technician for the system. John had a pear-shaped belly and long, wiry hair that fell in a bowl-cut over his Coke-bottle glasses. He wore geek T-shirts: “There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who
don't.
” Sometimes he peeled his T-shirt up toward his face and blew his nose into it. Sometimes he fell asleep in his bunk with his hand actually
inside
a bag of Nacho Cheesier Doritos, while a samurai movie played on his laptop. His salary likely topped $200,000.

BATS took retina scans and fingerprints of Iraqis and paired the biometrics with names, photographs, address, weight, height, and any additional information (whether or not said Iraqi was in “capture” or “kill” status). This information was then uploaded onto Toughbook laptops for marines in the field and also sent back to the Biometrics Fusion Center in West Virginia, a newly sprouted sapling in the post-9/11 forest of Defense Department agencies and programs.

The BATS system was a significant development. During the first phase of the war, the military relied on scattershot lists and databases, which were never centralized or complete. But what still bedeviled Americans, BATS or not, was the naming conventions used in the Arab world. Arabs don't have middle names: they have a chain of names with patronymics that reflect the person's heritage. US ignorance over this seemingly innocuous cultural distinction had Orwellian consequences.

Take, for example, the following name:

Since Arabic is generally written without vowels, the presence of which are intuited both by grammatical rules as well as prolonged exposure to the language, there is no agreed-upon standard for transliterating Arabic into English. So the name could be written “Muhammad Hameed Al-Dulaimi.” Or it could just as properly be transliterated as “Mohamed Hamid Aldulaymy.”