Smells Like Dead Elephants

Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Matt Taibbi

• Publisher: Black Cat
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780802192110
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Journalisme

From "the only political writer in America that matters" comes a collection of his best reportage about the worst of times (Harford Advocate). Matt Taibbi is notorious as a journalistic agitator, a stone thrower, a "natural provocateur" (Salon.com). Now, bringing together his most incisive, intense, and hilarious pieces from his "Road Work" column in Rolling Stone, the "political reporter with the gonzo spirit that made Hunter S. Thompson and P. J. O'Rourke so much fun" shines a scathing spotlight on the corruption, dishonesty, and sheer laziness of our leaders ( The Washington Post ). With no shortage of outrages to compel Taibbi's pen, these pieces paint a shocking portrait of our government at work—or, as Taibbi points out in "The Worst Congress Ever, " rarely working. Taibbi has plenty to say about George W. Bush, Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and all the rest, but he doesn't just hit inside the Beltway. Taibbi gets involved in the action. He infiltrates Senator Conrad Burns's birthday party under disguise as a lobbyist for a fictional oil firm that wants to drill in the Grand Canyon. He floats into apocalyptic post-Katrina New Orleans in a dinghy with Sean Penn. He goes to Iraq as an embedded reporter, where he witnesses the mind-boggling dysfunction of our occupation and spends three nights in Abu Ghraib prison. And he reports from two of the most bizarre and telling trials in recent memory: California v. Michael Jackson and the evolution-vs.-intelligent-design trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A brilliant collection from one of the most entertaining political writers of today, Smells Like Dead Elephants is "the funniest angry book and the angriest funny book since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town" (James Wolcott).

Fort Apache, Iraq

Travel the bloody roads with GIs, meet the carpetbaggers,
go inside Abu Ghraib, and witness the catastrophic nature
of the American conquest

July 13, 2006

I. THE GANG THAT DIDN’T GET HIT

The 158th Field Artillery had been in country since January and had never been hit. They were never going to get hit. You could just feel it. They were a security detail of good-natured Oklahoma boys, guardsmen from Fort Sill back home, traveling all over the country as they ferried a hotshot California colonel around to inspect Iraqi police facilities.

Back in Baghdad they’d thrown me in the back of the third of four Humvees in the convoy, a truck code-named Juliet.

“Juliet is like cock and ready to rock,” said Sergeant Stephen Wilkerson as we roared out of the motor pool in Camp ­Victory to the exit of the base, headed on a six-day journey across northern Iraq, the first stage of my five-week stay in the war zone.

To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. And the way to do that isn’t to burst in with your head in a point, bitching about WMDs and croaking passages from Arab history books. Jump in the truck and shut your mouth; get on board, literally and figuratively. In America, everyone has an opinion about Iraq, even me—but if you’re going to take the step of actually going there you’ve got to give it a chance.

Our route was north 225 miles to the city of Mosul, site of numerous bomb attacks in recent months, then on to Tal Afar—same situation there—and then back to Mosul before veering east to Irbil in free and peaceful Kurdistan and then south toward Baghdad again. When I arrived, there was news about a new prime minister, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was about a month from getting killed in an airstrike. And maybe some of al-Zarqawi’s men were hiding behind car wrecks, watching us through the cross hairs, but nobody was worried about that here. We were never going to get hit. The real problem was lunch—rumor had it that it was to be meals ready to eat, or MREs, on this first leg of the trip. Fuck al-Zarqawi. When do we get hot food?

“Hey, look up ahead,” said the driver, Specialist Kevin Spicer.

Spicer isn’t that tall, but his head is shaved shiny bald and he can bench-press about 9,000 pounds. His physique suggests something out of The X-Men, but underneath it all he is a softy who has a weakness for schlock soaps like The O.C. He pointed at a kid on the side of the road with a dirt-covered face.

“There,” he said. “Cute kid.”

The kid came into focus. Mud-streaked, in rags, standing in a trash pile. Roadside Iraqis were seemingly always doing two things: peeing and standing on trash piles.

“Scrawny-ass little boy,” muttered Wilkerson, the team commander, sitting behind a big navigational console in the passenger seat. Wilkerson has an outstanding tattoo on his foot, an arrow pointing to his big toe that reads TAG GOES HERE. Back home in Oklahoma he’d been one half of the inspiration for an underground comic book called Split-Dick and Stretch-Nuts. Which half? Wilkerson could pull his nut sack so far out of his zipper that he could balance a sixteen-ounce can of Heineken on the outstretched membrane tray. It was a trick the whole squad referred to, with reverent awe, as “the Grandmother’s Tongue.” “I just have stretchy skin, I guess,” he said.

Wilkerson has close-cropped dark hair and keeps his helmet shoved down just above his eyeline; he speaks with a twang thick enough to scare the banjo guy from Deliverance. Taking a second look at the kid on the horizon, he lurched forward suddenly.

“Oh, shit!” he said. “He just gave us the thumbs-down!”

“Well, fuck him and his Tonka truck,” Spicer shot back.

Wilkerson shook his head in mock despair. “You know,” he said, “we’re over here doing who knows what, and he’s giving us the thumbs-down.” With great pathos he sighed into the vehicle intercom system. “Shit,” he said. “If we weren’t in this country, his mommy and daddy wouldn’t be getting paid to blow us up.”

“That’s just ungrateful,” said Spicer. “Sad, really.”

Above us, the team’s truck gunner, a languid ex-cop, Sergeant Dustin Hames, who had been following the conversation on the VIC but apparently had not been sufficiently impressed to participate, ended the debate by tossing the kid a Beanie Baby from the gun bay in the Humvee ceiling. Somebody at home donated the Beanie Babies in massive numbers, and we donated the ones that we didn’t give to female MPs (“Can I have your moose?” one had asked us) to kids on the side of the road. Thankfully, this one fell wide right. Earlier in the day Hames had thrown a blue furry animal at a little girl and bonked her square in the forehead. Since then we had been debating the need for Hames to draw silhouettes on the side of the Hummer for every kid he nailed with a Beanie Baby.

“Damn,” said Wilkerson. “Some guys are worried about how many insurgents they kill. We’re worried about how many kids we hit with Beanie Babies. Shit, man. Wow.”

We rolled on. We were somewhere on a road headed north out of Baghdad, just beyond a notorious stretch of highway that was hit so frequently by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that most squads trembled at the thought of driving on it—most squads except this group from the 158th, which was never going to get hit. The highway was a flat road ringed with sun-cooked brush. As is always the case in Iraq, the road was littered everywhere with war-zone hazards: unsmiling young men tinkering with broken-down vehicles, animal carcasses, unnatural-looking piles of stones, potholes, mysterious trash ­formations. All the classic warning signs of IEDs. We roared right past them.

“If we stopped to check out every last thing,” said Wilkerson, “we’d never get anywhere.”

Toward nightfall we reached the base at Mosul. Along with Tal Afar, it was a favorite stronghold of foreign fighters, particularly from Syria. A police training academy here had been blown up twice. Even the cafeteria at the FOB (forward operating base) we were visiting later that night had been blown to bits once. The place we were planning to eat dinner!

“This looks like Ireland,” said Wilkerson philosophically, surveying the fields just outside the city.

“They even got sheep,” noted Spicer.

“That’s what I mean,” Wilkerson agreed. “You see Ireland in the movies, you always get motherfuckers herding sheep in this green-ass pasture and stuff.”

We stayed overnight at the FOB in Mosul. Like all FOBs, it was an otherworldly suburban expanse of mud, gravel, white-paneled trailers, and ad hoc fast-food joints carved incongruously into the ancient landscape of Iraq like giant, teeming anthills of Americana. The FOB in Iraq is often absurdly luxurious, with an array of Middle American comforts like Popeyes, Burger King, and Cinnabon at the soldiers’ disposal and most of the services (from food to laundry to shuttle buses to the rec centers) maintained with peak capitalist efficiency by the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root, which goes so far as to leave customer-survey forms almost everywhere you go.

These preposterous Tell Us How U Like Our War!–esque survey sheets (“Please give your overall level of satisfaction for services provided by KBR . . .”) provided a stark contrast to the idea of customer service just beyond the FOB wall, where gangs of Islamic extremists might put a bullet in your brain for buying the wrong thing—blue jeans, cigarettes; there were parts of Baghdad, it was said, where Sunni insurgents were killing civilians for making ice, ice of course being unholy since it wasn’t around in Mohammad’s time. (There weren’t Kalashnikovs, either, but who’s counting?)

In the morning, Wilkerson stood on the trunk of the Humvee and cleverly emptied the melted ice in the water cooler in such a way that it looked, from the side, like he was peeing first on the forehead of Specialist Matt Adamson and then on the scalp of the bespectacled medic Specialist Aaron “Doc” Gray, who opened his mouth and let the “pee” run down his throat. The photos came out great. Adamson’s girlfriend was about to have a baby back home, but Doc’s wife was the more immediate concern in the squad because she had sent Doc a picture of herself naked except for a few strategically placed rose petals. The production values of the picture were tremendous—hence the concern.

“Somebody, somebody took nekkid pictures of Doc’s wife,” said Steve. “And he claims it was her. He claims it was her.”

“How could it be her?” I asked, the investigative journalist in me taking over. “She’s got rose petals all over her.”

“My wife finished third in her high school class,” said Doc defiantly. “She’s a very smart girl.”

“That’s why you’ll never find out who he is,” snapped Spicer.

We rolled out of the FOB—our objective on the first day had been just to reach Mosul, but now we had actual business in the province—steamed through the city, and roared forty-six miles to Tal Afar. During our brief stay in Mosul, an American soldier from another unit had been killed by a bomb just outside the wall of the FOB, and an Iraqi policewoman had also been shot to death—but that was never going to happen to us; it just wasn’t possible.

We had a better shot at action in Tal Afar, a place lately beset by IED bombings and foreign-fighter attacks after a period of relative quiet. Not long ago, President Bush himself had given a speech in Cleveland and declared Tal Afar—an ancient-looking city near the Syrian border where foreign fighters had been slipping into the country—safe ground. Bush said that Tal Afar was “today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.” Not surprisingly, the insurgents had responded by bombing the living fuck out of the place, so much so that by the time we got there we found the mayor and most of the rest of the municipal government huddled up back-to-back in a heavily guarded castle on a hill like the last trembling teenagers in one of the Halloween movies.

“I love the president, he’s my commander in chief,” said one of the sergeants in our convoy. “But sometimes I wish he’d keep his fucking mouth shut.”

Our cargo, Colonel Donald Currier, a stately, silver-­mustached officer who, dressed in anything but camouflage, would look very much like an English professor, was in charge of inspecting Iraqi police efforts around the country and also helping administer and coordinate American aid to said stations. A former deputy cabinet secretary to California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Currier was a soft-spoken intellectual who believed implicitly in the ultimate success of the American mission in Iraq. He worked tirelessly toward that end, seemingly visiting every police station in the country in search of weak links in the chain.

In Tal Afar, a place where the police stations were under constant siege, the bureaucratic life preserver he represented was clearly needed. We met with the city’s mayor, the lean, nervous-looking bureaucrat Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, who first asked for money and equipment and then presented Currier with the good news that “the people no longer call the insurgents mujahedin. They call them terrorists.” That was enough good news to keep the ball rolling, so we moved out of the castle keep and inspected a few scattered police stations in town, including one where a small gang of miserable-looking American MPs were holed up on guard duty, four of them occupying a closet-size room on the second floor of the precinct house, where they lived seemingly around the clock, joylessly consuming MREs and playing Halo. Those MPs saw a lot of action. They not only had to fend off constant insurgent attacks against the police station, occasionally they had to break up violent struggles between local Iraqi army units (IAs, as we call them) and the Iraqi police (IPs). While the Iraqi army traditionally has had a closer relationship with U.S. forces, Iraqi police have often been more independent and have been known to fall prey to infiltration by various extremist groups.

“Our guys will go out and catch somebody who attacked us,” said Specialist Dan Mulford. “Then the IAs will roll in and say, ‘How come you took this guy? He’s a good guy.’ And we’ll say, ‘No, he’s a bad guy.’” He shook his head. “Next thing you know, the IAs and the IPs are going at it. We’ll fire a round in the air to disperse them.”

The 158th had better luck—it was nothing but blue sky, empty roads, and happy children waving at us as we roared down Iraq’s third world streets in our monstrous Space Age machines, spitting Beanie Babies in all directions. We stormed out of the city back toward Mosul. A week later, Tal Afar would be the site of a horrific suicide bombing that would kill twenty-four and wound dozens more, but of course we were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Smells Like Dead Elephants
• Also by Matt Taibbi
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Smells Like Dead Elephants
• Jacko on Trial
• Four Amendments and a Funeral
• Bush vs. the Mother
• Apocalypse There
• Ms. America
• Darwinian Warfare
• The End of the Party
• The Magical Victory Tour
• The Harder They Fall
• Generation Enron
• How to Be a Lobbyist Without Trying
• Meet Mr. Republican
• How to Steal a Coastline
• Thank You, Tom DeLay
• Fort Apache, Iraq
• Bush's Favorite Democrat
• The Worst Congress Ever
• Acknowledgments