Tortured

ON A WINTER NIGHT IN IRAQ, darkness stole across the desert like sleep itself. Cool and quiet and complete.

A man trudged across the sand about midnight, exhaling puffs into the cold air. He walked more than a mile, and finally approached a small building made of brick and concrete. It had served as a slaughterhouse, once upon a time.

Eric Fair stepped through the door, and started what he expected would be a night like any other, interrogating Iraqi detainees. He worked for a private American contracting company in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and in a matter of days the world would recoil at the revelation of what some people did there. But not yet.

The little building held about eight rooms, one of which the interrogators used as their office. They did paperwork there, jotted notes, relaxed and talked. Not a cozy situation, really, but Fair worked the night shift with his best friend, Ferdinand Ibabao. And roly-poly Ferd always told funny stories that made the nights bearable.

Another interrogator, ending his shift, briefed Fair on the detainee waiting down the hall: I’m trying something, the colleague told him, before leaving. I want you to take over for a little while.

Fair, a thoughtful and soft-spoken Presbyterian from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, listened to his colleague’s instructions. “All right,” he said. He could do that.

He walked alone down the building’s hallway, with small rooms off each side. He approached the occupied room, which was entirely dark. From the hallway he flipped a switch, and on the room’s ceiling, a bare bulb flickered to life. Fair entered.

The room recollected the building’s original purpose; it was long and narrow, suited to doomed cattle, with a tile floor. It stank of feces, and blood, and unwashed flesh. A man lay in the center, eyes adjusting in the light.

Fair didn’t reflect on how he had come to this dark place, and certainly didn’t know where he would end up, after this night. He simply regarded the sleepless man.

“Entusub,” Fair said.

The man dragged himself from the floor.

The interrogator lifted a finger. “Yadar.”

The man turned, and faced the corner.


ERIC FAIR SWINGS OPEN an enormous door, and we find refuge in Princeton Theological Seminary’s ancient Stuart Hall, among carved wood balustrades and antique silence.

He doesn’t want to hide. But no one at the seminary knows Fair’s past, yet, and he’d rather not be overheard.

We settle into an empty classroom. A professor has scrawled a notice on the chalkboard, about an upcoming Hebrew class. Fair takes a seat, looking slightly misplaced at 35 years old, with flecks of silver in his hair. But he likes the order of scholarship, and the discipline. Even now, after everything that happened, he still keeps the military haircut.

He speaks quietly.

“Coming back here and going to school,” he says. “Studying Greek for hours. Doing chores. Vacuuming the floor. None of that seems important anymore.”

Outside, a group of younger theological students plays some sort of game. They laugh, and the sound seems to slide down the rails of sunlight slanting into the Hebrew classroom. The loveliness and purity of the place make Fair’s story seem even darker, and dirtier, and harder to approach.