J. Lennon - Castle

The overall feel of the facility was one of calm. The dry season had not yet begun, and the interior of the building, and of our barracks, remained fairly cool, in spite of the brilliant sun. The detainees were far from cheerful, but we fielded few unreasonable complaints, and were only rarely forced to break up a fight, or settle a disagreement. Quiet Arabic conversation filled the halls; it seemed the detainees, like us, had settled in to wait, and to see what happened next. The only incongruous element during these nervous, patient days was a sound: a low, mournful whistling. Not quite tuneless, but embracing no particular melody, it sometimes had the quality of a plaintive call, as though for a beloved pet. At other times, it sounded like a small, elusive movement of some forgotten sonata; still other times it sounded like the wind. We didn’t know who was doing the whistling, or why, but as the days lengthened, it became a soundtrack to life in the facility, an ever-present, if elegiac, companion to our work.

Then came the summer.

The weather was very hot and dry. There was some relief from the shamal winds, when they blew; but when the air was still, time seemed to stand still with it, and the temperature routinely rose above 110 degrees. The weeks dragged by, and more detainees arrived. We requisitioned temporary off-site housing for them, but none was forthcoming, as supply lines were clogged, and the detainees, we were told, were far too dangerous to be housed outside the main compound. And so, instead, I ordered construction to begin on a new wing of the facility, and soon it was under way. Through it all, the days were colored by the aimless whistling that haunted the corridors — and though it was bothersome, no one complained, as though, in some oblique way, they thought they deserved it.

It was around this time that I first took notice of the boy, the thirteen-year-old who had come in around the same time as the pregnant woman. We had housed him in the area of the L where our three female detainees were held, and they now all occupied the same cell, at the very end of the hallway, where they could at least experience some modicum of privacy. It was off of this hallway that I had decided the new wing would be built, and I found myself here quite often, supervising the demolition of the outer wall and the construction of a new passageway. The boy’s name, I learned, was Sufian.

Most of the detainees would spend their time slumped against the walls of their cells in silence. Some talked in low tones. Many of them had a copy of the Qur’an, but most had nothing. Because we had never received the shipment of inmate uniforms we had been expecting, they were dressed in the clothes in which they had been captured, trousers and short-sleeved shirts, abayahs and dishdashas, and in this respect, Sufian was no different. He wore a filthy dishdasha, its grubby fabric torn and stained, and he sat on the floor at the front of the cell, peering through the steel mesh as we worked.

There was something slightly unnerving about the boy’s gaze. His brown eyes were large and alert, possessing none of the deadness and despair evident in the eyes of many of his fellow inmates. His face was thin, his cheekbones high; combined with his lively eyes, these traits made him appear curious and highly intelligent. It was difficult to tell, however, as the boy never spoke, at least not to any of the men and women under my command.

Though it was our policy to try to keep the Sunnis and Shiites separate, we could not determine in which, if either, category the boy belonged; even the women he now resided with had evidently ceased to bother speaking to him. He merely sat in his cell, watching and listening to all the facility’s goings-on with apparent fascination. As for me, I wondered about the child’s parents — whether they wondered where he was, or if they were even alive. I was not unfamiliar with the solitude and alienation associated with that age, particularly if one lived at some emotional distance from one’s family. And so I resolved to pay special attention to the boy while we worked nearby, and to try to make his detainment less unpleasant than it might otherwise be. Perhaps, somehow, this experience might even prove constructive for him — he could learn self-reliance, and to tell right from wrong; he would participate in this important new chapter of his country’s history.

After a few casual visits to the boy’s cell, however, I grew perturbed by his strange stare, and turned over supervision of the corridor reconstruction to a subordinate.

My superiors had given me clear instructions about what kind of information to seek when we interrogated detainees. We wanted to know, of course, which detainees were part of terrorist cells, which were Baathists, and which were in contact with foreign fighters, particularly Syrians and Iranians. Our political leadership was convinced that the Iranians were infiltrating the Shia, and so it became necessary to find out who was related to whom, and who knew whom; to separate them, and to play them off one another, telling them that their brothers or friends had talked, and had implicated them, and so on. The new influx of detainees was more fruitful in terms of intelligence; their social connections were many, and their various rivalries made it easier to goad them into revealing other detainees’ secrets.

But there were far too many of them, and tensions among my CWO1s and enlisted men and women were high. We now housed 374 detainees in a space built for 150, and our requests for matériel were taking an increasingly long time to be filled. From the tone of my communications with my superior officers, I could tell that Camp Alastor was becoming a place that people in positions of responsibility wanted to have had nothing to do with. I continued to receive effusive praise for my work, and while I relished this praise and believed it to be in earnest, I had begun to be troubled by the notion that perhaps it was motivated, in part, by a desire to keep Camp Alastor at a distance. Perhaps, among the officer class, information had begun to circulate about difficulties at prisons elsewhere in Iraq, and those who wished to be relieved of responsibility for the consequences had already started passing the buck. To be sure, I felt an increasing disgust with the poor planning and sloppy execution of our mission, and with the people who, so far, had failed to take responsibility for these errors. But it was not my place to judge — rather, it was my place to do as I was instructed, and so I tried to blind myself to the larger picture, and continued to do my job to the best of my ability.

My office was a small, windowless room at the center of the compound with cinderblock walls, a large aluminum-frame desk, and two chairs. I had spent much of the past several months here, filling out requisition forms, managing our overcrowding, and disciplining and counseling exhausted soldiers. I did not miss the irony in the fact that this room was much like the one I had spied in Japan, the one that had inspired my shift into ergonomics, and eventually intelligence: the one I had found so lacking at the time.

I had been hard at work one day drafting yet another requisition form, when a private first class named Jennifer Moss came to my office with a question about detainee interrogation. I had particular fondness for this soldier, as she was nineteen years old, and, like me, had had no idea that she would ever be serving in a prison in Iraq, expecting instead to become a tactician — still, so far as I knew, her goal in the armed forces. I had learned this by asking her, late one insomniac night when I encountered her patrolling the cell block. She was stoic about her disappointment, which she otherwise felt comfortable confessing to me; her official position was that she wished to serve her country in whatever capacity her country saw fit.