One night, I started to itch. It began on my legs and I scratched all night, waiting for the lights to come on so I could check my clothes. I thought I’d avoided bedbugs by keeping my distance from the POWs, but it turned out the bugs weren’t from the front lines, they were from the blankets. When the lights came on I lifted my shirt and saw two of them right away, crawling across the fabric.
“Oh no,” I said.
They were each about the size of a kiwi seed, and must have been feasting on me for a while because when I squashed them against the wall they left huge smears of my blood behind. I was infested from my underwear out—every article of clothing I had, except my hat and socks, were crawling with the critters and the eggs they left behind. Theo refused to check himself, saying that he didn’t have any. I could tell right away that he was in bedbug denial.
It’s a traumatic experience being covered in parasites, feeling them crawling all over you and growing fat off of your blood. It makes you feel like an animal. “American dogs,” we came to call ourselves.
The Little Judge had visited me several times in solitary, holding my credit cards and asking for the passwords, but I kept explaining that they weren’t ATM cards and pretending not to know what he was getting at. He even sent a couple of armed thugs to ask once, but neither spoke English so they didn’t get very far either. On January thirty-first, exactly one month since my arrival, he brought in some English-speaking jihadis to clear that problem right up.
It was late when our door opened and I was ordered from the cell. A guard led me across the hall into the office and placed me on the floor by the stove.
“How are you?” asked someone with a French Canadian accent.
“Never better,” I said as he lifted my cap.
I was sitting in a circle with five people: the emir, three young guys in black masks, and an older man with an air of authority lying on his side, Buddha style. The emir immediately placed a tea glass in front of me and filled it to the brim. There were guns everywhere, but none were being pointed at me.
One of the three wearing masks took the lead in the interrogation. He was in his twenties, with droopy eyes and some red in his beard. He sat to my right with his AK across his lap. Another of the young men, a pudgy one, sat to my left, and next to him was the third masked man, who I sensed was the leader among the three. He was big and wore black-rimmed glasses over his mask.
The three of them asked me some basic questions about who I was and explained that they’d been brought into the process due to the language barrier. They gave me the same spiel about how I was in a court and would be released soon if I was telling the truth. After the small talk they got right down to business and handed me a blank sheet of paper and a pen. I was instructed to write down everything about myself—my Social Security number, online passwords for email, bank accounts, and credit cards, for Facebook, my website, and Verizon, along with any other information that I thought might help them in their investigation.
“Look, I gotta tell you I’m not sure about all these passwords,” I said. “I keep them all written down next to my computer so I never really committed them to memory.”
“Do your best,” said Redbeard. “Have you ever been in the military?”
“No.”
“Because if you have,” Chubs piped up, “you’d better tell us, or else you’re in trouble.”
During the interrogation the man lying like Buddha observed everything but only spoke a few times, always in a very polite and hospitable way. After I had written down everything the masked men wanted and answered their questions, they changed the subject to politics.
“What do you think about the war in Iraq?” Glasses asked me.
“I think it was wrong and I was against it,” I responded, telling them exactly what I thought they wanted to hear.
“Because we don’t like Saddam Hussein, but—”
“But it’s not the job of the United States to force-feed a revolution down another people’s throat? I agree,” I said, cutting him off.
This response seemed to please them and ended the conversation before it had really begun. All in all, they were very professional. Maybe there really is an investigation, I told myself. Maybe I really was going to be released soon.
When I returned to my cell, Theo was shocked to see me.
“Wow, you were gone so long I thought they’d let you go,” he said.
Two days later, the masked men returned. After I’d been escorted into the office again, my face lit up upon seeing them.
“All right!” I said. “You guys here to take me home? Everything work out all right?”
“No,” said Redbeard. “None of the passwords worked.”
I wasn’t surprised but acted shocked. Resting in front of him on a coffee table was a white laptop. The emir and Glasses sat behind the desk, talking in Arabic. I sat down across from Redbeard, next to Chubs, and he turned the laptop toward me while picking up a chrome pistol-grip shotgun and ordered me to log in to my bank account. After a few failed attempts I managed to log in and show them my savings, which amounted to over sixteen grand, with another nine in my business account. Then we moved on to my credit cards. After I logged in to those, they looked over all my purchases and questioned me on them. They weren’t happy about the cigarettes, but I explained the logic of buying them duty-free and for some reason they accepted that. Then we moved on to my email, which for the life of me I could not seem
