J. Lennon - Castle

Our corner of Anaconda was desolate, with only dirt and sand for a half mile in each direction, and no sound but that of wind, and of planes taking off and landing. And for all my pride at my work on the facility, I had expected it to remain a lonely outpost on the edge of the base. Indeed, I’d imagined that within a year’s time after the site’s construction, we would all be redeployed, and the facility would slowly fill up with blown dust. The war, after all, was supposed to be brief.

Instead, in the summer of 2004, we received a new influx of detainees. We were told they were terrorists, captured by the First Armored and First Cavalry divisions during sweeps of suspect neighborhoods in Baghdad, and we were assigned to keep them isolated from one another, and to begin gathering intelligence from them.

To be truthful, I was at first quite excited by this development. The initial trickle of detainees had disappointed me somewhat — the Baathists had turned out not to be remotely close to Saddam, and were eventually freed; the purported al-Qaida operatives were mostly street criminals, who had little information to offer, and resigned themselves quickly to imprisonment. I was eager to prove myself as an information specialist, having arrived at my rank through my infrastucture expertise, and I wished to demonstrate to my commanding officers that these areas of endeavor were, in fact, intimately connected — an idea that they had at first resisted. Thus far, I had failed to make much progress, owing to the dearth of subjects; now, unexpectedly, I could put my ideas to the test.

But things immediately became complicated. In three weeks, we received 280 detainees, far in excess of our capacity. Some of the detainees were very young, as young as thirteen, according to our two reliable translators, who had spoken to them. There were four women, one of them pregnant. According to her documentation, she had been found in a house containing terrorist suspects, some of whom had been killed in combat, and she was to be questioned for information pertaining to their activities. In addition, a rifle had been found in the bedroom where she slept, and so she herself was also under suspicion, in spite of her condition. It was at this time that I began to feel out of my depth, and to worry that I was in danger of losing the firm control of the facility that I had taken such great pride in maintaining.

Up to this point my military career had been a textbook success, even if my path to this success had proved unusual. As it happens, I was well prepared for army life by Doctor Stiles and his unorthodox methods of training. This training, unfortunately, had been brought to an abrupt end not long after the terrifying night I spent in the woods; it appeared that my mother had prevailed, having given my father some kind of ultimatum that he could not ignore. But I didn’t forget the Doctor, and when I grew old enough to use public transportation on my own, I took a bus to the college to visit with him. These visits became a regular part of my adolescence, and we carried on long, intense conversations about politics, society, and war.

Eventually, however, the Doctor disappeared, and along with him my sense of moral direction. My parents’ marriage appeared to be in shambles, and I spent most of my time away from home, taking long walks along the railroad tracks, or camping out in the woods by myself. In time, I moved out, gathering my things into a duffel bag and riding a freight train out of Gerrysburg. I didn’t finish high school, and only later would I earn my equivalency degree through an army program. I wandered around the Midwest for several years, doing manual labor — mostly landscaping — and rarely keeping an address for more than a few months.

I might have continued on this path for years, for I felt as though my life had lost its direction, if it ever had one; and I spent my days in a state that today would be diagnosed as depression. Then my parents died. I was devastated — not by their absence, which I had grown accustomed to, but by the fragility of their lives, and the banality of their deaths. I feared a similar fate for myself — indeed, in the weeks after their passing, such an outcome seemed inevitable. But soon this fear gave way to frustration: at the meaninglessness of life, at the laziness of my generation, at the way we took America and its accomplishments for granted. While I was drifting along the West Coast, I witnessed a group of youths mocking an army recruiter in a public square, and I muscled through the crowd and impulsively enlisted. The rightness of this gesture invigorated me; it was the most definitive act I had ever performed, and I never looked back.

It did not take long for me to be singled out by my commanding officer, for my intelligence and my potential for advancement. Once I had my high school diploma, I was transferred into the warrant officer school at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; and upon completing the program there, I assisted in the organization and planning of several bases inside our borders. Later I was shipped overseas to help renovate and repurpose the army’s European assets. At the time Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I was working alongside a team of architects and contractors on the design and maintenance of bases.

But something was missing in my career, and it took a curious incident to make me realize what it was. I had been visiting a base in Japan, in order to inspect an aging barracks that was under reconstruction, when I happened to overhear, through a half-open door, the sound of an officer reprimanding a soldier. I paused and took a surreptitious glance into the room, a small windowless office containing a desk, a filing cabinet, and a computer. The soldier in question was standing at attention in front of the desk; meanwhile, the officer sat behind it, part of his body blocked from the soldier’s view by the large, already-obsolete computer monitor. To his credit, the soldier seemed to display the proper respect for his superior. But the officer himself appeared small, weak, and uncomfortable, hemmed in by the trappings of his position.

Over the next few weeks, I thought a great deal about the ergonomics of military life. I made a few sketches of bases, barracks, and prisons that incorporated my recent thinking, and showed them to the officer, a CWO3, under whom my division was then working. He passed them on to his superior, and soon I found myself face-to-face with a CWO5 and a brigadier general, who pointed to my prison drawing and said, “We want you to build that.” He was referring to the project that would eventually become Camp Alastor.

Needless to say, I was pleased. But my reassignment to the prison project gave me pause. I had had no direct experience in this arena, and was quick to remind my superior officers of this when they informed me of my redeployment. Their response was to remind me that this assignment was to be considered an honor, and they assured me that the higher-ups had perfect confidence in my abilities.

And for some time, it appeared that this confidence was justified. I led a team that included two architects, several builders, and a consultant CWO2 from Military Intelligence, and we completed our work under budget and ahead of schedule. Rumors abounded of the disastrous exploits of civilian contractors, with their bloated budgets, corrupt middlemen, and poor skills, and we were delighted to be able to report our successes to our commanding officers and prove ourselves superior to our rivals. When, early in the spring, the prison at last opened its doors and began accepting detainees, I led their questioning, bolstered by my structural improvements to the interrogation environment. The facility’s labyrinthine corridors, through which we led detainees in different directions at different times, contributed to a general sense of confusion and dependency; windows as narrow as arrow slits, drilled through overspec’d, two-foot-thick walls, reinforced the impossibility of escape. Cell floors were angled slightly down from the corridors, elevating army personnel several inches above the cells’ inhabitants, making them feel helpless and overpowered. Intelligence-gathering, its limited utility notwithstanding, went smoothly, with few attempts at resistance.