Raid Night
Michael J. Totten
“We want to use you as bait,” Sergeant Eduardo Ojeda told me when I embedded with his unit on what was shaping up to be a night raid.
“Excellent,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
This is what passes for black army humor in Baghdad.
“Our TST [time-sensitive target] blew up a vehicle and killed four soldiers and an interpreter in the next AO [area of operations],” he said. “He’s somewhere in our AO now.”
He could tell by the frozen and dubious look on my face that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “These guys hardly ever fight back when we nail them. And they always lose when they do. Come on. Let’s go fuck ‘em up.”
I donned my armor and helmet, slung my Nikon around my neck, and jumped in the back of one of the Humvees.
“I need your full name and blood type,” First Sergeant Ray Fisher said. “In case something happens.”
“Stay close to me,” said Sergeant Ojeda as he plugged his mouth with tobacco. “In the dark just look for the short guy. And call me Eddie.”
The military intelligence officers at the War Eagle outpost knew the target was somewhere in their area, but they didn’t know precisely where or how long he’d be there. My unit’s job was to go out and patrol the neighborhood known as Tunis until they could pinpoint his location.
We drove in the dark. The soldiers used night vision goggles. I had to rely on my eyes.
“How long are you in Iraq, sir?” Sergeant Fisher asked me.
“As long as I feel like it,” I said. “A month and a half maybe.”
“You’re lucky, sir” he said. “We’re here for 18. I just got back from leave and missed the birth of my baby boy by two days. At least I got to see him.”
“You don’t have to call me sir,” I said.
“Ok, sir,” he said and laughed.
“What’s the situation in Tunis?” I said.
“It’s not too bad anymore,” said Lieutenant Evan Wolf. “It’s a rich neighborhood. Lots of educated and cultured people live there, doctors and lawyers, people like that. It was infested with Al Qaeda a while ago, so the neighborhood formed a protectionist militia. They set up road blocks, gates around the mosque, and they drove Al Qaeda out. But now the militia harasses and extorts the residents. They follow us from house to house and intimidate whoever we talk to.”
Our convoy of Humvees crossed an overpass and stopped on a dark road among trees just outside the neighborhood. Half the soldiers dismounted the vehicles and set out to patrol the streets on foot. The other half stayed with the Humvees.
I joined those who went out on foot.
“How long will we be out?” I said to Eddie.
“Could be a while,” he said and plugged his mouth with more smokeless tobacco. “Last time we had a raid night we were we out for more than twelve hours.” He spit on the sidewalk. “We chased a guy from house to house to house. Didn’t catch him that night, but he was caught somewhere else three days later.”
Baghdad gets only one hour of electricity each day. Some parts of the city at night are almost as dark as wilderness. The soldiers I was with could see everything, but I could barely see anything. It was next to impossible to tell who was who in the dark.
Eddie was obvious, though. He was the short guy. He told me to stay next to him, so I did.
It was a hundred degrees outside even at midnight. My shirt felt disgustingly hot and close under my body armor. I heard choppers roaming low in the sky over the city.
“This country would be beautiful if it were not for the invention of the plastic bag,” somebody said. “That bag is everywhere—in the trees, stuck in barbed wire, on the sidewalks, crammed in every corner. Man, when this war is over I’m coming back to open a recycling factory. I’ll be raking it in.”
The area did appear to be nice, billowing plastic bags notwithstanding. I couldn’t make out many details, but I could see the shapes of the houses. Most were considerably larger than the average American home.
“I suppose I shouldn’t smoke,” I said to Eddie.
“You got that right,” Eddie said. “Snipers wearing night vision can see the tip of your cigarette from a mile away. They’ll watch as you lift the cigarette to your mouth and figure out where your head is. Then BLAMMO. They’re really good shots.”
I kept the cigarettes in my pocket.
“We’re being followed,” said Sergeant Fisher.
Eddie, the rest of the soldiers, and I turned around.
“Four of ‘em,” Eddie said.
Without night vision I couldn’t see anyone but the soldiers standing right next to me.
“Where are they?” I said.
“In the shadows two blocks behind us,” Eddie said. “There weren’t there a minute ago.”
Curfew enforcement in Tunis was total. In some areas of Baghdad only military aged males driving cars are stopped after 10:00 p.m. Tunis, though, is infested with a militia. No one is allowed on the streets after dark except licensed generator repairmen.
We kept walking. Half the soldiers walked backwards so they could keep an eye on the men following us.
Some of the soldiers stood in the light from a storefront lit by generator power. I tried to stick to the shadows. Presumably the men following us were militia. If they didn’t have night vision goggles—and they probably didn’t—they wouldn’t be able to see me any better than I could see them. And I couldn’t see them.
“Five of ‘em now,” somebody said. “They’re still following.”
The soldiers took up positions, crouched on one knee, and pointed their rifles down the street in the direction of our stalkers. I ducked behind a wall separating two driveways and checked the windows and the roofs of the houses to make sure nobody saw me.
“Why don’t you send the Humvees after them?” I said to the nearest soldier.
“We’re sending them now,” he said.
“More are out now,” said another. “Seven or eight of them.”
No one knew how many were coming out of their houses on side streets. No one knew who they were, either. They could be local militia. They could be the Al Qaeda cell the Army was hunting. Perhaps they found us before we found them. I no longer thought “we want to use you as bait” sounded funny.
An old man speaking on a cell phone walked toward us.
“Turn that phone off right now!” yelled one of the soldiers. “Right now!” He ran toward the man. “You turn it off now!” The man kept talking in Arabic.
Our interpreter told him to shut it off. He shut it off. Perhaps he was giving information to the militia. Perhaps he was talking to his wife. Nobody knew. Either way he was violating the curfew.
“Go home,” somebody told him.
Suddenly the soldiers started walking back in the direction we came from—toward the men who were following us and who hid in the shadows.
“We’re walking toward them?” I said to the soldier next to me. I still couldn’t tell who was who. “Are they still there?” I still couldn’t see them. I could hardly see anything.
“They’re still there,” he said. “We’re pushing back to see what they do.”
For the first time since I arrived in Iraq, I wished I had a weapon myself. When I couldn’t stay in the shadows, I zigzagged at random to make myself a more difficult target.
Eddie sidled up beside me.
“Stay right next to me,” he said. “If there’s shooting I’ll get you in the safest possible place.” The safest possible place, I thought, was outside Iraq. “If it escalates…” He trailed off.
“If it escalates…what?” I said.
“We’ll deal with it,” he said.
“Four more to west,” said a soldier. “They’re running.”
This time I could see them—four men rounding a corner and running away down a street. They were more afraid of us than we were of them.
“Does this kind of thing happen around here a lot?” I said to Eddie.
“It happens,” he said.
The Humvees finally pulled up to the area where the hidden men lurked. When our foot patrol caught up with them I saw that two had been caught.
The rule for properly building suspense in horror movies is based on how fear works in real life. Faceless and invisible enemies are scary. Real human beings with faces and fears of their own aren’t so much.
Our two busted stalkers looked a lot less intimidating in person. They seemed rather pathetic, actually, and they were not armed.
“My air conditioner’s broken,” said the first through our interpreter. “I was just going to a friend’s house to get another one. I can show you the broken one now.”
I’ve been on patrol with soldiers after curfew a number of times. Most Iraqis out after dark don’t appear to be threatening or up to no good. This guy stood out, though. I didn’t believe he was only trying to borrow an air conditioner. He was twitchy and much more nervous than anyone I had seen questioned before.
And anyway, aside from the twitchiness, why was he following soldiers around in the dark?
Our Iraqi interpreter wore a mask over his face to avoid being recognized by the locals. He checked the suspect’s identification.
The man did live in the area. ID cards, though, don’t say “militia man” on them.
Two soldiers guarded the second suspect while the rest of us walked to the first suspect’s house and knocked hard on the door.
No one came to the door. A soldier banged on the door again with his fist. “Open up!” he yelled.
The residents of the house finally stirred. Faint shadows darkened the windows.
“There are lots of people in there,” someone said.
I stepped back, having no idea what to expect.
A large man wearing shorts and no shirt opened the door. An old man in a dishdasha stood behind him. They weren’t armed and didn’t seem threatening.
“Salam aleikum,” said the shirtless man.
“Can we come in?” said the soldier who knocked.
The shirtless beckoned us in, and so we went in.
Soldiers dispersed throughout the house and rounded up everyone—four men, three women, and two children—into one room. Everybody, soldiers and Iraqis alike, were mellow and cool. No one seemed to be angry at anyone. Our shirtless host seemed to be the head of the household, so the soldiers spoke mainly to him instead of to the suspect they had captured outside.
“You’re right, he was bad,” the man said.
“The curfew is for your safety,” said a soldier through the interpreter. “We’re hot, too, okay? Finding an air conditioner isn’t a good enough reason to go outside after dark.”
“Sorry,” the man said. “Please forgive us. Anything you want, we are with you.”
“There are bad guys out after dark.”
“I understand, very sorry.”
We said good night and left the house. There was no interrogation. All the soldiers did was drop the guy off at home to get him off the street. Whether he really was trying to borrow an air conditioner, or whether he belonged to the neighborhood militia, I’ll never know.
The second man was still being detained.
“I work at the mosque,” he said through our masked interpreter. “I work there at night. I was just out getting some dinner.”
We had walked past the neighborhood mosque earlier and there were no lights on inside. It didn’t look like anyone worked there at night, at least not in any normal capacity.
All of us walked toward the mosque.
“What are you going to do with him?” I said to Eddie.
“We’re going to take him to the mosque and see if he really works there,” he said.
When we arrived outside the mosque, some of the soldiers squatted in driveways across the street and scanned the roof. I joined them as Eddie and the others took the suspect to the gate.
“There are four men on the roof,” a soldier said. “You can’t see them anymore. They just ducked away as we got here.” I crouched near the ground. “They have a little bunker up there. You can’t see it from here, but it has sand bags and sniper netting around it.”
“What are you going to do?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s a mosque.”
“They’re violating curfew,” I said, “and stalking us in the dark from a militarized mosque. And you aren’t going to do anything?”
“Our rules of engagement say we can’t interfere in any way with a mosque unless they’re shooting at us,” he said.
So we dropped off our stalker with his “co-workers” and left.
We walked the streets of Baghdad at midnight while waiting for the call from intelligence officers back at the outpost. If they could determine which exact house the Al Qaeda target was in, the soldiers I patrolled with would be first on the scene. All he had to do was make one more call on his cell phone and he’d be located. Then he’d be quietly surrounded by two dozen infantry soldiers, along with myself with my note pad and camera, before he had any idea what was happening.
In the meantime we chased shadows and silhouettes and dark vehicles on blacked out streets without any headlights.
We chased a car so far from our starting point I wondered if anybody still even knew where we were. We sure as hell weren’t in Tunis anymore. Eventually the driver pulled over and stopped. I got out of my Humvee and followed Eddie to the driver’s side door. Vicious dogs snarled at us from behind a gate.
Three men were inside. All were told to get out of the vehicle and were questioned and patted down.
It’s possible the three young men in the car didn’t even know we were trying to catch them. Humvees are driven in Iraq in the dark without headlights. They’re almost invisible. And they don’t go very fast.
None of the young men were armed. Soldiers searched the vehicle, didn’t find anything, and sent everyone home.
This is what it is like most nights during counter-insurgency warfare. “It’s like we’re Baghdad P.D.,” as one soldier put it. It’s not open war and constant explosions and bang-bang. Much of it entails patient police work and the chasing of ghosts.
We never did get the call from the intelligence officers. The insurgent commander, whose name I know but was asked not to reveal, was almost, but not quite, captured that night. His capture would have saved lives, and it would have been something to see.
This isn’t the movies, however. The Iraqi counterinsurgency would be a hard war to film accurately. Most of the time it’s so quiet. But it’s the quiet of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, not of rural Middle America. Explosions, mortars, bullets, rockets…these things can come flying at you at any time.
We drove. I watched the dark city through bullet-proof glass. Most homes were blacked out. Very few families stayed up late and ran their generators past midnight. Most Iraqis—and I knew this even though I could not see it—slept on the roofs of their houses where it’s cooler at night.
The dark shapes of palm trees somehow looked menacing and benign at the same time. They looked slightly more ominous we drove into a dense grove bathed in an eerie glow from starlight shining through dust.
Anything could have been waiting for us on the road up ahead. Anyone could have been watching and waiting, perhaps even with the same night vision goggles the soldiers themselves wore.
Suddenly the trees were gone and the sky opened up. I couldn’t see anything.
“We’re in the slum now,” Lieutenant Evan Wolf said. “It’s a nasty one, too. Some houses are literally made out of cardboard. I would kill myself before I lived here.”
I have no idea how these people survive without air conditioning and clean water. The environment here in the summer is unrelentingly hostile.
“How did you get into this job?” Eddie said.
“I needed to get out of the office,” I said.
“You’re way out now,” Eddie said and laughed.
“I can’t wait to get in the office,” Lieutenant Wolf said.
“Do you like your job?” Eddie said.
“I love my job,” I said. “It’s the best I’ve ever had. Do you like yours?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s the worst decision I ever made,” he said. “It’s hard for soldiers. We all want to go home, of course. But we also want to stay and make sure our buddies did not die for nothing.”
There were no street lights. All I could see was absolute darkness and the faint outlines of hovels against a backdrop of stars.
“It’s always interesting, though,” Eddie said. “No one gets to see places like this. Only Iraqis. And you. And us.”
“Raid Night” was excerpted from Michael J. Totten’s In the Wake of the Surge, published in 2011 by Belmont Estate Books.
Also by Michael J. Totten
In the Wake of the Surge
The Road to Fatima Gate
About the Author
Michael J. Totten is a foreign correspondent and foreign policy analyst who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, City Journal, LA Weekly, The Jerusalem Post, Beirut's Daily Star, Reason, Azure, and the Australian edition of Newsweek. He is a contributing editor at City Journal and writes regularly for Commentary. He lives with his wife and two cats in Portland, Oregon, and is a former resident of Beirut. Visit his Web site at www.MichaelTotten.com.
“Raid Night” was excerpted from Michael J. Totten’s In the Wake of the Surge, published in 2011 by Belmont Estate Books.
Smashwords Edition copyright 2011 by Michael J. Totten
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