"If you're going to do this," First Sergeant Wilson says, "do it smartly." [Keep in mind, this is the way Matt tells the story. But his version of events is almost exactly the same as the lead investigator's.] "Take only the used bills.The new ones are traceable."
But there aren't enough used bills in that first box. Most of them are crisp, untouched, wrapped in plastic. So, and here comes the ghost again, the second box gets opened.At that point, the whole room got fucking evil. Everything just going through my head. I won't have to live like a dirt-poor soldier. Saw my wife with a new wedding ring on. Lieutenant Greenley leaves with Jamal to hide one of the boxes a hundred feet from where they slept and alert headquarters to the find, faking to the chain of command that all is right and honorable under the watch of First Lieutenant Greenley. Wilson disappears into the night with an unknown quantity of cash. [Wilson has never admitted to stealing money.] This chaos is all the result, as Matt sees it, of the vital error in the plan: opening the second box. Listening to dumb-ass First Sergeant Wilson when he said the old bills weren't traceable. Like he knew what he was talking about.
[But really, the fundamental failure wasn't one of strategy; it was a failure of imagination. The money was like a blinding light to these guys-drawing them toward it, but way too powerful to actually look at and contemplate. It's not even going to be there, they thought as they drove over to the building earlier that night, not wanting to jinx it. It's not really going to be in those boxes, they thought when they saw the boxes. And once it was there, spilling out onto the floor and soaking up the blood from Matt's hand wound, Matt thought, There's no way that's real, it's impossible, it looks like Monopoly money, though logically he knew perfectly well that it was real. And so they found themselves in a situation they hadn't planned for, hadn't even allowed themselves to think about. And this, essentially, was the downfall of the Novak Eight. They lacked both the restraint to be unmoved by $200 million and the ability to imagine, and plan for, coming to possess it.]
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.