Here it is, a slice of reality, the good news/bad news of being there, doing the job, paying the price. Not glamorous, often tough, scary, frustrating, but service to the country, upholding traditions of the Corps. No flag raising like Iwo Jima, no glorious parade when you get home, no moment of giddy victory like VE or VJ day. Just doing the job, hanging on, and coming home to readjust as best you can, going back to building real life again. That's what there is, that was the message at the end of Saving Private Ryan... go home, lead a good life. God bless Carlson and all those hundreds of thousands of others like him. Semper Fi indeed.
Taking charge of a detention center in Iraq? Here's what you need to remember. By Mike Carlson, Mike Carlson served as the officer in charge of the Camp Fallouja Regional Detention Facility from March 2006 to October. He is now a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
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They're not prisoners, they're "detainees."
It sounds better, as if they're merely inconvenienced rather than shoehorned into cinderblock cells, thumbing their military-issued Korans and waiting to be interrogated. One-third are innocents caught up in sweeps; one-third are jihadists who will slit your throat, and one-third are opportunists who will rat out their neighbors. You will hold them for 14 days, no more, while the interrogators try to figure out who is what. Each gets a CF, for Camp Fallouja, and a four-digit number. No names will be used, mainly because numbers fit more easily onto spreadsheets. They will be forever known as entas. "Enta" means "you" in Arabic, and that's what you call them day after day, meal after meal, port-a-potty call after port-a-potty call. "Enta, ishra mai," you say, and the enta drinks his water, and if you say, "Enta, ishra mai kulak," he drinks all of his water, every drop, and holds the bottle upside down to prove it.
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It's not personal.
The enta who screams "meesta!" every 10 seconds for 48 hours straight isn't doing it to infuriate you, his captor. What it boils down to is that he can't pronounce "mister," and he was carrying that 155-millimeter round in the back of his pickup, and he was going to try to blow you up, and the reason he was picked by the insurgent leaders to haul the shell is that he's soft in the head, which is why he cannot stop screaming "meesta!"
The major who watches NASCAR races on satellite TV in his air-conditioned office at the battalion headquarters while you and your Marines march entas to and from the latrines in 120-degree heat isn't doing it to antagonize you, his subordinate. Frankly, he's just over here for the retirement money, and he didn't want to be in charge of four regional detention facilities in Al Anbar province any more than you wanted to end up as the warden in Fallouja. He wants to keep his head down and forget about the fact that if one, just one, of your Marines snaps and goes Abu Ghraib on a detainee, his pension is out the window.
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Contributed by Bill Faith on March 6, 2007 at 09:18 PM in , , |