Jamal had an acronym for their mission in Iraq: STAR-steal, trade, acquisition, requisition. One of the medics told Matt,"Man, when you get back to the States, they're going to have to send you to stealers anonymous or something. You're gonna need help, dude!" In Baghdad, Matt earned a reputation as the best supply sergeant in the battalion, possibly in the entire Third ID. He was the go-to guy.
The Iraqis called us Ali Baba. We protected the oil ministry while the city was looted. We took what we wanted.
On April 18, Matt's platoon sergeant, Kenneth Buff, is out with another sergeant, rooting around the Green Zone for saws to trim some trees when he comes across a small building with bricked-over windows and doors. Inside he finds ninety galvanized-steel boxes, and in each box there is four million dollars in American currency. Then one day he was shootin' at some food, and up from the ground came a-bubbling crude. They notify command and, as far as anyone knows, they turn in every dollar they found. [Which physically hurts almost every enlisted man who hears about it. Are you fucking kidding me? You dumb-ass!] Buff doesn't get any money, but he was interviewed by Fox News that very afternoon. It is, to say the least, an unexpected event. Saddam was not supposed to have American currency. The Third ID was expecting to find mobile chemical-weapons labs, not buildings stuffed to the rafters with $100 bills.
After chow that day, Matt and Jamal go find Sergeant Buff at headquarters and pump him for information. They feel a certain proprietorship for the contraband of the Green Zone. It was Jamal's idea to seek out Buff, and he just conceded to get him to shut up about it. Jamal wasn't looking to steal money; he just wanted to find some so he could get on TV. [Jamal was given an honorable discharge and now works installing cable for Cablevision. "I didn't give a shit about being on the news," he says. "That was a story we worked out.We should have just took the money and left." Jamal and Matt like each other immensely and speak highly of each other, but they still don't have their stories straight.] Buff gets in their truck, and the three of them drive over to see where he found the money.The building looks like a maintenance shack for the municipal water company-squat, cinder block, just a few feet off the road, windows bricked over. While they are driving through the area, they see several other buildings that look the same and that appear to be untouched.
It's hard to pinpoint the first stupid move the Novak Eight made, because it's hard to pinpoint a single not-stupid move they made. Maybe it's after Matt and Jamal had gone to look at the buildings with Buff and decided to ditch their truck and ask a specialist named Emanuel to drive them in his Humvee. Because then Lieutenant Greenley and Private Moyer walk over, asking if they could come along, too (sure, pile in). That initial widening of the cast: not good. ["Shoulda just been me and Sergeant Matt, late at night," Jamal says. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."] Or maybe it's a beat later, as they're driving out of the parking lot and someone asks where they're going and someone says,"To look for some money." The first rule of stealing twelve million dollars is not:Tell everyone what you're doing.
When the five of them get to the building, Matt takes a tanker's bar (like a crowbar, only bigger), climbs on the roof, and starts working on the bricked-over door, only to lose his grip, fall off the building, and land on his back. Jamal and Moyer finish the job, and the whole wall comes down in one piece onto the roadway, sounding like C4 charges going off.Which doesn't attract a whole lot of attention, since you hear stuff like that every twenty minutes in Baghdad. Behind the brick is a door, sealed with a lock and dated in Arabic, just like the door on Buff 's building. Matt breaks the glass, starts pulling out shards, and slices his hand open. It is like his body is forcibly trying to keep him out of that building and keeps sabotaging itself, throwing itself off roofs and trying to cut off appendages.
Matt had been a medic, and he knows by looking: This was a bleeder. Maybe this was the first mistake.A liter of DNA: not recommended for crime scenes. He wraps his hand in a mop head he finds under a sink, and they break through another door. Lieutenant Greenley is outside shouting orders, behaving as if being outside the building gives him plausible deniability. Like you go to jail only if you're in the same room as the crime. He is the ranking officer, after all, and he is in charge simply by being present. [This is how Greenley would play things, with only one foot in. He never decided whether he was a disapproving observer or a conspirator. So for the thirty-six hours before the entire thing unraveled, he tried to be both.]
They find another door, and Jamal, Matt, and Moyer work on it. As soon as it opened, it was stale air, like a closet you hadn't been in for a long time. There were two sheets coming down at real weird angles, covering the windows.And it looked like the floor was tiled with metal boxes. There is a total of $200 million in $100 bills in fifty galvanized-steel crates, riveted shut, with blue nylon bands around them. And then it just, one box began to-we had to know what it was-one box began to be opened. [This is how Matt says it.You can tell on the Novak tapes when he's getting close to the money-his vocal cords tighten, he searches for words. The actions become disembodied. The box is opened. Like there is a ghost in the room, a spirit brought to life by the Novak Eight, made up of the shadowy parts of themselves none of them want to own, and this spook does the dirty work.] The top comes off awkwardly, and money spills to the floor in a great avalanche. Jamal can hear his heart beating in his ears. Is surreal the word? Just fantasy, you know what I mean? When the first box was opened I was like,There's no way this shit is real. I think I said, "Holy fuck."
At almost the same time, a vehicle pulls up, and in walks First Sergeant Wilson and, depending on whom you ask, First Sergeant Burns. [While first sergeant is a pretty high rank, it's not higher than lieutenant, which means that Greenley still has de facto responsibility. But Wilson has about twenty years' experience on Greenley, which leads to a bit of confusion about who, exactly, is in charge. Right here, you see the notion of rank and the circumstances at that moment in Baghdad, undoing the normal sense of right and wrong. This is a common occurrence in war. Because what war does is turn what we accept as the unimpeachable rules of morality on their head: We can say that incinerating people is right, that exploding skulls with.50-cals can be an average event after which one eats an MRE and watches Happy Gilmore. And what we use as synthetic filler for that internal, hardwired moral structure is military discipline. It's right because your superior officer tells you it's right. And Matt's crime was rejecting the synthetic filler, choosing himself over the system, being an individual. Saying, if it's okay for you to blow people up, it's okay for me to take a few million bucks that doesn't really belong to anyone. War invites nihilism, after all, and Matt Novak simply opened the door when it came knocking.]
Matt throws a stack of hundreds to First Sergeant Wilson. Say, First Sergeant, aren't you getting ready to retire? Everyone's passing money around the room now. Don't you have kids going to college? Maybe you need this for a new vehicle. Some gets shoved at Greenley. Hey, Lieutenant, this isn't right.You're senior here!They're just testing it out. They don't know themselves if they're serious about it yet.