Eric's blog: "Men Worth Killing"

Men Worth Killing
(Written 2005)

It wasn’t the mortar that woke me. It was the headache.

This is my 5th trip to the desert, so I recognize the tell-tale signs of dehydration as soon as I see them in myself. The headache was one of those signs. It woke me at 2am and I was lying there trying to shake it off when the mortar came in. The impact point was quite some distance from where I was lying, so it did not register immediately. After the gunfire followed I realized that was a mortar I had heard. Oddly enough, I smiled and got a little excited and thought to myself, “So that is what they sound like!”

The other guys in the tent just kind of lay there. I reached for my 9 millimeter Beretta which we keep with us at all times. Our M-4 rifles, we keep at work. No one else moved, so I just lay there and kept listening. All the noise died down quickly. I just kept lying there, wide awake, waiting for 6am to come.

I really do not mind Iraq. I really don’t mind the war. I have no interest in politics, and it seems to me that combat is a natural state of mankind, sadly enough. No one can ever recall any given time when there was not a war being fought somewhere, at sometime, over some bullshit. It just happens to be Iraq now, and I just happen to be in it.

So why did we not move when the mortars went off? I found out later, myself. Here is a little lesson on what your tax dollars are paying for. There are these things, floating in the sky. Unless you are Stevie Wonder, you notice them the instant you get to Baghdad. They look a little like UFOs. I do not know what they are called or how they work exactly, since it is all super-secret-ninja-classified foobaz, but the basics are like this: when someone is somewhere shooting at us, or lobbing mortars in, these things immediately pick up on it and triangulate the position of the attacker and bring a truckload of hellfire and brimstone to bear on the location.

Dang, war is getting fun. Not very samurai like, but then again, our opponents are not very samurai like either.

So anyway, unless you are really near the fight or really near the impact location, it is all over before you get there. All you can do, if you are close enough to the impact point, is run over there and see if anyone needs help. Since the mortars did not land near us and the super secret ninjas were at work, we went back to sleep. The way we fight wars sure has changed.

Funny war, though. I work in a palace. Actually, I work in THE Palace. We work in the US Embassy, which is now inside of Saddam’s main palace in Baghdad. It is a little weird. It strikes me as funny that we sleep in trailers right behind the grandest structure for 2,000 miles in any direction. It strikes me as funny that our chow hall is inside his former ball room. It is a little neat to be chewing on some chicken concoction while looking up at a magnificent chandelier suspended from an ornate marble ceiling.

I cannot tell you how much joy it is to take care of your necessary bodily functions on a toilet that once held the butt of a guy who believes he is Nebuchadnezzer reincarnated. (If you do not know who that is, you should read more)

I went through the basic tourist-soldier things. I got a picture of myself sitting on his former throne. Yes; he had a throne made for himself. I got pictures of myself on the third floor balcony of his summer palace overlooking his lake. Yes; he had a summer palace and yes, he built a lake there, in the desert.

Not that this is fun, exactly. It is hot, even in the winter. You have to drink enough water to gag a fish just to keep from getting your ass kicked by the sun. I am not thrilled about the 60lbs of gear we have to wear, even though it is damn nice, state of the art equipment. Snipers and improvised explosive devices are not picnic either. The food is really damn good, though.

I like our mission. I am on a team that is dedicated to basically being bodyguards for the judges and lawyers that are presiding over cases against insurgents. It is unpleasant business since it requires that we be outside of the Green Zone and in the Red Zone. We are exposed to a whole bunch of pissed off Iraqis. Neat thing, though. Some of the cases we have going to trial are BIG NAME cases. The kind of names you would recognize if I told you, and you happen to be a fan of CNN or Fox News. No, we are not doing Saddam’s case yet, but we are doing some other high profile ones. I really, really, really hope I am still here doing this when Saddam’s case goes to trial.

We were in a convoy my first morning, trying to get from Camp Victory to the Embassy. Camp Victory is Saddam’s former summer Palace area. Leaving one palace area on the way to the main palace, we saw nothing but squalor in between. It looked to me like the poor areas of Kyrgyzstan when I was there. I saw people milling about in a general state of malaise. Some were doing their best to hustle out a living, selling fruit and propane tanks on the side of the road. I saw the election posters everywhere. I was surprised that none of them were vandalized.

“We are no longer occupiers. As soon as the election occurred, we became guests of the government” the nerdy Army guy says. Whatever you say, nerdy Army guy, I think. Meanwhile we are tearing ass through the streets, sirens wailing, massive 50 caliber machine guns mounted on the tops of the armored HMMWV
(Humvees) vehicles we are driving. I think to myself that guests probably should not be driving in the wrong direction down the highway, but who am I to say? It turns out we drive down the wrong lane to throw off the insurgents that try to blow us up by planting bombs along our route. We vary our routes to the point that we drive up streets the wrong way or go where there are no streets at all.

Kinda fun, though, until you remember there are some quality people out there determined to kill you, and moreover, determined to kill themselves in killing you.

I say quality people, cause that is what they are. I am a fan of criminal history. I read everything I can about it. I have known for a long time about Saladin and his “Hashashins”. They were the first Islamic terrorists and existed a few centuries ago. Even Marco Polo wrote about them with fear and respect in his journals about his travels. It turns out that Saladin drugged his zealots with hashish to keep them obedient, and that is why they were called “Hashashins”. He then trained them to become single minded killers, bent on assassinating key leaders at Saladin’s command. They were told if they died completing their mission, they would obtain the highest levels of paradise and thereby achieve Heaven, as well as 70 virgins. By the way, the word “assassin” comes from these guys. “Assassin” is merely a modern corruption of the word “Hashashin”. Turns out that Islamic terrorists virtually invented assassination, and even, more or less, the word.

These guys we fight today are more or less descendants of Saladin, even though they may not know it. They may never have heard of the guy. The guys we fight are tied to Al Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah. Unpleasant lads, overall. Nonetheless, they are decendants of Saladin and therefore or worthy foes.

Men well worth killing indeed.

Well, not all of them anyway. At the court where I work, we have been attacked twice now by what I can only describe as a near-sighted sniper. The first time he attacked, we had only two guys outside, and I was not one of them. The round from the AK-47 landed almost squarely between the two guys, missing either by nearly 4 feet. He fired off two more rounds, striking the concrete barriers our guys dove behind.

Quick sniper lesson for the uninitiated: never use a fully automatic weapon as a sniper rifle. You never want to squeeze off too many rounds, since it will very likely give away your location to anyone looking. Also, if you wish to be a sniper, it helps to not be half blind. A bad sniper, a real sniper I mean, if he misses his target, he misses by a few inches. This guy missed by several feet. I am being kind by calling him a sniper at all.

He, or someone as bad as he, attacked again last week. This time he shot at a group of 4 guys that I was in. When the first round hit, it struck the pavement off to my right, several feet away. We kinda looked around at each other confused for a moment, since we knew right away someone had fired a round, but we could not figure out what they were shooting at. We took cover and moved along the concrete barriers that line the courthouse to get back to the building. We did not bother to return fire. In truth, we were joking that we should find the guy and instead of shooting him, we should take him to the firing range and teach him how to shoot.

The court house is in an unpleasant place. It sits just west of the “Green Zone”, nestled firmly between Checkpoint 12 (the western-most checkpoint of the Green Zone) and Ad-Nan Palace. Ad-Nan is a huge structure, shaped like a modernized pyramid. Coalition forces work there, but I have no idea what they do. To the immediate north of the court house, called “The Clock Tower” because of it’s giant Big Ben-like clock topping the spire at the center, is a neighborhood. It is a poor neighborhood and is filled with Baath Party loyalists. For those who do not know, the Baath Party is Saddam’s former political party.

That neighborhood is not real fond of us. For fun, they like to get on the roof, throw a barbeque and squeeze off a few rounds from an AK-47 at us. Lucky for us, the AK-47s must be slippery with barbeque sauce, because those folks have not hit anyone yet.

The car bombs are real crowd pleasers. Let me give you the skinny on car bombs. The border between Iraq and Syria is about as tightly controlled as a prostitute’s panties. Anyone and everyone can get through there. The border is on the far side of a desert wasteland that makes up western Iraq. Shipments of vehicles keep getting pushed through where they are turned into car bombs and driven all over central and northern Iraq.

Our intelligence section has just brief us that these alleged “suicide” car bombers are actually “homicide” car bombers. It turns out, they are finding, that many of these car bombers are being duped. Take Ali, for example. Ali was told to drive a car full of explosives to a location on the north side of July 14th bridge. Ali was supposed to be part of a three vehicle convoy, all of which are car bombs. They are told to drive the cars to the Iraqi Police station there and leave them. They are supposed to go a safe distance away and then use cell phones to detonate the car bombs. Ali, who gets delayed in traffic, doesn’t get to the police station as early as his two friends. To Ali’s surprise, the two cars driven by his friends are blow to bits when they get to the police station. It turns out the terrorists are getting these suckers to “deliver” the cars, only to blow them up with the delivery boys still inside. It turns out that the cell phone they gave Ali to blow the car up was just a fake. The real cell phones were in the hands of a spotter located somewhere near the police station.

What happened to Ali, you say? Ali was caught by US Forces, at which point he promptly confessed everything. Turns out he considered himself a sympathizer and not a martyr. He is but one of several situations that have come to light recently that have shown us that the terrorists are tricking people to “deliver” these bombs, only to blow them up still inside of them, and then to create propaganda by telling everyone he volunteered to give his life to the cause.

Gee. What is the world coming to when terrorists can’t trust each other?