I’ve been in Baghdad nearly four months. According to my
company’s policy, I am entitled to a couple of weeks of R&R
back in the States. When someone mentioned that this is a very
generous policy, I pointed out that our other rules requiring that
we work seven days a week are not quite as generous. But I am
scheduled to return to Iraq in late July. I wouldn’t miss the
opportunity to go back for any reason.
Every trip to the outside world has to start with a ride to
BIAP. This time I made the trip with three professional private
security company drivers employed by the outfit across the street
from our house/office. Two of them happened to be going on an
R&R vacation too.
Any trip out of Baghdad first involves a very dangerous eight-
or nine-mile drive to BIAP. From there, I will fly to Beirut aboard
an airline with the improbable name of “The Flying Carpet.” I am to
spend the night in Beirut, and then at the crack of dawn to head to
Boston via London.
This drive to BIAP — Baghdad International Airport — was
without doubt, the scariest ride I have ever been on. I have no
idea how much of the fear we felt was genuine and how much was
imagining an enemy lurking out there when, in reality, there might
have been no one there at all.
We left our neighborhood late as usual. That put us in the
middle of heavy late morning Baghdad city traffic. At this time of
day, you can never be sure who is in the car or truck next to you.
Happily, all I can think is that if the guy in the next truck is
planning a VBED (Vehicle-Borne Explosive Device) bomb attack on us,
it will be so quick I’ll never know it.
After a short while, the traffic started to string out and
pretty soon we caught up with a convoy of U.S. Army Humvees out on
roadside bomb patrol. Our driver slowed down to convoy speed and
stayed 150 meters back. He then reached into the glove compartment
and pulled out a large piece of orange canvas. He put it in his
left hand and stuck it out the window. This was a signal to the
soldier manning the .50 caliber machine gun in the trailing Humvee
that we are “friendly.” It’s also a request for permission to
pass.
Obviously, any terrorist with half a brain could get his hands
on a couple of yards of orange canvas, fill his vehicle with
artillery shells, and create a VBED. Just as we, he could also
catch up with a Humvee convoy, wave the orange panel, request
permission to pass, and detonate himself. When detonated, such a
car bomb would easily engulf the entire three-vehicle convoy of
Army soldiers and, potentially, kill all nine on board.
As we slowly started to catch up, our driver still frantically
waved his canvas panel. The rest of us by now had joined him and
started to wave our DoD badges out the windows as well. A DoD badge
is exactly the size of a credit card, yet we were requiring the
soldier in the trailing Humvee to correctly decide at 100
meters whether we were friend or foe and whether to fire at us.
Whatever his decision, it would have to be made on the basis of no
visible evidence. He could not have possibly seen our badges and,
because of tinted windows, he couldn’t possibly have made us out
either. When we got to about 50 meters of the convoy, the soldier
gave us a motion to pass. This time he made the right decision. We
were not terrorists and we were not driving a car bomb. As we
gathered speed and passed the convoy we were traveling about 80
miles per hour. I gave the soldier a big thumbs up. He returned the
signal and smiled.
The road to BIAP — pronounced bye-op by those of us in Baghdad
— is referred to, not surprisingly, as the Bye-Op Road. The
military, however, with its fondness for code names, calls it Route
Irish. The 1944 Normandy Invasion, for example, was code-named
Operation Overlord. At least then, requirements of secrecy gave the
code name a purpose. The BIAP road is a six-lane divided highway
and no amount of secrecy or code naming is going to conceal it. But
no one should try to deprive the military of its God-given right to
use code names.
As we were passing Baghdad University, the driver got a call
from “home base” in the Green House. In the jargon of the trade we
were on a “mission,” and it was essential that headquarters stay in
touch. The driver was told that the U.S. Army has closed down Route
Irish. A car bomb had exploded, or a car bomb had been found and
was being disarmed. Whatever the case, we were re-routed and
directed to get to the airport a different way. The driver cursed
because he had never driven to BIAP this new way. He was not
familiar with all the danger points where terrorists can hide
before launching an attack with RPG’s or IED’s. Extensive use of
initials is another genetically encoded trait of the military
JOHN, OUR DRIVER TO BIAP, is about 35 and from Little Rock. He has
been doing the “personal security stuff” in Iraq for well over two
years. Today he really looks the part. He is fully decked out in
PSC regalia. He is wearing an officer’s flack jacket with extra
protection around the shoulders and neck. It also includes four or
five pouches for extra ammunition clips. A communication set-up of
some kind leads to a little microphone in front of his mouth, just
as phone operators had years ago. Because John smiles a lot, I am
unaccountably drawn back 50 years to the advertising tag line Bell
Telephone used for years about their phone operators: “The voice
with a smile.”
John is also carrying a very mean-looking machine gun of a kind
I have never seen before, and, topping it all off like a cherry on
a banana split, he wears black leather half-gloves and walks with a
swagger. The only time I have seen these gloves before is on
rappelers and on Olympic weightlifters. One day, I noticed John
wore these gloves to lunch and never took them off! He told me the
bare trigger finger gives him “the touch I need to fire my weapon
accurately and with mortal effect.” I think that John has also been
reading too many convoy warning notices.
John is a veteran of this corner of the world. He has had one
roommate, and “three sidekicks” killed since he arrived here. I
asked him how many ambushes or firefights he has survived, and he
replies: “Lots. I’ve lost track of how many. The weirdest one was
the night we got mortared while escorting a truck. The driver fell
out of the truck. He was covered with blood. He’d been hit by lots
of shrapnel and all this s—- was sticking out of his head. I told
the others: ‘Don’t tell the dude about that s—- coming out of his
head. Maybe he won’t realize what’s going on. They med-evacked him
out, but he died before he reached the hospital.”
John will keep coming back to Iraq for as long as there is
fighting going on here: “This security convoy stuff is the only
thing I know how to do,” he says.
Everyone in Iraq who carries a weapon follows a ritual every
time he gets in or out of his vehicle with his pistol, or his M-5,
or both. It absolutely reminds me of a major league baseball player
coming to bat. He spits, he scratches, he re-sets his cup, he
tightens and loosens his batting gloves, he twists his neck, he
scratches some more, and spits again.
In the case of our guys, the ritual involves chambering bullets,
clearing the weapon, popping out the rounds and catching them in
mid-air, engaging in endless metal-on-metal sliding noise,
practicing a quick draw, slamming a new clip into the butt of the
pistol, releasing it and slamming it home again. A while ago, I
jokingly told all the other passengers in an SUV that I would no
longer ride with them for fear of being shot while they were going
through their warm-up routines! What’s really interesting about all
this Rambo-like posturing is that none of our people have fired a
real shot in more than three years!!
The end of the routine always concludes with sliding the pistol
under their left thighs with the barrel pointed in a direction that
guarantees a Bobbit-like calamity. The theory about this is that,
the under-thigh location is the one allowing the quickest draw in
the event of an “underway emergency.” The other day CJ (one of my
associates) placed his pistol in the hot sun right above the
dashboard and conducted such a lengthy warm-up, that by the time he
slipped the pistol under his thigh, it was so hot it gave him a
blister right through his jeans! That can easily happen when the
outside temperature hovers around 130 degrees!
WHEN JOHN RESUMED DRIVING after hearing the bad news that Irish was
closed, two things happened. Just as we were about to pass a beat
up pickup truck, John said to Mike sitting next to him in the front
seat: “Hand me your pistol!” He then rapidly sped up to 90 miles an
hour and pointed the pistol to shoot straight through the
glass of the driver side window! I asked him about that later and
he said that he felt suspicious of the pickup we were passing and,
had his observation confirmed anything untoward, he would have shot
at the pickup’s front seat passengers through our closed window.
Fortunately, he detected nothing “untoward.”
After passing the pickup we moved in behind a truck that was
speeding along so we used him as a “blocking back” for about a
mile. Then traffic really started to slow down. The one and only
rule of the road by which we live in Iraq is this: “When you are on
the road speed saves lives. Excessive speed saves lives many times
over!” John then said to me: “This is no good. It’s too slow. Now
you’re going to learn why they pay me the big bucks!” (And, big
bucks is indeed what people like him get. The most frequent number
I have heard is $180,000 a year, but I have also heard much higher
figures.)
We slowed down sharply, made a 90 degree left turn, and bounced
across the torn-up center median. When we cleared the median, we
made a 90 degree right turn so we were headed right into the
oncoming traffic on the other side of the median! This was like
driving north in the southbound lanes of the New Jersey
Turnpike!
In Iraq, all traffic is alert to the kind of maneuver we had
just performed. No one is truly shocked when he is suddenly about
to be run down by a wave of oncoming traffic. With constant horn
blowing and John’s deft driving, we managed to work our way over to
the extreme left side of the highway (the slow lane for the
oncoming traffic) and found it pretty clear. We were then able to
make brisk and very steady “wrong way” progress until we came close
to the BIAP gate. At this point John said: “There is a Humvee
convoy coming towards us. If we don’t get back where we belong they
will just start firing at us. They will assume an SUV on the wrong
side of the road driving towards them is hostile.” So we crossed
back over to the correct lane and proceeded to get into the “DoD”
lane in which inspections are swifter, the dogs fewer, the delays
shorter.
About a month ago, a car-bomb exploded between two SUVs at
almost the same point where we crossed back. Since then, all the
lanes leading up to the checkpoint have been framed with a solid
wall of 12-foot high Texas Tees — massive, concrete barricades
four feet thick at the base. One now arrives at the checkpoint as
if in a tunnel — but no one can ease up beside you and
set off a car-bomb. Once we got through the infamous BIAP
checkpoint we were able to proceed at very high speed — over 100
miles an hour. There was virtually no traffic, but the holes left
by earlier car-bombs nearly caused John to lose control of the SUV
on two occasions. The high speed is not just posturing. It’s
essential in order to throw off the timing of roadside bomb crews
hundreds of yards away with a video camera ready to film your death
for the CNN evening news.
As we neared the BIAP terminal itself, someone fired a six or
seven second burst from an AK-47. I didn’t know if it was fired at
us, or by our side at the enemy, or whether anyone or anything was
hit. I could tell by the decibel level that it was fired from
pretty close by. John summed it up very neatly: “If the dudes don’t
hit our car, they don’t count.”
We finally pulled up in front of the terminal and our trip was
over. It was a scary trip but I’m not sure that any of the
scare was caused by actual danger. I suspect a lot of it was caused
by our imaginations. I never saw a terrorist; I never saw anything
get hit; I never saw anyone get hurt. Perhaps we could have taken a
leisurely Sunday afternoon drive out to BIAP and no one would have
done anything to harm us. Maybe there wasn’t a soul out there. But
maybe there was.
