Now Playing: Sloan
Topic: Gin&Tonics on the Tigris
My first real “brush” with death occurred inside the Green Zone passing through a checkpoint on the way to the Al Rasheed Hotel. The hotel was one of the few facilities inside the Green Zone that didn’t feel like a military facility even though it was heavily protected by coalition forces. In the early days of the war, civilians from the Defense and State Departments often stayed at the hotel because it the U.S. government had placed many reconstruction experts in the nearby Baghdad convention center.
Because Westerns spent so much time at the hotel and the convention center, in October 2003 insurgents attacked the hotel when Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz came by for visit. He walked away from the attack unscratched. Unfortunately, one soldier died and 15 other people were wounded. After the attack, the State Department and USAID began moving all of its personnel out of the hotel. Nevertheless, the carpet salesmen, bootleg DVD sellers, and small restaurant owner working inside the hotel continued to sell their wares to the Western travelers passing through the hotel. Because the U.S. military continued to run a dining facility inside the hotel, the merchants could also continue to peddle their trinkets to Americans who wanted to buy souvenirs inside the relative safety of a coalition-protected building.
Early in my tour, I decided to visit the hotel and buy a painting to liven up my dull white hard house. To get to the hotel, I called up the motor pool and asked for a driver. Then, to get out of the lovely concrete-walled prison that I called home, I had to put on my "battle rattle," which at that point consisted of the often recalled Second Chance battle amour and matching black helmet. It always bothered me that during the beginning of my tour I had to go through this large hassle to go anywhere inside the Green Zone, but by the end of my tour, I could walk the streets of the Zone without any armor at all.
On the way to the hotel, my driver tried to strike up a conversation. He wanted to know how difficult it would be obtain a visa to America. I told him that it would be very difficult, but not impossible. It wasn’t until after I left Iraq that I learned just how hard it would be for him to move to America. In 2006, the U.S. admitted only 202 Iraqis. Considering that an estimated 2 million Iraqis had been internally displaced and another 2 million had left their country due to the war, the odds of my driver ever obtaining a visa to the U.S. was very, very slim.
While talking about America, I felt that we were beginning to make the type of person-to-person connection that were supposedly very common in the foreign service. My driver began to feel comfortable around me and even tried to make a few jokes about all the American women he could sleep with when he arrived in America, and I pretended that there were so many perfect women in the America that he wouldn’t know what to do when he arrived. We both knew were we wrong, but we had a good time created a male fantasy world out of America.
Perhaps because we had distracted ourselves with the thought of sleeping with countless women, we didn’t approach the military checkpoint with the attention and carefulness that it deserved. My driver had gone through hundreds of checkpoints since the war began and had probably gone through that specific checkpoint at least a hundred times. I had been in Iraq for perhaps two months and had also gotten used to checkpoints. I no longer flinched at the sight of soldiers with guns staring into my face to see if I had any hostile intent. I no longer cared about the occasional marginally obtrusive searches where the soldiers opened the door quickly looking for anything that might have been out of the ordinary in the car and then carefully matched my face to my ID badge.
As we pulled up to the checkpoint, my driver and I were both were smiling. There were perhaps six soldiers milling around the barricades designed to force cars to slow down and weave to the left and right before moving on to the hotel parking lot. The soldiers stood a few feet away from the road talking amongst themselves and turned slowly to acknowledge our presence. My driver rolled down the automatic windows so the soldiers could check our badges. My driver and I reached down to grab our ID badges and hold them up for inspection. My badge lay on the outside of my clothing. My driver’s badge had accidentally tucked itself into his buttoned shirt. To get it out, he had to reach into a gap between where the buttons meet on his shirt.
“Whoa shit!” one of the soldiers shouted out as he quickly snapped his rifle up to a firing position.
The barrel sprang upward until it faced directly at the driver. The tip of the barrel stopped a mere foot from my face, and even though it wasn’t pointed at me, my heart raced wildly. From the corner of my eye, I could see the other soldiers following suit and raising their guns up to their shoulders, even though they didn’t know why the first soldier had reacted so wildly. In least than five seconds, every barrel from the unit of soldiers had swung up and were pointed straight at me. My driver didn’t even notice what was happened. When he finally pulled his ID badge free, he looked up and presented it to the soldiers. His instantly face grew white.
“Shit, man,” the soldier said to me. “I thought I was going to have to shoot your Iraqi.”
He said “your Iraqi” like the driver was my possession. He talked of my driver like he was an object or perhaps in indentured servant. My driver wasn’t a person. He was a disposable backdrop that they had almost shot because his badge somehow got tucked into his shirt.
“What?” I stammered in response to the gun pointing at my driver.
“I thought he was going for a gun.”
“Trust me, sir,” I said in a lighthearted manner in an attempt to calm everyone down. “We would never fuck with a U.S. soldier.”
“Tell your Iraqi to be more careful next time.”
The guard waved us through and didn’t even care that I had just had my first near-brush with death in Iraq, even though in hindsight or from the perspective of people living in the Green Zone and out in the Red Zone, this little incident was barely worth mentioning. Still, I found it very unsettling. I could have been shot. The incident wasn’t like the abstract sound of mortars and rockets that everyone told me would be the only thing that could kill me. I saw a gun barrel inches from my head. I heard the sound of fear in the voice of a young solder whose finger lay on a trigger. If he had been slightly more jumpy, I might have been shot, and even if the bullet didn’t hit me, I would have hit my Iraqi colleague. Then, I would have seen what an American bullet does to an Iraqi when fired at point blank range.
It would have been nice if that incident near the hotel had been my only frightening experience at a check point. It wasn’t. In late November, I had my second incident at a check point. It happen as I was returning to Iraq after taking a short one week rest break in London. When I arrived at the Amman airport to catch my flight back into Iraq, I found out that I would take the last leg of my trip with two colleagues from my compound who were also coming back from short rest break they had taken in Africa. Greg was an unlucky econ officer who always seemed to take the Rhino Runs into the Green Zone because he couldn’t weasel his way onto a helicopter. Will served as my compound’s Deputy Executive Officer and seemed to know everyone in the Zone. All three of us got along very well, so when we landed at the Baghdad airport, we decided to hang out together while waiting for a helicopter that could take us into the Green Zone.
Will was one of those men who could befriend anyone. He spent most of his life in Canada where openness and hospitality are a way of life. That warm almost Midwestern persona allowed Will to make friends at the airport. One of those friends worked for the State Department and shuttled diplomats around the airport. Will convinced him to hand over his keys to his van so the three us could drive from Camp Stryker to Camp Victory on the other side of the airport. We wanted to visit the massive Victory PX with its odd assortment of trinket shops and the much beloved Burger King.
Camp Stryker and Camp Victory were two of the seemingly endless series of military bases that surrounded the airport. The Americans had created all these facilities to support their operations in Iraq, and these camps had become the largest new U.S. military complex since the Vietnam War. The bases had become small self-contained cities. The spaces in between the bases were very lightly defended. The road we took looked like it belonged in Texas or Oklahoma. Although a fence or wall almost always ran along one side of the road, the other side generally reached off into the dusty distance – a no-man’s land where insurgents probably set up remote controlled mortar and rocket launcher. Off in that distance I could see houses, though the open space between the road and houses would be perfect for grazing cattle or building a campsite. Looking off into that dry landscape, I felt pangs of memories from hikes I had taken in eastern New Mexico, in rolling flat endless land stretching eastward away from the mountains.
I rolled down the window to feel the wind blow over my face. Like I child, I stuck my hand out of the window and surf it up and down in the air. I let myself be taken away by the sound of Led Zeppelin and Jethrow Tull coming over the radio. The three of us were no longer in Iraq. We were on a road trip.
Making our way around the airport, we eventually hit a small checkpoint. In the distance we spotted a lone soldier standing at a break in a concrete wall. He stood behind a small j-barricade waiting for us to move closer. Will saw him and eased off the accelerator. We moved closer to the checkpoint and reached a point where the soldiers had erected a concrete barricade. We had to weave into the other lane to close the distance to the guard. This weaving pattern was quite normal around checkpoints. They were designed to slow drivers down so car bombers couldn’t rush the checkpoint.
All of us were tired from our long trips back into Iraq. We didn’t notice the red warning sign roughly 40 yards in front of the guard demanding that all drivers come to a complete stop before proceeding. The soldier did remember the sign. He also noticed that we weren’t slowing down and were coming right for him. He assumed that we were a VBIED. The soldier slid down behind the jersey barricade and raised rifle to his shoulder. Although I couldn’t see his fingers, I could see that he had wrapped his left hand around the trigger. The world began to slow down. I realized that he was getting ready to shoot.
“Shit,” I shouted.
“Fuck,” Will replied as he snapped out of the daze and brought the van to a screeching halt.
At this point, the soldier realized that we were simply a bunch of fuckups who nearly got shot because we didn’t pay careful enough attention to the signs that warned that “deadly force is authorized” at that checkpoint. Rather that calling us forward right away, he motioned for us to stop. We stood in the same spot for nearly five minutes as cars from the other direction continued to go in the other direction. As each minute went by, the seriousness of the situation faded away. Greg and I began to mock Will for not stopping at the stop sign. The situation almost became comical when Will tried to apologize to the soldier using with Italian-like hand gestures because we weren’t close enough to actually talk to the soldier to explain what had happened. The soldier wasn’t amused.
When the soldier eventually waved us forward, he shook his head in disgust and asked, “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“Yes, sir,” said Will. “I just thought that I had to come to a complete stop up near you and not back near the choke point.”
“You’re wrong. You should have read the sign.”
“Sorry.”
“You have got to be more careful out here. I almost shot you.”
To help tech us our lesson, the guard directed us to a small parking lot where another specialist had the lucky duty of searching suspicious vehicles to make sure they weren’t carrying explosive or contraband materials. Clearly we weren’t dangerous, but the guard wanted to wait in the hot sun as the inspector examined our vehicle. Unfortunately, the owner of the van had packed it full of boxes that I never gave a second thought until someone started searching the van. We had no idea what was in them. I am still shocked that no one asked us to open all those boxes, but then again, we were Americans. No one ever carefully searched Americans.
Not a single checkpoint guard actually shot at me during my tour in Iraq. However, other Americans living in Iraq were not so lucky. For the most part, I don’t feel too sorry for most. Most of the time, they were drunk. People who drove drunk toward a checkpoint were asking for trouble.
The first drunk check point story I heard occurred after the first big party that I threw. Unlike most parties in Iraq, it was a blow out. With perhaps a 100 people stopping by throughout the course of the night, the party became a new benchmark for wild evenings inside the Green Zone. The evening had an intoxicating feel that kept people coming and coming, including Crazy Jill. She was a friend of friend that I had back in the States. I had never met her before that party, but I really liked her stateside friend. I assumed that I would feel the same way about Jill. When she arrived, she seemed pleasant. From time to time, I checked up on her to make sure she was having a good time. She seemed happy and always had a drink in her hands. Throughout the evening she kept dancing and talking to tons of young boys who were mesmerized her beautiful firm breasts.
Sometime around midnight, Jill had to leave. Her designated driver for the evening decided that it was time to drive back to the Palace, where both of them lived in tiny metal trailer. Jill didn’t want to go, but she eventually relented. However, when she arrived at the Palace, she didn’t stay for very long. She called up a mercenary she had met a few weeks earlier and told him about the party. He agreed to drive both of them back to my house so they could enjoy the party.
I didn’t see them when they are arrived, but I noticed that Jill was milling around the party. I asked her how she got back to my house, and she told me that she found a nice guy who agreed to bring her back. After the fact, I learned that this nice guy completely ignored Jill and went straight to the small tiki bar that I had placed outside of my house. He began drinking Jack Daniels straight without any mixers. He keep drinking and drinking and didn’t seem interested in talking to anyone. He seemed content just watching the party and drinking his Jack Daniels.
When they left my compound at 3:20am, he slid behind the wheel of his car. Jill hopped into the passenger seat. Because the mercenary was drunk, he was driving a little too fast and erratically. He weaved slightly as he moved down the mostly empty streets inside the Green Zone. He also forgot to turn on his headlight.
When the Marines manning the checkpoint near the Palace saw the mercenary’s car rapidly and erratically approaching the checkpoint, they pulled their weapons up high. The lead guard quickly turned his flashlight on and off to get the driver’s attention. It didn’t work. The Marine, realizing that he didn’t have much time until the car barreled into the checkpoint, fired a warning shot above the car. The mercenary still kept driving toward the checkpoint. Then, the Marine put a bullet into the engine block to bring the car to a halt. The car had so much momentum that it wasn’t coming to a quick stop. Thus, the Marine fired the third shot into the windshield between the driver and passenger seats. Jill latter told me that she heard the bullet fly past her ear. The Marines were getting ready for the next shot, aimed at the driver’s head, when the damage to the engine finally began to take effect and the car came to a slow halt.
After the car came to a complete halt at the foot of the checkpoint, the Marines slowly moved toward the car. They shouted at the mercenary and Jill, instructing both of them to get out of the car and lay down on the ground. Jill quickly complied. The mercenary wasn’t as cooperative. He was upset that the Marines had fired at him and damaged his car. To make matters worse, he was carrying a weapon, even though he was totally hammered. A State Department RSO latter told me that the Marine had to “take him down” using their large telescopic clubs.
The next morning, the Ambassador kicked the mercenary out of the country. The State Department considered kicking Jill out of the country, but they wanted to get more information about what happened. At first, Jill didn’t want to talk to them. She didn’t want to get the mercenary in trouble. Because she wasn’t providing enough information, RSO came to me to get more information.
When the two RSOs assigned to the incident came to talk to me, I expected the worst. I didn’t know anything about the checkpoint incident. When they called, they didn’t explain what they wanted to talk about when they called me, but I assumed that the party had gone a tad bit too far and had upset some delicate rules of diplomatic decorum. I assumed that my short stint in the foreign service was over. I felt certain that they were going to fire me.
While waiting for them to arrive, I frantically tried to clean my house. It looked like the worst frat house I had ever seen. Empty beer cans were everywhere. The floor was covered in mud tracked in by party through the course of the night. Crushed potatoes chips, cookies, and popcorn littered the ground, proving an extra layer of grim to the floor gave off a sound of stick tape in response to every footstep. A handful of broken liquor bottles lay on the ground in front of my house and inside the kitchen, giving the whole house the smell of a dank country bar. I tried my best to clean up what I could before they arrived, but I needed hours to properly clean it. In the end, I pushed most almost everything into my bedroom, hoping that they wouldn’t search the whole house.
When the two RSOs entered my house to interview me, they sat down on my couch with stern serious faces. Then, they smiled warmly and then began the interview by saying, “That was a great party last night.”
I couldn’t believe it. They were at the party! They had been getting drunk with me and actually wanted to see me throw more parties. They didn’t even care that someone left my party totally smashed, drove drunk through the Green Zone, and then got shot up at a Marine checkpoint. That was the mercenary’s problem, not mine. Unlike the States where the owner of a bar could be held accountable for the action of a drunk driver, that wasn’t the case in Iraq. Still, I couldn’t believe it. I just assumed that I would have to take responsibility for the incident at the checkpoint. I didn’t. On that day, I learned that I was operating under a totally different set of rules then one could have ever suspected. I felt that I had become untouchable.
Sadly, checkpoint accidents happened a tad bit too often. During that same week that the drunk mercenary nearly got killed, the Marines fired upon another vehicle carrying two U.S. Military personnel when their vehicle failed to obey a check point stop sign and directions of the Marine manning the checkpoint. The marines shot out the vehicle’s engine, but fortunately there were no injuries. After another one of my parties in late October, the same thing happened. I also had another friend who the Marines had to fire upon when the driver made a mistake and accidentally overshot the stop sign. I am sure that countless other incidents like these occurred during my tour.
In all of these incidents, the Marines acted correctly and within the parameters of their post orders and followed the military’s "use of force policy." However, to help prevent future accidents, right after Jill’s little incident, the Marines installed speed bumps in front of their checkpoint. My friends and I called them “Jill bumps” in honor of her actions.
