Fixing Hell by Larry C. James, Gregory A. Freeman

General Miller agreed. Next, I coordinated with a reservist who in civilian life was the warden of an Indiana state prison. Command Sergeant Johnson was the senior-ranking enlisted adviser for the military police brigade in Gitmo. He brought with him nearly thirty years of experience in the prison field. His task was the physical reconstruction and rehabilitation of a house separate and away from the main prison facility, much like a halfway house, and I was charged with building a team for the academic, medical, psychological, and intelligence collection efforts for the juveniles. My guidance to everyone was that we could never house these teenagers in the general adult prison population—not for a minute and no matter how inconvenient it was to keep them separate. We busied ourselves with the plan to retrofit an already existing house that was isolated from the rest of the camp. We named it Camp Iguana, after the two- to three-foot-long lizards that are as common in Gitmo as squirrels are back home, to differentiate it from the rest of the prison known as Camp Delta.
    We needed to devise a plan for the correctional custody, medical care, and psychological treatment of these young people, and we had to determine just how one can safely and morally interrogate teenage terrorists. And they were indeed terrorists, according to the intel we had on them. Their age didn’t make them any less so. Fortunately, there was a Navy child psychologist assigned to the hospital, Dr. Tim Dugan, who was an old friend of mine. I valued his judgment and trusted him, so he would be ideal for this task. Tim’s skills would be especially useful because our intel indicated that two of the three boys had been brutally raped, were clinically depressed, and suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These prisoners were in bad shape.
    Soon I boarded a small military C-12 prop plane out of GTMO and headed to a classified military location on the East Coast of the United States. The next morning we loaded up a huge C-17 with a medical team, military police, and a team of Air Force Special Forces shooters. These guys were a special reserve unit with two purposes in life: 1. Kill anyone who messes with our plane, and 2. Kill anyone who messes with the runway while the plane is on it. Those guys were focused.
    The Army MPs were on board for the custody and control of the prisoners. They had more damn guns and weapons than any SWAT team I had ever seen in any city in America. We took off and were in the air for twenty hours, which required us to refuel in midair two or three times. In the darkness, an Air Force KC-135 refueling tanker showed up out of the clouds for the rendezvous with our C-17. From the cockpit I watched the steady hands of the pilots and crew connect these two huge aircraft and complete this dangerous task. We landed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and remained on the runway for a short while, with the Special Forces shooters on high alert, watching for any sign of trouble. Then the back ramp in the tail of the plane was lowered and a truck approached with prisoners, both adults and the teens I was there for. We separated the teenagers out from the other prisoners. I immediately felt sympathy for the young prisoners, though I knew they were far from innocent. They looked not only terrified but also disheveled and lost. The adult detainees looked and smelled repulsive. They smelled like shit or a foul stench of body odor—it was hard to tell the difference. Their hair was uncut, raggedy and long, with long, unkempt beards. The tailgate was closed and we headed back to Cuba.
    Twenty or so hours later we landed and I had the teenagers separated according to plan, away from the general adult population. They were in fact never seen by any of the adult prisoners. The command gave me two male interpreters who were fluent in the specific language spoken in the villages where these three boys were raised. The two