By Mike Kelly
The Record
CAMP OUTLAW, N.M. — Felipe Diaz, Paterson police officer and New Jersey National Guard sergeant bound for Iraq, put down his gun the other day at this remote desert training base and picked up an unlikely tool of war - a shield.
Except for its clear-plastic design, Diaz’s protective shell seemed more suited to a Roman centurion 2,000 years ago, not a 21st-century American soldier in camouflage.
“This is a whole new ballgame,” said Diaz, a member of the Teaneck-based Foxtrot Company.
That’s an understatement.
The Pentagon has given Diaz and most of the 2,800 other soldiers of New Jersey’s 50th Infantry Brigade Combat Team the unfamiliar, politically sensitive mission of guarding captured Iraqis.
With their summer of training coming to a close, Foxtrot Company and other New Jersey units are swinging into an intense immersion regimen on how to handle prisoners. Besides plastic shields and other non-lethal gadgets, the soldiers take computer classes in Arabic culture and language and are encouraged to empathize with the plight of some detainees.
But behind almost every lecture and training exercise are two words - Abu Ghraib - and the indelible set of 2004 photographs showing a small group of U.S. Army reservists forcing captured Iraqis to strip naked and pose in sexually suggestive positions.
As the Army points out, Camp Outlaw was built on the sands of New Mexico’s rugged chaparral to head off another Abu Ghraib scandal in the sands of Iraq.
“We wouldn’t be here if that had not happened,” said Maj. Pamela Cooper, deputy commander of Camp Outlaw, which is meant to replicate a U.S. prison camp in Iraq, right down to the coiled barbed wire, the wooden guard towers, searing desert heat and actors in Arab dress.
With violence subsiding across Iraq in recent months, military authorities at Camp Outlaw and amid the soldiers tents of nearby Camp Westbrook make no secret of their desire to steer clear of fallout from anything resembling the Abu Ghraib scandal, which resulted in the jailing of some soldiers and others being stripped of rank.
“No one wants to relive that episode,” Cooper added. “We’re working hard to avoid it.”
By the end of 2008, some 20,000 U.S. soldiers will have passed through Camp Outlaw in four years on the way to Iraq, with almost half of their training focused on the delicate balance of guarding prisoners without abusing them.
The drilling is intense. The troops are required to endure a shot of eye-stinging oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray, as one of their first lessons - teaching them the pain prisoners might face if they are doused.
“The concept is that you get sprayed so you fully understand what you’re using and don’t use it in haste,” said Capt. James Egan of Glen Rock, Foxtrot’s commanding officer. “They want you to understand what it does to someone else. They only way to do that is to get sprayed.”
So far, no New Jersey unit has been assigned to Abu Ghraib prison itself - most are headed to a sprawling prison camp of 20,000 inmates near Basra. And while the Basra deployment will keep most soldiers out of direct combat, their role as prison guards is nonetheless laced with potential international consequences.
Across the Arab world and elsewhere, Abu Ghraib’s photos still reverberate.
“When I review the Arab press, the general idea is that Abu Ghraib was not an exceptional case,” said Professor Riad Nasser, director of the Middle East Studies program at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison. “The incident is seen in the Arab world as part of the way Americans view the Arabs and how they treat them. It still resonates in a very negative way.”
Likewise, New Jersey National Guard leaders are keenly aware of the delicate nature of their Iraq prison assignment and how even the smallest slip by one soldier could ripple across the globe.
“It’s fairly widely held perception that the Army can’t afford another Abu Ghraib,” said a New Jersey brigade spokesman, Maj. Jon Powers. “If we’re successful, we’ll be able to erase the memory of Abu Ghraib and the Army can move forward.”
“You learn from your mistakes,” said Lt. Sarah Bernal of Teaneck, the deputy commander of Foxtrot Company. “After Abu Ghraib, we took steps back in Iraq. We don’t want to repeat that.”
Teaching respect
On a dusty, sun-seared landscape that is home to fist-sized tarantulas and moths as large as sparrows, Foxtrot Company is spending two weeks learning how to guard Iraqi prisoners. On Foxtrot’s first day here, in the unit’s opening lecture, the legacy of Abu Ghraib was brought front and center.
“Remember the pictures a few years ago? What did that do to our image?” said an instructor, Sgt. Victor Hernandez, as Foxtrot’s soldiers sat in silence on folding chairs inside a circus-like tent. “It only takes one person to bring everything down. With history, it’s not what you did right. It’s what you did wrong.”
Hernandez told the Foxtrot soldiers that they should not refer to detained Iraqis as “prisoners.”
“They’re detainees,” Hernandez said. “Some did nothing wrong. They were just swept up, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He also encouraged soldiers to question an officer about a command that may seem abusive.
“We need to treat them humanely, with dignity and respect,” Hernandez said of captured Iraqis. “The line, ‘I did not know,’ does not apply. Ultimately you are responsible for your own actions.”
And that lecture was just the beginning.
Before Foxtrot departs around Labor Day for Iraq and its assignment to the detention camp near Basra, the unit’s soldiers will undergo a series of additional exercises aimed at testing their patience and quick thinking.
One evening last week, the unit was assigned to guard the gates of a mock prison camp. A group of actors, dressed as Iraqi civilians, approached.
“It’s important for the soldiers to understand the cultural differences,” said Abdul Hussain, an Afghan immigrant who settled in nearby El Paso, Texas, and was quickly hired as an actor by the Army.
“I feel like I am serving my country,” said Sean Doughty, who runs a local refrigerator repair business by day and plays a suicide truck driver at night, even though he looks like he belongs more in Dublin than Baghdad.
Over and over during the four-hour exercise as Hussain, Doughty and other actors came up, a squad of Foxtrot soldiers faced a difficult question: Were these civilians innocent or dangerous?
“You have to stay alert,” said Sgt. Harriet Wilson of Jersey City, who works as a guard at the Hudson County Jail when she is not serving in the National Guard. “Things can go from nothing to a big riot.”
One group of Iraqis played the role of prison workers. After a check of identity cards and a frisking, the soldiers allowed the workers to pass through.
Specialist Kemesha Smith, 20, of Paterson, a student at Bergen Community College, saw the moment as a chance to practice a few Arabic phrases. But when Smith spoke Arabic, the group of actors, which includes several Hispanic women, did not respond.
Smith paused, then tried a few lines of Spanish. The women smiled shyly and answered her - in Spanish - as Smith chuckled.
Moments later, another group of actors approached. This time, the group included a man hiding a package under his belt.
The package was meant to be a bomb. Suddenly, the man dashed ahead of the group and attempted to set off the bomb - mimicking a real-life suicide bomber.
But the Foxtrot soldiers were ready for him. With Wilson and Smith manning M4 carbines, loaded with blanks, at a guard post, the soldiers shot the bomber.
The next morning, Foxtrot practiced controlling crowds with non-lethal methods, ranging from plastic shields to firing beanbags with shotguns. Later that day, with sweat glazing their faces in the blinding sun, members of the company stepped forward to endure a squirt of pepper spray.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” said Sgt. Brenda Alston, a grandmother from Paterson. “It’s part of the training.”
Copyright 2008 The Record