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by Erik E. Gize
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The Sheikh came into the office on a Tuesday, with his whole posse in tow, and nobody really gave a rip. I sure didn’t, I think it was because I was still so blasted tired. The heat and dust blanketed just about everything, and, seemingly, every thought a man might have. It was almost always hot in Iraq and the air-conditioning in the thrown together “office” trailer couldn’t keep up. The place was full of flies too, with all the people coming and going. All these hard-charging younger officers, they seemed to be flustered with everything, and nothing, and busy with petty military minutiae. They could not be bothered with closing the door, keeping pests out. They all ran around, getting the place ready before the Sheikh, also known as “the enemy,” showed up.
His visit was shaping up to be yet another limp, hang-fire moment, another iteration of the same old dog-and-pony show. Bring them in, talk them up, and hope that they quit putting IEDs on the roads. I had been sent to Iraq, in the first place, to lead a four-man “CA” or Civil-Affairs team, and was still struggling to know, and understand, the locals. They were a hardy bunch though, intimately familiar with the landscape where they lived, and the environment they were raised up in. I worked hard to learn the nuanced aspects of their culture, and yet was frequently surprised by them.
That very morning I found out that the Sheikh was due to be on the FOB, and in the office, at about 1500, and I had not been informed, of course. The plan, rapidly tossed into action, was for a fairly standard get-together. We were to put on piping hot tea, served up in sticky, sugar coated tumblers, and present tables full of dates, figs, apricots from Turkey, and other dried, nondescript regional delicacies, or perhaps a bowl of hard candies, if available. Then, encourage some conversation, some lame attempts at binding agreements, and finally, the moment of enrichment, namely theirs; “Sign here, sir, for the nine-hundred-thousand US dollars, in crisp 100s, and no…no… thank YOU very much, sir”– and off they’d go.
We would always go to great lengths, lay out this big spread. We had to be nice, talk business and negotiate, on this or that reconstruction contract that the Sheikh’s so-called “company” wanted to bid on, or, pay them for work already “completed.” This was bullshit, obviously, since they never really completed anything. They much preferred to hold back their genuine efforts for projects more near and dear to their hearts, such as soccer tournaments, carwashes, or blowing us up.
Earlier, in the TOC, one of the intel officers came over, sat down next to me, in our little plywood pew, as we all stared at the ‘big-boards’ and went through the motions of the morning, coffees and donuts in our hands. He informed me that route-clearance gave him a situation report after their 0300 foray out along route “Irish”, and the other spider web mess of ratty-ass, potholed roads that comprised the surface transportation network in our Area of Operations. They’d seen a few interesting things, and thought that someone ought to know about it.
“The dude you’ll be meeting,” the young lieutenant started to say, “well, route-clearance tells me that this guy, and his crew, were busy putting bombs on the road this morning.”
“Fucking charming,” I said. I then turned back to the massive TV monitors, covered with maps of the AO, and all sorts of intricate graphs, that were supposed to tell us that we were, in fact, winning.
But my thoughts now strayed to the IED attack, our attack, of a week prior. We didn’t lose anybody that day, thank God, but a brand new $360,000 dollar MRAP was written off, after the smoke cleared. The bomb detonated, as designed, about twenty meters past an Iraqi police checkpoint. It succeeded in blasting a jagged hole right through the armor of that truck like the steel was soft butter. It also went through the frame, the air-handler, the transfer-case, and battery box, instantly frying all the electrical power for the truck, spraying boiling battery acid all over the place, thoroughly destroying the vehicle. It was a stroke of damned good luck that it had been aimed too low to kill any of us. Had it been a Humvee, even one of our “up-armored” versions, for sure there would have been dead people. That sobering thought hung in my mind for a while, a scene from some bad, drippy, Hollywood rendition of our current war. I was able to envision boiled human blood, and bone chips, instead of battery acid, coating the insides of a totally wrecked truck. As it was, we just got lucky, an early Christmas present. At about 0200 the morning after the attack, once back on the FOB, I called my mom on the team’s sat-phone, no details of course, only that we were all fine. Some of our guys had their bells rung a bit, I told her, but we were all okay. I asked her to please call the “mom and wife” network back home to pass that word to everyone that we were all just fine.
At 1440 or so, some sergeant reminded me that our guests were about to arrive and I snapped out of my stupor, finding myself back on the FOB, and now in the conference room of the dusty office-trailer, in the midst of a really weird war. I sat there, looking, with a glazed expression, at a glistening surface covered with powerpoint slides, dried apricots and pots of boiling tea.
The table in the conference room was quite large, big enough to get twenty people around it, fantastically heavy, and ornate. None of us were sure how it got there, undoubtedly shipped over in some container, but it was huge, and solid wood, stained a nearly black cherry-red, polished to a mirror finish. This table was way out of place on a dirt-caked FOB, itself a stone’s throw from the ruins of a smashed-up Iraqi nuclear reactor site, and odd looking, as it sat there, hulking.
The Sheikh arrived, and he and his gang came in and parked themselves for the meeting. We had some dizzily mindless slide presentation all queued up, and hard-copies printed out, placed in color-coordinated stacks so that each of us could have one. And, just in case the image projected up on the enormous screen didn’t thoroughly confuse you, the hand-out would. Staff thought of everything.
I sat down, on the side of the table closest to the door, which may have been smart, or perhaps really dumb, from a personal safety standpoint. I don’t know which, too numb to care much. It was simply too exhausting, just the thought of yet another fruitless (for us) negotiating session with the Sheikh, and his little bevy of hangers-on. Dealing with them all alternately hating on us, or begrudgingly admiring us, with every other glance, was mentally draining. But a very ancient game it all was, and one that the Sheikh and his kin excelled at.
I sat there, at the far left end of the table, for a few minutes, and then I could tell, suddenly, that someone was looking at me. I raised my eyes to the two GIs sitting directly across from me, both kids, busy picking at pimples, and skylarking. They were oblivious to everything, so, no; not them. I looked to my right, out of the corner of my eye, at the two GIs sitting directly next to me. Not them either, they were both young officers, and actually engrossed in all the slick graphs, pie charts and driveling data of the powerpoint.
But as I glanced at them, I noticed the Sheikh, leaning forward, looking to his left, directly at me.
“Commander Gize,” the Sheikh said.
“Um, yes sir?” I said, feeling that now, many eyes were on us, both.
“What would you do if you and I met on the field of battle?”
Shocked at this rather forward and somewhat bizarre question, I was caught off guard, not really sure how to respond, but this lasted only for a brief second.
“Well sir, I certainly hope that never happens,” I said. “But if it does, I’ll kill you.”
“You know,” the Sheikh blurted out, smiling, “I like you.” And that was his full, and final, reply.
The whole room was quiet by this point. Everyone seemed shocked I’d actually used the word kill. The conversation ended there, and we went back to the boredom of the PowerPoint game show. Nobody said another word about any of what had just transpired.
The Sheikh and his gang sat there, more or less placidly, for the rest of the meeting, sipped their tea, then took the figs, and the cash, and left. The office remained subdued as the meeting broke up. Several others meekly tried to talk sports, but nobody was buying it. That weird little moment hung in the air of the office and, indeed, the entire FOB, like mist, following me around for a bit, coupled with the occasional odd stares and whispers of others in the dining facility or the gym. The remainder of my deployment stayed fairly uneventful, even peaceful, and we never, had any trouble, at all, from the Sheikh.
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Erik E. Gize is an ex-naval officer, currently residing in the central Midwest. In 2008 he was activated from reserve status, and sent on deployment to Iraq (2009-2010) as a “Civil Affairs” officer, leading a four-man team in civil reconstruction projects in rural Iraq. The majority of his time was spent in the desert, approximately halfway between Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and the Iranian border. Mr. Gize is a graduate of the California Maritime Academy and Purdue University.
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