My oldest nephew is in Iraq, he is in Army Intelligence division, and interrogates a lot of "Detainees" (most of whom are not residents of Iraq, but of satellite countries around Iraq, surprise surprise! Not!)
Here is a recent email I'd thought I'd share, it was rather humorous and very telling of the intelligence level that we're dealing with in that part of the world….
Had somthing happen the other day that i just couldn't stop thinking about. You see, we deal with alot of Iraqi detainees over here and sometimes they just do some things that are just so memorable you just have to share them...like the guy who threw up in the middle of the holding area or the guy who did a pretty damn good Bruce Lee impersonation.
Well, the one i want to tell you about is about a guy (just a couple of days ago) who was detained for having hand grenades in his car, which would be no problem if they weren't illegal.
Naturally we questioned him at our holding area back on the base and begin to question him as to the reason for posessing these grenades. His first response was that the grenades belonged to his sons (Typical answer... trying to place blame eleswhere) Then he told us that his son had many weapons in this car and that he told him to remove them before he went to town with the car and i guess he forgot the hand grenades. After further questioning him, he admitted they were his, however he only used them for protection. Intrigued we asked him "Protection from what?" He said he was a sheep herder and that many bad people were trying to steal his sheep and the only way to keep them safe was with these hand grenades (We couldn't help to think that these were magic grenades and they wouldn't blow him or his sheep up...) well after deciding this man was still going jail (leaving his sheep unguarded against the rampant gang of sheep theives) we continued to question him further.
During this extensive interrogation, he asked one of our interpreters where the interpreter was from, and for his own protection, the interpreter lied and said he was from Syria. The detainee responded "That's okay, because you are with the Americans and I like Americans because Americans are from the moon". We paused upon the tranlated sentence, and looked at our interpreter..."Did he just say that Americans are from the moon?" The interpreter asked him again and the detainee again responded. " I understand that not all Americans are born on the moon like the poorer ones however most americans are from the moon."
We realized after the statement that in his world, magic grenades protected his sheep from wild sheep bandits and that all Americans are from the moon.
This guy did some other weird stuff but nothing as mind boggling as that particlular Moon statement and I just could not let that one go without telling anyone.
Take care and i'll see you all in hopefully 7 months.
SPC. J. T.
