Being There: Ramadi 
Carlos Brown Is a Hero (No Matter What He Says)
I’ve known him since the seventh grade, when he was awkward, obnoxious, and unpopular with the girls (okay, we both were). He always said he was going to be a surgeon, and when the Navy sent him to Iraq, I flew there to see him. I watched him work around the clock to save soldiers and civilians, Americans and Iraqis—even insurgents. Through it all, his mission never changed: Ignore the politicians, take care of the patients, kick butt at PlayStation, and get home safely.
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In Oklahoma he’s a regional general manager for Consumer Source, which publishes free shopping guides for cars, homes, and apartments. In Ramadi he’s the top sergeant in an Army civil affairs company, in charge of six 4- to 8-man teams that work, as the motto goes, at winning the hearts and minds of the people. Clichéd or not, it’s a vital role in a counterinsurgency, entailing everything from paying rent to Ramadi residents for seized property to providing the populace with some of its most basic needs, like blankets and sugar.
“Most local support for the insurgents is given out of fear,” Shanahan explained. “They will beat people’s feet, run power drills into their heads, or shoot them and leave them in the street to make a statement. Now, some people come in and say right to our faces that they wish Saddam were still in power, though they still want to get paid for damage to their house. I tell my men this is going to be frustrating, but we’ve got to be as sincere a help as we can. If it’s about to rain and a guy’s got bullet holes in his roof, he needs somebody up there fixing it without getting shot. If a home had all its windows broken in a gunfight out front, we’ve got to decide what to do about that.”
The meeting and greeting of locals occurs at civil-military operation centers, or CMOCs, located at the COPs. Carlos had suggested that I go outside the wire, so on my last full day in Ramadi, Shanahan took me to a weekly open house at a CMOC on the south side of town. The daily battles had already begun when our convoy arrived at eight-thirty that morning, and gunfire could be heard in the distance as Shan-ahan’s team—four civil affairs guys, a handful of warriors on security detail, and another handful of Iraqi soldiers who were stationed at the COP—set up laptops inside. It was freezing in the CMOC, a garage with concrete floors and walls that had been subdivided with plywood into small offices.
Business began at nine o’clock sharp, and ten men and women from the neighborhood had already assembled outside the maze of low concrete barriers out front. With a sentry leveling an M16 at them, the Iraqis walked one by one to the interior gate, stopping halfway and raising their arms to show that no explosives were strapped to their bodies. Most of the visitors were women in long black abayahs and hijabs who carried white flags—pillowcases attached to broom handles. They were familiar with the routine, coming each week to ask for money, be politely declined, and then leave with sugar and whatever new carrots the CMOC was dangling. This week they would walk out carrying fifteen-pound boxes of sugar on their heads and red Nike book bags over their shoulders.
Others in attendance received more-careful attention. A man whose home had been converted into a COP last summer came in to sign a twelve-month lease. While he was collecting nearly $10,000 in cash, Shanahan stuck his head in the room and nodded for me to follow him.
“You’ll want to see this guy in the other office,” he said quietly. “He’s making the Iraqi army guys go crazy.” Sure enough, an interested audience had formed around the man in the adjoining room, including four soldiers interviewing him, three more than the number attending to the homeowner. Unlike the other Iraqi men, who all wore blazers, sweaters, and mustaches, this man had on a dark dishdasha and wore a long black beard. “That kind of traditional look is more common with fundamentalist Islam,” said Shan-ahan, “somebody who might be studying to become an imam.”
While the man’s ID card circulated around the room, he explained through an interpreter that he’d come on behalf of three families in his building. An American tank parked outside their door shook their windows when it fired, and they frequently heard bullets bouncing off their roof. The families had asked him to make the Americans aware that they were there. A civil affairs sergeant pulled up a satellite map on his laptop and identified the building, then made a note of the request. Then he photographed the man, double-checked the name he provided against his identification, and thanked him for coming by.
The next man came in to lobby in English for a neighbor, a widow whose family had been forced from their home after it was shot up in firefights. Now she wanted to go back to fetch some personal things and assess the damage.
A sergeant looked up the location and frowned. “For one thing, there’s water everywhere,” he said. “That whole area is a mess. It looks like New Orleans.” The Iraqi shrugged. “And bad people have been in that house,” said the sergeant.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about next,” the Iraqi replied. He’d seen someone who wasn’t from the neighborhood hanging around the block. Sometimes the stranger went into the mosque next to the widow’s house and sometimes into an abandoned school across the street.
The sergeant looked at his laptop. “We’ve taken fire from those buildings.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” he said. He described the man, but when the sergeant asked if COP fighters could visit his house, the Iraqi balked. “We can easily make it look like we weren’t invited,” said the sergeant. The Iraqi said he’d need to think about that, then shook the sergeant’s hand and walked out of the office.
That was the last customer of the day, and Shanahan’s team was all smiles as they relaxed over an MRE lunch. They’d wanted to show the positive side of the counterinsurgency, and the day had gone well. One team member told a story about a tribesman who’d shown up at another CMOC to ask if he could graze his sheep in the lawn just outside. When he was told that that wouldn’t be the safest thing for the herd, that his sheep would be in a line of frequent fire, he’d asked if he could send his wives to pick the grass and take it back to his home. “This really is a whole other world,” said Shanahan.
The team grew subdued as they reassembled the convoy to head back to the FOB. A saying in Ramadi is “Complacency kills,” an idea soldiers keep in the front of their minds anytime they move outside the wire. As we left the COP, the mood stiffened more. A voice on our radio said the south route was “black,” and the line of Humvees immediately stopped. I was one of four guys in the last vehicle, and we watched as each Humvee in front of us turned around. Our driver was noticeably ticked; a U-turn in Ramadi is a tense proposition. I asked what exactly “black” meant.
“The route’s closed,” said the driver. “Something must have happened.”
“Something like an IED?”
“Could have been anything,” he said.
We took the north route to camp, a shorter drive but one described as more kinetic, a fact that was reflected in the landscape. Walls were pockmarked by gunfire, and cinder blocks showed behind gaping holes in the plaster. Instead of driving straight out of town, we were rolling through an area where more people lived, past shuttered storefronts and taller buildings with whole sides missing, exposing abandoned rooms like the back of a dollhouse. There was some foot traffic at an open grocery, men in dark tracksuits who stopped walking to watch us go by. Cars coming from the opposite direction pulled off the road and waited, following the protocol that kept them from being mistaken for a suicide car bomber and thus getting shot.
Talk in the Humvee had stopped. The driver seemed to fret while the gunner spun slowly in the turret above me. Twenty minutes later we were back at the FOB, and the driver remarked that he was surprised we hadn’t made any contact.
Two Black Body Bags
I GOT BACK TO THE FOB at four o’clock and headed straight for Carlos to tell him about the trip. He wasn’t in his hooch, so I went over to the hospital, only to find the trauma room empty. But outside the operating room, Radak-ovic was sitting in his flight suit working on the laptop. That could only mean that he was e-mailing Balad and getting ready to fly. I asked if the team had had customers.
“Yeah, Americans. I’m taking the two of them out. Commander Brown is finishing up with them now.” He nodded at the closed double doors without looking up from the computer.
I scooted past Radakovic to grab a hat and mask and go into the operating room. While I was tying on the mask, Carlos came out. He looked exhausted and empty, the way he always did at the end of a particularly brutal day. I expected him to pull up a chair and tell me how things had gone. But instead of stopping and saying anything, he kept walking to me. Then he put his arms around me and started to cry. “Thank God you’re okay,” he said.
I tried to hug him back but felt too confused.
“We got a call around noon about an IED that hit a Humvee,” he said after he let go. “All they said was that it was Americans and two had been killed. I was convinced it was you. And then the wounded came in, and you weren’t one of them. I thought you were dead. I kept asking myself, over and over, ‘What have I done?’”
I stared at him for a second. He looked lost, and I tried to move the conversation forward. “How are those guys in there?”
“They’re going to make it. One’s a broken leg, and the other’s a broken arm. They’ll be fine.” Then he said, “Shit, I was scared,” and walked back into surgery.
Once the patients were moved to the landing strip and Carlos had finished mopping the floor, he asked me to wait for him while he went to his room. He said he had to go to the morgue to identify the cause of death of the two other soldiers, but before he went he wanted to change into his uniform. “It’s just an administrative task, but I always put my uniform on for it,” he said. “They deserve that.”
On the walk over he told me what he knew of their deaths. Apparently two IEDs had gone off, one that disabled their Humvee but didn’t hurt anyone and a second one that was detonated after they got into the street.
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