Soldiers, Diplomats, Police

[jegs2]

...all in one -- from this story:

The battalion set about rebuilding and overcoming fear that the United States had planned to roll in and summarily execute every last Iraqi. A month into the occupation, tanks clawing the streets and botched communications did little to put Iraqis at ease. A crying woman walked up to a soldier and sobbed in broken English that she was frightened by the Arabic message blaring from speakers mounted on top of the psychological-operations team’s Humvee. “We have to leave our house now because you’re going to bomb it?” she asked. The Army had thought it was warning Tikritis that they were destroying ammunition nearby.
Clad in Kevlar helmets and flak jackets, Gray and I drove through side streets peppered with waving children and squatting men. A careful, soft-spoken and passive-aggressive Minnesotan, Gray couldn’t decide whether he liked his postwar nation-building job. He was acutely aware of the paradox in which the battalion found itself. “I don’t like it, but I’ll do it,” Gray told me. “It’s kinda f—ked [to] take a bunch of infantry soldiers who’re trained to f—king kill, not mediate who ran over somebody’s dog.”
Our Humvee approached a house that soldiers had raided the day before. It was the Wild West part of rebuilding a nation that Gray could get his hands around. “This, I like,” he said. “The rules are: there are no rules—except don’t kill somebody who doesn’t deserve to get killed. Look, it’d take four weeks to take down [raid and search] this house in the States. Here, a good source says it’s a good target so we take four hours to take it down.” The previous day, First Lt. Janucz Secomski, 27, and his assault team had removed from the home a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher sight, about $20,000 in Iraqi dinars and four AK-47s. They left another $10,000 in dinars. They had also cuffed and frisked a few men on the ground and taken two others into custody.
This time, Secomski’s team reentered the clean two-story home to look for more evidence that its owner, now in a POW cell, had posed a threat. Gray and I walked in last. Several women, some of them pregnant, stood in the foyer with children. It was strange, after traveling Iraq’s male-dominated streets for so long, to finally see uncovered female faces. They displayed a mixture of irritation, fear and playfulness. Once again without an interpreter, Gray communicated with charades and the sort of exaggerated language reserved for stroke victims, while Secomski’s men gently turned the place upside down. “Where money?” the women pleaded in English. “Where brother? Where Mustafa?” “The money,” Gray said calmly, pointing to a plastic satchel on the floor. “If money and men are bad, we keep. If they’re good, we bring them back.”
Confused, the women telephoned an English-speaking uncle to interpret. Nameer Hashim, a cousin of the house’s owner, arrived with the air of a troubled diplomat. Gray told Hashim he was confiscating the cash. An electrical engineer, Hashim eloquently argued that the cash was proceeds from the sale of a car. “With an RPG thrown in,” Gray said quietly to Secomski, who recognized Hashim, a thickset, 42-year-old bald man, from the previous day. “This guy’s full of s—t,” Secomski whispered back. “Please, we are not from Saddam’s family,” Hashim said, wiping his hands back and forth in the customary Iraqi way, miming that he was through with the matter. “We’re from the government before Saddam.”
“There were a lot of weapons in here,” said Gray patiently. “Yes, it was a lot, I cannot deny this,” said Hashim. “But for one dollar you can buy one RPG. Iraqis can get guns very cheaply. In America, I know, you can buy a pistol for $100. Here, you can buy one for $15. You must know, we are friends. We want to be friends, Iraqis and Americans. We are not trying to hide anything.” Gray walked Hashim into a bedroom, where on the bed lay a green uniform jacket—the type worn by Saddam’s feared police—on top of camouflage trousers.
“He’s not in the Army,” Hashim said of his cousin Mustafa. “He’s police. You must understand we want to live a new life after 25 years. We want a new peace that starts for us the same as it starts for you.” “That’s good, that’s why we’re here,” Gray said, patiently weighing his options. “We want to be friends, too.” “Yes, but they put me on the ground,” Hashim said, sotto voce, to Gray, nodding toward Secomski.
Finally, Gray and the assault team quietly left carrying weapons and money. Gray sighed. He had played the ultimate diplomat, listening to Hashim with respect. “That dude just fed us a load of bulls—t,” Gray told me. “The police don’t wear jungle fatigues.” He paused and winced.
“I hate doing that stuff. Part because we’re not here to be mean, we’re here to put the country back together. I tell you what, man, if I were in that position I sure wouldn’t have been as nice as that guy.” Gray planned to get out of the Army within the year and start a scuba operation in the Caribbean. But for the moment, the ocean was a long way off—and democracy had to be built with little training and a heavy hand.