Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Read Online Free PDF

roughly a hundred miles south of Mosul on the road to Baghdad. The unit was part of the “sky protection service,” though I’m not sure how much protection we really offered. My crew manned a Russian-made 37 mm gun. The gun had been a reasonably decent weapon when it was first fielded by the Soviet Union—which would have been in 1939. It was obsolete well before the end of World War II. By the time my unit operated it, it was old even by Iraqi standards, outclassed not only by missiles but by weapons such as the ZSU-57-2, which fired larger shells greater distances, and the ZSU-23-4, whose four-barrel guns could be aimed with radar.
    Not that any of that mattered. We were close to the lowest rung of the ladder when it came to the army. If there was a war, our job was likely to be bomb fodder.
    Life in the military was dull, duller, and dullest. I can hardly remember any of it, but let me assure you, I was never Iraq’s standout soldier. I did my job, followed orders, and got along with the other men in the unit. For me, that was enough of an accomplishment. I became familiar with an AK-47 assault rifle, but was far from a marksman with it. As for the radio, I could turn the knobs and work the switches, but that was hardly rocket science.
    At the very end of July 1990, I went on leave and returned to Mosul. While I was there, I went to the hospital to visit a friend. On August 2, I happened to be waiting in the hospital when I heard on the radio that Kuwait had just become the nineteenth province of Iraq.
    Shit, I thought. Now there will be big trouble.
     
    SADDAM HUSSEIN HAD been our country’s dictator since my childhood. Technically, he was the president and the head of the Ba’ath Party. In reality, he was close to a god, with the power of life and death over us all.
    He hadn’t been elected to either position. A member of the al-Begat tribe—which itself was part of the al-Bu Nasir tribe—he had joined the Ba’ath Party as a young man and rose through the ranks during a period of turmoil and revolts in the late 1950s and ’60s. When the Ba’athists took control of the government in 1968, he became an important power behind the scenes. He consolidated his hold on the government and took formal power in 1979. Within weeks he completed a purge of that Ba’ath Party, eliminating anyone who might be able to challenge him.
    Saddam, as a Sunni and as a Ba’athist, was a member of the minority in Iraq. To rule the country, he divided his enemies, often violently. He built up an internal security system, enforcing his will through spies and common people willing to rat on their neighbors and in some cases even their family members. Criticizing Saddam was treason; claiming someone had done so was an easy way to get back at someone you didn’t like.
    From what I have heard, Saddam started out as a fairly benign ruler. The older people told me he did the country much good when he first came to power. He built schools and hospitals, and seemed to be working for the people. But if that was true, his thinking changed as his rule went on. He started working for himself and his friends. Perhaps the circle around him grew tighter and greedier. With less people to tell him the truth about things, maybe he thought it was fine to take what he wanted for himself, rather than using his power to make things better for the country as whole. Whatever the reason, the results were devastating for Iraq.
    With Saddam’s rise, the Ba’ath Party was in effective control of the country. In most areas, especially in Mosul and other places in the north where Saddam’s party was strong, you had to be a member of the Ba’ath Party if you wanted to work. It wasn’t optional. Most people who were members of the party didn’t like Saddam, but they needed to support their families.
    Even I was a member of the party, though only at the most basic level. I joined when I was in middle school. We all did. It wasn’t voluntary; on the other