Code Name by Johnny Walker

Author:Johnny Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

WHILE I’D BEEN the only interpreter for the task group in Mosul, the increased tempo of operations in Baghdad meant that the SEALs needed several, and so two more joined the unit soon after we arrived. Both had worked with SEALs before and knew the routine pretty well.

One of them was a man named Oliver. I liked Oliver, whose family had come from Lebanon. He was a nice man and a competent interpreter, but as the missions went on he began to get what the SEALs call “soft.” He wasn’t a coward, but he had trouble with the physical aspects of the job, like jumping over walls and keeping up with the SEALs. He flinched at trouble, and started moving slower and slower.

He never said he was scared and never ran away, but his declining physical abilities seemed to be proportional to the increasing danger we were in. I think the pressure accumulated on him the way scratches accumulate on a car, until all of the paint is worn off. The job took a toll, and in his case, it came to weigh him down and turn him into an old man.

The SEALs would ask him to do something, and he would do it. But he rarely showed the kind of aggressive initiative that the SEALs valued. They don’t want to just go somewhere—they want to run there. They also want to be there before someone else suggests it. Oliver eventually wasn’t up to that and soon got left behind, assigned to do inside work rather than going out on missions. That put a little more pressure on me, but I didn’t mind.

Stress is a funny thing. I was smoking more, and drinking. Was that as a result of stress?

At the time, I didn’t completely understand the concept. Without words in Arabic or English to adequately express what I was feeling, maybe I didn’t understand completely what was going on inside my head. I knew I had to do my job, and I had to survive the war, and I had to worry about my wife and my children—were those things stress?

Surely, but again, it was like being in the middle of a vast jungle and trying to walk out. You focus on your goal, not on the mosquitos buzzing at your face at every step.

The three interpreters lived in a tiny house near the SEALs’ quarters in their compound. When I say that the house was tiny, I mean tiny, even by Iraqi standards. There were two rooms, including the kitchen, which was where I slept. To make enough room for my bed, I moved out the washer and dryer that had been in the corner, snugging myself in as best I could.

The translators were not all one happy family. We got along all right for the most part, but every so often there would be friction and one or the other of us would get his nose out of joint, to use an American expression. One man in particular seemed to always be rubbing me the wrong way.

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