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Abu Ghraib Closes
Sep. 3rd, 2006 08:24 amWe had heard rumors about it, almost as soon as we got there in March of 2004: the US military was going to close Abu Ghraib for good, soon, move all the prisoners down to some camp near Kuwait, bulldoze it into the ground, release our Marine rifle company to do the sorts of things that Marines are more accustomed to doing. The rumor persisted until we left in September of that same year.
Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines departed Abu Ghraib in the middle of the night on September 19th, and we left behind a world of trouble.
Life had been quiet when we arrived in March, but the Army MP unit that we were replacing had been ridiculously glad to see us. They had just lost a soldier to a roadside bomb (killed inside his armored Humvee), had had a couple of top people relieved for a number of indiscretions and maybe, just maybe, they sensed the shitstorm on the horizon. The first we heard about the abuse scandal was during a briefing our first or second day at "the Ghraib." And honestly, we thought little of it. The briefing was given by the Commanding Officer of the 18th MP Brigade (Airborne) and he said that he had a stack of courts martial to push through, a handful of them dealing with the abuse and the photos and whatnot. So, many of us figured, the Army had it in hand, justice was moving along as it should, nothing to see here.
By April, we all but forgot about the scandal, though it would define our lives in many ways in the coming months. Just not April. On March 31st, four Blackwater "security contractors" were killed in Fallujah, bodies burned and strung up from a bridge over the Tigris. And that's when all hell broke loose. Regular mortar and rocket attacks, convoys shot up daily, dwindling attendance from our local national workers, and intelligence brief after intelligence brief about pending threats. By late April, we had been jerked around by the threats so much that when the last came down--involving a helicopter loaded with explosives and 10,000 screaming mujaheedin--no one could pass it along with a straight face.
April ended on a bittersweet note. By then, the rest of our company had arrived--some had been on detached duty elsewhere in Iraq, others finishing their basic infantry training, others, like my best friend![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fattred1, caught up in a million quirks of bureaucrac. And the daily attacks eased up and stopped, but not before a massive bombardment claimed 22 detainees and wounded over a hundred more. In fact, in that time the insurgent attacks had managed to kill only detainees.
That month also saw Marines take full control of the base's defenses. Up to that time, perimeter tower personnel had been a hodgepodge of Army and Marines. We already had all the gates, but two or three towers had been left unmanned, and these provided an escape route for prisoners looking to go over the wall. We put Marines in two of them and demolished a third. Even with the rest of our company rejoining us, we hardly had a body to spare, which I have to think was by the design of our company leadership. Any superfluous Marines in our company would have gone into a pool that could have been utilized for prisoner escort, or interior guard duty, or that kind of thing.
I think our command staff had a better idea of what was headed our way, and they wanted us out of the way. Perhaps for that decision alone, I'm grateful for them. So, we took the perimeter and held it and, other than occasionally riding as escort for the local contractor who pumped out the porta-shitters, we stayed on the perimeter, looking out.
In May, the story broke. 60 Minutes and Seymour Hersh, separately, broke stories about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, complete with lurid pictures of stacked and naked prisoners. We got wind of it slowly, mostly coming from our internet access. By this time, the mortar and rocket attacks had stopped, and we might have gotten into a pretty calm routine, but when the story broke the protesters showed up. For the most part, it was peaceful and uneventful. Occasionally it got rowdy. The news reported a mob of 2000 locals, when it was more like 500 people who had been bussed in. Some reporter, wearing her ceramic insert vest under a swirl robes, trying to look like a local, had to be rescued by some Marines I knew when the crowd mistook her protective vest for the more explosive variety. But other than taking alot of flak in the media and occasionally being painted with a brush too broad, May was a quiet month.
June and July were even quieter. I think we had two or three mortar attacks in all that time. Somebody said that our brothers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had located and wiped out the mortar team that had harassed us all through April. Either way, what few attacks that came in those two months were either short, or off-target, or both. So, instead, we got down to the business of being annoyed with one another, finding all those stress points that are available in a group of 200 men who are spending a truly significant amount of time around one another for the first time. Nerves frayed, and bored NCOs concocted bullshit duties, and a couple people found themselves changing venues.
For me, August started with a bang of sorts, as some insurgent took a potshot at me with a Grail anti-aircraft missile. While I was standing in my tower. It missed us, missed another tower across the way, and hit the wall. From then on, things started to get a little hairy again. A barbecue, put on by some of the Kellogg Brown & Root workers just for the Marines, ended with a mortar attack. But by then, for the most part, we were chill to the whole notion. If something went really bad, we were ready, but we were way past getting worked up over things like that.
September came to us like a cool breeze. Our relief was headed toward us. I even rode on a convoy that took the advance part from our relief's battalion from Abu Ghraib to another base, down closer to Fallujah, where they would also be relieving Marines from our battalion.
But on the 12th, April seemed to come back to us in a big way. An insurgent, driving a Ford Expedition loaded with 15 artillery shells, drove at our walls, just as mortars and rockets started to impact the other side of the base. The detainees knew something was up; instead of heading for the shelters as they usually did, they pressed out toward the fences of their compounds. But the truck was destroyed by machine gun fire from two of our towers. I saw the fireball, the cloud of hell-black smoke flecked with glowing debris.
From there on, the alert was on. They had planned something big, failed, and would be trying again. We brushed up on incursion procedures that had last been considered in April: if they break through, all available Marines rally here, and here. Casualty collection point here. Command and control adjacent to it, here. This squad deploys to the chow hall to protect the civilians there and this squad to the KBR compound.
Our relief showed up in the middle of all this. And, on the day when intelligence said something was going to happen for sure, the base got hammered just at daybreak, just like on the 12th. But nothing else happened, none of our people were wounded, none of their rounds even came close to getting our guys in the towers and on the gates. They had shot their wad, and that was it. But we stayed on alert the rest of our brief time at Abu Ghraib.
So it was that one day, without notice, we just stopped going to our duty posts. We had trained our replacements and they took over. A couple days later, we packed our trash, signed over all of our "crew-served" weapons, the machine guns and mortars and whatnot, and boarded trucks for Al-Taqqadam.
And that was the last we saw of it.
The only post-script to that came in the February/March 2005 timeframe, just before our unit Reserve unit got together again after all the leave and enforced time off from training. Abu Ghraib was in the news again, the target of a terrible attack that left dozens of Marines wounded. Kilo company had not lost a single Marine to enemy fire or accident, and we had only one Purple Heart among our 200, given to a Marine dinged in the arm by shrapnel from a roadside bomb. He lost feeling, but not use, of two fingers on his left hand. So we saw that attack, and we knew: there but for the grace of God went we.
And today I see the news, and my friend Matt,fattred1, and I are glad. It was a place of evil and horror, one that we called home for six-plus months, but for all that a catastrophic mistake. Our military took up residence there, used the prison for its original purpose, and became tained by it. Whether by design of a power-mad administration, as Seymour Hersh attests, or association with the evil done there by Saddam's regime, or a mix of both, I'll never know.
But I'm glad for my brothers and sisters in uniform, that no one else will have to serve within those walls ever again. And I'll be glad for the Iraqis when they do finally destroy that place, bury it, take it down brick-by-brick and, God willing, Insh'allah, build there something, anything more constructive and useful. A park, a monument, a home for disabled veterans.
Something. Anything.
Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 24th Marines departed Abu Ghraib in the middle of the night on September 19th, and we left behind a world of trouble.
Life had been quiet when we arrived in March, but the Army MP unit that we were replacing had been ridiculously glad to see us. They had just lost a soldier to a roadside bomb (killed inside his armored Humvee), had had a couple of top people relieved for a number of indiscretions and maybe, just maybe, they sensed the shitstorm on the horizon. The first we heard about the abuse scandal was during a briefing our first or second day at "the Ghraib." And honestly, we thought little of it. The briefing was given by the Commanding Officer of the 18th MP Brigade (Airborne) and he said that he had a stack of courts martial to push through, a handful of them dealing with the abuse and the photos and whatnot. So, many of us figured, the Army had it in hand, justice was moving along as it should, nothing to see here.
By April, we all but forgot about the scandal, though it would define our lives in many ways in the coming months. Just not April. On March 31st, four Blackwater "security contractors" were killed in Fallujah, bodies burned and strung up from a bridge over the Tigris. And that's when all hell broke loose. Regular mortar and rocket attacks, convoys shot up daily, dwindling attendance from our local national workers, and intelligence brief after intelligence brief about pending threats. By late April, we had been jerked around by the threats so much that when the last came down--involving a helicopter loaded with explosives and 10,000 screaming mujaheedin--no one could pass it along with a straight face.
April ended on a bittersweet note. By then, the rest of our company had arrived--some had been on detached duty elsewhere in Iraq, others finishing their basic infantry training, others, like my best friend
fattred1, caught up in a million quirks of bureaucrac. And the daily attacks eased up and stopped, but not before a massive bombardment claimed 22 detainees and wounded over a hundred more. In fact, in that time the insurgent attacks had managed to kill only detainees.That month also saw Marines take full control of the base's defenses. Up to that time, perimeter tower personnel had been a hodgepodge of Army and Marines. We already had all the gates, but two or three towers had been left unmanned, and these provided an escape route for prisoners looking to go over the wall. We put Marines in two of them and demolished a third. Even with the rest of our company rejoining us, we hardly had a body to spare, which I have to think was by the design of our company leadership. Any superfluous Marines in our company would have gone into a pool that could have been utilized for prisoner escort, or interior guard duty, or that kind of thing.
I think our command staff had a better idea of what was headed our way, and they wanted us out of the way. Perhaps for that decision alone, I'm grateful for them. So, we took the perimeter and held it and, other than occasionally riding as escort for the local contractor who pumped out the porta-shitters, we stayed on the perimeter, looking out.
In May, the story broke. 60 Minutes and Seymour Hersh, separately, broke stories about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, complete with lurid pictures of stacked and naked prisoners. We got wind of it slowly, mostly coming from our internet access. By this time, the mortar and rocket attacks had stopped, and we might have gotten into a pretty calm routine, but when the story broke the protesters showed up. For the most part, it was peaceful and uneventful. Occasionally it got rowdy. The news reported a mob of 2000 locals, when it was more like 500 people who had been bussed in. Some reporter, wearing her ceramic insert vest under a swirl robes, trying to look like a local, had to be rescued by some Marines I knew when the crowd mistook her protective vest for the more explosive variety. But other than taking alot of flak in the media and occasionally being painted with a brush too broad, May was a quiet month.
June and July were even quieter. I think we had two or three mortar attacks in all that time. Somebody said that our brothers from Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had located and wiped out the mortar team that had harassed us all through April. Either way, what few attacks that came in those two months were either short, or off-target, or both. So, instead, we got down to the business of being annoyed with one another, finding all those stress points that are available in a group of 200 men who are spending a truly significant amount of time around one another for the first time. Nerves frayed, and bored NCOs concocted bullshit duties, and a couple people found themselves changing venues.
For me, August started with a bang of sorts, as some insurgent took a potshot at me with a Grail anti-aircraft missile. While I was standing in my tower. It missed us, missed another tower across the way, and hit the wall. From then on, things started to get a little hairy again. A barbecue, put on by some of the Kellogg Brown & Root workers just for the Marines, ended with a mortar attack. But by then, for the most part, we were chill to the whole notion. If something went really bad, we were ready, but we were way past getting worked up over things like that.
September came to us like a cool breeze. Our relief was headed toward us. I even rode on a convoy that took the advance part from our relief's battalion from Abu Ghraib to another base, down closer to Fallujah, where they would also be relieving Marines from our battalion.
But on the 12th, April seemed to come back to us in a big way. An insurgent, driving a Ford Expedition loaded with 15 artillery shells, drove at our walls, just as mortars and rockets started to impact the other side of the base. The detainees knew something was up; instead of heading for the shelters as they usually did, they pressed out toward the fences of their compounds. But the truck was destroyed by machine gun fire from two of our towers. I saw the fireball, the cloud of hell-black smoke flecked with glowing debris.
From there on, the alert was on. They had planned something big, failed, and would be trying again. We brushed up on incursion procedures that had last been considered in April: if they break through, all available Marines rally here, and here. Casualty collection point here. Command and control adjacent to it, here. This squad deploys to the chow hall to protect the civilians there and this squad to the KBR compound.
Our relief showed up in the middle of all this. And, on the day when intelligence said something was going to happen for sure, the base got hammered just at daybreak, just like on the 12th. But nothing else happened, none of our people were wounded, none of their rounds even came close to getting our guys in the towers and on the gates. They had shot their wad, and that was it. But we stayed on alert the rest of our brief time at Abu Ghraib.
So it was that one day, without notice, we just stopped going to our duty posts. We had trained our replacements and they took over. A couple days later, we packed our trash, signed over all of our "crew-served" weapons, the machine guns and mortars and whatnot, and boarded trucks for Al-Taqqadam.
And that was the last we saw of it.
The only post-script to that came in the February/March 2005 timeframe, just before our unit Reserve unit got together again after all the leave and enforced time off from training. Abu Ghraib was in the news again, the target of a terrible attack that left dozens of Marines wounded. Kilo company had not lost a single Marine to enemy fire or accident, and we had only one Purple Heart among our 200, given to a Marine dinged in the arm by shrapnel from a roadside bomb. He lost feeling, but not use, of two fingers on his left hand. So we saw that attack, and we knew: there but for the grace of God went we.
And today I see the news, and my friend Matt,
fattred1, and I are glad. It was a place of evil and horror, one that we called home for six-plus months, but for all that a catastrophic mistake. Our military took up residence there, used the prison for its original purpose, and became tained by it. Whether by design of a power-mad administration, as Seymour Hersh attests, or association with the evil done there by Saddam's regime, or a mix of both, I'll never know.But I'm glad for my brothers and sisters in uniform, that no one else will have to serve within those walls ever again. And I'll be glad for the Iraqis when they do finally destroy that place, bury it, take it down brick-by-brick and, God willing, Insh'allah, build there something, anything more constructive and useful. A park, a monument, a home for disabled veterans.
Something. Anything.