Chapter One
Welcome to Iraq
There is something deceptively innocent about the sound of mortars whizzing past you ... at least, the first time they''re shot at you.
One moment, I was standing there with my buddies unloading a truck. The next moment, my ears picked up the distinct "pssst" sound homing in on us.
The mortar shot overhead, so close that I instinctively ducked. I whipped my head around to track its course, feeling a split-second thrill run through my body, like that of a child setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July. But this was no celebration.
"Hit the ground!" someone yelled.
Right behind the first mortar was a second, then a third, then a fourth.
They each slammed into the earth with an enormous impact. The ground shook. The eight-story building above us shuddered, and we all covered our heads when the windows blew out.
As I lay there with glass and debris raining down on me, all I could think was, "Holy shit, what did I get myself into?"
If it was pounded into our heads once at boot camp, it was pounded in a thousand times: a moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one. The admonition was not meant to hone our sharpshooter skills, rather, it was meant to keep us from taking a bullet.
Our driver must have had the same instructor at the State Department''s boot camp. He took no chances as our Chevy Tahoe surged away from Baghdad International Airport. Next to him, in the front passenger seat, our gun captain peered out through the thick-plated glass, on guard for any sign of trouble. The M4 military-style carbine rifle was in his hands, loaded with a full magazine and ready to fire. In the back seats, the five of us newcomers were on the alert as well. It would not serve much of a purpose if we were killed our very first day here.
We, too, carried fully loaded M4 assault rifles, courtesy of the US government. But none of us in the SUV were military.
We were civilian contractors, officially known as international police trainers and advisers sent to the war zone to do work for the State Department. Our khaki uniforms were very similar to what US soldiers wore.
Strapped to each of us was what we called battle rattle-on our heads, were Kevlar helmets with sand goggles. On our chests, were bullet-proof vests. They, too, were made of Kevlar and rated to stop shrapnel. They could even, we were told, take a bullet from an AK-47. They had pockets up front, filled with extra ammunition. Each magazine of ammunition weighed a pound.
Our seven-and-a-half-pound M4 rifles were made by Colt Manufacturing and highly rated for accuracy. But they were also manufactured with a manganese phosphate outer coating. This, according to the manual, "insures complete protection against corrosion or rust on the barrel and all other critical steel parts of the weapon." It was kind of hard to imagine anything getting rusty in a place where you could spit on the asphalt and watch it fizzle away.
What the manual didn''t say was that the no-rust coating helped make the M4 hotter than hell to hold onto in the desert heat, so we carried gloves to handle our weapons. We were also issued a 9-mm millimeter Beretta semiautomatic pistol, which weighed in at two and a half pounds. Last, but not least, was a no-nonsense knife with serrated segments, a weapon of last resort.
At this point, June 9, 2004, we were both in country-physically inside the country where the war was-and in the war theater or in theater-where fighting could take place at any minute.
We''d arrived in theater hours earlier. After a short flight from our staging area in Kuwait City, Kuwait, our transport plane touched down at Baghdad airport and pretty much dropped us there. Then we waited.
It seemed that we spent a lifetime standing in the blistering desert heat, but I didn''t dare take off my Kevlar vest. Hundreds of military personnel were flown in about the same time. Like my group of eighty-eight civilians, they waited for transportation to parts unknown. We could do nothing but stand on the tarmac biding our time.
After a couple hours, a handful of people from our group went in search of bottled water. We''d all arrived with liter bottles, but those were guzzled down within our first hour there.
A fellow trainer, Kevin Kadowski, plopped down on his army trunk and yanked off one of his heavy military boots to adjust his sock.
"Check it out, Cole," he said to me, and he proceeded to bend the thick sole. He was able to make the toe touch the heel. That''s how hot it was, standing on the pockmarked tarmac.
"Yeah, that''s great. That makes me feel a whole lot better," I said, as the sweat rolled down my back.
Kevin said, "Aw, come on, you live in the Nevada desert, you should be used to this."
"I live in the desert, yeah, but not like this. It''s got to be over a hundred ten degrees here."
"More like a hundred twenty-five," he said, dropping his grin. "I checked."
The water bottles finally arrived, and we chugged them down, nonstop. About that same time, a string of SUVs showed up and began taking four men each. I was close to the front of the line but not close enough.
"More vehicles will be coming, don''t worry," we were told.
The SUVs sped away, dust twirling up behind them. More vehicles did come, usually three at a time, but they took other trainers.
Meanwhile, those of us who were left behind were sweating bullets out on the tarmac. Not only was it hotter than heck, it seemed unwise to be out in the open this way, just standing around, waiting for someone to fire a few mortars at us.
Then, finally, I was at the head of the line when a vehicle, its outline made fuzzy by the heat, appeared in the distance. I shaded my eyes and strained to make out what it was. It got closer, and its shape became more distinct. After a while, I could distinguish it as an SUV. It was no mirage, thank goodness. It was my ride.
As soon as our driver and gun captain pulled up in the Tahoe, they jumped out, greeted us, and wasted no time laying down the law.
"Gentlemen, these are the rules you''ll live by every time you convoy," the driver said. "You will keep your eyes continually scanning your own zone. There is to be no talking, no complaining, no daydreaming, and no bullshitting. The only time we want to hear a peep out of you, is if you spot something suspicious. Then you shout it out like your life depends on it ... which, of course, it does."
His speech finished, we could begin loading. I strode forward, grabbed the handle of the back door, and quickly discovered I could not budge it. At first, I thought it might be locked, but when I saw the man in the gun captain position-the front passenger seat-putting extra effort into yanking his open, I realized I needed to muscle mine, too. In time, it would come as second nature to exert strength to pry open the armored doors of the various SUVs we used.
We climbed in and buckled up, the bulk of our vests making the task a little difficult. The SUV surged forward, and, after passing through a couple check gates, we left the airport perimeter. Now began the dangerous trek to the city and our civilian contractor headquarters.
I say dangerous trek because, just like the tarmac at the Baghdad airport, the road sported craters from various explosions. We saw the twisted frames of numerous vehicles caught in those explosions. Each one was burned to a crisp. Many no longer resembled cars. They were just heaps of metal.
The only sound in the cabin was that of the engine and the tires thrumming over uneven pavement. Every time our heavy Tahoe hit a rut or swerved around yet another vehicle skeleton, the SUV rocked momentarily, and, from the corner of my eye, I saw the black radio antennae on the front bumper jiggle back and forth. It jiggled a lot.
We had no army escort to help us defend ourselves. Ours was a convoy of three vehicles traveling the BIAP Highway, a deadly stretch of road that runs from Baghdad airport to the city. Many US soldiers, coalition personnel, and media employees were killed on this highway. It gained a reputation as one of the deadliest roads in the world. We would have avoided it, except it was the only way into town.
I sat in the rear passenger compartment with four other men. All of us came from law enforcement backgrounds. We were hired by DynCorp International, a defense contractor, and had agreed to spend the next year in this country training Iraqi police recruits.
I thought it took courage for the Iraqis to step up to the plate for such a job, especially when their countrymen wreaked havoc on cities almost daily. The Iraqi police would take over maintaining peace in the streets once the United States pulled out. The way I saw it, the better we did our part of the job, the sooner our American soldiers could go home.
I mentally assessed my fellow trainers, with whom I had gone through boot camp.
There was Benjamin from the Midwest. A former city policeman in his early thirties, he was a very soft-spoken and mild-mannered man. But his easy-going personality belied his reaction time. I observed him in boot camp enough to know that this was someone who was very aware of his surroundings and quick to step in to handle a situation.
Leon was a black police officer from Philadelphia, in his early forties, about six feet tall, without an ounce of fat on him. Whenever you needed to find him, the first place you looked was in the weight room. Remember that kid in your high school who always came up with a quick quip to crack up the class? That was Leon. He was the jokester among us. His comedic take on things often came out of nowhere and always caught us off guard.
Another trainer was Wayne. Like me, he was from the south. He was the shortest of the group, maybe five feet eight inches tall. Wayne was what I liked to call a stand-up guy, someone you could trust, but he was on the quiet side, like Benjamin. It took a while to get to know him.
Another trainer was Kevin Kadowski, the one who discovered his boots could bend with the heat. He was a police officer from Chicago who just turned forty. We went through Phase One training class together and were roommates for the Phase Two training that followed in El Paso, Texas. I came to consider him my good friend.
At six feet four inches, he was one of the tallest trainers in our group. He was very much a family man who proudly showed us pictures of his wife and two children. Where some men made sure to pack a CD player for something to occupy their minds, Kevin made sure to pack a Bible. We all came to know him in boot camp as someone you could count on, no matter what.
Me, I was born and raised in Sheffield, Alabama. After college, I began my law enforcement career in a correctional institution. The bulk of my career was spent as a patrol officer in East Palo Alto, California, and I retired from the force, with honors, as a sergeant.
Now, we were all in a convoy that was taking us closer to the hotbed of trouble, inner Baghdad. Each time an Iraqi vehicle accelerated up an on-ramp and merged with traffic, we trained our guns on it. The drivers backed off and gave us plenty of room. We continued speeding down the highway.
Every so often, the policy of silence was broken for commentary from the driver.
"This is where two soldiers died ... here''s where a woman soldier lost an arm ... that''s where two of our international police trainers were hit with an RPG-a rocket-propelled grenade-then shot to death ... here''s where Frank Marlowe, a policeman from Denver, was taken out by a sniper a couple weeks ago. Hell, he''d just arrived at the airport. He never even made it to headquarters."
Passing so many sites where the death card had been doled out, I wondered if we would make it to headquarters.
Pretty soon, clustered buildings came into view. These were shacks, huts mostly, made of a brown brick-like substance. Some of the roofs were thatched. Here and there, I could see where walls were hit by mortar rounds and were now just rubble.
As we got closer, I saw that garbage and discarded junk lay everywhere. Laundry hung on lines strung from hut to hut. Cows, pigs, donkeys, and chickens roamed around at will.
These simple huts were much too small to hold all the excited little children that scurried around, dressed in rags.
For a split second I locked eyes with a little girl. She was perhaps four years old, a slip of a child in torn, ratty-looking clothes. Though her radiant smile told me she was happy, everything in her little world spoke of a life doomed by poverty.
"Keep sharp!" the driver barked, jerking me back to reality and the task of scanning my zone.
We were barreling up to an Iraqi checkpoint, meant to keep insurgents from entering the city. It was perhaps eighty yards away. From the corner of my eye, I saw a man dressed in a blue uniform step out from the hut. He stood in the middle of the road and held up one hand in the universal stop gesture. He didn''t stay in the middle of the road for long.
Our three vehicles blew through the checkpoint like it wasn''t even there.
"You never slow down for a TCP-a temporary checkpoint-you''re a dead man if you do," the gun captain told us over his shoulder. The matter-of-fact way he said it, he could have been a tourist guide on a trip through the Hollywood Hills. But his information was sobering. "We''ve had insurgents kill the checkpoint guards, and then one of them will dress in the dead guard''s uniform. When an American vehicle comes through, he''ll try to get it to stop or slow. If it does, his buddies all jump out and open fire on it. A lot of Americans have been killed that way. Don''t take a chance."
I spared a split second to glance at the driver to assess his demeanor. Unlike his body language when we went through the checkpoints at the airport, he was now displaying signs of aggression, like a teenager in his dad''s car, playing chicken on a desolate road. He was hunched up close to the dashboard, his knuckles were white as he gripped the steering wheel. If I were to look at him straight on, no doubt his eyes would be narrowed, not blinking as often as normal. Forget the smooth moves of a driver on a pleasant jaunt. His turns were sharp and sudden as we avoided debris and pot holes in the road. Even then, he didn''t pull his foot off the gas. No, we were hell-bent for our destination and anyone who got in our way be damned.
As we sped closer and closer to the city, the scenery changed. The buildings looked sturdier, more modern. Here and there, we saw the destruction of war-gutted buildings, collapsed walls, torched cars, and more damaged roadways.
As soon as we hit the city limits of Baghdad, the smell of burning garbage mixed with raw sewage assaulted our nostrils-not the nicest welcome. Litter was everywhere, and the roads here were even worse.
But I was unprepared for the city streets of Baghdad. We were now forced to slow down, and, though I didn''t dare glance over, I was sure the driver was now displaying more signs of alertness than ever. But I had plenty to occupy my mind. There were cars on either side of us, everyone trying to get somewhere. I scanned each vehicle to assess the level of danger, watching for a gun pointed our way, looking for an expression of hate on the drivers'' faces. Not exactly the same experience as driving across town with your family.
Soon, we were traveling through an area with pedestrians. What amazed me most was the juxtaposition of the modern world and the old. We saw a confusing mix of cars, donkey carts, and wagons that crowded the streets. Everyone, it seemed, had a cell phone.
Many people were dressed in traditional flowing robes, although most young men were in Western-style dress. The women in modern outfits-I saw maybe one in every twenty women dressed that way-invariably were younger than those in traditional garb, and all wore pant suits. In keeping with Muslim tradition, their arms and heads were fully covered. One woman wore her scarf pushed back so far off her forehead, it seemed it would fall off. From my understanding of the culture, it was a daring move. I applauded her in my mind, if only for a nanosecond. We were not here to be fashion police.
The sheer number of vehicles impeded our progress and forced us to slow down more than any of us liked. Our driver had one hand on the horn, blaring out a warning that we were coming through and to get out of the way. The SUV weaved in and out of traffic. At one point, I realized we were on the wrong side of the road, like an ambulance will do in the states, so we could jump past traffic. Our driver''s attention was focused on rule number one-a moving target is harder to hit.
The rest of us had other things vying for our attention.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from UNDER THE GUN in IRAQby ROBERT COLE JAN HOGAN Copyright © 2007 by Jan Hogan. Excerpted by permission.
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