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 Page B

hand, the requirements weren’t the most onerous. I spent three or four months going to meetings, which to me were just another set of classes I had to attend, though these were held after school. The lessons were little more than indoctrination sessions, and shallow ones at that. Supposedly we were being taught about Iraqi history and the like, but the classes were really designed to convince us that Saddam was godlike and that we should follow all that he and the Ba’ath Party dictated.
    The instructor was not very good. He had a lot of his basic facts about Iraq wrong. For someone like me, a bit of a smart aleck and a showoff, this was a real temptation. I could show how tough and quick I was with something other than my fists.
    I was wise enough not to contradict him directly in class, which would have brought me a swift cuff or some other punishment. Instead, I started asking him questions. He got embarrassed, because he really didn’t know the answers and wasn’t very good at camouflaging his ignorance. He’d fumble around, the other kids would give me knowing looks, and I’d do my best not to smirk.
    The secret of my success was a book on our country’s history. The instructor was supposed to be working from the book, but was too lazy to read it. I was simply looking through the book for arcane details and then asking about them. He grew more and more embarrassed as the classes went on, until finally he told me I didn’t have to attend anymore.
    That was the most valuable thing I learned from the Ba’ath Party—if you were enough of a smart-ass, they would leave you alone.
    There was a line, of course. If you were too much of a smart-ass, especially when you got older, they had ways of dealing with you which were not very pleasant. But I was able to walk the line.
     
    LIKE MOST IRAQIS, I’d had no idea that Saddam was planning an invasion of Kuwait. Anyone paying attention in the outside world knew that tensions had been building between the two countries at Saddam’s instigation for months, but most Iraqis had no clue what was going on, even if they were in the military.
    In the U.S. Army, soldiers hear plenty of rumors and can piece information together from different things like mobilizations and news reports. But in Iraq, no one trusted anyone, and rank-and-file soldiers certainly weren’t to be trusted with any information. The isolation of our unit, along with its distance from Baghdad and the front lines, meant that little information, even of the rumor variety, made it to me.
    And of course the general public found out only what Saddam wanted them to find out. He wasn’t about to publicize his intentions to take over Kuwait until he was ready to do so. Once the invasion started, all of the information the government-supported media spread reinforced his contention that the Kuwaitis were in the wrong and that their country rightfully belonged to us. Within twenty-four hours, Kuwait was suppressed and Saddam presented the country with a fait accompli.
    The history of Kuwait and Iraq was a complicated one, but not in the ways that Saddam and his regime implied. According to most sources, Kuwait City was only settled in the eighteenth century; the area was mostly empty before then. By the nineteenth century it was an important trading metropolis. That importance grew as oil became a critical export in the region.
    Like most of the Middle East and all of Iraq, Kuwait was part of the Ottoman Empire. But in the mid-eighteenth century, Sabah I bin Jaber established himself as the emir of Kuwait. (Sabah I bin Jaber was the leader of a tribe that originated in Iraq; among the reasons they are said to have gone to Kuwait was persecution by the ruling Turks.) Though still owing allegiance to the Ottomans, Sabah I bin Jaber was granted a certain amount of autonomy and independence over the region. Some of that independence continued after the arrival of the British, who also ended up formalizing Kuwait’s