'Stupid. Stupid and Sloppy.'
Yet another memory from Iraq
There were so many eyes around us, it felt like the whole world was watching.
There were the Iraqi soldiers behind us, their heads wrapped in cotton scarves to hide their faces and protect their identities, only their wide wet eyes visible between the folds. They watched Staff Sgt. Joshua Marcum carefully, aping his posture, following his movements, looking away only to glance at me or down the street at our Iraqi civilian interpreter, our “terp,” a twitchy guy in an oversized armor vest who hovered in the darkness some yards away, eyeing me and Marcum in turn.
There were the other American soldiers, part of Marcum’s nine-man squad from the 1st Infantry Division’s 82nd Engineer Battalion. Marcum, from Tennessee, was 25, an old man by Army standards, but his squadmates were just kids, most in their early twenties, some still in their teens. They waited beside the Iraqi soldiers, watching Marcum with the same attention as the Iraqis but with less fear, and with their faces, like Marcum’s and mine, boldly uncovered.
We were Americans, foreign masters of the town of Kanan. We feared nothing.
There were our subjects, an Iraqi family—a fat mustachioed man in his 40s, his wife, his mother and his three boys, two still teens but the third a fleshy twenty-something. They cowered at the open front door of their dirty little home, eyes wide and wary but dim with sleep.
Maybe they’d awoken sensing something wrong, perhaps the absence of passing cars and noisy neighbors. Maybe they’d awoken to an ominous silence that had preceded our arrival. They’d watched, standing at the dirty window, as we’d moved silently through the mud and fog under the greenish glow of a dying streetlamp. And they’d shuffled outside at hearing Marcum’s command, which none of the Iraqis save the terp could translate but which all of them had understood.
Then there was me, the scruffy reporter from South Carolina with the camera dangling from his neck and the soggy notepad wedged in his pants pocket, who’d showed up at Combat Outpost Gabe with a smiling public affairs officer at his side, happily announced that he’d just gotten blown up at Peace Day, showed everyone the bandage on his hand then invited himself on tonight’s mission to the nearby town of Kanan.
I imagined how I looked to the others. To them I must have been all eyes, watching everything and everyone, but mostly watching Marcum. It hadn’t taken me long to realize that something was happening here, a small part of something bigger, and that Marcum was at the center of it all.
So whenever Marcum stole a glance at me, he caught me looking back, half-smiling, one hand reaching for my notepad, the other caressing my rain-drizzled camera, the camera whose unblinking black eye threatened to remember everything with merciless recall.
Who knew how many thousands of people all over the world would read about Marcum’s every action, every mistake, and would see the pictures of him wide-eyed and perspiring, staring at the camera seeming to plead, Please understand.
The world was watching, all right. Or at least the tiny slice of the world that read my insignificant little South Carolina newspaper. Truth was, with my camera and my notepad, my probing questions and unforgiving eyes, I probably seemed and certainly felt a lot more important than I actually was.
But Marcum didn’t know that. For me and—as far as he knew—for all the world, Marcum was on stage.
He’d said it before; he’d say it again. “Terrorists are cowards.”
That was Marcum, hours earlier, waxing macho from the passenger’s seat of his armored Humvee. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was writing this down. “Terrorists are cowards.”
It was a cold wet night in late January 2005, just days from the country’s first free elections in a generation. All over Iraq, native cops and soldiers had moved into polling places hauling crates of ammo and boxes of bottled water, settling in for long stays.
Back in the States, the powers-that-be were touring the cable news shows smiling to the American people, saying that election day would be a success, that Iraq would soon join the ranks of free and democratic states, that everything was going great and getting better.
But here in Kanan we weren’t taking chances. With me in tow, Marcum and the rest of the 82nd Engineer Battalion’s task force had been making regular rounds of the fortified polling places dropping off more razor wire, more sandbags, more concrete barriers to keep out the suicide bombers.
By night, after curfew, they patrolled the muddy streets between the polls, listening to nervous Iraqi troops on the radio speculating in Arabic on their chances of survival.
Ahead, tracers looped through the night sky. From the looks of it, the burst was coming from one of Task Force 82’s polling places.
This was the best news we’d gotten all night.
Our driver, medic Pvt. 1st Class Timothy White, slung the Humvee around a turn to follow the leader, another Humvee commanded by 1st Lt. Joe Valintis, a 24-year-old from Chicago who was all Adam’s apple and no fight. But with tracers stitching the night sky and Iraqi democracy in the balance, the L.T. made straight for the gunfire.
Marcum turned to look at me. “We like firefights,” he said. “We don’t get into enough of them.” Trying to hide his self-congratulatory smirk, he looked like God-damned John Wayne in a Kevlar helmet.
It was true, they did like firefights—if the stories they told were true. A few weeks back, one story went, Marcum and his crew had found themselves facing down a clutch of insurgents armed with AK-47s and a machine gun. Real quick—pop pop pop—they’d dropped most of the bad guys with aimed shots.
White, a lanky 23-year-old loudmouth from Florida, had charged through a curtain of gunfire to treat the wounded men. Now he was nearly giddy at the prospect of more combat.
But White hadn’t even finished drawling “shit yes” when he had to slam on the brakes to avoid plowing into Valintis’s Humvee, which for no apparent reason had stopped at an intersection. I cracked my helmet on the metal frame of Marcum’s seat. Then we heard the lieutenant’s voice on the radio, begging for an update from his superiors.
It was standard procedure, whenever you were stopped like this, to dismount and secure the area on foot, so while the L.T. spun his wheels, me and Marcum and White spilled out of the Humvee.
No sooner had I found my footing in Kanan’s permanent patina of mud and shit than gunfire echoed off the labyrinth of narrow alleys winding in every direction. In an instant Marcum grabbed me by the scruff and shoved me behind the Humvee’s armored flank. “Stay there and stay down,” he barked.
I nodded, but Marcum had already turned away, towards the shooting, mentally computing the source and looking for corroboration from White. Sure enough, it was the poll again. The shooters were still there, still hanging around, begging for a fight.
At the L.T.’s choked order, we dove back into the Humvee. There was a charge in the air that made my spine hum. Was this the feeling you got on the cusp of inflicting some serious state-sanctioned harm on people who really deserved it? Was this the prelude to justified homicide? White checked to make sure I was in my seat before gunning the engine and following the L.T.’s truck as it barreled into the fight.
Then hung a right.
“What the fuck?” Marcum said as White, grimacing, followed the L.T.’s Humvee to a dead end. “The fight’s not that way!”
Again Humvees idled. Soldiers manning top-mounted machine guns swiveled left and right looking for bad guys and finding nothing but darkness, quiet and muddy Kanan sprawling on all sides.
The L.T. jumped out of his truck; Marcum threw open his door and charged into a confrontation with his superior while trailing frosty clouds of frozen breath like a human locomotive. I eased open my door and followed at a discreet distance, edging in just close enough to hear.
“Couldn’t you hear it? I could hear it!” Marcum was breathing hard, struggling to keep his voice down, pointing at the sky from where the clamor of guns and the tracers had long disappeared, the sky where his exhalations roiled and faded. Huff huff huff.
Valintis mumbled something about someone from company on the radio telling him to turn right, but Marcum wasn’t buying it. Falling into the passenger’s seat with a frustrated groan, he muttered a few choice insubordinations—never mind that I was back in my seat furiously writing everything down—before telling White to follow the L.T. out. Finally and probably too late, we were going in the right direction.
Fucking Hell. I was this close.
Five minutes later the patrol slid to a halt outside the poll, a schoolhouse with bad and fading renditions of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck painted on its cement walls and ringed by razor wire. Iraqi soldiers on the roof, silhouetted against the night sky, waved at us down below.
Marcum sent his translator in to do the talking. Meanwhile he leaned against his idling Humvee and told me about the worst thing he’d ever seen.
It had happened months ago, during Iraq’s long summer, when TF-82 was still new to town. At the battalion’s compound in Baqubah, a contingent of National Guardsmen manned the walls at Gabe and walked the perimeter to free up the engineers for duties outside the wire.
National Guard. Part-time soldiers.
It was your typical Iraqi summer. Hot. Dry. Dusty. Air conditioners were selling for $200 on the street and everybody had one, but nobody had power. And no power meant the water treatment plants weren’t working, so what little water you could squeeze from the taps was dirty and diseased.
Everybody was hot, thirsty, sick and dirty—and pissed off all the time. Summer in Baqubah meant more unemployment, more starvation, more violent crime, more attacks on the occupiers, more death all around.
Except inside Gabe’s concrete walls, where Halliburton kept the power on, the water flowing and the chow hall stocked with three flavors of ice cream. The Guardsmen were the thin brown line that kept the angry starving masses out and the amenities in.
Every couple days, car bombers targeted the camp’s front gate, a maze of earth, concrete, razor wire and machine gun nests. The rumble of exploding cars rolled over Gabe’s expanse of trailers, tents and basketball courts, startling the doves and rabbits the Americans had adopted as pets, sending pillars of smoke curling skyward and making jumpy Guardsmen on the wall even jumpier.
They were all cops, construction workers, school teachers. They did a weekend a month, two weeks a year in uniform, just enough to remind them that they were still part-time soldiers, but not enough to make hardened professionals out of them. Of course they were jumpy.
So no one—certainly not Marcum—was surprised when a Guardsman shot and killed a girl who was digging in the heaps of garbage dotting the no-man’s-land surrounding Gabe. She was just foraging for food, but to the Guardsman, she looked like a threat—a small-framed suicide bomber, maybe, or some dim-witted young insurgent planting an IED in the wide-open and in broad daylight. So the soldier pulled the trigger. And a teenage girl died.
“I had to clean that shit up,” Marcum added. I hadn’t known him long but already I could tell he was the kind of guy who was always performing, always conscious of what he was saying, how he looked, the narrative he was writing just by being here. But with this story he’d dropped all the pretense. He wanted to talk about this. He needed to talk about it, reporters and consequences be damned.
Marcum went outside the wire to recover the girl’s body. She weighed nothing. Cradling her limp bleeding shell, Marcum couldn’t help but see in her lifeless face the features of his own little girl, his blonde-haired blue-eyed angel.
You weren’t supposed to kill little girls. Little girls were the reason you killed people who weren’t little girls. Didn’t the Guardsman understand that?
Furious, red-faced, near tears, Marcum held the corpse up for the shooter to see. “Look at what you did, motherfucker.”
It was a messy little war; Marcum said he understood that. People died; he said he understood that, too. But it was his job to make sure the right people died, he said. And in a place where the bad guys dressed like the good guys, that was easier said than done. It wasn’t for amateurs.
In the darkness in his Humvee, racing towards the poll after that first burst of gunfire, I had watched Marcum’s face harden. He wanted the insurgents to be there, armed and ready, when he pulled up. More than anything, he wanted to find a busload of bad guys he could kill, a busload of problems he could solve, a busload of little girls he could save.
Standing there beside our Humvee, waiting for his Valintis to decide it was time to move on, me and Marcum shared an awkward moment. He knew I knew his terrible secret: that he had come to Iraq to be a hero only to discover that Iraq shrugged off heroism like a bad joke.
“Terrorists are cowards,” Marcum said. It wasn’t true, based on what I had seen and heard about: poor farmers taking potshots at bristling convoys, suicide bombers giving their lives to wound a couple cops, amateur insurgents taking on the combined might of the world’s greatest armies.
But it made him feel better.
At the poll there was nothing but shaggy Iraqi soldiers slumping around outside chewing nuts and spitting soggy shells into the mud. Marcum’s terp interrogated them, got a lot of shrugs in response then reported that at least he’d gotten a description of the shooters’ vehicle.
“A red Opel,” he said.
There were groans. I asked Marcum why.
“Every third car in Iraq is a red Opel,” he said.
Huddle. Here’s the plan: the patrol splits into teams and fans out on foot, knocking on doors and looking for red Opels and hot rifles. Arrest anybody suspicious. Each team takes along a couple of native soldiers, you know, for appearances. Got it? Okay—break.
Before the teams could split, here came a middle-aged Iraqi man high-stepping through the mud waving and calling out. He was unarmed, apparently, so Valintis didn’t shoot him. In rushed Arabic he babbled; the L.T. just blinked and nodded until the terp interceded. Suddenly the terp was sharing the man’s urgency. “There’s a woman inside,” he said, then he gestured at his own abdomen. “She’s bleeding … down there.”
Down there was a place no Iraqi spoke of in less than a life-and-death situation.
The L.T. put it together. “She’s pregnant?”
The Iraqi nodded.
On any other day, at any other time, this wouldn’t have been such a problem. But there was a curfew in advance of the elections, the roads were patrolled by incompetent Iraqi soldiers whose credo began and ended with “shoot first” and here there were bad guys. Besides, the plaintiff said he didn’t have a car.
The L.T. called White over for a quick consultation. “I can take a look at her,” White said, “but if she’s pregnant and bleeding, she needs a doctor.”
Watching Marcum watch this exchange, I saw his hard expression soften visibly. He stepped in and said that they had to something, anything. All eyes turned to Marcum. There was a moment’s hesitation … then action.
Between them, the Iraqi, the terp and the Americans improvised a plan while I stood in the wings snapping flash pictures that painted their shadows on a grimy brick wall.
There was a neighbor who was a taxi driver. If the Iraqi pleaded his case and Marcum twisted some arms, maybe they could get the neighbor to drive the woman to the nearest hospital. Meanwhile the L.T. could make some calls to the Iraqi Army, tell them that someone was coming through—so for God’s sake, don’t shoot!
In short order, cases were pleaded, arms were twisted and calls were made, and one very pregnant and bleeding woman was on the way to the hospital. Good deed done, Marcum took his team in one direction; the L.T. took his in another. I followed Marcum and nobody seemed at all surprised at my choice.
Right turn, left turn, backtrack, turn again—up and down Kanan’s labyrinthine streets we went, on the lookout for tire tracks and red Opels. It was cold. Underneath layers of wool, cotton and Kevlar, I was shivering. Mud had worked into my boot and mixed with hot sweat into a grimy, lukewarm paste that sucked at my feet with every step.
When Marcum paused to probe the darkness with his night observation devices, or nods, the Iraqi soldiers piled up behind him and me behind them. Each time, Marcum snapped his nods back into their stowed position atop his helmet and grimaced. Nothing.
An hour later, with the night growing only colder and wetter and his Iraqi troops starting to drag, Marcum was nowhere near giving up. So it was to everyone else’s relief—mine included—when the terp spotted a red Opel outside a ramshackle one-story house, one of dozens of identical houses on a long dirty street backed by an endless expanse of mud.
As we crept toward the house, silence descended on the street—a silence touched only by soft cries from deep in that dark expanse. With his night vision, Marcum could see the ghostly green shapes of feral dogs far away.
They were ugly, mean creatures that were born, lived, bred and died in Iraq’s vast festering garbage dumps. With no predators, a constant supply of fresh garbage and no one bothering to control them, the dogs had become more numerous and less domestic by the day until they were like a new species: wolf-like, predatory, nocturnal.
In Kanan on a night like this, the dogs were the only living things not behind locked doors—unless you counted insurgents and soldiers.
The terp was spooked. He pointed out the Opel from the end of the street and refused to come any closer. Marcum didn’t press the point. I knew from my reading that terps were an endangered species in Iraq. More than a few had come home at night to find their families murdered and the murderers waiting for them.
Terps were collaborators, lap-dogs of the infidel invader, enemies of the soldiers of Islam. Terps were whores, eager to sell out their countrymen for a handful of silver. But what a handful it was. Interpreters could clear a thousand bucks a week or more in a country where the average income was a fraction of that. Their wealth won them few friends in country that was dirt-poor and only getting poorer.
Worse, Marcum’s terp was local. Which meant he could point out the bad guys. And the bad guys could point out him.
Leaving the terp behind, Marcum deployed his motley crew in a semi-circle around the Opel and the house’s front door. I muscled into the circle with my camera at the ready.
Marcum stepped up and knocked.
All the world was watching. Feral dogs in the distance sniffed the scent of human sweat under the stink of rotting garbage and zeroed in on the shapes of men and two women gathered under the weak light of a streetlamp. Nervous neighbors parted drapes, warily eyeing the Americans and their lackeys, glaring at the suspect family huddled on their stoop, the neighbors’ eyes blaming the Americans, blaming the collaborators with their nervous stamping and their disguises, blaming the suspects for bringing this evil into their neighborhood.
By now I was practically tethered to Marcum’s elbow, snapping photos over his shoulder, each click of my camera drawing pinched angry stares from the suspects—especially from the family’s oldest son, a fat scruffy fellow dressed in rumpled cotton and seething abject fear from every pore. The terp knew the guy was bad by his reputation. I could tell he was bad just by looking at him.
But then, “bad” was a relative thing in the new Iraq, wasn’t it? And if you wanted to arrest everyone here who’d ever been bad, you might as well ring the whole damn country in concrete and razor wire. The question was whether the man had committed any specific offenses, particularly involving machine guns, Opels and polls—and whether there were any evidence.
Outside, the evidence was ambiguous. The car felt warm to Marcum’s hand, but he said he wasn’t sure he trusted his own judgment. He even flipped his night-vision goggles down and took a step back, peering deep into the car’s heat signature, applying what little he knew about how hot engines got and how fast they cooled to determine if it had been driven recently enough to be the shooters’ vehicle.
But this was the purview of a forensics expert, really, not a soldier. Guns he knew. And a gun he’d have to find to prove that the oldest son was one of his shooters. Of course, every household in Iraq was allowed one assault rifle, so even finding a gun could prove inconclusive.
“It’s so much easier to just shoot it out,” Marcum muttered. He glanced inside the empty house through its wide front window. “We’re going in.”
He ushered everyone—save the oldest son and an American to guard him—into the large front room, where he pantomimed to the Iraqi soldiers that he wanted them to keep an eye on the rest of the family. The Iraqis nodded their understanding. But they said nothing; they were locals too, and even if they didn’t know the suspect family, the suspect family might know them, even by the sounds of their voices.
Room to room we went: me, Marcum and one of his squadmates. The place was a hazy labyrinth—all but windowless, poorly ventilated, sagging and draped in carpets. There was little furniture but plenty of cabinets and shelves bulging and heaped with curious bundles and boxes. Marcum stood in a doorway groaning, posted his soldier in a hallway more to get him out of the way than anything else, then dragged me into what might be a kitchen.
Patting his vest, he realized he had failed to bring a flashlight. He spotted the one on my belt and said, “Got a light?” And with a flick of the on button, the I cast aside any claim to objectivity and became a combatant—and an eager one at that. Marcum grabbed the flashlight, slung his rifle and started rooting through the contents of a cabinet.
Nothing. He moved on to the next room, which was hot, dimly-lit and piled with blankets.
He froze mid-stride and I bumped into him from behind. “Shh,” Marcum whispered over his shoulder. He pointed at an 18-month-old baby sprawled belly-down on a blanket in the middle of the room. I backed out carefully, but Marcum lingered, his head tilted, a smile rising, his eyes reflecting unspoken emotions.
Moving on, Marcum reached into a cabinet in the next room. He wheeled with a Soviet-style bayonet in his hand. It was rusty and dull and old enough to be a museum piece. Technically, it was a weapon and Marcum could confiscate it, but aside from the tetanus risk, it was hardly dangerous—and besides, who knew what its sentimental value was.
Based on what I’d read, it seemed nearly every adult male in Iraq had worn a uniform at one time or another, and there’d been enough wars and uprisings to story any blade. Maybe Daddy had battled Kurdish cavalry in rocky northern Iraq during the Kurds’ long bloody fight for autonomy.
Maybe he had stared down Iranian human wave assaults in some dusty bunker in north-eastern Iraq. Maybe he had survived 30 days of carpet bombing by B-52s in Kuwait before fleeing with only what he could carry on his back.
Maybe, but Marcum didn’t seem to care. He tossed the bayonet aside. Fishing behind a cabinet he scored a jackpot: pieces of a disassembled AK-47 that was at least as old as he was. I reached out and touched it; it felt cold. But Marcum’s arched eyebrows said he didn’t care about that either. Even a cold rifle was leverage enough.
Outside, the son was sweating, breathing fast and eyeing his guard. His grandmother had bullied her way outside and was pressing a clean set of clothes to the son’s chest. He shooed her away without even looking at her, and she turned with tears in her eyes.
When Marcum showed the son the pieces of the old AK-47, Grandma fell to her knees at Marcum’s feet, clutching his pants legs and begging in Arabic for what I assumed was mercy, mercy.
She must have known what happened when Americans arrested people like her grandson. They got turned over to local authorities, the Iraqi police or Army, from where they were supposed to enter the judicial process. But if what I’d heard was true, in Iraq in 2005, like in 1995 or 1985, justice often meant summary execution at the hands of some mid-level uniformed thug.
Marcum knew it, too. Looking at the son, the suspect, Marcum’s eyes were hard and cold. But turning his gaze on the old woman at his feet, his eyes melted.
He knew the son was a bad character. He couldn’t prove that the guy was involved in tonight’s shooting, but he didn’t have to. He could detain anybody for 48 hours. And with the AK-47, he could probably justify holding the son even longer. With one word he could get another thug off the streets.
But even thugs had parents and grandparents. Even thugs were loved. And arrest might mean death for this son, this grandson, this … father?
Marcum tossed the AK-47 in the house and waved at his squad. “Let’s go.” Turning to the grandmother, he said, “Shokran. Masalama.” Thanks. Goodbye.
Already, she was weeping.
On the way back to Gabe, the mission ended if not accomplished, everyone exhausted and thoughtful under Kevlar helmets that seemed heavier, armor vests that squeezed tighter, uniforms sticky and cold with stale sweat, a hesitant voice spoke up on Marcum’s radio, telling him that some Iraqi soldiers at a highway checkpoint apparently hadn’t gotten Valintis’ message and had, um, accidentally shot up the car carrying the pregnant bleeding Iraqi woman.
The next day, after a few hours of sleep and some fried chicken at the Gabe chow hall, I joined Marcum and White for a patrol down on the outskirts of Baqubah. With the elections a day away, the roads were crawling with military traffic: U.S. troops in their brand-new up-armored Humvees and flatbed trucks, all bristling with machine guns and grenade launchers; troops from the Republic of Georgia in battered second-hand vehicles; Iraqi soldiers and cops in rusty white pickup trucks and compact cars riddled with bullet holes and with all of their glass cracked or shattered.
All this traffic was starting to make Marcum nervous—which made the rest of us nervous, too. And when our patrol passed, on the opposite side of the road, a long convoy from the New York National Guard’s 42nd Infantry Division idling on the shoulder, someone in our patrol got on the radio: “What’s going on here?”
There were only a few rules when traveling on Iraq’s dangerous dilapidated roads, and one of them was don’t stop. Another was, when you did stop, don’t pull over on the shoulder, where insurgents loved to plant roadside bombs. This 42nd I.D. unit had a lot to learn. Problem was, education in Iraq might come at a high price.
A few minutes later, a distant voice crackled on the radio, saying that some jumpy trooper from the 42nd had mistaken Iraqi Army officers in a pickup truck for insurgents and had opened fire with a .50-caliber machine gun.
Updates rolled in: medics had reached the truck; at least one officer was dead, others were wounded; the 42nd was setting up a landing zone for a medevac chopper.
One 82nd soldier spoke for Marcum, for White, for me, for my readers—for everyone watching this sad drama in this God-forsaken place—when he muttered into the radio with a tired and angry voice, “Stupid. Stupid and sloppy.”
Read more:
