They did it in waves throughout the day so that the IRF teams and guards would have time to cut down each wave of brothers and take them to the medical unit. It was shocking, even for us. All day long “Code Snowball” echoed throughout the blocks as more than sixty brothers hung themselves by their sheets. When one brother was cut down, another hung himself. The guards made the situation even worse by pepper-spraying the Afghani brothers before cutting them down.

  Word spread quickly to other blocks about what the Afghans had done, and more brothers started hanging themselves. There were Code Snowballs all over the camp until finally a state of emergency was called.

  The camp admin loved us so much, they didn’t want us to die. Each brother had to be brought to the hospital for a special review to make sure he was okay and wouldn’t try to kill himself again. One of the brothers wasn’t cut down soon enough and went into a coma. We didn’t think the camp admin could hide something this big from the outside world.

  Colonel McQueen, a broad-shouldered, no-nonsense Black man who was the camp’s warden, tried to calm the Afghani brothers. He promised that guards and interrogators wouldn’t desecrate the Holy Qur’an again. None of the brothers believed him. They demanded to hear it directly from General Miller. But General Miller was a chicken, and that night he spoke to the camp through the loudspeakers. He said that the interrogator who desecrated the Holy Qur’an had been kicked out of Guantánamo, and that guards wouldn’t mishandle or even touch the Holy Qur’an again. We had heard many stories like this at Guantánamo, and while it calmed things down for a time, we didn’t believe him. We all knew those Afghani brothers didn’t really want to kill themselves. They just wanted to send General Miller a strong and dangerous message that we were at a breaking point and if conditions didn’t improve, things were going to get really messy.

  The Afghani brothers got their message to Miller; the rest of us had to wait a little longer. We got our chance when he made a surprise visit to Lima Block. He was known to walk the blocks, but when he walked blocks full of Redeyes and Afghans—and we had both—they usually placed plexiglass barriers in front of our cages first so we couldn’t splash him. But on this day they didn’t.

  “The Big Nasty is here!” the brother at the front of the block called down.

  Miller was short and bald, and walked with an unmistakable arrogance. We knew he was the one who tortured us every day. We had all talked about what we would do if he ever walked our block. Everyone got ready.

  “You have shit?”

  “Please give me shit.”

  “I need just a little!”

  Unfortunately, this is not something you can just make on command. And it’s hard to hide. Because of the smell, guards knew when you saved it. Luckily I had a cup of urine left over from the previous night of fighting with the 9/4. It smelled very nasty. I’m sorry to tell you that this was our weapon of mass destruction. I’m not proud of it. But it’s all we had.

  Miller strutted onto our block, all chest and shoulders in an arrogant march like he owned the place. He didn’t even look at us, but we looked at him and smiled.

  “Hello,” we said. We played good detainees, like we were soft.

  When he got to the middle of the block, a brother called, “Allahu Akbar,” and all the brothers threw what they had at him. Urine. Dirty water. One brother had a cup of shit. General Miller was close to me and I splashed him with my nasty urine right in his face. The guards went to cover him, but they were too late to shield him from most of it. His uniform was wet, his face covered with spit, dirty water, pieces of shit and toilet paper, urine, soap. It looked very lovely on his bald head.

  “White trash! Stupid redneck! Idiot Rambo! Donkey ass! Room service!” we yelled.

  We danced and celebrated. We kicked the cage doors, the sinks, anything that would make noise, and our celebration spread to the next block and the block after that and soon all the blocks joined our party and you could have heard “Allahu Akbar” as far away as Sana’a.

  “Today,” I said to my brothers, “I am honored that the great idiot Miller sipped some of my very fine urine.”

  Omar didn’t like what we did.

  “You didn’t just throw feces on General Miller,” he scolded. “You threw feces on the entire American army. On America. They won’t let you do that.”

  He was right and he was wrong. We threw shit on the American army that tortured us. We threw shit on the general who made the army think that way. But that was not America and we knew it. We knew not to see America through the filter of Guantánamo, even though most of the guards still saw us through the filter of 9/11.

  It was one of the best days at Guantánamo. We were cut off from our families and the world and tortured until we would admit that we were terrorists. And yet the great General Miller had tasted our feces and our urine. We were inside of him. We knew we would be punished badly for what we did. But they couldn’t take that away and that’s what mattered.

  That night they gave us double meal portions for dinner and we were so happy to fill our stomachs. Usually the food was very little, and we were always hungry. We should splash the general every day, we joked. But we also felt something was not right. We all got tired very quickly and the block started to quiet down. I started to get ready to fight. I filled my sink with water and soaped my floor, but my body was getting heavy and all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep. Then the guards turned off our water and closed our windows. I called out to my brothers. The block was quiet. Almost everyone was asleep. The guards had drugged our meal. I tried not to fall asleep, but I did.

  While I slept, I had a vivid dream that I was dragged from my cage by barking dogs from hell, that my body burned with pepper spray, and that guards danced on my body, kicking and punching as they laughed and sang. I dreamed they dragged me to solitary confinement in India Block by my feet.

  That’s where I woke, the heat of pepper spray still burning my skin. I had a bad headache and bruises all over. I was sore, and my body was so heavy and tired I couldn’t move. My nightmare was real.

  Still, splashing Miller was worth it. When guards brought us our meals, we’d ask, “Where is Miller? Maybe he wants to share our meal with us again.”

  We scratched WHERE’S MILLER into the Styrofoam clamshells they brought our meals in. We called it out to guards when they passed by our cages. We wouldn’t have to wait too long to find out.

  - TWELVE -

  As Miller escalated the conflict across the camp, we were always looking out for what he would do next. Construction wasn’t anything new: Guantánamo was a living, breathing monster that was always growing, expanding, adapting, changing. Construction workers were constantly working on the blocks. The salty air corroded the metal, and they were either repainting the blocks in the same bland green or replacing parts of the cells to make them stronger. But they’d been working on Romeo Block for a long time, at least a month nonstop. It was their experimental block, always staffed with the worst guards, and no one wanted to go there.

  So what were they doing in there now?

  One day, after the third prayer, we heard IRF teams shouting and dogs barking in Romeo Block. We called out to the brothers there to find out what was going on. Right away, one of the guards started shouting at us.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Hey, idiot,” Hamzah yelled at the guard. “Watch your mouth or I’ll break it.” Hamzah had the deep, gravelly voice of someone used to getting his way all the time. He had no patience for asshole guards. All the other brothers on Tango Block started calling out to our brothers in Romeo Block.

  Our brother Azani called back from Romeo. Azani was from Yemen and one of the camp’s calmest and quietest brothers. He always followed the rules and never protested, even when guards did the most humiliating things, but he had stopped talking to interrogators, too.

  “Please, brothers!” Azani called. “Help me! Guards stripped me naked and took my clothes. They say it’s the new rules in Romeo.”

  General Miller and the interrogators thought they were clever. They were moving the weakest and most compliant brothers to Romeo, one of the worst blocks, to break them and make them talk. The interrogators had done this before. They had moved compliant brothers to Tango or Sierra, blocks full of Redeyes, knowing they couldn’t stand the craziness and would do anything to get moved to a quieter block. It was hard being on our block. There were IRFs and cell searches all the time and these brothers couldn’t handle it. They weren’t snitches. They were just brothers who avoided conflict. We called them brothers of absolute patience.

  More brothers cried out from Romeo Block.

  “They’re using IRF teams to strip us,” a brother called out.

  This had been a big problem since the beginning of Guantánamo—guards and interrogators taking our clothes. It was humiliating. Brothers couldn’t offer their prayers if they were naked.

  From Romeo, we heard IRF teams barking orders and shouting. Our young brothers cried out for their clothes.

  Tango block went dead silent.

  “They’re baiting us,” Omar said. “They’re cracking down on coordinated protests, and then they put all of us in a block together?” Omar knew how Miller thought. “But we can’t let them do that to our brothers.”

  There were around seventy Redeyes in the camp, guys from all different parts of the world, different ages and religious mindsets, different personalities. We weren’t an organized group; we were more like a tribe, and we had a wild reputation across the camp. Everyone knew who we were—other prisoners, guards, interrogators, even the commanders.

  I called a war summit. There were twenty-three of us on the block and we all agreed that we had to help our brothers. Our plan was simple: we’d pull the guards to our block and fight them here to make them stop what they were doing in Romeo Block.

  We all filled our sinks with water—the first thing guards did during a riot was turn off the block’s water. We hid our Qur’ans and toothbrushes to keep them safe from pepper spray. I rubbed my floor and bed and walls with soap to get ready. We prayed.

  General Miller had his SOPs and we had our DSOPs, detainee standard operating procedures. First, we asked the watch commander to call the camp officer so we could register a formal complaint and talk, but the camp officer refused to come to our block. Next, we called the guards names and splashed them with water.

  “Chicken!” we yelled. “Donkey!”

  In response, they turned off the water, then shuttered all the outside windows to keep us from calling to our brothers in Romeo Block. But it was too late. Brothers in Sierra and November Blocks relayed news of what was happening to other blocks. DNN was quick.

  Omar called one of the nicer guards to his cell and asked Othman to translate for him.

  “Your General Miller is trying to make us fight you,” Omar said. This guard had a palm-tree patch on his arm and wasn’t from the 9/4. “Look around you in the camps. You have boys and old men. Farmers. Look at me with my one leg. Does it look like we want to fight? No. Your General Miller wants chaos. He wants us to fight. So what does he do? He makes you enforce rules that make no sense. He puts the most compliant brothers who never cause any problems in Romeo Block and takes away their clothes. Listen!”

  “They’re just following the new SOPs,” the guard said.

  “Yes!” Omar cried. “He makes you punish us because of illogical SOPs.”

  This guard thought really hard about what Omar said.

  Another guard, one of the nastier ones, pulled the nice guard away and pushed him off the block. When the nasty guard came back, he danced up and down the block mocking us.

  “General Miller is making us fight!” he sang like a little girl. “Shut the fuck up, haji motherfuckers!”

  Waddah splashed him with toilet water.

  The nasty guard returned fire, showering all of us with pepper spray. This is how things would escalate. After the initial burn of pepper spray, you have a rush of adrenaline. There’s no coming down once that starts, and I wondered if they knew that. Abdul splashed the nasty guard with number two and that shut him up, but then everything broke down. More guards stormed onto the block with pepper spray and we splashed them with anything we had. We hit and kicked our cages, we shouted. The block turned into a sloppy, shitty, peppery hot zone.

  “Please!” Omar yelled at the guards. “Don’t get involved.”

  Othman yelled out, “If you walk through our block, we’ll splash you with number two!”

  The guards left the block wet and messy. We all chanted, “Send us the general!”

  A guard came back in and told us the general refused to talk to us.

  “Okay,” we said. We tied our blankets in knots at one end, then soaked them in water. This was something we had learned from the Afghani brothers when they rioted. With just a little water, the blanket became a hammer. When they all hit the floors and doors, it made a fierce thundering boom.

  I used my hammer to break off the bean hole doors from my cage. I held them up for brothers to see and soon others were hammering their bean holes, too. The guards went wild when they saw how many of us had broken them off, and they called Code Yellow, one of the highest-level emergencies.

  All their energy shifted away from Romeo to our block, just as we planned. But now Camp 3 filled with hundreds of soldiers, medical teams, dogs, officers, interrogators, civilians, all kinds of crazy people. Many IRF teams armored up. At last the idiot General Miller himself came. They had mobilized an army to fight us.

  One of the bigger idiot officers, a guy who was really well built, tried to enter the block. He didn’t get far. There was too much splashing and spitting. They sent an Arabic interpreter in next.

  “They want to talk to you,” he said. “But first, 441 and all the others who broke the bean hole doors have to hand them over.”

  “Fuck him,” Hamzah said. “If he wants to talk, we’ll talk about Romeo Block first, then we’ll discuss our metal doors.” Hamzah had no patience for the general. “They want to see our brothers naked in Romeo Block? Send them here and they can look at my cock.”

  The interpreter took out a small notebook from his pocket and wrote down everything we said.

  “Tell the general that if he wants my door,” I said, “he can come and get it himself.”

  Guards in raincoats brought in plexiglass barriers and placed them in front of our cages. We let them cover every cage and think they were in control. Maybe they forgot that we had broken the bean hole doors.

  The camp’s army major came in and asked us to give back the metal doors. Hamzah, who spoke English, explained to him how stripping our brothers in Romeo was not only a religious problem, it was just inhumane.

  “You tell the chicken general that if he wants to walk around naked, fine!” Hamzah said. “Maybe he wants to show off his cock. Tell him those brothers can’t pray like that.”

  “I’m not here to listen to your dictations,” the army major said. “SOPs are SOPs. No clothes in Romeo. Now give me the goddamn metal.”

  We wanted to solve the problem, but we were dealing with crazy people, and those killers only understood one language: the language of force and strength. So we refused.

  General Miller and the colonel stormed onto the block full of arrogance, like they could do whatever they wanted. They had IRF teams with dogs and shields to protect them.

  The general stopped at Omar’s cage with an interpreter.

  “Are you the one trying to turn my guards against me?” General Miller yelled. “Do you want my guards to revolt against me?”

  “I was just telling your guards why they shouldn’t fight with us,” Omar said.

  Miller listened to the interpreter and he looked like he was going to erupt. He surveyed the block as if he were assessing a battlefield. He turned away from Omar and charged down the walkway, safe behind the plexiglass. At the middle of the block, he stopped.

  “Now you listen!” he yelled.

  We reached through our bean holes and pushed the barriers over.

  “Allahu Akbar!” we shouted.

  We splashed the idiot General Miller and the colonel and the interpreter and all the rest with shit and dirty water. The IRF teams scattered everywhere like wet chickens. Oh Allah! It was lovely seeing them flee like that, bumping into each other, stumbling to the ground. Some of them got stuck in the back of the block. Their pretty beige uniforms were stained yellow and brown, and the only way out was to pass by us again.

  We all laughed hard at how easy it was to scatter them. Arrogance makes you forget how weak you are. We had no doubt that they would kick our asses soon. But for just a few minutes, we had chipped away at their confidence. Maybe they would listen to reason now.

  They didn’t. Guards set up big fans at the gate then emptied canister after canister of pepper spray into the wind until we couldn’t breathe. We could handle the pain of pepper spray on our skin, but when we couldn’t breathe… there was nothing we could do. One of our brothers, an older Palestinian, had asthma and he collapsed, unable to breathe. We thought he might die. We had no choice. We had to stop the fight to save our brother.

  IRF teams went to each cage and showered us with pepper spray, then beat us until we couldn’t move.

  They came for me with six guards and a dog. I’m not tall or big. I’m just five foot four and I’d lost a lot of weight because of months of sleep deprivation.

  “I’m not afraid of your dog!” I yelled.

  “Good for you!” the team leader yelled back.

  I had actually trained with guard dogs in Yemen. When they charged in, I snatched the dog and gave him a nice big hug that made him whimper instead of bark, and then he went still in my arms.

  “Save the dog!” the guards screamed. “Save the dog!”

  The entire team jumped on top of me, but my floor was so slippery from the soap and pepper spray that they all fell. When they had me restrained, they didn’t beat me, and I was glad for it. Instead, they dragged me to the rec yard, where they threw me to the ground shackled. More guards came and they all piled on top, holding me so I couldn’t move. The officer knelt on my neck, pulled my head up by my hair, opened my eyes, and showered each eye with pepper spray. The world went black in a blanket of pain. I thought I was blinded forever. Now they beat me, kicking, punching, throwing me around like a plastic toy. I didn’t feel the pain after the first couple of kicks. My spirit left my body and watched from above, listening to the solid thud of boots on ribs, skin splitting, ribs cracking. When they were done, I felt the sole of a boot on my face.

 

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