Weapons of Mass Destruction Page 12

  “Must be evacuating civilians before we launch the attack,” Sinclair said.

  They watched the mosque for almost an hour, and not a soul entered or exited the main gate. Like a castle, its drawbridge was already raised for battle.

  The militaristic impregnability of the structure impressed Sinclair the soldier but offended Sinclair the American citizen. He had been raised to respect the separation of church and state. The rhetoric of the Axis of Evil notwithstanding, he continued to believe that the United States exemplified this fundamental democratic principle. In Iraq, the conflation of politics and religion constituted yet another permeable boundary that confounded his understanding of an ethical universe of mutually exclusive forces. Good and evil. Democracy and radical Islam. Separation of church and state was right, and everything else was wrong. Occupying a mosque violated more than just rules of engagement. A more flagrantly sacrilegious military strategy was almost inconceivable. Almost. Snipers were notoriously susceptible to the seductions of minarets, whose shooting angles were incomparable.

  “How would you say churches compare with mosques?” Sinclair asked Logan.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “If you had to hunker down in a mosque or a church, which would you choose?”

  “A mosque. Just look at that minaret.”

  “Churches have spires.”

  “Purely symbolic. Churches are never used for military purposes.”

  “What about the Crusades?”

  “That was a long time ago. And they were Catholics, not Christians.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sinclair had trouble negotiating Logan’s born-again distinctions. They seemed unnecessarily elaborate or alarmingly loose, depending on the context. For starters, the difference between Christians in general and born-agains in particular eluded him. Logan said the determining factor was the believer’s relationship with the word of God.

  “You mean the Bible?” Sinclair asked.

  “What else would I mean?”

  “Catholics read the Bible.”

  “Correction. Catholics have their own liturgy. Loosely based on scripture.”

  “What about Methodists? And Lutherans?”

  “Sunday Christians.”

  “But Christians all the same.”

  “God will separate the wheat from the chaff on the last day.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re either born again or you’re not.”

  To Sinclair it seemed more a question of degree than anything else. As far as he could tell, garden variety Christians talked the same talk, but practiced what they preached less vehemently. He knew better than to say this to Logan, who was virulently opposed to radicalism of any kind. Just look at jihadis, murdering innocent people throughout the region. Even Israel, the holiest of lands, wasn’t exempt from their violence.

  “Don’t get me started,” Logan would say.

  It didn’t take much. The mere mention of Palestinians elicited tirades about the audacity of Arabs staking claims on the birthplace of Christ. As far as Logan was concerned, their demands defied historical record. Virtually every reliable source confirmed that Jews were the chosen people, the true heirs of the holy land. Jesus was a Jew, after all. The first great convert. Logan sincerely regretted that Jews wouldn’t be saved on the last day unless they accepted Christ as their personal savior. And why not? Technically, they were just unconverted Christians.

  When voting in national elections, Logan chose candidates based on their commitment to unconditional military support of the Israeli army. His decision to enlist in the Marine Corps was based largely on the belief that victory in Iraq would help safeguard the state of Israel. Fallujah’s imams apparently agreed, albeit for radically different reasons. Another of their favorite rants, broadcast in the same breath as evening prayers, characterized the American occupation as a conspiracy designed to aid and abet Jews intent on stealing Iraqi oil. Divested of regional propaganda and dogma, the insurgency’s insistence on the intertwined fates of Israel and Iraq was a mirror image of Logan’s viewpoint. Sinclair took this bizarre concurrence as yet another example of the dangers of mixing religion and politics.

  Though Logan was highly sensitive to distinctions among Catholics, Protestants, and born-agains, he lumped al-Qaeda, Hamas, Fatah, and Hezbollah into a single monumental terrorist bogeyman, intent on destroying Western civilization. Even Sinclair tended to agree that ideological and sectarian differences changed nothing on the ground. From a purely militaristic point of view, the United States of America was the world’s supercop, cracking down on the latest wave of international crime. Globalism had upped the ante. Twentieth-century fascism and communism had morphed into an even more insidious threat. New-millennial terrorism.

  Sinclair was equally committed to taking the fight to the enemy. Skeptics like his father said the conflict in the Middle East was all about oil. The few pinkos left in the world blamed capitalism, as usual. Radicals of all stripes said it was a religious war. But Sinclair knew they were fighting to safeguard freedom at home and abroad—freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from religious persecution, the freedom to vote according to the dictates of your conscience—everything his military uniform represented. His war was ethical, not religious. Had Americans all been fighting the same battles, they might have already prevailed.

  Logan was all for freedom as long as it didn’t affect prayer in schools. The First Amendment made him a little edgy. It was prone to falling into the wrong hands. The sixties had inspired Congress to outlaw flag burning, among other un-American activities. But the debate over whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include reference to one nation under God still reared its ugly head. When one of Logan’s college history professors claimed the phrase had only been added in 1954, he dropped the class. He made the mistake of recounting this story during one of the platoon’s late-night gabfests. Wolf pounced on every opportunity to alleviate combat anxiety with comic relief. The more humorless the target, the better.

  “You’re saying America is a Christian country?” Wolf asked.

  “I’m saying we’re one nation under God, and the God in question has a long white beard—”

  “Kind of like imams?”

  “You didn’t let me finish. And nothing on his head. Not a turban or towel in sight. Just more of that lily white hair.”

  “Not even a yarmulke? I thought your God was Jewish.”

  In self-defense, Logan eventually adopted the platoon’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy regarding religious convictions. But not before everyone understood that his patriotism was an act of faith. There was only room for one God in Iraq. His. Logan’s condemnation of sectarian militias didn’t undermine his belief that the United States was authorized to wage war in the name of Jesus Christ. After all, double standards were standard fare in religious wars. Mirror images of monotheism were embattled in the Middle East, not that either side recognized their reflection. Sinclair stopped short of equating Logan’s fervor with the fanaticism of the insurgents in the mosque. A lone born-again marine could hardly be held responsible for the apocalyptic tenor of this war. Besides he was very fond of Logan. They had been through a lot together.

  They cracked open a couple of MREs, more to stay awake than to stave off hunger. As usual, they swapped food groups. Logan was crazy about chips. When they had access to unlimited ready meals, he opened one after another and scarfed down bag after bag. Sinclair was perfectly willing to trade chips for fruits and vegetables, presumably because his mother had never allowed her children to eat junk food growing up. This was one of several private rituals, nobody’s business but their own. Around the other guys, Sinclair forfeited extra vegetables to avoid being teased. Logan wasn’t the only brunt of Wolf’s goody-two-shoes jokes. In the middle of his second bag of chips, Logan raised a finger as though testing the wind.

  “Hear that?”


  They both stopped chewing and listened to the distant grind of approaching tanks.

  “Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.”

  But still nothing happened. The tanks stopped, just out of artillery range, and even the Cobras patrolling overhead disappeared. Then Radetzky radioed an inexplicable order.

  “Retreat two blocks. Reconnoiter in the last cleared compound.”

  They had expected to hold their positions to pick off insurgents escaping the mosque bombardment. As many could be killed in flight as were incinerated inside by mortar explosions. This flush-and-plug strategy had been employed to great advantage in Baghdad, where heavy artillery was the backbone of almost every operation. It reminded Sinclair of shooting galleries at good old-fashioned county fairs, minus the Kewpie doll prizes. Logan thought of it more like a computer game with rapid-fire targets. He was disappointed when the plan fell through. Gunners rarely had the opportunity to practice sharpshooting.

  “What’s up with that?” Logan said.

  “Maybe they’re holding hostages inside.”

  “Then turn up the heat. Smoke ’em out.”

  “Don’t worry. Radetzky knows what he’s doing.”

  They hustled back to the designated compound, anxious to find out their next move. No one admired Radetzky more than Sinclair. With the foresight that separates officers from their men, he had no doubt devised another brilliant plan. Sinclair studied Radetzky’s maneuvers with an eye to emulating them some day. He had originally enlisted because of 9/11, but the longer he served in the Marine Corps the more he considered making a career of it. One in a hundred grunts were officer material. Sinclair certainly had the right attitude. Time would tell if he had the right stuff.

  Reunited with the platoon, Sinclair noticed that Radetzky seemed distracted. He ordered his men to lie low until daybreak. All but the most die-hard gunners welcomed the chance to bed down. Insomniacs spent their time cleaning weapons and muttering questions, none of which had answers. The usual flurry of radio transmissions from Tactical Operations was suspended. Periodically Radetzky checked in with the battalion commander. Otherwise he sat brooding, not even consulting his beloved aerial map of the city. Sinclair echoed his mood. They were far more on edge sitting around than they would have been gearing up for battle.

  Half of the company was crammed into a single compound. The floors were so jammed with prone bodies you couldn’t walk from one room to another. Snoring competed with the noise of dueling broadcasts outside. A psychological operations team tasked with bolstering morale was stationed nearby. Their loudspeakers sounded like they were inside the room, if not inside Sinclair’s head. Trying to drown out harangues from the mosque necessitated turning the volume up a notch every other minute. As usual, PSYOP’s choice of material was predominantly gothic, as though they had all watched Psycho one too many times as kids. They were forever splicing together audio clips from slasher films. The target audience was ambiguous. They were either terrorizing terrorists or trying to pump up guys like McCarthy who reveled in gore.

  Sinclair honestly didn’t know which was worse, the imam’s fanatic denunciations or the accompanying maniacal laughter, which sounded like the Joker in Batman. Both sides were screaming amplified bloody murder punctuated by the bone-rattling percussion of heavy-metal songs. Dead on Arrival’s “Attack of the Peacekeepers.” “Killing an Arab,” courtesy of The Cure. The War on Terror was the first war with an official soundtrack. The fact that it sounded more like a horror film than a military operation said a lot about the new millennium, none of it good. Guys like Sinclair would have preferred something a little more patriotic, maybe “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to remind them of what they were really fighting for. Guys like him were in the minority.

  Around 0400 hours a commotion next door roused the platoon. They took turns peering out of bedroom windows, trying to catch a glimpse of a bedraggled group of Iraqi National Guardsmen in an adjacent compound. Rumor had it they’d been flown in from Kurdistan to make a cameo appearance at the mosque attack. Everyone knew this was highly unlikely, but it made for a good story. Until recently, most of the INGs in Anbar Province hailed from CAP India, a Combined Action Platoon trained by veteran US Army and Marine Corps officers. They were virtually all Shiites whose desire to avenge themselves on Ba’athist Sunnis outweighed every other consideration, including death threats. Then the insurgency devised an even more compelling deterrent. They claimed the coalition was pitting Shiites against Sunnis to facilitate foreign domination of the region. Sectarian squabbles were momentarily eclipsed by a new species of Iraqi nationalism, united against the United States.

  Kurdish freedom fighters hated both factions. Near genocide convinced them that sectarian problems continued to demand sectarian solutions. If Shiites and Sunnis decided to resist American intervention, Kurds would embrace it. Their enemy’s enemy was their friend. Centcom was perfectly willing to adopt Middle Eastern mottos and motivations when they came in handy. Shiite Guardsmen were defecting, and the coalition had to take what it could get. Kurds stepped in to replace them.

  This particular unit looked more like whipped Shiites than Kurdish freedom fighters. Uniforms were mismatched. Their weapons wouldn’t have passed even a cursory inspection. They had the haunted expressions of traitors, not mercenaries, tricked into pitting themselves against their own regional interests. At the crack of dawn, they rallied for morning prayers. What they may have lacked in military discipline they made up for in spiritual conviction.

  Inside the mosque, insurgents prostrated themselves to the same God, enemy camps united in spirit to Allah. Politics were a Western invention, a mere blemish on a region whose deep structure was profoundly religious. Not to worry. Their prayers were part of Washington’s strategic plan. INGs were really only there to justify, not carry out, the mosque attack. The more devout they were, the better. As long as they showed up for photo ops, no one could claim American infidels were wantonly destroying sacred property. Headlines and captions would encapsulate the apparent truth.

  “Insurgents Attack Coalition Forces in Fallujah.”

  “Muslim INGs Liberate Occupied Mosques.”

  The offensive was scheduled to begin at dawn, but Radetzky was still brooding at the kitchen table at 0630 hours. Sinclair must have finally managed to doze off. There seemed to be no other way to account for the unmistakable sound of an airstrike, which he assumed was part of a recurring nightmare that had plagued him since the Battle of Baghdad. Rules of engagement forbade air attacks on mosques, if only to thwart the insurgency’s most effective recruiting tool. Nothing inspired jihad like the specter of burning Qurans. It turns out Sinclair wasn’t dreaming. The rule had been waived in light of what the CIA called incontrovertible evidence of the mosque’s strategic violation of Appendix D, No. 3-7. As far as McCarthy was concerned, they could call it whatever they liked as long as it authorized them to kick ass. Judging from the whining pitch and trajectory of laser-guided missiles, F-16 Vipers were targeting the mosque. The strike only lasted a couple of minutes, which was typical of aerial attacks. It didn’t take long to do the job using 500-pound explosives.

  “No wonder they didn’t bother backing up the offensive,” Sinclair said.

  “Even cockroaches can’t survive bombs that big,” McCarthy said.

  “This is East Manhattan, remember?” Wolf said. “If these roaches are anything like their cousins back home, nothing can kill them. Not even nukes.”

  They waited almost an hour before going in to mop up. The platoon was growing accustomed to inexplicable delays. The same couldn’t be said for the gang of CNN reporters that suddenly showed up, eager to start documenting evidence to justify the strike. Whenever a holy site was targeted, reinforcements were sent in for the sake of media damage control. Nothing was more damning than Al Jazeera’s coverage of mosque attacks. There was never any mention of grenades dropping like manna from minarets. Or weapons caches concealed behind qiblah walls.
They featured pictures of domes with what looked like gaping holes ripped open by what was characterized as indiscriminate bombing. The extent of the damage was actually miniscule in proportion to the scale of the threat. Laser-guided bombs guaranteed an unprecedented level of precision. Under the rules of engagement of virtually any other war, the buildings would have been leveled.

  Johnson was convinced imams hired their own version of embedded reporters, providing front row seats to anyone willing to conceal evidence of military operations in their mosques. Hospitals did the same thing, giving Al Jazeera photographers access to emergency rooms. Or so they said. The footage could have been bogus for all anyone knew, dating from Saddam’s genocides or the war with Iran. Heart-wrenching photographs of wounded children and stricken parents. Burn victims. Amputees. American reporters were too intimidated to follow up on these reports. More than one had already been kidnapped, even killed. They were only safe when embedded with the military.

  Radical Arab networks funded out of Saudi Arabia and Qatar established what amounted to a global media monopoly. Coalition news outlets could either screen their footage or none at all. Washington decried Al Jazeera’s smear campaigns. But the Iraqi provisional government refused to shut down its television studio in Baghdad. More embedded reporters showed up. Axis of Evil rhetoric was ratcheted up a notch. Tit for tat. Johnson seemed genuinely upset that both sides were more concerned with hype than documentation. He wasn’t naive enough to think that absolute objectivity was possible, but you didn’t have to spin news like a disc jockey. The guys from CNN were practically frothing at the mouth, they were so excited at the prospect of carnage. Vietnam had cured him of what he called ambulance-chasing journalism.