They say they haven't had water or electricity in the neighborhood for a few years now. What the elders urgently need help with is security at night. All of them have the same story: As soon as the sun goes down, bandits roam the streets, robbing people and carrying out home invasions. Residents in the neighborhood have set up barricades on the streets to keep them out. Everyone is armed. The locals claim that since armories and police stations were overrun at the end of the war, an AK now costs about the same as a couple of packs of cigarettes.
"They kill our houses," one of the men says.
"The Americans have let Ali Baba into Baghdad," his friend adds.
Another man claims enemies from an outlying neighborhood have set up a mortar position behind a mosque and are randomly shelling them at night.
Even late in the morning, you can still smell cordite in the streets from all the gunfire of the previous night. What's striking about the residents' complaints is the fact that Marine commanders have been claiming that all the gunfire at night is a result of Shias removing Fedayeen and other enemies they share with the Americans. But this is a 100-percent Shia neighborhood, and these people are clearly distraught by the violence. They ask Fick if his Marines will stay for the night.
He tells them that is not possible, but that his men will try to bring water some other day.
Hossein tells me he has a grim view of Iraq's future. "You have taken this country apart," he says. "And you are not putting it together." He believes that the violence the Americans are allowing to go on at night will only fuel conflicts between the Sunni and Shia factions. "Letting vigilantes and thieves out at night will not correct the problems of Saddam's rule," he says. He gestures toward the crowded slum below, teeming with people. "This is a bomb," he says. "If it explodes, it will be bigger than the war."
Espera, who's been listening to Hossein's analysis, offers his own take on the situation. "Let a motherfucker use an American toilet for a week and they'll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullshit."
Doc Bryan sets up a medical station under some ponchos in front of his Humvee. Mothers bring children sick with giardia caused by drinking dirty water, feverish infants, a girl whose legs were burned when a cooking fire exploded. Men start pushing to the front of the line, complaining of headaches and sleeplessness. Like the guy we met in the first neighborhood, they want Valium. Another family brings a son who can't walk, hoping that Doc Bryan can cure him like a faith healer. A fight nearly breaks out between a Marine and men in Doc Bryan's line who are stealing candy the Marines are giving to the sick children. By this time, hundreds of people throng the Marines' position, just trying to get a look at the Americans.
The Marines are driven out as the pandemonium grows. Farther into the neighborhood, hundreds of people descend on the Humvees. What Marines had initially viewed as jubilation begins to feel increasingly like hysteria. The mob's incessant chanting starts to drive the men crazy. Everyone who approaches is dirty, scared and desperately in need of help, which the Marines are incapable of giving. They nearly run over children who fall in front of the Humvees while running beside them. At one stop, Fick and I get out and see kids rocking on an unexploded artillery shell, gleefully bouncing on it like a hobbyhorse. "This is madness," Fick concludes.
As the Marines gather around their concrete sleeping area that night, some are disgusted by the behavior of the Iraqis. "What American man," Doc Bryan asks, "would cut in a line of children with life-threatening illnesses to try to get Valium for a headache, then steal their fucking candy? I have no respect for these men."
"Bro, it's not that bad here," a Marine says in the darkness. "Just think if someone invaded Los Angeles. Americans would fucking riot if their cable went out for three days. These people don't have water, electricity, hospitals, sewers, nothing, and they're waving and smiling."
"They won't be for long," Espera says. "Iraqis have a short attention span just like the American public. As soon as they stop celebrating that we got rid of Saddam and we cut 'em off at the titty—they figure out we're not going to be pouring money into this motherfucker, giving everyone a new car and a color TV—they'll turn on us."
In an effort to reach out to community leaders, Bravo Company sends Meesh to meet with the imam at a Shia mosque during a patrol. This neighborhood in north Baghdad is marginally better off than others. There's no sewage in the streets, and the low apartment blocks and shops near the mosque look tidy. The mosque itself is a squat, stucco building, with a small dome and a minaret not much bigger than a telephone pole. There are loudspeakers hanging from it for the prayers broadcast through the neighborhood.
Meesh enters the mosque early in the afternoon. Several young men who serve as the imam's bodyguards train their AKs on him the moment Meesh sets foot in the gloomy anteroom. After twenty minutes of negotiating with these characters, one of them leads him into the imam's office in the back.
The imam, a man in his early fifties who studied in Iran, looks to Meesh almost exactly like a younger version of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, with a long, pointed white beard and dark-black eyebrows. Though Meesh is a Sunni—as well as a beer-drinking dope smoker—he and the imam kneel and perform a prayer together. Then, according to Meesh, the imam tells him he welcomes the Americans, so long as they don't expose the Iraqi people to corrupting Western influences. Meesh tells the imam the Marines will try to bring some water the next day to distribute from the grounds of the mosque. He asks for the imam's help in controlling the people who invariably mob the Marines' vehicles. According to Meesh, the imam tells him, "If they come too close, the Americans should hit them. These people are used to being pushed around. You have to threaten them."
Within hours of Meesh's meeting, the loudspeakers from the minaret blare a message from the imam: "It is against your religion to harm Americans." Then the imam's guards go through the neighborhood, painting messages in red on the stucco walls lining the streets. They say, "An AK used after sunset is a tool of damnation." At least this is what Meesh claims happens as result of his meeting with the imam.
The next morning Second Platoon returns to the mosque, escorting a military tanker truck to distribute 2,000 gallons of fresh water to the residents. The Marines park the truck beside the mosque in an open dirt lot and wait beneath overcast skies. Unlike the day before, when crowds had turned out cheering the Marines, this morning there's almost no one on the streets. The few adults and children who are out hang back, staring vacantly. The Marines stand around the truck, holding a hose up, beckoning people to come and get the free water, but in twenty minutes only two or three venture forward. "All week people have been asking for water," Fick says. "We finally bring it to them, and nobody fucking wants it."
Though Meesh vows to me that the messages blared from the mosque and painted on the walls by the imam's followers were all pro-American, something has dramatically changed in the neighborhood. The people seem almost frightened of the Marines. I press Meesh about this. "Are you sure the imam said he wanted the Americans to come here?" I ask him.
"Dude, the meeting was totally cool," Meesh assures me.
Whatever really transpired with the imam, only Meesh knows. As has been the case since the invasion began, First Recon Battalion is almost entirely dependent on Meesh for all its Arabic intelligence gathering. It's not that Meesh is a bad guy, but it's astonishing to me that in an elite unit of American forces, among the first to occupy the capital city of a conquered country, there's no one within the command structure who fluently speaks the local language.
One week after arriving in Baghdad, Second Platoon finally receives orders for a night mission. There's a park in Baghdad that Fedayeen are suspected of using as an operations base. Second Platoon is ordered to set up observation posts near the park overnight, then move in and sweep it for signs of hostile forces in the morning.
An hour before sunset, the platoon moves into position on a high berm near the park. When the sun drops, the vast city, without any electricity,
goes nearly black. Then tracers light up the sky from the gun battles raging on all sides of the berm we occupy.
What makes the spectacle of these nocturnal gun battles even stranger is the fact that a kilometer to our east, a freeway is filled with cars streaming into Baghdad. We watch the fire course over the string of headlights.
Fick and I are taking this all in when he receives a call on his radio from his commander, Encino Man, who suggests he send foot patrols out tonight into the neighborhoods below. Encino Man tells him that Lt. Col. Ferrando has decided, after a week of keeping the men off the streets at night, that it's time for the Marines to become "more aggressive."
Fick resists the order, telling Encino Man he's going to keep his men in a defensive position on the berm and not move until dawn. He sits down next to Gunny Wynn and vents. "Look at this," he says, gesturing to the hundreds of tracer lines zipping through the sky. "They want me to be 'more aggressive/ to send the men into this? For what? Just to be out there waving the American flag? So I can come home with nineteen men instead of twenty?"
Fick watches the ongoing destruction in the city, then adds, "If Iraq stays a flaming cesspool until the end of time, does anyone really care? Does it fucking matter?"
Fick's talk a week earlier at the cigarette factory of giving his men a purpose by restoring order in Iraq seems like ancient history. Fick appears to have lost his belief in his mission here. The problem is not so much that the city has unraveled before his eyes in the past week—he pretty much expected Baghdad to be in total chaos. Instead, what's come undone is his belief that the Americans have any kind of occupation plan to remedy the situation. "Our impact on establishing order is just about zero," he says. "As far as I can see, there's no American plan for Baghdad. Maybe it's coming, but I don't see any signs of it." But he adds, leaving room for optimism, "A platoon commander's situational awareness doesn't extend very far."
In the morning the platoon drives down to the entrance of the park. There's a road bridge leading into it, with a tower sort of like Seattle's Space Needle rising beyond. It turns out this is Baghdad's amusement park, complete with roller coasters, hot-dog stands and buildings with giant pictures of Disney characters painted on them (no doubt in fiendish violation of international trademark law). The platoon stops by the bridge outside the park. Cars are driving in and out. Meesh finds out that there's a fuel depot in the park, and citizens are entering to steal gasoline. The Marines block off the bridge, turning away traffic in preparation for moving into the park.
A beat-up red Volkswagen Passat speeds toward them. Marines aim their weapons at it. The car stops nearby. There's a woman at the wheel with a fifteen-year-old girl in the passenger seat. The girl looks out at the Marines, smiling almost flirtatiously.
The driver gets out. A worried-looking middle-age woman in a brightly colored shawl, she's the girl's mother. Her name is Mariane Abas, and she tells Meesh that eight days ago while playing outside their house north of Baghdad, her daughter, Suhar, was hit in the leg by shrapnel from a bomb that seemed to come out of nowhere—perhaps from a high-flying U.S. plane. Doc Bryan opens the door. Suhar smiles at him. Her leg is in a cast. Doc Bryan and Colbert turn the girl sideways, extending her leg out of the car.
"Doc, you've got fifteen minutes," Fick says. "We've got to move into the park."
Doc Bryan cuts away the cast. The girl screams. Her mother climbs in on the driver's side and wraps her arms around her daughter's head and chest, holding her in place as she writhes in agony. Whatever hit the girl's leg ripped chunks of flesh off from her calf to her thigh. The bones were broken as well. Whoever treated her stuffed the wounds with cotton, which Doc Bryan now must rip out. Pus oozes out. She has a high fever, a bad septic infection. On top of this, her foot was set in the cast with the toes pointing down, so if she lives and her bones heal, she'll walk with a lame foot.
"We've got to get her to a hospital," Doc Bryan says. "This infection is going to kill her."
Fick radios the battalion, requesting permission to medevac the girl. It's denied. The platoon delays its mission for two hours, while Doc Bryan does his best to clean the wounds out. The girl wails and sobs most of the time. Her mother holds her head. Doc Bryan curses softly.
Fick walks away, turning his back on the girl. "This is fucking up our mission," he says, pissed off at the girl for showing up with her horrific wounds. "A week after liberating this city, the American military can't provide aid to a girl probably hit by one of our bombs," he says, pissed off at the war.
Despite an apathy that's set in among many Marines over the futility of their missions in Baghdad, Colbert remains committed. When a resident of one neighborhood comes forward complaining of an unexploded bomb in a garden where children play, Colbert enlists Espera's (grudging, extremely reluctant) aid to destroy it with a C-4 charge, though neither of them is specifically trained in ordnance removal, and the platoon is under orders to avoid handling unexploded rounds. Later, Colbert climbs into a five-foot-deep hole in a risky effort to locate and destroy an unexploded artillery round next to a home. Fick, concerned that he might kill himself, orders him to cease the operation.
Colbert despairs when he hears reports of other units accidentally firing on civilians. One episode reported on the BBC enrages him. U.S. soldiers, newly arrived in Iraq to begin the occupation, accidently slaughtered several Iraqi children playing on abandoned tanks. Under the ROE, the children were technically "armed" since they were on tanks, so the GIs opened fire. Maj. Gen. Mattis would later call this shooting "the most calamitous engagement of the war." After he hears of it, Colbert rails, "They are screwing this up. Those fucking idiots. Don't they realize the world already hates us?"