The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [46]
“Yeah,” whispered Conn. “We’re done.”
SOON AFTERWARD the briefing ended and we rolled out of the FOB, headed for yet another police station.
The four-vehicle convoy of the 615th zoomed through western Baghdad, winding through back roads, jumping median strips and driving against traffic on two-lane streets, twisting into dead ends and doubling back again. In the backseat of the second truck I furiously copied down the dialogue between gunner, driver, and truck commander:
Clear low wires!
Yeah, clear low wires, sorry.
Crossing over, flipping a bitch!
Flipping a bitch, crossing over.
Got a box up on the road.
Trash pile on the right!
In my previous embed assignment the lexicon had been a lot different. If the wisecracking grunts of the 158th MP were an X-rated vaudeville show—a gang of guardsmen from Oklahoma who spent most of their time swearing like sea captains and singing songs like “Gay Factory Worker from the South” while they burned up the highways—the 615th was an after-school special. All the classic high-school types were represented. O’Braden, the driver in my truck today, was the reformed Judd Nelson discipline case, a brooding, dark-haired sentimentalist who gushed about the sacrifices soldiers had to make. Bastien, the skinny, hyperactive gunner, was the class fuck-up, the kid who sits in the back row shooting spitballs. Sergeant Biederman, the squad leader today, was…well, I don’t know who he was in the movie. In this unit he’s a quiet leader who always seems a little exasperated, trying to keep it all together but occasionally losing his patience. A slight man at 130 pounds with a cherubic face, he’s been struggling today with the seventy-odd pounds of gear he has to carry with his uniform—not with the weight but with the arrangement—and is anxious to get to the station so he can redo some of the straps on his pouches.
Got a green truck on the left!
Got a blown-up piece of shit on the right!
Making a left—correction, right.
Alright, coming out. Train tracks! Gonna be a tight fit.
Hold on, Bastien.
Alright, you’re clear of the wire.
We slithered under the low wire of the side street. Biederman looked out the window and sighed. The young sergeant had had shit luck ever since I arrived. The first time we’d made this trip, to the Al Mamoon police station, there’d been a friendly-fire incident on his watch. The IPLO (a civilian American policeman contracted to train Iraqis forces) assigned to us, some cop from Georgia who’d been hired to teach self-defense to Iraqi cops, had been fiddling with his Glock pistol just inside the precinct gates when suddenly the weapon fired.
Biederman had been standing with his back to the IPLO, talking to me, when the shot went off. The look on his face recalled a cartoon character whose hat flies ten feet in the air in surprise. He immediately pushed me behind a car (not that I needed any help to run and hide), pulled out his weapon, and went over to investigate. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but upon learning that it was gunfire from our own party Biederman sagged visibly, like an animal taking a bullet. The look on his face said it all: This is the last fucking thing I need!
The IPLO was himself a symbol of everything that was fucked up, myopic, and stupid about the war. If you viewed the occupation as a luxury government employment program for American security-industry types—a kind of gold-leaf Tennessee Valley Authority for connected ex–Pentagon execs and retired cops and soldiers, all of whom could come to the Valley and set themselves up with a nice six-figure-or-better job inside the bubble—then you might think this made sense, having some monolingual Georgia cop come all the way to Baghdad at a taxpayer-supported rate of nine grand a month to teach hand-to-hand combat techniques to