Mark Bowden - The Best American Crime Writing 2006

Without even speaking to each other, Matt and Moyer take a box and drop it into a canal across the street. The plan is to report to command that they found forty-eight boxes instead of fifty, come back later with scuba equipment Matt had taken from Uday's house, and retrieve the money. Then Jamal comes back in the Humvee and drops another box in the canal, bringing the grand total of reappropriated money to $12 million. Before the curtain falls on the second act, there is about ten minutes of real happiness in the hot Baghdad night. This moment is as close as they would ever come to possessing that money, as close as they would ever come to free and clear. Jamal is drunk with the idea. He literally swoons and falls in the street. Does like the Nestea plunge. And Matt jumps on top of him.Who even remembers what they said to each other.

Lieutenant Greenley calls in the money and at that minute Lieutenant Colonel deCamp and Major Rideout are already in their vehicles and headed for the scene. There is still loose money flying around, and Matt finds a nice pocket in the top of a short palm tree and stashes $200,000 in it. Moyer and Jamal have $400,000 they don't know what to do with. It goes up into the tree, too; only now the stack is too high. You can see it from the road. This is so fucking stupid. They're walking back toward the building, and Moyer keeps pulling out more money-a handful of hundreds stuffed in his boots, a stack stuffed in his underwear. What the fuck? He's stashing money under rocks, in bushes, the Easter Bunny of $100 bills. This is totally fucking gay. And then Jamal decides there's no way he is leaving this place without at least a hundred bucks. So Moyer produces three $100 bills, and they each take one as a souvenir. Oh, this is so fucking fucked-we're fucked fucked fucked.

[When he gets to this part, you can sense the wheels in Matt's head spinning a little too fast, creating airy spaces in his monologue, and all you can hear is him smoking. Matt smokes almost constantly-Marlboro Menthols-and this moment is permeated by smoking.You can hear it on the tape, the articulated exhale like an audible symptom of self-loathing.]

When Lieutenant Colonel deCamp exits the building after checking out the scene, he says: "There's three hundred thousand dollars missing." What is he, fucking Rain Man? [DeCamp was wrong; there was way more than that missing. But still, the man knew all was not right.] Fucking Lieutenant Colonel deCamp; he was born with a silver spoon in his fucking ass. And he starts reading Matt Novak his rights as the rest of the guys load the truck with the $188 million, while the rest of the money is…everywhere. Because, let's face it, enough people have had their hands on the $12 million, the process of dispersion is so far along, we'll never really know where it all went. (By the next day, Jamal Mann had already sent an envelope of cash to his mother in New Jersey.) The $188 million goes into the bed of the truck, is driven to the airport, and is flown directly out of the country. Because that much money should simply not be around people.That much money has a mind of its own.

It took forty-five minutes for deCamp to find the $600,000 in the tree.

In the next couple of days, Matt, Jamal, and Moyer were isolated, pressed by the Criminal Investigation Command.When Matt would see guys from his unit, they'd say, "What's up, Clooney?" [See the movie Three Kings for reference.] Matt didn't see the humor in it. In the interim, there was close to $12 million missing and the rest of Matt's conspirators still moving about freely, unsur-veilled. And maybe another person. I heard someone outside the door that night, and he's never been identified. [The Novak tapes devolve often into wild conspiracy. There are men who took money home

I saw pictures of one guy who lives a block away on a bed with thousands of dollars…Captain Ahearn left the country with money. Most of the conspiracies have to do with what he sees as the wrongdoings of other people, as if there were a finite amount of guilt to go around and by giving some away it makes Matt less guilty. But he's probably right that there's a lot we don't know. Major Rideout believes that another $220 million could still be out there somewhere.]

Eventually, it was Matt who came forward and gave the fullest account of the events of April 18. Of the Eight, only Matt was kicked out of the army with a less-than-honorable discharge. Further evidence that the army exists on a parallel moral plane. Matt thinks it was because Captain Ahearn, his commander, didn't like him. [The way I heard it was that very few people liked Captain Ahearn, but Matt didn't keep his mouth shut about it.] Lieutenant Colonel deCamp says everyone got treated pretty equally, and if you look, several of the other Novak Eight are no longer in the army. [Still, only Matt was forced out.] Blanket immunity was granted, and no one got jail time. Major Rideout says,"My commanding general, General Blount, said,'This is going to be quieted; we're not going to let this get out.We're going to do a good investigation, but the last thing we need is a big black eye after what we just did, attacking into Baghdad and doing good stuff.' "

Over the next six months, during the protracted process that ended with Matt's removal from the military, he wasn't allowed to work. He would show up at his unit in Georgia and sit out front in his car, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the rest of his life came unstitched. He discovered that his wife, Michell, had been seeing someone else. And now he's separated, on his way to being divorced, without access to his children, living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin with his parents, who believe that yoga is Satan worship.

I had everything when I left for the desert. I did. I left a beautiful wife and two beautiful children, had a beautiful husky puppy and two cats. I had two vehicles, a Camaro and a Mercury Tracer, 1995 vehicles. Not like a couple of beaters. I had a 1997 brick home, corner lot, quarter of an acre. Privacy fence. Now what do I have? The money was the downfall of my entire life.

[The last of our interviews takes place late at night in a bar called the Thirsty Whale, located on Lake Minocqua, now abandoned for the season. Outside, the wind is howling through the bleachers, where summer people watch waterskiing shows. On one portion of the tapes, Matt is trying to enlist some help in destroying his ex-wife's Durango. Come on! Let's push it in the lake! Or set it on fire in the woods out by my folks' house!

He keeps talking about how he got more resolutely fucked than anyone else who was involved. He confesses that part of the reason he wants to talk about this episode in his life is that he hopes that a letter-writing campaign will ensue. He wants his day in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. I asked Sergeant Kenneth Buff, Matt's platoon sergeant and the first guy to find money that day, if victimhood was simply Matt's default identity. Buff said that Matt Novak was the kind of guy you wanted to hang out with. He was universally liked. Funny. Clever. It was only after all this that Matt had changed. "Matt sunk into a real depression," Buff said. "And I don't think he ever recovered."

Matt doesn't deny that he tried to steal money, but he is more interested in knowing: In the movie, is he the good guy or the bad guy? Maybe his guilt depends on the precise moment he made that crucial decision that his desires came before the greater good. As Rideout says:"A good supply sergeant, very few of them are probably legally correct. This guy was right on the edge of right and wrong." Was it the hypnotic power of seeing $200 million in cash, the golden ring in front of you? Or before that, when he kicked down that first door to take a sweet Sony television so his unit could watch porno movies in more dramatic fashion? Or earlier, when he got to Kuwait and was told he had to steal shit to do right? Or even earlier, when he was an infant, a fetus, a zygote that mutated imperceptibly? Or was it pre-Matt, in the primordial ooze, and it just so happens that anyone in Matthew Novak's position would take that money?