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7. Contemporary Popular Culture B. This Stupid War

Note: The opinions expressed on this page are my own considered positions.

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Paul Holton. Saving Babylon: The Heart of an Army Interrogator in Iraq. Provo, UT: Perihelion Press, 2005. Paperback, 239 pages, US$ 19.95, ISBN 978-1-933434-00-1.

Chief Wiggles has Been There…He Knows

Review by Joe Petrulionis

Here we have the personal memoir of Chief Warrant Officer Paul Holton, (a/k/a “Chief Wiggles”) the “morale officer” in a Utah National Guard Unit. When not in uniform, Holton works as an account manager for Federal Express Corporation and travels as a missionary with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Holton’s National Guard unit reported for mobilization in February 2003. Initially stationed at a holding camp in Kuwait, Holton provided intelligence support to a battalion-level commander, whose unit participated in the southern ground invasion of Iraq. After the U.S. started the war that March, Holton conducted the extended interrogation of some fourteen Iraqi Generals who had surrendered during the early days of the invasion. Once the so called “coalition forces” pursued the war into Baghdad, Holton’s role morphed slightly from interrogating high ranking prisoners to gathering information from willing Iraqi citizens. Living in the “Green Zone,” Holton was one of the first American military representatives whom an Iraqi citizen with information to share, would encounter.

Apparently working with little supervision, Holton’s team in Baghdad interviewed Iraqi citizens, helped to funnel seed money to individuals deemed deserving of coalition favoritism (thereby stimulating the local economy.) As a part of these public relations efforts, Holton maintained a blog website that helped to insure that awareness, donated items, and funds, were raised back home for Iraqi children. This effort to get candy, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toys delivered from U.S. donors into the hands of needy Iraqi children, was dubbed Operation “Give.”

Most of Saving Babylon’s 239 pages do not relate to Operation “Give,” but detail Holton’s retrospective of his own experience in Iraq. As an ex-intelligence analyst in the Army, this reviewer is easily convinced that Holton’s subordinates benefited from his constant optimism, his unquestioning faith in the mission of the U.S. military in Iraq, and his enthusiasm for a plan that he asserted was “divinely developed, one that had something to do with blessing the Iraqi people.” After all, a soldier’s job is not to question his/her legal orders but to carry them out with enthusiastic professionalism.

But this does not excuse the rest of us. Those of us at home have other responsibilities when our military is marshaled in our names. The voter’s patriotic duty is to critique administration motives, question its policies, and demand information vital to the open democracy that we hope to preserve. If the American public should allow the most sophisticated military force ever assembled to become a tool of one political party, or to be mobilized for dubious reasons, then it will be our own liberty and freedom that will be swept aside.

Chief Holton might be excused for his enthusiastic support of a war that Americans were being told pre-empted an immediate WMD danger, “we’re talking mushroom clouds.” Holton explains “Saddam Hussein had killed thousands of his own people, and would not hesitate to give his weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist organization or to use them himself, which he had done in the past.”

Most readers will appreciate Holton’s enthusiasm and his willingness to forgo the comforts of home while fighting his nation’s distant battles. And perhaps they can overlook his stubborn belief that the war in Iraq was a divinely inspired conflict between “good guys” and “bad guys.” But the United States and the Iraqi people are paying dearly for the absurd notion that Almighty God is using the U.S. military to root out evil from the world. This reviewer, these days a teacher of history and philosophy, will appreciate Holton’s memoir for a much different reason from most readers. Saving Babylon provides undergraduate students with a contemporary comparison between a primary source’s retrospective account, and subsequent scholarship, once the rest of the story becomes de-classified and then critiqued by future historians.

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