we passed back into dark and quiet fields, the illuminated face of the GPS showed that we were crossing the 14 northing. Baghdad glowed on the horizon. For the first time in a month, it lit the sky with electric light instead of firelight.
34
DOWNTOWN. After three weeks with the city in our sights, we drove into Baghdad early the next morning, April 10. The platoon had returned to division headquarters from Ba‘quba around midnight. While we waited in line for gas until nearly sunrise, al-Khirzgee slept in the back of the Humvee. I gently shook him awake and said it was time to go.
A warehouse near the gas pumps was being used by the military police to hold Iraqi prisoners. A sergeant sat behind a desk inside the door. His belt held a pistol, handcuffs, a club, and a bottle of pepper spray.
“Lieutenant Fick. First Recon. We picked this guy up near Ba‘quba a few hours ago. His name’s Ahmed al- Khirzgee.”
The sergeant jumped up. “Jesus, sir, that’s a prisoner? I thought he was your translator or something.” His hand went to the pistol.
“Relax. He’s been with me all night.”
Two Marines stepped from the shadows and grabbed al-Khirzgee by the upper arms. As they led him down a dark hallway into the warehouse, he looked back at me.
“Salaam alaikum, Ahmed. I hope you find your daughters.”
Baghdad was smoldering when we crossed a pontoon bridge over the Diyala River. The mud-colored Diyala runs lazily between banks often thirty or forty feet high. No bridge large enough for our vehicles had survived the fighting, so Army reservists threw out the mobile bridge, and we crossed slowly, one at a time.
Oily smoke poured from a refinery near the river, and other black pillars rose from all across the city. We drove through a hodgepodge of war and peace. Mark-19s thumped in the distance, while a herd of water buffalo wallowed in the muddy riverbank under the watchful eyes of a boy. He waved as we passed. Near him, on the road, three corpses in green Iraqi army uniforms rotted in the sun. Women carried water from the river in plastic jugs atop their heads. One of them stopped to rest, placing her jug on the hull of an abandoned T-72 tank.
A dirt dike angled away from the river. It separated a canal from a field piled with household trash and wrecked cars. We drove on it to avoid the pools of sewage on either side. Slummy housing blocks alternated with palm groves, giving the place a suburban feel, although Baghdad’s concrete high-rises were only a mile away. The architecture was Stalinist in its brute simplicity and uniformity, but instead of gray, everything was brown.
People watched as we passed. Most waved and cheered. Others went about the daily tasks of their hardscrabble lives, as if the Marines in the neighborhood were just another show of force by just another power beyond their control. Four boys perched high on a donkey cart passed us, going in the opposite direction along the dike. They sat atop a pile of looted goods — furniture, televisions, car tires, and buckets of brass shell casings. Down an alleyway, a boy led a donkey dragging a Jet Ski through the dust.
By the time we dropped off the dike onto a paved thoroughfare leading deeper into the city, the platoon had relaxed. Baghdad was not another Stalingrad, not even a bigger An Nasiriyah. It looked like the shooting war was really over. Gunfire echoed in the distance, and helicopter gunships flew low over the rooftops, but life around us plodded along as normal. Produce sellers hawked food from open stalls. Men in kaffiyehs sat at open-air cafes, drinking tea from tiny glasses. Other men smoked and fingered prayer beads, holding our gaze as we passed. We glided along with the traffic, swinging through roundabouts and stopping for traffic signals, jostling for space with trucks, buses, and taxis. A day before, I would have been apoplectic with so many people so close. But in another tribute to the human mind’s quest for equilibrium, frustration with traffic replaced fear of an ambush.
Our destination was Saddam City, a sprawling Shia slum in the northern part of Baghdad. We had been briefed that the de facto mayor of the neighborhood was a cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. We hadn’t heard of him and didn’t much care. After all, the Shia were supposed to be our friends. I first questioned that assumption on the drive into Baghdad. Walls, adorned a week before with likenesses of Saddam Hussein, had been defaced. As in the Roman practice of
But power knew no vacuum in Saddam City. Less than one day after the old regime’s collapse, images of bearded, turbaned clerics covered nearly every vertical surface along the sides of the road. U.S.-sanctioned
“That guy’s gonna come back and fuck us, sir,” Espera told me. “We just gave the fucker the golden key. Compare his shit-hole neighborhood to the rest of Baghdad. Anyone who doesn’t think the Shia want revenge needs to spend some time outside his air-conditioned office.”
We rejoiced in our new home. Painted in English on the side of the building was a sign: IRAQI STATE TOBACCO COMPANY. The factory grounds included a tall office tower and four warehouses. Fire raged through all but one of the warehouses, releasing clouds of sickly sweet smoke as thousands of bales of tobacco and millions of cigarettes burned. After three weeks of stress-induced smoking and dipping, the Marines rummaged through the one remaining warehouse, gleefully piling cartons of cigarettes in the back of the Humvees.
A concrete wall topped with concertina wire surrounded the compound. Inside the wall grew trees and a small garden. The parking lots were newly paved, and a triple-tiered concrete fountain decorated the lawn in front of the office building. Saddam’s sons had run the tobacco company, accounting for its prosperous feel in a sea of third world desperation. Inside the wall were hundreds of Marines in an orderly camp. Outside the wall were five million Iraqis in an anarchic city. The only human interaction across the barrier was provided by Navy SEAL snipers on the roof of the office building. They had orders to shoot any Iraqi with a weapon. They fired every few minutes throughout the afternoon and into the night.
We were supposed to begin patrolling Sadr City the next day. In the cavernous room where the battalion set up its operations center, I unfolded my new map of Baghdad on the concrete floor. The city sprawled across four hundred square kilometers, with a population of more than five million. It was bigger than Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, or Dallas. I carefully outlined the battalion’s zone in blue marker. The area covered twenty blocks square on the north side of the Tigris. It was the most densely populated part of the city. Other units’ zones abutted ours, so it looked as if all of Baghdad had been carved into manageable chunks.
With most of the Marine Corps and Army converging on Baghdad, there would be a lot of U.S. power in the city. If each small unit took control of a neighborhood and maintained a continuous presence in it, we could accomplish a lot. I envisioned meeting with a town council, maybe sharing tea with the elders, and having the autonomy to address their most pressing needs. Judging by what we’d already seen, I suspected that money, fresh water, and medical supplies would go a long way toward creating goodwill. The key, though, would be continuity. We had to develop personal relationships and deliver on our promises. We had to be in the same places day after day, learning the routines, learning names and faces, and learning to sense when something was amiss. When I finally refolded the map and left the operations center, I felt a new confidence and sense of purpose. The night was warm. As I crawled into my sleeping bag on the pavement, a firefight raged outside the wall. Tracers arced through the dark sky, and I wondered where all the bullets would land.
The next morning, our patrol was canceled. We would be leaving the cigarette factory the following day for another part of the city. First Recon’s zone had already changed. My faith in the postwar planning cracked just a bit. I rationalized that it was a mammoth operation and there would be a short adjustment period as all the units settled into place. But two days after the end of the shooting war, looters and criminals owned the city. U.S. patrols kept an uneasy peace during the day, but the Marines were ordered back inside their bases by sunset. At night, a tide of revenge killings ebbed and flowed across Baghdad as running gun battles consumed whole neighborhoods.
