Eric Fair

@misc{fairnd,
  title = {Eric Fair},
  keywords = {101st Airborne Division, Abu Ghraib, Alcohol, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Arabic, Baghdad, Basic Training, Bath Party, bethlehem, Black Water, CACI, Camp David, Camp Victory, Chemical Weapons, CIA, Civilian Life, Copenhagen, Department of Defense, Drugs, DynaCorps, Enhanced Interrogation, Fallujah, Fort Bliss, Texas, Fort Campbell, Kentucky, General Janis Karpinski, Geneva Conventions, IED, Infantry, Insurgents, Interrogation, Iraq, Kuwait, Linguist, Monterey, California, MSA, Multinational Force and Observers, Nightmares, Osama Bin Laden, Pacifism, Police Officer, PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), Saddam Hussein, September 11th, Sunni, United States Army, Water Boarding, Weapons of Mass Destruction},
  abstract = {Eric Fair (1972- ) enlisted in the United States Army in 1995. He worked as a linguist as part of the 101st Airborne Division and he was honorably discharged in 2000. In the aftermath of September 11th, Fair signed with the freelance contracting firm CACI and worked as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. He has struggled with nightmares since his return home. Interviewee Unit/Title101st Airborne DivisionYears Active1995-2000 (Army) \& 2001-2004 (CACI)EnlistmentEric Fair was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in May 1972. He graduated from Liberty High School in 1990 and went to college to study History in New England. In 1995, he enlisted in the United States Army with the intention of becoming a police officer after his enlistment. The plan was to do his required five years and then go to work for the police force. He went in as a Private and was discharged as a Sergeant.TrainingFair found life in basic training to be what he expected: difficult, boring and mind numbing. He describes basic training as a simple process in which you keep your head down and follow orders. It was a pretty simple process so long as you did what you were told.DeploymentFrom 1995-2000 he was deployed briefly to Egypt with an organization called the Multinational Force and Observers whose purpose was to ensure that the Camp David treaty between the Egyptians and the Israelis was being enforced. The job was to stand watch and make sure neither side is amassing an army. The observation was done through counting vehicles. Fair was next stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was part of the 101st Airborne Division in the Infantry. His job was as a linguist. It was a job he was given after having shown an aptitude for languages on an aptitude test administered by the Army. He spent 1.5 years studying Arabic in Monterey, California in order to be an Arabic Linguist. Although the difficult coursework required studying 10-12 hours a day, it was a great assignment and he knew how lucky he was to have received it. In 2000, his 5-year commitment was up and he took an honorable discharge. He figured that the language skills he learned were useless since he believed the Army would never need Arabic linguists. He returned to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he started working as a police officer. It was a great job for Fair and he enjoyed the fact that it was something new every day. About two years in, it was discovered that he had a heart condition. He then had the choice whether to sit at a desk for 20 years or find something else to do. As this was post September 11, 2001, he considered going back to the Army and putting his linguistic skills to use. However, he had a fiancée at the time and decided not to reenlist. On the day of September 11, 2001, Fair was golfing with his father when he heard about the planes striking the towers at the clubhouse. He went home and proceeded to watch the rest of the events unfold on the television. Seeing those images contributed to his desire to want to get involved. He felt angry and wanted to lash out. He also felt that he had learned Arabic for no good reason and now there was a reason. These factors prompted him to look for a way to get involved. He found that opportunity via CACI [a contracting company with its corporate headquarters based in Arlington, Virginia]. At the time, the armed services were contracting out assignments. In retrospect, Fair’s opinion of this has changed. Contracting freelancers as a system has some merit but it is not black and white. While it saves the United States government billions, the people contracted out receive none of the benefits a soldier gets. Additionally, Fair believes that citizens should fight war and that everyone should experience war to understand it. In 2003, Fair signed a contract with CACI. His contract began with a brief stay at Ft. Bliss, Texas in which he received inoculations but no job training. It was assumed by the contract that he would be ready to do interrogations. Because of the way the job description was worded, in which a person needed language skills and interrogation experience, the military knew it was largely hiring back its own people. There was some effort to coordinate between the Army and CACI but there was a gray area for those who were under outside contract. It was difficult to know where one stood in the chain of command and that was something a person had to figure out on his own. Fair says that those who were there because of outside contractors thought of themselves as specialized American soldiers. While the popular perception of these individuals is of greedy people with no loyalty, Fair found this not to be the case. For many, the process of reenlisting simply took to long as you had to reenlist, be paired with a unit, train with a unit and then there was no guarantee you’d deploy. At that point, no one knew how long the conflict would last and they were anxious to get to war quickly. When word came down that Saddam Hussein had been captured, Fair felt disappointed because he figured that it was done and he had missed it. In January 2004, Fair was flown to Copenhagen and then into Kuwait where he was taken to Baghdad. He took a cargo plane in and met his fellow employees. At the time, there were only 20-30 interrogators there so it was a small group. His first impressions of the base, which would become Camp Victory, was that it was a bit unusual because there were a number of palaces surrounded by man made canals. Initially, supervisors secured spaces that became known as CACI-ville and they were kept separated from the armed forces. He was then sent to Abu Ghraib where he was mixed in with the soldiers. After 2-3 days at Camp Victory, Fair went to Abu Ghraib to start interrogations. It was an immense facility with 2 holding tents containing 5,000-10,000 people scheduled for interrogation. There were only 25 interrogators and the detainees had to be processed quickly which made the numbers involved an issue. Abu Ghraib was a pre-existing prison in Iraq that had the same name recognition as Alcatraz would have in the United States. It was the prison where Hussein would send political prisoners and it was known for being a particularly hard prison. The typical process for interrogators was to try and find out about chemical weapons that everyone believed were present in Iraq. Interrogators were given a sheet of requirements for parenting units in which they should try and ascertain the location of Bath party leaders and whether there was a connection to Osama bin Laden. The main objective was to find out information about chemical weapons. Overall, there was not a good system of organization and interrogators had to sort through detainees 1 by 1. The screeners would perform 2-3 minute interviews with each detainee to help the interrogators know what they were dealing with prior to an interview. The interrogation team would then focus on groups of detainees the [Army] MP would bring into the room. These interrogation teams could consist of an interrogator, a translator and detainee or it could consist of just the interrogator and a detainee. In the beginning, Fair found it difficult to communicate with detainees. He had been taught MSA [Modern Standard Arabic] and most spoke regional dialects. Eventually, he grew to understand what the detainees were saying. To get a job as an interrogator the following criteria had to be met: language skills, a check box mentality to get necessary tasks completed, interrogation experience and national security clearance. These requirements were designed to be very specific and the vast majority of those people who could meet these specifications would be former military. Fair deems the whole process as a failure. A large number of people talked about chemical weapons because they wanted to be seen as cooperating. It was hard to tell who were revealing facts because they wanted to go home and who were doing so because they actually knew. Also, they were in an active war zone, which meant getting mortared on a daily basis, gunfire and sniper attacks. There was also an interest as to what was happening beyond the wall. In Spring 2004, the news of abuse at Abu Ghraib started to come out. Fair says the reports are unfair tot he majority of the people who were there. Abu Ghraib was a chaotic, horrible place and in trying to deal with it, some leaned too far to the other side. Fair believes that as an adult he had a very hard time getting a grasp on his emotions and nightmares and says that for an 18-19 year old it would have been even more traumatic. He views the naked stress pyramids and the stress positions as wrong. Enhanced Interrogation was a tactic used at Abu Ghraib. This includes sleep deprivation, stress positions and fear of harsh that are essentially good cop/bad cop. The point of these tactics was to get information. What was and wasn’t allowed was all spelled out on paper and Fair says he never did anything he was concerned he would get in trouble for because everything was all laid out on paper and was approved. The photographs people associate with Abu Ghraib were no done by interrogators. There was also a 2-way mirror so people knew others were watching. Abu Ghraib in 2004 is what you picture war to be like. There were medevac helicopters, mortar rounds and rocket attacks. The sense was that is these detainees weren’t the men pushing the buttons, they knew who were. There was an understanding that the Army was in charge. Yet, there were gray areas like whether civilians were bound by the laws of the military. Fair says that General Janis Karpinski did not spend the kind of time at Abu Ghraib that she should have. There was no real oversight going on there and clearly the military dropped the ball. While there were occasional media visits, they were always highly supervised. There was no “AHA moment” for Fair when things shifted for him. He remembers one day when he sat down to do his prayers before an interrogation and he wasn’t sure what he should be praying for. In retrospect, that was a pivotal moment for him when his views started to shift. It wasn’t until Fallujah when he was assigned to deal with detainees directly after capture that he started toe experience a crisis of conscience. Fallujah was a brutal place and was known as Ground Zero for insurgency. There were former Bath party members, Republican guards and former military and Fair began to be able to justify why they were like they were. He likens it to inner cities where the feeling is who are these outsiders to come in and tell us how to live. Fair found the Sunni to be well educated and well trained in interrogation procedures. He often dealt with individuals of a higher rank than himself. There was a slow realization that there were no chemical weapons and that there was no real connection to the events of September 11, 2001. Fair says that the Sunni would have been the ones to partner with in rebuilding efforts but we were at war with them. Fair began to experience an internal struggle between his belief that this wasn’t what the government should be doing and his commitment to the Army and his contract. He had a difficult time reconciling the two. He was then transferred back to Baghdad where he did more linguistic work and less interrogation. While this was a better fit, Fair ultimately quit 4.5 months in. He is of the belief that the war was not good and that contracting was not a good idea. While he remembers the events of the Blackwater [Blackwater USA contractors] who were hanged from a bridge, it doesn’t stand out too much. Violence was a daily occurrence. One memory that does stand out occurred when he was working the front gates. His job was to walk through a line up and try and get a sense of who was trying to infiltrate. He came upon two families who were each trying to locate a son who hadn’t come home the night before. There was one body badly burned that had to be identified by the father. The other family then wrongly believed the other son was safe. It was soon discovered he had died at the hospital. Both had been killed by a rocket attack. That event was every bit as tragic as the bodies on the bridge. Fair says you can’t generalize about the Iraqis as a people. They are no different than any other group in that there are good people and there are bad people. They share a common history and language but beyond that have all the same differences you would see in other groups. Fair notes that the Islam he experienced in Iraq was different than how he experienced it in the United States. You can hear a call to prayer everyday and it is simply a part of their everyday life. Fair’s experience with Enhanced Interrogation was brief. He participated in the use of sleep deprivation and he was charged with keeping the prisoner awake and then stripping him down. Fair says he knew immediately that this was wrong and this was when his support of Enhanced Interrogation ended. He never used it again and when he came home grew to regard it as immoral. With Enhanced Interrogation techniques you get an immediate reaction whereas other techniques yield a more gradual outcome. He heard rumors about the actions that resulted in the public pictures taken at Abu Ghraib but had no knowledge of that or water boarding techniques. He says he saw the CIA come in but wasn’t privy to what was occurring. Coming HomeFair’s return to civilian life was brutal. He says he was trained to be manipulative and tells the story of a family of brothers who were arrested for anti-coalition activities. H separated the two brothers and was able to get the younger brother to turn on the older brother by tricking him into thinking the family would be allowed to go home if he said they were part of an anti-coalition organization. Although it helped the war effort, Fair says it was still a terrible thing to do to a family. He never had the experience of having a person appeal to him for help in the interrogation room because he made sure to control the room. He became a different person each time he was in interrogation and would assume a persona that would work in that particular situation. Fair tells the story of an interrogation with a former Iraqi General who was arrested as a way of finding out where his son was hiding. The General wanted to know, even if he was to agree to give up his son, how he was expected to know where his son was when he’d been in custody for 3-4 months. Fair says this was a situation when the person being interrogated was the smarter person in the room. Fair returned home in May 2004 and was living in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He returned home with a friend from CACI. Fine almost headed back with DynaCorps (a security firm) but decided to join the Department of Defense as a Subject Matter Expert instead. His friend who he had returned with left with DynaCorps. As IEDs had become an issue, (who was building them and how to stop them) Fair’s job was to be part of the response team when an IED [Improvised Explosive Device] went off. This position gave Fair an ID badge that had the Geneva Conventions listed on it. As he was now identified as a combatant, he did carry a weapon. Most of the American causalities were gone by the time Fair and his team arrived. Fair says that the United States has gotten very good at recovering its dead. What would be left in terms of carnage would be the bodies of the Iraqis. Vehicle Borne IEDs were an issue and Fair’s job was to gather information and to assemble a target package that would be passed on. He felt it was an ethically different position than what he had been in prior because now it was someone else kicking in the door. He felt like his job was more similar to what he had done as a police officer. Fair’s views on the war had changed and he felt as if he shouldn’t be there. He stayed in his position for a little over a year. When Fair came home he flew into Baltimore and found out the friend he had returned with the last time had been killed. For the first few months he was Fair and then the nightmares started. He could smell in his dreams and couldn’t control what he thought. He found that alcohol was a temporary fix and says if he had access to drugs he would have used them. He finally went to counseling when he began to have arguments with his wife. He says that it was hard because he had no place where to file something like Iraq in his mind. The wounds are as fresh as they were yesterday and time hasn’t helped. He can control the frequency a bit more now that he has a son but has to be careful with films, reading accounts or talking about his experiences as it brings it all back. He has not found that talking about it helps and in fact, knows that based on this interview he will have nightmares tonight. Fair tells the story of how he use to have coins given to him while in the military displayed along with some little Iraqi flag in his office. He knows that someday his son will ask him about them and he’s no ready for that conversation so he packed everything up. It was like wiping a slate clean in a way. He has a loving wife, parents a sister and friends and doesn’t feel like he has been abandoned. Fair even dabbled in being a Pacifist and found support from his father in even some of the most extreme views he held. He says that there was a point here he recognized that these were his experiences and that he owns them and can use them as he seems fit. He hopes to a leave a record of what war really is so that people know its true costs. Fair concludes by saying that people should know that individuals sent to war return home broken and there is no fixing them.},
  language = {English},
}