Dont forget us here, p.26
Don't Forget Us Here, page 26
At 11 p.m., the guards went to this brother’s cage.
“Hey, man,” the guard said, “I need your clothes.”
“What?” the brother cried out. We all heard him yelling.
“It’s for your own safety,” the guard said. “So you can’t kill yourself. It’s block rules, man.”
This brother panicked. He was used to the comforts of Camp 4. He called out to us for help.
“This is solitary confinement,” Hamzah called back. “It’s different from where you lived.”
We did this with several brothers. They always said the same things.
“I promise I won’t kill myself!” he begged. Then he was reasonable. “The cell is really cold, and I can’t sleep like that.” Then he was nice. “Please… can’t you make an exception?”
This guard played his role well. “Hey, man,” he said, “I hear you. I do. But these are the rules for new detainees. You’ll get your clothes back before morning prayer. It’s only for the first week.”
That new brother was silent for a while. Then the guard said, “Hey, man, if you refuse, I’ve gotta call the IRF team. They’re gonna come and take your clothes anyway.”
Some brothers would call to us again and ask us to intervene on their behalf. We had a reputation for intervening.
“We’re sorry, brother,” we’d call back. “If we do that, we’re afraid they’ll take all our clothes.”
We let the guard take his shirt, flip-flops, towel, everything in his cell, and when the guard had taken everything, he said, “Please, I need your pants now.” This was the cruelest part of the joke. Most brothers refused and the guard would offer a blanket in exchange for their pants. Sometimes the brother would refuse again and ask for an Arabic interpreter and the watch commander. Some got angry and shouted and cursed at the guard. That’s what happened this night and we couldn’t hold it in any longer. We started laughing.
The guard returned the new brother’s stuff. “These guys were just messing around with you,” he said.
“Animals!” this brother screamed at us. “You’re all just a bunch of criminals and animals!”
That just made us laugh even more.
“Welcome, brother!” we called to him.
They couldn’t stay mad at us for long. Soon there would be another new brother and they’d be in on the joke, too. A lot of the time, the jokes we played on each other played off our worst fears. Somehow these jokes helped us see each other for who we really were—just guys trying to survive. The new guards would get to know us during their rotation, and many of them realized that what they had been told about us didn’t match the reality. Maybe our jokes allowed us to see the humanity in each other’s fears.
- TWENTY-ONE -
I was still in Camp V Echo the day the Camp VI escorts came to move me. They were nice, and this surprised me. In Camp VI, I was taken to a special room normally used for meetings with attorneys and with the Red Cross. The Camp VI commander was already there with three other camp officers and an interpreter. I’d been through a lot of commanders by now and could tell almost instantly what kind of commander they would be from their body language and the way they looked at me.
“How are you doing?” each one asked, putting out their hands for a handshake.
“Welcome to Camp VI,” the commander said. I think he meant it. He was a short guy, a lieutenant colonel with a kind smile. I knew right away that life under this commander would be different.
“So that’s what it feels like to shake the Americans’ hands!” I said to the interpreter. “It’s against SOPs, you know. Where’s the IRF team to welcome me?” They all laughed. “Do you know that I once got two months’ punishment in isolation for shaking a man’s hand?” I wasn’t joking about that, but I was smiling.
“It’s a new era,” the commander said. “Everything’s changed.”
“You mean we’re all new commanders here!” I said, and we all laughed.
“It’s a new period for us,” the commander said. “We hope you’ll help us keep the peace.”
“And please understand we’ve been living in hell for the last eight years,” I said. “We have fought hard for this. We’ve been burned before and need to heal and maybe learn to trust you. Give us some time to adjust.”
“I understand,” the commander said. “Our guards need time to adjust, too.”
“Look,” I said, “tell your guards we’re not fighting jihad. We just want to be in peace. Please promise us that when we have problems, you’ll listen to us and not just come with IRF teams and pepper spray.”
He nodded.
We both agreed that we were interested in everyone’s safety—the brothers and the guards. The camp commander went over some of the rules and SOPs, and then he stopped suddenly. He smiled like we were maybe just wasting time.
“I get the sense that you already know the drill,” he said. “Let’s get you in there.”
Camp VI was built as a maximum security prison, complete with communal living areas, like a real American prison. But since it opened in 2006, it had been used for solitary confinement. The communal areas intended for prisoners had instead been used as a place for guards to hang out while on duty. I couldn’t imagine what communal living would be like. I was excited but cautious—nothing ever ended up being what we thought it would be and I’d learned it was safer to be prepared for the worst.
When we got to Camp VI’s Echo Block, where I’d be living, the guard called Control.
“Control, this is Echo,” he said into the radio. “Control, please open Echo gate for Smiley Troublemaker.”
Like magic, the gate slid open. The guards gently removed my shackles.
“Fly free, Smiley!” The camp commander patted my back and I walked in.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. The communal area, a place we were never allowed to be before, had several metal tables. Now brothers in tan clothes—not orange—sat around talking, eating, drinking coffee! They were smiling and laughing—just relaxing and being happy. Past the communal tables, I saw cell doors wide open. Brothers walked around freely with no shackles. I was still in my orange clothes, a color I’d been wearing for eight years and that meant I was in solitary confinement. I stuck out like a burning flame.
Brothers rushed to me and circled around, each one hugging me, welcoming me, singing to me—we were crazy with happiness. Omar, Hamzah, and Salim brought me to my cell. They had already cleaned it and set it up for me. I felt lost and confused. I couldn’t hold my tears back seeing all this… seeing my brothers happy and not suffering. Am I in a dream? No, this was what we’d fought so hard to achieve, and it was real.
Brothers brought me new clothes, tan like theirs, and a special meal they had prepared from earlier meals. I sat at those tables in the hall and ate my meal freely with my brothers.
After eating, we walked around the block and the recreation area together. Everything looked very different. Everything felt different. Brothers lounged casually in their cells eating food, not worrying about guards punishing them for eating twenty minutes after mealtime. At the showers, brothers bathed with the doors closed, no guards standing outside timing them. They sang as the water flowed forever, steam rising above.
Brothers walked out to an actual recreation yard whenever they wanted, without having to wait or endure searches and chains. They exercised freely and some played soccer, laughing and happy.
I didn’t know what to do, what to say, or where to go, overwhelmed by all the space and choices. I walked up and down the block, looking into cells where every door was open. Even the cells looked different now. They were still white with metal beds and no window to the outside world, but the fact that they were open and had mattresses and sheets, not just ISO mats, made them seem friendlier now.
I made my way outside to join my brothers in the rec yard. Oh Allah! I let my eyes travel up to the open sky and my mind relaxed taking in the vastness of all that blue. I had never seen such a beautiful sky. The tiny rec yards in solitary confinement had always been covered with green tarp. I thought about all the people outside of Guantánamo who looked up every day without realizing how precious that was, how most probably never stopped for even a second to look and explore that great expanse. I felt the sky welcome me. I felt a strong bond with it that I had never felt before. Tears ran down my cheeks again. That mountain that sat on my chest for so many years had lifted a little and the weight of it all became less. I walked around the rec yard, looking out over the fence to the small hill covered with grass and trees. I couldn’t remember the last time I had looked so freely at nature. The brothers watched as my mind flew to the sky, to the hill, to nowhere and to everywhere. They all knew how it felt: every brother had the same experience when they moved to the communal blocks.
The rec yard was only a hundred feet by thirty feet, but it seemed huge to me. I felt like my legs had forgotten how to walk normally without chains, without guards, without a big canister of pepper spray in my face. It was like learning to walk for the first time. I worried that this freedom would end at any minute.
I stayed outside all day, just watching the sky. For years inside, we didn’t know how to distinguish night from day. All we had were the bright lights that never went off. Even when we had rec at night, the lights washed out the sky.
At dinner, I received my food in the common area with all the other brothers, not alone in my cell, standing behind the black line with guards harassing me or watching me eat. But I had no appetite. After so many years of hunger strike and force-feeding, food wasn’t that big a deal anymore. But the way we all sat together, sharing our meal, talking, laughing—it reminded me of my family and the life I’d lost.
After dinner, I lay down on the ground in the rec yard and watched blue sky turn so many colors while the sun set, before turning a beautiful black. I spent many hours by myself looking at the stars and the moon, thinking and talking to them. I told them all the things I had wanted to tell them for so long. The main lights went off at 10 p.m., leaving only a few small lights burning dimly in the block. When I came in from the rec yard to go to my cell, my eyes relaxed under the softer light. After so many years living under very bright lights, any light felt like thousands of small pins sticking into my eyes. At last, that feeling started to go away.
GUANTÁNAMO WAS LIKE a small piece of fabric woven together with threads from all over the world. We came from different backgrounds, but together we made something unique, a rare opportunity to encounter so many different experiences and perspectives. Living with the others for the first time, I wanted to learn more than how to endure the physical pain of hunger strikes, strategies to fend off an IRF team, and tactics to survive hours of stress positions.
Naturally, I spent a lot of time out in the rec yard, and one day soon after I’d moved, I heard a brother call my name from the neighboring yard.
“Hey, buddy!” Dan called to me in English. “What’s up?” He had changed. His hair and beard were trimmed neat. He walked to the fence with a swagger and confidence I’d never seen on any of the other brothers.
“What happened to you?” I yelled.
I hadn’t seen Dan in years, since he’d moved to Camp 4 with the compliant brothers. He was Yemeni and from a good family, his father a military general and his mother a doctor. He’d been swept up with a bunch of other Arab brothers in Pakistan and sold to the CIA just after the Americans invaded. He was about my age and had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. He was very handsome but also very short. I think his size just made his personality bigger.
We talked through the fence. He told me how he learned English from other brothers and from the guards in Camp 4. The way he talked about English it was more than just a language, it was a part of his life now. He’d learned how to rap in Arabic and could recite poems in English. He told me how he spent those years in Camp 4 reading books in English, watching movies, and talking to the African American guards.
“At first, I just wanted to be able to talk to the female guards,” he said. I remembered how he was always trying to flirt with the female guards in the open cages of Camp Delta.
One of the Camp VI guards came up to Dan.
“Yo, the King!” the guard said. They slapped hands in a complicated handshake and then did the most incredible thing—they sang a quick rap together.
I couldn’t help laughing. I’d heard there was a Yemeni brother who rapped and danced like an American, but I never imagined it was Dan—I mean, the King. This was the same brother we gave a hard time for not joining our hunger strikes because it made his stomach hurt. I was still the same Smiley Troublemaker who would send him my food anyway, but he was something new.
The way he talked about music and movies and the American guards he called friends, I realized that he’d done so much more than just learn English. The way he walked, smiled… He was full of confidence and a style that was all his own.
Learning English had created a bridge to another world that was full of life and love and even hope for Dan, one where guards could see him and talk to him not as a detainee or a suspected terrorist, but as the King. I think the King was who Dan would have been outside of Guantánamo—he was himself. Speaking English had empowered him to do that here.
I knew a lot of English by that point. When I met with Andy, I could understand what he said most of the time. Same with the guards and officers. But I couldn’t speak the language. I couldn’t hold a conversation and express myself, and I felt trapped because of it. In those first days in communal living, I decided the most important thing I needed to do was to learn English.
I didn’t want a kingdom like Dan’s. I wanted to learn English so I could be Mansoor.
OMAR WAS NEGOTIATING with the camp commander and Colonel Thomas to get classes for us, but this was still Guantánamo, and even though things were changing, they resisted anything that would help us make our lives much better. Omar was always reading and writing and encouraging the younger brothers like me to make the most of our time here, so while we waited for classes, he encouraged me to learn English on my own. In the beginning, I didn’t have anything to help me out—no books or pens or even paper. So I started with what I could get. I borrowed Around the World in Eighty Days from the library and read it line by line, translating each word and sentence until I understood everything. I practiced what I learned reading USA Today with any guards willing to spend the two minutes that SOPs allowed them to talk to detainees. I hunted for vocabulary words and definitions in anything I could get my hands on, like Men’s Health and National Geographic. It was a slow and long journey.
While I learned English, life in Camp VI continued to improve. We got TVs, more magazines, better medical treatment, and better food. The new rotation of navy guards was friendlier with us, too, and I think that came from the new colonel. I was now working with Omar and Khalid in pushing the camp admin to deliver on their promises to bring classes to Camp VI—English classes, art classes, and even computer classes. We wanted to prepare for our release and try to catch up after years of isolation. Classes weren’t a priority for everyone, but they were for Omar and me. Every week, we met with the camp commander and sometimes with Colonel Thomas to review our progress and go over issues we wanted addressed.
You might think all these improvements were a good thing. They were, and they weren’t. By now, the US government knew that they couldn’t close the camp, so they made just enough improvements to distract us from demanding our freedom. Our bodies were very weak from so many years of protests and fighting, and our health had gotten worse. Some of us had diabetes now, or heart conditions, high blood pressure, or kidney problems. With so much change and better conditions, it was hard to keep on top of camp admin the way we used to. They still only wanted to do the minimum. But we tried to keep up the pressure in our weekly meetings and I wrote letters.
Some brothers didn’t want to fight anymore. They told me, “Look, Mansoor! We’re tired and we need to relax. Please, let us just wait for our day in peace.” I could see in their eyes they were happy with the new peace and wanted just to be for a little while. In this way, the US government succeeded in quieting us, at least for a little while.
I was tired, too. Life in detention wasn’t easy, and it took me a long time to calm myself in communal living. The harshness of nine years of solitary confinement and fighting had obvious and lasting effects on me. Why did it take me so long to read Around the World in Eighty Days? I couldn’t focus. I had terrible headaches and eye aches. It was hard to read and keep my thoughts together.
We also had entirely new issues to contend with in communal living, ones that would have been unthinkable in the past. Now we had to argue about things like what we could watch on TV and if we should have video games. When the camp admin brought Game Boys to the block, a few of the older brothers appointed themselves cultural advisers and asked the guards to take them away before anyone could even turn them on. Most of the brothers on the block wanted to avoid any conflict, and even though they wanted to play the Game Boys, they let the guards take them away. I didn’t care about confrontation, and I went straight to the guards and told them to bring the games back.
“But your brothers told us…” the guards started.
“They aren’t the bosses,” I said. “There is no boss here.”
The guards were actually very nice and just trying to avoid conflict, too. They gave me the Game Boys, even though I had no idea what to do with them. I’d never even heard of Nintendo.
“How do I turn it on?” I asked.
In just ten minutes, I learned everything about the Game Boy and Mario Bros. and handed them over to those brothers who wanted to play.
When one of the older brothers saw what I’d done, he came yelling, “No Nine Tendos!”
This really upset me. We had spent so many years having every minute of our lives controlled by interrogators and guards, and now this brother wanted to control us when we had just a little bit of freedom?
