military force that had raced through Iraq did not have enough people to put a policeman on every corner in every city in Iraq. And the powers that be had not expected this swift and total disintegration of civil order, nor that it would last as long as it did.
The Iraqis were tearing up everything, constantly fucking with each other, settling old blood feuds and defending their homes and families. Most of the time, we could watch from afar, for it was impossible for us to intervene in all of the flashpoints of violence that were usually one-on-ones being fought by civilians who were going at each other for reasons we found incomprehensible.
They were shooting from passing cars and from buildings. I might see a confrontation through my scope but could not stop it. Had it been plain old South Los Angeles-style gang warfare, I could have busted caps on a few gangbangers to control the situation, but we were not the ones to sort out this ongoing mess, because we could not get the whole story of who was right and who was wrong.
A call would come in to headquarters, and off we would roar away to some crime scene, armed to the teeth and singing our version of the theme song from the
The city’s policemen began returning to work on April 14, but the streets remained wild. Casey and his boys were tagged to make one of the first joint patrols with Iraqi forces, and they set out in a strange convoy with a German television crew, a
At a bank that was being robbed, the brakes were slammed on and all four vehicles skidded to a stop in a cloud of smoke that billowed out of the doorway while yellow and orange flames danced inside. A man emerged, sputtering and choking, through the smoke, and Casey told his boys to keep some rifles on the potential thief, but he leaned back against the fender of his truck to let the Iraqi police handle it.
The cops grabbed the pudgy, middle-aged guy and began yelling in Arabic; then Mohammed threw him face first to the ground, where the screaming Iraqi police immediately began stomping the hell out of him. The yelling and action drew a crowd and left Casey with a problem: If he stopped the beating, it would be obvious to the cops, onlookers, and victim alike that the Americans were really the ones who were in charge. That wasn’t the theme for this war, because we had ostensibly gone in there to free the Iraqis and return their government to its citizens and let them run it as they saw fit. But if Casey did nothing, the press was going to report that Coalition forces stood by idly and watched a man being murdered. It was the sort of ambiguous situation that was all too common around Baghdad every day.
Mohammed, tired after his exertions, stepped away from the thief to let his boys continue their brutal interrogation, and Casey motioned him over. While the cop made his way through the throng, Casey rested his hand on the pistol hanging in a holster on his right hip and lightly drummed his fingers on the butt of the weapon to draw Mohammed’s attention. It was the only time during the war that Casey was happy that Iraqi people liked to stand very close to the person with whom they were speaking. Keeping a smile on his face, Casey spoke in a quiet, calm, and slow voice, so only Mohammed could hear. “If you or your boys beat someone else like that today, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head before you can throw the second kick.” Mohammed looked hard at the big Marine, and Casey’s eyes did not waver. The cop nodded in understanding, and they quickly hauled the guy away to the police station. It was another lesson in street democracy.
Meanwhile, I was assigned to a Force Recon platoon that went after high-value targets and large robberies, and with my background, I got up to speed in a hurry on their special tactics. The unit was officially called “Broadsword,” but on the street it was known as “Baghdad SWAT.” If the mission was special, they called for us.
On an early call, we headed into the ruined financial district of Baghdad, and while the troops moved in, I set up in a position of cover. A bunch of Iraqis came running from a building with their hands filled with Iraqi currency, and we stopped four of them, one of whom was a middle-aged man who stubbornly refused to take his hands from his pockets. He was only five feet from me, and I was well within my rights to shoot him dead, for he might have a weapon or grenade in the deep pockets of his baggy robe. I handed off my rifle and took out my pistol, and he pulled back, plunging his hands even deeper into his pockets, so I whipped the side of his head, forced him to the pavement, twisted his arms, and then yanked his hands out, arrest style. All the fool had in his pockets were some ten-thousand-dinar bills. He had risked his life rather than show other Iraqis that he was carrying a large wad of money that was becoming more worthless by the day.
On April 15, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Baghdad SWAT was sent to the Central Bank of Baghdad, which was being robbed once again and was ablaze when we arrived. A platoon from India Company cordoned off the area; then our assault force plunged through the smoke to clear the huge building. I climbed atop my Humvee, which had become my standard support position, and was searching window by window and door by door when I picked up some movement on the second story of a neighboring building, near a ladder. A guy with an AK-47 was creeping up on our guys in the swirling smoke that had made him almost invisible. “Almost” isn’t good enough. I set up on him at only 168 yards through the rolling cloud and dropped him cold with two quick shots.
We recovered over ten million dinars and around a million U.S. dollars from the bank’s vault that day, filling up Amtrac after Amtrac with money, which we hauled back to the Main headquarters compound. A million bucks, there for the taking. It had been a bank robbery, the bank was a catastrophe, and young Marines were actually sitting on piles of enough cash to make them rich, but we were all so focused on fighting and staying alive that I still believe not a one of us scoffed up so much as a dollar bill. The money ended up back at the American Embassy in Kuwait. We think.
Epilogue
The nuttiness finally ended on April 19, when we handed off central Baghdad to the Army’s 1st Armored Division and began our long trip south. Destination: Kuwait, then home. I had mixed feelings about leaving the combat zone, because the silence and lack of communication from my wife had become deafening, and the day that I would have to deal with the situation was drawing close. It had been hard enough to hold my focus when a mission was going on, but now that we were in a safe, isolated rear area, I had plenty of time for unwanted and unwelcome reflection about what was happening at home.
The battalion rolled back through towns where we had once spilled blood and lost friends killed and wounded. Our first stop was the awful Iraqi town of Ad Diwaniyah, the same shithole that we had so thoroughly messed up only a few short weeks before. The place was just as disgusting as we remembered, and we sat there for weeks, from April 24 until the end of May, waiting and rotting.
Our momentum was spent, and boredom, not the fedayeen, became the enemy. The jolt of coming to such a screeching, complete halt after combat left us with mental whiplash and morale contusions. At least in Baghdad we had sodas and decent food, and we could look at the cool women and check out an empty palace now and again, but now even those minor pleasures were gone. In retrospect, cop duty with Baghdad SWAT was better than anything Ad Diwaniyah had to offer.
The Main headquarters was set up in what once had been some sort of Iraqi military boot camp, a spread of dusty one-story buildings that had motivational sayings painted on the walls in Arabic. Dirt covered everything, and our boots kicked through piles of spent cartridge shells as we cleared workspaces and dove into the usual blizzard of postcombat paperwork to account for all of our gear and caught up on the administrative details. Unfortunately, that did not take very long, and although we resumed training to keep the boys sharp, we could not run them
