Generation Kill - Evan Wright [151]
“Just ’cause we’re feeding you doesn’t mean I don’t hate you,” the young Marine says, still trying to keep up his edge of hostility. “I hate you. Do you hear me?”
I study the man closely while he eats. He wears a torn, grimy wife-beater undershirt with his fat belly protruding. I look for bleeding or bayonet marks on his body—to see if Captain America penetrated his skin—but see no evidence of this. The worst signs of mistreatment on his body are gruesome bruises on his arms from the zip cuffs. While eating, the man periodically grabs his shoulders and winces in pain. I ask him how badly he hurts. He speaks English reasonably well.
“I need medicine,” he says, then bursts into tears, sniffling loudly.
“For your wounds?” I ask.
“No, I need medicine for my heart,” he says. “It is bad.”
He tells me his name is Ahmed Al-Khizjrgee. Despite his suffering, the more we talk he gives the impression of being both buffoonish and crafty. With his considerable girth, he brings to mind Sergeant Schultz in the old Hogan’s Heroes series. He tries to convince me that he is not actually a soldier. “It is your imagination that I am a fighter,” he says.
When I point out that he was found with military ID documents, carrying a loaded rifle in an enemy-ambush position, he finally admits, shrugging and stroking his Saddam mustache, “I am a very low soldier.”
Al-Khizjrgee says he is forty-seven years old, with two sons and five daughters. He claims he was originally a shoemaker and joined the Republican Guard late in life. His brother is a cabdriver in Baghdad. He is a peace-loving man. One of the Marines points out that a lot of other Iraqis threw down their weapons and fled. “You were waiting to kill us,” the Marine says. “You didn’t put your weapon down until we made you.”
“It is not true,” Al-Khizjrgee protests. “I am afraid. If I put my gun down, the police come and beat us.” He says he and the other men in his unit received no outside information on the state of the world. They could be shot for listening to a radio.
I ask him how he thinks the war is going. He tells me his superiors told him and the other men in the unit that Iraq was winning the war. He says he and the other men holed up in Baqubah had their doubts but kept these to themselves. “Everybody under Saddam is silent,” he says. “If Saddam say we have war with America, we say, ‘Good!’ If he say no war, we say, ‘Good!’ ”
The Marines, who were so angry with the man a moment ago, have now warmed up to him. One of them says, “We can’t put our weapons down, either.”
“He was just doing his job,” another Marine adds, now sounding almost impressed with the guy’s tenacity in hanging on to his rifle.
The Marines smile at him and feed him more pound cake.
Al-Khizjrgee fails to catch on to the newly festive atmosphere. He leans forward and confides in me that he is desperately afraid. “How can I go home now? What if my sergeant finds me? He will know I did not fight.”
About half an hour earlier, Colbert tuned in the BBC and picked up the report that Baghdad had fallen. I pass this information on to Al-Khizjrgee. “There is no Saddam. There is no Iraqi army. You have no sergeant anymore.”
Al-Khizjrgee stares in disbelief. “It’s true,” I tell him.
He begins to cry again, only now he smiles. “I am so happy!”
The news is only getting better for Al-Khizjrgee.
Fick walks up and tells Al-Khizjrgee he will be driving him to a detention facility near Baghdad tonight.
“For free?” he asks, as if unable to believe his good fortune.
THE BATTALION’S final enemy contact outside Baqubah occurs an hour before sunset, when the men in Alpha’s Second Platoon spot a T-72 tank near their roadblock south of the city. T-72s are the most formidable tanks in the Iraqi arsenal. As soon as the Marines call it in to their platoon commander, he