Then one of them shouted, “Pillow, you can come out now!” A short man in his mid-thirties stepped into the guards’ area, unshackled. explained to Wood that the current guard force called Detainee 760 “Pillow,” because when they had arrived, several months earlier, a pillow was the only object in his possession. A government report describes the facility as having been “modified in such a way as to reduce as much outside stimuli as possible,” with doors that had been “sealed to a point that allows no light to enter the room.” Inside, the walls were “covered with white paint or paper to further eliminate objects the detainee may concentrate on.” There was an eyebolt for shackling him to the floor, and speakers for bombarding him with sound.Īn M.P. Wood walked into the main area, which housed the guards through a door was the prisoner’s sleeping space. He thought, It must be somebody really important-the most dangerous person in the world, perhaps-to have this special attention, a guard force just for him.Įcho Special was a trailer that had been divided in two. Wood walked through the camp to Echo Special proud to be part of a serious national-security operation. Until recently, the guards and the interrogators had worn Halloween masks inside the cell. “You trust the handcuffs and everything, but, no matter what, we’d never be with him one on one-there would always be a partner,” Wood told me. Wood, who was twenty-three, had recently learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. “Never turn your back,” the sergeant major warned him. He recalled his political views as being “whatever Fox News told us.” He didn’t know the difference between a Hindu, a Sikh, and a Muslim-he had never met one.īefore his first shift in Echo Special, Wood was told to place a strip of electrical tape over the name on his uniform, and to use only nicknames inside the cell, so that if 760 were to somehow sneak a message out of the camp he couldn’t issue fatwas against his guards or their families. He didn’t harbor any particular animosity toward Muslims, but he had absorbed his mother’s belief: “If it’s not from Jesus then it must be from the Devil.” After completing the requirements to become an M.P., Wood enrolled in a criminal-justice program at a nearby community college. He had spent the morning of the worst terrorist attack in American history lying on his mother’s couch, high on painkillers after a tonsillectomy, but when he emerged from the haze he was angry, focussed, and longing for deployment. He sought structure and discipline-a life of pride, purpose, and clarity of mission.Īfter 9/11, patriotism eclipsed restlessness as Wood’s primary motivation to serve. After a few months, he signed up for the Oregon National Guard, on the military-police track.
Several of his co-workers were missing fingers, and the manager took every opportunity to denigrate the staff. In 1999, shortly after graduating from high school, Wood started a job at the local sawmill. His mother dated a string of alcoholics and addicts, and took the children to an evangelical church on Sundays Pat Robertson’s sermons blasted from the living-room TV. His father died in a plane crash when he was three years old, and his mother brought him and his brothers up in Molalla, Oregon, a lumber town about an hour south of Portland. When Wood tried to search for 760 in Guantánamo’s detainee database, he found nothing. The man confined there was referred to by his detainee number, 760. The International Committee of the Red Cross-which has access to many of the world’s most notorious detention sites, some of them in countries where there is no rule of law-had recently sent representatives to Guantánamo, but the base commander, citing “military necessity,” had refused to allow them into Echo Special. Then a sergeant major pulled him aside for a brief interview, and assigned him to work the night shift in Echo Special, a secret, single-occupancy unit that had been built to house the United States military’s highest-value detainee. For two weeks, he worked as a guard in the cellblocks, monitoring men who had been captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan. “I just remember being super excited, because I thought, I’m going to be doing something important,” Wood told me. He and his comrades were told that many of the detainees were responsible for 9/11 and, given the opportunity, would strike again. In 2004, Steve Wood was deployed to Guantánamo Bay, as a member of the Oregon National Guard.
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