The Book of the Dead

When the Alliance forces stopped their drive into Iraq in March 1991, the 3^rd Armored Division—the unit I was attached to—was about 350 miles southeast of Baghdad. While in the years to come there would be much criticism of the U.S. government's decision to cease attacking and advancing into Iraq, at the time there was hardly a person on the ground who was not baffled by it. After four days of fighting, frontline Iraqi formations were scattered, on the run, and surrendering; elite Republican Guard units were falling back on the capital and attempting to intercept an Iranian drive on the religious city of Karbala; and Saddam Hussein, the latter-day Hitler of the Middle East, was still very much in power.

Before the four-day ground war had erupted, the Alliance army—made up mainly of Americans, Brits, French, Egyptians, small contingents of Arabs from the various minor Gulf states, and even Syrians—had massed along the Iraqi border in Saudi Arabia, dodging sporadic Scud attacks and letting waves of bombers blow the hell out of Iraqi soldiers and cities.

My unit, the 404^th Civil Affairs Company, a reserve unit from Trenton, New Jersey, landed in Saudi Arabia on February 5, 1991. In the weeks prior to our departure from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, analysts had predicted 50,000 dead and wounded Americans in the first two weeks of fighting with Iraq, which was expected to utilize chemical, biological, and maybe even tactical nuclear weapons. A lot of the people in our unit—and presumably other units as well—were scared as hell at the prospect of flying into that kind of a situation, and many had tried everything they could to avoid being sent overseas with the rest of the company. In retrospect, of course, because of the actual low casualty rates, the ignominy of evading duty with one's unit is both easier to forget and all the more foolish.

When the transport aircraft we were riding in began its descent toward Dahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia, I expected a scene like I had read about in accounts of the Vietnam War sieges of Dien Bien Phu or Khe San—rockets pounding into the tarmac, soldiers burrowed in holes in the ground until mortar rounds or artillery shells hit and churned them out, commanders desperately trying to counter waves of sappers as they came over the wire … When we landed, we were greeted by some of the people from our unit who had flown in the week before as an advance party, and warned to watch out for the small clusters of wily-looking regular Army soldiers who lurked about the air base, looking for the chance to steal equipment from incoming troops.

After a brief stay in El Khobar Towers (made famous by a car bombing several years after Desert Storm), the 404th issued me a truck and sent me and about half of the other people in the unit out in small detachments to several of the combat units massing on the Iraqi frontier; as Civil Affairs soldiers, our job was to interact with civilians and refugees who ended up in the path of the army. Coincidentally, the soldiers who remained behind in Dahran were all longstanding members of 404th; those who were sent out into the war were members of a small unit from Connecticut that had been merged with the company to round out its strength; individuals like myself who had been called back to military service for the war; and a handful of 404^th veterans who deeply resented being sent out with the other sacrificial lambs.

After a drive north up the Saudi coast past Jubail, our mini-convoy of two trucks headed inland, northwest, along Trans-Arabian Pipeline Road, referred to in speech as Tapline Road. Our destination was King Khalid Military City (KKMC), a major Saudi military base whose location is so secret that it is not supposed to appear on maps and even we were not given its location, just directions on how to get to it. After arriving in the neighborhood of KKMC, we were to find the 2^nd Brigade of the 3^rd Armored Division, for which we would provide Civil Affairs support. Our trip inland was attended by rain, fog, and frost on our windshields in the morning, conditions not hinted at by the reports of journalists stationed on the Gulf Coast.

We rendezvoused in the desert with the 2^nd Brigade after several days of driving to and around KKMC, arriving at a chaotic mustering area in the dark, vehicles shambling around in every direction, navigating only in the dim green light of night observation goggles, headlights being banned for security reasons. It was under these conditions that the first sergeant of the company we camped near was killed, run over as he slept by a sort of military 18-wheeler called a Hemmit. This incident was viewed as an inauspicious omen, and demoralized many of the troops who heard about it, especially those in the dead man's company.

Shortly thereafter we began to advance on the Iraqi border. While the combat elements of the brigade led the way with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and self-propelled artillery pieces, my truck fell into formation with the massive trains of support vehicles that followed in their wake. The trucks, Humvees, personnel carriers, and other support vehicles traveled in six columns, each separated by 50 meters; these columns stretched nearly two kilometers in length, each vehicle 50 meters behind the last. So, each vehicle was separated by 50 meters from the ones to its front, back, left, and right (unless it was on an outside column, in which case it did not have anything on one side, or at the very front or very rear of a column). This great formation, a block of vehicles 250 meters wide and almost 2,000 meters long, roared across the desert toward the heart of Iraq, a shaft pushing along a tempered steel head.

At night, the columns would come to a halt, gingerly tighten up the interval between vehicles to just a few feet, and block off the alleys in between the columns by parking trucks at their ends. It was in these spaces that we camped at night.

I made friends with some of the other soldiers in the unit, among them Specialist Todd Blair and Captain Christine Maruffo. One of the ways we entertained ourselves at night was by telling stories or by reading to each other. My choice for reading material was a book by H.P. Lovecraft that I had brought with me, and Blair's choice was P. J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell.

Coincidentally, many of Lovecraft's stories, written in the 1920s and '30s, took place in or referred to events in Mesopotamia, Iraq, the area we were entering. His dark, nightmarish stories, perfect for reading by the glow of a chem-light while crammed into a Humvee, deal with primordial gods and races who prey upon a largely unsuspecting humanity. One of his subjects is a book called the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead, a tome that appears in or is mentioned in a great number of his stories.

After days of driving through endless expanses of flat, featureless, rocky desert, we came upon a huge earthen berm, erected by Hussein's troops as a defensive barrier against invasion from the west. Great holes appeared in the earthwork every half mile or so, breached by American combat engineers, and the vehicles of our column drove through one-by-one, reassembling on the other side. A large placard identified the unit that had excavated the breach that we drove through: the 82^nd Engineer Battalion, the same unit my grandfather had been a member of when it plowed through northern France toward Germany in 1944, after the breakout from Normandy. That unit had been stationed in Bamberg, West Germany, when I lived there as a child, and I used to walk past a similar sign identifying its headquarters when I wandered around the U.S. Army post in the afternoons after school.

For four days after we entered Iraq through its western wall, we followed the combat forces as they finished off and routed the Iraqi army. At night, we could watch the lights of B-52s stream eastward across the sky like flocks of shooting stars to drop payloads of bombs on cites, troops, or minefields, and near dawn we could see them returning to their bases in Saudi Arabia; the horizon a kilometer or two ahead of us would be lit by cannon and rifle fire and the muffled sounds of combat. In the morning, we would advance onto the battlefields, past smoldering tanks, collapsed bunkers, overrun fortifications. Small packs of dogs trotted everywhere, emboldened by the taste of human flesh.

After four days, a "100-hour war," the Alliance ceased its drive against the Iraqi forces, a decision that, while it has ultimately baffled many, first mystified the soldiers on the ground.

Once the actual fighting had ended, our work as Civil Affairs soldiers began. Initially, we set up camp at the furthest extent of U.S. advancement into Iraq, on a stretch of road called Highway 8, and began to provide aid for refugees coming down the road from the northwest, from the direction of Baghdad, headed southeast toward Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. We distributed food, directed people into medical tents, told people how Saddam Hussein had been defeated, how they had nothing to fear any more, how the superiority of our arms had determined the future for Iraq. We also searched vehicles headed into our zone of control (very few people were actually on foot), clearing people out of buses, cars, and trucks, and confiscating any weapons we found. While people in the United States were debating whether to arm Saddam Hussein's enemies, we were taking from them the few weapons they had.

At one point, a delegation of Bedouins came to us because they wanted to be supplied with weapons; brigade and division commanders bumped such civilian delegations on to the Civil Affairs people, as it was our  job to deal with civilian concerns. Our commander explained that the people who made this decision were in Safwan, a village on the Kuwaiti border 80 miles to the southeast. Some of the soldiers snickered at their mode of transportation, a dump truck, and others at their store-bought robes.

A few days later, the Bedouins showed up again, having been rebuffed in Safwan and sent back to us. They were almost out of gas, had left their families alone for a long time, wanted to know what we could do for them. Nothing, of course; not our problem. But we smiled, were friendly, quite unlike the way they thought soldiers were supposed to behave.

That more than anything baffled the people we dealt with. When they saw soldiers and guns, they expected to be shot at. We never shot at anyone, and probably no Iraqi civilian was shot at by an American during the entire operation. We smiled, shook their hands, gave them food, won their hearts and minds, took their guns, and sent them on their way.

After a few weeks of disarming people, my two-truck Civil Affairs team headed southeast, toward Safwan, where so many of the refugees had been heading. For many of them, their escape from Iraq ended there; many non-Shiites were afraid to go across the Shaat al-Arab into Iran, and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were refusing entry to most refugees. A series of refugee camps were thus set up in and around the little town.

During our stay in Safwan, we oversaw food distribution for the local people. One of the three main clans who controlled the village would assist us, while the other townspeople would line up to receive their rations. Nearly every day, shoving, wailing, reentering lines, stealing, and every other predictable antic culminated in a full-blown food riot, with incendiaries being flung over the walls of the school we were operating from, and troops rushing from corner to corner of the compound, battling hand-to-hand with rifle butts the clusters of people who began to grow into a mob. Finally, we would abandon the remains of the food, pile into our trucks, and drive out through the mob as they rushed to pillage the last of the supplies. This routine was repeated on a daily basis.

These rioters were, as noted, Iraqi villagers, not refugees. Indeed, there was very little unrest in the refugee camps, where the people seemed, uncannily, to be very well behaved. As it turned out, however, the circumstances of their best behavior were not all that uncanny, as another Civil Affairs soldier explained to me ...

Apparently, the commander of the 3^rd Armored Division had ordered that a large book, a big blank tome found in a school or other official building, be made available to the refugees. Those who wanted to go to America when the G.I.s pulled out just needed to sign their names in it and then behave themselves until it was time to go.

Over the next few months, as U.S. forces pulled out of the area, very few, maybe none, of the people who signed that book were ever taken out of Iraq by the United States. And what of the book? Was it taken back, like some gruesome relic, a stack of paper permeated with the souls of thousands? Not too damned likely; it is hard to imagine anyone who would want evidence like that ever turning up against them, a book full of pointing, accusing fingers. Was it burned? I hope so. Because if it was left behind, of course, it probably ended up in the hands of the Iraqi secret police, followed soon thereafter by the people they represented. The people whose hearts and minds we won, who we professed our friendship to. The people who could not escape into liberated Kuwait, who could not enter a U.S-defended Saudi Arabia. Sometimes I wonder where they are today,  so many years after they signed their names in that book … God only knows. I hope when the Republican Guards swept back into southern Iraq that those people swore allegiance to Saddam Hussein, spat on the American flag, cursed Uncle Sam. It does not hurt a single American if they did, and it very well might have helped some of them.

Despite the months of invective against him in the months leading up to Desert Storm, and the years following the 1991 operations, Saddam Hussein remained in power another 12 years. Reasons given for why he was not ousted at the time were as diverse as they were meaningless—fear of a power vacuum that will be filled by even "worse" powers, an inability to remove him because of the limitations of the U.N. mandate that called for the Alliance to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait, fears that the tables would have been turned on the Alliance forces if they had made it as far as Baghdad. Sane minds are forced to reject other notions that creep into them, dismal, lingering fears that those who rule countries have a greater affinity with their counterparts even in enemy states than they do with the masses of their own nations, more sympathy for those who command opposing forces than for the troops who fill their own armies. 

And if little regard was ultimately to be given for the American soldiers who fought in the sands of the Middle East then and in the decades that followed, what was given to the masses of refugees who were led to believe that those soldiers were their friends, that the United States would, inexplicably, save them? What became of the people who signed their names in that book in a village in southern Iraq? I have no idea whether or not there is any truth to the myth that angels enter into a Book of Life that sits near the gates of Heaven the names of those who have been blessed. For a certainty, however, I know that for a short time a Book of the Dead could be found in the desert outside a village near the gates of Hell, and into it were entered the names of the damned.