Tikrit
Sitting beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office deep inside a former Baathist presidential palace, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies.
‘We’ve had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing stupid things,’ he chuckled. ‘Here’s a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn’t have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off.’
Abandoning the lifeless carcasses and smouldering wreckage of the car, the third brother sought refuge in a nearby house. The occupants were less than impressed, related Stockmoe, slapping his thigh. ‘So they proceeded to beat the crap out of him and then turned him over to the Iraqi police. It was like the movie Dumb and Dumber.’
There have been so many examples of such incompetence that Stockmoe, who leaves Iraq this week after a year as the US army’s 1st Infantry Division’s senior military intelligence officer, has been doling out unofficial Darwin Awards in honour of the most side-splittingly useless insurgents.
Created in 1993 by a Stanford University student, the official Darwin Awards commemorate those who ‘contribute to the improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a really stupid way’. According to Stockmoe, Iraq’s gene pool is in better shape each day.
Military intelligence officers have long been the butt of jokes that their specialisation is an oxymoron. And it is perhaps a rash soldier who mocks an adversary that has killed well over a thousand troops in just over 18 months.
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