Devin Friedman : Operation Stealing Saddam's Money
from GQ
B y A ugust, everyone at Fort Stewart knew we were headed to war. It's one thing to go to the UN and pretend that it's all up to the weapons inspectors. But you can't play semantics with the people who order the bombs. Because preparing for war means buying stuff. And not just Javelin missiles, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the rest of the photogenic, lethal combat materiel.To shock to life the plodding, war-making golem of the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division, you need toothpaste and shoelaces and sunscreen. As a supply sergeant, Matt Novak's mission was to procure enough toilet paper for five hundred soldiers to wipe their asses for a month. He bought video cameras, flight suits, reams of paper, heaters, computers, crates of a luminescent liquid soldiers paint on vehicles so other soldiers wearing nightscopes don't mistakenly aerate them with.50-caliber cannons. It's a free-for-all spending spree when it's time to go to war. He rang up about $200,000 on his government credit cards at OfficeMax and Home Depot and army-surplus stores, and that's not including the supplies he procured through normal government supply channels. Often, the hard part wasn't buying the stuff but making sure you got it. He'd fill out a form for six desk chairs, and by the time the shipment got to the dock there were four; when they got to Matt there'd be two. That's how crooked the system is; that's the nature of the beast. So he learned to use unofficial channels to get what he needed. To be a good supply sergeant, it paid to be resourceful, flexible, acquainted with people who had somewhat pliant morals. He bartered, appropriated, and occasionally helped certain items fall off the truck before they were delivered to their rightful owner. There's a joke in the military:There's only one thief in the army; the rest of us are just trying to get our shit back.
[While this story is told from Matt Novak's perspective, italics indicate actual words spoken by Matt during a series of interviews last November while we drove around northern Wisconsin in his ex-wife's white Dodge Durango. There's constant background noise on the Novak tapes that gives them a wandering feeling.You can hear stuff rattling around in the backseat-his nine-millimeter, his medical records and written confession, a bottle of Celexa, an antidepressant he's just started taking again. At night he rolls the Durango down into the woods behind his parents' house because he doesn't want it to get repossessed, though he knows it's only a matter of time.]
The system only got more perverted once they got to Kuwait. Matt's unit was stationed at an assembly area-Camp New York or Camp Pennsylvania or whatever they named the colonies of tents they'd thrown up in the middle of the desert.The unit didn't have a lot of the equipment it needed: bullets, M-16 magazines, fluorescent lights,VCRs (the tactical purpose of a VCR was unclear to Matt, but his was not to reason why).They needed a generator and light sets, so Matt and some other guys drove into another unit's compound at two in the morning, backed up to a generator unit with light sets, fastened them to their trailer, and just drove right by the guards and out into the middle of the desert.
The Third Infantry Division was the first to blow the gates at the Kuwait-Iraq border; the front prong of the longest, fastest combat maneuver ever attempted; the heroic conquerors of Baghdad. There's a book, Thunder Run, about their daring assault. Matt wasn't part of that, though. He was attached to a battalion of combat engineers who drove into Baghdad a few days after the initial assault in a convoy of historic proportions that stretched backward to Kuwait, a huge snake in the desert stretching as far as the eye could see. Matt's unit reported directly to the palace complex, what would later become known as the Green Zone.They were sent to an outbuilding near Uday Hussein's house that had been gutted by American ordnance and were told to stay put for the night because the area was not yet secure. Get some rest. Do you really think we were going to sleep? Come on. Let's get realistic.
Matt's job was to find useful stuff, and that night alone he broke into fifty, maybe a hundred buildings in the palace complex. It was his first foray into the place that over the ensuing weeks would come to be his domain: from the bulrushes on the Tigris to the four-headed palace, from the zoo to the recreation center, from Uday's love shack to the lavish bungalows of the former Baath courtesans. I had no restrictions; just hopped in a gun truck, grabbed some guys, and went and took the stuff the army needed.
[This is as good a time as any to introduce you to Specialist Jamal Mann, a twenty-two-year-old black kid from the projects of Newark, New Jersey, with too many teeth and a crooked smile and a permeating innocence that would somehow cling to him even if he murdered someone. He was Matt's subordinate in Kuwait and Iraq.The first time they met, Matt said, "What's your name?" and he said, "My name is Specialist Mann, Sergeant." Matt said, "No. What's your name?"Jamal."I'm Matt, and you can call me Matt." He wanted to create a tiny, two-man culture outside the system. Matt's pretty sensitive to feeling crushed by the system, and he likes to find ways to pull power off the grid, unbeknownst. Slipping the command structure was one of the ways Matt could create some self-worth in a culture that he believes institutionally denied him that.That's what drew him out into the postapocalyptic playground that first night in Baghdad, what made being a supply sergeant such a natural fit, and it's likely this instinct played a part in the decision he made a few weeks later, which is what this story is about. But more on that later.]
In the month or two they were in Baghdad, Jamal and Matt acquainted themselves with hundreds of buildings in the city's tonier districts. They used crowbars, C4 explosive, and a big set of bolt cutters referred to as the master key to gain entry into the palace storehouses and the former homes of Saddam's inner circle. They obtained what was needed-water, mattresses, mops, hedge clippers, air conditioners, light switches, wiring, lamps. The commander wanted computers; Matt found computers. Not crap computers, either. Sony flatscreen monitors, Intel Pentium 4 processors, and DVD drives. The rule was: Whatever you can use, you can take. And that is a rule that can be applied liberally.
The palace complex was a monument to excess, a repository for the glut of stuff Saddam and his minions had stolen from the Kuwaitis, his own people, what he'd hoarded under the auspices of the oil-for-food program. Cash, cellophane bags filled with heroin and hashish, Kuwaiti royal china. Matt drove around in Saddam's armored Mercedes. Climbed aboard Uday's yacht. He requisitioned gold toilet seats. Bidets. Gilt mirrors.Johnnie Walker Red, Black, Blue, Gold, every label they make. There were crates of it. Matt and Jamal dried off with monogrammed towels and slept on Uday's satin sheets. Matt carried a sweet chrome nine-millimeter in the small of his back; Jamal was partial to a long-nosed.357 that looked like something Dirty Harry might consider too ostentatious.There was so much stuff to be had that people didn't really get greedy. First come, first served. [Given what happens later, it's likely Matt is playing up the moral vacuum that existed then. Most of the stuff he acquired in Baghdad and in the months leading up to the war had legitimate purposes and was procured through proper channels. But he's not lying about this shadier stuff. "Yes, that kind of thing was being done," says Major Kent Rideout, the man who would investigate Matt Novak. "It was considered war booty, and there were no regulations put forth on what could and could not be taken home." Officially, the Pentagon has since produced a document that dictates the rules and procedures for the procurement of acceptable war trophies-uniforms, insignia, patches, rucksacks, load-bearing equipment, flags, photos. But the lines get pretty blurry on the ground. Soldiers helping themselves to spoils is a phenomenon roughly as old as people fighting each other.There was a time commanders didn't pay their armies except with the promise of fruitful pillaging. See Conan the Barbarian for reference. Or, in effect, the Civil War. Isn't the basic rule of military action that once you beat someone, their shit is your shit? Isn't that how we got, say, Montana? Isn't part of the reason colonialism is considered impolite is that it's an extension of the war-trophy rule to the nation-state level? Isn't that a large part of what pisses some people off, rightly or wrongly, about our Iraqi adventure? Isn't there a serious debate about whether we're after democracy or cheap oil-or, more likely, don't we believe in the convenient truth that we get both for the same low, though seriously rising, price?]