W ith Baghdad settling down, at least for the moment, the head shed decided they wanted to open up a SEAL base in Habbaniyah.
Habbaniyah is twelve miles to the east of Fallujah, in Anabar Province. It wasn’t quite the hotbed of the insurgency that Fallujah had been, but it wasn’t San Diego, either. This is the area where before the First Gulf War, Saddam built chemical plants devoted to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, such as nerve gas and other chemical agents. There weren’t a lot of America supporters out there.
There was a U.S. Army base though, run by the famous 506th Regiment—the Band of Brothers. They’d just come over from Korea and, to be polite, had no fucking clue what Iraq was all about. I suppose everybody’s gotta learn the hard way.
Habbaniyah turned out to be a real pain in the ass. We’d been given an abandoned building, but it was nowhere near adequate for what we needed. We had to build a TOC—a tactical operations command—to house all the computers and com gear that helped support us during our missions.
Our morale sunk. We weren’t doing anything useful for the war; we were working as carpenters. It’s an honorable profession, but it’s not ours.
Taya:
It was on this deployment that the medical doctors did a test and, for some reason, thought Chris had TB. The doctors told him he would eventually die of the disease.
I remember talking to him right after he got the news. He was fatalistic about it. He’d already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else.”
I tried to explain to him that he was irreplaceable to me. When that didn’t seem to faze him, I tried another equally valid point. “But you’ve got our son,” I told him.
“So what? You’ll find someone else and that guy will raise him.”
I think he was seeing death so often that he started to believe people were replaceable.
It broke my heart. He truly believed that. I still hate to think that.
He thought dying on the battlefield was the greatest. I tried to tell him differently, but he didn’t believe it.
They redid the tests, and Chris was cleared. But his attitude about death stayed.
Once the camp was settled, we started doing DAs. We’d be given the name and location of a suspected insurgent, hit his house at night, then come back and deposit him and whatever evidence we gathered at the DIF—Detention and Interrogation Facility, your basic jail.
We’d take pictures along the way. We weren’t sightseeing; we were covering our butts, and, more important, those of our commanders. The pictures proved we hadn’t beaten the crap out of him.
Most of these ops were routine, without much trouble and almost never any resistance. One night, though, one of our guys went into a house where a rather portly Iraqi decided he didn’t want to come along nicely. He started to tussle.
Now, from our perspective, our brother SEAL was getting the shit kicked out of him. According to the SEAL in question, he had actually slipped and was in no need of assistance.
I guess you can interpret it any way you want. We all rushed in and grabbed the fatso before he could do much harm. Our friend got ribbed about his “fall” for a while.
O n most of these missions, we had photos of the person we were supposed to get. In that case, the rest of the intelligence tended to be pretty accurate. The guy was almost always where he was supposed to be, and things pretty much followed the outline we had drawn up.
But some cases didn’t go so smoothly. We began realizing that if we didn’t have a photo, the intelligence was suspect. Knowing that the Americans would bring a suspect in, people were using tips to settle grievances or feuds. They’d talk to the Army or some other authority, making claims about a person helping the insurgency or committing some other crime.
It sucked for the person we arrested, but I didn’t get all that worked up about it. It was just one more example of how screwed up the country was.
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