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  In his early thirties with thin brown hair, he wore the business casual attire of a young banker—sharply pressed khaki pants, a crisp collared blue shirt buttoned all the way to the neck, and an expensive silver watch that screamed with severity. The bulky set of body armor and black Kevlar helmet encompassing all of that didn’t so much ruin his look as emphasize it. Whereas my dirty, sweat-stained urban camouflage blended in with my body armor, the conflicting dress combination made Kevin look even more professional.

  I nodded. “I’m new to this AO, so I’m not quite sure what to expect.”

  “He’s a smart man,” Kevin said, “and very powerful on this side of the Tigris. Problems sometimes arise simply because he’s so cognizant of both.”

  Kevin’s terp snickered on the other side of him. “He’s also very prideful,” he said in flawless English. “And he gets more and more prideful every day.”

  About five steps away from the meeting house, an old Iraqi man with sagging brown skin and a stooped back stepped out of the front door, bearing both the patience and care of a turtle. He wore an elegant white dishdasha that seemed to glitter in the sunlight, despite its being made of cotton. A bushy salt-and-pepper moustache and a lazy blue eye peeked out from under his traditional Shia black-and-white checkered headdress.

  “Salaam aleichem, Modhir,” Kevin said, shaking the old man’s hand, then cupping his heart.

  “Hell-llloe,” the sheik replied in broken English. “It is good to see you.”

  Kevin’s interpreter introduced me as “Naqib (Captain) Matt,” and Sheik Modhir repeated his greeting as we shook hands. “Hell-llloe. It is good to see you.”

  I turned around and found the staff sergeant in charge of the squad on the ground. “We already have outer security established, sir,” he said. “I got three Joes to send in with you guys, if that works.” I nodded in agreement, always amazed at how easily and automatically NCOs took care of these matters.

  “I’ll hit you up on the radio if anything comes up,” I said. “And I’ll get the sheik to bring out some chai.”

  The staff sergeant chuckled. “Sir, that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about. They have superchai here, and there’s no end to it.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, unsure what superchai was, and followed Sheik Modhir and Kevin into the meeting house. The interpreter and the three soldiers assigned to inner security followed.

  Couches and chairs of real leather and blonde wood outlined the perimeter of the front room. Crystal vases rested on the tables, filled with exotic red flowers, while chandeliers lit the room in a sort of golden glow. Oil paintings of rivers and waterfalls and forests that resembled the old American Midwest were scattered across the walls. In the back of the room, on a large oak desk, sat two brand-new MacBook laptops. Meanwhile, as my eyes swept back across the room, I saw the battalion XO already sitting on one of the aforementioned chairs, with two members of his security detail on the nearby couch.

  This is the fucking Iraqi version of Versailles, I thought to myself.

  Kevin and the interpreter took seats next to Sheik Modhir, facing the battalion XO. While I sat on a far couch, facing the group, the soldiers who followed me in moved to the end of the room and found seats of their own. I quickly took off my helmet and wiped my brow, becoming aware of just how much I had sweated in the midday heat. Then I took out my notebook and prepared myself for a long bout of listening.

  “It is good to see you again, Modhir,” Kevin said, beginning with the normal pleasantries Arabs demanded in social situations. “How is your family?”

  “Fine, fine,” the old sheik replied. “Although Rassim’s wife has been sick. He has been away for a week keeping for her.”

  No one knew exactly how many children Modhir had or, for that matter, how many wives. His eldest son, Rassim, managed the internal operations of the family and the tribe. Another of Modhir’s grown children, Hamid, dealt with Coalition forces and, more specifically, with any and all contracting through Coalition forces. Hamid was one of the men who, sheerly through the amount of time they spent together, had become a close acquaintance of Lieutenant Rant.

  After Sheik Modhir asked Kevin about his parents, the battalion XO pushed the conversation back into the business realm. “Modhir here was just asking me why the Provincial Council is getting more and more of the allotted budget every month,” he told Kevin. “Maybe you’ll have better luck explaining it to him than I did.”

  Kevin looked sternly over at Modhir. The sheik’s one good eye met the gaze steadily, while the other one drifted over toward me. Creepy, I thought to myself. My eyes darted around the room in an effort to avoid his empty, still blue. I found a painting of loggers in a broad, powerful river and studied that while I listened to the continuing conversation.

  “Sheik, we’ve discussed this before,” Kevin said. “You know how important it is for the Nahias and the Qadas to learn how to manage the money for themselves. They are Iraq’s future.”

  The interpreter spoke, followed by Modhir in turn. The interpreter nodded and turned to Kevin. “He says that he is the chairman of the Qada, so it is just a waste of time to give them the money instead of just giving it directly to him, like it used to be. He says no one knows where the Nahia stops and the Qada starts. He says it is much simpler just to give him and Hamid the money because they know what is best for the area.”

  I bit my lip and avoided the impulse to shake my head. I had argued these same points with less powerful sheiks in the Saba al-Bor area, usually to no avail. This was turning into an identical discussion, just with bigger players and broader scopes. Explaining to autocrats—autocrats whom we had empowered, and necessarily so, to curb the violence during the reconciliation—that it was now time to relinquish power in the name of democracy and free enterprise often felt like the textbook definition of insanity. Further, separating the local Nahias from the provincial Qadas never seemed as clear-cut as it should have been, mainly because the councils shared and swapped members with confounding regularity; their lines and borders were as broken and ambiguous as the country itself. Most of these local power brokers lived in neofiefdoms and, beyond the occasional lip service they paid to democratic ideals, saw no pragmatic reason to change the status quo.

  My thoughts, however, were interrupted when one of Modhir’s servants brought out the chai and chocolate snacks. I quickly wolfed down my chocolate piece, then sized up the glass in front of me. The chai looked different from what I normally drank, and it tasted different too—more lukewarm and tinged with a spice I couldn’t place, which gave it a kick. It gave my stomach a settled, warm feeling, a sensation that quickly spread to my extremities. Ahh, I thought. This must be superchai.

  My mind floated away like a piece of driftwood. I daydreamed about women, sports, music, and pretty much anything that wasn’t Iraq. By the time my attention ambled back to the present, Sheik Modhir had told Kevin that stealing money served as the sole function of the Iraqi government, which was another reason the Americans were better off paying him directly.

  Good Christ, I thought. He’s an Iraqi fat cat. No sense of irony and upset that an entity bigger than himself existed to take or tax his money. I had had enough. I reminded myself that I didn’t have to be here and stood up, whispering to the battalion XO that I was going outside to check on the men.

  “Take me with you,” he replied under his breath, grinning slightly.

  I walked past the blonde wood and crystal vases and oil paintings and hanging chandeliers and out of the golden house. I found the soldiers posted outside as external security and spent the next forty-five minutes debating the more lasting GI Joe villain, Cobra Commander or Destro. When Kevin, his interpreter, and the internal security eventually came out of the meeting house, we loaded everyone back up and drove back to Camp Taji. Our Stryker patrol returned to JSS Istalquaal at twilight.

  THE DESTRUCTORS

  “Gunslinger X-ray, this is White 6.” Lieutenant Mongo’s voice punched
through Alpha Company’s radio room in strained severity. “We’ve been hit by an EFP. I say again, we’ve been hit by an EFP. Do you copy?”

  “This is Gunslinger X-ray. We copy.”

  I sat in the company TOC, discussing the cursed history of the Chicago Cubs baseball organization with Lieutenant Rant. Our faces and our conversation froze upon hearing the radio traffic. With Captain Frowny-Face on leave, Captains Pistol Pete and Clay split commander duties for the company; in an instant, Captain Pistol Pete bolted from his seat and seized the hand mic from the radio operator. Lieutenant Mongo and his platoon had only departed JSS Istalquaal for Hussaniyah twenty minutes earlier to conduct a Baghdad Now newspaper distribution for the local populace.

  “White 6, this is Gunslinger 5,” he barked. “Give me a full SITREP [situation report].”

  “We’re fine, we’re all fine.” Lieutenant Mongo’s voice contained an odd mixture of anger and disbelief, no doubt due to the fatal nature of EFPs. Surviving one was simply a matter of not being in its trajectory, not a comforting reality for men trained and reared on their own competency and lethality. “We’re all fine. It hit my vehicle, in the lead, on Route Ninjas. The Stryker is bent [no longer able to function independently], but we’re conducting self-recovery now.”

  As Lieutenant Mongo and his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class B, continued to update our company TOC, I realized that adjusting to the different numbers used in the infantry for radio call signs was now the least of my concerns. Determining who had targeted Coalition forces with the EFP, then successfully carried out the attack, fell squarely on my shoulders as Alpha Company’s brand-new lethal targeting officer. Due to my experiences in Saba al-Bor, concern peppered my thoughts, as reliable HUMINT tended to be hit-and-miss in that area unless we incorporated direct money payments for the sheiks. Because of Hussaniyah’s size, sprawling urbanization, and homogenous Shia population, I doubted we’d be able to sift through the populace to determine who bore responsibility for the strike. My worries proved illegitimate and unfounded. The next seventy-two hours yielded a surplus of leads and tips for the EFP attack, mainly due to the tireless, thorough work of Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull, Sergeant Secret Agent Man, and Specialist Wildebeest.

  First, they met with their historically accurate sources. I’d sit in a back corner of the room, watching, learning, and, most importantly, keeping my mouth shut. The meeting venues varied—sometimes taking place on the JSS, sometimes out in sector—but the tactics didn’t. Specialist Wildebeest buddied up to the sources, offering them cigarettes and smiles. Their terp, Eddie, an Iraqi American who lived in Chicago as a construction worker before he came back to Iraq as an interpreter, knew how and when to call the Iraqis out on their bullshit and when to simply inform us quietly that he thought they had lied. Sergeant Secret Agent Man served as the details man, jotting down notes, backtracking and shifting gears constantly, as a method of pinning down specifics and occasionally catching the sources in lies and exaggerations. Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull brought it all together though, bringing a cold intimidation factor to the meetings that most intelligence soldiers were simply incapable of. Their source meeting with the Iraqi code-named Orlando was just one of a dozen they conducted in the hours following the EFP strike.

  “How did you hear about the attack?” Sergeant Secret Agent Man asked Orlando through Eddie. We were all in an old, abandoned trailer that lacked electricity on JSS Istalquaal. Everyone else huddled around a large black flashlight in the center of the room, while I stood in the far corner, intent on not interrupting or stealing anyone’s thunder. I lacked the HUMINT collection team’s professional training and simply wanted to understand the process better.

  “He says that his friend went to JAM meeting right after crescent bomb explode,” Eddie translated. “They talk about how bomb kill whole ghost tank of American soldiers.”

  Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull laughed. “Those fuckers,” he said. “All they did was kill a tire.”

  “Who was at that meeting?” Sergeant Secret Agent Man pressed.

  Orlando took a deep drag from his cigarette and spoke. “Qusay, Jissam, a few other guys he not know,” Eddie said. “He want to make sure he get reward this month if he keep talking.”

  Specialist Wildebeest patted Orlando on the back while Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull spoke. “Ask him when we haven’t come through?” he said loudly enough to maintain dominance but not sharply enough to reveal any anger. “He knows if he’s right we’ll take care of him.”

  Eddie translated, and Orlando nodded. “He says that Abu Abdullah was in charge of meeting and the bomb. Abu Abdullah say at meeting that he got orders from Ali the Beard in Sadr City to attack.”

  While Sergeant Secret Agent Man pulled out a link diagram and updated the cell structure of JAM in the area, Specialist Wildebeest talked to Orlando about his family through Eddie. Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull walked over to me.

  “Sir, this is the third HUMINT source to claim Abu Abdullah headed this up. The emplacers keep changing but not him.”

  I nodded. “This is the same guy who has been lying low the past three, four months, right? The one we thought flew the coop to Sadr City early in the summer?” I had spent many hours studying the various JAM players in greater Hussaniyah and often got the details and names mixed up in the process.

  “That’s the one, sir!” Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull responded with a wide grin on his face. “You’re catching on fast.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “And you intel gurus always pretend this secret squirrel shit is impossible to understand. Now I know the truth.” A few minutes later, I left the team to finish up the source meeting and walked out of the trailer to inform the company and battalion leadership that we had enough independent source verification for an actionable target.

  Although everyone’s initial reaction in the aftermath of the EFP strike was to do something and do it quickly, cooler heads prevailed, ensuring the proper utilization of the source network. An unfortunate by-product of accuracy was lost time. In the grand scheme of our deployment operations, seventy-two hours was nothing, although it didn’t feel that way during that period. While Higher wanted us to move more quickly and applied the pressure accordingly, they deserved credit for listening to me and Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull. Abiding by the principle of precision targeting sometimes meant doing the counterintuitive thing. In this case, waiting rather than acting became just that. Subsequently, three days after the attack on Lieutenant Mongo’s Stryker, a cell of five JAM special-groups members had been identified and verified, and bed-down locations for all were confirmed. Captains Pistol Pete and Clay put together a plan for a multiplatoon raid, which battalion leadership tweaked slightly then approved. The plan called for five targets: the cell leader, the financier, the driver of the getaway vehicle, and the two emplacers. The purported cell leader, Abu Abdullah, served as the Wolfhounds’ number one target and initial hit for the night.

  Although I could have tagged along for the mission, I thought back to my own platoon leader days and remembered how much I detested excess personnel—especially excess officers—who came along on my patrols “just because.” So I sent out Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull and Sergeant Secret Agent Man instead, with Lieutenant Mongo’s and Lieutenant Dirty Jerz’s platoons, respectively, to augment the tactical questioning for the platoon leaders, and I took my place in the company TOC to battle-track. It was a bitter pill, but one that every junior officer must swallow eventually. I reminded myself just how lucky I was not to be back at the FOB serving as Lieutenant Colonel Larry’s lackey. No matter how down I got about my present reality, that thought always brought a smile back to my face.

  Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, Lieutenant Mongo, SFC B, and their Bad Boys platoon struck first, hitting Abu Abdullah’s second cousin’s house, where a new source claimed he slept occasionally. Eager to display his loyalties, Daffy Duck marked the house with an infrared Chem-Light dropped on the front stoop, a spontaneous idea
Staff Sergeant Sitting Bull contrived. Daffy Duck proved his worth in infrared spades that night, as the platoon’s lead fire team woke up a man matching Abu Abdullah’s exact description in the front room—a testament to both the silence of our Strykers and the platoon’s dismounted movement from them. Abu Abdullah initially played dumb, then attempted to bite one of the detaining soldiers and made a run for it. The fire team leader did not take kindly to these actions and butt-stroked the fat Iraqi across the face with his rifle as he reached the front door, bringing him to the ground. The JAM leader did not resist any more, and the rest of the house was cleared in fluid sequence.

  Two more of the cell’s targets would be detained that evening: one of the emplacers by Lieutenant Dirty Jerz’s platoon and the financier by the mortarmen/tanker combo platoon. The whole mission set lasted less than two hours, and the follow-on effects of our efforts were immediate. Locals came up to our patrols in the following days, expressing concern for the soldiers hit in the blast, and thanking us for detaining the Ali Babas. Three new sources stepped forward during this period and were subsequently vetted and developed by our HUMINT collection teams. All three provided vital intelligence in the coming months, often warning us of potential attacks before they occurred, thereby mitigating the chances of a repeat attack. One of the arguments against waiting to strike back was the possibility that cell members would flee Hussaniyah, as the second emplacer did. He was picked up three months later by another unit in the Baghdad neighborhood of Shu’ula because his name matched a report we input into the massive black-list computer database. Iraqi police detained the driver of the getaway vehicle in the early winter, acting on a tip from a local-national report that he had returned to Hussaniyah from the Diyala Province that very day.

  As the mission ended and the three platoons rolled back into JSS Istalquaal with the detainees bound and blindfolded, I waited outside between the TOC and the motor pool. Lieutenant Mongo and SFC B strolled by first, crowing proudly and grinning widely. Lieutenant Dirty Jerz and his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class A, sauntered in behind them, quiet and cool, but ready to call it a night. Then I saw my intel soldiers.