Iraq prison guard stories
Feb. 9th, 2006 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Adam, Katy's husband, is a military policeman and part of his job this last deployment was to deal with Iraqi prisoners. So he told a couple of funny stories tonight while we were sitting around drinking bourbon.
These aren't so funny in text, but told by a good story-teller, who you know personally is actually a decent sort of person, the sort who will cook his dog pork ribs because the dry dog food might bore her... then they are actually kinda funny. Funny or interesting.
His conclusion, first voiced over dinner, was that Iraq is the worst place in the entire world. I mean, say what you will, but it's not like his experiences there are going to have been the sort to convince him otherwise.
These aren't so funny in text, but told by a good story-teller, who you know personally is actually a decent sort of person, the sort who will cook his dog pork ribs because the dry dog food might bore her... then they are actually kinda funny. Funny or interesting.
We had copies of the prison rules in English and in Arabic, posted on the walls. Oh, we had the Geneva Convention, too. English and Arabic. Just in case anybody wanted to read it. (Not one of them ever asked, but anyway. We had it.) We took the Geneva Convention, put it in a bunch of those document holders, hung it up on the wall to display it. It was really long... Well, one page was hung upside-down.
I mean, come on. It was in durka-durka so it's not like we could tell. But an inspector came by. That page is upside down, he says.
The prison guard advisor guy we had answers him: Oh, yeah, we hang the prisoners upside-down to read that one.
OK, yeah, it was kinda funny, but, really, not at the time.
We couldn't ever threaten them [the prisoners], of course. "Eat, or I'll… talk sternly to you again!" And they're all... [*mimes pouting, eating morsel of food*] The eating was such a pain. If they didn't eat for three days, we had to force-feed them. And that was just... that was awful. That was the worst. Cuz you had to get a bunch of guys and catch him and restrain him and tie him up and... No, we fed them intravenously, so there weren't any feeding tubes or anything, but still. Still, it was awful. But I had some thing I would say to get them to eat. I forget. What was it?
Oh yes. They were always crying and moaning about their families-- always something about their family was sick, their wife was crippled, whatever. My wife, is cripple, my children, brink of starvation-- I mean, what is this, the Princess Bride? Yeah, anyway... So I would look all serious. "If you don't eat, you'll get sick, and then how will you be able to work for your family?" They couldn't really say anything against that, so they'd eat then, at least enough to get me out of the stupid force-feeding thing. God that was awful.
No, we really couldn't threaten them or anything. A stern talking-to was really about the limit.
But if you said, "Well, all right, I guess we'll have to send you back to the Iraqi police," they would just cry and cry... I have never seen so many grown men cry. Buncha babies.
They were really well-behaved, though. Much more docile than American prisoners. Well, except the crazy ones. There were some crazy ones. But they weren't violent crazy.
His conclusion, first voiced over dinner, was that Iraq is the worst place in the entire world. I mean, say what you will, but it's not like his experiences there are going to have been the sort to convince him otherwise.
